There is a version of career struggle that is easy to recognise. You hate your job. You have a terrible manager. The culture is toxic. You know you need to leave.
But there is another version that can be much harder to see.
Your career is going well. You’re performing, delivering and probably doing work that, on paper at least, you wanted to be doing. Other people may see you as successful. You may even genuinely like your job and the people you work with.
And yet, something isn’t working.
You’re tired more often than you’re not. Work occupies far more mental space than you want it to. You find yourself getting through the week and using the weekend to recover, only to start again on Monday. You have less energy for the people and things you care about outside work, and the practices you know support your wellbeing are often the first things to disappear when work gets busy.
Nothing is necessarily wrong enough to force a change. But that doesn’t mean everything is right.
High performance can hide a lot
One of the challenges for capable, high-performing women is that we can continue functioning long after something has stopped being sustainable.
We still meet the deadline. We show up for the meeting. We support the team. We respond to the emails, solve the problems and keep everything moving. From the outside, there may be very little indication that anything is wrong because our performance hasn’t changed.
And when we’re still performing, it can be easy to convince ourselves that we’re fine.
I’ve seen this pattern throughout my own career and in the thousands of women we’ve worked with at Women Rising. We can become so accustomed to carrying a lot that we stop questioning whether we should be carrying it at all. Being busy becomes normal. Being tired becomes normal. Having very little space becomes normal.
Sometimes we don’t recognise the cost of the way we’re working until our capacity begins to disappear.
Wellbeing isn’t there to make you more productive
I think we need to challenge the way wellbeing is often talked about in the workplace.
So much of the conversation still positions wellbeing as something we do to help ourselves cope with work. We exercise so we have more energy. We meditate so we can manage stress. We sleep well so we can perform. We take a holiday so we can return refreshed and ready to go again.
Of course these practices matter. I’ve built many of them into my own life for decades, and I know how profoundly they can support us.
But your wellbeing is not simply another performance strategy.
Rest does not have to earn its place by making you more productive. Your health, relationships, joy, energy and life outside work matter in their own right.
If every wellbeing practice is simply helping you recover enough to return to an unsustainable way of working, the problem may not be your wellbeing routine. The problem may be the way you’re working.
Success has to be sustainable
We talk a lot about career success, but not nearly enough about whether the version of success we are creating is one we can actually live with.
There will always be intense periods in a career. A major project, a new role, a difficult season, a business challenge or an important opportunity may require more from us for a time. I don’t think every period of pressure is evidence that something is wrong, and I don’t believe the goal is to create a working life without stress or challenge.
But there is a difference between a demanding season and a permanent operating model.
When every week is the busy week, when the next quieter period never arrives, or when you need your holidays simply to recover enough to continue, it may be worth asking whether the way you’re succeeding is actually sustainable.
This is particularly important for women because the demands of work rarely exist in isolation. Many women continue to carry a disproportionate share of caring responsibilities and unpaid work alongside their careers. Add the invisible labour of managing households, relationships, families and other people’s needs, and what looks manageable on an organisational chart can feel very different in a woman’s actual life.
Wellbeing cannot be separated from the context in which we are trying to work and lead.
Sometimes the problem isn’t your workload
There are times when the obvious answer is that there is simply too much work. But workload isn’t always the whole story.
Sometimes what exhausts us is the way we relate to our work.
Perfectionism can turn a task that needs to be good into one that has to be exceptional. People pleasing can make every request feel difficult to refuse. Overachieving can keep us taking on more long after we have enough on our plates. A strong sense of responsibility can leave us carrying problems that don’t actually belong to us.
Then there are the habits that become almost invisible over time: checking email late at night, being constantly available, saying yes before checking our capacity, filling every gap in the day, or believing that being indispensable is evidence of our value.
This is why another productivity tool isn’t always the answer. Sometimes becoming more efficient simply allows us to fit even more into a life that is already too full.
The more useful work may be understanding what is driving the way we work in the first place.
Your boundaries tell people what is sustainable
Boundaries are often discussed as though they are simply about learning to say no. They are much more nuanced than that.
They are about becoming clear on what you can reasonably give, what matters most, and what you are no longer willing to sacrifice in order to meet every expectation around you.
That might mean changing when you are available, having a conversation about workload, asking for support, delegating rather than automatically doing something yourself, allowing someone else to be disappointed, or deciding that good enough really is good enough in places where perfection isn’t required.
None of this means becoming less committed to your work. In my experience, sustainable boundaries often allow women to contribute more meaningfully because their energy isn’t being consumed by everything at once.
But boundaries require us to tolerate something many high-achieving women find difficult: the possibility that we won’t always be able to meet everyone’s expectations.
That can be uncomfortable. It can also be necessary.
Your career is only one part of your life
This may sound obvious, but it is remarkably easy to forget when work becomes consuming.
A meaningful career can be an enormously important part of a meaningful life. I believe deeply in women’s ambition, leadership and contribution, and I don’t think we need to diminish those things in order to care about our wellbeing.
But the career should fit within the life, not consume it.
There may be seasons when you willingly give more to your work because what you’re building matters deeply to you. There may also be seasons when other parts of your life need more of you. Neither has to become a permanent identity or a judgment about how ambitious you are.
What matters is that you’re making those choices consciously rather than waking up one day to discover that work has gradually expanded into every available space.
So if your career appears to be working but you don’t feel as though you are, I wouldn’t immediately ask how you can become more resilient or better at managing everything.
I’d start somewhere else.
Is the way I’m working allowing me to have the life I want as well as the career I want?
And if the answer is no, perhaps the next step isn’t finding a better way to cope with what you’re carrying.
Perhaps it’s deciding what you no longer need to carry.
If wellbeing and resilience are the areas that need your attention right now, Wellbeing & Resilience is one of the individual Women Rising Program modules now available through The Career Studio by Women Rising.
It will help you understand the patterns affecting your energy and wellbeing, create stronger boundaries, and build practical strategies for working and leading in a way that is more sustainable.
Because a successful career shouldn’t require you to disappear from the rest of your life.