Episode 94: Why Leadership Feels Heavier Than It Should

Episode Summary

In this episode, Coach Mo sits down with leadership coach Kurt Bush to break down why high-performing leaders get stuck in autopilot—and how that pattern quietly fuels decision fatigue, burnout, and inconsistent leadership under pressure. 

This conversation cuts straight to the real issue: leaders are trained on what to do, but not how to be when pressure hits. When stress rises, you don’t rise—you default.

Kurt shares how to disrupt those default reactions, build real self-awareness, and make principled decisions instead of reactive ones. If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or constantly putting out fires, this episode gives you a practical path to reset your leadership from the inside out.

Key Takeaways

• Disrupt the Default
  You don’t rise under pressure—you fall back on patterns you’ve never questioned. 
• Self-Awareness Is the Entry Point
  You can’t change what you don’t see. Awareness creates agency. 
• Burnout Isn’t Just Exhaustion
  It shows up as hesitation, overthinking, and delayed decisions. 
• Pause Is a Leadership Skill
  The ability to slow down in pressure is what separates reactive leaders from intentional ones. 
• You’re Carrying a “Second Job”
  Managing fear, anxiety, and internal pressure is draining your capacity to actually lead. 

Transcript

Welcome And Meet Kurt Bush

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to the Let's Pick of Mother Podcast. Where high achievers start performing and start transforming. I'm coaching Mo, Sodify, Core Energy Leadership Coach, founder of the inner arena, and creator of the Twin Eight Framework. Some learners, my power, mind action, and great. And when I'm here, retrain your mindset, challenge your limits, and turn culture into purpose. Subscribe now and join me on YouTube at Twinight Coaching. So let's get your reps in it. Welcome to another episode of the Let's Think About a Podcast. I'm your host, Coach Mo, and I'm here with another amazing guest. His name is Kurt Bush. Kurt, what's good, man? Hey, good to be with you, Coach. I'm happy to have you. Where are you checking in from?

SPEAKER_02 1:14

I'm in Iowa right now. I'm in the corner up here where it's flat, and I can get to Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota in about 45 minutes out here in flyover country.

unknown 1:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

What's the weather like up there right now?

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Sunny and 50. It's a little cold, if I'm honest. It's a little cold.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

That's not bad. So at least you're not dealing with all of the snow that probably happens up there. So it's shifting into that spring type weather, I would assume. We're on the right track. We're on the right track. Yep. That's good. So tell us who you are, what you do, and the type of value that you bring.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

Yeah, thanks for asking. And thanks again for having me. It's good to be with you. So I'm a leadership coach. I co-own a leadership coaching practice called the Brimstone Coaching Group with a good friend of mine named Chris. And we what we do is we help people become unstuck. We help people learn what it means to live fully and lead authentically by becoming self-aware of the ways that they show up in places. And we help them through the practice of reflection to become more in control and have more agency in how they show up in those spaces. I've got a background in manufacturing and pastoral ministry. I did both of those things for about a decade prior to launching my coaching practice. We're about two years in now, and I just love the work I get to do with leaders.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

That's great. This is the right show to be on because I love unpacking why people get stuck. But before we dive into getting into that, I want to understand a little bit more in depth why to pivot. Because you said you were in manufacturer

Why He Left Pastoral Leadership

SPEAKER_01 2:55

leadership, why to pivot into coaching?

