ME01a: Stretched to Breaking Point - Is It Me?
When leadership stops making sense, and nothing in the playbook helps.
Maya had just launched a regional initiative. Applause. Smiles. Fist bumps in the hallway.
By 8 p.m., she was alone.
Exhausted.
Staring at a spreadsheet that wouldn’t load.
Her inbox a quiet scream.
Her boss forwarding a global email demanding answers.
“Why haven’t the metrics improved?”
She wasn’t failing. She was unraveling. And she had no language for it.
She’d done everything right.
Read the books. Took the courses. Led with integrity.
She’d been promoted consistently. Praised often.
She believed in leadership as a practice, a responsibility, even a calling.
But suddenly the role had changed shape.
Be strategic :: but urgently tactical.
Drive transformation :: but follow process.
Empower the team :: but control the outcome.
Be authentic :: but don’t show fatigue.
It wasn’t just pressure. It was paradox. And no framework she knew had room for that.
This wasn’t a failure of competence.
It was the arrival of complexity.
What Maya was experiencing wasn’t burnout in the wellness sense. It was something deeper, existential, disorienting.
The playbook hadn’t prepared her for this. Not the Sinek slides. Not the “growth mindset” posters. Not the coaching scripts, the 360s, the corporate resilience rituals. And certainly not the branded water bottle that read:
Recharge. Refocus. Reignite.
Instead of support, she received symbolism. Instead of coherence, contradiction. Instead of care, performance.
At first, she blamed herself.
Maybe she wasn’t positive enough. Maybe she wasn’t strategic enough. Maybe, after years of succeeding, she was finally the problem.
That’s the trap.
When systems fail to hold complexity, they push the weight down onto the individual. And when the contradictions become unmanageable, many leaders—like Maya—turn inward, asking:
“Is it me?”
“Am I broken?”
“Have I hit my limit?”
But here’s the quieter truth. You’re not broken. You’ve just reached the edge of what the system, and the story of leadership you were sold, can hold.
This feeling is not an anomaly. It’s a pattern.
In the past week alone, I’ve posted about:
Contradiction fatigue: how opposing demands erode clarity
The misapplication of wellness: when care becomes compliance
And the creeping suspicion that the whole leadership industry might be bullshitting us just enough to keep the machine running
The response? Overwhelming. Public comments. Private DMs. Quiet affirmations. Not just agreement—but relief.
“I’ve felt this for years but didn’t know how to say it. I thought it was just me.”
It’s not just you.
It’s the system.
According to DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast:
• 60% of leaders report burnout
• Over half of successors don’t want senior roles
This isn’t a resilience gap.
It’s a structural failure to evolve leadership alongside complexity.
When frameworks stay simple but conditions grow complex, the human cost multiplies quietly, then suddenly.
So what now?
This is where Leadership, Rewritten begins. With the ones asking better questions:
What if the frameworks are too small for the terrain?
What if my sense of failure is actually a sign of deeper awareness?
What if what I’m experiencing is not a personal collapse, but a threshold?
In Praxis Q – a collection of practices, diagnostics and rituals to support somebody like Maya - we map five of these threshold states. Maya, and many like her, are sitting in one we call The Stretch, where demands outpace internal and systemic capacity, and the only options seem to be self-erasure or overdrive.
But thresholds aren’t the end. They’re openings, if we can name them, hold them, and design from them.
Reader’s Path: When the Frame Starts to Crack
You’ve read Maya’s moment. But maybe you’ve felt it too; the quiet recoil, the mask slipping, the sense that something is fundamentally off.
This isn’t a call to act. It’s a call to notice.
1️⃣ Pause
Ask yourself (honestly, not performatively):
What parts of my leadership posture are no longer mine?
Where have I stopped believing but kept complying?
No judgment. Just inventory.
2️⃣ Reflect
Try writing one line:
“The story I’ve been performing about leadership is…”
Then another:
“The story I no longer believe is…”
It doesn’t need to be shared. But it might need to be said.
3️⃣ Explore
Want to see the data behind Maya’s moment?
Click here for the Essay One Reference Guide
Includes burnout, pipeline collapse, and the thinkers who’ve warned us about bullshit leadership cultures for decades.
4️⃣ Look Ahead
Next:
“Or Is It the System?”
We’ll explore what happens when leadership roles become impossible to hold with integrity, and where we still might begin again.
Subscribe to get it first.
Read the next Maya Essay: Or Is It The System?
Well Richard Talking Heads have released the official video for Psycho Killer 50 years after the song was first played. The video does to me relate to Maya's state!
There is a circular reference in the PDF to the same guide. "Click here for the Essay One Reference Guide"