Why Winning Left You Flat | (#092) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

There’s a special kind of flatness that’s kind of hard to talk about, because nothing’s obviously wrong. The work still gets done, the results still show up. You’re still good at whatever you’re doing, but there’s less in it for you than there used to be. But you can’t say why.

You notice it in small ways first. The decision that should feel like discovery feels like just execution. You already know the answer. You’re just moving the pieces around. A conversation with someone smart, someone that you would have stayed up late with a few years ago, feels just transactional now. You’re handling things. You’re handling everything, but you’re a little less interesting to yourself while you’re doing it.

The really confusing part is that nothing, on paper, explains this feeling. You can’t pin it to a bad quarter or a tough year. The numbers are fine. The flatness doesn’t track anything you can identify, which is exactly why it’s hard for you and others to take it seriously. There’s no obvious event to point at, no obvious failure to diagnose, so you file it away under being tired or busy, or just getting older, and you keep trudging along. [01:10.3]

For a lot of people, it got more visible at a strange moment, the moment the company stopped needing all of you. The thing finally ran without your hands on every part of it, and instead of relief, you found extra space, and that extra space shows you what wasn’t there.

By the end of this episode, you’re going to understand something about yourself that puts the whole problem in a clearer light. The part of you that built your career is one part of you among several. Your current way of operating is producing a rigid, narrowed version of what you’re actually capable of, and the person you could become has access to capacities that this configuration has frozen out, including the ones that make someone magnetic or generative, alive in the room. You’ll understand the reason for it, and you’ll understand the work that releases what’s been locked away. [02:02.8]

This matters more than it might sound like, because if you don’t understand it, the next decade is just a more efficient version of the last one with the same flatness scaled up. But if you do understand it, what you build next will have a different quality, not because you changed your strategy or tactics, but because what’s making the strategy has changed.

So, here’s the belief we’re going to be taking apart, that most successful people assume that the disciplined, controlling, performance-oriented self that built their life is the genuine Self, the real them, and that anything softer or anything more open or spontaneous is either a weakness to transcend or a weakness to schedule, like the vacation, the hobby, the retreat that you book to recover so that you can get back to being the real you. [02:53.2]

I’ll come back to that obstructing belief and take it apart properly, because it’s wrong in a really important way, but, first, I want to be specific about what’s actually missing, because the word “flat” is too vague to work with here. Let’s start with curiosity, and here I don’t mean useful curiosity, what we might call curiosity that researches a market or studies a competitor.

What I mean by curiosity is the purer kind, curiosity about something that doesn’t pay, that won’t show up in any result, that you’d chase just because it’s interesting, following your thoughts without any predetermined agenda. When is the last time you allowed that kind of curiosity to lead you for an afternoon? For a lot of achievers, the honest answer is that they can’t remember and they didn’t notice when they stopped doing this.

Then there’s the ease, not like relaxation that you schedule, but the kind of ease that doesn’t have to be performed, where you’re not running some low-grade calculation about how you’re coming across. [03:57.8]

Then there’s the presence, being with another person without having to manage the interaction, without steering it somewhere, without half your attention on the next move, with no agenda. Sit with someone that you love and watch how hard it is to just be there, fully attuned to the other person a hundred percent, emotionally and mentally.

A lot of achievers assume this is burnout, so they just treat it like burnout. They take a trip, but the flatness gets on the plane and flies back with them, because it was never about being overworked. So, the vacation doesn’t address it, because the reason isn’t your schedule. The reason is deeper than that, in you. It’s in how your mind is organized.

I think you already know this to some degree, and maybe in a way you haven’t said to yourself or to anyone out loud, because there are people you respect who still have the thing that you’ve lost track of in yourself. You can feel it when you’re around them. So, the question worth sitting with isn’t whether it’s gone in you. It’s what it actually was and where yours went. [05:06.3]

To answer this. I have to tell you something about how the mind is built, and it runs against an assumption so deep you’ve probably never examined this assumption, or even know that you have this assumption. Most people think that we all have one mind, one you in there, generating your thoughts, your moods, your wants. That’s the water we all swim in.

