Dani Tan: Hi, I'm Dani Tan, and if you are here, you are in the right place. Welcome to the Pivot and Promotion podcast, where we say forget the rules because they weren't written for us. I'm Dani Tan. I'm your host as well as career and leadership coach and a proud advocate for redefining what success and leadership looks like. And here's what I know. You can lead at any level. You can pivot at any age, any. And you can make moves that feel right for you. Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder, starting something completely new, or just figuring out your next step. I've got you covered with strategies, stories, and straight up inspiration. So let's make some moves. Okay, so today we're going to talk about what nobody tells you about when it comes to success.

Success in general, success in a role. So let's go ahead and break it down. So the first part is, when it comes to success is that winning or success doesn't always feel like a sense of relief or the relief that you would expect. So whether you have received a new role, a new title, or even like the funding for something, you would sense there'd be like, okay, now there's going to be this sense of ease, and I'm going to go ahead of no more pressure. But you may realize, wait a minute. Actually still feel this, like a bit of pressure, and it's a different kind of pressure. So, for example, you thought the hard part potentially was getting what it was or what it is that you want to achieve, but now you are starting, starting to question whether you can actually deliver on it.

So that's where this starts to creep in. Now, I don't want to say this is imposter syndrome. I rather say it's an emotional lag. And that happens when your external world changes faster than your internal identity and you're trying to get them to catch up with each other. So I want to reiterate that one more time. It's an emotional lack of what your external world currently is and how fast it's changing versus your internal identity and how they are matching. And so while you felt potentially that the hardest part was going to be able to get this thing, now there's a whole new layer of potential pressure and unease that you're facing of, of. Wait a minute. Can I actually deliver on the things that I push forward for?

So, for example, I have a client who's a senior leader, and she wanted to land this dream role where she was going to be at a higher level and Doing some really mission led work which she was super excited about. When she got the job, she was like, oh my gosh, I just don't know if, if I'm the right person for this job. I don't know if I'm properly qualified for this job and I have the right experience for it. Even though she lands it, even though they offered her, even though she's in the role, a big thing for her was constantly feeling behind. She always had to catch up, right? Or like she's questioning her capacity, like how come I can't get all the things done? And so she thought there was almost something wrong with her.

Of I thought I was supposed to be like at ease now, supposed to feel better that I'm here, but now I feel like I have to make sure they don't find me out right in the sense of like maybe I'm not everything that I said I was. And so she started to question herself, question her capacity and her ability to just get the stuff done. And so the biggest thing that we did because outside of helping folks like get their next role, it's also about the transition of being in your new role. So we started to realize and unpack was that the new pace that she was going at was exposing these like old habits that she was having of like overworking to feel secure. And so once we started to say like, wait a minute, just because you're in a new role and it's your dream role does not mean you have to like push, push, push to an unrealistic pace to prove yourself that overworking does not necessarily create security because it also can create insecurity if you feel like you're doing things not at the level that you want to do them.

And so with that we have to kind of take a step back and understand like what our true capacity is. And so once we were able to name that and she stopped this thing of having to prove herself and more so just leading with the fact of how can I like get a foundation, have understanding and learning. She started to lead with a more like confident and calm direction. The versus in this like sense of scarcity and trying to find security through overworking. So that is something that's really important when it comes to you're not necessarily going to feel the relief always once you've achieved something because there's other emotions that come up and sometimes there's a lag between our external and our internal.

And so, you know, the question, question that I have for you is where is maybe a time that you finally had gotten something that you've been working towards, or you're kind of like, wait a minute, I don't feel at ease quite yet. And I'm just kind of curious of what comes up for you for that. The next phase, I would say, outside of realizing that winning doesn't necessarily always attribute to relief, is you could be in a new role but have the same patterns. So when you step into something new, you can bring your old beliefs with you. And so they don't just change overnight. It could be that you've always measured your value by output or being the go to person for everything. And it's really easy to carry those habits forward when they no longer necessarily serve you anymore.

Right. Like being, you know, based off of your output, being the go to person is super helpful for a good amount of time. But if you're especially somebody who's trying to go to something that is more strategy focused, that can actually not help you anymore, it can kind of hold you back in some ways. And so new rules typically require new operating systems or new beliefs. And so if you kind of just like barrel into the next thing trying to like prove yourself and trying to work super hard and you actually don't like pause to recalibrate, you'll create a similar cycle of burnout in this new container. So you want to understand and identify, like, what patterns you've had previously in roles. When you're stepping into this new role, what do you actually need to feel set up within this new role?

Are there some things that maybe you could potentially leave behind or adjust when you're going into this? So for example, I have a founder who definitely was falling back into her I do it all mode. She hadn't like redefined her role as she had built out her business and grew it. So while, yes, she brought on some people on her team, she did not realign her role with the new members on her team. Therefore, she was still doing it all. And her calendar looked identical to what it did before, which was super packed. So the biggest things that we had to do was talk about like what we're going to be her focus, her vision for herself, right? Whether that was going to be revenue goals, people goals, partnership goals, and then what the priorities were to be for those on her team that she had hired.

