Hearing the same, oddly specific sentiment multiple times got my attention. What were they hearing?

The context made me even more curious. My 2025 was tough. The first half was one of those periods that makes you start believing in reincarnation, because you must have been a real arsehole in a past life.

I was dealing with a chronic injury, wild demands from the tax department due to some (still unsolved) mystery and the joys of running a small business during an economic crisis. I learnt things, grew stronger, all of that. But overall, it was just hard.

Then the second half took a turn. One particular event had an especially profound impact. It didn’t make my life easier or more comfortable, but it did make me feel unmistakably alive.

I was reminded that happiness and aliveness aren’t the same thing.

When we want to be happy, the natural question is, “What makes me happy?” I have a list like that in my iPhone notes: “nature, sunrises, dancing, quality time with my family and friends…”

But that’s only half the story. There’s more to it.

So what creates that feeling? Where do we find it? How do we cultivate it?

The turning point

I called Mum and Dad from the car on the way home. As I relayed the events of the last three days, I noticed that despite the 38-degree heat, I was shivering. My whole body was covered in goosebumps.

“I think I’ve gone into shock.”
Mum: “I’m not surprised.”

I noticed something else unusual. Despite the distinctly unideal nature of what I was describing, including a few near-death experiences, my voice had a joyful, almost ecstatic enthusiasm.

A day of gruelling hiking with zero sleep, thanks to camping in 80km winds. The insane rush of adrenaline when I faced a black snake in strike position, ready to murder me. Getting lost in an active landslide area without service.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

These don’t feature on my “things that make me happy” list. Probably fair to assume they don’t feature on many.

Yet here I was, high on life.

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This was my first solo multi-night hike. For years, maybe decades, I’d dreamed of doing it. But I’d hesitated, thanks to an appropriate level of informed fear.

It was a Grade 5 track, which means you need to be able to handle potentially dangerous and unpredictable conditions without assistance. If something goes wrong, you can’t rely on getting help quickly.

I was prepared. I had an emergency rescue device. But unpredictable danger is part of this kind of adventure.

I didn’t do it for the danger. I’m not a masochist. I did it because I love hiking, and everything it requires of me, from learning new skills to stretching my mental and physical limits.

I’d metabolised friction into strength. I’d faced my fears, pushed myself, and developed resilience. Real risk, paired with genuine desire, offered me an opportunity to build character.

My aliveness wasn’t about comfort, or pleasure, or even adrenaline. It was the feeling of being fully in contact with life, living in a way that matched my values and the kind of person I want to be.

Truth is, the best things in life aren’t free. They come at a price. But that price isn’t money. It’s courage and commitment.

Obstacles and leaps of faith define all meaningful achievements. To become people we’re proud of, we must face our fears and stay true to our standards. Love, of anyone or anything, requires risk and vulnerability.

The quality of your risks determines the quality of your life

If you were purely in pursuit of happiness, you might assume the goal is to eliminate problems. But a good life isn’t defined by the absence of difficulty. It’s defined by the kind of difficulty we face. The goal isn’t to have no problems. It’s better quality problems.

That’s what 2025 reminded me.

Vulnerability gives life meaning. Risk gives life significance. It’s only because we have something to lose that our choices carry weight. Risk is part of the price we pay for aliveness. But not all risk is equal.

Low-quality risk is often vague, chronic, and misaligned. It’s the kind that happens to you, drags on, and quietly corrodes your confidence and capacity, like ongoing job dread, hiding a mistake, or consistent health neglect.

High-quality risk is chosen. It’s specific. It’s connected to a desire you actually respect. It asks something of you, and it gives something back, whether that looks like asking for a raise, ending a relationship you’ve outgrown, telling a hard truth, or doing a Grade 5 hike solo because you’re a little bit crazy.

My 2025 was full of vulnerability, uncertainty and exposure. But the first half was the low-quality kind. The kind you don’t choose, then have to do mental gymnastics in hindsight to build a “why I’m grateful this happened” narrative.

And the problem is, there’s only so much the nervous system can hold at once. When we’re already overloaded with low-quality risk, we cap our capacity for high-quality risk. When your bandwidth is being consumed by financial insecurity, relationship anxiety, and steady self-betrayal, your capacity gets spent on the wrong things.

We need to actively and skilfully manage this capacity, because life offers endless ways to spend it on unworthy substitutes. Drama in place of significance. Entertainment instead of vitality. Intensity instead of passion.

You get sensation. But you don’t get aliveness.

None of us is living risk-free. We’re all living with uncertainty. The question is whether you have any capacity left for the risks that would expand you. If you’re already carrying too much, even high-quality risk can tip you over.

This is why asking “What makes me happy?” isn’t enough. We must also ask: where is my risk capacity being spent? Do I choose it? Is it enlarging me?

Choosing aliveness

It would be easy to write off my aliveness as the pendulum swing after a hard year. Or the satisfaction of ticking an item off my bucket list. But that would oversimplify it. I’ve had plenty of difficult periods and bucket-list adventures. I’ve never been told I sound “so alive”.

What felt different was the quality of the risk. It was aligned with what I love and who I wanted to be. There was an intimacy between inner truth and outer expression that deepened into self-trust and expanded my self-image. Along with both came a new sense of freedom and possibility, grounded in respect for who and where I am now.

That’s how I now think about aliveness. Joy and excitement can be part of it. But it’s the felt “rightness” of living in accordance with your values and your potential. It appears when you’re in contact with freedom, choice, responsibility, and finitude. Aliveness is born from transforming through risks you respect.

That’s what the second half of 2025 gave me. Not ease. Better problems. Chosen risk.

To feel happier, we can ask what problems we need to stop solving. To feel more alive, we can ask what problems we want to start solving.

Don’t ask what risks you’re willing to tolerate. Ask what risks you’ll respect yourself for choosing.

Alex James is an executive leadership coach in Sydney, working with founders, CEOs and senior leaders across seven countries. More at alexstaceyjames.com

Herbie Hancock, a young jazz pianist, was playing with the musical genius Miles Davis. It was the 60s. They were in Stuttgart, Germany, and Hancock recalls: “We were tight, everything was working,” until his worst nightmare became reality.

“It was my solo, and I played a completely wrong chord.”

Horrified, he froze. Ashamed of his error, certain he’d destroyed the magic.

In a moment that changed Hancock forever, Miles paused, then kept playing in a way that, in Hancock’s words, “made my wrong chord right”. Miles didn’t just accept the mistake with grace. He calibrated to it. He responded so intelligently that the imperfect conditions became part of the music.

It’s that lesson that I adore.

Because in life, we’re often in Miles’s shoes. We’re offered ‘wrong chords’. A difficult client. A conflict with a loved one. An injury. Missing a flight. No one (at least not around here) is pretending these are good things. Just like no one is denying that Hancock played a wrong chord. But how we respond matters. Not only can we keep playing, we can make music from them.

Too often in life, when we experience a ‘wrong chord’, we tune ourselves to it. We replay it, dwell on it, and catastrophise it, keeping us stuck in its rhythm. Like Hancock, fear and self-consciousness lock our attention on the wrongness, and that fixation deafens us to the potential.

But what if we improvise like Davis?

What Davis invites, gestures at with the idea that we are artists of our lives, and the existentialist view that we are free, but within constraints. Conditions are real. Art is what we make of them.

The particular chord Hancock played meant Miles couldn’t respond in any way he wished for it to work. He had to meet the conditions and still fulfil the purpose of the performance. No one would have blamed him for the mistake. It wasn’t his, after all. But he accepted his freedom and responsibility to shape it.

Davis’s way of making beautiful music offers a lesson in how to make life beautiful, too.

Because really, life is like one big jazz improvisation. We can’t predict what comes next, and our job is to make something meaningful from whatever does. Living this way is about transforming the unexpected, less-than-ideal conditions of life into part of our song. It’s not only about accepting reality or reframing optimistically. It’s also about adapting purposefully.

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Making beautiful music requires both intention and skill

Davis was a master of his craft. His wisdom, talent, and experience made that moment possible. Even if Hancock hadn’t frozen, it’s unlikely he would have known how to recover in that way.

This is where I see the role of self-mastery in life.

Our ability to respond artfully to tricky situations is shaped by our degree of mastery in skills such as self-awareness, emotion regulation, relational intelligence, optimism, courage, and effective communication.

Mastery expands our range. It’s the capacity to riff with a wrong chord.

While mastery appears as perfect form, that’s only because it’s built on a refined relationship with error.

Davis trained for exactly that. He once told Hancock, “I don’t pay you to just play to get applause”. He wanted him to experiment. He invited mistakes. He knew this was the secret to revealing unexpected beauty, discovering new interests and developing mastery.

Perfect performances achieve none of that. Perfect lives don’t either.

Integration exercise

Here is a short practice to illuminate, thanks to the gift of hindsight, your capacity for artistry. Because the faster you remember this freedom in difficult moments, the better.

1. Write a list of three less-than-ideal experiences you dealt with recently: one minor inconvenience, one moderate issue, and one significant problem.

2. Next, scribble some notes about how you created something beautiful from them. Aim for both the perspective and action you took.

3. Lastly, note the skills that helped you turn it around. Creative problem-solving? Resilience? Patience?

It can also be useful to run this process on a current challenge. A ‘what could I do here’ perspective. Consider how you might riff with this wrong chord.

Life will continue to offer you losses, frustrations, and disappointments. Not as gifts, but conditions.

To be the artist of your life is to meet reality as it is, and still create something that belongs inside a beautiful life.

Until recently.

The sky would do its usual magnificent thing, and I’d feel… underwhelmed. I could appreciate its beauty, but it wouldn’t captivate my spirit in the same way.

‘Maybe I’d just seen too many, normalised the experience’, I thought. But that didn’t feel true.

I noticed other changes too. Compulsive notification-checking, scattered focus and a low-grade dissatisfaction.

I still felt like me, but a more soulless version.

Since this realisation, I’ve been dedicated to reclaiming that sacred spark. Hoping I could undo this dulling of my spirit.

Hijacked Attention

In today’s world, where attention is engineered and sold, what we worship is increasingly not what we value; it’s whatever has captured our nervous system. For most of us, we stopped choosing what to worship a long time ago. Culture has chosen for us.

To live with freedom, joy and integrity, we must reclaim what we attend to.

Engineered Worship

The term “Attention Economy” was popularised by Michael Goldhaber in the late 1990s. He noted three essential truths:

1. Attention is a finite resource

2. Far more information is generated than we can handle

3. Every act of attention on one thing cancels out attention on something else

The third point stuck with me. Attention as a zero-sum game raises the stakes.

When attending to one thing, it’s at the expense of another. When distraction wins, presence loses. When avoidance wins, progress loses. When fear is winning, love is losing.

And since then, the tools designed to exploit our attention have grown vastly more sophisticated. Every scroll is engineered with the precision of a slot machine: variable rewards, intermittent reinforcement, carefully timed hits of novelty and relief.

This is why I don’t blame people for struggling with it.