The renowned psychologists Richard Schwartz and Robert Falconer call this the mono-mind paradigm, and the argument they make is that it’s an illusion. The mind isn’t one unified thing, it’s more like a family, a system of parts, and each part has its own perspective, its own concerns, its own job to do, its own role, its own background. [05:49.4]

Now, before this sounds like some fringe idea that one therapist cooked up, look at how old this idea actually is. Schwartz and Falconer didn’t invent the view that the Self is plural. They might have given it a clean modern form in an approach called Internal Family Systems therapy, but the idea that we’re made of many minds runs back through the whole history of the subject of the mind, the study of the mind. You can find it in Freud, in Jung, in early Gestalt therapy and modern Gestalt therapy, in nearly every serious model of the mind, and you find it in spiritual and shamanic traditions going back thousands of years.

People have been describing the same thing with different vocabularies for a very long time. In fact, you already know this from the inside. You might say things like, “Part of me wants to take the meeting and a part of me wants to cancel,” or “A part of me is proud of her, but a part of me is jealous.” We say things like this every day. We treat these as a figure of speech or a turn of phrase, but it isn’t. You’re reporting the data accurately. There really is a part of you that wants the thing and another part of you that doesn’t, and they’re not the same part, but they’re both part of you. [07:02.3]

You’ve been living this your whole life. You just never took your own words literally and didn’t give yourself permission or allow yourself to examine this seriously. This is not a disorder, okay? Having parts is the normal architecture of a person. Everybody has them. The trouble isn’t the multiplicity. The trouble starts when one or more parts get stuck in extreme roles and take over, hijack the mind, with nobody steady in the core or center or the middle coordinating the whole system, a part frozen into a job that it can’t put down.

That’s where the difficulty lives, and at the extremes of that, a person’s sort of a control seat of their mind getting taken over by one part and then another part, and this is where we see the multiple personality disorder or what is now called the dissociative identity disorder. So, merely having some parts in conflict or intention is totally normal. It’s a normal structure of the human mind. [08:02.1]

For most people who have achieved what you’ve achieved, one part in particular took the job, took the control seat, and stayed there for decades and never once let go of the controls. Let’s look at that part, because it’s the one that you’ve been calling “me.” In Internal Family Systems, parts like this are called managers. That’s the category of that part. A manager is a part whose job is to keep you running, keep you safe, keep things under control.

For most people who have accomplished a lot, one manager in particular accumulated decades of dominance in the system, in the internal system. Let’s call it, for now, the warrior achiever. This part is the one that powers through obstacles, the part that doesn’t flinch when things get hard, that finds the way through, that closes the gap between where you are and where you said you would be. [08:57.3]

It’s important to be careful here, because it would be easy to hear what comes next as some sort of attack on that part, but it isn’t. This part is genuinely extraordinarily competent. It built your career. It built the bank account. It built the portfolio. It built the reputation that opens doors before you walk through them. Everything on the outside that works, this part orchestrated or made it earned its place. Okay, so it deserves real respect and appreciation and gratitude, and I’m giving it that right now.

Okay, so here’s the next move. It’s a change in just one sentence that we say to ourselves. Most successful people say, “I am ambitious. I am disciplined. I’m driven,” or something along this line. “I’m X,” X being some positive achiever equality, but the grammar smuggles in a claim that you weren’t aware of. It says this is what you are, the whole of you. [09:53.0]

So, try this other version, like, “An ambitious part of me makes most of my decisions,” or “A disciplined part of me runs most of my day.” Or even much more simply, instead of “I am ambitious,” “A part of me is ambitious,” or instead of “I am disciplined,” “A part of me is disciplined.” Okay, so it’s the same facts, different sentence, but that difference that it’s getting at is everything, because the earlier sentence leaves no room for more of you.

