You're Not Tired Because You're Working Too Hard
Most of the leaders I coach are somewhere between 45 and 60, and they've spent twenty-five years getting very good at pushing through. Everyone around them calls it dedication. It's the skill that built their careers, and it's why people still call them when something breaks.
What they notice now, if they let themselves, is that the pushing costs more than it used to. They're more tired at the end of a normal week, shorter with the people at home, and the work that used to feel like a good fight has started to feel like something they're surviving, even though the title, the team, and the results all look the way they're supposed to. Two clients showed me what that looks like up close.
A client I'll call Rob is a senior investment executive who has been at the same firm since his twenties. He came into a session after a week of market volatility, and every client wanted to know what it meant for them. He'd been on calls since he woke up, nodding through one conversation while thinking about the next, and by Thursday he was answering questions he'd already answered three times that day and doing his best to sound like he hadn't. If you've been the senior person during a bad stretch, you know that week. What struck me, though, wasn't what he said about his schedule but what he said about his body. His chest was tight, and his throat felt constricted, and he mentioned it in passing, the way you talk about traffic. His superiors saw someone who had it together, and he was working hard to make sure that's what they saw.
Another client I'll call Andrea, the CMO of a firm everyone knows, showed me a different version of the same pattern. Hers didn't come from a bad week but from the ordinary ones, when a campaign went out and the response was fine but nobody said anything, or when she presented to the CEO and the board and the conversation moved on to the next agenda item. In those moments, her chest and gut tightened, her breathing went shallow, her jaw clenched, and she leaned forward even when she was sitting still. She called it feeling wound tightly, and her way of handling it was to never pause long enough to feel it. She just opened the next thing. Most of us have a version of that, the reflex to reach for the next task the moment there's a gap, because the gap is where the feeling would show up.
Who the pushing is for
If you'd asked either of them why they push so hard, they would have given you a good answer. Rob would have said the clients needed him, the firm was counting on him, and after thirty years you don't get to have a bad week in public. Andrea would have said she's ambitious and cares about doing excellent work. Both of those things are true, and both of them believed they were describing their own values.
But when I asked Rob which parts of that week he actually wanted to be doing, which parts he would have done even if nobody required it of him, he had to think about it. Twenty years ago, a volatile week was the part of the job he loved. He'd be in the market all day, working out what was happening and what to do about it, and he'd come home tired and satisfied. This week he barely touched any of that. His days went to reassuring clients, updating the people above him, and keeping his face steady in meetings. That's the work that comes with his seat, and he'd been doing it for so long he'd stopped noticing that none of it was his. So the week wasn't hard because the markets were volatile, he's handled that his whole career, it was hard because almost every hour went to work he wouldn't have chosen, done to satisfy people whose judgment he's learned to manage.
Andrea's version was similar. What she loves is the creative part of marketing, the early stage where an idea is still rough and she's working out what a campaign could be. As CMO, she almost never touches that anymore. Her days go to budgets, headcount, and presenting to the CEO and the board, and the creative work that got her the job now belongs to the people who report to her. So when I asked her what she actually felt after a campaign went well, she realized the work itself didn't give her much. She was waiting for the CEO, or someone on the board, to say they'd noticed. Her drive ran on approval that had to come from someone else, and when it didn't, her body reacted as if something had gone wrong.
Neither of them is a people-pleaser, and they'd both laugh at the suggestion. What they had in common was that the thing driving them each day was how they'd be judged, not what they themselves wanted, and they'd been at it so long they couldn't tell the difference anymore, even though their bodies still could.
How the wiring got there
This usually goes back further than the job. Somewhere early on, Rob learned that being the one who has it together earns him a place, and Andrea learned that being noticed for excellent work makes her matter. That wiring is exactly what got them where they are, because it kept getting rewarded. And whatever gets rewarded often enough stops being a choice and becomes a reflex, and the reflex becomes the story you tell about who you are. Rob doesn't think of himself as someone who performs calm for his superiors; he thinks of himself as steady, and he is. Andrea doesn't think of herself as someone who needs approval; she thinks of herself as driven, and she is.
The problem is that the wiring was built for a person who no longer fully exists. Rob at 55 doesn't need to prove he belongs at the firm, but the reflex hasn't been told that, so it still runs every time the markets get rough. Andrea has a seat at the table, and part of her still works the way she did when she had to fight for one. Both of them have changed in what they care about and what they'd choose if nobody was watching, but the person deciding how they spend their days is still the earlier version. That's why work they used to love can start to feel like a chore. Every task driven by a motive you've outgrown carries a small drag, and by the end of a week those drags add up to the tiredness Rob was describing and the tightly wound feeling Andrea couldn't put down.
I know this pattern because I lived it. For most of my career I measured myself by what everyone could see: the title, the compensation, how full my calendar was, the performance review, the awards. By those numbers, I was doing well. What I wasn't looking at was what it was taking from me: how I was sleeping, how much patience I had left, whether there was anything left for my kids by the time I got home, and the conversations with my wife I kept putting off. So much of what I did each day was for someone else's approval and very little of it was mine, and the wiring that got me there was still deciding how I spent my days, long after I'd stopped being the person it was built for.
The question worth asking
I've come to believe, and I hold this loosely because I'm still living inside of it, that the body registers the gap between who you've become and what you're still doing long before the mind is willing to admit it. When something that once gave you meaning starts to feel draining, ask: does this still fit the person I'm becoming, or am I still doing it because an earlier version of me decided this is what it takes to matter? That question isn't comfortable, and I don't think it's supposed to be. But if any of this sounds familiar, the more likely explanation is that you're not tired because you're working too hard; you're tired because too much of the work isn't yours.
The work I do with clients like Rob and Andrea sometimes touches their schedules, but that's not the heart of it. Most of it is helping them notice when the work stops being theirs, and using a tight chest or a clenched jaw as a signal to stop and ask why they're doing it. I wish I'd known to ask that earlier. For years I assumed I was tired because I was working too hard, when the real reason was how little of that work I'd actually chosen.
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