Redefining What Success Looks Like For You & Your Season

What version of "success" are you chasing... is it even yours??

After leaving my job and stepping into a season of job searching, I’ve had so many interviewers ask what I'm looking for next and I've really had to stop and figure out what MY answer to that question is, rather than just what I think sounds good to them (or other people).

Today's episode is all about how we ALLOW other people to dictate what SUCCESS means for us and a 3-step plan to QUIT doing that so that we can live our lives FULLY and with great CLARITY about what we want.

If you’ve ever felt pressure to have it all together, keep up, or prove something to the world… this is your permission slip to slow down, rethink the rules, and choose what actually feels good to you.

Think of this one as a gentle mindset reset and a little pep talk from a friend 🤍

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Transcript

0:40

Hello. Hello. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I just love chatting as though we are. Are sitting over a cup of coffee or at a happy hour and just having some real girl talk here. And I always think of it as though I'm speaking with a friend and we're just chatting about what's going on in real life. Because I feel like sometimes we just, we have this feeling like we need to have everything all together or like we just don't really have a place where we can go to and someone can say, oh my God, me too. And I want episodes of this to be like that for you, but then for you to turn them off and leave them with a sense of, okay, I feel validated, but then I also feel like I know what I wanna do next, or I feel encouraged about what I'm gonna do next. That sort of thing. Today I'm gonna be talking about something that has been on my mind because personally, if you listen to last week's episode, I did mention that I have been unemployed for the last couple weeks. I submitted my resignation at my previous job and had my last day January 6th. So I was dedicating my, or I am dedicating my full time to finding the next right fit for me. And it has come with a lot of. I will say challenges, but mostly a lot of just having to really figure out and clarify what it is that I want next. And that's the thing that, by the way, if you go job searching, they're gonna ask you that every time you go. Like if you left your job or you're looking to leave your job, they're gonna ask you, what are you looking for? And so that after I had a few interviews where they asked me that, it was a good signal to me like, okay, actually I should think about this. What am I looking for? And not just. Responding with an answer that I think they want to hear, which I mean, I guess you still can do that when you're in front of them. But then leaving the interview and going, okay, actually how would I answer that? How would I tell a friend what it is that I'm looking for or tell my husband, this is what I'm looking for? And pause and think about that. Because sometimes we rush into things, especially when it comes to jobs or something that is financially related. We can rush into things and then we're just as unhappy as we were before. Even though we're kind of putting a bandaid over the issue now, which might be that financial issue, but this is something that has been on my mind. So I wanna talk today specifically about success and the way that we define that, because I think sometimes we have this version of success in the back of our heads that is really causing us pain in the. Short and long term and really just making us feel defeated and like failures and we don't even realize that it's there. We just have that definition of success in the back of our brains are wired into us from a young age, and we don't realize that it's there co like consciously, but it is there and it's affecting the way that we feel about ourselves as we go through our lives. And ultimately, success isn't about what you achieve, it's about the way that you feel in your life as you're achieving it. So. Rather than focusing on those achievements, focusing on what does success actually look like to you? And like I said, this is something that I've been pondering a lot as I've been looking for a job because I've had a lot of feeling when your job searching, you have a lot of feelings about what would people think if I had this job? Or I mean, hopefully you would be thinking like, what does my. Partner. Think about me having this job. What does my partner think about me having this salary? That sort of thing. Of course, you have to keep them in mind, but then you also think about, oh, what would the world think about me having this job? And that can sometimes be a point of pride for people, but also at the end of the day, you want to be an example for people. You wanna be. Proof of what could be possible for other people. And if being in a job that you hate and that is sucking the life out of you and is leaving you with nothing at the end of the day with your husband or your kids, or your dog or your roommate, or whatever it is, whenever you go home, that's probably not what you want to represent for other people. So that's what I've been thinking about a lot in the job thing specifically. But as I started thinking about it, I was thinking, you can apply this to so many things, your, physical health. You can apply it to the way