‘A promotion to a role I had been working toward for a long time.’
Marianna Bezler, Engineering @ OpenAI
If you are Exceptional at work and also Exhausted by it
Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders hire me to become the leader their next level is already waiting for, without losing themselves in the process. I write about my own journey through this on Substack.
If you built your career on commitment, reliability and overdelivering, and have now hit a ceiling you cannot push through by working harder, you are not alone. Many Senior Leaders reach exactly this point. And in most cases it is not a capability problem.
It is an overdelivering pattern that worked brilliantly at one level and is now working against you at the next.
You know the feeling. The calendar belongs to everyone else. The yes forms before the calculation is finished. The guilt arrives not when you have done something wrong, but when you consider doing something for yourself. You deliver everything and wonder why the next level keeps not arriving. Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders know this feeling from the inside, and most have spent long enough wondering when it will change.
I know this pattern from the inside. Fourteen years in investment banking across four countries, promoted by saying yes to everything, until the day I sat in a meeting with a billion euro mandate on the table and realised I had completely stopped caring. Deep down I already knew: I was standing at a turning point, in my career and in my life. What followed was not just a promotion. It was the beginning of work that finally felt like mine, ambition that did not cost me myself, and the strange, subtle pleasure of feeling genuinely alive in what I was doing.
That is what I want for the people I work with. The leaders I work with do not just get the promotion. They get back the life they had stopped allowing themselves for a very long time.
Through The Integration Method™, two tracks worked simultaneously, the career architecture and the pattern underneath it, the work goes to the level where the pattern actually lives. Not tips, not even frameworks you will forget by Wednesday. The real work, the kind that changes how Monday morning feels, that makes a clean ‘no’ possible, that builds the kind of leadership presence that gets noticed without exhausting you to maintain it.
The change is not about becoming harder or caring less. The dedication stays. What goes is the compulsion to absorb everything, manage everyone’s comfort before your own, and earn your value again every Monday morning.
What follows is leading from clarity rather than obligation, and a career and life that are no longer in competition with each other.
If you are a Senior Leader who has spent long enough being exceptional for everyone else, become the leader the next level is already waiting for. This is where the promotion follows. So does the life you have been putting off.
As an ICF PCC coach with 14 years in investment banking and 3,000+ coaching sessions, I know where this pattern lives and how to reach it.
BOOK A FREE TURNING POINT CALL
Danguole Litvinskaite, The Leadership Coach Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders Eventually Find
Danguole Litvinskaite is an Executive leadership coach based in Switzerland, specialising in helping Exceptional & Exhausted senior leaders advance without losing themselves in the process. With 14 years in investment banking across 4 countries, an ICF PCC credential, and 3,000+ executive coaching sessions, she works with senior leaders in tech, finance, consulting, and global financial institutions. Her 3-month intensive, The Integration Method™, addresses the overdelivering pattern at the level where it actually lives, combining corporate strategy, leadership psychology, nervous system regulation, and career navigation. Clients include senior leaders at the largest tech companies, Big 4 firms, and global financial institutions. Contact: info@coachandyou.com
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