On the interior weight of leadership, and three practices of release
It was a Tuesday morning. I hadn’t yet left my bed, and my mind was already running.
Before my feet hit the floor, I was thinking about a conversation I needed to have with a team member. Wondering how our newest staff were settling in. Turning over what the board needed to hear from me this month. Holding a coaching client in my thoughts, someone who had done deep, courageous work in our last session, and quietly hoping they were okay. The task list in my head was already longer than the one on my phone.
I didn’t expect the morning to feel that way. I’d slept reasonably well. Nothing was in crisis. The fullness was just there, waiting.
I reached for my journal and spent about ten minutes doing what I can only describe as a verbal dump. Thoughts, concerns, people, questions, half-formed prayers tumbling onto the page. It wasn’t elegant. (I genuinely hope no one ever reads it.) It was honest, though. Somewhere in that mess, I was trying to find God.
Focus was hard. My mind kept running ahead. Sitting there in the quiet, I realised I was already tired and the day hadn’t started.
When I shared this with my mentor not long after, he didn’t flinch. He named it almost matter-of-factly: this is the nature of the role. He prayed with me, encouraged me, and then offered a quiet and practical nudge. Find something outside of work, he said, that forces your mind to stop. Not as a reward. As a rhythm.
I’ve been sitting with that ever since. Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve fully worked it out yet.
The weight leaders carry
This year I’ve had the privilege of honest conversation with many senior Christian leaders across Australia. What I’ve noticed is harder to name than burnout, and quieter than crisis.
A leader who stepped into the top role less than twelve months ago. Capable, trusted, hand-picked. She has gone to her board chair more than once and said: I think you made a mistake. I don’t think I can do this. The board chair has held firm. You’ve got this. The doubt keeps showing up in the quiet moments, the ones the calendar doesn’t account for. I didn’t know how common this was until I started paying attention.
A senior NFP leader navigating the harder kind of complexity: internal workplace dynamics, back-channel conversations, the slow erosion of honest dialogue. Not external politics, the kind that lives inside mission-driven organisations and makes every meeting feel like it carries more than its agenda suggests.
A leader who has given fifty years to the work. Fifty years. Now facing the question of letting go, with no clear successor in sight. The anxiety of release dressed quietly as responsibility.
A leader who is genuinely energised, who loves the work, who feels alive in the role. Also scared. Scared the work will consume everything. Quietly asking whether the price is too high. I don’t think she’s found the answer yet.
Then me. On a Tuesday morning. Carrying more in my mind than any single morning was designed to hold.
Different seasons. Different challenges. Something the same underneath.
You are not the first
I’ve found unexpected comfort in 2 Corinthians 11. Paul lists his sufferings as an apostle: shipwrecks, beatings, sleepless nights, hunger. Then, almost as an afterthought, he adds: “And apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.”
The daily pressure. The mental holding of people, decisions, concerns across a whole movement. Paul felt this. He named it. He didn’t dress it up as strength.
The weight of leadership is not a sign of weakness. In many ways it’s a sign of faithfulness. You carry what you carry because you care. That matters.
Carrying it indefinitely, without release, is where good leaders quietly begin to fracture. Not dramatically. The thinking gets cloudier. The inner life thins. The margin disappears. Eventually what began as faithful carrying becomes something else.
Three practices have been helping me. I offer them not as solutions, but as starting points.
Practice 1: Name it
You cannot release what you haven’t acknowledged.
The journal isn’t weakness. It’s the first honest act of the day. The act of naming what is circling internally, giving it language, moving it from the invisible swirl of the mind onto a page or into words, is one of the most underrated practices in leadership formation.
Ruth Haley Barton writes about the importance of paying attention to what is happening in us, not just around us. The verbal dump, the honest prayer, the morning pages: these aren’t distractions from leadership. They are how we notice what we are carrying before the weight becomes the water we are swimming in without realising it.
Ten minutes. A journal, a voice memo, an unedited conversation with yourself and God. Name what you’re holding before the day begins to carry you.
Practice 2: Share it
When my mentor named what I was experiencing as normal, something shifted. He didn’t fix anything. He simply saw it, named it, and said: this makes sense. You are not alone in this.
That mattered more than almost anything else he could have said.
Research tells us that around sixty percent of senior leaders report feeling lonely in their roles, and nearly half say that loneliness negatively affects their ability to lead. I believe it. The interior weight of leadership was never designed to be carried in isolation. Paul describes it in Galatians 6:2 as bearing one another’s burdens. It’s not a metaphor for vague emotional support. It’s a description of what community actually does.
Mentoring, peer community, pastoral supervision: these are not indulgences for leaders with extra time. They’re the difference between carrying weight alone and carrying it alongside someone who understands the load.
In hindsight, I underestimated for a long time how much I needed this. I thought being capable meant being self-sufficient. Those are not the same thing.
Who is the person in your life who can hold what you carry? Not fix it. Just hold it with you.
Practice 3: Cast it
1 Peter 5:7: “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.”
The word cast is active. It implies something being transferred, moved from your hands into his. Not suppressed. Not managed. Cast.
My mentor’s nudge was practical: find something outside of work that forces your mind to stop. I have been learning this is not escapism. It is creating the conditions in which actual release becomes possible. A walk. A Sabbath rhythm. Something that has nothing to do with the role, something that reminds you the world keeps turning without your mental effort holding it in place.
Jesus says in Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me… for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
The invitation isn’t to carry less. It’s to carry differently, yoked with the one who knows the weight and promises to share it.
I don’t think I’ve fully understood what that looks like yet. I’m learning, though.
A question to close with
The weight you carry is real. The people in your mind at 6am on a Tuesday matter. The decisions, the conversations, the things still unresolved: these aren’t trivial. They are evidence of a leader who cares.
You were not designed to hold them indefinitely without release.
Which of these three practices is most absent from your life right now?
Start there.
A note on process: I use AI tools to support my writing. The ideas, stories, and voice are my own.
Recent Comments