Speaker 1  00:00

Quiet overachievers hear those senses right up until the day they hand in their notice, and I want to start there in today’s episode because there is a particular loneliness in being praised for the exact quality that is hiding how much trouble you’re really in. Now I know some of you have already decided this episode of the podcast isn’t for you because burnout is for people who can’t cope, and you are coping. So before we go anywhere near that word, let me just talk you through a few things that will help you decide whether any of them are familiar, whether actually this episode really is for you. You’re tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix, not dramatic exhaustion, just a low, constant tiredness that becomes your normal. You wake up on a Tuesday, and your first thought is that you really don’t want to work today, and then you feel guilty about it, and then you get up and go and do a great job anyway. Small things wipe you out. A single difficult meeting, and you’re done for the afternoon in a way that would have been unthinkable three years ago, and you find yourself thinking, “Why am I so tired? I haven’t even done that much. Maybe I just need to quit and start a hobby business. And maybe you’ve been miserable all week, and you can’t point at anything that caused it. Nothing bad happened. You’re just flat, and you’re living for the weekend in a way that you never used to, counting down from Tuesday afternoon and then arriving at Saturday too tired to do anything with it. So you spend it recovering and lose Sunday to the dread of Monday morning. And here’s the one I think is most telling, and certainly one I experienced because I hear it constantly. Can’t remember the last time at work was interesting, not hard, interesting. The curiosity has quietly gone, and you’ve been too busy to notice it leaving. If if one or more of those landed, stay with me for today’s episode because none of that is a character flaw, and none of it means you can’t cope. It’s a pattern. It has a shape, and most importantly, it has exits. And today, I’m going to take you through how to make the most of this, and where the exits are, and how to move forward with purpose, so that we can leave all these feelings behind one way or another. Let’s dive on in. Welcome to the Leading Women in Tech podcast, the show that celebrates women in technology leadership. I’m your host Tony Collis, and this podcast is the result of my passion for building better tech by diversifying the leadership of the technology sector. Join me on this journey as I discuss all things leadership, what it takes to be innovative, breaking through the glass ceiling, be a great leader, and how to navigate the unique experiences we face as women in tech. So sit back, grab your headphones, and get ready to be inspired to become a better leader. Let’s start with the question of why this is invisible to you, because there’s genuinely something at the heart of this, and it isn’t because you’re not paying attention. You probably check in with yourself all of the time. High achievers are relentless self monitors, in my experience, but we tend to miss some of the key things. The problem isn’t the frequency of the check; it’s the question you’re using for your self check-in for your self awareness, because the question you ask is, “Am I still delivering? And that is the single worst diagnostic available to you, for one very simple reason: delivery. For those of us who are high achievers, which is most of my listeners, if not all of you, delivery is the last thing that you fail at. You keep that going, even when your body is literally breaking down, right now I’ll just be upfront. I’m perimenopausal, and the brain is not as good. But you know what? I keep doing. I keep delivering. It took my husband calling me out, and I gave him permission to do this years ago when I started working with women who were perimenopausal. Menopausal.

