I went for my annual checkup last year. The doctor ran through the usual questions. Sleep? Patchy. Stress? "Normal." Exercise? Less than I'd like.
She looked up from her notes and said, "You keep saying 'normal' but I want to know what YOUR normal is."
I didn't have an answer. I hedged. Said something about managing fine and moved on. But she'd already landed the point.
The question stayed with me. I'd spent over twenty years leading teams, and I realized I'd made the same error with myself I warn every leader against making with their teams: I'd lost track of the baseline.
When "Normal" Becomes Broken
Most leaders I know run too hot. Not occasionally. Constantly. The back-to-back meetings, the Slack notifications at 11pm, the Sunday night dread. After a year or two of this, something quietly shifts. The elevated state becomes the new baseline.
You stop noticing you're stressed because the stress is... how things are now.
This is the high-performer trap. You're capable of functioning while depleted. You've trained yourself to push through. Each time you do, you tell yourself this is commitment. This is what it takes.
It isn't. It's normalization.
The World Health Organization defines burnout through three dimensions: energy depletion, increased cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. Notice what's NOT on the list: feeling exhausted. You burn out while still functioning at a level fooling everyone around you, including yourself.
The 46% Problem
Research from the Global Leadership Wellbeing Survey found 46% of leaders don't consistently think about how they want to "show up" when they arrive at work. Nearly half of all leaders walk through the door on autopilot.
Without a reference point, you won't spot the drift. You won't notice the moment impatient became your default setting, or when you stopped asking questions and started issuing directives. You won't catch the shift from leader to traffic cop.
Your "normal" is supposed to be your compass. Without calibrating it, it's useless.
Your Stress Is Contagious
Here's why this goes beyond your own health.
The same GLWS research highlights something I find genuinely unsettling: watching someone get stressed raises cortisol levels in the people witnessing it. This happens even among strangers. In a team where relationships are closer and stakes higher, the effect is amplified significantly.
You are a transmission vector for your own stress.
If you run at a stress level you now consider "normal," your team soaks it in every day. Your impatience in the stand-up. Your short replies on Slack. The way you sigh when someone brings up a problem. They read all of it. They absorb all of it.
Research cited by Most Loved Workplace shows managers typically experience worse wellbeing than the people they manage. Think about it. The people responsible for setting the emotional tone in a team are, on average, the most stressed people in it.
If they don't know their own normal... they have no idea what they're passing on.
What a Baseline Looks Like
In the Army, we ran preventive maintenance before every mission. You checked your equipment against its known baseline: fuel levels, tire pressure, radio frequencies, weapon function. Not because you expected failure. Because you needed to know what "working correctly" looked like, so you'd spot any deviation.
Leaders need the same discipline.
Your personal baseline is specific to you. It might include:
- Sleep. Not aspirational sleep. The number of hours you function well on.
- Physical signals. Where does tension live in your body when you're stressed? Shoulders? Jaw? Gut?
- Cognitive markers. Do you normally process complex decisions quickly? If you're rereading the same email three times, it's a signal worth noticing.
- Social energy. Do you normally enjoy conversations with your team? If you've started dreading them, you've drifted.
Most leaders resist doing this because it feels self-indulgent. Checking in on your own emotional state while a product launch is burning seems like exactly the wrong priority. But this gets the causality backwards. The more you know yourself, the faster you read situations. The faster you read situations, the better your decisions. Your self-awareness isn't separate from your performance. It IS your performance.
None of this requires a meditation app or a wellness coach. It requires paying attention.
How to Find It Again
If you've been running hot long enough to genuinely lose the baseline, create conditions to rediscover it.
Protect recovery time. Not "free time" filling with admin. Actual recovery: walking, sleeping properly, doing something with nothing to do with work.
Build deliberate checkpoints. Before I start my day, I ask myself three things: What's my energy level right now, honestly? What's on my mind besides work? How do I want to show up in the next three hours?
These take ninety seconds. They force me to check my instruments before walking into the day.
I didn't do this for most of my career. I thought situational awareness was for the battlefield, not the boardroom. I was wrong. The skill is identical. Know your baseline. Notice the deviation. Respond before it becomes a crisis.
The Two-Week Signal
There's a useful marker from Most Loved Workplace research: if any of these signals persist for two consecutive weeks, stop treating it as a bad patch. At two weeks, it's a systems problem.
The calendar is too dense. Priorities are unclear. The role has grown beyond what one person reasonably holds. Or you've been here before, recovered, and rebuilt the same conditions without noticing.
This is where knowing your normal pays off beyond the personal. If you've been tracking, you know when the drift started. You know roughly how long it's been building. That's data. Data beats gut feel every time, including your own gut feel about yourself.
Two weeks of signals is your body and mind telling you something structural needs to change. Listen.
Spotting It in Your Team
Once you know your own baseline, you get better at spotting deviation in others.
The signals mirror yours. Behavioral drift: someone who normally speaks up in meetings goes quiet. Cognitive slowdown: a sharp thinker starts second-guessing obvious decisions. Emotional detachment: the person who used to care about outcomes now wants to get through the day.
These aren't character flaws. They're warnings.
The best leaders I've worked with notice change before it becomes a problem. They don't wait for someone to break. They see the small shift, create space for a conversation, and ask before it becomes a crisis.
All of it starts with knowing your own normal well enough to recognize when something is off.
One Thing
Pick three personal baseline markers. Write them down.
What does your body feel like on a good day? What's your normal sleep? What's your default mood when things are going well?
Check them once a week.
No app. No framework. No keynote required.
Know your normal. Then watch for the gap. Your team's wellbeing depends on you doing it, whether you want to carry the responsibility or not.