EP 162: Why High-Achieving Women Secretly Resist Success

There’s a fear many high-achieving, soul-led women carry - but rarely name.

Not the fear of failure.
The fear of what success will cost.

Because stepping into your next level often means outgrowing people, patterns, and identities that once made you feel safe.
And that kind of expansion? It doesn’t just bring possibility. It brings grief.

In this episode, we explore the invisible emotional edge behind your stuckness - and what it really means to outgrow versions of yourself that were never meant to hold your next chapter.

Inside, we’ll walk through:

• The neuroscience behind identity conflict and success resistance
• Why your nervous system may associate struggle with belonging
• What to do when rising means losing connection - and how to lead through it with integrity
• How to stop sabotaging your success to stay safe in old roles and dynamics

This episode is for the woman who is ready for more - but finds herself hesitating, circling, or quietly shrinking to stay connected.

Because deep down, you already know - it's not about being ready.
It's about feeling safe.

Reflection prompts:

• What parts of me are afraid of being too big, too visible, or too different?
• Who or what might I lose if I fully step into the life I desire?
• Am I leading from expansion - or managing other people’s comfort?

Listen now to uncover the unseen blocks between where you are and who you're becoming.

Resources: https://jessicaread.com/resources

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Resource with Jessica Reed. This is the podcast for visionary entrepreneurs who are here to build a thriving business and luminous life, fully resourced from the inside out. Here we unlock the magic of inner alignment, emotional mastery, and energetic strategies, so you can lead with clarity, confidence, and ease. This is your space to shed what no longer serves you, embody your highest potential, and expand into the next evolution of your business and soul's work. You are meant for more, and it all starts here.

