Why Successful Women Still Feel Stuck

Why Successful Women Still Feel Stuck

The thing keeping so many women stuck is not failure.

It’s success that came at a cost.

In this episode, I unpack one of the most confusing experiences high-performing women face: building a life that looks successful on paper whilst quietly feeling disconnected, exhausted, flat or deeply unsure about what comes next.

We explore:

•  Why “stuck” is often not the real problem 
•  How years of conditioning can disconnect women from themselves 
•  The hidden cost of being the dependable one 
•  Why high-functioning women struggle with confusion 
•  The difference between urgency and alignment 
•  Why confidence is often a symptom — not the root issue 
•  How over-functioning, perfectionism and survival mode keep women trapped 
•  Why awareness must come before action 
•  The reason changing jobs doesn’t always solve the problem 
•  What “clarity before confidence” actually means 

I also share personal reflections from my own career journey, alongside powerful insights from coaching women through career transitions, reinvention and identity shifts inside Reset & Rise.

This is not a conversation about “fixing yourself.”

It’s about reconnecting with yourself underneath the noise.

Because often the women calling themselves stuck are not incapable, behind or failing…

They are exhausted from years of overriding themselves.

And honestly?
 That’s a VERY different conversation.

Key Takeaway

You are not broken.
You are likely disconnected from yourself whilst carrying too much for too long.

And once awareness returns?
 Clarity starts to return too.

Then confidence follows.
 Then momentum.

The real kind.

Connect With Me

If this episode resonated with you and you’re rethinking your career, identity, success or next chapter, you can connect with me here:

Instagram: @_sallyspicerincluded
LinkedIn: sally spicer
Newsletter: Reset & Rise — For women rethinking success, work and what comes next.

Ready For More Support?

If you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed or unsure what your next chapter looks like, the first step is not panic action — it’s clarity.

