Amanda Keehn

Mental health is still taboo. And that silence is costing people more than productivity—it’s costing them their health, their relationships, and in the worst cases, their lives. That’s not dramatic. That’s realistic.

Being a leader isn’t just about setting the vision or telling people what to do. It’s about demonstrating what good leadership actually looks like. And good leadership requires transparency and psychological safety—not just as concepts you talk about in a team meeting, but as things you model through your own behavior consistently, even when it’s uncomfortable. So let me tell you what that looks like for me.

I have CPTSD, ADHD, and OCD.

I work for a startup approaching its tenth year. That combination is, to put it plainly, a perfect storm for nervous system dysregulation. I have healthy self-care practices, and I work hard to stay regulated. But there are days I wake up and simply cannot give my team what they need because I need to care for myself first. Those days are not frequent, but they happen.

When they do, I don’t log on and say I’m not feeling well. I say: “Hey team, I will not be in today as I need a mental health day. I will see you all tomorrow.” That’s it—no over-explanation, no apology—just honesty. But that honesty doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every other day that I show up, I am demonstrating what taking care of myself actually produces. My team sees the difference. They see a leader who is regulated, present, and able to give them what they need because she is not running on empty. The mental health day only carries weight because of the consistency that surrounds it. Transparency without that track record is just words. Together, they build trust.

What that sentence does is more than give me a day to recover. It signals to my team that it is safe to take care of themselves too. It shows them what sustainable leadership looks like in practice. They don’t see it as flaky or irresponsible because they don’t operate under the false belief that a leader should be available every second of every day. They understand there is a human behind every leader, and that understanding gives them permission to be human too, which ultimately allows them to show up as the best leaders they can be.

This matters more than most organizations want to acknowledge.

According to the World Health Organization, 70% of the U.S. population has experienced at least one trauma, more than 80% of U.S. workers report experiencing work-related stress, and roughly 15% of working-age adults globally are living with a mental disorder. And that data is from 2024—before two more years of global instability, injustice, and collective exhaustion have had their full effect. The numbers have almost certainly grown.

Now imagine being part of that 80%, 70%, or 15% and having no safe person or place to say: I am exhausted. I just need a day. I’ve been there, and I ended up in the hospital.

We are all human. As leaders, we are not perfect. We don’t have all the answers. We don’t know everything. But we do need to show up as regulated as possible, and for that to happen we have to care for ourselves, even when it’s a workday.

Too often, people suffer in silence because they’ve been conditioned to believe that needing rest is weakness. That silence leads to spiraling, degrades your overall health, impacts your family, and sometimes leads to something far worse.

Rest is not a privilege. It is a right.

When I name my mental health day out loud, I am not oversharing. I am leading. I am showing my team that the human behind this leader is someone who takes her own wellbeing seriously—and that they are allowed to do the same.

That is what psychological safety looks like when it moves from conversation to action. Not a policy or a slide in a deck, but a leader being honest and showing her team the way.

What would it mean for your team if they watched you take care of yourself without apology?

When I stepped into a supervisory role at a new company, I hesitated. Not because I didn't know what I was doing. I did. I had already been a supervisor. I had built things. I had systems, resources, and approaches that worked. But I was new to the company, and I wanted to prove myself. So I shared. I brought ideas to peer meetings and showed other supervisors the resources I had created for my team.

Then I got the "feedback."

I was told that what I was sharing was making other supervisors feel as though they had to be doing those things too. So I stopped. I pulled back, kept my head down, and contained what I knew and what I was capable of. I made myself smaller in the name of keeping the peace. Somewhere in that shrinking, I started to feel insecure about my own leadership—even though nothing about my actual ability had changed.

That's the part that still gets me. I knew what I knew. I had the track record to prove it. But because someone else was uncomfortable with my output, I absorbed that discomfort as if it were my problem to fix.

It wasn't the first time. Earlier in my career, I had raised concerns about leaders who weren't performing. The response I got was quiet and direct: "Not everyone is going to perform at your level, Amanda." I was supposed to hear that as a compliment, but I didn't. I heard it as an instruction to stop expecting more—from them, from the environment, and eventually from myself.

This Is What Conditioned Insecurity Looks Like

Not the dramatic kind or the kind that comes from failure. The quiet kind. The kind that gets handed to you by people who need you to be less so that their average feels like enough—or by people who are passing down their own conditioned insecurities.

So I did the work to unlearn it. I went to therapy, kept educating myself, and at some point, I got brave enough to ask my team for direct feedback—the kind that actually gives you tangible information. What they reflected back to me aligned with everything I was learning in the classroom and in therapy. The pieces were confirming each other. And that convergence was clarifying in a way I didn't expect.

It wasn't just validation; it was evidence. Evidence that the version of myself I had become while shrinking wasn't the truth of who I was as a leader. It was the residue of years of being told to be less.

That's what unlearning looks like in practice. It's not a single moment but a slow, often uncomfortable process of holding up what you were conditioned to believe against what you're actually experiencing—and choosing, again and again, to trust the latter.

Relearning Followed

Not learning something new, exactly, but returning to what I already knew before the noise got loud: that I lead well and that what I bring matters. That sharing it is not a threat to anyone. And even if it feels that way to someone else, that is not mine to manage. That is a systemic problem, not a personal one.

When organizations tolerate a culture where high performance creates social friction, they are not protecting team morale; they are protecting mediocrity. When a high performer is asked—directly or indirectly—to dim what they bring so others feel more comfortable, the message being sent is that comfort matters more than growth.

That has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with the system you're operating within. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand that I was not the problem. I was experiencing a pattern that shows up in workplaces across industries, levels, and years. The leader who outpaces the norm gets quietly managed down—not through formal feedback, but through social pressure, the raised eyebrow, and the comment disguised as concern.

Once I stopped holding back, something shifted. My team was highly engaged. They told me they showed up and gave their best because of how I was leading them and that they had never experienced a leader like me before. More than half of them went on to receive promotions of their own.

That's what becomes possible when you stop managing yourself down—not just for you, but for everyone around you.

What I do now is continue anyway. I keep building resources. I keep sharing what works. I keep expecting more of myself—not because I'm trying to make anyone uncomfortable, but because I've never stopped believing that growth is the point.

If you've been told—in words or in silence—that you're too much, I want you to consider the source with clarity.

Have you ever pulled back to make someone else more comfortable? What did that cost you—and what did it take to come back to yourself?