Effort isn’t always the issue
There’s a particular kind of tiredness that doesn’t come from workload. It comes from effort without orientation. You can be organised, diligent, and genuinely trying, and still end most days with a quiet sense that nothing important has moved. You’ve been busy, but not necessarily progressing. You’ve been productive, but not necessarily aligned. In that situation, the usual response is predictable. It’s also understandable. You look for a better system. A tighter routine. A smarter workflow. A cleaner calendar. An app that promises to reduce friction. A method with a name. A new way of working that makes everything feel more under control. Productivity culture is appealing because it offers something immediate: a lever you can pull. And often, it helps. There are genuine gains to be made in how we structure time, attention, and energy. But there’s a point where more productivity advice becomes like turning up the volume on a radio that’s tuned to the wrong station. You can make it louder. Clearer. More efficient. You’re still listening to something that doesn’t quite fit. Why “do more” is such a tempting solution For many high-functioning people, effort is familiar territory. Effort is measurable. It’s respectable. It makes you feel in control. It allows you to stay moving without having to sit with ambiguity. Reflection, on the other hand, is slower. Less certain. It doesn’t always reward you immediately. It asks questions that can’t be answered in a single sitting. So when something feels off, it’s easier to work harder than to look inward. Not because you’re avoiding yourself. Because you’re competent. Because you’ve been trained, by culture, by workplaces, sometimes by family, to equate motion with safety. We also live in an environment that makes stillness feel irresponsible. Notifications. Feeds. Updates. Other people’s output, presented as effortless. Even the rise of AI can intensify it: if production is easier, why aren’t you producing more? This becomes a quiet pressure: if you’re not progressing, you must be underperforming. But there’s a flaw in that logic. Sometimes you’re not underperforming. Sometimes you’re misdirected. The experience of “busy but not moving” Most people can recognise this feeling when it’s described. You’re getting things done, yet you’re not sure what any of it is for. You’re completing tasks, but they don’t add up to a sense of direction. You’re responding to demands, but you can’t find yourself in what you’re building. It can feel like effort applied in multiple directions at once. Lots of motion, little traction. This is where people often start criticising themselves. “I just need to focus.” “I need to stop procrastinating.” “I should be more disciplined.” “I’m falling behind.” That self-talk makes sense in a world that treats productivity as a moral metric. But it often misses the deeper pattern: the system might not be broken. The person might not be broken. The effort might simply be pointed somewhere that doesn’t belong to them anymore. Identity misalignment doesn’t look like failure Identity misalignment is rarely dramatic at first. It often looks like competence. You still deliver. You still perform. You still show up. In fact, many people experiencing misalignment look impressive from the outside, because they’ve learned how to be effective even when they’re internally unconvinced. Misalignment shows up in subtler ways: • A persistent friction you can’t fully explain • A sense of dragging yourself towards tasks you used to do easily • A constant urge to rethink your plans, even when nothing obvious is wrong • A feeling of living in reaction rather than intention • A quiet irritability that doesn’t match your usual temperament In other words, you’re not failing. You’re not “unmotivated”. You’re signalling. Overthinking, in this context, is often information rather than a flaw. It’s the mind attempting to make sense of a gap: the gap between what you’re doing and what you can stand behind. The difference between efficiency and alignment Efficiency problems tend to respond well to tools. You improve a process. You create a better system. You remove unnecessary friction. You simplify. Alignment problems are different. They don’t dissolve through optimisation alone because the issue isn’t “How am I doing this?” It’s “Why am I doing this?” and “Is this actually mine?” When the “why” is unclear or borrowed, productivity becomes brittle. You can push it for a while, but it requires more force than it should. You start needing external pressure to stay moving, deadlines, approval, fear, comparison. And when the external pressure drops, the whole thing wobbles. This is why some people can take a break, return refreshed, and within a week feel the same heaviness. The issue wasn’t the absence of rest. It was the absence of internal agreement. The study that fits this better than “try harder” There’s a useful piece of research in psychology known as the self-concordance model (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999). In plain