Have you noticed that the more stressed you become about something, the less gracefully you perform?
I had a fun little lesson mirror this back to me recently.
As I’ve shared before, I’ve been studying Latin dance for almost two years now — salsa and bachata, simultaneously, for the same number of hours every week. When I first started, I had a really big resistance to salsa. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I loved bachata. I thought bachata was so sensual and beautiful, and felt I “should” learn salsa more out of a cultural obligation than the joy of it.
You can guess what happened next.
Even though I was doing the same amount of hours in both dances, I advanced much faster in bachata for the first year. I remember telling my teacher how weird that was, as I was spending the same amount of time on both.
That was lesson one...
Then came the plot twist.
About a year into practicing, I started noticing that I’d actually become worse in bachata than in salsa. I asked my instructor why I used to be better at bachata and now I’m not.
What he mirrored back to me was such a beautiful lesson:
“First of all,” he said, “You keep putting the two against each other as if it’s a competition. Second of all, because you love bachata so much and you’re desiring to get good at it, you’re really starting to overthink it. You’re putting so much thought into whether your movements are looking good.
“But when you’re dancing salsa, you’ve gone past the point of resistance. You don’t really care... You’re just having fun and going with it. Because you’re not in your head, you’re advancing faster.”
That’s when I got my second lesson.
I realized this has happened to me quite a few times in my entrepreneurial journey. I’ll get so into something, so obsessed — because it’s fun for me — and at first, I advance really quickly. You could call it beginner’s luck, but it’s really just passion. And a kind of naïveté in loving something so much you just want to give it your all for the fun of it.
Then... I start getting good. And the better I get, the more I start to take it seriously. The more seriously I take it, the more my perfectionist kicks in. This makes me get really good, really fast... until I hit the upper limit and it becomes self-sabotage.
I only saw this pattern clearly when I started to dance. I wanted to get even better and more refined, and in that wanting, I disconnected a little from how much I just love the activity for the sake of it. In that disconnection, I slowed down my own progress. (I’ve written before about the operating state this pattern creates when it goes unchecked — in Living in Survival State Keeps You Unconsciously Stuck.)
Where in your life has that happened to you? When you get really passionate about an activity, a person, or an idea, you give it your all, and then you begin to self-sabotage when your return starts to plateau or you sense that you’re not as good at the thing as you think you should be?
I don’t know about you, but I see this play out in my clients’ business, relationships and health all of the time... this experience was a healthy reminder for me that, while mastery and skill acquisition are important, what’s more important is to enjoy the process and truly have fun with it.
Anything we pour our love into will grow, but the minute we become obsessed or controlling about how it should look... that’s where we lose the plot. (This is the same pattern I unpacked in Stop Beating Yourself Up About Your Timeline — the pressure we wrap around our desires is what cuts them off at the root.)
TAKEAWAY: You're not being held back by a lack of effort. You're being held back by the stress you've wrapped around the effort.
What I share in the full transmission
In the audio training, I go deeper into how this pattern shows up not just in entrepreneurship, but in relationships, health, and every domain where you’re putting in full effort and the return starts to plateau. I walk through the difference between high performance that expands you and high performance that slowly empties you.
If you’ve been doing the thing you love and noticing it’s started to feel heavier, harder, less alive than it used to... this is for you.
Book a Story Clarity Intensive: You sense there’s a story running underneath everything — in the decisions that keep stalling, the message that won’t quite land, the next chapter you can see but can’t yet name. In 90 minutes, we find it. You leave with clarity on what’s been driving the pattern and what wants to be told instead. Book here.
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