Where does your energy go? The three zones that decide whether you last as a leader
There is a question that separates leaders who last from leaders who wear themselves out, and it is simpler than it ought to be: where does your energy go? Not how much. Where.
Everything you meet in your leadership sits in one of three zones. The first is what you control completely. It is a smaller area than most people think: your own choices, your behaviour in the room, your preparation, how you react when something goes against you. What you say, and what you choose not to say. That is all. Nothing else in your leadership is entirely in your hands.
The second zone is what you can influence but not decide. Almost everything that makes leadership leadership lives here: other people’s decisions, the team’s motivation, the customer’s trust, how your message is received. You can prepare, argue, listen and build relationships – and all of that raises the odds of the outcome you want. But the decision is always made somewhere else, in someone else’s head.
The third zone is what you neither control nor influence. The market. The economy. Decisions already made. The past. This zone is enormous, and it has a property that makes it dangerous: it often feels like zone two. It feels as though something ought to be possible – if you just phrase it better, work harder, hold one more meeting.
The wrong zone comes back as tiredness
The difference sounds academic. It is anything but. Energy spent in the wrong zone does not disappear – it comes back as something else. As exhaustion without results. As frustration with people who “don’t get it”. As a nagging feeling of working more and achieving less.
Most leaders who are about to wear themselves out are not doing too little. They are doing the wrong things at full strength.
If the zones are so simple to describe, why do experienced, sensible leaders spend years of energy in zone three? Because it feels like leading. Fighting the unchangeable looks like commitment, both to those around you and in the mirror. Someone who worries about the market seems to be taking responsibility. Someone who holds one more meeting about what the customers ought to think does not seem to be giving up.
But there is a less comfortable explanation too. Zone three is safe. Someone who fights the impossible can never really fail – if nothing comes of it, that is down to the market, the customers, the circumstances. Zone one is more dangerous. There are no excuses there. There it shows, in black and white, what you actually did and did not do.
Ten minutes with a sheet of paper
Write down the three things that take most energy out of you right now. Write them as they feel, not as they ought to be phrased: “I am worried about the reorganisation”, “I get frustrated with Johan in the steering group”, “I don’t know whether the customers will renew the contract”.
Then place each one in the right zone. Can I decide this? Can I influence it? Or does it lie outside both?
Be careful with the last question. The most common mistake is placing things in zone two that really belong in zone three, because it feels better. If you are unsure, test it: what could I concretely do tomorrow that would move this? If there is an honest answer, it is zone two. If all there is is “work harder” or “think about it more”, it is zone three.
If two or three of your things landed in zone three, you have just seen why you are more tired than your work justifies. That is not a failure. It is information.
In the book you meet a football coach who spent the three weeks before the most important qualifier in eleven years studying the opponents – until the team captain said what no one else dared to. He lost the match. What he won did not show on the scoreboard.
This step does not ask you to care less. It asks you to see clearly where your reach ends, and to move your energy there. What you let go of is not influence. It is imagined influence, and it has never given you anything but tiredness.
Zones of Control is the first of twelve steps in the book The Leadership Awakening – The Leader You Already Are. The same twelve steps are available as a course on en.orangize.se; the first three are free.
