#189: The Finish Line That Keeps Moving

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hello there, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You.

I'm grateful you're back. I want to start with a question, and I want you to actually sit with it for a second before we keep going. The question is, when is the last time you truly celebrated something that you accomplished?

Not a quick yay while you were already mentally on to the next thing. Not a fleeting moment of relief before you started loading up the next goal. I mean a real, genuine, I did this. Let me just sit here and feel really good about myself celebration.

Take your time. I'll wait. If you're struggling to think of one, I want you to know that I'm so glad that you're listening today. Here's what I want to confess about me. I graduated from college and instead of celebrating, I was already mentally packing for medical school.

I graduated from medical school in the same week that John and I got married, by the way, which is either romantic or crazy, depending on how you look at it. And instead of savoring any of it, we were already bracing for residency.

I passed my board exams, all of them. And what I felt was mostly relief, relief, and then immediately, okay, what's next? I got hired as an attending physician at Nationwide Children's. And instead of enjoying it, I was already in prove it mode.

Prove you know enough. Prove you can be the one who has the final signature on the chart. Prove that you belong here. Going and going and going, proving and proving and proving. Finish line after finish line.

And I don't think I really stopped to recognize myself and to feel any of it. Does this sound familiar? Because I don't think I'm unusual. I think one of the most common and one of the most quietly devastating patterns that I see in the brilliant, high-achieving women that I work with is this pattern.

We're so good at achieving and we are so bad at arriving and at actually having the goal met. Today, we're going to talk about what happens when success feels like nothing or worse, when it doesn't even register at all because you've already moved on.

So let's paint a picture of how this works because it can be sneaky. It doesn't feel like a problem when you're in it. It feels like ambition. It feels like drive. It feels like exactly what we've all been socialized that we're supposed to be doing.

You set a goal, a big one, the kind that takes years, the kind that requires sacrifice, the kind that becomes the answer to what are you working toward at every get-together that you go to for a decade.

You work for it, you make it, you cross the finish line, and then you look up and the goalpost has moved. It was already somewhere else before you even caught your breath. And there's this tiny, almost imperceptible moment.

Sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's an hour, sometimes it's just a split second where something in you registers, is this it? And then your brain, less its efficient little heart, says, no time for that.

Here's the next thing. Off we go. I want to name at least three versions of this that I see most often in the brilliant women that I coach, because I want you to find yourself in at least one, if not all of them.

So the first version is what I'm going to call the career achiever. She has built an extraordinary professional life. She has the title, the salary, the respect, the letters after her name, all the credentials.

She is genuinely excellent at what she does. And she wakes up some mornings with a feeling she can't quite name, a feeling of low-grade dissatisfaction that she pushes down quickly because she knows objectively that she should be grateful for the life that she's created.

She has everything she's worked for. So why the fuck does it feel like something's missing? Sometimes she figures out that what is missing is her, the real her, the one who existed before she became her job title.

She's been so busy achieving the career that she forgot to check in with the person living it. Version two, the life planner. She had a plan for partnership, tenure, maybe a family, a home, a life that looked a certain way by a certain age.

And she got it, or most of it, and she loves it genuinely. But she also has this quiet, guilty whisper. I thought I'd feel more complete. I thought this would be the part where I could finally relax.

Why am I still waiting to feel like enough? She's not ungrateful. She just built her whole identity around getting to a destination. And now that she's there, she doesn't quite know who she is when she's not in a dogged pursuit of something.

Version three, the goalpost mover. She's particularly good at this one, and I say that with tremendous love because I am her. She is brilliant at setting new goals the moment she's close to the old ones.

So she never actually has to sit with the question of whether the achievement was worth it, whether it made her happy, whether it was even what she actually wanted. There's always another mountain. The moving of the goalpost is, in fact, a coping strategy.

Because if there's always a next thing, she never has to ask, am I enough right now exactly as I am? Is any of this sounding familiar? Any of it sounding true for you? Here's the thing I want to offer you.

I want you to hear it with compassion rather than judgment because I'm talking to myself as much as I'm talking to you. The relentless pursuit, the inability to land, to savor, to stay, is almost never actually about ambition.

It's almost always about fear. Fear that if you stop, you'll fall behind. Fear that rest means laziness. Fear that if you actually let yourself feel good about where you are, you'll somehow lose your edge.

Fear that the real you, the one underneath all the achieving, won't be enough without the achievements. And underneath all of that, a part of you that holds a belief so old, you don't even know that you have it, that your value is conditional, that you are only as worthy as your last accomplishment, that love, respect, belonging, these things have to be earned over and over forever.

And there's no amount of earning that is ever definitively enough. That is exhausting. And it's a lie, but it's a lie that a lot of us have been living as if it were the truth for most of our lives. I want to tell you about a client of mine.

