It’s one of the most common requests we get. A senior leader – sometimes a CEO, sometimes a head of a division – gets in touch and says something along the lines of: “We’ve been through a lot of change. The pace isn’t slowing down. There’s some negativity creeping in. We’d love to do a mindset session to get everyone back on track.”
And look – we understand why. When the mood in the office feels heavy, when people seem resistant or disengaged, when productivity has dipped and you’re getting feedback that morale is low, “mindset” sounds like the obvious fix. Flip the switch. Get everyone thinking positively again. Problem solved.
Of course I love facilitating mindset sessions – I did my Masters dissertation on the effectiveness of mindset interventions in the workplace. Mindset is my jam!
Yet… I turn these requests down. Consistently. If I had a dollar for every mindset session I’ve declined, I’d probably I would have bought a small island by now. And I turn them down not because mindset doesn’t matter – it absolutely does – but because trying to work on mindset when your people are cognitively depleted is about as effective as asking someone to run 10km on a broken leg. The intention is admirable. The timing is all wrong.
Before we ever agree to talk about mindset, we ask one question first: on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being that your people have all the energy they need to meet the goals that are important to them – where would you rate their energy right now?
No surprises: the answer is almost always somewhere between 4 and 6. And if leaders are saying 4 to 6, you can safely interpret that as 3-5 or lower.
That number tells us everything. Because here’s the thing – this isn’t about your people needing a mindset overhaul. What they actually need is a cognitive energy top-up. And those are two very different problems with very different solutions.
Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Tired
Here’s where the neuroscience gets really interesting – and also where it completely reframes the problem you think you’re dealing with.
When we talk about cognitive energy, we’re not talking about whether someone had a good night’s sleep (though I’m all for that too). We’re talking about the brain’s finite capacity for high-effort mental work. Think of it like a daily allocation. You get a certain amount to spend.
When that cognitive energy runs low, specific things happen in the brain that make shifting your mindset genuinely, neurologically hard:
The control network goes quiet. The parts of your brain responsible for flexible thinking, reframing, and overriding unhelpful patterns – your prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, and frontoparietal networks – all reduce in activity when you’re cognitively depleted. These are exactly the systems that make a mindset shift possible. When they’re offline, change simply isn’t going to happen, no matter how motivating the session is.
Effort feels more expensive. Fatigue changes the brain’s effort-reward calculations. When someone is cognitively drained, the brain literally computes high-effort actions as less worthwhile. In practical terms? Reframing a situation, challenging a negative thought, or committing to a new way of working all just feel disproportionately hard – not because the person is being difficult, but because their brain is telling them it’s not worth the energy spend.
The brain shifts into conservation mode. When cognitive energy is low, the brain activates a very sensible but very inconvenient programme: conserve resources. People disengage. They choose easier options. They resist change. They default to what’s familiar. And yes – it can look a lot like a mindset problem.
Changing your mindset is one of the most cognitively demanding things the brain can do. It requires the prefrontal cortex to override deeply embedded patterns and generate new ways of thinking. It’s a high-control, energy-hungry process. Asking people to do that when they’re already running on empty is a bit like asking your team to take on an extra project when they’re already at capacity. It’s not laziness or resistance. It’s basic biology.
So when the brain is tired it’s a fundamentally different state – one where the very systems required for mindset change are both less active and more reluctant to fire.
Fill the Tank First: How to Actually Lift Cognitive Energy
The good news is that this is absolutely fixable. It’s not a lost cause – far from it. But the fix isn’t a 45-minute keynote on positive thinking. The fix is restoring cognitive energy first, so that when you do work on mindset, the brain is actually in a state where change is possible.
There are plenty of ways to do this. Here are a few to get you started:
Optimise your four hours of peak cognitive energy. Most people have around four hours of high-quality cognitive energy available in a day. The problem is that most people spend those hours in the wrong way – sitting in meetings that could have been emails, context-switching constantly, and doing low-value tasks during their mental prime time. Helping your people understand when their peak cognitive hours are and what to use them for is one of the highest-leverage things you can do as a leader. For the CFOs and COOs doing the mental arithmetic – that’s the equivalent of getting 25% more output from your current team headcount without adding a single person. I’d call that a fairly compelling ROI.
