Women do a lot, and a lot is expected of them. Run the home. Raise the children they gave birth to. Stay in shape. Keep a partner happy. Build the empire on top of all of it. Single or partnered, child-free or stepping into motherhood, a woman's work is never done.

Plenty of smart, capable women building impressive careers are living a silent, shadow life they never let anyone see. On the outside, thriving. On the inside, fantasising about walking away from all of it. These founders recognised what was happening because most of them lived it. They owned their struggle so others would not have to face theirs alone.

Behind the impressive career: why women secretly want out

Holding it all together, and still not enough

"A ridiculous number of high-achieving women were secretly fantasizing about disappearing from their own lives." That problem is why dopamine coach Kirsten Bombdiggity started her business. She works with women over 40 who run everything and feel like none of it belongs to them.

So many of them, she found, were holding up their entire world while still feeling like they were not enough. Her dopamine coaching stops them being scattered, focused on the nonessential, and hands them back their time and attention. Clients tell her they finally have white space in their calendars, are reading for pleasure again, and have found their way back to themselves.

The gap between who you are and how you show up

After 15 years as a global fashion buyer for M&S and Amazon, Alex Standley turned on the system she helped build. Now a stylist and speaker for female leaders, she kept meeting founders who command stages and boardrooms yet still feel like "an imposter in their own skin."

The gap, she says, sits between who these women are inside and how they present to the world, and no amount of skill or ambition closes it. It feels uncomfortable. Not everyone knows how to handle it. Standley’s work goes deeper than the wardrobe it starts with. Clients describe the change as the moment they finally trusted themselves.

Raised to put everyone else first

Long before issues of burnout, imposter syndrome, and disengagement surface, there is the conditioning. Best-selling author and social elegance coach Julia Cha built her work around what she calls "good girl conditioning," the training that teaches women to please, accommodate and give endlessly until little of them is left.

Her books, including Bad B!tch On Top and Millionaire Single Mom, push women to dismantle that programming and reclaim their voice. She teaches it one to one, through programmes and a DIY course, and through Julia Cha AI, a version of herself clients can talk to any time. The women who do the work stop performing the good girl and start leading as themselves.

Thriving on paper, exhausted underneath

The women who hire Amanda McKinney are, in her words, "objectively thriving but privately exhausted." As an accountability coach, she helps women founders work out why hitting the goal never feels the way they expected. Arrival fallacy is the misplaced belief that everything will be better once you reach a certain point. The realisation that it's not is a massive blow to motivation and your sense of self-worth.

McKinney works with leaders to overcome this and change how they actually lead day to day. The effect rarely stays with one person. When the founder of a 200-person company started leading differently, her team felt it and began making their own changes, and the culture held because she went first. Mend a leader's relationship with herself, and the whole organisation runs differently.

The cost of always being the strong one

The Soft Movement, founded by Ashlie Garcia, gives women language, safety and belonging when they are "emotionally exhausted, disconnected from themselves, and constantly performing strength while silently falling apart inside." It is built for women who learned to survive, succeed and look after everyone else, but never felt safe enough to be soft.

She built it before there was proof it would work, while navigating her own healing and the pressure to look successful before she was. What started as content became a space women came back to. They told her they thought they were the only one; that she had put words to something they had never been able to explain. The relief of being understood was the point.

Dimming what makes you effective

Watching capable women make themselves smaller at work, playing down the very things that made them good, is what pushed Rebecca Pate to act. A business strategist and career coach, she had done it herself, stuck in what she calls "a toxic corporate trap" before coaching her way out.

Once she was out, hundreds of women told her the same message landed, and they started paying her to help them move into their next role with confidence rather than apology. They already had the competence. The missing piece was permission to take up the space they had earned.

Built on what others think

Lesley Stonier left a successful corporate career and realised she had built her whole identity on what she did and what others thought of her. But she didn’t know how she felt about herself. The gap between performing as a leader and being one is, as Stonier puts it, where "burnout lives." And performing is not authentic.

After years stuck in an old story of proving herself, Stonier built a leadership identity and visibility coaching business, dismantling the old story and stepping into a new one before any evidence existed. Now, she watches her clients do the same, seeing that everything they had been trying to be was who they already were.

Looking outward for answers you already hold

There is a feeling many women in midlife know well and rarely name. They look successful from the outside and have privately lost trust and confidence in themselves. Debbie Mcleod, a midlife mentor who blends therapy and mediumship, recognised it because she had lived it. But low confidence can lead to lower ambition, and before you know it, you're not putting yourself forward for promotions you deserve or asking for the opportunities you can easily get.

Mcleod now works at a psychological and intuitive level, and has stopped apologising for the combination. Her clients stop waiting for permission, from partners, peers and their own inner critic, and start living differently. Self-trust, as she defines it, is "the ability to lead your life without needing permission."

Coming back to themselves: what successful women really want

The urge to quit everything tends to grow from being everything to everyone, until there is nothing left for yourself. These founders saw it, named it, and built the way back, because each of them walked it first. Doing more or trying harder was never the answer. The way through, for them and their clients, was to stop performing, trust themselves, and build a life that finally feels like their own.