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If you’ve ever watched someone else get the opportunity you knew you could handle, the sting might not be about your capability. It might be about conditioning. We’ve been trained to chase gold stars and wait for a shoulder tap, and for high-achieving women that pattern can run for decades because it keeps “working” right up until it starts costing us our freedom, fulfilment, and energy.

We talk about the system that rewards being picked and why it creates a life that looks successful on the outside but can feel strangely flat on the inside. When the old scoreboard stops motivating you, new questions get louder: Do I even want that next role? What do I want my days to feel like? How much of my career have I consciously chosen versus simply said yes to? We explore the grief and anger that can surface when you realise you played by the rules, yet still don’t feel like you’ve won.

We also get practical about what changes in midlife, especially for the “safe pair of hands” who gets things done, keeps everyone steady, and says yes by default. When you start wanting boundaries, delegation, spaciousness, and time to think, the workplace and the people around you may keep inviting the old version of you back. Choosing yourself can mean re-weighting internal measures like meaning, vitality, connection, and control over your time, even when there’s no applause or clear next ladder.

You don’t need a dramatic reinvention to start. You can pick yourself in micro moments: asking for what you want, creating opportunities, and making choices before checking what everyone else thinks. If this lands with you, subscribe, share it with a woman who needs the nudge, and leave a review so it reaches the people it’s meant for.

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. 

What if some of the frustration you feel right now, being overlooked, invisible, watching other people get opportunities you know you're capable of has less to do with whether people see you and more to do with the fact that you're still waiting for them to pick you, to notice you, recognize what you're capable of, tap you on the shoulder and say, we're ready, we want you. Because there comes a point where waiting to be picked stops serving us. At some point, we have to pick ourselves. And for women who spent their entire lives getting very, very good at being picked, I think this is a much harder transition than we realize. There was a recent podcast with Seth Godin and Stephen Bartlett that sparked this thought. Seth Godin speaks about we have been brought up in a system that made us want to be picked. As my daughter now says, pick me girls. We go to school, we want to get picked for the team, we want to get picked for this opportunity, we get good marks so that we get picked for university. We go to university and then we get picked for our first job. Then we get picked for promotion, then we get shoulder tapped for our next opportunity. We were brought up with this repeatable ladder, was all about do the work, meet the criteria for us, shoot the lights out, collect the gold stars along the way, and then somebody, somewhere, will decide that you're ready for the next thing. Now, for those of us that are high achievers, no wonder we worked well in this system. Learn the rules, understand what gets rewarded, and then deliver. Overdeliver better, faster than anyone else. Every time you're picked, you get more external evidence that you're capable, that you're ready, that you're on the right track. Got so many women that have come to me that have been shoulder-tapped their entire career. A role opened, maybe their name got suggested, there was a restructure, they fell into something, someone saw their potential. You can wake up a long way into a successful career and realize I don't know how much of this I consciously chose. I was just really good at saying yes when I got picked. But many of us have reached this point now where the rules have gotten a little fuzzy. The repeatable ladder, the contract that we made that says do X and Get Y has started breaking down. Maybe another promotion has become available, but you're looking at the people doing that job and going, hmm, do I want that life? Am I willing to do what that role says you have to do? You're very comfortable in your role. You could probably do that other role with your eyes closed, but the question of what next starts becoming much bigger and louder than what's the next title. Because you followed the rules. You worked really hard, you built the career, you created the life, and we were told, as part of buying into this system and chasing the gold stars, implicitly or implicitly, that somewhere at the end of all of this achievement would be the holy grail. You'd arrive, you'd have it all. So why are so many women sitting here going, I played by the rules? I did what it took to be picked. Why don't I feel like I've actually won? And this is where the anger, the disappointment, and the grief really starts to sink in. Maybe you did win according to the scoreboard that you were given. But that scoreboard likely measured the outside. Title, salary, health, status, achievement, whatever else it may be for you. It's like, okay, great, but you're not chasing that stuff anymore. Ironically, probably because you've got it. And you've realized that actually what you now want to measure is fulfillment, vitality, freedom, meaning, connection, control over how you spend your days rather than poking your eye out in yet another useless meeting. The old rules that we've grown up with aren't particularly useful for answering these questions. And now everything's up for debate. Korea, where I live, my relationships with my kids, my parents, my identity, what I want the next 20 years to look like. No one else can pick what comes next because there may no longer be an agreed next.