that your house looks. You can apply it to your relationship and comparing your relationship with others and like the success, quote unquote, of your relationship with others. It can really apply to a lot of different things. So my goal for this episode, the intention that I have for this episode, is to help you pause and think about, okay, what am, what unspoken versions of success am I trying to live up to in my brain that I don't. Really realize are happening and then figure out is that still aligned for you? Maybe, maybe it is, that would be great, but is that still aligned for you? And if it's not, let's redefine what that success looks like, or at least reshape it. Reframe it and help you feel good in your every day as you achieve whatever quote unquote success that you're trying to achieve. So, one thing I wanna point out is that a lot of the time our definitions of success that we have in the back of our brains are not ones that we created, they're ones that we inherited, that were kind of ingrained in us as kids. So when we were kids growing up, did, was there, someone in your life that was really, really forceful about specific measures of success, like money or titles, like being a specific boss at a workplace or something like that, or. Material items like cars or having a spotless house or working, working, working, like the hustle and always being busy or something more aesthetic, like being skinny or always having it together. Always having your hair done, always having your makeup done. There might have been someone in your life that even if they didn't do it directly, it's very possible. We all know we're all gonna go to therapy at some point for our parents, and our kids are probably all gonna go to therapy because of us. Like we all know that I don't have kids, but I'm saying this in solidarity with those of you that do have kids. But we, we all just have these experiences growing up that we. Soak up from the people around us, and maybe it's not even our parents, maybe it's Uncle Joe is constantly telling us about these, this amazing car that he has and how much money he makes, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, uncle Joe, chill. But somewhere inside of you, you grow up and you think, oh, success means looking like Uncle Joe. Or maybe your parents did talk about Uncle Joe and they were like, wow, I'm really proud of him. He is amazing. You know, and everybody talks about how Uncle Joe makes all this money and he. Is so important in his company, and he's got a sports car and it's very cool. And so you grow up and somewhere in the back of your brain you're thinking, if I don't make a lot of money and if I don't have a sports car, and if I am not the boss of the boss of the boss at my job, then I'm not succeeding. And I just wanna call BS on that because personally, as I've been going through this process with my job before, and then also my job search, something that has been pretty easy for me to let go of. And I'm very fortunate because my partner and I we're, or my partner and I, we're dinks, if you've heard that term, double income, no kids. So we're in a decent spot financially to where I could take a pay cut if I wanted to. And I'm very fortunate that as I've been in this job search. I've just completely let go of money being a measure of success for me because I, it doesn't matter. I've discovered this in my last job, that there was earning potential and there were a lot of months that I performed really, really well and I made more money and I had like great years or great months or whatever. And it was great, but at the end of the day, if those months I was hating my life and I was spending way more time outside of the house and like working late or working early or working on the weekend. Honestly, I never did that. I had a pretty strict boundary about the weekend, but sometimes working late or working earlier or something like that, then it was really sucky and at the end of the day, that extra money that I made. It was not improving my life or making my life feel more successful. What I've found it makes me feel successful in my job is when I'm contributing and when I like and when it serves the purpose of being my workplace and I'm contributing, that I'm contributing to, and then I get to sign off and come home. Enjoy my hobbies and enjoy time with my family and enjoy time with my friends and my spouse. And that's what's important to me about my job is that it's somewhere that, that, yes, I do wanna contribute and I want to be challenged, but I don't necessarily need to be in the higher ranks of it. And this is another thing because I think another thing that I've noticed myself being self-conscious about as I go through the job search is the companies that are, the companies that I'm in like final stages with don't necessarily do the most exciting things or anything I'm like super passionate about. But then last week I, so I got an offer last week. It was really exciting and when I got the offer I was kind of like, i, I started immediately thinking about, okay, well when I tell people if I accept this offer and I tell people that, what will they think? And then I was like, what the, like why do I even care what they think? I don't care what they think. I'm the one that has to go to this job every day. I'm the one that was miserable before and decided to leave my job, so I'm. My