60. How High-Achieving Women Advance Without Burnout: Commanding vs. Coping
When women leaders hit their breaking point, it's not because they lack strength or capability.
In this episode, I reveal why so many high-achieving women find themselves exhausted despite their success. The real issue runs much deeper than confidence problems or work-life balance challenges. They’re living their entire leadership life in coping mode.
Tune in this week as I reveal the four resiliency modes that shape how you lead and why most women get stuck in coping patterns that lead to burnout. You’ll learn the critical difference between active coping and true command, and how to identify which resiliency mode you're operating from so you can make the conscious choice to shift into command.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why perfectionism, people-pleasing, and hyper-independence are actually coping mechanisms, not personality traits.
The four resiliency modes and how to identify which one you're operating from in any moment.
How women's conditioning to manage others' perceptions creates a frenetic energy that leads to burnout.
The critical difference between active coping (which most high-achievers get stuck in) and surrender.
Why equating worth with effort and safety with control keeps women trapped in exhausting patterns.
Practical ways to shift from "I need to control the room" to "I know who I am in any room.”
How to recognize when you've actively coped enough and it's time to surrender to the process.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Episodes Related to commanding vs. coping:
56. Strategic Influence: The Feminine Way to Build Power Without Politics
59. Survival Masks in Women’s Leadership: What They Are & How to Break Free
Full Episode Transcript:
Let me be clear, women don't burn out because they're weak. They burn out because they live their entire leadership life in coping mode. Overfunctioning is coping. People pleasing is coping. Perfectionism is coping. Silence is coping. Hyper-independence is coping. Even emotional shutdown is coping. And here's the part no one tells you: coping is not resilience. Coping is survival, and survival always hits the limit. You don't need to cope harder; you need to shift into command. Let's dive into today's episode, where I will show you exactly how.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's show. I am excited to share with you a resiliency model that I learned recently, and I'm actually going to take it to the next level. But this resiliency model draws from the work of positive psychologists and resiliency science. Today we're talking about something that will change the way you understand yourself forever—not just as a leader, but as a human: your resiliency modes.
Most high-achieving women think that they have a confidence problem, but what's actually happening is much deeper. They're leading from a stress pattern, not from choice, and until you see the pattern, you can't shift the identity. So, let's dive into what these resiliency modes are and how they work for you or how they don't work for you, right? I've adapted this specifically for women leaders, so the examples I give are going to be about the ways women cope, and it looks very different from how men cope, especially in male-dominated environments.
So, let's dive into the first way that women end up coping. The first one is over-controlling: tightening, managing, perfecting, fixing. And if you listen to my episode on survival masks, this is really the over-control shows up when you are trying to fix everything, you're over-functioning, or maybe you're the ice queen and you're trying to control yourself and your own emotions. So you're shutting down your feelings in order to control yourself, right? Contain yourself. Or maybe it's the lone wolf where you're like, I'm going to figure it out by myself. So it's me or nobody else.
So this over-control has us often times—I used to joke with my team when I was leading my direct team of finance analysts. I would say, "When I start nagging you to do something, this is bad for both of us." You know, I would never want to be this nagging person. There was an over-control behavior that I would get into when I would feel anxious or fear. And if I didn't call it out, if I didn't notice it, that over-control becomes like a nagging person that you're like, this is not the type of leader I want to be, right? So you want to notice. One of the ways that women cope is by over-controlling, you know, being hyper-vigilant about everything and not really discerning.
The next thing that some people do, right, especially if you are a woman in a new space with all these new male leaders that are very abrasive and aggressive, right? You may be under-controlling, right? This is going to show up when you freeze, shut down, feel overwhelmed, or you're ghosting people. So in terms of the survival mask, this is really the ghost, the good girl. It's like sort of internal collapse where you're like, "Okay, well, it's just going to be what it is." And I just want to say this is not like surrender where you're consciously saying I've done what I need to do, let's just surrender to the process, which I'm going to be talking about next. But under-control is where you kind of just give up and you play the victim and you're just like, "Well, it's going to be what it's going to be."
