I started this week with a question I couldn't put down.
On Monday, writing on LinkedIn about Mother's Day reflection, I realised I'd been looking at the wrong thing. For years I'd been grateful for the aunties who shaped me, Aunty Matty's quiet acts of service, Aunty Mary's carrots cut to a precise length, Aunty Agnes signing her letters with big-stroke "I love you." But the deeper truth surfaced as I wrote: they weren't just shaping me. They were holding my mother.
My mother had a circle of sisterhood around her.
She could pour into my sisters and me because she was being poured into.
By Thursday, the same insight had shown up four more times.
On Tuesday, I wrote about my husband's collection of thank-you cards from patients, each one a small, durable testament to a moment of compassion, reassurance, or steadiness offered in someone's hardest season. What I didn't say is that my husband keeps these cards because they hold him too. Care work is depleting. Evidence of impact, returned, is one way the well refills.
Also on Tuesday, I sat with a newly minted coach as she talked about her path. The first thing she did was thank the experienced coaches who had held her through certification. She named them. Specifically. She knew she had not done it alone.
On Wednesday, I attended a panel on Mental Health Coaching as part of International Coaching Week. One observation has stayed with me: coaching does its best work at the intersection of ill-being and well-being. The space where someone isn't broken but isn't quite whole. Where holding is more useful than fixing.
And on Thursday, I joined fifteen other coaches I meet with monthly. We come together to support each other in building our practices, and to share the unglamorous challenges of running a coaching business. No clients in the room. Just practitioners, holding practitioners.
Five settings. One pattern.
The helpers need holding too.
One of the things I quietly see missing in many senior leaders is this:
They have built strong support systems around their teams.
They have built strong support systems around their families.
But they have not built one around themselves.
Most leaders already know they need support.
The challenge is structural.
The more senior you become, the fewer true peers you have at work.
Your direct reports cannot fully be that support system because the power difference is too great. Your boss or board cannot completely play that role either.
And outside of work, friendships that once felt easy and supportive often fade over time, simply because leadership leaves so little space to nurture them.
So, you end up surrounded, and “unheld.” Which is its own particular loneliness, and a quieter one than the literature on burnout tends to name.
And importantly, it is far more common than most people realise.
Recent Gallup research found that nearly one in four people globally report feeling lonely.
So if you have been carrying more than you say out loud, you are not uniquely failing at leadership.
You are human.
The cost is predictable. Energy that runs in one direction eventually runs out. Compassion offered without replenishment hardens into duty. The giving becomes performative, then quietly resentful, then burnt.
By the time most senior leaders send me a message to talk, they have been running on duty for longer than they would care to admit. The work, by then, is not to find more discipline. It is to be poured into again, deliberately, and by the right people.
The research is clear: connection is one of the most evidenced protectors of wellbeing under pressure. But the research stays abstract until you ask the specific question.
So, I'll ask it.
Who is holding you this week?
Not in the broad sense. The specific sense. One name. One person who, this week, has chosen you. Asked the second question. Sent the message that didn't need a reason. Stayed.
If you can name them, tell them. Out loud, in writing, today.
If you can't name them, that is not a failure. That is information. It means the next pillar of work for you is not another productivity tweak or recovery protocol. It is a supportive system. One person at a time.
A small invitation.
If this edition landed, two things you might do today.
Forward it to one person who holds you and tell them why. The thank-you you don't get around to is the one that matters most.
Or, if reading this surfaced the harder version of the question, the one where no name comes to mind, reply to this email with the word support. I'll send a short note on how I help senior leaders rebuild theirs. A quieter doorway in.
Till next week,
Mary