It is that time of year in Australia, and if you are anything like the leaders I know and work with, you are probably running on something that stopped being energy a while ago and is now just momentum.
Nothing is technically wrong. Just like the volume on something important has been slowly turned down, and you cannot remember when it happened or who turned the dial.
Here is what I think might be going on.
You have not been seen in a while. Really seen. Not your results, not your delivery, not your ability to hold the room. You. The weight of what you carry, the daily decisions and the invisible work that is not always recognised.
And before you tell me you are too senior for that to matter, I know. I have told myself the same thing. That needing acknowledgement is perhaps for leaders earlier in their careers. And then one day you realise you have stopped noticing. Not burned out, not checked out, just quietly desensitised to something that used to matter. You cannot give what you have forgotten you need. And the dehumanisation process starts.
So where do you go? Not upward from the sound of it. The board is busy, and the Chair has their own pressures or your leader is snowed under themselves (not excusing it, just a reality for many leaders). So, my suggestion is that you look sideways. Perhaps to a peer who has been in the same kind of room and sees you. Or a mentor who remembers your wins when you have forgotten them or someone who holds the mirror steadily enough that you can bear to look.
Not as a consolation prize, but as the thing that keeps you grounded in the feelings of being acknowledged and appreciated. To not lose what that feels like. Why?
Because leaders set the weather for their teams. Not the strategy, not the ra-ra meetings and definitely not the values on the wall. The weather: the thing people feel when they walk in on a daily basis. Whether it is safe to speak, to risk, to bring the full version of themselves. A leader running quietly on empty sets a particular kind of weather without meaning to. The recognition they are not receiving is often the recognition their team is not receiving either.
It runs like a rain chain, all the way down. And the only way to interrupt it is to make sure you are being seen somewhere, by someone, in some space that is yours.
This moment is not permanent. Exhaustion has edges, and this particular kind of flatness, the unseen kind, responds faster than you might expect once you stop trying to manage it alone. But finding those edges is almost impossible to do in the dark when you have quietly convinced yourself that needing something does not really apply to you anymore.
It does. It always has. And naming that, even just to yourself, is usually where it starts to shift.
If something in this landed, I would love to hear it. Not to fix it, but to create space.
As always, if you invest in yourself, the rewards will be unfathomable.
Until next time.
