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Category: Stress & Burnout

  • The Rung I Chased for Ten Years (and the Flatness at the Top)

    The most expensive mistake I’ve ever made didn’t cost me money.

    I spent years climbing a corporate ladder. One where everyone had pointy elbows, jockeying for the next “opportunity.”

    And when I got the promotion I remember my leader ushering me in by saying “Congratulations! Now you’re part of the problem too.”

    Wait?! What?

    Within weeks I felt like it was bait and switch. I told a mentor and advocate that the process was wrong.

    I’d climbed the goat path. Run the obstacle course. Been invited into the vault. Then the vault door was slammed shut and only then were the lights turned on to show me what I’d been clamoring for.

    I didn’t feel triumph. I felt faint, confusing flatness.

    Something closer to the feeling of showing up to what you were promised would be the best party and experience of your life – like what you imagine champagne and caviar is “supposed” to be like (for the record, I’ve had both and do not like either), but you find yourself standing in the doorway wondering why you’d rather be at a pizza party in someone’s backyard with a cold beer.

    Here’s my point: Some of the “shoulds” in your life that are costing you the most don’t feel like guilt.

    Let me show you how I missed it.

    Some “shoulds” show up as drive or ambition.

    We think we can spot a “should” because it feels bad. It nags. It guilts. *You should call your mother. (probably…yeah ok…maybe) You should answer that text (meh…). You should be further along by now. (argh)

    But the sneakiest ones don’t nag at all. They dress up as want.

    I should want this promotion. I should be scaling my business by now. I should want the big title, the big office, the big life someone sketched out for me before I had opinions about my life.

    That doesn’t feel like an imported order. It feels like your own honest ambition. Which is exactly the disguise.

    I accepted someone else’s ambition.

    And that’s the actual mistake.

    It wasn’t the climb. It was the fact that I didn’t actually want it.

    In fact…I did it out of spite because some guy told me he didn’t believe I could and didn’t support me. Everyone around me agreed that this next step, this next rung was the right one for me except this one guy. I’d been saying “no” for years. Right up until he said he didn’t believe I “could” and then my competitive nature kicked in.

    And I had to prove I could.

    My Autopilot is fast and cheap and confident (we met it in the Intruder Paradox piece). It handed my slower, thinking brain a tidy story… this is the win, go get it. this is how you prove yourself and get people to take you seriously… and my thinking brain, lazy by design, signed on the dotted line without reading the contract.

    Ten years of technically-mine decisions that somehow weren’t mine at all.

    My body sent me the bill.

    Here’s the thing about running someone else’s ambition through your own nervous system. There’s a tax, and your body pays it.

    Mine came due.

    ER visits. Chronic pain. Two surgeries. Medication. Chemotherapy. Two auto-immune disorders. Medically induced and then surgically induced menopause. And everything that comes with it.

    Let me be specific about the chronic pain, because “chronic pain” is a tidy phrase that tells you nothing.

    This was not bad-period pain. Not the cramps you push through with a heating pad, an Advil, and a tight smile at 9am. Because that’s the box everyone tries to file it in – and it’s the wrong box.

    This was pelvic pain that spiked without warning and shot straight up to the base of my skull. The kind that leaves you panting for a second. Nauseated. Shaken. Trembling. Then it would settle back into its baseline… a dull, pulsing, bone-deep ache in my abdomen, my hips, and my lower back.

    All the time. 24/7. Nothing touched it. Always on, always playing in the background.

    This background “noise” takes rent out of your brain and quietly eats the capacity you need to problem-solve, think critically, hold a conversation without a snap or a snark riding shotgun on every sentence. I wasn’t difficult. I was in pain, all day, every day, running a full executive load on whatever cognition the pain hadn’t already spent, popping Vicodin to make it through.

    Opioid medication dulls the pain and quiets the background noise, and dulls those executive functioning skills.

    Here’s what that looked like in the rooms where I was supposed to be the sharpest person present:

    + I’d be mid-point in a meeting, building to my point – the point I’d “practiced” – only to lose the thread. Just gone. I got really good at roundabout ramble phrases to bring myself back to my point and just hoped no one noticed.

    + I’d lose words presenting to leadership. Not obscure ones. Ordinary ones like “proposal” or “pen”. The word right there, close enough to touch, and my brain would hand me static instead.

    + I’d read the same report four times and retain nothing. Blank on a colleague’s name mid-introduction – someone I’d worked beside for ten years – while I was handing them to a client.

    So I built scaffolding to hold it together. Lists for the lists. Alarms on the alarms. The elaborate machinery of a woman spending most of her energy masking and hiding that things weren’t working out of fear.

