The Hidden Cost of Being the Strong One at Work
Some of the most capable owners are the least likely to notice they need help. They handle a cash crisis, make the hard call, hold the team steady, and keep the business moving while their personal world is coming apart. Over time that competence becomes the thing that hides what is happening underneath. In episode 411, Rosalind Price, grief and transitions coach, founder and CEO of R. Richard Price Consulting and creator of Mind The Transitions, made a distinction worth sitting with. Grief doesn't hide, grief invites. Loss keeps presenting itself, and most people lack the language to name what they are feeling. So the exhaustion gets filed under business pressure. If you are tired in a way sleep doesn't fix, the examination may need to go wider than strategy.
Inspired by Paper Napkin Wisdom Episode 411 with Rosalind Price.
The leader who never came off the clock
Rosalind's experience with grief started at four. Her mother was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, then stomach and colon cancer, and died when Rosalind was 16. Her father died from bone cancer when she was 23. In between, she was losing much of her support system to death and illness.
What she watched in her father is the part founders recognize. He was, in her words, on the clock. Up early, off to work, never a day missed. Then the girls off to school. Then a shower and the hospital, food on the table, home by eight. His role as a church minister meant even his rest was service.
"There were very little times that I saw my father be able to take time or even to take time, not just be able to, but take up space for himself."
She described it as autopilot. And she described something else that matters: she stopped only watching him and started experiencing him. As a human being, she said, as a man, rather than only as her father. Great admiration, because he never complained. Great empathy, because this is not what he asked for.
I know what that felt like from the inside. Years ago my son was hospitalized with bacterial meningitis, and there were days when we thought he might not come home. What I did was keep things normal for everyone else. Dance on time. Hockey on time. Everything on a schedule. I have said for years that the best way to find momentum is to give it away, and I still believe there is something real in that. Rosalind agreed that service gave her father meaning, life, purpose, a bragging right he deserved.
She also named the cost. He wasn't taking care of his health. No outlet for the stressors. Not much rest. And when his wife died, he did not get expert support for his own grieving. It bottled up, and then another illness came.
The habits that make someone good at building a company, responsibility, endurance, the willingness to carry heavy things, turn on you when every part of life gets the same treatment and nothing is allowed to flex.
Grief doesn't hide, grief invites
I offered Rosalind a premise: grief hides. Behind a full calendar, behind a list of to-dos that never gets done, behind avoidance.
She changed it.
"Grief doesn't hide, grief invites. Grief says, I'm here, I'm showing up, I'm inviting you to recognize me."
Her point is about language, not denial. When someone has grief awareness but no grief intelligence, the feeling seems hidden, because they cannot name it. And if you cannot name it, you cannot describe the impact it is having, or decide how to meet it.
Rosalind built that language through repetition. After an amicable divorce in 2019, following 17 years of marriage, she recognized ambiguous loss. He was still alive. They were still family. The dynamic was gone. When he died unexpectedly from a heart attack in 2022, that one landed differently. "That was gut-wrenching." By then her senses were heightened. She could name what she was experiencing, and naming it let her face it.
She also named anticipatory grief, which she had lived through with two terminally ill parents. The feelings arrive before the loss does, when you know something is coming on the horizon.
I told her about the RSVP. The invitation arrives, you put it off, you put it off, and then the party is in five minutes and you are sitting on the couch. She pulled the thread further. Grief gets mischaracterized as the party pooper, so people tell it to get its coat. "Grief is not the disruption. The experience is the disruption."
The death of an expectation
Here's the thing founders rarely say out loud. When a project fails, when a business or an idea you built doesn't work, it can feel like something died. I told Rosalind that, half expecting her to call it an overreach.
"That is a natural form of grief and loss. Because we know that grief is not just tied to death."
She called it the death of an expectation. Something you worked hard for, intended to turn out one way, and it didn't. Nobody goes into a marriage planning to divorce. Nobody raises capital planning to wind the thing down.
What gets lost is bigger than the money. You can lose an identity, a sense of purpose, a future you had already furnished in your head.
Rosalind felt she had failed. Her former husband would not accept the frame. He told her: we did not fail. Look at what we built in 17 years, look at this family. Maybe it didn't turn out how we expected, but we are still standing, and we define what success means to us.
That separation is usable in business. The value of what was created is one thing. The disappointment of how it ended is another. Notice when you are letting the second erase the first.
