Why so many capable, high-performing leaders are quietly doubting themselves.

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As usual, she arrives at work early, ensuring she is prepared for the day ahead.

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She presents in the leadership meeting - nothing difficult, just her usual department update. She has a productive one-to-one with a member of her team, receives positive feedback in her performance review and heads home.

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If you asked her colleagues how she'd been that day, they'd probably describe her as calm, competent and professional.

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But that wasn't her experience.

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What leadership looks like on the surface isn't always what it feels like on the inside.

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Before presenting, she spent the first half of the meeting mentally rehearsing what she was going to say. Afterwards, she replayed every word in her head, focusing on what she should have said rather than what she did say.

In her performance review, she heard plenty of praise. Yet it was the one suggestion for development that stayed with her, quietly confirming the story she'd already been telling herself:

“I'm not good enough”

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By the time she arrived home, she sat in the car and cried.

Nothing dramatic had happened that day.

It was the result of the continuous pressure that leadership had put upon her for years. A relentless barrage of leadership and strategy changes, managing difficult decisions, navigating complexity, technical overwhelm and changing expectations and problem after problem to be solved.

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But she didn’t see any of that, instead she put it down to what leadership is - a part of the job, thinking she was resilient enough to keep going through this phase, but this phase always went straight into another, and another.

She hid how she felt, the impact this was taking on her - externally performing the competent leader she thought that she needed to be, all the while believing that it was because she wasn’t good enough.

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And she isn’t alone.

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Leaders report significantly higher levels of stress, sadness and loneliness than the people they lead. From the outside, they appear to be coping well.

Inside, they're carrying the weight of constant self-doubt, emotional effort and the pressure of always being the person everyone else relies on.

There’s a reason for this. It’s not a character flaw, it’s what makes us human and understanding this is the start to managing it.

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This was me six years ago, and it is the story of so many leaders I coach today.

I think we've become very good at recognising when someone is struggling once they stop functioning or admit it out loud. We're far less good at recognising the leaders who are still performing, still delivering and still succeeding, but are quietly becoming exhausted underneath.

The same recognition sits at the heart of the coaching work I do and it’s those leaders I'm writing my new book ‘Exhausted, Not Broken’ for and those are the leaders I’m here to coach.

I’ve opened a waitlist for ‘Exhausted, Not Broken’ - not only to keep me motivated and on track with writing and publishing it, but to share parts of it with the people who will benefit from it most.

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Exhausted, Not Broken is for the senior leader who looks capable to everyone else, yet inside is feeling like they’re holding on by a thread.

The book aims to help you understand why you've been feeling this way, know how to rebuild trust in yourself, and have a practical way forward, to be the leader who not only looks capable, but believes it too.

Sign up to the waitlist now for early access, pre-reads and join me as I take this journey into writing and publishing my first book.

Join the waitlist here

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