Let’s dismantle a lie.
“Lazy” is not the word for women who are exhausted, disillusioned, and done carrying systems that don’t serve them.
What looks like procrastination to the less informed, is often protection. What feels like giving up to others, is often a refusal to self-abandon … again.
Ask me how I know…
You’re not lazy. You’re just done lying to yourself.
After years of overextending, people-pleasing, and proving yourself ten times as much as others … only to be seen half as clearly …
Your body and soul are waving the proverbial white flag. It’s not a failure. It’s a signal.
A signal to yourself and for yourself that says:
- Stop making exhaustion the metric for excellence
- Release loyalty to environments that reward burnout
- Reclaim joy, rest, and clarity as core leadership tools
Because truthfully, when exhaustion is named “ambition”, you forget how to rest…
You don’t need another productivity hack. You need permission to be human.
Joy (and yes, the names have been changed to protect the melanated) came to me with a problem we know all to well. She said, “I just can’t keep going like this …”
Does her pain sound familiar?
She was overcommitted to systems that praised her output but ignored her humanity.
So, together we reframed her leadership lens from overdrive to overflow. She now works three (3) days a week, leads strategic initiatives with clarity, and finally sees rest as a requirement ….
… not as a reward.
When you call rest revolutionary, you remember that ease is not earned. It’s allowed.
If you have been carrying the word lazy like a verdict — this is your permission to put it down.
What looks like laziness is almost always exhaustion, misalignment, or the body’s refusal to keep performing for systems that were never designed with you in mind. That is not a character flaw. That is intelligence.
The Different By Design newsletter is where we keep this conversation going every week — strategy and soul for the melanated professional woman who is done performing her worth. Come be in the room.