What Action Is Actually Hiding From You
I used to joke that being busy was a personality trait. Like, of course I had a full schedule, ten plates spinning, and a to-do list that never ended — that's just what you do when you're a person with goals. Right?
Suzanne Roske would have said the same thing. She was a PwC partner, nearly 20 years into a career she'd worked tirelessly for. She was good at it. She'd traveled to Chicago just for lunch. She was exactly where she was supposed to be.
And then one Sunday night in February 2014, she looked in the mirror after screaming at her six-year-old over a firetruck, and didn't recognize herself. That was the night she quietly thought something she'd never thought before — and the night she knew the pace that got her there was the very thing that was breaking her.
Here's the line from this episode that I can't stop thinking about: "Action masks our anxiety and our discomfort."
Let that land for a second. Because for a lot of us, the busyness isn't a byproduct of the life we've built — it's the reason we built it. Every time that quiet inner voice would come up in Suzanne's life (and she described it almost exactly this way: "Really? This is what we're gonna do?"), she'd push it back down and go into action. Because that's what gets rewarded. That's what gets you to partner.
But that voice doesn't go away. It just gets louder.
It took a pandemic, a walk in the North Carolina mountains, and something that felt less like clarity and more like grabbing a life raft, for Suzanne to finally say yes to the pause — what she now calls an adult gap year. Not a vacation. Not a sabbatical. A full, on-purpose stop. She moved her family to Mexico. All of them. Two suitcases each, one non-essential item per person. Eight months of slowing down enough to find out who she actually was.
What she found? She liked things simple. She loved sitting in problems she didn't have the answer to yet. She was carrying way more than was hers to carry.
None of that was available to her while she was moving at the speed she'd been moving. The clarity only came in the pause.
Now she coaches high achievers through their own version of that — and she's clear that it doesn't have to be a gap year. It can be fifteen seconds before you say yes to the next thing. It can be a week. The duration isn't the point. The intention is.
Two questions to sit with this week:
What is your busyness currently masking?
If you stripped away your title, your role, and your to-do list — what would be left?
Suzanne's story — her adult gap year — is one of the most honest conversations about success and identity I've had on this show. If you're white-knuckling a life that used to fit, this episode is for you.