    And under all of it, a fatigue that sleep didn’t touch. Not tired. Depleted. I’d hit 2pm and feel my thinking wade through wet sand, quietly doing the math on how many hours were left before I could stop performing “fine.” It was always 4 hours until I drove an hour to reset and then got back online to do my administrative work.

    I told myself this was just the cost of the level I was now playing at.

    And that’s the lie that keeps you climbing.

    The strain my body was under wasn’t a sign that I needed more grit. My body was flagging a significant all system failure but I kept overriding it.

    The lesson: I never asked if I was chasing my dream.

    My lesson was when I said yes to the promotion it wasn’t because I really wanted it. Others wanted it for me.

    I hit a point where I couldn’t do it anymore (that’s a whole different story) and I climbed down that ladder in my 40s. Deliberately. Shuffled sideways. Into work that fit me. And I’ve done it twice more in the years that have followed.

    But before I made the decision to climb down I wondered if it was “failing” because you’re supposed to you know, climb up the ladder. Especially as a woman. And as you rise up, you lift others with you.

    The Autopilot told me that going down the ladder was for people who couldn’t hack it; that everyone would see me as a failure. (The Autopilot was very invested in the ladder. The Autopilot also never once asked if I like heights.)

    I overrode the Autopilot with evidence and choices. Deliberately designed my exit and transition.

    Here’s what I know now – walking away from a title that doesn’t fit isn’t a fall. It’s authentic and the truest thing I could have ever done for me to align myself to do work with my values.

    The one question that would have saved me a decade.

    I knew I was proving myself but I never asked whose ambition and dream I was following. I couldn’t see that the room I was in was dictating and driving the decision, and much of that decision was coming out of fear and this longstanding need to be taken seriously.

    I didn’t ask the question did I choose this or am I just going through the motions because it’s what I’m supposed to do. Because it’s the logical next step.

    I’m not anti-ambition. I’m anti-imposed ambition. Want the promotion. Want the title. Want the corner office. Just make sure it’s your true want before you lose a decade and kill your nervous system going after it.

    Next Steps

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    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is “borrowed ambition” and how does it lead to burnout?

    Borrowed ambition occurs when you adopt external expectations, corporate milestones, or a desire to prove someone wrong as your own personal drive. Because this motivation is imported rather than authentic, pursuing it forces your nervous system to operate on stress and fear, eventually leading to severe physical exhaustion, health crises, and cognitive depletion.

    Is stepping down from a senior corporate role a sign of failure?

    No. Stepping down or moving laterally off a traditional career ladder is an act of intentional realignment, not defeat. Choosing to leave a title that actively damages your health or conflicts with your core values requires overriding default cultural conditioning (“Autopilot”) that falsely equates endless upward mobility with personal worth.

    How does chronic stress and physical pain affect executive functioning?

    Continuous physical strain and chronic pain consume immense cognitive bandwidth. This ongoing “background noise” drains the exact mental resources required for working memory, focus, and decision-making. When your brain is constantly processing physical distress, simple cognitive tasks feel exhausting, forcing you to rely on elaborate masking strategies just to perform routine work.

  • Lessons from My Corporate Detox, Six Months Out

    The rules I absorbed. The ones I’m putting down. And the choice I get back.

    Six months ago, Accenture, the world’s largest global consulting firm, released me from employment due to “lack of work.”

    I have a PhD, 20+ years experience, built and ran 2 multi-million-dollar consulting practices at 2 different firms. Let me tell you upfront – this isn’t an Accenture-bashing memory. As a former executive who has had to make these calls, I understand how this decision was made, because I’ve had to make it and execute it multiple times.

    This decision was made by people who don’t know me as a human but by looking at a business – at a spreadsheet, looking at profit and loss, and viewing human talent as “inventory” and “assets.”

    The questions are always

    + What is the market currently buying?

    + What inventory can we sell and at what price point to make a profit for our shareholders? For service based organizations, this is service and solution-based approaches built on skills of people who that work out to an hourly loaded bill rate – salary + cost of keeping them employed.

    + How long has the inventory been on the shelves? For service based organizations, this is how long has the person not billed their time directly to a client.

    + Do we think we can recoup the investment at some point in the future based on where we’re headed from a strategy perspective?

    It genuinely isn’t personal and is a purely, humanly-disconnected financial exercise, looking strategically at numbers.

    When someone says “it isn’t personal, it’s business” – this is what’s happening to get to the decision. Before it gets personal.

    Once the decision is made, the execution of that decision is pushed down to a leader who actually has the relationship with the human who is impacted, whether that leader agrees with the decision or not.

    Now it’s personal.

    In my past, I had the unfortunate difficulty of having to make both made the financial call and then executing the phone call.