Speaker 1  03:58

I have a load number of friends who started HRT, and I said to my husband years ago, “If I start having these symptoms, you tell me I need to go and talk to somebody. And he told me, and I resisted going and speaking to somebody. I resisted, I resisted, I resisted, and I think I got to the point of near burnout, partly with some family stuff going on as well at the same time, and I couldn’t see it because I kept delivering the the metric that stays green longest, because you are going to protect it above everything else, consciously and unconsciously, right up to the moment you cannot protect it anymore. Your sleep goes first, or at least it did with me. Then your patience, then your curiosity, then your capacity for any outsider work, so the friendships thin out. You stop going and seeing people. The hobbies stop. The exercise slides. Am I ringing any bells here, ladies? Then your joy in the work itself. Through all of that, the delivery stays because you hold it. You make it happen. So you run your check. You get a green light, a checkbox, and you conclude you are fine. But if you’ve been not along so far, you are not fine, my love. You are running an assessment that is calibrated to catch collapse, not decline. And by the time it finally fires, you are a very long way into something that has a visible in other measures months ago. It was it was so visible months and months ago. I talked before on this podcast about the early indicators about now, and I will link to some of those in the show notes if you’re curious. And the reason I keep coming back to it is that the early indicators are exactly the ones high performer is best at overriding. So here’s the thing: I want you to hold for the rest of this episode, because everything we do in the rest of this episode depends on this. You cannot self-assess with an instrument that is compromised. If you’re using the wrong tool, you’re going to get the wrong answer. I had a teacher many, many years ago when I was a little girl, his complaint about using calculators-gosh, now I’d be like an iPad. His complaint about using calculators was BS in equals BS out. If you’re using the wrong tool, the wrong questions, the wrong assessment, you will get the wrong answer. I’m going to give you some external assessments instead, and we’re going to take a look at that. So, let’s talk about what does it look like to be quietly burning out. There are two kinds of overachiever, and the workplace burnout looks quite different in each of them. The loud overachiever is visible. Everyone knows how hard she’s working, partly because she tells them, and I don’t mean that unkindly. I I want women to shout from the rooftops how awesome they are, but it’s often entirely appropriate. Her effort is visible, legible. It’s she’s she’s done great things, but when she’s stretched, people can see it. When she delivers, she gets paid in recognition. But today I want to talk to the quiet overachiever a little bit. The quiet overachiever pays exactly the same cost and collects almost none of the benefits. The work lands, the credit diffuses across the team, and she moves on to the next thing. Now I’ve worked with women in both camps, and they do need different toolkits, but the quiet overachiever requires a different arithmetic completely to surface this to get out of it. Because recognition isn’t just nice; recognition is a return. You’ve heard me talk about the importance of being visible at work, how to do that in an authentic way before. It’s some of what makes us feel like the cost of work and the hard work and the grit and the determination is worth paying. Take that return away, and you’re running an engine with nothing coming back into the tank. The fuel isn’t being grease isn’t being refilled. You’re just draining yourself. That can take years and years. By the way, the quiet overachievers often come to me midlife because they’ve been able to do it up until then, but there’s a second problem with quiet excellence, and I see this one all the time as well.

Speaker 1  08:10

When your effort is invisible, nobody around you has any way of knowing whether it’s because you are doing too much, doing too little, nobody ever prompts the check. The loud overachiever gets the “Are you okay? You’ve been going flat out for months. The quiet one never does. the The very thing that makes your work excellent, that makes it look like you’re just doing great things, is also you make it look easy. It’s the thing that removes every external signal that might have caught this early. Now, I just want to give a caveat to all this. There is, I would say, a gray area here. There’s the, there’s the people a bit like me. Earlier in my career, I was definitely a bit of an overachiever, and I would definitely talk a lot. I was not quiet, but I made my work look easy. But people thought I was stressed a lot. So it’s a kind of weird combination. People think I was stressed when I wasn’t. I was just getting shit done, and that comes down to the whole change management thing. Bring your team along with you. When I had a crisis, I would just plow through. I didn’t think about my team. That’s one of the reasons I talk about that. Bring your team along in a crisis. Because my early career wasn’t good in that, and so that can look like a loud overachiever, but actually it wasn’t because I never talked about what I did. I was quietly waiting, waiting for a round of applause, and it never came. People didn’t realize when I was burning out because that wasn’t what I was loud about. I was very vocal. I would speak up in meetings, in the right meetings. Some meetings I wouldn’t. So if you’re that kind of person, you might be quiet in the sense of you don’t ask for praise, you don’t give visibility to your work, and you look like you’ve got it together, but you might be loud another way. So the quiet overachiever we’re talking about here is someone who is not sharing their work visibly. Therefore, people didn’t notice that you’re going flat out for months, and maybe you’re not coping. Now, there are five stages of this quiet burnout. It’s it’s a loop, in fact. It’s a loop of behaviors rather than symptoms, because symptoms are easy to argue with. Behaviors are less easy because you’ll see them in yourself. First part: invisible excellence. This is your starting point, and it isn’t a problem at this point. You do exceptional work. It probably got you promoted. It gets absorbed into the team’s output, though, or attributed to whoever presented it. Early in your career, you might have had a great manager who noticed and promoted you. Get that you get to a point where this becomes the expected baseline. You don’t chase the credit because chasing credit feels grubby, and because honestly, you’re already onto the next thing. You might be frustrated that you’re not getting credit, but you’re not doing anything about it. If you’ve heard me and why nobody celebrates your achievements unless you do, or you’re onto why you’re not being seen as a leader. This is the same ground, but today I want to talk about it from a cost, an energy cost rather than the career cost. You’re spending energy at full rate with nothing coming back in. The second stage is early depletion. Now this is where things start to go wrong, you reread the same paragraph four times and still don’t take it in. And yes, that is also a perimenopause symptom or a lack of sleep symptom. There’s a lot of overlap here. You take three days to answer an email that should have taken three minutes. You miss a detail you would absolutely have caught 12 months ago, and you’re privately really upset or shaken by that, your temper is shorter with people who don’t deserve it. Usually, the people at home first, then it becomes your team. It always starts where you feel psychologically safe, and then gets worse and worse. And the invisible load you are carrying is starting to cost visibly, but only in the margins. And people will notice more than you do initially at this stage. People are noticing you’re a shorter fuse, you’re a bit slower at applying.

