You keep working on the symptoms, yet they just keep popping up in different places.
Last year it was the client who drained you for eighteen months before you finally fired them. This year it’s the hire who’s doing the exact same thing to your calendar. Last year it was the relationship where you shrank yourself down to a size that wouldn’t threaten anyone. This year it’s the boardroom where you shrink the same way—the self-confidence you need to walk into those high-level rooms, gone, strangled by the overgrowth of self-doubt.
Different symptom. Same root.
And you’ve been so busy treating the symptom—the client, the hire, the relationship, the self-confidence—and you keep asking yourself the same question: when is this finally going to be in the rearview?
MEET YOUR MINT
Here’s the uncomfortable part: what you’re dealing with isn’t even a pattern in the tidy, nameable sense. It’s a symptom of working on the symptom—the scaffolding holding the whole structure up, completely untouched, while you keep playing whack-a-mole.
Think of mint. You planted it once, somewhere, at some point in your life. You pull it out of one bed, feeling proud of yourself for finally handling it—and it pops up three feet over, in the vegetable patch, in the rose bed, wherever there’s room. Turn your back on it completely and it doesn’t stay contained. It overtakes the whole garden. (Ask anyone who’s ever “just planted a little” and ended up in a five-year turf war with a herb.)
That’s what’s actually happening when you fire the client and hire a nicer version of the same client. When you leave the relationship and shrink in the next one instead. When you hit the next revenue number and the exact same fear meets you there—just growing in a different bed.
Mint needs to be pulled out by the root—the whole root, not the visible stem.
Here’s how this shows up in your life:
- Left one job for “a better culture,” found yourself in the identical dynamic within eight months, and quietly wondered if you’re the common denominator. (You are. Just not the way you think.)
- Fired a client, hired a nicer version of the same client, only to be plagued with different—but eerily similar—issues.
- Told yourself “this time will be different” about a decision that has never, not once, actually been different.
- Solved a $10K problem, hit $100K, and found the identical problem waiting for you there—dressed up as a “leadership challenge.”
- Read every book on the symptom—boundaries, delegation, burnout, communication—and knew better, but your life didn’t change. (47 books on boundaries, and you still said yes to the thing you meant to say no to. Same mint, different bed.)
That’s the tell. Awareness without change. You’ve been collecting information about the symptoms. Nobody’s shown you the root system at the heart of the whole problem.
Fifteen years in capital markets taught me to spot a pattern shift before anyone else in the room did—and to build the systems that got ahead of it before it became a problem.
I just hadn’t turned that same skill on myself yet.
Then my body stopped negotiating with the strategy.
The symptoms came first, actually—years of them, each one showing up in its own corner of my life, and I dealt with each one separately, like separate weeds. Exhaustion here. Pain there. A gut issue over there. Different bed, different weed, same garden.
Then came the fibromyalgia diagnosis. And with it, a prognosis: this is just how things are going to be now. Manage it. Accept it.
And that’s when it happened. Something inside me woke up, and I heard myself say: “Screw that.”
I didn’t know where that voice came from, but it seemed to know something I didn’t. So I started listening to it, and let it guide me forward. That’s when I discovered the interconnectedness—the inner world feeding directly into the outer symptoms, showing up in places that had nothing to do with my body at first glance. The mint, again, just in a different bed of the garden.
Because the thing that needed attention—so I could stop living in my own version of Groundhog Day—wasn’t the fibromyalgia. It was the pattern underneath it. Once I looked honestly, that pattern had spread well beyond my body—into my mind, my emotions, how I ran my business. Same mint. More beds than I’d realized.
I’ve been pain-free for twenty years now, because I cracked the code on getting to the root and stopped chasing symptoms.
Nobody says this part out loud: it’s natural to choose managing the symptom over looking at the root—the symptom asks you to push forward. The root asks you to stop and look back, which feels like losing ground. On top of that, you’re attempting the kind of change your subconscious fights tooth and nail to protect its false sense of security.
But I get it. Managing the symptom feels like progress. It gives you a task list. A new system. A different hire. A better boundary script. It lets you stay busy being the person who’s “working on it” without ever finding out what “it” actually is. (There’s a special kind of pride in a beautifully color-coded to-do list that’s solving the wrong problem. Yes, I’ve made one too.)
Looking at the root gets brushed off—it asks you to stop when all you want to do is keep moving. You don’t want to lose the progress you’ve already got, and going deeper feels like going backward.
If you’ve done any real transformation work before, what I’m about to say won’t surprise you: permanent change only ever comes from the inside.
And it’s up to you to have the courage to ask just one question: if this keeps happening no matter what I change on the outside, what’s the root that keeps it alive on the inside?
And if you keep focusing on the symptom rather than the root, it doesn’t stay contained. That weed will keep making its way into every area of your life until you hunker down and face that sucker head-on.
Mint doesn’t care what system it’s in:
- The leader who keeps replacing “underperforming” hires—because the real problem was never the hires, it was a leader who can’t tolerate a mistake without someone paying for it.
- The partner who keeps picking fights about the dishes—because the real fight was never about the dishes, it was about feeling unseen for the hundredth time.
- The founder who reworks the offer every eighteen months—because the real problem was never market timing, it was a business trained to stay exactly small enough to control.
WHAT CHANGES EVERYTHING
This is where Pattern Recognition meets Values—you can’t pull a root you haven’t named.
Here’s what changes when you finally go to the root: it stops popping up in your self-talk. It stops showing up as the fear that makes you flinch before a hard conversation. It stops running your personal life the way it’s been running your professional one, quietly setting the ceiling on both.
It stops running your personal life the way it’s been running your professional one, quietly setting the ceiling on both.
Here’s the good news: patterns aren’t prison—they’re a map. These seemingly unrelated symptoms have been trying to tell you the same thing all along. You just need to look past the symptom and see the root for what it is.
THE ROOT PULL
Step 1: Unearth the Root
Where do you feel the most resistance right now? Notice where frustration, fear, or hesitation keeps showing up—a relationship, a decision, a number you keep almost hitting.
Step 2: Name What’s Feeding It
What belief is running underneath this? Every recurring pattern is fed by a story you haven’t said out loud yet. Often it’s some version of: “I’m not enough,” “success requires struggle,” or “I have to do it alone.”
Step 3: Plant Something New
What belief would you rather grow in its place? Not false positivity—something true enough to actually take root.
“I’m capable of this without the struggle.”
“Support is allowed to be easy.”
You didn’t get this far by avoiding hard things. You got here by getting exceptionally good at solving them—which is exactly why the root has been able to hide in plain sight for so long. It’s protected by your own competence.
Want to know which root is actually yours? The Breakthrough Blueprint Assessment takes two minutes and names the pattern you’ve been managing instead of meeting.
The root doesn’t need pulling from one more bed. It needs you to finally dig all the way down.
Your garden guru,
Anik
Connect with Anik on The Wellness Universe and follow her on Facebook and YouTube.
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