Why So Many Capable Leaders Are Losing Their Ability to Think Deeply

In the age of AI, deep thinking is becoming the rarest leadership skill

We spent years training leaders to be more efficient — to move faster, make better decisions, optimise systems, deliver results. And at the same time, almost without noticing, we surrounded them with tools, processes, and expectations that steadily fractured their Attention.

Now we look around and ask ourselves why so many capable, committed leaders feel depleted, restless, and strangely dissatisfied with work that once energised them.

I’ve been coaching senior leaders for over 15 years, across industries and across countries. The conversations are, on the surface, familiar: strategy, organizational complexity, team dynamics, pressure, responsibility. Underneath all of it, there’s a new layer of frustration that keeps surfacing, and most leaders can’t quite name it.

They’ve lost the ability to think deeply. And they know it.

There is a new undercurrent.

A form of frustration that shows up again and again, even when everything seems to be “working.” Leaders sense it, but they struggle to put words to it. It doesn’t sound like classic stress, or lack of competence, or even overload in the traditional sense.

What they are describing, often indirectly, is the quiet loss of something essential: the ability to think deeply, to stay with a question long enough for real insight to emerge, to connect dots without being pulled away every few minutes.

And the most striking part is this: they know it’s happening. They feel the cost of it — in their energy, in the quality of their decisions, in their sense of meaning at work. Yet almost none of them were ever taught how to recognise, protect, or deliberately cultivate their Attention in a world that constantly competes for it.

Attention is a Currency. You wouldn’t leave your wallet in the middle of the street and walk away. But that’s essentially what we do with our attention, dozens of times a day. And unlike money, you can’t earn it back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. The only question is whether you’re spending it — or just letting it be taken.

What is actually happening

A CEO I worked with last year said something that stayed with me: “I used to be able to sit down and work through a hard problem for an hour,” she told me. “Now I can’t get past twenty minutes without my brain pulling me somewhere else.”

She wasn’t talking about laziness or lack of discipline. She was describing something that had quietly eroded — a capacity she once took for granted, and only noticed when it was gone.

She is not an outlier.

Microsoft surveyed 31,000 professionals across 31 countries in 2025, and the picture is consistent:

• 68% of people say they struggle with the pace and volume of work
• 46% feel burned out
• the average professional receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages every single day
• we get interrupted by a notification every two minutes on average.

And somewhere along the way, we all just … accepted that as the way things work now. It’s a slow erosion of one of the most critical cognitive capacities we have.

In the 2025 NeuroMindfulness® Institute study, we look at the data from the Attention & BMR Assessment — 764 leaders assessed across 30 countries — one thing stands out immediately. Attention is the lowest-scoring dimension, at 57.2 out of 100. Body and mind sit in the low sixties. Relationships score the highest, at 72.4. And when you look at the archetype breakdown, 40% of these leaders fall into what we call the Scattered Multitasker profile — constant task-switching, mental overload, a reduced capacity for deep work. Another 19% are Anxious Overthinkers, stuck in loops of rumination and self-doubt. And 18% are Wired & Tired — physically exhausted but mentally agitated, running on stress and caffeine with no real recovery in sight. That’s 77% of senior leaders across 30 countries falling into one of three patterns that are all, at their core, attention problems.

Why it is happening — and why it is not going away

This isn’t a willpower problem or a time-management problem. It’s a structural one.

There is an entire industry — worth hundreds of billions of dollars — built around capturing and monetising our Attention. Every app, every notification, every feed algorithm is optimized not to inform us, but to hold us. Cal Newport put it well: people don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but because billions of dollars have been invested in making that outcome feel inevitable.

At the same time, the way we work has become relentlessly fragmented. Knowledge workers are interrupted on average 275 times a day. After each interruption, it can take 15 to 23 minutes for the brain to fully regain its previous level of focus. Do the math. We are collectively operating in a state of continuous, low-grade cognitive chaos — and calling it productivity.

The neuroscience confirms what leaders are feeling in their bones: scattered attention doesn’t just slow us down. It activates a stress response that depletes the very cognitive resources we need for decision-making, learning, and innovation.

It’s a vicious cycle. The more fragmented our attention becomes, the less capacity we have to recover it.

What most of us get wrong

Here’s the assumption I see most often — in leadership development, in wellbeing programs, in the conversations leaders have with each other: that focus is a personality trait. That some people are just naturally better at it, and the rest of us need to accept our limitations and work around them.

That’s not what the neuroscience shows.

Attention is a system. It’s a set of brain networks that interact constantly, and that can be trained, measured, and deliberately strengthened. The ones we mention mostly during leadership programs are the Central Executive Network, the Salience Network, and the Default Mode Network. The same way you wouldn’t expect a muscle to stay strong without any training, expecting focus to remain sharp in an environment of relentless distraction — without any intentional practice — will not work.

