Alysa Liu’s gold medal comeback is a leadership lesson about joy, not grit

Anyone who knows me knows I’m an optimistic, joy-seeking, recovering workaholic committed to leading a joyful rebellion against stress and burnout. So when friends started tagging me in posts about U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu’s joyful gold medal win at the Winter Olympics in Milan, I paid attention. Because this isn’t just a sports story. It’s a leadership story.

When Liu stepped away from competitive figure skating at the height of her career, it wasn’t because she lacked grit. It was because pushing harder was costing her joy. That choice runs against everything we tend to praise in high performers: Push through. Power through. Never quit.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Liu described a life reduced to repetition: living alone at the Olympic Training Center, shuttling between the dorm and the rink, being told when to train, what to eat—only to wake up and repeat it all over again the next day. There was little space for exploration or identity beyond the sport. Over time, she stopped caring about the details that once mattered—her music, her costumes, even her creative input. Others made those choices. The work became mechanical. Eventually, she began questioning not her talent, but her sense of self—wondering who she was outside a system that had defined her entirely by performance, saying: “I felt like a puppet other people were using.”

What Liu outlined is what happens when the conditions of performance become unsustainable. And she’s not the first young elite athlete to model this kind of leadership.

At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles withdrew from multiple finals to protect her mental health and physical safety. At the time, the reaction was polarized. The cultural script told us she should power through. That winners don’t quit. That leaders don’t step back.

But Biles demonstrated something far more nuanced: situational awareness under extreme pressure. She recognized that her mind and body were not aligned, and she refused to risk catastrophic failure in the name of optics. What many labeled weakness was, in fact, disciplined self-leadership.

While both Biles and Liu disrupted the myth that high performance requires self-erasure, workplaces create similar conditions for their employees every day—just with Outlook calendars instead of Olympic routines.

STRESS IS RESHAPING CAREERS

The 2026 State of Stress & Joy at Work National Study from The Center for Joyful Work shows stress isn’t just a performance problem today; it’s a leadership pipeline problem for tomorrow. Chronic workplace stress is career-altering. Nearly two-thirds of working Americans have considered leaving their career due to stress. Just under half have lowered their career goals because of it. And over half have avoided managing others altogether.

We tend to treat burnout as an individual resilience issue. But what Liu’s story—and the data—suggests is something far more systemic: when the grind crowds out joy, even the most driven people eventually disengage.

In my own life, family and friends told me I was working too hard long before I admitted it to myself. I assured them—and myself—that I’d slow down as soon as the next big project was over. But there was always another big project.

The praise came. So did the promotions. So did the anxiety. I was overwhelmed, exhausted, and confused. I had finally landed the dream job I’d worked so hard for . . . so why was I so unbelievably miserable? 

By the time I was confronted with a simple question—“What are your hobbies? What do you do for fun?”—I realized I had no answer. Like Liu, I had achieved what I worked for. And like Liu, I had lost myself in the process.

That’s not a personal failure. That’s what happens when we forget that performance and joy are partners, not trade-offs.

JOY FUELS PERFORMANCE—ESPECIALLY AT THE TOP

Liu didn’t just return to skating. She returned differently. Watching her in Milan, the joy was unmistakable—on the ice and off. That joy was the fuel that propelled her performance to the podium.

The national study confirms that joy is key to success at work: 79% of working Americans say it is essential to doing their best work. Among executives, that jumps to 89%. Yet 57% say they experience far less joy at work than they would like.

That joy gap—the difference between how much joy people need to perform and how much they actually experience—leads to a performance gap. And performance is shaped not only by skill and effort, but by the conditions in which work happens. When joy is present, people are more focused, more resilient, and make better decisions. When it’s absent, effort becomes unsustainable.

And one of the biggest blockers? Overwhelm.

OVERWHELMING WORK BLOCKS JOY

Liu’s relentless training schedule was the elite-athlete version of back-to-back meetings and stacked deadlines. The study finds that schedule stress is the most common of the five types of work stress. An overwhelming workload was cited as the number one thing blocking American workers from feeling joy at work.

In other words, we’re designing work in ways that systematically crowds out the very thing that drives high performance. If calendars are packed to the point where people can’t think, recover, or create, that’s not a time management issue. It’s a leadership decision.

FORCED POSITIVITY ISN’T JOY

It’s important to distinguish joy from toxic positivity.

Joy at work is a grounded, authentic sense of meaning and purpose in what we do, mattering in our relationships, and momentum and progress. Forced positivity is the “good vibes only” approach to systemic stress—it’s the pressure to stay positive while stress and challenges are being ignored or dismissed.

The problem isn’t “positivity.” The problem is inauthenticity. When someone’s words say “everything is fine” but their body says “threat,” the people around them feel it—and trust drops. In fact, the study shows that forced positivity increases stress and decreases joy. Almost two-thirds (65%) report that forced positivity is exhausting, while 64% say they are expected to appear positive at work even when they don’t feel that way.

Joy lives in the quiet spaces between our emotions—when we’re grounded in what matters most. It doesn’t need perfection. It just needs space. And that’s the problem: when we’re stressed, overwhelmed, and running on empty, joy doesn’t disappear—it just gets crowded out.

What is so inspirational about Liu’s return to the ice is that she didn’t simply “power through with a smile”—she changed the conditions. She made room for joy.

SUPPORT SYSTEMS MATTER—BUT ACCESS ISN’T EQUAL

Liu’s return also highlights the importance of support. She moved from isolation to connection—with family, friends, and coaches.

In the workplace, access to support varies significantly by role. While 78% of executives report having a support system that helps them manage stress, that number drops to 57% for managers and just 49% for individual contributors.

We often assume support is a personal responsibility—“build your network,” “ask for help.” But support is also structural. Leaders design systems that either normalize stress conversations or silence them.

Teams can start by paying attention to early stress signals: missed deadlines, low energy, irritability, silence in meetings. When stress is spotted early and addressed collectively, it’s far less likely to spiral into burnout.

WHAT GEN Z IS SIGNALING

Liu is part of Gen Z, and that context matters. The study found that stress has a stronger negative impact on younger generations. The same stressors older workers may experience as manageable are more likely to feel overwhelming to younger workers. They experience stress more frequently and feel its effects more intensely—a double burden of frequency and impact.

But Gen Z isn’t ignoring stress signals. They are naming them, which signals readiness for organizational change. Leaders who dismiss younger workers’ stress miss a warning sign about the future of work. Leaders who listen may find a generation ready to co-create healthier, higher-performing workplaces.

THE LEADERSHIP MANDATE

You can read the statistics about joy improving cognitive flexibility, problem-solving, and decision-making. Or you can watch Liu skate.

Her gold medal wasn’t the result of grinding harder. It was the result of skating differently. Less stress + more joy = better performance.

The question for leaders isn’t whether people can push through. They can. The question is: at what cost—and for how long?

If we want sustainable high performance, we have to design for joy, not just endurance. That means rethinking workload, normalizing authentic emotion, building real support systems, and listening, especially to younger generations signaling that the old model isn’t working.

Because while grit might win you a season, joy wins you a life well lived.