#10: The Productivity Pendulum: Why Most Leaders Swing Between Chaos and Clarity

Are you caught in the constant swing between hustle and exhaustion?

You're not alone. In this episode we will discuss The Productivity Pendulum, host Eric Pfeiffer—leadership coach, speaker, and author dives into one of the most overlooked cycles plaguing today’s leaders: the trap of unsustainable productivity.

We live in a world that celebrates burnout as a badge of honor. But what if the real power isn't in doing more but in aligning with your natural rhythm?

In this powerful solo episode, Eric unpacks:

• Why the modern leader’s productivity model is broken

• The hidden pendulum that swings between overdrive and shutdown

• How to break free from performance-based worth

• The difference between momentum and motion

• Practical steps to rebuild your rhythm without losing your results

Through raw storytelling, practical frameworks, and hard-won wisdom, Eric challenges the glorification of constant busyness and invites you into a more sustainable, soul-aligned way of showing up as a leader.

Whether you’re leading a business, a team, or yourself—this episode is your invitation to pause, reset, and rethink what productivity really means. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of how to lead from a place of clarity and capacity, rather than chaos and compulsion.

If you’ve ever thought, “I’m doing everything right but I still feel behind,” this is for you.

🎯 This episode is packed with actionable insights for executives, entrepreneurs, high performers, and anyone navigating high-stakes leadership in today’s fast-paced world.

 

 

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Episode Transcript

eric (00:00):
We are recording episode 10, the productivity of Pendulum. Most leaders are stuck in a cycle. They overwork, burnout and crash, and then guess what? Rinse and repeat the pressure's on. We want to get stuff done, people to see, jobs to be handled, stuff to be explored, money to be made. We all know the pressures that we're under on a daily basis, and too often we treat exhaustion.

(00:01):
So we treat it like a badge of honor, and we treat rest like it's a reward that we have to earn. We get to the end of the week, we finally get to crash, and somehow that's the reward that we earned. And most of us don't spend our weekends reinvesting. We spend our weekends trying to recover. But great leaders don't swing between burnout and busyness.

dawn (00:02):
That's right. And we see this with leaders all the time. I'm working with a group right now where I'm like, folks, we need to be aware of this because I sense that you are inching towards burnout and nobody is effective when they're burning out. But the problem is leaders think that they're being productive, oftentimes handling all the to-dos, checking off the list.

eric (00:03):
Busyness is frenzied activity or engagement in different. Things without clear direction. Right? And we'll come back to that later. Here's another thing, and I would encourage our listeners to consider which of these resonate with them.
And the last one that we see very often is the fear of being left behind. And for all of our entrepreneurs, all those people who are embarking on a new project or a new job responsibility or new promotion or something new, there's this constant fear that drives us that, you know what, if I'm not working somebody else is and therefore.

dawn (00:05):
Yeah, it's true. We, social media is that highline, so nobody is sharing necessarily when they take a rest or when they're feeling burnt out, when they're struggling with imposter syndrome, they're only sharing that highline.
Let us know if you have a better title for this tool. Productivity pendulum does describe what it's all about, but it's a very long-winded and two very long words. So. Alright. The productivity pendulum is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine one of those pendulums, right? We have those, the, we've all seen, like, on somebody's desk, there's the steel ball hanging from a string and you pull it, you know the laws of physics the length that you pull it to one side, and then when you release it, it will swing equal distance, the opposite side, right?

