You Have a Choice: Rethinking Leadership with Eric Nehrlich

From the outside, leadership can look like clarity, control, and confidence. But behind the scenes, many high achievers are holding it together with sheer willpower; exhausted, overwhelmed, and quietly wondering if this is really what success is supposed to feel like.

In this powerful episode of Inner Work, executive coach and former Google leader Eric Nehrlich joins MaryAnn Means-Dufrene for a conversation that pulls back the curtain. Together, they explore the emotional toll of performance-driven leadership, and what it truly takes to lead with integrity, resilience, and humanity.

This isn’t about productivity hacks. It’s about healing. It’s about choice.

The Disruption: When Success Costs Too Much

Eric was doing everything “right.” High-profile role. Big impact. A future that checked every box.

But underneath it all, he was fraying.

For years, he told himself the same story so many leaders do: just make it through the next milestone. One more quarter. One more review cycle. One more promotion. Until Christmas morning arrived and his body gave out. A 103-degree fever hit like a brick wall, and with it came the brutal truth that he couldn’t push any further.

This wasn’t just exhaustion. It was a complete system failure. Eric had been running on survival mode for so long, he didn’t realize how much he was losing; his health, his relationships, his sense of self.

That moment became a turning point. For the first time, he looked at the life he had built and admitted: I don’t want to keep doing this.

The Inner Work:  The Courage to Choose Differently

Walking away from the grind didn’t feel like clarity at first. It felt like loss. Like failure. Like breaking an unspoken contract with the world: if you’re competent, you keep going. You don’t slow down. You don’t say no.

But Eric began to realize something profound, he had been mistaking compliance for commitment, and exhaustion for excellence. He had been performing not just for others, but for an internal voice shaped by years of perfectionism, fear, and deeply ingrained patterns.

His healing didn’t come from a single decision. It came from choosing (again and again) to stop performing and start listening. He began to feel emotions he had long buried. Anger. Grief. The deep ache of burnout. And underneath it all, the quiet voice that had always been there, whispering: You have a choice.

This conversation between Eric and MaryAnn isn’t just about burnout. It’s about what it means to wake up inside your own life, to stop pretending, to stop pleasing, and to start leading from a place of truth. They explore how trauma shows up in leadership, how parenting mirrors the pressures of performance, and why emotional intelligence isn’t a “soft skill”, it’s survival.

The Rebuild: Confidence, Boundaries, and Coming Home to Yourself

The hardest part wasn’t hitting the wall. The hardest part was learning how to live differently afterward.

Eric shares how confidence, for him, no longer means doing everything perfectly. It means knowing that when he messes up, he can repair. That leadership isn’t about control, it’s about coming back to center when life throws you off.

He talks about the messy, real-world work of saying no. Of disappointing people. Of choosing rest over recognition. And how, slowly, that practice began to rebuild a version of himself he could trust, one rooted in awareness, not adrenaline.

This isn’t the kind of leadership story that ends in a big exit or viral success. It’s quieter than that. More powerful. Because it’s a story about finally choosing yourself.

What I Know Now: Truth from the Other Side

Eric leaves us with a powerful reminder: You always have a choice, if you're willing to accept the consequences.

The problem is, most leaders never slow down long enough to even see the choices in front of them. We get used to pain. We normalize burnout. We tell ourselves it’s just the cost of success. But it isn’t. It never was.

This episode is a call to pause. To listen. To remember that your leadership doesn’t have to come at the cost of your health, your joy, or your wholeness. There is another way. It starts with inner work. And it starts with you.

🎧 Listen to the full episode now!