The Hidden Cost Of Success

Without that fulfillment, without really knowing who you are and what matters to you most, without going beneath the surface to see what's really driving you and what a successful, happy, fulfilling life would look like for you, you're not going to be able to reach the inner success, to tap into that inner authority within yourself to drive your business and life forward. Welcome to Don't Step on the Bluebells, the podcast where personal healing and transformation takes center stage. I'm your host, Amanda Parker, and I'm a fellow seeker on the journey of personal growth. Join me as I delve into the stories of gifted healers, guides, and everyday people who have experienced remarkable transformations. Listen in as they share their practical wisdom to enrich your everyday life. And don't forget to hit subscribe and never miss a new episode. Welcome to today's episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells. Today we're talking about that feeling that so many people have when they have reached a certain level of success. And that level of success starts to feel empty, or maybe it never even really felt like success at all. So we're going to be unpacking what exactly that feeling is, why it happens to so many, especially entrepreneurs who have been working their way to building a business and then suddenly hit all the marks, check all the boxes, and realize that this is not what I thought it would feel like. A lot of people are working towards this idea of success. That might mean that they want to have, you know, a lot of money coming into the bank or a successful career, or maybe they're building a business and they really want to see things take off for themselves. They might have a beautiful car in mind or a house they want to live in or a second home, you know, a vacation home somewhere beautiful in Spain or in Florida. Depends where you live. And they have all these ideas in mind of what success actually means and what it looks like. But the reality is that for most of us, we have never really taken the time to think about what success mean to me? What is actually my idea of success? Not the things that we see on TV or we see on Instagram or that we see other people in our lives living up to that we say, oh yeah, that would be nice. Okay, they just got this new house. I'd like to have that too. But the things that actually mean success for us. So I'll share my own story. I had always been working towards this idea of what I thought my business was supposed to look like. So I had this idea about what a successful business would be. And that was bringing in a certain level of income, working with a certain caliber of clients, having incoming client requests coming to me at all times. There's continuous flow of money in my bank. I'm able to hire a full support team. I support my husband and I in paying all of our bills and taking care of the house and then making sure that we get, you know, the big fancy vacations a few times a year. I do love to travel. So that is very important. And I had all these ideas about what exactly success means and what it looks like for me. The truth is, most of those weren't actually my ideas. While, yes, it would be lovely to have a beautiful car and to own a house in the countryside on a lot of land and to be able to pay all of the bills between the two of us. There's a lot of things that, yeah, they would be really great. I'd be very happy to have achieved those things. But that's not actually what success looks like for me. And I think it's a really important distinction just to take a moment and say or recognize that we're often pushing ourselves to work towards some external goal. And if we don't hit that exact goal, it's not because we failed. It's actually because the things that we really are working towards, the things that matter most to us in our heart and our soul, those are the things that we're going to fulfill. So as I kept working through my business and I kept seeing that I wasn't hitting some of these external markers that I had set for myself, I would feel really frustrated. I'd feel like I hadn't made it or my business wasn't that successful. Now, the irony here is that on the outside, people were continually giving me the feedback about how successful I was, how great I was doing, how well my business was running. And I was sitting there thinking, but you have no idea what's happening in my business. But the truth is that I had put my focus, my definition of success, although I didn't know it at the time, was actually around being able to be completely free. I didn't have any clients who were dependent on me. Yes, I show up for my clients. Yes, I support them and I'm there for them, but there's no dependency there. That's something that I had really faced back in like the corporate days and also when I was doing leadership consulting, that I was on the clock. You know, there was a lot of time pressure, there were deadlines, I had to be able to respond quickly. People were waiting on me, or they couldn't push forward what they needed to do. So I had created a business that basically gave me all of the freedom that I wanted. I could work from absolutely anywhere, whether I was visiting my family in New York or traveling to Thailand, leading workshops from my hotel room, or just spending time in the park next door. I could literally do my work from wherever I wanted. I had coaching conversations from my desk, from hotel rooms, from family houses. I've had coaching conversations walking in the park with each of us in our own local park, wherever that may be, having that conversation from a distance. And that gave me a tremendous amount of freedom in my life and in my business. Another thing that I had built into my success metrics that I hadn't realized was creativity. So I had felt really stifled through most of my career. I was just trying to check the boxes and do what was expected of me, whether that was wildlife conservation or marketing or in leadership development. And as a result of that, I felt like I wasn't actually really creative. I wasn't getting to use my artistic side in my work. So when I started my own business, creativity was one of my absolute top values that I brought into everything that I did. So every single program that I designed was full of heart and soul. It was just this mix of all of these beautiful, wonderful, creative ideas that I had been sitting on for so long and that I could finally pour into something. And to be honest, my entire business has been like that. Whether it's creating these like free guides that I create that you can download on my website, whether it's this podcast here, having these conversations, being able to share what's going on in my world or talking to these incredible healers that I get the opportunity to speak to. It's