Why High-Achieving Women Tie Their Worth to Success
I hit a goal I’d genuinely cried over. Chased it for months. And I got to enjoy it for about one afternoon before my brain piped up with, cool, so what’s next?
One afternoon. That was the whole shelf life of it.
If you just laughed the tired laugh, hi, I’m Melissa, and I think we’re about to be very good friends.
I do a thing, and I have a sneaking feeling you might do it too. Another woman shares good news, and before I’ve even finished being happy for her, a little calculator in my chest starts running the numbers. Where does that put me. Am I ahead now, or behind.
I used to measure whether I was a good person by whether I was winning. A good quarter, I was a good human. A rough month, and I was failing at everything, not only the spreadsheet. Somewhere along the way my worth and my results became the same thing, and I never noticed it happening.
And winning never once closed the gap. I’d get the thing, feel incredible for an afternoon, and then the hunger would tap me on the shoulder and point at the next thing. Because I wasn’t actually chasing the win. I was chasing the feeling of being enough, and no trophy has ever once been able to hand that over.
For a long time that belief never really got tested, because the results kept coming. Then came the year they didn’t. Our industry took a hit, the business was nowhere near its peak, and for the first time in ten years my partners and I were not on the same page. I’d been optimistic when I should’ve been realistic. I hadn’t owned up to the changes I needed to make. It all came to a head one random weekend, with an email from the board that I read standing alone in my bathroom, gripping the edge of the sink, trying to breathe and not quite managing it. What if this was it. Everything I’d built, gone. What would people think. How did I even get here.
I was so tangled up in numbers that were falling that I spent six months on a heart monitor. My body was keeping score of things that had nothing to do with whether I was okay as a person, and I’d lost the ability to tell the difference.
Success wasn’t something I did anymore. It had become who I was. And when it started to slip, so did I.
What pulled me out was a stupidly simple question. Not the spiral, the real one. What is actually the worst that could happen. So, I followed it all the way down. Say we lost the whole thing. I would still have Dave. I would still have my kids. I would still have my faith. I would still be me, the actual person, not the revenue line. Not one of those could be assigned a number. None of the things that actually mattered had ever been on the board to begin with.
And nobody is ever in the room for the hardest conversations. People saw my wins. They didn’t see me standing at that sink.
And the women I was quietly comparing myself to had sinks of their own that I knew nothing about. When I couldn’t out-work the feeling, I compared anyway. Constantly. I can find a woman doing better than me in about four seconds flat, in any room, on any app. It is a world-class way to make yourself miserable, and I was extremely good at it.
What finally helped there was almost embarrassingly small. Three compliments a day, out loud, to real women. On purpose, especially the ones I’d quietly ranked as competition.
The first few felt clunky, like using a muscle I hadn’t exercised in years. I’d text a woman I was a little jealous of and tell her she was killing it. And I did not expect this part: it is genuinely impossible to celebrate someone and resent her in the same breath. Resentment can’t get a word in edgewise.
The more I meant those compliments, the quieter that calculator in my chest got.
I am still competitive to a frankly ridiculous degree. Do not play me in Monopoly unless you have cleared your whole evening and your emotional calendar. I love to win. But winning is something I do now, not the thing that decides whether I get to feel good about myself. My bubbly is loud again. My kids get a mom who’s all the way at the dinner table now, instead of half there and half back at work in my head. And I can watch another woman win and be genuinely happy for her. Just happy, no asterisk.
If you’re the woman who always moves the goalposts for herself, come find me on Instagram. We can be a beautiful mess together over there. And do one thing today: give three real compliments to three real women, and watch that little calculator lose its mind. Then come tell me how it went.
New here? Start with why I started MSB.
XOXO busy bees,
Melissa