The Day Your Success Formula Stops Working

For years, my superpower was situational awareness.

I could walk into chaos or a sketchy situation, assess what was happening, and know exactly what to do. Intelligence work trained me to read patterns, connect dots, and find the signal in the noise.

It was my formula. And it worked. Until it didn’t.

The breakdown came when I tried to apply the same formula to my inner world and my self-development. Situational awareness had trained me to be a solo operator, to scan, assess, and respond on my own. It was all about my individual ability to read situations and make the right call.

But personal transformation was different. The harder I tried to do this on my own, the less traction I got. I treated my development like a tactical situation I could master individually, but growth happens in relationships, not solo adventuring.

After years of struggling in deep personal work, I hit a wall. My old approach—throwing everything I had at whatever I was learning, going for the hardest challenges like climbing a mountain alone without gear, so that I could make sense of it… just stopped working.

I couldn't make sense of the world I was moving in, and I was no longer finding any signal.

And I was exhausted. The familiar signs of burnout crept in.

That’s when I made a move that went against my traditional way of trying to figure it out alone. I found myself in a small group of people doing similar work. Truthfully, I was skeptical. Groups felt inefficient, messy, and unpredictable. I tended to avoid them.

But something unexpected happened in those spaces…

What I learned changed everything I knew about personal development and building effectiveness. It cannot be achieved alone. I needed people. I needed relational spaces where we learned together, not heroic solo journeys toward transformation.

As you’re reading this, you might be hitting your own wall right now. Or no longer able to distinguish the signal from the noise. There is a lot of static in our world right now.

The Heroic Formula Breaking Down Everywhere

I see this everywhere in my clients.

The executive who takes on everything themselves, feeling the pressure to always have the answer, to be right, to be perfect. They carry that weight like Atlas carrying the world, never letting anyone see them struggle with uncertainty.

The high-achieving coach who feels responsible for their client’s success carries their transformation like a burden on their shoulders, believing that if the client doesn’t have a breakthrough, it’s because they didn’t try hard enough, push hard enough, or know enough.

It’s the same formula everywhere: “I have to do it alone.”

That Olympian mindset of determination and grit that doesn’t allow for the inevitable setbacks. The belief that asking for help is weakness, that collaboration is inefficiency, that leadership means having all the answers.

What I Discovered in the Breakdown

When I finally stopped trying to climb the mountain alone and found myself in small groups with others, real containers where we could share authentically, something extraordinary happened.

It wasn’t the answers we gave each other. It was the inquiry and exploration witnessed and shared.

Questions asked from care and curiosity, not from fixing or flaming victimhood. Deep listening without judgment. The questioning and reflecting created intimacy through shared life experience, even when our contexts were completely different.

I learned to live with questions as living inquiries, to honor that I didn’t have an answer, but to let the questions themselves become guides.

And here’s what was alchemical: something was happening in the space between us, in what I sometimes refer to as "the Field:" a collective intelligence, a collective creativity being tapped. New paths of inquiry would emerge, and creative paths forward crystallized.

This wasn't group therapy. This wasn't mastermind problem-solving. This was something entirely new.

In therapy, people have problems, and the group process is focused on healing. In masterminds, people share challenges and get advice.

But in these containers, nobody is broken, and nobody has the answers. Instead, we are creating conditions where new possibilities can emerge naturally.

The magic happened in the shared experience of inquiry and exploration.

What showed up wasn't an individual breakthrough but a collective discovery. They were Ideas that belonged to no one and everyone, insights that could only arise in relationships.

The wisdom wasn't in any of us individually. It was in the field between us.

This is what I mean by relational transformation: not fixing what's broken, but revealing what's already whole through authentic connection.

When Your Formula Breaks, What Then?

Here’s what I’ve learned from navigating this territory with hundreds of leaders:

First, recognize the composting. That winning formula that served you wasn’t wrong. It was perfect for who you were then. Now it’s breaking down to become soil for who you’re becoming. This isn’t failure; it’s fertilizer. The executive who built their career on having all the answers? That certainty is composting into the capacity to lead through questions and curiosity.

Second, resist the scramble for a new formula. The temptation is to immediately find the next strategy, the next framework, the next success blueprint. Don’t fill this space that is now here. That’s where your real capacity develops. It’s where you learn to navigate by an internal compass rather than external GPS.

Third, find your relational container. This is exactly what complexity practitioner Sonja Blignaut confirmed in our recent conversation. She’s seeing the same pattern globally: we’re not just between business cycles or leadership styles—we’re between entire ways of knowing.

“We don’t need more rational,” she told me. “We need more imaginal.”

The imaginal—that capacity to sense what’s emerging through relationship, story, and embodied wisdom rather than analysis alone. It’s what becomes available when you stop trying to figure everything out in isolation and start trusting the collective intelligence that emerges in an authentic relationship.

The breakdown of your formula isn’t the end of your effectiveness. It’s the beginning of your evolution.

The Fertile Void

Here’s what I want you to know: You’re not broken, you’re not failing, and you’re exactly where you need to be.

When your formula breaks, you’re in what I call “the fertile void”—that space between who you were and who you’re becoming. It feels like emptiness, but it’s actually pregnant with possibility.

Sonja calls this “liminal space”—the threshold territory where transformation happens. It is not woo-woo but actual developmental territory that every leader navigating complexity will encounter.

And here’s what I’ve learned: While you can begin this inquiry alone, transformation happens in relationship. You’ll need people who can sit with you in the questions, who can see possibilities you can’t see yet, who can hold space for your becoming.

The breakdown isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of something you can’t imagine yet.

I’m curious: Where is your success formula breaking down? What’s composting in your world right now?

Take some time with that question. Let it work on you rather than working on it.

And if you’re feeling the call to navigate this transition with relational support—if you’re ready to discover what wants to emerge through authentic inquiry rather than solo heroics—I’d love to explore that with you.

I have a few spots opening up for intensive work with leaders navigating their own pivots. The fertile void is powerful territory, but it’s not meant to be traveled alone.

[Schedule an explore call] if you’re ready to see what becomes possible when transformation happens in relationship.

Go well.