It’s difficult to change a pattern you cannot see, especially when that pattern has helped make you successful.
When the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, 21-year-old Angela Wimmer was in Washington D.C., working on a congressional campaign.
As the magnitude of what was happening became clear and the room around her dissolved into fear and frantic motion, something very different happened to Wimmer.
She felt what she refers to as “the click.” The physiological event where the chaos of the external world reaches a frequency that matches your internal RPM. The static of normal life disappears, and the world becomes high definition.
While others struggled to process the crisis, Wimmer became intensely focused. She could think ahead, make decisions and act. “I could stay calm and execute a plan while the sky was filled with smoke,” she recalls. “I didn’t realize that the online state would become my only setting.”
For years, there seemed little reason to question it.
Wimmer went on to spend more than two decades leading organizations through high-stakes moments, holding C-suite and cabinet-level roles across healthcare, higher education and asset management and is now Founder, CEO at Lavess Capital. The intensity that helped her thrive in those environments became one of her greatest strengths.
Until she began to see its cost.
When competence becomes a warning sign
Wimmer calls the pattern “intensity addiction,” the subject of her forthcoming book, “The Intensity Architect.” It is not a clinical diagnosis. Rather, it is her term for a learned reliance on high-intensity states — the pull toward urgency, pressure and difficult problems that can make high achievers feel at their best.
And that makes it particularly difficult to recognize.
“Some of the warning signs are really easy to miss because they don’t look like distress,” Wimmer says. “They look like competence.” You handled the last crisis. You closed the impossible deal. You navigated the turnaround. So, you take on the next one.
One early warning sign, she says, is surprisingly simple: Normal life starts to feel dull.
A quiet Sunday afternoon feels more uncomfortable than a complicated business problem. You begin gravitating toward the biggest, most difficult challenges because that is where you feel most engaged.
The danger isn’t intensity itself. It is losing the ability to choose when to use it.
Missing the quieter signals
For Wimmer, the reckoning came during COVID-19.
Working in senior leadership for a healthcare system, she was confronting problems of extraordinary urgency: moving thousands of employees to remote work, helping medical students graduate and dealing with the realities of a hospital system under enormous strain.
She also landed in the emergency room several times with health issues of her own, but she kept going. “My health can wait,” she remembers thinking. What finally stopped her wasn’t her own health. It was her 11-year-old daughter Mallory’s.
During the pandemic, Mallory began struggling with her mental health. Looking back, Wimmer could see signs she had missed while her attention was trained on the loudest emergencies around her.
“It really took that moment with my youngest daughter for me to say, ‘If I could miss something like this, what else have I been missing?’”
— Angela Wimmer, Founder & CEO at Lavess Capital share
That question changed the way Wimmer thought about intensity.
High-intensity leaders, she says, become exceptional at focusing on the most urgent signals. But that hard focus can come at the expense of “soft focus” like noticing the person who is becoming quieter, the colleague who is struggling or the problem that is small today but could become significant six months from now.
Look at the wake
The effects of high intensity can be just as difficult to see at work. Wimmer remembers a high-performing colleague she had recruited to join her who once casually said she was “holding on” as she tried to keep pace with Wimmer’s rapid decisions and the organization’s momentum.
Wimmer laughed it off.
Today, she wishes she had stopped and asked what her pace was costing her colleague.
Teams adapt to intense leaders, she says. They may stop bringing small problems forward. Risk-taking can decline. People become so focused on keeping pace that they spend less time thinking about their own development or the future of the business.
Her advice to CEOs is to ask directly: “What is my intensity costing you?”
The question matters because it acknowledges upfront that there may be a cost and gives the other person permission to talk about it.
Check yourself
Wimmer suggests chief executives use her three-question filter to regularly check in with themselves. Before saying “yes” to another opportunity, commitment or problem, CEOs should ask: Is this my intensity addiction talking? Is this my excitement or someone else’s? What am I not doing while I am doing this?
“These force leaders to identify the opportunity cost of another, whether it’s family, recovery, strategic thinking, developing the team or something else that isn’t currently screaming for attention,” Wimmer explains.
Start with a breath
Changing the pattern doesn’t require changing your personality.
Wimmer’s framework includes five practices: reset, rehearse, recruit, recover and repeat. But if a CEO does only one thing, she recommends starting smaller: breathe.
Wimmer practices breathing exercises throughout her day, including before Zoom calls and at bedtime. During particularly intense periods, she sits in her car and breathes before walking into her house. Then she began leaving her phone in another room.
The goal wasn’t simply to be home for dinner. It was to be at dinner listening, laughing and noticing the small things rather than mentally triaging the next day’s problems.
She also encourages leaders to think in “seasons of intensity.” A turnaround, acquisition or crisis may genuinely require extraordinary focus. Rather than pretending otherwise, recognize the season and schedule time to rest and recover before you reach the end of it.
Keep the superpower
Wimmer doesn’t want CEOs to become less intense. Far from it.
“I have not lost my intensity at all,” she says. “I really do think it’s our superpower.”
Today, she is an investor, board member, author and active YPO member. In fact, “The Intensity Architect” grew partly from a YPO wellness event where she first publicly shared Mallory’s story. The response from other members convinced her the experience wasn’t hers alone. What has changed isn’t how much she wants to accomplish. It’s how intentionally she chooses where to put her attention.
“I don’t believe in hampering our intensity at all,” Wimmer says. “I think the world needs us. We’re the people who build businesses and solve crises. But they need us to show up healthy and our best.”
The engine, in other words, isn’t the problem.
Learning to harness its power is the challenge.
