Why Working Harder Is Not the Answer

And What to Do Instead

Have you ever had the feeling that no matter how much effort you put in, nothing actually moves?

You are showing up. You are caring deeply. You are putting in the hours. And yet the same obstacles keep reappearing, the same frustrations keep surfacing, and the dial just does not seem to shift.

Sometimes it is dramatic, a persistent sense of pushing against something immovable. Other times, it’s quieter than that. A low-level hum of effort without traction. Of genuinely caring about things you have no real power to change.

When everything around us feels heavy and uncertain, as it does right now, even the low-level hum becomes louder, and the sense of helplessness we feel grows and can feel like it is crushing the life out of us.  

That is one of the things I hear almost every day from the leaders I work with. And if any of that resonates, you are in very good company. And more importantly, there is a reason for it, and you can do something about it

The Moment Everything Shifted for One Leader

Let me share a story.  I recently worked with a leader who, by any external measure, was doing everything right. Experienced, running a well-regarded business, genuinely invested in her team. And completely exhausted.

When I asked her what was taking up most of her mental energy, she barely paused. Interest rates. Falling consumer confidence. What a competitor was doing. Rising costs. Clients not responding to proposals. Tax changes. The rise of AI.

All of it was real. All of it mattered. And none of it was within her control.

What she had not yet seen, and what became the real turning point in our work together, was that the very act of focusing on those things was making her less effective, not more. Her energy was going to the territory where she had no power, which meant it was being taken away from the territory where she had a great deal.

When we mapped her three circles, something shifted. Not because anything external changed. But because she could finally see clearly where her energy was going -- and make a deliberate choice about what to do with it.

So What Are the Three Circles?

The Three Circles Model was introduced by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey, S.R., 1989, Simon and Schuster). It has become one of the most widely recognised frameworks in leadership development, and, in my experience, one of the most underused.

Many leaders have encountered it. Far fewer have ever actually applied it to their own working world in any structured way. So let's get curious about what the three circles actually are.

The Circle of Concern is the outermost circle. Everything you care about lives here -- the economy, organisational politics, how other people behave, decisions made above you, and what is happening in your industry. It is a large circle. And for many leaders, it is where most of their mental energy goes.

The Circle of Influence sits inside that. These are the things you cannot control directly, but where your actions, relationships, communication, and choices genuinely make a difference. Your team's culture, the way you give feedback, the trust you build with stakeholders, and how you show up when things are hard.

The Circle of Control is at the centre. And it is usually much smaller than people expect. This is the territory of your own thoughts, attitude, behaviour, words, and decisions. Nobody can take this from you. But when we are under pressure, it can be surprisingly easy to forget it exists at all.

The Insight That Makes This Model So Powerful

Here is where it gets really interesting.

When you focus the majority of your energy on your Circle of Concern, your Circle of Influence does not stay the same size. It shrinks. The very act of fixating on things you cannot change causes the space where you could make a difference to contract. It creates an inward pressure that heightens the feeling of helplessness, denting your confidence and, in turn, your well-being.

The reverse, though, is equally true. The more you direct your energy towards your Circle of Control, the bigger your Circle of Influence grows. You build relationships, develop skills, and increase your credibility. What once felt beyond your reach begins to move within it.

So what does this mean for you? It means the most powerful thing you can do right now may not be to work harder on the things that concern you. It might be to get much clearer about which things you can actually control and influence -- and put your energy there instead.

And here is something worth reflecting on. It takes the same amount of energy to focus on what you can control as it does to focus on what you cannot. You get to choose how you use it.

Why the Model So Often Stays as a Good Idea

You might be wondering why, if the model is this powerful, it so often stays at the level of a useful concept rather than a genuine shift in how leaders operate.

In my experience, there are two reasons.

The first is that people rarely actually map their circles. They nod along to the concept, feel the truth of it, and then forget about it on the commute home. It stays theoretical.

The second is that even when the mapping does happen, there is often no clear mechanism for turning that insight into action. You can see clearly that most of your energy is going to the outer circle. You feel the pull back towards what you can control. And then you go back to your desk, and the same patterns quietly reassert themselves.

This is where the Applied Curiosity Model comes in.

Have You Ever Wondered Why Understanding Something Like The 3 Circles Model Rarely Changes Anything?

We know we should focus on what we can control. We know that pouring energy into the Circle of Concern is counterproductive. And yet, we keep doing it.

Knowledge, on its own, is rarely enough. And I think it is important to name that because so many leaders assume that if they just understood something better, they would behave differently. But this is not a willpower problem or a motivation problem. It is a process problem.

What we need is a clear mechanism for taking the insight and translating it into consistent, deliberate action.

That is exactly what the Applied Curiosity Model provides.

Applied Curiosity: The How Behind the What

Applied Curiosity is the practice of treating curiosity not as a personality trait, but as a set of skills you can deliberately develop and apply. It works as a repeating cycle with three stages, and each revolution of the cycle deepens awareness and sharpens the choices available to you.

Research is the starting point. This is where you gather data and build your understanding -- not evaluating or judging, but genuinely trying to see clearly. Listening to understand. Asking honest questions without editing the answers before they arrive. In the context of the circles, this is where you find out what is actually taking up your mental and emotional energy. Not the tidy, leadership-appropriate version. The real one.

Reflect is where you turn that raw data into understanding. It is where you add context, pattern recognition, and honest meaning to what you have gathered. Where you ask not just "what is here?" but "why, and what does that tell me?"

Now while reflecting and ruminating can look similar from the outside, they are very different in practice. Reflection is motivated by genuine curiosity. It moves towards understanding and then towards choice. It naturally focuses on the Circle of Control. Rumination, on the other hand, is motivated by anxiety. It revisits the same ground repeatedly without moving towards resolution -- and it lives firmly in the Circle of Concern.

React is where insight becomes action. This is the "so what" stage. The point where you take one specific, deliberate, testable choice about what you will do differently. Without React, the first two stages remain genuinely interesting -- but ultimately inert. The benefit comes when we act.

The cycle then repeats. Whatever your React commitment produces becomes the starting point for the next Research stage. If the experiment worked, that is data. If it did not go as planned, that is also data. Either way, you begin the next cycle with more to work with than the last.

So What Happens When You Bring the Two Together?

The Three Circles Model shows you the territory. Applied Curiosity gives you the means to navigate it.

Without a practice like Applied Curiosity, the circles remain a concept you understand but do not use. With it, you have a repeating process for seeing clearly where your energy is going, making sense of what you find, and taking deliberate, grounded action in response.

That is what makes the difference between a model you nod at and a model that actually changes how you lead.

Ready to Map Your Own Circles?

If this has sparked something for you, maybe a flicker of recognition, a quiet question about where your own energy is going, then I would love to invite you to take the next step.

I have created a workbook that walks you through the process of mapping your Three Circles and applying the Applied Curiosity cycle to what you find. It is practical, reflective, and designed to move you from insight to action.

Download the FREE workbook here, Map your Circles and start working smarter not harder!

The questions I would like to leave you with

The question I would like to leave you with is this:

If you were to map your circles honestly today, not the polished version, but the real one, where do you think most of your energy is actually going?