I remember reading an article about gambling addiction. It described a trance-like state gamblers enter called “the zone” – a passive, immersive state where they play to extinction (not a penny left). It sounds uncannily similar to the “doom-scroll”. But instead of gambling away money, we scroll until we are emotionally and mentally bankrupt.

The truth we must remember is this: the things you do are doing something to you.

Your screen time is not a neutral habit. It trains comparison, shallow entertainment, and escapism. You’re not just wasting time; you’re losing agency, diminishing joy, and robbing yourself of a more worthwhile focus.

“Be careful what you love,” St Augustine warned, “because you end up turning into what you love.”

We need to recognise these sophisticated technologies for what they are: an invisible, invasive, highly manipulative threat to what matters - your relationships, your craft and your capacity for wonder.

Just like our chosen rituals sustain and reinforce the direction of our love and attention, cultural practices and technologies direct and reinforce their agendas upon us.

If attention is a zero-sum game, in today’s environment, it’s not a fair playing field. Playing by their rules, you can’t win. Engaging passively, you’re already losing.

But there is another way.

Our ability to focus is one of the most powerful tools we have for making healthier choices, building habits, and actually living the lives we want.

Attention helps us get stronger physically, be more loving, learn from our mistakes and appreciate the beautiful things in life. It’s the ability to notice, filter and then choose where our mental energy goes. When that filter isn’t working well, when the distractions consistently win, that’s when life can feel both overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.

But attention can be trained, supported and redirected.

Not all attention, or worship, is created equal.

There are two modes of attention:

1. Automatic, instinctive, and reactive: pulled towards whatever is most stimulating, urgent, or rewarding.

2. Conscious and intentional: the ability to choose what we give ourselves to, and why.

You can be devoted to something without ever deciding it deserves devotion. Scrolling, catastrophising, even “productive” compulsions like ‘busy-work’, for example. This is reactive attention. And the second option, intentional attention, is always available to us. We get to decide what has meaning for us. We get to choose what we worship.

Religion, at its root, was a technology of orientation. A practice of turning attention toward what is meaningful. To worship is to actively orient towards something and make it ‘sacred’ through the quality of your attention.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, wrote that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” When you give something your full, undivided, humble attention, you’re already doing what religion calls “prayer.”

So what do you consistently turn toward?
What do you organise yourself around?

This becomes your centre of gravity.

Every act of intentional attention trains your heart toward what’s worthy.

Regaining your agency

When I realised what was happening in my own nervous system, I was shocked. I have solid tech boundaries. I (naively) believed I’d done enough to avoid this experience.

Social media was meeting my desires for connection, inspiration and novelty without actually fulfilling my values of depth, growth and adventure in any meaningful way. Productivity apps like email were making me feel efficient while diminishing effectiveness. Even Substack, a place I cherish for expanding my mind, was slowly becoming a place for validation and distraction.

By successfully meeting surface-level desires, these technologies rewire our pain-pleasure systems. Before we know it, we’re compulsively attached to these mini, manufactured ‘highs’. Eventually, we witness a sunrise, and without background music, an inspirational quote and the option to swipe to a novel view in 4 seconds, it isn’t stimulating enough for us.

About two months ago, I deleted the four most distracting apps on my phone.

This single choice reduced my screen time by two hours per day. I did the maths…

730 hours per year.
7,300 hours per decade.
Nearly a year of my waking life.

That’s not accounting for the increased quality of those hours I got back, which is infinitely more valuable.

Instantly, I was more present. Four weeks in, the compulsion to reach for my phone disappeared. Two months later, I’d engaged in two projects I’d been distracting from for years.

And today, most meaningful, my joie de vivre is back. My tears of joy over a spectacular sunrise have returned. I’m getting goosebumps over witnessing a precious moment between strangers again.

The spark in my spirit has returned.

What next?

None of this is new news. We’re all aware of the dangers. But knowledge doesn’t always translate into change. Action does.

If you resonate with my experience, if you want to reclaim what you worship and start intentionally tuning your centre of gravity, here’s where I’d begin:

1. What captures you without your consent? What do you turn to when tired or anxious? What pulls you away from what matters?
   These are your enemies. Name them.

2. Get to the deeper truth of what you want. A) Where am I meeting instinctual needs without fulfilling the values they point toward? B) If worship is recognition of worth, what do you want to worship in this world?

3. Redesign your environment. You cannot rely on willpower against engineered design. Decide what you must abstain from. Set non-negotiable boundaries. Practise deliberately until this becomes your new standard.

In our tech-dominated, information-dense, psychologically manipulative environment, the most powerful form of resistance is for you to control your attention.

Decide who gets access to it, on what terms.

A return to your sacred

If you don’t choose what to worship, the world will choose for you. And when choosing what to worship, you’re choosing who you become.

The version of yourself you most respect has a centre of gravity. Where is it? Be there.

In my twenties, my pre-meal ritual shifted to calorie counting and self-judgement.

Before bed, Nana would kneel in quiet reverence, connect with what she believed in and imagine what she wanted for her family and community.

When I worked in corporate, my pre-sleep ritual was replaying the day’s issues, refreshing my inbox one last time, worrying about tomorrow’s meetings, and wondering if I had done enough.

Saying grace worshipped gratitude. Insecurities worship what we lack.
Prayer worships love. Worry worships fear.

The question isn’t if you worship, it’s what.

Today, most of us consider ourselves too clever to worship God. So instead we worship productivity, looking hot and owning stuff. Not because we’re inherently shallow or greedy, but because what we repeatedly give our attention to becomes what we worship.

And it’s not religion itself I’m interested in. It’s the orientation of our attention and how it acts as a practical form of worship.

And our modern problem is not a lack of worship but misdirected worship: fragmented, constant and aimed at things too trivial to deserve it. No wonder so many people feel spiritually undernourished.

Etymologically, ‘worship’ meant the acknowledgement of worth.
Attention is that acknowledgement.

So:
Where is your attention?
Is it worthy of your worship?

—Alex

This was generous and valuable feedback. Receiving it constructively was crucial.

She was quick to frame her intensity as a problem. I was quick to clarify, “The team finding your intensity a problem is not the same as your intensity being a problem.”

Working with the high-achiever archetype, I’ve had many similar conversations.

I myself was once given the feedback “You need to care less”. This broke my brain. I was confused, then angry, then disappointed.

Here’s what I wish I knew then…

Constructive feedback that should be taken as a compliment:

“You care too much”
“You’re too intense”
“You’re too impatient”

Now, I’m not denying that these can have unproductive expressions. They do. But for high-achievers, these comments often translate to:

• I don’t want to face, let alone fix, the problems you’re acknowledging.

• Your passion challenges my preference for comfort and/or mediocrity.

• Your bias for action and execution capacity intimidates me. I prefer a slower pace.

And yes, if you’re someone emotionally intense, who cares a lot, dreams big, pushes for excellence, and thrives at a fast pace, you almost certainly have patterns that could be tweaked to help you lead more effectively:

Care can lead to control, taking things personally or overburdening yourself with problems.

Intensity can mean unpredictable moods, consuming the energy of a room or missed opportunities for connection.

Impatience can lead to an agitated disposition, unrealistic expectations, or undermining creative/strategic space.

But caring less, hiding your passion, and slowing your pace to make others feel more comfortable is not a successful strategy.

I work with high performers, and even when imperfectly expressed, these are their superpowers. Do not dim them. Leverage them reflectively and intentionally. Stay conscious of your impact on others, learn to manage your instincts and practise behaviours that help you bridge others’ needs with your own.

And, if you’re ever offered similar feedback, dig deeper. First, thank the person for the insight, then seek to understand. Get clear on the specifics of what’s actually the issue. Ask:

“How is my caring/intensity/pace a problem? In what way is it affecting you/the team unresourcefully?”

Work backwards from the situation-specific opportunity. Let this help you express the virtues of your care, passion and ambition more potently, not less.

Because you know who else is intense, impatient and cares a lot? Every elite performer out there.

—Alex

The change would be significant. It’s not to be made lightly.

For high-achievers, this can be especially tricky. In part, because they share these common strengths:

1. High resilience

2. Solid self-responsibility

3. A strong reputation

And like all strengths, they can also become our weaknesses.

Resilience can mean staying too long and putting up with too much. Self-responsibility is leadership, but taking too much can become martyrdom. Having a strong reputation builds your success, but it can also constrain it.

When we’re struggling to decide if a place (or person) is ‘right’ for us, it’s often because we sense we’re part of the problem. But it’s tricky to get an accurate read on what’s ours vs theirs. What’s your responsibility, and what’s theirs? What’s within your control and what’s genuinely beyond your influence? Do you need greater flexibility or stricter standards?

You could strengthen your communication, set better boundaries, and improve your executive presence (or whatever your opportunities are) … But will it be enough?

That’s the question. And within this question lies the answer.

Get better. Use this tension to propel your own growth. Work on the parts you sense are your part. Then observe if it’s enough.

If you change, and nothing changes, you have a clearer read on where the problem is.

Don’t do it for them, do it for you. And don’t reach for perfection either. If you have to martyr yourself, abandon your needs and sacrifice your wellbeing to stay… it ain’t it.

Do your best. Acknowledge that you’re doing your best. And if your best isn’t enough, decide it’s not best for you.

My job isn’t to tell people whether they should stay or go. There is much arrogance and little value in such a thing. Confidence and clarity don’t come from other people's ideas about us; they come from our image of ourselves. I help clients evolve their self-image. Develop your image, discover your answers.

—Alex

Silence.

A client had just accepted a new role with significant earning potential. She named a target that felt ambitious to her, and I invited her to double it.

In her silence, I watched her face recalibrate as she confronted her “a lot” assumption.

She did double it. Then exceeded it. We didn’t expand her competence… only her imagination. We raised her ceiling.

Rethinking potential

We often talk about achieving our potential, as though it’s a destination. But fulfilling our potential is a continuous journey, defined not only by skills and effort but by what we believe is possible. When our capabilities, values, beliefs, and actions converge, capacity expands, and the cycle continues.

When we start asking, “Am I living up to my potential?”, we usually know the answer… and it’s a painful one. The question arises from the discomfort of knowing we could be more, do more, and have more impact.

Something feels like it’s holding you back. Something tells you, it’s you. That voice is usually wisdom.

And while many sense the possibility, few name it. And if you don’t name it, you won’t see it. And if you don’t see it, you can’t build it.

The word potential means “capable of being or becoming.” So the question is: Who do you believe you are capable of being and becoming?

Changing how you see

Seven years ago, still in corporate, I was struggling with the question “What next?”. One evening, my brother said, “Why don’t you become a coach?”

“I can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked.

And here we are.

I had reasons. They all sounded better in my head. I thought I was being “realistic.” But when I changed the belief, my reality changed with it. So what’s real, exactly?

We all carry quiet convictions about money, love, health, leadership and life. Beliefs about what’s “a lot” and what’s “enough,” what’s realistic and what isn’t, who we are and who we’re not. Those convictions behave like ceilings. Everything in our lives organises itself beneath them.

Einstein put it this way:

“Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.”

In other words, your brain doesn’t just passively absorb reality. It predicts it. And once it’s made a prediction, it downweights evidence that doesn’t fit.

