The Patterns You Didn't Know Were Running You
Why you can't think your way out of what you can't see
The temperature was warm with a cool breeze, the sun was shining brightly but everything looked so dim.
She woke up tired yet again and wondered what she could do differently. She looked up and beckoned — something’s gotta give.
She looked forward and continued to get dressed — she prayed that whatever she wasn’t seeing, whatever she was doing wrong, would become clear.
Can you relate? This was me, in the deepest edge of my burnout before I had the words to give it.
About a decade ago, during a brief obsessive spurt, I became consumed with the idea of living in a Downtown Los Angeles loft. I toured a few buildings in the area — the neighborhood continuously shifting, growing the high-end ‘liveable’ area of DTLA and shrinking and scattering what is known as Skid Row.
The buildings were intriguing to me. I liked the idea of super high ceilings, but the revealed architecture — intentionally exposing beaming and piping as a design choice — felt ambiguous.
It made me think of how, when I typically walk into a building, I rarely consider what structures hold it up, its inner workings, and take for granted that it won’t fall.
Architecture, like operating systems, is a double-edged sword because the same thing that makes it so effective can also make it quite dangerous.
The inner workings are naked to the blind eye.
The Hidden Systems Running Your Leadership
When considering personal operating systems — our thoughts, beliefs, values, somatic patterns, the nervous system’s definition of safe — there are often many hidden streams running silently in the background, impacting the way we see, interpret, and act on the world around us.
Societal expectations — the voice that says this is just how it works, stop questioning it.
Codependent work structures — the dynamic where your success depends on managing everyone else’s comfort before you ever get to your own.
Personal trauma — the thing you’ve “dealt with” that still runs the show when pressure hits.
And while this may seem like a very personal conversation, it bleeds through every area of our life — including our business and leadership decisions.
When it comes to personal operating systems, the very same ones that run our personal lives are at play in our professional lives. They may have a different font, we may even take a different role, but the same rules apply. Often a set of unspoken, unagreed-upon, and invisible rules.
Trying to find solutions at the level they were created — optimizing and working harder inside the framework — is like being on a hamster wheel.
It is exhausting, extracting, and continues to feed a system that is so pervasive it can feel impossible to escape.
Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out
Many of us have begun to question at varying levels depending on our journey. There may be an acute awareness that something isn’t working. There may be a detailed analysis of what isn’t working and why, yet zero idea of how to change it. Some of us may have clear diagnoses and a plan for change, yet something still seems to evade a clear solution.
Wherever you are on the continuum, the process can feel elusive and pervasive — because it’s not a clear action or behavior pattern that is at hand. It’s an entire system that, as a society, based on our position, we have internalized and normalized.
The work at hand is learning to separate our identity from the system creating the patterns. But it’s really hard, if not impossible, to do so when you can’t see it.
Now more than ever it is critical to deeply question the framework or paradigm from which decisions are made — and this is a whole body exercise, not a mental one.
The Invitation
When I started consulting independently after leaving Deloitte, the top of my website read:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein
I was in my mid-20s and watched people run hamster wheels around problems that, if they just took a step outside of their thinking, solutions became obvious.
After fifteen years, I’ve finally begun to learn how to articulate these blocks and provide greater insight.
I’ve created an assessment to help you begin to look at what’s been running underneath — the system creating that hamster-on-a-wheel syndrome in your career or business. Or the one running the thoughts that keep you in deep fear and overwhelm around all that is going on in the world. Or whatever your version of it is — that thing that may seem like the way things are done, that’s breaking down and asking you for a new way.
You can’t think your way out of patterns you can’t see. But you can begin to name them.
Take the Capacity Archetype Quiz and see what’s been running underneath.