Let's Think About It Podcast

Episode 79: Why Discipline Fails When You’re Emotionally Leaking Energy

• Morice Mabry • Season 3 • Episode 79

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Episode Summary

Leaders fail because they’re leaking emotional energy through broken systems. In this episode, Coach Mo breaks down why burnout, busyness, and frustration are often misdiagnosed as discipline problems when the real issue is how leaders are organizing, prioritizing, and regulating themselves under pressure.

Using a real client scenario, this conversation exposes the hidden cost of “just pushing through,” bringing work home, and believing that changing jobs will fix internal dysfunction. It also calls out how the punk-ass inner critic disguises fear as productivity and avoidance as responsibility.

This episode challenges high achievers to stop running from the situation and start leading themselves inside it by fixing systems, installing guardrails, and rebuilding emotional stamina using the S.W.A.G.™ framework.

Key Takeaways

  • Discipline breaks when systems are broken: Willpower can’t compensate for poor prioritization and organization.
  • Job-hopping doesn’t fix internal chaos: Unresolved systems follow you into the next role.
  • Busyness is often avoidance in disguise: Staying busy can feel safe, but it drains energy and delays growth.
  • The inner critic fuels emotional leakage: “Don’t slow down” and “everyone’s counting on you” are fear-based narratives.
  • Fix the system, fix the energy: When energy stabilizes, discipline becomes sustainable.
SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Let's Think About It podcast, where high achievers stop performing and start transforming. I'm Coach Mo, certified core energy leadership coach, founder of the Inner Arena, and creator of the Swag Framework. Self-awareness, high power, aligned action, and grit. Around here, we train your mindset, challenge your limits, and turn pressure into purpose. Subscribe now and join me on YouTube at Swag Coaching. So let's get your reps in.

SPEAKER_00:

