The Life That Survival Built
I was raised to be an overfunctioner. Rural settings, constant moves, and instability created a parentified child who grew into a hyper-empathetic, overfunctioning adult. In every relationship and every career setting, I showed up as the door prize…the unexpected dynamo who quietly won everyone over. “I just want to be a receptionist,” a partner teased me…
The Difference Was Never the Problem
I just had a conversation with a client that highlighted something I see often. A relationship that was once energized by differences had become contentious over those very same contrasts. The qualities that once created attraction, balance, and possibility had slowly become the source of frustration, resentment, and conflict. It left me thinking about how…
When The Costume Changes, But The Operating System Doesn’t
Congruent Reinvention The personal development world has turned reinvention into another performance. Become your highest self, your future self, your 2.0 self, your most successful self. We are obsessed with optimizing, scaling, upgrading, reinventing. But most people reinvent from the very survival patterns they are unhappy with and trying to escape. They simply reinvent their…
Best Self or True Self
We spend a great deal of our lives trying to become stronger, smarter, more disciplined, more successful, more resilient. Becoming our best self becomes the obsession. But after a couple of decades working in the trenches, I’ve begun to wonder if that’s the wrong pursuit. Perhaps the deeper invitation is not to become our best…
The Agreements You Never Made But Keep Showing Up For
The Unspoken Agreements That Are Running Your Life You are living, right now, inside an agreement you may not even acknowledge exists. It’s not a real contract. It’s not a conversation you remember having. It’s an agreement that was never spoken out loud, never negotiated, never signed and yet it is shaping how you show…
The Doctor Who Disappeared
He’d been working for hours and it was only 6 a.m. Reviewing messages, going to do rounds, checking the schedule, returning a couple of calls. He felt the exhaustion creeping in already and there were hours to go…There is a version of tired, all too familiar, that has nothing to do with hours worked. It’s…
The Intimacy We Forgot to Scale
You wanted to be seen. You wanted eyes on your craft, your creation, your expertise, the uniqueness of your concept. Everyone does. It’s the first hunger, the one that gets you to sketch out your idea on a napkin, share your original idea with peers, expand into public introductions/demonstrations, then proceed to launch. Many of…
The Third Job Nobody Pays You For
You clocked out but nobody told your nervous system. The last team member has left the chat. The last patient has been seen. The final decision made. The team has gone home. By every external measure the workday is over. And then you walk through your front door into the night job that is harder…
The Meaning Famine in Leadership
The demands were endless. They were unreasonable. They sounded like: “Do more with less support.”“Be faster with less resources.”“Figure it out with less communication.” While juggling competing priorities that were never actually reconciled, only relayed, you feel micromanaged and abandoned at the same time. Firehose in hand, prepared to put out the latest blaze, except…
When Your One Safe Place Evaporates
Home is that one safe place where masks come off and tensions melt away, right? It’s the Campbell soup, fresh-baked-cookie zone where you can be your complete self with reckless abandon, knowing you are loved for nothing more than being you. Or so you wish. In reality, home is where the battles take place; the…
The Meaning Famine in Modern Medicine
A physician told me this week: “I have never had more data and felt less valued than I do right now. I mean, I don’t know if I can keep doing this.” That last line was spoken from such a deeply exhausted place that I felt myself leaning forward, my usual list of potential pivots…
Behind The Curtain
It’s not the absence of people. You are surrounded by them. In fact, you often feel there are too many in the room, not too few. The waiting room is full. The inbox is full. The calendar is full. People need you at work, at home, in the group chat, on the board, in the…
When Busy is Just Scared with a Better Mask
You cut the overhead. It made sense at the time. Actually, the numbers demanded it. The org chart got leaner. Positions were eliminated, the team shrank, the structure simplified. It was the responsible call. The leadership call. And then quietly, without announcement, the work that used to belong to other people became yours. You are…
The Paralyzed Analyst—The Neverending Pause
You don’t want to look foolish as you feel the shockwaves of the latest numbers. You know it’s stupid to stop the digital campaign or disrupt the plan of care mid-stream, but you just can’t help but react. You desperately search for the reframe, the call to action, the shift. But here, procrastination is reframed as…
Ingredients For A Thunderstorm?