And I will tell you, sometimes when I'm coaching clients and I'm like, "Well, what would it look like for you to stand up for yourself?" They might say, "Well, it doesn't matter what I say anyway, so why should I do it?" Right? So it's like this under-control. It's like being resigned to not doing anything and sitting in your emotions, indulging in your victimhood, and not really stepping into your power or action, right? And you want to just notice, am I under-controlling? Under-control could also feel like things are just happening to you. Your calendar is happening to you, you feel overwhelmed, but that's you not taking the reins, you not pushing back, you not activating your boundaries.
So I want you to notice, is under-control showing up? And I know sometimes people are like, "How can I be overwhelmed if I'm under-controlling?" Overwhelmed means I have too many things to do. No, overwhelm is a mental state where you have a lot of things on your plate that are not organized, where you have not discerned or prioritized, and where you are not consciously being disciplined about your brain and how to use your brain and energy and time. I know that sounds pretty harsh, and it doesn't mean I'm trying to be harsh with you. It's the same way that I think about myself.
When I'm feeling overwhelmed, I actually, you know, sometimes beat myself up, but I catch myself. But oftentimes I'm giving myself a break to say, I want to get back into control. And right now my calendar and other people's needs and desires are in control, and I'm not in control, right? So that's the under-control when you feel like things are coming your way and you have no control. You do have control. I'm here to tell you, this is empowering talk. This is about choice. You have a control over what is in your calendar and what you do with your time and the energy you spend on thinking about things.
I actually had to stop myself because it's the holiday season and sometimes my brain likes to just go off on its own and create lots of worries and problems for myself. But if I am not taking control of that, then I just allow my brain to just flop around and think about all these things and then I start feeling not so great. This is where I am inviting myself to actually be more in control and decide, what do I actually want to be thinking about? And do I want to go on this ride that my brain is offering me at this moment when I'm tired? So, I want you to notice, is there under-control and how that relates to overwhelm?
So the third one is active coping, and here's the sweet spot. Active coping is really owning your experience. It's naming your emotions, taking aligned action from self-awareness and agency. So, you know, for example, I want to give you an example of active coping. Okay, let's use travel because holiday travel is coming up. So, maybe there's a big holiday family trip that you want to go on, and so you've planned it for you and your family to go, and you have done all of the things that you need to do. Well, the flights get canceled because there's weather. I don't know, my family's in Chicago. There's bad weather, so the flights are canceled.
So active coping might look like, "Okay, let's look at other options. Let's look at other ways to get there. Let's look at airlines, let's look at the car ride, maybe we'll drive." Like, let's actively cope, right? I'm really clear about me wanting to have a great time with my family and also having a good travel experience. So I'm looking at other flights, I'm looking at driving there, and I'm actively coping, and I'm talking to my husband about it and trying to figure out what is going to work. That active coping is great, right? But you also want to watch where you are moving into that over-control state.
Active coping needs to have a limit. Because what if you do the things? You're like, "Okay, so I booked us all new flights and we'll see what happens." It could cancel again, right? But I'm not going to like book other flights or rent a car because we've decided we're not going to rent a car. We've just booked another flight. So there's no more point in worrying about whether these set of flights are going to be canceled or not, right? But if you don't watch yourself, you may go into that over-control versus stick with that active coping where you're like, "I'm dealing with what's so in the moment."
And the next one, which is really empowering, because women end up getting stuck in this active coping because it ends up leading into potentially over-control and like keep thinking about the same thoughts or worrying about the same things over and over again. The fourth model of resiliency is surrender. This is the identity-level leap. This is actually, you know you've done whatever you need to do, and then you surrender. It's not collapse, it's not passivity. It's surrender. Surrendering is actually trusting your preparation, trusting your internal authority, trusting that you've done enough, trusting the moment, trusting instead of controlling it, right? This is where command lives.
