#197: The Flip Side - Success and Struggle

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, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I'm Melissa Parsons, your host, and today we are getting to something that I genuinely think does not get spoken about enough.

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And I say that as someone who has lived both sides of it, sometimes in the same year, the same month, the same day. Here's the setup. We spend so much time talking about how to achieve success, how to work toward it, how to stay motivated, how to push through the tough parts.

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What we don't talk about nearly enough is what happens when success actually arrives. And on the flip side, what happens when you've been riding high and then things get hard again? Because here's what I know from my own life and from the deeply personal work that I do with my clients.

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Success can be just as destabilizing as struggle. And struggle, when you're used to succeeding, can feel pretty catastrophic in ways that are completely out of proportion to what's actually happening.

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Both of these things are about the same underlying thing. Your identity, how you see yourself, who you believe yourself to be, and what happens when your external circumstances stop lining up and matching the internal picture that you have of yourself.

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So today we're going to go there. So let's go. Sometimes success feels wrong. It's more common than you think. I want to start with something that I have experienced firsthand, and I see this show up a lot with my clients.

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It's something that nobody really prepares you for, and that's this. Sometimes success feels just as uncomfortable as the struggle, and maybe even more. One of my coaches coined the term success intolerance.

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Her name is Stacey Boehman. You can look her up. She is one of my business coaches, and she coined this term. And success intolerance is exactly what it sounds like. It's when success arrives. Maybe it's the clients, maybe it's the money, maybe it's some recognition, the thing you've worked so hard for.

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And instead of settling in and enjoying it, your nervous system treats it like a threat. It's like, what the fuck is happening? Your brain thinks, this is very unfamiliar. This is not who I know myself to be.

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And it starts working, your beautiful brain, often completely below your level of conscious awareness to get you back to the version of yourself that your brain actually recognizes. It's like an internal thermostat, the idea that we all have this set point for what we believe we deserve, what we're capable of, what feels normal.

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And when our external results suddenly exceed that internal set point, the discomfort can be very real. And if we don't know to expect it, it can absolutely derail us. Now, you might be thinking, Melissa, there is no way I would be uncomfortable with success.

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I want it so badly, but I want you to stay with me because this can be sneaky. It doesn't usually arrive looking like you thinking, I don't deserve this. It actually looks more like a sudden urge to change everything that's working.

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It looks like deciding what you've been doing in your business is wrong just as things start to take off. It looks like spending money as fast as it comes in so that you never have to sit with the feeling of having the money.

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It can also look like chalking your wins up to luck, to timing, to a fluke, anything but yourself and the work that you've been putting in. And it can look a lot like self-sabotage. And underneath that self-sabotage, you can usually find an identity crisis, a quiet, destabilizing question.

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If this is who I am now, then who was I before? So I'm going to share something with you guys that I have never unpacked publicly because I think it's going to hit some of you and hit home and make this make sense for you.

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So I spent over 20 years as a practicing pediatrician. So many, many years of medical school, residency, sleepless nights, unimaginable pressure, profound responsibility. And I really gave everything that I had to that career, to becoming a pediatrician.

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And of course, I was compensated well. But most people who are not physicians don't know this, but physician salaries, especially for those of us in pediatrics, are not what most people assume. Especially when you add in the education debt, the hours that we put in, the overhead that we have to pay, the malpractice insurance.

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It really is a labor of love as much as it is a livelihood. And then I became a coach. Within the first few years of building my coaching practice, I out-earned my medical income, not just matched it, but exceeded it by a little bit at first and then pretty significantly.

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And I want to tell you, this was uncomfortable as hell. Not because I didn't want the money, not because I wasn't working for it, but because my entire identity had been built around being a physician.

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The sacrifices, the expertise, the years of training, the letters behind my name, that was the story I told myself about why I deserved what I had. And suddenly, here was this new version of me doing something that looked a lot lighter and freer from the outside, making more than my doctor self had.

