Discover your dominant Success Strategy here.

You can be capable, reliable and wildly productive, and still feel like your life no longer fits. That tension is often not a motivation problem. It can be a success strategy that worked brilliantly for years, then quietly started costing more than it gives back.

We dig into how patterns like over-helping, over-planning, over-working and over-perfecting become default settings in the brain. When a strategy brings rewards like validation, promotions or praise, it can shift from something you do into something you believe you are. The tricky part is the blind spots: we stop noticing the emotional labour, the cognitive load, the resentment, the constant vigilance or the fear of stillness that rides along with the “success”.

I walk you through five common success strategies I see in women’s coaching and leadership work: the Sponge, the Controller, the Hustler, the Achiever and the Pleaser. You’ll hear what each one looks like at its best, what it costs over time, and the key question each strategy needs to face when life gets more complex. We also break down why generic productivity and mindset tips can fail, because two women can share the same symptoms, like overwhelm and exhaustion, but need completely different solutions depending on what is driving them.

If you’re ready to stop playing whack-a-mole with your wellbeing, listen now, take the free success strategy assessment in the show notes, then subscribe, share with a friend and leave a review so more women can find what they need.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for women who've outgrown the old model of success. The ones who look fine on the outside but know the way they've been living no longer fits. If you're standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming, this is for you. Honour the space you've created today. Let's dive in. 

Every woman has a way of succeeding. A way of thinking, responding, and navigating to life that's helped her get to where she is today. The more successful that strategy has been, the more likely she is to keep relying on it. This is what I call a success strategy. And it may be costing you more than you realize. And the irony is, many women don't actually feel like they're doing well, but it feels like it's working. It's getting them validation, it's getting them external rewards, maybe they've got money, they've got title, they've got stuff. Your brain is incredibly lazy. And after a while, your brain stops asking, is this the best way for me to create success? Is this the best way for me to strive? Lazy. And it says, no, I'm going to keep doing this just automatically. The same is true of everything, including how you drive and strive for success. But this goes one layer deeper. Because as we get so much evidence that this strategy is working, our brain stops asking, is this the correct way? Very often it becomes entrenched even further, becomes part of your personality. And it can even become part of your identity. Maybe you're a helpful person. You consider yourself caring or your high achiever. These aren't personality elements, they are strategies. Now, of course, if a strategy works and it gets you a payoff, well, you're going to keep using it. However, every payoff comes with a price. And I'm wondering if you know the price you're paying for your success strategy. Our brain can struggle to see the downsize of something that has worked so well and for so long. So it ignores them, suppresses them, keeps them out of your awareness, and just wants you to double down and do more and more and more of what has worked. You'll know that becomes the definition of insanity. So that leaning in might be pushing harder, maybe it's preparing better or carrying more. But life keeps changing. You keep changing, circumstances, environments, who we're around, what we're holding, the amount of responsibility that we have. Very often, these strategies end up costing us way more than they benefit. But we can't see that from inside it. These good old things called blind spots. So maybe you've talked yourself out of opportunities because you are worried what others might think. Maybe you're spending a lot of extra energy absorbing and buffeting the emotions of everyone around you. There's a chance that a lot of your life is being shaped by a strategy that made perfect sense 10 years ago. What worked for us, either in our education years, early in our career, even as we're rising up the ranks, doesn't work when life looks very, very different. If you've got lots of responsibilities at work, if you're juggling kids of any age, maybe you're juggling aging parents, you have more complex health challenges probably than you did when you were 21, where the biggest problem was a hangover. So when everything around you has changed, doesn't it make sense that you need to look at how and why you are getting to your success? So it's time to look at what your success strategy is. Because if you're any of the following, exhausted, overwhelmed, overthinking, feeling stuck, feeling trapped, not sure what you're doing, well, it's likely that you're being asked for something different that lines up with who you are now and what your life now calls for.