    I didn’t hide behind layers of leaders to hand the decision to someone else to execute. I felt the full weight of the responsibility of the decision. I every person I ever had to release is still a stone on my soul. Because I knew, if I didn’t make that one decision today, I’d have to make ad additional 10 in a month. Because it was business.

    That’s a burden of business leadership. It isn’t about profit over people. Or people over profit. It’s people and profit.

    I haven’t said that out loud until right now.

    I haven’t had the right words.

    And I’ve spent the last six months in a kind of detox situation… shaking off so many things I’ve absorbed over 20+ years in corporate America that I started to mistake as part of my “identity.”

    I’m sharing the top five today.

    Lesson 1: Invisible rules outlive their context.

    Every organization runs on rules nobody writes down. You absorb them to succeed inside that specific place at that specific time. But the risk is that somewhere along the way you can maybe stop seeing them as a “rule to survive here” and rather start seeing them as just part of life, or a part of you. Things like:

    + Always be available and reachable. On vacation. On weekends. During the birthday party, the family celebration… the family crisis… even your own health crisis….

    + A packed calendar means you really, really matter.

    + You should never be the one who says “no.”

    + The person who cares the “most” is the one who stays latest or logs off last.

    + You have to “prove” yourself.

    + You can, and “should” be able to “do” it all – be a C-suite leader, be named to Forbes 40 under 40, a present mom who “never gets angry”, a compassionate partner who “understands”, volunteer of the week, keeps the house clean, shows up to events with home-made food, handstitchs the kids halloween costumes…I’m sorry…that sounds ridiculous even as I’m typing it…

    You learn the rules because they work for that organization, department, or team. Right up until you step out of that “room” or watch something change around or underneath you. Those same rules don’t work other places and can even become a liability.

    The “detox” is about catching a rule as it’s firing, looking at it, and determining if it’s valid, if it works for you, and if you’ll keep it. Like cleaning out the the junk drawer in your kitchen. Keep what works and what you value. Toss the junk.

    Lesson 2: Corporate loyalty is a one-way street.

    Organizations ask for loyalty like it’s a relationship, like a one-sided relationship.

    FYI: IT ISN’T.

    I can’t say that loud enough.

    For the record, those caps are for those of you in the back of the room, who have outstayed your time misaligned in organizations taking advantage of your brilliance.

    I feel like I need to restate the obvious. Just like marriage, employment is a contract. Yes, you hope there’s mutual respect – or even love – when you sign a marriage license, but at its core, it’s a legal agreement. Severing a marriage takes court filings, lawyers, and costly legal action because of how the government views joint assets and income.

    Employment is no different in its contractual nature – except companies will rip up that contract the moment it suits their bottom line.

    Read it that way. Act like it.

    I’ve had three corporate exists, two planned and deliberate and one unplanned, but it’s the same lesson… employment is a contract.

    Negotiate the contract coming in. Recognize the contract while you are there. Respect that it was contract on your departure.

    Give your work your best while you are there. But give your time and effort in context of the contract.

    + Your self-advocacy isn’t disloyalty to the organization.

    + Your belief in your self-worth isn’t disloyalty to the organization.

    + Your expectation for fair compensation and respect isn’t disloyalty.

    Your expectation for a promotion because of time in service or because Sheila got one and she’s a jerk – now that’s another conversation and likely a whole different article, but I digress…

    Lesson 3: Worth and value get welded onto identity.

    In the United States – in Western society actually – a big part of our identity is connected to our work, and our work is, in a lot of ways, is connected to “output” – what we “produce” and what we “do.”

    To our competence.

    To a title.

    To our reputation.

    Being the one who holds it together, or rides in at the eleventh hour to save the day.

    So when the badge stops working at the turnstile, and the login shows “user not found”, and you have to introduce yourself with the word former… an internal sense of worth can wobble.

    That’s a trap.

    I’ve been reminding myself that someone else’s decision, made on finances and margins and market cycles, is not a verdict on my worth.

    Its a verdict on fit, timing, alignment, and possibly values – but not on “value” as in my personal value and self-worth.

    But our brains don’t wait for that memo. The brain takes the signal from the external environment and translates it, super fast, into a self-claim (maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, not as ‘valuable’ as I thought) before you’ve had a chance to weigh in.

    I’ve been wrestling this one for months – who am I if I don’t have a “fancy title” or role description or current exciting, complex, difficult project or Fortune 500 company name to say when I introduce myself?

    Turns out… I’m still me. Same kick-ass stories, same skills, same sass. And when I talk to people without all of that other stuff they still lean in to listen to me. Even as “just Shans.”

    Lesson 4: Busy is the enemy.

    I want to put a big star here because this one is huge: busy is just busy. It doesn’t mean you are actually more productive, “moving the needle” toward anything of value, and all it does is make you “feel” better – for a minute.