When we are able to zoom out and see how we are actually interacting with our problem. Are we over-controlling, under-controlling? Are we actively coping? And have we actively coped enough to move into that surrender phase? Right? Because that surrender phase is super powerful. That surrender phase is where executive presence is. The ability to say, "We've done what we need to do." Now is the time to sit and stay steady and stay calm and see what emerges and what unfolds without this frenetic energy that oftentimes women get stuck in.
And I want to share with you, and I want you to have compassion for yourself if you notice yourself in this frenetic energy. As women, we were conditioned to manage others' perceptions. We're always managing how other people think or feel about us. Of course, this is something we could let go of, but we've been taught to do this. As little girls, right, do you remember your parents being like, "Well, don't say that. You're going to hurt grandma or grandpa's feelings. Don't do this, don't do that." And as women, we actually have way more feelings, like a capacity for feeling than men do. There's actually studies that show that women, their physical touch, we feel a lot more even physically in our senses than men do. So we're conditioned to notice other people's emotions and manage our perception.
And we're also conditioned to over-function, to belong in groups. Like I just remember, you go to somebody's house and you better start washing the dishes or helping because you have to belong. This is part of how you show that you're valuable. We're taught to anticipate everyone's emotional state. Like oftentimes the people I'm coaching, they were the peacemakers in their house. They made sure that mom and dad weren't fighting. They're now really thinking about all these people's emotions while they're trying to lead. It's a lot, right? This is oftentimes what leads to burnout when we're doing too many things, right?
We're also learned to prevent conflict by pre-controlling outcomes, and women's brains work very circular. We can run multiple scenarios at once, which is amazing, but can also cause us to be very frenetic if we're not in command of that power, right? If we're constantly thinking about all these scenarios and we're not slowing down enough to bring people with us, like people could feel like, oh, she's in her own world or, you know, I don't know what she's talking about, she's kind of scary because you're not calm and in command of yourself.
And we're taught to handle it without support. Like as women, as mothers, as caregivers, we're oftentimes just, you know, expected to handle it, and it's probably what you saw what your mom did if you had a model of this or your grandma doing it all, figuring it all out. So we equate worth with effort, and we equate safety with control. I'm going to say it again because I think those are really powerful because this is what keeps women in this coping and on the road to burnout. We equate worth with effort, and we equate safety with control.
So coping becomes our personality, not just a moment, and it drains power like nothing else. It has us being in what I say is those survival masks, and it has us doing things in a certain box that actually doesn't help us. So let me bring back those survival masks and share how they relate to these resiliency modes. So, the fixer, it's totally over-control, right? That is the fixer who wants to fix all these things. The next one is ice queen. This is controlling yourself and your own emotions, containment, over-control, disguising as composure, that poker face, right? Nobody could feel or sense your, you know, your leadership from an emotional standpoint because you have this mask up. The lone wolf, they over-control through independence. And I did this for a long time.
Listen, I didn't get married until much later in life, so I was an independent woman for a long time. Now I call myself an interdependent woman, right? I'm not codependent with my husband, but we're interdependent with each other. But it was vulnerable and it took a lot of work to move from this lone wolf survival state into more of a command state to be with my husband on a very mutual partnership level, right? And it's not just one and done. You know, sometimes I get into that lone wolf mode again and I do things and I forget to tell him about it. This is partnership, knowing those survival masks, letting them go, being in that command state.
And then of course, there's ghost, right? Hiding in the corner. And I still notice myself. Somebody asked me something today and I was like, "Oh, I just don't want to respond." I'm in under-control, disguised as harmony. I want to be like a good girl, which is, you know, I also notice myself, should I be a ghost or a good girl? So you want to notice, these are just ways that we're under-controlling versus telling the truth.
And then ball buster. This is over-control disguised as strength, over-controlling things. Maybe you are trying to control an outcome so strongly. You're so intense about it, and you scare people because they're like, this person just wants, like they're treating me as a transaction, not as a human person, right?
