When Meditation Turns Into a To-Do List: Executive Coaching for Overachievers
Why feeding your inner Planner is killing your creativity—and what to do about it
I’ve been trying to meditate, but honestly? It just turns into an eyes-closed planning session. I’m supposed to be the zen monk on the mountaintop, but instead I’m writing Monday’s to-do list in my head.
I’m realizing that it’s not that my practice is wrong, but the energy with which I do the practice is misaligned. When the Planner energy in me runs my meditation, my weekends, even my downtime, I’m doomed to fail. When I coach from a place of energy-first, content-second, people resonate. Here’s what that looks like.
Clients often come to me with tactical questions, and the first thing that I’ll ask them is, “What’s the energy behind the question?” The second one is, “What’s your desired energy?” Energy is emotions, emotional thoughts, physical sensations, limiting beliefs, spiritual inklings, or even simply a vibe (and who doesn’t love talking about vibes?). By the time a question gets to me as a coach, it’s not neutral. It’s usually very charged with energy.
Energy reveals so much truth that rationality alone cannot convey. I notice for a lot of my clients that the Planner is the energy in charge. The Planner (or Achiever) is that part of us that strategizes, manages logistics, is future-oriented, needs to get stuff done, is typically achievement-oriented, etc. And that’s a really helpful energy. It’s usually gotten us success. But it also never turns off if we let it run the show.
Silicon Valley trained me to think that success could only be measured by growth. Healthy culture was good, insofar as it grew revenue. Rest was okay, but only because it recharged you to work. I worked 7 days a week for the first 7 years of my journey. It was my badge of honor as a founder. Even 5 years post-sale of my company, the Planner has a strong hold on me. I often feel the guilt of not producing enough. This is why I often describe my practice as a form of executive coaching for overachievers—because we tend to overfeed the Planner at the expense of everything else.
Entrepreneurs have overfed the Planner.
We feed it copious amounts of our attention, conversation, and private ruminations. It then suffocates all the other parts of us. The parts of us that hold creativity and longing and joy and calm and fun. The suffocation of parts creates an imbalanced, myopic system. It can only see a situation from one perspective.
To give control to the Planner or the achiever is lazy. But worse, it is fearful. We stop trusting that there are any other parts of us that have answers, especially in a business context. This is where executive coaching for overachievers really matters—because it teaches leaders to bring all of their energies online, not just the hyper-productive one.
We lose our hearts as we focus everything on our minds. We lose emotionality as everything becomes about the hyper-rational. It goes from a problem of philosophy, literature, and ethics to a pure math equation. Companies and people become one-dimensional, and this is not the time for one-dimensional leadership.
We need nuance; we need to be able to see in the gray. My invitation is for you to feed a different part, and that means that you need to find portals into these different energies. Experiment with something radically different. Head to the Natural History Museum on a Tuesday afternoon. Take care of your friend’s puppy for the weekend. Head to the beach. And bring only a book and nothing else.
Challenge the part of you that values optimization and efficiency and productivity and achievement. Try reading the Tao Te Ching and playing with the concept of effortless action. It’s only in challenging your system that new energies can arise and contribute to your leadership. That’s the integrated way to evolve.
Otherwise, it’s like going to the gym and only training your biceps—while everything else goes soft. Doesn’t it get boring to be uni-dimensional? I get bored of my anxiety. I get bored of the singular story that I’m not productive enough. I get bored of the vision it shows me of what I could have been if I had stayed in San Francisco and run another tech company.
Boring, boring, boring. It’s time to face new fears and new challenges. I offer that invitation to you. This isn’t about living a life without suffering. It’s living a life where you evolve your sufferings in order to expand your sense of self and your capacities for new challenges.
And maybe—finally meeting the part of you that’s been waiting all along to lead.
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