The Work Needs You, But It Can’t Consume You

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

A few weekends ago, several close friends and I went deep-sea fishing off Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. It was my first time. The trip had been nearly a year in the making, which says something about the difficulty seasoned leaders often have making room for themselves.

Each time we selected a date, someone became busy. A meeting appeared. A deadline moved. A responsibility demanded attention. We kept postponing something we said mattered because something else always appeared to matter more. Eventually, we chose a date and committed to it. Not everyone who had hoped to join us could make it, but those of us who could went. 

Sometimes, self-care begins with accepting that conditions will never be perfect. If you wait until no one needs you, nothing is pending, and every problem has been resolved, you may never leave the office, turn off the phone, sit beside the water, or listen to your own breath.

Atlantic Beach is about an 8-hour drive from Atlanta. I could’ve flown and saved time, but saving time wasn’t the purpose of the trip. I needed to experience time differently. So I drove.

I listened to the sound of the road. I stopped halfway in Columbia, South Carolina, checked into a hotel, watched television, and did very little. The next morning, I continued toward the coast. Even before I reached the boat, the journey was teaching me how difficult it had become to slow down without feeling as though I were neglecting something.

That difficulty is especially real for seasoned leaders, thought leaders, advocates, builders, and people whose work is connected to a deep sense of calling. For us, the work is rarely just work. It’s connected to our identity, our history, our faith, and our understanding of why we’re here.

We don’t simply manage organizations; we carry visions. We don’t merely complete assignments; we respond to needs that often existed long before our organizations did.

Even when we leave the office, the work travels with us. It follows us into the car, sits beside us at dinner, and waits near the bed while we try to sleep. Our bodies may leave the meeting, but our minds remain at the conference table.

After decades of leadership, urgency can begin to feel like evidence of usefulness. Exhaustion can masquerade as commitment. We tell ourselves that the work can’t move without us, and sometimes the people around us reinforce that belief. 

Yet one of the hardest lessons of leadership is also one of the clearest: If everything depends on your constant presence, you’ve built dependency, not sustainability. Self-care, then, isn’t an escape from leadership. It is part of leadership.

I’ve thought about this more deeply as friends, colleagues, and fellow soldiers of purpose have passed away over the last several years. I would never suggest that overwork alone caused their deaths. Life and health are far more complicated than that. Their passing does, however, remind me that time continues to move regardless of our titles, intentions, unfinished projects, or crowded calendars. Time waits for none of us.

The question isn’t whether time will move. It will. The question is how we’ll care for ourselves within the time we have, and whether our daily choices support the life required to fulfill the calling we claim to honor.

As I wrote this, I was only hours away from the final stage of an oral-health journey that has lasted nearly a year and a half. I’ve lost all my teeth and have gone through the long process of replacing them. I’ve endured long periods of discomfort so that I could move toward something better.

Speaking is part of my calling. My mouth is one of the instruments through which I teach, advocate, encourage, and lead. Yet, like many people, I didn’t always give my oral health the attention it required. Eventually, neglect presented a bill that could no longer be postponed.

The experience has forced me to broaden my understanding of self-care. It isn’t limited to vacations, massages, fishing trips, or quiet weekends. Sometimes self-care means sitting in a chair you’d rather avoid. It means scheduling the examination, confronting the diagnosis, taking the medication, changing what you eat, speaking with a therapist, addressing grief, protecting your sleep, or admitting that your body has been asking for help.

Self-care can be physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and relational. It can be restorative, but it can also be uncomfortable. Caring for yourself sometimes requires doing something painful today so that pain doesn’t control your tomorrow.

For seasoned leaders, self-care must also include succession.

That may sound like an unusual connection. Rest is usually discussed as a personal matter, while succession is treated as an organizational one. In reality, they’re deeply connected. Leaders can’t rest if they leave every decision, relationship, and idea inside their heads. We can’t step away if no one else understands the vision well enough to carry it forward.

Part of the exhaustion many leaders experience comes from holding too much knowledge that has never been transferred.

I’m at a stage of life where I feel compelled to conduct what I sometimes call a “brain dump:” 

• Concepts I’ve carried for years but need to be written
• Lessons learned through success, failure, observation, and experience that need to be documented
• Ideas that have been living mostly in my mind but need to be organized so someone else can examine them, challenge them, improve them, and eventually build upon them

There’s something sobering about writing down what you know. It can feel like preparing for your own exit. None of us enjoys dwelling on our mortality. Yet we purchase insurance, prepare wills, save for retirement, plan for our children’s education, and make decisions about what should happen to our possessions.

Why would we protect our property but leave the treasures of our minds undocumented?

A seasoned leader’s legacy shouldn’t depend entirely on other people remembering what we once said in a meeting. Our teams shouldn’t have to reconstruct our vision from scattered emails, old presentations, and hallway conversations. If an idea matters, we should write it down and make it plain.

Documentation doesn’t mean that future leaders must follow every instruction exactly as we imagined it. Legacy isn’t control from the grave. The purpose is to give those who follow us access to the origin of the work: why it was created, what problem it was designed to address, how our thinking evolved, which mistakes shaped the model, and where we believed the work might go next.

Those who come after us deserve more than a set of tasks. They deserve the thinking behind them.

Every seasoned leader is already building upon work begun by someone else. We inherited ideas, movements, institutions, sacrifices, and unfinished assignments. Some of our predecessors taught us personally. Others left books, speeches, programs, organizations, and examples that reached us long after they were gone.

We owe the next generation the same generosity.

That’s why self-care and legacy belong in the same conversation. Rest preserves the leader. Documentation preserves the leader’s wisdom. Succession prepares others to carry on the work without requiring the founder to do everything forever.

A leader who never rests may shorten the years available to serve. A leader who never documents may leave decades of experience locked inside a life that was always temporary.

Seasoned leadership should therefore include two intentional practices:

• First, care for the whole person doing the work. Give your body rest, treatment, movement, nourishment, and medical attention. Give your mind quiet. Give your spirit room to listen. Give yourself permission to experience joy that produces no report, deliverable, or measurable outcome.

• Second, make time to empty your mind onto paper. Write the book. Record the story. Explain the model. Document the mistakes. Name the people who helped you. Describe how the vision changed. Let others see not only what you built, but how you learned to think about building it.

The work still needs us. Our families, organizations, communities, and causes benefit from our continued presence. But no righteous cause requires us to destroy ourselves in its service.

The boat will eventually return to shore. The office will still have problems. Emails will be waiting. Someone will need an answer. And if we’ve rested well, cared for what hurts, shared what we know, and prepared others to lead, we’ll return differently.

Perhaps that’s the invitation before seasoned leaders now: not to abandon the work, but to stop confusing our exhaustion with its success. We must care for the person carrying the vision and prepare the vision to outlive them.

The work should benefit from our lives. It should not consume them.