How to Lead Change When You're Emotionally Depleted
I cried three times today. Which, if you know me, is notable. I've become a non-crier. Not because I don't feel things — I feel everything — but because I've learned to process on the move, to tuck things away, to keep functioning.
But today the tuck didn't hold.
Every time I broke down, it was about the same thing: the underdog. A kid. An athlete. A colleague. Someone the system wasn't built for — and a system too rigid to bend toward them.
I want to be clear about something before I go further: my advocacy for the underdog is not personal. I have been the underdog at times in my life, yes. But that's not what drives this. What drives this is that I can see it. I have always been able to see it — the kid in the room who needs something different, the athlete whose talent is invisible because we're measuring it the wrong way, the colleague who is brilliant in ways the org chart doesn't have boxes for.
When you can see something, you have a responsibility to protect it. That's the deal.
And this week, that deal nearly broke me.
45 Minutes. 10 Problems. One Kid Who Thinks He's Stupid.
Three nights in a row. Two hours of homework each night. My oldest son, who has profound ADHD, trying to solve for X.
Every car that came down the road, he tracked. Every sound from the other room pulled him out. The math wasn't the mountain — the mountain was getting his brain to stay in the room long enough to climb it. 10 problems. 45 minutes. Minimum.
And here's what's breaking my heart: it's not that he can't do the work. There are some skill gaps, sure. But the largest barrier isn't mathematical ability. It's his inability to sustain attention to non-preferred tasks — which, for the record, is not a character flaw. It is neurobiology.
Research confirms that math, more than almost any other subject, requires sustained attention — the exact executive function most compromised by ADHD.
What I watched across those three nights wasn't a kid who couldn't learn. It was a kid who couldn't stay. And every time he slipped — every car, every sound, every derailment — the negative self-talk kicked in like clockwork.
"I'm stupid." "I can't do this." "Why is this so hard for me?"
He doesn't know how his brain works yet. And the system never told him. It just kept scoring him.
He isn't stupid. His brain is wired differently — and research is unambiguous on what happens when kids with ADHD are repeatedly made to feel like their struggles are moral failures rather than neurological realities. Students with ADHD who internalize shame show increased anxiety, reduced self-esteem, and declining executive function — the very functions needed to improve. Shame doesn't motivate. It compounds.
He is caught in a loop: struggle, shame, negative self-talk, reduced focus, more struggle. And the system — the rigid, one-size algebra class that won't bend — keeps scoring the loop instead of interrupting it.
A lower algebra class should not be a lowering of standards. It should be a complete overhaul of how we teach math and how we apply it for kids whose brains work differently. That is not a radical idea. That is just good pedagogy.
But rigid systems don't do overhauls. They do accommodations, grudgingly, on paper, often too late.
The Battery That Drains Fast
Advocacy mode, for me, is like running your phone at full brightness with fifteen apps open. It works. It works really well, actually. But it uses up the battery fast. And when it's gone, it's gone.
This week my advocacy battery has been running on empty. My son wasn't the only underdog I was fighting for. There were others — athletes, kids, situations I can't detail here — but the through line was the same: a system that works for most, applied without creativity to everyone, producing predictable casualties.
And I kept showing up. Because that's what I do. Because I can see it, and I've decided that seeing it means something.
But I want to be honest with you about the cost of that: I cried three times today. I am emotionally depleted in a way that feels cellular. And I am more convinced than ever that what I am doing with The GRL Initiative is not optional work. It is necessary work.
Because if the people who can see the underdogs don't protect them, the system certainly won't.
Let's Stop Blaming COVID and Start Leading
I want to name something that I think we've been dancing around as educators, administrators, and parents for the last several years: COVID happened to everyone. It was a disruption — massive, unprecedented, real. And we are allowed to acknowledge that without using it as a permanent excuse for not evolving.
McKinsey research found that the deep-rooted challenges in school systems predated the pandemic and had resisted reform efforts long before COVID arrived.
COVID didn't break our education system. It revealed the cracks that were already there. And what it left behind — the increased screen dependency, the attention fragmentation in kids who spent formative developmental years on devices, the erosion of sustained focus — those are real consequences that we are now calling learning loss and blaming on a virus.
But here's the harder truth: we handed kids the devices. We normalized the fragmentation. And now we are putting those same kids back into rigid, attention-demanding academic structures — like my son's algebra class — and wondering why they're struggling.
COVID was a disruption. The real problem is what we let it normalize — and what we're still too comfortable with to change.
Research published post-pandemic called for three transformational shifts in education: curriculum that is developmental and personalized, pedagogy that is student-centered and inquiry-based, and instruction that is genuinely flexible. That was 2021. It's 2026. We are still sitting in the same desks doing the same standardized math the same way for every kind of brain in the room.
That is not a COVID problem. That is a leadership problem. And leadership problems require leaders who are willing to do something different.
What The GRL Initiative Believes
The mission of The GRL Initiative has always been about identity, belonging, and growth — for athletes, for emerging leaders, for girls and women navigating systems that were not built with them in mind.
But nights like the ones I just lived through remind me that this mission is bigger than sport. It is about every child who sits in a classroom feeling stupid because the room can't see what they're capable of. Every athlete who quits because the system measured them wrong. Every woman in a meeting who learned to shrink.
The underdog is everywhere. And the through line is always the same: a system too rigid to see that different doesn't mean less.
We protect what we see. So the first work — always — is learning to see better.
See the kid who profiles every car on the road because his nervous system can't filter input the way yours does. See the athlete who plays physical and gets called for fouls because the officials are running a different game. See the colleague whose idea gets ignored until someone else says it louder.
And then — do something about it. Not someday. Now.
Lead Anyway
I am tired. Genuinely, bone-tired, three-cries-in-one-day tired.
And I am going to get up tomorrow and do it again.
Not because I have endless energy. Not because advocacy doesn't cost me. But because I made a decision a long time ago that the ability to see the underdog comes with a responsibility that I don't get to put down when it gets heavy.
Lead Anyway isn't a cute phrase. It's what you do when you're depleted and the system is still broken and a kid is sitting at the kitchen table telling himself he's stupid.
You sit down next to him. You say: your brain is not broken. It just needs a different door.
And then you go find the door.
That is the work. That has always been the work.
We can no longer wait for systems to get creative on their own. They won't. They never have. Change in rigid systems comes from the people inside them who refuse to accept that the way it's always been done is the way it has to be.
So if you're reading this and you can see an underdog — in your school, on your team, in your organization, in your house — this is your sign.
Protect what you see.
Lead anyway.
Dr. Lauren Young is the Founder of The GRL Initiative and Executive Director of Athletics and Activities at the Vermont Principals' Association. Join the GRL community at www.thegrlinitiative.com
