Your Body Will Say No Before Your Mind Will Admit It

The night before I flew home, I was fine. The next morning I woke up and could barely stand. My right hip flexor and quad had locked up, and it got worse all day, until I was dragging my leg through the airport to get on the plane.

I'd spent four months on a project abroad. For the first time in a long time I had space and a reasonable workload, and over those months I started to thrive. I could see, by contrast, what the grind back home had been costing me. And the morning I was supposed to go back to it, my body staged a protest I couldn't ignore.

How's that for a subtle cue from the body that it isn't on board with the plan.

The airport wasn't the start of it, though.

The first team I ever built, I almost worked myself into the ground protecting. I worked ten- and twelve-hour days, carrying the load so the people under me wouldn't feel the pressure, telling myself it was fine because they were new and I'd hold the weight until they were ready. I coached them and I held them accountable and the work still came back needing fixing, the deadlines still slipped, and I'd absorb the gap and keep coaching. I knew it wasn't sustainable. I'd known for months. Knowing didn't change a thing.

That's the part I most want the woman reading this to catch, because I think a lot of you are living in exactly that gap between knowing and changing.

High-achieving women cope. When coping stops working, we cope harder. And when that doesn't work, we cope some more, because coping is the thing that got rewarded every single time. We get very good at it. Until the morning we can't stand up.

Underneath all my good intentions was a belief, wired in deep, that if I let go it would all fall apart and the failure would have my name on it. A belief like that is a beach ball held under water. You can shove it down and hold it there for a while, and the second your attention slips, it comes right back up. I could decide on Monday to delegate more, to leave at a reasonable hour, to stop absorbing the gap, and the decision would hold right up until the first thing went sideways, and then the wiring underneath took the wheel again.

That's the thing almost nobody explains. Your willpower only runs the show in the moments you're white-knuckling it. The rest of the time the subconscious is driving on autopilot, and that's most of the time. So you can know your pattern cold, name it, read every book on it, and still watch yourself run it at 7am on a Tuesday, because the part of you running it was never listening to the part of you that read the book.

My body knew I was about to go back to those twelve-hour days before my mind would say it out loud. So it put the decision somewhere a to-do list couldn't reach. It locked my hip and made me limp through an airport, because that was the only language left that I'd actually listen to.

I don't run that pattern anymore. Not because I found better discipline, and not because I rested my way out of it. I changed the belief that was holding it up, and the pattern came down with it.

If you read this and felt your own version of that airport somewhere in your body, the question worth sitting with is not how do I push through this better. It's whether the thing you're calling exhaustion is exhaustion at all, or whether it's something underneath the tired that no amount of pushing through is ever going to reach.

I made a short quiz for exactly that, the Golden Handcuffs Quiz. It's free, and it's quiet, and the day after you take it I'll send you a short audio I recorded called "Is It Exhaustion, or Misalignment?" The thing I wish someone had handed me back when I was limping toward that gate. The Golden Handcuffs Quiz is here if you want it.