There is a huge misconception about burnout, and it’s that burnout comes from working too many hours. That’s nonsense. In high performers, burnout is almost never a workload problem. It’s a shame problem.

The runner

Think of a runner who usually wins. They train hard, they outperform most people, the effort pays off. Then the race changes. The rules get less predictable, the ground shifts, and the winning stops.

What does the runner do? They train harder. Because that is what they have always done, and it has always worked.

At first it looks like just another challenge. But the losing continues, and at some point it stops being about performance and becomes personal:

• I should be able to handle this.

• This is who I am.

• If I’m not winning, something must be wrong with me.

That is not motivation anymore but your shame taking the wheel.

Shame that shows up as a voice from the past (a primary caregiver that was never happy unless you would perform) or an idealised version of yourself.

Free Burnout Diagnostic

What actually breaks

So, let’s explain the true cause of this burnout. Burnout happens when the ratio between effort and reward collapses.

High performers and generally high functioning people have usually been regulating a pre-existing shame through achievement their whole lives (read this again), without realising it, because the reward kept arriving on schedule. When the reward stops, the regulator stops, and the shame that was quietly running in the background becomes the dominant force.

The push gets harder, but it’s no longer aimed at a result. It’s aimed at escaping the feeling of failure.

Free Burnout Diagnostic

The misunderstanding

When high performers notice this, they try to “fix” shame. Same pattern, new target. But shame is not broken plumbing. It’s a human signal, and it has a function.

The problem isn’t shame itself. Shame is a human emotion and is there for a reason. It becomes a problem when it is toxic shame, the kind whose intensity is no longer supported by reality and that starts making your decisions for you.

How am I eliminating this, I hear you asking. The work is not to eliminate it but to:

• observe it

• interpret it

• stop handing it the keys

If this sounds familiar

I built a free burnout diagnostic specifically for this pattern. It’s designed to catch the shame-driven version of burnout that most assessments miss because they’re still looking at hours and workload.

I think it’s the best one available online. If you find a better one, send it to me. Always happy to be wrong.

Free Burnout Diagnostic

I hear this phrase quite frequently in my practice. “I lost my purpose, help me find my purpose.” It usually comes from founders, but it also comes from senior leaders working in companies. Their profiles are quite similar. People who have been performing at a very high level for quite a few years, who reach out and tell me they need to find their purpose again.

I have to be honest with you. Most of the times I don’t buy that.

I’m not saying these people are lying. But there is a lot of hype around the term purpose. You can find purpose coaches, purpose content, retreats, the whole ecosystem. And I think 90% of it is nonsense. But that’s another conversation. The more important thing is this: you cannot lose something that you didn’t have in the first place.

I know that might sound a little aggressive or provocative, so let me explain what I mean.

What most people had was momentum, not meaning

What most of these people had was not purpose. It was momentum. They were winning, and winning felt like meaning. Sometimes easily, sometimes with a lot of effort, but the trajectory was positive, they were going up. When you are in a field and your hard work translates into results or money or progress, it’s quite easy to adopt this narrative that your purpose is to work hard and win, to build the biggest company, to have a huge exit, to build this amazing thing.

What I see more than you can imagine, and from people you would never suspect, is that these people build their whole identity around output. Around proving they can do the thing better than anyone else. And for years, even decades, it works. You get promoted, you get recognized, you get bigger titles, you raise money, you hire people. Whatever success means for you, you keep achieving it. And inside all of that there is always this quiet assumption running in the background that says: if I keep winning, I will eventually feel complete.

There is also another thing running quietly alongside it. A small entitlement. A little narcissistic monster whispering in your ear that you are special, you are better, you are not like everyone else. I know that because I was wearing that costume for quite a few years. It doesn’t happen consciously, but what it says to these people is that if they keep achieving, the restlessness will stop.

Of course it doesn’t stop. And the reason is that the winning was never solving the problem. It was a cover.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The mechanism underneath

Here is how this works, and I want to walk through it carefully because it’s quite specific. When someone grows up learning, whether from parents or society or school, that their value is tied to what they produce, they build an identity that requires achievement to justify its whole existence. Nobody sits down at 16 and decides this. It gets wired in. And the wiring says: if I’m not achieving, I’m not worth attention, I’m not worth love, I’m not worth respect.

This is how many high performers feel, and I’m not exaggerating it. Achievement acts like a way to snooze that feeling, to postpone it, to avoid it. And the external world rewards you for it. You get good feedback at work, you get validation, you get the girl, you get the guy, you are more attractive, more confident, people admire you. But that validation is never enough. Because it is answering the wrong question.

The question was never “am I good at this?” The question was “am I enough without this?”

That question runs in the background, almost unconsciously, and most high performers never go near it. Going near it would mean sitting still and welcoming feelings, and sitting still is where all the discomfort lives. So instead they do what every high performer does. They work harder, they set bigger targets, and they tell themselves the next milestone is the one that will finally settle it. The ceiling always goes higher.

I had a client a while back running a company doing millions in revenue, great team, successful personal life. By any external measure this person was succeeding. He came to me and told me he felt like a failure. And I’m like, what? He gave me this incredibly polished answer about where he should have been by now, what his peers were doing, what the trajectory should look like. Everything external. Where I am versus where I should be.

The more polished the explanation, the more I’m convinced there is avoidance underneath. Actual self-awareness doesn’t look rehearsed. It’s messy, it comes with pauses and contradictions. When someone has a perfectly structured answer for why they feel terrible, what they’re showing you is the story they built to avoid looking at the real thing.

And the real thing in his case, and in most cases I see, was that he did not enjoy what he was doing. He enjoyed winning. Those are two completely different things.

The doing versus the winning

When you enjoy the work itself, you can have a bad year, a bad quarter, even a failed venture. It hurts, of course, I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t because you’d have to be in some Buddha state for nothing to affect you. But it doesn’t destroy you, because the work has meaning independent of the result. When you only enjoy the winning, a bad quarter becomes existential, because your whole identity is built around it. So if your identity is built around winning, who are you without it?

This is where most of the “I lost my purpose” language comes from. These people didn’t lose purpose. They lost momentum. And without the momentum, there is nothing underneath to hold them. The motivation is mostly extrinsic, coming from what other people are doing or some internal judgment about where they are supposed to be, like a third person pushing them from the outside.

What I want to leave you with

Purpose is an internal state. It’s like saying I’m happy or I’m in love, it’s subjective, there is no external measure for it. So here is the question I ask my clients and I want to ask you: if you removed every external validation from the equation, would you still do what you do? If you knew there would be no bigness, no huge success, that you would be a regular person doing regular work, would you keep doing it?

The people I have worked with who found something resembling real purpose did not find it by achieving harder. They found it by getting honest about what made it so important to achieve in the first place, and by facing the emotions sitting behind the construct they built to avoid those feelings. That kind of work is the most uncomfortable, painful, nasty work you will do in your life. But it is worth doing.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

A few months ago, a client of mine sat across from me at the end of our first session, a senior leader running a team of about 60 people, and said something I was not expecting. He looked at me and told me that nobody knew he was there. When I asked why, he gave me this look as though I was the one who was confused, as though I did not understand something obvious about how the world works.

What he meant was simple. If this had been coaching, he would have mentioned it to his team, his partner, his board. Coaching is acceptable. Coaching signals ambition and investment in growth. Therapy signals that something is broken. Even if it is the same room, the same conversation, the same work being done, one word makes it fine and the other makes you feel like something is wrong with you.

This was not a one-off. I hear versions of this regularly, from founders, executives, senior ICs, and increasingly from younger professionals building their careers in tech. Smart, functional, educated, high-performing people who are dealing with real things, self-doubt, burnout, decisions keeping them up at night, and who will call what they need by any name except therapy. Advisory. Mentoring. A strategy session. Anything that sounds like performance and forward motion rather than sitting with what hurts.

The packaging problem nobody wants to name

The reason these people avoid the word is not that they are uninformed or emotionally illiterate. The reason is that therapy as a category has a branding problem, and almost nobody in the industry wants to talk about it honestly.

Therapy was historically built for a specific population and a specific model of communication. About 60 to 70 percent of therapy patients are women, and roughly the same percentage of therapists are women. The dominant model is talk therapy, which means articulating what is happening inside you, naming the emotion, translating internal experience into language. That works for a lot of people and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But for a certain type of person, and I see this especially in men though it is not exclusive to men, that model feels foreign in a way that is hard to describe if you have not experienced it.

There is a clinical term for this, normative male alexithymia, which is a fancy way of saying that a lot of men are functionally disconnected from their own emotional vocabulary. The emotions are there, fully present, but the words for them are not. And when you walk into a therapy room and someone asks you how you feel, the honest answer in many cases is: I do not know. Not because you are avoiding the question. Not because you are resisting the process. You genuinely do not know.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

When not knowing gets misread

Here is where the design flaw shows up. The therapeutic model tends to interpret “I don’t know” as avoidance or resistance, as a wall to break through rather than a literal description of the person’s experience. So the client walks out thinking therapy does not work for them, or worse, that they are bad at it. And what do high performers do when they feel bad at something? They do not come back. They find an alternative, and the alternative is called coaching, advisory, or consulting, all of which sound like they are about performance and forward motion and none of which make you feel like you are broken.

The distinction between therapy and coaching, by the way, is wildly overstated. The work overlaps far more than either industry wants to admit. But those overstated distinctions serve an important function: they give people permission to do the work without stigma. And I want to stay with that for a moment, because it matters.

I need to be clear about something. I am a therapist. I trained in this. I believe the process works, and there is plenty of evidence it works for men and women when the fit is right. What I am against is the industry pretending the packaging does not matter, and the quiet elitism underneath that pretence, the idea that if people avoid therapy it is their resistance, their failure to be vulnerable enough.

That is lazy thinking. If someone genuinely needs help and avoids it because the branding of therapy gives them a specific impression, that is not on them. That is on us. We have wrapped psychological work in a specific aesthetic, a soft-focus, feelings-first language that signals to a lot of competent, action-oriented people that this is not for them. And then we act surprised when they do not show up.

The performance paradox

There is a deeper structural issue at play here. High performers are, by definition, people who solve problems through action. You feel ashamed, you achieve more. You feel inadequate, you get more results. You feel anxious about your career, you work harder. The entire operating system is: if something is wrong inside, fix it by fixing the outside.

Therapy asks you to do the exact opposite. It asks you to stop doing and start feeling. For someone whose entire identity is built around competence and output, that is not a pleasant invitation. It sounds more like a threat, because you are asking them to sit in a room where the thing they are best at, performing, is useless.

I had a client once, a woman running her own firm, accomplished by any measure, who told me she had tried therapy three times before working with me. Each time she left feeling worse. Not because the therapist was bad, but because the format asked her to do something she had no practice doing, which was sitting with discomfort without solving it. She described the experience as showing up to a basketball court without knowing how to dribble, while everyone assumes you know the rules. That is not a personal failing. That is a design flaw in how the work is presented.

What I have been doing about it

I am still figuring this out, and I want to be transparent about that. I have been building a set of structured self-examination tools, video-led diagnostic experiences that cover the most common things people bring to my practice: repressed emotions, burnout, procrastination, purpose-seeking, shame, and the question of whether you are stuck or protecting yourself from something you do not want to face.

They are not therapy and they are not coaching. They are designed so you start working through the material on your own, at your own pace, without sitting across from anyone, without having to call it anything. If you get something from the process and want to go deeper with a therapist or a coach, you walk in with better questions and a clearer picture of what is going on. If you are already in therapy or coaching, the material gives your sessions a sharper starting point.

I got tired of the gap between how many people need this kind of work and how many will ever walk into a room and call it therapy. The category is creating a barrier, so I stopped fighting the category and started asking a different question: what if the work could begin before you decide what to call it, before you have to identify as someone who needs help? I am far less interested in what you call it than in whether you do it.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

You have probably been thinking about this for a while, maybe years. What am I supposed to be doing? What is the thing that would make all of this feel like it matters? You have turned it over in your head hundreds of times, considered options, explored ideas, maybe even made satisfying lists. But somehow you are still here, without the answer.

The problem is not that you lack ambition or clarity or self-awareness but that the way most people search for purpose makes it impossible to find. You are trying to think your way to something that does not live in your thoughts. You are looking in the future for something that only shows up in the present. And every time you project yourself into an imaginary next chapter and ask “is that it?” the answer feels flat because you are evaluating a thought, not a felt experience.

This experience is a short set of questions with a video from me before each one. It will not give you your purpose but it will show you why the search has not …

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You are tired, right? But not the kind of tired that a weekend fixes. The kind that sits underneath everything. You have probably tried resting. Maybe you took a holiday or a long break, came back and within a few weeks you were right back in the same place.

That is because the problem is not how much you are working but how you are working. Specifically it is what is fuelling you. Most high performers are running on some combination of urgency, obligation and low-grade fear. They do not notice it because it has been there so long it just feels like normal. But it is not normal, it is adrenaline. And adrenaline runs out.

This experience is a short set of questions with a video from me before each one. It will not tell you to work less or take more breaks. It will help you see what is actually draining you and what would need to change about the way you work for the energy to come back. There are no right answers. Just honesty.

At the end you can share your answers with me and I will send you a personal reflection. Or you can keep them private.

Questions

Q1: On a scale of 1 to 10, how burned out do you feel right now? And how long have you been at or above that level?

Q2: Make two lists. First, the parts of your work that drain you. Second, the parts that give you energy. Be specific about tasks, not categories.

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You do a hundred things a day without procrastinating. You reply to messages, make decisions, show up to meetings, solve problems. Then there are two or three things you keep NOT doing and you call yourself a procrastinator.

But are you really a procrastinator. What is this anyway? That’s not a personality type. It’s a pattern, and the pattern has a very specific structure: there’s a feeling attached to the thing you’re avoiding, and your system would rather stall than feel it.

This experience walks you through a short set of questions, each with a video from me, to help you see what’s actually happening underneath the procrastination. It’s not a productivity hack, don’t treat it as such. It’s a diagnostic. There are no right answers.

At the end, you can share your answers with me and I’ll send you a personal reflection. Or you can just keep them private. Either way, you’ll see procrastination differently after this.

Questions

Q1: Name 1–3 specific things you’ve been procrastinating on. Not categories, specific tasks or decisions.

Q2: For each one: when you imagine sitting down to do it, what feeling shows up in your body?

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Lots of high performers take pride of not being easily affected by feelings, by being in control of their emotions and rising up above them. Feelings are frequently considered ‘lame’ and are avoided. Some of them are the feelings of failure, rejection, being out of control, looking incompetent and, of course, being disliked.

You probably don’t think of it that way, potentially call it discipline or standards. But underneath every pattern that’s keeping you stuck there’s an emotion you learned a long time ago that it was not safe to feel.

This experience is a short series of questions, each paired with a video from me that gives you context before you answer. There are no right answers. The value is in your honesty with yourself.

At the end, you can email me your answers and I’ll send you a personal reflection back or you can keep them private. Both are valuable. The awareness is the point.

Questions

Q1: What’s the recurring problem in your work or life right now, the one that keeps showing up no matter what you do?

Q2: What feeling would you have to sit with if that problem actually resolved or if you took the action you’ve been avoiding?

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They got the role they were working toward or the exit or the comp package or the team reporting to them. The evidence says they’ve made it or they are in a way better place than average. People around them also treat them like they’ve made it. And yet there’s this weird flatness where the satisfaction was supposed to be. Or even more than that, there is a feeling of failure. Interesting ain’t it?

Most of them are not ungrateful, they know how good they have it. They’re not depressed either, they function fine. But there’s a gap between where they are and how they expected to feel about where they are, and no amount of achieving the next thing seems to close it.

