Why Successful People Sometimes Feel The Most Lost

Let’s have a conversation about an important realisation.

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With love - as always,

Rachel
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To the outside world successful people might seem to have it all together.

The career.
The confidence.
The income.

And the personal lifestyle that shows all the signs of "getting it right".

Coming from a North East working class background - for me that meant outward projection - monthly manicured nails, fashionable clothes from up-and-coming designers and the new car with the non-essential upgrades.

BUT

There's an unspoken truth that very few people are aware of.

Maybe that #instaenvy inducing all-inclusive holiday to the Caribbean that showed up recently in your social media feed wasn’t about someone living their #bestlife - it was someone trying to escape their current life.

What do I mean?

Let me ask you a simple question.
That maybe you’ve thought to yourself but not dared to voice out loud to anyone else - until now.

How do any of us admit that our success makes us miserable when we're bombarded by 'positive psychology experts' telling us we all need to be more grateful?

I've lived through that pressure myself and it feels like;

An awful combination of existential dread and guilt.

For me, this usually happened 10 minutes after I'd diligently ended my bedtime routine by listing all the wonderful things I'd experienced that day in my 'gratitude journal'. I could guarantee that not matter how grateful I felt when I when to bed, the moment I turned off the light and my head hit the pillow, I'd start my nightly dance with insomnia and its best friends - sickly feeling in my stomach and a brain that feels like it's doing cartwheels.

During what I was lead to believe was the ‘most successful point' in my career, I lost count of the number of sleepless nights I suffered. And when sleep finally arrived, I'd end up being jolted awake by my mind yelling SOMETHING’S VERY WRONG, while also needing to be distracted from going to places that I didn't want to contemplate at 2 am.

No matter how exhausted I was, I'd drag myself out of bed the next day, ready to do it all again.

Maybe you can relate?
I can't be the only person who's felt like my life was passing me by - while I watched everyone else's lives pass by - as I doom scrolled my way to sleep on social media?

The worst thing about this experience?
I had no idea why I felt this way or what to do about it.

So I stayed -

Stuck

Grateful

Silent

&

Miserable.

And embraced a nightly practice of honouring my existential crisis.

Nobody told us that success would feel like this.

Maybe you’re in a similar position - so what can we do about it?

One thing I know for sure is that Adversity-Awakened Warriors like us, we're not afraid to do 'The Work'.

If you’ve ready started taking steps to change your situation, I can take a good guess you're doing everything you can to push through. It's what people like us do because after everything we’ve been through - we know life’s too short to waste.

Pushing through does work - For a short while.
Although it's like sticking a bandaid (plaster) over a broken arm. Take my own experience as a prime example;

Of how NOT to do things right by doing all the right things.

As you might expect, I tackled this full-on as any hyper-vigilant, highly-driven, adversity-awakened person tackles any problem.

• I implemented ‘The Miracle Morning’ routine - including tips from other successful entrepreneur friends (the Bullet Coffee ritual didn’t last too long).

• I read all the self-help books by experts in their fields that I could get my hands on - although with hindsight they were all masculine focused, hustle-culture, that I didn’t realise at the time was part of the problem (Crush It, anyone?)

• I listened to a library’s worth of audio visualisation, NLP and hypnotherapy tracks - convinced I could re-wire my brain but instead I felt like I was failing Tony Robbins because why wasn’t it working? “Every day and in every way things are getting worse and worser”!

• I sat through hours of CBT workshops and therapy group sessions both online and offline - because changing my behaviour should “fix” my thoughts and feelings about the direction of my life, right?

• I hired life coaches, business consultants and mindfulness gurus - finally drawing the line when I caught myself researching ayahuasca trips (in both meanings of the word) because trying to find the answer in the bottom of a bucket of vomit, up a mountain in a foreign land with a load of strangers seemed a bit extreme (even for me).

