Lately, I've been feeling uneasy about so much of the personal development world. It's the world that saved my life and gave me my career—work I believe in deeply. But something about the way it's unfolding doesn't sit quite right with me.
We live in a time of mounting pressure. Underneath the headlines and noise and algorithms, many of us feel a subtle, persistent ache… or maybe not so subtle these days. A knowing that something is off. We can feel it in our bones. In the first moments we wake each morning, a sense of dread often creeps in. In the loneliness that somehow lingers, even in a crowded room or a successful life. This dread and disconnection drive us to reach for ways to feel better and regain a sense of agency amidst the chaos.
St. Joseph’s Sound, FL. © 2017 Carla Royal.
When Tools Become Traps: The Shadow of Optimization Culture
Many have learned all the tools and techniques, especially my high-performance clients: the mantras, the mindset hacks, the productivity systems, the breathwork routines, the rewiring strategies. There are countless ways to optimize our lives these days. When practices like meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and journaling get repackaged as productivity hacks, we lose sight of their original purpose, depth, and richness. Rather than tools for liberation and self-understanding, they become just another way to hustle harder, to tolerate circumstances that maybe shouldn't be tolerated.
The writer Denis Bischof put it plainly: much of what passes for personal growth today has little to do with becoming more fully human and more to do with becoming more marketable. I see this play out with many of my clients who are driven entrepreneurs. They come to me burnt out, anxious, and disconnected from themselves after years of chasing external success. The practices they thought would bring them freedom have instead become just another box to check, another way to grind themselves into exhaustion. It's a trap. It’s a troubling pattern I see everywhere: the hijacking of personal development by a culture obsessed with performance, grind, and external validation.
From Authenticity to Branding: A Crisis of Depth
We meditate to get more done. We regulate our nervous systems not to rest but to tolerate more pressure. We curate our emotional lives into something clean and palatable enough to post online. Authenticity goes out the window. Self-knowledge is unimportant. We become a well-coiffed but superficial version of ourselves.
There's a difference between doing the work to be seen and doing the work to see ourselves more clearly. There's a difference between genuine spiritual development and the spiritual branding that often masquerades as growth while actually enabling us to bypass the real work. Much of what I see today isn't people going too deep into their inner world; it's people staying just deep enough to function, to manage, and to make it all look okay from the outside.
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Coping Is Not Living: Why We Need to Go Deeper
But we weren't meant to simply manage. We weren't built to cope our way through life. As I wrote in my last essay, we're in the middle of a global storm. Everything around us feels chaotic and unmoored. Turning inward can seem like a luxury we can't afford. But what if it's the very thing that will help us move through these chaotic times, come together, and thrive again? The anxiety, numbness, and fragmentation so many are experiencing aren't just personal problems; they're appropriate responses to a world out of balance. They're showing us what isn't working, not just inside us but around us.
You Are Not Broken—You're Responding to a Broken System
We've been taught to internalize dysfunction as personal failure. But as Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." So no, it's not all your fault. And no, you're not broken. But if you've been living inside systems that reward disconnection, grind, and the kind of self-sacrifice that leaves you depleted rather than fulfilled, then of course you're going to feel off. Of course, you're going to reach for ways to feel better.
And yet, amidst all this dysfunction, there's a quiet wisdom whispering in our discomfort, inviting us to see it not as a problem to be solved but as a path to be walked.
The Wisdom of Discomfort: An Invitation to Remember Who You Are
What if the discomfort is here to wake you up? Not to punish you but to invite you to slow down. To turn inward and begin the difficult and rewarding journey of remembering who you are at your essence before this culture covered you with all its corrosive crud. And as you do this deep inner work, you simultaneously turn toward the world with greater wholeness, wisdom, and compassion to serve a world in need.
If something inside you is tired of just managing, tired of curating a version of yourself that looks like it has it all together, and if you long for something more honest, more alive, more meaningful, then maybe you are at a turning point.
The world we're living in is unsustainable, but there is a different way to live, love, and lead. It starts by being willing to turn toward what's been buried rather than polishing what shows on the surface. It's slower. And harder. And far more beautiful.
This is the excavation work I wrote about in “When Everything Burns”, the sometimes painful but ultimately liberating process of facing our shadows, feeling our grief, and letting the flames of transformation burn away what's no longer serving us. It's the deep transformation of my other essay, “Every Storm Runs Out of Rain,” which invites us to trust and come home to ourselves, not by resisting discomfort but by allowing it to move through and teach us.
Healing Is Leadership: A New Way to Live, Love, and Lead
When we commit to this inner transformation, we begin to heal ourselves, and we also begin to heal the collective. The two are woven together, inseparable. We remember we belong to each other and the earth. We start to embody a different way of being in the world. One rooted in wholeness, compassion, and connection. This is the kind of leadership our times are calling for. Not leadership that comes from a place of grind and performance but leadership that flows from an integrated heart. Leadership in how we live, how we love, and how we create community in a world of polarization and fragmentation.
This isn't just a personal invitation, it's a cultural necessity. The more of us who are willing to slow down, feel deeply, and show up fully and authentically, the better chance we have of ushering in a world where our institutions and societies reflect the depth of our humanity, not just the surface.
This Is the Great Work of Our Time
Change starts within, but it can't stop there. How we unburden and transform ourselves ripples out in ways seen and unseen.
If enough of us are willing to walk that path, we may just find ourselves ushering in a more grounded, wholehearted way of being, not only for ourselves but for a world hungry for realness and connection amidst the noise and chaos.
May we all find the courage to go beneath the surface and listen to the wisdom of our unease. May we do the slow, unglamorous, but utterly vital work of becoming more than optimized, but truly whole. And from that place of wholeness, may we each do our part to help heal a world in need.