How to Keep Obstacles From Taking You Down

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the discomfort that shows up when you’re on the verge of something – and how the instinct is almost always to push it down rather than feel it through. This is what that looks like in one very specific, very common situation: getting hit by an obstacle you didn’t see coming.

Do you ever find yourself tripping over obstacle after obstacle? Your day is going fine, you’re in a meeting, and something out of nowhere catches you off guard and spins you up. Later you think, “Why didn’t I see that coming?” or “Why did I say that?” Or maybe it’s someone who triggers you without meaning to. Whatever the obstacle is, it usually takes you down precisely because you didn’t see it coming.

I thought about this recently on a run, when I glanced at a tree branch sticking out of the ground – the same one I tripped over more than a year ago. It was a bad injury. Months of physical therapy before I could run again. And I couldn’t help but think what a metaphor that was for the obstacles that show up in our everyday lives, and how we actually recover from them.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: our natural reaction to hitting an obstacle – especially one we keep hitting over and over – is to slip into judgment. Judgment is when you tell yourself a story about what happened, and the story ends there. We blame the obstacle, or someone else, or ourselves. And once judgment sets in, the way we see the whole situation narrows. It’s tunnel vision. Judgment is like the period at the end of a sentence: this is what happened, period, end of story.

That’s actually the problem. Judgment keeps us from seeing the very things that could help us avoid the same obstacle next time – because by definition, the obstacles that catch us off guard are the things we didn’t see. The last thing we want is a response that keeps us from seeing more clearly going forward.

So if judgment isn’t the useful response, what is?

The opposite. Instead of narrowing our view, we want something that widens it – that helps us notice what we missed the first time. That’s curiosity. If judgment is a period, curiosity is the question mark at the end of the same sentence. Curiosity asks: What more is there than what I’m currently seeing? What can I learn from this? What does this have to teach me?

The quality of the question you ask determines the quality of the answer you get. “Why does this always happen to me?” rarely leads anywhere productive. A more genuine question – one asked with real curiosity – tends to open up something real.

Curiosity and the awareness it brings, together, create insight. And insight is where the real answer lives. Here’s the part that surprised me: getting curious doesn’t just open your mind. It opens your heart, too. And the heart is where creativity lives, where clarity comes from, where you find answers that go beyond what the mind alone can work out.

Why this matters for leadership

Everyone hits obstacles every day. If you, as a leader, get in the practice of choosing curiosity over judgment, you model that for everyone around you. And the more you practice asking yourself powerful questions, the more naturally you’ll ask them of other people too. When someone comes to you with a problem, judgment doesn’t lead anywhere useful – but curiosity does. You can help them ask the same kind of retrospective questions: What did I trip over? What does this have to teach me? What could I do differently next time?

Why we miss the obstacle in the first place

Often, we’re simply preoccupied – by our thoughts, or by emotions we haven’t processed. That’s exactly what happened to me on that run. I was upset about something else entirely, and rather than actually feeling that emotion, I was letting it run me instead. I wasn’t present enough to see the branch.

This isn’t unique to me, or to running. It happens to my friends, my family, the executives I coach – all of us, regularly. That’s part of why I recorded a guided audio to help people get back into a place of power, perspective, and curiosity when emotions are running the show instead of being felt and processed. If that’s useful to you, you can download it free at VergePractice.com.

In any case, I’m glad you’re here. Next time an obstacle catches you off guard, see if you can hold off on the period – and reach for the question mark instead.

The Sign You’re on the Verge of Something

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the cost of trying to look bulletproof. What happens next is what this post is about: what happens once you stop protecting the image and actually let yourself feel what’s been building underneath?

If things have been feeling like they’re coming to a head lately – if there’s an emotion sitting just under the surface that you’ve been managing rather than facing – I don’t think that’s a warning sign. I think it might be the opposite. You may be on the verge of the kind of transformation that can take your leadership to an entirely new level. But only if you stop pushing it down long enough to actually feel it.