so important for me to be able to pour creativity into what I do and to give myself that outlet for all of these ideas and inspiration that come through all the time. Another thing was that I have really been able to shape my business so that it fits what matters to me in my life. So, you, uh, if you've been listening for a while, you'll know that I've been on this spiritual journey for quite a while. And I talk a lot about it and I share what that experience is like. But as I have continued to evolve and grow, as I've continued to develop both spiritually, but also professionally and in my business, I've been able to reshape the offerings that I bring out into the world. So I have oracle readings that are available. People can book 60-minute sessions with me because I love giving oracle readings. And those readings are really like they bring that creativity back in where it's just a mix of all these different tools and techniques that I have been working on and developing for years, but it's also giving me the opportunity to shape my business as I grow personally. So my business is always a reflection of who I am and what I'm experiencing in the world or what I have just experienced and learned, and I'm bringing it back to my community. That is such a privilege. There are so many people who have built businesses that require them to show up and do the exact same thing every day, over and over and over. And I've worked with a lot of those like coaches and teachers where they are hitting the metrics. They're doing everything right that they're supposed to be doing, and they build a prison around themselves. And that's not even a judgment of what they're doing because they might have hit the revenue targets that I didn't hit. So they've been able to hit these revenue targets. They've hired the team, they've built out the business in such a way that they are now forced to deliver programs and to help people in ways that no longer feel aligned simply because that is the model that they built and that's the business that they built. And in the work that I've done, I've been very careful to make sure that I am only doing work that feels a hundred percent aligned with clients who I genuinely love to support. So once again, just bringing us back to that idea of what is success, because if I had only ever been following this model of thinking that I need to have this revenue target, I need to reach this level of income, I need to buy this kind of house, this kind of car, otherwise I'm not successful. Well, then I'd be sitting here and telling you right now that I have failed, that I've completely failed my mission and that my business isn't working. And the truth is, that is so far from the truth. My business is working beautifully, and it's just shaped differently than I thought that I had wanted it to be shaped. And I think that I'm really trying to share with you here that success is not always what we think that it is going to be. We might have an idea because of what we see in society or what our parents taught us, or, you know, what our friends are doing. We have this idea of what we're supposed to want, of what life is supposed to look like. And that can be really daunting to break from that norm to decide that, you know what, I'm just going to do this differently. I'm going to do it my own way because I have a better idea for what my life can look like. We are like this idea of success is so reinforced in our society about what we're supposed to do that most people never really give themselves a chance to do it completely differently. The other side of that are for the people who have really built this success around them, who have grown their business to reach those targets and to continue to expand, who are now in this place where they're saying, okay, I've hit all of these success targets. Why doesn't it feel better? And I think that that's a really common experience that happens that you are so focused. Likely you're like a high achiever, high performer, because you are pushing yourself to grow and build and create this thing that is gonna have a big impact and that's gonna drive a lot of revenue into your business, and then of course, bring that into your life. And I think it's first of all incredible to just stop and pause for a moment and actually look at what you've done. And also, I think for most people in that position, there's two things happening here. One is that you're not really able to enjoy or celebrate your success because you just keep looking for the next target. So you're just keeping your eye on the next goal, the next goal, the next goal. So as you're checking things off and as you're actually hitting these incredible achievements, you're not really giving yourself that chance to celebrate it, to feel it, to experience it. It's a bit of a survival mechanism to continuously search and seek out the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, while never really giving yourself a chance to just honor the path that you've been on and how far you've come already. And success can feel really empty if you don't take that time to just celebrate and honor where you've come. Because then you're just going into the next thing. I know I've done this so many times in my life as well, especially when I was working in like a nonprofit or in a corporate career, that I would just keep on growing, keep going, keep going, keep going. And then I keep hitting these incredible targets. A massive project would close, or we'd have some like huge win out in the field in Paraguay, for example, with our local producers. And I would never really give myself the chance to be like, wow, look at what we've done. That's incredible. And that's when success feels like you're not actually reaching the life that you want. Because even though you're hitting all the targets, you're not celebrating it. So it doesn't feel like fun. It just feels like another job that you're doing just for the purpose of achieving and reaching the next goal. So if you're an entrepreneur and you have been building this business and you've reached this level of success, and you're really thinking that this does not feel like I thought it would. Like I really wish that this felt better. The thing is that it's very likely that you have built a business that's not actually in alignment with the life that you want to be living. And that is such a common thing to happen that we are just trying to reach those external goal markers, but we're not really hitting pause long enough to see. Does this feel good for me? Is this the life that I want to be living? Is this the business that I actually want to be running? And so you're running full steam ahead, creating something, but you're not actually bringing yourself, your soul, your spirit along that journey with you. You might be building someone