If ambition is what you are, who you are, and it’s all of who you are and there’s nothing else in there, and then there’s no further question to ask. The second sentence, though, opens the gap. If it’s just a part of you that’s ambitious, then there’s a you that that part belongs to that is larger than just that part, and what’s left over, there might be another part in you that’s not ambitious. Once that gap is open, a lot more becomes possible to understand about yourself that wasn’t possible a second ago with that first sentence. [11:01.4]

This is why it’s so important to be precise about your words. Your words are reflecting some kind of reality, and when you’re talking about yourself, they’re reflecting what you believe is a reality of yourself. So, reframing the words is the method to opening up a difference in understanding yourself and realizing that that difference in words reflects a difference in the reality of yourself.

So, when you realize you say to yourself that that part is not all of you, it’s just a part of you, then you don’t have to fight this part. You don’t have to fire it or override it, or beat it into submission. Okay, that’s the achiever’s instinct, by the way, to attack the problem head on, but it’s wrongheaded. You don’t need less of any part. You need to stop mistaking that part for all of you. You need more of you. [11:54.7]

Now, the achiever part, we’ve been calling it actually warrior achiever, is like an employee who’s been doing three people’s jobs or more people’s jobs for 20-something years because nobody else was available. Nobody else stepped up. That’s probably his view, right? He’s not a tyrant. That part simply took on too much alone for far too long, and it’s been running things on the outside and making decisions for you that you weren’t even aware of.

Now, here’s what 20 years of one part doing all the work actually costs, because the bill doesn’t come due where you might expect. When one part takes over and holds on, it doesn’t do it alone, it does it by pushing other parts down and out of the way—to make room for itself, of course, and so that those parts don’t get in the way of what the dominant part wants to do.

In Internal Family Systems, these pushed-away parts are called exiles. They’ve been sent away, banished, kept out of the daily operation of your life, and the parts that get exiled aren’t the weak ones or the bad ones, though the manager parts might make them seem that way or think of them that way. [13:04.1]

These exile parts are the parts carrying the qualities that the dominant parts couldn’t afford to let operate while the dominant part was trying to win. Think about what wasn’t useful in those places that made you successful. A 12-year-old in a competitive school might start out with a kind of unguarded, natural spontaneity. He might just blur things out, say the thing that he’s thinking, follow his natural impulses, and then what happens? He gets it knocked out of him real fast, because in that hypercompetitive environment, spontaneity probably got you into trouble. But control gets you ahead, so he learns fast and he files that unguarded spontaneity away. [13:51.5]

Think of the kid who lights up over things for no particular reason or no obvious reason, and he can feel pure easy delight, unfettered, unrestrained, until he’s got a parent who only responds when he is obedient or performs well, and a parent who only leans in when there is some accomplishment to point at. That kid figures out which role pays off, and then the delight goes underground, but the performance stays online.

There’s the young person with an unselfconscious charisma or magnetism. He’s a performer, comfortable being looked at, losing himself in the flow of performance, until one day he opens his eyes and gets teased for it hard enough that he pulls it back in, locks it up, and learns to manage how he comes across instead more carefully.

Then there’s the simple capacity to be with another person without controlling how you’re being perceived, which almost no achiever gets to keep, because every environment you were trying to win in rewarded the micromanaging. [15:03.5]

None of those exiled parts died. Okay, it’s important to understand that. They merely got locked away. I shouldn’t say merely. They got locked away. It’s pretty bad. They got sent into exile in the example I’m giving, so that the warrior achiever could take the wheel and win in those specific environments that you were put in, and it paid off. In a way, that’s the cruel part. It worked. You won. But now you can feel what it costs you, even if you’ve never had words for it or were never conscious of it yet.

In your own private experience, somewhere you don’t say out loud, maybe you feel a little robotic? Or a little stuck, rigid? Yes, you’re productive, maybe more productive than you’ve ever been, but you’re not alive in the way that you used to be long ago. The machine runs beautifully, but there’s nobody home in it the way there once was, and that’s not a mood. That’s the report coming back from the parts that you exiled, telling you they’re still down there. [16:08.2]

The tragic trap is that you feel the flatness, but you reach for the only tool that’s ever worked or that you can ever remember working—more. More productivity, more optimization, another goal, a harder target, a new system. You try to achieve your way back into feeling alive, but it pushes the aliveness farther away every single time, because the part doing the reaching, the driving, the pushing, is the exact part that exiled the aliveness in the first place.

