The Cost of Carrying What Isn’t Yours at Work (and How to Stop)
I’m retiring.
(lol, please read on for an explanation if you’re triggered by that old marketing hook.)
I’ve spent most of this year circling two deceptively simple questions:
What do I actually do?
And what do I actually want to do?
These past few weeks, the words kept slipping out of my mouth—half-joking, half-dead-serious:
“I just want to retire.”
And for a minute, I meant it. Like, really meant it.
I started this year like a horse out of the gate, racing for a finish line that represented survival for not just me, but my two young boys. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor. Paying the bills, putting food on the table, keeping us safe—that was the finish line. But I also know survival looks different depending on where you stand. For many, survival is daily and systemic in ways I’ve never had to face. For me, it showed up as the grind of money tied to worth, individual effort praised at the expense of collective care.
And still, even as I joked about it, retirement isn’t really an option. Not for me, and not for most of us. Hope, I’ve learned, is the antidote. (Thanks, Pollyanna, for that early lesson.)
Two coaching sessions later (thank you, Barrett and Trudi, who have given me back more of myself than I knew I’d lost), I realized it wasn’t retirement I was craving.
That’s too simple.
It was the release of that which no longer serves me.
The reclamation of that which I discarded over the years.
A reintegration of all that I was and what we can become.
The Quiet Part Out Loud
So here’s the release:
I am retiring from running other people’s businesses.
I’ve done it for a long time. I’ve been good at it. Sometimes great at it. I don’t regret a second of it, but it’s not where my energy belongs anymore.
And if I’m honest, the hardest part hasn’t been the work itself. It’s been noticing how much of my identity was intertwined with systems I did not believe in. How quickly I reached for orthodox strategies, inherited practices, ways of leading that never really belonged to me in the first place.
Retirement, in this sense, isn’t about stepping back. It’s about saying no more to what was never mine. And maybe you feel this too: that you’ve been carrying strategies, roles, or expectations that never belonged to you either.
The System at Play
Because here’s the truth: most of us (especially those of us who are not white, male, straight, or wealthy) were groomed to sustain systems we didn’t design, systems built on white supremacy, patriarchy, and extraction.
Extractive capitalism trains us to measure our worth in what we can hold up for others. Hustle culture convinces us that burnout is just part of the job description. And leadership models (most of them rooted in extraction) teach us to carry weight that was never meant to rest on one pair of shoulders.
We inherit these roles, we internalize their rules, and then we call it ours.
Until we don’t.
The Cost of Carrying What Isn’t Yours
For me, that inheritance looked like:
Feeling complicit in extraction, even as I tried to build something different.
Pushing myself past capacity because the system made it normal to ignore my body’s cues.
Confusing motion with meaning, progress with proof.
Repeating patterns I thought I’d already dismantled.
It scooped out my spirit and replaced it with a ticking time bomb of resentment and depletion. Not overnight but in small, almost invisible ways. Until I realized I couldn’t keep doing it and still recognize myself.
We’re Ready for a New Paradigm
And here’s how I know this isn’t just about me.
I’ve been experimenting on TikTok lately. Nothing VIRAL has happened, and I wasn’t expecting it to. But one video about “your team is not your friends” pulled nearly 10,000 views and almost 1,000 likes. Another about the myth of “benevolent dictatorships” hit 1,300 views in a single day, with dozens of comments rolling in.
That’s not “viral” by internet standards — but it is directional information. People are resonating, not because it’s clever content, but because they’ve lived under these dynamics their whole lives.
The theses behind those videos were simple:
Leadership that centers care is a risk to business as usual.
What you normalize at work, you begin to accept everywhere.
And people showed up in droves because they know it’s true. If you’ve felt that same “in your gut” dissonance in your work, you’re feeling the old paradigm starting to shift under your feet.
We’ve been sold the idea that distance makes us professional, that hierarchy keeps us safe, that dictatorship can be “benevolent.” But every company, every team, is a microcosm. What we accept in the workplace, we accept in politics, in schools, in our communities.
And what people are telling me — in the comments, in the DMs, in their resonance, is that they’re done accepting it.
We’re ready for a new paradigm. So the question isn’t whether you’ll keep carrying it all. It’s whether you’ll choose what you’re willing to retire from now, so you can actually keep building what’s yours to hold.
What I’m Reclaiming
So, consider this my retirement announcement.
Not from work and not from ambition.
But from a version of work that no longer fits.
I’m reintegrating the places where I come alive. Where my clients see transformation. Where I feel most like myself:
Facilitation
Coaching
Strategic partnership
This isn’t closing a door; it’s stepping through the right one. (Or at least the right one for now.)
And the first way I’m making that shift real? I’m carving out dedicated space to do this work differently—with a small number of one day intensives. It’s one way I can hold the questions so many of us are asking.
Most of the founders I’ve worked with this year have hired me because:
Even with a team, everything still landed back on their desk.
Multiple revenue streams were competing for attention, and they couldn’t tell which one was the real growth engine.
They were evolving a brand or body of work but felt “a bit lost and unfocused” about what came next.
Their systems were strong enough for today, but would snap under the weight of growth.
They’ve built something before and burned out (or “the culture went to hell” and they had to scrap and restart)
Because retiring from what’s not mine also means reinvesting in the work that is: helping founders design systems that don’t wear them out. Here’s what that has looked like this year…
A coach/author clarifying the next evolution of their body of work — refining positioning and building a visibility plan that felt aligned, not rushed.
An education company ($250–500K) mapping their business into a flywheel, locating energy leaks, and clarifying the real growth engine.
A health services company ($1–2M) aligning their platform and freeing the founder from bottlenecks so they could return to vision.
A product consultancy sharpening a flagship offer and building a GTM system that created repeatable sales momentum.
A tech/AI start-up (investor-funded) building early-stage architecture (onboarding flows, governance and policy documentation, and planning cycles), creating investor-facing strategy and GTM readiness, and aligning product vision with organizational structure to support both funding and ethical growth.
And every one of them walked away with clarity, a system map, and the relief of knowing what only they needed to hold (and what the business could hold without them).
If you’re carrying more than your systems can sustain, and if, like one of my clients, you feel the urge every time you walk into your closet to sink into the corner and whisper “I’m retiring!” This is your invitation. You can grab 30 minutes of time with me here to chat.
An Invitation
So let me turn the question back to you:
What are you ready to retire from?
Not someday and not decades from now. Right now (today… maaaybe tomorrow).
In the way you lead, the way you build, the way you carry what was never really yours.
Maybe retirement isn’t about leaving the game. Maybe it’s about refusing to keep playing by rules we never wrote, rules that were never designed for our survival (or our joy) in the first place.
xo,
Brittany
P.S. Sometimes the next chapter starts with one good conversation. If you’d like to spend a day in deep thought-partnership with me, start by booking a 30-minute call.
On our call, you can expect:
A grounded, values-centered conversation about what’s working and what’s not
Space to share what feels most alive or urgent in your business right now
Clarity on whether a thought-partnership jam between us is the right fit for right now
Sound fun? Grab 30 minutes with me here.
