By Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group
Originally explored on Wake Up Women Leaders — Episode 26
You sat in your corporate job imagining the other side of the fence. Rolling hills, sunshiny days, doing what you love and never working a day in your life again. And now you’re putting in more hours than you ever did behind that desk, dealing with leadership overwhelm and wondering if you should throw in the towel.
In Episode 26 of Wake Up Women Leaders, Victoria Whitfield and I talked through what nobody tells you before you step into leadership or entrepreneurship, and what to actually do about leadership overwhelm once you’re in it.
Building on our conversation from Episode 25, where we talked about keeping your focus forward instead of stuck in the past. This week gets at what happens when the present moment itself feels like more than you bargained for.
The Belief That Gets Everyone
“There’s a lot of misconception about what it is to be an entrepreneur, to be in that leadership role before you step into it,” I said. “You often only see that pretty neat, tidy façade. You do not see the reality of the messiness that comes with the role.”
Victoria named the belief underneath it directly. People assume that loving their work is enough to make other people love it too, and pay for it. “The more I’m passionate about something, the more other people are gonna care, and they’re gonna want to buy it and give me money,” she said, describing the thinking many step into leadership with.
That belief doesn’t hold up in the marketplace. And that’s one of the first things nobody told you – and it’s often where leadership overwhelm begins.
It’s an Infinite Game, Not a Finite One
Victoria drew a distinction that reframes a lot of the frustration. “We’re playing a finite game, we’re looking to win. When we’re playing an infinite game, one that lasts the longest, the point is not necessarily to always be winning, but instead it’s to have the energy and the nourishment to continue to endure and stay in the game.”
I connected this to something I’d been rereading, Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. Zappos brought in millions of dollars and still wasn’t profitable for the first three and a half years. Hundreds of employees, a leader in its category, and still years from profitability. “That’s really normal,” I said. “Five years in is a normal level of profitability.”
In fact, when I shared that timeline with a client recently dealing with leadership overwhelm, her face fell. She thought it meant no hope in sight. But that’s not the point. “You need to focus on the progress that you’re making towards your goal instead of focusing on the gap of having not reached your goal,” I said. “While you’re focusing on what you haven’t completed, you’re missing all of the things that you have learned, achieved, the relationships you’ve created, the growth that you’ve had.”
What Nobody Told Us
We went through our own list of things nobody warned us about. Victoria’s: “No one told me how lonely being in business for yourself would be. The hours that are not paid. The research, the development, the planning, the organizing, the categorizing and filing.”
Mine: that hanging out a shingle doesn’t mean sales flow in. “There’s times that I have had to let go of the thing that I loved in my business because my clients didn’t,” I said. “My business is not a hobby. My business is a business. It’s to make money.”
Victoria connected this to the gap between what you love and what the market wants. “The difference between what you’re excited about and what your buyer’s excited about is non-existent at first,” she said. “Being able to separate your own love and enthusiasm from the reality of economic demand in the marketplace, based off of real marketplace data, marketing research.”
Still, neither of us frames this as a warning to turn back. Instead, “Thank God it wasn’t easy,” I said. “Those difficulties brought us to where we are.”
Respect Overwhelm as a Skill Gap
Victoria offered the first piece of the actual solution. “Respecting the overwhelm as simply a sign of skill gap,” she said. “Don’t get repressive. Don’t shame yourself and don’t should on yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you. Instead, respect the feeling of overwhelm as a skill gap.”
Her point isn’t about humility in the soft sense. “You can have your shoulders back, chest out, strong, and as big and juicy an ego that you want, and be teachable,” she said. “Never stop being teachable.”
Balance Is Not Equality
I offered the second piece, and it starts by throwing out the word equality. “When you hear the word balance, I want you to extract out of your mind any thought of equality,” I said. “Think of a whole system.”
Leadership overwhelm can also show up when one area of your life begins consuming all the resources. To illustrate, my metaphor here comes from my garden. “If I notice one plant is taking up all the resources, then I’m going to cut it back a little bit. I’m going to do some things to encourage the other areas of my garden to grow, to bring that balance back in.”
Similarly, if your leadership role has taken over the ecosystem, the fix isn’t guilt, it’s actively making room again for wellness and relationships: sleep, movement, nutrition, time with people you care about, interests that have nothing to do with your business. This is how you stop treating leadership overwhelm like a problem to solve and start treating it like a system to rebalance.
Regardless, the same prescription applies whether you’re out of balance or stuck in fight-or-flight. “We want to be grounded and we want to take care of our well-being, and we want to bring those relationships back in and give them a little bit more space,” I said. Naming small wins matters here too. “Today I learned how to resolve a dispute. Today was the first day that I asked for double my rate in a proposal. All of these things are new skills that you can give yourself a gold star for, and that helps to calm that responsive nervous system down.”
Community Is Not Optional
Victoria closed this part of the conversation on isolation. “It is not good for man to be alone,” she said. “Creator made us as women communal, tribal beings. When we’re in leadership and ownership roles, it tends to carry the connotation of isolation. Oh, I’m a strong independent, yada yada. You want to know what’s stronger than a strong independent? A whole village.”
For this reason, community has played an important role in both of our journeys. She and I met through a professional group coaching program, which is part of why we’ve each gone on to build community around our own work. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” she said.
Three Things to Do This Week
- Name one new skill you’ve picked up in the last month, even a small one, and give yourself credit for it instead of measuring the distance to your bigger goal.
- Look at where your business has taken up too much of your personal ecosystem. Pick one area, sleep, a relationship, an unrelated interest, and give it back ten percent of your time this week.
- Find one person or community you can be honest with about what’s actually hard right now, rather than solving it alone in your head.
What’s Coming Next
Next week’s episode is about budgeting your energy, not just your time or money. Victoria will be bringing in the medicine wheel as part of that conversation. Join us Wednesday at 3:30pm ET on LinkedIn Live and YouTube.
If this speaks to you and you’d like to share your story with us, comment CONNECT below and we’ll follow up with a three-way message on LinkedIn.
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