The Exhaustion Nobody Talks About
There’s a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with how many hours you worked.
It’s the tired that comes from being on all the time. From never letting your guard down. From being the one who has the answers, holds the room together, and keeps it moving — at work, at home, in every group chat and every meeting and every performance review and every dinner table conversation where someone needs something from you.
The tired of always being fine.
It’s not burnout, exactly, although for some, the constant grind will get you there. For others, we’ll just keep at it. Carrying the cumulative weight of keeping composed and looking confident, day after day, for everyone around us.
The performance trap isn’t just exhausting. It’s quietly eroding the thing that makes us actually effective: our humanity.
The executive who can’t show uncertainty to her team.
The manager navigating an AI rollout without a clue what comes next.
The high performer who’s holding it together so well that nobody thinks to ask if they’re ok.
In a world of social media comparison syndrome, fear of failure, and “vulnerability is a weakness,” we avoid this topic. Talking about it would mean admitting it’s happening, and admitting it’s happening would mean… what, exactly?
Welcome to the performance trap.
Most of us live here…whether we know it or not (or want to or not), but luckily we’re starting to notice.
The Shift We’re Seeing
Turns out, it’s not just individuals who are feeling this strain. Organizations are finally waking up to it, too.
I’ve been watching the shift from the front lines. In my work with leaders, executives, and teams, and through conversations with colleagues across the coaching space, we’re seeing a change in investment.
Companies are investing in people in a way we haven’t seen in a while (yes, it’s happening; it just doesn’t make headlines like a Facebook RIF).
Executive coaching, leadership development, and change management support are surging, and the why behind the spend is telling. It’s not about adding skills in the traditional sense. It’s about emotional intelligence, change leadership, and the very human challenge of leading people through uncertainty without losing themselves in the process.
And here’s another bit of context worth noting: people are job-hugging right now.
People are staying put, keeping their heads down, and trying to make where they are more sustainable instead of rolling the dice on something new or trying to navigate the difficulties of the hiring market. That means the investment in developing the people already in the building (or investing in developing yourself) has never been more logical, or more necessary.
👉 Sound familiar? This is exactly the work I’m focused on right now at The Modern Coach. Let’s talk.
The data confirms what we’re seeing on the ground.
According to the ICF and Gartner, 70% of companies now invest in executive coaching as a core part of leadership development, and 78% credit it with meaningful improvements in employee engagement and retention.
The global coaching market hit $5.34 billion in 2025 and is still climbing, not because coaching is trendy, but because organizations are finally acknowledging that the humans doing the leading are carrying too much, and that carrying it alone isn’t a sustainable strategy.
Turns out, there is something to that whole HUMAN thing after all…
Can We Retire “Soft Skills” Already?
Here’s where the performance trap gets interesting, and a little bit ironic.
We’ve been burning ourselves out trying to make the deck, hit the KPI, meet the deadline, and otherwise perform to all of these metric-driven performance expectations, and now organizations are paying serious money to develop something we’ve been systematically undervaluing for decades.
Soft Skills.
I have a bone to pick with whoever named them that.
Empathy, judgment, communication, and the ability to lead people through uncertainty have historically been categorized as soft skills, which, if you ask me, implies they are less valuable than hard (technical) skills.
Well, guess what?
Not anymore.
I’m calling for a rebrand!
I’ve been saying this on the No More Mondays podcast lately over and over again, so I might as well imprint it in the internet gods for all eternity.
Soft skills aren’t soft. They’re human skills.
Not only are they becoming more valuable, but they’re also becoming scarce, because they can’t be fully automated, delegated, or generated with a good prompt.
Jensen Huang (founder of NVIDIA) made the case recently that what you study matters less than most people think. Why? Because the things that made humans valuable before AI will make them more valuable after it.
Judgment. Storytelling. Communication. Curiosity. Personality.
They aren’t relics of a pre-AI world. They’re our human advantage.
We’ve just been calling them the wrong thing for thirty years.
▶️ And now back to the performance trap, and the real kicker of this month’s newsletter.
The thing you’ve been strong-arming your way through, the composure you’ve been hiding behind, the tough exterior?
None of it is protecting our effectiveness any longer.
If your leadership style or your company culture is still living in the days of the stay-in-your-lane, autocratic, tough-guy, it’s costing you.
Showing Up as a Person
Want to stay ahead during the transition into the AI Age? Be a human.
I don’t mean you need to suddenly fall apart, overshare, or even abandon the professionalism that got you to this point. But, I do recommend being transparent about your reality — with your team, with your peers, with yourself.
It’s ok to say things like:
“I don’t have this fully figured out yet, but here’s what I know.”
“Let me find out.”
“Hey, why don’t you take that on and bring it back to the team?”
“I hear your input, but here’s why we aren’t doing it that way…”
Anything of that nature builds more trust and stronger communication than performance.
The manager who checks in as a human — not just as a task-tracker — is the one people actually want to work for because that’s leadership. And it’ll establish more trust, stronger communications, and retention than any performance-driven metric or cold demand.
People can tell the difference between someone who’s present and someone who’s performing.
We always could.
Now we’re just a little less inclined to oblige.
Your Challenge This Month
Be more human this week.
Find a moment where you’d usually put on a smiling face and look like you have it all together, and admit you don’t know it all. Don’t have to be dramatic about it; just honest.
Tell your team you’re figuring it out alongside them.
Let someone help you with something instead of handling it yourself.
Tell someone you trust that you need help.
Put the performance down for a minute.
Human on purpose means giving yourself permission to be one.
It’s as simple as that. 🫶
Be curious. Be kind. Be human on purpose.
— Angie Callen, PCC, MJSC
