The Business You Built From Performance Is Never Going to Feel Like Enough
I was arrested three times in my early twenties.
The third time was the one that cracked something open. I was standing in front of a mirror and I met my own eyes, maybe for the first time in a decade, and something showed up in that moment that I can only describe as a glimmer of hope. Not a plan. Not a vision. Just a flicker of recognition that there was more available to me than what I had been choosing, and that choosing differently was something I was capable of.
I have been on a lot of podcasts. I do not usually open with that story. But Bunny Young, host of the Yes And Podcast, is one of those people who creates enough safety in a conversation that the real things come out. And what surfaced in this conversation was something I have been sitting with since, about performance, about congruence, and about why so many women build impressive businesses that still feel hollow.
The Blazer I Did Not Need to Wear
When I started coaching women who made more money than me, something shifted in how I showed up.
The mind game of it was real. I had spent years believing, without saying it out loud, that revenue was the marker. That someone who made more was worth more. And when clients started hiring me who had bigger numbers than mine, I did what a lot of founders do in that moment: I started performing.
I wore blazers. Not because I am a blazer person. Because I had decided that blazers meant professional and professional meant they would take me seriously and taking me seriously meant they would stay.
That logic does not hold. Not because the blazers were wrong, but because what was underneath the blazers was wrong. I was building from a question I had not named: what do I need to be so these people do not leave? And that question does not produce good business decisions. It produces a version of you that is designed for approval rather than for impact, and the people on the other side of it can feel the difference even when they cannot name it.
What is on the other side of relationships built from performance is disappointment. For you, because you have contorted yourself for a result that still does not feel right. And for the person you are serving, because what they get is not congruent with what drew them in.
Every sales call, every piece of marketing, every client interaction either comes from who you are or from who you think you need to be to get the result. The version that converts, the version that retains, the version that builds a business you can actually stand inside, is the first one.
What the Chanel-Lined Cage Actually Is
Bunny said something in our conversation that I have not been able to shake.
She called it a really expensive, fancy Chanel-lined cage you built for yourself to impress other people.
She was talking about what success looks like when the business is working by every external measure and the founder is empty. The cars, the houses, the shoes, the Instagram vacations. All of it real and none of it enough because the foundation underneath it was performance rather than purpose.
I see this constantly in the businesses I go into. The founder has hit the revenue. She has the team. She has the clients. And she is running on fumes and cannot figure out why it does not feel the way she thought it would feel.
The answer is almost always the same: she built something impressive from the outside and hollow from the inside because somewhere in the building, her decisions started being made for the wrong audience. For the people watching. For the followers. For the revenue milestone that was supposed to finally make her feel like she had done it.
My belief is that your life offline should be better than it is online. Not as a lifestyle preference but as a design principle. What is happening behind the scenes, who you are when no one is watching, what you feel sitting in your life when nothing is performing, that is where the real accounting happens. And if you are doing Tahiti every other week and you and your partner hate each other, I am sorry but that is not success. That is a very scenic version of the same problem.
Everyone Cares What People Think. That Is Not the Problem.
You are never going to reach a point where you do not care what people think. Anyone who tells you they have gotten there is not being honest. We are wired to want to be seen, heard, and understood. That is not a weakness to fix. It is the core human experience.
The version of this that costs you is the spiral. Someone does not like you, someone questions your pricing, someone says something that is not true about you, and you go into self-criticism, you pick yourself apart, you start second-guessing everything that was working, and you lose days to a story that is not even accurate.
The version that does not cost you is the stop sign. Something lands that triggers you, and before the reaction gets to go anywhere, there is a pause. A physical change if you need one. Get up, leave the room, go outside, do something that disrupts the momentum of the spiral before it starts. And then you name what is happening. What is the feeling. What is the value that got touched. You bring yourself to the two-way street. One road is self-criticism and spiral. The other is data, facts, and what is actually true about you.
You do not have to be fine. You do not have to pretend it did not land. You can feel the feeling and choose the road that does not send you backward.
The goal is not to stop caring. The goal is to know what to do with it when it shows up.
That is the muscle. Not caring less. Choosing better.
Rewriting What Success Means to You
One of the most important things I have ever done for my business was rewrite my definition of success.
Not because the old definition was wrong. Because it was someone else's. I had grown up equating success with materials and money, which is what most people absorb without realizing it, and I was measuring myself against a standard I had not chosen. Which meant I was either winning someone else's game or losing it, but I was never playing my own.
When I sat down to rewrite it, I stopped trying to make it about milestones and started trying to make it a feeling. When I close my eyes and sit in my life, am I satisfied? Am I fulfilled? Do I have the friendships I want? Is my marriage what I want it to be? Am I treating my body well? How is my relationship with my kids?
Success became a pizza, not a trophy. A combination of things that together tell me I am living the life I chose rather than the life I performed my way into.
The practical version of this is the shift from outcome to output. For a long time I was so focused on the result that when things got quiet or uncertain I would start to shake. Am I doing it wrong? Do I need to change everything? That spiral is not useful and it is not accurate, but it is what happens when the only measure of success is something outside your control.
Output is different. The conversation you start. The email you send. The post you put out. The standard you hold in the work. Daily, you can measure whether you did the things. Over time, the output generates the outcome. You cannot reverse-engineer it, but you can trust it. And when success is also a feeling, something you are building toward rather than waiting to arrive at, the quiet seasons do not shake you the same way. You are already inside the thing you are building toward. You do not have to wait to feel it.
Who You Are Is the Differentiator
The last question Bunny asked me was how I choose the rooms I am in.
I choose based on who people are, not on what they have done.
I have been in rooms with people who have impressive numbers and no integrity, and rooms with people who are earlier in their building and completely whole. The wholeness is the thing I am looking for. Congruence. Honesty. The same person offline that they are online.
I pedestaled people based on revenue for a long time and it always disappointed me. Not because those people were not impressive. Because what I was seeking from proximity to them was something they could not give me, which was the feeling that I was allowed to take up the space I was already standing in.
That feeling does not come from being in the right room. It comes from being the same person in every room.
The women I work with who are at the highest levels of their field, the ones doing work they love inside a business that does not suffocate them, are the ones who stopped performing somewhere along the way and started building from who they are. Not from who they thought they were supposed to be. Not from the blazers. From the actual thing.
That is not a soft idea. It is the most strategic thing you can do, because authenticity is the only thing you can sustain indefinitely. Performance has a shelf life. Sooner or later it costs more than it returns, and the business starts to feel like a cage no matter how well-appointed it is.
The blazers were never the answer. You were.
Go Deeper
If this conversation opened something and you want to do this work inside a room built for it, two places.
The Mom Founders Table Mastermind is where we redesign the business and the identity at the same time, because the operational work only sticks when the internal pattern underneath it changes too. Twelve months, thirty women, your people, your pricing, your processes, and the harder question of who you are building it for. Apply now.
You can also find this full conversation on the Yes And Podcast with Bunny Young. Bunny is one of the most genuine people I have met in this space and the conversation went places I did not expect. Follow her on Instagram and find the episode here.
