I'm not a boxer.

But I was ready to pick a fight.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. Another leadership meeting. Another conversation negotiating who in our leadership team was taking on what portion of our division’s goals. Yet another situation where my team was being pressured to take on an additional 30 Million in quota to cover the shortfall of another team. 

I felt my jaw clench. My voice got inappropriately loud. My hands slapped down on my notebook on the table.

And I had this wild thought: "I could flip this table right now."

(I didn't. But the impulse was real.)

That's when I knew something was deeply wrong.

Not with the meeting. With me.

Because leaders don't fantasize about flipping conference tables in quota meetings.

But managers who are pretending to lead? We absolutely do.

Here's what I realized in that moment:

I was no longer leading my team. I was managing their problems. I was no longer leading myself. I was managing my resentment. I was no longer leading with vi...

"You can have it all, just not all at the same time."

We used to say this constantly. To our team. To other women. To ourselves.

And we were wrong.

Not wrong about the sentiment. Wrong about what it implied.

Because when we say "you can't have it all at the same time," what we're really saying is:

"Leadership requires sacrifice." "Success requires compromise." "You have to choose between your career and your life."

And we’re calling BS.

The problem isn't that you can't have it all.

The problem is that you're trying to have it all in someone else's design.

Let me explain.

We spent years trying to lead like the men around us. Early mornings, late nights, constant availability, relentless drive.

We thought that's what leadership looked like, because that was all we saw.

So when we burned out, we assumed the problem was that we wanted too much. Career success AND personal fulfillment? That's not realistic. Pick one.

But here's what we discovered after a decade of deep work in ...

We spent 20 years climbing the corporate ladder as the "good leader."

We said yes to every request. Put our teams first, always. Stayed late, came in early, and prided ourselves on being the most helpful person in the room, whatever room we were in.

And we were absolutely miserable... but you'd never know it.

We loved working with our teams. Loved strategizing & solving complex situations. Loved leading our groups/initiatives. 

But with each over-step of our own boundary, each yes we actually didn't want to take on, each decision we made thinking we may finally get the actual reward we were seeking, we finally started to recognize, too late, that we were more than just tired, we were exhausted & completely burned out. 

Here's what no one tells you about servant leadership: It doesn't make you a good leader. It makes you a burned-out leader.

Because somewhere along the way, we confused leadership with people-pleasing.

We started believing that being a "yes man" was the same thing...

As I’m nearing my 50s, I realize now that if I had just listened to her in my 30s, my 40s would have been completely different.

As I sat there in the thin blue gown, my feet rested on the cold metal tray. The paper covering the bench crumpled and split beneath me as I shifted slightly trying to get a little bit more comfortable. Just as I started drifting off, the door opened quickly bringing me back to reality as my doctor walked in. She pulled up my electronic chart where she had just received the results from my heart monitor test and blood work. We were trying to figure out the slew of strange symptoms that I felt like I was too young to be experiencing. Complete & utter exhaustion, heart palpitations, swollen ankles, irritability, unexplained weight gain, stomach issues, shortness of breath, just to name a few. Most symptoms on their own are easily written off but I was in my 30s not my 70s for crying out loud! 

I remember the discussion like it was yesterday. As she swive...

Hi, we are Katie & Lynn and we are recovering over-committers.

We spent our entire adult life, and if we are being real honest as early as our teen years, overcommitting to things. We continually accepted more projects than we should. Our hobbies started as things we loved, but quickly turned into side hustles adding more commitments and eating up more unavailable time. We took on the "turn around" teams, even when we knew it wasn't a good fit. And we kept starting/taking on new corporate initiatives framed as "unique opportunities" thinking they would help us get ahead. We were master multitaskers and we did it all with a smile on our faces, even if our home life was filled with shit... literally. My boss was shocked the day I called to let him know I was working from home for an afternoon because I had an insurance inspector coming to the house. He had no idea that two weeks prior my finished basement had a city sewer backup into it and we had to essentially move a soggy basement ap...

Overcommitting is impacting your life, but not in the way you intended.

We have been there, completely stressed and overcommitted. Sitting on the couch at midnight, rewinding, yet again, the latest Netflix craze that is automatically playing in the background as we pound away on our keyboard planning forecasts for the new year, setting team quotas, rejecting and approving account trades and accepting the next 3 interviews that were just dropped into your calendar for tomorrow afternoon. And you still have to prep for the morning, take the dogs out, do the dishes and research a perfect spot for the girls night dinner this week. Not to mention the piles of laundry still left unfolded, and the holiday decorations that may not come down until March (if you're lucky).

So often we overcommit because we have a hard time saying no, letting people down, or thinking taking on just one more project or commitment is going to help gain favor in our career or our social circles. When in reality it...

We had no idea how we were sabotaging our relationships when we were just "working hard" to be successful.

Here we were again, texting "Finding parking now, be right there"... a message we could have put into a keyboard shortcut because we'd sent it so often. We were once again running "just a little behind", completely stressed out, blaming parking for why we were literally running in heals down an icy Chicago sidewalk because our friend had been waiting alone at the bar of a crowded downtown restaurant for over 30 minutes. But to be honest, it had nothing to do with parking, it wasn't even that we had left the office at the same time we were supposed to meet her. We were doing it AGAIN, a consistent pattern we started to recognize and neither of us was ok with any longer. 

We've all heard that old adage "You can't find the solution from the same thinking that created the problem". You need a new perspective or you will just relive the same situations. We were finally seeing a new p...