07/30/2026
If you're leading anything right now — a program, a team, an entire organization — there's a decent chance you're carrying more than you're letting on.
That's not a diagnosis. It's just the job. And most leadership content stops at "acknowledge your feelings," which is true, helpful, and also somehow never quite enough. Naming the overwhelm doesn't make the caseload smaller or the budget stretch further. So then what?
I got to sit with two leaders in Alaska recently who've clearly wrestled with this same question, and the pattern in what they said wasn't "push through it" or "just think positive." It was something closer to: change what you're framing the problem as, and change what you're feeding your own brain while you do it.
One of them put it simply — happiness isn't found once you've cleared the to-do list. It's found somewhere in the actual climb, mess and all. Which is either deeply wise or extremely annoying, depending on the day you're having 😳. (Ask me how I feel about it on a Monday versus a Friday.)
The other leader talked about something more practical: she went looking for a mentor, and later helped build a peer cohort of other executives wrestling with the exact same stuff. Her reasoning was almost embarrassingly simple — most leaders assume everyone else has it figured out, and they don't, and just hearing "oh, you too?" from another exec does something a strategic plan never will.
So if you're in the thick of it right now, here's the reframe worth trying: overwhelm usually isn't a sign you're failing. It's often just a sign you're the only one holding a problem that was never meant to be held alone. The move isn't to grit your teeth harder — it's to go find the person, the peer group, or the fresh perspective that helps you see the actual system underneath the chaos, instead of just the chaos itself.
You don't need to have that all figured out today. You just need one new input this week — one conversation, one different room, one person outside your four walls who might see something you can't.