Speaker 1  12:05

But here’s what really matters: you are noticing something’s off. You don’t always interpret this as depletion, but you interpret this as a slippage, which takes us straight into stage three: compensation. This is an accelerant because it starts to really get under your skin. It turns into a spiral eventually. You have noticed your slippage and your response because you have 30 years of evidence that this works is to work harder, head down, work harder. I will fix this. Start earlier in the day to get ahead. Double check the things you no longer trust yourself on. Add the Sunday evening decision to make Monday survivable. You have responded to a shortage of fuel energy by driving faster, and it works. That’s the cruel part of this, and why so many people end up burnt out enough that they leave tech, leave their career, restart over somewhere completely different, because output recovers. You stop the slippage by burning more energy, which confirms the strategy, guarantees you’ll use it next time harder and harder and harder. This is what I mean when I say constant hustle has a cost that doesn’t show up on any dashboard. No dials are going to tell you, but you are now spending more energy to do the same output twice, once in work and once in the extra effort required to produce it in this depleted state. And then we come to the fourth stage: concealing this. This second job quietly appears. Nobody hires you for it. You need to look fine. You put on the right face before any meeting or video call, deciding which meeting you have enough in the tank to be your usual self, and where you can afford to be just a little bit flat. Saying “Yeah, busy but good” when someone asks, because the true answer is too complicated and will expose you in a way you don’t want to be exposed. You don’t mention that you’re working on Sundays because you don’t want anybody to know you needed it because you were really good at boundaries a few years ago. I want to be really honest with you here. People underestimate how much this concealment cost you. Concealment is not free. Performing wellness when you are not well consumes genuinely huge amounts of energy every single day on top of everything else. You are now spending on the appearance of capacity as well as the capacity itself out of a tank that is depleted in energy, which brings us to the fifth and final stage of burnout here. Isolation, your concealment works, and that becomes a trap. Nobody offers help because from the outside there is nothing to help with. Your boss doesn’t check in because you are the one person she doesn’t worry about. Your reputation for coping becomes the precise reason nobody ever asks, and you draw the obvious conclusion, which is that everyone else is managing for. And you are the only one struggling, which makes admitting it feel even more impossible than it did last month. It is genuinely lonely near the top, and this loop manufactures more of that loneliness every time round. And then the loop closes because isolation sends you straight back to stage one, no support, no recognition. Still delivering, still spending. Each turn makes the next turn faster, and each turn puts the exits slightly further away, because the story you’d have to explain gets longer every month you don’t tell it. Let’s just take a moment to talk about everybody else around you at this point, because I don’t want you concluding your organization is negligent? I get a lot of women coming to me properly angry and burnt out because nobody helped them. And while I don’t want this to be victim blaming, there there is often more going on in your organization that you’re not seeing. Organizations are calibrated to notice drama, not decline. Your manager’s working model of a struggling leader is missed deadlines, visible stress, complaints, things falling over. Your products are not the issue here. You produce good work on time with no fuss because you are concealing it by definition. This reads somebody who is thriving in every system. You might get a comment about being a bit more grumpy at work, but honestly, we don’t often get that. So you end up in this position. I think that is this cruelest situation about corporate burnout in high performers.

