It’s your child’s school play. You promised yourself the phone would stay in your pocket, on silent, for the full ninety minutes. Twelve minutes in, during a scene change, you feel it buzz. You tell yourself you’ll glance at it in the interval. You do. It isn’t urgent. It could easily have waited until morning. You already knew that before you looked. You check it anyway.

What the research shows

DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast found that 71 per cent of leaders reported increased stress in the past year, up from 63 per cent three years earlier. The trend is not workload alone. It is a widening gap between how much leaders are doing and how much they feel able to stop.

Why this happens

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Mask: the part of you that decides, in a fraction of a second, whether whatever is happening in the external world threatens to expose a single belief sitting underneath it. I call it the Core Belief.

The core belief takes different forms for different people: “I’m not enough”, “I’m inadequate”, “I’m about to be found out”. Underneath the wording, it is the same old inheritance: a nervous system built to watch for danger that has not gone away simply because you became senior, capable, or visibly in control. Significant formative moments earlier in life, often small ones, subconsciously taught your nervous system a particular way of keeping that belief from being exposed. That is the job of the Mask: not a shield, but a habit that hardened under pressure until it stopped feeling like a choice.

For the leader in the school hall, that habit is over-performance and relentless output. It formed long before this evening, and it does not distinguish between a boardroom and a school hall. Stillness simply gives the Mask nothing to register as achievement, and the absence itself gets read as danger.

How this pattern shows up in senior leaders

The Overachiever Mask is one pattern I see frequently in founders and CEOs, and it rarely announces itself as a problem, because for a long time it looks like the opposite of one. It looks like the person everyone wants running the business. It shows up as the instinct to fill any unclaimed hour with output, and a low, persistent unease in the hour when there is nothing left to produce.

For a leader operating under this Mask, achievement has become the only reliable strategy for exposing the underlying belief to the world. Often, rest offers no respite from it. Neither does simply being present at a school play, however much you want to be there, without a phone in your hand. So, the Mask treats stillness itself as a kind of danger, not because anything is at risk, but because nothing is being proven, and proof is the only currency the Mask accepts to keep the core belief from exposure.

What it costs

The immediate cost is small: twelve minutes of a ninety-minute play, half-watched. The larger cost is what the pattern trains a leader to believe about rest, which is that it has to be earned, justified, or interrupted. Leaders operating this way rarely burn out from the work itself. They burn out from never getting the signal that it is safe to stop.

It also costs the people around them. A team led by someone who cannot rest learns quickly that visible busyness gets noticed and rewarded, whether it is what the business needs. A 2025 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine put the cost of a single burnt-out executive at over fifteen thousand pounds a year in lost output, and that figure does not count the pace their team feels obliged to match.

The reframe

The achievement was never the point. It was always a stand-in for something the core belief refused to accept on its own: that you are enough without having produced anything at all. A leader does not need to stop achieving to test this. They only need to notice, once, that the world did not end during the twelve minutes they were simply watching their child on a stage.

One thing to try this week

Choose one period this week, even fifteen minutes, where you deliberately produce nothing. Not a walk you turn into a call. Not admin you tell yourself is restful. Notice what comes up in the stillness. That discomfort is the Mask, not a sign that something is actually wrong. And that fact that you can observe the Mask, means you are not it.

This is what Leading Unmasked is all about. Freedom from subconscious, free-based patterns of behaviour that hold so many of us back in leadership and life.

Until next week,

Gavin

Sources: DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025; American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2025), cost of executive burnout research, cited in WorkTime (2026). DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025; WorkTime employee burnout statistics