    I have this insatiable drive to “feel” like I am getting something “productive” done every day. If I don’t, a little alarm goes off and a little anxiety sets in.

    I’ve had to sit and look at it. Really, really look it to understand why. Who is it serving? Who am I performing for? What is it getting me? Is it getting me closer to my goals?

    Or am I just moving papers around creating an illusion for my brain.

    Here’s what I’ve finally realized… “busy” is a bottoms-up brain stimulus-chasing brain function. It’s chasing a dopamine rush of feel good.

    And it’s noise.

    It’s manufacturing the feeling of doing something meaningful so I don’t have to sit still.

    Personally, 6 months after release, I’m paying myself to build something new and shed what no longer fits. I recognize that I’ve had the luxury of not sprinting to the next company or role the second the last one ended.

    But my nervous system keeps trying to spend that luxury on being “busy” anyway. Partly out of pure habit, partly out of what I now have learned is a brain-wiring difference. Three months into this detox when I couldn’t focus I got some help and learned I have an ADHD brain – and a lot of my past experiences now make a whole lot more sense.

    Busy is how I’d get the dopamine hit handed to me on a schedule.

    Including why I’ve chased so many shiny things for so long.

    Detoxing from “busy” is harder than actually detoxing from the job title, the work, the structure, or the identity.

    Lesson 5: If we don’t pause in the gap between an event happening to us to choose our path, reflex will choose for us on an autopilot default.

    The day I left Accenture, I felt 100 pounds lighter. Literally, the night I dropped off my laptop I felt pretty good. But the next morning when I woke up without any of the expectations, I felt so light.

    And I think that when someone capable, competent and committed feels lighter walking away from something – either by choice or if it’s chosen for them – that’s information about the misalignment in th conditions.

    I don’t say this with any bitterness toward the work, the organization, or the people. I say it as a pause.

    The consulting world raised me and I’m a consultant in my soul.

    I learned to be a consultant in the late 1900s (ha!), back when Joyce Doria, a Booz Allen partner and a student of Albert Bandura, father of social learning theory (one of my idols), might send you home if she decided you, as a woman, weren’t dressed appropriately to represent women correctly in the workplace. (FYI: My office was 3 doors down from Joyce…every morning was a really stressful walk past her office.)

    It wasn’t unheard of to work 16 or 18-hour days in a conference room racing a deliverable into a FedEx envelope – this was pre “sending it” digitally to a client.

    I’ve seen big shifts from my first gig training National guardsmen on how to bring in business to community Internet cafe’s at National Guard facilities in the early 2000s to today. The industry has asked a lot, and it gave a lot. I’ve learned to lead, to really problem-solve, and to dig for more when I was sure my tank was empty.

    AI is disrupting and rewriting all of it. And underneath the disruption there’s a quiet question the whole industry is asking its people… “did you do enough? Are you doing enough? Can you be replaced by a computer program”

    Which is being quietly translated through a productivity lens of “am I enough”

    But watch what the brain does with that. It takes “did you do enough”, and before you can weigh in, it translates it into “am I enough” – basically do I have enough value and worth.

    It’s a fundamental threat to the human psyche. Am I, a human being enough. Am I so easy to replace. What is my meaning?

    When we get down to it. That is the question.

    Who am I if I don’t have this?

    That translation is the whole game. It happens in a gap so small you don’t see it.

    The same gap where I was released and my nervous system reached for a reason and passed a verdict that the reason was “me” (to quote Taylor Swift – “Hey, hi, I’m the problem it’s me”)

    That’s also the same gap where the choice lives.

    You don’t choose the signal. Or even see the signal. But you can see the translation before it hardens into a self-claim, and pick the response.

    Catching the handoff from “did you do enough” to “am I enough” and refusing the trade by answering the question “yes I did enough. yes. I am enough”

    That’s what I’m building a space for.

    Taking my years of experience translating brain + behavior + social psychology for organizations to help people like me – Recovering Type A+ Overachievers shed cognitive load and high-functioning exhaustion picked up from rooms signaling expectations they’ve mistakenly owned as their own voice and get back on their own priority list.

    Six months out, I’m finally hearing the difference in the voice (ok – reality check, I’m getting quicker)

    If you’re a Type A+ overachiever…or just experiencing high-functioning exhaustion from those invisible “shoulds”… I see you.

    Stick around for the journey. I’m building this for us.

    Next Steps

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    References

    Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling good: The new mood therapy. William Morrow.

    Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization. W. W. Norton.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Why do corporate layoffs feel like a personal failure even when they are financial decisions?

