Why High-Functioning Women Miss the Signs of Pressure – Interview with Myra Swan Kotze
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Myra Swan Kotze is an Executive Pressure Specialist, former Group Managing Director, and creator of Accumulated Executive Pressure™, a framework that explores how pressure from sustained leadership responsibility can accumulate over time and leave its mark on the women carrying it. Drawing on her experience in senior corporate leadership and her work with accomplished women, she challenges the belief that continuing to perform always means everything is fine.
In this interview, Myra explores why highly capable women can overlook the cost of sustained executive pressure, how the body begins communicating through whispers, signals, and screams, and why protecting your health and life beyond work does not have to mean walking away from the career you have built.
Myra Swan Kotze, Executive Pressure Specialist
What led you to focus specifically on the pressure carried by women in senior corporate leadership?
I chose to work specifically with women because I was one of those women. I spent years in senior leadership, ultimately as a Group Managing Director, carrying responsibility for hundreds of people, significant financial outcomes, difficult decisions, and the constant expectation to deliver.
I know what it is like to be highly capable and successful on the outside while carrying far more internally than anyone around you necessarily sees. Although the corporate world has changed since I was in those roles, I still hear many of the same experiences from senior women today.
This isn't to suggest that men don't experience significant executive pressure. They absolutely do, and for some, that pressure can be equally or even more profound. I simply made a conscious decision about where I wanted to contribute.
I understand these women because I have lived a version of their world. I cannot change the experience of every woman in senior leadership, but for the women I do work with, I want that change to be big, meaningful and lasting.
What makes Accumulated Executive Pressure™ different from the stress or burnout executives may already recognize?
Stress is usually something we recognise because we can connect it to what is happening around us. A difficult quarter, a restructuring, a board meeting, a major decision, or an intense period at work. Burnout is also widely recognised, particularly when someone reaches significant physical or emotional depletion.
Accumulated Executive Pressure™ looks at something different. It is the gradual accumulation of pressure through the continuous, day-to-day reality of carrying executive responsibility over time.
A senior woman may move through hundreds of decisions, conversations, problems, and competing demands while remaining completely functional. The immediate situation passes, but that does not necessarily mean everything her body carried in response to it has disappeared. Over months and years, pressure can leave footprints.
That is why I don't describe Accumulated Executive Pressure™ as something that happens before burnout. Burnout can be one possible expression, or what I call a “scream,” but it isn't the only one. The accumulation may begin showing itself physically, emotionally, cognitively, or relationally long before a woman identifies herself as struggling.
Why can remaining highly functional make it harder for a senior leader to recognise that pressure is taking a toll?
Because we tend to use performance as evidence that everything is fine. A senior woman can still walk into the boardroom, make complex decisions, lead her team, deliver results and carry enormous responsibility. From the outside, there may be very little indication that anything is wrong. Often, she uses that same evidence herself: “I'm still functioning. I'm still performing. I'm still getting everything done.”
That is precisely what can make accumulated pressure so difficult to recognise. The early effects can be subtle. She may be more exhausted than she used to be, less patient, sleeping differently, withdrawing more at home or needing increasingly more energy to maintain the same level of performance. But because she can still perform, these changes are easily dismissed as the normal cost of senior leadership.
High-functioning women are exceptionally good at adapting. The danger is that adaptation can keep moving the line of what she considers “normal,” until something happens that becomes much harder to ignore.
Why do you believe endurance has become such a deeply ingrained measure of strength in executive culture?
Executive culture has traditionally rewarded the person who can carry more. The person who remains available, handles the difficult situation, takes on another responsibility, and continues delivering regardless of what else is happening.
Over time, endurance becomes intertwined with identity. Being the woman who can cope is not simply something she does, it becomes part of how she understands her own value as a leader.
There is also a practical reality. At senior levels, responsibility doesn't disappear because you are tired or because something difficult is happening in your personal life. People are depending on you. Decisions still need to be made. Results still matter. So you learn to keep going.
The problem isn't endurance itself. Sometimes, endurance is necessary in leadership. The problem comes when we begin treating the ability to withstand pressure indefinitely as evidence of strength.
I believe real strength includes recognising what carrying that responsibility is costing you, rather than waiting until your body or your life makes that cost impossible to ignore.
