You're Not Burned Out From Too Much Work. You're Burned Out From Too Much Performance.

I have spent a lot of my career reading rooms.

Not in the theatrical sense — though that too. I mean the other kind. The quiet, constant scanning that happens before you've said a word. Who needs what from me right now. What do they expect. What answer keeps this safe. What version of me do I need to be in this room, for these people, at this particular moment.

I used to think that was just good facilitation. Attunement. Emotional intelligence.

It's also exhausting. And sometimes, it's a lie.

I was working with a creative team — smart, thoughtful people — who were deep in a decision about a piece of work. Somewhere in the conversation they turned to me and asked: is this offensive?

I felt the familiar pull immediately. They needed an answer. I was the consultant. I was supposed to know. And I could feel myself starting to construct one — scanning what I'd read, what I'd seen, what position would be most useful to them, most credible, least disruptive.

And then I stopped.

Because the honest answer was: I don't know.

Not as a deflection or false modesty. I genuinely didn't know — and more importantly, I didn't think a confident answer from me was actually what the moment needed.

So I said it out loud. I don't know. And I'm not sure a definitive answer is what we're really after here.

Something shifted in the room.

It was almost physical — like collective exhale. Turns out they didn't know either. They'd been performing clarity they didn't have, waiting for an expert to confirm or deny so they could stop sitting in the discomfort. When I refused to perform certainty, they didn't have to anymore either.

We got curious together instead. We asked questions nobody had asked yet. We investigated. We actually got somewhere real — somewhere we couldn't have reached through my performance, or theirs.

I think about that room a lot lately.

Because I see it everywhere right now — especially in arts and creative organizations navigating AI.

Leaders sitting with genuine uncertainty about what this technology means for their work, their teams, their relevance. And performing confidence anyway. In board meetings. In staff retreats. In funder conversations. Nodding along, filling silences, constructing answers because the alternative — saying I don't know out loud — feels like too much of a risk.

The performance is costing them more than the uncertainty ever would.

This is what I want to name clearly: the exhaustion so many creative leaders are feeling right now isn't only from the workload. It's from the weight of constant performance. The split-second calculations. The managed appearances. The gap between what you're actually thinking and what you let the room hear.

That gap is where burnout lives.

Here's what I've had to learn, more than once:

I don't know is not a failure of leadership. It's an invitation to lead differently.

It takes the pressure off you. It takes the pressure off the room. It creates the conditions for honest conversation — which is the only kind of conversation that actually moves anything forward.

Creative teams, more than most, are starved for that permission right now. They need their leaders to model what it looks like to be uncertain without being unsafe. To not know without performing like you do.

That is, in fact, the most irreplaceable thing you can offer them.

This is part of the conversation I'll be having out loud next week with Paola Cacciatori, co-founder of Artelize — a former opera singer turned data strategist who knows this industry from the inside, and knows what changes when people finally stop pretending.

Soul and System: The Missing Conversation Between Arts Leadership and AI 📅 Wednesday, March 25 · 1PM EDT / 6PM CET · Free (link to register in the comments)

Before you go — one question worth sitting with:

What are you performing confidence about right now that you haven't let yourself say out loud yet?