Neither is working.
She’d been tracking her numbers every single day for three months.
Response times. Patient satisfaction scores. The backlog on documentation. She had a spreadsheet. She checked it before her shift and again on her lunch break — on the days she actually took one.
By the time she came to a coaching session, she wasn’t tracking anything anymore. She’d stopped looking at the spreadsheet entirely. “I just don’t care anymore,” she told me.
She’d gone from disciplined to checked out, swinging from one extreme to the other — and missed the third option entirely.
When something isn’t working, most high achievers do one of two things.
They grind. They push harder, check the numbers more, add more hours, and run on adrenaline until either the thing works or they’re too exhausted to keep going.
Or they tell themselves it’ll work out. They step back, stay calm, and trust that it’ll come together — without a real plan for how.
If you work in healthcare, you know both of these modes intimately. The shift where you’re running on cortisol and doing three people’s jobs. And the shift where you’ve mentally clocked out because caring too much costs too much right now.
Neither of these is sustainable. And neither of them is actually solving the problem.
Why hustle backfires
When you go into overdrive, you’re operating from your brain’s survival system. Fight-or-flight narrows your thinking. You react instead of respond. You make decisions based on urgency, not strategy. This is the lowest level of thinking available to you — and it’s the one you’re using when the stakes feel highest.
Why “it’ll work out” is also a trap
Stepping back and just “trusting the process” sounds like calm confidence. But there’s a version of it that’s actually avoidance. If you’re not actively learning from what isn’t working, you’re not building toward anything. You’re just waiting.
The third option
Stay grounded. And fix it.
These two things are not opposites. In fact, the groundedness is what makes the fixing possible.
Here’s how it works. When something isn’t producing the result you want, you get curious instead of reactive. You look at exactly where the gap is. You form a theory about what’s causing it. You make a change. You watch what happens. If it doesn’t work, you form another theory. You repeat this until the reality matches the goal.
This is the Study of One. You are the researcher. Your work, your goals, your life — all of it is a lab. You hypothesize, experiment, evaluate, and adjust. Knowing that every problem has a solution.
What this actually builds
Every problem you troubleshoot this way compounds. Each lesson makes you more effective in the next situation. The big results you’re after aren’t made up of one breakthrough moment — they’re made up of every small lesson along the way.
The goal isn’t to never have something go wrong. The goal is to get better and faster at figuring out why, and fixing it.
That’s mastery.
Where to start
Next time something at work isn’t going the way you planned, before you push harder or check out — pause. Ask yourself: where exactly is the gap? What’s one theory about why it’s happening? What would you change to test that theory?
If you want support building this skill, coaching through Logan Health is available to you as a workplace benefit. Book here.
Or, if you are not a Logan Health Employee, you can book a complimentary consultation to talk about working with me here.