No agenda, no attenda. Meetings are one of the biggest drains on cognitive energy in most organisations. Every unnecessary meeting your people sit through is cognitive energy that isn’t going toward high-value work. If you can send an email and get the outcome, send the email. If your people can check their messages in the meeting without missing anything, they probably shouldn’t be in the meeting. Make it a cultural norm to protect people’s cognitive capacity.
Stamp out continuous partial attention. Here’s a pattern we see constantly in organisations: someone sends a message and gets an immediate reply. So they send another. And another. And gradually, without anyone consciously deciding this, you’ve created a culture where everyone is expected to be available and responsive at all times. The result? Nobody is ever fully focused on anything. Continuous partial attention is one of the most efficient ways to drain a team’s cognitive energy. It’s also one of the most normalised. Start by changing expectations around response times and give people permission to actually focus.
Work with attention spans, not against them. People have natural attention rhythms. Forcing people to focus for longer than their natural attention span doesn’t produce better work – it produces more depleted people. Understanding optimal work-to-rest ratios and building them into the culture is a simple but powerful way to preserve cognitive energy throughout the day.
What Happens When You Get This Right
We worked with a financial services division of around 80 people who came to us with a request that will sound familiar by now – “our people need a mindset shift.” When we dug deeper, the picture that emerged was a team that had been through 18 months of restructuring, was working through a significant technology change programme, and was fielding a constant stream of client demands with a leaner team than before.
Their energy score? A 4.
We certainly got to the mindset work, but we didn’t start there. Instead, we started by helping their leaders and team members understand cognitive energy – what it is, what depletes it, and what restores it. We worked with them on restructuring how they used their peak cognitive hours, created some simple but firm boundaries around meeting culture, and helped them understand the cost of continuous partial attention.
Within a few weeks, the feedback was consistent: people felt like they were getting more done in less time. They weren’t as drained at the end of the day. And here’s the part that matters most for this article – when we then introduced the mindset component of the programme, the uptake was completely different. People were engaged. They were open. They could actually do the mental work required. The same content that would have bounced straight off a depleted team landed with a team that had enough cognitive capacity to genuinely absorb and apply it.
That’s the sequence. Cognitive energy first. Then mindset.
Why This Matters More Right Now Than It Ever Has
The leaders we work with are navigating more complexity, at a faster pace, with more ambiguity than any generation of leaders before them. AI is reshaping industries. Remote work has blurred every boundary that used to give people cognitive respite. Expectations haven’t gone down – they’ve gone up. And the rate of change that’s driving your people’s cognitive depletion right now? It’s not going to slow down.
Organisations that understand cognitive energy – and build it into how they lead and operate – are going to have a significant and compounding advantage over those that don’t. Because cognitive energy isn’t just a wellbeing issue. It’s a performance issue. It’s a retention issue. It’s a culture issue. And ultimately, it’s a profitability issue.
The good news is that this is one of the highest-return investments you can make. You don’t need more people. You don’t need a bigger budget. You need your existing people to be operating at a level their brains are actually capable of – and right now, most of them aren’t.
The Bottom Line
The next time you look around at your team and think “we need a mindset shift” – pause. Ask yourself what their energy score really is. Because if it’s sitting at a 4 or a 5, the mindset work will be fighting an uphill battle against a brain in conservation mode.
Start with cognitive energy. Build it up. Create the conditions where your people’s brains are actually capable of the flexible, high-control thinking that real mindset change requires. Then – and only then – the mindset work becomes WAY easier, WAY faster, and WAY more likely to stick.
It’s not a more complicated solution. It’s actually a simpler one. It just requires doing things in the right order.
If you’d like to find out more about how to improve performance with less effort why not either book a Performance Call or sign up for one of our Open Workshops