It’s the same principle that makes you miss the peanut butter jar when someone has put it back on the wrong shelf. Your brain expected it elsewhere. So it filtered out the actual data. Predictive Processing theory calls this “controlled hallucination”.

The same mechanism applies when you’re deciding what kind of money you can earn, how good your life can get and the impact you can have. If your theory says a certain salary, opportunity, or partner is out of reach for you, your brain won’t even bother looking for it. You’ll see past potentials as if they were invisible.

And in a way, they are.

Misplaced peanut butter isn’t a visibility issue. It’s a perception problem. If you predict that your potential is out of reach, then your potential becomes your misplaced peanut butter jar.

Detecting the lies we live by

We often mistake our current results for our limits. We accept inherited anxieties as personal truths. We confuse what’s familiar with what’s fixed. But many of the ceilings we live beneath are out of date, unconsciously adopted, or never real to begin with. And most of them persist only because we haven’t examined them.

As Sherlock Holmes said:

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

A large part of my work is helping clients investigate the ceilings they’ve normalised: assumptions about what’s possible, what’s deserved, what’s “too much.” These stories usually collapse under light questioning. What felt like truth was just a well-rehearsed idea.

This isn’t magical thinking or positive affirmation. It’s disciplined perception: examining the predictions shaping our behaviour, outcomes, and even our sense of self.

Raising ceilings you can’t see

To see through ceilings you’ve confused for the sky, start here:

1. Make the view beyond it clearer:
Who do you believe you’re capable of being and becoming? What vision have you avoided naming because of what you perceive it might demand from you? If you knew you would succeed, what would you be doing differently?

2. Name the current theory:
What do you believe isn’t possible for someone like you? What assumptions are you required to leave unexamined for this to remain true? What do you wish you were doing more of, but aren’t - why?

3. Trade ceilings for bridges:
What perceived ceilings are actually choices you’re making? What conditions or beliefs would lead you to make different choices? Fill in the blank: “If I believed _____ I would be more energised to take action towards fulfilling my potential.”

Just twenty minutes answering these questions can shift how you see.

For both my client doubling her income and for me becoming a coach, that first insight wasn’t an entire dismantling. It was an opening to new possibilities. Over time, we took different actions. We gathered new evidence. Eventually, we built new realities.

Start by challenging one ceiling this week. Find the contradictions, the weak spots in the story and uncover what “obvious facts” could be deceiving you.

And give your potential shape. Define what it means for you. Make who you’re capable of becoming as real and familiar as your peanut butter jar.

—Alex

The self isn’t fixed. Our preferences evolve, our values recalibrate, our worlds take on new meaning. What once felt essential can fade into irrelevance, reshaped by time, love, and loss.

Some experiences accelerate that process: falling in love, becoming a parent, or moving abroad. Each shifts your orientation toward the future.

Philosopher L. A. Paul calls these transformative experiences. They change you in two ways:

1. Epistemically: you can’t know what they’ll be like until you live them.

2. Personally: they alter your values, goals, and your sense of self.

Some of these experiences arrive uninvited: a diagnosis, an accident, a loss. Others invite us to choose: starting a business, committing to a relationship, pursuing a creative life. And they all share one defining feature: you cannot predict who you will become on the other side.

This raises an interesting question: when faced with such choices, who should decide—the person you are now or the one you will become?

The limits of logic

We’re taught that good decisions follow from research and analysis, that more information sharpens judgment. But with transformative experiences, you’re being asked to evaluate a future you haven’t lived through the lens of a self that doesn’t exist yet.

“What an experience is like determines the value associated with it,” Paul writes, “and without knowing what it’s like, we can’t reliably project its value.”

This keeps many stuck when faced with decisions defying logic. We wait to feel “ready”. We resist intuition in favour of the “right” decision. But in the case of transformative experiences, current information is always a lack of information.

Think of choosing between a leadership promotion and independent consulting, starting a family or a life of adventure, committing to a relationship or a spacious single life. Each has its own unknowable potential.

Logic helps us compare, but it’s not complete. A pro–con list only helps when the future resembles the present. And some futures never do.

When facing a potentially transformative experience, we’re better off not looking to common decision-making models and instead asking, “Do I want to meet the version of me on the other side of this?”

Let that answer guide you. The decision, then, becomes less about prediction and more about discovery.

Regret isn’t reassurance

Regret tempts us to treat the past as proof. If we regret a choice, we assume it must have been wrong. If we don’t, we decide we must have chosen well. But regret isn’t a reliable measure.

You might choose ambition over love and feel content. But what if both could have grown together? You might stay independent, travel, and feel free, yet the version of you who became a parent might discover a sense of purpose they’d never trade for freedom.

We can feel we made a good choice, but to claim a “right” one? Hard to say. The unlived life will always be a mystery.

No path offers certainty. Therefore, the task is not to pick the perfect one, but to choose with honesty and walk with courage.

And though transformative choices shape us suddenly, everyday ones do the same, but more subtly. The same principles apply at smaller scales.

Our everyday evolutions

It’s not just the dramatic inflection points that shape us. Small decisions, repeated, write different selves into being. The version of you who trained four times a week for a year doesn’t just look different; they think and choose differently.

When faced with daily decisions, we assume our current self decides. We ask, Do I want to go to the gym? And predictably, we reach for excuses. Our current selves are tired, distracted, and crave comfort, burdened by biology and psychology, weighted by the reality of now.

But what if you flipped the frame?

Instead of asking, “Do I want to…?” ask, “Which future self gets to decide?”

The perspective of your future self clarifies things. It’s more objective. The excuses are still there, but they feel less justified.

It’s less about me. It’s more about her.

The ethics of becoming

We tend to imagine our future self as simply “us, but older.” Philosopher Derek Parfit questioned that assumption. He argued that future selves are distinct people, psychologically continuous but not identical. Connected by memory, but separated by change.

Parfit’s idea brings moral weight to transformation. If your future self is partly someone else, then caring for them becomes an ethical act, not just a practical one.

Are you being generous to your future self? Or are you leaving them to deal with the consequences of your convenience?

It’s easy to discount your future self’s well-being because, on some level, they don’t feel quite real. Behavioural economists call this hyperbolic discounting. But they are real. One day, they’ll be the only version of you existing.

Skipping the gym, neglecting relationships, or blowing your savings isn’t just self-sabotage. It’s betraying the future version of you—the you who doesn’t get the health, connection, or freedom you could’ve given them.

Reading over scrolling, walking instead of snoozing, acting instead of procrastinating: more than acts of discipline, these are acts of generosity toward a future self relying on your loyalty.

The tension between you now and next

Every decision balances two claims on your allegiance: who you are and who you’re becoming. Small decisions ask for everyday fidelity. Loyalty over convenience.
Transformative choices demand leaps of faith. A belief that who you’ll become deserves the risk.

When you’re torn between what you want now and who you wish to be later, ask once, clearly: Who deserves the power of this choice, the self seeking comfort today or the one living the consequences later?

It may not feel logical. But it will often be true.

Alex James is an executive leadership coach in Sydney, working with founders, CEOs and senior leaders across seven countries. More at alexstaceyjames.com

We imagine they’ve been handed the holy trinity: enjoyment, meaning, and success. Their lives appear to “make sense” with ease.

What we envy is not their path but their freedom from choosing it.

We desire the freedom of their commitment, but also know, deep down, that a single path carries its own anguish: succeed at this or you’re screwed. When it comes to freedom, what we want is also what we fear. We’re constantly seeking and avoiding both freedom and commitment.

Because while our freedom exists within limits, we are free because we can choose. It is the responsibility of our liberty that feels heavy.

With every choice comes sacrifice. You can pursue anything you want, but not everything. As Ryan Holiday writes, “We don’t have a freedom problem. We have a responsibility problem.”

We long for the relief of having the path chosen for us. It’s why we indulge the ideas of soulmates and fate. But our lives derive their enjoyment and meaning precisely because we get to author them.

The paradox of freedom is this: that infinite options are what make us free, and so is the act of choosing. We don’t need one passion or one destiny to make sense of our lives. What we need is the courage to choose, and keep choosing the things that give it meaning. The things that us feel alive.

As Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree… From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.”

This captures the anxiety that underlies our modern obsession with “purpose.” We ask, What is my purpose? which is not a bad question, but it presupposes a single, predetermined path.

Underneath it, what we’re really seeking is the holy trinity of enjoyment, meaning, and success. And so a better question becomes: How can I experience more enjoyment, meaning, and success?

The first narrows to one answer. The second opens us to many possibilities. Sartre called this “the dizziness of freedom” — the vertigo of infinite choice. But that vertigo is not paralysis. It is an invitation to steady ourselves by choosing.

This is where the French idea of raison d’être (reason for being) adds depth. Unlike our narrow modern interpretation of purpose, raison d’être does not collapse a life into a single career or achievement. To claim “become a CEO,” “write three books,” or “launch a non-profit” as one’s reason for being would be absurd. A true raison d’être sounds more like: to raise kind children, to improve education for young people, to live with vitality, to grow wise and share knowledge.

When we equate career with existential justification, we set ourselves up for fragility. It breeds angst when work feels empty. It ties self-worth to achievements that fade overnight. It shrinks the scale of what a life can mean.

Your raison d’être is not what you do for a living. It is what makes your living worthwhile.

With these ideas in mind, I’ve engineered an LLM prompt to help you explore your purpose and raison d’être. It won’t hand you a single “purpose” because there is no one right fig. But it will illuminate the branches on which your figs lie. It will reflect back what you already know to be true, and for that very reason, find hardest to see.

—Alex

Alex James is an executive leadership coach in Sydney, working with founders, CEOs and senior leaders across seven countries. More at alexstaceyjames.com

For five years as an online creator, I’ve felt passionately about creating intelligent, original and thoughtful content. It pains me to see meaningful ideas bastardised for virality. I’ve ranted about this more than once.

So when I discovered Substack, it was love at first sight. Finally, a place for nuance.

And while revealing nuance is my speciality, and bastardisation is rife, two weeks ago, I was prepared to foolishly die on the hill that brevity forces you to dumb yourself down. Today, thankfully, I’m wiser.

One fine Tuesday afternoon, enjoying my blissful ignorance, I got called out.

A friend, and brilliant writer, told me:

“Brevity demands intelligence. To condense an insight without losing it’s punch is harder than meandering. If you feel your work is bastardised by constraint you’re probably hiding behind length as a crutch”

I sat back, took it in, then laughed.

‘Damn, he was right.’

I suddenly saw my stubbornness disguised as virtue. I thanked him.

The lesson here isn’t really about writing with brevity; it’s about welcoming disagreement.

I love being challenged. To me, it’s a sign of respect (when done respectfully).

Where many might feel offended by disagreement, I feel more insulted when people stay silent. But I haven’t always been this way. My ego hates being wrong as much as the next guy. But I’ve worked hard to tame its tantrums. I’ve chosen to believe that respectful disagreement signals trust: it says I care enough to share, and I trust you to handle it.

Because when we conflate disagreement with conflict, or only engage with those who think like us, we rob ourselves and others of the potential to learn and grow.

