The most common thing I hear from leaders right now is this: I am overwhelmed.
And no wonder. Executive orders pouring out of the White House, cray daily numbers from the stock market, inboxes that never empty, incoming texts, HR fires, emergency Zooms, Signal threads, last-minute comment letters, a zig-zagging economy, board requests, donor meetings — it all just multiplies. Pick your metaphor: a dike springing leaks faster than you can plug them or Lucy and the chocolates on the conveyor belt. Whatever image fits, it points to the same truth: leadership in mission-driven organizations right now requires a lot of a person.
I’ve written before about prioritization, about creating distance, about the discipline of self-care. I’ll return to some of that below. But first I want to do something simpler: acknowledge that this is one of the hardest times in recent memory to be doing this work. And even though overwhelm has a way of making us feel like we’re failing and alone, I want to say clearly — you are not. You were chosen for your role because you have the skill, the temperament, and the values to navigate these times. Trust that.
Resilience starts with self-care — and that’s not soft advice
Your greatest asset right now is your resilience. And the primary thing feeding it is how you take care of yourself.
One of the insights that has stayed with me from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet is both simple and radical: you cannot save the planet if you cannot first save yourself. If we aren’t stewarding our own resources — mind, body, spirit — we cannot do this work sustainably. And yet I see leaders grinding through illness, taking calls from bed, answering Slack messages at midnight, convincing themselves that the extra hours are catching them up.
They’re not.
There is always more work to do. That can feel discouraging — but it can also be liberating. If the demands of this moment are going to be there regardless of how hard you push, then the chaos can wait for you to rest, reset, and return with strength. That reframe isn’t an excuse; it’s a strategy.
Dr. Rick Hanson, whose work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, mindfulness, and positive psychology, argues that resilience isn’t just about enduring hard things — it’s about actively building inner strengths like self-agency, gratitude, and compassion, wired directly into your nervous system. His core insight is that we can train ourselves to be less reactive to the chaos, not by avoiding it, but by developing the internal resources to meet it differently. Worth a read: Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness.
Playing the long game
The overwhelm many of us feel is not incidental — it is, in significant part, a strategic feature of this economic and geopolitical moment. When we’re drawn into responding in real time to every executive order, every jump or fall in the stock market, every piece of breaking news, every signal of alarm, we become less effective. We are playing whack-a-mole on their terms.
The long view is an act of resistance.
Brené Brown has written about the particular challenge leaders face, in her latest book Strong Ground, when the world seems to be moving faster than our nervous systems can absorb — she argues that one of the most important skills for leaders right now is learning to create space between the moment of stimulus and the moment of response. A helpful mantra for this moment: “Between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response, lies our growth and freedom.” (- unknown, possibly Viktor Frankl). That pause is not weakness. It is judgment.
Staying anchored to your long-term north star while remaining flexible enough to pivot when it’s genuinely required — that is the discipline. It’s also what protects you from the exhaustion of emergency mode, where we are afraid to open email or answer the phone.
You are not alone in this
One of the things I find myself saying most often to leaders these days: none of us are doing this solo. The sense of overwhelm is near-universal across our sector right now, and that shared experience is both painful and important. It means the problem isn’t you.
Susan David, a Harvard psychologist and author of Emotional Agility, argues that the path through difficulty is not to push feelings aside or to brood in them, but to move through them with curiosity — using our values as a compass for what to do next. For nonprofit leaders, whose work is fundamentally values-driven, this is especially resonant. When the news cycle threatens to sweep us into reactivity, returning to values is how we find our footing.
Hope is not a strategy. But community is. Taking time to put the weight down — to rest, restore, connect with peers who understand what this work actually demands — is not a luxury. It is the infrastructure of effective leadership.
That is what builds a better world.
