Welcome to Heart Glow CEO, where high-performing leaders learn to regulate stress, strengthen self-trust, and make clear decisions without sacrificing their health or values. I'm Kc Rossi, Integrative Leadership Coach. Expect practical nervous system tools, conscious leadership insights, and real conversations that bring achievement into alignment.
Take a deep breath with me and let's dive in. Today, we're naming something you've probably been feeling in your bones, density. Not just I'm stressed, not just it's been a week, I'm talking about that heavy, invisible pressure that builds when the world feels like, how my client described it yesterday, a dumpster fire, and your job is to walk straight into the flames with people you care about.
If you're a big-hearted leader, especially in crisis-facing service roles, like domestic violence advocacy, shelters, case management, child and family services, special education, autism support, nonprofit leadership, this episode is for you because your leadership isn't happening in a clean, quiet environment. It's happening in urgency, in trauma, in broken systems with real human stakes. So today, we're going beyond just do box breathing.
I want to offer you a conscious leadership lens, practical, grounded, deeply compassionate that helps you do what many leaders struggle to do, lay the burden down without abandoning your people. Let's start here. A lot of mission-driven leaders secretly carry an identity contract that says, if I don't do it, who will? If I rest, I'm selfish.
If I say no, I'm letting someone down. And that contract sounds noble until you realize it's also the pathway to burnout, resentment, and collapse. So here's the distinction that changes everything.
Responsibility is what's yours to respond to. Burden is what you've absorbed that was never yours to carry. I want you to listen to that again and be open in your nervous system.
Responsibility is what's yours to respond to. Burden is what you've absorbed that was never yours to carry. Responsibility is I can take right action.
Burden sounds more like I must hold the weight of the outcome. And the savior pattern, the over-functioning pattern confuses the two. It makes you believe that carrying equals carrying.
But conscious leadership says carrying equals clarity. Now, let's talk about the savior reflex because it's sneaky. It shows up when you're exhausted but still say yes.
When you jump in before others have a chance to develop competence. And I know you're shaking your head to that one. When you handle the emotional load of the whole room.
When you take on more cases, more responsibility, more crisis. Because your heart can't tolerate the discomfort of someone else's pain. And believe me, I know this space all too well.
And there's a lot of unthreading that needs to happen. I need to say this with love. The savior reflex is often a trauma response dressed up as a virtue.
Yes, that truth can sting. But here's the thing. It's also a control strategy.
Because if you can fix it, you can soothe the terror of not knowing what will happen. This is especially true in domestic violence spaces. Where the stakes can feel immediate and life-altering.
You're dealing with safety planning, legal complications, fear, unpredictable escalation. Your system learns, if I don't stay hypervigilant, something terrible could happen. I was coaching a leader that's in this space.
She was in the car heading to work. When she got into the parking lot, there was a survivor in crisis. She actually needed to discontinue the call to call 911.
And there was this hypervigilance in her system. Where she was almost torn between disappointing me for having to jump off the call. But also put out that dumpster fire that was really needing her attention.
And so this is something that is, I think, ingrained. So I want you to really be gentle with yourself. As you start being aware of this putting out fires.
And ping-ponging from need to crisis to need to crisis. And then in the autism support environments. Whether you're a parent, a clinician, a teacher, a program director.
There's also a unique layer there too. Which is sensory overload, behavioral intensity. Advocating in systems that don't understand neurodivergence.
And constant decision-making. And sometimes the quiet grief of why is this so hard? These leaders often live in chronic alert. And chronic alert makes boundaries feel like betrayal.
If boundaries trigger guilt for you, I want you to consider this. Guilt isn't always a moral signal. Sometimes guilt is a withdrawal symptom.
When you've been conditioned to over-give. Setting a healthy boundary can feel like you're doing something wrong. When you're actually doing something new.
Now let's get you something that you can use today. Here's a simple protocol that I invite you to practice. It's three steps because I am a fan of threes.
Regulate, discern, act. Not as a long spiritual ritual as leadership hygiene. Let's break this down a little bit.
Step one is to regulate. This is not about getting calm. It's about getting clear.
So if you're able to, try this with me right now. Exhale longer than you inhale. Just one breath.
And then let your eyes gently move and land on something in your environment that feels stable. A wall. A plant.
I often use the edge of my desk. Then place a hand on your heart or your sternum and say, silently or out loud, I'm here. I'm safe enough in this moment to choose.
That feels so good just in that 30 seconds of one breath and one intentional safety phrase. And that's it. That's regulation for leadership.
You're not aiming for bliss. You're aiming for signal. And I think that's really important because in a lot of the change work that I've done over the years, I have had my expectations set so high that it often comes around to bite me in the butt.
When I'm looking for a 180, when I'm expecting fireworks, when I'm expecting unicorns and rainbows for all the hard work and effort that I've put in for stability and transformation. So I want you to just keep your expectations in check. And give yourself the permission to just exhale.
Exhale with just feeling 10% better. Not for butterflies and bliss. Especially in our crisis environments.
Step two is to discern with just two questions. What am I carrying right now that isn't mine? And here's the second question that completes it. What is mine to do cleanly without absorbing the outcome? Because your job is not to guarantee outcomes.
Your job is to be in right relationship with your role, your values, your capacity, the reality in front of you. In domestic violence work, that may sound like I can offer resources, advocacy, and safety planning. But I can't control whether someone returns.