SPEAKER_02 2:58

Yeah, good question. So previous to coaching, I was campus pastor in a local church. Yeah, I actually helped launch a campus of a church in 2020 on January 1st of 2020, which I don't know if you remember 2020, but it was wild. Something happened. A couple somethings happened. So I actually again helped launch a campus January 1st of 2020. And I love the work of creating culture and building culture. And that work that I was doing, without getting into all the details, uh one local church had died. Another one began in its place with some of the leaders that were in the old culture. And we were trying to build a new culture with some of the volunteer leaders that were present for the old culture. It was a lot of work. And through the pandemic, through all the culture building, what I realized is that I love helping people navigate their own stuff. I loved helping those leaders navigate their own anxiety. I loved helping them learn how they wanted to show up in spaces as leaders and then take the steps to do that. And what happened is as we got further into the culture building, as we got further away from the pandemic, I was getting to do less of that coaching because the culture was doing its thing. Yeah. The organization needed me to be more of an organizational leader as that culture shifts. What was needed of me was different. And if I'm honest, coach, that sort of organizational leadership just drains me like crazy. Yeah. So I began to find places to coach. I began to find places to help people define how they want to be and how they want to show up, help them take steps towards that, to where then it just became a full-time gig. And I stepped away from one role and into coaching full-time.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

That's awesome. I think the reason I love this business so much is because in real time we have the opportunity to help people become most leaders through my experience. Even myself, when I was on the up and come up, I wasn't taught how to condition myself through leading under pressure. Right? You just roll with the punches, so to speak. But as you go through these different training workshops, different modalities that are taught,

Defaults Versus Principled Decisions

SPEAKER_01 5:20

they're not really teaching you how to manage self and lead self under pressure. What's your approach? And how you help leaders, you said help leaders get unstuck. I would assume part of being unstuck is being able to make decisions under pressure and the different types of pressure that we face as leaders. What's your approach in helping leaders navigate under pressure?

SPEAKER_02 5:48

Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking it. I would affirm everything you said. There are volumes that have been written and spoken about what leaders should do, right? There's no shortage of this. I do think there's much, or there are many fewer resources to help leaders understand how they want to be and how that being impacts our doing, especially under pressure. We have a saying that my coaching partner and I will say to each other that everywhere we go, there we are. And I think that's true. We bring ourselves into every situation, especially the high pressure situations. So I think my approach, our approach on this is that in a high pressure situation, we will often default to something. When we are faced with a situation where we have to make a decision, we're gonna do that from a from either a default way or a chosen way. And we really want to help leaders disrupt that default way and allow them to get to a space where they can make what we call a principled decision of how they want to make that decision and how they want to be in the midst of it. So I think the short answer is we really want to disrupt those defaults so that leaders can make the best decision possible.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

A lot of us are operating in default, right? Because we develop certain filters in how we naturally see the world. And that's shaped through our culture, our upbringing, our family, our marital status, childhood, all of that starts to shape filters. And through those filters, we naturally carry these values and how we just operate, right? But we're never really taught what specifically is your value and how are you going to operate through these values to make decisions and things like that. You just make decisions based on how things have always been, right? And so then I look at it from the business standpoint, from an employee standpoint, where you're coming up through certain leadership tactics by your supervisor. And maybe they were a control freak, maybe they were timid about decision making, that naturally starts to shape into how you're gonna lead, not necessarily fully, but smaller components of that, because it shapes filters for us. Just as when we're growing up in a household, certain tactics and how your parents perceive certain situations, you acclimate some of that through your upbringing, right? It's the same in the environment of organizations, right? So now you promote and you flap your wings, now you're in this situation where you have to make certain decisions, and you haven't necessarily been taught how to deal with this fear, anxiety, the stress, this all of these decisions that's coming at me, and everyone is expecting me to know everything, and I'm expecting myself to know everything. Yeah, but we don't know how to really balance that because we're never really taught that. So we wing it until we figure it out. But that's where, in my opinion, where the energy starts to leak. Yeah, and the burnout starts to come in and decision fatigue happens, yeah, overthinking happens. Yeah. So I think we're in a great place as coaches to be able to take steps to help people navigate and take those initial steps into getting back to their authentic selves. Yeah.

Building Real Self Awareness

SPEAKER_01 9:55

So one thing that you mentioned was self-awareness. How what's your approach to helping them regain that self-awareness?

