Slaying Beasts: The Quiet Battle Between Who You Are and Who You Could Be.

There comes a moment in every life where the beast standing in front of you stops being poetic language and becomes painfully literal. You feel it in the tightening of your chest when you think about the life you want. You feel it in the tension across your shoulders when you confront a truth you’ve avoided, in the quiet moments where you realise you’ve been stretching your life on a frame that no longer fits the person you have become.

Beasts are not mythical or metaphorical, they are internal realities that take form the moment you push toward your potential.

People like to talk about “inner demons” and I have mentioned “limiting beliefs” from time-to-time, but most of that language dilutes the gravity of what actually happens.

A beast is not a mindset issue. A beast is a physiological threshold: the moment where who you are cannot yet hold the intensity of the next version of your life. You face beasts at the frontier of your growth, where the emotional, physical, and psychological tension becomes too real to ignore. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who is in expert in judgement and decision-making, would say the beast is the point where your System 1 threat response overwhelms your System 2 reasoning. Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, the founding father of flow-state psychology would say it is where challenge exceeds your skill ratio and forces you out of flow. ACT (Acceptance and Commitment) therapy teaches that the beast appears the moment you fuse with avoidance. Or just to reinforce the point further, Dr. Gabor Maté would say the beast is the body remembering every moment you stepped away from the truth.

Every framework points to the same centre: you are only as courageous as your nervous system is trained to be.

This is why people repeat the same patterns year after year. They aren't lacking wisdom or motivation or desire. They are lacking the capacity to withstand the internal intensity that growth demands.

Now, what you might not know is, when your body has never held pressure, your mind will always find reasons to retreat. If your nervous system has never stayed stable inside discomfort, your emotions will convince you to run. Or when you have never built physiological proof that you can survive difficulty, your identity collapses under the weight of possibility.

The two business women I have coached recently are perfect examples; two faces of the same struggle, two expressions of the same capacity limitation.

One fears success because success exposes her. She worries that the moment she steps into visibility, the ground underneath her will disappear. She fears embarrassment. She fears the weight of expectation and the sharp edges of judgement.

Her nervous system interprets upward movement as danger because she has zero somatic evidence that she can survive the intensity that comes with being seen. On the surface, she looks capable and competent, but inside she is bracing for the humiliation she believes will inevitably follow any win. She doesn’t avoid success because she doubts her ability; she avoids success because she doubts her capacity.

The other woman is different. She has discipline. She has routines. She shows up and is consistent in ways that would impress anyone who doesn’t understand the texture of high performance. But consistency without intensity creates stagnation. Her nervous system is not overwhelmed; it is under-stimulated. She has no challenge that stretches her, no friction that sharpens her, no tension that awakens her. The problem isn’t the absence of motivation; it’s the absence of challenge. Her system has settled into a plateau where growth is unnecessary. She isn’t afraid of success, she is numb to expansion. Her beast isn’t embarrassment; it’s flatness.

Both women think their issues are personal flaws. In reality, they are capacity gaps, gaps that must be closed physically and psychologically at the same time. You cannot coach either of them through mindset alone. Their minds are not the problem. Their bodies are untrained for the lives they keep trying to create.

And then there is the male archetype, the man who builds businesses and projects. He helped build a successful one, watched another collapse, and carries a beast that looks nothing like the women’s but is born from the same place. His fear is not visibility or stagnation. His fear is futility. The beast he faces whispers, “What if everything you build falls apart? What if belief itself betrays you? What if no matter how hard you push or how far you see, people never catch up?”

He invested in a startup built on data, omni-channel intelligence, and technical sophistication far ahead of the market curve. He backed it not only because it made commercial sense, but because a part of him wanted to build something that outlasted him. The company grew. It scaled. It proved him right. But with success came new beasts: structuring boards, navigating founder dynamics, translating vision for investors who only understood traction, not potential. He found himself carrying the emotional load of holding a vision others couldn’t yet see. Governance meetings turned into negotiations about belief. Structure became a battlefield. And he realised something few people ever admit: success demands just as much capacity as failure.

Then there was the other startup, the one with heart but no endurance. It failed, not because the idea was flawed, but because the founder quit. He watched a promising future evaporate simply because the person carrying it lacked capacity. And that failure carved a wound deeper than the financial loss. It challenged his self-concept as someone who “knows how to pick.” It forced him into long stretches of introspection, those early morning questions where you stare into the dark wondering whether you trusted the wrong person, or worse, whether you believed too hard in something that was never real.'

His beast is not dramatic or emotional. It is quiet, existential, and steady. It shows up when he sees potential that no one else recognises. It shows up when he tries to sell a vision based on instinct and futurism to people who prioritise traction over talent. It shows up when he realises he is trying to carry organisations on shoulders already tired from years of pushing uphill. His suffering comes from the gulf between what he knows is possible and what others are willing to believe.