As John Stuart Mill poignantly captures in his essay On Liberty:

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

This is why I no longer fear being wrong or challenged. Every sting shows me where truth still has something to teach me. Because while a truth may piss us off, if we let it, it can also set us free.

Today, I pay close attention to the ideas I cling to most tightly. Feeling a need to protect them defensively usually signals that I lack the knowledge to stand by them intelligently.

That’s late-stage capitalism doing its thing.

Power has shifted from external domination to internal self-regulation. It no longer relies on authority, but on aspiration.

“You can do anything” becomes “so you must do everything.”

For high-achievers, this is kryptonite. You’re not pushed by threat but pulled by a compulsion to prove yourself worthy through achievement.

As philosopher Byung-Chul Han says, “We’re no longer repressed, but seduced.”

We’re drawn toward the glow of optimisation, the polished performance, the endless pursuit of being more, doing more, proving more.

Every achievement offers a drug-like hit of relief, until the “not enough” undercurrent settles back in.

Rest feels dangerous. Imperfection brings shame. Compulsive accumulation replaces purpose. Moods rise and fall with output — and we call this ambition.

Hustle culture and compulsive self-optimisation are not flaws of this system; they are its features.

And the genius is its invisibility. No one is forcing your hand. No one else needs to hold the whip. You do.

Somewhere along the way, we agreed our worth would be measured in output. We found ourselves caught between wanting and obligation, between desire and fear.

What’s really eroding us

This cultural contract doesn’t just shape how we work; it corrodes how we see ourselves.

We often talk about burnout in terms of hours and output. But what really wears us down isn’t just overwork — it’s under-respect.

When the system teaches us to value ourselves only for utility, dignity erodes.

It happens in subtle ways:

• Important decisions made without our input

• Feedback only when something’s wrong

• Emotional labour is expected but never acknowledged

• Performance is praised whilst character is ignored

Principled high-performers feel this most acutely. Not because they crave applause, but because they lead from meaning. And meaning withers when you’re treated as a function, not a relational force.

Over time, this external erosion becomes internalised. We start to measure our worth by output alone. We sacrifice health, relationships, even curiosity — telling ourselves it’s discipline, when really it’s self-devaluation.

This is the hidden cost of seduction: it doesn’t just extract our labour, it distorts our self-respect.

Redesigning ambition

The work is not about abandoning ambition but reclaiming it. The goal is to unhook from cultural conditioning, so ambition is powered by integrity rather than seduction.

A few practical shifts I work on with clients:

1. Craft to External Reward Ratio — Aim for 70% intrinsic love of your work, 30% external rewards like status or pay. Mixed motivations aren’t wrong — but make sure the fulfilling parts lead.

2. Ego-Validation to Soul-Satisfaction — Ask: Where does my ambition come from — wholeness or lack? Ego-validation is insatiable. Soul-satisfaction fuels purpose and transformation.

3. Excellence Over Superiority — Strive to be your best, not the best. Comparison is natural but rarely productive. Aim to be good, not better.

4. Check Your Motivations — Desire for control makes you lose trust. Desire for understanding makes you curious. Hunger for approval makes you people-please. Hunger for connection makes you honest.

These aren’t quick fixes, they’re reorientations — ways of loosening culture’s grip and re-establishing integrity at the centre of your drive.

Toward self-mastery

Ambition can be a blessing or a curse. Left unexamined, it turns into self-betrayal. But aligned with authentic desire, it energises. It fuels performance and fulfilment.

This is motivational integrity at scale: the congruence between your true drivers and your actions, your purpose and your ambition, your fulfilment and your success.

But awareness alone doesn’t create agency. To examine motive is to ask, What moves me? To practise self-mastery is to ask, How do I meet, work with, and redirect what I find?

More on the practical practice of self-mastery soon…

Thanks to thousands of hours exploring, studying and getting to know the inner landscape of this archetype, I’ve observed a pervasive pattern that, when left unchecked, defines our destiny:

The reliance on fear-fueled motivation to achieve and its cost to our fulfilment.

Why fulfilment matters

Fulfilment, as I use the word here, doesn’t mean happiness in the fleeting, emotional sense. It’s something deeper and far more enduring. It’s closer to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia — the grounded contentment that comes from living in alignment with your values, integrity, and your potential.

While modern cultural narrative tends to treat ambition, ethics, and personal wellbeing as competing forces, eudaimonia reminds us of their interdependence. It insists that a life of integrity is the path to our fulfilment.

In the context of your motivations, this distinction matters. Because success that isn’t aligned with your truth may impress others, but it will never satisfy you.

I help high-achievers rewrite this fear-fueled achievement pattern. Because with utter conviction, I am here to tell you that the best way to achieve your potential is through your fulfilment, not in spite of it. That ambition is most sustainable when driven by pleasure, purpose, and intrinsic motivation, not by the avoidance of inadequacy. That true success is not born from fear.

The mechanics of fear-fuelled achievement

We’ll do more to avoid pain than to pursue pleasure. It's a truth of human nature, and many success frameworks rely on it. The problem is that this approach can only help you achieve a pain-free state, not an optimal one. It’s a trap because if fear of pain is your fuel, you must continually manufacture fear to fulfil your desires.

For high achievers, the common manufactured fear-fuel is:
I am not enough. Never doing enough. Never achieving enough.

And to a degree, this works. It motivates. But to maintain it, you must reject contentment, because if you ever let yourself feel “enough,” the whole system collapses. So the path feels strained, and the destination, hollow.

Inside the psyche of the unfulfilled high-achiever lives a haunting belief:

If I feel content, I’ll become complacent. If I’m complacent, I’ll fail. If I fail, I am a failure. And if I’m a failure, I’m unlovable.

Which leads to a painful ultimatum: Either I love myself, and no one else will. Or I don’t love myself, and others might.

And as relational beings, if those are the only options, we’ll always choose the latter.

Even if you become skilled at bouncing from one achievement to the next, as many high achievers do, two problems remain:

1. A drive fueled by the need to feel lovable is desperate, frantic, and fragile.

2. Even the wins are bittersweet. You want to feel loved, but not for jumping through hoops.

For the high-achiever, ambition promises growth, success, even fulfilment. But too often, it's powered by hidden fears rather than honest desires. We chase goals not because they’re meaningful to us, but because we fear what it might mean if we don’t achieve them.

And these misaligned ambitions don’t just fail to satisfy us, they take us further and further from our path. One day, we wake up feeling like strangers in our own lives, unsure what lights us up at all.

“Why Am I like this?”

(A question high-achievers love to ask)

This pattern begins in childhood.

Most of your early efforts were externally defined and evaluated. A familiar narrative seeds itself in your psyche:

“When you get good grades, follow the rules, and achieve impressive things, you are more lovable.”

Getting an ‘A’ in algebra probably wasn’t your heart’s desire at age eleven, but the fear of disappointing Dad was. So you performed. Not for the love of maths, but for the safety that came with approval.

Alongside academic expectations, you absorbed countless other moral frameworks. From social etiquette to work ethic, you learned how to behave to be accepted, respected, and safe.

Not all of this is bad, of course. Getting to work on time and being polite to strangers are good standards. But the point is that by adulthood, many of your choices are no longer freely made but are performed from unconscious conditioning.

High-achievers, despite their strong sense of personal agency and value on freedom, often find themselves controlled by an invisible web of internalised “shoulds.” They think they’re pursuing self-defined goals, but they’re performing adopted expectations.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT Deci & Ryan) defines this as Introjected Regulation, a form of motivation where external pressures have been internalised. You act not from true volition, but from conditioned demand. You no longer need to be forced; you’re forcing yourself.

Whether a child is taught to seek moral standing through religious obedience or social standing through worldly achievement, we see guilt and fear used as internal self-regulators. But in both cases, the deeper motive is the same: a longing to feel loved and accepted.

It’s easy to judge religious guilt as oppressive while overlooking that the same dynamics govern secular striving.

Contentment ≠ complacency

Here’s what most fail to recognise:

That “contentment equals complacency” only applies when doing something you don’t enjoy or find genuinely valuable. (Like algebra)

Let’s say you love playing soccer, do you quit after winning one game? Of course not. Winning is a milestone, not the reason you play.

We must remember that feeling content and feeling complete are not the same.

Fear is only necessary when you lack pleasure, purpose, or genuine interest to pull you. When your goals align with authentic desires, contentment and ambition can coexist.

The aim isn't to stay fearful. It’s to discover what pulls you and keep your attention focused, and refocused, there.

Here’s how Self-Determination Theory maps the continuum of motivation:

• At one end is intrinsic motivation: actions you take because they’re inherently meaningful or enjoyable.

• At the other end is extrinsic motivation: actions driven by outcomes, approval, or pressure.

[Note: This graph uses “Internal Pressure” in place of ”Introjected Regulation”]

As you can see, SDT shows us that the closer a goal is to the right (intrinsically motivated) side, the more you enjoy persistence and performance alongside pleasure and gratification. Their study revealed that learning, wellbeing and creativity also improve in this context.

This is why goals aligned with interests, values, and enjoyment lead to better performance. It’s also why the infamous high-performance state named 'flow’ is related to greater feelings of fulfilment and defines personal interest as a prerequisite.

And SDT recognises that not all external goals are problematic. Extrinsic motivation can become integrated when aligned with your values and freely chosen. The problem is that many high-achievers mistake internalised pressure for true volition, and that confusion makes the cost harder to detect.

Fear can drive achievement, but it cannot sustain fulfilment.

When your ambitions are aligned with genuine desires, then contentment and ambition no longer cancel each other out. They reinforce one another.

Toward the cultural layer

Even if you see this pattern in yourself, the culture around you still rewards fear-fuelled striving. Workplaces, social feeds, and even our language of success reinforce the idea that your worth equals your output.

In other words, the trap isn’t only psychological, it’s systemic. And until you see how culture seduces your ambition, you’ll be working against a current you can’t name.

That’s where we’ll go next: how late-stage capitalism quietly hijacks our motives, why dignity erodes when we’re treated as functions rather than forces, and what it takes to reclaim ambition with integrity.

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As long as you misunderstand purpose, you might forever believe you lack it. And as long as you misdirect consistency, you may be so distracted that you forget purpose matters at all.

We’re told that success comes from being relentlessly consistent — but consistent about what? Most people aim their discipline at the wrong level of their lives, and then wonder why they struggle to find meaning. Consistency is effective when you put purpose first. Otherwise, being flexible is the true flex.

Clients often come to me with one of two challenges: they lack clarity about their purpose, or they cannot seem to stay consistent with their habits. These are interrelated, but not in the way most people imagine.

The popular understanding of purpose is that it is a single grand, lifelong mission — a clear and specific direction for one’s career, perfectly matched to one’s strengths. Bonus points if it involves helping save the world.

Consistency, in turn, is commonly understood as the tactical discipline of daily habits: the ability to keep doing something over and over, no matter what, with the implication that a lack of consistency signals weakness of character or willpower.

There is some truth in these definitions. There is, after all, some truth in most bad advice.

