In 2022, I was working 60 hours a week.
I was beating my targets. My agency was running. My teams were solid.
And yet, every Friday night, I came home empty.
Not tired. Empty.
As if all the effort of the week had not actually fed anything in me.
At the time, I blamed it on fatigue. I went running on weekends, slept a little, and started again on Monday morning. The cycle repeated.
Three years later, as I began my mental performance training with Thomas Sammut, the mental coach behind Olympic swimming champion Léon Marchand, I understood what had escaped me all that time.
There are two very different ways to move forward in your work.
And the confusion between the two is probably the number one cause of exhaustion among ambitious founders.
Forced performance: the "I have to" trap
Forced performance is the kind you push from the outside.
You work because you must. Because you have no choice. Because if you let go, everything collapses.
The result?
Fear becomes your engine:
- Fear of failure
- Fear of what others think
- Fear of losing what you have built
- Fear of being found out
And your inner vocabulary sounds like:
"I have to..."
"I must..."
"If I don't do it, then..."
It works. Short term, it even delivers impressive results.
Because fear is an ultra-powerful fuel. It makes you move mountains. It keeps you standing where others would quit.
But long term, this engine has a cost.
You push.
You hold on.
You break.
It is exactly what you see in people who end up burned out after 10 years of "success". They did not fail. They just used the wrong fuel for too long.
Aligned performance: what flows from who you are
Aligned performance is the opposite.
It is not pushed. It flows from something in you that wants to express itself.
Your engine is desire. Curiosity. Meaning. Rightness.
And your inner vocabulary changes radically:
"I want to..."
"I choose to..."
"This matters to me."
It is not soft. It is not slack. You are still demanding, maybe even more than before. But that demand now works for you, not against you.
As Thomas Sammut puts it:
A consequence of what?
Of being aligned with what truly drives you. Of doing what you do for the right reasons. Of knowing why you get up in the morning.
And that shift is not necessarily visible from the outside. You can still work 50, 60, 70 hours.
The difference is what runs through you during those hours.
And what you feel at the end.
The Monday morning test
To find out where you stand, here is a very simple test.
Ask yourself this question on Sunday evening, or Monday morning when you wake up:
Do I actually feel like going to work this week?
Not "will I go". You will go. You don't have a choice.
The question is the desire.
If the answer is:
- a knot in your stomach that shows up on Sunday evening
- wishing the weekend would last one more day
- a fatigue that sets in before you have even started
- the feeling of climbing back into the ring every Monday
Then you are in forced performance. It is physical. Your body is telling you.
If the answer is:
- a certain drive, even when the week looks dense
- the urge to close out one topic, to push another forward
- the sense that what you do truly matters
- desire, not constraint
Then you are closer to aligned performance.
This test is not about mood. It is a signal.
And many founders have been ignoring it for years.
How you switch from one to the other
The good news: it can be trained.
The less good news: it does not happen in a week.
Here are the three levers I use and see working.
Lever 1: Put words on what truly drives you
Before any protocol, there is a question.
Who am I when I am at my best, in my work?
Not who I am when everything is fine. Who I am when I am aligned.
What kind of problem do I enjoy solving? What impact do I want to leave? What energy do I want to give off?
As long as those answers stay blurry, everything you do can drift to the "forced" side without you noticing.
Lever 2: Change your inner language
One of the simplest shifts, and one of the most powerful.
Every time you catch yourself thinking "I have to", stop.
Rephrase it as: "I want to" or "I choose to".
Sometimes it will not pass. The sentence rings false, because you do not actually want it.
That is exactly the signal. This task, this project, this obligation: are you carrying it, or is it carrying you?
Often, you discover you have spent years piling up "I have to"s you never actually chose.
Lever 3: Align the structural choices
The last lever is the hardest, because it touches structure.
If your work, your calendar, your business model are built around "I have to"s, no amount of mental work will hold over time.
At some point, you have to face certain structural choices:
- What am I doing that no longer fits who I am?
- What did I put in place out of fear, that I can now rethink?
- What am I carrying out of habit, rather than alignment?
That is where the real decisions are made. Not in motivation. In structure.
The real promise
Switching from forced to aligned performance will not erase the pressure of running a company.
There will always be hard decisions, demanding weeks, moments when the weight lands back on your shoulders.
But what changes is what carries you through those moments.
When your engine is no longer fear, but desire, personal standards and meaning, you no longer hold on.
You move forward.
That is what separates those who last from those who break.
Not talent. Not discipline. Not even intelligence.
Alignment.
Many founders understand this distinction intuitively the day they come close to burnout.
The point is to see it before.
Enjoyed this letter?
In upcoming editions, we will get into the concrete tools to clarify what truly drives you, and how to rewrite your inner dialogue day to day.
If you want a framework to think about your performance beyond motivation alone, the guide on energy management details the 4 reservoirs that make aligned performance sustainable over time.
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