terms, it suggests that people tend to sustain effort more naturally when their goals fit their values and interests, when the goal is internally endorsed rather than merely externally driven. That doesn’t mean everything should feel easy. Meaningful work still asks something of you. But there’s a difference between effort that feels clean and effort that feels conflicted. When a goal is self-concordant, energy has somewhere to go. Progress tends to feel more coherent, because you’re not spending half your capacity persuading yourself. When a goal is misaligned, the effort becomes noisier. You can still achieve, but the achievement doesn’t necessarily settle anything. This is why “productivity” can become such a confusing diagnosis. The person keeps increasing effort, and the results remain strangely unsatisfying. Why identity comes before action Action is visible. Identity is quieter. But identity sets the direction that action follows. When people feel stuck, they often treat action as the solution: do something, anything, to create momentum. But momentum without orientation can become its own trap. It keeps you moving while postponing the deeper question. And over time, the cost shows up as fatigue, cynicism, or
When your work still functions but no longer fits
When a functioning job feels wrong: identity, fit, and the quiet signs of misalignment. Most career dissatisfaction doesn’t begin with a crisis. It begins with a mild, persistent sense of wrongness that you can’t easily explain. The job is fine. In some ways, it’s more than fine. You’re paid properly. You know what you’re doing. You’ve built credibility. You’re not under threat. The work is manageable. The organisation might even be decent. And yet, something in you doesn’t settle. It’s an uncomfortable experience precisely because it doesn’t come with a clean story. If the job were clearly toxic, or if you were failing, the narrative would be straightforward: “This isn’t working.” But when the job functions and you function within it, the discomfort becomes harder to legitimise. You end up living in a strange tension: outward stability, inward question marks. Why this feels so confusing for capable people High-functioning people often struggle to trust internal signals when external markers look strong. They’ve been trained to prioritise what is measurable and defensible: performance, progression, feedback, reputation. They can explain why their role makes sense. They can justify staying. They can list what they should be grateful for. That ability to rationalise is not a flaw. It’s part of being intelligent and responsible. But it can also become a trap. Because the more “reasonable” your situation is, the more unreasonable your dissatisfaction can feel. You start to argue with yourself. You minimise. You assume you’re being dramatic. You tell yourself it’s just a phase, just a busy season, just fatigue. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s something else: the fit has changed. Not the job description on paper. The fit between the work and your identity. A job can be sustainable and still misaligned We tend to think of work in functional terms: can I do it, does it pay, is it stable? Those questions matter. Security matters. Money matters. Stability matters. But there’s another layer that tends to show up later in a career, often once someone has proven they can “make things work”: does this role still match who I am? That’s not a soft question. It’s a practical one. Because when the match is off, effort becomes noisier. You can still deliver, but it takes more out of you than it should. You can still perform, but you don’t feel inside the performance. You can still show up, yet you start to lose a sense of personal consent. And consent matters. Autonomy matters. Not as a slogan, but as a lived experience. A job can function externally while you gradually stop recognising yourself inside it. The early signs are often subtle Misfit rarely announces itself as a single, clear feeling. It tends to show up in small shifts: • You feel more irritated by tasks you used to handle easily.• You notice a growing cynicism, even if you hide it well.• You procrastinate in ways that don’t match your capability.• You find yourself more mentally elsewhere, more often.• You start asking longer-term questions you used to postpone: “Do I want this for the next decade?” These are not necessarily problems to be solved immediately. They’re signals to be interpreted honestly. Overthinking, in this context, is often information. The mind is trying to reconcile two realities: the job still works, but the fit no longer does. Why “fine” can be more draining than “bad” When something is clearly wrong, you have permission to respond. When things are “fine”, you don’t. So the internal tension stretches out. You stay because there isn’t a decisive reason to leave. You hesitate because you can’t justify the feeling. You keep going because you’re competent and other people are relying on you. This is how dissatisfaction becomes consuming over time: not because you’re