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My brain didn't know what to do with it. It felt wrong in a way that I couldn't immediately articulate. It felt like it didn't count, like I hadn't suffered enough for it. Like the old rules, the ones that said that I had to work hard and that meant long hours and sacrifices and earning every penny the hard way were being violated.

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I was breaking the rules. And that discomfort that I had with my own success was real. And I had to do some real work with my coach and my own inner life to let myself actually receive it, to stop waiting for it to be taken away, to stop treating it like a fluke.

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And I kind of came up against the ceiling of what I had earned as a pediatrician. And I was earning about what I made as a pediatrician, but I had a hard time breaking over the top of it until I got some coaching.

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So I got some coaching and I realized, oh shit, I am just coming up to this salary that I had made as a pediatrician and then I'm kind of subconsciously stopping myself from making more money. And when I stopped doing that, then I was able to exceed my salary as a pediatrician.

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And then I think my story takes a turn that makes it even more interesting, because once I did that inner work, once I got comfortable with the money, once it felt like it was actually mine and not a mistake or a fluke, I made a choice that most people in the online coaching world would find pretty baffling.

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I changed my definition of success, not because the money wasn't good, not because the business wasn't working, but because I realized that I had been chasing a version of success that was defined by numbers, by revenue, by clients, by scaling.

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And I had kind of stopped asking myself what I actually wanted my life to feel like. So I deliberately scaled back. I moved to working with just a small handful of private clients each week, plus my group coaching program.

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I protected enormous amounts of white space in my calendar. I build a life with time to do everything I want to do and nothing I don't. So now I have a lot of time that is unhurried, unscheduled, and genuinely mine.

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And that, of course, required its own version of that inner work because choosing to earn less than you could when you're fully capable of earning more goes against almost everything our culture tells us about ambition and worth.

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I had to get just as comfortable with that choice as I did with the original financial success. I had to be willing to own it without apologizing for it, without shrinking it, without overexplaining myself to every person who raised their eyebrows.

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My new definition of success is a life I love on my own terms. And I want to tell you that is allowed. In fact, it's probably more than allowed. For me, it's the whole point. Now, let's talk about the other side of the coin.

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Let's flip it because there's another experience I see just as often, and it can be equally destabilizing, but just in the opposite direction. What happens when you've been succeeding at your career, in your business, in your relationships, with your health journey, and then something hard happens, a setback, a loss, a failure, a season where things just don't work and you're not really prepared for it because success had become your identity too.

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I see this with a lot of the high-achieving women that I work with. Women who've been capable. They've been the capable one, the reliable one, the one who figures it out. And then something comes along the way that they can't figure out.

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Instead of treating it like a hard season, they often treat it like evidence that the whole story was a lie, that they were never as good as they thought, that all of it somehow was a fluke. The suffering in this scenario is often disproportionate to the actual circumstances.

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A difficult quarter becomes proof of total failure. A hard conversation becomes evidence that the relationship is and always was doomed. A bad week becomes the beginning of the end. And the reason the suffering is so amplified is the same reason that discomfort with success exists in the first place, identity.

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When success has become who you are, struggle can feel like an annihilation of your personality. Not just a hard thing that's happening, but a fundamental unraveling of the person you believed yourself to be.

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And this is where the idea of the internal thermostat becomes so useful and works in both directions. That internal thermostat just doesn't calibrate upward. If you're used to succeeding and your set point for what is quote unquote normal is high, anything below that line will feel deeply, viscerally wrong, even if it's temporary, even if it's completely within the normal range of a fully lived life.

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The goal, and this is the real work, is to build an identity that is not contingent on your external results at all, not on the successes and not on the struggles. An identity that is stable enough to hold both, that can say, I'm having a hard season and I'm still the person I've always been.

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These two things are not in conflict. This is not a passive or a resigned stance. It's actually one of the most powerful places you can operate from. Because when you're not in free fall every time something goes wrong and you're not in panic every time something goes right, you can think clearly.

