Say this out loud: "I'm so busy."
Sound familiar? Of course it does. We say it dozens of times a week — to colleagues, to friends, sometimes just to ourselves in the mirror while we scroll our third inbox of the morning.
But what if "busy" isn't a productivity status? What if it's a defence mechanism?
"Busy is avoidance," says Mo, psychologist, wellbeing consultant, and guest on the Roadblocks, Risks & Resilience Podcast. "It's avoidance from the thing you don't want to deal with. That is the bottom line of busy."
It's a confronting idea. And for many people — particularly driven business owners and leaders — it's also deeply accurate.
The Comfortable Lie We Tell Ourselves
Being busy feels productive. It gives us a story to tell, a reason not to stop, a justification for the decisions we're not making and the conversations we're not having. It also, Mo points out, inflates our importance in a way that's socially rewarded.
"Whenever someone says 'I'm super busy, I'm busy busy' — I'm going okay, fine. You own that."
The problem is that this busyness loop often crowds out the very things that would move the needle: difficult decisions, meaningful conversations, proper rest, time with the people we love.
For business owners especially, chronic busyness is frequently a symptom of something deeper — an avoidance of the risk involved in making a real decision, or the vulnerability required to ask for help.
You Can't Have Two Priorities
One of the sharpest observations Mo shares from his work in psychosocial wellbeing comes from a real moment on a corporate site. A leader he was working with was visibly dysregulated — spinning between competing priorities, getting nothing done on any of them.
Mo's intervention was simple: "You can only have one priority."
This sounds obvious. It isn't. Most of us are operating with three to seven "top priorities" at any given time, which means we are, in practice, bouncing between all of them and completing none effectively.
Mo walked her through a risk matrix: likelihood and consequence. Which of these things, if unaddressed, poses the greatest risk? Start there. Only there.
"The more priorities you've got, the more busy you are, the less you do," he says. "Bounce on five things and they'll each go up a little. Bounce on one thing and it'll go all the way up."
The ABC Model for Leaders
Mo applies a simple framework to help leaders understand why their energy management matters far beyond personal wellbeing:
A — Attitude. What's going on internally for you — your values, emotions, the thoughts you're not saying out loud. Others can't see it. But it shapes everything that follows.
B — Behaviour. How you show up. Your posture, your tone, the energy you bring into a room. This is what people around you can actually see and respond to.
C — Consequence. The impact of that behaviour on your team, your culture, your relationships. Positive, negative, or neutral — there is always a consequence.
The insight is this: if you walk into the office carrying ten unresolved problems and try to hide them with a performance of okayness, your team will feel it. They will put walls up. They will stop bringing you the real stuff. And the culture quietly deteriorates.
"If it's all about you and your problems," Mo observes, "other people won't have the safe space. They'll have walls up."
The inverse is also true. Leaders who do the internal work — who show up with genuine presence, who ask the simple questions and actually listen — create environments where people perform better, stay longer, and bring their whole selves.
What to Do Instead of Busy
If you want to reclaim your focus and your energy, Mo's approach offers a few practical anchors:
Name the avoidance. The next time you catch yourself saying "I'm busy," pause and ask — what am I actually avoiding right now? A conversation? A decision? An emotion?
Set one real priority. Not three, not five. One. What is the single thing that, if you addressed it today, would create the most forward movement?
Manage your energy, not just your time. Mo is deliberate about when he schedules meetings, what he eats, and how he structures his day — not as a performance hack, but because he understands that the quality of attention he brings to people directly determines the quality of the outcome.
Reflect daily. Even five minutes at the end of the day. How did I show up? What did I actually do? What would I do differently tomorrow?
Busy will always be available to you as an option. It will always feel more comfortable than stillness, more socially acceptable than saying "I don't know yet" or "I need more time on this."
But it has a cost. And in Mo's experience — personally and in decades of working with leaders and organisations — that cost is usually paid by the people around you first, and eventually by you.