The Self-Reliance Trap: Are You Trying to stop an Avalanche with an Umbrella?
How the individualistic mindset sabotages leaders—and the path to effective action
I've had the most reflective August of my life. I was busy enjoying family fun and crises while noticing the comings and goings of world events.
And it was despairing at times:
The wildfires in my native Spain have been relentless and heartbreaking- a familiar summer sense of powerlessness and grief seeing beautiful ancient trees decimated
The Minneapolis school shootings brought me to tears—a city where I spent a transformative summer on an internship in my 20s feeling carefree and deeply safe.
Then there were the AI debates about whether bots or humans will end the world sooner, questionable global leadership decisions affecting millions, cultures that reward narcissistic traits and give platforms to those who deceive and manipulate…
All these news in my consciousness while supporting family in various extreme situations and managing my own personal challenges.
Phew!
I could have let the feelings pass me by, an appealing option.
But then I’d be missing life!
I practice being as aware as I can in each moment. So I noticed the intensity of holding all of it together.
I cycled between alarm and despondency in a way that felt like textbook flooding.
Life changes in an instant in unexpected ways and we are called to action. But at times, we get stuck and inaction is what we do.
What to do when the weight of the world feels too heavy to carry or the problems too complex?
Too many leaders turn to individualistic mindsets and in so doing inadvertently sabotage their purpose.
Before we continue, let me clarify something our individualistic culture gets dangerously wrong:
*** It’s NOT on you to carry the weight of the world’s problems alone, face or fix anything alone.
*** What IS on you as a leader is being aware of and responding to your heartache and alarm signals, and learning to use them as guidance for aligned, effective action.
The self-reliance mindset is a trap that can get us drained, and keep us stuck in inaction or ineffective action- despite good intentions.
How I went from flooded to aligned action
The question that often confronts purpose-driven leaders is:
How can I direct myself and find the best course of action when it all feels overwhelming?
To find the answer we need to rethink our relationship to strong emotions.
Strong emotions are not a nuisance, they are messengers.
They are allies. Simple signals helping you align your actions to what matters most to you.
Are you listening? Or are you too busy trying to run away from them?
It’s often pain that crystallises what matters most
From my personal experience, my work with leaders and the reseach, here’s what I think makes the most difference in leadership:
Don’t ignore your emotions. Instead, listen more deeply and hold them with sweet acceptance until you befriend them and the process leads to clarity about what actions would align with your needs and values.
Emotions are not burdens you must bear in isolation- talk about them to trusted people who can just listen without telling you what to do. You find the answers inside most often than not.
My journey from intense emotions to making what feels like the most aligned decision in my career
A pivotal point in this story started five summers ago.
Faced with unrelenting wildfires news all over Spain, my grief over the destruction of nature felt unbearable. It was as though I could hear the trees burning.
I felt the weight of responsibility of the many ways in which humans contribute to natural devastation.
I chose to sit with that pain.
I allowed myself to stay present when images emerged of a future where my children’s children and down the generations might never know the pristine beauty I had grown up in and so enjoyed.
I felt the grief of the human-driven imbalance in our ecosystems, now in urgent need of restoration and care.
And I felt so small and inadequate in the face of it all.
The grief haunted my nights and brought tears to my eyes. I felt powerless, unsure of what I could do or how I could be useful.
But the worsening of the wildfires touched a deep chord in me and helped me get in touch with what I value most.
The pain began to mobilise me into action.
I had to do something.
So I made a commitment: to redirect all my work toward supporting leaders in sustainability—even though I don’t have a background in the field and had no clue if I could actually make a living doing it.
The inner call happened quickly, over a few days. But it took years of reflection and effort to align my work with the ecology movement.
The gift is that my heartache helped me understand my deepest why, my purpose and guide my leadership with concrete actions.
You can read more about how I extracted my purpose from this heartache in July’s Substack Want team performance? Start with why Why your team's performance starts inside you.
This summer, seeing the familiar and alarming news, it felt that I’m well on my way toward turning that initial ache towards a greater impact in what I love.
In my personal work, I am reaching more leaders than ever, helping them gain the skills to be more effective in their change-making—enabling them to better motivate others and treat people with respect and empathy along the way.
