How Do I Lead Others When I'm Barely Holding It Together Myself?

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with leadership. Not the ordinary tiredness of a long day — but the specific weight of being the one everyone is looking to, on a day when you have very little left to give.

If you're reading this from that place, I want you to know: you're not alone in it, and it doesn't mean you're failing.

The Mask Has a Cost

Leading is about knowing yourself well enough to know when you need to stop leading others — and start looking after yourself. That's not a contradiction. It's one of the most important things a leader can understand.

But vulnerability is often frowned upon. And in certain environments, it can be taken advantage of — especially when it arrives without warning, in front of the wrong people. The moments when you are at your lowest ebb are not the moments for a public unravelling. The wolves will smell your blood. And you may find yourself taken advantage of in ways you wouldn't have thought possible.

That isn't cynicism. It's experience. And knowing it is part of protecting yourself.

What it means in practice is this: take a moment to compose yourself. Step away if you can. Find your manager, your deputy, someone you trust — and ask them to share the load. That's not weakness. That's wisdom.

What Your Team Already Knows

Here's the thing about people who work closely with you: they notice. Every nuanced conversation. The distraction. The mildly vacant stare. The fractional pause before you answer. These are all signals that something isn't quite right — and most teams read them long before anything is said out loud.

What happens next depends on who's in the room. Some people will be genuinely worried about you. They care, and they'll be watching, hoping you're alright. Others will simply expect you to get on with it — after all, you're the one being paid to lead. And then there will be those who are quietly circling, watching for an opportunity, ready to step up the moment the space opens.

Knowing that those three camps exist isn't about distrust. It's about being clear-eyed about the environment you're working in, so you can navigate it with intention rather than react to it from a place of depletion.

The Two Mistakes Leaders Make When They're Struggling

When a leader is feeling vulnerable, they tend to go one of two ways — and both of them tend to make things worse.

The first is oversharing. In moments of overwhelm, the filter that usually tells you what's appropriate to say — and to whom — becomes unreliable. Things get said that wouldn't ordinarily be said. Confidences slip. The boundary between leader and colleague blurs in ways that are difficult to recover from.

The second is the opposite: battling on in silence, asking for nothing, telling no one, making matters considerably worse in the process. This is the more common of the two. And it carries its own costs — not just to you, but to the team who can see something is wrong and don't know how to help, or whether they should even try.

Both responses come from the same place: not knowing what the right thing to do actually is. Which is why it's worth thinking about it before you need it.

What Good Actually Looks Like

It starts with understanding what's actually going on. That takes some honest listening — to yourself, to what's underneath the surface. If you're too depleted to hear it clearly, the next best thing is to speak to someone you trust completely: someone who will give you their honest view, without judgement, and without an agenda.

Once you have some clarity on what's actually happening, asking for help becomes much easier. That help might come from a colleague. It might come from someone external to your organisation. If you have a genuinely trusting relationship with your manager, you may want to share something of what's going on — particularly if doing so might unlock some practical support.

It may also be possible, at least temporarily, to shift certain responsibilities to someone else. Not to abdicate them — but to lighten the load for a while. And if someone on your team is quietly hungry for more responsibility, this can be the moment to give them that chance. Everyone benefits when it's done thoughtfully.

But be clear about the line: you can ask for help, and you can delegate. You cannot hand your responsibility to someone else and step away. That distinction matters.

You've Still Got This

Here's what I'd say to the leader sitting alone at their desk right now, wondering whether anyone would even notice if they quietly fell apart — and whether asking for help would make them look weak in front of the people they're supposed to be leading.

You don't have to carry the burden entirely by yourself. If you have a strong team — people who relish challenge, who pull together rather than working in silos — then trusting them with more, at least for a while, is not a failure of leadership. It's an expression of it.

You don't need to verbalise what you're going through. In stepping back and letting your team get on with things, you are still quietly saying: I've got this. You still know what needs to be done. You're still holding the vision, even if you're not holding everything else right now.

That's not a leader falling apart. That's a leader who knows themselves well enough to know when to hold on — and when to let go.

If you're in this place right now and want support working out what's underneath it, Release is where that work begins — and Being You is where it leads.