If You Don’t Define Success for Yourself, Someone Else Will
At one point, this would have been a dream moment. But it wasn’t.
Shots of me toward the end of my time with oVertone for our new styling product campaign. I was miserable, trying to support the team however possible, and doing my best to hold my whole world together.
Two of my clients came to me after walking away from big, hierarchical jobs. They were smart, capable, and fed up. Like a lot of people, they left to build something better — something on their own terms. No pointless meetings, no corporate ladder, no one skimming off the top.
They wanted freedom. And for a little while, it felt like they had it.
They were technically running a business — clients, invoices, money coming in. They had all the surface-level signs of success. But underneath? They were exhausted. The numbers worked, sort of. But the anxiety didn’t go away.
When we sat down together, I said gently, “It feels like you’re running a freelancing operation, not a business.”
They paused. Blinked. And then — “Well, what could we even do differently?”
And that’s when I smiled.
When you realize you’ve rebuilt the thing you tried to escape
This happens more than you’d think. People leave rigid structures, determined to do it differently — and then slowly, inadvertently, they recreate the same patterns under a new name.
You go solo to get away from hustle culture, but now your Google Calendar is stacked with back-to-back Zooms. You leave a job where you’re underpaid and undervalued, only to pay yourself last because “it’s what a founder should do.” You start a company to be creatively free, but suddenly your life has expanded to meet your new paycheck, you’re chasing a topline revenue number that doesn’t actually mean anything to you, and you are back in the rat race, but this time, you don’t even know if there are greener pastures out there.
This doesn’t happen because you’re “bad at business,” but because you didn’t stop to define what success actually means to you and what it looks like.
Maybe you’re just done with the bullshit
Most of us grow up steeped in somebody else’s version of success:
Work hard
Climb the ladder
Hit 7 figures
Automate everything
Exit with a bang
Whatever it is, we internalize that as the goal — even if it makes us miserable.
Then one day, you look up from your laptop and think, “Wait. I hate this. And even worse, I built it myself.” Cue the shame spiral: I should be grateful. I should just work harder. Everyone else seems to love their business. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.
You’re not broken - I promise!
You’re just misaligned. And realigning isn’t about quitting your business — it’s about reimagining what it’s for.
Unlimited vacation doesn’t mean anything if you’re miserable.
A lot of people walk into my sessions carrying “golden ticket” ideas of success. A topline revenue number they picked because it sounds impressive. A fantasy that the business will run without them, while they sip cocktails in Oaxaca. A team that “just acts like grown-ups” and magically manages itself.
Or they hate their business and don’t know why. They hit their numbers and still feel anxious. They thought entrepreneurship would feel like freedom — and it just feels like more stress, but with better branding.
If your version of success isn’t working for you — you get to rewrite it. If you keep chasing something that’s not meant for you, you’ll burn out chasing a dream that was never yours to begin with.
Redefining success starts with asking the right questions
When those two clients started working with me, they said they didn’t want a traditional hierarchy. They didn’t want to become the thing they left. And yet… they were treating financial freedom like a slot machine. Keep pulling the lever, hope it hits. Hope this is the launch that finally makes it all easier.
What we did instead was start with their mission, vision, and values — not as branding fluff, but as a compass. From there, we restructured their finances to create actual stability, not just bursts of dopamine from big wins.
They didn’t give up on their dream. They just stopped chasing someone else’s.
And no — this wasn’t about working harder. It was about working in a way that was actually connected to their values, energy, and goals. This is the kind of work I do in private coaching: not giving you someone else’s blueprint, but helping you create your own.
Your business will reflect you — whether you want it to or not
Whatever’s unresolved in you will show up in your business. Your need to prove something, your fear of being seen, your belief that you have to do everything alone, perfectly, and without ever asking for help.
That’s not a reason to panic. It’s just a reason to slow down and start asking better questions.
Because if you don’t — if you keep pretending your trauma or people-pleasing or capitalism-induced anxiety isn’t driving the ship — you’re going to wake up in a business that looks good and feels terrible. You don’t have to scrap everything, you just have to stop lying to yourself about what you want.
You’re allowed to build something that actually works for you
You’re allowed to define success for yourself. It can be stable and slow and spacious. It can be creative and chaotic and fueled by snacks and ADHD brilliance. It can be weird and nonlinear and rad as hell.
What it can’t be — what it should never be — is a pale imitation of someone else’s goals. Because you’ll never be able to enjoy it.
If you’re ready to do this work — the kind that’s messy and real and rooted in who you actually are — I’d love to support you. And we can do it in your language, on your timeline, in your rhythm.
