The language your boss uses in a Monday morning standup is doing more damage than their actual expectations. And there’s a former Navy submarine captain who can prove it.
I picked up Leadership is Language by L. David Marquet a few weeks ago, and it gave me words for something I’ve been watching happen to clients for years. There’s one concept in this book that I think describes about 90% of the burned-out high performers I work with. I’ll get there.
First, the thing nobody told you about your job.
The system underneath you was built for a completely different kind of work
Marquet traces the language of modern leadership back to the industrial era. Factories. Assembly lines. Physical labor. The whole system was built for execution. Show up, do the thing, repeat. Thinking was someone else’s job. The boss thinks, the worker does.
That model carried forward. Into offices. Into knowledge work. Into your job, where the most important parts of what you do require thinking, reflecting, and making good decisions. But the structure you’re working inside was never updated for that.
He even points out that the language proves it. “All hands” meetings. “Leaders and followers.” “Direct reports.” That’s factory language running a knowledge economy.
A 2026 study in Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research found that knowledge workers experience occupational stress differently than industrial workers because the cognitive demands of their roles (e.g., constant context-switching, ambiguity, creative problem-solving), don’t map onto the rigid structures they’re working inside.
The system asks for your brain. The structure treats you like a pair of hands.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace Report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.
That means 4 in 5 people are checked out, coasting, or completely overwhelmed. And in my experience, most of those people aren’t lazy or disengaged by nature. They’re exhausted by a structure that demands thinking but only rewards doing.
Marquet calls this permanent redwork. Redwork is execution. Doing. Checking things off the list. The opposite is bluework, which is thinking, reflecting, and deciding whether you should even be doing what you’re doing.
Most workplaces are stuck in permanent redwork. Go go go. No pause. No reflection. Just continuous action without ever stopping to ask if this is the right direction.
So when you feel like you can’t keep up, it’s not you. The system was never redesigned for the work it’s asking you to do. And that gap between what the job requires and what the structure supports is where burnout lives.
When was the last time you were given actual time to think at work? Not squeeze in thinking between meetings. Not stay late to finally get to the strategic stuff after a full day of execution. Dedicated, protected, expected-of-you time to reflect on whether the work you’re doing is even the right work.
If you can’t answer that, you’re stuck in permanent redwork.
The reason you can’t see it when you’re in it
This is the part that alarmed me.
Marquet says that stress makes it nearly impossible to recognize when you need to stop. The more burned out you are, the less likely you are to realize it.
Think about what that actually means. The thing that would help you — pausing, reflecting, reassessing — is the exact thing your stressed brain is least capable of initiating.
Stress narrows your focus. It pushes you into execution mode. It makes the idea of stopping feel dangerous, like if you slow down even a little, everything will fall apart.
The APA’s 2024 Work in America Survey found that when people have psychological safety at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution. But more than half of U.S. employees are currently experiencing burnout. And burned-out people don’t feel safe. They feel like they’re one mistake away from consequences. So they keep their heads down and keep executing.
You see the loop. Stress makes you less aware. Less awareness means you don’t pause. Not pausing means the stress compounds. And the whole time, you look fine from the outside. You’re still performing. You’re still hitting deadlines. You’re just slowly disappearing inside the process.
I see this with clients constantly. They come to me and say something like “I don’t know when it got this bad.” It got this bad because the system never built in a moment for them to check.
If someone who loves you watched your average Tuesday, would they be concerned? Not your boss. Not your coworker. Someone who actually knows what you look like when you’re okay. Because you’ve probably adjusted your baseline so many times that “fine” doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
Why “speak up” culture is making things worse
Marquet makes a point that most people gloss over, and it’s one of the most important things in the book.
He argues that even well-intentioned leaders coerce instead of collaborate. Getting everyone on board. Building consensus. Aligning the team. Those sound positive. He says they’re still coercion. They’re still trying to convince people that the leader’s conclusion is the right one and everyone else needs to get there too.
Real collaboration, according to Marquet, looks like voting first, then discussing. Speaking last as the leader. Asking what and how instead of why, because “why” puts people on the defensive. And inviting dissent instead of driving consensus. Because all innovation starts as an outlier thought.
