From the Field  |  Andrey Ivanov

Why You Keep Hitting the Same Ceiling

You know the feeling.

No matter how hard you try, you keep bumping up against something you can’t see. You push, you make progress, and then you fall back. Push again. Fall back again.

People call it a glass ceiling, and most people blame the wrong things for it. They blame the economy, the boss, the timing, their luck.

After years of putting people through the hardest five days of their lives and watching what actually holds them back, I can tell you there are two variables that matter. And almost nobody is honest about either one.

Variable One: You Are the Sum of Your Habits

The first variable is personal. And I want to address this one first, because it’s the one you can take responsibility for, and taking responsibility is the right thing to do.

There are things you continuously do that are limiting your own growth. Some of it traces back to childhood. Some of it is cultural. Most of it you can’t even see, because you’ve been living inside it your whole life.

I’ve seen this in someone who is barely an adult. I’ve seen the exact same thing in an accomplished fifty-five-year-old CEO. Same issue. Different resume.

You cannot fix what you cannot see. That’s why the right environment matters so much: a furnace, where someone who is watching you operate under real pressure can observe the thing you do and give you an adjustment. Those adjustments are huge. They change trajectories.

Variable Two: Your Environment Will Make or Break You

Now the second variable, and this is the one people resist hearing.

You can do all the things correctly. You can say all the right words, invest all the proper money into all the proper places. But if your environment is not conducive, you will not win.

Even Jesus was not recognized as a prophet in his own land. Take that religiously or not, the principle holds: in a household where everybody is always negative, you cannot win. Because anything meaningful you will ever do is going to be hard, and in your most difficult moments, that environment will pull you under instead of holding you up.

So remove yourself. Fire the friends who are going nowhere and want company. Step out of the family environment that tears you down. You don’t have to hate them. You don’t have to be mean to them. But remove yourself.

The Part of You That’s Dying to Get Out

Here’s what’s underneath all of it.

There are parts of you that are dormant. Parts that were not put on you by anyone. They were in you when you were created. In you when you were born. In you as a child, trying to get out.

And when that part of you is starved, it doesn’t go quietly. All you feel is something dying while it’s trying to grow, and it’s painful. So you numb it.

You numb it with scrolling. You numb it with alcohol. With pot. With gambling. With hyper-working. With trying to please everybody just to fit in.

What Happens When It Unlocks

I’ve watched this moment happen more times than I can count, and the first thing I see is life. There is a level of hope in a person’s eyes that wasn’t there before.

The energy that used to work against you starts working for you. Instead of feeling defeated, feeling like you’re never enough, always living toward your next failure, the optimism starts to override the negative self-talk. You become a greater team player. You think more clearly, solve bigger problems, and adapt faster, because you’re no longer operating in survival and self-sabotage mode.

Your whole chemistry realigns toward your success. The simple things become enjoyable again. A bird chirping outside brings you joy. A walk brings you joy, instead of constant doom and gloom.

And the setbacks? They shrink. In size and in duration. Someone says something negative to you, you readjust quicker. Something doesn’t go your way, you readjust quicker. A lot of times you come back stronger, because you finally put down a stone you didn’t even realize you were carrying. And once it’s down, you look at it and think: why was I carrying that at all?

This Is What We Actually Do

The course you’ve seen photos of, the rucks and the missions and the long nights, is the furnace where all of this happens.

We remove the invisible barriers first, the personal ones and the environmental ones. Then we build on what makes a person great: the team-first posture, where you care for your teammates’ needs before your own, and trust grows, and selfishness dies, and resilience grows with it.

Five days. 120 hours. And you walk out with the thing you were actually looking for all along: yourself, unlocked.

— Andrey Ivanov