Don't Lead Hungry

Every Sunday, I run the same route. Aldi. Walmart. Occasionally Menards. If my wife is along, we might add HomeGoods or Marshalls to the mix. It is a routine that has become efficient over time. I know the layout, I know what we need, and I walk in with a list that I fully intend to follow.

This past Sunday broke that pattern.

I went in hungry. And what followed was one of those small, unremarkable experiences that somehow ends up revealing something you were not quite prepared to find.

At first, it did not seem significant. I still had my list, and I was still moving through the store with the same general intention. But somewhere between the produce section and the frozen aisle, something shifted. The list was still in my hand, but it had quietly lost its authority. Items that were never part of the plan started finding their way into the cart, not recklessly or carelessly, but in the way that feels completely reasonable when you are standing right in front of something and you are hungry. Each addition made sense in the moment. Each one felt justified. And by the time I reached the checkout, the receipt told a different story than the one I had planned to write when I walked in.

On the walk back to return my cart and collect my quarter, I found myself thinking about it more than I expected to, because I recognized the pattern.

Most leaders do not walk into their roles without direction. There is usually a plan, a set of priorities and commitments that represent what matters most, the equivalent of a list. And in most cases, that list reflects genuine thinking about what will move the work forward and why. The challenge is rarely the quality of the list itself. The challenge is what happens to it once the week actually begins and the noise of the work sets in.

Leadership has its own version of hunger, and it is subtle in ways that make it difficult to name in the moment. It does not feel like distraction. It feels like responsiveness. A new initiative surfaces that carries real promise. A concern gets escalated that demands immediate attention. A district priority shifts the landscape for the week. A staff situation unfolds in ways that no one anticipated. Each of those things carries weight, and some of them are genuinely important, but what tends to happen, almost without notice, is that the list begins to lose its authority in the same quiet way mine did somewhere between produce and frozen foods. You are still moving, still working, but the movement has gradually stopped reflecting the plan you walked in with.

What makes this particularly hard to see in real time is that none of it feels like poor leadership while it is happening. Every detour has a reason, and every addition to the cart can be explained. The justifications are real, and the intentions behind them are usually good. It is only when you step back and look at the full picture that the drift becomes visible - initiatives that started strong but never found their footing, resources allocated to work that was never really central to the plan, a team that is working hard but quietly unclear about what is most important right now because the direction has shifted often enough that certainty feels like something that keeps moving.

I have been that leader. I know what it feels like to be genuinely busy and quietly misaligned at the same time, to be responsive in ways that feel responsible without realizing how much distance has accumulated between where your energy is going and where your priorities actually live.

What I have come to understand is that clarity is not just about knowing what is on the list. It is about developing the kind of discipline that protects it once the hunger sets in. That means building the habit of pausing when something new enters the picture and asking honestly whether it belongs, not just whether it sounds good or feels urgent or seems like something worth pursuing. It means being willing to let some things go, even when they are interesting, even when others are leaning into them with full confidence. And it means staying honest about the pull that is harder to name - the desire to address everything, the discomfort that comes with saying no, the quiet assumption that adding more is the same as making more progress. Those instincts rarely come from a bad place, but left unexamined, they will fill your cart with things you never needed and leave you at the checkout wondering why the receipt does not match the plan you walked in with.

The list matters. But so does the discipline you bring to honoring it.