By: Kate Sarmiento
Nobody warns you that the view from the top is mostly just…more mountain.
Sharon Spano hears some version of the same confession almost every week from the executives who walk into her practice, and it never sounds like what you’d expect from someone who runs a company or sits on a board. It’s not “I failed.” It’s closer to “I did everything right, so why isn’t this enough?” These are people with the corner office, the successful exit, the family photos on the desk that look exactly like they’re supposed to. And somewhere underneath all of it, there’s this quiet, humming dread that nothing they achieve is ever going to be enough.
Spano, a PhD-level developmental coach who’s spent three decades working inside the C-suite, has a name for this. She calls it the emptiness of success, and if you’ve ever hit a goal you swore would fix everything only to feel exactly the same the next morning, you already know what she’s talking about. This isn’t a motivation problem. It isn’t a discipline problem either. It’s something structural, something baked into how a lot of high achievers were built long before they ever became high achievers, and it’s the reason so many leaders who look completely fine on paper are quietly coming apart underneath the surface.
When Winning Stops Working
Most executives assume that if they’re miserable, it’s because they haven’t achieved enough yet. One more promotion. One more acquisition. One more deal that finally makes them feel like they’ve made it. So they chase it, they get it, and for about six weeks it feels amazing. Then it doesn’t. The high fades faster every time, and some leaders start wondering if they’re just broken in a way that success can’t reach.
There’s a name for this, and psychologists have studied it for a while. Harvard-trained psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar calls it the arrival fallacy. That’s the false belief that reaching a goal will make you happy for good. He came up with the term after his own experience as a competitive squash player. He assumed winning a tournament would finally make him happy. He won. He was happy. And then the same stress and emptiness came right back (Source: The Good Men Project, 2020). The brain gets used to things fast. Whatever felt like the finish line yesterday just became the new normal today.
This is where things get uncomfortable, because the instinct is always to fix an emotional problem with an achievement. Work harder. Scale faster. Close the next deal. But if the emptiness comes from a mind that adjusts to whatever it gets, no amount of chasing is going to fix it.
And the cost shows up in numbers a board would recognize. A 2025 study built by researchers at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, Baruch College, Johns Hopkins, and the University of San Diego put a real price tag on burnout. It costs employers an average of $4,257 a year for a salaried employee, $10,824 for a manager, and $20,683 for an executive, nearly five times more at the top than at the bottom (Source: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2025). There’s a reason for that gap. Good judgment and clear thinking are the first things to go under chronic stress, and those are exactly what executives get paid for.
Vistage’s own survey of small and midsize business CEOs found that close to 25 percent feel burned out frequently or daily, and another 44 percent feel it at least sometimes (Source: Vistage Worldwide, 2025). None of these leaders think of themselves as fragile. They’ve spent their whole careers pushing through fatigue that would’ve stopped anyone else years ago.
It’s Not You. It’s the System You Grew Up Inside
Most executive coaching starts in the wrong place. Real leadership problems usually start at home, years before there’s any business to run. That’s part of why Spano’s practice leans on human development science instead of the usual advice about better habits and tighter routines. If the root cause never gets addressed, better routines just become a faster way of running the same broken loop.
Her Potential Unleashed Intensive is built around helping leaders spot the hidden loyalties, patterns from early development that keep high achievers stuck even after they’ve won every game available to them. Sometimes that means going back further, into early experiences that shaped why achievement became the goal in the first place. These aren’t character flaws. They’re old survival strategies that made sense once, maybe when someone was a kid trying to earn approval or stay safe in a chaotic house, and never got updated. Fast forward twenty or thirty years, and that same strategy is now running a company. It’s exhausting, because it was never built for the size of pressure a CEO carries.
This distinction matters more than it sounds. A leader who thinks their exhaustion is a discipline problem will just try to push harder, which is the wrong direction. A leader who understands they’re running on an old pattern actually has something to work with. Spano’s clients learn where they sit in what research points to as the 12 Stages of Human Development, and how that stage shapes their whole relationship with time, money, and success, often in ways they’ve never had words for before. Her approach, called Systemic Mapping, is built to bring these hidden patterns to the surface. It’s less about setting new goals and more about looking at who’s setting the goals in the first place, and why.
This matters beyond the individual leader’s mood too. Burnout or a deep sense of emptiness at the top doesn’t stay at the top. It moves down through teams, through decisions, through the whole culture of a company, often long after the leader has stopped noticing it. That’s the real mechanism behind how one disconnected leader reshapes an entire company’s mood, one short meeting and one short-tempered email at a time.
The Way Out Isn’t More Hustle. It’s a Different Question Entirely
This is where most leadership advice runs out of road. It stops at managing symptoms. Take a vacation. Delegate more. Set better boundaries. All fine advice, and none of it useless, but none of it touches what’s actually driving the emptiness. It’s a bit like repainting a house with a cracked foundation. It looks better for a while. It doesn’t fix anything underneath.
What Spano’s clients tend to examine, often to their own surprise, isn’t a new tactic at all. It’s their relationship with themselves, and whether their sense of worth stays tied to the next milestone on the calendar. The work doesn’t set out to make business problems disappear.
It looks instead at where a leader is standing when the decisions get made. Steady, or starving. Spano describes the work as helping clients reclaim what’s theirs and step into their full potential.
None of this happens on its own, and it rarely happens alone either. It usually takes someone who can see the pattern from the outside, because from the inside, the pattern just looks like normal life. It looks like ambition. It looks like commitment, right up until the achievement stops meaning anything.
Ready to Find Out What’s Actually Been Missing?
If any of this sounds familiar, here’s the good news: emptiness isn’t a life sentence, and it isn’t proof that something’s permanently wrong with you. It’s a signal, and you can work with it once you understand what’s causing it.
Dr. Sharon Spano works with high-impact leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, consultants, and coaches who want to move past this pattern for good. Her Potential Unleashed Intensive and private Systemic Mapping sessions help leaders find the specific patterns holding them back, so they can lead with a clear head instead of running on empty.
Learn more about working with Dr. Spano and take the first step with an Intensive Mapping Session, where you’ll start uncovering the patterns that might be holding you and your business back.
