It was 4:30 in the morning in New Mexico. I was in an Uber, half-conscious, heading to the airport for yet another flight, when it hit me: It’s her birthday today.
The warmth of it woke me up faster than the coffee I desperately needed. I thought about calling right then. But it was 4:30. In the morning. She lives on the west coast. Even the most devoted friend doesn’t want to hear from you before sunrise, unless someone is in the hospital or a sale is ending in five minutes.
I’ll call when I land, I told myself.
I didn’t call when I landed.
Or when I got home.
I left a long, apologetic voicemail a few days later. One of those messages where you keep talking because you feel so guilty you can’t figure out how to end it. She wrote back with characteristic grace and humor: “I was a little hurt, but no worries — there’s always next year!”
If you’ve ever winced reading a text, you know how that felt.
And here’s the thing: this wasn’t some out-of-character lapse. In a separate moment of peak overwhelm, I had just finished booking eight flights back-to-back (because when you know your airports and your connections, you book your own) and then immediately fired off an email to a client confirming the wrong car pickup date. I even reread it before hitting send, double-checking flight information. Still missed it. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t grade on effort.
And if you’ve ever dropped a ball you were absolutely certain you had a firm grip on, this one’s for you.
Your Brain Has a Bandwidth Problem (And High Achievers Have It Worst)
Here’s what nobody tells you when you’re proud of your capacity to handle a lot: the more you take on, the more your brain quietly starts rationing its resources.
Researchers call it cognitive overload, the point at which the demands on your working memory exceed its capacity. Think of it less like a failing system and more like an overworked team. Your best people are still showing up. They’re just exhausted, and eventually even the most competent among them will miss something.
Here’s the kicker: the people most vulnerable to this are often the highest performers. The ones carrying the most. The leaders, the caregivers, the owners, the managers who haven’t said “I’m overwhelmed” out loud because they genuinely believe they shouldn’t be.
A randomized controlled trial out of the University of Tokyo found that employees who practiced self-compassion showed measurable improvements in work performance, cognitive flexibility, perceived psychological safety, and reduced stress. Not people who beat themselves up harder. Not people who set more aggressive accountability standards. People who extended themselves a little grace.
Self-compassion, it turns out, isn’t the enemy of high performance. It may be the engine of it.
The Heavy Loads You Can’t See From the Outside
In the past few weeks, I’ve stood on stages in front of people from virtually every industry — sales teams and service leaders, healthcare workers and franchise owners, financial professionals and hospitality managers, realtors and entrepreneurs and everyone in between.
And here’s what I’ve noticed: almost universally, the people in those rooms are carrying more than they’re letting on.
The leader who is managing her team’s anxiety while quietly managing her own. The sales professional who closed three deals this week and still feels like he’s failing. The caregiver, literal or figurative, who has poured so much into others that there’s nothing left to pour back into herself.
We talk about mental health in terms of clinical conditions, and that conversation absolutely matters. But there’s another conversation we’re not having nearly enough: the one about the quiet weight that high-functioning people carry every day while looking completely fine from the outside.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And this year, I don’t want to just observe it. I want us to actually use it. Starting with something most of us haven’t practiced nearly enough: cutting ourselves a break.
Be the GPS. Not the Backseat Driver.
When you make a mistake, miss a birthday, send the wrong date, forget to follow up on something important, what’s the first voice you hear?
For most of us, it sounds less like a coach and more like a backseat driver who has opinions about every turn, audibly sighs at yellow lights, and doesn’t hesitate to announce, “Well, I would have taken a completely different route.”
The backseat driver doesn’t help you get there faster. It just makes the drive miserable.
A GPS, on the other hand, is relentlessly practical and remarkably kind. It doesn’t editorialize when you miss a turn. It doesn’t give you the silent treatment. It doesn’t bring it up again at dinner. It simply says, “Recalculating,” and gets you back on track.
That’s The Human Edge™ in action: not pretending you didn’t miss the turn, but not making the rest of the drive about it either.
The science backs this up. Dr. Kristin Neff, the world’s leading researcher on self-compassion, identifies three components that make this possible: self-kindness (treating yourself with warmth rather than judgment), common humanity (recognizing that imperfection is not a personal flaw but a universal human experience), and mindfulness (seeing clearly what happened without catastrophizing it).
Those three things, working together, are what allow you to recalculate — cleanly, quickly, without losing hours to guilt.
The Human Edge™ Reset: A Framework That’s Actually Yours to Keep
Since I’m all about practical tools you can use the minute you walk away from this page, here’s my own take on making this stick. I call it the 3-Acknowledge Reset — and unlike most three-step frameworks, this one takes about 90 seconds:
- Acknowledge the Mistake (Not the Story About the Mistake)
There’s a difference between “I sent the wrong date” and “I can’t believe I sent the wrong date — I’m so careless, what is wrong with me, this client is going to think I’m completely incompetent.” The first is a fact. The second is fiction. A novel. Stick with the fact.
- Acknowledge the Load
You didn’t make that mistake in a vacuum. What were you carrying at the time? Eight flights booked? A sick family member? A deadline that moved? Acknowledging context isn’t making excuses — it’s being honest about your humanity, which is the only way to address the root cause instead of just flogging the symptom.
- Acknowledge What’s Next
Make it right where you can. Call. Send the corrected email. Leave the world’s longest voicemail if you have to. And then? Let it go. Your GPS already recalculated. You don’t have to keep re-entering the address.
The Connection You Can’t Fake
Everything I teach, whether we’re talking about leadership, sales, resilience, or culture, comes back to connection. And connection cannot be manufactured when you’re running on empty and drowning in self-judgment.
The most trusted leaders I’ve observed aren’t the ones who never make mistakes. They’re the ones who own them without theater, correct course without drama, and refuse to let guilt become the identity they lead from.
That kind of leadership is contagious. When a team sees a leader recalculate in real time, with honesty and without self-destruction, they learn that it’s safe to do the same. And that is where psychological safety is actually born. Not in a policy document. In a moment of graceful, human accountability.
This is what I mean by The Human Edge™. Not perfection. Not the flawless email or the birthday you never miss. But the deeply human, scientifically-supported, incredibly underrated ability to extend to yourself the same grace that makes you someone others want to follow.
A Challenge for May (And Every Month After It)
The next time you catch your inner backseat driver warming up for a monologue, try this instead:
Notice the mistake. Own it. Correct it.
And then recalculate, without the commentary.
Because the world doesn’t need more people at war with themselves. It needs more people who know how to lead from a place of honest, compassionate, fully-human accountability.
That’s The Human Edge™. And it’s always been in you.
What are you carrying right now that deserves a little more grace? I’d love to hear from you.
Let’s connect to design a customized program to sharpen your Human Edge™!
