Last week, I shared that joy doesn’t have to be complicated and that there’s actually a simple path to get there. This week, I want to walk you down it.
Here’s the truth most leaders don’t want to hear: The resilience strategies many of us were taught are quietly doing more harm than good.
Push harder.
Sleep less.
Power through.
Save the joy for the weekend . . . or the vacation . . . or the next quarter.
I shared this on the Is Your Way in Your Way? podcast, and it’s a pattern I see constantly in healthcare and high-pressure industries. Leaders aren’t failing because they lack grit. They’re exhausted because they’re running outdated playbooks that confuse endurance with resilience.
On Broken Beautiful Me, I talked about how this misunderstanding keeps leaders stuck in survival mode when what they actually need is sustainable high performance. There’s a meaningful difference. Survival mode is reactive, depleting, and brittle. Sustainable performance is rooted, renewable, and fueled by joy. The shift between the two isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice.
Joy Has a Formula
Does Joy Have a Formula? I argue that it does. I know that sounds like a bold claim, but I’ve lived it. During one of the most stressful seasons of my life, I discovered my joy in the garden. And from that discovery, I built a blueprint for three things that became The 3 Stages Along Your Resilience Journey®: Ready, Set, Go®.
The Ready, Set, Go Framework at a Glance
READY: Discover Your Joy
TYou gain and harness self-awareness. You uncover what stresses you, what de-stresses you, and what genuinely brings you energy. You may discover you don’t even like cake and prefer ice cream.
SET: Design for Joy
You design the landscape around you, including your relationships, mentors, network, and leadership brand. You stop reacting to your environment and start shaping it.
GO: Deliver with Joy
You take aligned, strategic action. Not frantic action, not performative action, but the kind of action that moves you forward with clarity instead of pressure.
Joy sits in the center of all three stages. It’s the ingredient that keeps the cycle moving.
Why “Simple” Isn’t the Same as “Easy”
In The Joyful Leader®, I write that your joy is hiding in the places you think you don’t have time for. Stop and pull them out. Smell the roses. That’s what resilience is all about — building yourself up so you can live YOUR life at its fullest.
The research backs this up. Changing what you do during your time away from work is genuinely easy, and it can bring you more immediate joy than almost any productivity hack. But here’s the catch: Simple isn’t the same as easy. We resist simple things because they feel too small to matter:
A walk.
Ten quiet minutes.
A garden.
A sauna.
A sweatshirt and a goldendoodle on the couch.
This is where the Joy Menu® comes in. Think of it like a recipe: You get to write the recipe for your own happiness. And that means knowing which ingredients actually nourish you and which ones you’ve been adding out of habit.
My LinkedIn poll confirmed what I see in my coaching practice: Most leaders default to activities they think should bring joy (scrolling, “relaxing” with another screen, multitasking through dinner) rather than the ones that actually do. Those defaults bring less joy, not more. The Joy Menu forces the question, What’s actually on your plate, and did you choose it?
What Tuck Reinforced About Leadership
I just came back from executive education at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and one insight is still echoing: Leadership isn’t just about how we perform. It’s about how we stay connected while performing.
Research continues to show that emotional awareness and psychological insight directly impact leadership effectiveness. The cohort wasn’t focused on doing more. We were focused on building high-quality, low-volume models grounded in what people actually need — staying close to the customer, validating before building, and solving real problems.
That experience reshaped how I’m building Keane Insights®. And on a smaller note, but one that means a lot to me, several members of my Tuck cohort have already purchased The Joyful Leader®. That kind of peer support is its own form of joy. (My Dartmouth sweatshirt has also become an unofficial uniform when I’m in execution mode. Layla, my goldendoodle, has claimed it as hers whenever I switch into sales or presentation mode. She’s not wrong — it’s the comfiest thing I own.)
Two other voices have been shaping my thinking lately. John Register talks about recognizing the pull to return to a past that may have never actually existed, the weight of stigma and limiting beliefs, and the importance of exploring parallel paths instead of getting stuck in binary thinking. Nikki Spoelstra reframes the whole conversation by reminding us that life is about service, not sacrifice. Both ideas are foundational to Ready, Set, Go®. You can’t discover joy if you’re chasing a version of yourself that no longer fits. And you can’t sustain leadership if you’re confusing depletion with devotion.
What’s Coming This Month and Next
I’m officially introducing the framework today because the next several weeks will live inside the Ready stage. Here’s the breakdown:
- This week: introducing the Ready, Set, Go® model and the simple path to joy.
- Next two weeks: going deeper into the Ready stage to discover yourself, identify your stressors, and build self-awareness as the foundation of resilience.
- Into May: expanding the Ready stage into how it directly fuels resilient leadership, with more about how getting ready enhances our resilience and success.
We’ll get to stress, connection, and professional resilience later this season, as those topics deserve their own space.
Your Invitation This Week
Pick one simple thing, not a wellness overhaul or new routine, but one activity that genuinely brings you energy, and do it before your work is done, not after. Then notice how you lead differently.
That’s the beginning of the simple path to joy. It’s not glamorous. It’s not complicated. But it’s the doorway to building yourself up so you can both live your life and lead your team at its fullest.
Ready?
Next Steps
- Explore The Joyful Leader® → nicolevanvalen.com/book
- Take the What’s Your Sphere of Resilience® Assessment
- Book a keynote → nicolevanvalen.com/speaking
