I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.
Most leadership environments are busy. Properly busy.
The kind of busy where calendars fill weeks in advance, priorities change overnight, every conversation gets cut short and there’s always one more thing waiting.
You hear versions of the same thing everywhere.
“It’s just a busy time right now.”
“Once this project finishes.”
“After this quarter.”
“When things calm down a bit…”
And to be fair there are peaks and troughs in any role. But I think a lot of people still think this is just a phase.
That at some point, work will settle down and they’ll get a bit more of their life back.
More thinking space.
More presence.
More balance.
More time with family.
More time for health.
More space to think. To breathe a bit
The problem with this is, for many leaders, this doesn’t happen once or twice.
It turns into the operating model.
Temporary survival mode becomes permanent. And the pattern repeats itself.
Push through.
Delay life…just for a bit.
Promise yourself next month things will feel different.
Repeat.
And after a while, you notice something else.
No huge crash-and-burn moment.
Just this…
Conversations become more transactional.
You stop laughing as much.
You rush even when sitting still.
Your thinking narrows.
Your personality shrinks a little.
You’re physically present, but psychologically elsewhere.
I’ve seen leaders so consumed by urgency that they start rushing through their own lives.
But you know what’s interesting? Not everyone responds to pressure in the same way.
Over the years, I’ve worked with a handful of leaders who operated differently in equally demanding environments.
They stood out to me.
Still ambitious.
Still committed.
Still carrying huge responsibility.
But not mentally hurried.
That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
If anything, they’re more focused than everyone else.
While some people rushed, felt full and lost themselves a bit…
they stayed deliberate, grounded and present.
I remember a former CEO once saying to me:
“People always tell me how stressed and busy they are. But I just have five things to do, and I work through them one by one.”
Then he laughed and added:
“But I am the CEO, so I do get to set the priorities.”
And maybe that’s partly true.
But I also think some people learn how to operate outside the whirlwind instead of getting swept up in it.
They still have hard weeks and full calendars.
But they don’t seem to lose themselves in the same way.
The truth is leadership roles are demanding.
They do spill into life outside work.
You do think about them over the weekend.
You do care deeply.
Sometimes the work is meaningful and stretching and hard to switch off from.
I don’t think loving your work is the problem.
But I do think disappearing is.
Especially when the life you care about keeps getting postponed until “things calm down.”
Because for many people, that version of work never arrives the way they think it will.
Pressure probably isn’t disappearing any time soon. Maybe the question is how we stop losing ourselves in the middle of it.