Choosing Alignment Over Expectations – Exclusive Interview with Samka Keranovic
Samka Keranovic is Co-Founder of Desert Roots Wellness, a former VP and COO with more than 15 years of business and leadership experience, and a coach with 16 years of private coaching experience. Her work focuses on high achievers who look successful on the outside but feel exhausted, resentful, disconnected, or uncertain about the life they have built.
Samka Keranovic, Certified Holistic Life Coach, NLP Practitioner, and Neuroscience Coach
Her perspective on burnout and self-abandonment has also been published in Fast Company. In this interview, Samka explores the connection between burnout and self-abandonment, why overfunctioning can be mistaken for strong leadership, how resentment can become useful data, and what it takes to rebuild self-trust and create a life that feels aligned from the inside out.
What led you to build Desert Roots Wellness around helping high achievers create a life that actually fits?
For a long time, I thought burnout was a scheduling problem. I had spent years in corporate leadership as a Vice President (VP) and Chief Operating Officer (COO), so when I started feeling depleted and disconnected despite being successful on paper, my instinct was to optimize. I restructured my calendar, worked harder, and kept telling myself I just needed to get through the next milestone.
Eventually, I realized the workload wasn't the real issue. I had spent years becoming incredibly good at meeting expectations, anticipating what other people needed, and keeping everything moving while slowly losing contact with my own needs, boundaries, and judgment. I was achieving, but parts of the life I was building no longer felt like mine.
That realization became a major foundation for Desert Roots Wellness. I wanted to help other high achievers understand that exhaustion is not always a sign that they need to become more productive, or even simply rest more. Sometimes it is feedback that they have been disappearing from their own life. My work became about helping people rebuild that internal connection so they can remain ambitious and successful without sacrificing themselves in the process.
After 16 years of private coaching and more than 15 years in business and leadership, what patterns do you see most often in successful people who are quietly struggling?
One of the patterns I see most often is resentment in people who appear incredibly capable on the outside. They may feel resentful toward peers, leadership, a spouse, or other family members because they believe they are carrying more than everyone else and receiving very little recognition for it.
"Resentment is data."
When we look underneath it, there is frequently another layer. They have built much of their identity and their relationships around being the reliable one. They anticipate problems, step in, fix things, remember what everyone else forgets, and make sure nothing falls apart.
That competence can become a trap. The more capable they are, the more responsibility they absorb, and the more others begin to expect it. Eventually, the resentment is not simply about other people. It is also a signal that the role they have been carrying no longer feels sustainable. Part of the work is learning that being dependable does not require being endlessly available or responsible for everything. Sustainable success requires allowing other people to carry their share.
You have written about chronic self-abandonment as a pattern that can contribute to burnout. What does self-abandonment look like in everyday life?
Self-abandonment is the chronic habit of overriding your own needs, instincts, values, and boundaries in order to manage someone else's comfort, expectations, or approval. In everyday life, it often looks far less dramatic than people expect.
It can be not speaking up when something does not feel right, overexplaining your decisions because you feel responsible for making everyone else comfortable, or staying constantly available even when you are depleted. Individually, those behaviors can look like professionalism, flexibility, or being a supportive partner, parent, friend, or leader. The problem is when they become a pattern.
Over time, you become highly attuned to what everyone else needs while becoming less clear about your own limits, preferences, and priorities. That is why I describe burnout as more than overwork. You can reduce your workload and still feel exhausted if you are continually abandoning yourself inside the life you are living. Rest can help with fatigue, but it does not automatically repair the pattern that created the depletion.
Why can behaviors like people-pleasing, over-explaining, and always being available be mistaken for strong leadership?
Behaviors like people-pleasing, over-explaining, and always being available can easily be mistaken for strong leadership because, in the short term, they often look like commitment. The person says yes. They step in. They solve problems quickly. They make themselves available after hours, absorb extra responsibility, and keep things moving when others do not.
From the outside, that can look like dedication, loyalty, and reliability. Organizations can even reward overfunctioning because the cost is often invisible until it shows up as burnout and resentment.
The problem is that these behaviors are not always coming from healthy leadership. Sometimes they come from fear of disappointing people, difficulty setting limits, or a belief that being valuable means always being useful. Over time, the same behaviors that once earned praise can leave a leader feeling like they are carrying everyone while no one is carrying them. Strong leadership is not endless availability. It is creating clarity, accountability, boundaries, and shared responsibility so success does not depend on one person constantly overfunctioning.