SPEAKER_02 10:04

Yeah, that's interesting. There's some studies out recently that say as little as 15% of adults in America would consider themselves self-aware. Uh that's shockingly low. And I think when I use the word self-awareness, what I'm thinking about is do I know what I'm going to do when I'm trying to flap my wings, as you said? Do I know the things that I'm going to default to? As the great 20th century philosopher Mike Tyson once said, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth, right? Do I know when I get metaphorically punched in the mouth? Do I know what I'm going to do in defense protection? So that's kind of how we think about self-awareness. What we also believe is that that as adults, as leaders, most of us, and maybe this is a gracious way to think about it, but most of us, once we see those things and start to see, hey, when I get punched in the mouth, I do something I don't like or wouldn't prefer. Most of us can make the move to say, okay, now I have agency to fix it, or now I have agency to change it. A phrase we use a lot is once we see something, we can't unsee it. So self-awareness is not looking at ourselves just for the sake of looking at ourselves, but looking at ourselves for the sake of transforming and moving forward and growing and maturing.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Yeah. Give me a story.

A Client Realizes Performance Identity

SPEAKER_01 11:30

We love stories. What's the success story and how you you worked with a client and you saw tremendous transformation?

SPEAKER_02 11:39

Yep. So there's one person I can think of. This is a nonprofit leader. This person, we'll call her Renee, just for the sake. I like putting names, even if they're fake. Renee is on a Zoom with me, and she's doing everything she can to lead her organization well. She's a great leader. And she looks at me through the Zoom camera after a number of sessions and she says, you know what? I think I attach my value to my performance. And I think I feel good about myself when I think I'm performing well, and only then, and all that brings. And she leans in and she says, Is it possible I've done this for 35 years? And I'm like on the inside, I'm celebrating. I'm like, Yes, this is great. It's not great that she does it. I've actually seen this in her for a long time. I knew this was coming. We can often see as coaches things that our clients can't see right away. But she was finding it, right? She was finally connecting some dots, and I'm celebrating on the inside. And then externally, I'm staying cool and I'm just helping her celebrate this self-awareness. And it was only at that point that she had found it. She had connected the dots. Now that she could say, okay, now what do I do? And how do I think about uh how do I think about my success uh apart from my performance? Like, how do I think about if I've done a good job or I've done a good enough job that I can leave on the weekend or whatever it is? How can I think about those things and measure those things apart from what other people think of me? And that is the work that's been most gratifying for me. I think this is just such a common leadership story. Renee's Renee's story is not isolated, but yeah, I think that story of I think I've been doing this for 30 years. Yes,

Burnout As Hesitation And Misalignment

SPEAKER_02 13:25

this is amazing. And then there's this agency to do something about that.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

That is amazing. Do you guys work with any type of assessments that you help your clients with, or is it strictly one-on-one coaching, team coaching type thing?

SPEAKER_02 13:40

Yeah, we've tried a couple of assessments, and quite honestly, coach, I don't know that they've been as fruitful as we've wanted to. I think value of assessments in my mind are the value of them is to create that self-awareness. And we just haven't found for us, we just haven't found that that tool yet, or we haven't created that tool yet that does that for us. Yeah. So I know there are some really good assessments out there that people use, but we frankly, we just haven't found or we haven't been able to create one that does what we want it to do just yet.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

Yeah, I I feel you. I created an assessment, it's called the Burnout Mirror Assessment, and it's more around awareness. You take the assessment, it's probably take you maybe about five minutes, five, seven minutes probably tops. But the key is to identify what type of archetype you are and how you carry burnout. Yeah. If you're even carrying a burnout. So I leverage it as a tool to start the conversation.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Because in today's time, people think burnout is more so about feeling tired, not having energy.

