You Did It. So Why Does It Feel Like This?

Meet Max. He’s the picture of success. Multilingual, decades in senior oil roles, and paid very well. Bright, diligent, capable and funny. He leads a specialist global team, lives in a very pretty house and his children are all privately educated. His mother’s still telling people in the butcher’s queue about him.

From the outside, he’s exactly what business success is supposed to look like.

But Max is hiding something that not many people know. He doesn’t sleep very well. He’s just survived two rounds of layoffs and worries constantly what comes next. His boss, also under a lot of pressure, is a pain in the arse. Max dreads the business travel he used to love and has started to notice how often he jitters. His nails are bitten to the quick.

Like everyone else, he’s been recalled to the office four days a week but his team is global, so he hotdesks and spends all day on Teams. The demands are relentless and no one has time for chat so the friendships he used to get through work are a hazy memory.

And now his boss says that Head Office wants him to move countries again. This time to Saudi Arabia. But his wife and kids don’t want to go.

He’s stuck. He can’t say yes, but he also can’t afford to say no.

His life, like many others’, is built on a structure that he no longer controls.

Many of the leaders we’ve spoken to describe this feeling: of being caught in a version of success that no longer feels as good as it looks.

“I did what I thought you were supposed to. I worked hard at school and college and then got onto a graduate programme. I got promoted. I took some roles in places no one else wanted to go to, managed bigger teams, jumped in to sort out messes when people left. My family would say that I’m the one who made it, but my sister runs an artists’ studio and seems a thousand times happier than me.”

Now you’ve got the title, the team, the office, the back-to-back calls, the house, the pension. And yet, you lie awake at 4am with a pit in your stomach and a voice in your head asking, “Is this it?”

You’re not alone (nearly 70% of C-suite executives say they’re actively considering quitting for roles that better support their wellbeing) but, my God, you feel it.