Amor Fati At Work: Anita Čavrag On Leadership, Meaning And How To Love Your Fate

A force that unites most people is a desire to seek purpose and meaning. It’s how we make sense of our lives and how we strive to create a sense of accomplishment and place within the world.

Meaning will mean different things to different people. And it’s not always easy to find a way towards it when there are hundreds of decisions that are needing to be made everyday. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed as both a trainer and a learner.

Founders coach and psychologist Anita Čavrag offers a great perspective on how to move beyond burn out, overwhelm and an unhealthy desire to achieve at all costs. Her ideas are steeped in philosophy and her own lived experience. You can find out more about her story below.

I’d love to start by learning how you got to do what you do, and where that’s led you to now in your career.

I started my career as an HR expert. I did a lot of recruitment, and then moved into HR business partnership, where I worked closely with leaders of different departments. I’ve also done employer branding, and eventually moved into an HR manager role.

At some point, I lost my spark for that work. I always had a knack for coaching and working with people. Coaching was just a convenient container, but what I really wanted was to make a bigger impact in people’s lives. I’ve always been driven by the idea that everyone has a lot of potential, but we’re not always aware of it.

I wanted to help people get out of their own way so they could reach their maximum potential and become the best possible version of themselves. I’ve always believed in people more than they believed in themselves, encouraging and guiding them.

So I decided to become a coach. I started as a career coach, helping people who weren’t happy in their jobs and wanted to do work they genuinely enjoyed, rather than being stuck in what I call a corporate cage.

That slowly evolved into coaching business founders. I’m a business founder myself, and I’ve experienced firsthand the struggle that comes with entrepreneurship. I wanted to apply what I’d learned as a psychologist, having studied the human mind for more than 20 years and everything I learned in HR, to founders who are successful on paper, but whose success isn’t sustainable.

They’re working extremely hard, overwhelmed, carrying everything on their shoulders, and they’re not happy. And I always ask: what’s the point of building a business if you don’t enjoy the process, or the fruits of your labour, because you’re completely exhausted?

What often happens is that founders recreate the same cage they escaped from in corporate life. All of our emotional and psychological patterns come with us unless we resolve them. We replicate the same experiences in new areas of life whether that’s relationships or careers.

So the idea isn’t just to escape and find the perfect job or work you love. That’s one part of it. But the more important question is: who are you in all of this? And how do you create a great internal experience for yourself, even when external circumstances aren’t ideal?

That’s a much bigger and more important question than “what’s the ideal job for me?” It’s really about asking, “How do I create the conditions in which I can thrive?”

There’s a lot to unpack there, and it’s very philosophical, which is a great segue into my next question.

We’ve spoken before about our shared interest in philosophy. I’d love to hear about any philosophers you’ve implemented into your coaching approach, how philosophy underpins your work, and which philosophies you personally live by day to day.

One philosopher who had a huge impact on me is Nietzsche. He introduced the concept of amor fati, which means love your fate, that is to love everything that happens to you. It sounds strange, especially in the Western world, where we’re trained to shape reality and bend it to our will.

We celebrate progress, growth, and changing things. But amor fati isn’t about passive acceptance or surrender. Nietzsche said we create beauty by perceiving beauty.

Why does this matter, especially for entrepreneurs and leaders? Because reality has an objective component, and then there’s the subjective meaning we attach to it. If you can see challenges as opportunities, because that’s what they are, opportunities to shape your character, then you resist reality less.

This connects closely to Stoicism, which has become more popular recently for good reason. The Stoics talk about the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. It depends on how you respond to pain.

One thing I try to teach my clients is that chasing happiness as a feel-good state is futile. Happiness is a byproduct. What matters more is meaning, purpose, and deep fulfillment. What the Greeks called eudaimonia.

All of these ideas blend together: Nietzsche’s amor fati, Stoic acceptance, and meaning-based fulfillment. If you’re waiting to be happy once you reach X, Y, or Z, you never will. The goalpost always moves. If you can’t enjoy where you are now, you won’t enjoy where you’re going either.

Separating pain from suffering is critical. Many entrepreneurs avoid hard things because they associate pain with suffering. But growth requires hard things. When you accept pain as inevitable and see it as a chance to decide who you want to be, you stop resisting.

If you imagine your ideal self - how that version of you would respond to a challenge—and you act accordingly, that’s how you become that person. Pain shapes us. Suffering comes from resistance.

That view definitely appeals to the Stoic in me. Dipping more into your psychology background, you touched on this earlier, but I’d love to go deeper. 