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You can make decisions. You can stay and you can work and you can be in your life. Let me give you some examples of what I mean because I want this to land in your real life, not just as an abstract concept.

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And I want to go beyond the obvious career and money examples because this shit shows up everywhere. Let's start with your most intimate relationship. Maybe the model you grew up with, the one you watched your whole childhood, was conflict, tension, two people who loved each other, but mostly showed it through friction.

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That became your internal picture of what a real relationship looks like, what feels normal. And so you bring that into your own partnership. The arguments, the edge, the low-grade sparring. It's uncomfortable, but it's familiar.

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Softer, more curious, less reactive, more huggable, as my marriage coach, Maggie Reyes, often says. And something starts to shift. There's more ease, more laughter, more genuine fun between the two of you.

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It's working. And then one day, out of nowhere over something completely small, you pick a fight. You don't even really mean to, but there you are back in that old familiar pattern. And some part of you almost feels relieved because the ease was starting to feel too damn good, too different, too far from the version of the relationship your nervous system had always recognized as home.

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That is your internal thermostat dragging you back to its set point, not because conflict is better, but because it is known and therefore familiar. Or maybe it's your relationship with your body. Maybe for years, most of your life, if we're being honest, you've spoken about your body and to your body in a particular way.

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Critical, demanding, never quite enough. You've pushed it, punished it, ignored what it was telling you. And that relationship, as painful as it is, is one that you know. And then you start to shift.

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You start listening. You start moving in ways that feel good rather than in ways that feel like punishment. You start speaking to yourself with something closer to kindness. And some days it feels genuinely different, lighter, more peaceful, more like you're able to come home to yourself.

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And then the old voice comes back, the critical one, the one that says you're not doing enough, not changing fast enough, not there yet. And you listen to it, not because it's true, but because it's familiar.

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It sounds like you. Maybe the old version of you, but still you. Same thing, different arena. Or maybe it's your relationship with your kids. You decide maybe after some coaching, maybe after reading something that cracked you open or following somebody on Instagram or listening to this podcast, maybe, that you want to connect with them more than you want to correct them, that you want to be a parent who asks questions and is curious and genuinely listens, not one who turns every conversation into a teachable moment or a life lesson. That's my boy's like, oh, fuck, mom, do we have to make every goddamn conversation into a life lesson complete with all the swearing because swearing was allowed in the Parsons household.

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So you try. You show up softer. You ask about their day and you actually wait for the answer. You resist the urge to redirect, to advise, to fix. And here's what happens. I want you to be prepared for this because it can feel like a gut punch if you're not.

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They don't immediately trust it. They've been trained by you, by years of the old dynamic too. They're waiting for the pivot. They're waiting for that moment in the conversation where it becomes a lecture, that moment where connection becomes correction.

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So they hold back. They test you. They might even push you away a little bit because your new way of showing up doesn't match the parent that they have learned to navigate. And that rejection, even though it's small, even if it's temporary, can feel like proof that this shit isn't working.

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So you go back to what you know, you correct, you lecture, you slip back into those old, well-worn grooves, because at least in that version, you know your role, even if it's not who you want to be. This is the thing about change that nobody tells you.

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Your people have to adjust to that new version of you too. And their adjustment period can look like resistance or distance or testing. And if you don't know that that's part of the process, it can absolutely pull you back.

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Another example, you've been killing it at work for three years, promotions, recognition, results, and then you get a piece of critical feedback. And instead of processing it as information, useful, even if uncomfortable, you spiral.

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You go over it for days. You start questioning everything. Your brain has decided that that one piece of feedback or that one negative review has invalidated three years of evidence. That is struggling when you're used to succeeding.

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Or you've been working toward a goal for a long time. It finally happens. And instead of celebrating, you immediately start minimizing it or scrambling to set the next goal before you've even let yourself arrive at this one.