What I keep seeing, both in the people I work with and honestly in my own history, is that this gap has nothing to do with ambition or drive or gratitude. It has a lot to do though with whose definition of success they’ve been running on.

And for a lot of them, when they finally stop to look at it, the answer is: not mine.

How this gets installed

Nobody sits you down at 22 and says “here’s a definition of success, adopt it as your own, don’t question it for the next fifteen years.” It’s subtler than that.

Our life is built in systems that interact with each other. Your parents had a version of what a good life looks like. Your university peers had a version. Your first boss had a version. The industry you entered had a version. And because you were young and ambitious and surrounded by people who seemed to know what they were doing, you absorbed those versions without much filtering. Why wouldn’t you? They came from people you respected, and they seemed to be working.

That typically results into optimizing for the things those versions told you to optimize for. Money, title progression, 6-figure salaries, company prestige, team size, whatever it is. You built a career around hitting those markers because those markers were the ones your environment told you mattered.

The problem is you never stopped to check whether those markers were yours or inherited. And the reason you never stopped is because you were too busy being good at hitting them.

Why high performers specifically get stuck here

This is the part I find genuinely painful to watch, because the mechanism is so clean.

High performers are defined by their ability to identify a target and execute toward it with discipline. This is the trait that makes them successful. It’s also the trait that keeps them locked inside a definition they’ve outgrown, because questioning the target feels like quitting, and quitting is the one thing their identity won’t allow.

So they do what they know how to do best, work harder, optimize. They take the next role, chase the next milestone, restructure their external circumstances. And the whole time, the actual issue sits underneath all of it, untouched, which is that they’re executing brilliantly against a scoreboard someone else built.

This is a defence mechanism operating at the identity level. It’s not a thinking problem. The person isn’t failing to see the situation clearly. They’re protecting themselves from a confrontation they’re not ready to have, which is the possibility that years of focused effort were oriented toward something they absorbed rather than chose.

I did this for a long time. I was building companies, consulting, moving fast, doing the things the market told me a successful tech career looks like. None of it was wrong exactly. The work was real and the skills were real. But the organizing principle behind all of it was someone else’s idea of what I should be doing, and I didn’t notice until I trained as a psychotherapist, a field where you have to sit still long enough for uncomfortable things to surface.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The thing underneath the thing

Here’s what makes this different from a standard midlife recalibration or career pivot moment.

When someone is running on a borrowed definition of success, the arrival at the goal doesn’t produce satisfaction because the goal was never connected to their own internal system of what matters. It was connected to someone else’s. So hitting the target feels like completing someone else’s assignment. You get a grade but you don’t get the feeling, because the feeling was never going to come from this particular achievement. It was going to come from knowing you’re building something that’s yours.

The high performers I know who seem genuinely settled, not performing wellness on LinkedIn but settled in a way you notice when you’re around them, share one pattern. They stopped measuring themselves against the scoreboard they inherited and got honest about the difference between what they want and what they think they should want.

And I want to say something directly to the person reading this who’s thinking “okay but I have a mortgage and responsibilities and people depending on me, I don’t have the luxury of redefining success.” I hear you. Nothing I’m describing requires you to blow anything up. It requires you to look at something you’ve been avoiding, which is a different kind of work. Slower, less visible, but no less serious.

Things to try this week

If any of this landed, here are a few things worth doing, not as a self-improvement project but as a way to see the pattern more clearly so you have better information to work with.

• Write down your actual operating definition of success. The one running in the background right now, the one shaping what you say yes to and what you avoid and how you feel at the end of most days. Be specific. If it’s “make enough money that I never feel financially vulnerable,” write that. If it’s “be respected by people I consider smart,” write that. Whatever it is, name it plainly.

• Ask yourself whose voice first told you this was the goal. A parent, a mentor, a peer group, a culture. If the answer isn’t yours, the goal isn’t necessarily wrong. But it means you’ve never examined whether it’s right for you, and that gap between inherited and chosen is where most of the stuckness in high-performing careers lives.

• Notice when you’re optimizing instead of questioning. The next time you catch yourself working harder at something without knowing why it matters to you specifically, pause. Ask: am I executing because this is mine, or because stopping would force me to look at something I’m not ready to look at? You don’t need to answer right away. Noticing the impulse is enough for now.

• Say out loud what you expected success to feel like. Find someone you trust and tell them what you secretly thought it would feel like when you got here. Not what it does feel like, not what it should feel like. What you expected. The gap between the expectation and reality is where the real information lives, and saying it to another person makes it harder to intellectualize away.

• Give yourself permission to not know yet. If you’ve spent years running on a borrowed definition, you’re not going to find your own in an afternoon. The pressure to replace one clear answer with another clear answer immediately is itself part of the pattern. Sitting in the uncertainty for a while, without rushing to resolve it, is the only honest position available to you right now. And it’s usually the one from which something real starts to take shape.

Where this leaves you

The people who move through this don’t become less driven but differently driven. They stop spending their careers accumulating evidence they might be enough and start building from the assumption they already are.

In my experience the work gets better when this shifts. Not because the person becomes more skilled, they were already skilled. Because the energy that was going into performing against someone else’s standard gets freed up, and what comes through once it’s freed is clearer, more directed, and more sustainable.

Most people don’t do this work. They keep hitting the targets, keep feeling the flatness, keep assuming the next one will be different.

But some people get tired of the loop and start looking at what’s underneath it. That’s where it gets uncomfortable. And possibly useful.

-Aggelos

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

They can tell you they’re good at what they do. The promotions confirm it, the salary confirms it and of course, people around them confirm it. They’re not stupid, they can see the evidence.

But there’s this gap between knowing it and feeling it. And that gap gets filled with constant proof-seeking. How? With another win, one more signal or any other data point that says “yes, you’re still okay.”

Sometimes it’s attention they need or admiration or just the numbers going up in their bank account. But even when they get it, it doesn’t stick for a long time. The validation lands, registers for a bit and then…poof, it evaporates, and they’re back to needing more.

Their self-assessment doesn’t carry enough weight to settle anything. They finish something, look at it, think “yeah, that’s solid,” and then immediately need external confirmation to make that assessment feel real. Without it, the doubt creeps back in.

This is different from standard insecurity. These people have proof of their competence everywhere. Rational competence. BUT, the problem is the proof doesn’t compound into a stable sense of being good enough. It just resets.

And that pattern comes from somewhere. In lots of cases, from how their parents related to achievement, approval, and worth when they were kids.

Here are the parent types that wire this in.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The intermittent reinforcement parent

This parent gives approval unpredictably. Same achievement gets celebrated one day, ignored the next, criticized the third depending on their mood or stress level or whatever invisible factors the child can’t control or even see.

The child never learns what “good” actually looks like because the signal keeps changing, so they become compulsive checkers instead. They can’t internalize a stable sense of “I did well” when the response is random, so they just keep scanning for the next reaction, trying to decode what it means.

What this builds is someone who finishes a project and can’t settle until they know how it was received. Their own assessment doesn’t close the loop because it never did when they were learning how this works. Silence or delayed feedback reads as bad news because unpredictability learned to mean danger. They’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop, still running the same checking pattern they developed at eight years old.

The audience-focused parent

This parent cares less about what the child is doing and more about how it makes the family look to the outside world. Achievements matter primarily as social currency, as things they can mention at dinner parties or brag about to relatives.

The child figures out pretty quickly that private satisfaction doesn’t register with this parent. What counts is whether the achievement has visibility, whether it sounds impressive when you tell other people about it. So they optimize for external prestige over internal interest, choosing paths that look good over paths they actually want.

What this builds is someone whose career looks great on paper but feels hollow in practice. They’re still making choices based on how impressive they’ll sound rather than how fulfilling they’ll be. Achievements nobody witnesses don’t register as real because they learned that the point of doing well was always the audience’s reaction, not the thing itself.

The comparison-as-love parent

This parent only knows how to evaluate the child relationally. How did you do compared to your sibling, compared to the neighbor’s kid, compared to the top student in class? Where do you rank? That’s the only framework they use, so that’s the only framework the child develops.

The child never learns to assess their work on its own terms because everything is always measured against someone else. An A doesn’t mean anything unless they also know who else got an A and how theirs compares.

What this builds is someone who’s chronically competitive in ways that exhaust them. They finish something and immediately need the relational context to know if it was good. Who else did this? How does mine compare? Other people’s success feels like personal failure because they’re running the same ranking system their parent installed, where worth is always determined by position in the hierarchy rather than by the work itself.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The emotionally illiterate parent

This parent can’t process feelings, so feelings don’t count as valid information in their house. When the child says they’re struggling or upset or confused, the parent doesn’t know what to do with that, so they dismiss it or change the subject or get uncomfortable. But results? Results they understand and respond to.

The child learns that internal experience doesn’t matter, only measurable outcomes register as real. How something feels becomes irrelevant data because it’s not data the parent can process or validate.

What this builds is someone who can’t trust their own internal gauge. They don’t know if they did well based on how it feels, they need the external marker to confirm it. The promotion, the metric, the visible outcome that someone else can verify. They’ll be privately proud of something and feel absolutely nothing until someone else validates it, and then suddenly it becomes real because external confirmation is the only signal their system learned to trust.

The narcissistic supply parent

This parent uses the child’s achievements to regulate their own self-esteem. The child exists to make the parent look good, feel important, fill whatever emotional void the parent can’t fill themselves. Wins aren’t celebrated for the child’s sake, they’re immediately co-opted as fuel for the parent’s ego.

The child gets very good at figuring out what will make the parent look impressive and delivering it, but they never develop a sense of what they themselves want because that question was never relevant. Their job was to generate material the parent could use.

What this builds is someone who’s incredibly skilled at making other people look good. They anticipate what their boss needs, what clients want, they produce work that gets others praised. But if you ask them what they actually want for themselves, they have no idea because they’re still operating as supply for someone else’s needs, still waiting for the other person to finally be satisfied so they can stop performing. Except they never are, and the person never does.

The withdrawal-as-punishment parent

This parent disappears emotionally when the child disappoints them. They get cold, silent, physically or emotionally absent. When the child succeeds, warmth returns and connection is restored. So connection itself becomes contingent on performance, not just approval but the fundamental sense of whether the parent is present or gone.

The child learns that neutral isn’t safe, that they need active positive signals or they’re at risk of abandonment. Performing well isn’t just about getting praise, it’s about keeping people from disappearing.

What this builds is someone who can’t handle ambiguity in relationships. Their boss is distracted in a meeting and their nervous system reads it as rejection. Their partner goes quiet and they’re immediately scanning for what they did wrong. They need constant reassurance not just to feel good but to feel safe, because withdrawal learned to mean abandonment and their system is still wired to prevent that at all costs.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

Where this leaves you

Most of these parents didn’t set out to create this problem. Some genuinely thought they were preparing their kid for a competitive world. Some were running patterns from their own childhood without examining them. Some were too absorbed in their own psychological needs to notice what they were building in their child.

But what got created is someone who’s genuinely capable but can’t generate the internal signal that says “I’m doing fine.” That confirmation has to come from outside or it doesn’t register as real.

Which parent type you had shapes what kind of external validation you’re chasing. The comparison parent left you needing to know your rank. The narcissistic one left you needing to be useful to feel valuable. The withdrawal one left you needing constant reassurance just to feel safe in a room.

Understanding the pattern doesn’t automatically fix it, but it explains why you keep needing proof even when you already have mountains of it. Why your own assessment never settles anything. Why validation hits and then fades and you’re back to baseline.

You’re running adult-level competence on childhood-level wiring, still scanning for signals from people who couldn’t give them properly in the first place, still trying to fill a gap that external validation was never designed to fill.

The work, if you decide to do it, isn’t about convincing yourself you’re good enough. You already know that intellectually. The work is rebuilding the internal system that’s supposed to generate that feeling without needing constant external confirmation to make it real.

Most people don’t do it. They just keep performing, keep achieving, keep collecting proof that never quite compounds into feeling okay.

But some people get tired of that loop and start looking at why it’s there. Why their own sense of doing well doesn’t count. Why they need the validation to feel real. Why the gap between knowing and feeling never closes no matter how much evidence piles up.

That’s where it gets uncomfortable. And possibly useful.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

In reality, this doubt doesn’t signal missing any critical piece of information but avoiding an emotion. Let me explain.

When doubt shows up

There are two moments where doubt typically arrives. The first is when you’re sitting with an idea you’re excited about. You’ve been handed a project or you’re starting something new, you’re energized, maybe a little thrilled, and then you sit down to actually work on it and suddenly uncertainty floods in. Should I really do this? Is this the right approach? Maybe I’m missing something.

The second is when you put your idea in front of someone, your boss or an investor or even your partner, and you watch them react and it’s not the reaction you wanted. They’re lukewarm, they’re skeptical, maybe they push back, and immediately doubt shows up. Maybe this isn’t as good as I thought. Maybe I got this wrong.

In both cases, what’s actually happening underneath is that you have ambition about something, you want to move something forward, and you’re scared there’s a feeling coming that you don’t want to experience. The doubt is showing up to protect you from that feeling by slowing you down so you don’t have to face it.

And there are typically two kinds of feelings the doubt is protecting you from: a feeling from your past that you don’t want to relive, and a feeling in the future, either in success or failure, that you’re scared will destabilize you.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The past feeling you’re avoiding

Here’s how the past version works. You learned early, maybe as a kid, that when you put ideas out there, something bad happened. You got criticized, maybe someone got angry, maybe your idea was dismissed or torn apart. And as a child, the only way you can interpret that is “I must have done something wrong. What do I need to fix?”

That pattern gets embedded over the years even if your rational self doesn’t find it logical. Now, decades later, when someone pushes back on your idea or doesn’t immediately buy in, you don’t think “maybe they don’t fully understand it yet” or “of course there’s resistance, it’s a new idea.” You go straight to doubt because your system is trying to protect you from the feeling of being criticized or dismissed.

That’s quite frequent with executives. Someone gets critical feedback or someone reacts with anger and they immediately go into doubt instead of assessing whether the criticism is valid or whether the anger is even about them. They just want to avoid the friction because friction learned to mean “I did something wrong” when they were eight years old.

The doubt is doing its job. It’s slowing you down so you don’t have to feel that old feeling again.

The future feeling you’re avoiding

The other source of doubt is about what you’re scared will happen if you actually follow through. This one operates in two directions: fear of failure and fear of success.

Fear of failure is straightforward. If I do this and it doesn’t work, I’m going to feel horrible about myself, and I don’t want to feel horrible about myself, so I’ll just stay in doubt instead.

Fear of success is less obvious but just as powerful. If I do this and it works, I won’t be the person I think I am anymore. I won’t be the person who’s struggling or striving. I’ll be the person who’s actually winning. And even though part of me wants that, another part is scared: will I lose my drive if I’m not chasing anymore? Will people reject me if I’m too successful? Will I become the tall poppy that gets cut down?

Both versions, fear of failure and fear of success, create doubt because doubt slows your ambition down enough that you don’t have to risk either outcome. You stay in the safe zone of being disappointed with yourself, which you’re already used to feeling. That’s the familiar emotion. That’s the one your system knows how to handle.

Why it’s not actually about ‘a better plan’

Right about now you’re probably resisting and thinking “no, I am not avoiding any emotions, I genuinely don’t know if this is the right move.”

But in most cases, you don’t know if it’s right or wrong. You can’t know. How could you? You haven’t done it before. If you’d done it before, if you already knew how to do it, there would be no doubt. You’d have already felt all the emotions associated with doing it. There’d be no issue.

So of course you don’t know the answer. There’s no way to know how to do something perfectly before you do it. The only way to get to clarity is to actually do the thing, learn from it, adjust, do it better and iterate. That’s how anything significant gets done.