I hear a version of this constantly from the executives I coach, and I’ve felt it myself. Many of them come to coaching wanting to improve performance, often because they want to inspire more engagement in the people they lead. But what they’ll admit, quietly, is that they’re not really feeling engaged themselves. What used to work for them doesn’t anymore. They’re hitting wall after wall, feeling stuck, beaten down, exhausted.

And still, they keep pushing through – sucking it up in the name of forward momentum, shutting their hearts down along the way. Frustration, disappointment, discouragement – all of it gets stuffed down, right alongside whatever else is weighing on them personally.

Here’s the part that surprised me most when I first noticed it in myself: the pain of stuffing an emotion down is usually greater than the pain of just feeling it in the first place. And it’s not only the hard feelings that get buried. Joy gets buried too. Connection. Creativity. The ability to see past an obstacle instead of just staring at it.

Worse, shutting your heart down at work doesn’t stay at work. It doesn’t toggle back on the moment you walk in your front door. You end up moving through your whole life – home included – only partially present, with the most vital part of you stuffed down and denied.

That’s no way to live. And it’s no way to lead, either.

When you show up but you’re not really there, you can’t offer the best of what you have. And when you’re not bringing yourself, you can’t inspire anyone else to bring themselves either. Real leadership doesn’t start by changing your environment. It starts by giving yourself back what you’ve been denying.

A simple practice

This doesn’t require an overhaul of your life. It starts with something much smaller: spending a little time in stillness, and letting whatever wants to come up, come up. Not to relive it. Not to dwell in it. Just to notice it, sit with it, and let it move.

Because here’s what I’ve found: when you actually feel an emotion instead of resisting it, it changes shape. Anger, fully felt, often reveals itself as passion – the same energy, redirected into something constructive instead of destructive. Sadness can turn into compassion. Frustration can become the very energy that helps you push past the obstacle in front of you. Loneliness, felt all the way through, often turns into a genuine desire for connection.

None of this takes an enormous amount of time. It takes a willingness to slow down long enough to be with yourself the way you’d be with someone you love. 

If you’d like some help getting started

I know this can feel unfamiliar if you’re not used to sitting with your own emotions – I remember what that was like when I first started. So, I recorded a short, guided audio to walk you through the process. You’re welcome to use it as often as you’d like, until you’ve found your own way of doing this.

You can download it here:  VergePractice.com

If something in you has been feeling like it’s about to come to a head, don’t rush to shut it back down. That discomfort might be the clearest sign you’re on the verge of something – not a warning, but an invitation. The only way through it is to actually feel it.

Give that part of you a little time and attention, and you’ll find it has more to offer than you expected. Once you do that for yourself, you model the way for everyone around you to do the same. Real leadership inspires real leadership. And it all starts from the inside out.

The Bulletproof Trap

 

A few weeks ago, I made the case that heart beats mind when it comes to leadership that actually lasts. But knowing heart matters and knowing how to lead with it are two different things. So, what does it actually look like in practice?

It starts with giving up something most leaders have been trained to protect: the appearance of having it all together.

I can’t count how many leaders I’ve worked with over the years who believe that to be credible, they have to seem infallible — rock solid, always with the answer. Newer leaders often stay quiet in meetings because they’re afraid that asking a question will expose how much they don’t yet know. Meanwhile, the very questions they’re not asking, born of real curiosity, are often exactly what the room needs to see a problem with fresh eyes.

On the other end, I meet leaders who have it together on the surface — poised, polished, seemingly unshakeable. And they’re often mystified about why they can’t get their people to bring their best. When I go looking for why, the answer is usually the same: the polish itself is the problem. It’s hard to connect with someone whose “together” persona doesn’t feel like a real person is behind it. And you cannot engage people’s hearts and minds — which was the whole argument last time — without first letting them connect to yours.

