Where High Performance And Resilience Differ

Burnout, Boundaries And Belonging In The Lives Of Ambitious Women

In a previous post on LinkedIn I explored High Performer Habits That Quietly Hold Women Back. I identified 10 behaviours that look like strengths that women get rewarded for early in their careers, but can start hold them back when they want to advance. See the link to the post below.

www.linkedin.com

In the last post in this series leading up to Women’s Day I asked: | Julia Stewart

In the last post in this series leading up to Women’s Day I asked: Is the path that got you here still serving you? This week, we begin to unpack that question. As Women’s Month approaches, I’m exploring what habits of high performing women may no longer be serving them.   You’ve worked hard, you’re competent, committed, and respected. But somewhere along the way, your progress slowed down. Now, if you’re honest with yourself, you feel like you’re stagnating and you’re a bit stuck.   This is the paradox of success. The very behaviours that help high-achieving women succeed early on can quietly start working against them later in their careers. They’re subtle habits, often driven by strengths, like conscientiousness, collaboration, and commitment. But when overused, they can mutate into limitations. They are habits like : ⚠️ Reluctance to claim your achievements ⚠️ Over-preparing ⚠️ Indiscriminately prioritising loyalty over growth ⚠️ Unchecked perfectionism ⚠️ Being over-accomodating These patterns can fly under the radar for some time. But at some point they catch up with us. In the carousel below, I outline 10 common habits that help women succeed early on but can hold them back from rising further in their careers. Inspired by the research of Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith in How Women Rise, these 10 inner habits are worth reflecting on if you’re a woman ready to move to the next level of leadership, or a leader who wants to be an ally in helping others do the same. This is not about fixing women. It’s about strengthening your agency through awareness, intention, and courageous choices. ✨ It’s about Letting Go to Level Up. 👉 What’s one habit you’re starting to question on your leadership journey?What’s one habit you might need to upgrade? #WomensMonth #WomenInLeadership #HowWomenRise #LevelingUp #ExecutiveCoaching #AuthenticLeadership #HighAchievingWomen #CareerGrowth #ReclaimYourAgency #EmotionalIntelligence #CareerAcceleration #AllyshipAtWork

In this article, I explore a deeper concern that lies behind many of these habits, namely: the emotional toll of sustaining high performance in environments that don’t always support your full humanity.

Some women are not advancing not because they’re not capable, but because they are exhausted.They’re carrying the weight of being competent, likeable, responsible, prepared, agreeable, and grateful, often all at once.They’re navigating the fine line between being ambitious and being acceptable.

They are succeeding and proving their value by overextending themselvesAnd because they’ve mastered high performance, it can be easy to miss the warning signs of depletion until it’s gone too far.

High Performance ≠ Resilience

Sometimes we might conflate high performance and resilience, seeing them as more or less the same thing. Both require sustained effort under pressure, mental toughness, self-regulation, adaptability, inner strength and coping skills. But they are not the same.

High performance is often about output and delivering under pressure, staying composed, keeping standards high.

Resilience is different. It’s about adaptability, recovery and inner strength. It also relies on something that often many high performers don’t prioritise and therefore lack, which is margin.

When women consistently over-function whether due to pressure from the system or organizational culture, or simply to ensure they succeed at all costs, they are often praised for how well they’re coping. In reality, they are burning out.

In Tasha Eurich’s book Shatterproof  she introduces the concept of a Resilience Ceiling which is a personal threshold where even the most capable professionals can no longer cope sustainably. Once it’s breached, familiar strategies like pushing harder or staying composed no longer work. Minor setbacks feel major.

The challenge is that most high-achieving women don’t recognise the ceiling until they’ve smashed into it. This is because the very traits that once protected them, like grit, emotional control and perfectionism, also hide the real strain they are under.

True resilience isn’t about stoicism. It’s about knowing when to pause, ask for help, and recover. It’s about not mistaking suppression or denial for strength.

The Burnout Loop

Burnout is not just about workload.It’s about the chronic emotional dissonance of working in ways that conflict with your values, needs, and wellbeing.

You feed burnout when:

• You say yes when you mean no.

• You pour energy into roles or relationships that don’t reciprocate.

• You succeed at the cost of yourself.

And when you’re ambitious, it can be hard to stop. You’ve been told that pushing through is strength, that over-delivering gets noticed and that you can rest once it’s done. But it’s never done.

Eurich highlights that self-awareness alone isn’t enough.Many women know  they’re exhausted or over-functioning, but they lack the permission or power to act on that insight. She calls this the self-awareness gap, which is the space between recognising your emotional state and actually being able to shift the system around you.

Without systemic change, even the most self-aware, intentional professionals can spiral into burnout because the culture keeps rewarding over-extension.

The Boundary Dilemma

So many of the habits I outlined last week such as over-preparing, people-pleasing, and perfectionism are boundary issues in disguise.

Boundaries aren’t just about saying “no.”They’re about:

• Deciding what deserves your time, energy, and care.

• Letting go of roles and rhythms or routines that quietly erode you.

• Remembering that your needs are not a liability.

Boundaries protect your capacity, not just your calendar.And yet, in many workplaces, setting them still feels risky, especially for women who fear being labelled difficult, ungrateful, or “not a team player.”

The Missing Piece: Belonging

Resilience thrives in environments of psychological safety, where you don’t have to armour up, where your ambition is seen as legitimate, and where your limits aren’t weaponised against you.

Without belonging, boundaries feel too risky. Without boundaries, in high pressure environments, burnout becomes almost inevitable, it just the degree that differs.

Eurich reinforces this notion. According to her, resilience is relational. We are more shatterproof when we are seen, not just for our output, but for our limits, values, and emotional truth.

Belonging, then, isn’t a soft add-on. It’s a critical resilience factor. When women don’t feel psychologically safe, they don’t just hide their struggles, they suppress their ideas, their ambition, and their humanity (their needs). And the irony is, the more isolated or invisible they feel, the more they are expected to “power” their way through it alone.

Expanding Beyond Resilience As a Mindset

If last week’s post helped you identify the habits that might be holding you back, this one invites you to look underneath them.

Ask yourself:

• What’s the emotional cost of how I’m working?

• Where am I trading wellbeing for approval?

• What would it look like to build sustainable success, not just visible success?

As Eurich reminds us:

You can’t build resilience in environments that consistently deplete you.And you can’t sustain excellence on emotional overdraft.

Resilience isn’t just a mindset. It’s a system of support. It's time we stopped asking women dig deeper beyond than what’s sustainable, and work together to create conditions where they don’t have to.

This is not about fixing women.

It’s about shifting the culture that confuses excessive self-sacrifice with strength.

It starts with honest conversations about what we’re carrying, how it’s affecting us, and how we begin to rewrite the rules.

In closing, here are some questions to ask yourself:

What helps you maintain your edge without abandoning yourself?

Where are you beginning to redefine what resilience looks like?

Want Support Navigating the Shift?

I help high-achieving professionals unlearn the patterns that once helped them succeed, but now hold them back. If you're ready to evolve from over-functioning (womeninto clear, confident, authentic leadership, let’s talk. 

Book a FREE DISCOVERY CALL by emailing me on js@juliastewart.co.za or send me a whats app on 0836802363.

Would you like more agency, courage and resilience and significantly less stress, anxiety and conflict in your life? Contact me for a deep dive 90 minute session for only R1500 (includes an EQ report).

FOLLOW ME ON LINKEDIN www.linkedin.com/in/julia-stewart-consulting-and-coaching where I provide practical tips each week on a range of topics to support you in accelerating your career path and becoming a future-ready leader.