Learn how easily pros tie well-being to success—and how fear of failure can distort self-worth.
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Accounting ARC
With Byron Patrick and Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation
Busy season may still be a 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.
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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.
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.
11 Key Takeaways
- Stoicism is reframed as resilience, self-management and perspective—not emotional shutdown.
- You can’t control events, other people or the past, but you can control your attitude, thoughts and voluntary actions.
- Client stress becomes more manageable when you remember your options. You can’t control a client’s behavior, but you can control boundaries, escalation and—sometimes—whether they remain a client.
- You cannot care more about someone else’s business than they do. A nonresponsive client (or stakeholder) can’t be “forced” into urgency; you can only raise the issue and document your counsel.
- Stoic mindfulness looks like auditing your own thought patterns. Catch the stories you tell yourself (“I wasn’t good enough,” “They don’t like me”), then reframe them toward facts and what’s actionable.
- Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend.
- Virtue is action-oriented. Wisdom, courage, justice and self-control matter because they change behavior—not because they sound good on paper.
- AI can provide information, but it can’t hand you wisdom. Wisdom comes from lived experience and judgment—especially when applying insights in messy real-world contexts.
- Compassion and accountability can coexist. Empathy can shift an engagement from “gotcha” to “help fix what resources haven’t allowed,” without lowering standards.
- Ethical development is lifelong growth, evolving with experience and self-improvement.
- A stoic worldview expands perspective and reduces snap judgments. Broadening your exposure—professionally and personally—can reduce unconscious bias and increase gratitude, even when you disagree with others.