What got you here won't get you there. When the strengths that built your career start holding you back.

The chef who inspected every plate

Imagine a chef who opens a restaurant. (I first told this story on the podcast.) He's brilliant. He writes the menu, chooses the ingredients, cooks, plates the food and talks to customers. The restaurant takes off, so he opens a second one. He hires talented chefs, trains them and shows them exactly what great looks like.

Then Friday night comes. Both restaurants are packed and orders are flying in. There's one problem. Every plate still has to be inspected by him before it leaves the kitchen. Every single one.

At first he manages. Then orders back up, food goes cold, customers wait, the chefs get frustrated and he is exhausted. So he arrives earlier, stays later, works weekends, and starts telling people it's impossible to find good staff.

Someone asks him why he's inspecting every plate. He looks confused. Because he's responsible for quality. Have you trained your chefs? Yes. Do they know the standards? Yes. Are they capable? Yes. Then why are you still inspecting every plate? For the first time, he has no answer.

When he opened the first restaurant, checking every plate made sense. It contributed to his success. The business changed. His behaviour didn't.

You don't need to own a restaurant for this to apply. I see it most in CEOs and senior executives who were promoted for being the best operator in the room, and founders are not far behind.

Sometimes the behaviours that created your success become the behaviours that prevent your next level of success. You're still capable of doing the work. The question is whether you're still the person who should be doing it.

Your version of the plates

So how many plates are you still inspecting?

• How many decisions still come through you?
• How many meetings do you attend because you always have?
• How many client relationships could someone else hold?
• How many processes exist because you designed them five years ago?
• How many responsibilities have you kept because you can do them faster than anyone else?

Being faster than everyone isn't necessarily a strength any more. It might be the bottleneck.

Fiona McKenzie, who rose from account director to CEO of the B2B agency River and led it through its sale to Marketbridge, told me about this. She had been a hands-on client services leader with a team of around 30. Her biggest lesson in her first year as CEO was that she didn't need to be involved in everything. Her job was to set the vision and a framework for success, then give her leadership team the autonomy to run the business. Her test now is whether she can go on holiday for a week without writing anyone a handover.

Why the old version of you fights to stay

Most people are scared of letting go of who they think they're supposed to be. The achiever, the fixer, the dependable one. That version worked. It got you here. So it will fight to stay alive, even when it's the thing holding you back.

Your brain doesn't help. Its main job is to keep you safe, not to help you grow. Every habit and success strategy you've repeated sits in a well-worn path. Those paths are efficient, automatic and comfortable. When you start to change, your brain reads the uncertainty as danger and tells you to go back, because the old way worked.

That's protection. And protection easily becomes limitation. The friction you feel when you change is your brain forming new connections. You aren't losing control. You're learning a new rhythm.

Evolve, don't erase

What got you here won't get you there. Marshall Goldsmith wrote the book with that title, and it's still one of my favourite phrases. But I want to be careful with it, because people hear it as "throw everything out."

That's why I called my company MindsetShift rather than mindset change. A change sounds like a big bang where the old is gone. A shift builds on what's already there. It honours the past.

Howard Schultz is a good example, whatever you think of him. When he came back as Starbucks CEO, he felt the stores had lost what made them special. On 26 February 2008 he closed around 7,100 US stores for three hours to retrain baristas (NPR). It cost money, and it wasn't about nostalgia. He kept what made Starbucks successful and rebuilt it for what came next.

That's the invitation. Pause, reflect and rebuild, not because the old version failed but because it can't carry the weight of the next season. Too many leaders try to walk into a new season with the old systems and the old mindset.

The cocoon is the part people skip

A caterpillar doesn't simply grow wings inside a cocoon. It breaks down almost completely before it becomes a butterfly. The process is messy and nobody sees it, but it's necessary. Most people quit in the cocoon because the old shape feels so much more comfortable.

Sometimes life pushes you into one: a pause, a breakdown, a season that feels uncertain, maybe burnout. It's tempting to rush through to prove you're fine. Don't. That's where the unlearning happens. You don't come out brand new. You come out more whole.

Questions to sit with

Ask yourself what you need to unlearn. Maybe it's the belief that success means exhaustion, or that slowing down means falling behind, or the habit of defining yourself by what you produce.

Then ask: where am I holding on to a version of me that no longer fits? What does my new role need from me that my old role didn't? And what would it cost to keep inspecting the plates for another year?

You never arrive. You evolve. Your only job today is to leave room for the next version of you.