A truer understanding of purpose is this: it is one or a few abstract statements that reflect what a person deeply cares about and is most interested in pursuing. It is a guiding thread that can inform both life and work, revealing infinite possible paths for its fulfilment. It rarely changes entirely, though it may evolve as one’s priorities shift.

It is less “Coach 100 CEOs by age 50” and more “help people live and lead better.” Less “transform the U.S. education system for underprivileged kids” and more “improve education for children and be a great mother to my daughter.” Less “become a social media influencer on literature and philosophy” and more “improve public discourse.”

These are statements of higher abstraction, expressions of values-based interests rather than tactical goals. When clients struggle to define their purpose, they’re usually overthinking it. We want precision and certainty, but purpose asks for a tolerance of ambiguity. That ambiguity is what makes it so abundant in possibility.

There’s also a psychological principle at work here: equifinality — the idea that there are many possible paths to reach the same destination. When your highest aim is broad and abstract, it allows for multiple, shifting approaches over a lifetime. The more superordinate your goal, the more resilient you become when circumstances change, because you are not married to a single path. Understanding this makes it easier to see why consistency should be reserved for the highest-order goals — the ones broad enough to survive a change in tactics.

The specific ambitions — “coach 100 CEOs,” “launch a nonprofit,” “write three books” — are simply goals you might pursue to live your purpose. They are not the purpose itself.

The French, known for living well, have no exact translation for “purpose.” The closest is raison d’être, “reason for being.” To claim that “writing three books” is one’s raison d’être would be absurd. A reason for being might instead be to raise kind children, cook beautiful food, grow wise about the world, enjoy nature, solve creative problems, build meaningful relationships, help others, or any combination of these.

Once you have that higher abstraction, you can move toward defining lower ones — more specific aims. If you feel your raison d’être is “to help others” and you have a passion for health and fitness, maybe your purpose is “to help others live with vitality.” This may take many forms, from fitness training to cooking healthy meals for your family, to writing a blog or studying mindset. The goals change; the raison d’être, for the most part, remains.

While I don’t agree with everything Jordan Peterson says, I do appreciate his description of the power of purpose: “If you follow the thing that manifests itself to you as interesting, it will lead you through adversity. It’ll lead you to do difficult things…as you hit yourself against the world, pursuing what you’re interested in, you’ll tap yourself into alignment.”

In other words, a purpose not only tolerates multiple paths; it strengthens you for the challenges on those paths. And this matters for consistency because grit and discipline are far easier to sustain when you care deeply about where they are taking you. Interest and meaning generate an intrinsic motivation that keeps you engaged long after novelty wears off — which is precisely what most people are missing when they say they “can’t stay consistent.”

Consistency, in its truest sense, is the steady application of focus toward your highest aims. It matters most in the pursuit of your raison d’être, far less in the daily churn of low-level habits.

Modelling kindness for your children matters more than keeping your inbox at zero. Honesty in friendship matters more than replying instantly. Protecting your mental health matters more than taking creatine every morning. The worth of a task is measured by whether it strengthens your ability to live your values — everything else is secondary.

Yet most people focus their consistency at the lowest level of their lives, on tactical habits and to-do lists, rather than at the top, on their most meaningful pursuits. This is not entirely their fault. The internet has capitalised on the collective unease about not “having purpose” by offering the seductive comfort of perfect morning routines, biohacking tips, and get-rich-quick schemes. These are fast, easy, and cheap. They promise measurable progress without requiring you to confront the ambiguity of higher-order goals. They do not solve the real problem; they distract you from it.

Everyone is so busy tracking their steps, optimising their inbox, and obsessively tinkering with the ‘perfect’ morning routine — as if the right sequence of stretches, mushroom powders, and productivity hacks might reveal the meaning of life — that they lose sight of where consistency matters most.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these things; they can sharpen your mind, boost your energy, and make the rest of your life run more smoothly. My morning rhythm is sacred to me and absolutely supports my work. But before I had a clear purpose, it felt forced and brittle… as if missing a single day would undo my progress. Now it serves a higher aim, is led by values, and flows from meaning rather than the performance of discipline.

The difference is in where it sits in the hierarchy. These habits are supporting acts, not the main event. They’re the means, not the end. When they become the centre of your discipline, you risk perfecting the process and neglecting the purpose. The result is a perfectly maintained structure with nothing meaningful inside it.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth, known as “the high priestess of Grit,” describes grit as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” The key, she explains, is to be tenacious at the right level of your goal hierarchy. She agrees that the mistake people make is to apply grit to tactical goals rather than to the larger, more abstract goals that give life meaning.

Lower-level goals should be flexible. Higher-level goals should be uncompromising.

The rarity of truly accomplished people lies in their ability to sustain engagement with these higher-order aims beyond the honeymoon period, to maintain a quieter, more enduring form of passion. That is where consistency belongs.

These two struggles I hear most often, not knowing your purpose and not staying consistent, are, in fact, the same problem. When you aim your discipline at what matters most, consistency becomes far less of a fight. And when it’s aimed at the top, it tends to sustain itself… because, as with any meaningful pursuit, it pulls you forward instead of having to push yourself toward it. And when you have that higher-order aim, it should free you to be far more flexible at the bottom of the hierarchy. That flexibility is not a weakness; it’s what keeps you adaptable, lowers needless stress, and opens more paths to live out your purpose.

The point, then, is not to be consistent for consistency’s sake. It is to be consistent in the service of something that matters enough to you to justify the effort. Everything else can be negotiable.

Alex James is an executive leadership coach in Sydney, working with founders, CEOs and senior leaders across seven countries. More at alexstaceyjames.com

On energetic truth and self-deception

Our motivations are the invisible catalysts of our actions.

What you do can look the same. Why you do it changes everything.

Running because you signed up for a local fun run, or running to hide from the police because you stole a car… different.

Agreeing to an opportunity because you feel obliged, or agreeing because it sounds freaking fantastic for you… different.

Sharing a success to celebrate, or sharing it to seek validation… different.

Our motivations are often unseen, but rarely unfelt.

They shape the energetic truth of our actions, whether we realise it or not. And in life and leadership, that distinction is everything.

Generosity with silent strings breeds resentment.
Shallow praise to cushion criticism lands as an insult.
Performed care creates a fake connection while gradually eroding trust.

And yet these seemingly harmless acts are done every day, often by good people — even great leaders.

Underneath the disparity between intent and outcome is a misalignment between motive and action. You might tell yourself you're being kind or supportive. But if your true motivation is control, fear, manipulation or self-protection, then kindness becomes a mask.

Psychologists call it incongruence, and philosophers call it bad faith. It’s the betrayal of pretending, even to yourself, that your motives are pure when they’re not.

Your intention becomes a kind of self-deception. Strategy replaces sincerity.

The act might look noble, but it doesn’t feel that way to others. What they can’t name, they still sense. The incongruence is felt and relationships suffer.

Even unverifiable instincts cause damage

It’s relationally disastrous when motive and action are out of sync, for the very fact that it’s tricky to call out. Its intentional ambiguity makes it messy to address directly. So instead, people adjust around it. Usually, by trusting your word less.

You know this is true. We’ve all (unfortunately) known a manipulative type (or two). You probably trusted them for a while. But when the truth eventually came out, you said, “I knew something was off.” Their presence made you feel uneasy, confused, maybe anxious.

This happens in less sinister and more socially acceptable ways, too.

Like telling a white lie about why you’re cancelling plans.
Pretending you’re OK with a team member’s chronic lateness when you’re not.
Asking for less than what you know your work is worth.

These might seem insignificant. But they carry consequences.

They’re subtle but corrosive. Harder to repair precisely because they’re unspoken. They shape how safe others feel with us and how safe we feel to be ourselves.

And no amount of sophisticated self-delusion or deception can shield you from the reality of your motivations. When it comes to your why for any action, the truth always prevails. You reap what you sow — eventually.

The good news is that the opposite is also true. When you act from alignment, people feel that, too. In a world full of sinister motives, sincerity is magnetic.

The more you can trust yourself and be trusted, the better life gets.

Because where sincerity leads:
Being caring because you care builds lasting bonds.
Genuine acknowledgment, paired with honest feedback, creates trust.
Giving without expectation cultivates loyalty.

Same actions. Aligned motivations. Superior destiny.

Integration

In his essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:

“Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”

To live your virtue is to align your principles, motives and actions.

This kind of integrity requires inner cross-examination:

• What is my dominant motivation? What’s secondary?

• What do I stand to gain from this action?

• Is this an honest expression of my motivation, or an attempt to obscure it?

Your motives don’t need to be perfect, but they do need to be honest. As Emerson reminds us, people don’t just respond to what we say or do; they respond to the atmosphere of our presence. Our unvoiced motives beneath our actions speak.

And in an interdependent world, how people respond to our presence has enormous consequences for our future. Therefore, to practise this cross-examination is to craft a superior destiny.

Lately, I’ve felt an urgency to get this down on paper. Maybe it’s because I keep watching good people hold themselves back while others reach for power without earning it. Or maybe I’m just tired of seeing leadership reduced to jargon, acronyms, and LinkedIn posts.

Part one lays the groundwork for how I think about leadership — the foundation that everything else builds on. I hope it challenges some assumptions and expands your thinking.

If any of this hits home for you, I'd love to hear about it. Please share!

Rebranding Power

As a kid, I liked breaking the rules. Hated being controlled or contained. I grew up thinking power was that frustrating thing others had over me.

To have power, it seemed, meant to suppress others’ freedom. What I didn’t realise then was that my passion for freedom was power, just expressed differently.

Maybe you’ve felt something similar in your life, too?

Each person reading this will bring a unique lens. Your gender, your upbringing, your politics, even your personality – all of it shapes how the word ‘power’ lands for you. And most of us have learned to see it as something we should avoid rather than aspire to.

"To want power" sounds like an accusation.

We immediately picture someone hungry for control, dominance, or status. We’ve been conditioned to see power as a zero-sum game where someone winning means someone else loses.

And for those who abuse power, this misunderstanding is helpful. It keeps good people from claiming it, and lets harmful power flourish unchallenged.

What I invite you to consider is this: if you’re not choosing power, what are you choosing instead? Because the alternatives aren't neutral. They're helplessness, dependency, fear, and resignation.

What if we could flip the narrative?

What if the power of love, not fear, were recognised as the most vital force for creating change?

Because this kind of power exists.

You may not see it yet, but the more you recognise it, the more capacity you have for it. This is why we’re here.

What You’re About to Learn

• Why good people must lead

• Why we resist power

• How we corrupted the meaning of power

• The true meaning of power and its three forms

• The quiet strength of relational power

• The leadership foundation of personal power

I hope you enjoy reading this. I trust you’ll learn something. And most of all, I want you to leave changed.

I invite you to let this shift how you see yourself, the world, and your place within it.

Why Good People Must Lead

“Power Corrupts”. It’s the popular rhetoric.

Many principled people aren’t ambitious for it — understandably so, when it seems to represent everything they stand against.

But consider this:

How many passionate conversations have you had about the lack of impressive political leaders?

And how many people do you know willing to take their place?

How often have you complained about a terrible manager, but when those same roles open up, would you raise your hand?