Here’s the thing about needing to look bulletproof: almost nobody actually is. Fear, insecurity, not knowing enough — these are about as universal as it gets. And paradoxically, the things we’ve been taught to hide are often what connect us to each other most.

Think about the people who’ve genuinely inspired you — a mentor, a parent, someone in your field you admire. Chances are what moved you wasn’t their achievement. It was what they had to move through to get there: failure, doubt, a setback that could have ended things.

Letting a little more of that be visible does two things.

First, it takes the pressure off you. When you stop needing to look like you have all the answers, you get to actually be present with people — curious about their thinking instead of guarded about your own image.

Second, it gives other people permission. When they see that your steadiness isn’t the absence of fear, but something built in spite of it, it tells them they can find that same strength in themselves — and use it for something bigger than just getting through the day.

This is what it means to bring heart back online: not toughening up, but letting yourself be seen. The leaders who create the kind of engagement I wrote about last time aren’t the ones with the most polished exterior. They’re the ones willing to be known.

If this resonates, the Real Leader Revolution Manifesto goes further into what it takes to lead from that place instead of from behind a persona. You can download it free at RealLeaderRevolution.com.

What I’ve Come to See About the Leaders Running on Empty

 

A while back, I wrote about what it takes to become real — the question at the center of The Pinocchio Principle. The distance between how capable a leader appears and how alive they actually feel.

Since then, I’ve been sitting with that question in a slightly different way.

Because in the intervening years, I’ve watched the pattern deepen. The leaders I coach are more accomplished than ever. And more depleted than ever. They’ve read the books. Been through the workshops. Listened to the podcasts. They know what good leadership looks like. And yet they arrive at coaching sessions with the same quiet exhaustion I have been watching for three decades.

Something is running them. And it is not the workload.

I made a video about what that something is — what I’ve come to see beneath the surface of the leaders I work with, and beneath the surface of my own life during the years I was living out the same pattern.

The video is about sixteen minutes long, and it lays out the whole picture: the invisible modus operandi that runs us underneath our conscious awareness, the false beliefs most of us would never consciously choose but are living by anyway, the five movements that make change actually possible, and — most importantly — the picture of what becomes available when you stop running on the wrong fuel and start running on the right one.

I’ve also put all of it down in a manifesto. It’s called The Real Leader Revolution, and it’s meant to be read slowly. You can download it free at RealLeaderRevolution.com.

Why I’m writing this now

I share the video and the manifesto because they feel like the fullest expression yet of the work I’ve been building for thirty years. The Pinocchio Principle named the question. This new work is my current answer.

Not because I have finished figuring it out — I haven’t. But because I’ve watched enough leaders make this shift that I know it is possible. And I know the map exists.

If you have felt yourself running on empty, and no amount of rest is quite fixing it — this is for you.

If you have wondered why what used to work isn’t working anymore, and no framework or strategy seems to reach whatever the actual problem is — this is for you.

If you have started to suspect that the more you’re looking for is buried beneath the very habits and beliefs that got you here — this is for you.

Watch the video. Read the manifesto. Sit with it.

And if any of it lands, I’d love to hear from you.

Diane

P.S. If you’re new here and want to receive more of this kind of writing, subscribe to my email list — I send thoughtful pieces on leadership, mindset, and the inner work of the outer life, roughly once or twice a month.

What I Wish I’d Known Before Writing a Book Called “The Pinocchio Principle”

 

When I tell people I wrote a leadership book called The Pinocchio Principle, they usually assume it’s about honesty.

It’s not.

Or rather — it’s about a different kind of honesty. Not the honesty of telling the truth to others, but the far more difficult honesty of telling the truth to yourself. About who you are. What you want. Where you’ve been performing a version of leadership that looks good from the outside but feels hollow from the inside.

Pinocchio, in the original story, starts out as a puppet — animated but not alive. Capable of movement but controlled by strings he can’t see. And the journey of the story, at its heart, is about what it takes to become real.

That metaphor has never left me. Because I’ve lived it.

