There’s a version of survival that looks remarkably like success.

You’re functioning. You’re delivering. People come to you with problems and you solve them. You show up and you do the thing — whatever the thing is — and you do it well.

And if someone asks how you’re doing, you say, “Fine.”

“Fine” is useful. It ends conversations that would take too much energy to have. It keeps you moving when stopping feels like failure. And for high achievers, people who have built entire identities around being capable, “fine” is the word that holds everything together.

Until the day you catch a glimpse of yourself on a Zoom call.

And the person looking back at you has gray skin and exhausted eyes.

And you realize: that person is not fine.

That’s where executive coach Lauren Lefkowitz found herself. Two decades in corporate HR. 80–100 hours a week. Coaching on the side because she loved it — but not charging enough for it, because things that feel easy and natural couldn’t possibly be that valuable. Right?

She’d already broken both her shoulders trying to catch a Roomba vacuum that was heading toward a lamp cord. (Yes, really.) She’d kept going back to the same pattern in a new job, a new context, a new version of the same exhaustion.

That Zoom call was different, though. That was the first time she truly saw herself. 

The Problem with Fine

“Fine” is a ceiling and a floor at the same time.

It keeps us from falling further. It also keeps us from rising. The same word that protects us from the depth of what we’re feeling is the word that keeps us from fully living.

Lauren’s story is familiar to a lot of high-achieving women. Not the Roomba part — though it’s vivid — but the pattern underneath it. The fawning. The over-helping. The compulsion to manage every department, volunteer for every emergency, stay available for everyone and everything because that’s what capable people do.

And then one day the question comes, “What do I actually want?”

And the answer is silence.

The deafening kind of silence that hurts because you’ve spent so long settling that the part of you that knows what you want has gone very, very quiet.

Starting From What You Don’t Want

One of the most useful reframes from this conversation: you don’t have to know what you want in order to start moving toward it.

What feels wrong, icky, or off? 

What pisses you off? 

What do you know you don’t want anymore? 

What are you absolutely done with?

Start there.

For Lauren, the first answer was: I don’t want to work 80 hours a week anymore.

The next answer took months. She didn’t know what people did with evenings. She made herself a short menu of eight dinners she liked and put it on her fridge, because she’d lived so long on scraps of other people’s time that she’d forgotten what she wanted to eat.

That’s the territory. Leaning into that silence. Getting curious in the space. 

Lauren Lefkowitz is the founder of Fine Is a Trap and an executive coach who works with corporate leaders ready to escape the cycle. Find her at fineisatrap.com and on LinkedIn.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation on the Untamed Leader Podcast

And if something here landed — if any part of you recognized the gray skin, the endless fawning, the broken shoulders — give yourself the gift of a little of that space.