I’m not implying you should choose these paths, but it’s a curious pattern.

We see the problems. But we hesitate to become the solution.

Too often, when we recognise injustice or a lack of integrity, we respond with resignation instead of action. And our complex relationship with power is one reason why.

When we demonise power itself, high-integrity people back away from it — leaving seats of influence to be filled by those either unaware of their impact or, worse, eager to abuse it.

Then we point to those examples and say, "See? Power corrupts." It's a vicious cycle.

I learned this in my own career. The hardest part of hiring exceptional leaders wasn't finding them or even training them — it was convincing them they were worthy of the role. I'd sit across from incredibly capable people who would insist they weren't “right” or “ready” for leadership.

And this isn’t a new insight. It dates back to 375 BCE, and it’s part of why we’re in the mess we’re in today. As Plato writes in The Republic:

“The state whose prospective rulers come to their duties with least enthusiasm is bound to have the best and most tranquil government, and the state whose rulers are eager to rule is the worst.”

If you’re the kind of person who cares deeply about your impact, please keep reading. This is for you.

It’s time to reclaim power consciously and wisely.

Why We Resist Power

When I ask you to picture a "powerful person," what comes to mind?

CEOs? Politicians? Physical dominance? Your boss?

You wouldn’t be wrong, but you would be describing only one form of power: Positional Power.

Positional power is based on hierarchy. It operates through control, coercion or fear. It’s power over others.

It’s also the least sophisticated form of influence — more aligned with force than true power.

According to Western philosophy:

• Force is coercive pressure that compels action

• Power is capacity or potential, expressed in many forms

Eastern traditions offer further nuance:

• In Taoism, force represents rigid effort, while power with natural flow

• Buddhist philosophy distinguishes between coercion and the power of compassion

To me, force is false power — or more bluntly, lazy power. It’s what people reach for when they lack the skill, wisdom, or patience for real influence. And controlling the actions of others is not something principled people tend to enjoy much.

“Because I told you so” management approach? No thanks
The intentionally too-tight handshake to intimidate? Gross
Elon Musk’s spiral? Cringe

While our conditioning connects power to corruption and force, associating it with manipulation and control, it’s understandable that we’re repelled by it. Who wants to become that person?

But here's what I've learned after years of studying truly effective leaders...

Positional power alone is never enough for true leadership. And for the great leaders I’ve known, it wasn’t even necessary.

How We Corrupted The Notion of Power Itself

The Latin root of power is posse, meaning simply to be able.

Early English uses carried this same meaning: power as innate or natural capacity to do, act or be something.

Hits differently, doesn’t it?

In the last decade, three things helped me reconnect to this meaning:
1. Meditation
2. Learning tools of self-mastery
3. Reading books like Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

These emphasised power, but not as dominance or control. They revealed the power of presence, choice, and our ability to craft meaning, even in the most difficult of circumstances.

As I worked with these ideas, something shifted.

I started facing fears with more courage, accepting things outside my control with more ease, and taking responsibility for my own experiences with more confidence. Thus, my capacity to do, act, and be expanded. True power.

So, how did we lose this idea?

• 12th–15th centuries (Medieval Period): Feudal structures embedded “power” as sanctioned or coercive ability to rule, command or enforce. Think Lords and Kings.

• 16th–18th centuries (Renaissance & Enlightenment): Political philosophy reframed power as sovereignty, government and social contracts — the legitimacy or right to act over others

• 18th–19th centuries (Industrial Revolution): The rise of machinery and empires gave power a material, mechanical meaning. It became associated with dominance, control of resources and institutional authority

This shift from ability to control reflected:

• Growing societal complexity

• The need to describe hierarchies and governance

• The rise of institutional powers: religious, political, military and economic

As human systems evolved, so did our language. Power shifted from “I can do” to “I can make others do.”

In this context, Positional Power is almost a corruption of the concept itself. And while language has shifted, the essence of power — “innate or natural capacity to do, act or be something” — is still alive and well.

Why does this matter now?

Because when we unconsciously inherit the corrupt definition of power, we unconsciously limit our potential. The more aware you are of power’s true potential, the better positioned you are to harness it for good.

The True Meaning of Power

Power isn’t good or bad. It amplifies what already exists.

In the hands of the self-serving, it magnifies greed. In the hands of the principled, it becomes a force for care, justice, and change. Power doesn’t create character—it reveals and extends it. That’s why it matters who holds it.

If power is capacity, then it helps to understand the different ways that capacity shows up.

Most expressions of power fall into three forms:

Personal Power — power within ourselves
Relational Power — power with others
Positional Power — power over others

They aren’t opposing forces. And they’re not in competition.

The most effective leaders draw from all three.

Think of Martin Luther King Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or even a nurturing parent. Their power wasn’t limited to position — it came from presence, conviction, and care. Power wasn’t the goal. It was the channel.

So before we explore each form in depth, take a moment to reflect:

1. How might a dear friend describe your character?

2. What might be possible if those traits were amplified with intention?

3. Would power, expressed through those traits, be something the world could trust?

The Quiet Strength of Relational Power

Earlier, I asked you to picture powerful people. It’s unlikely your first thoughts were of:

• A mother creating and protecting life itself

• A mentor who believed in your potential before you did

• An emergency ward nurse making life-or-death decisions

• A writer shifting cultural consciousness through their craft

• Firefighters risking their lives to save strangers

Yet I suspect, on reflection, you’ll agree: these are powerful people.

The common thread? Their power affirms and enriches life… it deepens trust, it inspires action without demanding it.

This is Relational Power — power with, not over.

Relational power doesn’t enforce systems; it transforms people from within. It draws from inspiration, shared purpose, respect, love, reciprocity, and collaboration. People act not because they have to, but because they want to.

The most effective leaders I’ve worked with led this way.

I recall one, he was far from perfect, often inappropriate, and regularly self-sacrificing, but he had a good nature and great sense of humour. He uplifted and energised everyone around him. He was fun to be around, and people knew he had their backs. That was his power.

For another brilliant leader, her consistency, presence and careful listening earned deep respect and loyalty. She was down-to-earth, clever and reliable. People trusted her and were inspired to rise to her standards. That was hers.

These leaders weren’t using humour or presence as tactics to get people to follow them. They were being themselves. Imperfect, yes, but their good intentions were felt, and their humanity and values made people naturally want to follow.

What made them unique was what made them powerful. Any attempt to not be someone they weren’t from a place of insecurity would have diminished their natural authority.

This is the trap many principled people fall into. They believe:

• That they have to mimic someone else’s leadership style

• That influence comes from charisma or control

• That to lead, they need to become someone "more" than who they already are

The correlating assumption being: to successfully influence, I must become someone/something I’m not.

I disagree.

What Relational Power teaches you is: If you genuinely care about people and have solid self-awareness, you don’t need to try to be powerful; you need to realise you already are.

Yes, there are skills to learn that help you leverage this in leadership. But when you have principles and character, you’re already 80% there. What’s next is to trust yourself.

Integration Questions:

1. Where have you seen love or trust act as a powerful force—in yourself, your relationships, or social movements?

2. When did you choose an uncomfortable truth over a convenient lie, and what made that choice powerful?

3. Who are the three people who’ve most positively shaped your life, and what was the true source of their influence?

The Leadership Foundation of Personal Power

“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.” — Lao Tzu

Last but not least, the power to beat all powers… Personal Power.

Good intentions aren’t enough. We’re all shaped by unconscious conditioning and biases, often operating inside systems that reward behaviour misaligned with our values.

In other words, without personal power, positional power can corrupt.

Personal Power, power within oneself, is therefore the most important. It is the foundation upon which all other forms must rest if they are to be ethical, generative and sustainable.

It is not granted by title, status or relationships. It is cultivated through conscious inner work. It is, fundamentally, the ability to shape oneself.

The commodification of scalable leadership development has meant overlooking this crucial aspect of leadership. Simple structures, neatly packaged frameworks and two-day group workshops don’t speak to the depths that personal power requires.

Memorising a set of repeatable tactics on topics like ‘how to build trust’ is only a small part of the picture. The real question is how honestly you can answer Yes to:

Can you be trusted?
Do you trust yourself?
Do you trust your people?

This is Personal Power.

I remember losing my cool at a team member in the middle of a meeting once. She’d pressed my buttons and was in the wrong, but I reacted unconsciously. That night, I didn’t sleep, tossing and turning, certain it made me unfit to lead, and deeply mortified for my actions.

The next day, she acted like nothing had happened. My shame wanted to pretend it never had, too. But instead, I pulled her aside and apologised. She was surprised, admitting she was in the wrong and hadn’t given it a second thought.

I told her I wasn’t okay with how I handled it. Not because of her reaction, but because it didn’t align with the standard I hold for myself. That moment taught me something...

Personal Power isn’t about perfect action. It’s:

Holding the standard when you don’t have to.
Choosing integrity — even when no one’s asking for it.
And of course, taking the lesson and changing. I never reacted like that again.

The goal of personal power isn’t faultlessness. It is the ever-evolving capacity to self-govern, the inner ability to discern, decide and direct one’s life with wisdom, power and choice.

Borrowing from Stoic philosophy, this is my Personal Power framework:

• Mindful awareness — seeing truth within oneself and the world

• Wisdom — making skilful choices aligned with values, knowledge and intuition

• Self-leadership — acting from intention, not impulse

• Courageous integrity — standing by truth and justice, even under pressure

• Harmonisation — a coherence of mind, body and spirit

The more developed your Personal Power, the greater your capacity to:

• Lead with presence, equanimity and clarity

• Amplify benevolent potential through positional and relational influence

• Become a trustworthy leader of power in any system

Integration Questions:

1. When did I choose a mindful response over a reactive impulse, and what was the outcome?

2. What daily choices show that I prioritise my values over convenience?

3. Do I consider how my actions affect others, and how has this been a strength?

The Invitation for Principled Leaders

Has your understanding of power expanded? Has your awareness of your own power deepened? Can you see why it matters for principled people like you to claim it?

I hope so.

This isn’t a pitch for power. It’s a call to liberate it, in principled people like you.

As self-aware individuals committed to fairness and growth, we have a responsibility to unravel our unconscious conditioning about power. Whether or not you choose to formally lead others, I invite you to adopt a higher standard in your relationship with power. This allows you to amplify your potential.

If principled people like you continue to resist authority and influence, we all lose. And when you reclaim it consciously, we all win.

But I’m not confused.

Becoming a natural leader isn’t about adding more. It’s about unbecoming all the unnatural ideas you’ve absorbed about leadership over time.

Our most natural state is often where our greatest leadership potential lies.

The high-control, trust issues, conflict avoidance, self-doubt, and perfectionism — those aren’t who we are. They’re learned mechanisms. Protective patterns that formed in response to unideal circumstances, then calcified into habits.

Your leadership potential exists in the parts of you so innate, you barely notice them.

At its core, leadership is rooted in service, compassion, and courage. These qualities tend to surface naturally when we’re not caught in anxiety or locked in survival mode.

Which is the tricky thing, right?

Modern life tries to keep us there.

