I Almost Deleted This Newsletter.
Then I Had a Better Idea.
Three weeks ago I was ready to kill this thing.
Just archive it and move on. It wasn’t working the way I wanted and the easiest solution my brain produced was to eliminate it.
Which is funny, because that’s almost word for word what burned-out executives tell me before they quit a job that actually matters to them.
Anyway.
I didn’t delete it. But I did sit with the question of why I was considering it, and that turned out to be more useful than anything I’ve published here in months.
The honest answer is that this newsletter has been too careful.
I write about performance dependence, shame-driven achievement, burnout, identity collapse in high performers. Real things. Painful things. And I write about them the way a clinician writes a case study: accurate, structured, appropriately distanced from anything that could embarrass me.
The most-read thing I ever posted here was about my own confusion around my positioning. My own doubts. My own “I have no idea what I’m doing” moment written out in public. That post did more in a week than a carefully constructed article did in three months.
I noted that and kept writing the careful articles.
There is a specific fear behind this, and I know exactly what it is because I help other people identify it for a living.
It’s the fear that if people see you figuring things out in real time, they stop trusting you as the person who has things figured out. Classic authority protection. Classic performance dependence. I am, without any apparent irony, doing the exact thing I built this practice to address.
I built Undisguised to help people stop performing and start showing up. And I have been performing on my own newsletter for most of its existence.
So here is what changes.
This newsletter becomes the place where I think out loud. My own burnout in the past. My own transition out of 18 years in tech and consulting. The fears that come with building something from scratch in your late thirties when you have a mortgage and a partner and a reasonably strong preference for not being broke. The clients who made me rethink something I was sure about. The moments I gave bad advice. The reading that shifted something. The things that are obvious in theory and embarrassingly hard in practice.
Some of it will be uncomfortable to write. Some of it will probably be uncomfortable to read. That’s the point.
Now, the unsubscribe part.
If you signed up for structured frameworks and professionally distanced analysis of high-performer psychology, this is your exit. No hard feelings, genuinely. Hit unsubscribe. The content is changing and pretending otherwise would be yet another form of the same performance.
If you’re still here after that sentence, good. You’re the person I should have been writing for from the beginning.
Three articles are forming in my head as I write this. That’s usually a sign I’m finally going in the right direction.
See you next week.