There is a strange asymmetry in the lives of people who run things. An executive who can diagnose a failing supply chain in an afternoon, restructure a division, and read a balance sheet like a novel will sit across from the same relationship dynamic for the fourth time in 15 years and call it bad luck. Natalie Stavola, a human behavior and relationship expert who works with leaders on the subconscious patterns shaping their decisions and results, sees this pattern often enough to name it as structural rather than personal. Her argument cuts against the flattering story high achievers tell themselves, which is that competence is portable. It is not. The skills that build a career and the skills that sustain a relationship draw on different instincts, and the higher someone climbs, the more the first set is rewarded and the second set atrophies. That has consequences for judgment, for stamina, and eventually for the business itself.
The Strengths That Do Not Travel
Drive. Control. Decisiveness. Self-reliance. Every one of those traits is a professional asset, and every one of them is trained, reinforced, and compensated over a career. Stavola’s point is that they do not switch off at the door. “Those are assets in a boardroom,” she says. “In a relationship, they can read as impatience, or distance, or an unwillingness to need anyone. Same behavior. Very different outcome.”
That last line deserves more attention than it normally gets. The behavior does not change – the context does, and the context supplies the meaning. Decisiveness in a leadership meeting closes a loop; decisiveness at the dinner table shuts a conversation down before the other person has finished forming a thought. Self-reliance, which in a crisis is exactly what a board wants from a chief executive officer, tells a partner that they are not needed. Most leaders never see the conversion because nobody in their professional life has ever flagged those traits as anything but virtues. Stavola frames the first move as simple recognition: “Recognizing where a strength becomes a liability is the first shift.” For people accustomed to fixing problems by adding effort, this is an uncomfortable proposition, because the fix is not more of what already works. It is knowing when to stop deploying it.
The Choice Made Before The Thinking Starts
The harder layer sits underneath behavior, in selection. Stavola’s observation is that high achievers tend to choose partners who match an old pattern rather than a current need. Familiarity, not fit, does the deciding. “We are drawn to what feels familiar, and familiar is not always healthy,” she says. “If you grew up earning approval, you may keep choosing people you have to earn approval from.”
This is where the professional analogy sharpens. Leaders are trained to interrogate their assumptions in a due diligence process, to ask what they are not seeing before capital moves. Few apply that discipline to their own selection criteria, because the criteria never surface as criteria – they present as chemistry. Stavola is direct about the mechanism: “The pattern repeats because the choice was made subconsciously, before you ever thought it through.” Note what that implies for anyone trying to solve the problem by changing partners. If the filter is unexamined, a new candidate gets run through the same filter and produces the same result. The variable that needs adjusting is not the person on the other side of the table. It is the standard being applied, and that standard was set long before the first serious relationship, in conditions where the leader had no say. Naming it is the only way to revise it.
Achievement As A Hiding Place
The third pattern is the one with the clearest commercial footprint, and the one an organization is most likely to mistake for dedication. Stavola calls it what it is. “When something feels unresolved at home, work is the easiest place to feel competent again. So you take the extra project. You stay late.”
Read that through an operational lens and it stops looking like commitment. An executive who takes on the extra project as an avoidance behavior is making a capacity decision for reasons that have nothing to do with the business, and the organization absorbs the cost without ever knowing where the demand came from. Stavola’s framing is precise: “Achievement gives you the sense of progress that the relationship isn’t giving you, and the real issue stays untouched.” Progress is the operative word. The sensation of forward motion is real even when what requires attention has not moved an inch. This is why the pattern is so durable in high performers specifically. Ordinary people can’t convince themselves they are making progress when they are not. Leaders can, and they can do this for years.
Stavola is careful about how she classifies all three patterns, and the distinction matters for anyone who suspects they are living one. “The pattern isn’t a character flaw,” she says. “It’s a habit that was learned, and anything learned can be unlearned.” That reframing does the real work. A character flaw is fixed and shameful, which is precisely why it goes unaddressed. A learned habit is a system with inputs, and systems are what this audience already knows how to change. The obstacle was never capability. It was that nobody pointed the capability in this direction.
Follow Natalie Stavola on LinkedIn for more insights on behavioral blind spots, relationship patterns, and the subconscious drivers behind leadership performance.