    Service-based corporate layoffs are fundamentally impersonal financial calculations 0 evaluating talent as billable inventory, utilization rates, and profit margins. However, because Western culture tightly couples professional titles and productivity with personal identity, the brain automatically translates a structural, spreadsheet-driven decision into a personal verdict of being “not enough.”

    How does chronic “busy-ness” act as a neurochemical coping mechanism?

    Constant busyness triggers a bottom-up brain response that delivers quick dopamine hits, creating the illusion of meaningful progress and productivity. For high-achievers (and particularly neurodivergent individuals), staying continuously occupied acts as a functional distraction from anxiety, helping perform competence rather than addressing underlying cognitive exhaustion.

    What are workplace “invisible rules” and why do they cause burnout?

    Invisible rules are unwritten cultural expectations – such as remaining perpetually reachable, over-committing, or treating packed calendars as status symbols – absorbed to survive inside a specific organization. High-functioning exhaustion occurs when you mistake these temporary survival tactics for permanent personal standards and continue carrying them outside that corporate environment.

  • The Invisible Load: Why “Doing It All” Is Wearing Out Capable Women

    It looks like a time-management problem. It isn’t. And that’s exactly why the calendars and the spa days keep failing.

    You know the plate spinner at the circus. One plate, fine. By the eighth you sit up a little. By the eighteenth you’re at the front of your seat, holding your breath, certain it’s all about to come down.

    It never does. That’s the act. He’s a professional, and every one of those plates is his.

    We spin more than eighteen most days, and ours come down all the time. Not because we’re worse at it. Because half our plates were handed to us by rooms we walked out of years ago, and we picked them up anyway.It never does. That’s the act. He’s a professional, and every one of those plates is his.

    We spin more than eighteen most days, and ours come down all the time. Not because we’re worse at it. Because half our plates were handed to us…or thrown at us.

    Key Points

    + The invisible load is the unseen work of remembering, planning, and holding everything together. Real, measured, and heavier for women.

    + “I should be able to handle this” isn’t a fact. It’s a memory your brain re-rendered until it sounds like your own voice.

    + More effort makes it worse, because the load grows every time you handle it quietly.

    + The fix isn’t self-care or a better calendar. It’s prioritization: deciding whose plate is whose, and setting down the ones that were never yours.

    What is the invisible load?

    The invisible load, often called the mental load, is the cognitive and emotional work of running things that never shows up as a finished task. It isn’t doing the dishes. It’s holding the whole map: what needs doing, who needs what, what’s running low, what quietly breaks if nobody tracks it.

    At work it carries a third dimension no job description names. The constant deciding. The emotional labor of keeping people steady. The unwritten expectation to be always available and always credible.

    Researchers have documented this weight for decades, and it falls disproportionately on women (Hochschild, 2012; Robertson et al., 2023).

    It usually shows up in five forms:

    + Cognitive overload. The relentless deciding and anticipating, too many mental tabs open at once.

    + Emotional labor. Absorbing other people’s stress while keeping your own face calm

    + Unwritten expectations. Always reachable, always proving you belong. It compounds for women of color

    + Self-silencing and overperformance. Taking on more just to read as competent, which runs straight toward burnout

    + Gendered mental labor. The second shift (named back in 1989), with women still carrying about double the caregiving load at home

    None of it is measured. All of it is real. And because it’s invisible, it gets treated as free.

    Why does the phrase “I should be able to handle this” play before you can catch it?

    Because it’s a memory that’s triggered by a “cue” And memory isn’t a recording you turn off and on.

    We treat memory like footage we can replay, like we’ve got the real tape of what happened. We don’t.

    Memory is reconstruction, not reproduction. Your brain rebuilds the thing every time you recall it. That’s why you can ask seven people who watched the exact same event what they saw and get seven sincere, different answers. It’s why you can retell your own story enough times that the new details get recoded into long-term memory as if they were always there.

    Now hold that thought next to a “should.”

    A should is literally a memory that got installed early in the shape of expectations: who you were supposed to be, what a good girl/boy, daughter/son or a competent woman/man does (because most every expectation is shared in the binary). Then it got reinforced in the bigger rooms, school and work and the whole culture, re-rendered so many times it stopped sounding like an instruction from outside and started sounding like it was your own voice. Internalized. The reinforcement isn’t subtle, either. Women are rewarded, early and consistently, for being helpful and agreeable, and penalized when they aren’t. The same directness that reads as competent in a man reads as abrasive in a woman, a double bind that’s been documented for years and hasn’t closed.

    So breaking a “should” doesn’t feel like breaking a rule. In some ways, it feels like betraying yourself. The guilt, the shame, the fear that shows up when you don’t host the thing or answer the email or carry the plate (aka say yes to the thing you want to say no to), that weight is real, and it’s pointed at a standard you don’t remember agreeing to.

