“I was sitting in what I call the waiting room of death” (Part 1)

In the first instalment of a three-part series exclusive to Executive PA, leadership trainer and author Fleur Marks opens up about the health crisis that forced her to question everything she believed about success – and shares what she found on the other side.

Fleur Marks spent 20 years as an agency executive, leading high-performing teams, managing global brands and being the person everyone called on to deliver. She was known as the Happy Warrior; the one who could take on anything and smile through it. What nobody saw was that the smile was a mask.

“I was running on empty, quietly questioning whether my drive for success was actually worth it,” she explains. “But I was too busy chasing my ambition to slow down.”

Then her body staged what she describes as “a full revolt”. First, a rare incurable autoimmune disease – then cancer. She ended up in what she now calls “the waiting room of death”, stuck in a sick body with no known cure – and sitting with the real possibility she might not make her 40th birthday.

“I was lying in a hospital bed, stripped of every external marker of success I’d spent over a decade building and my doctor told me it was as good as it gets. We’d exhausted every treatment option. And I thought: if this is it, what do I actually want my life to be? I drew blanks. I’d been so busy chasing my ambition, I’d forgotten what I truly wanted from my life.”

The warning signs she ignored

Looking back, Fleur says the signals were there for years. From decision fatigue to brain fog, and exhaustion that never lifted no matter how much sleep she got. She would get sick the moment she stopped for a holiday and the persistent cough that appeared after running a marathon? She was too busy to have it checked. “I just called it dedication,” she says. “I was running on adrenaline and calling it excellence.”

Underneath it all were three stories driving her forward:

• I haven’t done enough.
• I’m not enough.
• I must appear to have it together at all times.

Every achievement reset the bar higher. The question she never stopped to ask was who she was if she wasn’t achieving.

A decade of rebuilding

She spent more than 15 years in and out of medical treatment and what emerged on the other side was a complete rethink of what ambition could look like.

“My ambition never left me,” Fleur says. “But I had to crack the code the hard way. I believed there was a better way to achieve, and I’ve spent the last eight years helping other leaders find it before they have to break to discover it.”

Her debut book, The Overachiever’s Reset combines her personal story with a practical framework for high performers who want to operate at a high level without it costing them everything.

Coming up in part 2: The overachiever’s cycle – and why EAs can be particularly vulnerable to it.