There’s a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show up on your calendar.
It doesn’t come from too many meetings or a project that ran long. It lives beneath the surface as something persistent and easy to ignore because you’ve gotten so good at managing it. Because managing it is, in fact, your specialty.
I know this exhaustion from the inside.
People who know me would describe me as steady. Calm under pressure. The one who observes longer than most before speaking. My sister calls it my filter.
What she means is that I don’t voice my first thoughts. I’ve learned to wait, to watch, to let the situation unfold a beat longer before I respond.
And more often than not, the waiting serves me. My initial assumptions get tested. My early questions answer themselves. The filter is a gift.
What people don’t see is what’s happening while I’m waiting.
My internal dialogue, in those moments, sounds something like: what the f**k? Or oh, sh*t, here we go. Or simply: what in the world is happening right now? I like to use a duck-on-water analogy here. Like a duck on the surface, I glide smoothly, but below the water line, my little feet are paddling like mad.
You might know exactly what I mean.
The Duck and the Distance It Creates
There’s a reason the duck-on-water image has stayed with me. It captures something true about the experience of performing steadiness because that’s what it often is. A performance. It’s not exactly dishonest but it’s not the whole story either.
And here’s what I’ve come to understand about that performance: it costs more than energy. It costs connection.
Not long ago, some friends told me they wished they could be as calm, cool, and collected as I am. That I’m the only one in the group who seems to have it all together.
They meant it as a compliment. What I felt was something else entirely. It was a subtle but unmistakable othering. At that moment, I wasn’t a friend in the circle. I was an aspirational figure outside of it.
Belonging is a fundamental human need. And when your steadiness becomes the thing that sets you apart (when people admire you rather than relate to you), you can find yourself subconsciously working against your own need to belong. Not because you chose this. Because the duck on water doesn’t advertise paddling.
And here’s what makes this pattern so hard to interrupt: the system rewards it.
A recent LinkedIn poll conducted by EBW Global asked leaders which trait organizations most often overvalue. Nearly half (49%) said calmness under pressure. Not empathy. Not self-awareness. Calmness.
What that number tells us is that when someone stays composed in a high-pressure moment, people don’t simply notice their composure. They make inferences. They read resilience into it. Judgment. Credibility. Leadership itself. Visible behavior gets treated as evidence of inner capability.
Which means the duck on water isn’t just a personal coping pattern. It’s a performance the culture has been actively auditioning for and rewarding with trust, authority, and advancement. No wonder it’s so hard to step out of. No wonder so few people think to ask what’s happening beneath the surface.
The very steadiness that others find so reassuring has been quietly writing your leadership story for you. And it may be leaving out the most important parts.
The consequences of that are twofold and both matter.
The first: people can’t offer you support they don’t know you need. If the surface looks smooth, there’s no signal that anything is required of them. Your needs become invisible, not because you’re necessarily hiding them, but because your composure speaks so loudly that your exhaustion can’t get a word in.
The second is subtler, and in some ways harder: people begin to feel that you can’t relate to them. That you have it figured out while they are, in their own words, a hot mess. Over time, that gap widens. The very thing that makes you effective (your capacity to hold steady) becomes the thing that holds others at a distance.
What No One Thinks to Ask the Steady One
Here’s what I wish someone had said to me in the middle of one of those paddling-hard moments, when the surface looked perfectly calm and I was working very hard to keep it that way:
What’s your take on this? And you’re free to change your answer later, as more information comes to light.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Not advice. Not admiration. Just genuine curiosity about what I was seeing paired with the permission to not have it all figured out yet.
If you are the steady one in your organization, team, or family, I want you to sit with the following question for a moment before you move on.
How do you mother the mother?
Because steadiness, especially in the midst of chaos or change, can feel like something deeply nurturing. It’s the grounding presence others reach for when they feel unsteady. The hand that holds the room together. In that way, it is a kind of mothering and it is a real gift.
But the mother needs tending too.
What would it look like to let the wiser, steadier parts of yourself turn toward the parts that are tired? Not to fix them or manage them or translate them into something more composed but simply to tend to them. To ask what they need. To give them the same quality of presence you’ve been giving everyone else.
That’s not weakness. That’s the work. And it begins with someone thinking to ask.
If this landed somewhere real for you, I’d love to hear what it brought up. You can reach me directly at Jenna@JennaStoliker.com. Or if you’re ready to explore what this kind of leadership looks like in practice, I’d be honored to sit with you in a discovery conversation. You can schedule one here.
