Belinda Pruyne, a longtime Chief Guide, is an executive leadership advisor, strategic consultant, and master coach
You schedule the workout. You protect the therapy appointment. You take the vacation, or at least you plan to. And still. There is a kind of depletion that none of those practices touch, a specific exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from not knowing yourself clearly enough to recognize when you are drifting from who you actually are.
McKinsey and LeanIn's 2025 Women in the Workplace report found that 60% of senior-level women report feeling frequently burned out, compared to 50% of their male peers. Gallup's tracking from 2022 to 2025 shows that gap has held at roughly 10 percentage points every year. This is not a bad quarter. It is a structural condition driven, in part, by the one practice most executive development programs never touch.
Self-Care Predicts Success More Than Strategy
We have been told a story about self-care, that it lives at the edges of a leader's life as something you earn after the real work is done. That story is wrong, and it may be one of the most costly beliefs women leaders carry.
Research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only 10 to 15% actually are. Working with colleagues who lack self-awareness can cut a team's chances of success in half. As Daniel Goleman defines it, self-awareness is emotional intelligence: knowing your internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions. Knowing yourself clearly enough to make intentional choices is one of the deepest forms of self-care available to a leader.
A separate study by Green Peak Partners and Cornell University found that across 72 senior executives, a high self-awareness score was the single strongest predictor of overall success, outranking technical expertise, drive, and ambition.
Not strategy. Not financial acumen. Knowing yourself.
Self-Care Is the Birthplace of Innovation
Rather than pushing harder, innovation comes from creating the internal conditions that allow new thinking to emerge.
When you are depleted, you default to repeating what has worked before, managing risk rather than embracing possibility, and leading from fear rather than vision.
Depletion narrows the aperture. Self-care opens it.
Research by TalentSmart found that 90% of top-performing leaders demonstrate high emotional intelligence, and self-awareness is its foundation. Leaders who know themselves think more originally, adapt more quickly, and build cultures where innovation is possible for everyone around them.
If you are leading with an old story, you are solving new problems with outdated tools. Self-care is what creates the space to write a new one.
The 360-Degree View: Your Self-Care Audit
Self-care is a whole-life practice. One of the most powerful tools I use with leaders is what I call the All About You Wellness Wheel — a 360-degree audit across every dimension of a sustainable life. This is not a performance review. It is a judgment-free zone. Rate yourself from 1 to 10. Ten means fully alive and flourishing. One means this area is calling for your attention.
- Physical health: Energy, movement, sleep, nourishment — how well are you caring for your body?
- Emotional wellbeing: Do you process what you feel or push through it?
- Intellectual stimulation: Are you learning and being challenged in ways that excite you?
- Spiritual grounding: Whatever that means to you. A sense of meaning, purpose, or connection to something larger than your role.
- Community and belonging: Do you have people around you who truly know you and care for you, not just your title?
- Purpose and impact: Are you doing work that matters in a way that reflects your values?
- Rest and recovery: Are you building genuine restoration into your life, or running on fumes and calling it resilience?
- Joy and pleasure: When did you last do something purely because it delights you?
Now, look at what you identified. Don’t judge it, just notice. Where are you thriving? Where are you depleted? Where have you been telling yourself “later” for so long that later has become never? That visual is your self-care map, and what it reveals is costing you more than you know.
The Self-Care Practice That Changes Everything
If there is a single practice I have seen transform leaders more reliably than any other, it is replacing judgment with curiosity.
When you look inward and see something you don't like, a pattern, a reaction, a gap between who you want to be and how you showed up, the instinctive move is judgment.
Judgment closes the loop; curiosity opens it.
When you replace the internal critic with a genuine question — “What is this telling me?” “What do I need?” — you shift from self-condemnation to self-knowledge. And self-knowledge is the foundation of all real self-care and all real innovation.
A Self-Care Practice to Try This Week
The next time you notice frustration, avoidance, or depletion, pause before the story. Get curious instead. Ask: “What is this telling me about what I need right now?” “What value of mine is not being honored?” You don't need to solve it. Simply notice it, without judgment.
Self-Care Is Not a Luxury
Women at the senior leadership level have earned the right to consider it, because it’s the practice that makes everything else possible: the clarity to lead with purpose, the creativity to innovate, the resilience to hold steady, and the capacity to sustain your impact over the full arc of a career worth having.
The women leaders who will define what's possible in the next decade are the ones who understand that taking extraordinary care of themselves IS the work.
Chief pairs senior women leaders with ICF-certified executive coaches like Belinda for personalized sessions on sustaining both leadership performance and wellbeing. Learn more.
