When you have to be a role model: the tiredness you’re not allowed to show

Monday, 7.55 am. The car is parked outside the building, the engine off. Two minutes until the all-hands meeting. He slept four hours last night, on Friday they lost an important client, and things are tense at home. He takes a deep breath, looks in the mirror, adjusts his expression. Then he walks into the meeting room and says: “Good morning! We’ve got an interesting week ahead.”

Nobody in the room notices a thing. And that is precisely the point.

People in leadership positions do this so well that they no longer even notice it as work. But it is work — and it has a name. It is called emotional labour. In this article I won’t write about burnout in general, but about this particular, quiet effort: what it costs when you have to be a model of calm, confidence and energy, even when you feel something completely different inside.

Work that isn’t in the job description

In the early 1980s, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild studied flight attendants. She noticed that their job wasn’t only serving drinks and looking after safety, but also something that appeared in no contract: a smile that had to look genuine, calm in the face of a rude passenger, warmth in the twelfth hour of a shift. In her book The Managed Heart (1983) she called this emotional labor — the effort you invest in showing the emotions your role requires.

Hochschild estimated that at the time roughly a third of workers in the US had jobs that demanded substantial emotional labour. Today that share would probably be even higher, as there are more service jobs. Interestingly, though, leaders long remained in the background of these discussions — as if emotional labour were a matter for shop assistants and nurses, not for chief executives.

In reality, leadership is one of the most emotionally demanding jobs there is. A leader looks after not only their own emotions, but the emotional climate of the whole team. People read their face like a weather forecast: if they look worried, something is wrong. If they’re angry, it’s time to keep out of the way. If they’re calm, things will probably be fine.

Surface acting and deep acting

Hochschild described two ways in which people carry out emotional labour, and later researchers added a third.

Surface acting means showing an emotion you don’t feel. You smile even though you’re angry. You speak optimistically even though you’re frightened. The inner emotion stays the same; only the expression changes.

Deep acting means trying to genuinely feel what the role requires. Instead of just smiling, you try to imagine how the other person sees things, or you look for something in the situation that truly calms you. The gap between inside and outside narrows.

The third option is naturally felt emotions: you show what you really feel, in a form that suits the situation. You’re tired and you say so — but not in a way that makes the team despair.

What the gap costs

In 2000, psychologist Alicia Grandey proposed that emotional labour be understood as a form of emotion regulation — and this opened the door to a decade of research. In 2011 Ute Hülsheger and Anna Schewe summarised it in a meta-analysis covering thirty years of studies.

The finding is fairly clear. Surface acting was linked to emotional exhaustion, cynicism about work, psychosomatic complaints and lower job satisfaction. Deep acting had much weaker links with these problems, and in places was even associated with better performance.

In other words: what wears you out isn’t regulating your emotions, but hiding them. The gap between what you feel and what you show is like a program running in the background of a computer. You can’t see it, but it drains the battery.

Why is the difference so great? In surface acting you feel one thing, show another and constantly watch that the first doesn’t slip out. That is three processes at once. In deep acting, and in honesty in a suitable form, the inner and the outer come at least partly into line, so there is less to monitor. The effort remains, but it is no longer doubled.

The leader as role model: emotional labour in three directions

A flight attendant does emotional labour mainly towards passengers. A leader does it in three directions at once — and that is part of why it is so exhausting.

• Downwards, towards the team. A leader has to convey security, even when they themselves are uncertain. The team needs to feel that someone knows where we’re going.
• Upwards, towards the board or owners. There they have to be confident, composed and reliable. Doubt is quickly read as incompetence.
• Outwards, towards clients, partners and the public. Here the leader is the face of the organisation. What they feel is no longer just theirs — it is part of the company’s image.

The pressure isn’t imaginary. Research on emotional contagion in groups shows that the moods of people with more influence in a group spread to others more readily. So a leader is right to sense that their face means something. The mistake happens only in the conclusion they draw from it: that they must therefore constantly show something they don’t feel. A team doesn’t need a leader without emotions, but a leader who knows how to handle them.

Add to this a belief many leaders hold: that tiredness is not allowed. That “being a role model” is the same as “never showing weakness”. People with this belief often say they learned it early — from a parent who was always strong, or in a family where someone had to hold everything together. In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we pay a great deal of attention to such roles, because they often move straight from the family of origin into the workplace. I wrote about how early patterns show up in our relationships with managers and colleagues in Attachment at work: how the pattern shows with your manager and colleagues.

What happens in the body and mind when you hold back

Researcher James Gross and his colleagues studied, in a series of experiments, what happens when people deliberately hold back the expression of their emotions. The findings are surprisingly consistent.

In 1993 Gross and Robert Levenson showed that in people who hid their reactions while watching an unpleasant film, physiological arousal did not decrease but increased. Their faces were calm, but their cardiovascular systems worked harder than in those who reacted naturally. In 2000 Jane Richards and Gross found that people who suppress their emotions remember less well what happened in the meantime — which, for someone who spends the whole day in meetings, is highly practical information.