How the book began

I didn’t set out to write about Pinocchio. I set out to solve a problem I kept encountering in my work: the gap between how capable leaders appeared and how alive they actually felt.

I had been working in organizational effectiveness and leadership development for over a decade. I’d worked with executives at Fortune 100 companies, facilitated culture change initiatives, designed and taught leadership programs. I had seen every kind of smart, accomplished, well-intentioned leader you can imagine.

And so many of them were exhausted in a way that went deeper than workload. They had achieved what they had worked for — the title, the influence, the results — and found that it didn’t feel the way they thought it would. Something vital was missing.

I recognized that feeling. Because somewhere along the way, I had started living it too.

I was running a consulting practice, raising three kids, trying to do everything well — and I had slowly become a very efficient version of myself who wasn’t sure she was living her own life anymore. I was effective. I was competent. I was, by most external measures, successful.

But I wasn’t what I would call real.

What I discovered

What I came to understand — through my own journey and through the privilege of accompanying hundreds of leaders through theirs — is that the most transformative shift available to any leader isn’t a new strategy or a better system.

It’s a return to themselves.

Not a romanticized, everything-is-easy version of themselves. But the grounded, wise, genuinely engaged version that exists beneath the accumulated weight of expectation, performance, and fear.

I call that version the Genius. And I wrote The Pinocchio Principle as a roadmap for finding it.

The book came out in 2011. In the years since, I have had leaders tell me that reading it gave them permission to want something different. That it named something they had been experiencing but couldn’t articulate. That it started a conversation with themselves they hadn’t known how to begin.

Those conversations are why I do this work. They are, in a very real sense, the whole point.

Why I’m still here

I share all of this not to tell you about a book, but to tell you about a conviction.

I believe the indomitable strength of the human spirit is essential to the future of business — and that it is, right now, largely underutilized. I believe there is a version of leadership that is both more effective and more sustainable than the one most of us were taught. And I believe it begins with the same question Pinocchio was trying to answer:

What does it take to become real?

That question is as alive for me now as it was when I wrote the book. It’s what animates every coaching conversation, every program I design, every piece I write here.

If it’s alive for you too — welcome. You’re in exactly the right place.

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You can find The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader on Amazon here.

And if you’re ready to go deeper, The Real Leader Academy is where that journey continues.

 

 

 

Start Before You’re Ready: 3 Insights for Stepping Into What Excites and Terrifies You

 

Can you think of the last time you did something that terrified and excited you at the same time?

If you’re like me, you can probably also think of a few times an opportunity like that revealed itself — and you let it pass by. We tell ourselves we’re not ready. We succumb to the doubt or the fear. And later, we feel the particular ache of recognizing we were ready for more and didn’t allow ourselves to step into it.

This week’s video is about what helps us step forward instead of shrinking back. I share three insights that have made the difference for me, and I imagine at least one of them will land for you too.

The first is about the discomfort of growth — and why feeling unready isn’t the warning sign we tend to think it is. The second is about a trap I’ve fallen into more than once: the belief that we need one more course, one more credential, one more bit of preparation before we’re allowed to begin. (Spoiler: there’s something a workshop can never give you that taking action will.) And the third is about what we can lean on in those moments when confidence simply hasn’t arrived yet.

We don’t grow by waiting until we feel ready. We grow by stepping into the thing that’s calling us — before we’re as prepared as we’d like to be — and discovering that we had what it took all along.

 

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If this resonates and you’d like more tools for leading from the inside out, you’ll find them inside The Real Leader Academy, including the Just In Time Coaching Library — a growing collection of tips and approaches for the real challenges leaders face.

 

 

What Disneyland Reminded Me About Presence (And Why It Matters for Leaders)

My family spent two days at Disneyland. I spent most of it somewhere else entirely.

Not physically — I was there. I stood in the lines, rode the rides, ate the overpriced food. But mentally, I was somewhere between a client situation I hadn’t fully resolved and a project that was nagging at me. I was going through the motions of being present while my actual attention was somewhere back in Phoenix.