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Your brain is just racing to get to the next familiar feeling of striving because arriving feels just too friggin strange. And that is succeeding when you're used to struggling. Or like me, you reach a version of success that looks great on paper and then you realize, oh shit, this doesn't actually match what I want.

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And the work becomes redefining success on your own terms while managing the discomfort of the world not fully understanding your choice. That is its own particular flavor of all of this. Okay, so what are you going to actually do?

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How do you actually work with this? Because I want to give you something concrete. This is not a topic where I want you to walk away just feeling seen without at least some start of a path forward. First, notice it.

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This is always step one. Any coach worth her salt will tell you that awareness is the beginning of power here. When success arrives and you feel the urge to discount it, to sabotage it, or to change things that are working, notice it.

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Name it. Ah, my brain is doing that thing where it tries to talk me out of what I've built. You don't have to act from it just because it's there. You don't have to believe all of your thoughts just because you're thinking them.

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When a hard season arrives and you feel the familiar spiral of catastrophizing, of making it mean everything about who you are, notice that too. Oh, I'm doing that thing where I treat a hard moment like a permanent truth.

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Take a breath. Come back to what is actually, factually true right this moment. The second thing is to separate your identity from your results. This is the deeper work and it is ongoing. Who you are is not your revenue.

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It is not your job title. It is not your track record of wins or your current season of struggle. Those things are simply experiences you're having. They are not the person you are. They are not the person having them.

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And this is where coaching and therapy can do some of their most powerful work. Untangling identity from outcome is not a solo project. It requires typically someone else to witness you, to reflect back to you who you are, independent what you're producing or what you have produced.

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If you don't have that kind of support, I want to encourage you to seek it out. I don't want you to think about it as a luxury. It is not a luxury. It is essential. Let yourself define success on your own terms and then live into that definition.

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You don't have to defensively defend it. You do not owe anyone a justification for how you choose to live. You might need to internally defend it to yourself. Know what success actually means to you, not to your industry, not to your parents, not to the metrics that other people use, but to you.

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What does a life you love actually look and feel like? And then build toward that. And when external definitions of success try to creep back in, because they will, you're going to keep living and keep living in the society that has a lot of external definitions of success.

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It might make you feel like you're not enough because you've already done this work. You'll have your own answer ready. I want to leave you with an image that we often use in coaching that I keep coming back to.

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I want to imagine that you have been swimming hard through a difficult river. You started out on one side, you decided to jump into the river, and it's a struggle, it's a grind. And then you finally make it to the other side, you make it to land, you're standing on solid ground, and it can be so unfamiliar, so different from the current you that you have known for so long that your nervous system might start to look for a way back into the river.

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Not because the river was better, but because it was known. The work is learning how to stand on that new shore, how to rest there, how to let your nervous system adjust to the solid ground under your feet without immediately looking for a way back into the current.

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This applies whether the land you're standing on is a new level of success or a hard and unfamiliar season of struggle. In both cases, the work is the same. Stay. Be here. Let yourself feel it without acting from it.

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Trust that you are capable of standing on this new ground, especially if you are interested in being in capital S self-energy. You can have calm, you can have curiosity, you can have compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, connectedness, creativity, and lots of choice.

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Okay, here's what I'm going to leave you with today, my friends. Success is allowed to feel uncomfortable. Struggle is allowed to feel hard. Neither of them is the full story of who you are. You are bigger than both.

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The invitation this week is to ask yourself honestly, which side of this am I on right now? Am I sitting in a success that I haven't let myself fully receive? Am I in a struggle that I've made mean more than it actually means?

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Am I chasing a definition of success that someone else wrote for me? And whatever your answer is here, can you just sit with that for a moment? You don't have to fix it. You don't have to explain it.

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You don't have to perform your way through it. Just be with it and see what it has to tell you. And as always, I am so, so rooting for you to become your absolute favorite you, not someone else's definition of that.

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Yours and yours alone. All right, I'll see you all next week.

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!