18 Sustainable Leadership: Defeat Burnout and Lead for Long-Term Success

✨ Sustainable Leadership: How to Lead Successfully Without Burning Out ✨

Too many women in leadership have been told that success comes at the cost of their well-being. Long hours, constant pressure, and the weight of proving yourself—it can feel like burnout is the only path forward. But what if leadership didn’t have to drain you?

In this episode of the Joyfully Unstoppable podcast, I share how sustainable leadership allows you to succeed without sacrificing yourself in the process. You’ll learn:

🎀 Why sustainable leadership matters more than ever.
🎀 The four core principles of sustainable leadership: alignment, boundaries, authenticity, and resilience.
🎀 How to build sustainable rhythms into your daily life as a leader.
🎀 The ripple effect of sustainable leadership on your team and organization.
🎀 The long-term payoff of choosing joy, confidence, and clarity over burnout.

If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s possible to thrive in leadership without exhausting yourself, this episode is for you.

👉 Listen now and start building a leadership model that sustains both your success and your soul.

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Transcript

0:08

Welcome to Joyfully Unstoppable, the podcast for women who are ready to lead boldly, live lightly, and reclaim their joy. Whether you're leading a team, a classroom, a boardroom, or your own big, beautiful life, I am so glad you found us. I'm your host, Becky Ham, leadership coach, speaker and founder of Women Lead Well. After years of high level leadership, I discovered that success doesn't have to come at the cost of your peace, your values, or your wellbeing. Each week, we'll explore what it means to lead with clarity, confidence, and authenticity. Even in a world that tells you to hustle harder and prove your worth, you carry a lot. Let's help it feel lighter. Now, friends, let's be honest. For too long, leadership has been painted as this relentless grind. You climb the ladder, you say yes to everything. You pour yourself into proving that you deserve to be in the room. In that model, success comes at a pretty steep cost. Sometimes it's your health. Oftentimes it's your relationships, and sometimes it is even your sense of self. Many women in leadership roles know this story all too well. The late nights, the endless responsibilities. This pull of, am I gonna be fully present at work? Am I gonna be fully present at home? It feels like the only way to succeed is to sacrifice yourself. But we are here today to talk about another way. Sustainable leadership is not about dialing back your ambition or lowering your standards. It's about leading in a way that allows you to achieve extraordinary results without exhausting yourself in the process. It's about aligning with your values. It's about protecting your energy and building rhythms that support long-term success. The truth is, success and sustainability are not opposites. They're partners, and learning to lead sustainably doesn't just change your life. It transforms your team, your organization, and the ripple of the impact your leadership has across organizations and industries. And I'm gonna argue that sustainable leadership matters more now than ever. Why? I think we all know that life has changed, right? Gone are the days when burnout was this badge of honor when busyness was your primary measure of success. We've got challenges today. Actual global disruptions shifting workplace cultures, heightened expectations that demand more than sheer effort, right? Burnout ain't enough. Hus ain't enough. With these, um, shifts. With these changes, I don't know what we wanna with these cataclysmic changes in our world. They demand clarity. They demand a resilience, they demand presence, not panic. And so for women. As we know by this point, the stakes are even higher because you're not only navigating those changes, you're not only navigating demanding workloads, but the unspoken bias, the pressure to prove yourself and the weight of responsibilities outside of work. The cost of ignoring sustainability is steep. Research shows that burnout is one of the leading reasons high performing women leave leadership roles all together. And I'm gonna add an even more important one. Research also shows that the leading cause of death in women who were of the age to lead is heart disease, the impact of chronic stress on our actual health. Staggering. And when you add to that, the percentage of women who are misdiagnosed when they come to the ER having a heart attack, and the negative health impacts of misdiagnosis when you're having a heart attack, has on your actual ability to live through the heart attack and survive. Yikes. So when we talk sustainable leadership, this isn't some like, like wishy-washy, this is how do you live? How do you organize your life and your leadership in a way that is sustainable across decades so you don't burn it all down, walk away from your leadership responsibilities.'cause you say it's too much. I don't care. I don't want this anymore. Or even worse, you have something actually impact your physical health that would prevent you from leading even if you wanted to. That is for you. The individual organizations are paying a price. For burnout and hustle culture too. They pay that