Susan DrummCEO Advisor & Executive Coach | Leadership Change Agent

Are You Leading or Just Holding It All Together #shorts

12 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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Susan Drumm delivers a short first-person monologue about the hidden emotional toll of leadership. She distinguishes true leadership from merely holding things together — arguing that many leaders manage others' emotional states while ignoring their own, producing creeping exhaustion, irritability, sleepless replaying of interactions, and a persistent low-pressure hum. She frames this pattern as ‘survival in disguise’ that yields results but doesn’t scale and undermines sustainable leadership.

Chapters

I kept wondering, why do I feel so exhausted after a day or week full of leading my team to achieve goals? And the answer was I wasn't just leading, I was managing the emotional weather of everyone in the room while ignoring my own. And the cost doesn't always scream burnout. It creeps in. You finish the week running on fumes, you're irritable for no reason. You wake up at 3am replaying something you didn't say. You keep performing, but there's this low hum of pressure that just never really turns off. And that's the toll of an old pattern doing all the driving, you're getting the results, but something feels off, like you're spending more energy holding it together than actually leading. And that's not leadership, that's survival in disguise. And it just doesn't scale.