At some point — I think we were waiting for the parade — my youngest grabbed my hand and asked me to look at something. And I realized I had no idea what she had been talking about for the last ten minutes.

I had been nodding. But I hadn’t been there.

Presence isn’t a soft skill

I want to make a case for presence that goes beyond the personal — beyond being a better parent or spouse or friend, as important as those things are. I want to make the case that the ability to be fully present is one of the most powerful and underrated leadership capabilities there is.

When you’re genuinely present with someone — not planning your response, not half-monitoring your phone, not running the background process of everything else you need to do — people feel it. They feel that they matter. They think more clearly. They take more risks. They bring more of themselves to the work.

Conversely, when a leader is visibly absent — technically in the room but not really there — the effect on the people around them is immediate and measurable. Conversations stay shallow. Trust erodes slowly. People learn not to bring the important things.

Your presence, or lack of it, shapes the quality of every interaction you have. And interactions are where leadership actually happens.

What snapped me back

Standing there watching the parade, I made a deliberate decision. I put my phone in my pocket. I let the client situation be unresolved for a few hours. I looked at what my daughter was pointing at.

It was a float. A fairly ordinary float by Disneyland standards. But the way she described it — the specific details she had noticed, the joy she took in explaining it to me — was anything but ordinary.

I had been missing it. Not just the float. Her. The whole trip.

And the thing that I keep coming back to is this: I didn’t get those hours back. They happened with or without my attention. The only question was whether I was going to be in them.

The practice of returning

Full presence all the time isn’t realistic. Our minds are meaning-making machines. They wander. That’s not a flaw to fix — it’s just how minds work.

What is possible is noticing when you’ve gone elsewhere — and choosing to return. Not with self-judgment. Just with intention.

In the middle of your next important conversation, try this: notice where your attention actually is. Not where you think it should be. Where it is. And if it’s somewhere other than the person in front of you — gently, deliberately, bring it back.

That act of returning is presence. It’s available to you in every meeting, every one-on-one, every conversation that matters.

And it matters more than most of what we spend our leadership energy on.

 

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I explore presence and what it means to lead from your fullest self in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

What a Really Bad Day Taught Me About Leadership

I once arrived at a client meeting with coffee in my lap.

I was running late, reached for my coffee while pulling out of the driveway, misjudged the lid, and poured a generous amount of very hot coffee directly onto myself. I didn’t have time to go back inside and change. I arrived flustered, damp, and not exactly radiating executive presence.

In the parking lot, sitting in my car collecting myself before going in, I noticed something interesting: how much worse I was making it.

The coffee was a fact. The spill happened. Nothing about my narrative in that parking lot was going to change it. But what I was telling myself about it — what it meant, what it said about the kind of day I was going to have, what the client would think, whether I could possibly recover — was a story. And it was a story I was choosing to tell, even if it didn’t feel like a choice.

The story underneath the event

This is something I work on with leaders constantly, because it applies to everything. Not just spilled coffee but failed launches, difficult conversations, critical feedback, restructures, disappointments, and the hundred small indignities of a demanding professional life.

Every experience has two layers. The first is what actually happened — the fact, the event, the words that were said. The second is the meaning we assign to it. And while we often can’t control the first layer, we have extraordinary influence over the second.

The problem is that most of us don’t realize we’re operating in the second layer. We experience our interpretation of events as if it were the events themselves. The story feels like reality. And when the story is “this is a disaster” or “I can’t recover from this” or “this always happens to me,” the story shapes everything that comes after it.

What I did instead

In the parking lot, once I noticed what was happening, I tried something different. I asked: what’s actually true here?

What was true: I was late. I had spilled coffee. I was late. The client was waiting.

What was a story: that this meant the meeting was ruined before it started. That I was incompetent. That today was destined to be a disaster.

