I have spent nearly twenty years studying why high-performing people get stuck. For most of that time, I was looking at the wrong map.

Several years ago, my life underwent what I can only describe as a structural collapse. A sixteen-year relationship ended. I left a role that had become a daily conflict with my values. I packed my life into a car and drove across the country to Seattle. One week into a new job, the world shut down.

Sitting alone in a quiet I had never experienced, something landed: if my job disappeared tomorrow, I would have no answer to the question Who is Liz?

Every external pillar — my marriage, my geography, my community, my professional identity — was gone or unrecognizable. I had fused so completely into those roles that without them, I felt erased.

The irony is that I had studied this. I had built interventions for organizations specifically designed to address this kind of ‘stuckness’. I had a map and it was the wrong one.

I was treating a structural problem as an emotional one. Applying the wrong solutions to the wrong source. That misdiagnosis is what I watch brilliant, capable leaders make every day.

That experience is the origin of this work and the basis of my forthcoming book.