When you spend your life waiting to be picked and getting all your adrenaline and dopamine and sense of meaning from being picked, waiting can actually be very frustrating. So many women tell me they feel invisible. They are overlooked, they're undervalued. They're watching somebody else get the role. They're swimming in comparison, going, why her or why him? What do they have that I don't have? Constantly worrying about what other people think of you and really allowing that to influence what you do next. This can look like behaviors where you wait for your boss to notice rather than intentionally orchestrating your career, waiting for the shoulder tap for somebody else to decide that you're now ready for another opportunity. Or even knowing what you might want. But then you don't feel like you can move until someone else reflects your value back to you. Now they can be legitimate bias, bad bosses, and workplaces that 100% do not recognize you. I don't want to dismiss that. But if you feel like you are trapped or stuck, another possibility worth exploring is have I become so accustomed to being picked that I'm still waiting for someone else to initiate my next move? Are you giving someone else power to determine when you are ready? There's a really alluring reason that we wait. Even if you stew, even if you whinge, say you hate it, but it can actually feel safer to be picked. Now, when you're picked by someone, when you're shoulder tapped, when they say, I choose you, congratulations, you meet the criteria. Someone else has decided that you're ready. Someone else has validated your idea or they've said this is good, they've given you kudos, and someone else has taken responsibility for opening the door. You now don't have to take that risk. And if it doesn't work, well, you have someone else to blame. If no one picks you, you can stay frustrated without ever having to discover what would have happened if you chose yourself. There is genuine, there's genuine vulnerability in saying, I want this. So I'm going to move towards it. You could get it wrong. Other people might not understand. They might judge your decisions or where you're going. No one may applaud you. There may be no way to know, have I got a gold star or haven't I? How am I doing? And when your life has been fixated on external validation, you haven't built an internal compass to say, I'm going to move towards it, and I don't care if I fail because I'm going to pick myself up and I'm going to find the next thing. This sense of waiting that we have can be deeply frustrating, but strangely comfortable at the same time. There is another challenge of waiting to be picked that a lot of women, particularly as we approach midlife, are finding becomes like a straitjacket. Let's say you're selected for a leadership position because of your skills, your experience, your qualities, your capabilities. Maybe you're reliable, you get shit done, you're a safe pair of hands to guide through this change, you're calm in the storm. The organization you're with knows this version of you and they've rewarded it usually handsomely. Then you hit midlife and you go, oh no. I don't want to be that version of me anymore. I want to delegate. I am going to stop rescuing everybody. I'm going to start saying no and not just be the default yes. I'm going to learn boundaries and become less available. I'm going to decide that spaciousness matters to me. I want time for thinking. You start dropping some of the guilt and the people pleasing. But the system around you, the contract you could say that you've stepped up into or where you are, has been built around the old version of you. So they are going to keep inviting, nudging, pushing you back into the role that you've always played. And it becomes really difficult to change inside a system that knows how useful the old you was. At some point, you have to decide whether being picked by the system is worth continuing to perform the version of yourself the system picked. As we are sitting at this doorway between who we've been, the pick me girl, and the life that involves us picking ourselves, the number of possible options that we are stepping into has exploded, which is why the ladder has broken down.

It's not the simple go to uni, go to college, go to work, move up the ladder, maybe find a partner, maybe have children, maybe do some traveling. There was a limited array of options. But right now, we're staring down the barrel of endless choice, almost the paradox of choice. And most of us don't have a useful role model for what the next 20 or 30 years can look like because our parents' options were likely dramatically narrower. But now you can start something at 50. I know 50-year-olds that are in better shape than 30-year-olds. They're buying houses in Tuscany, they're building portfolio careers, and that amount of possibility can be liberating. But it can be incredibly disorienting. Because there's no rules. There's no obvious gold star. No one can tell you which version is actually correct. And the people around you may not understand why you would mess with a perfectly good life. So when there are 10 possible ladders, being excellent at climbing ladders doesn't tell you which one you want. Choosing yourself may mean questioning things that you worked incredibly hard to build. Maybe you spent 25 years being this person. You've built this reputation, salary. You've worked so hard to get here. And it feels almost disrespectful to your younger self to decide you don't want what she worked so hard for anymore. You build this life with the information, desires, and options that she had. You followed the rules. But you can appreciate what she created without requiring her choices, a past version of you, following different rules to dictate the rest of your life. You can thank the woman who got you here and then allow the woman you are now to choose from here. This is where pick yourself becomes so much more meaningful. Now, before you get all eat prey love on me, go, oh my god, Joe, I'm gonna blow up my life. You can actually pick yourself in micro moments every day. If you want to eat prey love, be my guest. What if you could just decide what you want before checking in what everybody else wants? Maybe you could create your own opportunities. Oh ask for what you want. Ask for the promotion, ask for the new role to be made rather than relying on the shoulder tap, on waiting for something else to happen for you to get it. What if you could give these beautiful internal measures like fulfillment, energy, or freedom to have equal, oh shokara, maybe if not more weight along external measures and accepting that some choices won't come with a gold star, there may not be a cheer squad going yay. And it may involve standing exactly where you are now, but staying because you've consciously chosen it, the agency is ultimately in the choosing.

So I want you to think about somewhere in your life where you're currently feeling frustrated, overlooked, invisible, undervalued, or just stuck waiting. And rather than immediately make somebody or someone or some circumstance wrong, I want you to get curious on whether you're waiting for them to do something that you wouldn't give yourself permission for. Who exactly are you waiting to pick you? And what would change if you stopped waiting? 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.