The eye roll I could actually hear.

My son came bounding up to my office window this afternoon and tapped on the glass.

I should explain: my office is a converted garage. Which probably sounds considerably more impressive than it really is. One half is a desk, a laptop, and the vague suggestion of professionalism. The other half is still very much a nine-year-old's toy room. I share my desk with Godzilla on a semi-regular basis. I've removed Lego from my chair more times than I can count. And the boundary between "workspace" and "stuff we ran out of space for" is still a work in progress.

Anyway. He tapped on the window, clocked me at my desk, and delivered an eye roll of truly Olympic standard. Shoulders dropped. A huff that could have fogged up the glass. Then the full stomp back to the front door - the kind where every single footstep is making a separate point.

"You're working again."

Gone in about four seconds. Because he's nine, and I was immediately less interesting than whatever was happening indoors. But I sat with it a bit longer than he did.

It wasn't the working that got me. It was the again.

That word tells you something. It tells you what someone has started to expect of you. It made me wonder how many of the leaders I work with are living with their own version of that word? Not always spoken out loud. But there, quietly, in the background. Again. The phone out at dinner. The Sunday you could never quite switch off. The holiday where you were present in body but somewhere else in your head.

I've been reading some of Herminia Ibarra's work on identity lately. She talks about how we're not one fixed self, but made up of lots of different parts, different hats we wear, different versions of ourselves that have built up over time. And the question she keeps returning to is how we hold all those parts together. How we blend them. Because they don't disappear when one role gets very loud. 

But they can go quiet.

The risk isn't that you become a different person. Maybe, it's that you stop noticing which parts of yourself have gone silent.

I keep coming back to her suggestion that you don't find your way back to yourself through reflection alone. That "self-creation is a lifelong journey. Only by our actions do we learn who we want to become." Not by thinking about it. By doing.

Which is where today's stomp to the front door becomes the action step.

I didn't sit down and have a deep think about any of this after my son disappeared inside. Okay, I sat with the guilt for a bit, if I'm honest. Replayed the stomp. Wondered if I should have just shut the laptop an hour earlier. Told myself I was a terrible mum. Went round the loop a couple of times.

But then I stopped.

I shut the laptop. I went and found him. Twenty minutes, nothing remarkable, just the two of us. And something shifted, not fixed, just shifted in the way the rest of the afternoon felt.

I know, when you're running on empty, the last thing you need is someone telling you to do more. But this doesn’t have to mean more. It can just mean different. Not another task. Just a small shift that belongs to you, not the role.

Because I don't think most of the leaders I work with have lost themselves. I think they've just been too busy to look. And when you actually stop and pay attention to what is quiet as well as what’s loud, what you might find is that you're still there. And that the things that actually matter to you, underneath all the noise of the role, haven't gone anywhere either. They've just been waiting for a gap.

Maybe that's enough to know for now.

So here's the nudge. What's one part of you that's gone a bit quiet lately? And what's the smallest possible shift you could make this week that gives it a bit of air?

I sat with that question for a moment after I shut the laptop. It felt a bit uncomfortable, if I'm honest. Which probably means it was worth asking.

And then I went and found him.

The Lego will still be on the chair tomorrow. He'll be back at the window (almost certainly mid-call, there is genuinely a sixth sense involved). But today he reminded me that the parts of you that go quiet don't disappear. They're just waiting for you to go and find them.

If any of this landed, I'd love to hear what your version of the window tap looks like. Or if you want to get a clearer picture of where things have got out of balance, the quiz on my website takes about five minutes.