Spending Energy in the Wrong Direction
I used to be the person who had it all together.
I skipped eighth grade, graduated high school at seventeen, and carried a mental calendar so sharp I could remember appointments years after they happened. But that kind of natural leverage only lasts so long. My first real reality check was a college chemistry class. I coasted on high school prep to a 94 on the first exam, which turned out to be the absolute high-water mark before I scraped by with a C.
That was the first crack, but real life eventually dismantled the rest of the perfectionist act.
Pregnancy hit, and mom brain completely replaced my internal vault. My mental space got swallowed up by pump logs, feeding times, and pediatrician visits while my pristine calendar started slipping. Then came a divorce, buying a house, teaching high school, and a body whose metabolism and hormones decided to go on strike.
Right as I wrapped up a political campaign where I had been running a hundred miles an hour for fourteen months straight, the pandemic hit. It felt like hitting a brick wall at full speed.
I eventually found my footing in the nonprofit sector, driven by a core value of being of service. Two years after joining an organization for military and veteran women, I became the CEO. Right on cue, life stacked the deck again: a broken ankle, perimenopause, and an AuDHD diagnosis that suddenly illuminated my entire life after watching my kid go through the exact same evaluation.
I didn't become a different person through all of that. I just reached the point where I was no longer able, or willing, to mask my humanity with perfection.
The old trick of pushing harder didn't work anymore. I had to learn how to delegate, step fully into being an executive, and build systems that could handle the chaos of single parenting, running an organization, and managing real capacity drops.
I started this blog, Force • Distance in Progress, as the intellectual home for my coaching practice, Phoenix Rose Coaching. Everything I write here and teach my clients comes from tools I built out of sheer necessity. I needed scaffolding that actually held up when life got loud, and I know I'm not the only one who needs it.
Once you stop pretending you can willpower your way through relentless demand, you have to look at how energy actually works using fundamental physics concepts.
In physics, work isn't just effort. It's defined as Work = Force · Displacement, meaning work only happens when a force actually moves an object in the direction of that force.
Think about carrying a heavy box around a room. You can lift it, move it around, break a sweat, and end up exhausted by the time you set it down. But if you set it down at the exact same height where you picked it up, your net vertical displacement is zero. You did zero net work against gravity. You spent a massive amount of physical energy without gaining an inch of elevation.
That is what burnout actually feels like.
A lot of capable, high-performing people spend their lives carrying heavy loads only to end up at the exact same elevation. They handle a continuous stream of emails, manage home logistics, navigate meetings, and end the day utterly wiped out, yet they haven't achieved forward displacement on what actually matters to them.
That isn't a character flaw, and it isn't a lack of discipline. It's a vector problem.
Friction is a force that opposes motion. When you are navigating an unsupportive system, zero-margin schedules, health changes, or raw burnout, a huge portion of your daily force gets consumed just overcoming friction before you ever get a chance to create forward displacement.
When you ask yourself, "Is this force creating forward progress, or am I just spending energy to overcome friction?" the whole conversation changes.
Real capacity isn't static. It shifts depending on your health, your sleep, your family needs, and the weight of what you're carrying on any given Tuesday. Frameworks that demand peak output every single day without accounting for drag aren't realistic. We don't need systems that pretend friction doesn't exist. We need scaffolding designed to absorb crashes gracefully, lower the friction we can control, and make sure the force we do apply actually moves us forward.
Understanding how energy works is only half the problem. Once you stop wasting force on unnecessary friction, you have to answer a much harder question: where are you actually trying to go?
When I was standing watch in the Navy, I learned quickly that navigation isn't about drawing a straight line on a chart and locking the helm in place. The ocean doesn't care about your plan. Currents push you sideways, wind blows you around, and sea states change. Navigating with a chart and a compass isn't about pretending those forces don't exist. It's about knowing your intended path so clearly that when you get pushed off course, you can make a quick correction without panicking.
Most productivity models are built for an ideal world that simply doesn't exist. They assume calm seas, zero unexpected headwinds, and perfect visibility every single day. When life inevitably knocks you off course, those models treat the detour as a personal failure of discipline.
That's just bad seamanship.
When wind or current shifts a ship off its course, the bridge officer doesn't declare the voyage a failure and surrender to the sea. You check your location, calculate the shift, and adjust your heading. Course corrections aren't system failures. They're the standard, daily reality of staying on track.
Leadership and life work the exact same way.
Your true north isn't a performative lifestyle goal or a corporate buzzword. It's rooted in your core values and the actual mission you're called to serve. For me, that compass points toward integrity and being of service. When competing demands pull you in a dozen directions at once, clear values give you the reference point you need to figure out where your force is actually going.
Net force is directly related to a change in momentum. If you apply equal force in opposite directions, your net force is zero and your momentum doesn't change. You stay stuck in the exact same spot, burning out for nothing.
This isn't about flawless, straight-line perfection. It's about vector alignment. It gives you the clarity to evaluate where to deploy your energy, when to make a minor heading adjustment, and how to stop burning capacity on directions that don't serve your mission.
I named my practice Phoenix Rose Coaching because I know firsthand that things break, systems crash, and life occasionally burns down around you. But a collapse isn't the end of the story. You don't need a dramatic fairy-tale reinvention, you just need the tools to rebuild cleanly and keep going.
That's why I didn't start this blog or build my coaching practice to deliver motivational speeches or hand you another list of high-performance habits to feel guilty about.
There are plenty of places on the internet that will sell you a rigid routine, tell you to join the 5 AM Club, or promise that five easy steps will solve your burnout. (I actually listened to The 5 AM Club on Audible once when the hype got to me, and within ten minutes I knew the author wasn't a mom and didn't have dogs who would immediately claim 5 AM as high-energy playtime.)
You won't find performative routines, corporate buzzwords, or advice that ignores the real weight of what you're carrying here. Hell, I don't even have an email sign-up because I know I don't have the energy to maintain a weekly newsletter and you don't need more clutter in your inbox.
What you will find is grounded, practical scaffolding.
We're here to look at real capacity, streamline processes, reduce friction, and build systems that don't fall apart when life gets loud. Whether we're looking at energy through simple physics concepts or navigating choices using core values, the goal is always the same: streamlining how you operate so you can make actual forward progress in the right direction.
If you are a mission-driven leader, a nonprofit executive, a military veteran, or a high-demand parent tired of carrying heavy loads without gaining elevation, welcome. Take a breath. You don't need to push harder, you just need better scaffolding.
If this resonated, stick around and explore the blog, or check out my coaching offers to see how we can build that scaffolding together: starting with dropping the loads that aren't creating actual elevation.
