#64: Aligned Success in Life, Leadership, and Parenting

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Success Isn’t One Thing—And That’s the Problem

Overview:
What does success really mean? In this episode, we explore how differing definitions of success create misalignment in leadership, parenting, and personal life—and how to fix it. Through real-world insights and a practical framework, you’ll learn how to define success with clarity and intention.

Key Topics:

• Why success feels confusing (and why that’s normal)
• The Four Lenses of Success: Personal, Relational, Performance, Legacy
• Misalignment in leadership and team dynamics
• The hidden gap between what parents want vs. what they measure
• Aligned Success: a better way forward
• A powerful question to create clarity immediately

Key Takeaway:
Success is not one universal definition—it’s contextual. Alignment happens when we define it clearly and communicate it intentionally.

Call to Action:
Ready to create alignment in your life or leadership?
 Book a 1:1 coaching session to clarify your vision of success and build a path that actually feels as good as it looks.

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Transcript

Why Misalignment Sneaks In

The Neuroscience Of Value Alignment

Four Lenses Of Success

Success Misalignment At Work

Parenting Beyond High Performance

Questions To Define Success

Coaching Offer And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, let me ask you something. What does success actually mean? I went out and asked people from all different walks of life this exact question, and I asked a lot of the kids and their parents that I work with. And the answers were all over the place. Some people said happiness. Some people said freedom. Some people said specific accomplishments, the ability to like impact an outcome. Some people said loving relationships. Others were very much result-focused. And here's what stopped me just dead in my tracks. The problem isn't that we define success differently. The problem is we don't realize we're doing it. And that is where misalignment begins. We've talked about being misaligned because of external factors like distractions in our environment. And we talked about being misaligned when we stop, we actually over-accommodate or we just over-adjust what we're actually going to say. And this week I thought, well, this is gonna be pretty easy. We're just gonna define success and see how clear that can be. Well, I opened up a can of worms. This podcast sometimes is where we take ideas that feel a little bit tangled. So my this is my attempt to bring it into clarity and then action. We're gonna talk about success today, but it's probably not the way you heard about it before. It's nothing like the way I got trained with my MPA. I used to think that success was a really universal formula. Maybe a promotion, a top GPA, a certain salary, something you achieved and just checked off. As I got older, I came to realize that success had to do with my family and how my kids were doing. Five years ago I had a heart attack very unexpectedly, and success for me that year meant that by the end of the year I was going to get off the eight medicines that they put me on that made me feel awful, and I did, and that was success that year. But as I've worked with more parents, more leaders, more students, I realized something critical. Success is really, really personal, and often the problem is that we hold these definitions that were given to us by our parents, by leaders, maybe by society, some people that might be projecting their definitions of success onto the next generation, and I know I was guilty of that with my kids. So, how can we empower them to discover what success feels like for themselves? Because I think they were born knowing it, and then we teach them otherwise without meaning to. So defining aligned success is where I started. And we talked about alignment, it's not just about checking off boxes, as we all know. Any of any of us who have achieved the goals that we thought we wanted to achieve and were very goal-centered, we realize, well, we're still not feeling happy. So is happiness the new success? Is no, because you're not always happy, but you can still be successful. Is inner peace the new success? Well, we have inner peace, but sometimes we get taken off our ground, and I don't think that means that we're failures. So it got pretty mucky there for a while. Many people, many parents, many leaders define success by external markers like grades, promotions, wealth, and they unconsciously project these measures onto their kids or employees, not to say that there is anything wrong with grades, promotions, and wealth. The problem is that when we're chasing someone else's version of success, we often miss the feeling behind it. So if we are doing it because this is how our bosses think we're going to be measured as successful with the business, even if we might have a different idea, this creates a real disconnect in ourselves. And neuroscience actually backs this up. It's why some people, when they do really well and they graduate on the dean's list and joined their sorority and did everything they were supposed to do, sometimes because their decisions weren't aligned with personal values, they don't feel it. They don't feel the high from it, they don't feel the accomplishment from it. We sometimes feel drained when this happens, and sometimes they just feel like I missed the mark. We see this with people that are successful musicians sometimes. They feel like they missed the mark. They did everything that they thought they were gonna do to make themselves happy and feel successful, but really they weren't there. Some of the goals were not theirs. Of course, I looked into neuroscience because I'm a brain geek, and neuroscience really backs this up. So the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, as a study by Moll in 2013 showed, is activated when decisions align with your personal values. So I'm gonna say that again. They've proven that a certain part of your brain lights up when your decisions are aligning with your personal values. And in contrast, when we pursue goals disconnected from these inner feelings because they mean something to somebody else or they mean what we think we should be doing, we feel drained even if we succeed. