I Had Spinal Fusion Surgery and It Became the Best Excuse I Ever Had
If the person with the most legitimate-sounding excuse is running a racket, anyone can be.
A few years ago, I had a double fusion surgery on my lower back. Three vertebrae are permanently joined with a rat’s nest of titanium. A serious procedure that genuinely changed what my body could do.
The recovery was long. The limitations were real. The version of myself I had been before the surgery wasn't coming back. I had been a guy who lifted heavy. A guy who pushed real physical limits. A guy who said yes to outdoor adventures without thinking twice. After the fusion, all of that felt closed off. My back was fragile. The gym was a place I didn't belong. The trips and challenges I had loved looked like things other people did, not things I did anymore.
This is what I told myself, over and over, until it became the ground I stood on. I'm broken now. I can't do what I used to do. The old version of me is gone.
What I didn't know yet was that the most damaging part of my situation wasn't the surgery. It was the story under the story I was telling about it. And it took an unexpected room and an unexpected word for me to see it.
The Word That Changed Everything
A few years into living inside that story, I sat in a room at a Landmark Forum. I wasn't there to fix my back. I was there for other reasons entirely. But somewhere in the middle of the program, the facilitator started describing a pattern.
A racket, they called it.
The framework had four parts. A complaint on the surface. A story underneath that made the complaint feel permanent. A payoff hiding in the story. And the cost the person paid for running the whole thing without knowing they were running it.
The facilitator pointed out that rackets usually attach to complaints that are at least partly true. That is what makes them sticky. The complaint passes inspection, so the story underneath never gets examined.
I listened for about thirty seconds before I realized they were describing my back.
My complaint was that I couldn't be as physically fit as I used to be. Reasonable on its face.
My story was the upgrade. I told myself I was a broken person. With a fused spine, I simply couldn't do the things I used to do. The old version of me, the one who lifted heavy weights and pushed real physical limits, was gone for good.
The payoff was that I didn't have to challenge myself anymore. I had a permanent excuse for not getting to the gym. A permanent excuse for not pushing my edge. No one could argue with a fused spine. The complaint was true enough. The story underneath it was the racket. The payoff was avoiding the risk and discomfort of training again.
The cost was high. I missed the benefits of fitness. More than that, I missed the things I actually love. The outdoor adventures. The physical challenges. The sense of pushing my limits. I was using my back as a reason to opt out of my own life.
The whole frame I had built, the one that felt to me like a simple acceptance of reality, suddenly looked like something else. Not a fact. A choice I had been making for years without realizing it.
Why I Couldn't See It on My Own
Once I had a name for what I was running, I could also see why I'd missed it for so long.
Most coaching books on patterns and self-deception use clean examples. Someone whose complaint is obviously not the real issue. Someone whose excuse falls apart under three seconds of scrutiny.
This was not that.
My complaint was true. My back had been opened up and reconstructed. The limitation was real. A doctor would back me up. A surgeon would back me up. An MRI would back me up.
That is what made it the perfect racket. The complaint had so much external validation built in that I never had to look underneath it. Friends nodded sympathetically. Family stopped suggesting I get back into climbing or skiing. The world cooperated with the story. From the inside, the racket looked like reality.
This is the trap. The most justified-sounding complaints are the ones we are least likely to examine, because the surface complaint is doing real work. It is partly true. And partly true is enough to keep the story underneath protected from inspection.
When a complaint is bulletproof on the outside, that is the moment to look hardest at the inside. Not because the complaint is wrong. Because the complaint is doing too much work.
What Changed When I Saw It
When I finally saw the racket clearly, I made a change. I stopped letting my back be an excuse and started treating it as a constraint to work within.
There is a meaningful difference between those two framings. An excuse closes off the question. A constraint defines the playing field. An excuse says, "This is why I can't." A constraint says, "given this, what can I do?"
I found a coach who understood spinal fusion and could design training around my real limitations rather than my imagined ones. The training plan was different from what I would have built before surgery. But it was a training plan. It assumed progress was possible.
A year later, I was high on Ama Dablam, one of the more technically demanding peaks in the Himalayas. Twenty-two thousand feet of ice, rock, and snow. Sheer thousand-foot drops on either side of the route. Nothing between me and the next ridge but sharp air and the next placement. I pushed myself further than I had ever pushed before, fused spine and all.
Today, I'm in the gym lifting nearly as much as I lifted before the surgery. In some ways, I'm in better overall shape than I was then. The training looks different now. More functional movement. More focus on feeling good in my body and living the life I actually want to live. My back is part of the design, not a wall I keep running into.
Here is the lesson I keep coming back to. The real limitations from the surgery were significant. But they were much smaller than the limitations I was putting on myself through the racket. The story I was telling was doing far more damage than the actual injury.