But all of that stops if you’re worried about feeling a certain way. If you have doubts, you stop the iteration. You stop the process. You stay stuck in your head trying to figure it out intellectually, which you can’t do because the information you need only comes from doing it.

So intellectually you know this. You know that failure is part of the process, that you learn by trying things. But you’re still stopped, which is how we know it’s emotional, not intellectual.

How to prove it to yourself

There’s a simple test that shows you exactly what doubt is doing.

Pick something you’re doubting right now. It can be anything, a project, a decision, a conversation you need to have or just remember something from the past that’s still bugging you.

Now do this little mind hack. Close your eyes, control your breath and think of something you genuinely feel care and love about without a second thought. It can be a child, a puppy, your wife/husband, your mum or dad. But it needs to be something where there is no second thought, just warmth and care. Try to experience the feeling of care and openness in your heart.

Now, with that same openness and welcoming energy, look at the thing you’re doubting. Don’t defend against it. Don’t analyze it. Just look at it the way you’d look at that thing you love.

Take a breath, drop the defense and open your heart to it.

What happens to the doubt?

If you actually do this, you’ll notice the doubt starts to drift away. You might not suddenly know everything, but you know the next step. You can see what to do next. And if you don’t immediately, you know that if you sit there with an open heart long enough, the next step will become clear.

That’s how you know It was always a matter of having your heart closed to protect you from a feeling, not more information.

There’s an old saying: doubt is the sin of the heart. What that means is you have to have your heart closed to experience doubt. Heart closed means you’re defending against something. In this case, defending against an emotion.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The longer-term work

Opening your heart in the moment dissolves the doubt temporarily, which is useful. But the real work, the thing that changes the pattern long-term, is learning to actually welcome the emotions you’ve been avoiding.

Learning to welcome criticism, to welcome the feeling of someone being angry at you or dismissive, to welcome the possibility of failure. But most importantly. learning to welcome success and what that might change about your identity.

There is a funny-not funny thing about emotions, when you resist them, they’re unbearable. It’s like resisting the need to go to the bathroom. It gets extremely uncomfortable. But the actual experience of the emotion, when you stop resisting it, when you get curious about it, when you welcome it, is not that uncomfortable.

You can approach this intellectually. You can recognize that every time you’re triggered, every time you notice yourself going into doubt, there’s something there that’s holding back your freedom. And you can actually get excited about that because if you do the work, if you move through the trigger instead of avoiding it, there’s freedom on the other side. It’s like finding the start of a gold mine. You have to dig a little, but if you know there’s gold down there, you’re going to do the work.

Or you can approach it more experientially, bringing genuine curiosity to the emotional experience itself. What does this feeling actually feel like in my body? Where is it located? What’s the texture of it? What happens if I just sit with it instead of pushing it away?

Either way, the work is the same: learning to welcome the thing you’ve been protecting yourself from. Doubt isn’t protecting you anymore, you are this child any more. You’re capable of feeling whatever needs to be felt. You always have been.

- Aggelos

They’re still trying to get their parents to love them.

Not consciously, usually. The conscious story is that they’re driven, that they have high standards, that they care about excellence. And some of that is real. But underneath it, running quietly like a background process, is a child who learned early that love wasn’t given freely. It was earned. And the way you earned it was by being impressive.

How conditional love becomes a performance contract

John Bowlby’s work on attachment established something foundational: children need a secure base, a relationship where they’re accepted regardless of their behavior or output, in order to develop a stable sense of self. When that secure base is conditional, when love and attention fluctuate based on achievement, the child doesn’t just learn to work hard. They learn that their worth is something they produce rather than something they inherently have.

Carl Rogers called this “conditions of worth,” the internalized belief that you are only valuable when you meet certain standards. In families where achievement is the primary currency, those conditions get set early and run deep. The child learns to read the room, to figure out what generates warmth and what generates disappointment, and to organize their behavior accordingly.

What looks like ambition from the outside is often this internalized contract operating on autopilot. The person isn’t choosing to pursue excellence. They’re executing a survival strategy they developed at eight years old and never consciously revised.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

What this looks like operationally in adulthood

The structure of the drive is self-defeating by design. Each achievement produces a brief window of relief, a momentary sense of having done enough, followed by a return to baseline anxiety and the need to chase the next thing.

Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory distinguishes between intrinsic motivation, doing something because it’s genuinely meaningful, and extrinsic motivation, doing something for external reward or to avoid negative judgment. People operating from conditional worth are almost entirely extrinsically motivated, but they’ve internalized the external standard so deeply that it feels intrinsic. They think they want success. What they actually want is the feeling they imagine success will finally deliver, which is the sense of being enough.

The goalpost moves because it has to. If achievement were actually delivering what they needed, they’d stop at some point. The fact that they can’t stop is diagnostic. Each accomplishment gets discounted almost immediately because the accomplishment was never really the point. The point was the approval and approval from people who make love conditional is structurally unavailable in the quantity required.

So they achieve more, take on bigger challenges and the thing they’re actually chasing stays exactly as far away as it always was.

The fragility underneath

These are often sharp, capable people who appear confident and self-assured from the outside. What’s underneath is what psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Lora Park identified as contingent self-esteem, a sense of worth that’s entirely dependent on external outcomes rather than stable and self-generated.

Contingent self-esteem is structurally fragile because it requires constant maintenance. When the performance is going well, the person can feel reasonably okay. When it falters, or when the expected validation doesn’t arrive, there’s nothing to fall back on. The self-esteem isn’t actually there. There’s just the performance of it.

This is why these people often can’t receive genuine compliments gracefully, can’t rest without guilt, can’t enjoy achievements for more than a few hours before needing the next one. The positive feedback doesn’t stick because it’s being processed by a system that was never designed to accumulate satisfaction. It was designed to generate more performance.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

The dissolution problem

The pattern becomes most visible when something disrupts the drive such a Burnout, a significant life event or a parent dying. Or they achieve enough that the chase simply loses its meaning and the engine stalls.

What follows is often described as a crisis, sometimes a career crisis, sometimes an identity crisis, sometimes a vague but persistent sense that nothing feels real or meaningful anymore. The person looks at everything they’ve built and can’t find themselves in it. Because they weren’t building for themselves. They were building for an audience, and either the audience is gone or the performance has stopped working as a source of relief.

This is the moment the real question surfaces: who am I when I’m not performing? What do I actually want, separate from what generates approval? For many people, this is genuinely unanswerable at first, because they’ve never had occasion to ask it. Their entire adult life has been organized around the performance contract established in childhood. Without it, they don’t have a clear sense of what they value or what they want or what would feel like a life that’s actually theirs.

The psychoanalytic term for what they’re doing is external locus of control, their sense of self is governed by what happens outside them rather than from within. Dissolving that pattern isn’t just a matter of insight. It requires building something that was never built in the first place.

What the work actually involves

Understanding the pattern is not the same as changing it. Most people in this situation understand it quite quickly once it’s named. What’s harder is the grief.

Because underneath the performance contract is a loss that never got fully acknowledged. The love that should have been unconditional wasn’t. The child who just wanted to be seen and accepted for who they were had to become a performer instead. That’s not a small thing. And achieving more doesn’t address it. Neither does simply deciding to stop caring what the parent thinks.

What actually changes things is separating achievement from worth at the level of genuine belief rather than intellectual understanding. Recognizing that the original judgment, that they weren’t enough as they were, was never accurate. It was a reflection of the parent’s limitations, not the child’s value.

And then, slowly, building motivation that comes from actual desire rather than from the need to discharge anxiety. Asking what they’d pursue if no one were watching. What would feel meaningful if there were no one to report it to. What success looks like when it’s genuinely theirs.

That process is slower and less dramatic than it sounds. But it’s the only version of high performance that doesn’t eventually eat the person alive.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

The support system wants to help. They genuinely care. But they don’t have the framework to understand what the founder is experiencing, so the help they offer doesn’t land. The partner suggests taking a vacation. Friends say to delegate more or set boundaries. A therapist recommends mindfulness or work-life balance. The founder nods, appreciates the effort, but knows none of this addresses the actual problem.

Because the actual problem is that they’re making decisions with incomplete information that will affect twenty people’s livelihoods, they’re carrying knowledge about the business that nobody else has, they’re managing competing pressures from investors and customers and team members who all need different things, and they’re doing this in an environment where showing uncertainty feels dangerous.

A vacation doesn’t solve that. Delegating doesn’t solve that. Mindfulness doesn’t solve that.

What the founder needs is someone who gets the specific psychology of operating under that kind of pressure, someone who understands that advice like “just communicate better” or “practice self-care” is about as useful as telling someone drowning to relax and enjoy the water.

The mismatch in support

The people around a founder typically don’t have the reference points to understand what they’re dealing with. The partner sees them stressed and wants to help, but their frame of reference for work stress comes from environments with managers and teams and HR departments, places where problems have defined escalation paths and someone else is ultimately accountable.

They suggest things that would work in a normal job: talk to your manager, set clearer expectations, take a mental health day. None of which apply when the founder is the manager, when the expectations are structural not personal, when taking a day off just means the problems compound while they’re gone.

Friends are similar. They care, they want to be supportive, but their advice comes from a fundamentally different context. They don’t understand why the founder can’t just “set better boundaries” or “learn to say no” or “not take things so personally.” They’re trying to help, but the help is based on a misunderstanding of what the problem actually is.

Even psychologists often miss this. Many founders are highly intellectual people who’ve already read the mainstream psychology literature, who understand cognitive behavioral techniques and stress management frameworks, who know the theory but need something else entirely.

What they need is someone who understands the specific constraints of their situation. Someone who gets that the problem isn’t that they have poor coping skills or need better self-regulation, but that they’re operating in a fundamentally different kind of environment than most people, one where normal advice doesn’t apply because the structural conditions are different.

A founder recently described going to therapy and spending half the session explaining the business context so the therapist could understand why a particular situation was stressful, and by the time the therapist had enough context to offer input, the session was over. The next session they’d have to rebuild that context again because a different problem had emerged.

The therapist cared, was competent, but didn’t have the native understanding of what it’s like to run a company, so every piece of advice had to be translated and most of it didn’t survive the translation.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

The need for operational support

Founders, especially solo founders, need a specific kind of support that’s different from emotional validation or general life advice. They need someone they can trust for operational thinking, someone to bounce ideas off, someone who can help with decision-making in a way that actually understands the constraints they’re working within.

Sometimes a co-founder fills this role. Someone who has the same context, the same skin in the game, who can think through problems at the same level of detail and complexity. But not always. Co-founders can have their own version of the same isolation, or the relationship dynamic doesn’t allow for that kind of vulnerability, or they’re dealing with different parts of the business and don’t have the overlap needed for this kind of support.

When a founder doesn’t have this, they end up making decisions completely alone, which compounds both the stress and the likelihood of errors. They’re processing complex strategic questions with no one to reality-check their thinking, no one to point out blind spots, no one to say “have you considered this angle” in a way that actually adds value rather than just creating more noise.

This isn’t about needing cheerleading or reassurance. This is about needing a thinking partner who operates at the same altitude and can engage with the actual complexity of what they’re dealing with.

The volatility problem

In 2025 and 2026 specifically, there’s been a noticeable increase in founder volatility. Founders have always been volatile to some degree, that comes with the territory of operating under sustained high pressure with high stakes, but the current environment in tech has amplified this significantly.

Many startups have become genuinely anxious places to work. Market conditions are uncertain, funding is tighter, growth expectations haven’t adjusted to match the new reality, and founders are caught between investor pressure to show momentum and the practical reality of what’s actually achievable.

This shows up as emotional decision-making that founders later regret. Overreacting to a single data point. Making org changes based on frustration rather than strategy. Showing favoritism toward people they trust on a personal level even when that trust isn’t necessarily reflective of skill or performance.

The favoritism thing is particularly telling. When a founder is under extreme pressure and doesn’t have proper support structures, they start relying heavily on the few people who feel psychologically safe. Not because those people are objectively the best at their jobs, but because the founder can be honest with them or because they reduce rather than add to the founder’s cognitive load.

This creates its own problems. Team members notice the favoritism, morale suffers, the founder knows they’re doing it but can’t seem to stop because they’re in survival mode and those trusted few are the only thing keeping them functional.

The pressure from below

What makes this worse is that the team often doesn’t extend much empathy upward. People working at companies, even startups, frequently assume certain decisions are obvious, that the founder is making things harder than they need to be, that if they were in charge they’d do things differently and better.

Everyone thinks it’s about them. The engineer thinks the founder doesn’t understand the technical constraints. The designer thinks the founder doesn’t care about user experience. The sales person thinks the founder is too focused on product and not enough on revenue. Each person has a clear view of what the founder is doing wrong from their particular vantage point.

But the founder is sitting in the middle trying to optimize across all of these competing concerns simultaneously with incomplete information and limited resources, and most of the people complaining wouldn’t actually be able to do the job better if they were in that position.

This isn’t to say there aren’t bad founders. There are plenty. Founders who make terrible decisions, who don’t listen, who let ego override judgment. But in many cases, the people criticizing the founder are critiquing individual decisions without understanding the full set of constraints those decisions were made under.

When the team is openly complaining, when morale is low, when people are questioning the founder’s judgment, that adds another layer of pressure. Now the founder is not only trying to solve the actual business problems but also managing the perception that they’re incompetent, dealing with the psychological weight of knowing their team doesn’t trust them, trying to maintain authority while feeling increasingly isolated.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

The athletic analogy

Founders need to treat themselves the way athletes treat their bodies. An athlete doesn’t just train and compete, they manage nutrition, sleep, recovery, mental preparation, all the inputs that affect performance. They track metrics. They work with specialists. They understand that performance is a function of the whole system, not just effort.

Founders typically do the opposite. They treat business metrics as sacred and their own internal state as irrelevant or a sign of weakness. They’ll obsess over CAC and LTV and burn rate while ignoring that they haven’t slept properly in months, that they’re making decisions while emotionally dysregulated, that their judgment is impaired because they’re operating in a constant state of stress with no recovery.

Taking care of emotional health isn’t separate from business performance. It’s foundational to it. A founder who’s burnt out, isolated, emotionally volatile, is going to make worse decisions. They’re going to miss things. They’re going to overreact or underreact. They’re going to damage relationships with their team or investors or customers because they don’t have the emotional bandwidth to manage those relationships well.

This isn’t touchy-feely startup culture nonsense. This is operational reality. The founder’s internal state directly impacts the quality of their output, and most founders are operating with a degraded internal state because they think attending to it is optional or self-indulgent.

What actually helps

Succeeding as a founder is roughly fifty percent business execution and fifty percent resilience, and resilience isn’t about toughness or pushing through, it’s about having the systems in place to sustain performance under pressure.

That means building an actual support structure, not just having people around who care but having people who can engage with what the founder is actually dealing with at the level they’re dealing with it.

This might be other founders who’ve been through similar stages. Not founders in general, but founders who have relevant context, who understand the specific pressures of the founder’s situation, who can think through problems without the founder having to translate everything into civilian terms first.

It might be a coach or advisor who specializes in working with founders and has pattern recognition from seeing similar situations play out dozens of times. Not a generic executive coach, but someone who gets the specific psychology of founder-mode operating.

It might be a peer group of founders who meet regularly and can be honest with each other about what they’re actually experiencing, who create a space where performing confidence isn’t required.

The specific form matters less than the function: the founder needs access to at least one person, ideally a few people, who can hold the complexity of what they’re dealing with and provide perspective that actually lands.

And this needs to be proactive, not reactive. Not “I’ll reach out when things get bad” but “I have regular touchpoints with people who get it so I don’t spiral in isolation.”