I can't force readiness. I cannot hold responsibility for their partner's choices. Do you hear the difference? And in autism support, that might look like I can create structure, accommodations, skill building, and co-regulation.
But I cannot make a nervous system behave on demand. I cannot take responsibility for every meltdown. I can't carry the weight of an entire system's limitations.
Are you starting to see the difference? When you get this wrong, you start doing emotional labor for the universe, and that's not leadership. That's self-erasure, and I don't want that for you. Step three is act.
And I want you to think about this as one clean move. One clean leadership move, just one. A boundary, a decision, a delegation, a repair.
Here are a few examples that you can borrow. So some boundary phrases without apology spirals. And so this is so important.
I think I talked about this last week, about when to be aware of where the period needs to land. So being really aware of when you're falling into runoff sentence, which usually spirals into self-deprecation, rationalization, and justification. So super clean.
Keep it simple. I can do X. I cannot do Y. I'm at capacity, but here's what I can offer. My clients love that one.
I'm not available for that, but I'm happy to help you find another option. So can you see in that example where you're not trying to be the savior? You're not trying to fix it. You're not over-giving, over-caring, stepping over your 50%.
And then here's another one. That's urgent. Let's identify what's most essential in the next 30 minutes.
So you can see this is yes and. This isn't no. This isn't not caring.
This isn't shutting the door. But it's such a beautiful balance of yes and. And this is how we bring safety and regulation not only for ourself, but for those that we're in relationship with.
So a couple of decision phrases. This is helpful when the room is dysregulated. Here's what we know.
Here's what we don't. Here's our next step. So for someone that is a perfectionist, and I'm a recovering one, that can feel like, wait, I could do more.
I can fill more. I can be more. But it's really clean.
Here's what we know. Here's what we don't. Here's our next step.
You can also start to see, once you build these muscles, you can start to see these other beautiful systems come into play. So when I hear that one, I immediately think of emotional intelligence. Because it is not making stories up.
It's not heading down this meaning-making path. It is really coming back to data. And data helps our decisions.
It helps us get very clear. Here's what we know. Here's what we don't.
So be okay with calling it out. This is reality testing in real life. Here's our next step, which helps people feel and move from thought into action and keep momentum.
There's some proactive nature to that as well. So it's not propagating being stuck or feeling like a victim. Another decision phrase that's helpful is, we're choosing the best option with the information we have.
And again, this is not spinning out into assumption mode. Really powerful. Lastly, and you can always go back.
That's why I provide the show notes and the transcription. So if you want to borrow these and get them into your bones and have them be second nature, I invite you to go back to the show notes and the transcript. So repair phrases are great when guilt turns into resentment.
Well, not a fun place to be. But these two phrases can help you. I noticed I said yes when I meant to say no, and I need to correct that.
There's so much vulnerability and accountability and truth-telling in that statement. Can you allow yourself to go there when you need to? You don't need to hold it all and people please. I just recently used this.
My bestie and I love to travel. We're often blessed to travel in the winter for several weeks. And this year, I just wasn't feeling it.
And I said yes when I didn't feel aligned, and I had to circle back and disappoint her. And I had to use the repair phrase. I said yes when I meant to say no.
I'm sorry. It just doesn't feel like the right time. I would love to be warm.
You know that. And it's not the right time. And again, being okay with that, not going on and on, not trying to self-correct or do her emotional work for her, but being honest and to my own truth and alignment and also taking responsibility when I needed to repair something.
The second one is I want to reset our agreement so it's sustainable. This is really beautiful for service providers, entrepreneurs, anything where negotiation is in the play, because you're not static. Part of honoring our humanity is knowing that when we grow, our agreements get to change to honor that growth.
So one of those repair phrases, I want to reset our agreement so it's sustainable. In leadership, you also hear this win-win. We both win or we don't play at all.
And that's where that level of leadership comes in. That last one is huge because sustainable leadership is not a luxury. It's ethics.
Now I want to speak directly to the leader who serves in crisis spaces and feels guilty even listening to me right now, because you might be thinking, but people need me, Casey. You don't understand. It's not like I'm selling software.
There are real consequences. Yes, my beautiful friend, and you being chronically overloaded also has consequences. When you carry burden instead of responsibility, you become more reactive.
You make messier decisions. You lose discernment. You start resenting the people you're meant to serve.
You numb out or you get sharp or a little bit of both. You either disappear emotionally or you explode. So here's the paradox.
Your boundary is not a wall against love. Your boundary is a container for love. And this is conscious leadership.
This is the reframe I want to offer you today. If your leadership requires self-sacrifice to be good, it will eventually become harmful. Not because you're bad, because your nervous system has limits.
That's just the truth. And leadership that ignores limits becomes force, even when it starts as care. I hope this is landing for you.
And to close this out, I would love to do a tiny little closing practice, the lay it down micro ritual. Take one breath with me and name your burden silently. What am I carrying that isn't mine? Now imagine placing it down, not throwing it away, not denying it, just setting it down beside you.
And then say, I release responsibility for outcomes I can't control. I commit to the next clean step I can take. I lead with compassion and boundaries.
Beautiful. That's the work. That's the practice.
That's the path of the regulated, big hearted leader. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a fellow leader in a crisis facing role, someone who cares too much and calls a dedication. And if you're ready to build sustainable leadership from the inside out, the nervous system boundaries, clean decisions, self-trust.
Come into my world through Heart Glow CEO. I'll drop the link in the show notes. Until next time, my friend, lay your burden down, keep responsibility and lead from clarity.
