Section 4
interview
mariola czarniak
Mariola Czarniak: Interview
by Kamil Grund
Kamil: Your work focuses on helping individuals and leaders unlock their full potential through mindset and clarity. What’s one common subconscious belief you see holding people back the most — and how do you help them shift it? Mariola: Contrary to what most people assume, the issue is rarely ambition, intelligence, or lack of knowledge. At that level, you usually know exactly what needs to be done. The real issue is that your conscious goal has outgrown your subconscious self-image. You decide what you want intellectually, but your nervous system still organizes around what feels familiar - and familiar quietly defends itself. That is where sabotage begins. The moment your next level demands more visibility, larger decisions, greater responsibility, or a stronger identity, resistance activates. Sometimes it slows you down through hesitation, over- analysis, and delay. Other times it speeds you up in the wrong places through impulsive decisions, premature reaction, or movement without true advancement. Different behavior. Same sabotage. I call this The Pushback Reflex™ - the invisible pull back toward the level of self that still feels psychologically safe. Highly capable people rarely plateau because they do not know the move. They plateau because part of them does not yet feel safe sustaining the cost of the next level. Most people try to solve that by pushing harder. In reality, that only creates more internal friction, more fatigue, and less precision exactly when precision matters most. When I work with leaders, the shift happens by recalibrating that subconscious set point so your inner identity finally matches your external goal. Once that happens, execution stops feeling like self- management and starts moving with far more certainty, consistency, and power. Kamil: Y ou’ve spoken about the importance of clarity in achieving goals, for example through the SPEC system you share on LinkedIn. How do you guide someone to get specific about what they want when they feel overwhelmed by too many options? Mariola: Clarity is one of the most underestimated accelerators of achievement. You rarely fail from lack of effort. More often, your energy is being dispersed across goals that are too vague to generate decisive action. So when you feel overwhelmed by too many options, the issue is usually not the number of choices - it is that nothing has become specific enough to trust, and the mind keeps consuming energy without committing.
My role is to interrupt that circling and move you from abstract desire into precise target. That is where I often use the SPEC principle. First, we SELECT - because words like success, freedom, or growth may sound compelling, but they are too broad to organize execution. Your target has to become exact. Then we PROJECT - mentally and emotionally stepping into that outcome until it feels internally visible rather than intellectually distant. From there, we EXPECT - building enough subconscious congruence that the goal stops feeling hypothetical and starts feeling attainable. And finally, we COLLECT - remaining open to the route, because meaningful achievement rarely arrives through the exact path the intellect originally designs. Once that level of specificity is established, your energy stops leaking, hesitation loses oxygen, and execution starts moving with a level of force vague ambition never commands. Kamil: High-achievers often struggle with internal barriers despite external success. Based on your observations, what differentiates someone who sustains high performance from someone who peaks and plateaus? Mariola: What differentiates someone who sustains high performance from someone who peaks and plateaus is the ability to renew your underlying drive after success. In the early stages, ambition, urgency, necessity, and external goals create enormous momentum. But there comes a point where those same drivers stop producing the same fire. That is where many high achievers quietly lose edge. Your business may still be growing. Your title may still look impressive. Yet fulfillment drops, decisions feel heavier, and what once energized you begins requiring more force than it should. Nothing appears broken enough to demand intervention, yet you are no longer being optimally fueled for the level you have reached. That is where plateau begins. Most people respond by tightening routines or pushing discipline harder. That may restore control temporarily, but it does not restore sharpness. Elite athletes understand this instinctively. Every new level demands recalibration. What built the first championship does not automatically build the next. Leadership is no different. This is where I do some of my deepest work - helping leaders reactivate the internal edge beneath visible success so achievement keeps expanding without draining energy, fulfillment, or the quality of the relationships around them.
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