What Are You Waiting For?

What if the life you’ve built—the success, the career, the achievements—still leaves you feeling empty inside? 

In this powerful and deeply honest episode, Dr. Tanya Prewitt-White delivers a wake-up call for high-achieving women who are doing everything “right”… but still wondering, is this really all there is?

This isn’t about doing more—it’s about becoming more aligned with who you truly are. Dr. Tanya shares her personal journey of feeling unfulfilled despite external success and how she broke free from the invisible cages she had unknowingly created. She challenges the idea of waiting—waiting for the perfect time, the right conditions, or someone else to change—and instead invites you to take radical responsibility for your life right now.

You’ll learn how to stop overthinking, move out of analysis paralysis, and start taking action that reconnects you with your purpose, your joy, and your truth. Whether it’s small daily shifts or bold life decisions, this episode will help you reclaim your power, redefine happiness on your terms, and stop living a life that looks good on paper but feels empty in reality.

If you’ve been feeling exhausted, disconnected, or like something is missing—this is your sign. You don’t need to wait. You don’t need permission. You are the one you’ve been waiting for.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

It's possible on paper, but it's dusted on the inside. If it even hasn't brought you the happiness you expected. If there's a quiet little voice that keeps asking, is this really all there is? Then this podcast is for you. Here's your host, executive coach, and guide for high-achieving women, Dr. Tanya Cruitt White.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Welcome to Success to Soul. I'm Dr. Tanya, your host. And I want to be someone in your life who is always honest and always loving. And the truth is loving. So here it is. Honey, midlife isn't 50. Midlife for women is 35 to 38. Yes, for those of you in the back, I'm going to say it one more time. Midlife is 35 to 38. So if you're like me and you're in your 40s or you're over 40 or you're in your mid-40s, honey, you're not at midlife. And so, what are you waiting for? I don't have to be the one to tell you that your boobs are sagging beyond your belly button, do I? Or that your brain is foggier than the Golden Gate Bridge. And that you never know how many days or years you have in this body with this life and these awesome souls to love. So, my woman friend, I want to be the one to tell you we can stop waiting. No one is coming to save us. Not our spouse, not our partner, not our lover, not our boss, not our executive coach, but gosh, if I was yours, I'd try. Not your aging parent, not your best friend who loves you so deeply and knows everything about your life. And not your kids who have their own souls to mend and paths to walk. It is not anyone else's job to save us. But the good news is this: you have the power and the ability and the resolve somewhere inside you to save yourself. And life can get really, really good when you do. And you know how I know? Because I used to be the one waiting. I used to be the one prisoned in the cages of my life that I co-created. If you don't believe me, well, I put pen to paper and in my book I wrote, I finally admitted I was unhappy. It wasn't that my husband demanded I center my life around him or our little beautiful family, but I had. I moved from my small New York City apartment and left a tenured position at the City University of New York that I loved in order to give my marriage and our relationship a real chance. But in Chicago, I was unmarred. I had no solid support system or close women friends and was piecing together a life. In a word, I was miserable. I don't know about you, but I was raised not to complain, but to make the most of any situation. And that's what I did. I built a career. I restarted over and over again. And when I cultivated close female friends and they moved away for love or for opportunities, I was happy for them. But my heart hurt knowing I'd have to start from square one with another woman friend. And I pushed through in a city that didn't feel like home. Twelve years in Chicago, I was still in a space I didn't love to inhabit. So yeah. All right. There you have it. I don't know about you, but I get to work with so many women who achieve, who grind, who hustle, who accomplish, who support, who serve. And someday we wake up and realize we are not happy. But you have the power, I know you do. You can change your reality. But we wait for some far-off date on a calendar that may never come. Things like when our kids are grown, when our boss retires, when we retire, when this or that happens, or this or that person changes, then we'll go on that trip, then we'll pitch the project, then we'll write the book, then we'll do the thing, then we'll go on more dates. We wait and we waste away the preciousness of our life, of our breath. And we are creating the conditions of our lives. This condition that we'll be happy, we'll be grateful or successful when the conditions are better or the conditions are perfect. But we all know they never are. And I also don't need to be the one to tell you we aren't getting any younger. I don't know, we're not getting any younger. And there's some things that no collagen mask from Sephora are going to fix. So let's embrace our lives today. You want to be more happy? Be happy. You want to be more peaceful, be peaceful. You want to be grateful. Find things in your life to be grateful for. Action commitment therapy is so helpful for us, and it's not just for therapists. Anybody can use the tool. So, first of all, we acknowledge or accept where we are. Where we are is not a surrender. We acknowledge what emotions we're feeling where life doesn't feel full. It's not a giving up, it's a truth. It's our acceptance. And we cannot change anything that we do not accept in our lives. And so for my previous self, I began to feel suffocated by family responsibilities, a career way too mundane for this dynamic heart and soul. And my life had become so predictable, as predictable as Monday morning traffic in Chicago. I was unfulfilled. So we acknowledge it, we sit with it, we own it, we feel it, and everything starts with acceptance. Once we name what we feel, we can change it. Then we ask, how do I want to feel in my life, in my family, in my relationships, in my friendships, in work, right? How do I want to feel? For me, I wanted to feel alive and inspired. Now I know so many of us get stuck in the ruminating, right? The ruminating, what Dr. Martha Beck