weak, but because you’re living with a question you won’t let yourself fully ask. And the question underneath isn’t usually “How do I become more productive?” or “How do I get better at my job?” It’s often closer to: “What am I doing that no longer reflects me?” That’s an identity question, not a performance question. Fit is not a vague concept It can be helpful to know that this idea has been studied. A large meta-analysis by Kristof-Brown and colleagues looked at different types of fit at work, including person-job fit and person-organisation fit, and found consistent links between better fit and better work attitudes, as well as lower strain and withdrawal-related outcomes. You don’t need academic language to recognise what that means in real life. When the fit is there, work tends to feel cleaner. You might still be stretched, but the stretch has meaning. You feel more at ease in your own contribution. When the fit isn’t there, work can start to feel like a constant negotiation with yourself. The usefulness of this research isn’t that it tells you what to do. It’s that it legitimises the experience. The sense that something is off is not necessarily indulgence. Fit matters, and when it changes, your system notices. How identity changes before your career does One reason this stage is so common is that identity evolves faster than career structures. Your career has momentum. It has commitments, responsibilities, and a social story. It can’t change shape overnight, and in most cases it shouldn’t. But identity can shift quietly. What mattered to you at 28 might not matter in the same way at 38. What you once found exciting might now feel empty. The version of you that was willing to sacrifice everything for advancement might now want a different kind of life. This doesn’t mean you made the wrong choices. It means you’re alive and developing. The problem is when your work remains organised around an earlier version of you, and you keep trying to force the current you to comply. That’s often when “wrongness” appears, not as a dramatic breakdown, but as a persistent mismatch. The role can be right; the shape can be wrong Sometimes the
When adaptability stops being a strength and starts costing you
How “being flexible” can become losing yourself. Adaptability is usually framed as an uncomplicated virtue. In career terms, it’s employable. It’s promotable. It’s a sign you can handle pressure, navigate change, and stay useful when circumstances shift. Organisations love it. Leaders reward it. Entire professional identities are built around it. And for good reason. The ability to adapt is a genuine skill. It’s often the difference between being stuck and being able to move. But there’s a quieter truth that tends to surface later, especially for high performers: Not all adaptation is healthy adaptation. Some adaptation is responsiveness with a stable centre. And some adaptation is a slow drift away from your own preferences, needs, and truth. From the outside, both can look identical. Competence. Flexibility. Calm under pressure. “Easy to work with.” “Can turn their hand to anything.” From the inside, they feel very different. Why this question matters for capable people The people most at risk of “losing themselves” are often the ones least likely to be seen as struggling. They’re the reliable ones. The ones who can walk into a new situation and figure it out. The ones who don’t make a fuss. The ones who can take feedback, adjust, deliver, repeat. They’re also often the ones who learned, early on, that meeting expectations was a safe route through life. Sometimes that comes from family messaging: you’re good at maths, you’d make a good engineer. Sometimes it comes from school: here’s what you’re praised for, so you keep leaning into it. Sometimes it comes from work: this version of you is valued, so you keep reinforcing it. None of this is malicious. It’s just how identity is shaped in environments that reward performance and coherence. And it’s why adaptability can become a default personality rather than a deliberate choice. The “Yes Man” dynamic without the comedy Most people have seen the Jim Carrey film where the main character says yes to everything. It’s exaggerated, and that’s what makes it funny. In real life, it isn’t always funny. It’s often subtle, respectable, and professionally rewarded. It looks like this: You agree to the meeting that drains you because it’s easier than saying no. You take the role that doesn’t quite fit because you can do it, and other people can see you doing it. You shape your language, your tone, even your opinions to match the room, because it reduces friction. You become a composite of what is needed. At a certain point, you can’t tell whether you’re choosing your life or merely being selected by it. That’s not a moral failing. It’s a pattern. And patterns have origins. Healthy adaptation has a centre. Self-erasure doesn’t. A useful distinction is not “adaptability versus authenticity” as if one is good and one is bad. It’s: adaptability with a centre versus adaptability without