Speaker 1  16:32

You are too competent to be rescued. The signal your organization is listening for is the one signal you will never send, which brings us back to the same conclusion as before. If the instrument you are using to understand whether you’re burnt out is compromised, and your organization’s instrumentation is also looking for the wrong thing, then nobody is catching it. It is not playing until you break down, which is why I actually work with a large number of women who’ve taken a career break. Ostensibly, they’ve taken some time off to be with their kids. When I actually dive into it with them, and they they come to me to help get back into the workplace. So many of them left because they were burnt out. It happened to coincide with teenagers. Often, I think that’s quite telling. Is it our age? Is it having teenagers? Is it the point that we’re at in our career? Interesting set of questions that I don’t have the answers to. I could hypothesize, but but honestly, when I dive into it with them, they were burnt out. That’s why they actually left. They wouldn’t have left if they found a way to work that wasn’t burning them out. So before you exit, before you get there, let’s talk about some of the beliefs that are keeping you in this loop. Number one, if I need help, I’m not who they think I am. Your identity has become entangled with being the reliable one. Asking for help doesn’t feel like asking for help. It feels like a confession that the last decade was a performance. It wasn’t needing support in a hard moment, doesn’t retroactively delete your competence. I promise you, the people who respect you will not experience that in that way. The second belief is that stepping back now would undo everything you’ve built. The irony being, the women I work with who’ve had a career break, we came back in where they were, because this belief assumes the alternative is holding steady, and that’s the false comparison. The real choice is never between stepping back and carrying on indefinitely. It’s between a small adjustment that you can choose now and a large one that gets chosen for you later. I’ve watched this enough to tell you it’s much kinder on your career to make that adjustment right now, and to your mental health. I think taking your career break is nice, but it’s then really stressful getting back in. And then the third belief is, it’s not bad enough to say anything yet. And this was definitely me, and it costs the most because the threshold moves over time. Whatever you’re currently experiencing becomes the new normal, and the bath for bad enough quietly raises to sit just above your normal. You are boiling a frog in your cell. It means it’s never bad enough until suddenly it’s catastrophic. The straw really does break you. There is no arrival point waiting for it in this one trap. There is just meltdown. I’ve seen this one so so many times it breaks my heart. So let’s talk about the exits you have from this spiral. Like, what can we do? Because that’s what I really want for you. Now that you understand what’s going on, let’s talk about getting out of this situation. If you’re thinking, “Gosh, yeah, this is resonating. My God, maybe I am on the way to full on burnout. I’ve got these early symptoms. What can I do? Every single one of what I’m about to tell you is external, because we realized earlier on, if you’ve been listening, paying attention, that your internal read is not trustworthy. We do this to ourselves. This is not about better self-monitoring. It’s about using external stuff to help you. So first of all. Use a checklist you didn’t write. When you assess yourself against your own standards, you will grade yourself against your best year, and you’ll fail that comparison while missing the actual data. Use an external list instead, written by someone who isn’t inside your head, and answer it honestly. The value that that asks about sleep, curiosity, patience, recovery, and dread, other than the one question you keep asking yourself about output. Secondly, you need to break the concealment cycle with exactly one person. If you do nothing else this week, do this: say one sentence out loud to one person.

