You Don't Need More Capacity. You Need More Support.
What women told me they actually need to lead, mother, work, and still have something left for themselves.
I asked a group of military mothers a question that I thought would give me a wide range of answers:
What resource would make the biggest difference for you right now?
I expected specifics, and I got them:
24-hour childcare.
A trusted babysitter.
A mentor willing to invest in their career.
More flexibility.
Predictable schedules.
Help with the mental load at home.
Leaders who understand pregnancy and postpartum regulations.
Time to focus on work without thinking about home, and time to be at home without thinking about work.
But underneath almost every answer, I kept hearing the same thing: support.
Not another planner or another lesson on time management. Not another reminder that they are strong enough to figure it out. One woman said it plainly: “Take care of me so I can take care of everything else.”
That stayed with me because women who are capable are very rarely told they need more support. We're usually given more to carry.
The Leadership Insight
I've spent nearly two decades in military leadership, and one thing I know about capable people is that competence can become a trap. You handle something well, so people give you more. You make it work, so nobody questions whether you should have had to make it work in the first place.
You solve the problem, adjust the schedule, find the childcare, move the appointment, finish the work, take care of your people, go home, take care of your family, and somehow keep moving. Eventually, being able to carry a lot becomes the expectation. And somewhere along the way, you start expecting it from yourself too.
That's the part I want women to question.
There is a difference between having capacity and living at the edge of it. There is a difference between being resilient and being unsupported. And there is definitely a difference between knowing you can figure something out and deciding you should have to figure everything out alone.
Some of the women who answered my question weren't asking for extravagant things. They wanted uninterrupted time. Childcare they could trust. Compassion when their child had an appointment. A leader who understood that being a mother did not make them less committed to the mission. One woman wanted a mentor who would actually initiate the relationship because she worried someone further along in their career might be too busy for her questions. She ended by saying, “Might be too much to ask, but I can dream.”
A mentor willing to invest in you should not feel like too much to ask. Neither should a break. Neither should flexibility.
And yet, women have gotten very good at treating basic support like a luxury.
I believe deeply in personal responsibility. I believe in preparation, systems, boundaries, honest conversations, and building the infrastructure your goals require. I have lived that. But I also refuse to tell a woman working a demanding schedule with limited childcare that she simply needs a better morning routine.
Some problems are personal. Some are structural. And some require both individual agency and better leadership. Knowing the difference matters.
If the problem is a boundary you refuse to set, we can work on the boundary. If the problem is an expectation you've inherited about what a “good mother” or “committed leader” should do, we can examine the expectation. But if the problem is that you have nowhere safe for your child to go while you're required to work, you don't need a mindset shift. You need childcare.
Good leadership has to be honest enough to recognize the difference.
I was raised by women who knew how to make things work, and there is a lot from that lineage I carry proudly: resourcefulness, discipline, responsibility, the ability to keep moving when things get hard. But honoring what we inherited does not require us to recreate every hardship that produced it.
We can keep the resilience and add support. We can keep the discipline and add boundaries. We can keep the ambition and build infrastructure around it. Tradition can be a foundation without becoming a cage.
Maybe that's part of what leadership looks like for us now—not proving how much we can survive, but building lives, teams, families, and systems where survival isn't the standard in the first place.
Action to Take Now
Think about the area of your life that feels the heaviest right now and ask yourself: Am I trying to become better at carrying something that actually needs more support?
Maybe you need to delegate something you've convinced yourself only you can do. Maybe you need a conversation with your partner, a mentor, more flexibility, or a boundary you've been avoiding. Maybe you need to admit that a system around you is not working and stop interpreting its failure as your own.
And maybe the first step isn't fixing any of it today. Maybe it's simply naming what you need without judging yourself for needing it.
If you need space to work through that question, the Legacy Journal was created for exactly this kind of reflection. It's a place to examine what you're carrying, where it came from, what still serves you, and what you're ready to do differently.
Closing Reflection
The women who responded to me did not sound incapable. Quite the opposite. They sounded extraordinarily capable. They were leading Soldiers, raising children, managing homes, navigating careers, finding childcare, maintaining relationships, and still asking themselves how they could do it better.
That's exactly why I think we need to change the question.
Instead of always asking, How can I handle more? maybe it's time to ask, What would allow me to lead well without requiring me to carry everything?
Those are two very different questions, and I think the second one can change a lot more than your schedule.
I'm continuing conversations like this in September during my free Masterclass Returning to Yourself: Reclaiming Your Identity in Leadership. And beyond that, I'm building something deeper for women who are ready to examine the expectations they've inherited and intentionally decide what leadership, motherhood, success, and legacy will look like on their own terms.
More on that soon.
For now, start here: What support have you been treating like something you have to earn?