One of the most overlooked leadership skills, especially for neurodiverse, emotionally attuned, and people-focused leaders– is knowing your own limits. I talk about this often, but I don’t think leaders hear it enough or take the time to apply it:
- You must know your depleters, your boundaries, and how to exit or regroup when you’ve reached them.
Too often, I see leaders pushing through circumstances that drain them. They don’t know their depleters– the tasks, environments, or social dynamics that chip away at their energy. And when you don’t know what drains you, you also don’t know when to pause, reset, or delegate before things spiral.
When leaders aren’t aware of their limits, meetings go sideways, emotions escalate, teams disconnect, and the leader may leave wondering, “How did that go so wrong?”
Let me give you a real example.
Case Study: The Meeting That Went Off the Rails
A wonderful business leader who I coach runs a large service company. One day, she called me, clearly frustrated and angry.
“Why can’t my team work together? Why are they always creating drama?”
After letting her process verbally, I asked a simple question:
“What brought this on?”
She had just finished a team meeting. There was a lot of finger-pointing and almost no progress. The meeting went nowhere, and it left her emotionally drained.
Here’s what we knew from our coaching work together:
- One of her biggest depleters is meetings– especially ones without focus or forward momentum.
- She got frustrated. She stopped leading. She shut down.
- And when a leader shuts down, it doesn’t go unnoticed. It often creates the very “drama” they’re trying to avoid.
- We pinpointed that her energy crash happened about ten minutes into the meeting. That was the moment she emotionally checked out. And once that happened, the team began to drift and so did the trust in the room.
We talked through what she could have done instead:
- Take a breath.
- Refocus on the speaker.
- Acknowledge something constructive in their comment.
- Gently bring the team back to the project’s goal.
A huge look of awareness came over her face.
“When I shut down in the meeting, that creates drama—and that carries into everything. I have to have these meetings. I need to ask my number two to back me up if he sees I’m not steering the team. I also need to regroup on the fly and refocus everyone on the goal. I got this.”
And you know what? She does.
What This Means for You as a Leader
Being a different thinker often comes with strengths in innovation, emotional intelligence, and vision. But it also comes with challenges—especially around energy management and emotional regulation.
If you’ve never taken the time to list out your top five depleters, I highly recommend you do that today. Grab a piece of paper or email yourself this prompt:
What are my top five energy depleters– those situations that leave me emotionally or mentally exhausted?
Once you know them, you can begin to:
- Spot early warning signs in meetings or conversations
- Prepare your support team to step in
- Exit or reset gracefully before emotional dysregulation takes over
- Lead more consistently from your strengths
When you know your limits, you can take care of yourself and show up powerfully for your team.
You don’t need to power through everything.
You need to be honest about your needs, your strengths, and your weak spots.
That’s not weakness– that’s wise leadership.
I’d love to hear what you learned from this and one of your top five depleters.
JoyGenea
Transcription:
So one of the key things in leadership—and I talk about it often—but I just don’t think leaders understand or remember this enough, when they are neurodiverse and different thinkers, maybe a little more, um, people-focused. And what that is, is the fact that you need to know your limits and boundaries, and you need to know how to exit yourself from circumstances when those limits and boundaries have been met.
So often, I see in leaders that they don’t know their depleters. They don’t know the things that really kind of will deplete them and completely make it really hard for them to lead with their strengths. And when they don’t know that, they don’t know or notice that in a meeting, things have gone terribly wrong. And that all of a sudden, maybe people are asking of them things that they are not able to give at this time, and so forth.
And unfortunately, that causes them to freeze up, right? We have those items where we’re fight, flight, freeze, fawn—I think there’s another one too, but I’m just gonna go with those that I can remember right now and be at peace with that.
And when we freeze, or when we all of a sudden fight, we do that because we are uncomfortable and because things have gotten out of our abilities, potentially. So, knowing our depleters and knowing our weaknesses also makes it easier to say, “Wow, this whole circumstance is inside my weakness. Who can I lean on in this moment? Who’s an ally in this room?” Or, if no one’s an ally in this room, “How do I exit quickly? Do I need to just go to the bathroom and take a timeout?”
Not a bad thing—that’s the right thing to do. But what I often see in leaders that are neurodiverse is they are so used to masking that they continue to mask. They just keep going like somehow they can power through this. No. You usually make a dang mess, and then you end up cleaning it up, and you go, “Well, how did this get like this? How come so many people are offended? How come the circumstance got so elevated?”
Like, it’s not a priority—I know that and you know that—but in that moment, when you weren’t in one of your strengths, you maybe said or did something that’s now created this situation.
So, the easiest way to deal with that and to have it turn out a whole lot better is for you to actually be aware of your weaknesses and of those spots. So, if you’ve never sat down with a sheet of paper—and I do mean this—or email yourself this: What are your top five depleters? What are the top five weak spots that, when you step over there, it literally zaps all of your energy?
Because if you don’t know those, you don’t know when to exit yourself from certain circumstances to take care of yourself. And that is when we do one of the five F’s—fight, flight, fawn, freeze, and so forth.
We gotta catch those moments. That’s how you become a powerful leader with a different-thinking brain—is you know your limits, and you know how to take care of yourself.
I’m JoyGenea, International Neurodiversity Coach, teaching people how to take their brilliance, bring it to the world, and lead others at the same time.
Thank you so much. Bye now.