Reframing help-seeking

There’s a persistent narrative that asking for help means failing, that strong founders should be able to handle everything themselves, that needing support is a sign of weakness.

This is objectively stupid. An athlete who refuses to work with coaches or nutritionists or sports psychologists isn’t strong, they’re sabotaging their own performance. A founder who refuses to build support structures isn’t resilient, they’re operating with unnecessary handicaps.

Asking for help is a competence signal, not a weakness signal. It means the founder is smart enough to recognize they can’t optimize the whole system alone, resilient enough to acknowledge they need input, strategic enough to invest in the inputs that will improve their performance.

The founder’s job isn’t to have all the answers. The founder’s job is to make the best decisions possible with available information, and part of that is creating the conditions where they can actually think clearly rather than processing everything through a fog of stress and isolation.

This means being honest with the people around them about what they actually need. Not pretending everything is fine, not performing confidence they don’t feel, but being direct: “I need someone who understands this specific kind of pressure to help me think through this decision” or “I need to talk through what I’m dealing with without having to explain all the context first.”

Most people in a founder’s life don’t know what they need because the founder hasn’t told them. The partner wants to help but doesn’t know how. Friends offer generic advice because they don’t know what specific kind of support would actually be useful. The founder assumes nobody can help so they don’t ask, and the cycle perpetuates.

Breaking this means educating the environment. Being explicit about what’s useful and what isn’t. Helping the partner understand that “how was your day” needs to be a different kind of conversation, that listening is more valuable than advice, that sometimes the founder just needs to externalize what they’re thinking without needing the partner to solve anything.

Helping friends understand that the founder isn’t looking for suggestions about work-life balance, they’re looking for connection and presence, and the most helpful thing is often just acknowledging that what they’re dealing with is legitimately hard without trying to fix it.

Creating space for the founder to be human rather than always performing strength.

The structural reality

The loneliness founders experience isn’t inevitable. It’s a function of how the role gets constructed and the lack of proper support infrastructure.

A founder operating in isolation will make worse decisions, burn out faster, and damage more relationships than a founder with proper support. This isn’t about feelings, it’s about performance optimization.

The path forward is straightforward: treat emotional and psychological infrastructure with the same seriousness as business infrastructure. Build relationships with people who actually get it. Be honest about what’s needed. Ask for help before things are critical.

The founders who last, who build sustainable companies rather than burning out in year three, aren’t the ones who tough it out alone. They’re the ones who recognize that resilience is a system, not a personal quality, and they build that system deliberately.

That’s the work.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

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You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid

Tbh I was also one of these people. I liked geeking out with my work, being in my cave, delivering good work but frequently neglecting the social and interpersonal aspect. Then I’d be surprised when someone else got the opportunity I thought I’d earned.

The pattern I see next is usually some version of ‘the company doesn’t value real contribution, loyalty means nothing, something must have gone wrong with performance.’

But the actual issue is rarely about performance but a misunderstanding of how advancement works past a certain level.

This article might land uncomfortably to some.

The shift that most people miss

Early career, hard work does get rewarded. Performance is measurable and delivery leads to promotions. The system operates fairly at that level because competence and output are the main differentiators. Also, you are threatening nobody. Let this land.

Then somewhere around mid to senior level, the rules change completely. But most people keep playing the old game, optimizing for execution and output, while those advancing have moved to a different game entirely.

Past a certain point, everyone works hard and delivers. Competence becomes baseline. What separates advancement from stalling is visibility, relationships, and strategic positioning. This sounds political to a lot of people, like work should speak for itself, like it’s unfair that someone less qualified advances through managing up.

So the pattern continues, work like a dog, deliver more, wait for people to notice, oh they did not, the environment sucks. Except decision-makers aren’t tracking output in the way most assume. They’re deciding based on who they know, who they trust, who’s visible when opportunities arise.

The narrative that protects the pattern

A common narrative develops which says that advance requires becoming a suck-up, someone fake who schmoozes and abandons principles. The whole system is unfair and advancement requires sleaze.

And yes, some people do advance by sucking up. Usually those are people who aren’t working as hard and compensate through perception management. When high performers see this, the conclusion often becomes: “I’m not going to be that person. I have dignity.”

What’s actually happened is avoidance of the real work gets reframed as preservation of integrity. A false choice gets constructed: either be a principled hard worker who gets passed over or be a sleazy suck-up who advances through politics.

This is a convenient dichotomy but it’s not accurate. People advance without being sleazy all the time. They communicate their work to the right people at the right time, work on strategic positioning, make their ambitions clear. All while maintaining their principles.

But acknowledging this requires admitting that something important has been avoided, not that dignity has been protected. That’s uncomfortable.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

The “work speaks for itself” lie

The most common sentence from people who get passed over repeatedly: “That’s not my style. I let my work speak for itself.”

There’s an identity built around being the dependable executor who doesn’t play politics, who focuses on substance over optics. It feels righteous.

But past mid-level, advancement requires being known for good work by people who make decisions. It requires relationships with decision-makers and understanding organizational dynamics and positioning strategically.

This gets labeled as politics and dismissed as beneath consideration but in reality it is your refusal to learn skills required for the claimed level.

The person who got promoted usually isn’t just better at networking, and probably isn’t a suck-up. They understand that decisions get made in conversations others aren’t part of. That influence and visibility matter and being good at the job is necessary but not sufficient.

They invested time building relationships and visibility that make them the obvious choice. Those who got passed over were working and delivering and wondering why that wasn’t enough.

What actually differentiates

When I ask people about their last desired promotion and what they did to position themselves beyond good work, most struggle to list much.

Regular strategic conversations with decision-makers, relationships with stakeholders who’d advocate, making impact visible beyond immediate teams, understanding political landscape, making ambitions clear, they most sound like rocket science.

Which means they didn’t actually compete for the promotion but hoped someone would notice they deserved it based on work quality alone.

The person who got the role did something different. Not in work output, in positioning and visibility and relationships and making ambitions known. They weren’t necessarily better at the job but at making sure the right people knew they could and wanted to do the job.

The pattern across companies

When someone leaves hoping the next company will be different, it usually isn’t. The problem travels because it’s not about the company, it’s about understanding how advancement works and whether the required work gets done.

This pattern repeats and each time feels like betrayal, each time there’s hope this company will recognize contribution that doesn’t happen.

But without changing strategic approach and doing relationship-building and visibility work, the pattern will follow. Similar to how someone early career who’s overly agreeable gets steamrolled, then moves companies and gets steamrolled again because the interpersonal operating system hasn’t evolved.

The fix isn’t finding perfect meritocracy but accepting what advancement requires and deciding whether to do it.

What tends to work

Schedule a conversation with a trusted manager or senior leader, not necessarily to ask for promotion but to understand what advancement looks like from their perspective. Ask what people who get promoted do differently. What visibility they have. What relationships they’ve built. What strategic work they’re involved in. How they communicate impact and ambitions.

Then listen without defending current approach or explaining execution focus. Just listen to how decisions actually get made and what advancing people do that others don’t.

The pattern in these conversations: hard work is assumed. Loyalty is appreciated but insufficient. People who advance build strategic relationships, communicate impact effectively, position thoughtfully, and make ambitions clear.

None of that requires abandoning principles but treating visibility and strategic positioning as part of the job instead of beneath consideration.

The choice is between continuing to work harder than those who get promoted while maintaining the narrative about ass-kissers, or accepting that required skills change at senior levels, doing the positioning and relationship-building work with integrity, and dropping the narrative that enables avoidance.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

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You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid

Fast forward some years after the next promotion didn’t come or the product failed. Or you got passed over. Normal career stuff.

Except it didn’t feel normal. It felt like a frecking disaster! Like a personal attack.

I’ve had people argue with me about this for three sessions straight. They want any explanation except the one that threatens the identity. “Maybe I need a better strategy.” “Maybe I’m in the wrong company.” “Maybe I need to pivot industries.” Anything but admitting they built who they are around moving fast, and now they’re not moving, and they don’t know who the fuck they are anymore.

What actually happened when you succeeded early

You worked your ass off. You sacrificed weekends, took on projects no one else wanted, stayed late fixing things that weren’t your job, learned faster than your peers, delivered when it mattered. You earned that success, you earned that success, you were genuinely capable and you proved it.

But here’s what happened alongside all that real capability: you started believing your capability was a ticket that guaranteed success in every possible circumstance. You went from “I’m capable and I work hard” to “I’m special and I will figure it out no matter what.”

That second belief is the problem. Confidence turned into grandiosity and you didn’t notice the shift.

Confidence vs grandiosity (and why the difference matters)

Confidence says: I’m capable, I’ve developed real skills, I can handle difficult challenges, I’ve proven I can deliver results when I have the right conditions and resources.

Grandiosity says: I’m special, circumstances don’t really apply to me, I transcend normal limits, if I just think hard enough or work hard enough I can overcome anything because I’m different from other people.

Confidence is grounded in reality. It acknowledges what you’re genuinely good at while recognizing that external conditions matter enormously. It says “I’m capable within circumstances” and adjusts when circumstances change.

Grandiosity is a narcissistic narrative that positions you as someone who overrides circumstances. It says “I’m capable regardless of circumstances” and interprets any failure to override those circumstances as proof you were never actually special.

When you succeed early through real capability, it’s incredibly easy to slip from confidence into grandiosity without realizing it. Because when things are working, both beliefs feel the same. Both make you feel powerful and driven and willing to take on challenges. The difference only becomes visible when things stop working.

Someone with confidence hits a wall and thinks: “These conditions are harder than the ones I succeeded in before. What needs to change about my approach or my situation?” Someone with grandiosity hits the same wall and thinks: “I should be able to figure this out. If I can’t, it means I was never actually special, and everything I believed about myself was a lie.”

See the difference? Confidence adjusts to reality. Grandiosity makes failure an identity crisis.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

What 2025-2026 is teaching high achievers

The economy right now is fundamentally different than when you were rising fast. AI is disrupting everything about how work gets done and who gets rewarded for what. Companies are restructuring constantly, budgets are frozen, roles that used to exist don’t exist anymore. Literally everyone I know in product and growth and leadership is suffering more or less.

But you don’t know that because you’re comparing yourself to what you think other high achievers are doing based on their LinkedIn posts. You don’t see that they’re also struggling, also anxious, also wondering if something is wrong with them. You just see the curated version and assume you’re the only one who can’t figure it out anymore.

I had a client, exceptionally talented product leader, who built her career on being the person who could turn around struggling products. She’d done it three times in a row, always came in and fixed what was broken, always delivered results within six months. She genuinely was that good.

Then she took a role in 2024 at a company that was struggling worse than she realized, in a market contracting faster than anyone predicted, with a product that had fundamental problems she couldn’t fix without resources the company didn’t have. She tried everything that had worked before, put in the same effort, applied the same strategic frameworks. Nothing moved.

She came to therapy convinced something was wrong with her specifically. Had she lost her edge? Was she burnt out? Did she not actually know what she was doing? She was torturing herself trying to figure out what had changed about her capabilities, when what had actually changed was everything external to her capabilities.

The company was underfunded in a market where funding had dried up. The product needed engineering resources that weren’t available. The customer segment was cutting budgets across the board. She was as capable as she’d always been, but capability doesn’t override reality when reality is fundamentally hostile to what you’re trying to do.

But she couldn’t see that because her identity was built on grandiosity, not confidence. The narrative said circumstances don’t matter for people like her, that she’s special enough to overcome anything. So when she couldn’t make it work, the only explanation her framework allowed was that she wasn’t actually special, that she’d been fooling herself all along.

Reality crisis or identity crisis?

You think you’re having an identity crisis because you built your identity on being someone who succeeds and now you’re not succeeding the way you used to. But what you’re actually having is a reality crisis. You’re running into the limits of the grandiose narrative that your capability overrides circumstances.

You were capable before and you’re capable now. What changed isn’t you, what changed is the environment you’re operating in. But your framework doesn’t allow for that interpretation because your framework says “I’m someone who figures it out regardless of conditions.” So when you can’t figure it out, you conclude you were never actually special, that it was all an illusion, that your previous success was just luck.

That’s the trap. You’re either special and invincible and able to overcome any circumstance, or you’re a fraud who never deserved the success you had. There’s no middle ground where you’re genuinely capable AND circumstances matter enormously AND sometimes capable people can’t overcome hostile conditions AND that doesn’t mean anything about whether you were ever actually good.

The high achiever in your network who just announced a new role? They applied to forty positions and got rejected from thirty-nine and they’re terrified they won’t be able to perform because the expectations are unrealistic. The founder posting about growth metrics? They’re burning through runway faster than planned and having panic attacks about the next funding round. The person who seems to have it figured out? They’re also in therapy, also anxious, also wondering if they’ve lost whatever made them successful.

Nobody posts the real version. Everyone is managing their personal brand. So you’re comparing your internal experience of struggle to everyone else’s carefully curated external presentation, and you’re concluding that you’re the problem when you’re actually just the only one being honest with yourself.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

What you actually need to do

Separate your capability from the grandiose narrative you built around it. You are capable, you did earn your success, you do have real skills and strategic thinking and ability to deliver results. That was true then and it’s true now.

What’s also true is that circumstances matter more than you wanted to believe. The market matters, the economy matters, the specific conditions of your company matter, the resources available to you matter, the timing matters. Being capable doesn’t override these things, it just gives you better odds in favorable conditions and helps you survive longer in unfavorable ones.

You’re not struggling because you lost your capability or because you were never actually good. This is the story the little voice tells you quietly but the truth is you’re struggling because you’re trying to operate in conditions that are fundamentally harder than the conditions you succeeded in before, and because you built an identity around grandiosity instead of confidence.

That’s hard to accept because it means giving up the narcissistic narrative that made you feel powerful and invincible. It means accepting that you’re subject to the same external forces as everyone else, that being good at what you do doesn’t make you immune to market conditions or economic realities or structural changes. It means being human instead of being exceptional.

Most people don’t feel relieved when they first accept this, they feel smaller and more vulnerable and less special. The relief comes later when you realize that not being invincible doesn’t mean you’re not capable. It just means you’re operating in reality instead of in a grandiose fantasy about your own exceptionalism. And reality is where you can actually make different choices instead of just beating yourself up for not being able to override circumstances through pure force of will.

You’re capable and you’re struggling and both of those things can be true at the same time. That’s not a personal failure, that’s what it looks like to be a capable person operating in difficult conditions. Stop making it mean something about whether you were ever actually good, and start dealing with the actual reality of what’s changed and what you need to do differently given those changes.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

Explore more articles

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The Elaborate Performance of “Trying to Change”

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You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid

You think you’ve done the hard work of understanding yourself. You’ve analyzed successfully. You know why you are the way you are.

Except you haven’t. You’ve seen fragments of the truth and convinced yourself it’s the complete picture. Your intelligence gave you confidence in an incomplete analysis, and now that incomplete analysis is exactly what’s keeping you stuck.

The pre-analyzed client

High performers frequently show up to therapy with the analysis already done. They’re not coming for help figuring things out. They’re coming because they think it’ll save time to just tell me what to think about them.

“I know I have avoidant attachment. I need help implementing strategies to be more present in relationships.” “I’ve identified that I’m a perfectionist and it’s causing burnout. What techniques can you give me to manage this?” “My issue is impostor syndrome. I’ve done the research. I just need accountability to change my thought patterns.”

They want me to be sort of a technician. They’ve diagnosed the problem, now they need someone to help execute the fix. Except their diagnosis is wrong or incomplete or missing the actual issue entirely.

I had a VP of Product come in who’d spent six months “working on” why she couldn’t delegate. Had the whole thing mapped out: controlling parents, early career experience where delegation led to failure, perfectionism about her work. Wanted specific tactics for letting go. Asked me which delegation framework I recommended.

