I’ll say the unpopular thing first. Being ‘the strong one’ is not a compliment. It’s a job description nobody consented to, handed out in childhood, and most senior leaders are still doing unpaid overtime on it forty years later.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Be Perfect driver, one of five psychological drivers identified by Taibi Kahler, the decision so many of us made early on that nothing is ever quite good enough. Be Strong is its quieter sibling, and I’d argue it’s the one doing more damage, because it looks like a virtue right up until it doesn’t.
The decision behind the driver
Here’s the mechanism. Somewhere in childhood, you made a decision, not a personality trait, a decision, that needing help was a weakness. Maybe you were the eldest. Maybe a parent leaned on you before you were ready for it. Maybe showing distress simply didn’t get you anywhere useful, so you stopped. Whatever the specifics, you decided that coping alone was safer than needing anyone, and that decision made complete sense at the time, given whatever was happening around you.
Like all five drivers (the others being: Be Perfect, Try Hard, Hurry Up!, Please Others), it’s not something you were born with, and it’s not a fixed part of your personality either, whatever your team might assume about ‘just how you are’. It was a strategy. A very good one, for a child working out how to stay safe and useful in a particular household. The trouble is nobody tells you when the strategy stops being necessary, so it just keeps running, unexamined, into your forties and fifties.
What it looks like from the outside
From the outside, Be Strong looks like resilience, and for a long time, everyone rewards it as such. Saying ‘I’m fine’ before you’ve checked whether you are. Building a team full of people who need you, rather than one that could survive a fortnight without you. Struggling to delegate the things that genuinely matter, not because you don’t trust your people, but because needing them feels dangerous in a way you’ve probably never said out loud.
It also shows up in smaller, easy to miss ways. Taking the difficult call yourself rather than asking a colleague to sit in on it with you. Working through the weekend rather than telling your partner you’re underwater. Answering ‘how are you’ with a joke instead of an answer. None of these look like a problem individually. Stacked up over twenty years, they are the whole problem.
A story I hear often
I’m going to describe a composite here, not any one person, because the pattern is so common across senior leaders that no single client’s details matter more than the shape of it.
She’s a divisional director, mid-forties, exceptional at her job by any measure her board would use. She has never once, in three years of working together, opened a session by telling me something was genuinely hard for her. Everything is framed as a problem to be solved, briskly, and moved past. It took a health scare, nothing catastrophic in the end, but frightening enough in the moment, for her to admit in a session that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked anyone for help with anything, professional or personal, without immediately following it with ‘but I’m fine, don’t worry about me’.
What changed wasn’t the health scare itself. It was that, for the first time, she let people see her needing something before she’d already solved it. Her team didn’t lose confidence in her. If anything, several of them told her afterwards it was the first time they’d felt like colleagues rather than people managing around her competence. That’s the bit that tends to surprise Be Strong leaders most. The vulnerability they’ve spent decades avoiding is usually the thing that deepens trust, not the thing that undermines it.
What it actually costs on the inside
What I don’t think gets talked about enough is what it costs on the inside, because that’s the part nobody sees and almost nobody admits to.
It’s a kind of low-grade vigilance that never fully switches off, even in the quiet moments, because some part of you is always scanning for the next thing that needs holding together. It’s the specific exhaustion of maintaining competence in front of people who have no idea how much it’s costing you to look this calm. It’s being surrounded by a full diary, a full team, a full life, and still feeling profoundly alone, because you’ve never let anyone close enough to see the parts that aren’t coping.
And underneath all of that, there’s often a quiet resentment that nobody ever notices you might need something too, conveniently forgetting that you’ve spent years making absolutely sure they never would. That resentment rarely gets said out loud. It just leaks sideways, into irritability with the very people you’d never admit you needed.
This isn’t just a coaching observation. A 2019 study in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies found that senior executives are more prone to loneliness precisely because of the demands of the role, including the social distance and lack of support that come with seniority itself.
Separate research from RHR International, summarised by Vistage, found that around half of CEOs experience loneliness during their careers, and the majority of those believe it actively hinders their performance. Not just their wellbeing. Their performance.
Where I recognise this from
I grew up with a father who was a sergeant major in the army. Structure, standards, and one message that came through very clearly: you get on with it. There wasn’t a version of my childhood where help was simply going to turn up if I didn’t ask for it, because there often wasn’t anyone spare to ask, so I stopped asking, and got very good at coping instead. I was given responsibility earlier than most children are, and I took it, because that’s what happened in our house.
I’m not telling you that for sympathy. It’s just the honest starting point for why I recognise this driver so quickly in the leaders I coach, rather than something I read about in a textbook. It wasn’t a flaw, and it wasn’t a hardship story either. It worked. It built a genuinely capable adult, and I wouldn’t hand that back. The only question, forty-odd years later, is whether coping alone is still the most useful setting, or whether it’s quietly costing more than it’s earning.
The allower: what actually starts to shift it
In Transactional Analysis, each driver has what’s called an Allower, the antidote permission underneath the pattern. For Be Strong, the Allower is this:
It’s okay to be open, and to ask for what you want and need.
Read that again, because it’s doing more work than it looks like. Not ‘it’s okay to be weak’. Not ‘stop coping’. Just: it’s okay to be open about what you want and need, out loud, to another person, before you’ve reached the point of running on empty.
In practice, that’s smaller and less dramatic than it sounds. It’s telling your COO you’re finding a particular decision genuinely difficult, rather than presenting it as already resolved. It’s letting a colleague see a piece of work before it’s finished, rather than only when it’s polished. It’s answering ‘how are you’ honestly once in a while, even when the honest answer is ‘stretched’. None of these require an overhaul. They require noticing the exact moment you’re about to perform strength, and choosing openness instead, just once, and seeing what actually happens.
My honest opinion, having sat with a lot of leaders who carry this, is that you cannot think your way out of a childhood decision. You have to notice it in the moment it fires, usually right as you’re about to say ‘I’m fine’, and get curious about it instead. Fine compared to what? And then, harder still, actually ask for the thing you need rather than quietly managing without it again.
This is also where self-compassion research is genuinely useful, not as a soft add-on but as a direct antidote. Dr Kristin Neff‘s work shows that treating yourself with the same care you’d offer a struggling colleague isn’t self-indulgence, it’s a skill, and it’s one the Be Strong driver actively trained you out of.
If any of this landed uncomfortably close, that’s not a flaw in you. It’s a decision you made a very long time ago, for good reasons, that’s simply overdue a review.
As an executive coach in London, leaders come to me precisely because they’ve run out of road doing this alone, and that review is exactly the work we’d do together.