So after thousands, tens of thousands of hours of going back and diving into coaching call transcripts and all my frameworks, I've identified five success strategies. Now, these aren't personality tests. There's a very, very good chance you will be using all five. None of these are wrong. Let's be clear: nothing is broken. There is nothing wrong. All of these have made you successful in some way. However, most women usually have one dominant strategy with often a secondary underneath. That's the one that's on autopilot. And the biggest mistake is assuming that the behavior will tell you the strategy. I'm going to run you through these five, and at the end, I'm going to give you some really concrete examples about why knowing your strategy is really important to ensure that the tools and the frameworks that you're putting in place to get out of overwhelm or exhaustion or feeling stuck or paralysis or procrastination. If you're not putting in the right tool for your strategy, nothing's going to work. It's like playing whack-a-mole, like I'm doing this and it's not working. Yeah, because you're going after the wrong thing. And you're going to listen to these and go, I'm that one. No, no, no, no, no. I'm that one. I'm that one. I promise. So let me run you through each of these. And as I do, I want you to listen for which of this really not just sounds like me, but also feels like me. Which one is going, yes, Joe, that's that's who you are.  

So our first success strategy is what I love to call the sponge. The sponge has got so much of their success through helping, fixing, caring, being empathetic, caring really, really deeply, picking things up no one even knew were likely to drop. This is a beautiful success strategy, and it will have worked likely since childhood. Being the caring one, the nice one, the supportive one, everyone leans on you, that shoulder to cry on. Your team can come to you. You have such a huge heart. However, being a sponge means that you just suck everything up. You take on too much. And this quote that I love will resonate really, really strongly. And that is just because you carry it well doesn't mean it's not heavy. You can make absorbing everything, everyone's emotions, everyone's stuff, everyone else's worries, worry about how so-and-so is going to get on with so-and-so. You make it so easy, people stop noticing you. You become invisible and you don't know how to stop doing it. And the challenge, if you're a sponge, is that you hold so much for everyone else that you forget who you are underneath it all. Because there's just so much emotions and it's heavy, and you just feel so lost. So the question the sponge has to ask themselves is what happens when you can't carry everything into this next chapter with you. Maybe you're not a sponge.

Maybe your dominant success strategy is a controller. Controllers have got their success through organization, being prepared, being reliable. They're one step ahead. They're that one at the park with the wipes, the band-aid, the heroastic, a pen and a snack. Like, well, of course, this is just who I am. I'm just always on it. This is a brilliant success strategy. You will have got great at juggling a million things, being dependable, being organized. You can tame the chaos. A little metaphor that often comes to mind when I think of a controller is almost like trying to get an octopus in a Hessian bag. Like, imagine all those limbs slipping out. Like, you will make it happen. You will make sure that everything is where it is. You've got the plan, it's color-coded. You know what's happening with the meals. So great strategy, particularly well-leveraged in large teams, in chaotic work environments. So you've got a head start on everybody. However, the cost of being a controller is that you can't switch off. The cognitive load is huge because you're not just living today and planning today. You're mentally planning tomorrow while living today and beating yourself up about what you missed in the past. No, nothing ever falls through the cracks with you because you've normalized hypervigilance. Constantly scanning plan A, plan B, if this, then that, if this, then that, trying to contain everything and control everything means that you're exhausted in a way that sleep just doesn't fix. Now, the challenge with a controller is when there were fewer parts to control, and say it was just you and you were living by yourself or with a partner, didn't have a stressful job, well, that's okay. You can control everything then. But the more complexity you've got in your life, you add children, you add bigger jobs, teams, hello, external environment, hello, politics, hello, AI. Well, what begins to happen when life becomes too uncertain to organize your way through? That is a question every controller needs to start asking themselves. So, what if you're not somebody who absorbs like the sponge, and perhaps your dominant strategy isn't that what you want to control and organize everything?  

Maybe you are the hustler. Maybe you found success through moving, through momentum. You love a good list, you've ticked things off, and you've actually gone and put something on your to-do list after you've finished it for the pure joy of ticking it off. Now, you and I get shit done, gal, you can get it done better, faster than anyone. You can achieve an extraordinary amount in a very short amount of time. And if anyone wants something done, they're gonna give it to you because you're gonna put in the hours, you're gonna make it happen. You're gonna hustle and grind and you're gonna make it happen. Now, again, very, very well exploited in corporate environments because you're probably doing four people's jobs and you're probably doing it better than four people could. However, the cost of a hustler is always moving. But what if you're not sure what you're moving towards anymore? Because you're not actually present in this life that you have. Hustlers have this constant franticness inside their bodies, like gotta do more, gotta do more. They always have to be productive, they always want to be striving and achieving things, but it's just about that movement. Stillness terrifies a hustler. Rest has to be earned only after doing a certain amount of things. Joy, fun, presence, all earned with movement. But there comes a point when you can't outrun it anymore, and that it could be different for everyone. So the question a hustler has to ask themselves is what happens when working harder no longer gets you where you want to go? That is when you know you have a success strategy that needs re-evaluating.