    And it’s fast. The should fires in under 200 milliseconds, before deliberate thought arrives. You’re not choosing to pick up the plate. You’re reacting to a reconstruction that has been re-rendered into bedrock. By the time the thinking part of you shows up, the plate’s already spinning, and the only question that feels available is how do I keep this up, not was this ever mine to hold.

    Is the invisible load the same as burnout?

    No. But the invisible load can be a cause. Burnout is what happens after you carry the burden of things that are yours too long without relief.

    And the numbers say it isn’t imagined. Women leaders are about twice as likely as men to be “always on,” and for every 100 men promoted into leadership, only 87 women are (McKinsey & Lean In, 2023). The load gets normalized into the background, which is exactly why nobody names it and it keeps growing.

    Why don’t time management and self-care fix it?

    Because both quietly accept that the woman is the thing to fix. That’s the same move that made the load invisible in the first place.

    Better boundaries. More confidence. A tighter calendar. A weekend away. All of it points the repair back at the person already doing the most. And the math doesn’t close: a load that grows every time you handle it can’t be out-handled. More effort just raises the ceiling on what gets expected next.

    There’s a particularly costly version of this, the sprint. The promise that pushing through this one crunch, this one quarter, will buy the rest on the far side. But moving crisis to crisis without real recovery doesn’t build resilience. It compounds the stress and teaches the body to treat chronic pressure as normal (American Psychological Association, 2023). Sprinting feels productive. It’s depletion with good posture.

    What actually helps: ask whose plate it is

    Here’s the difference between you and me and the expert plate spinner. That plate spinner chose every plate. He set them up, he knows how many are in the air, he’s watching them. Nobody walks onstage and lobs him a surprise plate on a random Tuesday with a guilt trip attached.

    Our setup is different. Some of our plates we picked on purpose. The rest got thrown to us, and we caught them because a should told us they were ours. You don’t crash from spinning. You crash from spinning plates that belong to someone else. So the work isn’t spinning better. It’s sorting the plates.

    1.Make the load visible. Ten minutes, the list that isn’t on any calendar: the remembering, the anticipating, the “I’ll just deal with it.” Notice what you hesitate to write down. The hesitation is information.

    2. Ask whose plate it is. One question, every line: Would I expect this of someone else? Where the answer is no, you’ve found a should that was never yours. The question does real work, because it moves the load out of “my character” and into “my choices” (Tulshyan & Burey, 2021).

    3. Set down what isn’t yours. Not thrown back, not shattered for drama. Just set down, so the pole gets a little lighter.

    4. Choose what you carry. Nobody carries all of it. The ones who look like they are, are dropping things in private, or paying for it in sleep, or coming apart where the room can’t see. “Doing it all” isn’t a high bar that strong people clear. It’s not a real thing. It’s a setup. So pick what gets the real you, and let the rest be good enough on purpose. That isn’t lowering the bar. It’s stopping everything that lands in front of you from setting it.

      Frequently asked questions

      What is the invisible load? The unseen mental and emotional work of running a household, a team, or a life: tracking, planning, anticipating, holding it together. It produces no visible output, so it’s easily dismissed as “not real work,” which is exactly why it stays invisible and falls disproportionately on women.

      Why do I feel like I have to do everything myself? Because the response is trained to fire before you can question it. Years of being rewarded for being helpful and never difficult turn “I’ve got it” into a reflex that runs before the deliberate part of your mind has weighed in on whether the task was ever yours.

      Why does breaking a “should” feel so terrible? Because a should is an installed memory, re-rendered so many times it sounds like your own voice instead of an outside instruction. Breaking it registers as betraying yourself, not breaking a rule, which is why the guilt is so out of proportion to the actual stakes.

      The bottom line

      The invisible load is real, it’s structural, and is often built by systems that benefit when capable women stay too busy to question what’s happening. Things are bound to crash, and that isn’t about character or capability or competence. It’s about capacity.

      So look at the pole. Go plate by plate and ask whose plat is this? Keep the ones that are yours, with both hands, because you want them. The rest, the ones you caught out of an old reflex, off a memory you re-rendered into fact, you can hand those back.

      References

      American Psychological Association. (2023). Stress in America 2023: Strained, drained, and uncertain.

      Catalyst. (2023). The double-bind dilemma for women in leadership. Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

      Hochschild, A. R., & Machung, A. (1989). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home. Viking.

      Holder, A. M. B., Jackson, M. A., & Purdie-Vaughns, V. (2023). The impact of intersectionality on women of color in leadership. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 44(3), 517–533.

      McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org. (2023). Women in the workplace 2023.

