The Well Runs Dry: Why Impact Leaders Need More Than Resilience
In 2025, 29 per cent of people who left their jobs in Australia's not-for-profit sector cited burnout as their primary reason for quitting — a sharp rise from 21 per cent just the year before. (Unimelb) In housing and homelessness alone, 71 per cent of organisations report rising staff stress, with nearly half saying it now threatens service delivery. (Unimelb) Among those doing the deepest relational work — counsellors, social workers, advocates — research consistently finds that many were drawn to their vocation by a history of personal wounding, often self-sacrificing, perfectionistic, high-achieving people who focus outward rather than inward. (Senvic)
We are, in other words, a sector that runs on care it rarely replenishes.
David Whyte names this precisely: “exhaustion is not the result of working too hard. It is the result of betraying yourself — of spending years doing work that matters, from a self that is slowly going missing.” What we call burnout is often something older and deeper: a soul that has been giving from an empty well.
Joanna Macy went further: she saw in the impact and purpose-led community a particular form of numbing — not cynicism, but the quiet shutdown that arrives when grief goes unwitnessed for too long. Grief at what we see. At what isn't changing fast enough. At the gap between the world as it is and the world as we know it could be. This grief, she insisted, is not a pathology. It is evidence of a life well-loved. But without adequate space to metabolise it, it calcifies into the very disconnection we are trying to heal in others.
Here depth psychology offers a crucial reframe. Carl Jung understood the soul — the psyche — not as a private possession but as the place where individual and world are still continuous. What we suppress in ourselves, we enact in our systems. The saviour complex, the martyr dynamic, the hyper-responsible leader who cannot delegate or receive — these are not character flaws. They are unlived depths, asking for attention. Otto Scharmer locates the source of genuine leadership precisely here: not in strategy or structure, but in the inner place from which we operate. Shift that, and everything downstream shifts.
What, then, actually helps?
Irvin Yalom's decades of research into group therapy offer a compelling answer. The therapeutic group, he found, is the most powerful container for interpersonal learning because the group itself becomes the laboratory. The dynamics that arise between people in the room — the over-functioning, the rescue, the silence, the sudden recognition — are the same dynamics running through the organisations and movements they serve. The group makes invisible patterns visible. And through what Yalom called universality — the profound relief of discovering you are not alone in what you carry — something begins to loosen.
This is what a therapeutic group for those ushering change (those in “changemaking” roles) offers that no workshop, retreat, or coaching program can fully replicate: not information, but transformation. Not tools, but the lived relational experience of being known, challenged, and held — simultaneously — by people who understand the particular weight of living as a whole human being in service in these ways.
“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong...Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing.”
The well needs tending. The work we tend to depends on it.
If you’re in Naarm/Melbourne and seeking to join an interpersonal group to support you in deepening the well in which your vocation, leadership or service draws from, we may have a spot in Leading From the Well open. This is a weekly interpersonal group for those ushering change, facilitated by Al Jeffery held at CERES in Brunswick East.
