There are three different accounts of Jesus walking on water, described in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John.The most popular account, at least to me, is the account of Matthew where Jesus walks on water, Peter sees him and asks to do the same. Then, when Peter steps out of the boat and starts to walk on water too takes his eyes off Jesus and focuses on the turbulence around, beginning to sink, cries out to Jesus, and is pulled back up and into the boat.That is the encounter that has always stayed with me.But Mark and John’s accounts do not describe this event with Peter.Also, there is a line in Mark’s account that has taken on a new meaning when I read it during my sabbatical, when I had more time to sit inside the Word of God.Mark 6 Vs 48 - 49, He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them.They were straining at the oars.Exhausted from rowing against the wind.The wind was against them. Meaning they were moving in a direction opposite to the natural direction of the wind.And what struck me as I read that verse and, sitting with that line, was the question it raised. Why? Why were they rowing against the wind? Why not turn the boat, align with the direction nature was already moving, so they could move more easily? They wanted to reach Jesus. That was their goal.Their straining, the exhaustion, the battle against the wind and tide, none of it was required for their goal of getting to Jesus to be achieved.But Jesus – both fully Divine and fully Human – was already walking across the water to meet them where they were anyway.That image settled into me as lived wisdom.Because I recognised myself in it completely.I Had Been Rowing and Straining Against The TideFor most of my working life, I had been operating in environments and in ways that were contrary to who I fundamentally am. I did not have language for this at the time. I just knew I was exhausted in a way that sleep did not fix, that I was producing results, but the cost of producing them kept rising, that I would arrive at the end of a project depleted rather than satisfied.The burnout and the depression were, in part, the accumulated cost of rowing against the tide for too long.When I finally had the space to stop and examine this, I realised that:·<span style="font-variant: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-language-override: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-feature-settings: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I had been working against my own nature in delivering work, trying to follow acceptable strategies and norms.·<span style="font-variant: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-language-override: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-feature-settings: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I realised that there is a natural way of being that allows the work being done to flow more naturally and more effortlessly.·<span style="font-variant: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-language-override: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-feature-settings: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; That they should even inform the nature of work that I accept, the practices I adopt, and the methods and tools I leverage to continue to deliver fulfilling work.What I Found When I LookedThe tools that helped me most to distil truths about my personality and preferences were psychometric assessments and personality frameworks.I had done a few of these earlier in my career, at APM Terminals, but I had treated them as interesting data points rather than as guidance I could actually live from.What changed during my sabbatical after reading that verse was that I went back to them with intention and did as many as I could find that made sense.I started with the free versions and, in some cases, paid for the detailed reports where necessary, and started looking not at individual results but at the consistency across them.The tests I worked through included the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Enneagram, the Plum Profile, and Clifton Strengths Finder.Each of them names things differently, each was developed from a different perspective, but across all of them, certain patterns kept surfacing. I started paying attention to those patterns.The most consistent thing that emerged across every assessment was that I am a long-term strategic thinker and was motivated by long term goals.Short-term gains do not motivate me at all. The work that most engages me is work that will have impact for five, ten, twenty years, work that will outlast my presence in the room where it was created.When I saw that reflected to me clearly, things clicked into place. Of course, I had been burning out in environments organised entirely around short-term deliverables or led by short-term-focused thinkers.Of course, I had felt the grinding mismatch between what was being asked of me and what I was actually built for.It was like asking a fish to climb a tree and then wondering why it kept failing.The second consistency was that I was logical and analytical. Which made sense for why I loved organising and applying data. Not as an end in itself, but because data, used honestly, tells you things that opinion cannot. I am logical. I like to understand the full picture before I move.The third thing, and this one took longer to name, is that I valued ambition and impact in equal measure. The work I did could not only be purely for economic gain, not purely for influence, but must truly also be to make the kind of difference that is real and lasting.I cannot be motivated to do things just because they make money. I also