How Do You Reclaim Yourself When Life Keeps Asking for More?
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Written by Ebi Sheila Diete-Spiff, Lifestyle Strategist
Ebi Sheila Diete-Spiff is a leading self-love and transition coach, speaker, and mentor. She is the founder of Ebi’s Powerhouse, where she equips women worldwide with the tools to break free from self-doubt, reclaim their worth, and step into their power with confidence.
There is a particular kind of depletion that can be difficult to recognise because, from the outside, everything still appears to be working. You are showing up, meeting deadlines, supporting other people, making decisions, leading, producing, coping. Nothing has necessarily fallen apart. Yet somewhere amongst the constant responding, producing, and performing, you may have stopped noticing what all of this is asking of you.
This is one reason I believe we need to broaden our conversations about burnout, wellbeing, and sustainable performance. We tend to notice the problem when somebody can no longer continue.
But what if we became more interested in what happens before burnout becomes visible? What if one of the earliest losses is not performance, but connection with ourselves?
The Beautiful Interruption: Creating space before the response
I call the first part of this process The Beautiful Interruption. Consider how easily we can move through a typical day, thinking, responding, analysing, anticipating, solving, performing.
None of these is inherently problematic. They are essential human and professional capacities. The difficulty comes when they become so automatic that there is almost no space between what happens and our response. The email arrives, we answer, the notification appears, we look, someone asks, we respond.
A problem emerges, and we solve it. One demand moves seamlessly into the next. We can become extremely efficient at responding to life while becoming increasingly disconnected from our experience of living it.
The Beautiful Interruption is the deliberate creation of a gap. It is not withdrawal from responsibility. It is not disengagement or an invitation to stop being ambitious. It is a moment in which we do not immediately have to react. Within that moment, something important becomes available: awareness.
What have I normalised?
What am I overriding?
Where is my attention going?
What is quietly consuming my capacity?
What is my body communicating before my mind tells me to keep going?
Transformation does not always begin with changing something. Sometimes it begins with noticing something.
The danger of becoming excellent at overriding ourselves
Human beings are remarkably adaptable. We can normalise exhaustion, constant availability, checking emails late at night, carrying work into weekends, being the person everybody relies upon, and believing that recovery has to be earned.
Because we are still functioning, we may conclude that we have capacity, but functioning and flourishing are not the same thing. There is a difference between having sustainable capacity and becoming highly skilled at overriding its depletion. This distinction matters especially when we think about high performers and leaders.
The person who appears most capable may also have become exceptionally practised at pushing beyond their own signals. They continue delivering, solving, and supporting everyone else. From the outside, this may look like resilience, but resilience should not simply mean becoming better at enduring depletion.
The Bridge: Returning to another form of intelligence
Once we interrupt the automatic pattern, what comes next? This is The Bridge. It is not about abandoning the intellect. Our intellectual capacity enables extraordinary things. It allows us to strategise, innovate, plan, analyse, and solve complex problems, but intellect is not the only information available to us.
Direct experience also offers intelligence. The body, the breath, sensation, rhythm, and space. We can also receive an experience before immediately deciding what it means. This matters because sustainable change cannot live entirely in intellectual understanding.
We can understand boundaries and still override them. We can understand burnout and still keep pushing. We can know that we need rest and still feel unable to stop. We can intellectually recognise that something needs to change while repeating the same pattern.
Sometimes our minds understand something that our bodies have been practising differently for years. The Bridge invites the whole human being back into the conversation.
From transmitting to receiving
Much of modern life trains us to transmit, answer, explain, produce, react, interpret, prove. Even when another person is speaking, how often are we already preparing our response? We may be physically present while our attention is somewhere else entirely. Receiving asks something different. Listen before preparing the answer. Notice before judging. Feel before explaining. Experience before interpreting.
This does not mean abandoning critical thinking. It means allowing experience to arrive before the intellect immediately takes possession of it. Sometimes, when we create that space, what we notice is remarkably simple.
“I am tired.”
“I don't actually want to say yes to this.”
“I need space.”
“I haven't properly switched off for days.”
“Something about this doesn't feel right.”
“I miss myself.”
Not everything we notice requires analysis. Sometimes it is simply information.
The Reclaiming: Coming back to what was already ours
This brings us to what I call The Reclaiming. When we hear the word reclaiming, we may imagine taking back something that was stolen, but for many of us, there was no single moment when we lost connection with ourselves.
It happened gradually:
Life became louder.
Work became faster.
Technology became more demanding.
Notifications wanted our attention.
Deadlines wanted it.
Other people's expectations wanted it.
Organisations wanted it.
Social media wanted it.
Even our own thoughts wanted it.
Somewhere amongst all that wanting, we became extraordinarily skilled at responding to everything outside us. Reclaiming is about restoring the relationship with what was already ours: our attention, body, direct experience, inner space, capacity to notice, voice, boundaries, ability to choose, and ultimately, our own life.
Why reclaiming ourselves is also a workplace issue
This may sound like an intensely personal conversation, it is. But it is also an organisational one. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 12 billion working days are lost globally every year to depression and anxiety, at an estimated cost of US$1 trillion in lost productivity.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2025 reported that only 21% of employees worldwide were engaged at work, while 40% experienced stress during much of the previous day.