• I plastered my bathroom mirror, kitchen cupboards and every other available surface with post-it notes - because I’d been told by well-meaning experts that affirmations were the key to changing everything - even if they made me appear like a serial killer and every visitor to my home made a quick exit (who can blame them).

Perhaps you too,

Have already tried everything out there to silence that voice in your head, ‘flip’ your feelings and practiced gratitude until it felt like spiritual bypassing and self gaslighting?

Don't get me wrong.
I’m not saying the above techniques aren’t useful.

They can be brilliant with a distinction - when used at the right moment and in the right way to solve the specific problem they’re designed to address. Otherwise, it’s like someone handing you a sword to chop fire wood when we both know - you need an axe.

From experience, when I tried the typical approach to ease my suffering by ignoring the root cause - None of the advice worked.

In fact, it made my situation worse.

Because here's what many experts don’t tell you, perhaps because if you realised the simple truth, they couldn’t make a fortune peddling the latest quick fix and life-hacking trick - not that I’m biased:

The solution can’t be found out there,

Because there’s no problem to fix inside you.

Your mind’s not broken.
Let me repeat that clearly - THIS ISN’T A MINDSET PROBLEM.

The problem is;

We’ve all been encouraged by mainstream experts to try to solve our soul-deep misalignments with surface-level psychology strategies.

As a result?
We’re all wasting our time, money and energy applying useful tools and techniques in an unhelpful way because they’re all designed to communicate with our conscious and subconscious mind. The language of the intellect - Words, tactical logic and practical actions.

The 5 step checklist to success.

3 ways to start your best morning.

10 minute audio to feel happy.

3 item gratitude list.

A complete miscommunication with the CORE ROOT of the REAL ISSUE.

We can’t think our way out of this type of situation because our thoughts are the root cause. And to think we can, is to be caught in the mind’s greatest trap and our greatest blind spot.

The logical mind loves the known and hates the unknown - the intangible feels incredibly uncomfortable. So, all the steps, tips, hacks and tricks marketed to us every day they feel ‘good’, manageable, sensible and therefore safe.

They’re just not useful in this specific case.

What do we need to do instead?
Listen to our intuition and instinct.

I think of them as our ‘wisdom communicators’ and they share their messages through a different language -
Feelings, whispers of “just knowing” and ‘signs’. This makes it tricky for us to interpret because for so long society prioritised the logical mind and the chatter that we all experience in our heads. All of our societal systems are predicated to prioritise the masculine intellect over the feminine intuition.

That awful feeling of dread, the sense that something is wrong and the knots in your stomach as you drive to the office - that’s a very clear message from your wisdom communicators.

BUT it’s not a message to think differently about your current situation.

Your inner guidance system is shouting,

You’re in the WRONG SITUATION and you need to get out!

And that takes courage.

It means potentially walking away from every achievement you were lead to believe was important and facing the fact your success has been a distraction from the real question that's been drowned out by everything you’ve built.

What am I meant to do with my life?

Because you’re right when you catch yourself thinking - there’s got to be more to life than this.

I know, this can be a lot to process because this problem is endemic, it’s broader than one single person. Our whole view of success is founded upon the motivation of tribal dynamics based on gaining power for survival. We are quite literally driven to succeed by danger.

It’s important we all start to have these conversations because without awareness and open dialogue - Nothing is going to change. Our future can be predicted and it’s more of the same. I’ve experienced the worst of what can happen when we ignore our intuition for too long and conform to the expectations of others - burnout and breakdown. I wouldn’t wish that for anyone else.

Having lost it all only to realise that everything I’d built was a lie because I was living someone else’s version of success! I can confidently share my own hard won wisdom from learning the hard way.

You’re not lost.

Instead, you`ve followed a path to a destination that other people designated as yours.
When instinctively you know it’s not.

What you’re experiencing isn’t confusion.

It’s discernment.

And that place of true awareness,

Is an invitation to begin the most important work of your life.

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If any of this felt like it hit home and you're sitting there thinking, this is me! I promise you, you’re not alone. Let’s keep our conversation going - why not write back to me?