You’re Not Burned Out. You’re Running Someone Else’s Code.

The inherited operating system that no one is talking about.

Introduction

On the first day of the Lunar New Year 2026, the year of the fire horse, I found myself tucked away in a corner of my favorite cafe, a stone’s throw away from Union Square, sipping my new drink of choice: matcha latte with almond milk.

During a brainstorming session, I was reminded of the McKinsey/LeanIn report Women in the Workplace. It was a report I had become accustomed to following, but admittedly hadn’t been all too familiar with as of late.

As I read the report highlighting burnout rates, a struggling pipeline, and decreasing ambition – the summative text, then the data, back to the summary – there was a visceral agitation, an unmet craving for a statement of the obvious.

This wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling.

I’ve sat in rooms with executives, high-paid consultants, and subject matter experts, watching them rack their brains about issues – simultaneously doubting what was obvious to me and wondering why no one else could see it.

The Engineers that Wouldn’t

It flashed me back, almost two decades earlier – I sat in a steering committee meeting and looked around at stumped partners, senior managers on the consulting side, and senior executives sponsoring the project on the client side.

A recurring issue that arose weekly like the tide with the moon, yet again. There was a contingency of rebels holding up a company-wide transformation of a multi-billion dollar company. A small, yet profoundly pivotal to the business, group - Engineering.

They refused to accept the change fervently - they hadn’t signed off on documents, refused to attend change adoption or early training meetings, and essentially turned a blind eye to the transformation.

Besides being bewildered by the incessant confusion of this group of senior leaders - it was humorous to me - a very expected disgruntled engineer’s response.

The Junior Consultant That Could

A few months into these meetings, they asked me (a junior consultant at the time) to go to a remote site where the engineers were stationed and spend the week there.

My directive: get them to sign off on the business process documents.

Huh? Senior Managers and Partners had their hands on this as it was pivotal and holding up the project, and they asked me.

I had some success onsite getting resistant subject matter experts to sign off on documents, and they wanted to see if I could have the same success there.

Another consultant, far more senior than I, had already been out there for a couple of weeks, and it wasn’t going well.

I didn’t want to go.

I arrived at the very much off-the-beaten-path site, which, without giving too many details, was more like an industrial plant than a corporate office.

The ‘building’ was a trailer built on the grounds.

I walked into a room of exclusively middle-aged white males and my consultant counterpart, another woman.

I was at least happy that she was there, not to be the only woman in what felt like a hostile, abandoned yard to me.

I walked in with a friendly smile, “Hello.”

Blank stares.

I experienced the initial (disapproving) judgment of my arrival. I decided to play it cool and just sit at my desk and work, while observing.

“Is there somewhere I can sit?”, I questioned.

One of the engineers, whom I assumed was the leader, motioned toward an empty desk without looking at me.

I needed an in to understand the dynamics of the group, who they listen to, and what the actual resistance was.

My counterpart, a management-level consultant, had a slew of reasons and stories of why it would be hard to be there, all of which echoed the weekly meetings I was accustomed to attending.

I put her and the team back at corporate in one frame of mind. My goal that week was to figure out that of the engineers while simultaneously keeping at bay the constant anxiety of needing to perform and feeling very out of place in my current work conditions.

The Self-Transforming Mind: The Leadership Skill Hiding in Plain Sight

At the time, I knew one of my gifts as a young consultant was getting people on board, converting a historically resistant groups to project champions.

I didn’t exactly know how I was doing it at the time - I figured it was because of my cross-functional approach being an EECS in a Human Capital role.

While that may have had something to do with it, I now realize something way deeper and intrinsic to my way of being was at play - a core survival skill.

A well-known Harvard professor, Robert Kegan, has done decades of research on behavioral change and has coined a concept: the self-transforming mind. An ability and capacity to observe and see your mental processes or lens, and adapt and choose one that would be most effective and aligned with your goal.

Kegan and his team spent decades studying this capacity and consider it a rare skill and the most advanced stage of adult development.

It was a way of life for me, a lens through which I navigated the world in the vastly different environments I found myself in.

By the end of the week, the documents were updated with necessary changes, signed, and the room of the previously obstinate engineering group was buzzing with excitement about the changes to come.

They had not only been heard, but with their suggestions integrated into the design, they realized their jobs would become easier and previous gripes about the process would become a non-issue.

I was successful in my mission, and it only took a week!

I was exhausted from holding three to four frames of reference in my mind and shifting between all of them to communicate effectively, manage competing agendas, and work to stay physically and psychologically safe in a place that did not feel so.

My success was met with a conspicuously underwhelming level of gratitude for the money, time, and value I now know I saved and created. I am sure someone far more senior than I received the accolade.

Nonetheless, I was happy. It was the weekend, and I could go back to my main hotel.

Through my twenty-something lens - I knew if it hadn’t been completed, I risked having to return to this remote location and stay in a local hotel far too outside of the city for the taste of my social life at the time.

Double Consciousness and the Inherited Operating System

When I first learned of Kegan’s concept of the ‘self-transforming mind’, I immediately thought of W.E.B. Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’.

I first learned of Du Bois’ work in my late teens during my tenure at a university, W.E.B. Du Bois, himself, once taught at Howard University. But it wasn’t until my time at Cal that I more fully understood the necessary coping skill and revisited his work.

Double consciousness is a concept the Du Bois puts forth, that people of a non-dominant group, when in a dominant setting, “...are forced to view themselves through both their own eyes and the devaluing lens of a racist white society.”

Du Bois wrote this in 1903 and, similar to Kegan’s work almost a century later, also spoke of the evolving nature of this experience.

Anyone who has ever been accused of ‘code-switching’ or has had to strategically maneuver micro-aggressions or mansplaining while staying regulated and still needing to perform at their job has lived double consciousness.

It is a skill that any Black American, interacting with American institutions, systems, or racism with any level of success (translate as surviving) has had to develop, whether consciously or not.

It is a psychological and emotional tax that, while DuBois was primarily speaking of Black Americans, in his famed work The Souls of Black Folk, I am sure it extends to anyone who has ever been an other, especially in an environment that does not mirror or value their reality.

What’s Seeking to Emerge

While the self-transforming mind is considered an advanced and rare skill for leaders today, it is a basic survival skill for people who live in bodies that resemble mine, stemming from the double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of.

By this point in my career, I’d moved through two Fortune 50 companies, a graduate degree, and landed at Big IV consulting firm.

As a Black woman, you don’t maneuver or transition those spaces without what I see as ‘evolving the intrinsic double consciousness’ that comes with being an ‘other’ in environments that have historically harmed people that look like you, without developing the mental complexity of the self-transforming mind.

I learned that holding the lens through which others see you, while working to develop your own positive self-view, and simultaneously doing the work required to be a star (because that is all that feels acceptable) – is a mandatory skill for someone like me, not a nice-to-have in the executive ranks.

And as echoed through my body while reading burnout rates amongst women and even higher for Black women, it is exhausting.

Data that flashed me back to my twenty-something self and her journey of holding all of this at once. A visceral reminder of something I’ve long come to know – this system does not allow for the full self-actualization of me.

And this isn’t only about race or gender. The inherited operating system constrains everyone.

But it fails loudest for the people carrying the most complexity with the least support.

The ones who’ve been running the self-transforming mind since childhood aren’t behind.

We are ahead.

Yet at capacity, because the system demands advanced complexity as a core survival mechanism.

There’s something else seeking to emerge.

I decided that what was needed was an architecture that can hold, develop, nurture, and support my capacity. It was time for a REWRITE.