The Heavy Burden of Our Own Expectations

She appeared confident, quick and sharp in her responses. Yet something in the conversation felt heavy.

It was as if she was carrying something invisible.

I asked:

“I sense some heaviness. Does that resonate?”

She looked at me and stopped speaking. There was a long pause, as if she was turning inward and carefully searching for the right words.

She had recently stepped into a significant leadership role in a difficult market, one marked by intense competition and instability.

“The role I’ve just started feels like an oversized costume,” she eventually said. “I have too much responsibility.”

“Too much responsibility,” I asked, “or too many expectations of yourself?”

Another long pause.

“Yes. Exactly. No one puts the same expectations on me as I do.”

When responsibility quietly becomes over-responsibility

She was not only carrying responsibility for her role, her decisions and her team.

Somewhere inside, she had also taken responsibility for the instability of the market, the uncertainty surrounding the organisation and outcomes that no individual leader could fully control.

When the ground outside did not feel steady, she responded by trying to become even more controlled, competent and responsible inside.

This can look like strength.

It can also become an enormous hidden drain on our energy.

Over-responsibility rarely announces itself dramatically. It appears through thoughts such as:

I should have anticipated this.

I need to know the answer.

I cannot afford to make a mistake.

If the team is struggling, I am failing.

If the business does not succeed, I have not done enough.

The leader’s formal responsibility remains the same. But internally, the role expands until it includes almost everything: the market, the organisation, other people’s reactions and every possible outcome.

Eventually, the leadership role really does begin to feel like an oversized costume.

The expectations nobody else has asked us to meet

There can be a considerable distance between the expectations attached to a role and the expectations we attach to ourselves.

This is especially relevant when capable people step into larger positions. The promotion may be external, but internally they are still trying to prove that they deserve to be there.

Instead of growing into the role, they try to eliminate every sign of uncertainty.

Yet uncertainty is not evidence that we are unqualified. It is an unavoidable part of leadership, particularly in complex and unstable environments.

The more senior the role, the less likely it is that one person can know, predict or control everything. Leadership is no longer primarily about having all the answers. It becomes the capacity to stay present, think clearly, involve others and act responsibly when no perfect answer exists.

Do women carry this differently?

I have noticed this pattern particularly often among accomplished women: their competence is visible, but so is the internal pressure to continuously prove it.

This does not mean that all women doubt themselves, or that men do not struggle with self-imposed expectations. We are individuals, and leadership pressure takes many different forms.

But women may enter senior roles while navigating contradictory expectations. Be decisive, but not intimidating. Be ambitious, but also accommodating. Be confident, while knowing that your competence may be scrutinised more closely. When you are one of few women in the room, an individual mistake can feel as though it carries more meaning than simply being human.

Under these conditions, self-doubt is not necessarily a personal deficiency. Sometimes it is an intelligent response to years of being evaluated against narrow or conflicting standards.

One experienced female executive once told me:

“Everyone is already doubting me - the society, the executive board. Why would I also doubt myself?”

We laughed.

But she could say this after more than twenty years of executive experience. She had developed the inner authority to stop participating in other people’s doubt. She had strong boundaries.

Someone entering such a role for the first time may not feel that freedom yet.

This matters for male leaders, too. Supporting female colleagues does not mean reassuring them that they are capable while leaving the environment unchanged. It can mean examining whose competence is presumed and whose must repeatedly be demonstrated. It can mean making expectations explicit, allowing learning without humiliation and ensuring that uncertainty is not interpreted differently depending on who expresses it.

The load I carried myself

My client asked me:

“How did you deal with this in your corporate role?”

Sometimes I share my own experiences in coaching, and sometimes I do not. The question is always whether sharing will serve the client rather than shift attention towards me.

This time, I answered.

Looking back at my corporate career, I can see that one of my heaviest burdens came from within. The expectation that I should be outstanding, highly knowledgeable and consistently competent.

Not knowing was not an option. Not being able to do something felt equally unacceptable.

Whenever I noticed even a slight doubt or uncertainty in myself, I judged it immediately.

Sometimes I would crumble and hide. At other times, I would go all in working harder and paying almost any price to overcome the feeling that I was not enough.

From the outside, this could resemble ambition and high performance. Inside, it was often fear wearing the clothes of excellence.

And this strategy works for many, until the cost becomes too high.

What actually belongs to you?

There is a difference between responsibility and the fantasy of total control.

Healthy responsibility asks:

What is mine to influence?

Over-responsibility insists:

I must guarantee the outcome.

The first creates agency. The second creates a burden no leader can sustainably carry.

Perhaps the work is not to care less or lower every expectation. It is to distinguish between the responsibilities that genuinely belong to us and the weight we have added ourselves.

It is learning to say:

I can prepare thoroughly without knowing everything.

I can influence the conditions without controlling the outcome.

I can take my role seriously without making myself responsible for the entire system.

I can lead while still growing into the role.

Questions for reflection

• Which expectations genuinely belong to your role and which have you placed on yourself?

• What are you currently carrying that is not fully within your control?

• Where have you confused uncertainty with incompetence?

• What do you believe you must prove, and to whom?

• How does your inner pressure affect your decisions, visibility and energy?

• What would responsible leadership look like without over-responsibility?

• If you trusted that you did not have to know everything, what might you do differently?

• What support would allow you to grow into your “oversized costume” rather than exhaust yourself trying to fill it immediately?

• Based on your answers, what will be your next step?

Sometimes the role is not too large.

Sometimes we have simply made the burden larger than the role.