Put Your Oxygen Mask On First
A still glacial fjord framed by steep mountain walls, with scattered ice floating across calm blue water beneath wide, open sky. Photograph by Charissa Simmons
There’s a reason flight attendants repeat this instruction every time:
Put your oxygen mask on before assisting others.
It isn’t selfish.
It’s functional.
Yet in leadership, this is often the first rule we break—especially during change.
When uncertainty stretches on, leaders tend to override their own signals. We stay busy. We stay available. We keep supporting. We tell ourselves we’ll process things later—once the team is settled, once decisions are made, once the noise quiets down.
But unprocessed leadership doesn’t disappear.
It leaks.
It shows up as impatience.
As over-explaining.
As urgency where clarity would serve better.
As exhaustion quietly reshapes tone, judgment, and presence.
You cannot offer steadiness if you haven’t reclaimed yourself.
Before you can fully support others, you have to do a few things first:
Pause long enough to notice what the change has taken from you.
Not every cost is visible. Some are emotional. Some are cognitive. Some show up as narrowed thinking or shortened patience. Naming the loss is part of regaining capacity.
Process before you project.
Teams don’t need leaders who are still actively working through their own reactions in real time. They need leaders who have made sense of the moment enough to communicate clearly and consistently.
Restore before you reinforce.
Burned-out leaders can enforce standards, but they struggle to sustain trust. Restoration—mental, emotional, physical—is not a reward after the work. It’s what makes the work sustainable.
Stability is internal before it’s external.
If you’re dysregulated, your team will feel it even if your words are measured. Presence comes from regulation, not performance.
This doesn’t mean disappearing or disengaging.
It means being intentional about when you listen, when you speak, and when you step back long enough to breathe.
Putting your oxygen mask on first isn’t stepping away from leadership.
It’s stepping into it—clearer, steadier, and more capable of carrying others through what comes next.
If this resonated, you may want to read this next → Why the Most Important Leadership Work Is Often Invisible