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad that I found that research because it explained so many things to me. I did expect some variety in the answers, but what I found was really deeper than that. People weren't just giving me different answers. I felt like they were coming from different places. They were coming from different lenses. Some were speaking about how they feel in their life, others were speaking from what they achieved. And when then it clicked for me all of a sudden that success is definitely not one definition. It's multiple definitions, and it's applied to different areas of our lives. Most of us have never really stopped to define these areas clearly. My husband and I, about I guess about 15 years ago, um, did this lifebook training, and we're in that we broke down the areas of our lives, and we had the big tab notebook and everything. I like organization, and we looked at 10 different areas of our life, of our lives at the time, and we're so different now. We grew so much, but we were very purposefully and mindfully, and we go back every year and look at it and think, how are we doing in this area? How are we doing in that area? And I thought that was really a bit much, and my mind worked like we could do it in four lens of success. We could look at four categories and pretty much get the clip notes for it and give you a deep enough dive where you could do something about this. So I looked at it like personal success, which is an indicator like how do you feel? Are you at peace? Do you feel aligned with yourself? Are you able to be yourself and give yourself the freedom to make the choices to be yourself? Does your life reflect who you are? Do your clothes reflect who you are? Does your environment reflect who you are? Does what you say, what you speak, what you feel, is that all in alignment? And that to me is personal success. And you can have that without having some of these other things. So it depends on what you're focused on when you're talking about success. Then you have relational success, and that is how you connect. So it's about relationships. Are they supportive? Are they honest? Are you in integrity with yourself in your relationships? Are they meaningful relationships, surface relationships, just obligatory relationships? Like, are you are you being for real with the people that you're around? Then there's performance success. And when you produce, and everybody likes that feeling, the brain really likes the feeling of working and accomplishing something. It's a dopamine hit. And that's it's a great thing. It's kind of like, are you achieving goals? Are you acting, measuring life from your standard? Like my standard this year was that I'm going to live in congruence with who I am. And when I start to deviate from that, I catch myself all the time. One of my students' standards was that he was going to share with, you know, take the steps to not be afraid to share how smart he was. I had another student who shared about being more flexible with things and being able to flow with life more, and that was her standard, was that she would figure out ways to flow with and negotiate the changes that were given to her. So everybody has some of that, and those types of goals are important. And are we are we getting results? Are we wanting to put energy and action towards something? And are we seeing a result like we can impact our environment? We can impact ourselves. The other success was, and I I heard this from a student in eighth grade. She wants to leave a legacy, and I think that was really impressive. She wants to know, and I think we all can stop and think about that. What are you leaving behind? Are you making an impact? Is this world going to be a little bit better because you're in it? Is one person's day going to be a little bit better because you bumped into them? Are you contributing to something bigger than yourself? So those that's the framework that I wanted to look at it in, and I think I covered anything. If, as you're listening to this, you're like, Sarah, you missed, please message me because I'm always open for growth. None of these are wrong. What happens is when we mix them up or assume others share our definition, that is when the problems start. So looking at it through a leadership lens, this is tricky because it shows up all the time. Businesses do have to perform. We they do have to make money. There has to be metrics, KPIs, outcomes in business. Organizations define success this way, and there's nothing wrong with that. But then the individuals that make up the business are also defining their success through personal and relational lenses, through their purpose, through their autonomy, through feeling valued, through