I don’t think we talk enough about the cost of working and living within fast-paced, extractive, mind-focused systems that reward authority, overworking, and winning while constantly asking us to disconnect from ourselves and our humanity.
As someone who works closely with women with big hearts and big visions who support and lead others, I witness every day how women adapt and compromise to try and fit into systems that were never built for us.
It is so easy to forget ourselves and run on autopilot because there is rarely space to slow down and reimagine what is not working or sustainable.
So we end up prioritizing:
– being functional over being well
– keeping up over listening to our needs and boundaries
– doing what is expected of us over bringing our unique gifts and insights
– meeting the demands of the current systems over contributing and cocreating from a place of care, compassion, big vision, inspired action, and deep integrity
Not because we don’t want to stay close to our own humanity.
Not because we don’t want to honour our natural gifts.
Not because we don’t care.
But because the systems around us are massive, established, and loud.
Pushing against them, stepping outside of them, or trying to change them comes with a cost.
Trying to do things in a different way can cost us friendships, collaborators, clients, income, security. The systems are created to uphold themselves and to punish anyone who tries to step out of line.
Here is the thing: Those oppressive systems, that rigidity, that pressure don’t only exist outside of us. They live in our bodies, in our nervous systems, in our minds, in our hardened hearts. And they impact our behaviour, our actions, our work, our leadership in big ways, in subtle ways, in heartbreaking ways that most of us don’t even notice or track – because there is no space to slow down and question the structures that are supposed to hold us.
So we adapt to the pressure.
We work faster to try and keep up.
We stop listening to our own needs, our body’s pace and boundaries, our natural flow of inspiration.
We meet demands.
We deliver.
While slowly losing ourselves.
Our joy, our spark, our aliveness.
Quietly.
But we keep going.
We push through.
Because we want to contribute and create deep impact and real change.
But somewhere inside, in the quietest part of us, we know.
We know that the adapting and pushing through is unsustainable.
We know that something needs to change.
But slowing down feels like a threat to our nervous system.
Pausing to assess and reimagine feels undoable.
That is what survival mode looks and feels like.
We keep going.
We stop questioning.
We uphold the systems that are running us down.
We are too exhausted to reimagine anything.
We feel too frozen to even try to disrupt what is not working.
We stay quiet.
While we move further and further away from ourselves.
Working in fast-paced, extractive, unsustainable environments and ecosystems can cost us:
– the ability to stay present with ourselves and those we love (overwhelm leaves us numb)
– focus and direction in our leadership work (we become reactive and uninspired and disconnect from our intuition and felt knowing)
– our creativity and inspired action (because we run on autopilot)
– our felt joy and aliveness (creative expression, movement, friendships and social events are not prioritized and get squeezed into a busy schedule between work projects)
– our well-being (we keep going too fast, we overstep our own boundaries, we lose touch with our own needs)
And to be clear, I am not only talking about old school, traditional, super corporate and hierarchical work environments.
That fast-paced unsustainable autopilot pressure to keep up and stay productive without pausing to take a breath lives in all the systems around us and within us. Big and small.
The media.
The algorithms.
The rooms we are in.
Small, ethical businesses.
Non-profit organizations.
Solopreneur spaces full of big dreams.
In our expectations of ourselves and others.
In our best intentions.
In our most vulnerable moments and seasons.
This is why shifting our relationship with work and leadership is foundational.
It can feel vulnerable.
Coming back to ourselves, reconnecting with the wisdom and knowing that lives in our nervous system can feel unfamiliar.
Like we are in new territory.
But it matters deeply.
In big and small ways.
And it impacts the way we show up in the world.
What we bring. What we disrupt. What we cocreate. What we reimagine.
Let’s cultivate that shift, together.
It is time *
If you are a woman in a leadership or change-making role longing for your work and leadership to look and feel different – slower, softer, more human, more inspired, more alive – you might resonate with my Embodied Leadership approach that centers leadership that is deeply human, relational, attuned, impactful, and sustainable.
I have a few online events and roundtables for women founders, leaders, and changemakers coming up this autumn and an Embodied Leadership Circle for women leaders in a season of change starting in November. They are not on my website yet, but if you sign up to my *slow* Embodied Leadership email list, I will send you updates about upcoming events and offerings where we explore leadership that is anchored in the wisdom of the body and centers care, aliveness, sustainability, and deep impact.