The corporate world has long promised women that they can “have it all”—a thriving career, a fulfilling family life, and personal satisfaction. Yet for many women in leadership positions, this mantra has become less of an aspiration and more of a pressure cooker, forcing them to navigate competing identities and values that leave them feeling fragmented rather than fulfilled. Executive coach Yana Carstens is helping women leaders understand that the path to sustainable success isn’t about balancing external demands—it’s about addressing the internal conflicts that create silent suffering in corner offices across corporate America.
The Hidden Cost of Misaligned Values
Unlike their male counterparts who often face straightforward professional challenges, women executives contend with a more complex web of expectations. Carstens, who specializes in working with high-performing women, has identified a critical distinction: women leaders don’t burn out simply because they’re working too hard. They burn out because they’re operating in environments that fundamentally conflict with their core values.
“When women come to me saying they’re burned out, it’s rarely just about the hours or the workload,” Carstens explains. “It’s about spending years suppressing what matters most to them—whether that’s connection, creativity, authenticity, or impact—in order to fit into systems that weren’t designed with their values in mind.”
This values misalignment creates a particular kind of exhaustion that no amount of vacation time or self-care can resolve. Women find themselves succeeding by conventional metrics while feeling increasingly disconnected from who they are and what truly matters to them.
The False Binary: Career Versus Motherhood
Perhaps nowhere is this tension more acute than in the persistent false binary between career ambition and motherhood. Despite decades of progress, women leaders continue to face an unspoken expectation to choose between being fully committed to their careers or being fully present for their families—as if the two exist in zero-sum opposition.
Carstens challenges this framework entirely. “The question isn’t ‘Can women have both?’ The question is ‘Why are we still operating from a paradigm that suggests they’re mutually exclusive?'” she notes. “Men aren’t asked to choose between fatherhood and executive presence. They’re assumed to integrate both identities seamlessly.”
This artificial separation forces women to compartmentalize aspects of themselves, creating internal fragmentation that manifests as imposter syndrome, decision paralysis, and chronic self-doubt. Women executives often describe feeling like they’re failing at both roles—never quite enough at work because they have family responsibilities, and never quite enough at home because they have professional ambitions.
Performance-Based Worthiness: The Internal Prison
Carstens has observed another pervasive pattern among women leaders: the unconscious equation of performance with worthiness. Many high-achieving women have internalized the belief that their value depends on what they produce, how well they perform, and how perfectly they execute—a pattern that often begins in childhood and intensifies throughout their careers.
This performance-based worthiness creates a relentless internal pressure that’s distinct from external workplace demands. “These women are often their own harshest critics,” Carstens observes. “They’ve achieved extraordinary success by external standards, yet they remain trapped in a cycle of never feeling good enough.”
The challenge is particularly acute for women in male-dominated industries, where they may have spent years proving their competence, suppressing emotions, and adapting their natural communication styles to fit in. Over time, this constant self-monitoring and self-correction becomes exhausting, leading to disconnection from authentic leadership presence.
Listening to the Body: Early Warning Signals
One of Carstens’ most powerful contributions to executive coaching is her emphasis on body-based signals as early indicators of values misalignment and burnout. While traditional leadership development focuses on strategic thinking and executive presence, Carstens teaches women to recognize the wisdom their bodies offer.
“Your body knows before your mind does,” she explains. “Tension in your shoulders before certain meetings, the knot in your stomach when you compromise your values, the exhaustion that sleep can’t cure—these are data points, not weaknesses.”
Many women leaders have been trained to override these signals, viewing physical discomfort as something to push through rather than information to be honored. By reconnecting with these body-based cues, women can identify misalignment earlier, before it escalates into full-scale burnout or health crises.
Internal Versus External Boundaries
Carstens makes a crucial distinction that transforms how women leaders approach boundary-setting. Most boundary conversations focus on external limits—saying no to additional projects, delegating tasks, or managing time more effectively. While these external boundaries matter, Carstens emphasizes that internal boundaries are equally critical.
Internal boundaries involve honoring your own values, trusting your intuition, and refusing to abandon yourself in service of others’ expectations. For women leaders who’ve spent careers accommodating, pleasing, and proving, establishing internal boundaries represents a fundamental shift.
“External boundaries are about protecting your time and energy,” Carstens notes. “Internal boundaries are about protecting your integrity and authenticity. Both are essential, but internal boundaries create the foundation for everything else.”
Whole-Person Thriving: A New Leadership Paradigm
Rather than helping women become better at navigating systems that don’t serve them, Carstens advocates for a paradigm shift toward whole-person thriving. This approach recognizes that sustainable success requires alignment between who women are and how they lead—not continued fragmentation and compartmentalization.
Whole-person thriving means bringing previously suppressed aspects of yourself into your leadership: emotional intelligence, relational connection, intuitive decision-making, and values-driven action. It means defining success on your own terms rather than constantly measuring yourself against external standards that may not reflect what actually matters to you.
For women executives ready to move beyond the exhausting pursuit of “having it all,” Carstens offers a different possibility: becoming whole.
Women leaders ready to reconnect with their authentic leadership presence and organizations committed to supporting whole-person thriving can explore values-aligned executive coaching at www.realignandthrive.com.