So, what I want to share is that these strategies were brilliant. They helped us, but they also deeply cost us our identities and our ability to feel satisfied and our ability to feel joy and our ability to let go of the doing, doing, doing versus being. The surrender is really about being in the moment, doing what you already needed to do, but not overdoing it. And this is our pattern that we need to let go of as a mother, as a wife, as a leader, as an entrepreneur. I notice myself in this all the time. And me being able to zoom out and saying, "Am I over-controlling? Am I under-controlling? Am I actively coping? And have I actively coped enough to move into surrender?" Me being able to do this, this pause has changed so much for me and my clients. As I share with them this strategy, it really helps them to notice themselves and to make conscious choices to move more towards command.
All right, so why active coping isn't enough? I want to really bring this point home. Most high-achieving women get stuck here, right? It's that coping mode. And active coping is amazing. It's awareness and agency alive, but active coping still assumes you are the one responsible for controlling the entire system, and it keeps you producing power, not embodying it. This is why surrender is so powerful.
So, I want you to notice, where are you way over actively coping, right? This might look like you keep over-preparing. You can't rest. You rehearse conversations. You imagine every scenario, every variable. You're mentally exhausted. You're always on, right? There's actually studies that show that women's brains are even on when they're sleeping. They're constantly thinking about things. There is no command in a state that requires constant vigilance.
The leap into command is surrender, and this is why this part of the resiliency mode is so powerful, right? Surrender is what happens when you trust your identity more than the outcome. This is the shift from, "I need to control the room" to, "I know who I am in any room." It is about you. It's about your expansiveness. This is where your presence expands, your voice steadies, your power stabilizes, your decisions sharpen, and your emotional world calms because the pressure to perform dissolves.
So you want to ask yourself, "What am I doing? Am I over-controlling? Am I under-controlling? Am I active coping, or do I need to be surrendering?" Right? And I think oftentimes enough, we need to keep asking ourselves, "Do we need to surrender in this moment, or are there a few more things we need to do to actively cope?" And you can ask yourself, "What do I need and want to do to get satisfied?" Take one micro-action from that identity. Ask yourself that question so that you can get clearer and clearer about how to stop coping and start commanding.
All right, that was today's episode. I want you to go out and try it on. Notice yourself. Whatever problem or whatever circumstance you're in right now that feels like a lot, I want you to zoom out and ask yourself, "Am I over-controlling, under-controlling, actively coping? And is it enough? Is this enough to surrender to the process?" Because when we surrender, that's where our command, that's where our power is.
All right, have a beautiful week ahead, and let me know what you think about this episode. I'd love to hear from you. You can DM me directly on LinkedIn. You can find me in the show notes as well. You can book a call with me. I would love to hear from you. All right, have a beautiful week. Take care.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's show. I am excited to share with you a resiliency model that I learned recently, and I'm actually going to take it to the next level. But this resiliency model draws from the work of positive psychologists and resiliency science. Today we're talking about something that will change the way you understand yourself forever—not just as a leader, but as a human: your resiliency modes.
Most high-achieving women think that they have a confidence problem, but what's actually happening is much deeper. They're leading from a stress pattern, not from choice, and until you see the pattern, you can't shift the identity. So, let's dive into what these resiliency modes are and how they work for you or how they don't work for you, right? I've adapted this specifically for women leaders, so the examples I give are going to be about the ways women cope, and it looks very different from how men cope, especially in male-dominated environments.
So, let's dive into the first way that women end up coping. The first one is over-controlling: tightening, managing, perfecting, fixing. And if you listen to my episode on survival masks, this is really the over-control shows up when you are trying to fix everything, you're over-functioning, or maybe you're the ice queen and you're trying to control yourself and your own emotions. So you're shutting down your feelings in order to control yourself, right? Contain yourself. Or maybe it's the lone wolf where you're like, I'm going to figure it out by myself. So it's me or nobody else.
