The Wake-Up Call

Picture this: you wake up trying to be a good partner, a present parent, a reliable senior manager, a strategic thinker, a supportive management peer, a resourceful collaborator and a responsible adult. By noon, you’re already failing one of these roles. Sometimes all of them.

Not because you’re incapable. But because the invisible walls that should separate your life’s roles have turned into open doors. Everything comes in. Everything mixes. Everything becomes urgent.

Managers don’t burn out from work. They burn out from blurry boundaries. And the cost is not only personal. It shows in leadership, in decisions, and in credibility.

Why Managers Think They’re Failing

Most managers operate under the pressure of at least six roles running in parallel: leader, colleague, expert, partner, parent, adult child, loyal friend. Each role comes with its own set of expectations: some explicit, most unspoken. And somewhere along the way, managers internalise a dangerous mental model:

“I must hold everything together.”

This belief quietly creates the sensation of failure:

“I’m not enough.”
“I’m always late for something.”
“Someone is always disappointed with me.”

To avoid disappointing others, many managers begin to shrink themselves. They speak more gently, ask for less, and quietly carry more weight than their role requires. I’ve seen this even at the very top. A CEO I once worked with postponed requesting critical resources from the board because he didn’t want to “appear demanding.” He believed it was his job to absorb pressure and remain humble, rather than redistribute responsibility — even though securing resources was explicitly part of his mandate. The outcome was predictable: the company stagnated, the board remained unaware of the urgency behind key investments, and the CEO grew increasingly frustrated, mistaking an inability to articulate needs for a virtue of humility.

The same pattern appeared in a Senior VP who consistently under-communicated needs to his peers. Instead of surfacing constraints early, he carried them alone, believing that a “strong executive” should be self-sufficient. By the time he raised issues, they had turned into avoidable crises — not because he lacked competence, but because his boundaries were blurred by an outdated belief that asking for support or collaboration was a sign of weakness.

And at the operational level, a Senior Project Manager I coached constantly took on tasks that belonged to others. She handled conflict between departments, shielded the team from stakeholder pressure, and silently absorbed scope creep rather than escalating it. She believed that protecting everyone meant leading well. In reality, it left her depleted and invisible, with a reputation for being “overwhelmed” rather than strategic, leading her almost to the verge of burnout.

What looks like underperformance is rarely a competence problem. It’s almost always a boundary breakdown: a silent collapse of the internal structure that should keep your roles separate, your priorities clear, and your leadership strong.

The Strategic Life Circles Model

Before we explore boundaries, I want to invite you into a simple but revealing exercise — one that will show, with surprising precision, how you’ve structured your life and where your boundaries are silently collapsing.

Take a blank sheet of paper. In the centre, draw a small dot. That dot is you — stripped of titles, obligations, expectations, and roles. Just you.

Now begin drawing a series of circles around that dot. Don’t aim for symmetry; aim for honesty. Let the distance between circles form intuitively.

Populate each circle with the people you intuitively know have that level of access to your time, energy, attention, and other resources. As each circle takes shape, pause and reflect. This exercise only works if you access sincerity, not performance.

As you draw each circle, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who genuinely needs access to this level of my energy and emotional presence?
2. Who contributes meaningfully to my stability, well-being, or purpose?
3. Who do I naturally turn to, and who naturally turns to me, at this level of closeness?
4. Who deserves this level of closeness and intimacy?
5. Whose presence in this circle supports the life and career I want to build next?

Write the names directly into the circles. Do not justify yet. Simply notice.

Once your circles are populated, take a deeper look and evaluate the level of legitimacy of each incumbent. Some names will feel right. Others will immediately feel uncomfortable.

1. Now use the following questions to evaluate whether each person’s placement is legitimate:
2. Have I placed this person here out of emotional habit rather than current reality?
3. Does this person take more from this circle than they give consistently?
4. Do I keep them here because of guilt, tradition, fear, or the pressure not to disappoint?
5. If I were designing my life intentionally, would they still have access to this level of me?
6. Does their presence here distort my priorities, drain my clarity, or blur my boundaries?

