A lot of my friends and clients look at my coaching business and my career and say they see nothing but straight predictable lines. They see a 30-year corporate career and an easy transition into coaching CEOs and senior executives when my position was eliminated in 2016.

What they don’t see is that my first impulse was to go into consulting, and it took a good friend to remind me that I was passionate about coaching before I even considered trying to do it full time.

What they don’t see is two years of struggling with confidence about IF I could help someone, let alone WHO I could help and HOW to talk to them about it.

What they don’t see is the sleepless nights I spent thinking about my rapidly depleting savings and when (and how) I would have to find a “real” job.

What they don’t see is the hard conversations I had with my wife, my panic bubbling underneath the calm, confident exterior.

What they don’t see is the crippling fear I had that my business was going to completely dry up at the beginning of the pandemic.

What they don’t see is that even today I track how many months of savings I have.

Doing something new is terrifying. Most people don’t fail. They just don’t stick it out long enough.

Do you remember the Magic Eye illusions? If you look at the picture below, you may not see anything unusual at first. But if you focus beyond the picture, a deeper pattern emerges (if you see it, leave a comment).

It hit me recently that this is a lot like our experience of life. On the surface, it seems like life is “out there,” outside of us. That the circumstances of our lives create our experience, and determine our happiness.

But the only way we can experience life is internally. Our sense organs and brains constantly take inputs and create an experience. Each of us has our own experience, uniquely flavored by our prior experiences and our current feelings.

At the same time, I really don’t seem to be in control of the experience that shows up. Like the weather, it constantly changes. When I’m feeling bad, I have a bad experience. But if I wait, if I allow things to settle, I seem to have a default setting toward a better experience. And toward a deeper wisdom coming through.

There is something that is incredibly freeing about this. That we don’t have to figure everything out. That we have access to a deeper wisdom if we only allow space for it.

What can you let get better, just by leaving it alone?

My client had just been offered a C-Suite role. Her first.

And she found herself gripped by thoughts that she was not ready, that she did not deserve it.

That she was not enough.

This has been a constant theme in her life. It’s one of the things that drives her success. If you’re not enough, you never stop working.

But it’s exhausting.

“How do I stop thinking these thoughts?”

“I’m not sure anyone can control their thoughts. I still have that thought from time to time. Most leaders do.”

“Then what do I do?”

I have some bizarre thoughts from time to time. But most of them just pass on through. Some thoughts, though, seem more solid. More frequent. They bring a certain feeling, in my stomach or my throat.

They look real.

But we think we are our thoughts when we are the thinker.

The thinker is like the sky. Pure and open.

The sky is unaffected by the storms that pass through.

And if you see that you’re not your thoughts, you can feel the same way.

You feel whatever you happen to be thinking. And that’s always changing. But you’re not. Like the weather, if you don’t like your thinking, just wait and it will change.

Do you get stuck in your thinking? What if you stopped trying to stop?

Many of the leaders I work with come to me thinking that more time working means more results. That the goal is to push as hard as possible without burning out.

One CEO, who I’ve been working with for the last two years, used to make an analogy to cars. Every week, he would assess how busy he was by talking about RPMs.

Most cars can run at about 8,000 RPMs before they run into serious trouble.

But If I asked him how the engine was running, and he said 8,000 RPMs, I knew that was the bare minimum he would accept from himself. There were times he said 11,000 or 12,000 RPMs, when the business was really cooking. The question was how long he could maintain 11,999 RPMs.

At some point, though, he saw what all of my clients see, even as they resist all the conditioning that taught them otherwise.

They see that the breakthroughs happen in the pauses. They see that the more ease they can allow, the more effective they become.

I don’t mean that they aren’t busy. My client is still incredibly busy. But today, he isn’t nearly as stressed. Because he gets that it works against him.

He sees the river carrying him is more powerful than his frantic paddling every could be.

And that the river has bigger ideas than he ever did.