Are you living as a human being, or performing as a human doing? For years, I could not have told you the difference. My calendar was full. My numbers were climbing. And my sense of self was entirely outsourced to my output. The human doing vs human being struggle is the question underneath almost every career crisis I see in my work. So when I sat down with George Grombacher on the LifeBlood podcast, this is what we dug into. How we turn into human doings. And how we find our way back to being.
Watch our conversation here, then keep reading. I want to walk you through this.
How a Human Being Becomes a Human Doing
I grew up in Silicon Valley. Firstborn daughter. Enneagram three, if that means anything to you. From a very young age I was obsessed with being the best. The best daughter, the best student, the best everything.
On the surface, that looks healthy. But underneath it was an inadequacy I always remember having. And when my ambition started running on that inadequacy, the suffering started.
I took my gold star chasing mentality to Google. By 24, I was managing 80 million dollars in revenue. I was working my 8 to 7, not my 9 to 5, and drugs and alcohol became my coping mechanism for it.
Here is the moment I can point to now and say: that is when my humanity had fully collapsed into my job title. I was sexually harassed by my direct manager. I did not report it, because I was up for promotion, and I did not want to anger or embarrass the people who could grant me the significance and approval I so desperately needed. My exact thought was: without Google, who was I?
That is a human doing. Not a person who works hard. Plenty of healthy people work hard. A human doing is a person who no longer knows who they are without the work.
I call the pain underneath this the success wound. It is the pain that comes from mistaking success for self-worth. It wears different costumes, the grinder, the hider, the pleaser, the seeker, the work hard play hard type, but every one of them is a strategy for earning your right to exist through doing. Take the grinder. She proves her value by the volume she produces. She works past the point of diminishing returns. She loves being a machine. And that is the whole problem. You are not a machine.
Fulfillment Comes From How You Work, Not What You Do
When you realize you have become a human doing, the obvious fix seems to be changing what you do. New job. New boss. New industry. I understand that instinct deeply. But my research tells a different story.
More than 10,000 people have filled out my survey, and my team has worked with 5,000 people. So many arrive desperate. Get me a new job. My boss is a nightmare. This is not my right path. And 60 percent of those people end up staying in their role. Not because they are complacent. Not because they could not land another job. Because changing their ways of working changed their experience of the job.
Fulfillment doesn’t come from what you do or what you work on. It comes from how you work and your working styles.
I tell people, with a whole lot of love, that more often than not the job is not the problem. You are the problem. And I find that incredibly freeing. It means you have autonomy. You have choice in how you experience your work. Now, I am not telling you to put up with a toxic culture or stay in a dead end job. I am telling you that the doorway to contentment usually sits in your relationship to the work, not in the work itself.
There are practical stakes here too. Despite being a career coach, I am a huge fan of sticking things out, having the difficult conversation, and asking: is there a way for me to be successful here? Switching jobs has an opportunity cost. You reset the clock on the brand equity you have built. I had a client in private equity who left every two years, and she missed out on the carry that was available to her. The wound that keeps you chasing the next thing has real financial consequences.
You Heal on Four Levels, Not Just One
Here is why so much career advice never touches this problem. It speaks only to the doing level. Five steps to give better feedback. Five ways to have more emotional intelligence. All of it focuses on the level of behavior, and it ignores the whole root of the iceberg. Our emotions. Our energy. Our spirituality. Our motivations.
We heal on four levels. We heal on the level of emotion, the level of thought, the level of action, and the level of spirit.
So often it is the emotional piece that makes us want to hit the escape button, or the shrink button, or the disengage button. That is why one of the chapter titles in my book says that emotional work is critical in your career. For a lot of people, it is the missing piece.
And coming back to being a human being is not about doing less for its own sake. It is about working from the natural part of you that is already courageous, clear, and confident. The part that knows who she is, what she wants, and how to get it. It is working from a place of nervous system regulation and intention, knowing how and why you are doing something and why it matters to you. I call that state aligned ambition. The doing serves the being, instead of replacing it.
Three Ways of Being That Hold When Everything Burns
I want to tell you where the last chapter of my book came from, because this is where all of this stopped being theory for me.
I wrote chapter 9 when I was 37 weeks pregnant. My son was growth restricted, so I was going in for advanced tests and screens to make sure he was okay. I live in LA, about a mile from where the Palisades fire broke out. I went up to my roof and saw more lava and fire than sky. My husband and I grabbed what we could, and I said goodbye to the nursery I had spent the last five months setting up. Our hospital was in the fire zone.
Over the following weeks, I watched my community walk through it. My house was okay. Many of my friends were not so fortunate. And when I reached out to them, it took no time for them to say things like, what we have, what remains, is enough. Two things can be true. I can be devastated, and a part of me is also liberated. Uncertainty is the birthplace of invention and innovation.
Writing that chapter, three principles came into living color for me. Abundance, which is choosing to see what remains as enough. Non-duality, which is seeing the gray area between the black and white thinking that plagues so many of us, that mental seesaw of I am going to get fired or I am going to get promoted. And faith, which is meeting uncertainty with peace instead of a tighter grip.
Most of us will face a career fire at some point. A reorg. A layoff. A season where everything you built feels like it is burning down. A human doing meets a career fire with more doing. More grinding, more chasing, more proving. A human being meets it with abundance, non-duality, and faith, and then acts from there. That is the difference. That is the whole practice.
Come Back to Being
So let me ask you what I ask my clients. Where in your life are you proving your value by the volume you produce? Who would you be without your title, your inbox, your to do list? If those questions make your stomach drop a little, good. That drop is the doorway.
You were never meant to earn your existence. You are allowed to want big things, to build, to lead, to achieve. And you are allowed to do all of it as a human being, anchored in who you actually are. Yes. Yes. YES. That is available to you.
If you want the full roadmap, including original research on this phenomenon of never enough in a corporate context, my book Healing the Success Wound walks you from the roots of the wound all the way through the healing.
READY TO STOP LIVING AS A HUMAN DOING AND COME BACK TO BEING? BOOK A FREE INTRO CALL TODAY.