This Can't Be Normal: Chanie Wilschanski on the Invisible Weight of Leadership
Barbara sits down with Chanie Wilschanski, a mom of four, leadership advisor, and founder of Schools of Excellence. Chanie works with school owners and organizational leaders who have built genuinely successful businesses and still find themselves carrying an amount of invisible responsibility that never shows up on a balance sheet. Her book, This Can't Be Normal, gets its title from a question she asks leaders again and again: what have you normalized that was never supposed to be normal in the first place?
Chanie names the pattern with a story every overloaded leader will recognize. You can have systems, checklists, and a team running the day to day, and still wake up at 3am worrying about a problem that isn't technically yours to solve. You can be at your own anniversary dinner and send a Slack message. You can be doing a Target run with your grandchild while a loop that hasn't closed keeps spinning in the back of your mind. That is the invisible weight of leadership, the noticing, anticipating, tracking, and forecasting that never clocks out, even when someone else is officially in charge.
She traces the pattern back to competence itself. As the oldest of eight children, Chanie built her sense of safety around being the one who could see what needed doing and do it. That same competence built her success, and it became the thing that nearly broke her. She talks openly about getting sick repeatedly and about two miscarriages, and names them as her body's response to holding a level of responsibility no one was ever meant to carry alone.
The conversation moves into what Chanie calls infrastructure, and she is direct that it has nothing to do with adding more SOPs. Every client she works with already has systems to death. What's missing is a standard, someone who owns it, a rhythm for returning to it, and a response, decided in advance, for when it breaks. She walks Barbara through a real coaching exchange where a client's fear of not ordering crayons spirals, in ten seconds, all the way to a fear of ending up in jail, and explains why that walk-through, not a pep talk about delegating, is what actually lets a leader hand something off.
Barbara and Chanie also get into the identity underneath all of it, the idea that niceness and caretaking have quietly come to mean disappearing while you carry someone else's outcome. Chanie offers a reframe: you can care about a person without carrying the responsibility for what they produce. She closes with a practice from her own marriage, a Tuesday breakfast with her husband that is pre-decided in calm, mood-proof, and tied to their identity as a couple, and with the mission behind her book: building a version of leadership in schools, and everywhere else, that doesn't get passed down as dysfunction to the next generation.
Key Takeaways
- The invisible weight of leadership is the noticing, anticipating, tracking, and forecasting that follows you home, on vacation, and into the shower, whether or not you're technically in the business.
- Competence built your success, and left unchecked, it becomes the trap that keeps you the answer person for everyone around you.
- More systems, processes, and checklists will not create the relief leaders are waiting for. Infrastructure means a standard, an owner, a rhythm of return, and a pre-decided response.
- People rarely change until the pain of staying still outweighs the pain of the alternative. Protecting your team from consequences keeps them from ever getting there.
- A rhythm only works if it's pre-decided in calm, mood-proof against how you feel that day, and tied to who you want to be, not to what's convenient.
Action Steps
- Pick one thing that has been keeping you up at 2am and walk it downstream, out loud, the way Chanie does with her client and the crayons, until you can see what would actually happen if it went wrong.
- Build one predictable rhythm of return this month, whether it's a weekly check-in with your spouse or a standing time you close your laptop, and pre-decide it in calm before you need it.
- Name one part of your life or leadership you have quietly accepted as normal, and ask what it's costing you to keep accepting it.
How we can help:
Chanie Wilschanski helps leaders build the infrastructure, rhythms, and ownership that allow organizations to thrive without everything routing back to them.
Free Download: This Can’t Be Normal - Chapter 1
https://schoolsofexcellence.com/lwatch1
Barbara Schindler is an executive coach with over a decade of experience working with business leaders and entrepreneurial companies, specializing in leadership transitions and whole person development.
Want to talk through how this applies to your leadership or your business? Book a complimentary coaching call and let’s talk through what it looks like in your leadership: https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/discovery