a centre. Adaptability with a centre means you can flex your approach, but you still recognise yourself while doing it. You’re responding to context, not abandoning your internal reference point. You might change tactics, but your values and preferences remain audible to you. Adaptability without a centre is different. It becomes pure responsiveness. The room becomes the compass. The organisation becomes the compass. The next opportunity becomes the compass. And because you’re capable, you can keep this up for years. This is the part many people miss: losing yourself is rarely caused by incompetence. It’s often caused by capability. “Fit” isn’t the same as feeling like yourself One of the most confusing experiences in a career is when you fit a role and still feel off. You’re good at it. You deliver. You get results. You can even see a sensible future in it. And yet, you feel a low-level wrongness you can’t justify. This is where language like “ungrateful” or “restless” gets applied, often by the person experiencing it. But there’s a more precise explanation: fit and authenticity aren’t identical. A study looking at authenticity at work and person–environment fit found they are related but distinct, and that lower authenticity is associated with poorer wellbeing outcomes, including higher burnout and boredom. In other words: you can fit, and still feel less like yourself. And that gap matters. This is not an argument against adaptability. It’s a reminder that being able to perform in a context doesn’t automatically mean the context is good for your identity. How losing yourself actually feels “Losing yourself” sounds dramatic, so people often dismiss their early signals. They tell themselves they’re being over-sensitive, or that this is what adulthood looks like. But the lived experience is rarely dramatic. It’s more like a slow thinning. You notice you don’t have clear preferences anymore. Or you do, but you don’t trust them. You feel oddly fatigued by decisions that used to be simple. You feel irritation, not because you hate the work, but because you feel managed by it. You feel less spontaneous, less direct, less whole. You might also find your mind becoming busier. Not because you enjoy overthinking, but because something in you is trying to restore coherence. It’s trying to answer a question you haven’t been asking aloud: “When did I stop being in relationship with myself?” Overthinking, here, isn’t an enemy. It’s information. It can be the mind’s attempt to reunify what has become fragmented. Career variety can be valuable, and still ask for integration It’s worth saying clearly: having a varied career is not a problem to solve. Moving from one field to another can be exploratory, intelligent, and full of learning. Roles in engineering, finance, procurement, transformation, change management: none of these are inherently “wrong”. Sometimes change is exactly how you find what resonates. Sometimes you have to try a room to learn what kind of person you are in it. The issue isn’t variety. The issue is whether the variety is integrated. A varied career can create a rich identity when you can see the thread beneath it. But when the moves are mostly driven by
Outgrowing an identity at work
Why “failure” is often misalignment in disguise. There’s a particular kind of self-criticism that shows up in successful people. It doesn’t sound like arrogance. It sounds like accountability. “I’ve lost my motivation.” “I’m not as sharp as I used to be.” “I should be more grateful.” “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Underneath those statements is often a private fear: I’m failing. But many of the people who say this are not failing in any obvious way. They are still performing. Still delivering. Still functioning in roles that look stable and respectable. Their lives continue to make sense to everyone around them. Which makes the internal experience even more confusing. When things look fine on paper, discomfort can feel illegitimate. You assume it must be a mindset issue. Or a discipline issue. Or a resilience issue. You try to push through. You add more effort, more productivity tools, more self-management. And still, something feels off. This is where it can be helpful to name a different possibility. What if you are not failing. What if you have outgrown an identity. Failure is usually clear. Misalignment is usually foggy. Failure, for all its sting, has one advantage. It is tangible. A proposal is rejected. A target is missed. A project collapses. A relationship ends. There is an event you can point to. There are lessons you can extract. There is a narrative you can form about what happened. Outgrowing an identity rarely offers that clarity. It arrives as a low-level mismatch between who you are becoming and the life you are still living. It can look like low motivation, but it is not laziness. It can look like indecision, but it is not a lack of courage. It can look like boredom, but it is not a character flaw. It is often the early signal that your internal definition of self has shifted. This