So this over-control has us often times—I used to joke with my team when I was leading my direct team of finance analysts. I would say, "When I start nagging you to do something, this is bad for both of us." You know, I would never want to be this nagging person. There was an over-control behavior that I would get into when I would feel anxious or fear. And if I didn't call it out, if I didn't notice it, that over-control becomes like a nagging person that you're like, this is not the type of leader I want to be, right? So you want to notice. One of the ways that women cope is by over-controlling, you know, being hyper-vigilant about everything and not really discerning.
The next thing that some people do, right, especially if you are a woman in a new space with all these new male leaders that are very abrasive and aggressive, right? You may be under-controlling, right? This is going to show up when you freeze, shut down, feel overwhelmed, or you're ghosting people. So in terms of the survival mask, this is really the ghost, the good girl. It's like sort of internal collapse where you're like, "Okay, well, it's just going to be what it is." And I just want to say this is not like surrender where you're consciously saying I've done what I need to do, let's just surrender to the process, which I'm going to be talking about next. But under-control is where you kind of just give up and you play the victim and you're just like, "Well, it's going to be what it's going to be."
And I will tell you, sometimes when I'm coaching clients and I'm like, "Well, what would it look like for you to stand up for yourself?" They might say, "Well, it doesn't matter what I say anyway, so why should I do it?" Right? So it's like this under-control. It's like being resigned to not doing anything and sitting in your emotions, indulging in your victimhood, and not really stepping into your power or action, right? And you want to just notice, am I under-controlling? Under-control could also feel like things are just happening to you. Your calendar is happening to you, you feel overwhelmed, but that's you not taking the reins, you not pushing back, you not activating your boundaries.
So I want you to notice, is under-control showing up? And I know sometimes people are like, "How can I be overwhelmed if I'm under-controlling?" Overwhelmed means I have too many things to do. No, overwhelm is a mental state where you have a lot of things on your plate that are not organized, where you have not discerned or prioritized, and where you are not consciously being disciplined about your brain and how to use your brain and energy and time. I know that sounds pretty harsh, and it doesn't mean I'm trying to be harsh with you. It's the same way that I think about myself.
When I'm feeling overwhelmed, I actually, you know, sometimes beat myself up, but I catch myself. But oftentimes I'm giving myself a break to say, I want to get back into control. And right now my calendar and other people's needs and desires are in control, and I'm not in control, right? So that's the under-control when you feel like things are coming your way and you have no control. You do have control. I'm here to tell you, this is empowering talk. This is about choice. You have a control over what is in your calendar and what you do with your time and the energy you spend on thinking about things.
I actually had to stop myself because it's the holiday season and sometimes my brain likes to just go off on its own and create lots of worries and problems for myself. But if I am not taking control of that, then I just allow my brain to just flop around and think about all these things and then I start feeling not so great. This is where I am inviting myself to actually be more in control and decide, what do I actually want to be thinking about? And do I want to go on this ride that my brain is offering me at this moment when I'm tired? So, I want you to notice, is there under-control and how that relates to overwhelm?
So the third one is active coping, and here's the sweet spot. Active coping is really owning your experience. It's naming your emotions, taking aligned action from self-awareness and agency. So, you know, for example, I want to give you an example of active coping. Okay, let's use travel because holiday travel is coming up. So, maybe there's a big holiday family trip that you want to go on, and so you've planned it for you and your family to go, and you have done all of the things that you need to do. Well, the flights get canceled because there's weather. I don't know, my family's in Chicago. There's bad weather, so the flights are canceled.
So active coping might look like, "Okay, let's look at other options. Let's look at other ways to get there. Let's look at airlines, let's look at the car ride, maybe we'll drive." Like, let's actively cope, right? I'm really clear about me wanting to have a great time with my family and also having a good travel experience. So I'm looking at other flights, I'm looking at driving there, and I'm actively coping, and I'm talking to my husband about it and trying to figure out what is going to work. That active coping is great, right? But you also want to watch where you are moving into that over-control state.
