When Adaptability Becomes a Trap – Exclusive Interview with Ekaterina Leonova
Ekaterina Leonova, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), is a change coach and founder of Secure Within, based on combining nervous system science, somatic psychology, and behavioral science into a coaching approach built around the knowing-doing gap, the space between what high achievers understand intellectually and what they can actually sustain in their lives. While most performance and productivity advice targets mindset and habits, her work goes deeper, into the behavioral patterns that quietly override good intentions, making lasting change feel less like willpower and more like coming back to yourself.
In this interview, Ekaterina breaks down why adaptability can become a trap for high achievers, how to recognize when someone has outgrown an identity rather than simply grown tired of a career, and the practical first steps anyone can take to rebuild self-trust and separate what they genuinely want from what they've only learned to want.
Ekaterina Leonova, Change Coach
What happens when someone builds a successful career around who they needed to be rather than who they are now?
It's a misalignment trap. If we could always choose who we became on purpose, this would be simple. But most of us didn't get to design our own identity. We built one as a response to our environment. To what got praised, what got attention, what kept us safe. "Who I need to be" and "who I am" merged in the process, although they come from very different places. The first one is adaptation, and the second one is our authentic core.
Developmental psychology calls part of this identity foreclosure: committing to an identity, a career, a set of values, a way of being, without ever really exploring whether it fits. Self-determination theory adds more: autonomous motivation, driven by your own values, holds up differently than motivation controlled by external approval or fear of disappointing someone. Most high achievers run almost entirely on the second kind. It works, until it doesn't.
The question we should ask ourselves is whether our identities are chosen, or only reinforced. A career can be objectively successful and still be built on an introjected self, values absorbed rather than internal and authentic. That's why success can feel empty. This feeling is a good indicator of how aligned we are with who we are and the path we chose.
Why can adaptability become a problem for high achievers who have spent years meeting expectations?
Adaptability gets praised as a strength, and often it is, when it comes from a stable sense of self. Being able to walk into any room, work with anybody, read what's needed and deliver it–that's another kind of adaptability. It’s called self-monitoring: constantly scanning the environment and adjusting behavior to match it. High self-monitors are the people who look effortlessly adaptable, because they're endlessly easy to work with, prioritizing what makes things function over what they actually think or feel. It's heavy emotional labor, though: managing your internal state to produce the expression a situation requires. Do that daily for years, and it becomes identity.
However, what looks like an easy-going behavior can be a fawn response: appeasing, accommodating, becoming whatever keeps things calm, which functions the same way fight or flight does, just more socially rewarded. Constant attunement to everyone else requires de-attunement from yourself, until you stop noticing yourself.
Why do accomplished professionals often keep pushing for the next achievement when success no longer feels fulfilling?
The main reason is a dopamine rush and the desire for more. Neuroscience tells us that dopamine isn't a reward hormone, but an anticipation-of-reward hormone. Research on incentive salience shows it spikes while you're pursuing a goal, not once you've reached it, which is exactly why the achievement itself rarely delivers the feeling of joy and satisfaction the chase promises. You finish your project, and the dopamine spike is already gone. Your system scans for the next target before you've had time to feel happy and celebrate your previous win.
There is another possible layer: contingent self-worth, when self-esteem depends on performing well rather than existing well, and a mindful pause, no matter how well-deserved, isn't just uncomfortable, it feels like a threat to your value. If you prove your worth through output, rest feels like a threat. So we keep achieving.
Our Western definition of success doesn't help either. It's built almost entirely around doing, producing, acquiring, and not around feeling enough. This way, success does not really have a finish line. It is a constant rush on a path that never really ends. We only stop when we burn out, sadly.
What does a nervous system-informed approach look like in a session, and why does the body matter here when most of this seems to happen in someone's head?
The body doesn't lie. The mind has psychological defenses–denial, rationalization, compartmentalization–built specifically to keep us functioning while we override how we feel. The body does not build such armour. But we tend to ignore what it is telling us, until we are ill.
The amygdala processes threat responses through what's called the fast pathway, a largely unconscious route. Cognitively, we're always catching up to what the body already knows. Body-based signals aren't just unfiltered truth, they're also faster.