That gap, between real constraint and manufactured constraint, is where most of the leverage in a life sits.
Where CEOs Do the Same Thing
I am a coach. I work with founder-CEOs of high-growth, mid-market companies. The reason this story matters in the work is that I run into the leadership version of it constantly.
A CEO will tell me, with conviction, that something cannot change.
"I can't get my team to step up."
"The market is what it is."
"We can't find good people in this geography."
"My partner won't engage on this."
"The board won't let me do that."
"I can't take time away. The business needs me."
Every one of those complaints has at least some truth in it. The market really is challenging. The hiring pool really is thin. The partner really is hard to engage. That is the part that makes them effective rackets.
But the structure underneath is the same one I was running with my back. The complaint is the surface. The story underneath is what makes it feel permanent. The payoff is not having to do the harder thing. The complaint is letting them avoid. The cost is the version of the business and the life they are saying no to, without ever realizing they are choosing.
When a CEO swears, "I can't change this," I do not argue with the surface. I listen for the story under the story. What is the explanation that follows the complaint? What does that explanation make impossible? What would have to be true if the explanation were a half-truth instead of a settled fact?
Most of the time, when we look together, the real constraint is much smaller than the manufactured one. The market really is hard, but a sharper customer focus would still work. Hiring really is tough, but the team they already have has more in it than they are accessing. The board really has limits, but the CEO has not actually proposed the version of the plan they say they want.
The complaint stays. The racket goes.
Diagnostic: Testing Whether Your Complaint Is a Constraint or a Story
If a specific complaint of your own is starting to surface, run it through these questions.
Is your complaint at least partly true? If yes, that is exactly the condition that makes it a candidate. Rackets don't run on lies. They run on selective truths.
What does this complaint let you avoid doing? Be specific. Not "stress" or "discomfort." What concrete action would you have to take if this complaint were not in place? Who would you have to confront? What would you have to invest in? What would you have to risk being wrong about?
What story have you built around the complaint? Listen for the version that starts with "the truth is" or "the reality is." That is usually the story doing the heavy lifting.
What would change if the constraint were real but the story were optional? Hold the actual limitation in place. Take away the explanation that has settled in around it. See what becomes possible.
Who else benefits from you continuing to run this? Sometimes a racket protects you from a hard conversation with someone else. The other person may have an interest in the story holding too. That doesn't make it true.
If you can sit with these questions and still believe the complaint is the whole picture, that is a useful answer. If you find yourself flinching at any of them, the story is louder than you thought.
Where to Start
Knowing you are running a racket is not the same as stopping. The next move is doing one piece of work that the racket has been protecting you from.
Pick the smallest version of that work that still counts. Not the dramatic gesture. The first concrete step.
If the story is "I can't get my team to step up," the next step is a specific accountability conversation with a specific person about a specific outcome. Not a leadership offsite. A conversation.
If the story is "the market is what it is," the next step is one targeted experiment with a sharper offer to a sharper customer. Not a strategic overhaul. An experiment.
If the story is "I can't take time away," the next step is one half-day off the calendar in the next two weeks, with the team handling whatever lands. Not a sabbatical. A half-day.
The point isn't to prove the racket wrong in one move. The point is to break the assumption that the constraint is total. Once you have one piece of evidence that the story has more give than you thought, the rest of the work gets easier.
That is what the new coach did for me. He did not try to tell me my back wasn't fused. He just designed a training week. Then another one. Then another one. After enough weeks, the story I had built no longer fit the data.
Questions for You and Your Team
Use these to surface the rackets that may be running in your business or in your own leadership. The most useful conversations come from sitting with these questions long enough to feel uncomfortable.
What is one complaint you have repeated, in some form, over the last twelve months? Persistence is the signal that there is something to look at underneath. The complaint that keeps coming back is the one most worth examining.
What story have you built around that complaint? The story is the part that makes the situation feel immovable. Listen for the explanation that follows the complaint. That is where the racket lives.
What does this complaint let you avoid doing? The payoff is rarely "being lazy." It is usually a specific, harder thing. Naming it directly is the first step in choosing whether to keep avoiding it.
What would have to be true for this to be a permanent constraint? If you can't make that case in one paragraph, the constraint is probably manufactured.
What is the smallest action that would test whether the story is the whole truth? Not the heroic move. The first concrete step that would generate one piece of new evidence.
Working on Your Own Patterns
If a complaint of your own surfaced while reading this and you want help looking under it, that is the kind of work I do with founder-CEOs every week. ACCELERATE is my individual executive coaching program for founders and senior leaders working through the patterns that keep them stuck in their own leadership.
Learn more about ACCELERATE
