For years I ran a chiropractic practice I never built.
I bought it turnkey. The systems were already in place, the front desk was already staffed, and all I had to do was step in, look pretty and run it. On paper it worked. Underneath it ran a quiet hum: is this all I’m meant to do?
So I sold it and built something of my own. No front desk. No safety net. Nobody catching me if I dropped the ball.
And that’s when I found out something that had been true the whole time, and I simply hadn’t been in a position to notice it. I knew how to run an operation somebody else had built. I had never once had to be the person who built it.
The competence was real. It was also borrowed.
I work with professionals who are in the middle of this exact move. They are transitioning from one thing to creating their own thing, and they arrive with a track record that is genuinely earned. They did everything right inside somebody else’s system. They knew how to play by the rules. The structure was there, the support was there, and they often crushed it inside that system for years.
Then they step out on their own, and the same person who ran things beautifully inside that structure is suddenly second-guessing decisions s/he used to easily make before lunch.
Chances are they read that as a competence problem. It isn’t. The competence didn’t go anywhere. What went away was the structure that had been holding a part of them steady, and nobody warned them that the structure had been doing that job.
The transition isn’t asking you to change how you do things. It’s asking you to become somebody entirely different.
And nobody hands you the blueprint for that identity. Your task is to build it under pressure, in real time, while the transition is triggering you.
What’s actually happening when it hits
Here’s the part nobody explains at the office.
A deal falls through. An email from the legal team lands in your inbox. And in that moment our old wiring comes back online — the wiring that got built long before any of this, when you were small and something felt unsafe.
A younger part of us starts making the decisions.
That’s not a metaphor. Under pressure, the prefrontal cortex — the adult brain, the part that weighs and decides — steps back, and the amygdala takes the wheel. You’re in an adult body, in an adult meeting, with a younger part of you answering the questions.
It costs exactly what you’d expect. You reread the same email nine times and it still hasn’t gone in. You defer the decision. You snap at somebody who didn’t earn it. You perform calm in the room and pay for it at home.
And here’s the thing that matters most in a transition: you can’t build trust out there if there isn’t trust in here. Your nervous system is contagious. Your clients can feel it. Your team can feel it. Your kids can feel it before you’ve said a word.
Insight won’t fix this, and that’s not your fault
Most of the people I work with have already done the reading. They can explain their patterns accurately. They’ve had the realisation more than once.
And the pattern keeps running.
That isn’t a failure of effort or intelligence. It’s that understanding a reaction and interrupting one are two different skills, and only one of them gets taught. Talk therapy can’t easily reach a nervous system that hijacks you in the exact moment it matters most. You don’t need more insight in that moment. You need something you can do in your body while the pressure is in your chest and you don’t have five minutes to sit and journal.
There are two I’d start with.
One: widen your gaze. Under pressure your eyes narrow onto the threat like an animal mid-chase, even when the threat is an email. Keep your eyes on one spot and let your peripheral vision spread to the corners of the room. Take a deep inhale, a sip of air at the top, then a long drawn-out exhale. Three times. That breath is called a physiological sigh, and it’s the fastest way to bring your heart rate down that has ever been recorded in a lab.
It won’t stop the trigger from firing. Nothing does. What it buys you is a pause.
Two: use the pause to ask one question. What am I making this mean about me?
The issue is rarely what’s happening out there. It’s the meaning being made about you. Ask it honestly and the answer is usually some version of I’m not enough, or I’m a failure, or everyone’s about to find out. That’s the story running the reaction. Once it’s conscious, it stops running the show from underneath.
Is this sustainable?
That’s the question I’d put against how you’re operating right now. Not whether it’s working — plenty of unsustainable things work for a while. Whether you could run it this way for another ten years without something breaking. Health, marriage, the business itself.
Because the pressure isn’t going anywhere. The markets, AI, whatever the next year decides to do. The only thing that’s ever yours is how you respond to it.
And somebody is watching how you do it
Last year I dropped my son off at a ski lesson. He was four, brand new to it, and he went off on his own perfectly happily. At the end of the day his instructor pulled me aside to tell me he’d been the one talking the other kids through it when they froze at the top.
A four-year-old co-regulating other four-year-olds.
I didn’t teach him that. He caught it, watching me learn how to stay in my body under pressure instead of reacting out of it.
That’s what this actually is. Not a bigger portfolio. Not a cleaner exit.
Whoever’s watching you walk through your transition — your clients, your team, your kids — is going to inherit how you did it.
Make it worth inheriting.
TAKE THE NEXT STEP
Understand What’s Driving Your Patterns
Recognizing your patterns is one thing. Understanding what’s driving them and how they’re affecting your decisions, relationships, and ability to move forward is another.
In a private Pattern Clarity Call with Nima, you’ll explore the underlying patterns that may be keeping you stuck and gain greater clarity on what needs your attention.
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