matters because people tend to treat fog as a personal failure. They assume that if they were more competent, more disciplined, more confident, they would know what to do. But fog is not always a problem to solve. Sometimes it is the honest weather of transition. The identity you needed to succeed is not always the identity you want to keep Most professional identities are built with good reasons. They are shaped by what you were praised for. They are reinforced by what you were rewarded for. They are stabilised by what your environment needed from you. Over time, a role can become more than a job. It becomes a shorthand for self. “I’m a lawyer.” “I’m a consultant.” “I’m a founder.” “I’m an engineer.” Again, none of this is wrong. It is social. It is practical. It helps other people place you. It can also help you place yourself. The problem appears when the identity hardens. When you only know how to be valuable in one shape. When you keep performing a version of yourself that once fitted, but now feels slightly outdated. When you start living from an identity that used to be a stepping stone and has quietly become a permanent home. This is a common reason clarity fades later in successful careers. The external identity remains intact, but the internal identity is changing. You are still being you, but a different you. Why it feels personal When someone misses a target, it can feel painful, but it is at least recognisable as an outcome. When someone outgrows an identity, it can feel more unsettling because it touches meaning. If the identity has been the container for your confidence, your status, your sense of contribution, and your belonging, then outgrowing it can feel like losing yourself. That can trigger shame. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the old identity was socially legible and internally familiar. Letting it loosen can feel like stepping into a room without a name badge. This is why people often reach for the word failure. It is a word that makes the discomfort sound practical. But misalignment is often closer to the truth. Misalignment sounds less dramatic, but it is more precise. It points to a mismatch, not a defect. Overthinking as information Many people notice the same thing when they outgrow an identity. Their mind gets louder. They second-guess decisions. They replay conversations. They wonder whether they are making a mistake. They research, plan, reassess, then circle back to the same uncertainty. In high-performing cultures, overthinking is treated as something to stamp out. The assumption is that clarity comes from being decisive, and decisiveness comes from having certainty. But in identity transitions, certainty is often unavailable. Overthinking can be a signal that the old identity no longer explains your life. The mind is trying to build a new internal map. It is searching for coherence. The question is not how to stop thinking. The question is what the thinking is pointing to. Often it points to a gap between what you are doing and what you can stand behind. Purpose is directional, not fixed One reason people feel they are failing is that they expect purpose to be a final statement. A single line that explains the whole life. A stable definition that never needs revisiting. A clear answer to “What do you want?” That expectation creates pressure. If you cannot name your purpose clearly, you assume you are behind. But purpose is often directional. It is a sense of orientation, not a permanent conclusion. When you outgrow an identity, the old direction no longer pulls with the same force. That does not mean you have no purpose. It may mean you are between directions. Between the old identity, which has completed its job, and the next identity, which is not yet fully formed. The “provisional self” is part of the process, not a problem This is where Herminia Ibarra’s idea of “provisional selves” is useful. Her research describes how professionals in transition often experiment with new ways of being. They observe, try on different
When you can’t articulate what you do anymore
Identity, misalignment, and the quiet signal underneath. There’s a moment many capable people recognise, often long before they say it out loud. Someone asks what you do for a living and, instead of a straightforward answer, you feel yourself reaching for language that doesn’t quite land. The sentence becomes a string of job titles, half-explanations, and corporate shorthand. The more you speak, the less you sound like yourself. It can feel strangely exposing. Not because the work is shameful, but because the explanation reveals something you’ve been trying not to look at. You can’t find a clean connection between the role and the person inside it. It’s easy to treat that moment as a confidence issue. A personal branding issue. A failure to “pitch” yourself properly. But very often it’s neither of those. It’s an identity moment. Why this question carries so much weight “What do you do?” is not a neutral question in modern adult life. It’s a shorthand for social location. It signals