Took four sessions to get to what was actually happening. Her issue wasn’t exactly about delegation but mostly about…meaning. The work she was delegating was the only work she found interesting. Everything else in her role was politics and strategy and sitting in rooms talking about roadmaps. The reason she couldn’t let go of execution wasn’t because she was controlling but because without it, her job became something she fundamentally didn’t want to do. Her analysis had focused on the mechanism, completely missed that she’d built a career toward a role she didn’t actually want. By the way this is the reason I always say ‘start with therapy before you move to coaching’.

Anyway, the delegation explanation was sophisticated, well-researched, fit with her self-image as someone who needed to work on her leadership skills. The truth was messier and required admitting she’d made career choices that got her somewhere she didn’t want to be.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

When intelligence becomes defense

Smart people think they’re being efficient by coming in pre-analyzed. What they’re actually doing is trying to maintain control. If they direct the conversation, if they frame the problem, if they set the terms of what we’re examining, they don’t have to face the vulnerability of not knowing. Don’t have to let someone else see something about them they haven’t already approved.

Another client, founder of a growing startup, came in because his co-founder had told him he needed to “work on his communication.” He’d already analyzed it. Knew he was direct to the point of bluntness, understood it came from his engineering background and his belief in radical transparency. Wanted communication coaching. Asked if I’d work with his leadership team to help them understand his style better.

Took three weeks to crack through the intellectual defense. His “directness” was rage, yes, rage. Rage that he’d built this company and now had to spend his time managing people instead of solving problems. Rage at his co-founder for growing the team when he’d been fine with ten people. Rage at himself for agreeing to scale when what he actually wanted was to stay small and technical. Every “direct” piece of feedback was him punishing people for existing in a company he no longer wanted to run.

The communication problem was real. But working on communication would have been like treating a fever without finding the infection. His analysis had given him something acceptable to fix. The actual issue would have required him to confront that he’d built something he didn’t want and didn’t know how to get out.

The partial truth

You’re not making things up when you analyze yourself. The patterns you identify are real and the explanations make sense. The problem is you’re seeing 30% of what’s happening and treating it like you’ve seen everything.

Take the standard story high performers tell themselves about burnout. You’re working too much, not setting boundaries, being a perfectionist, saying yes to everything. You understand why: achievement-oriented upbringing, fear of failure, need to prove yourself. You’ve analyzed this thoroughly.

Maybe what you call burnout is actually boredom. Maybe you’re working endless hours because the work doesn’t engage you anymore and staying busy prevents you from admitting you’ve outgrown your role. Maybe your “poor boundaries” are you unconsciously creating reasons to leave a job you don’t want to quit deliberately. Maybe you’re not afraid of failure, maybe you’re afraid of admitting you spent ten years building expertise in something you no longer care about.

Your analysis picked the explanation that let you stay who you think you are. The actual truth would require changing your story about yourself.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

Why smart people can’t see this

When you analyze yourself, you’re using your brain to examine your brain. That’s asking your bias to report on your bias. You can’t see around your own perspective, can’t identify blind spots because you’re looking from inside them.

But admitting you need outside perspective means admitting your analysis might be incomplete. Means someone else might see something you don’t. For analytical people, this threatens your entire identity. You’re used to being the smartest person in the room, used to figuring things out faster than others. The idea that someone else understands you better than you understand yourself is unbearable.

So lots of you are trying to control the process. Come in with the analysis done, tell the therapist what to focus on, explain why certain approaches won’t work for you, make sure the conversation stays in territory you’ve already mapped. You stay in therapy for years getting incrementally better at managing symptoms of a problem you’ve misidentified.

I had a senior marketing exec who understood her “anxiety” completely. Knew it was about control, about uncertainty, about her childhood where things were unpredictable. Had done CBT, had coping strategies, managed it well enough to function at a high level. Came to me wanting to optimize her anxiety management techniques.

Her “anxiety” wasn’t anxiety. It was her body correctly identifying that she was in a relationship that made her feel unsafe. Her partner was emotionally volatile, sometimes warm and sometimes withdrawn, and she’d spent three years trying to manage her “anxiety” about the relationship instead of admitting the relationship was the problem. The anxiety framework let her make it about her psychology, let her avoid seeing that her partner’s behavior was what was actually unpredictable and unsafe.

But examining her relationship would have required vulnerability or would have meant admitting she’d stayed in something unhealthy out of fear of being alone. Would have meant looking at why she chose someone emotionally unavailable in the first place. Easier to have an anxiety problem she could work on.

What this actually requires

Look at what you think you’ve figured out about yourself. Your main issues, your patterns, your psychological makeup. Now ask: what if the frame is wrong? Not wrong in details, wrong in how I’ve set up the entire question. What if the story I’m telling myself is protecting me from something I don’t want to see?

You probably won’t do this honestly. Your intelligence will defend your analysis immediately. Will explain why your understanding is correct, will point to evidence, will make the case that you really have seen clearly.

I am afraid that’s the problem. You’re smart enough to defend any position about yourself. Smart enough to make any explanation seem true. Smart enough to miss what you’re missing while feeling certain you’re seeing everything.

Some people will read this and realize they’ve been working on the wrong things for years. Some will get defensive and explain why their analysis really is complete. Some won’t know what to do with this even if it lands. All of those are fine. The point isn’t that you need to throw out your self-understanding. The point is recognizing that being smart doesn’t mean your analysis is right. Often means your analysis is sophisticated enough to sound right while being fundamentally wrong. You can keep analyzing. Just stop being so certain you’re seeing clearly.

- Aggelos

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

Explore more articles

OUTGROWN - Diagnostic workbook

High performance as a way to get accepted by your family

The loneliness and emotional pressure that founders experience

Why hard work alone doesn’t advance you

Who are you if you are not “crushing” it?

Self-analysis as a meta way to maintain control

Is It “Post-Holiday Anxiety” or Just Clarity?

The Elaborate Performance of “Trying to Change”

We’ve Turned ADHD Diagnosis Into a Trend

You’re Just Trading One Type of Friction for Another

Shared accountability, leading without authority and other funny corporate myths.

The High Cost of Endless Pondering

The Coaching Industry’s Credibility Problem (And Why It Should Matter to You)

You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid

And now you’re back but it feels like dragging a cat to take a shower. Your body is doing this thing where Sunday night feels like a low-grade panic attack. Your chest is tight. Your stomach is off and you’re irritable in a way that feels disproportionate to “just” going back to work. Some articles call it ‘Post-vacation blues’ and provide cool tactics on how to manage your re-entry.

But what if the problem isn’t that you’re bad at transitioning? What if your nervous system is correctly identifying a threat?

The Body Knows Before You Admit It

Your nervous system has one job: keep you alive. It’s constantly scanning your environment for signals of safety or danger. This happens below conscious awareness through something called neuroception, the process by which your autonomic nervous system evaluates risk without your thinking brain getting involved.

When you’re in a work environment that’s chronically stressful, politically toxic or fundamentally misaligned with what you need, your body notices. But daily routine is a powerful anesthetic. You adapt and develop coping mechanisms. You tell yourself stories about why it’s not that bad, why you should stay, why leaving would be irresponsible or dramatic.

This adaptation is necessary. You’re managing your threat response well enough to function, but you’re doing it by staying slightly numb.

Then you take time off. Real time, not a long weekend where you’re still half-plugged into email aaaand something shifts. Your nervous system, finally given permission to relax, drops the performance. The constant low-level cortisol that you’d normalized as just “how work feels” starts to clear. Your body remembers what baseline actually feels like.

And then you have to go back. Your nervous system, now recalibrated to what safety actually feels like, registers the old environment accurately. It’s not saying “this is uncomfortable because change is hard.” It’s saying “this is a threat because this place harms you.”

The dread you’re feeling is clarity, only amplified by a 100.

The Pressure to Feel Rested Is Making It Worse

There’s this toxic script around holidays that says if you did it right, you should come back refreshed and energized and ready to crush Q1. If you’re not bouncing back with renewed enthusiasm, you must have failed at resting properly.

This framework is garbage. It assumes the problem is your recovery strategy when the actual problem might be what you’re being asked to recover from.

If you spent two weeks on a beach and you’re still dreading Monday, that’s not a personal failing but…data. No amount of sleep or boundary-setting or mindfulness practice can compensate for returning to an environment that chronically activates your stress response.

That’s a common pattern in my practice. Someone comes back from leave feeling worse, not better, because the contrast is so stark. They spent years thinking they just needed to manage their stress better, develop more resilience, find better coping strategies. Then they get distance and realize the volume of coping they were doing just to stay functional.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

What Distance Actually Shows You

Time away from work doesn’t just provide only rest but also perspective. And perspective is dangerous when you’ve been invested in not seeing clearly.

When you’re in the daily grind, you’re focused on execution. You’re managing tasks, navigating politics, putting out fires. You don’t have bandwidth to step back and ask whether this is actually where you want to be or whether you’re just here because you’ve been here and changing feels too hard.

Distance changes that. Suddenly you’re not managing the immediate demands. You’re just existing. And in that space, thoughts you’ve been avoiding have room to surface. Thoughts like “I don’t actually want to do this anymore” or “I’ve been telling myself this will get better but it hasn’t” or “I’m staying out of fear, not genuine commitment.”

These are realizations that your daily routine normally keeps suppressed. Your brain, when not occupied with survival mode at work, starts asking bigger questions about whether survival mode should be the baseline.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You can try. You can lean harder into productivity systems or convince yourself that everyone feels this way or rationalize that the benefits are too good to leave. But the knowing is there now. Your body felt what it’s like to not be in threat mode constantly, and it’s refusing to collude with the story that going back is fine.

The Inbox Won’t Fix This

Most advice about returning to work after holidays focuses on tactics. Batch your emails. Don’t schedule meetings your first day back. Make a prioritized to-do list. Ease back into your routine gradually.

This advice isn’t wrong but it’s just addressing the wrong problem. If your issue is that you have 500 unread emails and need a system for triaging them, great. If your issue is that you fundamentally don’t want to be doing this work anymore but you’re afraid to admit it, no inbox strategy is going to help.

I’ve watched people spend enormous energy optimizing their return-to-work routines while completely avoiding the question of whether they should be returning to this work at all. The optimization becomes another form of avoidance. If you’re busy perfecting your re-entry strategy, you don’t have to face the possibility that re-entry is the wrong move.

From a psychology standpoint, this is a version of problem-focused coping being applied to a situation that actually requires meaning-focused coping. You’re trying to make the situation more manageable when what you really need to do is question whether you should be managing this situation at all.

The tactics might buy you some breathing room. They might make the first week back slightly less brutal. But they won’t address why your body is screaming at you not to go back.

Listen, Then Lead

So listen to your nervous system. Actually listen, not just acknowledge it exists while you override it with willpower and coffee. Treat it like a separate entity that’s trying to communicate something important. Write down what it’s telling you, exactly as if you were transcribing someone else’s concerns.

“My body tenses up every Sunday evening.” “I feel nauseous thinking about Monday morning.” “I’m irritable with my family because I’m dreading work.” Don’t edit it. Don’t rationalize it. Just document what’s actually happening.

Then own it. This is real information about your experience, not a character flaw or a phase you need to get over. Study it. What patterns emerge? When did this start? What specific aspects of work trigger the strongest responses? What would need to change for your nervous system to register this environment as safe?

Once you’ve listened and understood, you get to decide what to do with that information. Some people will leave their jobs in 2026. Some will pivot internally or renegotiate their role. Some will stay because they’ve weighed the alternatives and this is genuinely the best option available right now.

All of those choices are legitimate. The point isn’t that everyone needs to quit. The point is that you stop suffering unconsciously. You stop pretending the dread is irrational or that you should be able to white-knuckle your way through indefinitely. You take your nervous system by the hand, acknowledge what it’s telling you, and then consciously lead it where you’ve decided to go. That might be toward the exit, or it might be toward staying with clear eyes about what you’re choosing and why. Either way, you’re making a decision instead of just enduring.

Happy new year :)

Aggelos

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

Explore more articles

OUTGROWN - Diagnostic workbook

High performance as a way to get accepted by your family

The loneliness and emotional pressure that founders experience

Why hard work alone doesn’t advance you

Who are you if you are not “crushing” it?

Self-analysis as a meta way to maintain control

Is It “Post-Holiday Anxiety” or Just Clarity?

The Elaborate Performance of “Trying to Change”

We’ve Turned ADHD Diagnosis Into a Trend

You’re Just Trading One Type of Friction for Another

Shared accountability, leading without authority and other funny corporate myths.

The High Cost of Endless Pondering

The Coaching Industry’s Credibility Problem (And Why It Should Matter to You)

You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid

I’m not talking about simple procrastination. I’m not talking about someone who knows they’re avoiding something and feels guilty about it. I’m talking about sophisticated psychological architecture, the kind where someone constructs an entire narrative about why change is impossible while simultaneously paying someone to help them change.

It’s remarkable, honestly. The human capacity for self-deception is genuinely impressive when you see it up close.

They’ll sit in my office and tell me all the reasons why they “can’t” do the thing. Why they’re “too anxious” or “too busy” or “too broken” or “not ready yet.” They’ll describe their limitations with absolute certainty, using language that closes down possibility before we even explore it.

And the whole time, they’re sitting there. In a room with a specialist. Who they’re paying. To help them with the exact thing they’re saying is impossible.

The contradiction doesn’t register. Or maybe it does, unconsciously, and that’s precisely the point.

How Therapy Becomes the Avoidance

Here’s what I’ve learned after some years of doing this work: showing up to therapy or coaching can itself be a form of avoidance. A highly sophisticated, socially acceptable, expensive form of avoidance.

You get to tell yourself and others that you’re working on your problems. You’re taking action. You’re investing in yourself. Look at you, being so responsible and self-aware.

But if you’re not actually doing anything between sessions, if you’re not taking the small uncomfortable steps that would create real change, then what you’re really doing is outsourcing your accountability to someone else while maintaining the appearance of progress.

This is brilliant, in a fucked up way. You get all the social credit for “working on yourself” without having to face any of the actual discomfort that change requires. You get to feel like you’re trying without actually trying.

And when it doesn’t work, when nothing changes despite months or years of sessions, you have a ready-made explanation: “Not even a specialist could fix me.” Or the softer version: “I need someone more specialized, someone who really understands my specific situation.”

The narrative stays intact. You’re not someone who’s avoiding change. You’re someone who’s too complex to be helped, or who hasn’t found the right helper yet. See the difference? One makes you responsible. The other makes you special.

The Language of Masked Avoidance

The language people use to describe their situation tells you everything if you know how to listen.

“I can’t” is the big one. “I can’t focus.” “I can’t leave my job.” “I can’t set boundaries.” “I can’t start until I feel ready.”

Can’t is absolute language. It closes the door on possibility before we’ve even looked at what might be possible. It frames the situation as something happening to you rather than something you’re participating in creating.

But when you dig into the “can’t,” what you usually find is “I don’t want to deal with the consequences.” Which is a completely different thing.

You can leave your job. You just don’t want to deal with the financial uncertainty. You can set boundaries. You just don’t want to deal with people being upset with you. You can focus. You just don’t want to give up the things that are fragmenting your attention.

These are choices. Reasonable choices, sometimes. But they’re choices, not impossibilities.

The language of identity is the other big reveal. “I’m just not a morning person.” “I’m too anxious to do that.” “I’m not good with confrontation.” “I’m the kind of person who...”

When you define yourself by your limitations, when you make them part of your identity, you’ve built a psychological prison where the bars are made of words. Now you can’t change without changing who you are, which feels impossible, so you don’t change.