When I separated the fact from the story, something shifted. Not magically — I was still a little rattled. But I walked into that meeting present enough to actually be useful. And as it turned out, the client barely noticed I was late. What they noticed was that I was fully there when it mattered.

The leadership application

You don’t have to spill coffee to use this. You can use it the moment you notice that your reaction to something feels bigger than the thing itself. That’s usually a sign the story is running.

Ask: What is actually, factually true here? What am I adding to it? And what would be available to me if I set the story down for a moment?

The leaders I’ve worked with who navigate difficulty with the most grace aren’t the ones who don’t get rattled. They’re the ones who notice when they’re rattled — and choose, intentionally, what they do next.

That’s not a talent. It’s a practice. And it starts in the parking lot.

 

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I wrote more on navigating the stories that run our leadership in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

How to Navigate Change Without Losing Yourself in the Process

 

Something I’ve noticed about the way most leaders navigate change: they try to power through it.

They treat uncertainty like an obstacle to overcome — something to be solved, managed, or outwaited. And the harder they push, the more exhausted and disoriented they become. Not because the change is too hard. But because they’re approaching it from the wrong place inside themselves.

There’s a version of you that can meet change, challenge, and uncertainty with something that looks a lot like courage and grace. I’ve seen it emerge in leaders who were convinced they didn’t have it. And I’ve watched the same leaders miss it entirely when they tried to force their way through.

The difference isn’t talent. It’s where they’re operating from.

Two ways of showing up

In my work with leaders, I talk about two distinct modes of operating. I call them the Puppet and the Genius.

The Puppet isn’t weak or lazy. In fact, it tends to show up most forcefully in the highest achievers — the ones with the most at stake, the most responsibility, the most pressure. The Puppet operates from fear, from the need to control outcomes, from the accumulated weight of every expectation and assumption about how things should go. When change hits, the Puppet tightens its grip. It defaults to what has always worked. It resists what it cannot predict.

The Genius is something different. It’s the part of you that can stay curious when everything is uncertain. That can ask “what is this situation asking of me?” instead of “how do I make this stop?” It’s the part that trusts your own capacity to navigate whatever comes — not because you have all the answers, but because you’ve stopped pretending you need them before you can move.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: the Genius doesn’t arrive when the change gets easier. It arrives when you stop fighting the change and start getting interested in it.

What this looks like in practice

A client of mine — a VP navigating a significant organizational restructure — came to me exhausted and furious. Everything she had built was being dismantled. Her team was scattered. Her role was unclear. She had a dozen reasons to be angry, and she was right about all of them.

But the anger wasn’t helping her lead. It was keeping her locked in Puppet mode — reactive, contracted, focused on what she was losing rather than what was possible.

What shifted things wasn’t a new strategy. It was a question: “What if this disruption is happening for you, not to you?”

Not as a platitude. As a genuine inquiry. What might this change be making room for? What has the old structure been preventing? What could you do now that you couldn’t before?

She sat with that for a long moment. And then something in her face changed. Not relief exactly. More like recognition.

“I’ve been so focused on what I’m losing,” she said, “I haven’t once asked what I might gain.”

The practice

When you’re in the middle of change that feels threatening, try this: notice which part of you is in the driver’s seat.

Is it the part that is contracted, defensive, focused on risk and loss and what might go wrong? That’s the Puppet. It means well. It’s trying to protect you. But it cannot lead you through what it cannot see.

Or is there a quieter part available — one that is curious, grounded, willing to not know yet? That’s the Genius. It doesn’t need the change to be resolved before it can show up. It shows up precisely because the change is unresolved.

Navigating change well doesn’t mean being unaffected by it. It means choosing, again and again, which part of yourself gets to respond.

 

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If this resonates, I explore the Puppet and the Genius at length in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

Why Losing Your Passion at Work Is a Leadership Problem (Not a Personal One)

 

A third of your time on this planet is spent at work.

Let that land for a moment.

