How Reconnecting to Joy Improves Your Ability to Lead, Live and Love

The benefits of joy are often overlooked, particularly by the women who need it most. The high-achieving, high-performing female leader who has spent years equating seriousness with success and busyness with worth.

I know this territory personally. For years I took life so seriously that I existed in a near constant state of survival. Some days it felt excruciating to simply inhabit my own body. The weight of responsibility, my own expectations and the expectations I felt from others left very little room for anything else.

Certainly not joy.

The Cost You Don't Realize You're Paying

What I did not realize at the time was that this was not strength. It was depletion dressed up as dedication. When you have spent years pushing through, proving yourself, making yourself smaller or harder just to fit the room, joy does not disappear overnight. It gets quietly filed under things you will get back to later. When things calm down. When you have earned it.

Later never comes.

What Joy Actually Does for Your Leadership

My coach once said to me: "Chantelle, there is so much joy to be experienced in this life, if only you would let yourself see it."

She was right. I just was not ready to hear it yet.

Joy is a signal of alignment with who you truly are beneath the performance and the proving. When you lose contact with it, you do not simply feel flat. You may be leading, loving and living from a fraction of your actual capacity.

As a leader, this shows up in ways you will likely recognize. Your decisions start to feel heavier than they should. You find yourself reacting rather than responding in a way you are proud of. You go through the motions but are often disconnected from the actual experience, living in your head, most likely in fear based thoughts. The people around you feel the difference, even when nobody says a word. Here is what I know for certain: your team does not just need your competence. They need you to be fully present. It fundamentally shifts the whole dynamic.

When I reconnected to joy, something shifted in how I led. I became more relatable, more real, more willing to be seen. Not because I became less professional, but because I stopped pretending I had it all together and started embodying who I actually was. That is a different quality of leadership entirely.

What It Does at Home

The boardroom is rarely where the real cost shows up first.

It shows up at home. In the thinning patience. In the presence that disappears somewhere between the office and the front door. In the quiet guilt of knowing the people who matter most are receiving whatever happens to be left over.

When you are genuinely nourished, you come home differently. Not perfect. Present. There is a version of you available to the people you love that simply cannot exist when you are running on survival. Joy makes that version accessible again, and it allows you to connect with them on an unimaginably deep level.

Where to Begin

If joy feels distant right now, you are not broken. You are likely just very tired from holding too much for too long. Here is where I would invite you to start:

Start by asking yourself when you last felt truly joyful. Not content, not fine, but genuinely joyful. You have to acknowledge where you are before you can work with it. That moment of honest reflection allows you to shift the dynamic.

Consider simple ways to invite joy back in. Time in nature, an afternoon with friends or family, a moment of genuine connection. The key is absolute presence. No phone, no half-attention, no mental to-do list running in the background. Just you, fully there.

Notice how hard that might actually be. Real presence is a practice. It means sitting with the people in front of you and actually seeing them, looking at them while they speak, hearing them fully. The mind will want to step in, and that is completely normal. The practice is simply to keep coming back to presence, for as long as you can, as often as you can.

A Few Questions Worth Sitting With

When last did you do something purely because it lit you up?

What have you been telling yourself you will allow once things calm down?

What would shift in your leadership, your relationships and your sense of self if joy was not something you earned, but something you chose?

I would love to hear what comes up for you.