measure of success, I need to figure out what that, what that looks like before worrying about what their measure of success is for me. Because quite frankly, they don't have to live my life every day. They don't have to be the one that is feeling the way that I'm feeling in my everyday life. So I did notice myself thinking that whenever I was thinking about accept, like if I were to accept this offer and tell people about it, but then I realized the priority for me right now is going to a team that is healthy and happy. There's not a lot of turnover. That's what I came from and a place where I do feel like I can contribute. But then I also feel like the people there respect a work, work-life balance, and those are, those are my biggest priorities. Money is not the biggest priority. Doing something that I can go and tell people about. And I think that this is my, the, the difficulty,'cause I was in a non-profit healthcare related field before. And so everybody's like, oh my God, I just thank you for what you do and da, da da. And before I was in that field, I was not passionate about it. Like, I was at a blood bank and before I was there, it's not like I was super passionate about the blood bank or anything. I became passionate about it, but I didn't care about it before I started. So I keep reminding myself these things as I look for the next right fit for myself, that I need to figure out what is important to me rather than worrying about what others might think of whatever it is, because they don't have to live in my life every day. I'm the only one that has to do that, so I just want to you to start thinking about where you might have inherited certain definitions of success. Think about like, where did that come from? Who taught me that that is what matters in life? And is that benefiting me or is it taking away. From me, because if it is taking away from you, if it's not serving you, get rid of it. You know what I mean? So that's kind of step one I would say into this. Like if I was gonna give you like a three step plan into redefining success for yourself, I would say step one is kind of doing that audit of what, what in the back of my brain am I thinking of as successful? That really isn't. And you can, again, I'm applying this a lot to my job search right now, but you could do this for like your health I have a lot of friends that have just had children and maybe growing up for whatever re maybe you grew up in the same time period as me and everybody that was portrayed in media was really, really skinny. And somehow in the back of your brain you just believe that skinny is successful when it comes to your looks and you just had a baby. And, first of all, it's really not realistic, but also Like at the end of the day, what successful is for you, may not make sense with the whole skinny thing, right? Because if you just had a baby, what is successful is that your body just did that. You know what I mean? Like your body just grew human, or what is successful is getting as much sleep as you possibly can. Or what is successful is being able to get, or what is successful is focusing on your water because especially if you're breastfeeding, apparently, like the baby dehydrates you really fast. I don't know, So. Think about what measures of success or metrics of success you kind of have in the back of your brain. Audit those. See, is that serving me or is it taking away from me? And if it's taking away from you, redefine it. What is actually successful? Skinny is not successful making, making my water goal, sleeping as much as I can. That would be step one. And then step two is identifying your actual like measure definition of success or your actual priorities, right? So when I was talking about in the workplace, for me, having a healthy culture and people that are staying and people that are happy where they are, and when, by the way, when I've been in interviews, I've just been asking every team, what is the average tenure of your team? Like, how long are people staying there? And the places that I'm I've gotten furthest in the process with that I haven't withdrawn from are the ones where the most new person there is like four years, but most everybody on the team has been there seven years, nine years, eight years, 12 years, 15 plus years. Right. And to me that's a very good indication that people are happy and that they're staying. And so that's for, that for me has been what I'm measuring as success or what I'm prioritizing in the search. But maybe having a healthy culture is more important to you than making more money or, you know what, maybe we could flip this, like maybe being a business guru, being a boss babe. Like maybe you're starting your business, you're an entrepreneur. Maybe that success, even though you haven't gotten to the level of quote unquote success, where like your business. Is booming or something. Maybe that is way more important to you than some of the other things you're doing on the weekends, like going out and drinking or doing things with your friends that you normally do. But because they don't really get that you want to build this thing up and that you really need to spend probably all of your free time doing that. That's also okay if that is what success looks like for you. Because here's the other thing, every season is a different level of success, right? Or a different measure of success