I've worked with a lot of leaders who feel quietly guilty about purpose.

Not because they lack it. But because they're not sure they've found it — at least not in the way they were told they would. No lightning-bolt moment. No singular calling that reorganized everything. Just a persistent, underlying sense that what they're doing matters, interrupted regularly by doubt, fatigue, and the ordinary friction of a complex life.

I want to suggest that this is not a failure of purpose. This is what purpose actually looks like.

Early in my coaching career, I sat with a man who had built something remarkable — a team, a culture, a reputation for integrity and results that others pointed to as a model. By every external measure, he was thriving.

And yet the first thing he said to me, quietly, almost as an aside, was: "I'm not sure any of them would still respect me if they really knew me."

We talk extensively about mental burnout. We talk about emotional exhaustion. We talk far less about what I'd call somatic disconnection — the gradual erosion of our relationship with our own physical experience. And yet the body is not separate from our leadership. It is the ground from which everything else grows.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that high-achieving leaders know well. It isn't the tired that comes from too many hours or too little sleep. It's something subtler — a depletion that sets in when you've been working against yourself, pushing hard in a direction that doesn't feel natural, wondering somewhere underneath it all whether you're actually built for this.