Your Peak of the Week
Hey Reader,
Welcome back to Peak of the Week — where we talk about what it really takes to perform at your best. As a person. As a leader. And increasingly, as an organization.
This Week →
- The year my internal operating system completely collapsed
- What I discovered when I stopped blaming myself and started getting curious
- Why this changed how I see performance…in myself and in others
Read Time 4-5 minutes
The Number Lied To Me For Years
For a long, long, long time I believed a very specific thing about myself. And I think you might have believed a lie like I did (for longer than I care to admit).
What was the lie? It was that my worth lived on a leaderboard.
Top of the board meant I was safe. I was valuable. And that I belonged.
Not on the board? Well….Who are you now, Laura?
I had built an entire identity around production. Around output. Around the external marker of a number that told me whether I was ok or not. Whether I was enough or not.
And the terrifying thing about that operating system? It worked.
For years, it worked wildly well. I was disciplined, driven, and relentless. I produced. I performed. I climbed. And the number rewarded me for it, which only reinforced the belief that this was just… how you succeed. How you stayed safe. How you mattered.
Until the year it all came crashing down.
I Was Not Even In My Body
2023 broke me open in a way I did not see coming.
I had a full-on breakdown. Full-on. I was not even in my body most days, rather just living inside my mind, spinning, surviving, white-knuckling my way through days that felt completely disconnected from anything real.
And the number dropped. Significantly.
And here’s what I did, because it’s what the operating system told me to do…
I pushed harder.
More effort. More hours. More forcing. Because that’s what the program said — if the number is dropping, you’re not working hard enough. Try harder. Do more. Be more.
Old Laura forced, efforted, worked endless hours… but in a state of panic and fear that I wasn’t enough.
And I want you to really sit with that for a second. Because I was doing everything the program told me to do. I was following every rule I had ever learned about success and performance and what it meant to be a high achiever.
And it was destroying me.
The Question That Emerged
Somewhere in the middle of that darkness, a question cracked me open.
Who are you when you’re not producing?
And I had no answer.
I had been so busy running the program — the one that said your worth is your output, your safety is your number, your identity is your performance — that I had never once stopped to ask who I actually was underneath all of it.
That question didn’t come from ambition. It came from the wreckage.
And what I want you to hear today…. clearly… because this is the part that set me free…
I wasn’t broken.
My operating system was.
I had real inner work to do, absolutely. The healing, the nervous system work, the generational patterns I had been carrying for decades without realizing they weren’t even mine. That work was mine, and I decided to take responsibility for it.
But I had also been running on a set of programs — about worth, about safety, about what success is supposed to look like — that were never actually true. I had just accepted them as truth for so long that I stopped questioning them.
Programs I had inherited.
Programs the world had handed me.
Programs that had been quietly running the show for waaaaaayyyyy too long.
What I now know that I could not have told you then…
When someone’s performance drops — in life, in work, anywhere — our first instinct is to look at the person.
What are they doing wrong? What do they need to fix? What’s the matter with them?
But we almost never ask about the operating system.
What were they trained to believe? What programs are running underneath the behavior? What environment shaped the way they’re showing up right now?
That shift… the shift from diagnosing the person to decoding the system… is what changed me.
What I Couldn't Stop Seeing After
Once I understood my own operating system…
I started seeing it everywhere.
In my coaching clients. Brilliant, capable, wildly gifted people who were exhausted and confused and blaming themselves for results that had so much more to do with the programs running underneath than with anything lacking in them.
I should be stronger. I should be further along. What’s wrong with me?
And I started seeing it in organizations, too.
Because organizations run programs, just like people do. They develop operating systems — about how decisions get made, about what gets rewarded, about whose voice matters and whose doesn’t — and then they wonder why performance looks the way it does.
And almost always, when something isn’t working, the first question is about the people.
Never about the programs.
I spent the better part of 2023 doing the hardest inner work of my life. Rebuilding my own operating system from the ground up. And what came out the other side was not just a healed version of old Laura.
It was a completely different understanding of what performance actually is.
And a burning conviction that I was meant to do something with it.
The ripple effect I’ve always believed in? It starts here. With you. With one more person understanding that they aren’t the problem.
The program is.
And programs… can be rewritten.
Now It's Your Turn:
Question #1: What program have you been running about your own worth or performance that you inherited — from family, from work, from the world — that you’ve never actually stopped to question? What has it cost you?
Question #2: I’m going to ask you to dig deep here… Where in your life or your work are you pushing harder right now… when what’s actually needed is to look at the system underneath?
Be honest.
Because sometimes the most courageous thing isn’t more effort, pushing, or forcing.
It’s getting curious about the operating system.
Know someone who’s in a season of “pushing harder” and getting further from themselves in the process? Forward this their way. Sometimes the most important thing we can offer someone isn’t a strategy.
It’s the question underneath the question.
Next week, I’ll be talking about what happened when I started getting inside organizations and saw these exact same programs playing out at scale. And what I realized I had been unknowingly building toward for the last 15 years.
With belief in our collective rise, one person at a time,
Laura
P.S. — If any of this resonates and you want to talk about what this could look like inside your team or company, book time here.
P.P.S. — If you’re looking for individual support, I work with a small number of people one on one. Book an activation session and let’s get into it. Book here.