“I’m doing well at work. My team is delivering and thriving. I just don’t care about my job anymore. I’m there for the paycheck and I don’t like that.”

This was how a senior PM leader, Devan (name changed to protect privacy), at a scaled tech company opened our coaching discovery call He was receiving positive performance feedback at work. His team was delivering well, and his reports were developing in their careers. Like everyone, he was very busy and working long hours. But he just wasn’t feeling connected to the work like he used to. He didn’t know why, and he wanted help to figure it out.

The more we explored his situation together, it was clear that nobody else really noticed it. But he felt it. He’d stopped having as many opinions in leadership meetings. He stopped pushing back when he thought a decision was wrong. He’d gone quiet in a way that looked like steady and calm leadership to his team.

It wasn’t steadiness. It was the early stages of something I’ve seen in almost every leader who stays too long in the wrong soil. His leaves had started to rust.

Leaves Are A Canary

In a forest, a tree under stress doesn’t wither immediately. In fact, in can take decades for subtle problems to impact the tree roots, and trigger fatal withering. When an issue arises, the tree redirects energy from growth to survival. Leaves often start to change first by curling, rusting, and thinning out. Well before the roots are in real trouble.

Leaders experience the same pattern.

The signs don’t present as problems initially. They show up subtly. You stop volunteering for things you’d normally be interested in. You start editing yourself in rooms where you used to speak freely. You notice you’re doing the job on autopilot. Your system is telling you something is off, even when you can’t name what it is.

Most high-performing leaders are trained to override signals like these. Push through pain. Stay professional. You don’t want to be the squeaky wheel or be seen as “the difficult one”. Especially in an environment where leadership roles are being flattened. So the quiet adaptation continues, until one day you realize you’ve been operating at half capacity for longer than you’d like to admit.

What Rusty Leaves Look Like

These are the signals to watch for most carefully. They’re not diagnostic criteria. They’re early warnings that something more severe is brewing under the surface:

#1: Your curiosity has disappeared

The questions that used to energize you feel like obligations to answer. You’re addressing them, but you’re not interested in them. Curiosity is often the first thing to go.

#2: You’ve stopped disagreeing

Previously, you used to strategize how to push back effectively when needed. But now, you subconsciously calculate that it’s never worth it. You’ve learnt that your perspective doesn’t land here, so you’ve stopped offering it.

#3: You’re exhausted by everyday events

Tiredness after deep work is expected. Tiredness after a meeting where nothing was decided, a conversation that went nowhere, a process that didn’t need to exist etc. is depletion. Your energy is going out and not coming back.

#4: You’ve started making excuses to yourself

You find yourself justifying why you’re staying. Counting down to something. Rehearsing the reasons it’s not so bad. When the internal monologue shifts from “I want to be here” to “It’s not that bad and it’s a paycheck”, the roots are already under stress.

#5: You notice a feedback gap

Your manager says you’re doing great. You feel like you’re disappearing. Both things can be true at once. External performance is easier to sustain than internal spark. It masks the problem from everyone, including yourself, until it can’t anymore.

Season vs. Soil

Not every difficult period means you’re in the wrong place. Some seasons are simply more taxing. If you’re going through a major strategy pivot, a big deal negotiation, or a personal change, that can cause significant leaf damage. The question is whether the difficulty is temporary or structural. A hard season has a curve that you can see the other side of. And you’re still yourself during it, just under pressure.

The wrong soil feels different. It doesn’t shift when the project ends. You feel it in the mundane moments; the Tuesday afternoon meeting that drains you relentlessly, the work that should be easy but somehow isn’t. .

The question to ask yourself to know the difference of season vs. soil: when was the last time I felt like myself at work? If the answer is months ago, that’s a sign that you are in the wrong soil. Not the wrong season.

Treating Your Leaves Like A Scientist

Devan noticed several of the rusty leaf signals. And he initially wondered if he was failing at his job. He consistently received feedback that he was one of the most high performing SWE-turned-leaders on his team. If it wasn’t his performance, what was it? He was struggling because he was experiencing a mismatch in his innate style and his environment.

He is someone who did his best work operating in bursts: high pressure, high urgency, private processing time, and direct communication when needed. His current role required him to process information with others (often in large meetings), to collaborate over a period of months before a launch, and to make decisions via consensus. His habitat wasn’t unleashing his natural strengths.

When he understood that, something shifted. He stopped interpreting the signals as evidence of his own failure and started using them as information. Most leaders don’t have a map for diagnosing their environment. They’ve been given every tool to improve their own performance. But almost none for how to know if you’re in the right conditions unleash that performance.

He took the approach that served him well throughout his life: he started experimenting. With both tactical changes he could make (e.g. the way he prioritized his time and energy on his calendar, meeting and delegation structure, 1:1 document templates etc.) but also with bigger changes (reporting structure, projects he focused on etc.). He realized that by making a few meaningful shifts to invest his energy in the right projects, he was able to operate at speed, and delegate more steady projects to his leads, who were keen for more experience in scaled processes. He started feeling a spring in his step again. His curiosity started growing. And he directed it to the bright spots that brought him energy.

Shedding Damaged Leaves

Damaged leaves don’t require a new environment or a total job change to shed. Certainly not as a first step, and potentially not at all. As a first step, you have to stop overriding the signals, and telling yourself to keep soldiering on.

If you’re feeling any of the leaf rust signals, try using this prompt in your favorite LLM:

“I’m a [role] at a [stage] company. I’ve noticed the following problems in my work life: [include 1-2 things: e.g. I’ve stopped being curious, I’m exhausted by the wrong things]. I don’t want to leave my job. Help me design 2-3 small experiments I could run in the next 30 days to change the conditions around me — not my performance, but the environment I’m working in. Be specific to my role and situation.”

Not all soil problems require transplanting. Some require negotiating for different light, different resources, a different kind of visibility. But some do require a move. You’ll only know the difference if you try experimenting, and see what works or doesn’t. If you still feel rusty leaves a few months after running experiments, that’s a sign you might need a bigger soil shift.

How are your leaves doing? When was the last time you checked on them?

If you’ve been noticing these signals and want to understand them better, the Wild Growth assessment at anbara.com/assessment is a place to start. It maps your growth pattern and the conditions where you’re most likely to thrive. Which makes it easier to diagnose whether what you’re experiencing is wrong soil, or just a hard season.

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Watch: How did Brazilian football go from super high to super low? Good reminder that past wins aren’t any guarantee of future success (and same with failure).

2. Economics: The best and worst US state economies. Super interesting. Who knew that Louisiana is the biggest exporter state in the US? Not me.

3. Read: Wrestlers match up at libraries to promote literacy. Lucha Libro! What a fun idea.

4. Cook: 15 Strawberry Desserts. That cake is a beautiful way to use up extra strawberries that are on their last legs.

5. Wear: Summer shoes that are comfy, cute, and office-friendly. I’ve loved Rothy’s flats for years, especially that they are machine-washable. Did now know they had kids shoes now!

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.