Don’t Carry It All

Why endurance isn't leadership.

I used to think endurance was proof. Proof I could hack it. Proof I could lead. If it hurt, I thought it mattered. If it cost me, I thought it was necessary. Endurance wasn’t a side effect of leadership; it was my credential.

When I went to work for my family business straight out of college, I didn’t ease in. I went straight into management. Within months, I was running an entire department: performers, technicians, costumes, and the care of sixty-five horses. We did a show every night of the year. If something broke at 2:00 a.m., it was mine to fix. If someone melted down, it was mine to resolve. Because I could see fast and solve fast, I became the person everything landed on.

That’s how over-carrying works when you’re good at it. “I can” turns into “I must.” Endurance becomes identity.

a close up of a sign on a table

I remember one time on a road show when a performer (someone I’d known since I was a teenager) laid into me in front of my team. It was surgical. He knew exactly how to make humiliation feel like truth. One of my managers tried to stop it but I waved her off. I said, “This is important. I need to hear it.”

I couldn’t see that I was being manipulated.

Everyone else could.

The cost wasn’t abstract. My health tanked. I lived on caffeine, sugar, nicotine, and adrenaline. Vacations were temporary escapes from a life that was a permanent emergency. I existed to manage other people’s crises, moods, and refusal to grow up. I called it responsibility. In reality, it was a jurisdiction problem.

Here’s the trap that kept me there: I believed I wouldn’t be liked, loved, or taken seriously unless I was the responsible one. I thought if I suffered enough (especially at the hands of the people who resisted change) they might finally listen. What I didn’t understand yet was that the system already worked for them. My suffering wasn’t persuasive. It was convenient.

The truth was that no amount of carrying what other people dumped on me would change how they saw me. In fact, it reinforced what they knew and I didn’t: I was desperate for their approval, and willing to suffer endlessly to earn it.

The problem is this: endurance isn’t the right currency to earn respect.

Boundaries are.

When I realized that, everything shifted. I could be fair. I could communicate clearly. I could name the boundary and the consequence. And then I could follow through without rolling over. That was my jurisdiction.

I stopped offering my vitality as a bargaining chip. I stopped confusing guilt with goodness. I let their anger, their disappointment, and their refusal to change belong to them.

The most concrete change? I don’t feel guilty about other people’s choices, and I don’t take on other people’s emotions. I can care without owning the outcome. I can be kind without distorting the truth.

Boundaries didn’t damage my leadership. They made me a leader.

If any of this feels familiar — carrying what others expect, managing other adults’ emotions, fixing the same problems because “someone has to,” mistaking endurance for virtue, I have a question for you:

What did you give up without questioning whether you had to?