eric (00:07):
And so what this tool is doing is helping us understand what so many people struggle to figure out, which is what most people talk about as work life balance. But we've reframed it as work life integration.
And the car is as good to us as it serves that. Purpose. There is a clear purpose for that vehicle, except that like many people out there, I myself hate the effort that is required to maintain my carbs. I hate when the light check engine light comes on or the gas light comes on, or the windshield wiper fluid light comes on, right?
We've all played that game of how long can I go before I actually stop to get gas? Like at really, at what point does my car stop moving forward? Right? That's right. Yeah. We've all had that check engine light on for weeks or months, and we're playing like roulette with, our opportunity to drive the car by, by thinking I can just keep going.
Before this vehicle called me. Breaks down. And too often when we are working with leaders, what we discover is that most people it's not until they find themselves broken down on the side of the road of life, broken marriages, broken relationships with their kids significant health issues.
'cause she chose the house, right? That's kind of, I trust her on that. Why are we moving this house? This is the ugliest tree. It's buried. It looks like it's dead, right? It looks so dark on the bark. I thought this is gotta be a dead tree. Are we gonna have it removed? What are we gonna do with it? And my wife said, babe, don't you understand that tree is in a season of resting?
Most amazing fruit. But then guess what happened? Eventually that fruit, after we ate a bunch of it and the birds came and picked at it, the fruit all fell off, and then guess what? The leaves all fell off.
Yeah. And the goal is to only increase productivity because slowing down means you are losing. Or you're failing. Right. So these are the two metaphors just to kind of draw us into the reality that we A, we don't wanna wait until the consequences of breaking down are so great that they're unrecoverable.
There is a required input yes, of rest and abiding and cultivating and investing in ourselves in such a way that it allows us to be increasingly more productive. There's a rhythm. If you think of that pendulum swinging back and forth, there's gotta be a rhythm. And we'll come back to discussing kind of the different kinds of rhythms we need to think about.
Yeah, I crash at a holiday. And how many people go on holiday and then they get sick for the first few days because they're finally resting and their body's like, that's it. We're checking out. We're done. We're not doing anything else. So versus. A principle of life I wanna recommend to all, just instead of resting from our work, what if we learned to work from rest?
He needed to invest, he needed to put some input into the system. So he's redoing the front end of this truck. He had to buy the products. You know, he has to, the truck now is out of commission for a season while he does the work on this truck. But there's no understanding that, well, this truck is worthless now.
Optional to the point where Yeah, as optional. And so something that was a small, quick fix. Now, now the whole system's blown. I
And that can be very difficult for some of us to wrestle with because maybe we've grown up in a culture where it's like, Hey, burn the candle both ends. You work, work, work. That's how you prove your value. That's how you become successful. Or the opposite, people who become so paralyzed by their fear of not knowing what to do and how to do it, that they get stuck on the opposite side of the pendulum.
And again, so that we can hopefully in the future, avoid the more catastrophic consequences, right? Of what happens when we break down. We need to pay attention to what does it mean for us to invest in ourselves, to maintain ourselves, to cultivate ourselves? So on the left side of the semicircle, I want us to think of four key investments that we need to make.
Start with Why. Mm-hmm. A great book that drives us with deep questions to wrestle with who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose here on earth? And who, how, who do I wanna be when I show up to any environment? And that. Pushes people to consider the fact that our life matters. Our impact in this world matters.
The second thing is I. Perspective. Very rarely do we slow down to reflect and to make sense of our life experiences, whether it was from the day that we've just experienced or the week before or the month before or the year before. I've talked a lot about the discipline importance of journaling, which is an opportunity for us to reflect on what's going well in my life, what's not going well in my life?
The third key area that we need to invest into is our priorities. We need to make really clear, sure that we are clear about our priorities, whether it's in our families, whether it's in our friendships, whether it's in our hobbies, whether it's in our workplace. We need to intentional our priorities every single day, every week, every month, every year.
Abuse alcohol. I can abuse you know, going on vacation as easily as I can. Abuse, you know, watching Netflix shows. But we're really talking about activities that we engage with that bring us joy. Mm-hmm. That refresh our spirit, our heart, our minds, our bodies. And obviously some of those are done in isolation.
That's the fifth term. The byproduct of investing in our personhood. Our perspective, our priorities in our play is those, that that's how we recharge the battery. That's how we put fuel back in the tank. Mm-hmm. That's how we make sure that we as a vehicle are able to. Operate optimally. And what that does is that power drives us back into the activities of work and productivity and and engagement in whatever we're doing.
If you are, for example, doom scrolling, if you are numbing out, if you are. Not at work, but you are engaged in, relationships that are draining outside of work. That's not actually what we're after here.
And we all have them. Think about it. Most human beings go to sleep at some point in the day, and then they wake up at some point in the day. They eat X number of meals each day. They might drive to work at a certain time. You know, most days they talk to similar people each day. These are all routines or predictable patterns that we engage with the hope that they are serving a purpose, right?
I'm still ambitious and hope, hopefully in a good way now. But I was ambitious. I wanted to get ahead, I wanted to be successful. I wanted people to see me as being a standout. And so I oftentimes engaged in this cycle that we've talked about already of work really hard burn out. And then crash and then try to recover and then rinse and repeat.