Resilience as flexibility, not endurance
Some people dislike being called resilient. Rosalind explained why. The compliment becomes an expectation. If you are the resilient one, you are invited to be strong all the time, you cannot be vulnerable, and it can give everyone else permission to stop offering you support.
Her own definition is different.
"Resilience is the ability to have those moments of weakness, have those moments where you might need to power through, those moments where you do need to have solitude and rest. But the resilience comes in for me, by definition, is by understanding when I need to function in those roles and then be able to pivot and be flexible when I need to."
That is flexibility of behavior, which is close to what leadership asks for anyway: being right for the situation instead of making the situation right for you. She said she might be the soldier in one instance and the seeker in another.
During her divorce she chose differently than she had at 16 and 23. She rallied her troops. The people closest to her heard that she knew they were used to the forever strong one, the bounce backer, and that she was not doing that this time. She was going to be ugly through this one. She was going to order the DoorDash. And the invitation went out to them to stand up and support her, if they were willing and able.
A strategy that got you through an earlier chapter may not fit the person you are now. Carrying it forward unexamined is habit, not strength.
What to do when someone on your team is grieving
Most leaders feel badly equipped here, and there is a thicket of rules about what you are and are not allowed to say. Rosalind cut it down to two human things.
Say I'm here, and mean it sincerely. I'm here means you can be present in silence, or walk beside someone while they process, or hold space so that when they do want to talk, you are not shutting the story down.
Ask what support would be most useful. Her specific version: what are the one or two critical things we can do while you are navigating this and still managing your day to day.
Two more things she added. Acknowledge the loss rather than tiptoe around the person. And if they want to talk about it, do not change the subject or try to take them back to the old days, because it is new now.
On performance, she was practical. You may not be able to shift the workload. The expectations can look different. Say the thing out loud. We know what high performance looked like for you before, and it might look different now, and that's okay. Let's be realistic with that.
She also pushes leaders to build their own grief awareness first. You recognize in others what you have learned to recognize in yourself, including in moments when the person cannot articulate it, or will not, because it is a professional setting.
Restoration, not healed, and what to do with this week
Rosalind avoids the word healed. Healing implies you will never again feel pain, sadness or longing, and that is not true. She says restoration. Grief is her lifelong companion, because relationships that significant leave a longing that does not go away, and grief outbursts are normal. They do not mean you are not over it. There is nothing to get over.
That gives room for a full, productive life with moments of sadness inside it.
Three things worth doing in the next seven days.
Name one unaddressed transition. A relationship that changed, a business that didn't become what you imagined, a role you left. Rosalind warned that avoided losses compound: rumination, being on autopilot all the time, cumulative losses stacking on top of each other. Once you can name a thing, you can choose to face it.
Audit one responsibility you are carrying. Is the way you are handling it what you actually need now, or the soldier habit from an earlier chapter? If it is the habit, say so to the two or three people closest to you, the way Rosalind did.
Make the two-sentence offer to someone on your team. I'm here. What are the one or two things we can do for you right now. Then be quiet long enough for an answer.
And notice who around you has been on the clock for a long time. Someone holding things together so steadily that nobody counts the weight. Today is a good day to acknowledge them. Perhaps that someone is you.
The Napkin Moment
Rosalind Price's actual paper napkin captures the essential wisdom of the conversation:
"I can't control every transition, but I can meet it with awareness and choose how I move forward."
The first part acknowledges that much of life happens beyond our control. The second preserves the agency to decide how we respond.
What makes the message powerful is the importance Rosalind places on awareness. Choosing how to move forward becomes more meaningful when a person has recognized what has happened, what has been lost, and what support might be needed.
Awareness gives that choice a foundation.
What the Strongest Leaders May Need to Reconsider
For someone who has spent decades building a business, being dependable can become inseparable from personal identity. People know who to call when something goes wrong. The leader responds, solves the problem, and carries on.
Rosalind's conversation raises the possibility that the strongest person in the room may also be carrying losses that nobody else can see.
Her father's devotion gave his family stability. Govindh's commitment to maintaining normal routines helped his family through a frightening medical crisis. Neither experience diminishes the value of service. Both reveal why people who give so much also need opportunities to receive care.
The next chapter of leadership may require a different relationship with strength.
And perhaps the question worth carrying forward is this: What have you been so busy holding together that you have never allowed yourself to acknowledge what you lost?
Related Insights
If the way you carry things has stopped fitting the leader you are now, that is depth work, and it goes better with people who will challenge you on it. Build the Field
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