We're gonna big, gonna be gonna big, gonna be big, go and big, go on big.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to another episode of the Let's Think About It podcast. I'm your host, Coach Mo. And today I want to dive into why discipline fails when you're emotionally leaking energy. Yeah, I want to talk more in the weeds about discipline and why do we feel this drain? We're in January. It's here, the new year, and January is just about over. How are you feeling about 2026 so far? I want to talk about discipline because as leaders, we may feel we're not disciplined enough in how we are attacking certain objectives, endeavors, and goals. In order to like really break this down, I think the easiest way for me to do this is to just give you guys an example. Okay. Most of us as leaders, as high achievers, we feel that at times where this dream is coming from can be that we're not disciplined enough. Here's what I mean by that. So I was working with a client, and you know, she wanted to get into the conversation about being busy, feeling the burnout in her role as a leader. Okay. And she was contemplating on changing jobs. I asked her, tell me what's going on. And the main thing that came from that was she's so busy that she has to bring her work home. Okay. I asked her about that. I said, how is bringing work home helping you fix the problem? She said it's not. Of course, she went into a deep explanation around that. I'm not going to get into all of that, but I said, let's think about that. If you're taking home your work because you're so busy at work, how is that benefiting you and your family? So she said, it's not. I said, bringing home your work, is it fixing the problem of the busyness at work? And so she said, absolutely not. I said, okay. So help me understand in your role as a high-level leader, how would switching jobs benefit you? She said, I wouldn't necessarily be as busy. I said, that's an assumption, right? At your level, is it safe to say that you're going to be potentially be busy at another organization in which you have a similar role of what you do now? She said, Yeah, but in this, in my current situation, it's it's just out of control. I said, okay, is the out of control part of how do you prioritize and organize your day? And she said, Well, I don't have time. Oh, okay. I said, So think about this. Let's just say hypothetically, you decide that you would like to find another job and move on, okay? But you just mentioned that your current prioritization, strategies, organization is broken. And so that's creating a little bit more of the busyness that you might be feeling, which causes you to bring home work. Bringing home work at night is taken away from your family, it's not fixing the problem. So it's a repetitive process. Am I hearing you correctly? She said yes. I said, okay, if that root of the problem fixing your organizing and your prioritization methodological approach to limiting busyness, if that's not fixed, how would that change going to another organization? She thought about it and she said, I don't really know. And I said, Okay, let's look at it like this. Think about when you first got this role in your high-level position. You had to probably prove yourself, right? She said, Absolutely. Okay. You had to build trust, right? Absolutely. You had to learn the culture and the politics and the bureaucracy that comes in your role in the new organization, right? She said, absolutely. And I said, depending on the organization, there's probably a probationary period, right? She said, absolutely. Then I said, there's the mental load that comes with starting a new position, right? She said, absolutely. And then I said, think about everything that we just said: proving yourself in a new role, rebuilding trust with your supervisors, new employees, the whole nine, learning a culture in politics, possibly going through the agony and emotional wear that you have to be in a certain role for a certain amount of time, like a probationary period, that can create some sort of mental toll on you as well. All of that because you're feeling burnt out at your old position. And this is what the new mental constraints you'll be taking on in the new position. And she was like, Wow, I didn't think of it like that. I said, absolutely. I said, what about all of this energy that you would need to put into in this new role? Why not put that same energy towards fixing your current system and organizing? And then I said, also consider the energy that you have to put into researching and job searching, prepping for the interview, all of that. All of that comes with a certain emotional stamina that you have to carry. He was just like, wow. Okay, maybe I do need to rethink this. Absolutely, you should rethink this. Absolutely you should rethink this. Because we as leaders, we're in a certain dynamic and it's draining us, right? And that punk ass inner critic, the first thing it says is, man, maybe we just need to look for another job. That's the answer. Rightly, you can get another job, more than capable of getting another job. I would imagine that because you're a high achiever. But if the root of the problem isn't resolved, and in this scenario, the root of the problem was being more organized and being more disciplined to developing her organizational skills so that she wouldn't necessarily need to carry her work home in the evening. And all of that energy that she's willing or was willing to invest in finding another job and the emotional stamina that comes with it, when you do get the new job, why not put that same energy into reorganizing? You know what I mean? I get it. We become emotionally drained for whatever our dynamics are, but let's look at our current systems and how we lead self. Let's look at that, right? If you're feeling disengaged, burnt out at work rightfully, but why? Why? And what systems within self can be corrected to put certain car rails up so that you can continue to show up or begin to show up in this case, lighter, more energized, encouraged, okay? Because the discipline that is failing, maybe it's not really that, maybe it's just our systems, is the reason why we're emotionally exhausted, right? Maybe let's say you feel you're not being heard and you're really frustrated that no one listens to you. You have all of these ideas because you're a high achiever and you're not getting the respect that's due. But when it comes time to speak up, to be courageous, you fall back. See, that's the system that needs to be retuned. How do you show up more confidently to implement your thoughts without falling back? See, it all also comes back to that punk ass inner critic, right? Yeah, that inner critic, it shows up in a way to make you feel that you need to be more busy. It shows up masking dynamics where we're not doing enough. So we gotta work harder. And if you work harder, we can't afford to slow down because we're gonna be judged, and right now we can't afford to be judged, or everyone is counting on us, we can't afford to slow down because everyone's counting on us. You hear that narrative, right? Or if I slow, I'm weak. If I rest, I'm lazy. All of these are false narratives, false narratives in what that punk ass inner critic is telling us. And we listen to it by default. We naturally do, and it's okay. It's okay because what we're doing right now is we're calling it out, we're acknowledging it, but now we're going to learn how to pivot, right? Instead of in this situation and what I was talking about, feeling the busyness of the role, that I need to jump ship and find another job. See, that's the inner critic talking, trying to influence you that you need to jump ship really quick. How about readjusting what we actually have control over? How about adjusting how we put up our guardrails so we don't carry this busyness? How do we shift our viewpoint when everyone around us we feel is incompetent and we still have to show up? How do we change our viewpoint in that environment? How do we take a step back to reflect on how do we show up better? How do we show up without fear? And that's why I talk about the SWAG framework: self-awareness, white power, aligned action, and grid. I love this framework. It actually starts with any of the letters in the acronym of SWAG because you can come into any entry point of it. But self-awareness is key. It's key tapping into the