Announcer,

hello and welcome back to Clover. I want to start today by naming something that I think a lot of us are feeling, especially if you're listening to this in December, but that we don't really talk about. It's not burnout or breakdown, it's not failure. It's the quieter kind of exhaustion that shows up after a long year of leading, deciding, showing up and being on I've been calling it the leadership hangover. And if you've had a year where from the outside, things look good or even really good, but internally, you just feel tired in a way that you can't explain. I want you to know you're not alone. Here's what I mean when I say leadership hangover. It's not that dramatic version of burnout where everything falls apart. Most of the time. You're still functioning, you're still doing the work, you're still showing up to the meetings and making the decisions and answering the questions. But underneath that, there's emotional fatigue, there's decision fatigue, there's the weight of being the person people rely on over and over again. And because you're still capable, it's easy to tell yourself you're fine or that you shouldn't complain, or that you just need to push through a little longer, but pushing through is usually how we miss the signal entirely, and December in particular has a way of making this feel louder. You're wrapping up the year, which means reflecting on everything you did and everything you didn't. You're being asked about goals and plans and what's next, sometimes before you even had a chance to exhale. At the same time, there's family holidays, expectations and this underlying pressure to feel grateful, grateful for the opportunities, the success, for the life that you built. And that makes it really hard to say out loud, I'm proud of what I did this year, and I'm also completely exhausted by it. So instead, a lot of us carry guilt on top of fatigue, like being tired means we're ungrateful or weak or somehow failing at the thing we worked so hard to build. But gratitude and exhaustion can exist at the same time. One doesn't counsel out the other. So it's tricky about a leadership hangover is that it doesn't always look the way we expect it to. Sometimes it looks like numbness or things that used to excite you just don't land the same way anymore. Sometimes it shows up as irritability. Your patience is shorter, your tolerance is lower, and things that normally wouldn't bother you suddenly do. Sometimes it's avoidance decisions you normally make quickly feel heavy, so you put them off, not because you don't know what to do, but because you're tired of deciding, and sometimes it just feels like this flatness. You're not unhappy, you're not happy, you're just done. It's not a personal flaw. It's a nervous system that's been carrying a lot for a long time. So let me say this clearly, if this resonates, here's what I don't want you to do right now. I don't want you to label yourself as burned out and panic. I don't want you to make a dramatic life change, and I definitely don't want you setting aggressive goals to try to get your spark back. December is not the time for reinvention, but it's the time for honesty with yourself. You don't need to figure out your next big move. You don't need a five year plan, and you don't need to fix yourself, what you probably need is a little more gentleness than you've been allowing. Here's a reframe that's been helpful for me. A leadership hangover isn't a sign that something is wrong with you. It's a signal that you've been carrying a lot, often quietly, often competently and often without much space to set it down. So instead of asking yourself, what's wrong with me, try asking this instead. What would support look like right now? Instead of success, support might look like fewer decisions. It might look like rest that doesn't need to be earned. It might look like boundaries that don't come with long explanations. Sometimes, support is simply letting things be good enough for a while, and as the year winds down, I want to offer you this permission. You don't need to end the year energized. You don't need clarity yet, and you don't need to reinvent yourself before January. You're not behind, you're not failing, you're human, and you've been leading. So thanks for spending this time with me today. If this episode resonated, I hope it helped you feel a little less alone in this season. I'll see you next week. You.