Two Good People, Two Different Stories — Part One You want to blame him. You have a whole list of reasons, and they are valid. Your friends and family even weigh in sometimes and they agree with you. You are both convinced of your position. Storm clouds are brewing…you can feel it. In fact, you…
Posting Into The Void
On the Meaning Famine and What’s Really Happening to Us Are you the person who listens to podcasts on the commute, during the run, while fixing dinner, or adjacent to your kid’s Babe Ruth game? Are you on YouTube at midnight and again first thing in the morning? Doom scrolling before you’ve even left your…
A Thousand Tiny Goodbyes
It was nothing. It’s expected even, right? Part of the ebb and flow. That’s where your mind goes as you read the polite message declining the renewal. The rationalization arrives before the disappointment does. It arrives so fast you almost miss the fact that something just landed. Something that stings a little. Something that, if…
The Loneliest Job In The World
“You are performing with a confidence you don’t entirely feel, for people who need you to feel it.” I’ve worked with entrepreneurs for over twenty-five years. The fearless leaders who can’t talk about what they really feel are the ones I think about most. Entrepreneurship requires that you show up confidently, allaying everyone else’s fears…
Why Have Our Fights Gotten SO Bad?
“The fight you keep having isn’t new, it just has more fuel.” The cycles of conflict you have as a couple haven’t changed exactly, but they have become more intense. The old patterns were always there. But they weren’t always like this. There’s a difference between a familiar argument and a familiar argument amplified by…
The 6 AM Email
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…
Your AI Coach Doesn’t Know You’re Lying to Yourself
On The Seduction Of Being Understood By Something That Can’t Feel The Weight Of What You Are Avoiding The Observation The AI coaching market just crossed $5 billion. Venture capital is thrilled. Your nervous system remains completely unimpressed. I’m still trying to catch my breath. Every week I watch another breathless announcement: an app that…
Two People. One House. Two Completely Different Worlds.
On the invisible battle happening behind closed doors in high-achieving homes. She scanned the driveway again for the twelfth time or maybe it was the fifteenth. She’d lost track. It wasn’t that big of a deal, at least that’s what she kept telling herself. It was just an argument. Couples argue. She knew this better…
THE STARTING POINT
What Change Actually Looks Like Before It Looks Like Anything People want to know what change looks like. They imagine a moment. A shift. Something dramatic and visible, a decision made, a boundary held, a new version of themselves stepping cleanly into view. That’s not what I see in this work. What I see is…
You Look Like You Have It Together-But Do You Feel Like It?
She sat in boardrooms in corporate America. She knew how to read a room, how to speak with authority, how to hold her ground in a meeting full of people who assumed they were the smartest one there. She dressed well. She delivered. She performed so exceptionally that she almost convinced herself it was the…
The Martyr
When Sacrifice Becomes the Strategy Let’s talk about martyrdom. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that lives in high-achieving people. It doesn’t come from laziness. It doesn’t come from lack of vision. It comes from a pattern so deeply hard-wired, it doesn’t even feel like a choice anymore, it feels like your identity. You…
Why Highly Intelligent People Struggle With Anxiety
For years I blamed modern conveniences and comfortable living for the epidemic of anxiety we see around us today. When we were running for our lives from predators or wild beasts…we knew fear. Today, our threats look very different. We’re not running from predators, we’re trying to reconcile bank accounts, meet deadlines and navigate complex…
Why Success Sometimes Makes Life Feel Harder
“Everything looks successful from the outside… so why does it feel this hard?” Over the years I’ve sat with many highly successful professionals, physicians, founders and leaders who experience this stage of success. I spoke with someone this week who gave me permission to share. Their business is thriving. Growth is strong. Receivables are up.…
Why Overfunctioners Attract Underfunctioners
“The tragedy of the overfunctioner is that the stronger they become, the less support they receive.” Why the Strong One Always Ends Up Carrying Everything One of the most common patterns I see in couples, families, and leadership teams is this: The more one person overfunctions, the more the other underfunctions. And in this scenario…
If My Life Is Changing, Why Are My Struggles Always The Same?
Many of us are startled to arrive at a point in life very different than where we imagined we would be. That realization can feel disappointing, confusing, frustrating, discouraging– especially for the highly motivated person, reaching for the stars. You’ve done the work:New relationships.Career growth.Expanding awareness.Therapy.Coaching.Personal development. And yet, somehow, here you are again. Experiencing…
Navigating Loss During the Holidays
GRIEF For all those (like me) navigating the holidays while experiencing loss, I want to acknowledge that loss takes many forms. Some of us have lost people, others have lost relationships, their health, homes, identities, businesses or the futures they thought they were walking towards. Grief doesn’t make space for the holidays; it holds us…