They forgot to tell the world about us…

You took "you can do anything" as a literal assignment. The world didn't get the same briefing.

Are you tired? I'm tired.

 Not the "I need a nap" kind of tired. The existential dread kind of tired. The I've been working my ass off for years only for Chad to get the recognition, or maybe even the promotion, over me kind of tired. The kind where you're putting in loads of effort because you actually care about your team and your work, but care isn't a "metric of success" so nobody else seems to...care? The kind where you're starting to wonder, what am I doing all of this for?

 I've had countless conversations with women recently who want to make a positive impact through their teams and their work but who are feeling a bit meh at the moment. To put it mildly. And I get it. I feel it too.

 A few months ago I had a conversation on the podcast Behind the Gloss about how most of us Millennial and Gen Z women were told we could do anything. Be anything. And we took it as a literal assignment. We went out and got the degrees, the training, and the experience. But it seems like nobody told the world that we, specifically you and me, could do anything?

 Because why is it that in the year of our lord Taylor Swift 2026, my girlfriends are turning down really good jobs because they don't have structural support for mothers? Why is it that a client showed up to a Like a Leader workshop and told me her PhD coworker was turned down for a job, asked for feedback, and was told to smile more? Why is it that my girlfriend is crying because a man with less than half her qualifications is up for the same award she is?

 Turns out the rah rah girlboss energy we got growing up doesn't quite match reality. Ot at least not, in the words of Meghan Markle, “yet.”

So what's a girl to do? Obviously we want to change the system! YAY! FIGHT THE METAPHORICAL MAN! But what I've noticed a lot of women in my circle actually doing is reevaluating what "anything" even means. Because it carried a lot. It meant succeeding according to traditional metrics: money, prestige, titles. But it's almost like we never stopped to ask ourselves if that's what we actually want. Or who we actually want to be.

 And I'm not saying we don't still want the money and the title, because I know you do and I definitely do, but there's a shift happening in the women I work with. It's about the cost of "anything." The emotional cost, the personal cost, the energetic, physical, mental, financial cost. And that goes for "anything" generally, but also for the way she leads.

She's done being told not to care and to lower her standards. The standards have been lowered for leadership and the results are in: NOT GOOD.

 So we do the work. We think about what we actually want. And we start thinking about pulling back, because after all, you spent hours on that presentation only for nobody to notice or care. But then! THEN!! We get hit with the guilt. You know the guilt. The ehh but I should be doing more guilt. The I'm better than this guilt. The but that line on my team's slide is not perfectly aligned with the other lines and I NEED to fix it guilt.

You can drive yourself absolutely nuts.

 And the other option seems to be continuing along exhausted no matter how many 20 minute NASA naps you take.

 The guilt spiral and the exhaustion are both signals that something isn't working. And perhaps, you're trying to operate without a clear sense of what you're actually "optimizing" for.

 And look, the system is still broken. Chad is still getting promoted. The PhD is still being told to smile more. That is real and it is enraging and we are not done fighting it. But we also can't wait for the system to fix itself before we figure out what we want from it. Both things have to happen.

 Here's the thing about presenting it as a binary though: there's actually more in there if we're willing to sit with the complexity for a second. What opens up when we stop forcing it into two options?

 Getting specific about what you actually want. Building a strategy around that. Choosing each step toward it carefully and deliberately. If that sounds messy, it's because it is. It takes reflection, and it takes time. And look, I know what our 2026 social media addicted brains have been told: you can have anything in 3 easy steps and see radical change in just one week. But when you're designing a strategy tailored specifically to your life, your specific needs and desires, there's no easy 5 step framework for that. Your life is not a listicle. This takes time, effort, and real work.

 The "anything" we were promised when we were younger was someone else's definition. The work here is figuring out yours.

 And if you're like, but Kels, I already told you, I'm freaking tired, I get it! But the alternatives are staying tired processing all that guilt, or staying tired doing all the things that aren't getting you anywhere anyway.

Let's start working on getting you the rest you need so you can actually get what you want - anything.

xoxo

Kelsey

This Week's Thing: 

Tell me what you want, what you really really want.

No seriously. Stop. I need you to actually answer that.

Not the answer that sounds good in a performance review. Not the thing you think you should want based on where you thought you'd be by now. What do YOU actually want from your work right now?

Take 10 minutes this week, phone down, and write it out. No filter, no editing yourself. 

• What would feel like enough? 

• What would feel like winning? 

• What are you actually optimizing for?

Because you cannot design a strategy around a goal you've never let yourself name.