It’s 11pm and your laptop was already closed.
You open it again, just to answer one email telling yourself it would only take a minute.
It didn’t.
And somewhere between the reply you didn’t need to send tonight and the next one you’d started drafting, you noticed something.
A small, quiet noticing. Not loud enough to stop you. But loud enough to register.
The first time, it might not even arrive as “I’m doing too much.”
It might arrive as: I’m exhausted, but I just want to get one more thing off my plate.
That’s the override sentence. The one you say to yourself right before you keep going. It’s the moment before you even question whether you’re doing too much.
You hear it. You override it. You keep going.
And it’s only later, sometimes much later, that the real sentence finally surfaces:
I’m doing too much.
You’d known it for a while. Maybe weeks. Maybe months. Maybe even longer. But that was the moment you actually heard yourself say it.
That moment is what I want to talk about.
Because in a recent article, Are You the Exhausted Hero?, I named a pattern that’s costing capable women more than they realize. The over-available, over-responsible, I-can-handle-it version of leadership that looks competent from the outside and is quietly draining you on the inside.
It’s the same pattern I wrote about in why doing more doesn’t make you more visible, a different domain, same operating system.
A lot of you wrote back. You recognized the pattern.
This piece is about something even more specific.
Not the pattern itself.
The moment you knew.
The moment is the information
It rarely arrives as a crisis.
It arrives as a small, ordinary moment in an otherwise ordinary day.
- The 11pm email you didn’t need to answer
- The Sunday night pit before the week has even started
- The meeting you led on empty and nobody noticed
- The yes you gave while your body was already saying no
- The third “quick favor” before lunch on a day you barely had time to eat
None of these moments look like much.
That’s the point.
They’re not the dramatic burnout story. They’re the moments before that story. The ones where the information is already there, if you’re willing to see it.
Why these moments are so easy to miss
You don’t miss them because you’re not paying attention.
You miss them because you’ve built yourself to override them.
The capacity was native. You turned it into a capability, one that people now depend on.
Your willingness to step in is real. Your ability to keep going when other people would have stopped is real. That’s your personal operating system, the one that got you where you are.
And the same operating system is the reason the small moments don’t break through.
You don’t hear them as information. You hear them as something to push through.
I want you to consider that this isn’t a failure of self-awareness. Most of the women I work with are unusually self-aware. It’s that the signal-to-override loop happens so fast you don’t get to choose. You feel the pull, override it, keep moving. And the moment is already gone.
This is reflexive. We’ve been conditioned to read these moments as weakness to manage instead of information to use.
What naming the moment changes
Here’s what shifts when you catch the moment as it’s happening:
You get the moment of choice back.
That’s the whole shift.
Not “you stop working at 11pm.” Not “you say no to everything that drains you.” Not some bigger overhaul of how you operate.
Just the moment of choice.
The override loop runs on autopilot. Naming the moment interrupts the autopilot. For an instant. And in that instant, you can choose differently. Or choose the same thing, knowing you chose it.
Both of those are leadership.
The autopilot version is not.
This is what leading differently actually looks like in practice. Not doing more. Not doing less. Catching the moment where you’d normally default, and making it a moment of choice instead.
Leadership by design, not by reaction.
The question that surfaces the next moment
The next time you feel that small noticing that you’re doing more than you need to do, ask yourself this:
What am I about to do on autopilot that I’d choose differently if I gave myself a second to choose?
One question.
You don’t have to act on the answer. You don’t have to change anything in that moment.
You just have to hear yourself ask it.
Because the moment you knew you were doing too much is not a moment of failure.
It’s a moment of information.
And what you do with that information, over weeks and months, is what changes the pattern.
Now I want to hear from you.
What was your moment?
The specific one where you actually heard yourself say I’m doing too much. Where were you? What did you do next? What will you do next time?
Leave a comment below, or send me a note through my contact page. I read every one.
And if this named something for someone you know, send it to her. Sometimes the first moment of choice starts with someone else naming the moment you’d been overriding.