calls the anxiety spiral, where our need for control creates our need for planning, and then our need for planning becomes the need for our perfectionism, which only creates more overthinking and more control and more overplanning. Whew! And then we've dug so deep down into this hole of analysis and paralysis and anxiety that we need a ventilator for air. And that AED needs to come and take our heart and shock us from the numbness and the paralysis that we created, that we feel. What I'm telling you is sometimes we need to stop thinking, we need to stop overthinking, we need to stop processing everything as a form of control. So far that we end up going deeply into this depressive paralysis because woman friends, action, action heals. Yes, ACT, ION, action, girls action. For real. I was never a cheerleader, but gosh, I'm a cheerleader now. And so if we want to feel more inspired, more alive, whatever it is you want to feel, ask yourself, what do I need to do? And then do the thing. Don't overthink. Trust your desire. Trust whatever comes up for you is the action that you need to do. It's really simple. Do the thing. And clients tell me all sorts of big and small things that come up for them. They need to tend to the garden with their hands for only 10 minutes to feel more alive. They need to read in the evening before they go to bed to feel grateful. They need to hug their partner when they arrive in the home and they need to sit in that embrace to feel safe, to feel loved. Right? Other people, they need to quit their job. They need to buy a new home. But I want you to know that it can be big things, big actions, but it also can be small actions that make up the realness, the everyday life that we're living. So these are the moments we're desiring more of. More of what makes us feel whole. More of what makes us know that we are leading with our soul, not just our head. We're leading with our heart, not just our brain. This is what makes us feel alive. And so I want to be the one to be real. What would shift for you if you took 100% responsibility for your life? Yes, I'm talking about radical responsibility for everything in your life. What if you owned that you are that powerful, you are that energetic, magnetic, that yes, you can create anything that you want? What if you took ownership over every response you've had to people who did you wrong? And woman friend, I know, I know your boss gave the job to the less capable, less deserving colleague. I know your spouse or partner maybe emotionally cheated, physically cheated, or doesn't even see who you really are. I know your family member left you out of the trust or the will and it hurts. I know your colleague took your ideas as their own and ran away like Jackie Joyner Kirsty into the sunset and you're angry. But what if you took responsibility for your response, your day, your peace? Who would you be? How would you show up? Do that thing, and I promise you, your life will shift and change. There's a stimulus, right? There's a trigger that causes sometimes an emotion in us. Feel that emotion, acknowledge the emotion, and then choose how you want to respond. Sometimes we have to wait to be happy. But I don't want us to keep waiting. I want it to be before the stars align because if your life is like mine, every day the stars don't align. Sometimes, as a friend of mine says, life be life in, right? And I'm no astrologer, but I do believe that if we ask for the right doors to open, I believe we receive in this life not what we want, but who we are. And we are powerful and we are kind and we are energetic and we are loving and we are supportive and we are worthy. And I know we are more than capable. I know sometimes we create the cages we call prisons in our lives. Because I used to create my own cages, but I want to be the person to tell you not to wait another day. Your life, your breath, your soul is much, much too precious. So let me tell you a little bit about how my story is unfolding. I have a wise, wise mentor in my life, a teacher. People come into our lives for reasons we don't always understand in the moment, but they're always profound. And my coach and my mentor at the time, Nini Lee, said to me as I was saying, I'm not happy. I feel miserable in life. I don't know if I can do another 10 years like this. I was desperate. And she looked at me through the Zoom screen. We were countries away, but I felt connected through the screen. And she said, Have you told your husband all of this? Because if you want to be fully transparent, fully loved, you have to trust yourself enough to be fully seen. So I text my husband, and I told him everything. I had nothing to lose. Every hurt, every disappointment, every dream that was dying inside of me. I told him I couldn't do another decade like the last one. And I told him, I'm going to live my biggest dreams. I said that to him, and I said, I hope you're coming with me. But if you're not, I'm still going. And in sharing my truth, I saw it. The problem wasn't just my husband, it was me. I had given away pieces of myself bit by bit to fit in a mold of what I thought I should be in this world. I was waiting for someone to save me. My husband had never asked me to sacrifice my happiness. I had done that all on my own. And so, my woman friend, you living in your truth, in your fullest authenticity, provides the people around you to love you more. Yes, you are going to lose some things, but you are going to gain so much more. You being all in, in your fullness, in another woman's permission to take the makeup off. That's who you're going to be, to be in her fullness too. My friend, you are the one you've been waiting for. And she's so beautiful, and she's so strong, and she has strength that she has never met yet. She survived her worst days, and she's still grateful for it all. So let's together, arm in arm, take one hundred percent radical responsibility for our lives. For we know how the story ends. So it is. See what beauty we can create together. Because you are worthy of all of your dreams, the big ones and the small ones. And if no one has told you today, you are more than enough. I love you, Dr. Tanya. I'll see you next week.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

So that's it for today's episode of Success to Soul. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance to win a grand prize drawing of a value with $10,000 with Dr. Tanya herself. Be sure to visit success to soul.com to pick up a copy of your free gift. You can ask her any question you like in your voice, and she'll answer you back personally in her voice. Then join us on the next episode.