Professional Amnesia

More often than realized, you can lose yourself in a thousand small adjustments in your day-to-day career. It’s what I like to call professional amnesia.

It doesn’t hit like burnout, but instead seeps in slowly, disguised as competence. You start adapting to every re-org, every leadership shuffle, every “new direction.” You nod along in meetings, pick up extra weight, and before long you’ve become fluent in the language of survival. Hell, I once landed in a role in a massive technology company with countless spans and layers between me and anyone who could hear me, and thought to myself “I could probably put my head down here and look back up to see twenty years have passed.”

(Note: I thankfully didn’t put my head down, and in fact kicked up some good kinds of impact that made that part of my journey two years, not twenty.)

It’s just… something gets lost in all that translating. The part of you that had conviction. The part that used to make noise. The good, awake part.

You remember the frameworks and the deliverables, sure, but you often forget why you ever wanted to lead in the first place. The good news is, though, is that this development, while uncomfortable… it isn’t failure. It’s… erosion.

Conversely, the worst part is, no one notices it happening… not even you.

From the outside, you look fine. Inside, you start feeling like a supporting character in your own story. You wake up, open your laptop, and it hits you:

“I’ve been busy for months… but I can’t name a single thing I’m proud of.”

That’s when the memory starts to come back.

Usually it resurfaces after a shake-up… like a break-up, or a family loss, or an unceremonious “we’ll give you two weeks of pay and a box to ship that laptop back in.” Whatever the shake-up, it’s definitely the kind of silence you can’t scroll away from.

The rediscovery moment always hurts, because when the fog lifts, you see all the ways you’ve been operating on autopilot. You realize how much of your creativity you traded for compliance, how much of your conviction you outsourced to process or just trying to fit into an unmoored system with no navigation of its own.

But that sting? That is not regret. That’s a reboot. (Comic book fans, you get it.)

It’s your career reminding you who you are when you’re not trying to fit in.

Professional amnesia is universal. Every high-functioning leader loses the plot at some point. What separates the ones who burn out from the ones who break through is whether they stop long enough to remember themselves on purpose.

So please, take inventory:

• What parts of your work actually make you feel alive?

• What parts drain you dry?

• What parts have you outgrown, even if they still “look good” on a slide?

When you start remembering, your work changes. You stop chasing optics and start chasing impact again. You make sharper choices. You build cleaner systems. You stop trying to “find balance” and start living with intent.

That is not nostalgia. That’s re-alignment.

And maybe that’s the whole trick? Not reinventing yourself, but remembering yourself.

We all forget. We all fall asleep! (Not at your desk. Not while driving!) The best leaders know when it’s time to wake up.