The H2 Leadership Podcast

You can never be them. They can never be you. So stop trying.

In a culture obsessed with comparison and counterfeits, most leaders spend their entire lives trying to become someone else. They look at other leaders and think, "How do they do that?" They scroll through feeds, compare themselves to the competition, and slowly lose sight of the one thing that makes them irreplaceable: their unique design.

Here's the truth: God put you on this earth with a unique spiritual, practical, relational, and emotional fingerprint. You are uniquely designed for impact. But if you don't understand your design, you'll spend your life getting lived by your circumstances instead of actively living with purpose and agency.

In this episode, we're diving into the fourth sphere of an H2 Leader: Design. This is about how you maximize your talents and abilities—not by copying someone else's playbook, but by discovering and unleashing what you're uniquely wired to do.

What You'll Learn:

• Why most people are getting lived by their lives instead of actively living them—and the main reason they don't have agency
• The difference between form (spark, beauty, passion) and function (usefulness, practicality, value)
• Why focusing only on passion is incomplete—and why we need to talk more about purpose and usefulness
• The IKEA principle: how form without function (or function without form) leads to unfulfilling work
• How to design your life like a designer by balancing what energizes you with what serves others
• The power of asking "How can I be of value?" instead of "Here's what I'm bringing"
• Why understanding your design is the key to preventing burnout (not just working less)
• How to identify the environments where you thrive—and why this matters more than you think
• The myth that you'll figure this out at 22—and why design clarity comes over time as form and function converge
• Real stories: the leader doing world-changing work who was intimidated by a simple board retreat (because it's not his design)
• Why one organization has a literal waiting list of people wanting to join their team—and what that says about leadership below the surface
• The connection between self-awareness (last week's episode) and design—you can't understand your design without self-awareness first

Key Insight:

Most leaders don't know their design, so they try to live someone else's. But when you understand your unique design—your strengths, your environments, your spark and your function—you stop wasting energy trying to be someone you're not. You unleash what only you can bring to the world.

Design isn't just about doing what you love. It's about the convergence of what energizes you (form/spark) and what serves others (function/usefulness). When those two come together, you become irreplaceable.

The Form + Function Framework:

Form (Spark): What makes you come alive? What environments fire you up? What work do you wake up wanting to do?

Function (Usefulness): How can you be valuable? What needs do you uniquely meet? Where can you serve?

When form and function overlap—that's your design. That's where you thrive.

Reflection Questions:

1. In what area of your life or leadership have you lost the spark—and what would it look like to tweak some things so you could recover it?
2. In what area can you be more valuable to the team you serve?
3. What is your ideal day at work? What is your absolute non-ideal day? (The gap reveals your design.)
4. What environments do you absolutely love walking into—where you think, "I can't believe I get to do this"?

Practical Exercise:

Map out your ideal day at work. Then map out your ideal Sabbath day (rest and replenishment). Then map out your absolute worst day—what drains you and feels like a beat down. The patterns you see will reveal your design.

Do an audit at the end of each day for a week: Rate the day 1-10 and ask why. You'll start to see what energizes you versus what drains you.

Resources Mentioned:

• Anti-Burnout by Alan Briggs (design principles threaded throughout)
• H2 Leadership Coaching (three-day intensive experiences to uncover your unique design)

Want More?

A major reason people burn out is they don't understand their design—they're living counter to how they're wired. If you want to go deeper on this, check out Alan's book Anti-Burnout and explore coaching at h2leadership.com.

For leaders who know there's more—the "more" isn't out there. It's right here. Once you have clarity on your unique design, you can take courageous next steps to actually live in it.