The Wrong Job Was Killing Him. So He Quit It — Without Quitting.
How a Director-level data strategist escaped the lunch rush, calmed his nervous system, and got back to building the thing he came to build
Kevin's nerves were fried.
That's how he put it when we first talked. Not burned out. Not frustrated. His nerves were friend. And when someone at his level — a director at one of the largest healthcare systems in the Midwest — uses that phrase, you pay attention.
He said he wanted to be a better leader. A better husband. What he actually needed was to get out of the rapids before they took him under.
The Pattern
Kevin is a big data guy in the truest sense. Not a technician — a thinker. Someone who sees abstract connections inside massive datasets and can translate them into something an organization can actually act on. That's a rare and valuable thing.
He'd been recruited to this healthcare company specifically to build something ambitious: a revolutionary approach to how they gathered, managed, and used data across the entire system. The kind of project that could reshape how a major healthcare organization understood its own patients, operations, and business.
He never got to build it.
Instead — through a combination of shifting priorities, new leadership, and a VP too busy managing up to manage his team — Kevin got reassigned. He went from strategic architect to short-order cook.
His new role was a service hub. Dozens of departments with dozens of requests, all flowing through Kevin and his team. An endless lunch rush with no last call. Tables keep filling, requests keep coming, and the kitchen never closes.
He described it exactly that way — he'd worked a short-order restaurant in college, and this felt identical. Except the stakes were higher and the exits were less obvious.
The constant chaos was doing real damage. His health. His thinking. His energy. His relationships at home. He was in a permanent state of fight-or-flight, and the fantasy that kept surfacing was the same one every time: I just want to go live on a boat at sea.
That's not a vacation fantasy. That's a nervous system asking to be relieved of duty.
What Was Actually Happening
Kevin had made a deal with himself that turned out to be a bad one.
He'd accepted the service role voluntarily — not because it suited him, but because he thought it was the price of admission. If I can make this work, I'll prove I'm a leader. He was opting into someone else's definition of success, grinding through a role completely mismatched to his temperament, believing that surviving it would earn him the right to do what he actually came to do.
It doesn't work that way. You can't outperform a fundamental mismatch through willpower.
His big brain was in the wrong place. And a big brain in a high-volume service role doesn't just underperform — it suffers. Kevin wasn't failing because he lacked capability. He was failing because he was a marathoner asked to be a sprinter.
Meanwhile, he had enormous credibility elsewhere in the organization. People knew he had big ideas. His reputation for strategic thinking was real and recognized — he just wasn't in a position to act on any of it.
The Work
The first thing we worked on was his nervous system. You can't think strategically in fight-or-flight. Before anything else could change, Kevin needed to come down from the ceiling.
Then we worked on the harder thing: letting go of the role.
Kevin felt like stepping back would be admitting defeat. Like he'd be seen as someone who couldn't handle it. We sat with that for a while. And then I asked him the question that broke it open: At what cost, Kevin? What if this job actually kills your health — does that prove anything?
It didn't. And he knew it.
So we reframed the move entirely. Stepping out of the wrong role wasn't failure — it was strategic clarity. And there was a way to do it that actually built his credibility rather than costing it.
We worked on how he'd make the case to his leaders. Not an apology. Not a retreat. A pitch. He went to them and said, essentially: I'm not the right person for this role. Here's who is. And here's where my brain actually creates value for this organization.
It worked. Kevin got himself moved out from under that VP and into a direct reporting relationship with the Chief Technical Officer. He helped hire his replacement for the service role — someone whose temperament was actually built for rapid turnaround. And he got the green light to start building the thing he'd come to build in the first place.
What Changed
Kevin's nervous system came back online.
He stopped living in the rapids. He stopped fantasizing about cabins in the woods. He started thinking clearly again — strategically, creatively, at the level his brain is actually designed to operate.
He's now doing the work he was recruited to do. Building a forward-looking data and analytics infrastructure for a major healthcare system. Putting his big brain in a big place.
And he did it without blowing up his career. In fact, the opposite — his willingness to name the mismatch honestly and make a smart case for a different path added to his reputation rather than diminishing it.
In His Words
"It's helped me tremendously — not just in how I lead, but in how I think. I'm in a much better place than I was seven months ago. I came in wrapped in dread and grinding; now I'm genuinely okay — and not lying to myself about it."
"What I've loved most is how practical it's been. Every session became a working playbook I could apply immediately. I can honestly say this has been one of the most helpful, transformative things I've ever done."
— Kevin, Healthcare Data Executive
If This Resonates
If you've been grinding through a role that doesn't fit — telling yourself it's temporary, that you'll earn your way out the other side — Kevin's story is worth sitting with.
The question isn't whether you can survive it. You probably can.
The question is: at what cost?
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