Good Enough, at What Cost?
Comparison is a double-edged sword. It can be the fuel to your fire or the water that puts it out. Some exceptional women are dumping buckets of water on their own fires right now, measuring themselves against others, or against an environment that rewards burnout over fulfillment.
There's a common thread: you aren't where you thought you'd be by now. It doesn't matter why, it’s just all you can see and all that does is feed frustration, deflation, self-doubt, and exasperation.
Different Lens, Same Outcome
This isn't confined to executives. You can be a business owner, an empty-nester, or both. You want more but something keeps pulling you back. For some, it's fear of failure. For others, it's a standoff between burning out to get there, or staying put and risking a different regret. And some are simply watching everyone else's highlight reel, wondering why it looks so easy when it's not you doing it.
By any reasonable measure, you're a remarkable, strong, impactful woman. And yet you measure your own worth against one very specific metric: the version of success you'd pictured hitting by a certain age.
That vision didn't materialize, at least not exactly how it was supposed to, how you should have done it, how you needed to do it.
This Is Not Judgment
As a coach, I don’t judge opinions and feelings, categorize right and wrong, and I most definitely don’t tell you what to do. Rather, I honor and create the space for you to breathe and regroup. Dreaming is beautiful, ambition is exciting, and hard work is very admirable for a goal you set for yourself. We all deserve to go after exactly what we want, as long as it is what we want, a distinction I'll circle back to.
But here's what's been emerging in my sessions lately: there's a real reason behind these perceived failures. Emphasis on perceived.
Burnout has been discussed ad nauseam in this space. What's missing from that conversation is you. The mental and emotional energy sucked dry by all this comparing and measuring, leaving very little for what's actually in front of you: the job, the relationship, your wellbeing, and above all, your own reserves.
You're depleted, running on fumes, disappointed in yourself for not somehow defying that and driving on empty anyway. That's what it looks like to draw your value from running yourself into the ground without missing a beat.
Two Ways This Goes Wrong
Sometimes you don't get there, and you treat that as a personal failing: not disciplined enough, not good enough, didn't want it badly enough.
Other times, you do reach that destination but the anticipated euphoria never arrives. You earned that fair and square, but holding onto it cost more than you had left to give, and you never calculated everything else you valued: your partner, your children, your parents, the simple joys, your own wellbeing.
So what do you do? You tell yourself you're just not that incredible, special, smart, strong, or super, and your brain starts to not only believe it, but predict it in every new situation you encounter.
In reality, you never actually calculated the cost of what you deem good enough, a cost someone else might find affordable simply because they're built differently: different environments, value systems, stamina, thresholds, priorities, support systems, resources, partners.
Yet when you compare yourself to someone else, you're using one measurement: the accomplishment itself. Everything that was sacrificed for it, maybe even fully lost in the process, seldom shows in the image of success you're comparing yourself to.
What the Research Shows
Psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot developed something called the self-concordance model, first published in 1999 and replicated extensively since. The most important finding from that research is that goals pursued from guilt, obligation, or someone else's standard don't just feel worse to chase, they're harder to sustain, too.
Self-concordant goals get more sustained effort and greater wellbeing once attained. Introjected or externally-driven goals can absolutely still be reached, but attainment doesn't deliver the payoff it's supposed to because the goal was never actually yours to begin with. The results don’t necessarily reflect your ability as an individual; they simply show the mechanism behind the behavior. In other words, your brain is not always acting based on how capable you are.
Inherited, Not Chosen
Cultural and family expectations do some of their most insidious damage right here. A specific role, income level, or life milestone gets held up as the marker of a life well lived, by a family, a culture, a community, often with real love behind it, and it gets absorbed so early it stops registering as an external standard at all. Instead, it feels like ambition, like a goal you chose. And by the time you're exhausted chasing it or holding onto it, you’re past wondering how much of it actually fits your life.
It still costs the same energy to sustain whether you chose it or not, but it doesn't come with the same reserves.
That’s the disappointment we rarely discuss at the table. Instead of one very specific failure, there’s something slower and more confusing: working harder than anyone around you for a version of success that either never materializes, or does so for a very brief amount of time.
The Only Questions That Matter
The way out is definitely not about lowering the ambition standard or ceasing to care. It's running any goal through one honest question before spending years chasing it, or making yourself feel smaller for not attaining it: how many of my priorities am I willing to give up for this? Do I like what my life will look like when this arrives?
That's how you build a goal that will actually hold.
Aline
Reference: Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497.
