Hey Reader,

In my organization, there was this one partner who had become almost infamous. I didn’t work with him closely, but most of us knew one thing about him: he proudly said he was going to retire at 50, years before partners typically retired.

Nobody believed him.

From the outside, nothing about his situation suggested he should want to leave. He was highly respected, seated at the top of the organization, and his work was excellent. He had everything that most of us work hard for. No one could understand why he would walk away from it all when he didn’t have to.

But when the time came, he retired. Right when he said he would.

I’ve thought a lot about that story. What strikes me now isn’t how unusual his decision was. It’s how clearly he could separate the external feedback he received from the internal question, “Do I still want this?”

It’s one of the toughest questions senior leaders face, and the majority avoid answering it at all. We can’t always explain that kind of dissonance without sounding ungrateful. We can barely explain it to ourselves.

When we’ve been performing at a high level for a long time, the rewards accumulate. We get recognition, compensation, status, stability, and the sense that we matter to our organizations. And at the simplest level, those rewards feel good. They reinforce what we hope for in our lives. At a neurological level, they work exactly as designed: Our brain’s reward system responds to anticipation of a win, the dopamine spike when we achieve it, and all the external rewards that come with it.

But there can be a point where those external rewards and praise just don’t light us up in the same way. Research from the University of Michigan has shown that ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ are two separate systems in the brain. The drive to pursue a goal is mediated by different neural mechanisms than the feeling of achievement. In plain terms: You could want something intensely and feel very little when you actually get it.

For us senior leaders, who’ve been successful for a long time, this can show up in a specific way. The wins and praise keep coming. But over time, those external markers of achievement feel less rewarding than the last. Our brains adapt to that level of success, and the reward signal diminishes even as the performance stays high. And because nothing seems wrong from the outside (certainly not from what you’ve been told), there’s no signal telling you something has changed. So many of us stay in the same place thinking we’re the problem. In reality, we may need to reconsider what success means to us, no matter how crazy that might look to others.

If you’ve been feeling this lately, there is a practice you can come back to regularly.

Think back over your last few significant wins. The ones that really mattered to you (or were supposed to matter but didn’t feel as great as they should have). Answer two questions for each win:

• What did this do externally?
  • Did you secure a new client? Did you get any external rewards? Did you hit an important target? Did you receive any praise?
• How did you feel when the win happened?
  • Forget about how it should have felt or how you described it to other people. Really think about how that win felt for you.

If there’s a consistent pattern of wins looking significant from the outside but falling flat on the inside, that gap is worth paying attention to. You’re not ungrateful for feeling this way. This information is telling you something about the distance between what you’re being rewarded for and what you truly care about.

You’ve already proven you’re good at the work, so that’s not the question here.

The question worth sitting with is: “Is this success taking me toward a future I want, or is it just showing me what I’ve become very good at doing? Those two things can look identical from the outside for a very long time. From the inside, they feel different. And you’re the only one who can tell them apart.

That partner knew the difference. He’d known it for years. The praise never confused him about it. And it’s okay to take the time to work out what that success looks like for you.

If you’ve been dealing with that gap lately, I’d love to hear your experiences with it. Hit reply; I read every response.

From one human to another,

There are five traps that keep leaders stuck. Which one is driving you?

Not sure? Take the ​quiz​ to find out which one fits you.

The human side of leadership is something I've built my keynote around. If that's a conversation you'd like to bring to your organization, you can find out more by clicking the banner below.

​​​

600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246
​Unsubscribe · Pre​ferences​