unknown 14:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

It's a little bit deeper than that, in my opinion. Burnout is more so about those moments where you consistently hesitate in your decision-making process. I like that when you're going back and forth. Should I or shouldn't I? Should I or shouldn't I? You have multiple decisions that you have to make throughout the day as a leader, and you're tired and you're fatigued, and what should I do? Then you hesitate to ask for guidance in what to do because of a certain judgment that's present that makes you feel like if I ask, they're gonna think this of me, and I don't want them to think of this of me, so I'm not gonna do anything. So you don't do anything, then you're stuck and you're paused, and you're inconsistent with your decision making. That in itself is weight, and over time you're leaking energy. Yeah, so the burnout assessment just drops you in a little category of how are you carrying burnout, and I think it's just an eye-opener for people to just really start to understand like how am I carrying this? Because, like you said before, we're on autopilot. Yeah, we're not considering overthinking, over functioning as a category of burnout. Yeah, but when you really think about it, your indecisiveness over one decision that's lingering for a day, yeah, it's heavy. Yeah. And that's burnout.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

Yeah. You feel me? Yeah, I really appreciate how you put that. I had a friend of mine who will talk about burnout like this. He'll say, maybe burnout isn't so much about the time that we give to things, maybe it's more about alignment. And I think I hear so much of that in what you're saying. I just appreciate the way you articulate that.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

It is, it is all about alignment. And how do you get that alignment back? Yeah. That's why I got swag here. Swags, self-awareness, why power, aligned action, and grid, right? And I'm sure you guys have your framework that you utilize. But at the end of the day, just like you said, self-awareness is the entry point to any of these operating systems. You need some sort of operating system, in my opinion. And a lot of times, we're like you said, we're on autopilot because of the filters we carry, we're not really taught this, and we just show up with our fireman hat on, yeah, with the big holes, and just putting out fire. And guess what happens? Fires keep popping up, they keep popping up. You're in that cycle. I gotta put this fire out, gotta put this fire out, gotta put this fire out. And if you have some sort of leadership operating system that you naturally go to, I guarantee you there's some sort of pause. Because within the pause is how you regain self-awareness.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

And with self-awareness, you regain your purpose. Purpose guides you towards certain actions, yeah, and that's what it is, and you're not giving up on yourself, and that, my friend, is swag. That swag was great about the work that we do is we have the ability to help people shift lives, shift the ability to shift people's lives in a positive way because they're on autopilot. Yeah, us as coaches, we generate the awareness to help them see where they are and re rediscover what actions need to take that they need to take to move forward. Yeah,

Coaching Mission Driven Leaders

SPEAKER_01 19:00

I'll said. Yeah. So what's your plan for that you see your team of what you're what you guys are doing from a coaching standpoint? What do you see happening for you guys over the next two to three years?

SPEAKER_02 19:15

Yeah, it's a good question. He you know this, uh, the best laid plans. There's a saying that goes over that. I don't know what, I don't know how it goes after that. But we started this thinking that we had a certain target of potential clients. And I think everybody goes into their coaching practice thinking who they're going to target. And what we've actually seen is that we we had no idea that our sort of demographic would lean towards uh sort of entrepreneur, mission-driven leaders or nonprofit leaders. That that is not the most flashy group of clients. And what we have found is that those are the leaders who have the least amount of resources available to them. Maybe maybe not financially, maybe, maybe not in a traditional use of the word resources, but when we walk into corporations and talk to them about our coaching, what we find is big corporations have 15 different resources that they use for leadership development or leadership training. And that's great, but nobody's using any of those 15 right now. Okay. Or very few people are using them. But when we talk to mission-driven folks or entrepreneurs or nonprofit leaders, they're saying, I want to grow, I want to get unstuck, and I have no idea who to reach out to. Uh, nonprofit organizations, they're led by boards who do their best. These are not often development people who understand how to lead development, to do leadership development. We talk to small businesses, they're just trying to survive. They don't know where to go to grow themselves. That's that's kind of been our sort of aha. Is that those relationships have been really good? And we love working with those folks. We we both have a nonprofit background. We both led churches, we both know what it's like to lead in the trenches of that world. Okay. So we just we love if we could fill our calendars with sort of those under-resourced nonprofit folks, we

Leading Nonprofits Through Fear

SPEAKER_02 21:05

would love that.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Okay, so let's do this. I'm a potential client. I'm coming to you, right? Nonprofit leader, struggling under pressure, no budget has been cut. I'm dealing with a lot of bureaucracy in my section in my industry. So funding isn't as available. I gotta have these type of conversations with my staff that I may have to let somebody go, and I don't know how this is even gonna survive. And this organization may not be in existence in the next two or three years. Yeah, I'm very fearful of losing everything, and there's a fear that I'm gonna fail. Yeah, how do you approach those type of clients that might be knocking at your Door for assistance.

