The leaders I work with are remarkable people. They show up, day after day, for their teams, their organizations, and the people who depend on them. And almost without exception, they are carrying more than they name. Underneath the productivity and performance, something else is happening. Something that rarely gets named in team meetings or in performance reviews. And that is loss and the grieving that follows.
Some leaders talk about ‘burnout’. It is a word that people reach for when they are running on empty, when they go through the motions of a life that once felt meaningful, and they wonder: When and why did it start feeling like this?
Loss comes in many forms. We know the profound, irreversible loss when someone we love dies. Loss is far broader and more textured than this and many of the losses that leaders carry go entirely unnamed. It gets called stress or burnout. And because most organizational cultures have very little language or permission for anything but forward momentum, people keep moving.
There is the loss of agency: the feeling of being swept along by something larger than yourself, with no hand on the wheel. The world and business shifts so rapidly and relentlessly that many leaders find themselves reactive rather than intentional, responding to what’s needed rather than choosing.
There is the loss of purpose: the quiet but destabilizing question: What is this all for? Why am I doing this? What am I actually a part of? Not a crisis of competence but of meaning.
There is the loss of identity: If I am not in this organization, doing this work, then who am I? For many leaders, work has been so central to their sense of self that any shift can unravel something foundational to their being. For some it’s like an earthquake, the ground has shifted and they feel profoundly displaced.
There is the loss of feeling genuinely valued: Not the performance review kind, but the felt sense that your presence and your particular way of contributing, actually matters. It’s the loss that many parents feel as their child grows more independent or that a leader feels when they sense the room has shifted and their voice carries less weight than it once did.
There is the loss of a part of oneself: An emotional aliveness that has dimmed, a physical vitality that has diminished, or a quality of presence that once came naturally.
These are all losses. And they all come with grief.
Most leadership culture is not, by design, a culture of acknowledging loss and grief. It is usually a culture of forward momentum, resilience, and results. Grief is slow while leadership demands speed. It asks us to stop and feel something at precisely the moment when stopping or slowing down feels impossible. And so it goes unnamed.
I have come to believe that grief is one of the most avoided experiences in leadership and is very costly to leave ignored. When someone tells me they feel burnt out, I get curious about what is unfelt, unseen and unnamed that is quietly drawing on their energy. A lightbulb seems to switch on when I offer that we have finite energy available to us. It helps to understand that when grief goes unnamed, the choice of where our energy goes is made for us. We find ourselves depleted without understanding why, disconnected from what once energized us.
What if we saw grief not as something to resolve or to get to the other side of but as evidence of having cared deeply, as a signal pointing towards what matters most? Naming grief is not the same as being consumed by it. It is simply allowing what is true so that conscious choice becomes possible again.
If you feel a persistent depletion that rest does not fix, I want to offer this: burnout is real, but it is not a destination. It is not something you simply accept as a label and carry forward. It is an invitation to look underneath at what has gone unfelt, unseen, and unnamed.
Our energy is finite. That is not a weakness, it is simply fact. And because it is finite, how we direct it matters greatly. Our capacity to choose where we place our attention, how we respond, and what we tend to is a profound expression of our agency. When grief goes unnamed, our agency slips away and we get claimed by something we didn’t consciously choose. When we name what we have lost, even imperfectly, we begin to reclaim it.
You might begin with a few questions:
- What have I lost that I haven’t yet allowed myself to grieve?
- Where is my energy going that I haven’t consciously chosen?
- What would it mean to begin tending to that, even slightly?
You don’t need fully formed answers, you need only to be willing to turn toward the questions. As you do, you move closer to the possibility of reclaiming something, your agency returns, energy follows, and what once felt like a permanent state of depletion begins to slowly feel like a passage instead.