Why Happiness is Hard-Fought for High Achievers| ARC

Learn how easily pros tie well-being to success—and how fear of failure can distort self-worth. 

Busy season may still be a few days out, but the stress response already starts to hum for a lot of accounting professionals — the calendar fills, the inbox tightens, and the margin for error feels like it shrinks to a sliver. In the latest Accounting ARC, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, take that reality head-on with a surprisingly practical lens: modern stoicism. 

They start by naming the misconception most people bring to the word “stoic” — that it means emotionless, rigid, “stone-faced.” Shimamoto, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, admits that’s how he learned it, too: a kind of unfeeling resilience. But the article that sparks the episode — a Psychology Today piece on the science of Stoicism — reframes it as something more useful (and more human): a set of attitudes and behaviors linked with resilience, lower anger, and higher life satisfaction.  

“Step outside yourself and ask what advice you would give a friend if they said the things you are saying to yourself. Then take your own advice.”
~Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP 

That distinction matters in accounting, where “too stoic” can get thrown around like a critique — as if being objective means being uncaring. Patrick, co-founder and educator for TB Academy and senior product manager for Karbon, and Shimamoto push back: accountants are often the “reasonable one in the room,” but that does not mean they feel less. It often means they carry more — and need better ways to process it. 

Rather than stay in the abstract, they structure the conversation around a research-based framework called the Stoic Attitudes and Behaviors Scale (SABS), which breaks modern stoicism into dimensions upon which people can actually reflect.  

This episode quietly does two things at once: it normalizes the pressure accountants sit with, and it offers a language for responding to that pressure without pretending it isn’t there.

The conversation opens with what Patrick calls one of the biggest and most important stoic ideas: recognizing what is within your control — your attitude, your considered thoughts, your voluntary actions — and what isn’t. He uses a simple example (the weather) to make the point: you can’t control the storm, but you can control whether you spend the day miserable about it. 

Then the accounting version arrives quickly: clients. The two discuss bad client behaviors and confront that sometimes the pressure we feel is pressure we manufacture ourselves. 

The second dimension hits a nerve: true well-being depends on what is “up to us,” like character and virtue, not wealth or external success. Patrick calls it tough and Shimamoto gets personal about why: in a profession wired around achievement, many people tie happiness to success and carry a strong fear of failure. 

That’s where Shimamoto’s “everything happens for a reason” mindset shows up: when something falls through, he often finds (most of the time, he says) that another opportunity appears that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. It’s not denial. It’s a deliberate attempt to keep perspective while the disappointment is still fresh. 

The third dimension — stoic mindfulness — is about paying attention to your judgments and habits of thought, using reflection to catch unhelpful patterns. Shimamoto describes a loop many analytical professionals know well: replaying conversations, assuming someone doesn’t like you, and turning a single awkward moment into a full narrative. 

Patrick offers a tool that feels especially applicable to leaders who spend their days supporting others: step outside yourself and ask what advice you would give a friend if they said the things you are saying to yourself. Then take your own advice. 

Shimamoto, meanwhile, connects it to meditation in a practical way: the goal isn’t to “clear your mind” perfectly. It’s to observe thoughts — especially negative ones — and let them pass instead of clinging to them. 

For accountants, Shimamoto argues, that bigger-picture thinking is often the work: stepping back to assess impact — on the organization, on the community and beyond. 

This episode turns stoicism into a toolkit for busy-season brains: control what you can, stop narrating catastrophes, practice compassion without losing standards, and hold your work inside a larger story than the next deadline.

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