Ciao.
Today, a guest post by Sarah Oelschig on why the worst way to deal with burnout is optimism. I love Sarah’s approach. It’s both realistic and liberating.
Shannon Burch and Bri Falls host the System Override podcast. I joined them to discuss why layoff waves can no longer be called crises, how AI could spark a creative renaissance if it weren’t so busy with compliance, and which entrepreneurs reach the highest ROI and why. Listen here.
On holding hope and brutal honesty at the same time, and why it’s the only leadership posture that works right now.
Here’s what the last 12 months have looked like from inside a Human Resources role across several organizations. The specific details don’t matter. They’re interchangeable across several industries.
In the span of a single year, HR leaders have drafted governance policies for AI tools that half the team is excited about, and the other half is terrified of. They’ve led training sessions on technology adoption for leaders who are still processing the last round of organizational change. They’ve fielded questions from employees who wanted to know (with understandable urgency) whether their jobs were safe. They’ve built compensation structures, onboarding programs, and key plans, knowing that any of them could be rendered irrelevant by a single client decision or a shift in market conditions.
At no point during the last year did anyone tell them to stop holding out hope for the organization’s future. That was also their job. Simultaneously.
If you’re a leader right now, at any level, in any industry, I suspect some version of this is familiar to you. The ground is shifting, the instructions keep changing, and you’re expected to be both the person who sees the situation clearly and the person who steadies everyone else as they see it.
There’s a name for the psychological posture that makes this survivable. It was coined in a prisoner-of-war camp, which should tell you something about the degree of difficulty involved.
From 1965 to 1973, Admiral James Stockdale was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. During that period of more than seven years, he was tortured more than 20 times. He had no knowledge of when or whether he would be released. He not only survived; he led. He created a moral code for his fellow prisoners and maintained the structure of the camp under conditions designed to destroy both.
When author Jim Collins interviewed Stockdale for his book, Good to Great, he asked which prisoners didn’t make it out. The answer was immediate: the optimists. The ones who said they’d be home by Christmas. Then Easter. Then Thanksgiving. But that day never came. They died, Stockdale said, of a broken heart.
Collins named it the Stockdale Paradox. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be,” Stockdale stated.
Rather than alternate between them, you must hold that faith along with your current reality. You must hold both simultaneously.
In the moment that posture is the only leadership framework I’ve found that doesn’t collapse under the pressure of what’s actually happening.
According to the Wall Street Journal’s 2026 Layoffs Tracker, layoffs have risen for three months in a row, hitting 97,000 in May, which is the highest level for that month since 2020, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Tech has been hardest hit, with companies letting go of more than 123,000 employees so far this year, up 66 percent over the same period in 2025.
AI is upending workplaces in ways both real and whitewashed. About 4,000 workers were cut in recent weeks at Cisco as the company spends $1 billion on severance costs so it can reorient around AI, and Coinbase announced the elimination of “pure managers.”
McKinsey’s most recent analysis found that 94 percent of organizations report not seeing significant value from their AI investments, yet according to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report, 41 percent of employers globally intend to reduce their workforce because of AI over the next five years.
A meQuilibrium study found managers are 36 percent more likely to experience burnout than their direct reports. And the Vistage CEO Confidence Index, surveying more than 1,500 small and midsize business leaders, found that 71 percent of CEOs report feeling burned out or emotionally exhausted.
The economy is volatile, and the forecasts are unreliable. While corporate initiatives get cut mid-execution, every quarter brings a new contingency plan. Every earnings call that you sit through is expectations management. Your team is watching you for signals, and the one honest signal (the one you most definitely can’t say out loud in most rooms) is: “I don’t know what’s coming either.”
That’s the brutal facts side of the paradox, and most leaders I work with are reasonably skilled at this half. They can see the problems, name the risks, and build the spreadsheets. It’s the other half that’s killing them.
Sitting in the HR chair, I have a unique opportunity to see the human interior of organizational stress before it shows up in the performance data.
The leaders who are struggling the most right now are not the ones who can’t see the brutal facts. They’re the ones who have lost access to the faith half of the paradox. They’ve been holding the brutal facts for so long and absorbing so many consecutive shocks that the faith — the genuine, non-performative belief that this will eventually be okay — has gone quiet.
From the outside view, they’re still functioning. They’re still making decisions, running meetings, and holding the team. However, the inner signal that says we will get through this has been replaced by something flatter and more mechanical: we just need to get through this quarter.
That’s not the Stockdale Paradox. That’s survival mode, and it has a limited shelf life.
I know this because I’ve been there. Not as an observer, but as the person in that chair.
A few years ago, I burned out. Comprehensively. The kind of burnout where you sit in your car in your own driveway for 20 minutes after work because walking into your house feels like one thing too many. The type where your diet becomes cereal for dinner because choosing food requires more energy than you have. The sort where you are surrounded by people and feel entirely alone.
Eventually, I wrote a book about it because the book I needed didn’t exist yet. I called that book Unburned. What I want to share here isn’t the recovery story. It’s what I learned about the paradox from living inside its failure.