And then there’s the masked actionability: “I’m here, therefore I’m doing something about it.”

This is the most sophisticated version. You’re in therapy. You’re reading books. You’re listening to podcasts. You’re thinking about the problem constantly. All of this feels like action because it requires time and energy and sometimes money.

But none of it is actually action. It’s preparation for action. It’s thinking about action. It’s consuming content about action. The actual action, the thing that would create change, remains perpetually in the future, waiting for some condition that never quite arrives.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

The Small Things They Don’t Do

When I work with someone, I pay attention to the small, concrete things they could do to move from A to B. Not the big transformative leaps. The small steps that are entirely within their control.

“Between now and next week, talk to one person about this opportunity.”

“Set one boundary this week, even a small one.”

“Spend 30 minutes working on that thing you say you want to start.”

These aren’t big asks. They’re deliberately small, deliberately concrete, deliberately within the person’s control. No one needs to cooperate with you for you to do these things. No circumstances need to align. You just need to choose to do them.

And consistently, the people who are using therapy as sophisticated avoidance don’t do them.

Next session, they’ll have elaborate explanations. The week got away from them. Something came up. They were going to do it but then X happened. They thought about doing it, does that count?

Or sometimes they’ll pivot to a different problem entirely, one that feels more urgent and therefore justifies why they couldn’t address the original thing. The avoidance mechanism is fractal. It reproduces itself at every level.

When I point this out, when I reflect back what’s actually happening, the response tells me everything about whether we’re going to make progress.

Some people get it immediately. The mirror shocks them. They realize they’ve been performing the appearance of trying while actively avoiding the actual trying. This realization, however uncomfortable, is the beginning of real work.

Others get defensive or dismissive. They stop coming. They’ve figured out that I’m not going to participate in the narrative they’re constructing, that I’m not going to be the authority figure who confirms they’re unfixable or the enabler who lets them pretend showing up is enough.

And honestly? I rarely demonstrate patience with this pattern anymore. Not because I’m unkind, but because patience with avoidance is just enabling avoidance with better manners. If someone’s paying me to help them change and they’re actively working against that change while pretending they’re not, the kindest thing I can do is name it clearly.

The Unconscious Goals

Here’s what’s really happening underneath all this: people have unconscious goals that contradict their stated goals.

Consciously, they want to change. They want to be less anxious, more confident, more successful, whatever it is they came to work on.

Unconsciously, they want to prove something else entirely. Usually some version of: “I’m beyond help” or “I’m special and complex” or “Change is impossible for someone like me” or “I tried everything and nothing works.”

These unconscious goals serve protective functions. If you’re beyond help, you don’t have to face the discomfort of actually changing. If you’re special and complex, you get to maintain a certain identity and narrative about yourself. If change is impossible, you don’t have to take responsibility for your current situation.

The therapy or coaching becomes part of proving the unconscious goal. You’re not there to change. You’re there to demonstrate, with evidence, that change isn’t possible. The specialist couldn’t fix you. The methods didn’t work. You tried so hard and it still didn’t happen.

Now you have a story. A good one. One that explains your situation while preserving your self-image as someone who’s trying, who wants better, who’s doing their best.

The problem is this story costs you your life. It costs you years of staying stuck while performing the appearance of working on it. It costs you the actual changes you claim to want. It costs you the truth about your own agency.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

Everything Is a Decision

Let me be clear about something that might be uncomfortable: everything is a decision, including inertia.

You’re not stuck. You’re choosing to stay where you are. You’re choosing it actively, every day, sometimes multiple times a day.

When you say “I can’t leave this job,” what you mean is “I’m choosing to stay in this job because leaving feels more threatening than staying.” That’s a decision. Maybe a reasonable one given your circumstances, but still a decision.

When you say “I can’t set boundaries,” what you mean is “I’m choosing not to set boundaries because other people being upset with me feels more threatening than continuing to overextend myself.” Again, a decision.

When you say “I can’t start until I’m ready,” what you mean is “I’m choosing to wait indefinitely because starting before I feel ready feels more threatening than never starting at all.” Still a decision.

Inertia is a decision. Procrastination is a decision. Avoidance is a decision. You’re choosing comfort over discomfort. You’re choosing the known over the unknown. You’re choosing the pain you’re familiar with over the pain you’d have to face to change.

These aren’t bad choices necessarily. Sometimes staying is the right call. Sometimes the timing genuinely isn’t right. Sometimes the cost of change really does outweigh the benefit.

But they’re still choices. And when you pretend they’re not choices, when you use language like “I can’t” or “I have no choice” or “I’m stuck,” you’re lying to yourself about your own agency. You’re making yourself smaller and less powerful than you actually are.

The Absolute Language Problem

Pay attention to absolute language in how you talk about yourself and your situation. Absolutes are almost always lies.

“I can’t do this” is an absolute. The truth is usually “I could do this but it would be uncomfortable/scary/uncertain.”

“I’m not a person who...” is an absolute. The truth is usually “I haven’t been a person who does this up until now, and I’m choosing not to become one.”

“I always...” or “I never...” are absolutes. The truth is usually “I usually” or “I rarely” or “I have a pattern of.”

The language matters because it shapes what feels possible. When you use absolute language, you close down options. You make change feel impossible before you’ve even explored whether it might be possible.

Here’s a better frame: “I could make 10% progress on this.”

Not 100%. Not perfect execution. Just 10%. One small step. One conversation. One boundary. One hour of work on the thing you say you want to do.

If you can’t identify what 10% progress would look like, or if you refuse to commit to even that, then you’re not serious about changing. You’re serious about appearing to try to change while making sure you don’t actually have to change.

And look, I get it. Change is terrifying. The unknown is scary. What you have now, even if it’s painful, is at least familiar. The devil you know feels safer than the devil you don’t.

But you don’t get to pretend you’re trapped when you’re actually choosing. You don’t get to use “I can’t” when what you mean is “I won’t because I’m scared.” You don’t get to outsource your agency to a therapist or a coach or the universe and then be surprised when nothing changes.

What Happens When You Confront This

When I reflect this pattern back to clients, when I make visible what they’re doing, a few things happen.

Some people stop coming. They realize quickly that I’m not going to play the role they’ve cast me in. I’m not going to be the authority figure who confirms their unfixability. I’m not going to let them use our sessions as evidence that they tried and it didn’t work. They leave, usually with some story about how I “wasn’t the right fit” or “didn’t understand their situation.”

Fine. Better they figure that out early than waste months going through the motions.

Some people get angry. The confrontation feels like an attack. They think I’m saying they’re lazy or that their struggles aren’t real or that they should just magically be able to do things that feel impossible.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying their struggles are real and their fear is real and their pain is real, but they’re also making choices that keep them stuck while pretending they have no choice. Both things are true simultaneously.

The anger usually means we’re getting close to something real. The defense mechanism is activating because the underlying vulnerability is being touched. If we can work through the anger, there’s usually something valuable underneath.

But some people, when confronted with this mirror, have a realization that changes everything. They see the pattern. They see how they’ve been constructing elaborate mechanisms to avoid the very thing they claim to want. They see their own agency in situations where they’ve been telling themselves they were powerless.

This realization is uncomfortable as fuck. It’s destabilizing. It means accepting responsibility for where you are, which is harder than blaming circumstances or biology or other people or bad luck.

But it’s also the only place real change becomes possible.

Because if you’re powerless, if you truly can’t do anything, then we’re done. There’s nothing to work on. You’re stuck forever and that’s just how it is.

But if you’re choosing this, even unconsciously, even for protective reasons, then you can choose differently. Not easily. Not without discomfort. But you can.

The Work You’re Actually Avoiding

The elaborate avoidance mechanisms exist for a reason. They’re protecting you from something that feels threatening.

Usually, it’s one of a few things:

The threat of failure. If you actually try and it doesn’t work, you’ll have to face that you’re not capable of what you thought you could do. Better not to really try, so you can always tell yourself you would have succeeded if you’d actually given it your full effort.

The threat of success. If you actually change, you’ll have to let go of your current identity, your current relationships, your current life. Success means becoming someone different, and what if you don’t like who that person is? What if other people don’t like who that person is?

The threat of responsibility. If you admit you have agency, you have to take responsibility for your choices. You can’t blame your circumstances anymore. You can’t be the victim of your situation. You’re the author of your life, which means the state of your life is largely your responsibility.

The threat of discomfort. Change requires feeling things you’d rather not feel. Anxiety. Uncertainty. Embarrassment. Vulnerability. The avoidance mechanisms protect you from having to feel these things, at least in the short term.

The work you’re avoiding isn’t just the practical steps toward change. It’s the emotional experience of changing. It’s facing these threats directly instead of building elaborate systems to avoid them.

And here’s the fucked up part: the avoidance itself creates the very outcomes you’re afraid of. You avoid trying because you’re afraid of failure, but the avoidance guarantees failure. You avoid changing because you’re afraid of who you might become, but staying stuck creates a different kind of person, one who’s diminished by years of not living fully. You avoid taking responsibility because it feels too heavy, but the lack of responsibility makes you helpless, which is heavier in its own way.

The mechanisms you’ve built to protect yourself are the main thing hurting you now. That’s the realization that changes everything.

What This Means for You

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself, here’s what you need to know:

First, this isn’t about being a bad person or being lazy or being weak. This is about being human. Avoidance is a normal protective mechanism. The sophistication of your avoidance just means you’re smart and creative. You’ve built something complex to solve a problem, even if that solution is now creating bigger problems.

Second, no therapist or coach can fix you if you’re actively working against the fixing while pretending you’re not. We can provide tools and insights and frameworks and support, but we can’t want change more than you do. We can’t do your work for you. We can’t make you take the uncomfortable steps you’re avoiding.

If you’re in therapy or coaching right now and nothing’s changing, ask yourself honestly: am I using this as sophisticated avoidance? Am I showing up so I can tell myself I’m working on it while making sure I never have to actually change?

Third, start paying attention to your language. Every time you say “I can’t,” pause and ask: is this true? Or do I mean “I don’t want to because it would be uncomfortable”?

Every time you use identity language like “I’m just not the kind of person who...,” ask: is this an immutable fact about me, or is this a story I’m telling to avoid having to change?

Every time you feel like you’re stuck, ask: what am I choosing here? What would 10% progress look like? What’s one small thing I could do that’s entirely within my control?

Fourth, get honest about your unconscious goals. What would it mean if you actually changed? What would you have to give up? What would you have to face? What story about yourself would you have to let go of?

Sometimes the unconscious goal is more important to you than the stated goal. That’s okay. But you should know that’s what’s happening rather than pretending you’re trying to change when you’re actually trying to prove change is impossible.

Finally, make a decision. Not a half-decision where you sort of try while keeping all your escape routes open. An actual decision.

Either decide you’re going to change, which means accepting the discomfort and uncertainty and doing the small concrete things even when they feel impossible.

Or decide you’re not going to change right now, which means accepting your current situation without the story that you’re stuck or powerless or that it’s anyone’s fault.

Both are legitimate choices. But the worst place to be is the middle ground where you’re pretending you want to change while actively ensuring you don’t. That’s where you waste years of your life.

The Truth About Agency

Here’s what I believe after the years of doing this work: you have more agency than you think you do, and less than you wish you did.

You’re not powerless. You’re not stuck. You’re not unfixable. You’re making choices, consciously and unconsciously, that create your current reality. That’s agency.

But you also can’t just decide to be different and have it be so. You can’t think your way out of patterns built over decades. You can’t overcome trauma or conditioning or circumstance through willpower alone. That’s the limit of agency.

The work is in the middle. Recognizing where you do have choice and power, even when it’s uncomfortable to admit it. Using that choice and power to take small steps. Building evidence that change is possible by actually changing in small ways. Not waiting until you feel ready but starting before you’re ready and discovering you can handle more than you thought.

And stopping the performance. Stopping the elaborate avoidance mechanisms. Stopping the outsourcing of accountability. Stopping the use of therapy or coaching as a way to prove you’re beyond help.

If you’re going to pay someone to help you, actually let them help you. Do the small things they suggest. Take the uncomfortable steps. Stop explaining why you can’t and start exploring what 10% progress would look like.

Or don’t. Save your money. Stop performing the appearance of trying to change. Accept where you are without the story that you’re working on it.

Either way, you get your agency back. You’re choosing consciously instead of unconsciously. You’re being honest with yourself about what you’re actually doing and why.

That honesty, however uncomfortable, is worth more than any elaborate mechanism you could build to avoid it.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

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You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid

But let’s also be honest about what’s happening right now. We’ve turned psychiatric diagnosis into a trend. Especially ADHD. And that trend is creating real harm alongside whatever good it’s doing.

It’s almost impossible to scroll LinkedIn without seeing someone announce they have ADHD, usually with a hashtag and a personal story about finally understanding themselves. I don’t doubt their pain. I don’t question that they’re struggling. But I deeply doubt the system that profits from labeling that struggle as a medical disorder requiring lifelong medication management.

Because here’s what’s actually happening underneath the awareness campaigns and the destigmatization efforts: more diagnoses equal more prescriptions, which equal more consultations, which equal more money flowing through a system that has financial incentives to see pathology rather than normal human variation.

And the numbers are impossible to ignore.

The Surge That Should Make Us Pause

In 2022, 11.4% of U.S. children, about 7 million kids, had been diagnosed with ADHD. That’s up 1 million since 2016. We’re talking about a 14% increase in six years for a condition that’s supposedly genetic and stable in the population.

Prescriptions for stimulants in England have risen 18% every year since the pandemic. Not 18% total. 18% per year. That’s exponential growth in medication use for a condition that hasn’t fundamentally changed.

Adults are catching up fast. Telehealth clinics have made “getting diagnosed” easier than ordering a pizza. You fill out a questionnaire online, have a 20-minute video call with someone who may or may not be qualified to make this assessment, and walk away with a prescription. Some of these services advertise diagnosis and treatment in a single session.

Something changed. And it wasn’t the underlying neurobiology of the human population.

What changed was the medicalization of normal human struggles, the lowering of diagnostic thresholds, the financialization of mental health care, and social media’s amplification of self-diagnosis culture. These forces combined to create an environment where having ADHD became almost fashionable, where every focus issue became potential evidence of a disorder, where medication became a socially acceptable productivity hack.

Why the Diagnostic Bar Dropped

The criteria for ADHD haven’t technically changed. But the way those criteria get applied has shifted dramatically.

“Trouble focusing” now gets medicalized before anyone rules out stress, trauma, sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, understimulation, or plain boredom. These are all legitimate causes of attention problems. They’re also all solvable without psychiatric diagnosis or medication.

A 2021 global review of ADHD research concluded that the condition is “convincingly overdiagnosed and overtreated” in many developed countries. The researchers found that diagnostic rates varied wildly between regions and providers, suggesting the diagnosis has more to do with who’s doing the assessing than what’s actually happening in the person’s brain.

I’ve spent 18 years as a licensed therapist. I’ve done thousands of assessments. I can tell you from direct experience that proper differential diagnosis for ADHD is complex and time-consuming. You need to rule out anxiety disorders, trauma responses, mood disorders, learning disabilities, sleep disorders, substance use, medical conditions, and environmental factors. You need to gather developmental history. You need collateral information from multiple sources. You need to observe patterns over time, not just in a single consultation.

Most of the ADHD diagnoses happening now don’t involve that level of rigor. They involve someone saying they struggle to focus, a clinician running through a symptom checklist, and a prescription getting written. This isn’t good medicine. It’s assembly-line diagnosis designed to maximize throughput.

