Stop Efforting: Why Forcing Outcomes Backfires for Leaders

There’s a word I use in coaching that isn’t really a word: efforting.

You won’t find it in the dictionary, but every leader I’ve worked with recognises it instantly. It’s that grinding, white-knuckle, jaw-clenching energy of trying to make something happen through sheer force of will.

You know the feeling. The project is slipping. The team isn’t getting it. The stakeholder won’t budge. And so you lean in harder. Think about it more. Send another email. Schedule another meeting. Work later. Push through the weekend.

It feels responsible. Diligent, even. But if you’re honest, you know it isn’t working. It’s just more.

The effort that doesn’t feel like effort

Here’s what’s strange. Some of the best work you’ve ever done probably felt easy.

Not easy as in trivial — but easy as in flowing. You were fully engaged, thinking clearly, responding to what was in front of you without overthinking it. Hours passed without you noticing. Decisions happened naturally. The right words came out in conversations without rehearsal.

And then there are the other times. You’re working just as hard — probably harder — and nothing lands. Every email takes three drafts. Every decision feels like it could go wrong. You leave the office exhausted but with a nagging sense that nothing actually moved forward.

The difference isn’t the amount of effort. It’s the quality of it. One is engaged and present. The other is efforting.

What efforting actually is

Efforting is what happens when we try to control outcomes that aren’t ours to control. It’s the mental equivalent of pushing a river — exhausting, futile, and slightly absurd when you step back and look at it.

It shows up in familiar ways:

The endless preparation. Spending four hours preparing for a thirty-minute conversation because you need to control every possible direction it could go. By the time you walk in, you’re so loaded with scripted responses that you can’t actually listen to what the other person is saying.

The Sunday night strategy session. Lying in bed mentally rehearsing the week ahead, playing out scenarios, solving problems that haven’t happened yet. You call it “planning.” Your body calls it “stress.”

The grip on the outcome. Needing the presentation to land perfectly. Needing the client to say yes. Needing the team to respond in a specific way. The need itself becomes a kind of tension that everyone in the room can feel — and ironically makes the outcome less likely, not more.

The double effort. Doing the work, and then doing the worrying about the work on top of it. Two jobs where there should be one.

For those of us with ADHD, efforting can be particularly seductive. The urgency feels productive. The hyper-focus feels like an asset. But there’s a significant difference between the natural flow of deep engagement and the frantic spin of trying to force your way to clarity. One leaves you energised. The other leaves you hollow.

Allowing isn’t passive

When I talk about “allowing” as the alternative to efforting, people sometimes hear “do nothing.” That’s not what I mean.

Allowing is active. It’s showing up fully, doing what’s in front of you, and then trusting the process to unfold without needing to micromanage every step. It’s the difference between gripping the steering wheel so hard your knuckles turn white, and holding it firmly enough to steer.

A client of mine — a CTO at a fintech company — described it perfectly. She said: “I used to think my job was to push the boulder up the hill. Now I realise my job is to notice which way the hill slopes and work with it.”

She hadn’t become lazy. If anything, she was more effective. But she’d stopped adding a layer of mental strain on top of everything she did.

Think of it this way: a surgeon doesn’t muscle their way through an operation. They’re intensely focused, highly skilled, and completely present — but there’s no strain in it. The scalpel moves precisely because the hand isn’t gripping too tight. That’s allowing. Full engagement, zero efforting.

The willpower trap

Part of why efforting is so persistent is that we’ve been taught to admire it. “Work hard.” “Push through.” “No pain, no gain.” We celebrate the grind. We wear exhaustion as a badge of honour.

And willpower — the engine of efforting — has been positioned as the ultimate virtue. If you want something badly enough, force yourself to do it. Discipline. Grit. Hustle.

Except willpower is a terrible long-term strategy. It works for short bursts, but it’s fundamentally unsustainable because it requires you to override your own felt experience. You’re essentially arguing with yourself all day.

I’ve noticed something with the leaders I work with: the ones who achieve lasting change almost never credit willpower. What they describe is more like a shift in understanding. They didn’t force themselves to lead differently — they saw something that made the old way stop making sense. The new approach wasn’t harder. It was obvious.

That’s what allowing looks like. Not efforting your way to a new behaviour, but having an insight that makes the old behaviour fall away naturally.

How to notice you’re efforting

You can’t think your way out of efforting — that’s just more efforting in disguise. But you can notice it, and noticing is enough.

Some signals:

Your body is doing the work your mind should be. Clenched jaw. Tight shoulders. Shallow breathing. Headache at 3pm. Your body is honest about what your mind won’t admit: you’re pushing too hard.

Everything feels urgent. When you’re efforting, there’s no distinction between what matters and what doesn’t. Every email feels critical. Every decision feels high-stakes. The signal-to-noise ratio collapses.

You’re working on the same problem twice — once in reality, and once in your head. The meeting is over, but you’re still replaying it. The email is sent, but you’re still wondering if you got the tone right.

You’re not enjoying any of it. Not in a “work is sometimes hard” way, but in a “I can’t remember the last time this felt good” way. Efforting strips the life out of everything it touches.

When you notice any of this, you don’t need to do anything. That’s the whole point. Just noticing interrupts the pattern. It’s like waking up inside a dream — the moment you see what’s happening, it starts to shift on its own.

The paradox

I realise the irony of writing an article that essentially says “stop trying so hard” — and then asking you to do something with that information. So I won’t.

Instead, I’ll share what I’ve seen happen when leaders start to notice the difference between efforting and allowing:

They don’t become less ambitious. They become less exhausted by their ambition.

They don’t stop caring about outcomes. They stop suffering about outcomes that haven’t happened yet.

They don’t do less. They do what they do with less noise around it.

And their teams notice. Because just as efforting is contagious — when the boss is grinding, everyone grinds — allowing is contagious too. When a leader is settled, present, and clear, it gives everyone else permission to be the same.

That might be the most useful thing a leader can do. Not by trying to do it. Just by being it.