When Success Isn’t Enough: A Diagnostic for a Life That Fits

If something in your life feels… off – you’re not broken, but you may be drifting.

I adapted a tool called the Titanic Diagnostic (originally from the Reinvention Academy and built for businesses) to help individuals spot the icebergs in their own lives. It’s designed to help you anticipate, design, and implement for change across the systems you operate in – whether that’s your work, your relationships, or your personal rhythms.

If you’re tired of firefighting through your days, constantly shape-shifting to keep the peace, or living a life that technically works but doesn’t feel like yours… this is for you.

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Fine, Functional, and Fractionally Falling Apart

There comes a point – maybe on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, maybe mid-existential meltdown – when you ask: “Is this my life? Like, actually mine?” You look around at the job you’re in, the people you’re surrounded by, the habits you keep, and feel it: something’s not quite right. Not disastrous. Not explosive. Just… misaligned.

And here’s the kicker: misalignment isn’t usually loud. It’s a slow leak. A low-level hum of off that you start calling “normal.” According to psychologist R.C. Warner, this kind of misalignment shows up as “quiet stress” – a sense of chronic tension and fatigue that slowly wears you down from the inside out. You might look successful, but inside? You’re running on fumes.

I wasn’t in crisis. But I’d been high-functioning my way through a fog for years. I was juggling multiple versions of myself to meet everyone’s expectations – at work, at home, in friendships, in public. Somewhere along the line, I lost touch with the me that wasn’t just reacting. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened, but I knew I was a long way from what I now call base level normal: the calm, consolidated version of me that isn’t constantly firefighting my own damn life.

That’s when I used the Titanic Diagnostic – originally developed by the Reinvention Academy to help organisations detect when they’re drifting toward disaster. I didn’t create it – but I adapted it for personal use. Because it turns out, people hit icebergs too.

It gave me a way to examine my life not as a mess, but as a system. It helped me see the misalignment, not just feel it. And that changed everything.

One powerful insight from coaching literature says this: “You can be successful and still feel completely lost.” That hit hard. Because the truth is, many senior professionals don’t feel broken – they feel numb. Or unmotivated. Or like they’re “fine” (but in the way someone says “fine” through gritted teeth). Success doesn’t protect you from misalignment. Sometimes, it causes it.

And when you’re living a life that isn’t yours – not really – it’s exhausting. As Dr. LaShawn Gooden puts it: “When our daily actions persistently conflict with our core values, it erodes our resilience and fulfilment even when everything looks successful from the outside.”

I was told once I was a round peg in a square hole. And yes, technically, it fits. But it’s not comfortable. And just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The longer you’ve been off the path of your base level normal, the harder it becomes to claw your way back – not physically hard, but emotionally. Because it forces you to look at the conversations you’ve avoided, the jobs you took out of fear, the relationships you maintained out of habit. One study describes the cost of ignoring this alignment gap as “emotional dislocation” – a term that perfectly describes the feeling of being slightly removed from your own life.

That’s where this diagnostic changed the game for me.

Once I started reducing the versions of myself I kept alive to make others comfortable, I was staggered by how much space opened up on my plate of resilience. It wasn’t that I needed more capacity. I needed fewer performance personas. The blog I wrote previously, Where Comfort Ends, Resilience Begins, touched on this: sometimes we think we’re overwhelmed because we need to “build capacity.” More often, we just need to remove what doesn’t belong, or no longer serves us.

This isn’t about blowing up your life. It’s about seeing it clearly. The diagnostic won’t give you answers, but it will help you ask better questions – ones you’ve probably been avoiding for years.

Try this one: Do you feel like you’re managing your life – or just being managed by it?

If you want to find your way back to base level normal – the you that feels familiar, whole, and finally off autopilot – this is your first step.

And if someone in your world is quietly drowning in a life that no longer fits, send it to them. It might just be the thing that helps them surface again.