The cost of being the strong one

I was thirty-one the first time somebody told me I made it look easy, and I remember thinking: that's the problem. If it looks easy, nobody sends help. If it looks easy, nobody asks. If it looks easy, you get more of it.

There's a version of leadership that gets rewarded specifically because it costs you something in private. You handle it. You absorb it. You smooth it over before it becomes anybody else's problem. And the reward for that is more of it — more responsibility, more trust, more weight, and almost never more rest.

I want to be careful here, because I'm not saying capability is a curse. Being the person who can figure it out has opened doors for me that nothing else would have. But somewhere between capable and indispensable, I stopped being a person with a role and started being a role with a person attached.

The unlearning has been slow. It started with something small: I let a meeting be awkward. I didn't rush in to fill the silence, didn't rescue the moment, didn't smooth the edge. It was ten seconds of discomfort that felt like an hour, and the room survived. So did I.

That's the work this month. Not becoming less capable. Just becoming less automatic about it.

Get the next one on Sunday.