or a different definition of success. Your success now, your success, like I'm 30 now. Success in at 30 looks a lot different than what it did at 21. At 21, I was just trying to figure out how to be a wife and how to like cook dinner. And how to do my taxes and whatnot. But at 30 things look a lot different. Life looks a lot different. Or maybe you're in a different phase, like you just moved and being a homeowner, the definition of success there is gonna be a lot different than when you were in renting and an apartment, or maybe you have children or you just got a dog or something like that. The things that are gonna be successful in your everyday life and make you feel good at the end of the day. Because let's face it, you're the only one that's gonna be with you every hour of every day of your life. So we might as well make as many of those, like feel good to us and like ourselves in the process. But whatever those things are that are gonna make you feel good at the end of the day about yourself and feel accomplished and feel successful, those. Those are the things that we want to prioritize. And honestly, I just really don't believe, like, unless it's like something that you built from the ground up yourself, I really don't believe that our jobs or our workplaces, like at the end of the day, that's probably not what you're gonna care the most about. You're gonna, like, if you're laying in bed and you're thinking about all the things you didn't do, it's probably more like things around the house, things with your children, things with your family, things with your friends. You're not laying in, in bed at the end of the night going. Like, oh my God, I really regret that I canceled that meeting. Or, oh my God, I really regret that I didn't finish that spreadsheet. I know you have to return to that thing later on. So maybe that thing is something that you're like, I wish I would've done that. But at the end of the day, that thing is probably not making up the life that you want to live. I don't know if that. I hope you're picking up what I'm putting down. And then the last thing, and I always suggest this, so you probably will see this coming once I say it, but the third thing in this three step process is take action. So do one thing, right? So take action on one thing that you've decided is successful. So if, if success for you right now in this phase of life is really building up your marriage or your relationship or something like that. Then maybe that means that right now you, the action that you're going to take is you are going to designate a specific day of the week for date night. And if work comes up, if family comes up, if whatever comes up that it's a non-negotiable that is date night, or if you are really prioritizing your health, but you know, maxing out your workouts or running a few miles a day or something like that, like that's not realistic to you. That's not what success looks like for you and your health in this stage of life. What success looks like to you is a water goal or a sleep goal or something like that. Set that up right now. If sleep is your goal, you guys like. Take an action right now. I know you can't just go to sleep right now. I'm not. I mean, maybe you can, maybe it's like nine or 10:00 PM and you can just go to sleep right now. But maybe the action that you can take is you can like set up your bed space, like bedtime space to go to sleep. Or you can plug your, put, plug your charger in across the room right now so that whenever you go to bed you can put, plug your phone into the charger and you're not scrolling and you're not losing sleep because you're scrolling or if success in the workplace right now looks like setting boundaries, then maybe you can find a project that you've been assigned to do or is. Kind of outside of your job expectations or is taking up a lot of your time right now and you can ask for an extension on it or you can ask for, yeah, like an extension of the deadline or something like that because you're really trying to get work life balance and prioritize that and have that be the success in your life right now. I hope this is making sense to you guys. I love you all so much and I thank you for listening in and hopefully. This is something good that you can kind of chew on this week and think about like what kind of hidden unspoken measures of success am I holding myself to and do I actually care about those things? This might be a good time to go back to, I had an episode a few May a few weeks ago, or a few, a few episodes before this one. That was about the nine areas of life balance, or maybe it was seven areas of life balance. Gosh, don't even ask me. Job, the job search takes so much mental load, but. The different areas of life balance. This might be a good place for you to go. So you can figure out like, okay, where, which areas do I want to prioritize right now? And which ones am I kind of okay, letting take the back burner? Because we can't be successful in every single thing, in every single phase of our life, nor do we want to. And that's what I want you guys to realize is like, I don't think you actually wanna be successful in every single little thing that you have. You just have certain things. That light you up and that you want to do really, really well. And those are the things that we need to be focusing on. So hope this is helpful. Love you. Thank you.