Active coping needs to have a limit. Because what if you do the things? You're like, "Okay, so I booked us all new flights and we'll see what happens." It could cancel again, right? But I'm not going to like book other flights or rent a car because we've decided we're not going to rent a car. We've just booked another flight. So there's no more point in worrying about whether these set of flights are going to be canceled or not, right? But if you don't watch yourself, you may go into that over-control versus stick with that active coping where you're like, "I'm dealing with what's so in the moment."
And the next one, which is really empowering, because women end up getting stuck in this active coping because it ends up leading into potentially over-control and like keep thinking about the same thoughts or worrying about the same things over and over again. The fourth model of resiliency is surrender. This is the identity-level leap. This is actually, you know you've done whatever you need to do, and then you surrender. It's not collapse, it's not passivity. It's surrender. Surrendering is actually trusting your preparation, trusting your internal authority, trusting that you've done enough, trusting the moment, trusting instead of controlling it, right? This is where command lives.
When we are able to zoom out and see how we are actually interacting with our problem. Are we over-controlling, under-controlling? Are we actively coping? And have we actively coped enough to move into that surrender phase? Right? Because that surrender phase is super powerful. That surrender phase is where executive presence is. The ability to say, "We've done what we need to do." Now is the time to sit and stay steady and stay calm and see what emerges and what unfolds without this frenetic energy that oftentimes women get stuck in.
And I want to share with you, and I want you to have compassion for yourself if you notice yourself in this frenetic energy. As women, we were conditioned to manage others' perceptions. We're always managing how other people think or feel about us. Of course, this is something we could let go of, but we've been taught to do this. As little girls, right, do you remember your parents being like, "Well, don't say that. You're going to hurt grandma or grandpa's feelings. Don't do this, don't do that." And as women, we actually have way more feelings, like a capacity for feeling than men do. There's actually studies that show that women, their physical touch, we feel a lot more even physically in our senses than men do. So we're conditioned to notice other people's emotions and manage our perception.
And we're also conditioned to over-function, to belong in groups. Like I just remember, you go to somebody's house and you better start washing the dishes or helping because you have to belong. This is part of how you show that you're valuable. We're taught to anticipate everyone's emotional state. Like oftentimes the people I'm coaching, they were the peacemakers in their house. They made sure that mom and dad weren't fighting. They're now really thinking about all these people's emotions while they're trying to lead. It's a lot, right? This is oftentimes what leads to burnout when we're doing too many things, right?
We're also learned to prevent conflict by pre-controlling outcomes, and women's brains work very circular. We can run multiple scenarios at once, which is amazing, but can also cause us to be very frenetic if we're not in command of that power, right? If we're constantly thinking about all these scenarios and we're not slowing down enough to bring people with us, like people could feel like, oh, she's in her own world or, you know, I don't know what she's talking about, she's kind of scary because you're not calm and in command of yourself.
And we're taught to handle it without support. Like as women, as mothers, as caregivers, we're oftentimes just, you know, expected to handle it, and it's probably what you saw what your mom did if you had a model of this or your grandma doing it all, figuring it all out. So we equate worth with effort, and we equate safety with control. I'm going to say it again because I think those are really powerful because this is what keeps women in this coping and on the road to burnout. We equate worth with effort, and we equate safety with control.
So coping becomes our personality, not just a moment, and it drains power like nothing else. It has us being in what I say is those survival masks, and it has us doing things in a certain box that actually doesn't help us. So let me bring back those survival masks and share how they relate to these resiliency modes. So, the fixer, it's totally over-control, right? That is the fixer who wants to fix all these things. The next one is ice queen. This is controlling yourself and your own emotions, containment, over-control, disguising as composure, that poker face, right? Nobody could feel or sense your, you know, your leadership from an emotional standpoint because you have this mask up. The lone wolf, they over-control through independence. And I did this for a long time.
