Most high-achieving business leaders eventually hit a moment where they stop and ask, is this it.

Not because anything is broken. The revenue is there. The team is growing. The milestones are getting checked off on schedule. And something still feels unresolved.

I have felt that. I would guess most owners reading this have felt it too, even if they have never said it out loud to anyone, including themselves.

That was the focus of a recent Ask the CFO conversation with Diana B. Patel, founder and president of Resonant LLC. Diana has spent over 20 years in leadership development and has coached more than 700 sessions, all centered on one question: what actually makes people fulfilled, not just successful.

Our discussion started with her definition of fulfillment, but it quickly turned into a much bigger conversation about core values, career decisions, executive presence, and the discipline it takes to build a life you do not need a vacation to recover from.

Fulfillment Has Four Parts, and They All Start With P

I asked Diana for the clinical definition of fulfillment, because I am a numbers guy and I wanted something I could actually work with.

Her answer is built on four elements: purpose, people, process, and peace of mind. Purpose means something in the work feels meaningful, not abstract, but genuinely tied to a reason you care about. People means there is some human connection in the work, whether that is a team you build with or someone you serve. Process means you are getting something out of the doing, not just waiting on the outcome. Peace of mind means you are grounded while you do it, not white-knuckling your way through.

Notice what is missing from that list. Happiness is not on it. Diana was intentional about that. Happiness carries the assumption that you are always riding a high. Fulfillment includes the hard stretches. You can be in the middle of a genuinely difficult season, the kind every business owner eventually lives through, and still be fulfilled, because fulfillment comes from why you are doing the work, not from whether it feels good on a given Tuesday.

The Story You Tell Yourself Changes the Work

Diana shared a story about a gardener that has stuck with me since the conversation.

A gardener pulling weeds is doing a task. Ask why, and if the answer is to maintain the garden, that is a job. Ask why again, and if it is to build something beautiful, that is a career. Ask again, and if it is to make the world a little better, that is a calling.

The gardener is still pulling the exact same weeds the entire time. What changes is the story.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. A lot of the friction owners and employees feel toward their own work is not actually about the work itself. It is about which level of the story they are telling themselves that day. The task never changes. The framing does.

Core Values Are Decisions, Not Posters on a Wall

I push on this constantly with clients, so I wanted Diana's take on it directly. A lot of businesses have core values. They put them on a poster in the break room, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and then everyone forgets they exist.

Diana's framing, borrowed from Harvard Business Review, is that a core value is the choice you make when you are presented with alternatives. It is not an aspiration. It is a decision rule.

My own values are deliberately simple. I operate with the highest level of integrity in everything I do. And I say what I am going to do, and I do what I said. That is it. When a prospective client's behavior does not line up with that, I do not pursue the relationship, no matter how good the opportunity looks on paper.

That is the actual test of whether something is a real value or just a word on a wall. Does it change what you say yes to and what you walk away from.

I Turned Down the Corner Office, On Purpose

Here is something I do not talk about often, but it came up in this conversation and I think it is worth sharing.

Several business people, over the years, have told me I should be a CEO. Usually because the title comes with more influence and more money attached to it.

My answer is always some version of, why, do you want me to fail and get fired.

I know where my skills actually sit. I am good at being an accountant, a manager, a director, a CFO. I am good at being what I half-jokingly call a second fiddle confidant, the person who makes the numbers and the decisions underneath them actually work. Taking a CEO seat would not have been a promotion for me. It would have been a setup.

This is a version of what is sometimes called the Peter Principle, people get promoted based on being good at their current job, right up until they land in a role that does not fit them at all. Avoiding it takes real self-awareness, and I think that self-awareness is a business decision, not a personality trait.

It also explains a lot of my own career. I spent a few years auditing at Arthur Andersen, good training, did not love it. I spent about five years at large publicly traded manufacturers and it never fit, too much bureaucracy, not enough autonomy. Then I spent 25 years in family-owned businesses, until the last one I helped sell into private equity.

Looking back, I think publicly traded companies suboptimize because they manage to the quarter and to the stock price. Private equity owned businesses suboptimize because they are managing toward a three to five year exit and maximizing value on that timeline. Family-owned businesses can actually focus on the mid to long term, which is the tradeoff I wanted. The risk there is complacency, since there is no external pressure forcing urgency, so instilling that sense of urgency becomes part of the job, and you have to instill it to the people who own the business, not just the people who work there.

Diana offered a line in response to that story that I have kept turning over since. I forgive myself for not knowing something only experience could teach me. Every past decision looks more obvious in hindsight than it actually was at the time you made it.

Balance Is the Wrong Word

We spent a good chunk of the conversation on work-life balance, and neither of us thinks that phrase holds up anymore.

I gave up on the idea of balance a while back and started thinking about it as one continuum instead. I will work from my phone during a family moment in the morning, and I will be fully present for my family during a stretch that used to be work hours. That only works because I own my time and my business. Someone with a traditional job and a fixed routine cannot do the same thing, and I want to be honest about that instead of pretending my situation generalizes.

Diana's version of this is what she calls work-life harmony. Some seasons genuinely need more from work. Some seasons need more from family. The goal is not to keep both perfectly weighted every single week. It is figuring out how they feed each other instead of fighting each other.

She gave a distinction that I think is the most useful filter in the whole conversation. Think of your health and your relationships as glass balls. Work is a rubber ball. If you drop the rubber ball, it bounces back. If you drop a glass ball, it does not. That does not mean you never drop one, it means you treat them with a different level of care.

Patience Is Active, Not Passive

I have worked on patience my entire career, mostly because my natural instinct is that immediate gratification takes too long. I want things done, and I want them done now.

What I have learned, especially with the kind of clients I work with, is that businesses and people often are not ready for the next step, and pushing anyway when nothing is actually broken creates a pattern I see constantly, two steps forward, one step back. My line for this is that it is a lot easier to fix Rome when Rome is not burning.

Diana connected this to something author Dorie Clark calls active patience. Patience is not sitting around waiting. It is setting process goals, the things fully within your control, while an outcome goal plays out on a timeline you do not fully control. If the goal is five new clients this month, you cannot force that outcome directly, but you can control how many calls you make, how many emails you send, how many events you show up to. Those become the checklist. The outcome follows.

What Is Going Well, and What Can Go Even Better

Diana also walked through something called appreciative inquiry, which sounds academic until you see it in action. Traditional problem solving starts with what is wrong and tries to fix it. Appreciative inquiry starts with what is already working and asks how to build on it.

If you distill her entire coaching philosophy into one sentence, it is this: what is going well, and what can go even better.

That is a different starting point than most owners default to when they are looking at their business, their team, or their own career. Most of us are trained to hunt for the problem first. It is worth trying the other question on the next hard decision that lands on your desk, whether that is a hiring choice, a values conversation, or deciding whether the role you are in still fits who you actually are.

Diana B. Patel is the founder and president of Resonant LLC, where she works with senior leaders through one-on-one coaching, keynote speaking, and workshops focused on turning insight into practice. She also writes a newsletter featuring people who are cultivating fulfillment in their own work. If you would like to be featured or nominate someone, visit her at dianapatel.com.

About Ask the CFO Ask the CFO is a free, interactive series hosted by Lowell Mora, founder of Impact CFO. Each session brings business owners and financial experts together for practical conversations about the decisions that shape profitability, growth, succession and long-term business value. Register for an upcoming Ask the CFO session