Take a load off, Fanny
Take a load for free
Take a load off, Fanny
And you put the load right on me
The Weight (Lyrics by the Band’s Robbie Robertson)
There is a moment that doesn’t announce itself. No title, no ceremony, no one tells you it’s happening.
But something shifts.
You realize, quietly and without permission, that something is now yours to carry. Not because you were assigned to it. Not because you are the most qualified and certainly not because you can control the outcome.
But because you see it—and cannot unsee it.
And in that moment, whether you say it out loud or not, you make a choice:
This is mine .
Most of what we call leadership is built around the wrong idea. We talk about influence. We talk about authority. We talk about vision, strategy, execution.
But underneath all of that—beneath the frameworks and the language—is something much simpler and much harder:
Leadership begins when someone accepts weight. Leadership begins when someone chooses weight.
But not symbolic weight.
Real weight.
The kind that stays with you after the meeting ends. The kind that shows up at 2 a.m. The kind that doesn’t go away when things get inconvenient.
The kind that changes you and likely your career trajectory..
The people I’ve spoken with over the years—across public systems, NGO’s, local government and communities—don’t describe leadership the way books do.
They don’t sound like they are “building influence.” They sound like they are carrying something. A failing system. A fragile agreement. A group of people who are depending on them. A decision that will affect people they may never meet.
And almost always, they are doing it without full control. As if there ever is such a condition. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough. The weight doesn’t come with certainty. It doesn’t come with guarantees. It doesn’t even come with the promise that what you are carrying will turn out well.
You may do everything right and still fail. You may carry something for years and never see the outcome. You may make decisions that hurt people, even when you are trying to do the right thing.
And still—the weight remains.
This is where most people step away but not because they don’t care. Because the equation no longer makes sense.
- Why carry something I cannot fix?
- Why take responsibility when I have no authority?
- Why step into something that may cost me, without the assurance of success?
There are reasonable answers to those questions. But the people who lead rarely answer them with logic. They answer them with a choice. The choice is not dramatic and it doesn’t always feel noble. There is often reluctance and sometimes it feels like there was no real choice at all. Just a quiet recognition:
- If I don’t carry this, who will?
- Can I live with myself if I don’t?
This is the moment the weight of leading begins to change you. All this usually happens inside. Rarely are there conversations with peers to check if you are accurately reading the room or missing something.
The change is subtle. You start to see your organization, the mission, and people differently. The problems are no longer abstract—they have faces, names, families attached. Decisions are no longer theoretical—they have consequences to the organization and to those people.
Then there is the relationship to time that feels different, because what you are carrying doesn’t pause when you do. It keeps moving. It never sleeps. You begin to feel the edges of responsibility in places you didn’t before. The edge shows up in conversations, in the silence and what you choose to ignore if that is even possible.
You realize that leading is not something you do occasionally. It becomes something that is alive inside you and alive between you and other people.
Change is afoot and it is change you have chosen and provoked.
You become less interested in being right and more interested in being responsible. You are less interested in having answers and care more about asking harder questions. You stop looking for clean solutions (there are none) and start learning how to stay in tension.
You understand that most decisions are not between good and bad, but between competing goods, each with a cost. You more clearly understand the limits of authority and the significance of showing up anyway.
And perhaps most quietly, you begin to let go of the need to be seen and being significant. You do this because much of what you are carrying will never be visible to other people
Some of the most important things you do will not be recognized. Some of the hardest choices you make will not be understood. Some of the weight you carry will never be acknowledged.
And on you go.
This is the part that changes you the most. Not the success. Not the recognition. Not the outcomes.
What changes you is the carrying on and staying in the work. The choosing, again and again, to hold something that is not centered on you. It reshapes your sense of self. You become less defined by what you achieve and more defined by what you are willing to hold. You are less concerned with how things look and more concerned with what is actually happening beneath the surface.
This is leading. It’s not for everyone
Lets hold onto our humanity. Change is rarely comfortable. There is a cost to changing. You can no longer turn a blind eye or avoid difficult conversations. You will need to hold ambiguity and tension longer than you would prefer.
Time to take a few deep breaths. There are moments when you will wish you could put the weight down.
Sometimes, you will.
Sometimes, you will need to.
But here’s the thing and there is no getting around it: once you have carried something that matters beyond yourself, you are rarely the same again.
We often think of leadership as something that expands us. Sometimes yes. But more often, it deepens us. It asks more of us. It exposes us to complexity, to consequence, to responsibility.
If we choose to accept that, if we allow ourselves to carry the weight without needing to control the outcome, something else happens.
We become steadier and sturdier but not because leading is easier.
But because we have learned to stay.
The question is not whether weight exists.
It does.
In every system, in every community, in every organization, in every family there are things that need to be carried.
There are two questions to answer:
- What are you willing to carry?
- And more important: What are you already carrying that you haven’t fully accepted?
Because leadership doesn’t begin when someone gives you authority. It begins when you say, quietly and without announcement:
“This matters. And I will carry it.”
That is the moment and the weight that changes you.
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