You’re a high achiever.
You excel at solving problems.
You optimize, strategize, and figure your way through any challenge. You research the best approach, find the right tools, hire the right people, and execute with precision. It’s honestly impressive.
And for a long time, it’s worked.
Until it didn’t.
Now the thing that built your life makes you tired and it doesn’t seem to be able to get you to the next version of you.
You’ve outgrown the fixing, figuring, make-it-happen way of being in the world.
You’re caught in what I’ve come to call the “fixer’s trap”.
The Fixers Trap
When something feels off — when you’re anxious, stuck, disconnected, or just quietly miserable — your first instinct is to fix it. Fast.
Out comes the arsenal of tools. Identify the issue. Find the solution. Implement. Move on. It’s all rational, logical and works – until it doesn’t.
If you’re reading this – it’s stopped working. There’s something you can’t fix, figure, strategize or optimize.
Not because you’re not good enough, because all the work you’ve done has led you to this moment, to your next step.
You just don’t yet have an alternative path. So you keep at it with the tools you have.
You become exceptional at overriding yourself.
- You feel the exhaustion and still perform.
- You experience grief and still produce.
- You’re internally disconnected and still win.
The people around you cheer you on and laud your ‘progress’.
It’s not progress. And you feel the discordance.
Inside, the voices tell you you’re losing relevance, losing drive, becoming ordinary. You question who you are without the striving.
In reality, those efforts just take the thing trying to get your attention and bury it deeper. Compressed things have a way of eventually exploding.
The Signs
The problem isn’t that you’re broken.
The problem is that the operating system that created your success cannot carry you where you’re trying to go next.
You’ve simply hit a ceiling. How do you know? Well, at first, the signs start off subtly –
- You start getting fed up with that running commentary in your head — the itty bitty shitty committee — that tells you you’re not doing enough, not moving fast enough, not healed enough, not there yet.
- You feel exhaustion at the thought of signing up for another course because maybe this one will finally fix the thing that feels broken.
- You notice the either/or trap: either I’m going full throttle, or I’ve completely checked out. No middle ground. No nuance. Just on or off.
Then the ‘fix-it’ exhaustion continues to get worse (trying to get your attention) – full throttle leads to the crash, to full on checking out, to complete numbness – your body begins to show the signs.
It’s not a punishment, it’s a higher part of yourself calling you forward, because we’re meant to continue to evolve. Yes, there is life beyond achievement. In several models of human development the achiever stage is not even halfway through our progress.
Society has idealized it so we find ourselves stuck.
“Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.“
— Ken Wilber
If Fixing and Achieving Doesn’t Work, What Does?
At some point, growth stops looking like adding more.
It starts looking like being able to stay present long enough to hear what your life has been trying to tell you beneath the noise.
Your mind may have chimed in with all kinds of opinions. “That’s not the answer.” “That’s too simple.” “What does that even mean?” etc.
Give this a chance. It works.
First – what presence is not.
It’s not the same stillness. It’s not doing nothing. It’s not sitting cross-legged on a meditation cushion letting your mind wander hoping enlightenment will arrive. It’s not checking out. It’s not a one time phenomenon.
Presence is an internal awareness. Presence is a practice. It’s the ability to slow down and witness what’s happening inside you — the fear, the discomfort, the grief, the confusion — without immediately rushing in to change it.
There’s a beautiful film called Collateral Beauty with Will Smith. His character has lost his daughter and from the outside, he looks completely absent from his life. People around him are worried. They think he’s broken.
If you watch closely, he’s not absent at all. He’s deeply, intentionally present to his own process. He’s not performing. He’s not numbing out. He’s moving through something real, in his own way, on his own timeline.
We judge that. We pathologize it. We want to fix it.
Most often, the most profound thing happening in a person’s life is invisible to everyone around them.
Rumi wrote about this — the idea of meeting the difficult parts of yourself at the doorway. Not slamming the door. Not pretending they’re not there. But actually inviting them in. Sitting with them. Asking what they need.
That’s presence.
A Practice You Can Actually Use
You may be thinking- sounds beautiful, Maren…how do I start applying this?
Fair. Here’s one way to start developing presence in your own life that we talk about in Ep 208 of the Soulful Leader Podcast.
It’s a practice rooted in the teachings of Saint Francis — the idea that if you want something in your outer world, you give it to yourself, inside, first. If you want kindness, be kind to yourself. If you want compassion, offer it inward before grasping for it anywhere else.
Practicing this not only trains you to be more present, it starts moving you out of the habitual achiever brain and makes space to break through that ceiling you keep hitting.
There’s a second piece to Saint Francis’ practice, a piece that takes it even deeper: you give it to a complete stranger. Someone you’ll never see again. Someone whose name you might not even know.
Why a stranger? Because your ego doesn’t attach to the outcome. You’ll never know if it made a difference. You give it and it’s gone. And in that release, something opens.
- Identify the need/want
- Give it to yourself – inwardly
- Give it to a complete stranger
Stephanie saw this unexpectedly on the side of a highway during a storm. She was shaken from a difficult experience of her own when she came across a young woman whose car had spun out on the highway. Instead of trying to fix anything or trying to figure out what the woman might need, she quietly asked the woman: what do you need?
The woman shook almost uncontrollably. Stephanie told her it was okay to shake, giving her permission – as she’d given herself permission to be shaken up by her own experience.
She was present. She listened. To herself, then to the stranger.
Then she asked the woman if she’d like a hug. She did. Listening created a safe space for the two of them to connect, to heal.
Was Stephanie hugging her for the woman or for herself? Both. And that’s kind of the point.
When we do the inner work — even imperfectly — we open a door to possibility. Not a fix. Not a solution. Us as pure potential – to heal, to connect, to evolve.
An Invitation
You don’t need to fix yourself. You’ve outgrown that.
You need to meet yourself. There’s a difference — and it changes everything.
The next time you feel that familiar urge to push through, optimize, or override what you’re feeling — pause. Just for a moment. And ask: what is this asking of me within?
Not what’s wrong with me. Not how do I make this stop. Instead slow it down. What is the need (space, understanding, time, kindness) and where can I give it to myself?
Questioning -without the need to find an answer, or fix something- is the beginning of presence. And presence, it turns out, is the thing that truly moves you forward.
The next version of your life will not be built through more force.
It will be built through your willingness to finally stop abandoning yourself inside your own success.
Want more?
Listen to Episode 208 of The Soulful Leader Podcast: “When Pushing Harder Makes Everything Worse” wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube.
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