Your Thursday Three Things for February 19, 2026
How’s Your Battery?
There’s a simple question more leaders should be asking themselves:
How’s your battery?
And no, not your phone’s battery… yours.
Recently, we had a conversation with David Ko, CEO of Calm, the mental wellness platform valued at over $2 billion and downloaded more than 180 million times across 190 countries. What stood out wasn’t scale, valuation, or metrics.
It was energy.
Despite leading one of the most recognized companies in mental wellness, David’s focus isn’t just growth. It’s presence. It’s awareness. It’s knowing whether he’s operating in the red, yellow, or green.
That framing matters.
Many of us were conditioned to push. Push through stress. Push through fatigue. Push through frustration. Push through anxiety. We wear exhaustion like a badge of honor. We equate busyness with importance and activity with productivity.
But operating on low battery doesn’t make you strong.
It makes you reactive.
It makes you short-tempered.
It makes you physically present but mentally absent.
And that shows up everywhere … at work, at home, in leadership, in relationships.
Globally, unchecked mental health costs over a trillion dollars annually in lost productivity. Leaders report high levels of overwhelm and anxiety. Employees operating on “low battery” are significantly more likely to disengage or leave their organizations. But beyond the statistics is something more human: when your battery is drained, your clarity drops, your patience shrinks, and your decision-making narrows.
So what does a reset actually look like?
One practical approach David uses is something he calls the “3 W Reset”: Water, Window, Walk.
Drink water. Dehydration alone affects mood and cognition.
Look out a window. Shift your visual field. Create psychological space.
Take a short walk. Three to five minutes of movement can regulate your nervous system and restore clarity.
No retreat required. No hour-long meditation. Just awareness followed by action.
Another important insight from our discussion: vulnerability in leadership is not weakness. It is strength. Many leaders still believe that acknowledging stress will undermine authority. In reality, modeling self-awareness increases trust. It strengthens culture. It builds resilience across teams.
Sometimes the shift is as simple as asking someone, “How are you?” — and then asking again, “No really… how are you?”
That second question opens space.
At the same time, not every conversation among men needs to become therapy. Sometimes presence is enough. Hitting golf balls together. Hiking without cell service. Sitting in silence. Men often don’t need to fix one another — we need to know someone is there. Connection without pressure. Community without performance.
One boundary that stood out in our conversation was around sleep. No work email before bed. No work email first thing in the morning. The last input of your day sets the tone for your sleep. The first input of your morning sets the tone for your nervous system. If your mind never powers down, your battery never truly recharges.
If you’d like to hear the full conversation with David Ko, we explored these themes more deeply on Men Talking Mindfulness:
🎧 Audio: [https://pod.fo/e/3905c0](https://pod.fo/e/3905c0)
📺 Video: [
Three Deep-Dive Resources to Build a Durable Mental Battery
