Episode 88: Why High Performers Feel Stuck (And How to Break It)

Episode Summary 

Most leaders don’t lack discipline—they lack alignment. And that’s where strategic capacity quietly breaks down.

In this episode, Kristen Crabtree introduces a powerful shift: the difference between achieving goals and actually living in alignment with who you are. Too many high performers are stuck on autopilot, chasing outcomes that were never truly theirs—leading to burnout, second-guessing, and constant internal pressure.

Kristen breaks down the concept of “self-revelation” and how uncovering your truth unlocks clarity, decision-making, and sustainable performance. This conversation goes beyond surface-level mindset work and gets into the real root—patterns, emotional conditioning, and the internal noise that keeps leaders stuck.

If you’ve been grinding but still feel off, this episode will challenge how you think about strategy, awareness, and what it really means to lead yourself first. 

Key Takeaways

• You’re Achieving… But Not Aligned
  High performers hit goals that were never truly theirs—and pay for it with burnout. 
• Autopilot Is Killing Your Strategic Capacity
  Repeated patterns and unconscious decisions keep you stuck in cycles you don’t question. 
• Awareness → Pause → Different Action
  Real change starts when you interrupt the pattern—not just recognize it. 
• You Don’t Need More Discipline—You Need Truth
  Alignment removes the need to force motivation and grind. 
• You’re Not Stuck—You’re Conditioned
  Your patterns aren’t random… they’re learned. And they can be unlearned.

Transcript

Welcome And The SWAG Framework

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to the Let's Think About It podcast, where high achievers stop performing and start transforming. I'm Coach Mo, certified core energy leadership coach, founder of the inner arena, and creator of the Swag Framework. Self-awareness, my power, aligned action, and grip. Around here, we train your mindset, challenge your limits, and turn pressure into purpose. Subscribe now and join me on YouTube at Swag Coaching. So let's get your reps in.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

We're gonna big, gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Hey, don't trip, gotta get it how you're welcome to another episode of the Let's Think About It podcast. I'm your host, Coach Mo, and I'm here with another amazing guest. And her name is Kristen Crabtree. Miss Crabtree, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_03 1:11

I'm great, Coach Mo. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Man, I'm doing awesome. Where are you checking in from?

SPEAKER_03 1:18

I'm in Massachusetts, the Berkshires, Williamstown specifically.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Okay, born and raised?

Meet Kristen And Her Work

SPEAKER_03 1:26

Oh gosh, no. But if we went off on that, it would be a long conversation. I was an army brat, so I traveled a lot, and then I traveled in an RV full time. And yeah, I've traveled a lot, been a lot of places.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

I've never been to Massachusetts. What's that region of the country like?

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Right now, cold, but so I wound up in the New England area as a result of my story, but I stayed here because of the community. The people are my people. Like I really, I really resonate with this area. Yeah. It's there's a lot of trails, a lot of outdoor stuff. There's Boston, but that's on the exact opposite end of the state.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah. That's awesome. So tell my audience who you are, what you do, and the type of value that you bring.

SPEAKER_03 2:21

Okay. So I'm a self-revelation guide, is what I consider myself. And I'm also a certified divorce coach, but that's really just one component of the work, the bigger picture and my passion is really helping people hear their truth and live an alignment with it. And I use a specific model of the archaeologist artifact and architect. And people travel through that process to hear who they really are and then live intentionally, live in alignment with that truth.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Yeah, I love that. I work with a lot of leaders. And that's what this podcast is geared to or high achievers, leaders. And one thing that's missing, in my opinion, in leadership development is self-regulation, leading self, and ultimately teaching people how to be strategic and leading self too. So how did you get into that pivot from being a divorce coach to self-revelation?

