Navigating Overwhelm as a Female Sales Leader: How to Reclaim Your Focus and Drive

The pressure is real. As a female sales leader, you’re juggling revenue targets, team

management, strategic planning, internal expectations, external client demands—and let’s not forget your actual life outside of work. Feeling like you’re on a never-ending hamster wheel? You’re not alone. But here’s the deal: overwhelm doesn’t mean you’re failing. It’s just your brain waving a big red flag that something needs to change.

The amount of times I have found myself in this position over the years I couldn’t count, but my mechanisms for managing and changing it are so far removed now from how I used to crumble to it.

As you build competence, you become the “go-to” person. “Tasks” and “stuff to get done” just keep coming your way and flying into your inbox. You lose patience with most people and situations because you are feeling stress and anxiety, and it all comes flooding out at meetings – and also at important meetings where you really needed to show up as your best.

So, when you don’t manage this spiral correctly, you inadvertently start to spoil opportunities that you have now overlooked and not shown up for as the best version of you. An image you don’t want to create.

Being a busy fool is not a good thing. You are also not superwoman and these situations cannot be maintained. I am not saying that some specific scenarios/projects don’t demand this – they do – but it cannot become a pattern of working. This is when you need to take back control and prioritise like a boss and get out of survival mode and firefighting.

Be ruthless. Put your tasks into 4 buckets:

Urgent and important – do now

Important and not urgent – schedule them and physically block time out in your diary

to do them on do not disturb

Urgent but not important – delegate – this is what your team around you are for, just

do it effectively and empoweringly

Neither? – then delete it, it is not relevant

Block even more time out of your diary for focus time outside of meetings. Don’t respond to emails like you have 10 minutes to reply. Absorb what is coming in.

Often I find that three smartly placed phone calls can address over 10 emails that needn’t have been sent. Always, chose speaking in person to address matters.

Start saying no and be clear on your boundaries – does this meeting need to happen? Does this meeting need you to be present or a proxy who can attend for you and feedback?

Always be pro-active and constructive in your feedback to your leaders. Don’t turn up moaning and bringing problems about how much you have on your plate. Do the above simple steps, and then if some problems still exist, present a solution upwards, for example, do you genuinely need some further resources? This is how you positively highlight yourself in times of high workload.

Finally, with every task, ask yourself, is this going to help me get closer to my goals? If it is a yes, then find a way of getting it done, if it is a no, cut the fluff and stop doing those things. I know this is not always an easy approach, but I promise with practice you will become a pro at it, and things, at both work and at home, just start feeling better.