Hi {{first_name}}

Imagine you’re attending a school play for your child, or the child of a family member.

You have promised yourself that your phone will remain in your pocket for the full ninety minutes. It is on silent. Everyone who might need you knows where you are. Nothing happening at work tonight genuinely requires your attention.

Twelve minutes in, during a scene change, you feel the phone vibrate.

You tell yourself you will wait until the interval.

Then you check it.

The message is not urgent. It could easily have waited until tomorrow morning. In truth, you probably knew that before you looked.

So why did you look?

It would be easy to blame the phone. Most of us have developed a complicated relationship with the small glowing rectangle that follows us everywhere. But I think something more interesting may be happening, particularly for leaders who have spent years becoming useful, responsive and relentlessly dependable.

Sometimes the difficulty is not putting the phone away. It is what we feel when there is nothing we need to do.

DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast found that 71 per cent of leaders reported increased stress, compared with 63 per cent three years earlier.

Workload clearly plays a part. Many leaders are carrying responsibilities that are genuinely demanding. But I often wonder whether there is another source of exhaustion hidden beneath the volume of work.

It is one thing to have a great deal to do. It is another to find that you cannot quite stop doing, even when the opportunity is there.

I see this regularly in my work coaching founders and senior leaders. They take a holiday but remain mentally available. They go for a walk and turn it into a call. They finish one demanding week and immediately begin planning the next. Even rest becomes another activity to optimise.

None of this necessarily feels driven or unhealthy from the inside. It often feels responsible. That is part of what makes the pattern so difficult to recognise.

Achievement can bring satisfaction, freedom and the knowledge that we have used our abilities well. There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition or hard work.

But achievement can also begin to carry a private responsibility it can never fulfil.

It can become proof.

Proof that we are capable. Proof that we matter. Proof that we deserve our position. Proof that other people have not overestimated us. Proof that we are, after all, enough.

The reassurance often works. That is precisely why the pattern survives. The problem is that the reassurance does not last.

The next result is needed. The next problem must be solved. The next message deserves a response. The next moment of stillness creates a small gap in the evidence.

That gap is what some leaders find uncomfortable.

The message at the school play may not matter very much. Responding to it does. For a few seconds, you are useful again. You are needed. You are back in the familiar territory of producing, solving and proving.

In my Leading Unmasked approach to coaching senior leaders, I call the subconscious strategy behind this pattern the Overachiever Mask. This is one of seven Masks that are prevelant in leadership.

It is not a personality type, and it does not mean that every ambitious person is secretly insecure. The question is not how much someone achieves. It is what has authority over the achieving.

Beneath the different ways this pattern develops sits the same Core Belief: ‘I am not enough.’ The Mask already believes this. Its purpose is to prevent that belief from being exposed to other people, or to conscious awareness, as though it were true.

The Mask continually watches for anything that might reveal the belief it is organised around. It interprets stillness, an unfinished task or a period of apparent unproductivity through meanings learned much earlier in life. It generates persuasive thoughts, recruits emotion and makes action feel necessary.

Check the message. Use the hour. Do something worthwhile.

None of these thoughts sounds unreasonable. That is why they work.

The Mask is trying to ‘protect’ the Core Belief from exposure. This does not keep the person safe or serve their deeper interests. It keeps a false belief hidden and allows it to retain authority.

This is one of the central ideas in Leading Unmasked, the subject of my forthcoming second book: an enormous amount of human effort can be organised around preventing other people from discovering something that was never true in the first place. Because you are enough, and always have been.

The most obvious cost is personal. If achievement has become the only reliable route to feeling enough, there is no natural finishing line. Every success brings relief, but it also creates the conditions for the next test.

The less visible cost is cultural.

Teams pay close attention to what their leaders reward, particularly when the leader does not realise they are rewarding it.

A leader who remains constantly available may believe they are demonstrating commitment. Their team may learn that commitment means answering messages during dinner.

A leader who fills every space with activity may believe they are maintaining momentum. Their team may learn that visible busyness matters more than thoughtful judgement.

A leader who cannot stop may unintentionally create an organisation in which nobody feels entirely permitted to stop.

No policy about wellbeing can fully compensate for a leader whose behaviour quietly communicates that rest is evidence of insufficient commitment.

The answer is not to become less ambitious or to pretend that important responsibilities do not exist. It is to become curious about who is deciding.

This week, choose fifteen minutes in which you deliberately produce nothing.

Do not turn a walk into a call. Do not clear a few emails while having coffee. Do not use the time to plan how you will use the rest of your time more effectively.

Simply stop.

Then notice what happens.

You may feel peaceful. You may feel restless. You may suddenly remember three things that appear to need your attention. You may feel an almost physical pull towards your phone.

The discomfort is real, but it does not prove that anything is wrong. It may simply be an internal signal that the Mask has learned to interpret as danger.

You do not need to defeat the feeling or argue with it. For fifteen minutes, see if you can notice it without allowing it to decide what happens next.

That small distance matters.

The moment you can observe the Mask, you are no longer completely mistaken about who is speaking. And the moment you recognise that you have a choice, the Mask no longer has quite the same authority.

Perhaps the phone really can wait until the interval.

Perhaps you have nothing to prove during the next twelve minutes.

If this has brought something to mind about your own relationship with over-performing, I would be interested to hear what you notice. You are always welcome to reply.

Until next week,

Gavin

Source: DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025.