The worst stretch of my career had no name…
…for about a year.
I was leading in technology, at IBM and elsewhere, and I was performing at a level that looked, from the outside, like it was going well. Inside, I did not have a word for what was happening, so I treated it as a character flaw and worked harder. Working harder on an unnamed thing is how you get 18 months in… with migraines… and stomach cramps… and exhaustion…
All week this series has been about the Mind at work… the press release it writes, the 2 true things it holds, the second chair it resists, the labels it files too fast, the stop it cannot take at speed, the yes it waits for. Sunday is about what happens when the Mind turns that last trick on itself… when the thing it refuses to name is its own state.
The loudest voice of the 1990s went quiet about the hardest thing…
…for years, and then stopped being quiet, which by now you will recognize as her signature move. The woman who opened her career refusing to clean up the first take spent the late 2010s doing the same thing with something far harder than a lyric: Alanis Morissette has been open about postpartum depression across 3 pregnancies. She realized the first one 16 months in. She has described it as being covered in tar and underwater… a performer at the top of her field, months deep in something she could not yet name, still performing.
The song she wrote about it, “Diagnosis,” was released Apr 24, 2020, ahead of the album Such Pretty Forks in the Road that July. And it is not about the low point. It is about what happened when it got a name. She has said she felt better once she knew what was going on with her. 25 years after the debut that named everybody else’s unspoken things, the bravest song was the one that named her own.
…and the room you lead in is quiet about it too
Now look at the room you lead in.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 reported manager engagement falling to 27 percent, and described managers as overloaded and undersupported. Back in 2022, Deloitte and Workplace Intelligence surveyed 1,050 C-suite leaders and found around 7 in 10 seriously considering leaving for a job that better supported their wellbeing. These are not the people at the bottom of your org chart. These are the people running it. And nearly every one of them is doing what I did at IBM… performing well on the outside, filing the inside as a character flaw, working harder on an unnamed thing.
renew starts with a name
renew does not start with a program. It starts with a name. Your Mind cannot begin to come back from something it is still calling a personal failing. That is why this vector closes every week I write… the other 6 all draw on a reserve, and Sunday is the only day that asks whether the reserve is real. A sabbatical, a coach, a book, a practice… every renewal tool works better aimed at a named thing, and none of them work aimed at a vague sense that you should be tougher.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: give the hard thing its actual name this week, on paper, to 1 person you trust. That is the whole move.
A Diagnosis is not the end of the story. It is the first honest page of the next one.
If any of this is closer to home than a leadership post should be, that is worth taking to someone real … a doctor, a therapist, or a person who loves you. I am a coach, not a clinician, and the difference matters here.