Success Without Alignment And Abuse

SPEAKER_03 3:28

Revelation to coaching. So work. Actually, they came in the opposite order, but they came about from my own transformation journey. I don't specifically work with business leaders, but the work I do will really resonate with your audience of business leaders. I'll touch on my story in a second, but I don't want to lose this thought. The reason is that leaders, whether it's business, politics, whatever, they are incredibly skilled at achieving, but they're not always achieving what's in alignment with who they are. They've gotten so good at setting a goal and hitting it, and setting a goal and hitting it. A lot of those goals aren't really their goals. They're not really them. They're just adaptations that they've adopted throughout their life. And so what happens in that situation, I find, is that they're constantly like pushing for motivation and pushing for discipline. And when you really live in alignment with who you are, you don't need motivation or discipline. It just happens, right? It just is absolutely yeah. Absolutely. So to give the short answer to your story, which these days is my preferred version, I was very successful as a real estate broker in California, but I did leave that work to travel full-time with my spouse for a number of years. What I didn't realize during this whole 22-year adventure, so to speak, with my ex is that I was being psychologically abused. I was being controlled, manipulated, blamed, gaslit, all those things. I didn't even know what those words meant. She used, I was married to a woman, she used my childhood trauma against me to control me and manipulate me. So one of the messages that I like to share with people of any category, certainly leaders, but anybody, is that a lot of times when we know things aren't right, and there's some big signals that tell us things aren't right, but when we know things aren't right, we're waiting for clarity and we're waiting for a plan. And if you wait for those things, you're never gonna make the change. It's not gonna happen. So when I left my marriage, I left in a place of fear, confusion. I knew nothing about myself anymore. Nothing at all. Like from the bare very basic things, like what do I want my home furnishings to look like? Because everything had been decided for me from leaving and being in that place of who am I? Who am I really? That is what that was my starting point for the self-revelation work that is now something I guide other people through. The divorce coaching actually came after the fact.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 6:41

Because the self-revelation guide, that's my passion project. Okay. I wrote a book. There's a whole story about how that came to be. I just published the journal that goes with it. I have t-shirts that that doesn't sound like it goes with it, but it actually does. I have an app that's going to be out in a couple of weeks. All of that is it, I didn't build it from a place of logic. I built it from a pay a place of hearing my truth and what I'm supposed to do in this world. It may never make me any money. It's cost me a lot of money. That's okay. But the divorce coaching is the avenue that I use to support myself financially.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

We've developed this habit to be on autopilot, right?

unknown 7:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

And what I mean by that is we develop certain patterns through our natural consciousness from our environment. And when we desire change, there's something inside us that's signaling, hey, let's make a change. This doesn't feel right. But because we're an autopilot, that signal, we are unaware of what that signal truly means. So we stay in the pattern. We keep repeating the pattern, we keep repeating the pattern, and then we carry this shame and guilt on ourselves because we haven't changed and we're not changing. But the signals are there, and we don't know how to trust the signals to make the change. And like you said, and like you said, you're waiting for this, you know, this epithet to show up to say, okay, it's time for the change. Let me take your hand and walk you over here. But that really realistically never happens, and we have to learn internally how to listen to those signals and take action from that. Is that what you were saying when you brought that up?

SPEAKER_03 8:39

Yeah, very much. In fact, usually it takes us getting hit in the head with a two by four by that voice, by that truth, before we actually will take the leap. The bear that's chasing us has to be more scary than the abyss that's in front of us. So we're standing looking at this abyss, and we've been running from this beast. And we're like, okay, do I turn around and face the beast one more time out of 50 gazillion times, or do I just take the leap and get away from the beast once and for all? And that's really what that's when people change.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

I agree with you 100%. I also think this too, it's easier to accept the pain of today than to explore the fear of tomorrow.

SPEAKER_03 9:30

Yep. The unknown is very scary.

Autopilot Patterns And The Leap

SPEAKER_01 9:32

The unknown of tomorrow can be scary as hell for a lot of people. They don't know what the outcome is going to be, and they would just rather settle with the cycle or the pain that they're dealing with currently.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

I think one of the things that I approach this conversation to help people become more strategic for self-revelation is swag, self-awareness, white power, aligned action, and grit. To even begin the momentum of self-revelation, you gotta have self-awareness. You gotta know those thoughts. And then more importantly, what's your purpose? What's your values? And what necessary actions do you need to take to move forward for self-revelation and not giving up on yourself, trusting your process that you can do this? See, that's swag, that's swag, and it's simple, it's simple that we can use a term like that to say, you know what, my swag is off. I need to get my swag back, right? It aligns with your approach. And so can you take us through what your approach is to helping someone develop self-revelation?