This is where most managers experience their first moment of discomfort and breakthrough.

Now draw the circles again, fresh. This time, place each person where your clarity tells you they belong — not your guilt, fear, loyalty, or inertia.

Some people will move outward. Some will move inward. Some will be removed entirely. Others will surprise you by how close they actually should be.

You will feel the shift immediately. Your new map is not just a diagram. It is a boundary blueprint for how to live, work, and lead with more intention.

In this exercise, most managers discover that their circles are not circles at all — but overlapping layers, leaking into one another. That’s the moment the real work begins: understanding that boundaries don’t collapse in your calendar; they collapse on paper long before.

When managers feel overwhelmed, the instinct is to blame the workload or the perpetual pressure to deliver. But overwhelm rarely comes from volume. It comes from structural confusion when these circles lose their form and begin to merge.

The first circle, Identity and Personal Aspirations, is the quietest layer of your life, and paradoxically, the most essential. Every intentional decision comes from the clarity you place here. One senior manager I coached had abandoned this inner circle entirely — no reflection, no self-care, no personal direction. His choices were dictated by urgency and by whoever shouted the loudest. In contrast, a strategically mature director I worked with protected this circle fiercely: ten minutes of grounding every morning, and a weekly alignment ritual with his stakeholders. His leadership had a depth and calmness that no crisis could destabilise.

The second circle, Nuclear Family, contains the people who feel your absence before anyone else notices your fatigue. When work infiltrates this space, guilt becomes your emotional soundtrack. One project manager I coached was “available 24/7”, a badge he wore with pride, until his partner confessed she felt like a single parent. His generosity at work was costing him the relationships that anchored his well-being. Meanwhile, another VP set one clear rule: no evening, no weekend calls or in the office unless the building was literally on fire. His team respected him more, not less. And at home, trust was restored.

The third circle, Extended Family and Close Friends, often carries history, loyalty, and expectations inherited rather than consciously chosen. Many managers allow this circle to expand without limits, guided more by old habits and emotional obligation than by current priorities. One operations leader I coached treated every family request as urgent, absorbing responsibilities that were never his. He arrived at work emotionally depleted and frustrated by his own inconsistency. Once he learned to distinguish genuine support from self-sacrifice, everything shifted: his energy stabilised, his decisions became clearer, and his family adjusted to his new boundaries.

Another client — a young entrepreneur — discovered how to navigate this circle with elegant firmness, especially with long-standing friends with whom he no longer shared values or direction. He remained respectful and present, but no longer allowed their needs or dramas to consume him. For him, saying “no” became an act of maturity and intentional alignment, not neglect.

The fourth circle, Direct Work Relationships, is where most boundary problems surface. Teams, managers, clients and various other stakeholders often behave as if they have unrestricted access to your time and emotional bandwidth. One coaching client tried to be her department’s emotional shock absorber. She became popular until she became invisible. Her decisions softened, her clarity blurred. After our coaching, she started to practise what I call “precise generosity”: unapologetically assertive, responsive but not reactive, clear on responsibilities, confident in saying “no” without guilt. His boundaries didn’t isolate her anymore; rather, they connected her even better.

Finally, the fifth circle, The Wide Professional Network and Society, is where lots of noise lives. Industry expectations, LinkedIn comparisons, social media pressures, corporate narratives, and the subtle fear of falling behind. I coached an executive whose goals were shaped entirely by what he assumed “everyone else was doing.” Successful on paper, deeply misaligned in reality. When he learned to filter the noise and choose intentionally, his career accelerated precisely because he stopped performing for an audience that didn’t matter. He understood how to get himself unstuck, through approaching this circle with strategic discipline: selective visibility, quality over quantity, zero emotional dependence on comparison.

Across all five circles, one truth holds: life becomes chaotic the moment an outer circle invades an inner one. And most boundary problems begin quietly — in small permissions, unspoken expectations, and roles that creep inward without you noticing. Until one day, the structure that should hold your life together dissolves, and everything feels urgent, everywhere, all at once.