cannot do things just because they look good or make people comfortable. But work that connects economic sustainability to genuine long-term impact - that is my natural home. That is the water I am supposed to swim in.And understanding those three things about myself explained everything.Why the ecosystems I had been operating in had values that ran contrary to mine. I was not failing. I was misaligned.The Gift of True Self-UnderstandingI want to be direct about this: understanding yourself is not a soft or secondary concern. It is not something you do after you have sorted out the more important things. It is foundational.One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, particularly when you are coming out of burnout or depression, is honest and thorough self-knowledge.Because without it, you will do what I did in 2019 and 2020. You will quit and re-enter the corporate world and make the same choices you made before, gravitate toward the same choices, accept the same kinds of demands, and find yourself back at the beginning, more confused, angry, and depressed than before.Allowing the breakdown without allowing self-understanding only buys you time. It does not buy you change.With it, something different becomes possible.When you know you are more collaborative than competitive, you stop accepting roles or applying methods that reward aggression. When you know you are a long-term thinker, you stop measuring your value by short-term metrics that were never designed for how you work. When you know you need solitude and focused time in the mornings, you stop agreeing to arrangements that erode that before your day has even started.Not every opportunity is for you. Not every project in the organisation deserves your raised hand. Knowing yourself makes the discernment cleaner.It also changes how you relate to other people. You begin to see the difference between someone who is genuinely different from you and someone who is actually cruel or incompetent.You stop requiring people to change before you can engage with them. You simply make clear, honest choices about how much access they have and in what capacity. That is not coldness. It is clarity and alignment.You Can Begin to Curate Your EnvironmentI want to be honest: I have not yet found a perfect working ecosystem for the person I now understand myself to be. I do not think perfect ecosystems exist. But I have found something more useful, which is the knowledge that even within imperfect environments, I can create some oases of sanity.I can guide people in how to interact with me, rather than waiting for them to figure it out and being drained when they do not. I can say yes selectively. I can bring my full self to the things that align with my nature and be more bound in the things that do not.And I started, in a very deliberate way, to curate something of my own. I began writing, first as a way to think out loud, then as a way to put the kinds of ideas I cared about into the world in the way I would want to see them done. This personal blog and a Substack I write on infrastructure development and financing became that for me.What I noticed was that the people who found and responded to what I wrote were the right kinds of people. When you are honest about who you are and what you are for, you begin to attract the people and opportunities that belong to that version of you, rather than to the version you were performing.That is what alignment does. It narrows the gap between who you are and how you live, and it makes almost everything less effortful.What This Means If You Are Still Finding Your Way OutIf you are reading this from inside a burnout season, or just beginning to come out of one, I want to offer this as something practical to do in the stillness.Take the assessments. Do not do just one. The Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the Clifton Strengths, the Plum Profile. Pay for the full reports where you can afford to. Then look across them, not at each one in isolation, but at the patterns that repeat. Those patterns are the outline of your natural way of being. They are the direction of the wind.Then ask yourself honestly: in what ways have I been rowing against that? Where have I been demanding of myself things that run contrary to my nature, and calling it ambition? What kinds of environments have I been tolerating because I thought I should be able to handle them, even as they steadily drained me?I am an INFJ. A Reformer. Logical, strategic, collaboration-oriented, long-range in my thinking, and motivated by both impact and results. That is not a set of limitations. It is my map. And having my map has changed how I travel through the world.The world does not need you to be someone else. It needs you to be yourself, fully and honestly, in the work you choose, the methods you apply, and the environments you allow yourself to inhabit. What you want to do is understand that self clearly enough to stop rowing against it.Align with the natural direction of your wind. You will still arrive. And you will not be exhausted when you get there; rather, you will be fulfilled and whole.

I spent years operating against my own nature and calling the exhaustion ambition. Psychometric tests helped me see the pattern. Self-knowledge is the foundation for every honest choice that followed

I stopped rowing against the tide -  I started to understand myself and align with that. 

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I stopped rowing against the tide - I started to understand myself and align with that.

I stopped rowing against the tide - I started to understand myself and align with that.

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