Not a third of your workday. A third of your life. Which means if your work feels like a grind – if you’re pushing through it, white-knuckling your way from one obligation to the next, surviving instead of thriving – that’s not just a professional inconvenience. That is the texture of a significant portion of your life.

I’m not going to pretend that work is always meant to feel blissful. Every meaningful endeavor has its hard days, its tedious stretches, its moments of doubt. That’s different from the slow erosion of passion that I see happening in so many high-achieving leaders.

And I want to make a case for why that erosion isn’t just a personal problem – a matter of attitude or perspective or self-care that you can fix with a long weekend. It is a leadership problem. And it has consequences that ripple far beyond you.

The cost you aren’t calculating

Here’s what most leaders don’t realize when they make peace with feeling depleted: the energy you bring to your work is not self-contained.

When you’re running on fumes, everyone around you feels it. Your direct reports feel it in how you show up in one-on-ones: the half-presence, the clipped responses, the sense that you’d rather be somewhere else. Your peers feel it in how you engage in meetings – whether you’re genuinely curious and generative, or just getting through the agenda. Your organization feels it in the quality of your thinking, your decisions, the kind of problems you’re willing to sit with.

Leadership is a transmission, not a transaction. What you carry inside yourself is what you transmit to the people around you. And a depleted leader, however accomplished and competent, transmits depletion.

I’ve seen this play out in organizations again and again. A team whose leader has lost their spark begins to lose theirs. The culture quietly dims. People start doing the minimum required to stay out of trouble rather than bringing their best. Nobody named it as a problem. Nobody pointed to the leader. But the source was there.

Why it happens to the best ones

Losing your passion at work doesn’t happen to lazy or uncommitted people. It happens to exactly the opposite kind of person.

It happens to the leaders who care deeply and have been pouring themselves out for so long that the well has run dry. The ones who made success their identity and then discovered that achieving it didn’t feel the way they expected. The ones who kept saying yes to things that didn’t align with who they really are, because they were so good at executing that the requests kept coming and they felt responsible for saying yes.

This is part of something I call the Curse of Competence. The better you are at something, the more of it you’re asked to do – whether or not it’s what lights you up.

Over time, you can find yourself at the top of a ladder that’s leaning against the wrong wall. Impressive by every external measure. Quietly lost on the inside.

What reigniting actually looks like

I want to be clear about what I’m not suggesting here. I’m not suggesting you quit your job, blow up your career, or make any dramatic external changes. In my experience, the most profound shifts happen from the inside out – in how you relate to what you’re doing before you change what you’re doing.

What I’ve seen work, again and again, is this: when leaders reconnect with why their work matters – not the metrics, not the deliverables, but the genuine human impact – something shifts. When they start bringing more of who they actually are to what they do, rather than the polished, managed version they’ve learned to present, something opens up.

There’s a part of every leader I’ve worked with that is wiser, more creative, and more energized than the version that shows up exhausted and going through the motions. And when that part gets activated – when you stop performing leadership and start being it – the effect on the people around you is immediate and unmistakable.

That’s not idealism. I’ve watched it happen in boardrooms, in hospitals, in classrooms, and in startup teams. It is available to you.

The question I’d ask you

If you set aside what you’re supposed to feel about your work – what you’ve decided is reasonable or realistic or acceptable for someone at your level – what is the honest answer to this question:

Does your work feed you? Or does it deplete you?

If the honest answer is the latter, that’s worth paying attention to. Not to spiral into crisis, but to get curious. Because the version of you that is genuinely energized, engaged, and lit up by what you do doesn’t just feel better – it leads better. It makes better decisions. It draws out the best in the people around it.

And the world needs that version of you more than it needs the depleted one.

 

If this landed for you, I explore the journey from depletion to what I call your Authentic Genius in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

And if you’re ready for a more structured journey, The Real Leader Academy offers programs specifically designed to help high-achieving leaders reconnect with what makes their leadership most powerful — and most sustainable. → RealLeaderAcademy.com

 

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