For a long time, I lived in two worlds.
In one, I built a business: growth, ambition, getting things done. In the other, I meditated, went on retreats and questioned who this “I” actually was.
The worlds felt utterly different. But I entered both as the achiever. In business, I wanted more success. In meditation, deeper insights, deeper states, more progress.
The ego is remarkably good at turning even its own dissolution into an achievement project.
Retreats also opened a different perspective: deep stillness, openness, moments when striving subsided and the boundaries of self became less solid.
Coming home was always utterly painful.
Emails, targets, conflict, noise. What had felt so real seemed to disappear, and I desperately tried to hold on to it.
That created a fear I rarely talked about: What if going deeper meant losing what had made me successful? Would I lose my edge, my drive?
Letting go sounds different when you suspect you might be letting go of the engine of your success.
Almost 30 years into meditation, that fear was misplaced. I still love excellence and can be fiercely determined.
But I have become suspicious of some of what we call “drive.” A surprising amount is identity maintenance.
Under pressure, someone questions your judgment and suddenly you need to win. A challenge to your position becomes a challenge to you.
How much energy goes into leading, and how much into protecting who you need others to think you are?
This is where meditation and coaching meet for me.
Executives come into coaching under pressure, caught in conflict or facing a difficult decision. But often the deeper work starts somewhere else.
Who feels threatened? Who needs to be right? Who needs to win? What are you defending that has little to do with the situation itself?
Meditation has taught me to stay with those questions rather than rush to fix the surface.
Over the years, meditation stopped belonging to the cushion or the retreat.
You take it off the cushion. The meditation goes on, even in an airport terminal.
The stillness I once tried to bring home is not confined to a retreat. Stillness, spaciousness, boundlessness and timelessness are there in ordinary life: in a meeting, on a bike, at the airport.
Not because the world becomes quiet. Because the stillness was never dependent on the world being quiet.
The two worlds were no longer two worlds.
You don’t need decades of meditation to ask: Can you hear criticism without defending yourself? Stay open when your certainty is threatened? Make a difficult decision without needing to prove something?
I feared meditation would make me less effective. The opposite happened.
The discipline stayed. The ambition stayed. More energy became available for what actually matters.
Don’t only ask how you can become more driven.
Ask how much of your drive is spent defending who you think you are.