Speaker 1  20:34

It might be your partner, might be a colleague that you trust, but you need to say, “I’m doing well at work, but I’m running on empty, and I don’t want to keep going like this. It does not have to be your boss, a friend, a peer, a company, a coach. One person needs to know because the loop isn’t broken by a big disclosure. It’s broken by ending the performance that you’re making to everyone else. Concealment continues because you aren’t being honest. You need one honest sentence to punch through that concealment, that facade you’ve been putting up. Once you break that loop, suddenly things will become easier. I promise. The third step you need to make is interrupt this compensation reflex you have, this is counterintuitive, but it’s the highest leverage bit of this entire conversation. When you notice yourself slipping, the correct response is less, not more. When you slip, it’s a it’s an energy signal, a fuel signal, a depletion signal, not a discipline signal. You have 30 years of practice treating yourself with this ability to keep going. When you catch yourself reaching for that earliest start in the morning, or a Sunday, or a Saturday session, name it out loud, that is compensating. Do the opposite of it. If you want the deeper mechanics of this work, I will point you at a separate episode on the leadership energy model that is in the show notes. It’s from about a month ago on bravery, grit, and confidence. It’s an energy model that really helps you understand what’s costing energy. So go check out the show notes for that episode. And then, fourthly, name floor, not a ceiling. Your ceiling is excellence at how much you’ll deliver. You almost like you have no floor right now, no minimum you protect regardless of what’s happening. So define one. You keep trying to reach the ceiling. Define in writing a floor, a minimum of delivery of performance, seven hours sleep, no email before the school run. One evening a week that belongs to you, minimum. I’d like it to be more. By the way, floor is easier to defend than a limit because it’s much more about what you’ll do at a minimum, things that you won’t give up. This is a practical start to putting in boundaries that are going to give you some of your energy back. And then finally, recruit somebody into your life who has explicit permission to tell you what’s going on, as I do with my husband. You know me well. If I start seeing seeing flat, short tempered, I’m not sleeping, I’m emotionally absent, I might not spot it, but you can. I gave I gave my husband a list of perimenopausal symptoms that I’d seen in friends and clients, and I said to him, “If this starts happening, you have permission to call me out on it. And it still took me three months from when he started calling me out to it to go and talk to my doctor. And I think I have a really good relationship with my husband. It was so scary to admit that I needed support medically for something, and that has been my most recent form of burnout. I burnt out in my 20s, early 30s. I didn’t have anybody around me pointing it out. I just burnt out, which is my this time around because I kind of knew it was likely to happen. I didn’t let it get too bad because somebody, my husband, had explicit permission to tell me. Give someone permission that converts an awkward observation to an agreed-upon early warning system for you. It means the next time around this burnout spiral loop, someone’s going to catch you at stage two instead of stage five once you’re entirely isolated, okay. If you are also a leader, let me just talk about something else before I leave you today. The quiet overachiever on your team-they are so often invisible for exactly the same reasons. You are invisible to your boss. Same mechanics, same blind spot, same reputation for coping, coping, coping, doing the concealment work. The thing you’ll notice first is they get a bit more snappy, or they’re just a bit slower, and you’ll see that’s performance issue. But you see that very late on. Really, you should be able to catch this at stage two if you can have honest, psychologically safe conversations.

Speaker 1  24:58

Give them the gift. Of doing that, they will learn what leisure costs from watching it when it costs others. They’ve got to realize what it’s costing themselves. I think we all need a checklist, not one in our head, one written down, a thing that says this is what it looks like when I’m starting to burn out. I want you this week to do three things: get that checklist written down, not in your head. Say one true sentence to one person this week about how you’re really feeling, and put in place your floor. What’s the one thing you’re not giving up? However busy things get, none of that requires you to step back, slow your ambition, announce anything to anybody in the organization. All of it, though, is about breaking this loop, this cycle. Because if you want to fix this, you have to start breaking the cycle. If you got to the end of this episode and you’re not sure whether it’s describing you, I have made a checklist. It’s called “The Signs You’re Leading at an Unsustainable Pace. It takes about five minutes to go through. It’s free. Nobody sees your answers but you. It’s the external instrument I’ve been talking about all through this episode. You’ll find [email protected] forward slash resources forward slash is dash this dash unsustainable. Interesting way to to write that, but is dash this dash unsustainable? Go and have a look at that. Link is in the show notes. It’s a free download. Make it your checklist. Are you actually in an unsustainable place? If you already know your answers and you’re nodding along and you need some support in this, I do each month offer a small number of complimentary strategy calls to listeners of this show. They always run out quite quickly, but you can go to tonycollis.com for slash let slash chat. Sift this one for next month. We can dig into this honestly and what is going on. What changes you can make. You have spent years being the person nobody has to worry about. You are allowed to be the someone now who gets looked after by others. Thank you for listening, and remember, keep leading. Bye for now.