Asking it to bring them back is like asking the prison guard to free the prisoners that he was hired to keep locked up. He doesn’t understand that. It’s not part of his job description and he’s not even sure how to do it. Instead, he’ll do what he is trained to do. He’ll work harder. He will work harder to not open the cell. [17:02.5]

The aliveness doesn’t come back through the front door. It can’t. It comes back through the parts that got frozen out a long time ago, like the 12-year-old and the kid who lit up, and the one who didn’t yet manage how he was being seen. They’re still there. They’ve been waiting in the basement of your mind, and reaching them is a different kind of work than anything that’s ever worked for you before as an achiever.

So, what is this work? It runs on at least two conditions, and you can’t skip either of these. These are both necessary. The parts that did the exiling, the example I’m giving here is the warrior achiever, but also any of the other managers. The broader category for the manager parts is the category of protectors, because that’s what they think they’re doing. They think they’re protecting you, keeping the exile parts down where they can’t get you hurt again and can’t slow you down. [17:57.1]

So, the first condition is that these protectors have to relax their grip enough to let the exiles be approached, and the second condition is that there has to be something steady and safe present when that happens. Otherwise, the protectors won’t allow it, or if you do some kind of end run around them, when they figure it out, there will be backlash.

They’ve spent decades keeping these parts locked up. They’re not going to stand down for nothing. They’ll stand down for one thing, and it’s the thing we haven’t talked about yet. In Internal Family Systems, it’s called the Self, capital S. I like to call it a Higher Self. It’s usually called the True Self, but for shorthand, it’s just called Self, capital S. [18:40.3]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

The Self is not another part. It’s not like a better part or a wiser part or one more character in the cast. Instead, it’s the ground all the parts can be heard from, the center of you that isn’t a part at all, the core of you. When it’s present, the protectors in you feel it, and then they can ease off and relax back, because they can tell someone’s finally home who can handle whatever they’ve been trying to handle alone. The exiles feel it, and they start to thaw, because for the first time there’s something or someone holding them that won’t drop them or try to get rid of them. [20:03.8]

The clinical researchers who do this work describe what the Self feels like when it’s present, and I’m just going to list some of these qualities: curiosity, compassion, calm, clarity, courage, confidence, creativity, and connectedness. Shorthand is the 8 Cs. Plus, presence, perspective, patience, persistence, and playfulness, the five Ps, when the Self is in a kind of therapeutic mode. That’s what’s there in the center when the parts aren’t taking over, overwhelming, or trying to run the show.

But I don’t want you to hear this as some kind of clean split. It’s not like the warm fuzzy self over here, and then the cold, hard achiever over there. That’s not it. Even your protectors carry some of these qualities in their own way. Your achiever warrior has real creativity, maybe, or the elegant strategy that nobody else saw, the move that broke the frame and changed the game. Okay, that is a kind of creativity, and it definitely has real confidence, the kind built on competence, knowing that you’ve done the reps and you will deliver. [21:07.2]

So, that’s not fake. It’s just confidence that has to be earned again every morning or every test, because it’s tied to the next performance. So, this isn’t about trading one for the other. Integration doesn’t hand any single quality to one part only as a monopoly, and then take it away from the rest. Instead, integration widens your range. The same quality gets more registers to play in, confidence that isn’t only performance-contingent or creativity that isn’t only strategic. Okay, more room for what was always in there.

So, what actually comes back when you go through this process, this inner work, that I haven’t really laid out yet, but I’ve kind of pointed at, because this question is the one that’s probably on your mind the most. What’s the payoff? [21:54.0]

Okay, so when an exile unburdens, when a part that’s been frozen for decades finally comes back online, it doesn’t come back empty or just like a baby needing to be fed. Instead, it comes back carrying the exact things it took with it when it left or when it was banished.

