When Potential Becomes a Prison

By Deevo Tindall

Read time: ~6 minutes

Why You Should Read This

This isn’t a story about potential, or burnout, or the tired idea of “finding balance.” It’s about that quiet, invisible current that keeps pulling so many of us off course, the subtle disconnection between what we do and who we are while we’re doing it.

If you’ve ever looked around at your life that looks successful on paper but still feels a little misaligned in your bones, if you’ve ever wondered why all that movement isn’t translating into meaning, this might offer the clarity you’ve been avoiding (or pretending you didn’t need).

The Myth of Potential

For most of my life, potential felt like a compliment.

People told me I was capable, creative, adaptable, that I could do anything I set my mind to. And for a while, that belief became my fuel. I kept starting things, building things, chasing things, trying to turn capability into fulfillment.

What I didn’t realize then is that potential, when left untethered to purpose, becomes a bit of a trap, and iIt keeps you in motion without ever demanding any real depth.

I’ve come to understand that, I wasn’t chasing success as much as I was chasing resonance, that feeling of being in sync with what I was building. But when you’re good at a lot of things, it’s dangerously easy to mistake competence for calling. I could make almost anything work, and I did, which, ironically, became the problem. I kept doing things that looked meaningful but didn’t feel meaningful, and because they worked, I convinced myself I was on the “right path.”

Potential without direction is noise, it fills the calendar but drains your spirit. It builds momentum but never any real movement… iIt’s like running on a treadmill made of gold, impressive, exhausting, and still somehow going nowhere.

The Cost of Disconnection

This is the quiet epidemic of our time, we don’t burn out because we’re doing too much, we burn out because we’re building from disconnection.

We grow businesses while neglecting the very person responsible for their growth. We treat “more” as if it were synonymous with “better,” and then act surprised when our peace evaporates the moment we hit the next goal.

Most ambition, left unexamined, is survival in disguise. We chase achievement because stillness makes us uncomfortable, and stillness forces us to feel, stillness invites us to confront the parts of ourselves that constant motion helps us avoid.

Once you start slowing down, even a little, the patterns start to reveal themselves, the old stories about worth, the belief that speed equals value, the subtle fear that slowing down means falling behind. But growth doesn’t come from more, it comes from meaning. It begins when you understand why you do what you do and allow that awareness to reshape how you do it.

The Science of Awareness

Neuroscience tells us that awareness literally rewires the brain. The anterior cingulate cortex (say that three times fast), the part of our brain responsible for emotional regulation and conscious choice, activates when we name what we feel and why we feel it.

According to a Yale study, just two minutes of reflection can shift your nervous system from fight-or-flight into creative flow. That’s why all these ancients told us to meditate, not to be “woke,” but to be still, stillness is literally the point.

Awareness isn’t soft work either, it’s structural, it’s the bridge between confusion and clarity, between compulsion and creation, and once you start operating from awareness, you stop chasing energy and start directing it.

The scattered potential begins to cohere into form… (ooh, that’s a nice line, right?)

The Turning Point

When I finally started slowing down, something inside me recalibrated. I began to notice the spaces between the noise, the quiet moments of honesty that revealed what I’d been avoiding.

Let me be clear, it wasn’t that I lacked vision, it was that I had been trying to construct meaning without understanding myself first, I’d been mistaking reinvention for evolution.

Reinvention is what we do when we don’t trust stillness. Evolution happens naturally once we stop resisting what we already know. I stopped calling it “starting over” and began calling it “coming home.”

That’s when everything changed. The brands I built became extensions of truth rather than performances of success. The work stopped being about proving something and started becoming about expressing something.

The Bridge Between Who You’ve Been and Who You’re Becoming

If you’ve ever felt like you’re standing between versions of yourself, no longer who you were, but not yet who you’re becoming, that’s not confusion… that’s alignment asking to be heard.

This is the work I do now with founders, creators, and leaders who’ve realized that achievement doesn’t always translate to peace. It’s not about branding in the traditional sense; it’s more about integration. It’s about restoring perception so that what you build on the outside finally mirrors what you know on the inside.

Because every brand is a mirror, every message is a reflection, and every business is a portrait of the consciousness that built it, and while that may sound philosophical or even existential, it’s true, you are the brand, and until you see yourself clearly, nothing you create will ever feel complete.

Join Me

If this hits you somewhere deep, join me for The Brand Alignment Blueprint™ Workshop, a one-day visibility reset to help you reconnect with your story, clarify your message, and rebuild from truth instead of performance.

DM me for details or visit thebrandstoryteller.com

About Deevo

Deevo Tindall is a storyteller, strategist, and recovering overthinker who helps founders and creators build brands that actually feel human. He believes branding is therapy with better lighting, that awareness is the first form of strategy, and that clarity, real, grounded clarity, is the most underpriced asset in business.

When he isn’t guiding leaders through identity work and narrative realignment, you’ll find him behind a camera, misquoting Jung, or convincing himself that black coffee counts as breakfast.

Follow him on LinkedIn or explore his work at thebrandstoryteller.com