What changes around midlife can make some accomplished women begin questioning whether they still want their leadership roles?
By midlife, many senior women have already spent decades building their careers. They have proven themselves, carried significant responsibility, and achieved many of the things they once worked incredibly hard to reach.
Then something can begin to shift. It isn't necessarily that she has lost her ambition or that she is suddenly less capable. Sometimes she simply becomes less willing to accept the personal cost of continuing in exactly the same way.
She may find herself thinking, “I don't know if I want to do this anymore.” That can be frightening when so much of her identity, achievement, and financial life has been built around her career.
But I think there is another question worth asking before assuming she wants to leave: “Do I no longer want this career, or do I no longer want to feel the way I feel while having it?”
Those are very different questions. Sometimes the career isn't what she wants to escape. It is the way she has had to carry it.
In your Whispers, Signals and Screams model, which early signs of accumulated pressure are easiest for executives to overlook?
The whispers are often the easiest to dismiss precisely because none of them necessarily feels serious enough on its own.
It might be waking already exhausted, struggling to switch off at the end of the day, feeling emotionally flatter than usual, losing patience more easily or gradually withdrawing from the people and activities that once restored you.
A senior woman can explain almost all of these away. She has had a busy month. She needs a holiday. There is a difficult project underway. She isn't sleeping well. Once things settle down, she will feel like herself again.
That phrase, “once this is over,” is one I pay particular attention to because executive life rarely stays quiet for long. One demanding period is replaced by another.
In my Whispers, Signals and Screams model, the objective isn't to make women anxious about every change they notice. It is to help them recognise patterns earlier, before whispers have to become louder signals, or eventually screams, to get their attention.
How does Recognition, Release, Recovery™ help a woman recover without stepping away from the career she has built?
Recognition, Release, Recovery™ begins by changing the question. Instead of asking, “Can I keep pushing?” or “Do I have to leave my career?”, we begin by recognising what years of sustained executive responsibility may have been leaving behind.
Recognition gives language to the invisible footprints of accumulated pressure. It allows a woman to see patterns she may previously have dismissed simply as the normal cost of leadership.
Release is the intentional process of no longer carrying every emotional, psychological, and physiological burden as though it has to remain with her indefinitely. It is not about reducing ambition or becoming less committed to her role. It is about changing how that responsibility is carried.
Recovery is not about returning to the woman she was before leadership. It is about restoring the capacity to lead with clarity, resilience and vitality while protecting the woman behind the executive title. In many cases, that means remaining in the career she has worked so hard to build, but no longer believing that success has to come at the expense of her wellbeing.
How did experiencing the cost of sustained leadership in your own life change your definition of success?
For many years, I measured success by what I could build, achieve and carry. I became a Group Managing Director, built successful businesses and carried responsibility for hundreds of people. From the outside, I had many of the things we associate with a successful executive life.
What I didn't fully understand at the time was what sustaining that level of responsibility was costing me personally. The impact wasn't confined to work. It reached into my health, my marriage, my relationship with my daughter, and eventually the way I experienced my own life.
That changed my definition of success profoundly. I no longer believe success can be measured only by what a woman achieves professionally if maintaining those achievements is steadily costing her everything else that matters to her.
Today, success means being able to hold significant responsibility without disappearing underneath it. It means protecting your health, your relationships, and the person you are beyond your title, while still pursuing meaningful, ambitious work. I don't believe women should have to choose between an extraordinary career and themselves.
What would you like senior women to understand about carrying responsibility without losing themselves in the process?
I want senior women to understand that carrying significant responsibility doesn't have to mean carrying everything at their expense.
For too long, we have admired the woman who can keep going regardless of the cost. She delivers, she solves, she supports everyone around her, and because she remains capable, very few people stop to ask what carrying all of that is doing to her.
You do not have to wait until your body, your relationships or your life forces you to pay attention. Nor do you have to become less ambitious, step away from the career you have built or stop being the woman people can depend on. But you do need to recognise that your capacity is not an unlimited resource.
The goal is not a life without pressure. That is unrealistic at senior levels. It is learning to carry responsibility differently, so that the pressure of leadership does not slowly consume the woman carrying it. Your career can remain important without requiring you to disappear inside it.
Read more from Myra Swan Kotze
