As a female leader, overwhelm is probably not foreign to you. The mountain feels too high to climb, yet you feel pressure to get to the summit—pressure from others, but also from yourself. And the dictator in your head says you can’t do it; you’re incompetent; you’re an imposter. You want to slump down and cry in a corner, but if the leader is cracking, who’s in charge? So instead, you fantasize about escaping to a desert island or taking a low-level job that requires no leadership skills at all.

Even if you have multiple degrees and lead a Fortune 500 company, fear and low self-worth are probably in the driver's seat. Perhaps you’re afraid of looking at who you are and how you feel on a deeper level. You just hope that achieving the success you want will give you the freedom you feel you lack, so you keep pushing the boulder up the hill and exhausting yourself. But you can wait your entire career for external validation, or you can look at how YOU make it hard for yourself. So I challenge you to try something new: acknowledge your feelings and look at what you fear. Even if you hide your fear-based mindset really well, it’s still operating, and it’s what you’re actually trying to escape from.