      Pew Research Center. (2023). Gender disparities in household labor and career advancement.

      Robertson, K., Dumas, T. L., & Boswell, W. R. (2023). Gendered mental labor: A systematic literature review. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 15(1), 123–145.

      Tulshyan, R., & Burey, J.-A. (2021). Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. Harvard Business Review.

      Next Step

      You can sign-up for a real-talk resets – my candid thoughts, sent directly to you whenever I have something worth sharing. Sign-up here 

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    1. How to Find Work-Life Balance for Women Leaders 40+

      If you’ve built a successful career – but feel like it’s running you instead of fueling you this post is for you.

      I’m going to walk you through how to reclaim work-life balance without quitting, starting over, or sacrificing everything you’ve built.

      This is the same approach I use with experienced women leaders over 40 who want more breathing room, more clarity, and a way of working that actually fits their life now not just the version they built 10 years ago.

      Ready to trade survival mode for something more sustainable? Let’s go.

      Key Takeaways:

      1. Work-life balance doesn’t require a dramatic exit – just smarter, more aligned decisions.
      2. Most women don’t need reinvention. They need realignment.
      3. Micro-moves (not massive overhauls) can restore your time, energy, and clarity.

      Why “Balance” Isn’t Working Anymore

      You’ve followed the rules. Built the career. Earned the respect. But somewhere between meetings, milestones, and managing it all – you lost the feeling that your work works for you.

      That’s because the idea of balance keeps everything looking functional, even when you’re running on empty.

      Work-life balance tells you to juggle. Work-life alignment asks you to recalibrate.

      The difference? Balance is a time equation. Alignment is a values decision.

      And when you’re over 40, the calculus changes. The cost of continuing without clarity gets steeper.

      Work-life balance implies a scheduling problem. But for most high-performing women, the issue isn’t time it’s alignment.

      You’re not just managing tasks. You’re carrying unspoken roles, expectations, and the emotional weight of being the one who always holds it together.

      Maybe you’ve internalized beliefs like:

      + “Saying no makes me unreliable.”

      + “My title determines my worth.”

      + “If I step back, everything will fall apart.”

      That’s not strategy. That’s survival. And it’s costing you.

      What Work-Life Alignment Actually Looks Like

      The reality is that “balance” is a myth – it’s a fancy word for juggle.

      Work-life balance asks: How do I juggle everything without dropping the ball?

      Work-life alignment asks: Am I carrying the right things – and do they reflect who I am and what matters to me?

      Work-life alignment means your calendar reflects your priorities – not just your obligations.

      It means saying yes to work that energizes you, and no to things that don’t – even if you’re good at them.

      It means showing up without constantly performing, proving, or pleasing.

      Alignment isn’t about necessarily working less. It’s about working in a way that’s honest, strategic, and sustainable.

      And the best part? You don’t have to do radical things to get there.

      Realignment, Not Reinvention: Lisa’s Story

      Lisa had spent 20 years in healthcare leadership. She was respected, capable, and utterly exhausted.

      She didn’t want to walk away from the career she’d built. But she just couldn’t keep going like this.

      Working with me and using The Career-Life Realignment Reset, Lisa got clear on what mattered to her, reconnected to what mattered most to her, not what looked good on paper and identified the one strategic shift she needed to make. She reclaimed 40% of her work week and gained visibility across the organization.

      No title change. No personal reinvention. Just alignment.

      What Helped? A Career-Life Alignment Audit

      Most high-performing women don’t need a reinvention. They need a realignment.

      When things start to feel off – when the role no longer fits but you can’t name why – it’s not always a sign to quit. It’s a signal to pause and audit what’s working, what’s draining you, and where you’re out of sync with your values.

      Here’s how to start:‍

      STEP 1. Spot the Pattern

      Stop asking, “Why can’t I do it all?” and Start asking, “Whose rules am I still following?” If you’re still playing by inherited rules about what success or leadership should look like, it’s time to disrupt the default. You don’t need more effort. You need more intention.

      STEP 2: Audit Your Alignment

      Use these three lenses to assess your current role:

      + Cancel or renegotiate one meeting that no longer serves you

      + Say out loud what you’re excellent at – without softening or minimizing

      + Choose one obligation you’re done tolerating, and act on it

      “When women shift from performance to values alignment, they see more satisfaction and less burnout.”
      — Forbes Women, 2022Don’t stop at the audit. Clarity only matters if you act on it.
      That leads us to Step 3.

      STEP 3. Shift the Levers

      ‍Once you know what’s misaligned, start making micro-moves with macro impact. You don’t need a dramatic pivot. Small shifts often change everything:

      + Energy: What lights you up? What drains you – even if you’re good at it?

      + Impact: Where are you truly having an impact? And where are you just filling gaps?