And here’s what makes this particularly problematic: ADHD symptoms overlap with almost everything else. Depression causes poor concentration. Anxiety causes restlessness and difficulty completing tasks. Trauma causes hypervigilance that looks like hyperactivity. Chronic stress causes executive function problems. Boredom in an unstimulating job causes inattention.

If you assess for ADHD without carefully ruling out these other causes, you’re going to see ADHD everywhere. Which is exactly what’s happening.

The Social Media Self-Diagnosis Machine

Social media has turbocharged this trend in ways that are both understandable and deeply concerning.

Endless symptom lists. “Do you relate?” reels. Personal stories that make struggles feel universal. Content creators building entire brands around ADHD identity. It’s created a culture where people encounter lists of symptoms, recognize themselves in those symptoms, and conclude they have ADHD.

This is how human pattern recognition works. If you show someone a list of vague symptoms like “trouble focusing,” “forgetfulness,” “difficulty with time management,” “emotional dysregulation,” most people will see themselves. These aren’t specific to ADHD. They’re common human experiences, especially in our current environment of information overload, chronic stress, and unrealistic productivity demands.

There’s something deeply soothing about having a name for what hurts. About finding a community of people who share your struggles. About having an explanation that makes sense of why life feels harder for you than it seems to be for others.

But attributing every struggle to a disorder isn’t healing. It’s often the opposite.

When you label yourself as disordered, you shift your locus of control outward. The problem isn’t your circumstances or your choices or your environment. The problem is your brain, which is broken, which means you need medical intervention to function. This framework can be incredibly disempowering even as it feels explanatory.

And the social media version of this usually skips right past the part where you get a thorough professional assessment. You self-diagnose based on TikTok videos, then you find a telehealth service that will confirm your self-diagnosis, then you’re on medication within weeks. No one asked about your sleep. No one assessed for trauma. No one considered whether your inability to focus might be your body’s reasonable response to an unreasonable situation.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

The Diagnosis Economy

ADHD has become an industry. That’s not hyperbole, that’s just accurate description of what’s happened.

There are telehealth clinics built entirely around ADHD diagnosis and treatment. Their business model depends on high volume, which means quick assessments and immediate prescriptions. The incentive structure pushes toward more diagnoses, not fewer.

Pharmaceutical companies make billions from stimulant medications. Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin, Concerta, the market for these drugs has exploded. These companies fund awareness campaigns, sponsor research, and market directly to consumers in the U.S. They have every financial reason to expand the definition of who “needs” their products.

Content creators have built entire platforms around ADHD identity. Some of this content is genuinely helpful, providing community and practical strategies. But some of it functions as advertising for diagnosis, creating a pipeline from “I saw this video” to “I got diagnosed” to “I’m on medication” in a matter of weeks.

The loop feeds itself: awareness campaigns increase diagnoses, which increase prescriptions, which create more content about living with ADHD, which increases awareness, which increases diagnoses. At every step, someone is making money.

I’m not suggesting there’s some conspiracy here. I’m saying the incentives are aligned in a way that produces overdiagnosis regardless of anyone’s intentions. When everyone in the system benefits from more diagnoses, you get more diagnoses. This is just basic economics applied to healthcare.

And the people who lose in this system are the ones who get labeled with a disorder they might not have, started on medication they might not need, and told their brain is broken when the real problem might be their job, their relationship, their trauma, or their entirely reasonable response to an unreasonable world.

What Medication Actually Does

Stimulant medications help many people with ADHD. I’m not denying that or dismissing it. For people who actually have ADHD, medication can be transformative. It can mean the difference between constant struggle and functional success.

But these aren’t vitamins. They’re powerful drugs with significant effects and potential risks.

Stimulants alter heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns, appetite, and mood. Short-term side effects can include anxiety, insomnia, decreased appetite, irritability, and emotional blunting. Long-term data shows cardiovascular risks increase with years of use. There are concerns about growth suppression in children. There are questions about dependency and tolerance.

Before prescribing any psychiatric medication, a responsible clinician must weigh whether the side effects and risks are more or less harmful than living with the symptoms. This is basic medical ethics. You only intervene pharmacologically when the benefit clearly outweighs the harm.

But that calculation requires actually knowing whether the symptoms are from ADHD or from something else. If your attention problems are caused by untreated trauma, giving you Adderall isn’t treating the root cause. It’s masking symptoms while the underlying problem continues. That’s not good medicine.

And we’ve somehow normalized using stimulants as productivity hacks. Fake prescriptions flood the market. College students use them to study. Professionals use them to work longer hours. The line between treatment and enhancement has blurred to the point where it’s barely visible.

This should concern us. Not because medication is inherently bad, but because we’re using powerful drugs to solve problems that might not be medical problems at all. We’re medicating away the symptoms of environments and lifestyles that are making people sick instead of changing those environments and lifestyles.

When It’s Not Actually ADHD

If I were a kid in 2025, I’d probably be labeled ADHD. I was restless, struggled with traditional schooling, had trouble sitting still, was emotionally intense, got bored easily. Every single symptom on the checklist.

But I wasn’t ADHD. I was dealing with a complex family situation, some developmental trauma, and a temperament that didn’t fit well with conventional expectations. The symptoms were real. The cause wasn’t a neurological disorder.

I learned to manage my attention through understanding what drove the symptoms. Through addressing the underlying causes. Through developing strategies that worked with my nervous system rather than trying to chemically override it. Through changing my environment to better fit who I am rather than trying to change who I am to fit the environment.

This is what gets lost in the current diagnostic frenzy. Attention-deficit traits aren’t automatically a disorder. Just like being sad doesn’t always mean depression. Just like being anxious doesn’t always mean an anxiety disorder.

Sometimes poor focus is trauma. Your nervous system is in hypervigilance mode, constantly scanning for threats, which makes sustained attention on neutral tasks nearly impossible. That’s not ADHD. That’s a trauma response. And the treatment is trauma work, not stimulants.

Sometimes poor focus is environmental. You’re in a job that bores you to tears, or you’re in constant meetings that could have been emails, or you’re dealing with an organization that rewards appearing busy over doing meaningful work. Your attention problems are your brain’s reasonable protest against an unreasonable situation. That’s not ADHD. That’s a mismatch between you and your environment.

Sometimes poor focus is a circadian rhythm disorder. You’re a night owl trying to function on a 9-to-5 schedule. Your brain isn’t disordered, it’s just forced to perform at times when it’s not optimized for performance. That’s not ADHD. That’s chronobiology.

Sometimes poor focus is temperament. You’re naturally inclined toward breadth rather than depth, toward variety rather than sustained attention, toward movement rather than stillness. In a different cultural context or a different type of work, this wouldn’t be pathological. It would just be how you’re built. That’s not ADHD. That’s human variation.

A proper assessment distinguishes between these possibilities. It doesn’t just check off symptoms and assign a diagnosis. It asks deeper questions about causation, about context, about what else might be happening.

Most current ADHD diagnoses don’t involve that level of inquiry. Which means a lot of people are getting diagnosed and medicated for something they don’t actually have.

The Cost of Medicalization

By labeling everything as a medical condition, we strip away what makes us unique. We pathologize normal variation. We turn struggles into symptoms and symptoms into disorders.

This matters more than it might seem. When you’re told you have a disorder, it changes how you understand yourself. You’re no longer someone who struggles with focus sometimes. You’re someone with ADHD. That label becomes part of your identity. It shapes how you interpret your experiences and what you believe is possible for you.

For some people, this is genuinely helpful. The label explains things that were confusing. It provides a framework for understanding and a path toward support.

But for others, it’s limiting. It suggests their struggles are permanent and neurological rather than contextual and changeable. It implies they need medical intervention to function rather than environmental changes or skill development. It medicalizes what might be normal responses to abnormal circumstances.

Being human in 2025 is genuinely hard. We’re dealing with information overload, constant connectivity, unrealistic productivity demands, social isolation, economic precarity, political chaos, and environmental crisis. Most people are stressed, overwhelmed, and struggling to focus. That’s not pathology. That’s a reasonable response to challenging conditions.

When we take those reasonable responses and label them as disorders, when we prescribe medication to help people adapt to unsustainable circumstances, we’re treating the symptoms while ignoring the causes. We’re making it easier for individuals to cope with broken systems rather than fixing the systems.

This is politically useful for those who benefit from the status quo. If your workers can’t focus, give them Adderall rather than examining whether your workplace culture is burning people out. If your students can’t sit still, medicate them rather than questioning whether your educational model is developmentally appropriate. If your citizens are anxious and inattentive, diagnose them rather than addressing the systemic issues creating widespread distress.

I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to medicate the population into compliance. I’m saying the incentives push in that direction regardless of anyone’s intentions. It’s easier and more profitable to diagnose and medicate individuals than to change oppressive systems.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

What to Do Before Medication

I’m not saying you don’t have ADHD. For many people, the diagnosis is accurate and the medication is genuinely helpful. I’ve seen lives transformed by proper treatment. I’ve seen people finally able to function in ways they couldn’t before.

But I am saying that before you accept a diagnosis and start medication, you owe it to yourself to be thorough.

Get a comprehensive assessment from someone who has no financial incentive to diagnose you. Not a 20-minute telehealth consultation. Not a single appointment where someone runs through a checklist. An actual assessment that includes developmental history, trauma screening, sleep evaluation, medical workup, and differential diagnosis.

Rule out other causes. Address your sleep. Deal with your stress. Process your trauma if you have it. Change your environment if it’s not working for you. Try behavioral interventions and organizational strategies. Give these things real time and effort, not just a week of trying and giving up.

Get second and third opinions. ADHD is complex enough that reasonable clinicians can disagree. If one person diagnoses you quickly and easily, see someone else who might be more thorough. If three different qualified clinicians all reach the same conclusion, that’s more reliable than a single assessment.

Research medication thoroughly if you decide to try it. Understand what it does, what the side effects are, what the long-term data shows. Understand that starting medication is easier than stopping it. Some people find that once they’ve been on stimulants for a while, their brain has adapted in ways that make coming off difficult.

Consider the alternatives seriously. There are many ways to manage attention and executive function challenges that don’t involve medication. Coaching, therapy, environmental modifications, schedule optimization, exercise, meditation, dietary changes. These take more effort than taking a pill, but they build capacity rather than masking symptoms.

If you do try medication, monitor it carefully. Pay attention to side effects. Notice whether it’s actually helping with the things that matter or just making you feel more productive while you grind yourself down. Be honest about whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

And most importantly, don’t let the diagnosis become your entire identity. You’re a person with strengths and struggles, not a collection of symptoms. The label might be useful, but it’s not who you are.

The Balance We Need

This isn’t an anti-medication argument. Psychiatric medication saves lives. I’ve seen it. I’ve had clients who couldn’t function without their medication and who transformed when they found the right treatment.

This is an anti-overdiagnosis argument. It’s a plea for more careful assessment, more thoughtful treatment, and more skepticism about the systems profiting from turning normal human struggles into medical conditions.

We can acknowledge that ADHD is real and that some people genuinely need medication while also acknowledging that the current diagnostic trends are concerning. We can support making mental health care more accessible while also questioning whether what we’re providing is actually good mental health care.

We can remove stigma around seeking help while also maintaining appropriate skepticism about quick diagnoses and easy prescriptions. We can create space for neurodivergent identities while also recognizing that not every form of struggle represents a disorder requiring medical treatment.

The current trajectory isn’t sustainable. We’re creating a generation that believes they’re fundamentally broken and need pharmaceutical intervention to function. That’s not destigmatization. That’s a different kind of harm dressed up as progress.

Real mental health awareness would include awareness of overdiagnosis. Real destigmatization would make it just as acceptable to say “I don’t actually have a disorder, I was just in a bad situation” as it is to say “I have ADHD and I’m on medication.”

Real care would prioritize thorough assessment over quick diagnosis. Real treatment would exhaust non-pharmaceutical options before prescribing powerful drugs. Real support would address the systemic issues making people sick rather than just helping them cope with sickness.

We’re not there yet. But we could be if enough people started asking harder questions about what’s really happening behind the awareness campaigns and the destigmatization efforts and the flood of diagnoses.

Before you accept that label and start that medication, just pause. Think. Research. Get multiple opinions. Try other approaches. Be honest about whether this is actually the answer or just the easiest answer in a system designed to provide easy answers to complex problems.

You might genuinely have ADHD. You might genuinely need medication. But you also might not. And knowing the difference matters more than you think.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

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You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid

They talk about making the switch like it’s going to solve everything. Like the problem is where they are, not the nature of the work itself.

Then they switch sides. And six months later, they discover it’s just a new flavor of pain.

The corporate person who joined a startup learns that speed comes with constant fire drills and founders who change direction based on a podcast they heard. The startup person who joined an enterprise learns that resources come with seventeen stakeholders who need to weigh in before anything ships.

Both groups thought they were moving toward the solution. What they were actually doing was trading one set of problems for a different set of problems. Same amount of friction, just applied in different places.

The Startup Dream (And Its Reality)

If you’re in a big company right now, you probably have some version of this fantasy. A small, nimble team. Direct access to the founders. The ability to ship something and see it in customers’ hands within days, not quarters. No bureaucracy. No slide decks for slide decks’ sake. Just building and moving fast.

And parts of that fantasy are real. Startups do move faster in certain ways. You can have an idea in the morning and test it by afternoon. You don’t need to run everything through five layers of approval. If something isn’t working, you can kill it and try something else without writing a strategy doc about the strategic rationale for the pivot.

But here’s what you don’t see from the outside: in a startup, the enemy is chaos.

You’re hired as the magician who will deliver hockey-stick growth by Christmas. Never mind that the product isn’t quite ready, the market positioning isn’t clear, and half the foundational growth infrastructure doesn’t exist. You’re here to make it happen anyway.

Your biggest enemy is expectations that go beyond logic combined with founders’ mood swings. On Monday, the strategy is enterprise. By Wednesday, it’s SMB. On Friday, the founder read something about product-led growth and now that’s the new direction. You’re expected to deliver results while the foundation keeps shifting underneath you.

There are no processes because processes feel slow and bureaucratic. So you reinvent everything. Every project requires figuring out from scratch how it should work because no one’s done it before and there’s no template to follow.

The “resources” you thought would exist are theoretical. Sure, there’s some VC money in the bank. But you’re competing for engineering time with three other high-priority initiatives and the founders’ latest idea. You’re expected to drive growth but you can’t get a basic analytics implementation prioritized.

The “freedom” you imagined turns into being responsible for everything because there’s no one else to do it. You’re not just doing growth strategy. You’re also doing customer support, sales enablement, product marketing, and whatever else needs doing because the team is ten people and everyone wears seventeen hats.

And the speed? It cuts both ways. Things ship fast, but they also break fast. The pressure is relentless. There’s always a fundraising deadline or a customer deadline or a board meeting deadline that requires you to show momentum right now, not next quarter.

The Corporate Dream (And Its Reality)

If you’re at a startup right now, you probably have your own version of the fantasy. Actual budgets. Real teams. The ability to focus on your domain instead of doing everything yourself. Established processes so you’re not reinventing the wheel constantly. Strategy that doesn’t change every week. Adults in the room who’ve done this before.

And again, parts of that are real. Big companies do have resources. You can get a designer assigned to your project. You can run actual research studies. You can build things properly instead of duct-taping them together at 2am before a demo.

But in a large company, the enemy is inertia.

You have resources on paper, but accessing them requires navigating a matrix organization where everyone reports to someone else and has their own priorities. You spend more time building alignment than building product.

That stability you wanted? It comes with risk aversion. Every decision needs to be vetted. Every initiative needs a business case. Every change needs impact analysis across seven different systems and approval from stakeholders who don’t understand what you’re trying to do but have the power to slow you down.

