High performers often share a peculiar vulnerability: they feel okay about themselves only when things are going well. Get the results, feel good. Miss the target, spiral into self-attack. The relationship with themselves is entirely contingent on external outcomes.

This might not seem like a problem. After all, these people are successful. They achieve. They perform. Whatever internal architecture is driving them, it seems to work.

But there's a hidden cost. And there's something lurking that reveals itself only when circumstances align in a certain unfortunate way.

"Most of the time, the restless dragon is asleep. Because you're on top of stuff most of the time. But when the world wobbles, it awakens and tears you apart."

The Restless Dragon

I think of it as a dragon that lives inside high-functioning people. Most of the time, the dragon is asleep. It doesn't bother you. You might not even know it's there. Life is good, you're achieving, the plates are spinning nicely.

But the dragon isn't gone. It's just dormant. And when circumstances shift—when the world wobbles, when something goes wrong that you can't immediately fix—the dragon wakes up. And it attacks.

What does this attack look like? Self-criticism floods in. Your sense of self crumbles. You feel terrible not just about the situation, but about who you are as a person. The internal voice becomes vicious in a way it never was during the good times.

Here's the key insight: the dragon was there the whole time. Your achievements weren't taming it—they were just keeping it sedated. The conditional nature of your self-worth meant you were always one failure away from the attack. One crisis away from the floor dropping out.

Why High Performers Are Vulnerable

This pattern is especially common in people who've always been successful. If you're high-functioning, you've spent most of your life getting positive feedback. You solve problems. You get results. You outperform most people around you.

But this success creates a dangerous blind spot. Because things usually work out, you don't notice that your sense of self is entirely dependent on things working out. You think you have genuine self-confidence, but what you actually have is a conditional arrangement: I feel good about myself when I'm performing well.

This arrangement holds up fine—until it doesn't. Until you hit something you can't solve quickly. Until the world stops cooperating with your expectations. Until you fail in a way that matters.

And then the dragon wakes up, and you realize your "confidence" was always conditional. There was no unconditional foundation underneath it. You were walking on what felt like solid ground, but it was actually a platform suspended over a void, held up only by your achievements.

"You're not on top of things. You're running to stay on top of things. And the moment you stop running, you discover there's nothing underneath."

The Chinese Circus of High Performance

Another way to picture this: imagine those plate-spinning performers in a circus. They have dozens of plates spinning on sticks, and they run around keeping them all going. It looks impressive. They're clearly skilled. The plates stay up.

But notice the effort required to maintain this. The spinner is never relaxed. They're always slightly anxious, always scanning for plates that are wobbling. Their success is moment-to-moment, requiring constant vigilance.

Many high performers operate this way internally. They're keeping numerous plates spinning—work, relationships, health, reputation—and their sense of self depends on all the plates staying up. Let one crash, and it doesn't just affect that one domain. It triggers the dragon. It threatens the whole internal architecture.

This is exhausting in a way that's hard to see from outside. The person looks successful. They're achieving. But they're working incredibly hard just to feel okay about themselves. And the threat of collapse is always present.

The Alternative: Unconditional Ground

The alternative is to find ground that isn't conditional on outcomes. A relationship with yourself that doesn't fluctuate with your performance. A baseline of "I'm okay" that's present whether you succeed or fail.

This sounds simple, but for people who've spent their lives in the conditional mode, it's deeply counterintuitive. If I don't criticize myself when I fail, won't I become complacent? If I accept myself regardless of outcomes, where's the motivation to achieve?

This fear is understandable but mistaken. Unconditional self-acceptance doesn't eliminate motivation—it changes its source. Instead of performing to avoid the dragon's attack, you perform because you want to, because achievement genuinely matters to you, because excellence is part of how you want to live.

Here's the irony: this unconditional ground often improves performance rather than undermining it. When failure doesn't trigger an existential crisis, you can take bigger risks. You can try things that might not work. You recover from setbacks faster because you're not also recovering from the internal attack.

Recognizing the Pattern

How do you know if you have a restless dragon sleeping inside? Some questions to consider:

If you're honest with yourself, you might find that more of your psychological stability depends on external outcomes than you'd like. You might find that the dragon is there, just dormant, waiting for circumstances to activate it.

Waking the Dragon Deliberately

One counterintuitive approach is to deliberately examine what happens when things go wrong—not to wallow, but to understand the pattern.

When you notice the self-criticism flooding in after a failure, pause and observe it. This is the dragon. This is what was there all along, just sleeping. By seeing it clearly, you create space between yourself and the attack.

The goal isn't to eliminate self-criticism entirely. It's to separate "this thing didn't go well" from "I am fundamentally flawed." The failure is real. The situation needs addressing. But your worth as a person was never on the table—that's a fiction the dragon tells you to justify its attack.

"Your competence at specific things can be in question. Your worth as a person is never on the table. Keeping these separate is the goal."

Building True Ground

Building unconditional ground is slow work. You can't decide to have it and then have it immediately. It's more like building trust in a relationship that's been damaged—you need accumulated evidence over time that the new pattern is real.

But you can start. You can notice when your self-worth is fluctuating with outcomes and name it: "Ah, there's the conditional pattern." You can practice, in calm moments, reminding yourself that your worth isn't actually dependent on the next outcome. You can catch the dragon waking up and choose not to believe its narrative.

Over time, this creates something more stable. Not perfection—you'll still have moments when the old pattern activates. But a foundation that doesn't collapse when circumstances shift. A place to stand that isn't dependent on keeping all the plates spinning.

The dragon doesn't have to disappear entirely. It can remain as a sleeping presence, an occasional visitor rather than a constant threat. What changes is the relationship with it. You're no longer held hostage by outcomes. You can fail and still be okay. You can succeed without needing to in order to feel worthy.

That's the difference between genuine confidence and conditional confidence. And for many high performers, discovering this difference is the most important work they'll ever do.