The choice was never between pressure and vanilla

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‘If I stop pushing forward, it’ll be like I’ve given myself a lobotomy.’

She said it in our sixth session together. High achiever - running a business, writing a book, leading a team in tech, raising a toddler, the works. Not someone who does things by halves.

She hadn’t come to me for help with any of that. The work, the business, the book - those were fine. She’d come because the tension was leaking. She was snapping at her husband. Getting irritated by strangers on public transport. Feeling quietly furious at her in-laws for taking a spa day when they visited to help with childcare. She could hear herself doing it. She didn’t want to be that person.

Friends had suggested she do less. Maybe step back from the business, or at least the book. She had considered this for approximately three seconds.

So there we were, six sessions in, and we’d finally hit the real thing.

She was terrified that releasing the pressure meant losing herself. Losing her edge. That without the pushing and the striving and the very high standards, she’d go ‘vanilla’.

Her word. And I knew exactly what she meant by it - the acceptable, comfortable, slightly beige version of a life. The version where you stop caring quite so much and somehow that becomes the whole story.

(Vanilla is a perfectly good flavour, for the record. Just not when we’re talking about your business.)

A different version of the same mistake.

I knew exactly what she meant. Because I’d spent years making a different version of the same mistake.

In my late twenties, I was working in education on an accelerated leadership track - taking on a toxic team inside a toxic organisation. I thought I just needed to get better at it. Tougher. More skilled at navigating the politics. And I did get better. Genuinely. My capacity to cope grew. What didn’t change was the environment I was coping inside.

I started feeling dizzy every day from tension. Not metaphorically - actually dizzy. My doctor ran tests. Nothing physically wrong. I was holding my breath so hard from the constant pressure of it that I was literally not breathing properly.

I eventually took some time off. Came back. The external circumstances were exactly where I’d left them.

That’s the thing nobody tells you. You keep upgrading your ability to survive something that shouldn’t have been survived. You mistake your own resilience for progress.

Acceptance…

Which brings me to a tool I encountered in my coach training that I initially wanted nothing to do with - acceptance.

What?!
I do not do giving up.

So I ran an experiment. I picked one word to hold my decisions up against for the year - a kind of shorthand for the direction I was trying to move in. The word was ‘flow.’ Just to see what happened if I stopped fighting quite so hard.

It turned out to be the most successful year of growth I’d had in my main business.

I didn’t let go of where I was going. I didn’t stop taking action. I let go of fighting. Of being a rock hitting other rocks. I stayed open to different roads.

Unexpectedly, this was faster, more productive, and significantly more enjoyable.

Acceptance and ambition are not opposites. The pressure you’ve been holding might not be driving you forward. It might be the thing slowing you down.

Options

Back to my client. We mapped it out plainly.

Option A: keep doing what she’s doing, keep feeling how she’s feeling.

Option B: step back from the things that matter to her.

Option C: keep moving forward with what’s important, AND let go of the fight. Be open to the actual process - the iterations, the bumps, the doubling back, the roads that look wrong and turn out to be fine.

She thought about it for a bit, then told me about a period at work when she’d been desperately stressed. The shift came when she stopped pushing so hard. Let go of perfection. Focused on moving forward with ease rather than force. She delivered to a high standard. Got promoted not long after.

She knew this move. She’d made it before. She just hadn’t tried it outside work yet.

She’s working on option C. The tension has reduced. There’s more connection with her husband. The book, she says, is flowing in a way that’s actually fun.

Productive pressure

There is a version of pressure that’s useful. The productive kind - the focus that comes from caring about something, from being close to the work, from having a deadline that matters. That’s real.

But purpose-driven founders are particularly good at turning the dial past that point and not noticing. The pressure becomes ambient. It stops being about any specific goal and starts being about identity. And then releasing it feels like losing yourself rather than gaining ground.

Nobody I work with accepts vanilla. But there’s a difference between refusing vanilla and needing the pressure to prove you’re not heading there.

Diamonds do form under pressure. But the choice was never between pressure and vanilla.