For example, the aliveness of a young part, the creative, unfettered spontaneity, the unselfconsciousness and unselfconscious play, and creativity and spontaneity and adventurousness that froze at the precise moment when achievement first started to matter more than being yourself. Okay, so that young part went under holding all the life it had and it’s been holding it the whole time. If you get to it, that life comes back with it.

Okay, so here’s some of what shows up: spontaneity that doesn’t run itself past an internal review board first, that doesn’t check every impulse against how it’ll be scored. Charisma or magnetism that a person has when he’s not managing his own self-presentation or is not self-conscious, which is really the only kind of charisma that actually works, by the way, the kind that you can’t perform or pretend to be or just fake, because the faking of it, the trying, the trying hard is what kills it. [23:13.2]

The easygoingness, the easygoing nature that lets other people relax around you, that makes a room settle when you walk into it instead of tighten up and get tense, and being in flow with the work, losing track of time, being fully immersed in it, carried by it, instead of standing over it, trying to force it forward by sheer will.

Now, there’s a common worry that comes up here for every high-achiever at the moment they understand or begin to understand this, and the worry is that you’re being asked to regress, that reconnecting with some five-year-old part of you means that you’re going to start acting like a five-year-old, like going soft, losing the edge, crying, showing up to the board meetings full of feelings. Okay, so let me kill that worry directly, because it’s based on a complete misunderstanding. [23:58.4]

A 70-year-old’s creativity and a five-year-old’s creativity are both real creativity. They’re just in different registers. The 70-year-old has judgment, knows what’s worth making, knows what to leave out, has a whole library of experience behind every choice. The five-year-old has none of that and has something that 70-year-old mostly lost, the unguarded delight in the making itself, the total absorption. No part of him standing outside the activity, watching how it looks as he’s doing it.

So, here’s what nobody else tells you: you don’t have to choose. The integrated version of you ends up getting both the mature judgment about what to build and the now newly unburdened kid’s pure delight in the actual building of it. You’re not regressing to the five-year-old. You’re getting back the quality, the childlike nature of the five-year-old, embodied, expressed in the register of the mature adult, wise person you are now. [25:03.8]

So, that’s not less mature. It’s actually more complete, fuller, richer, integrated—and this is where it pays off, okay, in the only currency the achiever has ever fully trusted: results. A person operating with this extra range builds different things and builds them better, and I mean this concretely.

You end up being better at first principles work because real curiosity has come back online, and first principles thinking is just curiosity that refuses to accept the given answer. You can’t fake your way there through sheer discipline and will. You get there through the parts of you that actually truly sincerely want to know. You’re better at hiring, at reading people, because your read now has more to work with than merely transactional pattern-matching. [25:55.0]

The exile parts of you have come back online. They could always feel things about a person that the warrior achiever filtered out as noise. You get those parts back and you stop misreading the people you’re about to bet on you. You actually have a better intuition.

You’re better at your relationship, at marriage, at the table with the person you love, because you can finally be fully a hundred percent present without having to manage the interaction, worried about how you’re coming across or worried about the outcome. Being fully hundred percent present is the one thing intimacy actually requires and the one thing manager parts have a lot of trouble doing.

You’re better at your own creative work, the things you’re building, the things you’re creating, because the activity itself is alive again, instead of being one more box to clear.

Notice what none of this required. It didn’t require more effort. You’ve been trying more effort for 20-something years. This is the opposite. It requires releasing what’s been frozen up and letting back in what was already yours. Okay, once you understand that, you’re standing on ground that wise people figured out a very long time ago in a different language, maybe, depending on where you’re hearing this, on the other side of the world. [27:12.4]

I’ll just mention really briefly, Confucius. Twenty-five centuries before any of this had a clinical term, Confucius drew a line between two ways that a person can operate. He called one the xiaoren, the small person, the one ruled by appetites and reactive impulses pushed around by whatever he wants in the moment. Then, he called the other type of person the junzi, the cultivated person, the one centered in something steadier, a moral and esthetic ground beneath the impulses.

