You Are Not Burned Out. You Are Under-Resourced.
Why Black women in leadership are under-resourced, not burned out—and what it actually takes to lead from wholeness.
I have watched it happen more times than I can count.
A woman walks through the door of one of my retreats.
She is accomplished. Polished. Capable beyond measure.
She has built something real—a career, a company, a life that looks, from the outside, like everything she worked for.
And yet.
Something is off.
Not broken. Not failing. Just… not full.
She cannot quite name it. So she does what high-achieving women are trained to do: she pushes through. She adds another morning routine, another productivity system, another commitment to “do better” at self-care.
And still, the emptiness remains.
I want to offer her (and you) a different diagnosis.
You are not burned out.
You are under-resourced.
And those are not the same thing.
Burnout is what happens when you have given too much.
Being under-resourced is what happens when you were never given enough to begin with.
Black women in leadership have been operating inside systems that were not designed to sustain them—systems that reward output and penalize rest, that celebrate strength and pathologize softness, that ask us to lead at the highest levels while quietly—sometimes loudly—questioning whether we belong there at all.
We did not arrive at exhaustion because we are weak.
We arrived here because we have been carrying weight that was never meant to be carried alone, without the infrastructure, the support, or the cultural permission to set it down.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a design flaw.
And it requires a design solution.
What it means to be resourced
In over a decade of curating retreat experiences for Black women, I have identified something consistent: the women who thrive—who lead with clarity, who build sustainably, who show up fully—are not the ones who work the hardest.
They are the ones who have learned how to be resourced.
Being resourced means having what you need—emotionally, physically, spiritually, relationally—to meet your life from a place of wholeness rather than depletion. It means your nervous system is regulated. Your inner world is tended to. Your rest is real, not just a pause between responsibilities.
It means you are not running on fumes and calling it discipline.
It means you are not performing strength while quietly falling apart.
It means you have a community that holds you, not one that simply applauds you.
Resourcing is not a luxury add-on to leadership. It is the foundation of it. And for Black women specifically, building that foundation requires us to unlearn the lie that we must earn our restoration.
The retreat moment that changed how I understand this work
A few years ago, a woman arrived at one of my Sweet Life Retreats.
She was a senior executive—brilliant, warm, clearly someone her entire organization leaned on. She told me she almost did not come. She could not justify the time away. There was too much to do, too many people counting on her.
By the second day, something shifted.
I watched her laugh—really laugh—for what she said felt like the first time in months. I watched her sit in stillness without reaching for her phone. I watched her remember, slowly and visibly, who she was before the title.
She sent me an email six months later.
She had restructured her team, set boundaries she had been afraid to set for years, and started a creative practice she had abandoned in her twenties. She said the retreat did not give her anything new.
It gave her back what was already hers.
That is the work. That is what being resourced actually looks like in practice.
Three things high-achieving Black women need to hear right now:
Rest is not the reward for finishing. It is the condition for continuing.
We have been taught that rest comes after the work is done. But the work is never done. If you are waiting for a finish line before you allow yourself to exhale, you will be waiting forever. Rest is not earned. It is required. And building it into the architecture of your life—not as an afterthought but as a non-negotiable—is one of the most powerful leadership decisions you will ever make.
Community is not a nice-to-have. It is a survival strategy.
Black women in leadership are often the only one in the room—the only woman, the only Black person, the only person who looks like them, thinks like them, carries what they carry. That isolation is real, and it is costly. Finding and investing in community spaces where you do not have to explain yourself, translate yourself, or shrink yourself is not indulgent. It is essential.
You cannot lead well from a life you are not actually living.
The women I serve are often so focused on building the vision that they have stopped inhabiting their own lives. Relationships, joy, presence—those are not distractions from the work. They are the source of it. When you are full, you lead differently. You make decisions differently. You see possibilities that exhaustion has made invisible.
This is what I know after ten years
The world will always have more to ask of you.
There will always be another goal, another opportunity, another responsibility that feels urgent.
But you—the woman underneath all of it—she needs tending too.
Not when things slow down.
Not when you have finally proven yourself.
Now.
You are not behind. You are not failing. You are not too much, too sensitive, or too ambitious.
You are under-resourced.
And that is something we can actually do something about.
Rakita Lillard-Brown is the Founder and CEO of Holistree, a luxury wellness brand dedicated to Black women in leadership. She has spent over a decade curating retreat experiences, intimate community, and restorative frameworks for high-achieving Black women ready to lead from a place of wholeness. Learn more at holistree.com.