price in terms of the cost of turnover, how much it costs a company to recruit and train a new individual and then develop them. They pay the cost in disengagement when people stay in their actual role, but they check out because they have to. It's a coping mechanism to deal with burnout. And organizations pay the cost in lost innovation because if you are barely keeping one little nostril above water every day, you're probably not taking the big risks, right? You're probably not innovating. You're probably just holding on for sheer life. So sustainable leadership matters. It matters because it makes you more effective, not less. It matters'cause it keeps you alive. It means leading with your whole self intact body mind, and yes, your spirit. So you can make sharper decisions, inspire others authentically, and stay in leadership for the long haul. So what is sustainable leadership? Let's take a second and let's talk about it. At its heart, sustainable leadership rests on a few non-negotiable principles. Principle one, alignment. Sustainable leadership begins with knowing who you are and what matters most to you. You're gonna lead from your values. When your decisions, goals, and actions are aligned with your authentic self. You conserve energy. And you avoid that energetic leak of pretending or performing right? I talk about energy vampires, energy leaks. When you put on a mask every day to show up, because you are not leading from a place of authenticity, you burn so much unnecessary energy that you can't then put to the more meaningful aspects of your job and your life non-negotiable. Number two. Boundaries. We have a whole episode on it. I will link it in the show notes below. Without clear boundaries, leadership is inevitably draining, right? You're eating your seed corn, you're spending from your principle. I gave you two very different metaphors there to illustrate, but they're true, right? Both farming and um, investing. Sustainable leadership requires you to protect your time, your energy and focus. Not only for your own wellbeing, but so your team sees healthy modeling of what leadership looks like. You don't spend the principle, you spend the interest. So the principle is there continuing to grow interest, right? You don't eat your seed corn. You plant that seed corn so it can grow more corn, of which you can eat some. You learn it. And when you lead that way, your team learns it so that everyone is producing interest, everyone is producing value out of the interest, not stripping themselves for parts there. That's a third metaphor for us to use. And this brings us to the third non-negotiable. Uh, and that is authenticity. When you. Lead sustainably. You stop leading from who you think you should be, and you start leading from who you actually are. Why is this important? One, because of the energy conservation, but two, because authenticity builds trust, it reduces self-doubt, and it allows you to influence without the constant striving, so you align with your values. You lead authentically, non-negotiable. Number four, resilience. Leadership is demanding. Resilience is not about pushing harder. Resilience is about regulating that nervous system, managing your body budget. Another previous episode, I'll link and sustaining your energy through recovery practices. After you do something really intense, after you spike that cortisol for something and that happens in life, what do you do to recover from it so you can continue grounded? And I wanna be clear, these principles don't require a total overhaul of your life. They invite daily choices, small choices that add up to lasting transformation. And so ask yourself, which one of these principles comes most naturally to me? And which one feels like it needs the most attention right now? Where am I strongest? Where am I weakest? Right? Just do that self-reflection and I hear you. I hear you say, Hey Becky, this sounds great, but, but my job is insane and sustainable leadership just isn't possible for me right now in this season, Hypothetically, I'm with you, but I can't do it. And hey friend, look, maybe it's not possible today, but Right now, today, there are absolutely things you can do to improve the sustainability of your leadership, and these are through small, very intentional changes that you can make to move you from exhaustion into empowerment. So let's talk about those. What can you, especially when everything is cra, especially 2025, the dumpster fire that has been 2025 sustainable leadership like Hunt, read the room. Becky, no. Friend, I'm telling you. Yes. Now thing number one, I want you to clarify your vision and values. I know I say it all the time because it is that important. When you are grounded in what matters most, you let go of distractions. You stop chasing every demand. The boundaries kind of invent themselves, the things you're gonna say no to become obvious. And so I want you to start by asking. What kind of leader do I wanna be remembered as? What is most important to me, the person, as I embody this role, as I fulfill this role? Step number two. You can stop proving yourself. You can't. You could just stop right now. Doesn't matter how chaotic, doesn't matter how stressful, doesn't matter how difficult, how challenging your current role is right now, in this moment. You can stop trying to prove yourself. What do I mean