What do conventional approaches to burnout often miss when identity or misalignment is part of the problem?
Conventional approaches to burnout often focus on recovery without asking what someone is recovering to. Rest, vacations, meditation, exercise, better time management, and healthier routines can all be valuable, but recovery without realignment is often temporary.
If someone returns to the same role, the same expectations, the same lack of boundaries, and the same version of themselves that created the exhaustion, they may feel better for a while and then find themselves right back in the same pattern.
When burnout is connected to identity or misalignment, the deeper questions are different. Who have you had to become to maintain this life? What are you continuing to tolerate because it is expected of you? Which responsibilities still belong to you, and which ones have you simply become accustomed to carrying?
Sometimes the problem is not that a person needs to become better at managing their life. Something about the life itself may need to change. Burnout can become useful information when it reveals that the way you are living, leading, or relating to others no longer fits who you have become.
How can someone tell whether they genuinely need rest or whether their role, priorities, or lifestyle no longer fit who they are?
There is no single sign because misalignment can show up in many different shapes. For one person, it may look like exhaustion. For another, it may be resentment, irritability, dread, numbness, or a growing sense of disconnection from work or relationships they once cared deeply about.
One question I encourage people to ask is, What am I returning to? If time away genuinely restores you and you return feeling engaged again, recovery may have been what you needed. But if you rest, feel better temporarily, and then quickly return to the same depletion or disconnection, that is also useful information.
That is when I become curious about what the person is returning to. Does the role still fit? Are these priorities still theirs? Are they living according to their values, or primarily according to expectations they have inherited or accumulated?
Rest is important, but sometimes exhaustion is carrying a message. The goal is not to interpret every difficult day as a reason to change your life. It is to notice persistent patterns that remain even after you have given yourself real space to recover.
What is one practical way a high achiever can start rebuilding self-trust when every decision feels difficult?
When someone is second-guessing every decision, I do not start by telling them to simply be more confident. I want to understand why they stopped trusting themselves in the first place.
We go to the root cause. Is the hesitation coming from fear of someone's reaction? A need for approval? Fear of judgment, rejection, or disappointing someone? Once we understand the pattern, we begin challenging it in small, intentional increments.
For example, if someone is afraid of how a particular person will react, I may have them make one small decision for themselves and communicate it without asking for permission. Then we observe what actually happens. We look at the other person's response, separate their reaction from the client's identity and worth, and examine why that response has carried so much power.
The process is simple but powerful. Find the root, make one independent decision, observe the reaction, separate the reaction from your identity, and repeat. Each small decision becomes evidence that you can tolerate discomfort, remain grounded, and trust your own judgment. Self-trust becomes much easier to rebuild when we address why it was lost instead of simply telling someone to believe in themselves.
What does it mean to you personally to choose alignment over external expectations?
Choosing alignment over external expectations is deeply personal to me because I see alignment as part of the essence of being human. When the life you are living no longer reflects who you are, even success can begin to feel empty.
For me, choosing alignment meant letting go of the identity of always being the dependable one. I also had to stop measuring success by how other people defined it or by what looked impressive from the outside.
There was a point when I realized that being perceived as successful was not the same as actually feeling fulfilled. I wanted a definition of success that made me feel whole, not one that required me to keep performing a version of myself that no longer fit.
Alignment does not mean abandoning ambition. It means becoming more intentional about what you are ambitious for. It is choosing work, relationships, responsibilities, and goals that are consistent with who you are now, not simply with who others expect you to be. For me, that is what choosing yourself really means.
What would you want someone who looks successful but feels exhausted and disconnected from themselves to understand first?
The first thing I would want them to understand is: do not turn the exhaustion into resentment toward yourself or everyone around you, and do not immediately assume you need to tear down everything you have built.
When people feel deeply disconnected, it can be tempting to believe that changing careers, leaving a relationship, moving, or completely reinventing their life will solve the problem. Sometimes external changes are necessary, but changing the scenery does not automatically change the patterns you carry with you.
Before making major decisions, I believe in becoming curious about yourself. Where did you stop speaking up? When did you begin overriding what you needed? At what point did you become more committed to meeting expectations than listening to yourself?
That requires personal responsibility without self-blame. Other people may have contributed to the circumstances, but understanding your own patterns gives you the power to change them. When you identify where you began abandoning yourself and start rebuilding that relationship, decisions about your career, relationships, priorities, and future often become much clearer.
"You do not have to destroy your life to find yourself again."
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