You Cannot Lead From a Broken Vessel

Wola Joseph-Condotti

September 8, 2026

We wear our exhaustion like a medal.

Listen to how leaders talk to each other. I have not taken leave in three years. I was on calls till 2am. I have not had a full weekend in months. We say these things the way you would report an achievement, with a kind of quiet pride. As though running ourselves into the ground was proof of how serious we are.

Women do this even more than men, because we have something extra to prove. We are told, in a hundred small ways, that we have to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. So we do. We push through the tiredness, the missed meals, the headache we have been ignoring for a week, and we call it dedication.

But let me ask the question we avoid. What is the point of building an empire from a hospital bed?

The Cost Nobody Puts in the Budget

Leadership has a physical cost, and we pretend it does not.

The stress does not disappear because you are capable of carrying it. It goes somewhere. It settles in your shoulders, your sleep, your blood pressure, your gut. The body keeps a quiet record of everything the mind decides to ignore, and one day, usually at the worst possible moment, it presents the bill.

I have watched it happen to people I admire. Brilliant, driven, seemingly unstoppable, right up until the collapse. The health scare that came out of nowhere, except that it did not come out of nowhere at all. The body had been sending memos for months. They were just too busy leading to read them.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Nobody hands you an award for the breakdown. The company does not pause. The targets do not soften. You simply become unavailable to the very people and purpose you were sacrificing yourself for.

Rest Is Not the Reward for Work. It Is Part of It.

We have the sequence wrong. We treat rest as something we earn after the work is done, which of course means we never quite earn it, because the work is never quite done.

But rest is not the prize at the end. It is part of the equipment. A rested leader thinks more clearly, decides more wisely, and treats people more kindly than an exhausted one. Your judgement, the single most valuable thing you bring to the table, degrades sharply when you are depleted. You make worse calls tired. Everybody does.

So when you protect your health, you are not being self-indulgent. You are protecting the quality of your leadership. The sleep, the exercise, the actual holiday, the meal eaten sitting down, these are not luxuries stolen from the work. They are what make the work sustainable.

Stewardship, Not Vanity

For those of us who lead from faith, I want to put this in the right frame.

Caring for your body is not vanity. It is stewardship.

Your body is not an inconvenient container for your ambition. It is the vessel you were given to carry your assignment, and it was entrusted to you, exactly like every other resource. To run it into the ground is not more spiritual, and it is certainly not more godly. It is simply poor stewardship of something that is not, ultimately, even ours.

You would not run a company vehicle for years with no service, no fuel, no rest, and then be surprised when it failed on the highway. Yet we do exactly that to ourselves and call it commitment.

A Word From Scripture

Even Elijah, one of the boldest prophets in Scripture, hit a wall. Right after his greatest victory, he crashed. Exhausted, depleted, so low he asked God to take his life.

Watch what God did. No rebuke. No sermon. God let him sleep. Then He fed him. Then He let him sleep again, and fed him again. Only after the rest and the food did the assignment continue.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is sleep and eat something. God knew that about Elijah. It is worth knowing it about yourself.

Final Thoughts

You are not a machine, and the day you start treating yourself like one is the day you begin quietly shortening your own usefulness.

Take the leave. Sleep the night. See the doctor before it is a crisis and not after. Move your body. Eat the meal. Guard your health with the same seriousness you guard your calendar, because a calendar means nothing if the person meant to keep it has burned out.

You cannot lead from a broken vessel.

So mend it. Rest it. Steward it well.

The work will still be there in the morning. Make sure you are too.

About Author

Wola Joseph-Condotti

Wola Joseph-Condotti is the CEO, Eko Power Limited. She is a Harvard-trained lawyer and passionate advocate for faith-driven leadership, gender equity, and energy transition in Africa. She writes from the intersection of power, purpose, and personal growth.