She is the one everyone calls first.
The client rings her instead of her ops manager. Her child texts her and not their father. Her dear elderly mother asks for her and not her siblings. And employees wait outside her office, just to ask her a quick question.
She wonders how this ever started. Then on reflection, it built itself over years, one yes at a time. She became the reliable one in every room she walks into.
At work, she holds the standard when everyone else quietly drops it because it doesn’t matter this once. She insists it does matter and instils consistency of standard. At home, she remembers the dentist appointment, the school form, the empty fridge. With ageing parents, she takes the hospital calls, chases the care package, wades through the waiting room paperwork. With her employees, she is the calm centre on the day everything goes wrong. With her friends, she is the one who turns up with the casserole for a sick friend. In her community, she is the one who says yes when the committee needs a chair, yet probably kicks herself for saying yes… again, but does the best job ever.
Ask anyone who knows her and they will tell you the same thing. She is completely capable. She always has been.
This is exactly the problem.
Capability can hide need. Now, let’s be clear, she is more than capable of caring for herself. She doesn’t ask and people around her don’t think she needs to be asked. They assume if she needed something, she’d ask. But the problem is she doesn’t ask.
Nobody checks in on the person who never seems to need checking in on. Nobody offers help to the one who has never once asked for it. The competence that makes her indispensable is the same competence that makes her invisible, and the two have been sitting side by side for years, unnoticed.
A single point of failure
This has a name in business terms too. A single point of failure. Every business owner recognises what happens when one system carries the full load without backup.
It works, beautifully, right up until it doesn’t. Then, like a collapsing pile of dominoes, it fails all at once, and it takes everything downstream with it.
She is that system. She’s not a server or a supply chain. She is a wonderful woman.
Her team’s confidence to deliver exceptional client results runs on her calm demeanour. Her business has been consistently high performing because it runs on her attention. Her family’s stability runs on her memory. Nobody has built the life equivalent of a Business Continuity Plan for what happens if her capacity to deliver runs out. Why? Because nobody has ever seen it run out. Everyone has quietly built their lives on the assumption that she is inexhaustible.
She has never been inexhaustible. She has simply never been given permission to say so.
There is an old tree in most established orchards. The one that carries the heaviest harvest, year after year. Birds nest in it and children climb it. Whoever is tired sits down, with their back against its trunk in its shade without a second thought. Nobody prunes it, waters it, or checks its roots, because it has never once failed to produce. Every orchard has a tree like this, quietly feeding everyone around it. And every orchard eventually loses one, because a tree that gives without ever being tended eventually runs out of what it has to give.
Same with a business. A business built on one endlessly capable person is not resilient. It is at risk.
Where it shows up first
This is where it stops being a personal issue and starts being a commercial one. The woman holding her business together while also holding her family, her parents, her team and her community together is not running at capacity. She is over capacity and is running at deficit. She is covering the shortfall with whatever she has left of herself. This happens week in and week out.
The deficit shows up in her decisions before it shows up anywhere else. A fraction of a second hesitation or she settles for someone to hire because she is too exhausted to hold out for the right one or explain why she feels someone isn’t quite right. It shows up in the growth she quietly declines because she just can’t find the space to have more conversations. Ultimately, it shows up in her putting off the sale of the business because she knows the business is not sellable when the business still relies so heavily on her.
Who nourishes her?
Peace is not a reward for finishing everything on her list. It is what allows her to see the list clearly in the first place. Purpose gets harder to reach the more of her energy goes to holding everyone else up. And profit, real, sustainable profit, has never once come from a woman running on empty. It comes from a business built to carry its own weight, so that she is free to lead it rather than prop it up.
The question that has been playing on my mind is, “Who nourishes the woman who usually nourishes other people?”
Get in touch and let’s have a confidential conversation that costs nothing, but might change everything. 30 minutes for a virtual coffee. No script. No sales pitch. Just an honest conversation between two people. Nothing to prepare… just turn up.Love. Gail.