Lachlan Brown
A job interview can feel like more than a professional evaluation. Sitting across from people who hold something you want, their approval can begin to feel like oxygen, and you may find yourself holding your breath.
Someone who is skilled at reading a room may perform brilliantly: adjusting tone, posture and vocabulary in real time to become exactly what the audience appears to want.
A person can get the offer and feel almost nothing.
More precisely, they may feel a brief spike of relief rather than joy, followed by a hollow settling. Within hours, the familiar restlessness can return: what is next, and what remains to prove? The win does not land; it passes through them like water through a net.
It is easy to call this ambition, drive or a healthy refusal to be complacent. But ambitious people usually enjoy their wins, at least briefly. When every achievement becomes instantly obsolete, the problem may be that no achievement can fill the space it was aimed at.
Burnout and honest self-reflection can reveal that this pattern is not purely professional. Interviews, performance reviews and other moments of evaluation can reactivate an older need for approval. For me, that reflection led back to childhood.
I want to be careful with this, because it would be easy to make my father the villain, and that’s not the truth. He wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t absent. He was present, providing, and deeply committed to his version of love — which was practical, achievement-oriented, and almost entirely expressed through expectations. He believed that pushing his children to excel was the highest form of care. And in many ways, it was. The work ethic he instilled in me has served me well. The discipline. The resilience.
But there was a cost, and the cost was this: I learned, very early, that love and approval were the same thing. That being valued meant being impressive. That the way to secure your place in someone’s regard was to perform — constantly, flawlessly, without showing the strain.
This is not unusual. Some people learn to perform academically, socially, through caretaking or through compliance. A possible underlying belief is: I am loved for what I do, not for who I am. When that belief takes hold, it may influence professional and personal interactions for years—but it is not universal or permanent.
The Buddhist concept that helped me see this most clearly was taṇhā — craving. Not craving for material things, though that’s how it’s usually presented. Craving for a particular feeling. Craving for the sense of being enough, of being accepted, of being seen. The relentless pursuit of the next approval hit, the next validation, the next person saying “well done” in a way that might — this time — actually register.
The teaching says that this craving is the root of suffering. Not because wanting things is wrong, but because the wanting is unquenchable when what you’re really seeking can’t be provided by the thing you’re chasing. You can’t get parental love from a hiring manager. You can’t get unconditional acceptance from a performance review. You can chase these substitutes your entire life and never feel full, because the hunger isn’t for what you think it’s for.
When I first saw this clearly — really saw it, not just understood it conceptually — I cried. Not from sadness, though there was sadness in it. From recognition. From the sheer relief of finally understanding why nothing had ever been enough. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t ungrateful. I was looking for something real in a place where it couldn’t be found.
The question that followed was harder: if professional success isn’t the answer, what is? If achievement doesn’t fill the space, what does?
I don’t have a clean answer to that, and I’m suspicious of anyone who does. But I can tell you what’s changed in how I relate to work, ambition, and the persistent urge to impress.
Noticing the shift from self to performance
The first useful change is noticing the exact moment you shift from being yourself to performing an impressive version of yourself. Once you can feel it happening, you can choose whether to let the performance run or stay grounded.
For me, staying grounded is harder. It means being less polished. It means pausing before answering instead of firing off the articulate response. It means saying “I’m not sure” when I’m not sure, instead of improvising confidence. It means risking being ordinary in a moment where I’ve been trained to be exceptional.
But staying also means something else: being present. Actually being in the room, rather than managing how the room perceives me. And there’s a quality to that presence — a groundedness — that turns out to be far more compelling than any performance I ever gave. Not to everyone. But to the people who matter.
Redefining what success actually means
The second thing that changed was how I defined success. For most of my life, success meant the same thing it had meant in my family: external validation. Titles, recognition, visible markers of achievement. Redefining it required not just new language but a new nervous system response — learning to feel satisfied by things that don’t come with applause.
A good day of writing that no one reads. A conversation where I was honest instead of impressive. A decision made from alignment instead of ambition. An evening where I did nothing productive and felt no guilt about it. These sound small. They are small. But for someone whose entire self-worth infrastructure was built on output, they’re revolutionary.
The Buddhist tradition speaks of sammā diṭṭhi — right view. It’s the first step on the Eightfold Path, and in practice, it means seeing things as they are rather than as your conditioning needs them to be. Right view, applied to success, means recognizing that the metrics you’ve been using were never your own. They were inherited. Useful, perhaps, in certain contexts — but not the only way to measure a life, and not the way that leads to peace.
I still feel the pull. I still walk into rooms and scan for who I need to impress. I still catch myself calibrating my performance to the audience. The conditioning doesn’t evaporate — it fades, slowly, unevenly, with setbacks. But now, when the pull comes, I can name it. I can feel it without obeying it. I can choose, at least some of the time, to show up as the person I actually am rather than the person I think the room requires me to be.
And that, more than any job offer or title or round of applause, is what success feels like when you finally define it for yourself.
Did you like my article? Like me on Facebook to see more articles like this in your feed.