When I burned out, both halves failed simultaneously. I couldn’t see the brutal facts clearly because I was too deep inside them, experiencing them. At the same time, I couldn’t hold faith because I’d been spending every ounce of my cognitive and emotional capacity on keeping everything else upright.
This is the specific mechanism that incapacitates leaders. You’re so busy holding the team, the organization, the clients, and the strategy together that you have nothing left to hold yourself. Your faith in the company and its mission remains, but it disappears when you run out of cognitive resources to sustain it.
Psychologist C.R. Snyder’s research on hope is instructive here. Snyder defined hope not as a feeling but as a cognitive skill: the combination of goal clarity, pathways thinking (the ability to see routes forward), and agency (the motivation to take the next step). All three require cognitive resources. When those resources are depleted by decision fatigue, sustained uncertainty, or the cumulative weight of holding too much for too long, hope feels harder, but it also becomes structurally unavailable.
Rather than a character failure, that’s a resource failure. It’s the failure that the Stockdale Paradox, applied correctly, is designed to prevent.
Here’s what I’ve learned from burning out, recovering, sitting across from many people in various stages of the same process, and leading a global HR function through a period that has required more paradox-holding than any in my career:
1. Separate the signal from the noise (ruthlessly)
Not every update that appears urgent is a brutal fact worth confronting. Decision fatigue will quickly paralyze you. If every piece of incoming information gets treated as a crisis requiring your full attention, you’ll burn through your cognitive reserves before lunch. The discipline is in deciding what actually requires your clear-eyed assessment and what’s noise masquerading as urgency.
Audit your information diet the way you’d audit a budget: where is your attention actually going, and is the return worth the cost?
2. Protect the faith side with the same rigor you protect the P&L
Most leaders treat their own resilience as an afterthought. It’s the thing left over after the team is taken care of, the strategy is set, and the fires are out. You’re not an afterthought. Your capacity to hold the paradox is the infrastructure underneath everything else. If it collapses due to overwhelm or insufficient recovery, the team will feel it within days.
Protect that balance the way you protect any critical system: with boundaries, recovery time, and with the honest acknowledgment that you’re a resource that can be depleted.
3. Find one person who can hold the faith when you can’t
Stockdale didn’t survive alone. He survived within a community of prisoners who collectively upheld the code. The paradox isn’t a solo sport. Find someone — a peer, a coach, a partner, or a friend — who can hold the faith half for you during the weeks when you’ve lost access to it.
This isn’t someone who tells you everything will be fine. It’s someone who believes it will be fine. They can see the route forward when your pathways thinking has gone dark, and who can hold that belief steadily enough that you can borrow it until yours comes back online.
4. Name what you’re carrying to yourself
The fastest way to collapse the paradox is to pretend you’re not holding anything heavy. Affect labeling research regularly shows that naming a feeling reduces its neurological intensity. You don’t need to announce your struggle to the team, but you need to be honest with yourself about the weight.
The leader who says this is hard and I’m still here is in a fundamentally different psychological position from the leader who says, “I’m fine,” while their cortisol levels tell a different story.
5. Build your team’s capacity to hold the paradox
The most resilient organizations I’ve seen don’t depend on a single leader’s capacity to hold hope and honesty simultaneously; they distribute it. They create cultures where brutal facts can be named without triggering panic, and where assurance in the organization’s future is grounded in shared evidence rather than the CEO’s personality.
That means clarity about the challenges, clarity about the plan, and, critically, visible evidence that the plan is producing results, even small ones. Minor victories can rebuild faith pathways for the whole team, not just you.
The Stockdale Paradox doesn’t tell you what to do about AI disruption or how to restructure your team or whether your strategy will work. It’s not a decision-making framework. It’s a psychological posture — a way of holding the uncertainty that allows you to keep making decisions at all.
The leaders who will get through this period (and there is a way through, even when it doesn’t feel like it) aren’t the ones with the best strategy or the most resources. They’re the ones who can hold the brutal facts in one hand and the genuine faith in the other, without letting either one go for as long as it takes.
That’s hard. It’s the hardest thing I know how to do, and it’s the only thing I’ve found that actually works.
The optimists died of broken hearts, while the cynics survived but lost the reason to. Stockdale held both, and he walked out.
Hold both.
* * *
Sarah Oelschig is a Senior Director of People Operations, certified professional coach, and the author of Unburned: A Slightly Messy, Mostly Honest Guide to Life After Burnout. She writes about burnout, recovery, and the interior experience of working life at sarahoelschig.substack.com.
The science of hope. Chan Hellman explains when hope is a resource and when it becomes a liability. TED.
Words are enough. The easiest strategy to gain control of your brain’s alarm center is to label what’s happening, inside and outside of you. Article.
Reasonable hope and reasonable worry. Data-based insights to get good reasons for hope and for preoccupation. Article.
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Speak soon,
Avy
P.S. - I am mostly active on LinkedIn and Substack. The first one for work, the second one for my soul. Let’s connect!
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