What psychological patterns or narratives do you see most often in high achievers when they get stuck?  They may look successful externally, but internally there’s resistance. What narratives do you try to shift through your coaching?

High achievers often equate self-worth with achievement. Their value is earned through performance and excellence, rather than being inherent. They carry this pattern into their private lives too. They want to be the best parent, partner, provider. They prove their worth by doing and performing.

This is a toxic pattern and I’ve had it myself. I grew up in a very strict environment. Perfect grades were expected and never praised. Anything less was criticised or shamed. That shaped me into someone who only felt good when achieving.

Changing that is hard, because it’s a core belief. Core beliefs are difficult to shift. But understanding that your worth comes from simply being human is transformative.

When you separate achievement from identity, not only do you feel freer, but you actually perform better. Achievement driven by fear of failure leads to burnout. Many high achievers are playing not to lose, rather than playing to create.

Separating achievement from identity unlocks true excellence and sustainable success.

That’s a great way to frame it. From your HR background, how do you see coaching complementing or challenging existing HR practices around talent development and retention?

One of the biggest myths in organisations is that people can be managed. You can manage processes, not people. People can be led, guided, mentored.

That’s why I like the rise of the “leader as coach” model. Especially with experienced people, your job isn’t to tell them what to do. They already know. Your role is to remove obstacles so they can do their best work. That’s where coaching supports organisations.

That leads nicely into neurodiversity and inclusion. Some organisations fall into what’s been called the “inclusion delusion”—thinking they’re inclusive when it’s more performative.

How do you think coaching could help organisations support neurodiversity more effectively?

Inclusion isn’t inclusion if it’s forced or based on fake harmony. Real inclusion tolerates and even values difference and conflict. There’s no growth without healthy conflict.

Some businesses drift into what I call toxic harmony. Harmony isn’t always good. Avoiding conflict creates a false sense of safety. Diversity of thought is important. When everyone looks, thinks, and feels the same, you get more of the same. But if inclusion becomes a quota or a metric to tick off, it becomes performative. True inclusion requires commitment, not optics.

That feeds well into psychological safety. How can organisations reduce toxic harmony and create real psychological safety?

Psychological safety means being able to show up as yourself without fear of judgment, and being able to make mistakes without being punished. That doesn’t mean avoiding responsibility. But there must be tolerance for experimentation and failure, especially in innovative companies.

Psychological safety is only possible in relatively flat businesses with low power distance. When decision-making is centralised and power gaps are large, safety becomes impossible.

If psychological safety is just a buzzword without structural change, people become cynical. The same applies to inclusion and diversity. I believe the future is self-managed organisations with high autonomy. They already exist, and they’re thriving. Engagement is dramatically higher.

We can’t keep organising work like it’s 1885. Knowledge work requires autonomy.

From your coaching work, what core questions do you use to help clients uncover motivations or inner blockers?

One of the most powerful questions is: In what way are you benefiting from this problem?

There’s always a benefit to our suffering, even if it’s unconscious. For example, someone wants to grow their business but keeps procrastinating. They think they’re lazy. But maybe growth means more time away from family, and part of them doesn’t want that sacrifice.

Another example is a leader who says they can’t trust their team. That story may serve their ego and reinforces a sense of superiority or indispensability.

We’re not singular beings. We contain multiple motivational systems. Conflict arises when those systems aren’t aligned. The goal is alignment. When you recognise how different parts of you benefit from the status quo, resistance dissolves. There’s relief, clarity, and self-compassion.

That question changed my life.

Well said. A more playful question now: If you could go back in time and speak with any historical figure, who would it be and why?

It would have to be Viktor Frankl. His work on logotherapy, that is the idea that our deepest need is meaning, had a huge impact on me. Meaning isn’t something you find. It’s something you create, especially through suffering.

His concept of paradoxical intention such as exaggerating symptoms to break anxiety changed how I live. I started intentionally making breaking patterns and doing silly things. It was incredibly liberating. We’re prisoners of logic and perfection. Play breaks that. That approach helped me through a deep period of anxiety and identity loss. 

I like that perspective. It reminds me of Albert Camus’ absurdist philosophy that because life is inherently absurd, you might as well go all in on the silliness when you’re in that mindset. 

What’s next for you over the next five to ten years? What do you want to build?

I don’t set rigid goals, but I have a vision. I want to normalise conversations about misery at work, particularly for founders. When you’ve built the system yourself, you can’t blame anyone else.

I want to create a safe community for tech founders to talk about the inner game of building a business. Not just scaling and metrics, but mental health, sustainability, and sanity. Because otherwise, what’s the point?