It is utterly blindsiding to be at the peak of your career, and realize you are suffocating. I know this intimately because I lived it.
Almost a decade ago, I built a life that looked perfect for the outside world. By all external measures, I should have been happy. But I was ‘managing’ a highly functional, entirely invisible exhaustion.
Everyone around aspired to be me. But I looked at them and thought they were blessed. To each, the proverbial grass looked greener on the other side.
They had a rationale for why they aspired to be me. They could point to my seeming success.
I did not have that luxury. There was nothing outside in my life that I could point to. Just a feeling that was not quite right. Not the feeling I was expecting to experience when everything on the outside looked right.
The isolation of outward success is unforgiving. There is no justification, and no way to fully explain it to those who have not lived it.
And when you are the one holding the architecture of a system together, your doubts are often considered a liability, leading to you not being able to share them.
The instinct in these times is to ignore the feeling and look at a different goal to focus on. One more milestone. Then I’ll have a different experience. This illusion held for a little while until the cycle became obvious.
To have a different experience of being alive, one must come from a different space. Any amount of outward imitation of success falls short. This realization laid the foundation for my coaching practice much before my formal education as a coach.
Back in the day, I could not share my hesitations with anyone because everyone was impressed by me and wanted to be me. Today, I hold a private practice for leaders because I know exactly what it costs to sustain that illusion. And it is not a price that one can ever pay in full and move on from. The only way out is to wake up from it altogether.
Last month, an executive came into our coaching conversation and defaulted to impressing me with their outward success. They expected validation. They received a mirror. The moment the need to impress is removed, the underlying shape of the mind is exposed.
The ultimate luxury for a successful leader is not finding another room where everyone is being impressive. It is finally finding a room where they are allowed to stop.
