The day I stopped pretending I was fine.

She had everything. And she was exhausted.

Mary had spent seventeen years earning the title on her door. VP of Operations at a mid-sized manufacturing firm. Two hundred people reported up through her. Her calendar was a Tetris game of back-to-back obligations. She was, by every external measure, successful.

She also hadn't had a good night sleep in months - five hours or less. She snapped at her husband over small things. She sat in parking lots before client meetings, talking herself into walking into the meeting. When a colleague mentioned she looked tired, she said what leaders always say: "I'm fine. Just a lot going on."

She was not fine.

What Mary was experiencing has a name, but she wouldn't have used it then. She was running almost entirely on what energy practitioners call catabolic fuel: urgency, anxiety, obligation. The drive to not fall behind. The fear of looking weak. The creeping suspicion that everything she'd built was one bad quarter away from unraveling.

The conversation she didn't expect

Her CEO suggested coaching. She heard it, initially, as criticism. "Does he think I'm not performing?" she asked herself on the drive home. She almost declined.  She actually wanted to lash out and challenge his observation of her – thinking it was performance based.

She didn't.

What followed was not what she'd anticipated. She had expected strategies. Frameworks. Better time management. Instead, in one of our earliest sessions, I asked her a question she'd never been asked in a professional context:

"What are you pretending not to feel right now?"

She stared at the screen for a long moment. Then she answered honestly, perhaps for the first time in years.  She was afraid. She was lonely in her role. She missed the version of work that used to feel like play. She had been so focused on protecting her image as someone who had it together that she had lost track of the person who actually needed to be held together.

What changed, and how slowly it happened

Nobody tells you that real change in a leader doesn't happen in a single class or a single coaching session or with a single insight. It happens the way weather changes, gradually, then all at once.  And what a joy when that escalation is experienced by the client!!

For Mary, the first shift was permission. Permission to not be okay. Permission to have limits. To say, in a meeting, "I need to think about that before I respond," instead of producing an answer on demand. I worked with her on her inner critic, the voice that told her that rest was laziness, that asking for help was weakness, that being human was a liability.

Over several months, something quieted. Not the work, the work remained demanding. But the story she told herself about the work changed. She stopped measuring her worth by her output and started noticing the quality of her presence.

Her assistant noticed first. "You've been different," she said one afternoon. "More... here."

Mary thought about that for a long time. “More here”. That was it, exactly.

The wellness outcome no one puts in a report

Two months into coaching, Mary started sleeping again. Not perfectly, she was still a leader with real problems, but the 3am spiral stopped. The car ride, that had been a time to judge herself and others, stopped. She took pleasure in the ‘ease’ of quiet in the car.  A few months later, she began to recognize the early signals of her own depletion before they became crises, and she'd built enough of a toolkit to do something about them.

More than that, she started to model something different for her team. She said "I don't know" in meetings. She told a high-performer who was visibly struggling, "You don't have to pretend with me; my job is to remove obstacles, so you get to do great work." She started asking, in one-on-ones, the question that had changed things for her:   "How are you, really?"

The doors that question opened, the conversations it started, the trust it built, the problems it surfaced before they became resignations, became one of the most significant leadership investments she ever made.  She got really good at what I call OEEQs (open-ended empowering questions).

None of it showed up in a dashboard. Yet, ALL of it changed her organization.

What leaders like Mary teach us

The leaders who most need coaching are often the ones least likely to seek it. They have the most to lose, in their minds, from being seen as someone who needs support. They have built identities around self-sufficiency that feel existentially threatened by vulnerability.  And, in reality, most leaders who work with coaches are good!  They just find ways to be better, with less effort/stress.

When these leaders go through it, they almost universally say the same thing: "I wish I'd done this sooner."

Not because coaching fixed them. But because it reminded them they weren't broken. They were human. And being human, it turns out, is not a liability in leadership. It is the whole point.