by that? How many of you. Seek validation from others through your overachievement. You are still trying to be good enough. You're still trying to be taken seriously. You're still trying to prove your worth or prove your seat at the table, my friend. Stop. Sustainable leadership requires you to trade that perfection for presence, and I get that you never want to, um, overpromise and underdeliver. But, but here's the thing. You don't have to over deliver every single time either, I promise. And when you shift that energy from trying to prove yourself to just focused on the work that needs to be done, you will actually add more value. You really? I promise. You really will. And so it's this beautiful thing when you stop trying so hard to get the thing, that's when you get the thing. So now, step three, I've talked about recovery cycles earlier in the episode. If you guys can hear my dogs in the background, I'm sorry. They've decided this is the time. Every time I hit record on a podcast, they decide that it's time for the Zoomies. So if you hear them, I am so sorry. Just think of it as the joy of life. So. Number three, protect your recovery cycles. Why do I say that? Because leadership life is not one like wind, sprint after the other. You're not just sprinting, crashing, sprinting crashing, sprinting, crashing. You can do that, but you sure don't have to. Build in recovery. That might be a daily reflection. That might be a 15 minute walk around the block at lunchtime. It could be a weekly reset. I've got a weekly reset ritual that I can link in the show notes below that you can download that's free, that you can use at the end of the week. You could actually take your dang weekends and not work through the weekends. You can take a quarterly day off. Just to relax and reset, replenish your body and your mind. You do what works best for you. But my point is you intentionally on the calendar, build non-negotiable small moments throughout your week and bigger moments across the season to give yourself time to reset. Number four, delegate and empower. Sustainable leadership multiplies impact by trusting others to do good work too. So oftentimes we think of delegation as weakness, right? That if I'm delegating, it's because I'm not, I'm not strong enough to do it myself. I don't have the capacity to, I'm not big enough what I like. Delegation is a, comes from a place of I can't, no. Delegation is a leadership strength. In my 12 week program, frantic, flourishing, we have an entire module on delegation. Why? Because women in particular can be challenged by it. And two, because it's important for me as a leader to help other women leaders realize that delegation is not this crutch you use because you can't do it all on your own. It doesn't come from a place of weakness, or, I need help. No. You delegate because developing your team's ability to operate at your level is one of your core leadership responsibilities. Delegation is leadership because you are teaching your team how to function as you, and there's nothing more core to the heart of leadership. Then building your replacement, building people who can do the things that you can do, building people who can level up in whatever area they're operating, and delegation allows for that. Number five, you can create rhythms in your life to support sustainable leadership. Right now, even in the crazy times, you can create rhythms. Not just goals. And so instead of chasing outcomes, you establish practices that sustain you. This could be journaling, it could be a a five minute pause between meetings, so a quick meditation. It could be an end of day reflection that you do. You can do that now. All five of these actions that I gave you, they are doable today. No matter how chaotic your current workplace is, and again, we're gonna be honest here, you might not be able to snap your fingers and have the chaos magically disappear. That's not, that's not a reasonable expectation, but it's not an either or. These practices expand your capacity, and the more sustainable your leadership, the more you lean into these practices, the more effective and influential you become and the more the chaos starts to subside. So you can lean even more fully in to sustainable leadership. So again, it's not this dichotomy of if it's chaos, I can't have sustainability. You can build sustainability into the chaos, and I'm gonna push this point even further'cause I believe pretty strongly in it. Sustainable leadership doesn't stop with you. The way you lead directly shapes the culture of your team. And so when you model balance and boundaries, authenticity, you give your team the permission to do the same. And again, to go back to that, um, principle interest analogy or seed corn and other corn, I, I'm not a farm. My grandpa was a farmer, but I'm not. When you lead from that place, your team learns to lead from that place. And so then you have everyone. Operating in the interest and the principle remains intact and gets to build more interest. That's where true innovation comes in. That's where the risk taking that leads to quantum growth. That's where that comes from. And so imagine the difference between a leader who constantly sacrifices herself, sending those emails at midnight, never taking time off, pushing through every challenge. And the leader who sets boundaries, who prioritizes