The Joy Experiment: What Happens When High Achievers Stop Proving
You've spent your whole life becoming someone worth respecting.
You’ve been working on yourself:
Healing, improving, and proving you're serious, responsible, worthy of the success you've built.
And now you're standing in the middle of your life wondering: Is this it?
Here's what no one tells you about high achievers: You learned to thrive under pressure, but you forgot how to thrive in freedom.
You know how to work toward something. You know how to optimize, strategize, discipline yourself into the next version of you. And yet, do you know how to simply be someone who enjoys their life?
Not as a reward. Not after you've earned it. Not once you've fixed one more thing.
Are you someone who just... enjoys it?
And if you're drawing a blank, that’s okay. It just means that you’re operating from an outdated identity.
The Identity You've Been Running
The old operating system says: "I heal. I improve. I work on myself. Repeat."
It's the identity of someone who is always becoming.
Always in process.
Always one insight away from finally being enough.
And listen, this way of being got you here, and it made you successful. It kept you safe when chaos was the norm and proving yourself was survival.
Yet now, now you're accomplished, stable, and perhaps you've built the life… And as a result, this identity doesn't know what to do when there's nothing left to prove.
So it invents problems. It finds new things to fix. It mistakes intensity for aliveness and rest for laziness.
It keeps you in healing mode when you're ready to live.
What Thriving in Freedom Actually Looks Like
I had a client who embodied this perfectly.
Highly successful corporate career. He achieved financial freedom. And he was finally in a position to pursue his dream: something with a camera, maybe in front of it, maybe behind it, he wasn't sure yet.
And he was completely stuck.
Not just because he didn't know what he wanted. But because he'd spent his entire life being the responsible one, the serious one, and the one who had his shit together.
He was drowning in outdated expectations from family, paralyzed by perfectionism, and terrified of failure. He couldn't even begin experimenting because experimenting felt frivolous, unfocused, and not serious enough.
He went over and over it in his mind, unable to find a resolution. He kept deflecting to other hobbies, claiming he could enjoy anything.
And he could enjoy anything. But that's because he didn't feel he could properly pursue what he actually wanted.
He had to expand his definition of play.
He had to learn to prioritize himself and his needs, which was something he had never done before in his entire life. He had to discover that curiosity could be guidance, not just discipline and willpower.
We worked together for six weeks.
A month after we finished, he took a sabbatical from his well-paying corporate job and flew abroad to begin filming his first movie.
Not because he figured it all out. But because he stopped needing to figure it all out before he could begin.
He installed a new identity: "I explore, I play, I enjoy, I discover."
And once he began taking himself seriously as someone who gets to want things, his life clicked into alignment the way it was always capable of being.
The New Operating System
This is what Week 3 of Becoming the Calm is about.
Not another healing protocol. Not another thing to work on.
An identity upgrade.
From: "I heal, I improve, I work on myself."
To: "I explore, I play, I enjoy, I discover."
This session installs the identity of someone who:
Thrives in expansion, not just in fixing
Feels safe without a goal or problem to solve
Trusts curiosity as guidance, not just discipline
Experiences joy without earning it first
Because freedom is your natural state, and every day can be a gentle experiment in joy.
You don't need permission to play. You don't need to heal one more thing before you're allowed to enjoy your life.
You just need to teach your nervous system what it feels like to thrive in the life you've already built.
Your Invitation
This week's hypnotic audio is designed to do exactly that, to anchor this new self-concept so deeply that playing, exploring, and discovering become as natural as working on yourself used to be.
You've done the hard work. You've built the life.
Now let's install the identity that gets to actually live in it.
And if you're realizing you're ready to not just play, but to fully claim your vision and voice in the world? Stay tuned. Something's coming in February.
If you’re not yet a member of the Lucid Hour, I invite you to join us using the link below. If you’re inspired to go deeper, I also offer custom hypnotic audios.