SPEAKER_02 22:02

Yeah. You just described a very real scenario for a lot of nonprofits, right? In 2026, nonprofit world is crazy. Funding is crazy. Donors are crazy. All that stuff. Fundraising is wild in 2026. Yeah. So you just described a scenario that's not abnormal. Our posture is always this. Our posture is always that we want to partner with as many of those leaders as we can. Because even if the next three years for those leaders, even if that is a nonprofit closing, or even if that is them transitioning out, we want them to be able to do that from a place of wholeness and authenticity. Yeah. I don't even know. I'm 42. I don't know what failure and success even mean anymore. Like I think some of those things are harder and harder for me to define every year I'm on this planet. But what I do know is that I want that leader in that situation to be able to show up as their whole authentic selves and lead from a place of fullness, not from a place of being depleted. We think about it like this that uh what when a leader is dealing with their own stuff, navigating their own anxiety, those you talked about fear and protection just a minute ago. We think that's like a whole second job. Dealing with those things is a second job. Yep. And that nonprofit leader does not need that second job. It's already enough to do the first job that they get paid for, or they're expected to do, or they want whatever. However, we want to finish that sentence. So our posture is always, man, how do we help that person do that second job a little less to do the first job more fully, even if it leads to, hey, we're not around in three years. We still want that to be led from a place of wholeness.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Yeah, thank you for sharing. I think that's a great idea and approach. I think also for me working with clients in similar situations like that, it's to pause. Let's take a step back. Let's start there. What's important? What are those values that we need to get back in alignment with? Because when under pressure and dealing with all of the external noise that we experience, whether it's budget constraints, bureaucracy, personnel, you name it, right? All of these things can be coming at us at one time. It's easier to be distracted away from your values in those moments. And your values are tied to our purpose. If you really think about it, when you're distracted from your purpose, you are more susceptible to burnout really fast over time because what's important, let's just say family. Family correlates with work-life balance. Okay, you're working 60-70 hours a week, the value of family is off. Now you're carrying what you're doing at work into family, and your family naturally feels that. Just give me 10 more minutes, just give me another hour, I'll be there, I'll participate, and then you're consistently blowing them off because you're distracted away from that value in that real time. So my approach is the pause, and the pause correlates to the self-awareness. Yeah, sometimes that's what we need. We just need to pause. Because sometimes that judgment is saying you can't afford to pause right now. Yeah, you can't afford to slow down, you have to press through this. If you're gonna win, we gotta press harder. So guess what you do? You press and you press. And burnout starts happening from that viewpoint. Yeah, so it it all just really comes back to how do you slow down and have the awareness in real time to know to slow down to honor your values

Disrupt The Pattern With A Pause

SPEAKER_01 26:40

and your purpose. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_02 26:43

Yeah, 100%. We use the word disrupt, the idea that when we feel pressure or we feel a threat, we use the word threat too. This idea that when we feel pressure, we likely feel a threat that's attached to some sort of previous pressure or previous event that that taught us that these things aren't safe, that there's a danger coming. I have a client who had an experience in middle school that was highly embarrassing. Uh that we would call that the little T trauma. We're trauma-certified coaches, we call that little T trauma. And that embarrassing moment in middle school carried with her into adulthood, into our leadership, where she's constantly on the lookout. Her nervous system is constantly on the lookout for places where she might feel embarrassed, like that one time. And so we're always encouraging and inviting ways to disrupt the autopilot. I love how you use the word pause. And we're saying the same thing with different words, but uh, find ways to disrupt those things that we've always done so that we can just stop long enough. Can we disrupt it enough to let those new ways of preferred being to let those be in place and get going? Man, I love that.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

