what changes when you stop carrying it alone

They walked into our first session still angry from a meeting they had left twenty minutes earlier. They were a trusted leader at their agency but were running on fumes. They'd already taken stress leave once, with the plan of quitting and moving away.

But they came back instead, and spent the next few years dealing with it the only way they knew how: alone, and mostly by faking it.

"Everything felt so hard," they told me later, looking back on that time. "I did not want to go to work." They'd gotten so burned out that they dreaded people asking how the job was going.

That's a common starting point: Someone is doing more than enough, and privately convinced that if they stop gripping the wheel, everything would fall apart. They don't necessarily want a different job or a different life — they want to feel like themselves inside the one they already have.

Our coaching work was about learning to trust other people to handle things, instead of believing they had to do three jobs at once to keep everything from falling apart. It was about reclaiming the fun, silly person they'd buried under the hyper-achiever, and taking things less seriously. Underneath all of it was letting their job matter less and remembering they were more than that job.

In making their job matter less, they became an even bigger asset to their employer. It's such a common trap in the public good sector: to get so lost in all that needs to get done that they lose sight of the amazing work they get to do every day.

At the end of our six month coaching container together, I asked what stood out. There was less bitterness now toward things outside their control, they said, and more compassion for themselves and for other people. "I had put so much weight on my shoulders," they told me, "and I don't anymore." The work load is still huge but it doesn’t carry the same weight.  Asked what they wanted to celebrate, they said rediscovering a bravery in themselves they hadn't felt in a long time. 

Six months after that, I asked what had changed since.

They'd started passing decisions up the chain instead of absorbing everything themselves. "I'm more okay to pass things up now," they said, "and that feels really good." With a colleague they used to feel responsible for propping up, they drew a real boundary, and found they could hold compassion for that person without taking on their stress as their own. They'd hired a new team member on instinct, handed over real responsibility within two weeks, and watched her take off. Their team, who used to be a little afraid to approach them, was now stopping by their desk to joke around.

A fifteen-minute morning coffee ritual with their staff, half work and half nonsense, became part of the routine, and they said it changed the tone of the whole day. And somewhere along the way, they'd gotten back in touch with the sillier parts of themselves. "I feel like my little me would be so proud of who I am today."

There wasn't one dramatic turning point they could point to. Six months out from the end of our work together, all of it had just quietly become how they worked now.

They'd also told their supervisor, not long before we recently talked, that they hadn't been this happy to come to work in nearly 20 years. Things still get hard. But they don't feel as heavy anymore. They're enjoying their life again.

When I asked what they'd tell someone on the fence about getting a coach, they didn't hesitate: "It's not what you think it is. If you're scared, get over it and go for it.