You Are Not Broken

There is something I want to say plainly, before anything else.

You are not broken. And the way you are leading makes complete sense given who you are, what you've built, and what this role has quietly asked of you.

That is not a reframe. That is just what is true.

Here is what I hear most often from the women I work with, in their own words: "I am functioning, but it takes more out of me than I admit." Not burned out. Not collapsed. Functioning — at a level most people around them would call high performance — and quietly paying a cost that doesn't show up anywhere anyone can see it.

Because what everyone sees is composed, capable, and fine.

What nobody sees is the 3am wakeup that has nothing to do with a crisis. The strategic thinking that keeps getting pushed to next week. The version of you that exists before 7am — before the first text, before someone needs a decision only you can make — and how far away she feels by the time you get home.

Here is what I have learned from sitting with women in this seat: when I ask them to describe what they are carrying, they almost never reach for a personal explanation. They reach for a structural one. "This isn't a confidence gap," one woman told me. "It's a design gap." Another said: "I am no longer willing to call this normal."

They are right on both counts.

The Executive Director role was built to run on one person — the institutional memory, the final decision-maker, the bridge to the board, the face of the organization to funders — simultaneously, every day, without adequate support for the person doing it. The exhaustion is not evidence that you are not cut out for this. It is evidence that the role was never designed to be sustainable for the human being inside it.

That is not a personal failing. That is a design problem.

And the most important thing I want you to hear — the thing underneath everything else in this letter — is this: the fact that you are still here, still leading, still caring about the mission and the people and the work, is not proof that you are fine. It is proof of how much you have been compensating for a gap that was always there.

You were never supposed to figure this out alone.

Here is the one thing I want you to take from this issue.

The next time you catch yourself thinking a stronger leader would be handling this better — pause. Name it differently:

This is a structural problem. I am not failing it. I am feeling it.

That shift will not change the structure. But it will stop you from spending energy on a version of the problem that was never the real one.

I work with women nonprofit Executive Directors on exactly this — what the role is quietly asking of you, and what becomes possible when you finally have somewhere to put it. If this letter is landing somewhere real, I would be glad to talk. You can book a free 30-minute conversation here.