My client's eye had been twitching for three months.

Sleep gone. Dreams about work. The body running a parallel conversation his mind refused to have.

We didn't talk about stress management.

I see it again and again in the leaders I work with. The jaw that clenches before the difficult meeting. The shoulders that rise when the CEO's name appears on the phone. The sleep that fragments the week before a board presentation. Not anxiety about the presentation. The identity question underneath it.

Am I the person they think I am?

With this client, we talked about who he was trying to be. The one who reaches. The one who never arrives. Something in him was so fused with striving that stillness felt like death. Not metaphorically. His nervous system genuinely could not distinguish between rest and failure.

Three months of twitching. Three months of the body saying: this version of you is unsustainable.

He didn't want to hear it. Nobody does. Because hearing it means questioning the strategy that built everything. The reaching. The performing. The relentless forward motion that got him promoted four times in eight years.

Six weeks after he stopped asking "how do I get there?" and started asking "who do I want to be?", the twitching stopped. Sleep came back.

His kid noticed before he did. Not the professional transformation, not the leadership presence. His child noticed that dad was present at dinner again.

The body had known for three months. He was the last to find out.

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