Less Overthinking, More Living

There’s that inner feeling of tiredness that has nothing to do with how much sleep you’ve had.

It shows up after a day that went exactly as planned. You know those days where you did the things. And you checked the boxes. Nothing went wrong. And somewhere around 9 pm, after the house is quiet, a thought crosses your mind: is this it?

I hear a version of that question from almost every woman I work with, and I heard it again in a recent podcast conversation with Lynda Leonce, a woman who spent 16 years building a career she was genuinely good at. Promotions, recognition, a life that looked, from the outside, like it was working. And underneath all of it, this same quiet ache: why doesn’t any of this feel like enough?

She wasn’t in a crisis of any sort. Nothing had fallen apart. That’s the part I want you to sit with, actually, because I think a lot of us are waiting for permission to want something different.

And we think that permission only comes when things get bad enough, and we need to force change. But the good news is that doesn’t have to be a rock bottom. It can just be a feeling that won’t go away. It’s a sense that you’re living a life someone else wrote for you. A very reasonable, well-intentioned, perfectly defensible life – and it still isn’t yours. It’s not bringing the joy you’d hoped for.

What we’re actually grieving

Something I’ve discovered both in my own life and in the women I sit with: the hardest part of change usually isn’t the leap itself. It’s admitting that the thing you built carefully, over years, sometimes over decades, was never quite the thing you wanted.

It’s a strange grief. You’re not mourning a loss. You’re mourning a life that technically succeeded.

And I think that’s exactly why so many of us stay in it longer than we need to. It’s hard to walk away from something that isn’t wrong. It’s much easier to leave a burning building than a comfortable one.

But comfort and alignment are not the same thing. You can have one without the other for a very long time. Long enough to build an entire life around it.

The question underneath the question

What struck me most in this conversation wasn’t the big pivot — the move, the new career, or the reinvention. It was something much smaller: a single question she now uses when an old fear or a familiar knot of anxiety shows up. Not why am I feeling this, or how do I fix this, but: who’s the one that’s feeling that?

It sounds almost too simple to matter. But there’s something in that question that creates a half-second of space between you and the reaction enough space to notice that the fear talking isn’t necessarily you. It’s a program, or in my world, old lenses. Something you picked up a long time ago, from somewhere, that decided this is how you respond now.

Great news: you are not required to keep carrying every belief you inherited.

**Learn more about inherited beliefs here.

Alignment doesn’t look like more effort.

The other thing I loved is what she said when I asked how she balances getting things done with wanting more ease in her days. I had no idea what she would say.

Her answer: less debating or overthinking. Less back-and-forth with herself about whether to trust the pull she feels toward something.

Life, she said, got faster and simpler once she stopped negotiating with her own knowing.

That’s definitely not what we’re taught! Most of us were raised to think that a well-run life requires more discipline, willpower, and self-management. What if the life you actually want requires less of that? And to think that we don’t need more structure, but less resistance to what we already know?

An invitation, not a checklist

I’m not going to wrap this up with five steps to finding your true self. I wish it were that easy! According to Lynda, this is a process.

What I’ll offer instead is the same thing she offered listeners at the end of our conversation: most of us spend our lives pointing our attention outward — at what others think, at what we’re supposed to want, at whether we’re doing it right.

Try, just for today, turning that light inward instead. Take the time to see what’s actually there, underneath the script. Experience living in this alignment even just for a few minutes here and there. Begin making decisions based on how you feel in that moment. Allow yourself to experience things directly, without having to think through the pros and the cons. Just let yourself be.

That’s usually where the real life has been waiting the whole time.

A recent conversation on the See Her Now podcast inspired this reflection. If any of this lands somewhere familiar, I’d love to talk — book a discovery call and let’s see what your own life looks like through a truer lens.