When Success Starts Asking Different Questions
There’s a hum…a specific vibration inside us. If we listen carefully, it’s trying to tell us something…
There’s a moment I’ve seen again and again in leaders’ lives, and it rarely arrives with fanfare. It doesn’t show up as a crisis or a collapse. More often, it creeps up quietly, as a low-grade hum that’s hard to shake. From the outside, things look good. Sometimes very good. The milestone has been reached. The role is solid. The résumé tells a coherent story of progress and competence. Friends and colleagues say things like, “You’re crushing it,” and they mean it.
And yet, internally, something feels off. That hum gets louder.
The work that once felt energizing now feels heavier. Decisions that used to come easily take more out of you. You find yourself daydreaming at odd moments, not necessarily about escape, but about something different, something truer, though it’s hard to name exactly what that is. You’re not unhappy in a way that would justify blowing everything up, but you’re no longer satisfied in a way that lets you keep going on autopilot. There’s a growing sense that your outer life and your inner truth are no longer fully in sync.
I think of this as success-driven dissonance, and it’s far more common than we tend to admit.
When this dissonance shows up, most ambitious people default to one of two moves. The first is to freeze. You notice the discomfort, but you decide to ignore it. You tell yourself this is just a phase or fatigue. You break out the gratitude journal. You keep delivering, keep performing, keep meeting expectations, all while slowly disengaging from the parts of yourself that are trying to get your attention. Over time, this can turn into a kind of quiet languishing. Nothing is obviously wrong, but nothing feels fully alive either. All the colors just get subtly…muted.
The second move is to escalate. If this milestone didn’t do the trick, maybe the next one will. A bigger role. A more visible platform. A harder challenge. The same ambition that carried you forward before kicks back in, and you double down on achievement as a way to outrun the discomfort. Sometimes this works for a while. Often, it just pushes the dissonance further down the road, where it tends to come back louder and more insistent. The hum becomes a hornet’s nest.
Both of these responses are understandable. Both are rooted in competence and drive. And both can quietly make things worse.
There is a third path, though it’s the one we talk about least. It doesn’t involve freezing, and it doesn’t involve converting to #DigitalNomad to live that #VanLife in #Bali. It involves sense-making. Slowing down just enough to listen carefully to what the dissonance is actually pointing to, without panicking or self-sabotaging. Taking the inner vibration seriously, while also respecting the real responsibilities, relationships, and systems you’re embedded in. Asking not “How do I escape this?” or “How do I overpower this?” but rather “What is trying to come into focus here, and how do I move toward it deliberately?”
This kind of work isn’t flashy. It doesn’t produce overnight transformations or dramatic reinventions. What it does produce is clarity. A clearer understanding of what still matters to you, what no longer does, and what needs to change so that your ambition and your integrity can coexist rather than compete. It allows people to stay in the arena, but on terms that feel more honest and sustainable.
I’ve lived this moment myself, and I now encounter it frequently in my work with senior leaders. It’s one of those thresholds that, once you’ve crossed it, you start to recognize everywhere.
Alongside my work with teams and organizations, I’ve begun doing a small amount of private advisory work with leaders navigating this exact moment. If this reflection resonates, you’re welcome to reach out. No pressure, sometimes the most important thing is simply having the right conversation when the vibration inside you starts getting louder.
