IN 2020, my body made a decision my mind was not ready to make. I had spent years managing projects and directing teams. I was able to sit in rooms and connect the dots between projected goals, desired outcomes and the obstacles in between. I ignored several flags, even though I knew what they were. I knew the language of depletion and the particular silence of a woman who has been carrying something too heavy for too long. I witnessed it with my mother. And I felt it in myself, but I never really understood the gravity of it, even though I had been experiencing it and seeing it in many around me.

And then I burned out. Not a quiet burnout. Not the kind you can schedule around or explain away with a busy season. The kind where your body stops cooperating and the performance you have been maintaining, with considerable discipline and considerable cost, simply cannot continue. The kind where the message is no longer subtle.

What made it so difficult to recognise, even then, was how thoroughly I had been trained not to see it. I had learned, like so many Caribbean women, that strength meant endurance. That stopping to listen to your body was a luxury. That the right response to difficulty was to push through it, carry it quietly, and show up the next day as if nothing had happened. I had built a professional identity on the very conditioning that was now dismantling me.

The five practices I am about to share are not things I developed in a training room or discovered in the research literature. They are things I had to learn in my own life, through my own burnout, at a cost I would not wish on anyone.

Practice one: Name it without negotiating with it

The first thing I had to learn was the hardest: to name what was happening without immediately placating or avoiding it.

When the burnout arrived, my first instinct was to negotiate with it. This is just a difficult season. Once this project is finished, I will rest. I have been through worse than this. I am not the kind of person who burns out.

Every one of those sentences was a way of avoiding the plain truth, which was that I was burnt out and had been for longer than I wanted to admit.

Caribbean women are extraordinarily skilled at this negotiation. We were raised to reframe difficulty as endurance, to find the silver lining before anyone sees us acknowledging the cloud. I had done it so consistently, for so long, that I genuinely could not tell the difference between being resilient and being in denial.

What finally broke through was not a dramatic moment of clarity. It was exhaustion. And in that tiredness, I finally said it plainly: I am burnt out.

That sentence was the beginning.

Practice two: Stop performing wellness while you are unwell

Around the same time that I was negotiating privately with my burnout, I was performing perfectly well for everyone around me. I was very good at this. And the better I was at it, the longer the burnout went unaddressed, because nobody around me had any reason to believe something was wrong. The people who might have offered support did not know support was needed.

What I had to learn, slowly and with considerable resistance, was that the performance was not protecting me. It was to protect the burnout. Every time I showed up composed when I was not composed, I was extending the conditions that were making me unwell.

Practice three: Identify what you are holding that belongs to someone else

DR KERRIANN PEART.

When I finally took an honest inventory of what I was carrying, I had to sit with a difficult reality: a significant portion of it was not mine. Not in the sense that I had stolen anything. But in the sense that I had accumulated responsibilities, obligations, emotional labour, and invisible tasks over years of being the reliable one, the capable one, the one who could be counted on to absorb the extra and keep things moving.

I had not noticed how much of it belonged to other people because I had never stopped long enough to look. When I finally made the list, and asked honestly for each item whether it genuinely belonged to me, I had to reckon with how much I had taken on not because it was mine but because I was capable of carrying it and nobody had ever taken it back.

Practice four: Build a delegation system, not a permission structure

Here is the thing I had to admit about myself: I had built a system in which everything required me.

I told myself this was because I had high standards. Because certain things needed to be done in a particular way. Because I had learned, early and repeatedly, that if I did not do it myself it would not be done correctly.

That last belief was not entirely without basis. There were genuine contexts, growing up and building a career, where the consequence of things not being done correctly fell disproportionately on me. And so I had adapted, as Caribbean women so often adapt: By becoming indispensable.

But eventually the system you built to protect yourself through competence becomes the system that prevents you from being anything other than always on.

What I had to build instead was not a system where I checked and approved and oversaw. I had to build a system where other people were genuinely responsible for their own portions of the work.

Practice five: Recalibrate your definition of strength

This is the practice that took the longest. It is still in progress. I grew up with a very specific definition of strength. It looked like endurance. That definition of strength was modelled for me. I celebrated it in others. I performed it myself with considerable investment.

And I had to learn, slowly and against a great deal of internal resistance, that this definition was not strength at all. It was survival. And survival, while sometimes necessary, is not a sustainable leadership practice or a healthy life.

Real strength, I have come to understand, looks different. It looks like knowing when to stop before the stopping is forced on you.

I did not arrive at this understanding easily. I arrived at it through burnout, through the humility of a body that refused to keep performing what my mind was insisting on. And I am grateful for it, in the way you are sometimes grateful for the difficult thing that turns out to have been exactly what was needed.

You were not built to burn. You were built to last. Those are not the same thing. And the difference between them is worth everything.