The Five Lies We Told Ourselves on the Way Up
Nobody climbs to the C-suite on cynicism.
You get there on belief. On drive. On a set of stories you started telling yourself early — about what the title would mean, what it would feel like, what it would finally prove.
Here’s the thing about those stories: they’re not true. Most of them were never true. And the gap between what we believed the C-suite would deliver and what it actually delivers? That gap is where burnout lives.
I spent years operating on five beliefs that felt like fuel. Turns out they were accelerants — they burned fast, burned hot, and eventually burned me out completely.
In my book Crash and [Burn] LEARN, I call these the five false beliefs. They’re the foundation Section 1 is built on — the myths that quietly set executives up for the ten blind spots that lead to burnout. Here’s my commentary on all five.
False Belief #1: Reaching the C-Suite Will Make Us Happy
This one is almost embarrassing to admit. But if you’re honest with yourself, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
There’s always been a next milestone. Partner. VP. Managing Director. CEO. And at each one, there’s a version of you that believed — genuinely believed — that arriving there would feel different. Better. More settled.
It doesn’t. Or it does, briefly. And then the brain resets, the baseline shifts, and the next target appears on the horizon.
Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation. Your nervous system is extraordinarily good at normalizing wins. What felt like the destination becomes just another departure point. The happiness you were chasing doesn’t live at the top. It never did.
The dangerous part isn’t the disappointment. It’s what you do with it. Most high-performers don’t sit with the emptiness — they chase harder. And that’s where the cycle begins.
False Belief #2: The C-Suite Will Silence Our Inner Critic
The inner critic is patient. It will wait for you.
For many of us, the drive toward the top was never really about the title — it was about finally shutting up the voice that whispered we weren’t enough. Smart enough. Credible enough. Deserving enough.
Here’s what nobody tells you: achievement doesn’t silence that voice. It gives it new material.
Once you’re in the room you fought to get into, the critic doesn’t retire. It upgrades. Now it asks whether you belong there. Whether you’ll be found out. Whether the people around you are figuring out what you already suspect about yourself.
Imposter syndrome doesn’t disappear at the executive level. Research suggests it intensifies — because the stakes are higher and the scrutiny is real. The credential accumulation that was supposed to build our confidence instead becomes another thing to defend.
False Belief #3: The C-Suite Will Erase Our Past Failures and Trauma
We carry more into that corner office than we think.
For some of us, the climb was always partly an escape — from a background we were ashamed of, a failure we couldn’t forgive ourselves for, a version of ourselves we were determined to outrun. The C-suite was going to be proof. Evidence. The final counter-argument to whoever — or whatever — made us feel small.
But the past doesn’t erase. It follows. And when the pressure peaks — when the board is unhappy, when a deal falls apart, when you’re lying awake at 3am running the numbers — those old wounds don’t stay buried.
The body keeps score. That’s not a metaphor. The unprocessed stuff from earlier in life has a way of surfacing exactly when we need our clearest thinking. And the higher the stakes, the louder it gets.
False Belief #4: Everyone Wants the C-Suite and Only a Select Few Deserve to Be There
This one is subtle. And it does real damage.
When you believe the seat you’re in is rare and precious and reserved for people like you — people who earned it, who sacrificed for it, who are cut from a different cloth — a few things happen.
You stop asking for help, because asking feels like exposing a crack in the facade. You stop admitting doubt, because doubt seems incompatible with deserving the role. You push the people around you harder, because you assume they should want what you want and operate the way you operate.
The truth is more complicated. Not everyone wants the C-suite. Not everyone should be there. And the belief that only a select few deserve it creates a kind of entitlement that quietly corrodes leadership — making it harder to listen, harder to be wrong, harder to build the kind of team that actually sustains growth.
False Belief #5: The C-Suite Will Make Us Indispensable and Give Us Ultimate Control
Real talk: the C-suite is where you discover how little control you actually have.
Markets shift. Boards intervene. Key people leave. Deals fall apart for reasons that have nothing to do with your strategy. Economic forces land on your balance sheet that no one predicted. The higher the seat, the larger the surface area for things to go wrong in ways you cannot control.
And yet the belief persists — that with the right title, the right authority, the right track record, you can finally impose order on chaos. That you’ll be protected. That your value will be recognized in a way that makes the ground feel stable.
The executives I’ve watched burn out fastest are often the ones who held this belief most tightly. When control slips — and it always does — the dissonance is brutal. It’s not just a business problem. It feels like a personal failure.
What These Five Beliefs Have in Common
Every one of them is a story about the future delivering what the present can’t.
Happiness is coming. Silence is coming. Erasure is coming. Validation is coming. Control is coming.
And while we wait for the arrival, we keep driving. Harder, faster, with less recovery and more at stake. Until something breaks.
I know this pattern intimately. I lived it. And what I’ve learned on the other side is that the work isn’t about dismantling ambition — it’s about untangling ambition from these false premises. Leading from a place of genuine clarity instead of chasing a payoff that was never on the way.
That’s the work. And it starts with seeing the belief clearly enough to question it.
The free Ten Blind Spots assessment is a good place to start. So is a conversation.