else's dream and you might be really good at doing that. But imagine what would be possible if you actually started turning all of that energy inward into the work that feels amazing for you to bring into the world, as opposed to the work that might feel really amazing for someone else to bring into the world. There is this paradox that can happen while you're building and creating something that's meaningful for you. And I see that it very often happens when you're reaching a certain threshold, you're about to transition into a new space. Maybe that is you've built your business, you've reached the certain level, and you're like, okay, now what's next? You know? And a lot of people, especially if you've hit success, you can become even more afraid to fail because you don't want to lose it all. So you start to become very afraid of taking chances and having the courage to do like really bold moves that might bring your business forward in a different direction. So you start to hit this place where you're now afraid of failing, but you might also be afraid of succeeding because the success hasn't felt that great until now. So you're putting yourself in this space of limbo, almost paralyzed to move forward or to change anything. So you don't want to destroy what you've already built. And at the same time, you don't want to go and continue building something that that feels like a prison that you don't actually want to be running. So once you actually start to realize that the next level that you're growing into requires you, it's not about new tactics. It's not about coming up with a new business model. It actually requires you to become someone new. It requires you to become a person who can hold that success and who can actually grow alongside with the business or the creation or the endeavor that you're bringing to life. This is where the inner work comes in. Now, a lot of entrepreneurs, at least in my world, have been doing that inner work for a long time. But there are people who have just really put their heads down and done the work. And now that you've reached that level, whatever that level is that you thought you wanted to get to, you start to realize that without that fulfillment, without really knowing who you are and what matters to you most, without going beneath the surface to see what's really driving you and what a successful, happy, fulfilling life would look like for you, you're not going to be able to reach the inner success, to tap into that inner authority within yourself to drive your business and life forward. So this is a really amazing point in time. If you have the right guide or you have access to the right community of people to start doing that deeper inner work before you just go off and build the next thing. In my own space, I know that I was when I first left my um job in nonprofit, and then I moved into leadership consulting. And then right before I launched the Courage Factory, I was going through that same phase where I was so unhappy in the job that I was in. And I just recognized that if I kept going into new jobs, I was just going to recreate the exact same situation over and over and over again. And that I needed to do something drastically different. So for me, that was about leaving the corporate world entirely, going on the soul-searching journey through Asia, becoming a Reiki healer, becoming a coach, and really embarking on that process of spiritual awakening, even though I didn't have the words for it then. I knew I was searching for meaning. I was searching for purpose, I was searching for something deeper and bigger than myself. It's important to reconnect to what really matters to you, what really matters in your life, and to actually allow yourself to tune in and hear that voice from within. That can be incredibly difficult, but it doesn't have to be. There are toolkits that you can learn. There are like habits and rituals that you can learn to actually start to tune in to your own intuition, your own inner wisdom above the noise all around you. I think it's really important that you know that that feeling when you reach success, whatever that means, the external marker or internal, if it still feels empty, it's not a sign that you're ungrateful. It's actually a signal that you're just ready for more alignment in your life. And I can say with without a doubt that getting to know myself and what really drives me and what really matters to me has been the absolute most fulfilling work I have ever done in my life. And my business is a direct reflection of how much I value that inner world and how important it is to me that I do work that really feels aligned and lifts me up with people that I love working with. So if you are finding yourself also in this storytelling, I want to let you know that I'm launching a new program called the Inner Authority Lab. And this is really a space to come together with other like-minded people, especially founders, because that is something very close to my heart. So coming together with these, you know, other founders who have created this incredible success and are now at this point where they want to grow to their next level, but they know that growing to that next level is going to require them to go within, to figure out those inner layers, that inner working of their own system before they just start shooting off in the dark, trying to find out what that next level of growth looks like. They're tired of questioning what the next move is, they're tired of overthinking what they should be doing or how they should grow their business or what the best way forward is. And they're really ready to get that wisdom from within, to tune out all of that noise from all around them and to be able to hear their own inner voice guiding them forward. So if you want to join the inner authority lab, you will have all the links that you need in the show notes, but you can also find it at www.amandaparker.co backslash inner dash authority dash lab. And I would love, love, love to see some of you in there. I'm so excited to bring this program to life and to do the work right there alongside you. So thank you. Much for tuning in to this episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells. If you're finding yourself in this space, don't worry, there is hope. It does not have to continue on like this. You don't need to keep reaching success that feels empty. I promise you there's a way forward where you actually get to feel fulfilled and really excited and proud and happy for everything that you've created. Thanks for listening to Don't Step on the Bluebells, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells. If you enjoyed this conversation, please give the podcast a five star rating wherever you listen. And don't forget to hit subscribe and follow along so you never miss a new episode.