If You Don’t Want to Leave — But Something Isn’t Working

For corporate women who don’t want to leave — but are tired of work feeling heavier than it should.

I remember sitting outside a room I didn’t want to walk into.

There was a restructure to deliver. I’d been asked to assist with it — which is the word organisations use when they mean: stand in front of these people and make this sound like strategy. I knew what it was. My direct report knew what it was. We’d said it to each other quietly, in the way you do when you can see something clearly but have no real power to change it. It felt less like an efficiency exercise and more like an attempt to move on people who had become inconvenient.

But I walked in anyway.

I stood at the front of the room and I looked at the faces. Not the roles, not the headcount — the faces. And behind each one I could see a family. A mortgage. A school run. A conversation that was going to happen that night at someone’s kitchen table that I was, in this moment, responsible for starting.

I felt sick before I went in. I was exhausted when I came out.

And then I pushed it down and kept going.

Not because I didn’t care. Because that is what the role required. You absorb it. You perform it. You make it sound considered and necessary and fair. And then you walk back to your desk and you answer your emails and nobody asks what it cost you to do that.

I stayed in that job for a while longer. From the outside, everything looked solid. I was trusted, reliable, good at what I did. The kind of person organisations lean on when something difficult needs to be handled well.

What nobody could see — what I couldn’t fully see yet myself — was how much energy was going into the performance of it. Not the work itself. The performance of believing in work I didn’t believe in. The effort of representing decisions I hadn’t made and wouldn’t have made. The slow accumulation of moments where I was asked to be the face of something that didn’t sit right, and I complied, because I was capable and because that was what leadership looked like from the outside.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no single moment where everything broke. Just a growing weight — the kind that doesn’t show up on any measure of performance, doesn’t get named in any review, doesn’t register to anyone watching from the outside because you’re still doing it all perfectly well.

The strange part is that I didn’t want to leave. I cared about the work. I cared about the people. I had invested years building something real, and walking away from it felt like failure.

What I didn’t yet have language for was this: the exhaustion I was carrying wasn’t about the hours or the difficulty of the role. It was about the gap. The distance between what I could actually see and what I was required to say. Between how I was built to lead and what the environment kept asking me to perform instead.

That gap has a name. And once you can see it clearly, the weight you’ve been carrying quietly begins to make a different kind of sense.

Not as failure.

As information.

If you don’t want to leave — but something isn’t working — you’re probably not in the wrong place.

You may simply have been performing a version of leadership that was never really yours.