Two clients. Same week. Different industries, different companies. One a senior leader in a multinational. The other a CEO and Founder of his own tech business.
Same problem.
One described it as his head being permanently underwater. The other said he’d been crawling to his car at the end of the day, tank completely empty, nothing left. Running on fumes. Everyone’s person. The one who dives in first, takes it all on, absorbs the pressure so nobody else has to.
When I dug in with both of them, it came down to the same thing.
The Be Strong driver.
I’ve been working as an executive coach in London and across the UK for 18 years. And in that time, the Be Strong driver is the pattern I’ve encountered most consistently, in CEOs and Founders, in construction and tech, in men and in women, in leaders at every level of seniority. It doesn’t discriminate.
And it starts long before work.
What Is The Be Strong Driver?
The Be Strong driver is one of five core psychological drivers identified within Transactional Analysis, a framework developed by psychiatrist Eric Berne that helps explain the deeply ingrained patterns governing how we think, feel and behave.
Drivers are the beliefs we form in childhood about how we need to be in order to be loved, accepted and to belong. They develop early, typically before the age of ten, and they stay with us, running quietly in the background, long after the circumstances that created them have changed.
The Be Strong driver sounds like this:
Don’t show weakness. Don’t ask for help. Don’t burden other people with your problems. Just get on with it.
As a child, you learned, whether explicitly or implicitly, that being strong was what kept you safe. That showing vulnerability, asking for help or admitting you couldn’t cope would cost you something. Love. Approval. Your place in the family.
So you became the strong one. The reliable one. The one who held things together. The one everyone turned to.
And it worked. It got you through. It probably also contributed significantly to your success.
The problem is that you brought it with you into adulthood. Into your leadership. Into your team. Into your family. And what served you as a child is now costing you as a leader and as a human being.
What It Looks Like In A Senior Leader
The Be Strong driver doesn’t always look like struggle from the outside. That’s what makes it so insidious.
From the outside, Be Strong leaders look capable, dependable, unflappable. They’re the ones who stay calm in a crisis, who take on the extra project, who never complain. The ones you can always count on.
From the inside, it looks quite different.
It looks like being the last one to leave. Like absorbing the emotional weight of the team because you don’t want to burden anyone else with it. Like saying yes when you mean no, and then resenting it quietly. Like being unable to sit still, unable to ask for support, unable to admit, even to yourself, that you’re not okay.
It looks like crawling to your car at the end of the day with nothing left.
Here’s what I see in Be Strong leaders specifically:
They find delegation almost impossible, not because they don’t trust their team, but because asking someone else to carry something feels like weakness. They struggle to ask for help at any level. They suppress emotions and push through, long past the point where the body and brain are giving clear signals to stop. They are the last person to admit they’re struggling, even in a coaching session, even when it’s completely safe to do so.
And the cost? Exhaustion. Burnout. Decisions made from depletion rather than clarity. Leadership that is technically present but emotionally unavailable. And a team that has learned not to bring real problems to a leader who will just absorb them silently and carry on.
You are not superhuman. You are someone who learned, very early, that pretending to be superhuman was the safest thing to do. There is a difference.
Why It Costs You More Than You Realise
There is a particular cruelty to the Be Strong driver that I want to name directly.
Because you are so effective at suppressing the signals, the fatigue, the frustration, the need for support, you often don’t realise how depleted you are until something forces the realisation. A health scare. A relationship that has quietly eroded. A moment of such complete exhaustion that you simply can’t push through anymore.
By that point, the cost has already been significant.
I see this in leaders who have been running at full capacity for years, who have given everything to the job and the team and the business, and who wake up one day and realise they have nothing left for the people and the life that actually matter most to them.
The Be Strong driver also has a particular impact on leadership effectiveness that is worth naming. Because you take everything on, your team doesn’t develop. Because you don’t ask for help, you don’t model the psychological safety that would allow your team to admit their own struggles. Because you suppress your emotions and push through, you miss the important information those emotions are trying to give you.
Strong is not the same as effective. And exhausted is not the same as committed.
Where This Driver Really Comes From
This is the part that most leaders find both the most surprising and the most useful.
The Be Strong driver didn’t form at work. It formed in your family of origin, in the dynamic you were born into, or grew up in, or survived. It formed because being strong served a function. Because someone needed you to be strong. Because showing vulnerability or asking for help came with a cost you learned, as a small person, was not worth paying.
I’m not asking you to blame your parents or your childhood. Most of the time, these patterns are passed down unconsciously, parents doing their best with what they had, in circumstances that shaped their own patterns long before you arrived.
But I am asking you to consider this: the belief that you must be strong, that you cannot ask for help, that showing vulnerability is dangerous, that belief formed in a context that no longer exists. You are not a child anymore. The people around you are not your family of origin. The rules have changed.
You didn’t choose to be the strong one. It was chosen for you. And you can choose differently now.
What Shifting This Actually Takes
The leaders I work with who make real progress with the Be Strong driver don’t get there by trying harder. Trying harder is the driver. That’s not the solution. That’s the problem.
What actually shifts it is a combination of three things.
First: Awareness.
You cannot change a pattern you cannot see. Understanding where the Be Strong driver came from, really understanding it, not just intellectually but in your body, in your history, is the beginning of being able to make a different choice.
Second: Permission.
Permission to not be okay. Permission to ask for help. Permission to let someone else carry something for a change. This sounds simple. For a Be Strong leader, it is genuinely one of the hardest things I ever ask of someone.
Third: Practice.
Slowly, deliberately, repeatedly making different choices. Delegating something you would normally take on. Saying no to something you would normally absorb. Asking for support instead of pretending you don’t need it. Letting your team see that you are human.
None of this happens overnight. And all of it requires something the Be Strong driver is specifically designed to resist: vulnerability.
But here’s what I know after 18 years. The leaders who do this work, who are willing to look honestly at where these patterns came from and make different choices, become not just more effective leaders. They become better humans. More present. More connected. More genuinely at ease with who they are.
That’s worth more than any amount of pushing through.
Ready To Do Something About It?
I’m Sue Belton, an award-winning executive and leadership coach based in Fitzrovia, central London, working with CEOs, Founders, MDs and senior leaders across London and the UK. This work, understanding the patterns that are driving your leadership and building a genuinely different way of leading, is at the heart of my Strategic Leader Programme.
If you recognised yourself in this piece, I’d love to have a conversation. Explore the Strategic Leader Programme via the link below, or connect with me on LinkedIn and say hello.
And if the ideas here resonated, particularly around the patterns that keep high performing brains stuck, my international bestselling book Screw Meditation goes deeper into the brain science and the practical toolkit. Comment BOOK on my latest LinkedIn post and I’ll send you a physical copy, posted anywhere in the world, as part of my ongoing anniversary giveaway.