Perhaps the most interesting is a 2003 study by Emily Butler and colleagues. It showed that suppressing emotions affects not only the person doing it, but also the person they are talking to: the conversation felt less connected, and the partner’s blood pressure rose more than with someone who was being genuine. So people sense that something isn’t genuine, even if they don’t know what.

At home, when the mask slips

Emotional labour doesn’t end when you leave the office. It ends when you run out of strength to keep doing it — and that often happens right on the doorstep at home.

Partners of people in leadership positions often describe this with the same image: “All day long they’re kind, patient and inspiring to everyone else. We get what’s left.” The team sees a leader who is always composed. The family sees a person who shuts down in the evening, is irritable or silently stares at their phone. Both are real. The only difference is where emotional labour is being done and where it no longer is.

Sleep often joins in here too. When there was no room for any emotion during the day, that room opens at night — as rumination, early waking or restlessness. I described how sleep and emotions are connected in Sleep and emotion: why everything hurts more after a bad night.

Tiredness you’re not allowed to show is therefore doubly tiring: once because of whatever tired you, and a second time because of the effort to make sure nobody notices.

How it sounds in conversation

Part of a conversation might sound like this (composed, not a real person):

“I can’t afford to be tired. If I let up, the whole team lets up.”
“What do you think would happen if, just once, you said it had been a hard week?”
“They’d think I can’t cope. That I’m weak.”
“And what did you think when your former boss once admitted he was exhausted?”
A pause. “Actually … that he was human. I trusted him more.”
“Interesting. You have different rules for yourself than for him.”
“I always have.”

That last sentence often opens the door to the layer where the rule “you mustn’t show it” was learned in the first place. Who in the family was allowed to be tired? Who had to be strong on behalf of others?

Exercise: an inventory of the gap

The exercise takes ten to fifteen minutes. Do it in the evening, while the day is still fresh.

1. Choose three moments from today. A meeting, a conversation, a phone call — moments when you were “in role”.
2. For each one, write down two words: what you felt and what you showed. For example: “anxiety — confidence”, “anger — patience”, “tiredness — energy”.
3. Rate the gap from 0 to 10. Zero means you showed exactly what you felt. Ten means you showed the opposite of what you felt.
4. For the moment with the biggest gap, find a sentence that would be honest yet appropriate to the role. Not “I feel awful”, but “This week has been demanding. I don’t know everything yet, but I do know what we’ll do tomorrow.” This is the path from surface acting to naturally felt emotions.
5. Choose one place or one person where the gap can drop to zero. A friend, your partner, therapy, a walk on your own. Write down when you’ll go there this week.

If at the fifth step you realise there is no such place, that is a very important realisation — perhaps more important than all the others. It can help to think about vulnerability: not as weakness, but as the condition for anyone being able to support you at all.

Where this doesn’t apply

I don’t want this article to sound like a call for complete honesty at every moment. That would be bad advice.

Some holding back is part of the role. A leader who shows panic at every piece of bad news doesn’t help the team. The ability to stay composed when others aren’t is part of the responsibility. The question isn’t whether you regulate your emotions, but whether you have somewhere you don’t have to.

Regulating is not the same as denying. Deep acting and honesty in a suitable form are skills that can be practised. The aim isn’t to throw off the role, but to narrow the gap between you and the role.

Tiredness can be a sign of something more serious. If it lasts for weeks, isn’t fixed by a holiday, and is joined by a sense of emptiness, cynicism or physical complaints, it may be burnout, depression or a physical illness. I wrote about the signs of burnout in Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break, and about what is particular to burnout in a leadership position in When a leader burns out: who helps the one at the top. If the difficulties have lasted a while, talk to your GP first. If thoughts appear that you can no longer go on living, in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (between 7 pm and 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline (Zaupni telefon Samarijan) on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency in Slovenia 112.

A space without a role

One of the things therapy can offer a person in a leadership position is simple and rare: a space in which you don’t have to be a role model. Where you can say you’re tired, frightened or uncertain without it having consequences for the team, the board or your image.

Many people who are used to leading have misgivings about this. What if I cry? What if I don’t know what to say? What if it breaks me? These fears are very understandable, and I wrote about them in Fear of therapy: what if I cry, what if I don’t know what to say?. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

From the experience of people who have found such a space, something surprising often emerges: when you have at least one place where there is no gap, it becomes easier to carry elsewhere. The role remains, but it is no longer all you are. And something else often happens too — a leader who allows themselves to be human allows the team the same. I described how this connects with the pattern of constantly proving yourself in The “never enough” syndrome: high performance at the top that brings no peace.

What to remember

• Emotional labour is the effort of showing the emotions your role requires — a leader does it downwards, upwards and outwards all at once.
• What drains you most is surface acting: the gap between what you feel and what you show.
• Holding back emotions increases physiological arousal, weakens memory and affects the other person too.
• What helps is an honest sentence in a suitable form — and at least one place where there is no role.
• Tiredness that lasts for weeks and isn’t fixed by a holiday is a reason to talk to a doctor.