But what felt so different is that the same pain and vision has now called me toward seeking even greater impact by collaborating with others who share my concerns and mission.
In essence, holding space for myself and allowing my inner state to be and inform me, coupled with a lot of soul searching and analysis, has led me to make a move towards collective action:
(Drum roll) I an honoured to have accepted a trustee position at Hometree, a very special Irish NGO that reforests native woodlands and works with communities and farmers in a very ground-breaking way. Their business model stands for all I love: respect and care for each other and respect and care for our planet. People can donate to offset their personal emissions or contribute in larger ways.
Hometree has already shown that collective vision, purpose and action creates meaningful change at scale. By supporting them I believe I can amplify both of our efforts towards a more beautiful, healthy Earth while helping communities thrive.
I celebrate that my pain informed me to align my work those 5 years ago towards this vision that means so much to me.
And science shows the wisdom of turning to each other in crisis.
The Neuroscience of Heartache: When Our Alarm Systems Activate
When we're confronted with real threats—wildfires, violence, systemic destruction—our bodies respond with what researchers call "emotional flooding."
Stress hormones flood our bodies, heart rate creeps up (blood pressure may as well), we may experience sweating, shaking, and an inability to think clearly or communicate effectively.
Interestingly, men tend to flood more quickly and take longer to recover, while women's cardiovascular and nervous systems bounce back faster, but both experience the same overwhelming physiological response. (It has to do with evolution, women can’t lactate if they are too stressed, for instance.)
During my August weeks, I was experiencing exactly this flooding over and over. The moments of being completely flooded with worry and disconnect weren't weakness, they were normal responses to all I was holding and my awareness of personal and global events.
How do you turn flooding around in the moment?
With a practice of being present, mindful and getting in touch with your emotions and needs.
For me, my practice of mindfulness and self-connection allowed me to turn strong emotions into wisdom through understanding them pretty quickly. I don’t have these emotions the entire day, they come and dissipate once I sit with them like I do with a dear friend. Or once I share my concern with someone who cares about me.
All of us need to up our emotional literacy and learn how to work with our bodies in a more sophisticated way that enhances the self-regulatory natural circuits. There’s plenty of research that shows that identifying and naming our emotions helps us regulate them by deactivating the amygdala and activating regulating areas in the Prefrontal Cortex.
A good place to start along the journey of soothing yourself is my meditation series When the World Feels Overwhelming (£29):
And don’t miss my seasonal Mindfulness Weekends (free) to practice knowing yourself more deeply and directing yourself from this wisdom. The next one is on September 19-21st, the Autumn Re-centring Weekend. All purpose-driven leaders welcome! It’s my way to spread more consciousness in leadership.
A second point that might seem counter-culture.
As pack animals, we're biologically wired for collaborative recovery. The neuroscience lingo is called co-regulation- literally, we regulate together with others, by design.
Isolation and superficial relationships can aggravate our challenges, while people who calm us and make us feel secure help us return to balance when perhaps we ourselves didn’t manage to do that.
Our heartache isn't meant to be carried alone—it's meant to connect us to others who care just as deeply.
If you take one thing away from reading this post, I hope it is this:
Humans were never meant to endure crises in isolation.
Our nervous systems are designed for co-regulation (I have written before about how our brains and bodies synchronise).
It has been shown that we actually recover faster through connection with others. The social brain networks get engaged when we connect lovingly with other people, and safe relationships help activate our parasympathetic recovery systems.
It has further been discovered that after a major crisis (e.g., an earthquake), the quality of relationships is what predicts wether a person recovers or they go into trauma. Think about that!
We are wired for connection.
We heal and recover faster when we are connected.
On the flipside, isolation is being proven to have toxic effects on body and mind and to be one of the leading causes of chronic illness!
So… don’t think that bearing things alone and pushing yourself to be stronger, tougher and more guarded are a good way to go!
It is ineffective, and you pay the price both physically and in performance.
Together, we can take collective action towards shared goals that is actually much more powerful and magnificent than what any of us could do alone.
If it’s hard for you to think this way and you clam up into an inner ball, you are not alone, though.
Don’t Try to Stop an Avalanche with an Umbrella
Through my executive coaching partnerships, I’m privileged to witness leaders in their most private moments. Again and again, I see how desperately they want to create the change our world needs.
