Self-Care Sounds Optional.
Leaders need a different strategy.
When I think back to my last corporate role, the logistics alone still raise my stress level.
Full-time work. The 1+ hour commute each way, several days a week. Middle school kids with sports practices, games, homework, meals, and all the invisible work that comes with family life.
And somehow, in the middle of it, I was training for half-marathons.
It all got done.
The work moved forward. The kids got where they needed to go. The house kept functioning. The miles got logged.
But the reality was that I was exhausted.
As an achiever, I knew how to push through. Make the best decision you can. Keep going. Hope you are making the right calls. That was the model many of us were taught.
Yesterday, I read a LinkedIn post from a colleague reflecting on the weight of carrying two full-time roles at once: new mom and business owner. She wrote that self-care had gone by the wayside, even though she knew it mattered.
I remembered that feeling immediately.
Wondering how everyone else was making it work.
Quietly assuming the problem must be my capacity, discipline, or time management. If I tried harder, it would eventually get better.
I no longer think “pushing through” is a leadership strategy.
It may get us through a hard week. It may be necessary in a true crisis. But as a long-term approach to leadership, it is costly.
It costs us our patience.
It costs us our judgment.
It costs us our ability to see clearly.
That is why I think it is time to retire the phrase self-care.
Not because taking care of ourselves is unimportant, but because the phrase makes it sound optional. Something nice to fit in after the real responsibilities are handled.
Caring for the energy, clarity, and steadiness required to lead is not optional.
When we treat it like something extra, we eventually make important decisions from a place we would never recommend to someone else: depleted, reactive, overextended, and hoping we can hold it together long enough to get through the day.
This is why I talk about leadership endurance instead.
Endurance assumes there is a goal. It assumes the work will be hard. It assumes we need pacing, support, recovery, and a plan we can keep following when the pressure increases.
For leaders, this matters because our decisions carry consequences. Our boards, teams, clients, communities, and families are relying on us to make decisions from a place of calm, clarity, and confidence.
Those are the 3 Cs I come back to often.
Calm, so we are not making decisions based on emotion or urgency alone.
Clarity, so we are solving the right problem, not just the loudest one.
Confidence, so we can follow through on the decision and own the implications.
When we are running on empty, one of those is usually missing.
Sometimes everything feels urgent. Sometimes we solve the symptom instead of the root issue. Sometimes we second-guess decisions.
Most leaders I know are not struggling because they forgot that sleep, movement, quiet, nutrition, boundaries, and support matter.
They are struggling because those things have been treated as separate from the leadership system rather than as part of it.
A leader running on fumes may still get the work done. Many of us have proof that we can.
But getting it done is not the same as leading well.
We can stop pretending exhaustion is proof of commitment. And we can stop calling the maintenance of our leadership capacity “self-care,” as if it belongs somewhere on the margins.
Energy is not a bonus ingredient for leadership. It is one of the core inputs.
The most important decisions require calm, clarity, and confidence, and those don’t come from an empty battery.
That is the real work of leadership endurance: building the conditions that let us make clear decisions when the pressure keeps coming.
Look at the most important decision you’re carrying right now. What needs your attention first: calm, clarity, or confidence?
Thoughts for Reflection
"The more exacting the challenge, the more rigorous our rituals need to be." - Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement
"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it." - Attributed to Lou Holtz
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The language matters more than people realise. Anything called "care" or "wellness" is the first thing cut when the calendar tightens. Endurance reframes it as structural. Sometimes the depletion is a signal the route needs redrawing, not the pacing.