It looks responsible... It feels like a prison...
Sarah leads a customer facing team in a fast paced tech company.
Lots of demand. Complexity. High pressure.
And she’s Good at it with a capital G!
Sarah came to work with me because despite finding her career rewarding and having a family she loves, she was – like many capable women – exhausted.
She was often working late into the night, and on her emails first thing in the morning.
Her pilates classes and the other things she used to love to do for herself had quietly faded from her schedule as her role at work seemed to gradually take over her life.
She knew she needed to do something differently, but despite this knowledge and her best attempts, her brief glimpses of better work-life balance were always short lived and she’d ultimately find herself back in the cycle of over-working.
Sarah, before we met, was trying to change her behaviour to fix a problem she didn’t even know she had…
If you’ve ever tried and struggled to change a challenging habit – the habit is actually a symptom, not the cause.
And you have to find the root.
Sarah, it turns out, was a perfectionist.
The shame and panic she felt when something was even a little off was intolerable to her, so of course, she was checking her team’s work, answering their questions at all hours and re-doing work she felt wasn’t good enough herself rather than giving constructive feedback and letting her team learn.
She was desperately trying to stay in control to avoid any imperfections – taking responsibility for their work in ways that was keeping them all trapped.
Her team weren’t being given the chance to learn from their mistakes.
Sarah wasn’t being given the chance to exhale.
Women like Sarah don’t like control for control’s sake. They lack the capacity to feel safe when things go wrong.
I call it living in The Fortress of Control.
Because from the outside, Sarah’s leadership looked thorough. Responsible. ‘Going above and beyond…’
But from the inside, it felt like a prison.
When Sarah stopped trying to fix her apparent scheduling problem and got underneath this pattern, her leadership transformed.
She has the work-life balance she’d been searching for, and it’s sticking.
She’s more connected with her family.
She’s going to pilates.
She’s napping in the sun on the weekend with a book in her lap.
She doesn’t open her emails before or after work.
And she now knows what to do when the compulsion arises, because she’s got the keys to the Fortress.
If you’re hanging out in the Fortress of Control, there’s a good chance you’re capable, high functioning and a step ahead of everyone else… But at some point, there’s a cost to pay.
The Fortress represents one of six survival mode patterns I see driven women trapped in.
Find out which one’s keeping you stuck with my new free diagnostic, The Survival Mode Decoder for High-Functioning Women.
The decoder is a custom GPT trained in my material – you need to be signed into your chatGPT account to use it.