status, competence, values, lifestyle, even how seriously someone expects to take you. It’s one of the first questions asked at networking events, family gatherings, weddings, and first dates. We’ve made work the most socially acceptable way to be known. That’s not inherently wrong. Work is meaningful. It’s where we contribute. It’s where we test ourselves. It can be a source of pride. But when work becomes the main language of identity, the answer carries more than information. It carries a claim about who you are. Which is why it becomes uncomfortable when the claim no longer feels true. Chandler Bing There’s a scene in Friends where a trivia game escalates into a high-stakes bet, and the decisive question is: “What is Chandler’s job?” Nobody can answer. It’s played for comedy, but there’s something uncomfortably familiar in it. Not because people don’t know your job title, but because even you can’t explain it in a way that feels human. You might recognise the sensation: • You watch confusion spread across someone’s face as you speak. • You hear yourself using language you wouldn’t use with anyone you actually care about. • You feel yourself performing “professionalism” rather than describing reality. • You sense a gap between what your work looks like and what it means. And under all of that, a quieter realisation: I don’t think this is me anymore. It’s not always dramatic. Often it’s subtle and private. But it lingers because it touches something deeper than work tasks. It touches identity. When language goes first One of the most reliable early signals of misalignment is a loss of clear language. Not because you’ve suddenly become inarticulate, but because clarity requires internal coherence. When your role and your identity are moving in different directions, coherence becomes harder to access. You can still do the work well. You can still deliver. You might even be praised for competence. But when someone asks you to locate yourself inside the work, you hesitate. You can feel it in the body: a slight tightening, a searching, a need to over-explain. You might even dread situations where the question is likely to come up, not because you fear judgement, but because you don’t want to hear yourself say the words again. It’s easy to interpret this as a problem to fix quickly: refine the pitch, rewrite the LinkedIn headline, find a cleaner job title. Sometimes those changes help. But they don’t always resolve the discomfort, because the discomfort isn’t primarily about communication. It’s about connection. Misalignment isn’t failure. It’s information. For high-performing people, misalignment can feel like a threat. If you’ve built a career by being capable, reliable, and adaptable, it can be unsettling to admit: I don’t know how to describe what I do. I don’t know where I fit in my own story. The instinct is often to push through it. To “sort it out” privately. To read more, think more, gather more data, run more scenarios. Overthinking gets a bad reputation, but in moments like this it’s often doing something understandable. It’s trying to protect you from making an irreversible move. It’s trying to find stable ground. It’s attempting to regain a sense of self that feels coherent. The problem isn’t the thinking. The problem is mistaking thinking for resolution. Because identity questions rarely resolve through mental effort alone. They resolve through honesty, time, and a willingness to let the old definition loosen. That can be uncomfortable, especially for people who are used to being sure. Why this happens to competent people There’s a particular pattern that shows up in careers built on capability. You become someone who can “wear a dozen hats”. Different teams, different managers, varied responsibilities. You say yes. You learn fast. You make things work. You tick the boxes. From the outside, it looks like success. From the inside, it can start to feel like you’ve become a professional shape-shifter. In that pattern, your identity can gradually become organised around meeting requirements rather than expressing something true. Not because you were dishonest, but because you were busy. Useful. Needed. Rewarded. And usefulness is seductive. It keeps you in demand. It creates momentum. It gives you an immediate sense of value. Until one day the question arrives, “What do you do?” and you realise you can’t answer without borrowing other people’s words. That’s often the turning point: not a breakdown, but an awareness. Something has become too far away from you. Self-concept clarity and the quiet need underneath There’s research suggesting that people tend to experience work as more meaningful and intrinsically motivating when they have a clearer sense of self. In plain terms, when you can locate who you are, you tend to feel more internally anchored, more able to say, “This fits” or “This doesn’t.” That matters because the struggle to articulate your work isn’t only a social awkwardness. It’s often a sign that your internal anchor is shifting. The old language no longer maps neatly onto your lived experience. And