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The other day, I admitted to my friend, as we sat in the Portuguese sun sipping on our decaf cappuccinos, that I’m a “lazy achiever.”

What this means is that I’ve long since stopped hustling my butt off, and I’m still able to achieve my goals.

But it wasn’t always like this. I spent most of my 20s striving to be someone I wasn’t. Back then, I thought that having a successful career was the most important thing in life and I worked extremely hard to earn my PhD and “make something of myself.”

But the stress of it all was too much on my system. I couldn’t handle the workload and ended up leaving the elitist ivory tower of academia to teach yoga on a tropical island.

When I came to realise that life in paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (it became boring fairly quickly), I moved back to Europe, started a coaching practice, and ended up retraining as a somatic practitioner.

And suddenly, all of my previous life and career decisions made sense.

When our goals are bigger than our nervous system’s capacity to handle them, it leads to things like overwhelm and shutting down, or anxiety and burnout.

We call this “self-sabotage,” but it’s actually a smart, protective mechanism of the nervous system. 

When I “ran away” from academia, I was told back then by others that I was being too hasty and might regret it later. But my body knew exactly what it was doing because carving out that space for myself allowed me to begin the process of unhooking from hustle culture. 

Over the past decade, I’ve been on a journey of learning how to do fulfilling work in the world, whilst honouring the pacing, rhythm, and capacity of my body. 

I’ve learned that taking a nervous-system-based approach encourages us to honour our big, juicy desires but also work with what’s doable, breaking down our goals into manageable actions that match our current capacity. As we build our capacity, we can then maybe start to take bigger and bolder action that yields us bigger results. 

But I’ve also learned that small actions compound over time too. The key to reaching our goals is to sprint when it’s necessary, rest when we need to, and take small doable action over time.

Going slow and steady can feel like death to those of us who are only familiar with the hustle and grind.

Yet with burnout becoming so prevalent and our collective mental health declining in the last decade, it’s clear to me that the cultural messages we receive around what success is and how to get there aren’t making us happier—they’re making us sicker.

Meeting our bodies where they are at and operating from our current nervous system capacity is a radical rebellion against a dominator culture. 

This is the power of somatics. It’s goes against a culture that tells us to “go big or go home.” But in my opinion, it’s the best route to sustainable success and deep fulfilment.

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