Excavation And The Artifact Test

SPEAKER_03 10:56

Yeah. So you're totally right that it starts with self-awareness, which starts with quieting monkey mind, right? The process that I walk people through, I call it an excavation. So it goes along the lines of the concept of the archaeologist. So the archaeologist chapters in the book, and part of the process is really learning to understand the current science, philosophy, metaphysics, theory out there on the different aspects that I look at. I look at the mental body, emotional body, physical body, and energy body. And so within each of those in the book, not necessarily in the one-on-one work, but in the book, they're presented with a lot of different current understandings that they can then pick and choose what resonates with them. But the point of that is that as they're doing their excavation, which is the next chapter in each of the sections, and the excavation is made up of each body has a hundred or more questions and 20 to 40 exercises that people don't have to do all of them, but the idea is again to pick and choose what resonates. But those questions and exercises are designed to start to peel away that mask, peel away those layers, peel away those adaptations to get to what I call the artifact. So the artifacts are really determining what is an authentic value, quality, characteristic, drive, dream, whatever. So an artifact that is authentic versus an adaptation, right? So once they have identified the artifacts, so artifacts are experiences or memories, and there's a whole thing we could talk about with memories, but experience or memories that somehow make them who they are. But the question is whether those have made them the adapt the adapted version or is part of their authentic self. So then the next step in the process is to intentionally build who your truth wants you to be, like who you really are supposed to be in this world. Because what people have forgotten, and I will say this to everybody out there, you are miraculous, you are amazing, you are magnificent, but you have forgotten. And the gift absolutely the gift of this journey in this life is the remembering. It's the remembering of that. So that's one other thing is I don't, I don't know anybody else's truth or their perfect path or their journey. And that's why I call myself a self-revelation guide, because my role here isn't to tell you what to do or who to be or how to do it, it's to provide you the resources and the tools and the techniques to hear that for yourself and then know how to design from there.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Well, that's interesting. And I love what you said when identifying, you know, that truth and remembering that truth. But it's hard. It's hard in a sense where maybe you've been beat down for years and you've been in this cycle of negative reinforcement into your consciousness on a daily day-to-day basis, and your environment that you're surrounded by are negative, and you finally decided that you want to break free from this, but somehow when you take a step forward, you take five steps back because that's been the environment that you've been in for decades, and all of a sudden now you want to make this change. Yeah, how does one start to become more intentional in making that change?

