By Dr. Abiola Salami, Worldclass Performance Strategist This article is the third in a four-part series exploring the unseen costs of leadership, inspired by my book T.I.T.L.E. – Taming the Invisible Toll of Leadership & Expectations (A Performance Tool for Healing the invisible burnout behind leadership success).
Why Self-Care and Grit Won’t Save High Performing Leaders By Dr. Abiola Salami, Author of T.I.T.L.E. – Taming the Invisible Toll of Leadership & Expectations (A Performance Tool for Healing the invisible burnout behind leadership success).
Introduction
Let’s end the performance theatre. If leadership feels unbearable right now, you do not need more grit and you do not need another self-care conversation.
What you need is the truth. Because the advice most leaders are receiving in 2026 is not just useless; it is dangerous.
There is a cruel joke we are playing on leaders. A call it the Modern Leadership Contradiction. Here it is: We place leaders inside broken systems, then tell them to cope better. We overload calendars then recommend mindfulness. We create decision chaos, then praise resilience. We extract emotional labour
then offer wellness webinars. That is not leadership development. That is institutional gaslighting.
February Is When Fake Solutions Collapse
January allows lies. February demands receipts. Because by now, the new tax realities are no longer theoretical, cost pressures are no longer “temporary”, FX assumptions have already been revised, talent anxiety is rising, not falling, boards want execution, not empathy and governments want compliance, not context.
And still, leaders are told: “Be strong“; Push through“. This is what leadership requires.”
No. This is what poorly designed leadership systems demand.
GRIT Was Never Designed for Permanent Disorder
Let me be precise because this matters.I wrote a book titled GRIT: A Performance Tool for Driving Accountability & Onwership in Young Talent in the Marketplace. Grit is essential. It builds discipline, ownership, resilience, and follow-through. It is especially critical for young talent learning how to carry responsibility, persist through difficulty, and perform against odds.
But grit was never designed to compensate for permanent disorder. Grit works when the system has some hope of stability, sacrifice has an end date, the rules are clear and the reward is proportional.
That world no longer exists for senior leaders.
Today’s leaders operate inside policy volatility, economic unpredictability, social distrust, technological acceleration, constant visibility and moral ambiguity. This is not episodic adversity. This is ambient chaos.
Applying grit here does not build character. Rather, it builds burnout with a LinkedIn profile. Using grit to grow capacity is healthy but using grit to survive broken systems is abuse.
Self-Care Has Become a Corporate Alibi
Let’s say the quiet part loudly: Self-care has been weaponised to avoid fixing leadership design. Instead of addressing endless meetings, decision reopen culture, undefined authority, emotional dumping on leaders, energy-blind scheduling and performative alignment; we say: “Take care of yourself.”
That is not care. That is abandonment wrapped in concern. You cannot breathe deeply inside a collapsing structure and call it healing.
Why Leaders Are Quietly Breaking (Without Falling Apart)
Leaders are not failing. They are being asked to do the impossible. We tell leaders, be decisive without authority; be empathetic without boundaries; be accountable without control; be calm inside instability; be human without margin; be visible without protection
In Nigeria right now, this is amplified because leaders must translate unclear policies into certainty, calm teams under cost-of-living pressure, defend margins under tax stress, maintain morale while tightening belts, look confident while recalculating survival and then we clap when they don’t complain.
This is not strength. This is slow erasure.
The Most Dangerous Leadership Myth
Here is the myth destroying leaders: “If I were stronger, I could handle this.” No. If leadership requires extraordinary personal sacrifice to sustain ordinary operations, the problem is not you. The problem is the system.
Leadership was never meant to be sustained by heroics. Heroics are emergency measures not operating models.
What Actually Breaks Leaders
Not pressure. Pressure can be survived. What breaks leaders is mmbiguity without authority, responsibility without protection, expectations without design, uccess without alignment and the cruelest part is that the better you are, the more the system leans on you until there is nothing left to lean on.
This is not a mindset problem. It Is a design failure. Read this slowly: No healthy system should require unhealthy leaders to function.
If leadership only works when leaders skip rest, suppress emotion, carry everyone else, silence values, betray identity, then leadership has become extractive. And extraction always collapses eventually.
The leaders who last are not tougher. They are better designed The leaders who remain sharp under pressure reduce cognitive load instead of glorifying busyness; they contain emotional labour instead of absorbing it; they design honesty instead of demanding loyalty; they protect energy instead of spending it recklessly and they refuse success that requires self-betrayal
This is not weakness. This is evolution.
Why I Wrote T.I.T.L.E.
I wrote T.I.T.L.E. – Taming the Invisible Toll of Leadership & Expectations because too many exceptional leaders were quietly paying for success with their health, their clarity, their relationships, their integrity and their sense of self
And ignorantly, everyone kept calling it “the cost of leadership.” It is not. It is the cost of bad leadership design. And bad design is optional.
A Question That Should Make You Uncomfortable
If your current leadership model requires you to be less patient, be less present, be less honest and be less authentic just to succeed, then think about it honestly, is that leadership Or slow self-destruction disguised as responsibility?
This is the insight behind my book: T.I.T.L.E. – Taming the Invisible Toll of Leadership & Expectations (A performance tool for healing the invisible burnout behind leadership success).
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About Dr. Abiola Salami
Dr. Abiola Salami is the Convener of Dr Abiola Salami International Leadership Bootcamp ; The Peak PerformerTM Festival Made4More Accelerator Program and The New Year Kickoff Summit. He is the Principal Performance Strategist at CHAMP – a full scale professional services firm trusted by high performing business leaders for providing Executive Coaching, Workforce Development & Advisory Services to improve performance. You can reach his team on hello@abiolachamp.com and connect with him @abiolachamp on all social media platforms.
For private coaching, boardroom recalibration, or executive healing strategy, connect email me directly at hello@abiolachamp.com to begin your private Executive Coaching Session.