feeling like they may be making an impact on the world. So what happens? You have a leader talking about one type of success and three other types of success in the room at the same time that are not being addressed. So you got a leader standing up saying, whoa, look at our profit margins. We are winning, and a team quietly feeling like they personally are losing and they're empty. That is not a performance issue. The numbers look good. That's definition misalignment in business. So you could try something like here's what success looks like for the company, and here's what success looks like for you as a human being. Let's talk about it. The one that stood out to me more than anything was the parenting lens. And when I asked parents what success meant for them personally, most of them said to feel free, to feel safe, to feel happy, to be able to live life on their terms, to be able to impact their environment, to have a happy family. But when they talked about their kids, and when I asked the kids, some of the kids said these same qualities and they mirrored these statements. But some of them, for some of them, success became achievement and performance, and that was it. And I don't think that's what their parents meant to communicate. That raised a really powerful question to me. Are we raising successful kids or just high-performing kids? In parenting, effort and achievement definitely matter, but not at the expense of your identity or your joy or your self-worth. So, as a parent or leader, how are you supposed to create the space for other people to define sex success on their terms? Well, the first thing you can do is pause and ask, what feelings do I associate with success? Is it pride? Is it peace? Is it safety? Is it freedom? Is it a feeling of just having enough and being enough and just a full heart? Then you can ask the people you're working with or raising, what does success feel like to you? And get them into the feeling behind it. I mean, some people could say it's, you know, making a certain amount of money, and there's nothing wrong with that indicator, but really is what's the feeling that you would have from making that amount of money? What's the feeling that you will have when you get the grades? Will it be that you're able to work at something and accomplish it? Will you would it be a feeling of satisfaction that you can have some kind of power over what's going on? Is it a feeling that other people are going to approve of you? Do you want to be seen? Do you want to be heard? So over time, focusing on that feeling behind the achievements that people talk about helps us all stay true to what really matters. Because the truth is we can have some of those feelings without those external indicators. And I'm not discounting that external indicators are important. I think they are, but the truth is we could be a little happier because we can find ways to have those feelings in our lives anyway. When you break it down in business, here's what success looks like for the company, and here's what success looks like for you as a human being. Align success equals when your definitions match the context and are consciously communicated. As a parent, it can sound like, yeah, this is really important. You tried really hard, achievement is important, you got your grades, or you made your whatever you tried out for, but not at the expense of your identity or your joy or your self-worth. You know, do you still feel like you? Is this really something that you want to be doing? So the solution, the solution to all this is just aligned success. What do we do with all this? What we do is we move towards what I call aligned success. And aligned success means you define success based on the context. Then you communicate that definition really clearly and you allow space for others to define it for themselves, and this is key. In leadership, we talk about what it looks like for the individual and for the company because they're both important. In parenting, we talk about the importance of having a growth mindset, and we also talk about the importance of happiness and staying true to identity and feeling good about yourself regardless. We talk about that, and this is where alignment replaces just assumption. Here's a simple but powerful question you can start using today. What does success look like for you in this area of your life right now? Ask it in your workplace, ask it in your home, ask it of yourself. Don't assume it, don't project it, just clarify it. Well, this was a doozy, and if this conversation resonated with you and you're realizing that there might be some misalignment in your life or your leadership or your relationships, I'd really love to work with you. I have clients who are happy to give testimony and give recommendations. I offer one-on-one coaching sessions where we can get clear on your definitions and your goals and how to bring everything into alignment pretty easily, pretty seamlessly, so that you're not just performing but you're really feeling it and feeling successful. You can reach out to me directly, which is fine, or grab a session through the link in the show notes. Message me on LinkedIn and just message me the word alignment. Success is not confusing. We just haven't been taught to define it with intention. When you get clear on that lens you're using and allow others to define the lens they're using, you don't just create better results, you create alignment, and alignment is where real success lives. Here's to a successful week. See you next time.