The years of chaos piled up like the clothes on my teenager’s bedroom floor, and I was far from calm. I was fresh from five back-to-back Zoom calls, with Teams messages dinging and another crisis to manage. As I sat across from my manager, their gaze distant across the screen, I found myself unable to express what was happening for the first time in my career.
My confidence was crushed, projects were piling and I gave up emptying my email inbox months ago. No matter what I did, I could not reset my nervous system, and even if I kept working overtime, I could never meet the ever-increasing demands.
That morning, I was standing at the breakfast table listening to my husband parent our children. He said something that stood out to me as alarming. He said to my teenagers, “The calmest person leads the room.” I knew he was speaking to me as much as the kids, and it was the moment I knew something needed to change deeply.
I was no longer calm. I didn’t know how to move out of the drive system, which kept me constantly in threat mode as a leader. Listening to the news as I drove kids to school, my nervous system responding to every text message, opening my emails on the weekend, and my mind unable to stop the running dialogue of not-enoughness.
The pandemic, global economic challenges, perimenopause and life’s ebbs all found me washed up on the ocean shore, without a clear pathway back to the pond of calm surrender. This was the space I knew a leader needed to lead from. I just didn’t know how to access it, in this new season of stress and adversity. Physical weight started to pile on, matching my inner world and the responsibilities I carried heavily, the demands of monthly travel and the allure of remote work waned.
Have you ever endured a season where, as a leader, you could not reframe the weight of the responsibility?
Across one decade, leaders have been asked to navigate what no previous generation has faced simultaneously — a global pandemic that dismantled every assumption about stability, a moral reckoning that demanded courage in the face of institutional fracture, the trauma of terrorism and war, the psychological impact of public life with bullying online through social media’s always-on scrutiny, and the disruption of artificial intelligence rewriting the rules of human work and value.
These crises have not arrived one at a time, giving leaders space to recover and recalibrate. They have arrived all at once, stacked on top of each other, compounding in ways that have left even the most experienced leaders depleted, disoriented, and quietly wondering whether they have anything left to give.
Researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter created a framework in which burnout is a measurable psychological syndrome characterised by three dimensions: emotional exhaustion (feeling drained and unable to recover), depersonalisation (developing cynical detachment from people and work), and reduced personal accomplishment (experiencing decreased effectiveness and competence).[1]
If you were to slow your mind right now and reflect on these three measures, what score would you give yourself in each arena?
We lead others through the lens of our own compassionate gap, and the impact is immense. The Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report identifies manager burnout as a critical tipping point: when managers burn out, team engagement follows, and, ultimately, productivity. [2]
Only 42% of burned-out workers have told their manager about their burnout — and of those who do speak up, 42% say their manager takes no action to help. Maslach and Leiter identify six organisational factors contributing to burnout: workload (demands exceeding capacity), control (insufficient autonomy), reward (inadequate recognition), community (lack of supportive relationships), fairness (perceived inequity), and values (ethical conflicts). [3]
As a leader, how can you take a pause, a selah, to reset the rising tide of responsibility, to lead from a place of inner calm and leadership? If we are unable to articulate clear pathways for space and retreat, how will our teams feel empowered to do the same?
Your leadership needs what you can’t find in a strategy session
1. The calmest person leads the room. You can’t regulate a culture you haven’t regulated in yourself first. Leadership calm isn’t the absence of pressure — it’s the capacity to stay grounded inside it.
2. Burnout is not a personal failure — it’s a systemic signal. When you can no longer reset your nervous system, empty your inbox, or find the floor beneath the weight of responsibility, that is not weakness. It is data. The most honest thing a leader can do is pay attention.
3. You cannot lead others through a gap you haven’t named in yourself. The compassionate gap — the space between the leader’s needs and others’ needs, and the depleted person behind the role — doesn’t close through more effort. It closes through honest self-awareness, intentional retreat, and the courage to ask for help before the crisis demands it.
The word selah appears throughout the Psalms — a pause, a breath, an invitation to stop and listen before moving forward. It is precisely this kind of intentional space that the Selah Leadership Retreat offers.
Designed for leaders who are ready to move from depletion to discernment, Selah is a curated retreat experience where you will reclaim the gut-level wisdom that gets buried under noise, integrate the presence that balances decisiveness with compassion, and learn to read beneath the surface of what your team is actually saying. You will develop the self-regulation that separates reactive leadership from grounded authority, and you will leave with a concrete leadership development plan — a blueprint for the culture and future you are building.
If the calmest person truly leads the room, then Selah is where you learn to become that person again.
[1] Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, “Understanding the Burnout Experience: Recent Research and Its Implications for Psychiatry,” World Psychiatry 15, no. 2 (2016): 103-104.
[2] Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report Available at: gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
[3] Maslach and Leiter, “Understanding the Burnout Experience,” 105-107.
