There is a specific kind of tiredness that sleep does not fix. It shows up on Sunday night, tightens through Monday morning, and follows people who, by every external measure, are doing well. They have the title. They have the salary. They have the career they told themselves they wanted. And still, somewhere underneath it, there is a quiet question they rarely say out loud: why does this feel so heavy?
Richard Strilowich has an answer, and it is not the one most people expect. Strilowich is an international bestselling author, a spiritual leadership coach, and the founder of Still Point Coaching. He spent more than forty years in the corporate world, recently retiring after a long career that took him through software development, IT project and program management, director-level leadership, and human resources management. Alongside that career, he spent more than thirty years exploring contemplative Christian and global spiritual traditions. He is the author of The Corporate Sage: Gracefully Integrating Spirituality for Authentic Leadership, and his central premise is that the exhaustion so many professionals carry is not caused by the workload. It is caused by the split.
What the Divided Life Actually Looks Like
When Strilowich talks about the divided life, he is describing something very concrete. There is your real self, and then there is your work self, and somewhere along the way, you discover that the values of who you really are do not line up with what your role requires of you.
He is careful here, and the distinction matters. This is not a story about villainous corporations. As Strilowich puts it, companies are supposed to be operating the way they are. The problem is not that the organization is broken. The problem is that your values and the things you are required to do have fallen out of alignment, and you still need to live, and you still need the paycheck, and you may not be able to leave.
That combination, the misalignment plus the inability to walk away, is what creates the pressure. Strilowich describes it as feeling trapped with no way out, and he is direct about where that leads. It takes you to a deeper level of hopelessness, and chronic stress held that long will very likely show up in your body as a health issue.
The Statistics Confirm What People Feel
Strilowich points to workplace engagement data as evidence that this is not a niche experience. He cites the widely reported figure that only around seventeen percent of people are fully engaged at work, which means the overwhelming majority are somewhere between disengaged and actively disengaged.
He layers a second pressure on top of it. In his conversations with corporate professionals, he hears a constant, low-grade fear of being laid off. Change has always been a feature of corporate life, but Strilowich sees artificial intelligence accelerating it. Companies are cutting headcount while pushing productivity gains through AI, and he expects that trend to continue. When you need the paycheck, that uncertainty is not an abstraction. It is a daily source of stress, and it sits directly on top of the split that is already there.
Reaching the Top Is Not the Same as Arriving
One of the most useful things Strilowich names is the trap hidden inside ambition itself. He has watched it, and he has lived it. You work your way up the ladder, you reach the level you were aiming for, director or vice president, and the moment you get there, you discover it did not give you the inner fulfillment you were counting on.
He is fair about this. Some people are genuinely driven by that climb, and it suits them, and he says clearly that this is okay. But in his experience, they are the smaller group. The larger group reaches the top and finds that it was not satisfying, and that something deeper was going on the whole time that they had not yet looked at.
The practical insight is this. If you are treating the next promotion as the thing that will finally make the discomfort stop, it is worth asking whether the discomfort is really about the promotion at all.
The Layoff That Broke Him Open
Strilowich does not teach this from a distance. As a manager, over two years, he had to lay off roughly twenty-eight people. He describes the hardest part not as the conversations themselves but as the selection, knowing that this was going to happen regardless and that he was the one deciding who stayed and who did not.
One case changed everything for him. The person he had to let go was a number one top performer, and Strilowich was the one who had given them that rating. He had to read a corporate script over the phone that attributed the layoff to performance. He knew as he was reading it that it was not true. He would still have made the same choice because the business needed people in a different area, and that person was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was even the one who had put them there.
That gap between what he knew and what he was required to say created what he calls a real inner crisis. The intensity of that stress eventually contributed to a heart event that required an emergency stent in a coronary artery.
“That split when you can’t leave really causes a tremendous amount of internal pressure. It almost feels like you’re trapped with no way out.”
– Richard Strilowich
The Ego Is Not the Enemy, but Your Identity Might Be
Strilowich offers a definition of ego that is more workable than the usual one. The ego, at a general level, is our sense of separation, and we need it. We would not get anything done without it. The problem is not having an ego. The problem is being overshadowed by it, believing it is who we are, and tying our identity to it.
The consequence is easy to trace. If your identity is that you are a corporate vice president, and that title falls away, the anxiety becomes almost unbearable, because it is not just a job that disappeared. It is your sense of self.
The alternative Strilowich proposes comes from the spiritual traditions he has studied for three decades. He quotes the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience. That divinity within, integrated with your own unique nature, your strengths, your talents, your abilities, is what he calls the real self. And the practical payoff is direct. When you operate from the real self, you carry a deeper inner peace, the kind he describes as peace in the center of the storm, and if you lose your job, it does not define you.
Intuition, Fear, and How to Tell the Difference
Strilowich gets asked constantly how to distinguish real inner guidance from fear, and his answer is refreshingly unmystical. He does not trust his initial feeling. Feelings are fleeting, he says, and many of them are actually unconscious beliefs surfacing and triggering a reaction.
So he builds in time. He sits with it. He prays on it, he meditates, and sometimes he simply walks in the woods. What he is doing is separating himself from the feeling, especially fear, so that he can sit with what is actually happening. Then he checks again. Does the intuitive hit still hold, or does something different want his attention?
The takeaway is simple and immediately usable. Real guidance survives a pause. Fear usually does not.
Where to Begin When You Cannot Just Quit
For the person with a mortgage, children, and no runway, Strilowich does not offer an escape plan. He offers a starting point, and it is deliberately modest.
Start with where you are. He references Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and is honest about its implications. If you are truly at the survival level, worried about food and shelter, you are probably not open to this work yet, and you should not be. Survival comes first. But if you are somewhere in the middle and moving toward self-actualization, then the work becomes available, and a guide, whether a coach, a mentor, or a therapist, can make a significant difference. He also recommends mindfulness as a practical, near-term tool for releasing anxiety while the longer process unfolds.
His first non-negotiable daily practice is meditation, and he insists on it with the people he coaches. He also strips it of complexity. Five minutes. Eyes closed. Pick a word that resonates, peace or love or a name that feels right, and breathe with it, repeating it. The trick, he says, is letting go of the expectation that you are supposed to feel something other than what you are feeling. If you have a monkey mind and cannot stop your thoughts, let them run. Do not try to squash them. The practice is having the experience you are having without judging it.
Alongside meditation, he names contemplation of spiritual readings, practicing the presence through a repeated mantra, and selfless service, which in corporate language is servant leadership, being of use to the people around you without expecting anything back.
Your Career Is Not the Obstacle
The reframe at the heart of Strilowich’s work is that your corporate career is your spiritual path. Not a detour from it. Not the thing standing in its way.
He arrived there the long way. After the heart event came a deep depression, which sent him searching, which led him to books that seemed to fall into his lap, to a vision quest in the woods, and eventually to a spiritual director who helped him reframe his entire perspective on what was happening and who he really was. Looking back across forty years, he says plainly that he was not smart enough to have planned any of it, and that it turned out better than he could have imagined.
What changed was not his job. What changed was his perspective on it. He began to recognize that the hard situations and the good ones alike were in service to his growth. And when that shift took hold, the anxiety started slipping away, a deeper inner peace came through, and so did clarity and focus. Not perfectly. He still got knocked off center when a boss demanded a business case in two hours. But he recovered in a fraction of the time he used to spend obsessing, and he looks back now knowing he did not need to carry that much worry, because the events happened the way they were going to happen anyway.
That is the offer Richard Strilowich is making to anyone who feels like two people. You may not need a different career. You may need to stop leaving half of yourself at the door of the one you already have.
