Keeping Your Leadership House Steady In an Uncertain World
By Suzie Thoraval
How self-care strengthens the foundations leaders rely on
“The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.”
With the start of the new year, I’m looking at how I can make improvements to my day-to-day experience to set myself up for success in 2026.
One thing that keeps coming up for me is the need to prioritise self-care. I've been noticing that when I make plans for what I want to achieve, I often overlook the basic truth that I don’t have an equal amount of energy all day every day.
As the day unfolds, capacity changes. What I can do well in the morning is not as easy in the afternoons. Similarly, what feels like renewed vigour after holidays can dwindle after intense months of working without much of a break.
My unrealistic expectations
But when I’m making a list of what I want to do for the day, I’m setting my goals as if I have the same capacity at 8 am as I do at 4pm. My plans are based on the assumption of consistent capacity rather than the reality of busy weeks or unexpected setbacks that draw more heavily on my energy reserves. I'm setting expectations as if focus, creativity, patience, and emotional steadiness are always available on demand.
My to-do list therefore, becomes aspirational rather than achievable. I work hard, but still feel the 3pm slump where my concentration is flagging. At the end of the day I’m noticing what I didn’t get done rather than what I completed. Shame and guilt creep in. I’m disappointed, even though the plan was unrealistic. It didn’t account for the need for energy and recovery.
I hear similar stories from many leaders - we expect more of ourselves, more than we would of anyone else.
Why self-care matters more than ever
Leadership today is practiced in conditions of ongoing uncertainty and information overload. Natural pauses, supporting resets in our work and home life are less common. Work boundaries blur, transition time is reduced as digital communication fills gaps, and uncertainty creates a vigilance that’s harder to switch off.
Pressure builds up over the days, weeks and months and we are all struggling to keep up. Unless we consciously choose to build in pauses, we head for stress, overwhelm and burnout.
Many leaders tell me their natural response to the pressure they feel has been to push harder, tighten schedules and expect more from themselves. It can feel like this is the responsible and necessary thing to do. But over time, this response to our fast-paced world erodes our judgement, patience, creativity and resilience.
Rather than being separate from performance, self-care is what makes performance possible.
Sustainable Leadership
Work by the World Economic Forum indicates that sustained uncertainty places ongoing demands on leaders’ cognitive and emotional capacity, making recovery and energy management increasingly important. It consistently identifies self-management, resilience and emotional regulation as core leadership capabilities in uncertain environments.
Other research highlights how prolonged cognitive and emotional load affects decision quality over time. Leaders' capacity to process complexity, maintain perspective, and regulate emotion becomes more stretched without deliberate recovery.
For leaders to be effective, they need to build in energy recovery and personal resilience to their daily routines.
Keeping your leadership house in order
One useful way to think about self-care is that it is the foundation that supports your leadership house.
The foundation of that house is made up of how you look after your physical, emotional, mental, creative, social, and spiritual capacity. On top of that foundation sit your plans, goals, and strategies. Those are the visible parts of leadership that others see and experience.
When the foundation is sound, you have greater access to clarity, patience, and perspective. Those qualities help you achieve your plans and goals, especially when pressure increases. When the foundation of your leadership house is neglected, strain weakens the structure.
For many leaders, maintaining that strong foundation involves:
recognising that energy changes across the day and week
allowing space between demanding tasks
investing in physical, emotional, mental, creative, social, and spiritual needs
treating these investments as contributors to leadership effectiveness
During periods of increased pressure or unexpected change, regularly returning to these basics helps keep the leadership house strong.
Maintaining care when life is full
Effective leaders tend to realistically design their days, weeks and months. They allow buffers. They revisit expectations of themselves and others as situations shift. They protect a small number of self-care practices that support their daily capacity.
Your self-care routine doesn’t need to be elaborate. What matters most is paying regular attention to what you need and adjusting when your energy, workload or conditions change.
Over time, this approach supports clearer thinking and more sustainable leadership.
Ask yourself:
Where does my goal and work planning assume more capacity than I actually have?
Which forms of care support my ability to sustain my leadership capacity over time?
What would shift if I treated care as part of the plan rather than something added later or if I have time?
Self-care shapes how leadership is practiced over time. When it is built into expectations of what you need to fuel your goals, you are better able to remain present, thoughtful, and effective as the situation around you throws up uncertainties and changes to which you must respond.
Attention to your capacity supports your performance.
As you plan ahead for 2026, how can you make space daily for the self-care you need to maintain the capacity to achieve your goals?
