Leading a charity turned out to be surprisingly brutal. Here’s what I learned about handling pressure

The first thing I noticed when I started leading Jubilee+ was how tired I became. Formerly a night owl, suddenly I just couldn’t handle working late. It started out as mental tiredness – at the end of the working day, my brain ached. But it soon progressed to physical and emotional fatigue too.

I’d been on the Jubilee+ leadership team for years, and in secular leadership before that. I had also completed four years of leadership training in my church stream, so how hard could it be to step into this new role? But no one warned me how different it would be to move from being in a leadership team to actually leading the team.