By Sydney Ashland

She sent the email at 6:00 am, from bed, without a second thought. She had been rolling over an issue from work that had been mentioned the previous day. It was only said in passing. It wasn’t something she had even agreed to research, but before she fell into bed, she felt compelled. Compelled to do a deeper dive. Somewhere in the night, her nervous system decided it was up to her to fix. And by 6:00 the next morning, she felt that familiar rush of thoughts, paired with tension in her shoulders and belly. Ignoring these signs, she emailed HR and her boss. And she did it all as a working wife and mother. Her husband was sick and not working, her son had a demanding school schedule as well as serious athletic commitments after school. She had the least bandwidth of anyone she knew, yet the email was sent before anyone from work had begun to sip on their morning coffee. But this wasn’t competence. This was hypervigilance and overfunctioning survival patterns on steroids.

You know this kind of morning. You know what it’s like to awaken with that light tension that you ignore in service to what needs to be done. You don’t hesitate — hesitation is for the weak or uncertain. You are not weak, you are strong, you are driven, you are the woman or man of the hour. And you tell yourself this is just you walking your talk, when it is really you unconsciously in service to a survival pattern much bigger than you know.

She sits. She hovers on the edge of a bar stool in the kitchen. To an outside observer she might look like she is on the verge of arising, rather than hesitantly deciding to truly sit. And within moments her posture succumbs to the weariness. Her back curves, her belly softens and her elbows drop onto the countertop like wheels on a runway. She is tired and when she acknowledges this fact, her body collapses forward. It feels good, this moment of allowing. And then it happens — she hears the coffee maker kick on. First the trickling water, the musical sound of water on grounds. But before the aroma begins to waft, she has bolted upright, headed to the sink, grabbing the loaf of bread on her way to the toaster. The sixty-second revelry has come to an end.

She is known as a force of nature.
She feels deep in her soul like the aftermath.

We are witnessing a life programmed for performance. But the experience of true success is elusive, limited by the personal disregard necessary to maintain the performance. And this is where the wakeup call resides. Deep in the tissues of a body habituated in overfunctioning lies a fatigue that no manner of rest eliminates. This fatigue is physical, emotional, social and spiritual. It is real. And it cannot be resolved by doing less of the same thing that created it.

She knows something isn’t quite right. She isn’t tone deaf or clueless, yet she feels powerless. Powerless in the face of repeated patterning that now defines her existence. Just as in nature, repetitive patterns create fractals of beauty in fern fronds and shell spirals, the repetitive patterns of her life have created an overfunctioning architecture that she can’t escape.

As quickly as she had the thought that these habits are hopelessly encoded in her DNA, she asked herself — but why can’t I change that? I’m a force after all. I’ve heard that all my life. There has to be something out there that can help me shift the pattern. And there is. It is called the Fractals of Personality — a blueprint that not only identifies what is currently operating, but highlights a sequence of incremental changes that disrupt the pattern.

The pattern has a name. And it has a portal. Find yours at fractalsofpersonality.com.