squadcaster-c86a_1_04-22-2025_131542: 0:47

Somewhere along the way of my business journey, I realized something strange. I wasn't actually afraid of failing. I wasn't unclear on what I wanted. I wasn't unprepared. I was actually afraid of what would happen if I succeeded, and the identity that I would actually have to leave behind if I succeeded, because deep down. I knew that stepping into my next level would mean outgrowing people, outgrowing patterns and outgrowing identities and coping strategies and behavioral patterns that I had spent my whole life protecting because they had served a really great purpose for me, even though they were extremely limiting. I'm going to give you some examples of this shortly. And I see this all the time with high achieving women. They're not actually confused. They're not stuck. They're not afraid of what success will cost them. In fact, most women are willing to do whatever it takes to get that success. We have it in us and we see it all the time. We've seen it in the hustle culture. We've seen it in the burnout culture. We know. We know that we're not afraid to actually do what it takes. Doesn't mean that we will do those things, but we know we're not afraid to do it. But while we are actually afraid to do, and this was something that I was not aware of for such a long period of time, and even just recently. In my next level, as every time we want to expand every time we are getting ready for that next increment in our growth, we have to go through something first. It just seems to always happen, right? I have just experienced this within myself yet again and found yet another identity that I still am doing the work to be okay with letting go of so that. I can take that next step in my journey, and I'm not gonna say of becoming my future self because I already think and act as if I am her in my capacity right now in what I believe she would be doing, thinking, saying, and that it grows and that expands every day as well. So what I see with these high achieving women is that what they are also afraid of is the identity that they have to let go of. Welcome back to Resource with Jessica Reed. This is where we talk about the invisible edges that keep powerful women stuck, and how to move through them with clarity, with emotional safety, with deep alignment. Today's episode is something that I never really realized that I was experiencing until I was well into my own evolution. It wasn't until I really started growing in my visibility, in my income, in my leadership, that I noticed how much grief was actually coming with it, and how much fear was coming along with it, how much resistance I had to growth without even realizing it. So this episode is for you. If you are the woman who keeps hitting that invisible ceiling, who keeps doing the work, who knows what she has to do. You are willing to do it. You're willing to do whatever it takes, except probably this thing that you're not aware of. You can even feel what's possible. You close your eyes, you're like me, you close your eyes and you see the thing. You know that it's there. You know that the steps that you are taking you towards it, but at the same time, something is holding you back. And today we are gonna put a name to what that thing is. So that fear of outgrowing people, roles, relationships, identities that have defined who you have been, we are going to ground this in neuroscience. We are gonna explore the identity attachment underneath Success resistance, and tie it back to something that I teach inside my Energies of Success framework so that you can really learn how to meet this resistance without making it wrong. But actually find a way to safely move through it. So let's drop into this. Now, you are not likely as stuck as you think you are. You are in an identity conflict. Let's start here. Again, you're not unclear, you're not lacking the steps, you're not lacking the strategy. You're not self-sabotaging for no reason, nor because there's something wrong with you. Which by the way, is what most women think. I'm just not cut out for this. I don't know why I always self-sabotage. What is happening is that your nervous system is experiencing an identity threat. This is what I mean as humans. We don't just build habits, we build identities, and we attach to roles and relationships and emotional patterns because they give us predictability and they give us a sense of belonging. And from a neuroscience perspective, your brain is constantly trying to keep you in familiar, emotional territory. Not happy, not even healthy, just familiar. Okay, so I want you to start thinking about what is familiar for you. So when you start to expand and this version of you who is ambitious and she's visible and she's well resourced and she's emotionally grounded, this threatens the roles that you've always played. Whatever they might look like and do you know what? Sometimes it's really hard to admit to those roles. I know even for me having to identify where I had been always going into a victim, always going into these old coping strategies that were the only way that I knew how to get love tension. So I thought. Old patterns that actually I had picked up in my childhood that had just been rewrapped in different, wrapping in different scenarios of my life and my business. The system contracts, the brain says this isn't who we are, and the body says it's not safe for me to go there. And so you contract, and this is why growth can actually sometimes feel like grief. Because parts of you are actually mourning the identities that you're outgrowing, even if they were painful identities, because they were familiar, because they kept you connected. This is why it can feel so scary because we're not just stepping out of our comfort zone and stepping into the familiar, and we think so much about stepping into the next level version of us, of ourselves, but we don't often think about the death and the rebirth that needs to come with that. And the identity, the part of us. And I, say that I don't know, if you're not watching YouTube, you can't see me. But I think about that part and I think about that part as a small child who has just been coming forward into my conscious mind to try and keep me safe. And that part, she needs to stop taking the lead. And we don't often think about the parts of us that got us to where we are. And how hard it can be to actually stop allowing those parts to take the lead. And that is where so much of the discomfort and the fear comes from. It's not, as I said at the very beginning, so much about I'm afraid of failing or even I'm afraid of succeeding. It's actually I'm afraid of who I will need to be. And who I will need to, the parts of me I will need to let go of in order to succeed because that often comes with people who we're connected to. It comes with familiar scenarios that we are connected to, and it comes with deep seeded parts of us that we know, that we've come to know as our identity. And it also keeps you connected to a circle of people. Who may not be able to come to that next level with you. So this is why the struggle is actually about belonging, and this is one of the key shadows, that energy of struggle that only finds peace when it aligns with purpose. So here is the thing that so many women, are in this chronic struggle loop because they don't have purpose. Because their nervous system associates belonging with struggle. It says, if I succeed, I'll be too much. If I