What once we made that big shift there of like, this is what her focus is versus their focus, she was able to actually start to get to the work that she needs to get done versus being the person who does it all. Because at the end of the day, when you cannot simply be an individual contributor just because you're high performing, especially when you are a founder or a CEO, right. You have to be able to depend and lean on your team. And so being able to make that shift in realizing that before, when she was first starting and fundraising and she was, you know, a solopreneur, essentially it made sense for her to be the do it all for everything. But that's not going to serve her in this new role.

Those old patterns, this new role going to take her to have to delegate, to have to communicate, to have to hire and develop people as well. So I'm curious for you, what patterns maybe are you holding on to that no longer match the role that you're currently in? Some things that you're having some hard times, like to kind of release or let go or essentially like evolve. In the last piece, I would say is success. And I feel like this could be kind of brutal. But success does not always feel safe. So success does not always feel safe because sometimes it can feel uncomfortable, it could feel threatening. It could be this energy of, like, what if I lose it? What do I have more to prove? And so it can feel better and more safe and aligned if you're able to redefine it.

So if you don't redefine success and what it means to you in this season or for your life, you'll constantly have this old version of you chasing, chasing this version of success. So this is the biggest thing that I would say, if something comes up that you want to achieve or go after. Right. Make sure it makes sense for who you are. I always think about it in the sense of, like, there is this idea of success and goals, but is it your version of success and goals? Is it something that has been out there and put out there? So you think that's like the gold standard, something you must achieve because that is like a societal norm, or is it something that is truly in alignment with what you want for your life, for your values, what you prioritize?

Because that's when success feels more aligned versus empty. And success can feel empty and unstable and insecure when we're just going after things that are kind of like name brand, let's say. And so I always say it's best to define it based off of what you want for your life, what you want for this season versus trying to chase something that is just a label or a title, understand what the intentionality is behind that. And so that way your brain can start to Create some certainty around what that success looks like and it can start to identify with that versus just chasing something that feels kind of like just pretty, pretty and shiny. We don't need shiny and sparkly here anymore. Okay. That's how we feel more aligned.

So the thing that I would say for this would be one of my clients, she, she definitely was very focused on changing her job search to find a new company. We had her do an. I had to do an exercise essentially that's called like the priority checklist. And when the priority checklist, what you do is you list out no matter what the role is. We don't have to have a title, we don't have an industry. You don't have to have anything. You create a priority checklist of what it is you want in your next role. Now that could be something like a women led organization. It could be mission driven, it could be X, Y and Z salary, it could be location based, it does not matter. You get to make your priority checklist and you rank it based off what's most important to you.

This creates a filter for what it is you're going to go after. It's not like hard, you know, fast and the only thing. But it's a good guideline. This kind of defines for you what success looks like for you, taking into account what you want your life to look like holistically. And so when she was able to do this, we had that as a baseline. I always have you do this at the beginning of coaching because you're in a different head space. You're like excited, you have the energy, you're invigorating. So we do it. Then when you start the search, our minds go up and down, we're in waves, all the different emotions pop up. So for example, when she started doing her search, she started looking at all the shiny companies.

She was like, well, I want to work at this company because it's like, you know, a big company, it's Netflix. I want to work at this company because it's a really big company, it's meta. And so my question for her was, if you looked at your priority checklist of what's most important to you, how do these things fit back to that and how are you really defining success for yourself? So when she did the comparison for herself, she realized that she wanted to work at more of a smaller company. She wanted to work at a mission based company, she wanted to work at a company that was led by women. So the organization she started to list out, she realized we're not matching. So the biggest question is, okay, how are you defining success for yourself versus where do you see it from a society standpoint and what do you want your life to be?

It's okay. You can want to have shiny, fancy new big brands, but also just be realistic for yourself for what's going to really make you happy. Because that's the thing that happens is that then we dive into the next thing and we're not as jazzed about it once we're there because we're not leading with the right part of either our heart or mind. Mind when we were making that decision or that choice. So that goes to say it's really important to figure out, like what does success feel like for you to create that safety around it and knowing that it's what you want for yourself. And so the question, of course I'm going to ask for you is what does success actually look like for you you now? So what does it look like for you now to be successful and are you living it?

And success doesn't have to be a number. It could be something as simple as having the flexibility and freedom to wake up and go to a coffee shop. It could be to read a book. It could be something of a title, of course, or a salary range or a place to live or the work that you're doing. But knowing like, what does that look like for you and are you living it now and if you're not, what do you want to do about it? So overall, just to take away this is again what nobody tells you about success when it comes to a new role, of how when you get that win, it's not always how you feel, how you think it will feel that you can be in a new role and have still the same patterns as before. And then last but not least, you want to be able to define it for yourself.

Awesome. Well, if you have any questions, let me know. com and I will talk to you soon. Bye bye.