The Dubai trailblazer mindset for 2026: How to win beyond the rat race without burnout

We’re running a little late. I worry their time might be wasted, but they don’t. They’re busy professionals, yet they refuse to live by the tyranny of the ticking clock.

Life’s too short to panic over what you can’t control.

There’s an air of reassurance and calm around both Jason Leavy, the founder and Chief Executive Coach at Prime Performance Labs and Samira Cutts, Chief Performance Coach and a neuroscientist too. Leavy sets me at ease relating about how he almost lost his laptop on a plane, and how he got it back. I exhale and avoid the clock for the next few minutes.  This composure forms the crux of our conversations: Essentially, perseverance in a world that is constantly rushing around you, knocking you off your feet, and you can’t find time to breathe.

 You only know how to breathe stress.

But maybe not. As Leavy, Cutts, and several other Dubai-based trailblazers such as the cheerful Anna Zeitlin, a Partner – Fintech and Financial Services at Addleshaw Goddard, a law firm and Nikola Kukoljac, Vice President of Solution Architecture at Help AG point out through their life stories, rich experiences, brutal learnings and un-learnings over the course of decades, maybe life doesn’t have to be such a rat race.

Maybe, you can just walk along the race-track too and still win.

Here’s what Dubai’s leaders say.

Understanding stress, burnout, and leadership

Leavy observes the pressures of modern leadership. “Everybody is unique. Their biology, lifestyle circumstances are dramatically different. The commonality would be stress, burnout are ever-present in this always-on culture that leaders have to exist in. There are multiple facets attempting to balance one’s life—personal and professional, the ability to create boundaries.”

Cutts adds a neuro-scientific perspective: When you’re in a role as a high-performance leader, the most important skills you have, are the ability to solve complex challenges and stress, burnout will diminish those cognitive functions. “It’s very important for leaders to understand this in order to be successful. They have to understand the science and strategies to prevent burnout, so it does not impact their core skills. Sleep: if you don’t get deep sleep, the toxins are not removed. And if the toxins are not removed, it affects learning and development.”

Cutts also brings a deeper psychological lens to this need for grounding. For her, it has been 24 years of experience, working with people suffering from severe, conditions. Witnessing critical cases pushed her to explore preventative wellbeing. The lessons weren’t abstract—they were personal.

Moreover, these words come from a place of experience. She had grown up in challenging situations that taught her how to keep herself safe, physically and psychologically.  Her early years shaped her resilience and perspective. As she says: You never came from a place of privilege. You had to earn it

Adversity was always around her. "I developed a problem-solving mindset, identifying what works and what doesn’t work," she says.

‘Harder, faster stronger isn’t the solution’

 This high-pressure ecosystem often fuels the myth that ‘harder, faster, stronger’ is the only path to success—a belief Leavy and Cutts caution against, illustrating with tangible examples.

Leavy expands further, describing the ecosystem leaders navigate. It’s an ecosystem of volatility, turbulence, the pace of change. Balance against that, you then have toxic cultures, perpetuated by social media—you feel what you’re doing is never enough, as he says.

There’s a belief that harder, faster, stronger is the right way to go, which creates impossible expectations on leaders. It weighs heavily. Something that starts as a high-stress situation, ends up as a physical manifestation. It goes hand-in-hand, adds Cutts. The body doesn’t work compartmentalised manner, each has an impact on the other. “Your work and career are determined by the success of your health, which allows you to develop a growth mindset. It’s a package deal,” she says.

Leavy illustrates with an example: “Think of a scale, 1 to 10. Ten is your best, when you feel most alive. The challenge is maintaining that state over a long period. Just like a 100m sprinter can’t sustain marathon pace, leaders slow to a jog and a walk.”

 So in leadership, what does it look like? Yo-yo dieting, disrupted sleep, low energy levels, struggles to concentrate—the way to simplify it is that leaders are trying their best, but not doing their best. And as Cutts elaborates, when stress eats into your sleep. “The only time our brain can remove toxins, is during deep sleep. And, if you don’t get that deep sleep, the toxins are not removed, and if they’re not removed, our brain cannot learn and develop.