The other common mistake is treating this as an individual problem. A leader goes on a mindfulness retreat, feels better for a week, then returns to exactly the same environment and the same patterns. Nothing has changed structurally. The attention fragmentation starts again almost immediately.

Sustainable change requires both: the individual practice and the organisational awareness.

What we are seeing in the data

At NeuroMindfulness Institute, my co-founder Arnaud and I have spent years studying this, co-designing leadership program with wise & experienced HR leaders and CEOs. Over the past year, we’ve assessed over 700 leaders across 30 countries through our AI-powered Attention & BMR Assessment — a tool that measures attention across four dimensions: focus itself, its impact on the body, on the mind, and on relationships.

You can measure your attention in 10 minutes, here is the AI-powered, GDPR compliant, free tool you can use — find your attention archetype : (Free) Attention & BMR Self-Assessment by NeuroMindfulness Institute.

The pattern is remarkably consistent. Attention scores the lowest of all four dimensions — an average of 57 out of 100. Relationships score the highest, at 72. The ability to focus is quietly undermining everything else they’re trying to build.

We also ran a pilot with top 100 leaders of a multinational company, they went through our 100-Day Attention Mastery Challenge — a structured program built around one new micro-habit per week, supported by neuroscience-grounded content and measured before and after.

The results were striking, these days we are working with the CEO & HR leaders to make sense of the data in their business context. But what struck me most wasn’t the numbers. It was the archetype shift.

At the start, 46% of the group fell into what we call the Scattered Multitasker pattern — the most common profile we see across our entire dataset. By the end of the 100 days, that number had dropped to 3%.

If you’re curious to explore this with your team the 100 days attention mastery challenge, join here and get access to the weekly videos introducing the habits — free resource: https://neuromindfulness.thinkific.com/courses/100-days-challenge-Attention-Mastery-by-neuromindfulness-institute.

What actually helps

From everything we’ve learned — in the research, in the coaching rooms, in the programs we’ve run — a few principles keep holding up.

Measure first. You cannot protect what you cannot see. The leaders who make the most progress are the ones who start by understanding where their attention is actually going — not where they assume it’s going. That’s what our Attention & BMR Assessment does. It creates a mirror. And the conversation it sparks is, almost every time, the beginning of real change.

Build habits, not heroics. Sustainable focus doesn’t come from a weekend retreat or a burst of motivation. It comes from small, repeated practices — micro-habits that gradually shift the default. One new habit per week, stacked onto what already exists in a leader’s routine. That’s the design philosophy behind our 100-Day Challenge. It’s not about discipline, it is about making focus feel natural again and creating a movement internally.

Make the invisible visible — together. One of the tools we use early in the process is the Wheel of Attention — a framework that maps everything competing for a leader’s focus at once: professional demands, digital environment, personal life, self-care. When leaders see it, the reaction is almost always the same. A quiet “I never thought about it like that.” Suddenly the problem has a shape. And that changes the conversation.

Leadership at scale. The leaders who go through this work don’t just keep it for themselves. They bring the language, the tools, the awareness into their teams. We call them Attention Champions. That’s where the real shift happens — not in individual improvement, but in a shared understanding that focus is a prerequisite for the kind of work that actually matters. Leaders create internally an Attention Conscious Culture by creating a movement.

The question worth sitting with

In a world where AI is absorbing more and more of what used to require human cognitive effort, the ability to think deeply — to do the work that machines still can’t replicate — is quietly becoming the most important leadership capability of our time.

It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t make for a compelling slide deck. But in every coaching conversation I’ve had over the past two years, it’s the thing that was holding everything else back.

Where your attention goes, your life goes. So the real question isn’t how to do more. I invite you to take a break, go for a walk and reflect on this — Is your attention going where it actually matters to you?

I’m curious what you’re seeing in your own teams. Drop a comment, or reach out directly. We are happy to share more insights from the research and brainstorm with you what could work for your leadership team.

Stay cool, stay amazing… stay focused,

Veronica Brejan | Co-founder, NeuroMindfulness® Institute

A note for business and HR leaders: If this work resonates with you and you want to be equipped to lead this kind of transformation within your own organisation — not just experience it, but facilitate it — we offer a globally recognised certification through the NeuroMindfulness Coach Certification (NMCC). The first level — Practitioner — is self paced. It is accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), and it gives you the tools, the neuroscience foundation, and the practical frameworks to drive attention mastery across teams and cultures. More about the NeuroMindfulness Coach Certification (NMCC) here.