There is something almost embarrassing about the moment you realize you have been sprinting in the wrong direction. Not because you lacked effort. The effort was real. But because the thing you were chasing was always going to move faster than you could run.
I noticed it in myself first. I was building my coaching practice and had convinced myself that clarity was a prerequisite for action. Once I knew exactly who I served, I would know what to offer. Once I knew what to offer, I would know how to show up. I was optimizing before I had taken a single real step. And I kept wondering why nothing was moving.
Around the same time, I was working with a client who was deep in a job search. Application after application, every word carefully considered, every version of the CV refined. The effort was genuine and the strategy was not wrong, exactly. But something underneath it was running hotter than it should. There was a kind of chasing happening that was distinct from just working hard, a particular quality of desperation that leaked through the polish no matter how much care went into it. The process felt like sprinting after a shadow.
You cannot grab your shadow. The harder you chase it, the faster it moves. The only way to get it back in its natural position is to stop, turn toward the light, and let it fall behind you.
That image has stayed with me, because it describes something I now recognize in clients fairly regularly. The goal is real. The want is genuine. But the direction is wrong.
There is a version of effort that comes from vision, from knowing what you are building and moving toward it. And there is a version that comes from scarcity, from the felt sense that you do not yet have enough, that you are not yet enough, and that the next achievement will finally fix that.
The two can look almost identical from the outside. The person working long hours, refining their positioning, sending careful emails, and you cannot always tell which kind of energy is underneath it. But the person inside the experience knows, even if they cannot always articulate it.
The scarcity version has a particular internal texture. Every rejection confirms that the thing you want is pulling further away. Every iteration that does not land feels like evidence of fundamental inadequacy rather than just a miss. You speed up, and it speeds up too. And the shadow lengthens.
What makes this pattern so persistent is that it is genuinely hard to think your way out of. You cannot reason yourself from scarcity into abundance. More information about the market, more feedback on the CV, more clarity about your niche - none of it addresses the actual problem, which is not informational. It is about the relationship between the person and the goal. Where they are standing. Which way they are facing.
In coaching, this distinction maps onto something that cuts deeper than mindset or motivation. It is a question of level.
At the level of behavior, the scarcity-chaser and the vision-led person may be doing the same things. But behavior, over time, is downstream of something else: identity. Who you understand yourself to be, and what you believe is natural for a person like you.
When a client is chasing a goal from scarcity, the implicit story is often that the goal exists somewhere ahead of them, outside of them, and needs to be seized. The self that would hold that goal feels like a future self, conditional on arrival. But when a client is moving from vision and identity, the logic runs differently. The goal is an expression of who they are becoming, not a reward for proving themselves. The setbacks are information. The gaps are just gaps, not indictments.
That shift in orientation changes everything about how a person shows up. Not because they have become more positive, but because the energy behind their actions has changed at the source. People around them feel it. The desperation that leaks through polish cannot be hidden, and neither can its absence.
The question I find most useful in sessions is not "What do you want?" but "Who are you when you are already living this?" It sounds subtle. It is not a small distinction. Asking a client to describe themselves from inside the goal rather than approaching it from outside begins to move the identity toward the vision, rather than treating them as two separate things.
The reason the shadow metaphor works for me is that it describes a relationship, not an outcome. The shadow does not disappear when you stop chasing it. It falls into its natural position behind you when you orient yourself toward the light. The light here is not optimism or positive thinking. It is values. It is a clear enough sense of who you are and what you care about that your movement has a direction, rather than just a target.
What becomes possible then is a different quality of effort: committed but not desperate, persistent but not frantic. The work is the same. The person doing it is inhabiting it differently.
I see this as one of the things coaching is well placed to support, precisely because it does not begin with the goal. It begins with the person. And when the person changes their relationship to what they are building (when they stop treating their own growth as a condition to be satisfied and start treating it as the actual work) the shadow stops being something to chase.
It simply follows.
About João
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