So, two modes of running a human life named and distinguished 2,500 years ago. But the move I actually want to focus on here comes later, almost 2,000 years after Confucius in the 15th century in the Ming dynasty. It’s my favorite philosopher. His name is Wang Yangming. [28:02.7]

Wang names something precise, something that maps onto everything we’ve been talking about. He calls it liang zhi. It usually gets translated as innate moral knowing or pure knowing, and here’s what he means by it: liang zhi is the faculty that perceives directly, immediately, clearly, when you’re operating from your genuine nature. You don’t reason your way to it. You don’t deliberate, weigh the options, build the case, use willpower and discipline. In fact, there’s no effort in it at all. You just see what’s true and what’s right, the way your eye just sees light. It isn’t an achievement that you have to earn. It’s the native operation of a mind that isn’t obstructed. [28:49.0]

Wang’s claim is that everyone has this. Everyone. It’s not a gift handed only to the sages and withheld from the rest of us. You have it right now. What you lack, what we all lack, isn’t the faculty. What we lack is a clear channel for it. The thing is in there, working, but it has been distorted on the way out, bent and blocked and filtered by everything stacked on top of it. Wang’s whole project is the clearing of those obstructions, so that what was always there can operate to the way it was meant to.

Now, it’s easy to hear this as just a nice parallel and then miss the actual claim. This isn’t just a parallel. Wang Yangming isn’t describing a second separate path that happens to rhyme with the first or just repeat the first path. He’s describing what becomes available when the first one is complete. He’s telling you what’s on the other side of the integration. [29:49.0]

So, think about what’s been distorting the channel in your case. What we’ve been looking at here is the warrior achiever, forcing every read through achievement logic, asking of everything, “What’s the return? What’s the ROI? What’s the angle?” asking, “How does this move us closer to the goal?” the protectors filtering out anything that doesn’t serve productivity before it ever reaches you.

That whole apparatus sits on top of your liang zhi, bending the signal, so the person operating from liang zhi isn’t reasoning his way to wisdom, isn’t smarter or more disciplined than you. Instead, he’s perceiving clearly and directly, because those parts have stepped aside and the channel is finally clear.

So, put the two together and see how the work of Wang Yangming extends the clinical work. The clinical work describes the conditions, what has to happen inside for the protectors to relax and the exiles to come home for the system to integrate. Wang Yangming describes what the integrated person can then perceive. He has a name for that person, too, the sheng ren, the sage, the one whose pure knowing, whose liang zhi operates without obstruction. [31:02.7]

One tradition tells you how to clear the channel, one modern tradition, and the other, an ancient one, tells you what comes through it once it’s clear. So, the inner work doesn’t just make you feel better. That’s the small version of the promise. The real results-driven version is that it restores a faculty that you’ve been operating without. You’ve been making the biggest decisions of your life through a distorted signal, and then calling that distortion your judgment

Now you can see that the self that built your career is the smaller one. Not the weaker one, the smaller one, and those are different claims. The warrior achiever is enormously competent. I’ve said that before and I mean it, and I’m not walking it back. I want to repeat it here. [31:51.3]

Inside its domain, there’s nothing better, right? Give it a defined problem, a target, a goal, a mountain to climb, and it will out-grind and out-execute all the competition. Okay, so that is real. But look at the size of that domain—it’s narrower than the life that you now are trying to live. It can build a company on grit and pattern matching, but it cannot on its own build the marriage, the family, the lasting, loving relationship.

Grit doesn’t work there. In fact, the harder it grips, the worse the relationship gets, the worse the marriage gets, the worse the family gets, and you’ve probably already run that experiment or tried to, or have lived in it while somebody else, some other parent, has been trying to run that experiment unknowingly with you in it.