You can start here:
 Career Clarity Form

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, hello. It is officially the hottest day of the year, which makes me very, very happy. But before I go out in the sun, I want to talk to you all about why successful women still feel stuck. Okay. And I think it's one of the most confusing experiences women could have. And from my line of work, this is how it plays out. Okay. When your life looks successful on paper, and when you've achieved the things that you were taught to want, okay, and when everyone around you is telling you how lucky you are, and your parents are boasting about you to all of their friends, okay, it becomes near on impossible to admit that something no longer feels right. And how do I know this? Well, as you know, I have been there, okay. I held on far too tightly for far too long. And in the end, right, it was only really me that suffered. I mean, I would argue that my immediate family suffered as well because I was so miserable, but I was suffering, right? And I didn't realise or recognise that the people that I worked with, the ones that I was terrified of letting down because I'd always been the reliable one, the one at work, you know, um, who was like putting in the extra hours and carrying all the load. But those people were probably, and on reflection, better off not having me in their team and having someone in their team who wanted to be there instead, okay? Because I gave my career everything. It literally was my whole personality. And I love that phrase so much, it really makes me laugh. But seriously, I gave it everything, and I didn't know who I was without it. And questioning it felt like I was questioning genuinely my whole identity, right? My whole being. Like, who was I without the title, the respect, the salary? And my ego played like a huge, huge part in it, and regularly piped up saying things, ridiculous things, which again kind of make me laugh now, thinking, Well, how could they possibly survive without me? And I mean, it's a joke, right? In the corporate world, you are trained and conditioned to be so full of your own self-importance, and it's a survival technique, right? So there's no shade. But seriously, I used to like have back to backs. I used to wear back to backs like a badge of honour and run to meetings. And I I laugh at how seriously I took it and how seriously I took myself now. If I look back, right? But it is our coat of armour, right? Our survival instinct. So it's no surprise, I think, that it becomes so ingrained in our identity. But let's get back to this kind of um this feeling, if you like, of being stuck. So stuck is a feeling, right? It's quite easy to say, it feels pretty definite. Um, but interestingly, and this is what I find in my line of work, is that it's not actually easy to articulate why. And that's where I don't know, like we become unstuck, which is hang on, this that phrase is not going to work because we're all gonna get really confused. So, what can I say instead of unstuck? Um uh, this is where the theory or the concept of being stuck falls apart. Because what happens next when I ask my clients, well, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by being stuck? Is they can't answer it straight off the bat. So it's not like it's on the tip of their tongue, and that genuinely is where the real work begins, right? So hold on to your hat. So let's start with um, let's start. I'm thinking like this could be like a whole bloody novel. We could be here until like Sunday night, but let's just let me cut into this, right? Why might we feel stuck, right? We can unpack this in loads of different ways, right? And genuinely, each of those I think could be an episode in itself. But let's look at it in the simplistic terms. We feel stuck because of conditioning, and that conditioning comes in many different forms. So, as women, we're conditioned to be dependable, loyal, liked, likable. Um, and I'm sure most of the environments that you've worked in have made you believe that you are lucky to have a job, right? Budgets are down, you know, costs are up. We're doing everything we can to keep the lights on, this freaking corporate weird drama. So, in other words, be grateful for your lot. And let's face it, as women, right, we do not like letting people down. So then we have this unwritten rule that we live our lives by, which is like we got to have the resilience of an ox, which I don't even think is a phrase, but do you know what I'm trying to say? Like, we are resilient. Again, we wear it like a badge of honor, like at work and at home. We excel at holding shit together, not just our own, but everyone else's too, which leaves very little mental or physical capacity. Um, and I think that is the word that we need to focus on here is capacity to actually sit down and work this stuff out. So we live our lives, quote unquote, in control, right? Holding everything together, carrying loads that don't belong to us. We have become perfectionist, which we all know isn't healthy, but there is this pressure to perform. And quite frankly, be amazing at everything we do. And the standard we set just keeps rising and rising and rising, and yet we still kind of you know seek to meet it, right? And then, sorry, we are still not finished, right? To put on top of all of that is the load. And I'm saying the load as if it's like one word, right? And the fact that we've stayed in our roles for too long, we have become institutionalized. We don't even know what is possible in terms of our next move, how the markets change, the fact that we're now 10 years older, we feel less relevant, we're less practiced in this job transition lark, and we don't know what jobs are out there, right? It's absolutely terrifying. So despite being the most in control, perfection of shit holding together human you know, and don't pretend you do not commend yourself for this, right? Secretly, and how amazing you know you are for holding it all together, despite massively moaning about it. But the question then begs is how is it even possible that you are this superhuman and don't have it figured out about what you're going to do next, right? So you are not stuck, you are confused, you're definitely exhausted, but you're definitely confused. And we have completely fallen out of practice for all of the reasons above, right? About asking ourselves what we actually want. And I therefore think that's a very, very different conversation, right? Because women are like us don't really do confusion very well, do we? We are the people that everyone else goes to for the answers. The organized one, the capable one, the one who's got like 74 tabs open mentally at any one time. I've literally got about 30 tabs open on my computer at the moment. Um, but you know, we're the one who remembers birthdays. I don't, by the way, I do not remember anyone's birthdays, um, and I'm terrible at life happening, but you know, I fix the problems, right? We're the ones jumping on the call, smoothing over the tension, carrying the emotional load, etc. etc. And so when we don't know what to do next, right, it feels catastrophic. And then suddenly the woman who knows exactly what to do in every other aspect of her life is sitting there staring into space, frantically googling jobs for over 40s who are burnt out and still need to earn what they need to earn, right? And honestly, that is the point where women start calling themselves stuck. So I want to challenge this idea of being stuck because obviously you can tell from this pod, I absolutely don't believe that you are, right? And what I see is, you know, over time and time and time again, women have overridden themselves for so long they can no longer hear themselves clearly. And I think that is very different because when you spend years kind of being this dependable, resilient, reliant one, the one who kind of gets on with it, you are so au fay with functioning and coping and delivering and performing that you actually lose connection with yourself underneath it all. So the one day we're then waking up and thinking, like, what is wrong with me? Why can't I figure this out? Why do I feel so flat? Why does everything suddenly feel so heavy? And it's because we're high-functioning women, right? We immediately make ourselves the problem. I'm not confident enough, I don't have enough time, I'm behind, I'm not capable, I need to push harder, right? And most of those things, all of those things, right, are complete distractors. Underneath all of that is this exhausted, disconnected human who is essentially trying to make huge life decisions from survival mode. And that is where we start making mistakes, right? And the second we then