Marquet says the censoring of information is directly proportionate to the power gradient. The steeper the hierarchy, the more people self-edit. They reword emails. They stay silent when the boss floats an idea. They stop pushing back entirely. It’s a rational response to a system that punishes dissent.
A Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study found that in workplaces with higher levels of psychological safety, employees were less prone to burnout even during periods of intense stress and resource constraints. They also found that psychological safety measured in 2019 predicted willingness to stay in the job in 2021. That’s a two-year protective effect from one workplace condition.
But psychological safety isn’t something you create for yourself. It’s a structural condition. It either exists in your environment or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, the rational response is exactly what Marquet describes: you stop speaking up. You stop raising concerns. You stop advocating for yourself.
Most people think the problem is their confidence. They think if they were just braver, more assertive, or more willing to have the hard conversation, things would be different. But bravery in an unsafe system has nothing to do with courage. It’s a gamble. And most smart people stop gambling when the odds are consistently against them.
Think about the last time you disagreed with a decision at work. Did you say something? If yes, what happened? If no, why not? Be honest. Was it because you didn’t care enough, or because you’d learned that speaking up costs more than staying quiet?
If you’ve stopped advocating for yourself, that’s a culture problem.
Prove mode vs. protect mode: the concept that explains 90% of my clients
This is the part I mentioned at the top.
Marquet describes two sides of the performance mindset. Prove mode, where you’re trying to demonstrate competence. And protect mode, where you’re trying to hide incompetence.
Protect mode is what happens to people who’ve been stressed into silence. The best way not to make an error is to do nothing. And that’s exactly what burned-out high performers start doing. They stop innovating. They stop volunteering for projects. They show up, do the minimum to not get noticed, and go home. It’s a survival mechanism, especially in a workplace that made it unsafe to try.
Here’s how to tell which mode you’re in right now.
If you’re in prove mode, you’re still running. You’re over-preparing for meetings. You’re saying yes to projects you don’t have capacity for. You’re working weekends not because you have to, but because you need the evidence that you’re still good at this. The fuel is anxiety, but it looks like ambition from the outside.
If you’re in protect mode, you’ve pulled back. You’re doing exactly what’s asked and nothing more. You used to have ideas. You used to volunteer. Now you just want to get through the day without drawing attention. The fuel is exhaustion, but it looks like disengagement.
Most people cycle between the two. You spend three weeks in prove mode, burning through every reserve you have, and then crash into protect mode for a week where you can barely bring yourself to open your laptop. Then guilt kicks in, and you’re back to proving.
That cycle is the mechanism of burnout for high performers. It’s not a straight line down. It’s an oscillation that gets wider and more violent over time until something breaks.
Marquet’s answer is what he calls the improve mindset. Open. Seeking feedback. Emotionally detached from past work. Looking forward instead of backward. Focused on the process, not the person.
I love that framing. And I’ll add to it from what I do with clients.
The shift from prove/protect to improve requires one thing first: you have to be in an environment where improvement is actually safe. Where making a mistake is treated as data, not as a character judgment. Where asking for help is seen as smart, not as a signal that you can’t handle it.
If your environment doesn’t support that, the improve mindset isn’t available to you yet. That’s information about the system you’re working inside.
Three things you can do this week
First, audit your redwork-to-bluework ratio. Look at your calendar for the past two weeks. How much of your time was spent executing vs. thinking? If the answer is 90/10 or worse, that’s structural. Flag it. You’re not going to think your way out of burnout while running a schedule that never lets you think.
Second, notice your prove/protect pattern. Over the next five days, check in at the end of each day and ask: Was I trying to prove something today, or was I trying to protect myself? Write it down. The pattern will become obvious fast.
Third, run the speaking-up diagnostic. Think about the last three times you had a thought, concern, or idea at work and didn’t say it. What stopped you? If the answer is “it wasn’t worth the risk,” that tells you something specific about the culture you’re operating inside. And it tells you where to focus your energy.
If you want to dig deeper into what’s actually driving your burnout, take the free Burnout Drivers Mini Assessment. It maps your situation across five specific dimensions so you’re not just guessing at what’s wrong.