Quieting Monkey Mind With Mindfulness

SPEAKER_03 14:47

Yeah. So to go back, I got off on the tangent, but we were talking about awareness, which you know you had brought up. The awareness needs to connect with the concept of self-trust. And self-trust is formed through the awareness and being true to it. So let's back up to awareness again. In order to hear your truth, and when I use that term, what I'm talking about is that version of you that doesn't have all those layers of adaptation, right? It doesn't have all those masks. So that's how I'm using that word. In order to hear that truth, I made reference to monkey mind. Monkey mind is that cyclical spinning or just jabber or inner critic or whatever, the noise in your head that is there all day long. And yes, I hear it. That noise in your head that is there all day long. You have to find ways to quiet it. The way to quiet it is a very scary word, meditation, right? People are like, I don't know how to meditate, I can't meditate. And I think I know I said that a gazillion times. And it's for me, it was because the idea of medic meditation was fairly limited, like sitting cross-legged, breathing, staring at a candle, whatever. And we do that for two minutes, and we're like, oh my God, I can't shut my mind up. So I must be a failure. I must not be able to do this. And then that's one more thing that we have to beat ourselves up about, right? But there are infinite techniques to use that would be classified as meditation, but that can be incorporated into your daily moments that enable you to quiet your brain, even if only for 10 seconds. And the more you do that, the more trust you develop with your truth. Your truth starts to go, oh, okay, all right. You're start, you're starting to listen. Okay. And so some of those tools are what a lot of people call mindfulness. The first bite of your food that you eat in the morning or at lunch or whatever, even if it's from McDonald's drive-through, you're unwrapping it in the car as you drive, right? That first bite, if you just think about, don't close, I'm closing my eyes right now for those of you who are watching. If you're driving, don't close your eyes. Just think about the texture and the flavor and um the seasonings and how it feels on your teeth and your tongue. Literally, if it's only one bite of food, that is a moment that your truth now knows that you're doing something different. And the more you do that, the more what I call and other people call the observer will start to be there. And the observer is this part of you, for lack of a better word, that can then watch your behavior, thoughts, and emotions and allow you to see it as separate from it and without judgment, and then allows you to pause in the patterns that aren't working for you. So we all exist in this sort of loop of like feeling, thought it. Some people say thought, emotion, behavior, experience, and back. I actually have a different way of looking at it, which would be a 20-hour conversation. So we won't go into that. But the basic idea of the loop where you have a thought, the thought leads to an emotion. An emotion is a feeling that releases a chemical. So it's an actual chemical, right? Cortisol and adrenaline, just like alcohol or heroin is a chemical, no different. So you actually become addicted to these chemicals, and they cause behaviors which cause experiences, which cause the same thoughts. But the thing about that, the way that plays in with this is say you're working a job and your boss is just god-awful, and you finally get up the guts to quit, right? You're like, I'm just gonna leave leap off the abyss like she told me to do. And you leap off the abyss. Now, because you're addicted to the chemicals of cortisol and adrenaline, and there's some others in there, because you're addicted to that from the stress of your job. What's going to happen next is you're either going to get another job with a similar boss to create the same because you're a junkie now. You're a junkie, you need your fix. So you're either going to reproduce it in real life, or what probably 80% of us do is you're gonna ruminate. You're gonna think about how awful your boss was and how miserable you were, and you're gonna think about that conversation and what you should have said, or the conversation that might happen and what you're gonna say. And all that is doing is giving you the same fix. And so by developing that awareness through that like observer, you can then start to see when that is happening, and you can say, Oh, okay, so now I'm being a junkie. That doesn't necessarily mean you just stop.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

I wouldn't even say junkie, it's just an awareness of the pattern in the cycle that you're in.

SPEAKER_03 20:15

I use that teasingly, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

You know what I mean? I remember I was working with this one particular client, and they had said they left a toxic environment, and then they came, and then I said, tell me more about that. And they said, just a really bad experience, just to make the story a little bit shorter. So then in their current role, they start experiencing difficulty with their current supervisor. And I was like, let's take a step back. Tell me the job before the toxic company that you worked at. Why did you leave that place to go to the place where you had where it was toxic? Tell me the scenario there. And she said, it was I had difficulty with the manager at that place too. And I said, Oh, okay, let's take a step back. I said, Do you notice a pattern? She said, No, I don't know what you're talking about. She didn't own it. I was like, You said you left the first organization because you were having difficulty with the supervisor. And in the next place, you said it was toxic, and now you're in this current role, and certain toxic toxic behavior is starting to surface up. I said, What's the pattern there? What's the pattern? And she said, I don't know. I said, maybe that's the now is the time to take a step back to examine the patterns and what's resurfacing as we speak. And I think that's really important because it all ties back to self awareness, right? Because it's quick to say, I'm ready to go find another job. I gotta go. I don't like this place. You can go, but if there is a root cause, you have to have the awareness to identify what that root cause is. Because if you keep jumping jobs. To job, the same patterns will resurface. It may not happen immediately, but that boss will come in, the culture appear, whatever. It's the same in relationships, right? How you attract certain behaviors in your mate when you go from relationship to relationship, same type of pattern. And I think when we can be very conscious and take a look at those patterns, it really does help us become more intentional in what we truly want in our lives.