Next up, maybe your dominant strategy is an achiever. You have earned your success through excellence, high standards. You've checked everything twice. You have an impeccable eye for detail. You can spot a typo in a report four blocks away. You take huge amounts of pride in your work. Everyone comes to you because you do it and you do it well. You send out your Excel spreadsheets with all the text wrapped, all the borders are equal, you've got the thicker borders on the outside and the thinner borders on the inside. You can pride yourself in your standards, your perfectionism, everything that you've achieved. However, to an achiever, nothing ever feels like enough. You will push your achievements onto the team. You'll hide behind them. No, no, no, it wasn't about me. It was a team effort. We did it all together. You'll struggle to take credit, you'll struggle to receive praise. You don't like being out in front. Because you live in terror of making a mistake, you're often bordering the line between being prepared and being overprepared, double-checking everything, wanting to be on top of your inbox because you don't want to be caught out not knowing something. You will marinate in your mistakes for hours and beat yourself up because you've caught it. You should have double-checked it. But the problem for an achiever is the finish line keeps moving. After looking at walls full of trophies and achievements and whatever it is that you've done in life, you start to wonder, well, what if the gold star was never actually the thing you're chasing? So achievers have to ask themselves, what happens when you finally achieve the thing? And it still doesn't feel like enough.

And then finally, rounding out our success strategies is the pleaser. The pleaser has had success through creating harmony and making life easier for everyone around them. I need to flag, many women often don't resonate with the words pleaser. They think it's like a sucker. However, as more and more people who work with me find out, oh, if you don't like conflict, if you swallow your words, and you are very empathetic, well then maybe, just maybe, your dominant success strategy has been the pleaser. Again, we don't judge any of these. There's no good ones or bad ones because pleasers have a huge heart. They are so thoughtful, they are kind, they're empathetic, they're accommodating, they're usually good people. You're great with people, you're probably a great leader. You can bring the team together. However, pleasers can very, very easily lose themselves in keeping everyone else happy. Say yes when you mean to say no. Stew in resentment because you're doing too much that you shouldn't be doing. You're not getting the credit. Pleasers can often feel very much invisible because no one sees all the things that say they said yes to. So they are your five profiles. You have your sponge, your controller, your hustler, your achiever, and your pleaser. I'm curious, did you find yourself nodding along to all of these? Which begs the question, which one is actually your dominant?

Now let me explain to you why this matters. Because your dominant strategy is going to tell you the ways that it's serving you and give us a much greater insight to how it isn't. So let me give you a practical example. Let's take two women who are suffering the same symptoms on the outside. They're both overwhelmed, they're exhausted, they're drowning their to-do list and they can't get ahead. Sounds pretty common, right? So if your success strategy has been a dominant sponge, well, then you have got to this place by absorbing everyone's stuff, their emotions, taking things on. So the strategies that you need is you need some boundaries, my friend. You need to learn how to stop carrying things and you need to learn to recognize and reduce your over-responsibility patterns. However, if your dominant strategy is an achiever, well, the reason that you're so overwhelmed is you never feel finished. So you need a different finish line. You're exhausted because it's never good enough. So you're constantly finessing, and hence you can never tick anything off the list because it's not good enough. So you need to redefine good and you need to learn how to find ways to untangle your worth and through achievement. So, can you see it's the same behavior, but it's a different cause and it's a different solution. This is why you can recognize yourself in each profile. However, you need to understand which is the dominant one, which ensures that you are actually putting the right solutions in place. Before we wrap, I want to leave you with one question. Every one of these success strategies has helped build the life you have today. They got you through challenges, opened doors, and created so many opportunities. They worked, but life changes. The demands on you change, and what worked 10 years ago isn't always what your life needs now. Every success strategy has a payoff. Every success strategy has a price. The only question is, is it still worth what it's costing you?

If you're curious which strategy has been driving your decisions, I've created a free success strategy assessment. It takes about 90 seconds and you'll get your dominant strategy. You'll find the link in the show notes. Can't wait to see which one you discover. Thanks for joining me today. If this episode resonated, share it with a woman who needs to hear it. And if you want to be part of the Ripple Effect, leaving a review helps it reach the women it's meant for. I'll see you next time.