After leaving my corporate role over 18 months ago, there was so much I had to unlearn about my relationship with my work.
I used to think that if I could just get through the next deadline, the next project, or the next demanding stretch, things would settle down.
There was always a next thing.
When I left corporate, I was expecting a different chapter, however it’s been no different with entrepreneurship, in fact, there are a million more “things”. Establishing my focus, niche and branding, building a new website, finding clients, cold calling, reaching out, following up, social media exposure, workshops and content building, the list is endless.
And even when a few things came off my list, I didn’t necessarily feel any different. My mind was still moving. My attention was already on what needed to happen next. Slowing down didn’t come as naturally as I thought it should.
The pressure and stress didn’t shut off when I left corporate, it just switched environments.
I remember a lesson I learned long ago when I left America to live in India for several years which was that: You can change your job, your city, state or even continent but your unhappiness, sadness, or problems will follow you if you don’t address and deal with them.
I knew that applied to my personal life but I never thought it would apply to my nervous system or my professional work habits.
Over the last 18 months, I’ve become much more aware of the relationship between our patterns, our internal state, and the way we move through our lives.
My nervous system has been part of that learning, but the bigger lesson has been about how we operate, what we normalize, and what we may need to do differently.
These are five things that changed how I think about success, pressure, and well-being.
01 – Regulation is part of your internal foundation.
Regulation is the ability to recognize your internal state and develop greater flexibility in how you respond to it.
It’s not about being calm all the time. It’s about being able to recognize what’s happening internally and respond intentionally rather than automatically reacting when demands or challenges arise.
02 – Awareness has to come before recalibration.
Before you can change a pattern, you need to recognize it. What triggers the urgency? What expectations are you carrying? What are you telling yourself in the moment?
I found myself glued to my computer for hours, working late into the night, convinced that everything on my list needed to be done right away. I was operating in urgency ALL THE TIME rather than the actual demands in front of me.
Why was I trying to build my business as quickly as possible? Why couldn’t I just build it slowly and intentionally? My nervous system telling me it was an emergency, when in fact, it wasn’t.
I realized if I didn’t become intentional about how I operate, there will always be another reason to stay in go mode.
03 – Your standards need to account for your whole life.
Professional standards are rarely left to chance. We show up on time, work late, exceed expectations, work through lunch… and our health, relationships, energy, and recovery often receive whatever is left over.
Professional standards aren’t the problem. The problem is that we define them explicitly at work but don’t treat our personal standards the same way. Recalibration means being more intentional about your personal standards too.
04 – Knowing what to do and being able to do it are different things.
I’ve been sitting with the fact that I’ve taught yoga for 12 years and studied the science of stress for at least eight, yet I still found myself burned out and dysregulated.
How did I get there when I knew what to do and understood the impact stress was having on me?
Understanding the value of rest, healthy routines, or time away doesn’t automatically make it easy to implement them. Knowledge alone doesn’t necessarily change how we behave under pressure.
It wasn’t until I hired my own coach that I began to uncover something important: the beliefs and mindsets shaping how I operated were part of what kept me stuck in activation.
I needed to look beyond what I knew and examine what was driving my behavior.
05 – Lasting change requires examining the beliefs beneath your behavior.
There will always be another technique, strategy, or hack promising to change your life. And sometimes those things genuinely help. A podcast can offer a new perspective. A workshop can create a breakthrough. A conversation can help you see something differently.
But a moment of clarity isn’t the same as lasting change.
What matters is what happens when the inspiration fades, the demands return, and you find yourself facing the same situations that triggered your old responses.
Many of the beliefs we operate from have been with us for years. We may believe that being dependable means always saying yes, that our worth is tied to what we accomplish, or that slowing down means we’re falling behind.
We rarely stop to ask whether those beliefs are still serving us.
Until we do, we can keep adding new strategies while operating from the same underlying assumptions.
The biggest shift for me hasn’t been learning how to do more, manage more, or push through more effectively.
It’s been honest self-awareness.
Learning to pay attention to how responding, recognize the patterns and beliefs shaping my decisions, and recalibrating my internal operating system.
It’s not the kind of self-awareness that simply helps us identify a problem, but the kind that asks us to look honestly at our own patterns, expectations, and choices.
Because before we can change how we’re operating, we have to be willing to see it.
If you’re at a point where you know something needs to change but aren’t quite sure where to start, I’ve created a free guide to help you begin.
What Needs to SHIFT? is a short, guided exercise to help you identify where pressure is showing up, recognize recurring patterns, and explore what may need to change.
Until next time.
Sam
One Shift | Coaching & Integrative Wellness
Helping you build the internal skills for sustainable performance.