feel like something is off, we either completely freeze and hide and don't do anything about it, or we try to immediately go into solve. So we apply for jobs, start a business, book a course because we don't think we're skilled enough, you know, burn out how our lives down by Wednesday, because we're action-oriented, right? This is what we do. We are productive and capable, and we've been taught that movement means progress, right? But what if the real reason you feel lost is because you have been spending years moving without actually checking whether the direction still feels right, and that is why number one, obviously, women come and work with me, but why when you go and see a career coach, it's not about getting that next job. That's what people think they come to me for, right? Because obviously they feel something's off, or they want to work on the confidence, etc. But genuinely, we do not start with action in reset and rice, right? And I know that really, really frustrates some women because they come to me wanting that. Tell me what job to apply for, tell me how to do it, tell me what business to start, tell me what my next move is. They're like, I need action, I need that dopamine, right? But your next move is not the first thing we need to figure out, okay. You are. We need to figure out who you are before we then start making decisions. Because if you start building this next chapter on not solid foundations, and you're building it from a place of exhaustion and pressure and fear and panic and proving energy, right? We're just going to recreate another version of the same life with different branding, right? And that is what so many high-performing women are actually doing. So different companies, same dynamic, different titles, same exhaustion, you know, different business, same overfunctioning, different salary, same disconnection. Because no one's ever taught us, um, and we don't feel like we've got enough time to actually pause long enough to figure out what it is that I actually want now. So this is like not what I wanted 10 years ago, or it's not a version of me that was trying to survive, or it's not a version of me that's trying to impress anyone. This is me now, and this is where awareness genuinely changes everything. Because when we finally slow down long enough to hear ourselves properly, the answers are already there, like genuinely, they're already there. And this is, I mean, I love the aha moments we get in coaching sessions, but like that realization of like, oh, okay, yeah, I've been telling myself this the whole time, and I've just been distracting or avoiding, or yeah, just completely ignoring myself. It's buried under, right? It's buried under all of this expectation and conditioning and fear, people pleasing, the perfectionism, which we know the more self-aware we get, that we actually don't want to be anyway. And and like, frankly, it's just noise. So, one of the first things I ask within Reset and Rise is like, how do you actually want to feel in your life and your career? So, not what job title do you want, and not what salary sounds impressive, and not what good look looks like on LinkedIn. I mean, like literally puking your hand, but you know, how do you actually want your life to feel? Because we have spent so many years building these lives on like these external measures of success, and then internally feel really resentful. Resentful is a word that I personally um had to do a lot of work with because I did. I actually I felt resentful a lot of the time, and like it was just like this kind of low-level like anger. And I'm like, well, what would my life be like if I didn't feel resentful? Like, it took me a long time to work through it, and I'm through the other side of it now, but like that's how I felt internally. I felt resentful, like I felt drained, flat, anxious, trapped, overwhelmed, etc. etc. And I think this is why when we become so emotionally detached from ourselves, this is why clarity feels so hard. Because clarity doesn't come from this, like just focus on it and think hard and it will happen. It comes from doing everything that our body is telling us not to do, which is basically creating enough space to hear yourself underneath all this noise. And so we, you know, this is what we've got to work on, right? So um, let's think about this, right? Let's think about the difference. We want to think about if we've got clarity, what is going to start to return, right? And if we were to confront some of these other feelings and you know, think about the kind of honesty and the trust that we have our own voice to say, like, I actually don't want this anymore. I I actually I do feel exhausted. I've built a life that works for everyone else, but not me, right? And that I don't think is failure. I think it's quite humbling to have those thoughts because you're then left with a okay, what's next? So now I've acknowledged that I don't want to feel like this anymore, but it's not failure, right? It's awareness. And and awareness, I think, genuinely is where everything starts. So um, so yeah, I mean, in reset and rise, right, we spend a lot of time on awareness before action, right? Um, we don't go into like full-on strategy, follow this PowerPoint presentation, here's a five-step plan, perfect time to move, right? It's not all about that at all. It's about building everything from the foundation first, right? So once we've got that, and I think what is fascinating is, you know, we have all the answers, we just need to tap into them. Um and I tell you what as well, I had this conversation with a founder this week who I'm working with, who's gone to sit up on their own, and she has left the corporate life to build a wellness business, supporting women who like no longer wanted to live that world either, right? And interestingly, she thought that part of her future business model was to have, you know, was to involve going back into corporates to speak and consult and like kind of build visibility, right? And it makes sense, right? Like logically, it made sense, but then this massive corporate opportunity landed in her inbox, like literally in her inbox and LinkedIn. She didn't have to do anything about it, right? Um, and instead of like excitement, her body basically screamed like absolutely not. So she then thought it was like imposter genome syndrome. So she's like, Sal, can we jump on a call? Like, I want to work through this with you, like, oh my god, you know, this used to be my world. Why do I feel so nervous about it? And then I was like, okay, well, do you think it is that, you know? And we did a real kind of delve on it, and she was like, actually, it's not that I don't feel confident, right? It's that I don't want that life anymore, right? And her nervous system knew it before her brain had even caught up. And in the relief of the session, she finally admitted, I do not want to go back into that world like at all. And the clients that she gets, and she's getting clients, aren't even coming from going and talking to corporates. So I think what I'm trying to say is like when we try to force alignment, it just doesn't work, right? And this is what I mean when I talk about like listening to yourself properly. Your body will often tell you the truth before your mind catches up. You've just got to be listening to your body, right? And that is why slowing down matters. Because once we do that, we can actually stop, you know, panic applying and catastrophizing and making these decisions from like, oh my god, I need to survive, right? And start approaching things which are with a completely different energy. And that energy is like space and awareness and you know, clarity and just feeling like you trust yourself to make these decisions. Um, so here I am telling you, offering you, challenging you that you're not stuck, my dear. You just need a little bit of clarity and a little bit of space to work it out. And the magic then comes from what then is the possibility out there, right? What could the future look like? And spoiler alert, it doesn't mean you have to burn down everything and completely walk away from your salary and your financial security in order to follow your dreams, right? Or order to follow a role that gives you purpose, makes you feel alive and makes you feel energized. Because I promise you that is possible in your 40s. Um, so anyway, um I hope this helped. Um, I'm gonna go and enjoy the sun now. I hope you do the same. Share this with someone that you think would benefit. Um and look after yourself. Start thinking about what it is that you want. And if you were to reconnect with actually trying to figure that out, where would you start? Let me know how you get on.