You're you're so right. When you were saying that, I was thinking about sports, I was thinking about basketball because sometimes in basketball, I don't know if you really follow Hoop or not. I'm a baseball guy. Oh, you're a baseball guy. Same thing, even in baseball, they they get into a rally where the pitcher just can't throw a strike or anything he he throws is getting smacked, right? The other team is on this run. And guess what the baseball coach typically does? He tap the arm to do to do a pause, bring somebody else in. Same thing with basketball. When the other team goes on a run, guess what they do? They disrupt it. You got to disrupt the run by calling a timeout. Let's do a pause here, let's do a reset of a play so that we can stop this run. It's the same exact thing, and that's what came to my mind when you said the power of disrupt.

SPEAKER_02 29:01

Yeah, it is the same. And I I think you said something that I want to affirm, and I think it's so powerful. You talked about the pressure of not being able to pause or the pressure of not wanting to pause. And yeah, we just every person we interact with uh expresses a similar feeling or expresses a similar fear. I just can't take my foot off the gas. I don't know, coach. I think we we typically ask the question, can you afford not to? Exactly. And I always want to ask that in a gracious kind of way and in a non-judgmental kind of way. We believe self-compassion is one of the most important things to hold up in this work, but but yeah, I think the question is always, can I afford not to pause? Right. And I think the answer is I can't afford to just push and push and push.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Exactly. That goes back to why I created the burnout mirror assessment. In fact, you can find that at the inner arena leadership forward slash burnout hyphen mirror. Um, yeah, that's exactly why I built that, just to help people pause to think about how this

Resources, Course, And Closing

SPEAKER_01 30:10

burnout is really showing up for me. As we get ready to wrap this up, any lasting thoughts that you would like to share? And how can my audience get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_02 30:20

Yeah, thanks for asking. I like to leave with leaders all the time is that if a leader is feeling stuck, if a leader's listening to this and you're feeling stuck or overwhelmed, it just doesn't have to stay that way. There is this myth that this is what it means to be an adult, and this is what it means to be a leader. And there are better ways. There are better ways than exhaustion and frustration. There are better ways. It takes some work, but there are better ways. So I just I always like to cast a vision that there is another way other than what we might know today. As far as how people can get a hold of me, uh, our website is best. It's brimstone coaching group. Let me let me say quick to coach. The brimstone word, brimstone is a species of butterfly. And butterflies are the only transformed creatures in the world. They're the only creature that is born one thing and transforms into another. And the brimstone butterfly is the species that lives the longest. So we wanted to capture the sort of butterfly transformation that is possible in our lives. So brimstonecoaching group.com and all sorts of resources on there. People can find who we are, why we do what we do. But we're particularly excited about a course that we are launching called attending. And it is a 10-day online course that gives people a guided experience on pausing and just noticing what's happening inside of us. 100% free, 10 days all online on the courses page of our website. We would love for people to engage that and see what's stirring up inside of them.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

So basically, what you're saying is if I'm like a calipillar and I enter the brimstone coaching group platform, I'm gonna come out as a butterfly. Coach fully transformed.

SPEAKER_02 32:10

Let me say this, coach. We believe there are lots of coaches doing lots of good work that lead to transformation outside of just brimstone coaching group. Uh so we certainly don't believe we have the corner on the market of transformation, but we certainly do believe it's possible and hope to see it in our clients. Along with so many other good coaches like yourself who are doing that work too.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

Absolutely, because we're not in the business of guaranteeing transformation. It's up to the individual to put in the work to create their own transformation. We're there to hold your hand and guide you and support you and help and offer those empowering questions that helps you get out of your own damn way. I appreciate you, sir. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. That's another rep in the inner arena. You didn't just listen, you leveled up your swag. Self-awareness, why power, align action, and grit. If this at 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 Y, act in a moment, and keep your grid strong.