Fear is a powerful motivator, and entire systems are built on it. From cultural myths to corporate hierarchies, we’re constantly nudged into scarcity, urgency, and comparison.

This is where our responsibility as leaders comes in.

The more we cultivate internal calm, navigate truth with grounded presence, and develop natural authority through mutual respect, the less hold those fear-based systems have on us.

And the less hold they have on us, the more effective our leadership becomes.

The Key To Leadership Feeling Natural

Many see me as a “natural leader”. And in some ways, I am — leadership has always felt intuitive to me.

But it’s not because I was born with some charisma or confidence gene. Nor because I had some special skillset either. It was a different lens through which I saw leadership.

My parents were deeply aware of how social conditioning shapes our sense of worth and hierarchy. And they actively worked against that.

I watched them choose respect over status, values over wealth, equality over hierarchy. Because of that, leadership never felt like something that made me more important or special.

Leadership simply felt like a choice to step in and support when a situation called for it. I saw it as an invitation to help people, challenge myself, and develop relationships.

I wonder if that resonates more for you?

Having worked with principled high performers for years, I see that this version of leadership already lives in them. They just don’t resonate with traditional models built on status or dominance.

You don’t want to be “in charge.” You want to connect with people, support others and grow — but not at the cost of authenticity.

The Leadership I Teach

I’ve recently learnt just how differently I see and teach leadership.

Mainstream leadership development tends to focus on frameworks, tactics, and tools. And sure, those are useful. They offer structure. But a structure without a deeper foundation doesn’t hold up under real pressure.

The leadership I teach begins (and ends) with posture: a way of being in relationship with yourself, with others, and with the world.

Your posture is a values-based orientation that guides your goals, decisions, and actions.

We’ve been misled to believe leadership is a skillset complemented by a particular personality. But true leadership is a philosophy grounded in principled character.

The difference?

One is about who you are when people are watching.
The other is who you are when they’re not.

When you embody leadership as a philosophy, it doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels like alignment. And when you’re in alignment, leadership becomes energising and impactful — not just for others, but for you, too.

Living up to your potential feels good. And I don’t mean how many accomplishments you accrue. I mean:

• How solid your sense of self is

• How attuned you are with your values

• How fully you express your gifts

• How deeply you fulfil your desires

Leadership helps you do all of that… and more.

My Vision for Leadership

If we want better workplaces — and a better world — we don’t need more rehearsed frameworks.

We need more conversations about integrity and humanity. About the nuance of what it means to lead well.

We need to invest in becoming professional humans, not just professional managers.

My work as a coach and creator is dedicated to deeper, more honest conversations about leadership.

I am for the high-integrity, high-achievers who are committed to mastery, meaning, and impact — but don’t see themselves in traditional models.

My work begins by asking different questions:

What would it mean to lead,
not as who you think you should be,
but as who you truly are — with a steady commitment to becoming your best self?

What would it mean to lead,
not because you have to,
or because it pays well,
but because you genuinely want to serve?

What would it mean to lead,
not from a rigid set of structures,
but from a grounded set of values?

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Coming Soon: Rebranding Power

The two forgotten powers, the invisible influence of the best leaders, and how we’ve corrupted the concept of power itself.

There are quieter forms of power — and they’re often the most transformative.

We’ll go there next. Because leading with integrity starts with understanding power and your relationship to it.

I was sensitive, contemplative, and shied away from the limelight.

According to my memory, the leaders were the dominant personalities—the confident kids who naturally took charge. Looking back, I realise how wrong I was.

Recently, while rummaging through old keepsakes, I stumbled upon something that surprised me.

In primary school, I was ‘Prefect’, the leadership role voted in by peers and teachers. And in Scouts, my favourite after-school activity, I held the title of 'Sixer', leading a pack of boys.

I'd entirely forgotten about both positions, which struck me as curious…

Despite never seeing myself as a leader, not seeking the role out, nor considering it special enough to remember, I was often invited into these positions.

With hindsight, I realise I was unaware of my influence, and I've noticed the same pattern in many of the best leaders I know.

Today, with almost two decades of leadership experience, I've learnt:
The people who crave to be “Boss” are often the worst at it.

Those loud, dominant personalities I once mistook for leaders weren't leaders at all… they were bullies.

The Leadership Crisis We're Not Talking About

There's a growing trend of people opting out of leadership. And I get why.

But what's not being said is who is opting out.

It's not everyone—it's the high-integrity people. The ones who:

• See systemic issues

• Are deeply aware of their impact

• Refuse to compromise their values

In other words, those best suited to lead.

And you know who's not opting out?
The power-trippers, low-integrity types and the bullies.

Is it possible you were a kid like me?
More of a leader than you consciously remember?

Did you perhaps:

Enjoy helping others without needing recognition?
Notice when someone wasn't included, and try to include them?
Sacrifice for siblings or friends because it felt like the right thing to do?

If so, I'm glad you're here.

When you shy away from leadership, those with less integrity gain more opportunity for most authority.

The world needs more leaders like you.

Peeking At The Possibilities

This crisis is why I'm beginning this conversation. This is an invitation to look a little deeper for your leadership potential

Many of us have a funny relationship with the concept of leadership. We recognise it when we see it in others, yet often fail to see it in ourselves.

This is the beginning of a series exploring leadership beyond the conventional title. It speaks to principled high performers—the forces for good who rarely recognise the extent of their influence.

It’s about leadership, NOT as a performance but as a philosophy.

If you've found your way to this, there's a good chance you have natural leadership qualities hidden in plain sight… qualities our world desperately needs.

Is this you?

• You have high standards and value excellence

• You're thoughtful, perhaps introverted, and prefer depth over dominance

• You care deeply about your impact, sometimes to the point of overthinking it

• You question whether leadership positions are "worth the sacrifice"

• You often doubt whether you are ‘made’ for leadership

What you may not realise is that the very qualities making you hesitant about leadership—your dedication, integrity, and thoughtfulness—are precisely what make you the kind of leader our world desperately needs.

If you've ever thought, "I'm not leadership material" while simultaneously being the person others naturally turn to for guidance, this series was created specifically with you in mind.

My intentions for this project

I want to help you:

1. Better understand what true leadership is—and isn't

2. Recognise and embrace your natural leadership potential

3. Learn the philosophies and principles that underpin grounded, effective leadership

So that you can:

1. Make confident and informed decisions about your own path

2. Expand your sense of what opportunities are available to you

3. See leadership as a fulfilling pursuit, whether or not you've previously aspired to it

This series is my contribution to the leadership conversation, particularly for high-integrity high-achievers. Over the coming months, I'll share what it means to become a natural leader and why this approach fundamentally differs from conventional leadership training.

If we want a better world and better workplaces, we need more leaders of integrity—like you.

This is just the beginning of our exploration. If it’s resonated so far, stay tuned.

With love,
Alex

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P.S. Even if you don't see yourself leading teams, this is still for you. We're all leaders of ourselves, in our relationships, of our pursuits. It just depends on what degree you choose to see it and act it.

It was my favourite time of day. My hour-long commute to work… a few final moments of 'peace'. I’d listen to podcasts, feeding my starving soul before another anxiety-riddled Groundhog Day. (It’s impressive, really, how well certain work environments pull off fear and boredom simultaneously.)

I’d been a successful sales leader for a decade. Sales wasn’t the passion, but leadership was. I suspected a more aligned path existed, but supporting my team kept me happy-ish.

Then I was poached for a promotion. (Cue ego froth) I was sold the dream into a strategic management role overseeing a $40m portfolio. Instead of guiding people, I was buried in complex data and preparing 40-page proposals to present in fancy boardrooms.

I looked successful. Sounded powerful. But I was climbing a ladder that was quietly killing my soul.

As I pulled into the car park this particular morning, Michael Bernard Beckwith’s voice through the speakers pierced my trance…

“Pain pushes until the vision pulls”

It struck me. I was well aware of the pain. So what then was the vision?

That question was the crack. It felt like a dark crevasse because I didn’t have the answers. But it was finally letting the light of possibility in.

Outwardly, that day looked ordinary. Inwardly, something had shifted. His words spoke purpose into my suffering. I took his words as a call to arms. I’d been pushed plenty. It was time to be pulled. The question now begged, by what?

Three things I wish I’d known sooner about personal transformation

I'd love to tell you it got easier after that, but I'm not a liar.

The space between deciding you're fed up and figuring out how to feed yourself can be brutal.

You stop tolerating what once felt bearable, which is progress. But your outer world takes time to reorient with inner transformation. This creates an existential tension.

This phase is sacred. But it also sucks. Here’s what I wish someone had told me:

1. You’re not lost, you’re in ‘Liminal Space’

Liminal space is the psychological waiting room of transformation—the Latin root limen meaning "threshold." You're no longer who you were, not yet who you're becoming, often accompanied by a sense of unease or being ‘out of place’.

It was at this point, I entered this threshold.

I thought I should know what was next. I craved clarity I couldn’t grasp. I felt like a stranger in my own life.

Often, the more profound the inner shift, the louder the dissonance with your current reality. Despite the discomfort, the contrast is a signal of growth.

That emptiness you feel, while tormenting, is full of potential. As Jerry Seinfeld notes, "Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void."

What we experience as ache is insight on its way in–wisdom finding its way to us.

“We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative.” — Alan Watts

The temptation in this phase can be to close the crevasse as quickly as possible. But hurrying is a mistake. Your aim here is to widen that gap of ‘not knowing’ by asking the big questions… like, who am I beyond my labels and titles? What does success mean to me? What am I willing to suffer for?

2. When your old world starts to collapse, let it

I promise it gets better, but first, it gets worse. I call this phase Constructive Reality Demolition. This is where your physical world starts catching up to your inner transformation.

As you hang in liminal space, old structures that gave you security and comfort crumble. What once felt solid becomes unstable.

It’s easy to perceive this instability as regression. But when you outgrow your current reality, stability shakes, and while it feels like punishment, it’s more preparation. Welcome to your initiation.

You've:

• Decided you’re no longer available for a certain reality

• Elevated meaningful standards for how you choose to live

• Transformed core beliefs that have reshaped what's possible

When these core elements shift, it’s like tectonic movements—disrupting our worlds until elements reshape around their new form. Your reality isn't 'falling apart because you failed, but because you outgrew it. Things aren't burning down because you screwed up, but because you set them alight.

It's constructive demolition. Your deeper wisdom is making you move. Perfect.

Still, chaos triggers the urge for certainty, which can look like:

• Reaching for old comforts

• Trying to control the uncontrollable

• Procrastinating on meaningful progress

Resist the urge to revert. Allow the burn strip to away the unnecessary. Let it reveal what truly matters.

“The old world falls apart, and a bigger world is revealed.” — Joseph Campbell

3. A little self-delusion is productive, even necessary

Ok, it starts to get fun now. Rewriting your new story takes more imagination than you’re used to. You’ll need faith in a version of yourself you haven’t met yet. That’s why I call this Productive Self-Delusion.

Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep mapped the rite-of-passage phases: separation, transition, and incorporation. This part is incorporation.

A new story is being written—by you.

You’re not just reacting to the world as it is anymore. You’re creating it. Deliberately.