We're going to call her Deanne. Deanne came to me having just made partner at her firm. She'd been working toward that for 11 years, 11 years. And when it happened, she told me she felt nothing. Actually, she felt worse than nothing.

She felt a little bit of terror because the goal that had been organizing her entire identity for over a decade was gone and she didn't know what was underneath it. When we started working together, what we found was that the pursuit had been protecting her from a very uncomfortable question.

Who am I when I'm not working towards something? She had never asked it. She'd been too busy running and grinding and pushing. The answer, when she slowed down finally enough to look, was wonderful. She was fucking hilarious.

She was curious about things that had nothing to do with her career. She was a deeply loving friend. She had opinions about art and food and books. She'd been there the whole time. She just hadn't had a quiet enough moment to meet herself.

That is what slowing down makes possible. Not stagnation, not failure, not falling behind. Slowing down helps you meet yourself. So what do we actually do about this? Because I'm not here to tell you to stop being ambitious.

I love your ambition. I want you to keep it. We need more caring, loving, ambitious women in the world. I just want you to stop letting your ambition rob you of the very life you're building. Coaching is what taught me that it was safe to slow down.

Not immediately, not all at once. I am still very much a work in progress here. You can certainly ask my husband, John. But slowly, through the practice of looking at my own thoughts and asking, wait, who decided this?

Is this actually what I want? Is this true? What I found when I slowed down enough to look was that a lot of my relentless forward motion had been on autopilot. I had been living someone else's script of what success was supposed to look like and feel like and mean.

And I had never stopped long enough to write my own. Here's what I want to offer. Three invitations, not tasks, not goals, simple invitations.

The first, the next time you accomplish something, anything big or small, I want you to pause before you move on. Even for five minutes, even just to say out loud, I did this. It was epic. I'm proud of myself.

You don't have to have a party. You can. You don't have to post about it. You certainly can do that too. You just have to give yourself 30 seconds of acknowledgement that you would give absolutely to someone you love.

And 30 seconds doesn't feel like long enough. Like, let's do 30 minutes at least. This is going to feel uncomfortable at first. Your brain is going to tell you that it's indulgent, that there's no time, that other people have done harder things.

Let those thoughts be there. Pause anyway. The second invitation, ask the question underneath the goal. For any goal that you're currently pursuing, I want you to ask, what do I think I'm going to feel when I get there?

Really sit with it. What's the feeling that you're chasing? Is it freedom? Is it safety? Belonging, enoughness? And then ask, is there any way to access some of that feeling right now, right where I'm sitting, without the goal being completed first?

Spoiler alert, there is. This is not me telling you that the goal doesn't matter. It's me asking you to stop outsourcing your emotional life entirely to some future moment that may or may not deliver what you're hoping for.

The third invitation is to get curious. If you stopped achieving for a season, if you gave yourself genuine permission to rest, to not be in pursuit of anything for just a little while, what comes up?

What feelings show up? What questions start asking themselves? I know that might sound terrifying to some of you, but that terror is actually useful information. It's pointing to exactly what needs your attention.

Here's the thing. Your achievements are real. Your hard work is real. Your capability is already extraordinary. But none of that is who you are. It is what you have done. And you, the actual you, the you that exists when you're not performing or proving or pursuing, she deserves to be known by you first, especially by you.

And then you can introduce her to other people if you want. I want to end with this. I graduated college and didn't celebrate much. I graduated med school and got married in the same week and had a hard time stopping to really feel either one.

I passed the boards. I got hired. I joined a practice. I built a coaching business. And for so much of it I was already somewhere else in my head before the ink was dry.

And I will tell you honestly, I grieve some of that, not in a punishing way. I'm not going to give my inner critic any ammunition here, but in a soft, honest way. Some of those moments deserve to be felt, and I move past them too fast.

In the work that I am doing now, I am going back and I am celebrating those earlier versions of myself. It's not too late to do that. Here's what I also know. I'm not going to do that to myself anymore.

I am practicing arriving. Not perfectly, not always, but I am practicing the pause. I'm asking the questions underneath the goals. And it has made my life richer in ways that no additional credential ever could.

You don't have to wait as long as I did to start. Whatever finish line you just crossed or you're about to cross, let yourself feel it. You earn that feeling. Don't sprint past it. And if you are sitting with that quiet, uncomfortable question, is this it?

Please know that question is not ingratitude. It is not failure. It is your capital S self, your wise self tapping you on the shoulder, saying, I think it's time we meet. I would love to help you do that.

Please reach out to me, Melissa at Melissaparsonscoaching.com. Slide into my DMs on Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever you follow me. Thank you for listening to your favorite you. I will see you next week, beautiful humans. I'm off to celebrate finishing this podcast.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!