SPEAKER_03 22:42

Yeah, so let's look at that for a second. The patterns is 100% right, and that's what it's all about. But I think what's missing from the way a lot of us approach like healing or change is that we recognize a pattern and we think, oh, I've got to change this. And that's all in the brain. What is remarkable is to realize that there actually is a physical, biological, biochemical reason that you can't break the pattern. And that's why it keeps happening again and again, because you have this biochemical need. And so you have to fulfill it or you have to get sober. I call it emotional sobriety. And there's other people who use those terms, but they don't use them the way I use them. So in AA, they use it, but they use it more as like emotional maturity. And then in psychological behaviorists use it more as emotional regulation, but nobody uses it in the context of an actual addiction, which is really what it is. And we have to break that addiction. Yeah, all right.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

How do you break it? Give me the juice, give me the insights.

Emotional Addiction And Repeating Cycles

SPEAKER_03 24:06

Let's talk about it. Yeah. So there's a lot of different ways, a lot of different techniques or tools. And sometimes you have to pull out all of them. I have had to do that. I was like, okay, that one didn't work. Let's try this one. The first one I always try is so you have to have the awareness. Without the awareness, there's no way you can get free. Same thing with alcohol or whatever. I've also been sober now for two years plus. And kicking alcohol was way easier than kicking the chemicals of emotion. Way easier. Because you can not put alcohol in your house. You cannot go in a bar. You cannot go in a liquor store. But the monster in your brain, you can't ever leave that, right? So it's always going to be there. So you're never going to be 100% sober. That's not the objective. The objective is to have shorter moments of falling off the wagon and longer moments in between falling off the wagon, basically, is the way I look at it. Right. How do you do that? You want some tools. So let's talk about some tools. So one thing is gratitude. So again, you have to have the awareness, but you have the awareness. And okay, so let's back up to that. You have the awareness, you see the pattern. You're talking to your boss always irritates you, and then you get in a fight, or you don't get in a fight because it's your boss, and then you go away and you're you're like grumbling and irritated, right? So you in the beginning, as you start to quiet monkey mind in those 10 seconds of eating mindfully your food, whatever it is. So you have enough of those that there's breaks in that chatter. So that now, when something like that is happening, you can see it and go, oh, this is what's happening. Now, the first time you'll probably still do whatever you were going to do before. That's that's just the way it goes. And you might even do that the second time and the third time. But eventually you'll be able to pause for a second. So that pause may only last long enough for you to like take in a breath and think about what else you could do, but still relapse, right? And that's okay. Like this is all part of the process of getting sober. But eventually you're able to become aware, pause, and intentionally behave differently.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 26:32

That is where the juice happens. So awareness, pause, different behavior. Now, that is all great if you're like in a situation when where you're interacting with somebody else and making decisions about behavior, right? But what about when you're doing that lovely thing of spinning out in your head, right? Coach Mo, have you ever done that? No? Yes? Have you ever done that?

SPEAKER_01 26:57

No.

SPEAKER_03 26:57

No, never, never spun out in your head. I could have your head.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Wait, say that again. Please reframe your question. Reframe it question.

SPEAKER_03 27:06

Like when you think about something that either happened that you didn't like and you go over it and over it and over it and over and you're like, Oh, yes. I was gonna say, if you haven't done that, I want to be in your brain so bad. Okay, so here's here's what happens, because a lot of us do that.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

And I so I was doing beating ourselves up, basically.