Beyond the science of leadership pressures, Zeitlin illustrates how these lessons play out in real life, showing the personal side of slowing down and speaking up.

Learning to speak up and slow down

The bright-eyed Anna Zeitlin calls her story ‘vanilla,’ but that’s the least convincing part of her narrative. Her trajectory is anything but plain: growing up in London, studying law at university, and even taking it a step further by studying the subject in Mandarin. As a relatively junior trainee, she was presented with an opportunity to move to Dubai—and she couldn’t bring herself to walk away from it. The appeal was clear: access to opportunities she may not have had elsewhere. “I have been in Dubai for nearly 14 years. I can’t believe how much change I have seen, and so many cerebral advances. And it remains a very exciting place to be,” she says.

Reflecting on her year, one marked by stepping into partnership, she is upbeat despite the pace. But she remains clear-eyed about the gaps in her profession. “Mental health was never discussed when I started my career… the legal profession is still not very good at embracing conversations around it,” she says. Her solution is empathy in practice: checking in on her team’s wellbeing and learning to prioritise her own.

But she stands with much confidence, as compared to her earlier years. This evolution mirrors what many women in high-pressure fields experience. “We are now seeing more women step into senior roles, still not enough, we need to see more,” she emphasises. Zeitlin remains modest: She doesn’t mentally see herself as a leader yet, but it’s something that she is ‘increasingly’ feeling more comfortable admitting.

 That confidence was hard-won, compared to the days when she was new to the profession and at times would even spend grueling days and nights at work, despite going through a lot in personal life. “If that was me now, I would be more confident to speak up about my needs. I still think, as women, we don’t do that enough.”

Like Zeitlin, Nikola Kukoljac also sees growth as a gradual, intentional shift rather than an overnight transformation.

Reflecting, recalibrating, and resetting

For Kukoljac, reflection is an annual ritual. He tries to get his days off, disconnect, and later systematically go through his phone to see what he’s done, and he would like to change. His approach is gentle rather than punishing: micro-steps, not reinvention. “A couple of years ago, I realised planning is important to be successful, and I don’t push myself too much,” he says.

Both Zeitlin and Kukoljac recognise that self-care is less about indulgence and more about maintenance.  They don’t pretend to be perfect at it. “I am not very good at this,” Zeitlin admits.  Work swallows your evenings and sometimes your weekends. However, her anchor is routine—and exercise classes where she can lock her phone away.

Meanwhile, Kukoljac crafts a different version, with the same purpose. He creates small routines, and some of them doggo-centric. As he cheerfully says, he has the best dog in the world, and sometimes as most of us dog-lovers agree, that’s all you need. “What calms me down is sitting with her,” he says. Apart from this furry stress-buster, he enjoys his walks. “As the internet never lies, I try to do 10k steps.”

‘Controlled chaos’

Balancing it all, is always a work in progress. “I love my job. So, when you love something, it’s not difficult to do. I have long working hours but I do love working with people. I love travelling, too. It doesn’t utilise energy as I think. So I develop a concept of ‘micro sleeps’, taxi, car or plane. This is the idea, not a lot of planning but controlled chaos.”

Looking for emotional clarity and focus

Kukoljac has his own mechanism for emotional clarity at work. “If an email upsets me, I do not work for 3–5 minutes… I cool down. If I am in meetings, rarely can people make me upset… I maintain clarity by saying I will come back to you.” It’s a skill that took years to cultivate, especially for someone who describes himself as “naturally hot-tempered.”

Planning ahead without burning out

As they look to 2026, the theme is similar: Structure without suffocation, ambition without depletion. Zeitlin calls herself a ‘creature of habit,’ one who thrives with routines but accepts that life ‘throws things at you.’

Kukoljac frames his planning as optimistic realism. “Every year will be better than the previous, and better doesn’t mean more money. It could mean kids or dogs, more time with the family.”

His biggest lesson mirrors the quiet wisdom that threads across all their stories: “It’s not a race. You can achieve a lot, but also in micro steps, without burning yourself out.”