Listen, I didn't get married until much later in life, so I was an independent woman for a long time. Now I call myself an interdependent woman, right? I'm not codependent with my husband, but we're interdependent with each other. But it was vulnerable and it took a lot of work to move from this lone wolf survival state into more of a command state to be with my husband on a very mutual partnership level, right? And it's not just one and done. You know, sometimes I get into that lone wolf mode again and I do things and I forget to tell him about it. This is partnership, knowing those survival masks, letting them go, being in that command state.
And then of course, there's ghost, right? Hiding in the corner. And I still notice myself. Somebody asked me something today and I was like, "Oh, I just don't want to respond." I'm in under-control, disguised as harmony. I want to be like a good girl, which is, you know, I also notice myself, should I be a ghost or a good girl? So you want to notice, these are just ways that we're under-controlling versus telling the truth.
And then ball buster. This is over-control disguised as strength, over-controlling things. Maybe you are trying to control an outcome so strongly. You're so intense about it, and you scare people because they're like, this person just wants, like they're treating me as a transaction, not as a human person, right?
So, what I want to share is that these strategies were brilliant. They helped us, but they also deeply cost us our identities and our ability to feel satisfied and our ability to feel joy and our ability to let go of the doing, doing, doing versus being. The surrender is really about being in the moment, doing what you already needed to do, but not overdoing it. And this is our pattern that we need to let go of as a mother, as a wife, as a leader, as an entrepreneur. I notice myself in this all the time. And me being able to zoom out and saying, "Am I over-controlling? Am I under-controlling? Am I actively coping? And have I actively coped enough to move into surrender?" Me being able to do this, this pause has changed so much for me and my clients. As I share with them this strategy, it really helps them to notice themselves and to make conscious choices to move more towards command.
All right, so why active coping isn't enough? I want to really bring this point home. Most high-achieving women get stuck here, right? It's that coping mode. And active coping is amazing. It's awareness and agency alive, but active coping still assumes you are the one responsible for controlling the entire system, and it keeps you producing power, not embodying it. This is why surrender is so powerful.
So, I want you to notice, where are you way over actively coping, right? This might look like you keep over-preparing. You can't rest. You rehearse conversations. You imagine every scenario, every variable. You're mentally exhausted. You're always on, right? There's actually studies that show that women's brains are even on when they're sleeping. They're constantly thinking about things. There is no command in a state that requires constant vigilance.
The leap into command is surrender, and this is why this part of the resiliency mode is so powerful, right? Surrender is what happens when you trust your identity more than the outcome. This is the shift from, "I need to control the room" to, "I know who I am in any room." It is about you. It's about your expansiveness. This is where your presence expands, your voice steadies, your power stabilizes, your decisions sharpen, and your emotional world calms because the pressure to perform dissolves.
So you want to ask yourself, "What am I doing? Am I over-controlling? Am I under-controlling? Am I active coping, or do I need to be surrendering?" Right? And I think oftentimes enough, we need to keep asking ourselves, "Do we need to surrender in this moment, or are there a few more things we need to do to actively cope?" And you can ask yourself, "What do I need and want to do to get satisfied?" Take one micro-action from that identity. Ask yourself that question so that you can get clearer and clearer about how to stop coping and start commanding.
All right, that was today's episode. I want you to go out and try it on. Notice yourself. Whatever problem or whatever circumstance you're in right now that feels like a lot, I want you to zoom out and ask yourself, "Am I over-controlling, under-controlling, actively coping? And is it enough? Is this enough to surrender to the process?" Because when we surrender, that's where our command, that's where our power is.
All right, have a beautiful week ahead, and let me know what you think about this episode. I'd love to hear from you. You can DM me directly on LinkedIn. You can find me in the show notes as well. You can book a call with me. I would love to hear from you. All right, have a beautiful week. Take care.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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