The journal

Burned out, or tired of performing?

For high-achieving women who feel exhausted, or like an impostor, in a role they are plainly good at.

Two sentences come up often, and they are usually said quietly. "I think I'm burned out." "I feel like a fraud." The women saying them are often the most capable people in the room. That is part of what makes them hard to say.

Start with the honest check

Burnout can be serious. If you are not sleeping, if your health has changed, if you feel hopeless, or if the exhaustion does not lift with rest, see your doctor or a licensed therapist first. That is not a detour. It is the careful order. There is more on that in executive coaching or therapy.

When it is not the work that is tiring you

For many senior women, the exhaustion has a particular shape. The work itself is manageable. You are good at it. What drains you is everything around the work: managing how you come across, staying one step ahead of the question you might not be able to answer, being the woman who always has it handled.

That is not weakness, and it is not a lack of resilience. It is what it costs to perform a version of yourself for a long time.

The performance costs more than the work.

What the impostor feeling may be pointing at

The impostor feeling is usually treated as a confidence problem. For accomplished women it is often something else. The feeling may be right that something is off. It may be wrong about what.

Sometimes you have outgrown the version of yourself you are still performing, and part of you knows it. Then the feeling is not evidence that you do not belong. It is evidence that the role you are playing no longer fits the woman playing it.

Why rest and more confidence do not fix it

A vacation helps for a week. A confidence program helps for a quarter. Then the pattern comes back, because nothing underneath it moved. You can name the pattern. You have probably named it for years.

Knowing was never the bridge.

Where coaching fits

Coaching is for the woman who is functioning, often very well, and who can feel that the way she is functioning has started to cost more than it returns. It takes one thing you are trying to change and stays with it until it moves.

INKOSI Global does the interior work first, so what shows up later is real rather than performed. Carly Lewis has been a master executive coach for eighteen years, working with founders, partners and senior leaders. The practice opens on Monday 18 January 2027.

If you would like to know where you stand before then, the reading takes about four minutes.