Ignoring the body has a cumulative cost. Every time you push through a signal instead of responding to it, your system registers it as physiological strain, what's known as allostatic load. Eventually, what was manageable becomes a symptom, a shutdown, a burnout.
So in my work, I teach clients to listen to the body as one of the first steps, not only because it's the fastest access point to what's actually happening, but because it's also the fastest nervous system regulation path. The vagus nerve responds to breath and body cues much faster, well before a reframed thought ever could.
What do you think conventional performance and productivity advice misses about lasting change?
If change worked the way most productivity advice assumes, you'd be calm, well-rested, physically and mentally solid, and all you'd need is a better system or a bit more discipline. For most people, that's simply not where they start.
From my experience, and what behavior change research backs up, self-regulation is a limited, state-dependent resource. When you're running on chronic stress, sleep deprivation, or a high allostatic load, your actual bandwidth for sustained change drops, no matter how good the system is. You cannot discipline your way past a depleted nervous system.
Dopamine also runs the show in most productivity culture. It runs on quick wins, streaks, and gamified hits of progress that keep you engaged but train your brain to chase the next hit instead of building tolerance for the slower, less stimulating work lasting change actually requires.
So the plan has to include your physical and mental baseline health, not as self-care on the side, but as the actual infrastructure change runs on. Skip that, and you're optimizing a system that doesn't have the energy to run it.
What is one practical way to rebuild self-trust after years of prioritizing external expectations?
When it comes to rebuilding self-trust, I suggest starting small: build self-awareness and self-attunement, notice what you feel and need in the moment, then act on it. It can be really small, but it is always significant. You're exhausted, so you rest instead of pushing through. You feel a boundary should exist, so you set it, starting with a small, low-stakes situation first.
That's the whole mechanism. Psychologist Albert Bandura called it mastery experience: self-belief builds through small, repeated proof of capability, not through insight or motivation alone. Self-trust follows the same rule, it rebuilds the same way it was broken, promise by promise, kept to yourself instead of being overridden.
This is also why resolutions and mindset shifts don't work here. You can't think your way into trusting yourself, that's the mind trying to fix something only the body can relearn. Every time you notice a need and act on it instead of overriding it, your nervous system logs it as evidence: this person follows through, even for me.
Do that consistently, and you will notice the shift when you've proven to yourself, dozens of times, that you will honour your needs.
What does feeling secure within yourself change about the way you make career and life decisions?
Inner security changes the motivation behind every decision, why you choose what you choose. Without it, you search for safety: the option least likely to bring criticism, rejection, or disappointment. Feeling secure within, you search for alignment: does this actually match who I am and what I want?
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Research on rejection sensitivity shows that people who feel less secure in their worth read ambiguous situations as more threatening and organize decisions around avoiding that threat before they even notice they're doing it. A stable sense of self removes that. A no becomes information, not an indictment, you take it, learn from it, and move forward in full self-confidence, instead of the rejection becoming evidence about your value as a person.
That's really the core shift: your nervous system stops treating disagreement, rejection, or a wrong turn as a threat. Once it's not danger, you can take in feedback, adjust, and keep choosing what's true for you, not what presumably keeps you safe.
What would you say to someone who has built the life they once wanted but no longer recognizes themselves in it?
There is always an opportunity to pivot, always. I am talking about circumstances of the middle class in the Western world. Unfortunately, too many people can't influence their circumstances. That's not a mystery, it's how the nervous system and the perception of self actually work. Neuroplasticity doesn't shut off at some age, your brain stays capable of forming new patterns for as long as you're alive. Also, your identity isn't fixed, researchers call it narrative identity, your ongoing story about who you are. Stories can be revised, so can yours.
So the first move isn't dramatic. It's actually a pause. Stop long enough to notice what's no longer working and what needs to change to align with what you truly want. Realignment might look like revisiting your values and rebuilding the self-esteem and self-trust you sacrificed for the life that used to fit. This part takes reconnecting with yourself, and it takes time.
Then it's step by step. Small, consistent choices that move you back toward yourself, the same way trust and confidence get rebuilt anywhere else: through repetition and slow but consistent movement toward your new life goals.
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