make more money, then they'll think that I've changed. If I rise, I'll lose that connection. So they unconsciously stay smaller, so much smaller than they're capable of being. And again, night out of fear of failure. Not out of not having the capacity to be able to do the tasks or to learn the things or to implement the strategy, but actually out of a desire a, very survival, instinct based desire to stay loved. This is a neurobiological attachment response. Your system wants to preserve your relational safety more than it wants to scale your income, but your soul, it wants that freedom. It wants that financial abundance, it wants that freedom to be able to, if you think about us as spiritual beings, we are meant to be free. I, so I believe, and until you really see these things clearly, you will keep confusing. Self projection, sorry, self protection with procrastination. And this is why, again, the energies of success that I implement into every container that I have, my mastermind, my private space, this is my signature framework because it's not just about what you do, it's about who you actually feel safe to be. Become. We can't have the leverage strategy without clearing the past to create space, the internal space, and aligning ourselves energetically into who we need to be to hold that. That's the Energies of success framework. By the way. You've not heard me speak about it before. Clear align and leverage. They all piece together and they are all essential. The energies of success is the only way to create a successful, a scalable, a sustainable, but also, in my opinion, a happy and joyful life. Because when we are working in alignment, when we have cleared the identities that are no longer coming with us. When we and that, work is continual, the energies of success is like a big circle. We keep feeding it through, though again, we can't have that leverage strategy without that internal work. So how do we move through this with integrity? How do we meet this fear? It's not just by pushing through it. And as someone who has been through and. I've gone through again recently, that anxiety exposure, I'm not talking about that need to push through the fear or push through the anxiety so that we can teach our brain it's safe. I'm not talking about that in this case. I'm not talking about bypassing it either. Pretending that we don't feel grief or discomfort as we grow, but really we move through this with integrity by creating space for all of it. The version of you that is scared to outgrow the people that mean the most to you, the part of you that wants to be big, and the part of you that still wants to be accepted. The fear that being more means being alone. So here is where I would guide you to begin. If you're my client, first of all, name the trade-offs that you fear the most, and then ask yourself, if I fully step into this next level, what am I afraid I will lose? And what part of me am I afraid of saying goodbye to? I recently went through something deeply personal, and I said, I sent my therapist a message and I said. This is what I need to work through and good luck because I am telling you the resistance that I have to, to not doing this thing is massive. It's serving such a purpose that I know I need to let it go because it's impacting my life. But there's a big part of me that doesn't want to, and it's okay to admit that if you can't see that, if you can't feel that resistance into the pieces of you that aren't coming with you. Then you're not going to be able to fully own them. You can ask yourself, whose approval am I still trying to keep? And bringing all of this into light. It removes the shame around it. Then we would be regulating around your identity shift. Okay? If we were working privately, we would be using EFT. We'd be using somatic anchoring hypnosis as we bring you into that next level. As we let your nervous system stretch into a new baseline of safety, and we would imprint that into your subconscious, we would be clearing out the old, working through the emotions, the traumas the, things that are stuck in your body that are keeping you in that old identity. Because the goal isn't just to expand it is to feel safe expanding and if necessary. Then we will hold space to grieve the old identity with compassion and to let go of the version of you who needed to be small to feel loved. And we would thank her. We would consciously choose the version, the part. You hear me talk a lot about parts when we work together, the part of you that is safe to lead, to thrive, to be fully expressed. And if that kind of work is something that you are ready for. In your next level, in your next era, if you are ready to go deep, because that's what we do in my spaces. We go deep, and that's why it's not for everybody. Then let's have a chat about what private mentorship looks like, because I know you. I know that you are not actually afraid of failing, but you're afraid of who you'll have to stop being if you succeed, and that's okay. Don't let that unspoken fear run your business. Don't let it stop you from rising. Don't let it talk you out of everything that you are meant to become, because what's waiting for you on the other side of that fear, on the other side of that grief, that attachment to that part of you is freedom and his fullness and his leadership, and a business that feels like home. So if you're ready to move through this work gently but powerfully and sustainably, then let's chat. Come over into my dms and we can chat about private mentorship. That would probably be the best space to go into the steps of work. I have free resources that may support you. You can explore all of those in the links below. This work is tender. And I was tagged in a post yesterday of a past client of mine and we worked together probably, gosh, two, nearly three years ago. And she still tagged me yesterday in this post. And she's talking about the work that most women are scared to do. And that is that, it's that work on themselves. It's understanding and, I'm gonna say this with love. And you're gonna know exactly what I mean. If you've been following all of this, it's understanding that you are the problem, you are the problem, and you have the ability to fix that because your business won't outgrow your identity. It's tender work. It's sacred work that when you stop struggling just to belong. Then you start finally being able to rise in your truth. If this resonates with you, I would love to hear from you. Pop over to my Instagram, jessica dot reed dot ilc and say hello again. I have linked a heap of free resources below. You can go down and have an explore resources to help you build emotional resilience resources to help you build energetically aligned offers and to break through your biggest internal and external barriers. And if this work is calling you. Then you can click below and you can explore the private mentorship application. And if it is a good fit, we can move forward with that. And until next week, I hope you have the most amazing week, and I'll see you then.

18:56

Thank you for tuning into resource with Jessica Reed. If today's episode spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it with another soul led entrepreneur who is also ready to rise. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected because when you are deeply resourced, you become unstoppable. Until next time, my friend, stay resourced. Stay radiant and trust in the magic that is you.