He is not weak. He is overloaded. And overload is its own kind of beast.

Three stories, three lives, three internal battles, all manifestations of the same truth: none of these people are limited by mindset. They are limited by capacity.

Because capacity is the unspoken backbone of all human performance. It is the sum of your physical, emotional, cognitive, relational, and identity bandwidth. It determines how much intensity you can tolerate before you retreat, how much visibility, pressure, responsibility, and possibility your system can hold without collapsing.

Most people are psychologically ambitious but physiologically under-built. They want the life their body cannot sustain. There's that saying from Top-Gun, "Your ego is writing cheques, your body can't cash"...

This is why the body matters. This is why training is not optional. This is why the nervous system, not the mind, is the centre of transformation.

High-performance psychology has known for decades that the mind follows the body. You can’t think your way into courage. You earn courage through exposure. You earn resilience through repeated encounters with intensity. You earn identity change through proof, proof that your system survived what it once feared.

Think about even the simple idea of excercise, strength and conditioning or reformer pilates. When balance collapses, when rotation is off, when the body shakes uncontrollably, it is not that there is failure, it is a discovery of the edge of stability. And the moment the body learns to stay inside that instability, the identity stretches with it.

This is what Zone 4 and Zone 5 training teaches, that you can stay calm inside chaos. That you can hold intensity without panicking. That breathing is a skill. That pressure is survivable. That your system can adapt. Even in strength and conditioning training; load is not danger, that failure is not fatal, that fatigue is just a signal, not a stop sign.

Training becomes capacity. Capacity becomes confidence. Confidence becomes identity. Identity becomes the version of you who slays beasts.

This is why slaying beasts is not poetic, it is biological. It is the act of pushing your system to hold more than it did yesterday. It is the discipline of standing inside intensity long enough that the intensity stops feeling like a threat. It is the steady, slow, deliberate evolution of someone who no longer retreats from the life they want.

The woman who fears success must learn to tolerate visibility. She must build a body that knows how to remain stable while being watched. She must test her limits in tiny ways, being seen in places she would usually hide, speaking when she would normally stay silent, taking small risks that condition her to survive the embarrassment she imagines. Her training is exposure therapy, not emotional, but physical. She must build somatic evidence that she is safe inside attention.

The woman who lacks the final 1% needs to reignite intensity. Her nervous system needs challenge, novelty, shock, and uncomfortable edges. She needs intervals, sprints, load, heat. She needs disruption in the best sense of the word, physical challenges that wake her system up. Her training is ignition.

The male archetype needs to learn that he does not need to carry everything alone. He must train inside environments where load is shared, team training, partnered lifting, environments that remind him his strength is relational, not solitary. He needs thresholds that teach him how to release, not accumulate. His training is unburdening.

And across all three stories, one truth stands firm: the beast is not your enemy. The beast is your boundary. It shows you where you stop, what you cannot yet sustain, and the exact part of your life that is under-built.

When you avoid the beast, your life contracts, but when you face it, your life expands. See, when you train for it, your identity reshapes. And when you finally slay it, you realise you weren’t fighting an external force, you were fighting the smaller version of yourself that couldn’t hold the life you’re now living.

Slaying beasts is not an act of violence; it is an act of evolution. And as you evolve, you discover your nervous system is large enough to house your potential. Then it is in that moment your body becomes strong enough to carry your ambition and your identity then stops negotiating with fear.

You don’t slay beasts because you’re brave. You slay beasts because you’re built. And you get built by choosing discomfort over avoidance, challenge over numbness, exposure over shrinking.

This is the work. This is the real transformation. This is how you move from wanting a bigger life to becoming the person capable of living it.

And once that happens, once you’ve built the capacity to meet the intensity of the life you’re stepping into, there is no beast left that can break you.

THREE KEY TAKEAWAYS.

1. You do not lack motivation, you lack capacity. Every fear, plateau, rut, or stalled ambition is a sign your nervous system cannot yet hold the intensity required. Build the body and the mind follows.

2. Your beast is not a barrier, it is a map. Wherever you hesitate, avoid, procrastinate, or collapse reveals the exact domain you must strengthen. The beast shows you where to grow.

3. Lasting transformation is physiological, not intellectual. If you want a bigger life, you must build the nervous system that can sustain it. Emotional resilience, identity expansion, leadership, ambition, everything else sits on the foundation of your capacity.

At some point, the life you want will ask more of you than the life you’ve known. And when that moment comes, don’t shrink. Don’t retreat. Don’t negotiate with the smaller version of yourself.

Instead, breathe, step forward, and meet the beast.

Because everything you’ve been reaching for lives on the other side of your capacity to hold the moment you once feared.

TK