The Chase. Why we keep looking outside for something that lives within

There is a pattern I keep seeing in coaching conversations — and one I know intimately from my own life.

People spend years chasing the next thing.

The promotion. The relationship. The house. The luxury holiday. The recognition. The title. The version of life that finally whispers: then I'll feel complete.

And when it arrives? There is excitement. Relief. Something expands, briefly.

But it rarely lasts.

Almost immediately, the mind moves again. Toward the next target. The next achievement. The next external marker that might — this time — give us what we've been searching for all along.

Here is what I've come to see: we are usually not chasing the thing itself.

We are chasing a feeling.

Worth. Love. Safety. Validation. The simple, aching sense of being enough.

And somewhere along the way, we learned that external achievement is how you earn those things.

For some people, this shows up through material life. If I get this car, this wardrobe, this holiday — I'll feel like I've made it. For others, it lives in career and ambition.

I've worked with many people who genuinely believe the next promotion will shift something fundamental inside them. That becoming a Director, VP, or founder will finally allow them to feel seen.

But when we slow down and look underneath, the real questions are almost never about the role itself.

They're more like: Will I finally matter? Will I finally be enough? Will I finally deserve love?

These aren't adult questions. They were formed long before adulthood. In bedrooms, in school hallways, at dinner tables — in all the moments where a child was quietly learning what they needed to be in order to be loved.

I can see this clearly in my own story. And honestly, it took me a long time to be willing to look at it.

Growing up, I was involved in performance sport. I was good at it, and I worked hard. But what I remember most isn't the training or the competitions themselves — it's the feeling when I won. The warmth that appeared. The pride in my mother's eyes. The way the room felt different around me when I came home with a medal, when teachers praised me, when I was performing well.

Nobody said it explicitly. Nobody needed to.

I made the connection inside myself, the way children do — quietly, completely, without question.

Achievement = love.

But the other side of that equation was just as powerful — and far less talked about.

I hated losing. Not in the healthy, competitive way. I mean I truly could not bear it. Coming second or third wasn't something I could brush off or feel proud of — it was painful. Upsetting in a way that felt bigger than the result itself. Because on some level, it wasn't just a loss in a competition. It was confirmation of something I feared about myself.

And that meant I couldn't acknowledge myself for simply showing up. For training, for competing, for pouring myself into something I loved. None of that counted if I didn't win. The effort was invisible to me. Only the outcome spoke.

Looking back, I can see how much that cost me — not just in sport, but in the way I carried that same lens into everything that followed.

Into school, into my career, into every room I entered. I became driven, ambitious, always reaching — not always knowing why, but always chasing that same feeling. The next proof that I was worthy. That I was enough. That I deserved to be loved.

For a long time, I couldn't even see it as a wound. It just looked like ambition. It just looked like drive.

And externally, it worked. I achieved things. I was praised, promoted, recognised.

But internally, something never quite settled. There was always a quiet restlessness underneath — a feeling that I hadn't quite arrived yet, that the real validation was still one step ahead.

Because no achievement can permanently resolve something that was created inside.

Each time I reached a goal I had wanted deeply, my internal state eventually returned to the same place. The satisfaction faded. The striving came back. Another mountain appeared on the horizon, and I was already leaning toward it before I'd even caught my breath.

Seeing that pattern — really seeing it, not just intellectually but feeling the truth of it — changed something in me.

Not my desire to do meaningful work. Not my love of doing things well.

But the energy underneath shifted.

I stopped needing the achievement to tell me I was okay.

And that — more than any promotion, any recognition, any external marker — felt like the first real arrival.

Because instead of always living slightly ahead of myself, rushing psychologically toward some future moment where I finally get to feel worthy, I became more present in the actual work. When I'm in it now, I'm actually there. Not performing. Not proving. Just building, thinking, creating — without the background hum of but will this be enough?

Work became lighter. Clearer. More mine.

Achievement itself is not the problem. Creating, building, growing — these are beautiful human impulses.

The question worth sitting with is: what are we hoping it will give us?

Because if we are unconsciously asking external life to resolve an internal absence, the chase never ends. There will always be another goal, another title, another milestone just out of reach. The goalpost moves, because it was never really about the goal.

And maybe the deeper invitation — the one underneath all of this — is not to stop creating.

It is to start asking: what am I actually hungry for?

Because what we're truly looking for might not be out there at all.

Where in your life are you chasing something — and what are you hoping it will give you?