The most expensive mistake I’ve ever made didn’t cost me money.
I spent years climbing a corporate ladder. One where everyone had pointy elbows, jockeying for the next “opportunity.”
And when I got the promotion I remember my leader ushering me in by saying “Congratulations! Now you’re part of the problem too.”
Wait?! What?
Within weeks I felt like it was bait and switch. I told a mentor and advocate that the process was wrong.
I’d climbed the goat path. Run the obstacle course. Been invited into the vault. Then the vault door was slammed shut and only then were the lights turned on to show me what I’d been clamoring for.
I didn’t feel triumph. I felt faint, confusing flatness.
Something closer to the feeling of showing up to what you were promised would be the best party and experience of your life – like what you imagine champagne and caviar is “supposed” to be like (for the record, I’ve had both and do not like either), but you find yourself standing in the doorway wondering why you’d rather be at a pizza party in someone’s backyard with a cold beer.
Here’s my point: Some of the “shoulds” in your life that are costing you the most don’t feel like guilt.
Let me show you how I missed it.
Some “shoulds” show up as drive or ambition.
We think we can spot a “should” because it feels bad. It nags. It guilts. *You should call your mother. (probably…yeah ok…maybe) You should answer that text (meh…). You should be further along by now. (argh)
But the sneakiest ones don’t nag at all. They dress up as want.
I should want this promotion. I should be scaling my business by now. I should want the big title, the big office, the big life someone sketched out for me before I had opinions about my life.
That doesn’t feel like an imported order. It feels like your own honest ambition. Which is exactly the disguise.
I accepted someone else’s ambition.
And that’s the actual mistake.
It wasn’t the climb. It was the fact that I didn’t actually want it.
In fact…I did it out of spite because some guy told me he didn’t believe I could and didn’t support me. Everyone around me agreed that this next step, this next rung was the right one for me except this one guy. I’d been saying “no” for years. Right up until he said he didn’t believe I “could” and then my competitive nature kicked in.
And I had to prove I could.
My Autopilot is fast and cheap and confident (we met it in the Intruder Paradox piece). It handed my slower, thinking brain a tidy story… this is the win, go get it. this is how you prove yourself and get people to take you seriously… and my thinking brain, lazy by design, signed on the dotted line without reading the contract.
Ten years of technically-mine decisions that somehow weren’t mine at all.
My body sent me the bill.
Here’s the thing about running someone else’s ambition through your own nervous system. There’s a tax, and your body pays it.
Mine came due.
ER visits. Chronic pain. Two surgeries. Medication. Chemotherapy. Two auto-immune disorders. Medically induced and then surgically induced menopause. And everything that comes with it.
Let me be specific about the chronic pain, because “chronic pain” is a tidy phrase that tells you nothing.
This was not bad-period pain. Not the cramps you push through with a heating pad, an Advil, and a tight smile at 9am. Because that’s the box everyone tries to file it in – and it’s the wrong box.
This was pelvic pain that spiked without warning and shot straight up to the base of my skull. The kind that leaves you panting for a second. Nauseated. Shaken. Trembling. Then it would settle back into its baseline… a dull, pulsing, bone-deep ache in my abdomen, my hips, and my lower back.
All the time. 24/7. Nothing touched it. Always on, always playing in the background.
This background “noise” takes rent out of your brain and quietly eats the capacity you need to problem-solve, think critically, hold a conversation without a snap or a snark riding shotgun on every sentence. I wasn’t difficult. I was in pain, all day, every day, running a full executive load on whatever cognition the pain hadn’t already spent, popping Vicodin to make it through.
Opioid medication dulls the pain and quiets the background noise, and dulls those executive functioning skills.
Here’s what that looked like in the rooms where I was supposed to be the sharpest person present:
+ I’d be mid-point in a meeting, building to my point – the point I’d “practiced” – only to lose the thread. Just gone. I got really good at roundabout ramble phrases to bring myself back to my point and just hoped no one noticed.
+ I’d lose words presenting to leadership. Not obscure ones. Ordinary ones like “proposal” or “pen”. The word right there, close enough to touch, and my brain would hand me static instead.
+ I’d read the same report four times and retain nothing. Blank on a colleague’s name mid-introduction – someone I’d worked beside for ten years – while I was handing them to a client.
So I built scaffolding to hold it together. Lists for the lists. Alarms on the alarms. The elaborate machinery of a woman spending most of her energy masking and hiding that things weren’t working out of fear.
And under all of it, a fatigue that sleep didn’t touch. Not tired. Depleted. I’d hit 2pm and feel my thinking wade through wet sand, quietly doing the math on how many hours were left before I could stop performing “fine.” It was always 4 hours until I drove an hour to reset and then got back online to do my administrative work.
I told myself this was just the cost of the level I was now playing at.
And that’s the lie that keeps you climbing.
The strain my body was under wasn’t a sign that I needed more grit. My body was flagging a significant all system failure but I kept overriding it.
The lesson: I never asked if I was chasing my dream.
My lesson was when I said yes to the promotion it wasn’t because I really wanted it. Others wanted it for me.
I hit a point where I couldn’t do it anymore (that’s a whole different story) and I climbed down that ladder in my 40s. Deliberately. Shuffled sideways. Into work that fit me. And I’ve done it twice more in the years that have followed.
But before I made the decision to climb down I wondered if it was “failing” because you’re supposed to you know, climb up the ladder. Especially as a woman. And as you rise up, you lift others with you.
The Autopilot told me that going down the ladder was for people who couldn’t hack it; that everyone would see me as a failure. (The Autopilot was very invested in the ladder. The Autopilot also never once asked if I like heights.)
I overrode the Autopilot with evidence and choices. Deliberately designed my exit and transition.
Here’s what I know now – walking away from a title that doesn’t fit isn’t a fall. It’s authentic and the truest thing I could have ever done for me to align myself to do work with my values.
The one question that would have saved me a decade.
I knew I was proving myself but I never asked whose ambition and dream I was following. I couldn’t see that the room I was in was dictating and driving the decision, and much of that decision was coming out of fear and this longstanding need to be taken seriously.
I didn’t ask the question did I choose this or am I just going through the motions because it’s what I’m supposed to do. Because it’s the logical next step.
I’m not anti-ambition. I’m anti-imposed ambition. Want the promotion. Want the title. Want the corner office. Just make sure it’s your true want before you lose a decade and kill your nervous system going after it.
Next Steps
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is “borrowed ambition” and how does it lead to burnout?
Borrowed ambition occurs when you adopt external expectations, corporate milestones, or a desire to prove someone wrong as your own personal drive. Because this motivation is imported rather than authentic, pursuing it forces your nervous system to operate on stress and fear, eventually leading to severe physical exhaustion, health crises, and cognitive depletion.
Is stepping down from a senior corporate role a sign of failure?
No. Stepping down or moving laterally off a traditional career ladder is an act of intentional realignment, not defeat. Choosing to leave a title that actively damages your health or conflicts with your core values requires overriding default cultural conditioning (“Autopilot”) that falsely equates endless upward mobility with personal worth.
How does chronic stress and physical pain affect executive functioning?
Continuous physical strain and chronic pain consume immense cognitive bandwidth. This ongoing “background noise” drains the exact mental resources required for working memory, focus, and decision-making. When your brain is constantly processing physical distress, simple cognitive tasks feel exhausting, forcing you to rely on elaborate masking strategies just to perform routine work.