Miserably Successful: Why the Change You Want Starts Within
~80 to 90% of the time, we’re running on our sympathetic nervous system.
That’s what our research found when I was at McKinsey. Fight or flight, all day long. Foot on the gas, tank near empty.
Here’s the part that took me years to understand: no promotion, no title, no perfectly curated external life actually turns that system off.
I lived this. Seventeen years at McKinsey. Amazing partner role, incredible client relationships, a 36-hour work week I had designed, a family I loved. Everything was green lights.
But every single morning, I woke up with anxiety. Not about anything. My body was simply telling me: this is not what you’re meant to be doing.
So when Cortney McDermott told me on the Flourishing Edge podcast that she had been “miserably successful,” I knew exactly what she meant.
The Gold Stars That Don’t Add Up
Cortney is the author of Change Starts Within You and Give Yourself Permission, a TEDx speaker, and a coach to leaders at the highest levels. Before that, she was a corporate executive with every marker of arrival, the titles, the accolades, even the private jet.
I had all of the accolades and the titles… I was doing the thing that they said you’re supposed to do,” she told me. “And yet something just kept feeling really off.”
There was no single dramatic collapse. She calls it a slow drip, signal after signal that the life she had built was not the life that was hers. Her wake-up was, in her words, “a cold and lonely hallelujah.”
I hear versions of this story from leaders every week. Perfectly curated external lives. Hollow, suffering-filled inner lives. And most people respond by rearranging the furniture, new job, new team, new city, while leaving the inner world untouched.
The Cup Wasn’t Full. It Was Empty.
When I asked Cortney about the moment her cup ran over, she corrected me and the correction is the whole point.
The cup wasn’t full. That’s the point. It didn’t runneth over. The cup was empty.”
High performers don’t break because they have too much. They break because there is too little inside, too few internal resources to keep funding an externally driven life.
Cortney draws the distinction as push versus pull. Push is forcing outcomes from depletion, another goal chased as proof of worthiness. Pull is what happens when your inner intelligence leads and circumstances begin to meet you.
Sourcing your worth from the outside, she says, “is a zero sum game. You will never win that game.”
This converges completely with what I’ve seen in my own journey. When I finally left McKinsey, people called it courageous. But it wasn’t courage that set me free. It was the pull of my purpose, the why that made the path worth walking.
Cortney put language to it through psychologist Rollo May: “The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it’s conformity.”
Responsibility Is Your Ability to Respond
Cortney estimates that ~97 to 99% people will never take responsibility for their own inner conduct.
Not responsibility as blame. Responsibility, as she defines it, your ability to respond.
She uses a navigation metaphor I love. If you want to get to Chicago but don’t know whether you’re in LA or New York, you have a problem. Step one is simply admitting where you are, without the useless expenditure of energy that comes from being upset about it. Step two is holding the image of where you’re going, even if, like Timbuktu, you’ve never seen it.
It reminded me of a story Thich Nhat Hanh tells. A woman feels unseen by her husband, and he asks her: if someone gave you a flower and it began to wilt, what would you do? You wouldn’t blame the flower. You’d ask what it needs.
Cortney added a layer I found important, especially for women who spend their lives attending to everyone else’s needs: the first question is not what your husband or your team needs. It is what do I need to give myself? “How do I become the person who feels nurtured?”
That is inner work. It is also, I believe, the foundation for outer impact, the premise underneath everything we build at Happiness Squad, from the REWIRE program to the Sunflower Model.
Three Practices That Change Your State
So where do you start? Cortney offered three practices, and the first one is gloriously counterintuitive.
Rest
Literally lie down. When you’re oversaturated, don’t add another podcast, book, or framework. “You are oversaturated and you need to time out.”
Cortney’s image for this stuck with me. Most of us spend our days in high beta, the fastest, most stressed brainwave frequencies. Living there, she says, is like owning a Ferrari and driving it around in first gear. A magnificent machine, engine screaming, burning through fuel and barely moving.
