Some executives who are quietly drowning look completely fine from the outside. The title is right. The salary is right. The calendar is packed in a way that reads as importance rather than what it is: depletion, dressed up as discipline.
Ginny Priem spent more than two decades in corporate leadership finding that out the hard way, and now she runs a framework built around one uncomfortable question: What are you still doing that you should have let go of months or years ago?
The cost of not answering that question rarely shows up on a spreadsheet. It shows up as a team that never quite hits its ceiling, a leader who can’t take a real vacation, and a body that eventually forces the conversation the calendar kept avoiding.
Where would you put yourself? Were you even a consideration for the top five most important people in your life?
Why Does Hiring People Like Yourself Backfire?
Priem built her first teams the way many new leaders do. She hired people who worked the way she worked, thought the way she thought, and moved at roughly her speed. It felt efficient at the time. It also quietly failed, and it took years of running real teams before she understood why.
Five versions of the same person are not a stronger team. They are one person’s blind spots, multiplied by five. What performs better is a group built out of different strengths set next to each other on purpose: someone who connects, someone who communicates clearly under pressure, someone willing to do the operational grind nobody else wants. That is a deliberate staffing decision, not a personality match.
“You’re not going out to brunch. This is work that you’re doing.”
You have to be strategic about who ends up on a team, because being pleasant is not the same as being effective. Leaders who confuse the two pay for it slowly, over years, in a way that never shows up on a single performance review.
Letting Go Is Not the Same as Losing Control
Priem calls her whole philosophy Unsubscribe, and the sunk cost fallacy is exactly what it is built to fight. Once someone has invested years in a job, a strategy, or a relationship, walking away starts to feel like admitting the investment was wasted, so people keep adding to it instead.
Ask anyone who has left a miserable job or a toxic relationship whether they regret hanging on longer. Almost nobody says yes. The regret runs the other direction: people wish they had let go sooner.
Ten years ago, Priem took a vacation and, for the first time in her career, did not work through it. That sounds small until you notice how rare it is among people running teams. She had spent years staying reachable on every day off and telling herself that was dedication. What she learned instead is that a leader who works through vacation is not modeling commitment. She is teaching her entire team that rest is not allowed, whether she says a word about it or not.
Letting go of that control changed how her team performed, and not because she stopped caring. She stopped being the bottleneck. Holding on to every decision, every outcome, every message the second it arrives, is not leadership. It is anxiety dressed up as leadership. Turn off notifications for a day and the emails are still there when you get back to them. Given real room, most teams handle more than the executives above them are willing to admit.
I have made the same trade in a smaller way. My phone stays off during a run or a ride, and I keep zero notifications on email or text, checking both only when I have decided to. Nothing urgent has ever gone unresolved because of it. The message is still there when I get back to it, exactly like Priem describes, and the peace that comes from not being on call for every ping is not something you get by explaining it to people. You get it by doing it.
Burnout Hides Behind Competence, Not Weakness
Burnout rarely looks like someone falling apart. It looks like someone extremely good at their job, refusing to stop being extremely good at their job, long after their body started sending warnings nobody in the room wanted to name.
Priem knows this from the inside. “I had abnormal skin cancer lesions removed from my body. My hair broke off and fell out, and I got shingles on my face in my thirties.” That is not a metaphor for stress. She connects those health problems with a period of chronic stress. She kept telling herself she was fine because her calendar said she was succeeding. Hustle culture trains people to wear busyness like a badge, but everyone gets the same twenty-four hours in a day, and constant motion is not proof that any of it points at what matters.
The fix she teaches is blunt on purpose: notice the reaction before it hardens into a habit. React, observe, respond, in that order, deliberately. Most leaders skip straight from reacting to justifying the reaction, and by the time the pattern gets named, it has already cost them a decision, a relationship, or their health.
Resilience Is Not About Bouncing Back
Priem has a hot take on the word resilience, and it starts with rejecting the way most people use it. The word got worn out during the pandemic, deployed to praise anyone who simply kept showing up. Her view is more blunt: human beings are resilient by default. The people who came through years of lockdowns, layoffs, and uncertainty demonstrated resilience whether they called it that or not.
The leaders and performers she considers genuinely exceptional are not the ones who return to where they started. They use what knocked them down to move somewhere better than where they were before.
“It’s not about bouncing back. It’s about bouncing forward.”
Bouncing back treats a setback as an interruption to recover from. Bouncing forward treats it as information, evidence about what needs to change before the next version of the same problem shows up.
Many performance reviews still reward the first definition. An executive who survives a brutal quarter and returns to business as usual gets called resilient. The one who uses that same brutal quarter to change how the team operates rarely gets the credit, even though that is the harder, more useful response.
The Point of Work
Ask most people to name the CEO of a company they don’t work for, and watch them struggle. She left corporate leadership with a string of titles behind her: director, senior director, associate vice president. None of it mattered the moment she walked out the door, and she says so plainly. People who attach their identity to a role are building on ground that disappears the day the role does. That isn’t an argument against ambition. It’s an argument against mistaking the title for the point of the work.
The same idea follows her into how she talks about feeling stuck. When an executive can’t say why they feel stuck, she doesn’t ask about strategy first. She asks what they find meaningful, in the job or outside it, because pressure has a way of making people perform work that technically succeeds while meaning nothing to the person doing it.
An Important Question for Executives to Ask Themselves
Priem runs an exercise in her keynotes simple enough to try right now. Name the five most important people in your life. Most people rattle the list off fast: a spouse, kids, a couple of close friends.
Then she asks the second question. “Where would you put yourself? Were you even a consideration for the top five most important people in your life?” Most people can’t answer right away, and the pause is the answer. People who spend their careers managing everyone else’s priorities routinely forget to put their own name anywhere on the list, not because they don’t value themselves, but because nobody ever asked them to check.
Write your own name down somewhere on that list. Not necessarily first, but somewhere real, carrying the same weight as everyone else on it. If there’s no room for it without rearranging the whole list, that says more about how you’re running your life than any performance review ever will.