By Laura Morrice

Burnout is no longer a personal dilemma, it’s an organizational risk. The World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy.

From Output to Alignment

For senior women, who often shoulder both high-stakes delivery and the invisible labour of team care, the cost is amplified. Deloitte’s Women @ Work 2024 highlights that burnout remains stubbornly high across global markets, with women reporting persistent stressors and insufficient structural support. Yet the answer is not “more resilience training” layered onto the same operating system.

The answer is energetic intelligence: a leader’s capacity to align mental clarity, emotional regulation, physical presence, and purpose so decisions are made from coherence rather than crisis.

This is not soft. It is strategic. Organizations with more women in leadership demonstrate stronger performance, healthier cultures, and greater innovation, according to a decade of McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research. And on the individual level, women leaders consistently score higher on critical leadership competencies, from communication to initiative, per Harvard Business Review. The missing piece is an operating model that allows those strengths to be sustained without depletion.

Why Energy is the Missing Link

Traditional leadership cultures reward speed, volume, and constant availability. The neurological price is continuous activation: when the nervous system sits in a low-grade fight-or-flight, the brain’s fear centres dominate and strategic vision narrows.

By contrast, leaders who cultivate physiological and emotional coherence access sharper judgment, better self-regulation, and more creative problem solving. Research from the HeartMath Institute links heart–brain coherence with improved decision-making and intuitive accuracy—capacities that matter in ambiguous, high-velocity markets.

Energetic intelligence reframes leadership from “how much can I push?” to “from what quality of energy am I leading?” It integrates four dimensions:

• Mental: clear priorities, focused attention, and a bias for simplicity.
• Emotional: the ability to metabolize stress and restore equilibrium fast.
• Physical: sleep, breath, and somatic grounding as performance infrastructure.
• Purpose: decisions aligned to values and long-term impact, not short-term optics.

When these dimensions align, leaders stop oscillating between overdrive and crash. They operate from sustainable power.

Why Women’s Strengths Become Competitive Advantages

Many of the capabilities now prized in volatile markets—sensemaking, relational trust, collaborative execution—map closely to strengths where women often outperform. HBR’s analysis shows women scoring higher in most leadership skills, and during crises they’re frequently rated as more effective by their teams.

The challenge is not capability; it’s capacity. If the system keeps extracting energy, even exceptional leaders eventually burn out.

Energetic intelligence solves the capacity problem by changing how energy is generated and spent:

• From reactive to responsive (decisions from regulation, not adrenaline).
• From performative to purposeful (effort concentrated where it compounds).
• From solo to systemic (team practices that stabilize the collective nervous system).

The result is quieter minds, cleaner calendars, and clearer outcomes—without the hidden cost to health, relationships, and retention.

Operationalizing Energetic Intelligence

This is where my work comes in. I read energy patterns quickly—where power is leaking (over-functioning, people-pleasing, hyper-control), where the signal is jammed (unprocessed emotion showing up as urgency), and where alignment wants to emerge. Then I guide leaders to re-tune: mentally, emotionally, physically, and, critically, through the chakra system as a practical map for restoring coherence between thought, feeling, action, and result.

In practice, that looks like:

1. Personal Cadence

• Strategic breathwork before high-stakes meetings to shift physiology in under two minutes.
• “Single-intent blocks” (90–120 minutes) aligned to the one outcome that moves the business, not the inbox.
• Weekly energy reviews: What fuelled me? What drained me? What gets redesigned next week?

2. Team Coherence Rituals

• Opening 90 seconds of regulated breathing on calls; closing with a single clarity sweep (“What’s the one decision we made?”).
• Meeting hygiene: fewer attendees, pre-reads, and clear owners, protecting attention as a finite asset.

3. Leadership Architecture

• Align incentives and metrics to behaviours you actually want (depth, quality, sustainability), not just volume.
• Normalize recovery as performance infrastructure, not a perk.

None of this asks you to lower standards. It asks you to remove the energetic friction preventing your best judgment from coming through.

A 90-Second Grounding Protocol (For Boardrooms and Back-to-Backs)

Use this any time you feel the “push” taking over:

1. Feet + Spine: Plant both feet. Lengthen your spine as if a thread lifts the crown of your head.
2. Breath: Inhale for 4, hold for 2, exhale for 6. Repeat for six cycles.
3. Somatic Cue: Relax the jaw and the space between your eyes—two micro-regions that lock under stress and are the last to release tension.
4. Coherence Statement (silent): “I choose clarity over urgency. I act from alignment, not adrenaline.”

You’ll notice your voice drop half a register, your pacing slow, and your thinking widen. That is coherence arriving.

Two-Question Energy Check-In (Daily)

• Where am I making a decision from pressure rather than purpose?
• What one boundary or design change would make this week 20% more sustainable?

Document the answer, enact it within 24 hours, and measure the lift. Small energetic pivots produce outsized business returns.

Measuring What Matters

If you need a business case: McKinsey’s longitudinal data connects women’s leadership with stronger cultures and performance; HBR’s research shows women excel in competencies that correlate with resilient, innovative teams; WHO’s definition formalizes burnout as a workplace management issue, not a personal failing. Add physiological coherence (HeartMath) and you have a repeatable stack: regulate → align → decide → deliver.

The Invitation

If this resonates, you’re already sensing the shift. Energetic intelligence is not a wellness add-on; it’s a leadership edge.

• I’m opening an early-bird Feminine Leadership Immersion Bundle, currently not yet public. London Business readers may use the checkout code FEMININE POWER to receive it for the special price of £88 (after early bird £111). www.lauramorrice.com/courses
• You can also subscribe to my monthly newsletter for practical alignment tools: www.lauramorrice.com/chakra-power-subscribe

The leaders who win the next decade won’t be the ones who ran the fastest until they crashed. They’ll be the ones who learned to generate power from alignment, and built companies that could do the same.