If your purpose terrifies you, good.
If your vision feels too audacious, perfect.
If your dream is meaningful enough that it could break your heart, that’s the one.

In other words, it needs to matter.

The bolder it is, the more Productive Self-Delusion you’ll need to back it.

Truth is, most people settle for mediocre aims because failing at something we're only half-invested in hurts less.

When you imagine being fired from your mildly satisfying job, it stings. But when you imagine pursuing your passion and failing—ooft, ouch!

Those leading the most meaningful lives and achieving true success aren’t fearless–they embrace fear more. They bare their souls on the altar of their passionate pursuits, risking most but winning more.

The more significant your purpose feels to the evolution of your soul, the bigger the risk it will feel to your heart. That's how you’ll know it’s real.

Imagine you could be, do, or have anything.
Go big, or go back to the pain. Those are your options.

Ignore the whispers, make excuses for why you’re “not ready”, and you’ll only prolong the suffering of denying who you know you could be.

The only way to fail is not to follow the call.

Life After Liminal Space

I promised you it gets better, and that I’m not a liar…

Four months after my casual existential crisis, I had my second life-altering moment. Amid my liminal turmoil, I was offered the dreadful gift of clarity on the path I desired.

The dissonance between where I was and wanted to be was so stark I couldn’t bear it… and so, the vision pulled.

Three months later, I handed in my resignation.
One month after that, I boarded a one-way flight to Canada.
Fast forward five years, and I’ve built the business of my dreams.

My shift was dramatic, but it’s a mistake to think yours has to be.

Transformation can be born from shifting worldview, values or a slow realisation of a desire you’ve suppressed. It might feel incredibly significant internally, but require very little external change.

It’s also an error to expect utter clarity and confidence on the utter side. My path has not been without a zillion challenges. I’ve questioned and doubted a million times. The difference is, you can’t unsee what you’ve seen. Transformation reveals truths that change you.

Deciding to pursue your vision is a one-way street, which sounds like a warning, but it’s a profound gift. That commitment is freedom.

The takeaway

If you’re seeking meaning, feeling pushed by life, or in the messy middle of your own liminal space, this is for you:

1. Pain is a signal, not a mistake. When it pushes, don’t just ask “how do I escape this?” Ask, “What truth is trying to pull me forward?”

2. Let things crumble. Especially if it wasn’t truly nourishing you to begin with. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to stay steady amidst chaos.

3. Choose ‘unrealistic’ visions. Believe in a vision so epic it makes you think “who am I to have this?!” That’s not delusion, it’s devotion.

Your becoming will probably be messy. Confusing. At times stunning, others tender. This is the price and the privilege of living a life pulled by a vision.

Remember, you are not lost. You are being beckoned by a calling of a more unified whole.

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A Pause for Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Change

“Pain pushes until vision pulls” isn’t just a motivational quote for me now; it offers me grounding wisdom about life.

The push-pull dynamic relates to two Taoist concepts:

• Taijitu (yin-yang), where opposing forces create wholeness

• Hsian Sheng, or “mutual arising”, which describes their interdependent nature.

Light is known because of dark. Knowing is born of not-knowing. Fulfilment is understood only through contrast with hollowness.

Those moments of discomfort in liminal space and demolition are like the contrasting dots within the symbol - the "seed of the opposite" beginning to restore balance. When yang (external success) reaches maximum expression, the seed of yin (inner truth) emerges.

For me, corporate success represented yang — structure, ambition, and momentum. It gave me status, security, and a sense of power. But too much yang creates overextension, burnout, and disconnection.

My yin—my intuition, creativity, spirit—was being starved.

When we pursue success at the cost of self, life eventually demands recalibration. Sometimes gently. Often violently.

That imbalance becomes an invitation to integrate. To remember the parts of ourselves we’ve neglected. To redefine what is meaningful to us.

Destruction is sacred rebalancing. Pain is the friction of something truer trying to emerge.

We don’t transform by clinging to certainty but by letting go of outdated definitions, misaligned goals, even former versions of ourselves.

“Each force exists only in relationship to its opposite… take one away and the other ceases to exist.” — Reg Harris

We are not here to choose between clarity or chaos, purpose or pain, courage and fear. We’re here to hold both, and let the dance between them shape us.

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In twenty minutes, I would be approaching the most dangerous airport in the world, landing on its 30-degree angled runway.

I would be starting a 15-day journey I'd dreamed of for 15 years.

Ever since my Dad spoke of his desire to hike the Himalayas, I'd envisioned it.

I knew I'd go one day, but I thought it would be with him.

Despite being a fit, strong 74-year-old, Dad's heart condition meant he would not be joining me.

I'd never considered the possibility of doing it without him. I'd never attempted anything like this.

It was too far beyond my realm of experience to reach the level of certainty I had previously made life decisions.

I have a high risk tolerance, but I still had an unconscious benchmark of comfort that guided my life.

This dream didn't fit that.

It was not on the edge of my comfort zone; it leapt beyond it.

Something I've learnt is that when our brain observes gaps in experience, it associates them as something to be afraid of - which is far from true.

When we’re afraid, it’s rarely a sign that something is wrong. The anxiety is (often, not always) reflective of it being new.

My burning desire to go, combined with my complete lack of preparedness, resulted in a profound life change.

Whilst curled up on the couch in my apartment one winter evening, one simple sentence changed the trajectory of my life:

‘Say Yes. Then figure out how.’

It sounded preposterous. I’d spend my entire life doing precisely the opposite - seeking certainty before starting was the sensible, responsible, and safe thing… or so I thought.

As far as I knew, the correct strategy was:

• Get your “ducks in a row"

• Figure out ‘how’ to get it right first

• When you’re confident of success, then commit

Reflecting on the bold but wise invitation on the page, I realised how many years I’d wasted waiting to feel ready, believing fear was a problem to be solved.

It had meant not fulfilling this dream with Dad.

I felt the grief of my lack of action. I decided I wouldn’t be available for robbing myself of more meaningful ambitions.

Silently, I declared: This philosophy would now be my guiding principle.

This seemingly mundane moment became a revolution - a defining moment in my life.

Clarity and certainty were no longer considered prerequisites but instead outcomes of my commitment.

With certainly no longer required, everything became possible. An infinite world of opportunity revealed itself.

Those 15 days in the Himalayas were still, to this day, the most magnificent of my life.

To imagine I could have let that experience slip through my fingers while clinging to certainty is devastating.

Nine years later, this guiding philosophy has taken me light years beyond where I thought possible:

• Living abroad as a nomad

• Discovering my passion for Thai boxing

• Building a global business doing work I adore

The secret to success with this formula?

Become more devoted to your desires than your fears. Trust yourself. Decide that no matter what happens, you’ll handle it.

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Questions to explore:

• What do your actions reflect you’re most devoted to right now?

• What are you getting to experience or avoid through this direction of your devotion?

Pausing, I checked my map… 'damn, wrong bus stop' I realised. I turned in the right direction according to my earlier plans. Not a soul in sight.

Observing the swarms of people heading in the opposite direction, I doubted myself. They all knew exactly where they were going… safety in numbers.

'My path must be a silly option if no one's choosing it', I momentarily assumed. I had to make a decision. So I decided to trust myself.

I was about to embark solo on one of the most arduous hikes in the Bernese Oberland. As I trod towards the abandoned forest beneath the towering cliff face, the sun of the European heatwave beating down, I noticed my nerves.

'A touch more blissful ignorance would be nice', I thought. I was (unfortunately) very aware of how tough a 1 km elevation climb in the scorching heat would be.

As I reached the trailhead, I spotted the peak I'd be ascending and checked my map for a Plan B to clarify if a mid-mission abort was possible. Nope.

'Last chance, are we doing this?' me, myself, and I discussed.

It was an easy ‘Yes’.

Moments later, the overgrown canopy enveloping me unexpectedly opened to reveal a stunning glacial waterfall…

Pristine pastel blue water gushed between moss-covered limestone and towering majestic pines. The dappled sunlight sparkled on the dancing droplets. A light breeze gently brushed my cheeks.

I stood in awe, feeling the power in its roaring current, enjoying the perfect warmth of the golden light through the lush green roof.

Bliss enveloped my entire being. My nerves dissipated with such conviction that it was like they’d never existed.

I suddenly recalled the hundreds of people I’d left just minutes ago. ‘How on earth is it possible I have this whole place to myself?!" I smiled so big I almost pulled a cheek muscle.

It was like I was being serenaded by Mother Nature. We were at a romantic spot for two, and she was saying, "Good call, babe. I've got you."

I felt like I'd stumbled upon a secret. Which I had, but not in the way I first thought.

The spot was clearly marked on the map. It was my strategy of seeking my own path, which was a mystery to the masses.

As I hiked in solitude up the strenuous and rewarding trail, they shuffled in a crowded yet convenient race straight to the top.

The following eleven hours of hiking were some of the most gruelling and magnificent of my life. Happy didn't come close. I was in ecstasy.

The physical challenge felt like ease thanks to the joy consuming me and my devotion to the direction I'd chosen. In reality, all I did was keep walking toward my desire. But the truth is, that's not as easy as it sounds.

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Thousands of people caught the chairlift that day. Straight over the spectacular waterfalls, local farms and quiet mountain villages in order to fight for the “prime” position and get the perfect photo of the “Top Spot”.

I saw six people on my eleven-hour hike.

That ratio accurately represents how many people dare to walk their unique path today.

And not without good reason.

My hike, just like the many other choices I’ve made in life, have been:

• Tougher

• Riskier

• Taken longer

But, my dear friend, I discovered that when effort, fear and patience don’t turn you off… when heart, courage and resilience become your standard, a world of infinite opportunity exists for you.

The challenge, the commitment, the journey- those aren’t sacrifices. They’re the rewards. That is where you find fulfilment.

Choosing the wrong path is how you find your right way.

I beg you to choose it.

About Your Right Path

If you’re tempted to search flights to Switzerland and plan a hike, I get it, but we both know that’s missing the point.

The compelling nature of my experience might suggest that this adventure is the pathway to freedom. And this is precisely the mistake we too often make: confusing someone else's joy/success/freedom as the path to our own.

As a heuristic, it makes sense. But as a life strategy, it leads to diminished fulfillment, misdirected energy, and a persistent sense that something isn't quite right.

Thanks to social media, this is dreadfully easy to do. We are drowning in the noise of other people’s choices, curated carefully to look like what we desire.

The trouble being:

When we loudly doubt our intuitions, we blindly follow external expectations.

When we disconnect from what turns us on, we settle for what tickles our fancy.

When we forget we possess the courage to diverge from the crowd, we move through life in a haze of false comfort—believing we're safe because we're not alone. But nothing feels more lonely than self-abandonment.

The exhilaration I expressed wasn't a result of the spectacular views or physical achievement. It was the resonance my soul experienced, thanks to my actions harmonising with my most honest desires. That's the real magic.

This story isn’t about climbing mountains but about discovering your own.

This is an invitation for you to discover your own irreplaceable enchantment.

Question: What trail are you not taking because no one else seems to be on it?

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