Whose Rules Are You Succeeding By?

Six in ten senior women in corporate America say they’re frequently burned out. And for the first time in the history of McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s Women in the Workplace report, women are less interested in the next promotion than men.

The researchers point to some important reasons. Women still receive less sponsorship, fewer advocates in the rooms where promotions are decided, and fewer opportunities to advance.

I don’t disagree with any of that.

But I also wonder if there’s another story sitting inside the same numbers.

I kept thinking about the women I work with. Successful by every measure they’ve ever been handed, and yet something no longer fits. Maybe some of them haven’t lost their ambition. Maybe they’ve climbed high enough to see the view. From a distance, the next promotion represents possibility. Get close enough and you start to see the tradeoffs you couldn’t see before.

What the job actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday. What the people already in that seat have quietly given up to keep it. You start asking questions that never occurred to you while you were still climbing. And choosing not to take the next step, which reads as settling from the outside, can feel from the inside like waking up.

I know that feeling because I’ve lived it. In 2019, after nearly a decade living and working overseas, I moved back to the United States for a senior leadership role. I was proud of it. I’d spent years building toward it, and on paper it was exactly the opportunity I’d always pictured wanting.

I remember thinking, this is it.

I don’t know that I said it consciously, but underneath everything I believed that arriving here would feel different. That the years of work would finally resolve into some lasting sense of certainty. Instead life felt familiar. The title changed. The questions I’d carried with me didn’t. I still wanted work that meant something. I still wanted to feel present in my own life. I still caught myself asking what all of it was for if I wasn’t enjoying the getting there.

It was an uncomfortable thing to notice. The achievement was worth celebrating. But I’d expected it to hand me something it was never able to give.

There is a name for this phenomenon. “The Arrival Fallacy.”

We assume that once we reach where we are going, achieve what we are after, we’ll finally feel satisfied. And sometimes we do, for a while. Then the brain does what it’s built to do and adapts. Yesterday’s dream becomes today’s normal, and our attention moves to the next thing. Achievement isn’t a problem in itself. It’s just that we gave it a job never built for.

Which is why I think there may be more to this moment than first meets the eye. When senior women say they don’t want the next promotion, some of them aren’t getting less ambitious. They’re getting more deliberate.

The question has changed. Not “Can I do this job”?. They already know they can. The question is “Do I want to sacrifice so much to get there”?

For a long time we’ve treated success as if it had one definition. Earn more, lead more people, keep moving up. Those things matter. They’re also not the same as building a life that feels like yours.

At my keynote last week, I centered the talk around one question: whose rules are you succeeding by? Most of us have never actually asked it. We inherit our definition of success from parents, teachers, early bosses, colleagues, the feed, a culture that rewards the climb. Sometimes those inherited rules line up with what matters to us.

Sometimes we look up and realize we’ve gotten very good at building a life we never chose on purpose.

Maybe beneath the numbers, another story could be unfolding. Some women aren't stepping away from success. They're stepping away from someone else's definition of it.

The challenge, of course, is that you can't redefine success until you know the definition you've been living by.

I closed my talk with three questions. They’re simple to ask, but not always easy ones to answer:

1. What is your current definition of success, and where did it come from?

2. What are you hoping success will give you? How do you hope it will make you feel?

3. If you designed success from the inside out, what would change?

And there’s another piece we didn’t have space for here.

So many of us postpone the feelings we’re really chasing until we reach the next milestone. I’ll feel confident when... I’ll feel peaceful when... I’ll feel successful when...

What if those feelings weren’t the reward waiting at the finish line?

What if they were the starting point?

That’s what I’d like to explore next week.

Because I’ve come to believe that the feelings we’re chasing aren’t meant to be the reward at the finish line.

They’re meant to become part of how we live—and lead—today.