wellbeing and leads with authenticity, that first leader creates a culture of exhaustion. The second leader builds a culture of trust and innovation. So within your team, sustainable leadership looks like encouraging open dialogue with psychological safety, right? Because your body budget, you're in a place where you can do the emotional self-regulation to have those open and candid conversations where you have the resources you need to be innovative, right? You empower others to take ownership. Instead of carrying everything yourself, you're setting them up to grow. It is where you celebrate progress as much as outcomes, because we know outcomes are important. Outcomes are always gonna be important, but good progress, good processes, good progress. That's what brings you the ultimate outcomes. So you gotta release the outcome. Focus on the progress modeling healthy work rhythms so your team knows that it's safe to do the same thing. And then as they become leaders, they model that for their teams. And that's where the real cultural shift comes. And so I'm, I'm, I'm so committed to this. The greatest gift you give your team is not your endless effort. It's your sustainable presence. When you lead this way, your influence multiplies. And so I want you to ask yourself, let's do a little moment of reflection. What are you modeling for your team right now? Is it sustainability or is it sacrifice? And then when you commit to sustainable leadership, the payoff extends far beyond your current role or season. It fundamentally changes how you experience success because now success is not something that drains you. It's something that sustains you. So you can have more of it, And this is why I am such a fan of sustainable leadership because we, we are conditioned to think that if we operate anywhere other than burnout and full throttle, like a hundred percent effort a hundred percent of the time, that somehow we're sacrificing success. And I'm telling you No, that's what I'm telling. I'm telling you. No, that's a lie. When you lead sustainably, you set yourself up for sustainable success, more breakthroughs, more positive outcomes for you as the individual, but for your team as a whole. And again, over time, that culture ripples out. So the benefits of sustainable leadership are profound. For you, we're talking renewed confidence, clarity of vision. You get to be happy in your work again, right? You stop dreading the pace. You start leading with energy. Those Sunday scaries are in the rear view, and for your organization, the ripple effects are undeniable. Higher engagement, stronger retention, greater innovation. So sustainable leadership doesn't just serve the leader, the clearly it does. It strengthens the entire ecosystem. And for the next generation, for the team, now that you are building your future leaders, your choice to lead sustainably matters even more than you can imagine. Because when you model this way of leadership, when you model this road to success, you redefine leadership for you and for the women who come after you, and the men who come after you. And so here's the big question. If you keep leading the way you're leading today for the next five years, where does it take you? Where do you end up after five years? If you keep doing what you're doing exactly the same as now? Where are you five years down the road? And if you choose sustainable leadership, what new possibilities might open up for you? What would be different? Sustainable leadership is not a dream. It's a choice you make. It's a choice you can make today to lead with alignment, boundaries, authenticity, and resilience. So your success is no longer at odds with your wellbeing. You don't have to keep caring leadership like it's a burden that is so heavy you can carry it differently. You can lead boldly, live lightly and reclaim your joy because the question isn't whether sustainable leadership is possible. The question is whether you are ready to believe it's possible for you. And so here's where I'm gonna leave you. If sustainable leadership feels impossible. Then my friends frantic, flourishing is built for you. This is why I created the program. In this 12 week group experience, you will clarify what's next. Without abandoning what matters, you'll reconnect with your voice, your vision, and your vitality. You'll build rhythms that support your highest contribution without burnout. You'll step fully into the next evolution of your leadership with courage and joy. And now I am hosting a free 60 minute webinar breakup with burnout. Three ways to rewire your Leadership for sustainable success. This Thursday, September 18th at noon Eastern registration information is in the description below. Sign up now and take your first step toward a better 2026. Now if this episode spoke to you, I would love for you to share it with a friend who's running on empty. We need more women leading from alignment, not adrenaline. And please don't forget to like and subscribe. It really helps a small podcast like mine. You can also grab one of our free resources, like the Mental Load Reset or the Weekly Reflection, practice@womenleadwell.net and LinkedIn, the show notes below. Remember. Joyful, sustainable and authentic leadership is possible, and you deserve to enjoy every minute of it. Until next time, I'm Becky Ham, and this is joyfully Unstoppable.