Lying down is how you shift gears. Within minutes your brainwaves slow out of high beta, your vagus nerve signals your body that it’s safe, and the chemistry that fuels creativity comes back online. Even 30 seconds counts. Einstein napped; so can you.
Move
Cortney’s word for what builds up when we don’t move is “muck.” Just getting through an ordinary day, noise, screens, environmental toxins, other people’s stress, we accumulate residue, and it settles right on top of the inner voice we are trying to hear. Often you’re not confused. You’re clogged.
Movement is the fastest way to release that stuck energy and clear the line. “Once you’ve moved, you’ve changed your state. Once you change your state, you can change your story.”
State first, story second and it doesn’t take a workout. A walk between meetings does more for your thinking than the meeting notes will.
Yawn and laugh
Cortney calls yawning and laughing two of the most powerful meditations we have. Inner technologies we were born with, and then literally trained out of. Think about it: school taught us don’t yawn, don’t laugh. We suppressed the two fastest reset buttons we own.
“Yawning is considered the greatest kept secret of neuroscience. It energizes you and relaxes you at the same time.” It’s why animals yawn before and after a fight, it releases an enormous amount of energy while flooding the body with the chemistry of calm and connection. The payoff is that you start making decisions from a place of inspiration rather than desperation.
Laughter resets the system the same way, and it compounds when it’s shared. We don’t laugh at work nearly enough, not with our colleagues, not in our meetings, and it costs us. As Cortney put it, do these things “especially with groups of people,” and “you’re gonna be playing at an entirely new level of your game.”
If rest, movement, and laughter sound too simple to be leadership tools, look at what they are up against. Remember the number this piece opened with: we run on our sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, ~80 to 90% of the time. No one has access to their best thinking, their patience, or their creativity from that state.
And the modern workday is engineered to keep us there. We sit boxed into back-to-back meetings; Mayo Clinic calls sitting the new smoking, barely moving, rarely laughing with the people around us. Then we wonder why the ideas stopped coming.
The fix doesn’t require an off-site or a sabbatical. Build recovery breaks into the day: a short nap, an NSDR session, five minutes of mindful breathing. Take the walk between meetings. Let the laugh happen in the meeting. These micro-moments compound into a nervous system that can actually lead.
Your Inner Intelligence in the Age of AI
In an AI-fueled craze for productivity, Cortney argues that intuition matters more than it ever has.
She loves etymology, and this one is perfect: intuition means inner teacher. Confidence comes from confidere, with trust. The faculties were built in from the start.
“All of our technologies are actually based on technologies that we come equipped with,” she told me. “If you don’t know that, then you will rely on the technologies excessively… to a point that you have eclipsed and forgotten that you had all of that in the first place.”
Cortney says it plainly: YII – Your Inner Intelligence – trumps AI every time.
Cortney’s test for any advice you receive, including hers: “I don’t have your answers… but you do have your answers. And if someone’s telling you just take these five steps, run in the opposite direction.”
My own practices for turning up that inner voice are simple. The liminal 10 to 15 minutes when I first wake. No phone, just noticing. Walks in nature without a device and a daily sitting meditation practice; my 10-day Vipassana became the foundation for our REWIRE program.
Most of us are so noisy, even in quiet rooms, that we can’t hear the whispers of our inner soul telling us the way to go. Stillness is how the whisper becomes audible.
Start Within
If you don’t like the scenery out there, the job, the culture, the relationships, the invitation is not to blame the scenery. It is to examine the beliefs and ways of being that keep recreating it.
Rest before you strategize. Move before you ruminate. Ask what you need to give yourself before you audit what others owe you. Treat your intuition as the senior advisor it was always meant to be.
* * *
If this resonates, listen to my full conversation with Cortney McDermott on the Flourishing Edge.
Learn more about Cortney McDermott on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Cortney McDermott. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
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