There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from trying to be too much. Trying to be the decisive leader and the empathetic one. The bold visionary and the careful steward. The person who sets the direction and the person who ensures everyone feels heard. Leaders carry the weight of an extraordinary number of expectations, their own, their team’s, their board’s, their investors’, and after a while, the carrying itself becomes the problem.
Most of the leaders I work with are genuinely good people. They are not overwhelmed because they are struggling. They are overwhelmed because they care, and caring in their world has come to mean continuously adapting themselves to what the situation seems to require. There is a version of them for every room they walk into, and the mental effort of maintaining all those versions is, to put it plainly, exhausting.
The interesting thing is that this exhaustion almost never shows up as what it actually is. It shows up as leadership problems. Difficulty delegating, because the version of you that delegates well requires a calm you do not currently have access to. Difficulty being present in meetings, because part of your attention is always monitoring how you are coming across. Difficulty with decisions, because every decision carries the weight of everyone it might disappoint. It all looks like business pressure. It is actually the pressure of trying to be a consistently performing version of yourself.
I spent years in consulting performing a version of competence I did not always feel. There is nothing more tiring than being impressive. It requires constant maintenance. Constant vigilance about how things are landing, whether the room is convinced, whether you have done enough to justify your presence. I would come home from client engagements genuinely depleted, not because the work had been hard, but because the performance had been continuous. And the most insidious thing about it was that I had forgotten it was a performance. I thought that was just what work felt like.
When you stop performing leadership and start simply being the person in the room, something remarkable happens. The energy returns. Not because the demands have reduced, but because you have stopped spending half your resources on impression management. What you have left, when you are just yourself, is surprising. There is a quality of attention that becomes available when you are not simultaneously monitoring your own impact. You hear things differently. You respond rather than react. You stop trying to pre-emptively satisfy expectations that nobody may actually have of you.
The expectations you are carrying are, in large part, your own creation. Not all of them. Real pressure exists. Boards have genuine expectations. Teams have genuine needs. But the version of those expectations that sits in your mind at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, rehearsing tomorrow’s response, is your thinking, not their requirement. They are probably not thinking about you. And even if they are, their thinking is not in the room with you tonight.
Here is what I would offer: the version of you that shows up when you stop performing is not a lesser version. It is usually a more effective one. Authenticity in leadership is not a soft skill. It is one of the most practically useful things you can bring into a room, because it creates genuine contact rather than managed impressions. People feel the difference. They may not be able to name it, but they know when they are with someone who is actually there.
You were hired, or you built what you built, because of who you genuinely are. The expectations were built around that person. Not the performing version, but the actual one. What might become lighter if you trusted that person to show up, without all the management and maintenance that surrounds them?
If the weight you are carrying belongs mostly to other people’s expectations, real or imagined, it might be worth exploring. You can book a free 30-minute conversation here: