I was an hour late to pick up my eight-year-old from his swimming class. He had no phone on him, no way to reach me. He just waited. I had been so consumed by work that I simply forgot to come. I still sit with that hour sometimes. And that was the day I decided to leave the role. Here is the part that makes it strange.
On paper, I was doing everything right. I had joined a new company as a manager with nothing familiar around me, no team yet, no peers I knew, no mentor down the corridor, and I had built it all from the ground up. We hit every target. We built the systems. The ratings were excellent, and so were the raises and the bonuses. I’m a high achiever by nature, so that part came to me, the way it had before in my earlier career, the way I’ve watched so many capable managers pull it off. From the outside, it was a success story.
But underneath all of it was a quiet loneliness. The work was fine. What I missed was the sharing, that small joy of turning to someone and saying, we did it. I had the results, but I was carrying them completely alone. And I could not switch off. I couldn’t shut the day down, couldn’t enjoy my own evenings, couldn’t put the job down long enough to feel like a person again. Slowly, quietly, it was hollowing me out. And you already know where that ended.
Here is what I did not know then. That feeling is not rare. It might be the most common experience in leadership there is.
Harvard Business Review found that around half of all CEOs report feeling lonely in the role, and 61% believe it is hurting their performance. It gets sharper the newer you are, more than 70% of first-time leaders feel it too. So if you have felt this, you are not the exception. You are the majority.
Looking back, I know exactly what I was missing. And it wasn’t that I was too proud to ask. The organization was new and unfamiliar to me, and it simply wasn’t a collaborative place, so reaching out led nowhere. In the end, that is why I left. What I needed was a safe space, and the workplace itself was never going to be one. Somewhere outside it, to work out how to enjoy the work again, and how to manage the fatigue before it wore me all the way down.
If I’d had a coach back then, even one honest ally with no stake in that building, someone who could have simply said, this is lonely, it is meant to be, and here is how you open up to your team without sounding fearful or looking weak, I think that whole chapter might have gone differently. I might have stayed. I might have gone further.
Here is the part that took me years to really understand. This loneliness isn’t about a lack of people. Most leaders are surrounded all day. It’s about not having a single person you can be fully honest with. Someone who doesn’t need anything from you, doesn’t report to you, and isn’t quietly reading how you come across.
So let me ask you something. When was the last time you had a conversation where you didn’t have to manage how you were seen? For a lot of leaders, the honest answer is that they can’t quite remember. The higher you go, the more people are around you, and somehow the fewer places you have to simply think out loud.
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And this shows up in the body, not just the mood. Gallup finds senior leaders score noticeably higher on loneliness than the people who report to them, carrying more stress and more of that heaviness we don’t say out loud. And the US Surgeon General has warned that ongoing disconnection carries a health risk on the level of smoking around fifteen cigarettes a day. We tend to treat leadership loneliness as something soft, a passing mood to push through. It isn’t. It’s a real cost, to your health and to your judgement.
I see this from the other side too, in my own coaching work. At the mid-point and again at the end of a coaching journey, I always ask my clients the same question. How does this actually help you? And across so many different leaders, the answer comes back almost the same. It gave them a sounding board. A partner. A safe space to reflect and to hear their own thinking out loud. They could do that alone, and they know it, but the revelations simply aren’t the same on their own. Something opens up when there is another person holding the space with you.
Harvard found the same thing in the numbers, leaders who reached for that kind of support saw real results, with more than seven in ten reporting better performance because of it.
Which is why I no longer see this as a luxury. Call it a coach, a mentor, a peer group, or simply one trusted person who has no stake in how you look. Sometimes the place you work simply will not be that space, however capable you are, and that is not a failure on your part. It’s a signal to find it somewhere else.
Whatever form it takes, having someone like that is not a nice indulgence in today’s pressure. It’s part of how you keep leading well without paying the quiet price I paid. For me, that someone is a coach, and it is the work I now do for others, precisely because I know what its absence once cost me.
You can reach the top on your own strength. Most high achievers do. But you were never meant to carry it all in silence, and I know now what that costs. So if it has felt quiet at the top lately, that quiet isn’t a weakness in you. It’s the shape of the role. And the answer was never to carry more of it by yourself. It’s to find the one honest space where you can finally put some of it down.
Usha Nagrani, an HR Leader turned ICF Executive Coach, empowers senior management professionals and business leaders to achieve breakthroughs as expats, build cross-cultural teams, and navigate the exciting journey of career acceleration.