Behind statistics like these are human beings. Some may be absent from work. But many are still there, answering emails, attending meetings, managing teams, achieving targets, and appearing to cope.
That is why organisations cannot afford to look only for visible breakdown. We need to become much more interested in what happens before performance declines.
Burnout rarely begins on the day somebody can no longer continue. Long before that, there may have been overriding, reduced recovery, constant availability, difficulty switching off, boundary erosion, disconnection, and increasing effort required simply to maintain normal performance.
The performance remains visible. The cost of maintaining it often does not. This raises a question I believe leaders and organisations need to ask more frequently. Not only "Are our people performing?" But, "What is it costing them to maintain that performance?"
Reclaiming human capacity through W.O.R.T.H.Y.
This thinking also sits at the heart of the W.O.R.T.H.Y.™ Ecosystem I use in my work.
W.O.R.T.H.Y. represents:
Worth: Recognising that human value cannot be reduced to human output.
Ownership: Reclaiming agency over our attention, decisions and direction.
Resilience: Moving beyond endless endurance towards recovery, adaptation and sustainable capacity.
Truth and transformation: Becoming willing to recognise what is actually happening instead of continually normalising what depletes us.
Healing and healthy Boundaries: Understanding that boundaries are not barriers to performance, they can help protect the capacity required to sustain it.
Your voice and visibility: Reclaiming the ability to speak, contribute, disagree, ask for what we need, and participate fully.
These principles begin with the individual, but their impact does not end there. I see capacity moving through four interconnected levels. Individual capacity to leadership capacity to team capacity to organisational capacity.
A depleted leader influences how they communicate, how they respond under pressure, how mistakes are handled, how much psychological safety other people experience, and whether recovery is modelled or quietly discouraged.
Those behaviours influence teams. Teams influence culture, and culture ultimately influences organisational performance. That is why I don't believe wellbeing and performance should be treated as separate conversations. Human capacity connects them.
Sustainable performance should not require unsustainable humans
Much of personal and professional development focuses on becoming. Become more confident. Become more productive, resilient, a better leader, and become the next version of yourself.
But constant becoming can quietly reinforce the idea that who we are now is somehow insufficient. What if transformation does not always begin by adding something? What if sometimes it begins by reclaiming something? Your attention. Your voice. Your boundaries. Your capacity. Your relationship with your body. Your right to recover. Your ability to be present. The person underneath the performance.
For organisations, this requires a shift too. Instead of asking only how we can get more from people, perhaps sustainable leadership asks, "What conditions enable people to contribute fully without continually depleting the human capacity on which that contribution depends?"
That is not lowering standards. It is recognising what makes sustained performance possible. Because sustainable performance should not require unsustainable humans.
How to begin reclaiming yourself
Reclaiming yourself does not need to become another item on your to-do list. Start smaller, choose one moment today. A meeting, a conversation, a walk, a decision, the moment before you open your laptop, or simply the few seconds before answering a question. Create an interruption and pause.
Before responding, notice. Before interpreting, receive. Before automatically saying yes, check what is happening within you. Before rushing into the next task, allow yourself to experience this one. Then ask, "What becomes available when I stop transmitting long enough to receive?"
Perhaps another question will follow. What have I been giving away that I am ready to reclaim? My attention? My voice? My boundaries? My recovery? My time? My ability to choose? My presence in my own life?
The Beautiful Interruption teaches us to pause. The Bridge invites us to receive. The Reclaiming asks us to return. Not to a better version of ourselves, to ourselves. Perhaps sustainable transformation does not always begin with the question, "Who do I need to become?" Sometimes it begins somewhere quieter: What was already mine that I am ready to reclaim? Pause. Notice. Receive. Reclaim.
Your next step: What are you ready to reclaim?
Before you move on to the next email, meeting, or demand on your attention, pause and ask yourself, "What have I been giving away that I am ready to reclaim?"
Your attention? Your voice? Your boundaries? Your capacity? Your right to recover? Or simply the space to hear yourself again?
You don't have to change everything today. Begin with one interruption. One conscious pause. One moment of receiving before responding.
If you are ready to explore this more deeply, I invite you to connect with me and discover the W.O.R.T.H.Y.™ Ecosystem, where we explore how reclaiming worth, ownership, capacity, boundaries, and voice can transform not only how we live, but how we work and lead.
Because the goal isn't to become better at carrying more. It is to build the capacity to live, work, and lead without losing yourself in the process.
Read more from Ebi Sheila Diete-Spiff
Ebi Sheila Diete-Spiff, Lifestyle Strategist
Ebi Sheila Diete-Spiff is a self-love and mental fitness strategist who empowers women to reclaim their worth and embrace their potential with confidence. Born in Hertfordshire, England, she transformed personal struggles with toxic relationships, divorce, chronic illness, and single motherhood into a journey of resilience and growth. A pivotal awakening in 2014 inspired her to embrace self-love, fueling her mission to guide women worldwide past self-doubt. Through her signature blueprint, The WORTHY Woman Framework, Ebi offers tools for healing and empowerment. Today, she stands as a beacon of hope, inspiring women to live boldly and authentically.