That warrior achiever cannot read a complicated relational situation accurately. The room where three people want three things that all are in conflict and none of them are saying so out loud or explicitly or owning it, because it’s filtering all of it, all of that through achievement logic and missing the actual deeper signal. It cannot sustain the kind of curiosity that produces real discovery, understanding, the deep kind, as opposed to mere tactical knowledge that you pick up to win, just to win the next thing. Real understanding doesn’t run on deadlines. [33:15.4]

The genuine Self, that larger ground that we’ve been talking about, the capital S Self, the parts that the parts can be heard from, that’s the bigger thing. The achievement self was never supposed to be in command. It was supposed to be in service, a superb specialist working for a wise general commander. Somewhere along the way, that specialist took the general’s chair, probably because he looked and the chair was empty, and someone had to sit in it and no one else competent was running it, so he’s been running the whole operation from a seat that was never meant to be his own, and he’s not even enjoying it. So, that’s the inversion. Almost every successful person you know is living inside it. [34:00.6]

So, let’s pull the whole thing together, because we’ve covered a lot of ground, and I want you holding it as one picture, not seven different pieces.

Your mind is a system of parts. That’s not a metaphor and it’s not a disorder. It’s how a mind is built and people have known it for thousands of years. For most people who’ve built what you’ve built, who’ve accomplished a lot, one part took over and held that wheel for decades. I’ve been calling this the warrior achiever, but it could be your super manager, or whatever name you’ve given it, or that it likes—and it ran the operation by freezing out to the other parts, the ones carrying spontaneity, delight, magnetism, charisma, adventurousness, easygoingness, the capacity to be with someone without micromanaging it.

The good news is those parts didn’t die. They went into exile, which is not such great news, and they took your aliveness with them. The genuine Self isn’t that achiever-dominant part. Instead, it’s the core of you that is holding, in the background, all of the other parts, but has been blocked from its view by these other protector or manager parts. [35:13.2]

When the genuine Self leads finally, the protectors can relax and the exiles can come home and unburden, and at least two things come back: the range you’ve been missing and a faculty for perceiving directly that Wang Yangming named liang zhi, the clear seeing, the pure knowing that you’ve been operating without.

Okay, let me show you what this looks like in real life. A founder, mid-40s, took his company through a nine-figure outcome. By every external measure, he was finished, and he came to me, not because he was in pain exactly, but because he’d gone numb, sort of the opposite of pain, but it’s a pain of its own, and that numbness scared him more than active pain would have. [35:55.0]

In our work together, the picture was almost textbook. One part of him had run everything since he was a boy in a house where love arrived only after achievement, and that part that took over was brilliant, but exhausted and completely alone in there. We discovered that underneath that, there was a kid who had stopped expecting anyone to be glad that he existed for no reason, for no accomplishments.

As that younger part of him started to thaw, the changes didn’t show up first in his business. They showed up first at his kitchen table. His wife and kids remarked that they noticed a change in him, that he was more engaged, present. They were surprised that he wasn’t snapping, that he was there a lot more often. He started building again, creating new initiatives, and these new things were actually new, not some defensive reiteration of the last ones. The grind didn’t increase, but his range did. [36:51.4]

Now, hear the other path that this could have gone down, the one you’re probably on by default, because defaults are powerful and this one costs you annoyingly for years before you notice it. Leave the configuration where it is and the next decade probably runs more efficiently than the last, because you’re more experienced, but that’s the trap—it’s that it works.

So, the company scales faster and the founder narrows year-over-year a little flatter, a little more robotic, optimizing a life that he’s less and less present for, and that relationship that you meant to get to, that marriage, the family that you told yourself comes after this next milestone, that keeps waiting on a version of you that can’t on its own build it. It’s not that it won’t. It’s that it can’t. It’s the part that you’d been asking to build it. It’s the exact part that can’t do that kind of work.

Or you make this change. Then the genuine Self, the True Self, the Higher Self comes back to center. The frozen parts come back online out of the underground of your mind, the basement of your mind, and what you build or create next has a very different quality, not because you found a better tactic or strategy, but because what’s making the strategy is finally the whole of you, instead of just one exhausted fragment of you. [38:13.5]

There’s a name for that mode of operating, the one where action stops being forced, and that’s what we’ll be looking at in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. David Tian, signing out. [38:27.7]