awareness of your thoughts in certain key moments when you're feeling overwhelmed, doubtful, fearful, afraid, frustrated, in that moment, in that moment, you have control over those thoughts. And if you feel you don't, what actions can you take to get control over your thoughts? And why is that even important? And how do you keep moving forward without giving up on yourself? And see, I can bounce all around the swag framework, whether it's grit, whether it's aligned action, whether it's why power, whether it's self-aware, doesn't matter. If you get in the cycle, there's consciousness of creating power of choice and just how you feel in that moment, because you have swag. You have swag in that moment. And that's a powerful place to be, right? And so in talking with this particular client about the situation, see, in that moment when she was thinking about changing jobs, thinking that's the thing she should do, she didn't have swag in that moment. Why? Why did she have swag? Because she felt really drained, she felt stagnant. She felt that she had no choice but to leave because the busyness was overwhelming to the point where she was taking her work home, right? But taking her work home wasn't resolving the issue. So she thought the result is to just find another job. So she would go into this other job initially, probably feeling really good about herself, because she got another job, not knocking that, but the root of the issue, the core root, was that her system was broken. Her organizational system of being organized was broken. So at some point in the new organization, it's going to resurface, and she's going to carry this frustration, doubtfulness, busyness as she carries right now. And that's not swag because you don't feel good about yourself. And swag is more than just about an attitude, it's the self-awareness, why power, aligned action, and grit. And in that moment, when you have swag, guess what? Guess what? You are conditioning self. And in these situations of being a high achiever, a leader, okay, how do you condition self when you're feeling overwhelmed? And the punk ass inner critic is the source that's telling us we can't slow down, we gotta keep pressing forward. We can't let anybody know how we feel internally, so just keep moving forward. That's what the punk ass inner critic does. And we just naturally carry it. Just like when you come into a neural, and we all experience this, we have to prove to our superiors that we can do the job. And we're on edge. We're working harder so that we're not formulating any negative judgments about when certain things arise. There's a fear component that we can't share with our supervisors or our peers or people that report to us because we don't want them to think we're not capable of doing a job and that we got our shit together. So we naturally just carry it. As we carry this, we're leaking energy. Our emotional stamina is being tested. Because what do I do? Who do I talk to? Some of us have coaches that we talk to, some of us have mentors that we work with. Great for you, but most of us are taught that you gotta push through this. This is this is what success looks like. You work harder and you compete. That's what it is, right? So how do we like really train our conditioning systems to be more effective through these through reps? That's how you do it. You keep in awareness, you keep in your purpose, you're creating aligned actions, and ultimately you're never quitting on self. And doing that propels you into the discipline of continuous development of self. So before you decide to make a decision that's frustrating you in key moments, think about how you can put up the guardrails and manage self better before making an erratic decision based on your emotions in that moment. Think about that. How do you show up, right, when you have to make a big decision, and that punk ass inner critic is guiding you through fear, nervousness, hesitation? How do you step back then and recalibrate the most effective approach you need to make that decision? Think about that. Think about change, the change that's constantly happening within your organization and how frustrating it is. How do you show up to regulate self then? Think about the bureaucracy that you're dealing with, and you feel like you have no voice, right? Is the answer to run to a different organization because you have a voice there, or you think you would have a voice there? Or how do you address creating a voice where you currently are? It can be scary though, because that punk ass inner critic is present telling you, helping. You live through assumptions of certain past experiences that may come to light in the future that hasn't even happened yet, and it's co-signing to play it safe. Don't speak up. Keep your thoughts to yourself. That's what it does. That's what it does. And so you're not conditioning yourself by staying small. You're not speaking up. How do I get the courage in that moment to speak up? Reps, swag, self-awareness, white power, aligned action, and grid. Figure it out. Figure it out. Or reach out, reach out to me. You guys know how to find me. Reach out to me. It's all good. I'll be happy to brainstorm how swag can support you. I'm here to create awareness to help you get out of your own damn way to tame that punk ass inner critic. Because regardless of what the situation you're dealing with, because we all deal with different dynamics. I'm dealing with different dynamics, right? The difference is what's your to condition yourself so that you show up a better individual. That's what this is about. That's what this is about. And a lot of times it's not necessarily about leaving the dynamic. It's not. The situation that you're in, yes, the inner critic will be telling you, you know what, maybe it's just easier to find another job. Maybe it's just easier to lead the situation. How about learning how to lead self in the situation so that you can grow from the situation instead of running from the situation? The inner critic will play that same old song that just put your head down, stay busy, don't say nothing, and just mind your business. But could that also be characterized as avoidance to stay safe? Because how are you actually growing in that particular situation where you don't say nothing and you put your head down and you just mind your business? Maybe you're comfortable in that state, which is totally fine. It's all about creating power of choice. And that's the lens that I'm coming from. How are you creating power of choice when you're in avoidance mode, when your head is down and don't say anything and just mind your business? Where does growth come from that? Okay. If you're having conflicting issues with peers, staff engagement, supervisors, doesn't matter. What's your approach to dealing with it? I get it though. I get it. No situation is perfect and every dynamic is different. But how do you condition yourself to put those guardrails up so that you are becoming a better communicator, collaborator, and trust builder? That's really, in my opinion, when you have swag, that's ultimately what you're doing is closing communication gaps, building collaboration, and fostering trust. Because your awareness is there, your purpose is there, key aligned actions are there, and more importantly, grit. The ability not to give up on self is there. And at the end of the day, that's what this is all about leading self. I'm gonna leave you guys on that. Just think about it. That's what this podcast is about, right? Let's think about it. Think about the frustrations you may be carrying right now, the overwhelming feelings as a high achiever. And you most of you are probably in a good spot, which is great. Good for you. Kudos. But in those moments, when you take a dip and you're not feeling your best, just examine which system within self is broken in that moment. If you fix the system, you fix your energy. If you fix your energy, you're leading self better. That's it. I appreciate you guys. I'll catch you on the next round. That's another rep in the inner arena. You didn't just listen, you leveled up your swag. Self-awareness, why power, aligned action, and grit. If this hit home, share it, subscribe to the Let's Think About It podcast, and lock in with me on YouTube at Swag Coaching. Until next time, stay aware, lead with your why, act in alignment, and keep your grit strong.