      + Values: Does how you spend your time align with what matters to you now?

      This isn’t about burning everything you’ve worked so hard to build to the ground. It’s about taking your power back – one lever at a time.

      So…Now What? Make it Practical.

      Big shifts start with small check-ins. You don’t need a spreadsheet. You need a moment of honest reflection.

      Try this Weekly Alignment Check-In

      Ask yourself these three questions – candidly :

      + Am I putting up with things because it looks impressive?

      + Would I change if I stopped trying not to disappoint anyone?

      + Is there a decision I could make this week that would give me breathing room?

      If your gut just whispered “yes” to any of these…you’re ready to realign.

      References

      American Psychological Association. (2023). Stress in America™: The State of Mental Health in the Workplace.

    2. How to Stop Saying “Yes” on Autopilot

      Let me paint a picture.

      You’ve had three back-to-back meetings, your inbox is a mess, your team just Slacked you “quick Q?” and now someone’s asking if you can just take a look at that deck before EOD.

      And without even thinking, you say:

      “Sure, I’ve got it.”

      No Sheila – you don’t “got it.”

      But your mouth said yes before your brain had time to consult your actual calendar or your real energy.

      Welcome to the amygdala hijack.

      It’s not a mindset issue. It’s not a lack of boundaries.

      It’s biology – and your brain is doing exactly what it’s been wired to do when stress shows up like an overbooked meeting request.

      Here’s what’s happening

      When you’re under pressure – decision fatigue high, energy low, calendar packed – your amygdala kicks in. This is your brain’s fear center. Its job is to keep you safe, not strategic.

      It senses threat (a disappointed client, a critical boss, or even the awkwardness of saying no) and immediately pulls you into survival mode. Fight, flight, freeze – or in the case of women leaders? Fawn.

      Fawning is that reflexive yes. The over-accommodating. The default “I’ll just do it.”
      It’s protection disguised as professionalism.

      Here’s the problem: when the amygdala takes over, the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for logic, decision-making, and strategy, gets pushed to the back seat (Arnsten, 2021). You can’t think clearly because your brain is too busy protecting you from perceived social threat.

      Sound familiar?

      + To all you experienced leaders: It’s why your calendar is full of work that doesn’t actually move your title or salary.

      + To rising stars: It’s why you overprepare and still get overlooked.

      + To the business owners and entrepreneurs: It’s why you’re spinning in five directions but not gaining real traction.

      The science behind the spinout

      This isn’t about “just saying no” or “having better boundaries.” That advice skips over the biology.

      According to Arnsten (2021), chronic stress triggers a chemical cascade that weakens activity in the prefrontal cortex—making it harder to access executive function in the exact moments you need it. In other words, the more overwhelmed you feel, the harder it is to think straight, speak up, or strategically respond.

      That’s not a personality flaw.
      That’s neuroscience.

      And if your work relies on positioning, persuasion, and power? You need your prefrontal cortex online.

      The Pattern Interrupts That Get Your Brain Back

      If your brain’s been hijacked, you can’t mindset your way out.
      You need a pattern interrupt—a physical or sensory cue that tells your nervous system “Hey, we’re not under attack. You can stand down now.”

      Here are three quick resets I use and recommend:

      5-4-3-2-1 Grounding

      This one’s popular because it works. Scan your environment and say out loud

      + 5 things you see

      + 4 things you feel

      + 3 things you hear

      + 2 things you smell

      + 1 thing you taste

      It forces your brain to shift from reactive to present. Use it before you respond to that “quick favor” email.

      Cold Water on the Wrists

      Run cold water over your wrists or splash your face.
      It activates the parasympathetic nervous system and literally chills your fight-or-flight response.
      Try it between meetings, or before that high-stakes conversation.

      Stand Up. Change Rooms. Change State.

      Move your body. Change your visual input. Step away from the desk, even for 60 seconds.
      The movement plus visual disruption helps reset your amygdala’s sense of danger.

      These aren’t hacks. They’re interrupts. Micro-movements that shift your brain back into power mode.

      Before You Say Yes Again…

      Ask: “Is this a real yes, or an “amygdala yes”?

      Because clarity, confidence, and positioning all live in the prefrontal cortex.
      And if you’re leading, building, or leveling up? You can’t afford to keep giving power to a hijacked brain.

      Reference

      Arnsten, A. F. T. (2021). Stress weakens prefrontal networks: Molecular insults to higher cognition. Nature Neuroscience, 24(4), 408–417. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00860-4E: helping clients strengthen confidence, sharpen clarity, and create meaningful momentum in ways that are practical, honest, and sustainable.

      Your next step

      To learn more about how we could partner together check out our services or book a free chemistry call today.