Why Do I Keep Going Backwards? What I Got Wrong About "Total Life Control"

Years ago, I published a blog and podcast episode promising seven steps to total life control.

I have to laugh at her now. Total life control? That version of me was still measuring safety in how tightly she could grip. What I've learned since — from building a seven-figure business, from coaching hundreds of leaders, and from the past two years of studying neuroscience and emotional wellness — is that control was never the assignment.

Authorship is.

One of my coaches once dubbed me the pivot queen during a moment of deep doubt: "You're the pivot queen. It's what you do!" She was right. That’s Liz Benny! But pivoting well was never about controlling life. It was about learning to work with a brain and body that would rather repeat yesterday than build tomorrow. 

So consider this the rewrite my younger self needed: same seven steps, new science, and a belief shift underneath them.

Why do I keep going backwards? I build something great, and then I shrink it.

You keep going backwards because your brain is running on autopilot, and autopilot only knows the past. Each morning, your brain downloads yesterday's thoughts, emotions, and stress chemistry and presents them as today's reality — before you're even fully awake. When the past holds rejection, exhaustion, or fear, your brain replays those chemical patterns not because something is wrong right now, but because familiar feelings are the ones it knows how to produce.

So you build something great in a moment of expansion. Then the familiar pattern reasserts itself, and you quietly shrink the idea, the ask, the dream, back down to the size your nervous system recognizes as safe. That's not a character flaw. It's our wiring. As I tell my clients: you're wearing your old self to new places, and there is no itinerary that leads to new with the old schedule and plan. Old self cannot take new self where she's going. She doesn't have the rule book.

Why dropping your desires makes the load heavier, not lighter

Here's the pattern I see in nearly every woman leader I coach. She's carrying her home, her institution, and her desires all at once. When the pile gets too heavy, she triages — and her desires drop first. Her desires feel like the only optional weight. Why? Because she’s been last and least important every other time.

But your desires were never weight. They were fuel. Drop them, and everything else you're carrying gets heavier, because now you're hauling the same load with no reason that belongs to you. This is what disengagement actually is, and it's epidemic: Gallup's latest data shows women managers posting one of the steepest engagement declines of any group in the workforce. We didn't lose our ambition. We dropped it to carry everyone else, and then wondered why our arms gave out.

How today's thoughts become tomorrow's reality

Your future self is not waiting somewhere in the distance. She is being crafted right now, by the thoughts you think and the emotions you rehearse today. Today's exhaustion, repeated daily, becomes tomorrow's over-exhaustion. Today's "I'll get to my dream next quarter" becomes a decade of next quarters.

The intervention is metacognition: noticing what you're thinking, pausing the thought, and getting present. I tell my clients it is the hardest leadership skill you will ever acquire, and not many people have it. Your brain does not tell you the truth; you have to intervene with the actual truth. This is called cognitive reappraisal and is not soft work. That is the hardest kind of leadership development there is. Rather than letting an unhelpful thought live rent free in your head, you replace it with a more helpful and often more truthful thought instead. This is you creating a progress monitoring system of your thoughts.

The 7 Steps: From Life Control to Future Self Authorship

1. Acknowledge your emotions. Allow yourself to feel the guilt and fear. These are natural responses to change — and naming an emotion is the first act of regulating it, not wallowing in it.

2. Name the old vision. Clearly define the vision you need to release. What’s the tension? Write it down, talk about it with a trusted friend, and unpack why it no longer serves you. Your brain cannot release a pattern it hasn't consciously named. Name it to confront it.

3. Grieve the loss. Give yourself permission to mourn the old vision. Grief is not a detour from growth; it's how the nervous system closes a chapter instead of dragging it into the next one. A client said this: "It's been like shedding old skin — I'm not the same leader I was four weeks ago."

4. Embrace the new vision. Focus on what gets to be great now. Write it, speak it, let yourself feel it — because the feeling is what encodes it.

5. Pause the thought, grateful flow. When the old spiral starts ("Who am I to want this? What if it falls apart?"), pause the thought and start naming what you're grateful for, one thing after another. Gratitude interrupts the familiar chemistry mid-loop, and once you're in a grateful flow, you start to realize it ain't all bad. Because truly, It just ain't all bad.

6. Write to your future self — and from her. Write a message from the woman you're becoming back to the woman you are. Research on expressive writing shows that putting internal experience into written words produces measurable emotional and physical benefits — and in my coaching rooms, I've watched women write future self messages that started coming true before they finished reading them aloud.

7. Move your body to move your mind. Regulation is physical. A walk, breathwork, ten minutes of movement — these shift your state faster than an hour of rumination, because you cannot think your way into a new identity while your nervous system is holding the old one.

Breaking New Ground 🏡

If you want to see authorship instead of control, watch "Breaking New Ground" on Max. My dear friend and coach Robert Hartwell bought an old home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on Juneteenth 2020 — a home with a history in which people who looked like him were once enslaved. He could not control that history. Nobody can. But as a free, gay, Black man in America, he now owns that home, and he is authoring its next chapter room by room. (I even have a cameo in Episode 2!)

That's the whole belief shift in one story. Robert didn't need control over the past to create something magical. He needed vision, and the courage to renovate. So do you.

We Are the Source ⭐

Life is always happening, but it doesn't have to happen to you. It can happen for you — not because you finally gripped it tightly enough, but because you stopped outsourcing your future to autopilot and started authoring it on purpose.

Life is short. Let that be the reason you live with gratitude and stop postponing your desires, because they were never the weight. They were always the way.

🎧 When you're ready to build your next chapter while your current one still pays the bills, start with The Protected Pivot™ Executive Briefings — six short, private podcast episodes, free at drtaryn.co/clarity.

We are the source. We hold the power. I believe in your ability to create profound change, and I'm here for every step.

Until next time, cheers to change 🥂

Dr. Taryn

Dr. Taryn Fletcher, Ed.D. is an author, executive leadership coach, and business coach for educational leaders. CEO of Truly POC Inc. and a former principal and superintendent, she replaced her superintendent salary in 90 days and built a seven-figure business in under four years. She works with senior, breadwinning women in education leadership through The Protected Pivot™.