You get stuck optimizing slide decks instead of doing actual work that matters. I’ve watched talented product people spend three weeks perfecting a strategy presentation that gets 30 minutes of exec review time, then another two weeks incorporating feedback, then another week socializing the updated version. A month of their life went into a PowerPoint that maybe influenced a resource allocation decision. Maybe.

The “adults in the room” you hoped for often turn out to be people who’ve learned how to survive in a political environment, not necessarily people who know how to build great products. Some are genuinely excellent. Others are excellent at appearing competent while avoiding accountability.

That focus you wanted? It gets fragmented across competing priorities. You’re responsible for this quarter’s numbers and next year’s strategy and the exec’s pet project and the compliance initiative that legal is requiring. Each one is supposedly high priority. None of them get the attention they need to actually work.

What “Alignment” Really Means in Each World

Both groups call their problems “alignment issues.” They’re using the same word to describe completely different dysfunctions.

In a startup, alignment problems mean the founders can’t decide on a direction. They mean the sales team is selling something the product team hasn’t built yet. They mean everyone has a different understanding of who the customer is because no one’s written it down and it keeps changing anyway.

Startup alignment is a chaos problem. There’s not enough structure to create shared understanding. Not enough process to ensure decisions stick. Not enough clarity about who makes which calls.

In a big company, alignment problems mean seventeen stakeholders have seventeen different opinions about priorities. They mean three different teams are building overlapping solutions because no one knows what the others are doing. They mean you need six meetings to decide something that should take one conversation.

Corporate alignment is an inertia problem. There’s too much structure, too many people who need to weigh in, too many dependencies that slow everything down. The clarity exists, but it’s codified in processes that make movement difficult.

Same word. Opposite problems.

Why We Keep Falling for This

There’s a psychological pattern underneath this career switching that’s worth naming. It’s called the fundamental attribution error in psychology, though I think of it as the “grass is greener” trap applied to work.

When you’re experiencing pain in your current environment, you attribute that pain to the environment itself. The problem is that you’re at a startup, or that you’re at a big company. If you could just change the environment, the pain would go away.

But when you observe other people in different environments who seem happy or successful, you attribute that to their personal qualities or to inherent advantages of that environment. They’re thriving because startups are energizing, or because corporate gives them the resources to do real work.

You’re underweighting how much your current pain is just inherent to doing difficult work in complex organizations with imperfect humans. And you’re overweighting how much the other environment will solve your problems.

I see this constantly in coaching. Someone at a 10,000-person company is miserable because they can’t get anything done without navigating bureaucracy. They think the problem is the bureaucracy. They join a 50-person startup and discover the problem is that there’s no structure to navigate, so everything is on fire constantly.

The pain didn’t go away. It just changed shape.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

The Real Differences (And What They Mean)

I’m not saying startups and large companies are the same. They’re not. The differences are real and they matter. But the differences aren’t about one being better than the other. They’re about different trade-offs that fit different people at different times.

Startups give you broad impact and exposure to everything. You’ll learn fast because you have to. You’ll be closer to decisions. You’ll see the direct results of your work. But you’ll also deal with constant uncertainty, resource constraints, and the reality that most startups fail.

Large companies give you resources and the ability to work on things at scale. You can go deep on your domain. You can build things properly. You can learn from people who’ve done this at scale before. But you’ll also deal with politics, slow decision-making, and the frustration of watching good ideas die in committee.

Neither is objectively better. They’re different games with different rules.

The mistake is thinking that the game you’re not playing is the one where you’d finally be happy. That over there, on the other side, that’s where the work would finally feel sustainable and the problems would finally be solvable.

What This Means for Your Career Decisions

If you’re thinking about making a switch from startup to corporate or corporate to startup, you need to be honest with yourself about what you’re actually trying to solve.

Are you running from something or running toward something? Because if you’re just running from pain, you’re going to find pain wherever you land. It’ll just be different pain.

Are you leaving because you genuinely don’t fit the environment, or because you’re having a hard quarter and the other side looks easier from here? Timing matters. Making career decisions when you’re burnt out or frustrated leads to different choices than making them when you’re clear-headed.

What specifically about the other environment do you think will be better? Get concrete. Don’t just say “I want more speed” or “I want more resources.” Describe what you’ll actually be able to do differently and whether that matters enough to justify the trade-offs.

And most importantly, what are you bringing to the new environment? Your skills at navigating corporate bureaucracy don’t automatically transfer to navigating startup chaos. Your ability to ship fast in a startup doesn’t mean you’ll know how to influence without authority in a large organization.

Both environments require specific skills. Switching environments often means you’re temporarily less effective while you learn a new game. Are you ready for that?

The Honest Conversation About Friction

Every environment has friction. The product doesn’t ship as fast as you want. The strategy keeps changing or won’t change when it should. You have too many resources or not enough. People move too slow or change direction too fast.

This friction is a feature, not a bug. It’s what happens when imperfect humans try to build complex things together under resource constraints and time pressure. The friction is the work.

At a startup, you’re fighting chaos to create enough structure that things can scale. At a large company, you’re fighting inertia to create enough flexibility that things can evolve. Both are legitimate work. Both are exhausting. Both require skills and patience and political capital.

The question isn’t which environment has less friction. Neither does. The question is which type of friction you’re better equipped to handle right now, or which type you’re willing to learn to handle.

Some people are naturals at creating structure from chaos. They thrive in environments where nothing is defined and they get to build it. Other people are naturals at navigating complexity and politics. They know how to work the system and get things done even when the system is working against them.

Most people can learn either skill set if they’re motivated. But you’ll be more effective and less miserable if you’re working with your natural strengths rather than constantly fighting against them.

The Pattern You Actually Need to Break

The pattern I see isn’t just about switching from startup to corporate or vice versa. It’s about thinking that changing your external circumstances will solve internal struggles.

You’re unhappy with the pace, so you change companies. You’re frustrated with politics, so you change environments. You’re burnt out from chaos, so you seek stability.

But if you haven’t figured out what you actually need to be sustainable in your work, if you haven’t developed the skills to navigate the inevitable friction, if you haven’t learned to set boundaries or pick your battles, you’re just going to recreate the same problems in a new context.

The grass isn’t greener on the other side. The grass is greener where you water it. And sometimes that means staying where you are and learning to work within the constraints instead of assuming the constraints are the problem.

Sometimes the move is absolutely right. Sometimes you genuinely don’t fit where you are and a different environment will let you thrive. I’ve seen people make these switches successfully and it changes their whole career trajectory.

But successful switches come from understanding what you’re moving toward, not just what you’re moving away from. They come from realistic expectations about the trade-offs. They come from knowing yourself well enough to know which types of friction you can handle and which types will break you.

The people who thrive after switching are the ones who go in with open eyes. They know startups will be chaotic and they’re ready for it. They know big companies will be political and they’re prepared to navigate it. They’re not surprised when the new environment has its own set of problems. They just find those problems more interesting or more solvable than the ones they left behind.

That’s very different from switching because you think it’ll finally be easy over there. It won’t be. It’ll just be hard in a different way.

You’re just trading one type of friction for another. The question is whether you’re ready for the trade.

→ If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for.
→ If you’re curious how this would look applied to your situation, schedule a chemistry call.

Explore more articles

OUTGROWN - Diagnostic workbook

High performance as a way to get accepted by your family

The loneliness and emotional pressure that founders experience

Why hard work alone doesn’t advance you

Who are you if you are not “crushing” it?

Self-analysis as a meta way to maintain control

Is It “Post-Holiday Anxiety” or Just Clarity?

The Elaborate Performance of “Trying to Change”

We’ve Turned ADHD Diagnosis Into a Trend

You’re Just Trading One Type of Friction for Another

Shared accountability, leading without authority and other funny corporate myths.

The High Cost of Endless Pondering

The Coaching Industry’s Credibility Problem (And Why It Should Matter to You)

You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid

There’s truth in it. Good work requires collaboration. No one succeeds alone in complex organizations building complex products.

But watch what happens when things go wrong. Suddenly it’s not “we” anymore. It’s you.

The product didn’t hit targets? That’s on the PM who was “accountable” for growth. The launch didn’t go well? That’s on the marketing lead who was supposed to “influence” the product team. The customer experience is fragmented? That’s on the person with “customer experience” in their title, even though seven different teams touch the customer journey and none of them report to that person.

The shared accountability was very real when celebrating. Became remarkably individual when allocating blame.

The influence myth

“You don’t need direct authority, you just need to influence the right stakeholders.” “Great leaders lead through influence, not positional power.” “This is a chance to develop your influencing skills.”

Influence matters. Being able to build relationships, make compelling cases, bring people along, these are real skills.

But influence is not a substitute for authority. It’s a complement to it.

Influence works when people want to be influenced. When their incentives align with yours. When they respect your expertise and trust your judgment. When helping you helps them.

Influence fails when none of those conditions exist. When the engineering team has their own roadmap and your project isn’t on it. When the sales team has their own targets and your initiative doesn’t move them closer. When the executive who controls the budget thinks your area isn’t strategic.

You can be the most influential person in the world, and if the structural incentives don’t support what you’re trying to do, you’re going to fail. Or exhaust yourself trying not to fail.

Power isn’t about fancy titles. It’s about who controls resources, who makes decisions, who can say no and make it stick. When you give someone accountability without power, you’re setting them up to either fail or burn enormous political capital trying to succeed. That capital runs out.

What real ownership actually looks like

A 70% good plan with a clear owner beats a “collaborative” one any day.

I’ve seen strategies that everyone contributed to, socialized across fifteen stakeholders, with buy-in from all the right people. But if no one actually owns execution, if decisions still require consensus, if resources still need negotiating case-by-case, that strategy gets diluted and delayed until it’s unrecognizable.

Meanwhile, rougher strategies with clear ownership deliver real outcomes because someone can make decisions and move resources without building consensus every time.

Real ownership includes decision rights. Can you actually decide, or do you need to “align” with eight other people before anything moves? If every decision requires a committee, you don’t own anything.

Real ownership includes resource control. Can you allocate people, budget, or engineering capacity? Or do you need to negotiate for those things from people who have different priorities? If you’re constantly begging for resources, you don’t own the outcome.

Real ownership includes priority setting. Can you say no to things that don’t serve the goal? Or do you have to accommodate everyone’s requests because you don’t have authority to push back? If you can’t protect focus, you don’t own the strategy.

Real ownership includes consequence authority. When things aren’t working, can you change course? When people aren’t delivering, can you address it? Or do you need to escalate to someone else who has actual authority? If you can’t course correct, you don’t own the execution.

Most “accountability” in organizations doesn’t include any of these things. It’s accountability for outcomes without authority over inputs. Setting someone up to fail and then blaming them for the failure.

The gaslighting frame

What makes this insidious is how it’s framed as developmental. “This is a chance to develop your leadership skills without formal authority.” “If you can make this work, imagine what you could do with actual authority.”

This puts the burden on the individual. Suggests that if they’re struggling, it’s because they’re not good enough yet at influencing or leading or building relationships.

Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes people do need better influencing skills.

Most of the time, the problem isn’t the person. It’s the structure.

Put even the most skilled influencer in a situation where incentives don’t support what they’re trying to do, where power dynamics work against them, where organizational structure creates competing priorities, they’re going to struggle too.

I’ve worked with talented growth and product leaders who were “accountable” for driving revenue or activation or retention. Didn’t control the product roadmap, the engineering capacity, the sales process, the pricing. But accountable for the outcome.

When the numbers didn’t move, they were told they needed to be more strategic, more influential, better at stakeholder management. Not that the organization had set them up in an impossible position. Not that the structure was broken. Just that they personally needed to be better.

That’s taking a systemic problem and making it feel like an individual deficiency.

Why this keeps happening

Shared accountability protects leadership from making hard decisions.

Giving someone real ownership means making choices. Deciding this initiative is more important than that one. Giving someone authority that comes from somewhere, which means taking it from somewhere else. Potentially creating conflict between teams or functions.

Shared accountability avoids all of that. Everyone gets involved. No one gets told their thing is less important. No one gives up control. We all “collaborate” and “figure it out together.”

Feels safer and more harmonious. Until it doesn’t work, at which point leadership can point to the person who was nominally accountable and suggest they should have influenced more effectively.

Organizational risk avoidance masquerading as empowerment and teamwork.

The cost is enormous. Projects move slowly or not at all. Talented people burn out trying to make broken structures work. The organization loses credibility with those people, who leave and tell everyone this place is dysfunctional. Meanwhile, the structural problems never get fixed because we keep treating them as individual performance issues.

If you’re stuck in this

If you’re in one of these “accountable without authority” situations right now, you have options. None of them are perfect, but they’re better than pretending the structure will fix itself.

Get explicit about what you actually control. Have a direct conversation with your manager about decision rights, resource control, consequence authority. Not confrontational, just clarifying. “I want to make sure I understand what I can and can’t do here.” Get it documented if possible.

This conversation does one of two things. Either you find out you have more authority than you thought and you can actually use it. Or you confirm you don’t have the authority to succeed, which gives you information to work with.

Raise structural issues early, not late. If you’re seeing that you need X to deliver Y and you don’t have access to X, say so now. Not as complaining, as risk flagging. “I’m seeing this gap. How should we handle it?”

Most people wait too long because they’re trying to prove they can handle it. Waiting means the problem compounds and you’ve already burned credibility on something that won’t work.

Protect your narrative. Document what you control and what you don’t. Make constraints visible. When you update on progress, include what’s blocking things and who owns unblocking them. Not victim mentality, just transparency.

This matters when accountability conversations happen later. You’ve already made clear where the structural problems are.

Decide if it’s worth it. Sometimes these situations are temporary or the upside justifies the frustration. Sometimes they’re not. You get to choose what you’re willing to tolerate and for how long. But choose actively instead of drifting.

Staying in a structurally broken situation for years while it erodes your confidence and reputation is the worst outcome. Some people make it work. Some leave. Some renegotiate. All of those are legitimate. The point is deciding consciously what you’re doing and why, not just enduring and hoping it gets better.

The reality

If everyone’s responsible, no one’s responsible. If everyone owns it, no one owns it. If we’re all driving together, the bus stays in park.

Collaboration is essential. Good work requires input from multiple people, diverse perspectives, genuine collaboration. But collaboration needs a frame. Needs someone who can synthesize input, make decisions, allocate resources, and own outcomes. Without that, you just have people talking about what should happen while nothing actually happens.

Next time you hear “we’ll figure it out together,” ask who’s actually going to make the decisions. Who controls the resources. Who can say no. Who owns success and who owns failure.

If the answer isn’t clear, neither is the path forward.

The most ridiculous setup I’ve seen? An initiative requiring collaboration from six teams, each with different roadmaps and different executives. The “owner” was a senior PM with no direct reports and no budget, expected to “influence” teams to reprioritize their work to support the initiative. They were reviewed on whether the initiative hit its goals. None of the six team leads were reviewed on whether they supported it.

It failed. The PM was told they needed to work on their influencing skills.

That person left six months later. The org chart stayed exactly the same, ready to burn out whoever came next.

Explore more articles

OUTGROWN - Diagnostic workbook

High performance as a way to get accepted by your family

The loneliness and emotional pressure that founders experience

Why hard work alone doesn’t advance you

Who are you if you are not “crushing” it?

Self-analysis as a meta way to maintain control

Is It “Post-Holiday Anxiety” or Just Clarity?

The Elaborate Performance of “Trying to Change”

We’ve Turned ADHD Diagnosis Into a Trend

You’re Just Trading One Type of Friction for Another

Shared accountability, leading without authority and other funny corporate myths.

The High Cost of Endless Pondering

The Coaching Industry’s Credibility Problem (And Why It Should Matter to You)

You’re Creating the Exact Problem You’re Trying to Avoid