Yet many confess how limited their influence feels—how impossible it seems to do enough in the face of overwhelming challenges. Exhaustion and self-doubt creep in, and the default response is silence, pushing harder, or giving up.
C-levels, managers, team leaders—these aren’t just roles. They’re humans with families facing illness, relationships marked by generational trauma, financial pressures. Each carries a story, a purpose, and a set of emotions.
I witness how hard it is for leaders to hold the inner tension between personal needs and professional responsibilities and mission, and to stay true to their values while pushing for the change they long to see (often in systems that resist it).
It’s like standing alone before a mountain.
If an avalanche were threatening to barrel toward your town, no one would grab an umbrella and rush out single-handedly to stop it.
That image seems absurd. The obvious response would be collective: engineers, responders, evacuation teams, neighbours—everyone mobilising in synchrony.
Seen through that lens, the power lies in shifting from an individual to a collective mindset.
And yet, when it comes to our jobs or the big issues we’re trying to solve, it’s easy to fall into the trap of individualism:
Marching out with your flimsy umbrella of good intentions (and exhausting yourself, let alone not being able to stop the avalanche)
Retreating inward like a turtle pulling into its shell- you are more likely to fall here if you don’t know how to regulate your emotions
Different strategies, same mindset. This is the trap:
Acting alone against forces that clearly demand collective action.
Let the very things that break your heart become your most reliable compass—showing where you’re meant to go next, where you would be better to find allies, how to regroup and reorganise your actions to be more effective.
The Compounding Effect of Collective Leadership
When we transform our individual alarm or pain into collaborative purpose and action—when we carry ourselves in ways that invite others in rather than pushing them away—the ripple effect is extraordinary.
One regulated leader influences a team. A team shapes an organisation. The organisation touches the community. The community changes society.
And the ripple effect grows even stronger when we join forces through larger collaborations—like my decision to step into partnership with Hometree, where collective vision is already creating change at scale.
Our individualistic culture has sold us a dangerous myth: that you should handle everything alone. That if you’re overwhelmed by global challenges, it’s a personal failing. That the weight of creating change rests entirely on your shoulders. This mindset not only exhausts us—it keeps us stuck and it decreases effectiveness.
It divides, when the solutions we need are clearly too complex and large to be solved by any one individual or organisation.
Instead, we need clarity about what is our responsibility and remit.
Here’s what is on you:
Listening to your emotions as signals of your values, needs and purpose
Managing your mental and emotional states so you can show up aligned and empathetic
Shifting from “I have to fix or bear this alone” to “we can activate more change together”
Taking responsibility for your actions (and inaction)
And here’s what is not on you:
Carrying the weight alone
Having all the answers
Fixing systemic problems single-handedly
Being perfect or emotionally invulnerable
Your heartache about the state of the world isn’t a weakness—it’s your inner compass, pointing you toward what matters most.
The invitation is to use that compass in community: seek collaboration, build relationships that calm and regulate you, and develop the relational skills that make collective action effective—skills like deep listening, navigating judgment, welcoming diverse viewpoints, holding difficult conversations, and turning conflict into stronger relationships.
If you want to grow these skills in community, join us for The Empathic Leader course starting October 3rd. Register for the free taster, a masterclass on Empathic Listening Skills for Leaders on September 25th and leave with a practical map to build trust and deeply listen.
The vision we long for can be birthed, tended, and nurtured together. We can find sustainable ways to counter the forces that pull us apart and destruct. Together, we can create a world that works for everyone and respects Nature— more quickly and better.
It’s a beautiful puzzle to solve. And I believe we can only solve it together.
What collaborative impact are you personally being called toward? I’d really love to hear what’s stirring in you as you read this.
Do drop a note in the comments.
With deep appreciation for your leadership in challenging times,
Nati
About me
I help purpose-driven leaders transform their inner sensitivity into strength through integrating neuroscience with emotional intelligence. My approach creates leaders who can maintain presence under pressure, transform difficult conversations into opportunities for genuine connection, and build cultures where both innovation and wellbeing flourish together.
For close support, you can check out my executive coaching partnerships and The Empathic Leader course.