The Most Dangerous Boundary Errors Managers Make

Boundary problems rarely announce themselves. They don’t enter your life loudly. They slip in quietly, through small compromises that feel harmless in the moment. And then, almost without noticing, you find yourself exhausted, conflicted, or strangely invisible in the very places where you should feel most grounded. Over the years, I’ve seen four patterns repeat themselves with surprising consistency, four boundary errors that even the most talented managers fall into.

The first is role collision. This happens when a manager confuses who they are with what others expect them to be. They become the therapist for their team, the firefighter for stakeholders, and the emotional rescuer for family. In trying to protect everyone, they lose the clarity of their own role. One day, they realise they are carrying responsibilities that belong to five different people, but to none of their circles in a healthy way. The result is predictable: exhaustion, guilt, and decisions made from a place of depletion rather than authority.

Then comes emotional leakage - when emotions that belong in one circle slip into another. A difficult conversation with a stakeholder burdens your tone at home. A family conflict shapes how assertive you are in a meeting. You arrive in one circle still wearing the emotional residue of another. Decisions become reactive, responses disproportionate, and leadership credibility erodes without a single intentional mistake. Emotional leakage is not a moral failing — it’s simply a sign that boundaries have become too porous to contain what they are meant to separate.

A third, often invisible error is misplaced loyalty. Many managers are loyal not to what truly matters, but to what is simply loud. They prioritise the colleague who insists, the stakeholder who pressures, or the family member who guilts them — instead of the relationships and priorities that genuinely sustain their wellbeing and performance. You should never underestimate how loud your own need for external validation can be. I often see managers prioritising tasks or people, especially senior leaders, not because it’s strategic, but because they are seeking approval. Misplaced loyalty behaves like a thief: it steals energy from where it is needed and donates it to where it is wasted.

And finally, there is the availability trap - the belief that a good manager is always reachable, always responsive, always “there.” This is the fastest route to inner fragmentation. When you are constantly available to everyone else, you slowly become unavailable to the circles that matter most: your identity, your family, and your strategic mind. Presence dissolves. Clarity fades. You are everywhere except where leadership truly begins.

What Happens When Boundaries Work

When boundaries work, life doesn’t suddenly become effortless. It becomes legible. Your decisions stop fighting for space inside your mind because each one naturally falls into its rightful circle. The constant oscillation between overdrive and exhaustion fades, replaced by a steady, sustainable rhythm of energy.

Your roles begin to stand apart instead of collapsing into each other: you lead with authority at work, and you arrive at home with presence rather than leftovers. Relationships lose their heaviness. They become clearer, cleaner, less tangled in unspoken expectations. You stop rescuing the wrong people and start supporting and trusting the right ones, including yourself, for the right reasons. And without emotional spillover from one circle to another, your strategic thinking sharpens; your mind finally has room to breathe.

Healthy boundaries don’t restrict your life. They refine it. They transform leadership from a reactive struggle into a deliberate, grounded way of being.

Working your boundaries

Boundaries are not a luxury; they are a form of inner leadership. When they weaken, everything in your life starts competing for space. When they strengthen, everything finds its rightful place. If reading this article made you notice even one circle that has collapsed, that’s not a sign of failure — it’s a sign of readiness. Real change begins the moment you stop negotiating with chaos and start leading from the inside out.

If you want support in redesigning your circles, strengthening your boundaries, or rebuilding clarity in your leadership, THAT is work we do in coaching. Share with me your Circle Map, and let’s elevate your leadership by resetting these boundaries. When you’re ready to begin, reach out. Your next level of leadership is already waiting for you.

How can I support you?

Growth Mindset for New Managers - Your online autonomy training is designed to catalyse your personal growth and ensure your fast transition to your first management role.

The Manager Mindset: One-on-one coaching designed to boost your performance and enhance your sense of fulfilment and satisfaction in life.

Master Your Resilience - Group coaching that helps you navigate life's challenges with greater ease and flow, empowering you to thrive through adversity.

Complimentary Strategy Call (FREE) - Let’s craft your personalised roadmap for transformation. Discover where coaching can take you in just 6 months with a free, strategic call to set your path toward success.