Not Every Story Your Mind Tells Deserves Your Unquestioning Agreement

There are seasons when life asks us to move differently than we'd planned. This year has been one of those seasons for me.

A variety pack of health challenges has required me to slow down, pace myself, and accept that my capacity isn't what it used to be. While I haven't always welcomed those limitations, they've uncovered something I wasn't expecting — the stories I tell myself about productivity, self-worth, and what it means to make meaningful progress.

The hardest part hasn't been having less energy. It's been the nagging fear that I'm falling behind. That fear doesn't need much help these days. Everywhere I turn, someone is telling me that AI means we should all be moving faster now — that slower is no longer an excuse.

So the fear has a constant source of fuel.

That fear has a way of creating a vicious cycle. When I feel like I'm not doing enough, I'm tempted to push harder. Pushing harder leaves me more depleted, which slows me down even more. Then the fear returns, whispering that I need to do more, faster.

For a long time, I mistook that cycle for motivation. What I'm learning instead is that progress doesn't have to be fueled by adrenaline. It can be fueled by acceptance.

When Colorado Forgot the Sunshine

A few winters ago, Colorado forgot how to be Colorado.

It was the dreariest winter I had endured since moving here. Many mornings I woke up to dull grey clouds blanketing the sky with the persistence and sheen of duct tape, sticky side facing out.

The weather led to the dull drums. And before I knew it, I was weaving stories of how I couldn't handle a cloudy day.

When I believed the stories, every task became harder. I fought wave after wave of resistance, which zapped my energy even more. Lo and behold, the struggle persisted.

One morning I woke up to ripples of grey clouds covering the sky, hiding the sun so well I couldn't help but wonder if it tripped at the horizon and didn't get back up. I took a deep breath and sighed as I exhaled.

Before I launched into my usual internal story time about cloudy days, a thought popped into my head. What if the weather this winter is offering me an opportunity to reorient?

What if the problem isn't the weather, but the story I keep telling myself about it?

This was the beginning of a transformation. It's when I decided to detangle my productivity from needing to feel hyperactive. I had a lifetime habit of operating from a high level of activation and charge. I was addicted to feeling energized, inspired, and excited in order to tackle my work full throttle.

Without the sunshine, I worried I wasn't as productive. I felt mellow instead of energized.

And because mellow felt unfamiliar, my mind quietly translated it into something much more threatening, you're not doing enough.

Familiar Doesn't Always Mean Safe

Our brains are remarkable prediction machines. They're constantly making sense of our experiences by drawing on what's familiar. And our nervous systems often confuse what's familiar with what's safe.

For much of my life, urgency felt familiar. Deadlines. Pressure. Crisis. A full calendar.

Ironically, those conditions often gave me energy. Adrenaline created momentum, and momentum felt productive. What didn't feel productive was a slower, steadier pace.

Peter Levine, the psychologist who developed Somatic Experiencing, describes trauma as anything that happens too much, too fast, or too soon for the nervous system to process.

When that happens, the body doesn't just remember the event — it reorganizes around protecting itself from it happening again. I think about that definition often now. Not because a cloudy winter was traumatic, but because it helped me understand why slow had started to register as a threat, and why speed had started to feel like the only safe way to move through the world.

Without realizing it, I'd internalized the belief that if I wasn't operating at full speed, I wasn't performing good enough. Slowing down didn't feel restorative — it felt like giving up.

That's one of the many ways our adaptations become mistaken for our identity.

"I work best under pressure." "I just push through." "This is what commitment looks like."

The stories that keep us stuck rarely sound like fear. They sound like responsibility.

Ambition. Resilience. Or simply, "This is just who I am."

But what if those aren't character traits? What if they're adaptations?

That winter, I started to find focus in the stillness. I taught myself to operate from mellow instead of sinking into despair by inviting stillness into my body through somatic practices. I coined a phrase that helped me orient, my goal on those days was to make gentle progress.

From a place of compassion, I was able to keep a steady beat of both work and rest so my efforts fit my capacity. I shifted away from my orientation of all or nothing thinking one embodied moment at a time.

Learning to Trust a Different Kind of Progress

This year, I find myself accepting the invitation to embrace an even slower pace with my work. That has been far more uncomfortable than I expected — and far more countercultural than it was a few winters ago. It's one thing to slow down when the world isn't watching the clock too closely. It's another to do it now, when the message everywhere is that speed is no longer optional.

When you've spent years associating urgency with effectiveness, a calmer pace can feel unsettling. My nervous system didn't initially interpret "steady" as productive. It interpreted it as stagnation.

The fear wasn't really about my health. It was about what my health challenges stirred up. Would I fall behind? Would I lose momentum? Would I still accomplish what matters — in a world telling me everyone else is moving exponentially faster?

Those questions weren't coming from reality. They were coming from stories I'd accepted without much examination.

The more I've practiced radical acceptance of my current reality, the more I've started rewriting one of those stories. The new one sounds something like this: things are unfolding exactly as they're supposed to. I've been granted the time and space to prioritize my health, so that I can give sustainably.

I don't always believe that story yet. Some days I still believe the old one. But I'm noticing something surprising when I lean toward the new one. Progress is still happening. Not always in ways that are obvious day to day. Not always at the pace my ambition — or the algorithms — would prefer. But it's happening.

What This Means for Leaders

I hear a version of my own story almost every week now, in conversations with leaders who are exhausted.

One client described it to me as getting stuck in action. He needs to keep doing and doing, but feels like it's never enough. He’s constantly living in fear that there will never be enough time, so everything has to be crammed in. He knows, in the way we all know these things somewhere in our bodies, that the pace isn't sustainable. And still, slowing down feels impossible so he continues to push.

I don't think that's a personal failing. I think it's the same nervous system logic I lived out that grey winter, playing out in a leadership role instead of a home office. Pushing harder feels like the responsible thing to do. It rarely occurs to us that pushing harder might be the thing making it worse.

Leadership isn't about ignoring reality — or outrunning it. It's about responding to reality with clarity instead of fear. That begins by recognizing the stories we've mistaken for truth, especially the ones that sound less like fear and more like professionalism.

Challenge Accepted

Sometimes the bravest thing we can question isn't to fight the obstacle in front of us. It's to question the story that tells us who we have to be to overcome it.

This week, notice one story you've accepted without question. Maybe it's the belief that you have to push harder. Move faster. Keep pace with everything that's changing. Maybe it's the story that slowing down means falling behind, or that your worth is tied to your output.

Before accepting that story as truth, get curious. Ask yourself these questions (inspired by The Work of Byron Katie and adapted with a focus on the body):

• Where is this story coming from?

• How does believing this story feel in my body?

• What if the opposite were true?

• What could be possible if I didn't believe that story?

Imagine what's possible when we stop believing everything we think. When we honor reality instead of resisting it. When we recognize that some of our oldest stories aren't reflections of our character — they're reflections of how we've learned to survive.

We can begin writing new stories, grounded not in urgency or fear, but in the quiet confidence that meaningful progress doesn't require abandoning ourselves to create positive change.

That's a challenge worth accepting.