The Cost of Holding It All Together

0:00Have you ever had a moment where you stop and think, wow, I've created this incredible life, but do I actually want to keep doing what it takes to maintain it? And now it's not an obvious question. It tends to appear in passing and just quickly it's easy to move on from it, right? Because your attention is usually on what's in front of you, what needs to move, what needs to be decided, what needs to be held, and you're really good at it. Which means the focus stays on keeping things working at the level that you expect of yourself. But this episode sits inside that question, not to evaluate the life itself, but to look a little more closely at what's involved in sustaining it and what becomes visible when you pause long enough to notice. Let's get started, shall we? Welcome to Project Joyful, the podcast for Health Centre Leaders.

1:04Project Joyful is the space for conversations at the intersection of leadership, health and lived experience. Here we explore what it means to lead in ways that honour your body, protect long-term capacity and support a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. This episode is part of the Biology of Leadership Series in this series, which will leadership through your body, not as a performance to optimize or a mindset to fix, but as a biological experience, straight down the side. Leadership doesn't just live in decision strategies or roles, it lives in your nervous system, and how responsibility is held, and how reliability and care that will quietly organise your body long before your body sees you. These conversations are for leaders who are capable, trusted and effective, and who are curious about how leadership is experienced internally, not just how it performs extremely.

2:09There's nothing you need to do as you list them, no insight you need to apply. This is simply an invitation to understand what's been shaping your experience of leadership and need the service, and what's become possible when biology becomes a part of the conversation. Let's begin, shall we? Have you ever had a moment where you stop and think, I've created this incredible life? Do I actually want to keep doing what it takes to maintain it? It's not even the big moment, right? It can be something small like driving home at the end of the day, or looking at your calendar for the week ahead, or noticing how much of use required to keep everything moving at the level that you're used to, because you're really good at this. You know how to operate here? You know how to deliver, how to respond, how to hold multiple things at once and have them all land, but every now and then there's just that brief pause where you see it from

3:16a slightly different angle, not the life itself, but the ongoing energy it asks of you to keep it running the way that you do. And it can show up in really specific ways, like the way your body tightens slightly before you walk into a high stakes conversation, even when you're fully prepared. You know what you're going to say, you've thought through, you've already considered how it might land, and still there's that subtle bracing as you reach for the door handle or you're waiting for that meeting to start. Or you're getting to the end of the day, everything's been handled, everything's moved forward, the way it needed to, because you've already thought a few steps ahead, right? You run through how things could play out, made decisions early, caught things before they became issues, and then you get home, you sit down, and instead of switching off, your mind's still going, replaying parts of the day, running ahead to tomorrow, like something

4:18hasn't quite settled yet. Or maybe you're being the one that everyone relies on, the one people come to, the one who keeps things steady, because you've usually already got a sense of how things are going to unfold. You've thought about what might happen, what you do if it does, and then in a quieter moment, you're noticing that you don't really take things to anyone else in the same way, not because you can't, but because something in you's used to being the one who's got it all handled, or it doesn't quite occur to you to actually bring it to someone else, well maybe it feels easier to just take care of yourself, or maybe you're not sure or it'd be done in the same way that you'd want it done. It's subtle, but when you start to notice it, you can feel how much of you is consistently engaged in keeping everything moving at that level. And the thing is, if you look at those moments, the tightening before you walk into the room,

5:23your mind's still running at the end of the day, already knowing how things are likely to play out before they happen. Some of that's actually being driven by what's in front of you. It's not the conversation that's causing that response. It's not the workload, it's not even the level you're operating at. It's that somewhere along the way your systems learn to stay slightly ahead of everything, to anticipate, to prepare to have a sense of what's coming so that nothing catches you off guard. And you've gotten really good at that. It's part of why you're trusted, part of why things run the way they do around you. It's part of your personal brand. But what that means is that you're really just responding to what's actually happening in the moment. You're holding what might happen, what could happen, what needs to be ready if it does, and you're holding it consistently. And that has an energy cost.

6:25Because some days your systems got more capacity for that. You're sharper, you're faster, everything feels like it flows. And on other days, well, nothing's really changed on the outside, but it feels harder to hold, right? The same level, the same expectations, the same conversations, they just require more of you. Not because you're having a bad day, but because of how much of your energy is going into staying ahead of everything, rather than just meeting what's actually there. And that's why it can start to feel like, do I want to keep doing what it takes to maintain this? And it's not the life itself, it's the way it's being held. Because when you see that it's the way you're holding it that's creating the demand, there's an assumption sitting underneath it that most people don't question. That if you don't hold it this way, something drops. That your edge comes from being across everything, from thinking ahead, from staying that

7:26level of prepared. But if you look closely, your edge isn't actually coming from that. It's coming from your ability to see clearly, to make decisions, to respond to lots in front of you and move things forward. The holding, well, it's just wrapped around that. And when you're constantly holding what might happen, your attention is split. You are in the moment and part of you is managing everything around it. Which means you're using more energy to stay at the same level of clarity. Whereas when your system isn't doing that constant background work, that same clarity, that same decision making, that same standard, it's still there. But it's coming through without the extra load around it. So it's not that you lose your edge. Your edge was never coming from the holding in the first place. And this is also where this becomes something that you can't really think your way through.

8:29Because you can see it, you can recognize the pattern. You can even start to notice it in real time. But what actually shifts it, well, it's not more awareness. It's what's happening when your system starts to experience operating differently. And that is a very different conversation to the one most leadership spaces are having. It's not about any more or refining your strategy or finding a better way to manage it. It's about what changes when that constant holding is no longer what's driving how you operate. And that's the space that we step into inside biology of leadership. It's three one hour sessions looking at how your biology is shaping the way you lead and what becomes available when that's no longer running in the background in the same way. And it's free. You can explore it here at traceytutty.co.nz, board slash leadership biology. You see, it's not meant to feel this hard to sustain the life that you've built.

9:36I'm sending you lots of love. Bye for now. Thanks for listening to today's podcast. Can I ask you a favour? Tell conversations spoke to you today. Could you please take a moment to leave a five star review? Your review will help people discover this podcast and together we can create a world where there's even more love and more laughter. And if you want to hear more from your project joyful podcast, just click the subscribe button. Bye for now. Bye for now.