June arrives with a kind of anticipation few other months bring. The days stretch, the pace is supposed to slow, and somewhere in the back of your mind, a picture quietly surfaces. You didn’t put it there on purpose. It built itself over years. Long car rides, family vacations, the highlight reels of strangers on the internet whose summers look like a travel magazine nobody subscribes to. Kids running ahead of their parents on the beach, everyone laughing and unhurried, bare feet in the sand before breakfast. And not a single shot of the drive there. Six hours that were supposed to be four, a GPS that recalculated more times than anyone found helpful, and a stretch of roadwork that will never fully be forgiven.
That picture is doing more work than you realize.
THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURE
A client of mine took a break from sessions over the summer. When she came back after two weeks away, something was off.
“Welcome back. I hope your vacation was fun and restful.”
A heavy sigh. “Yeah, it was good.”
Her shoulders were down, smile polite, eyes somewhere else. Her voice had none of the inflection you’d expect from someone who’d just had two weeks away.
“I have an observation. Can I share it?”
“Sure.”
“Your body language and tone are telling a different story than your words. What’s going on?”
She thought for a moment. “It was a reasonably good trip. We were all together, no real disasters. Which, depending on your family, is already a win. But I don’t feel like I had a real vacation. I might as well have stayed home. Everyone else is talking about it like it was this great thing and I’m sitting here not understanding why I feel the way I do.”
Her family was already retelling moments, laughing, making plans to go back. She couldn’t square their experience with her own. Nothing had gone wrong by any measure they were using. But her measure was different, and she hadn’t known that until she got home and the feeling followed her through the door.
We ended that session with a question I asked her to sit with: “Where did your version of the perfect vacation come from?”
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. – Anaïs Nin
She came back the following session having called her dad.
What she found out surprised her. Those family vacations she remembered as effortless, the ones that felt like her dad had conjured them out of thin air, were anything but. He’d planned carefully and taken it seriously. He wanted her and her brother to have picture-perfect memories, not see the pressure it took to give them that.
She was there for the rain that wiped out an entire day’s outing, and the restaurant that was supposed to be the special night of the trip that turned out to be closed the day they arrived. What she didn’t know was what those moments cost him. The disappointment he absorbed quietly so it didn’t become hers.
What she remembered was different. The rained-out day became a hotel movie marathon, no agenda, nowhere to be. The closed restaurant led them to a hole-in-the-wall pizza place that became a tradition every time they went back. The boredom and backseat bickering turned into car games they invented on the spot and played for years.
Her dad didn’t get the vacation he planned. He got something she still talks about. And he gave her, without knowing it, a picture of summer that felt effortless. Because he made sure it looked that way.
That was the real beginning of her shift. Not a strategy. A conversation with her dad that reframed everything she thought she knew about where her picture came from. The a-ha moment came quickly. What unfolded in the sessions that followed was slower, getting honest about where her energy was going and where it wasn’t doing anything useful. That work took time. It usually does. But it started with a question she’d never thought to ask.
The vacation was where it surfaced. The same thing happens at work and at home. The project launch that didn’t feel as significant as she thought it would. The performance review that went well and still left her wondering if she’d really earned it. At home it looked the same. The holiday that was supposed to feel magical. The weekend she’d cleared for herself that somehow went to everyone else’s needs instead. Once you see the pattern, you start recognizing it everywhere.
WHAT THE GAP IS TELLING YOU
When reality doesn’t match the image, the instinct is to fix the reality. Plan more carefully. Control more variables. But most of those variables were never in your hands to begin with.
You can plan the trip. How things unfold once you get there is another story. Anyone who has ever traveled with other humans already knows this.
This is where a lot of quiet burnout lives. Not in dramatic failure, but in the ongoing effort of trying to meet expectations that were never fully realistic. Expectations you absorbed rather than chose. Nobody hands you a form to sign. They just become yours. When you fall short of a standard you didn’t consciously set, the result isn’t disappointment alone. It’s the exhaustion of feeling like you failed at something you were never in control of.
Meanwhile, the internet is helpfully showing you everyone else’s best moments. The ones that made the cut. Filtered, framed, and posted at the exact moment before the argument in the parking lot.
The gap isn’t asking you to try harder. It’s asking you to look at the picture.
WHAT OPENS UP WHEN YOU SET IT DOWN?
The unplanned moments have a stubborn habit of outlasting the planned ones. Her dad knew that, even if he wasn’t enjoying it at the time.
Letting go of the picture isn’t lowering your standards. It’s figuring out which standards are yours.
That picture carries a limiting belief most people never recognize as one. “If it doesn’t look a certain way, I’ve failed.” It runs quietly in the background, more like background noise than conscious thought. The good news is that once you name it, you can start to turn it down.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. – Joseph Campbell
In the sessions that followed, the work went deeper. Less about summer specifically, more about the stories she’d collected along the way and where they came from. Which ones were worth keeping. That shift doesn’t happen in a single session. But once you can see the picture, you can start choosing what to do with it.
Two honest questions worth sitting with this month, and they go beyond vacation: what do I want from the coming months? Not what they should look like. And where does what’s realistic and what would be truly fulfilling meet?
If the picture you’re carrying is making it harder to be present in the life you’re living, not just this summer, you’re welcome to book a free, no-obligation discovery call. It’s a conversation about what’s coming up for you and what next step feels right.
Wishing you a June that feels less like a performance and more like your own.
~ With a little more presence, Holly
Holly Steinhoff, CPC, ELI‑MP, CICP
Founder & CEO
