Why Some Leaders Thrive While Others Burn Out as a NGO Supervisor

Will you finish your current leadership role having achieved the impact you set out to create — or will you leave wondering what actually changed?

If you often end days buried in email and back-to-back meetings, feeling drained but unsure whether anything you did really mattered, this episode is for you. It compares two leader types — one who thrives and achieves lasting impact, and one who burns out while getting short-term results — and shows why aligning daily actions (not just ambitions) and shifting your mindset are the missing links between busy work and meaningful leadership.

Listen to learn how to:

• Spot the everyday habits that steal your time and keep you misaligned with your leadership impact.
• Use a simple alignment check (like a daily compass) to make small choices that add up to big, lasting results.
• Reframe the beliefs that drive reactive behavior so you can act like the future leader you want to become — energized, focused, and fulfilled.

Tap play to discover the practical alignment habits and mindset shifts that will help you turn busy weeks into measurable leadership impact.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Why Some Leaders Thrive While Others Burn Out

[00:00:00] Will you achieve the impact you are seeking by the end of your current role? Find out what prevents most leaders from achieving greater impact in today's episode.

Welcome to the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast. The podcast helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace. Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And the question is: [00:01:00] Will you achieve the impact that you are seeking by the end of your current role as a leader? Many leaders do not achieve impact not because they are not working hard enough, but because they are misaligned. In today's episode, you're gonna learn the difference between leaders who thrive versus leaders who burn out, how to align daily actions with the impact you want and why mindset is the key to it all.

So let's look at a tale of two leaders here. One who achieves the impact that they want while thriving, and one who gets results but feels dissatisfied and burnout. So Leader A starts the day reviewing priorities tied to their vision, invest in coaching and their team, and leave space for strategic thinking.

While Leader B starts their [00:02:00] day buried in email, back to back meetings, ends the day feeling drained and staring at a to-do list that has not shrunk and wondering what if anything they've done truly matters. So once again, we are on a journey exploring The CLEAR Leadership Model, which I introduced two episodes ago. Last week we talked about Clarity, defining the kind of leader you want to be, and if you haven't listened to that episode, I highly recommend that you go back and do that because it's tied to this week's episode. It's the first step.

But Clarity on its own isn't enough without Alignment, which is the A part of CLEAR. It's like setting your GPS, but then ignoring the directions. When we talk about being aligned, Alignment is like checking your compass every day, making [00:03:00] sure that you're actually heading toward the impact that you want to create.

So the question is, are the actions that you are taking every day going to lead you to the impact that you want? Most leaders are very surprised when they see and become aware of how they use their time and how most of their time is spent on things that will not make an impact. For example, on email or being in long meetings, and we discover this in my course through what I call a Time Audit, detailing how they use their time on a typical day.

Although these are part of our work, meetings and emails and so on, they do not create the impact that most of us are seeking, and especially the impact you want to make as a leader on your team. So in order to [00:04:00] truly create impact, once we have Clarity, we need to align. Align ourselves and our actions to become the person who has that impact, who's achieved that impact.

In other words, your future self. The person who achieves that impact achieves it because they have the beliefs, the emotions, the actions, and the skills in order to do so we need to look at the gap here and see how do we align ourselves to close this gap. When we look at our actions and how we use our time, there are reasons why we spend a lot of time maybe on emails or in meetings, but here's the truth.

Alignment isn't just about what you do. It starts with how you think. The beliefs [00:05:00] driving your actions are what determine whether you stay aligned or not. It all starts with our mindset. So what is the mindset which is compelling you to focus on things like emails and meetings rather than things that might have more impact?

It could be that you think that it is important to get back to people quickly, that otherwise they will think that you're ignoring them. Or maybe you think you need to be available all the time, or you're not a good leader. Or maybe you think you cannot say no to going to a meeting, that you are the only person who is eligible to attend it.

All of these beliefs are what drive our actions and lead us to spend time on things that fill our time, but do not necessarily create the impact that we want. That they do not bring us to our desired destination. [00:06:00] And there are many types of thoughts which may lead us to take actions that do not align us with the impact that we want.

Email and meetings being only small examples, but there are certain patterns of thinking that I find many leaders have in the NGO sector, which create misalignment. So this week I want you to truly reflect, are your daily actions aligned with the impact that you truly want as a leader? And next week we're gonna go even deeper because even when we know where we want to go, there's a hidden trap that keeps many NGO leaders stuck.

I call it High Performance Syndrome, and I'll show you how to break free from it in our next episode. All right, until next week, keep evolving. Bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do, [00:07:00] or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is a first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz. What is your leadership style? You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz. Fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it.