Leadership Burnout: We Are Not the Ocean

You know the moment. It’s late, the work is technically done, and yet something in you won’t let go. Your shoulders are still up near your ears. Your jaw is set. You’ve answered the messages, closed the laptop, and the bracing hasn’t stopped. The day is over and yet it isn't.

This is the exhaustion that surprises us. We expect to be tired from the workouts or from moving furniture, from cooking a holiday dinner, travelling or working on a weekend. That tiredness makes sense; it has an obvious cause and, in theory, an end.

But there is another exhaustion that doesn’t match the workload, and it’s the one that wears us all down for years. It comes not from what the world asks of us, but from what we add on top: the gripping, the proving, the private conviction that if we let go for a second, it all comes apart.

This part, leading often to a leadership burnout is almost always self-made.

The Model We Inherited

Most of us were taught a forceful model of leadership (and of life). Force is what we saw: the leader who has a plan, pushes through, who never wavers, who carries the whole thing alone and lets you know it. Force is a posture, and the posture is against something.

It needs resistance the way a raised fist needs something to strike. This is why it’s so tiring, force only knows itself by what it’s straining against, so it can never put the strain down. To stop bracing would be to stop being strong. Or so the model says.

Part of what keeps that grip so tight is a different pressure underneath it: the pressure to be right. The forceful leader cannot afford to be wrong, because being right is how they justify carrying everything alone.

But most of what leadership actually asks of us isn’t a problem with a correct answer. It’s a polarity: autonomy and belonging, candor and care, urgency and patience, two true things in tension that you manage rather than solve.

The need to be right turns every one of these into a fight to win, and you cannot win a polarity. You can only exhaust yourself trying.

Another Kind of Strength

There is another kind of strength, and it’s worth feeling the difference rather than just naming it. Notice what your body does when you imagine forcing something open versus when you imagine being carried by a current. The first is all effort and clenched edges. The second moves, and it moves with something.

That’s the distinction I keep returning to: the difference between being forceful and being powerful.

Powerful doesn’t brace. It doesn’t need an enemy. It comes from a place that’s harder to admit to in a culture that prizes force, it comes from authenticity, connection, clarity of self and underneath that, from a certain humility. The humility is this: I am not the source of everything I draw on. I am not the ocean.

I am a wave.

A wave is genuinely powerful. It can move boats, shape coastlines, knock you off your feet. But it is not powerful because it is separate and ambitious.

It is powerful because it is part of something vast, and it lets that vastness move through it. The wave doesn’t manufacture its force in isolation and defend it. It is expressed by the ocean. It rises, it carries, it returns, and it never once has to pretend it is doing this alone.

Listening As Power

This is also, the shift that Frederic Laloux describes in Reinventing Organizations. The most evolved organizations he found — the ones he calls Teal — run not on command and control but on self-management, wholeness, and a sense of evolutionary purpose.

Their defining move is to stop imposing a plan on the world and instead listen to how the work wants to unfold.

That is a wave’s relationship to the ocean, written into how a whole company operates: power that comes from participating in something larger rather than dominating it.

You can see the same thing in the leaders many of us instinctively trust. What made figures like Jacinda Ardern, Barack Obama, or Wab Kinew here in Canada feel powerful was not force.

It was listening and learning, the capacity to take in what was actually there before responding to it.

Listening looks passive from the outside, which is exactly why the forceful model dismisses it. But listening is how a wave stays connected to its ocean. It is not the absence of power. It is where the power comes from.

Where Leadership Burnout Actually Comes From

This isn't a call to do less or care less. It's a relocation of where the strength comes from, and, often, a review of what you believe about yourself in terms of what you are responsible for.

It's worth saying plainly: the forceful model isn't a flaw in our character. It's something we absorbed, from childhood, from the leaders we watched, the way we were schooled, the stories a whole culture tells about what strength looks like. It runs on its own, the way inherited things do.

No one chose it; we breathed it in. That part of us behaves as though it were the ocean and must act accordingly: inexhaustible, self-sufficient, always right, and so it takes on a job, in work or life or both, that was simply never ours to do alone.

No wonder it's tiring. We've taken on the work of an entire ocean.

So the work is to learn to notice it. Because the moment you can feel the bracing happen — there it is again — something new appears that wasn't there a second ago: a choice.

You can check in with yourself. What is truly yours, and only yours, to carry? What could you afford to listen to a little more?

When you stop generating force against the world and start drawing on something larger than your own will — your values, your people, the work itself, whatever you understand the ocean to be — the bracing can finally stop.

The power remains. The exhaustion doesn't.

And despite the title, of course, in a way, a wave is the ocean. We were never separate, never in a vacuum, never really alone, never the small thing straining against the big thing.

Yet the reach was never (entirely) ours.

And that, strangely, is the good news:

so much of what you've been carrying was never yours to control in the first place.

So I'll leave you with some questions, because this part is yours to feel your way into.

Where in your leadership — your life — are you bracing to control more than you humanly can? And what might loosen if you let yourself realize you are playing your part, a real part, a powerful one, and that it only works in concert with everyone else's? If you paused and listened, what would you hear trying to emerge? What becomes possible when you stop trying to control the whole thing?

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!