I recently went and stayed with an old friend who moved to the country about a year ago.
Her and her husband are now semi-retired empty-nesters in their mid 50’s, relishing in the peace and quiet – it’s delightful.
She’s been a smart, hard working, successful leader since I met her – both in the corporate world and in their family businesses, and she shared something with me while I was staying with her that’s consistent with what I see in my clients:
She didn’t realise how burnt out she was in her old life, until a few months after having moved to the new property when she finally felt her nervous system settle.
It took months for the hyper-vigilance to switch off. For the tank to be on anything but empty.
And she realised in retrospect, that she’d been operating from that space for years.
Surviving and putting one foot in front of the other – because she had to – and because she was smart enough to not completely tip herself over the edge.
This is how many ambitious women are living, in what I call The Desert of Depletion. And collectively, we’ve accepted it as normal.
Time and time again – after a few months of working together – I hear women say a version of ‘I didn’t realise how much I was pouring from an empty cup’.
Waking up tired before the day has even started. Feeling no motivation to do the things you know you love.
These things have become so widely accepted that many women don’t even know they’re signs of systemic depletion.
This survival state often shows up when the underlying story sounds like ‘if I stop, everything will fall apart’.
Pressure from work, mortgages, family and more, mean for many of my clients who are the breadwinners in their families, there’s a real fear of slowing down.
If you can relate to that and you think you might be living in the Desert of Depletion, please stop beating yourself up with the proverbial “I should just push harder and be more organised” stick.
Please stop believing that everything will be okay after you’ve spent a week on the beach in Bali.
You need to learn to tune in with your TRUE capacity is (not what you think it should be), and find ways to begin to honour and protect it in your day to day life.
There’s no prize for destroying yourself in pursuit of your goals, and perpetuating living like this is feeding the story that your vitality, joy and aliveness aren’t important.
The Desert of Depletion is one of six survival mode patterns I see driven women trapped in.
Discover your dominant survival pattern – and what to do about it – 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.
