What does success mean to you?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about success.
As a business owner, one of the first things all coaching programs ask you to do is to define your goals, or what success means to you.
I have been through countless business coaching programs, and this is something I have repeatedly struggled with.
It seems like such a simple question.
What do I want?
How big do I want this business to become? How much money do I want to make? How many people do I want to serve? What kind of impact do I want to have?
Sometimes, I can come up with answers to those questions. But sometimes I wonder whether I’m answering based on what I really want, or based on what feels possible.
Because those are two very different things.
And lately, I’ve started wondering if there’s another question underneath all of this:
How much success do I feel safe enough to imagine?
I keep coming back to that question because I’m beginning to wonder how often I’ve confused what feels possible with what feels safe enough.
Maybe some of the goals I’ve struggled to define weren’t difficult because I didn’t know what I wanted. Maybe allowing myself to fully want them meant imagining a version of myself, of my life, and career that felt unfamiliar.
And unfamiliar has not always felt safe.
What happens inside you when you imagine actually having it?
Cognitively, I know what I want. I want to build a successful coaching business that makes a meaningful difference in the lives and careers of people navigating complex trauma, while creating the financial success that allows me to support my family and eventually leave my corporate career.
And yet, when I sit down to imagine what that might look like or feel like to me, there is this battle that happens within me.
Part of me can see it.
I can imagine the business thriving. I can imagine doing work that matters deeply to me and earning enough from that work to support my family. I can imagine what it might feel like to finally close my corporate laptop for the last time and know that I built something that made that possible.
And then, there is this other part telling me to pump the brakes. Nice dream, but it will never happen for you. Don’t get your hopes up. You’ve tried so many different ways to make this business successful, but you will never be able to get there.
The “what if” scenarios race through my brain so fast it would make NASCAR proud.
I’m Cyndi Bennett, Trauma-Informed Career Coach and creator of the Resilient Career Academy. You’re listening to The Resilient Career Newsletter, Issue #7, where we explore how complex trauma can follow us into the workplace, and what becomes possible when it no longer gets to make our career decisions for us.
If this is your first time here, welcome. If you’ve been here for a while, I’m glad you’re back. This is a space where we talk honestly about the parts of career development traditional career advice often misses, especially when CPTSD, old protection patterns, and our very human need to feel safe come to work with us.
What if you get too big and you can’t handle it, and your mental health suffers for it?
What if you leave your corporate job and aren’t able to support your retired husband?
What if you realize that this is NOT something you want to do full-time?
And I could keep going.
I could follow every one of those “what ifs” until I had built a convincing case for why the safest thing to do is keep my dream exactly where it is: a dream.
But I’m beginning to recognize this pattern for what it is.
It’s protection.
This is the part of me that wants certainty before I take a risk. It wants to know that I won’t fail, that I won’t lose what I already have, and that success won’t somehow become more than I can handle.
I understand why that part of me is there. But I don’t want protecting myself from what might happen to become the reason I never discover what could happen.
So what if, just for a moment, I suspended the safety net?
What if I let the “what ifs” be there without allowing them to make the decision for me?
What if I sat in the discomfort of wanting something I cannot guarantee and allowed myself to imagine what might become possible anyway?
Because perhaps courage isn’t believing that none of those obstacles will happen.
Perhaps courage is recognizing the protection pattern, understanding what it is trying to do for me, and deciding that I am willing to pursue the dream anyway.
What's standing between you and that version of success?
Once we allow ourselves to imagine what success could look like, the next question becomes:
What’s standing between where you are today and where you want to be?
There may be very real obstacles.
For me, there are still things I need to figure out in my business. I need to continue growing my audience, reaching the people who need this work, and building a business that generates enough consistent revenue for me to feel comfortable walking away from my corporate income.
Those aren’t protection patterns. They’re real business challenges that require real strategies.
But there’s another layer I have to pay attention to. What have I already decided those obstacles mean about what is possible for me?
There’s a difference between saying, “I haven’t figured out how to do this yet,” and deciding, “I’m never going to be able to do this.”
There’s a difference between recognizing that something will be difficult and deciding that difficulty is a reason not to pursue it.
And there’s a difference between acknowledging that something involves risk and allowing that risk to determine how far we’re willing to go.
This is where I think our protection patterns can become harder to recognize, because they don’t always feel like fear. Sometimes they feel like conclusions we’ve already reached about ourselves and our careers:
I’m not ready.
I don’t have what it takes.
I’ve tried before, and it didn’t work.
It’s too late for me.
I should just be grateful for what I have.
Some of those thoughts may contain information worth paying attention to.
The question is whether we treat them as information to consider or evidence that the thing we want isn’t possible.
Maybe being Limitless isn’t about pretending there are no obstacles between us and the success we want.
There will always be things we have to figure out, learn, navigate, or work through.
Maybe it’s about recognizing when we’ve turned an obstacle we could navigate into a limit we’re no longer willing to challenge.
Do you believe you can navigate what's standing in your way?
This may be the hardest question for me.
When I think about what could stand between me and the success I want, I can immediately start looking for certainty. I want to know the strategy will work. I want to know I’ll make enough money. I want to know I won’t regret leaving the security of my corporate career. I want some kind of assurance that if I take the risk, everything will turn out the way I hope it will.
But there is no business coaching program, career strategy, spreadsheet, or five-year plan that can give me that kind of certainty. At some point, I have to decide whether I trust myself enough to move forward without it.
That doesn’t mean believing I can prevent every obstacle or handle everything perfectly. I may make decisions that don’t work. I may have to change direction. I may need help. I may discover that something I thought I wanted isn’t right for me after all. Navigating what stands in my way doesn’t require me to know exactly what I’ll do before I get there.
For me, the more important question is whether I believe I can figure out what to do when I get there.
That is a very different kind of confidence.
It isn’t confidence that says, I know this is going to work.
It’s confidence that says, I don’t know exactly how this is going to work, but I trust myself to keep learning, adjusting, asking for help, recovering when something doesn’t go as planned, and making the next decision.
Maybe that’s part of what allows us to loosen the grip of those protection patterns.
We don’t have to convince ourselves that nothing bad will happen. We don’t have to eliminate uncertainty before we pursue what we want.
We can acknowledge the risks, recognize when our need for safety is asking us to stay exactly where we are, and still decide that what could become possible is worth exploring.
For those of us who have spent a lot of our lives anticipating what could go wrong, perhaps one of the most courageous things we can do is leave a little room for the possibility that something could go right.
What would you allow yourself to want?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about everything that could go wrong if I pursue the version of success I described at the beginning of this newsletter. I’m learning to give just as much consideration to what could go right.
So I want to leave you with the question I’m asking myself:
If success felt safe, what would you allow yourself to want?
What would you pursue in your career if you didn’t need a guarantee that it would work out? What possibility have you been making smaller because it feels safer that way?
You don’t have to know how you’ll get there yet. You don’t have to have every obstacle figured out. For now, I’m simply inviting you to let yourself imagine it.
Hit reply and tell me: What would you allow yourself to want?
I’d love to hear what becomes possible when we give ourselves permission to answer that question.