(00:28):
And then a mentor came along and said, Hey bro. You are gonna be dead by the time you're 35. This isn't sustainable. You know you're gonna lose your marriage, you're gonna lose your family, you're gonna lose your health. You're, I mean, you really are. And I remember like, wow. And I was already experienced and I was getting sick all the time.
Where you want to see the desired ROI. And so I identified marriage, family, my physical health, which includes my emotional health and my spiritual health. Let me add that in there. And then obviously I wanted to be really effective and productive at work. I said, great. So what we have to do is we have to design the inputs to match the outputs, and your inputs have to lead to sustainable results that can increase over time rather than this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Any one experience or expression of them doesn't feel life changing, but it's actually over time that they begin to make significant changes. And so we committed to a date night each week. We committed to Saturday morning coffees to kind of debrief the previous week and to pre-brief the, the coming week with all the activities and kids schedule my travel and her work.
Gonna go fight for today. And then we did this even when our kids were in school, like, oh, I got a test, or, Hey, I wanna play with my friend, or I want to, learn to ride a bike. Whatever it was, we just said, Hey, let's do that. Awesome. And then at night, over dinner, we had a predictable pattern of together celebrating what was your high, what's your low, and then what's your buffalo?
And there's so many more areas. But now transfer that into, working with my teams. Even with our team at Empower Coaching, right? We have a Monday morning, almost two hour meeting where we're, debriefing, what's gone on the week before, where we start with celebrations. What are you celebrating?
Give it three months. If after three months this isn't working for you, no problem, we'll move on. And what do they always say, Don, after three months we can't afford not to do this on a weekly basis. Yeah. We can't imagine not doing this every week. I can imagine not doing this every week. I said exactly, because that one hour each week isn't always gonna feel powerful or like you're getting traction, but you put in, a number of weeks in a row.
Mm-hmm. And then we just, all we do is reverse engineer and say, okay, well what are the predictable patterns, the necessary inputs, short, small. On a regular, weekly, daily, weekly, or seasonal basis, that will over time yield dramatic results.
We have dinner together, we play a game after dinner. And you know what? Sometimes those teenagers. Are disgruntled about us forcing them to sit there and play a game together. But we do it because, like you said, over time, those are the things that are gonna yield the results that we want. And it's, it's easy to throw those things away because they feel difficult or not convenient at the time.
Atomic habits was game changer for me because it was like, if you wanna add something to your schedule. Combine it with something that is an already non for you. So when I wake up, that's when I meditate, I wake up every day. That's a non-negotiable, like knock on wood. So far, so far it's been, yeah, it's been pretty non-negotiable.
Our lives in many ways. Love it. Okay. Real quick, a couple of quick practical things that we can go from this podcast episode and go do, even right now while you're driving on the treadmill, whatever you're doing. That would be a lot of fun to have our listeners share with us through the comment section or DM us and let us know.
Where do I feel like things might be? Burning out a little bit, slowing down, breaking down and to ask the, then the next question, which is, is there a simple predictable pattern that I could experiment with over the next. A month and a half to two months that I think could potentially move the needle in that area and give me a greater ROI.
We started talking about it a little bit, but how do we lead with our eye on an actual return on our investments that's bigger than just profit? A lot of times we are very focused on our bottom lines, but we would challenge that there's a lot of areas in our life that maybe we need to be focusing on the bottom line and.
This episode might be for them. So go ahead and send that off. And don't forget, as always, we have a free gift for you in the show notes, five shifts to become the leader that you wish you had. And remember this week, great leadership isn't frantic, it's focused, and you can learn to lead with rhythm and not reaction.