Tools For Emotional Sobriety

SPEAKER_03 27:28

Yeah, beating yourself up. So my dog just passed away two weeks ago. And I actually I knew she had a terminal diagnosis. We're all terminal. I was confronted with the fact that she was going to die imminently soon. It went on seven months, which is great because I had all that time with her. And so I was able to intentionally live in those seven months with her, give her the best seven months, give me the best seven months. She died in the most peaceful way possible in the home. I'm saying all this because when she passed, there was no like guilt or regret. However, one day, about a week after she passed, and I had been so peaceful, right? And I had some days of sobbing and all that's normal. That's sadness, right? Sadness is different from emotional addiction. Sadness is good. Cry, do it, but the emotional addiction is more that stuff that doesn't have to happen that you're doing in your brain. So, anyways, I'd had peace, I had gratitude, I had tears. All of that had happened. One day I decided to spiral to think about, oh, did I do everything right? You know, was it too soon? Was it right? Did I do and caught myself? I'm like, okay, this is ridiculous because you did everything right for her and you. And so I was able to see, okay, I'm being a junkie, is what I call it. And I do use that laughingly, but it's I'm like, okay, so I don't need to be doing this. And I'm doing this because I have been used. So for seven months, I was having anticipatory grief. Okay. I was living in anticipatory grief because I knew she was dying. So I was constantly in this hyper-vigilant state. When you're hyper-vigilant and experiencing grief, you've got a certain cocktail going on. You've got cortisol adrenaline, lessening of dopamine, less oxytocin. So, like your cocktail is a certain way. So I was going through withdrawals, and that's why I started spinning in this silly loop. So, this is the time I had to take out like seven different tools. The first thing I always go to is gratitude. And for her, I am so grateful that she brought me the community I have because I moved to somewhere I knew nobody to escape my marriage, and I knew nobody. Community is super important to me, it's one of my core values. Everybody in my life right now is either in my life because of her or I have a deep relationship with because of her. So I went to a place of gratitude, and that didn't totally solve it. So then I did some deep breathing, and there's a lot of different kinds of breath work you can do. There's fox breathing, there's the vagal nerve breathing. So there's a lot. So I tried that. That didn't work either. So then I was like, okay, I know looking up as opposed to looking down has some psychological effect. Okay, so that's helping a little. Okay, smiling. Smiling releases chemicals, right? Bio. So I smile. So sometimes you have to pull out a whole lot of these. And again, it depends on the situation. If it's just stuff in your head or if it's an interaction with another person, there's going to be different techniques depending on where it is that you're trying to break that. Anyways, I'm talking a lot.

How To Connect And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_01 30:49

No, it's all good. I love that. Especially when you were talking about spiraling. I correlate that a lot with my clients and what they're dealing with as being high achievers, right? They get into the spiral mode where they're thinking that they're not good enough. And so that's why they got to keep going, they got to keep pressing harder, got to keep pressing harder because part of their mind is telling them and that punk ass inner critic shows up telling you that you're not good enough. You got to keep pressing through. And then that's the spiral, and they start reflecting on that. I'm not good enough. And what are people thinking about me? I got to keep pressing. I got to keep pressing. Because if I fail, this is all gonna fall apart. So they carry that fear of failure, the fear of what people will think of them if they know that they're underperforming in their mind, and so they just work harder, and then that's where that burnout really starts to creep in, and they're not their true version of self. So that's how I mirror to what you were saying about the spiraling. But with that being said, you provided us a lot of great nuggets today. And my last question that I want to ask is how can my audience find you?

SPEAKER_03 32:01

Excellent. Thank you. If you enjoyed this conversation and just want to chat, go to u2.0.com. That's y-o-u, the number two, the word point, the number zero.com. And you can literally get on my calendar for just a free half hour chat. Because again, this is my mission, this is my passion project. So that's what I do. If you want to see my bigger self-revelation system, so my book, my journal, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. That's at Paramour Paradox.com. And Coach Mo, I'm sure that you'll include that in the notes. But Paramour, which is P-A-R-A-M-O-U-R, Paradox.com has the whole kit and caboodle of what I've created.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Thank you so much. I really do appreciate you stopping in, sharing your wisdom, your nuggets. I really enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 32:52

Thank you, Coach.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

That's another rep in the inner arena. You didn't just listen, you leveled up your swag. Self-awareness, why power, aligned action, and grid. If this hit home, share it, subscribe to the Let's Think About It podcast, and lock in with me on YouTube at Swag Coaching. Until next time, stay aware, read with your why, act in alignment, and keep your grid strong.