Is This As Good As It Gets? Why So Many Women Leaders Quietly Believe Success and Fulfillment Aren’t Possible

I still remember the night everything changed.

It was 2009, and I was sitting at a Chairman’s Award dinner for JCPenney. My buying team had just been recognized as the second-highest-performing team in the company out of 90 teams. We had also been the top-performing team in women’s apparel for two years.

I walked across the stage, shook hands with executives, and accepted the recognition we had worked so hard to earn.

On paper, I had achieved everything I wanted. Then I sat back down at the table beside my husband (at the time) and felt tears rising.

In that moment, I realized what I had avoided seeing:

It hadn’t been worth what it had cost me.

At the time, I had a 4-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter. I had been traveling eight to 10 times a year and working 60- to 70-hour weeks. I assumed that was what success required.

The hardest part to admit? There were parts of my children’s early years that I barely remember because I was so exhausted and pulled in so many directions.

I was sitting in the moment I thought would make it worth it.

It didn’t.

I remember thinking this was a really inappropriate emotion for a celebration dinner.

So I did what I’d been taught: I pulled myself together, smiled, and made it through the rest of the night.

But something broke in me that day that I could not put back together or unsee.

For the first time, I quietly asked myself a question many successful women carry:

Is this really as good as it gets?

Over the years, I’ve learned many accomplished women carry some version of that same question.

They’ve built meaningful careers. They’re capable, respected, and admired from the outside.

Yet privately, they wonder:

• Why does success feel this hard?
• Why don’t I feel more grateful?
• Why does it take so much energy to maintain?

We are often taught to measure success by achievement, not by sustainability.

We celebrate titles, promotions, and visible wins.

Much less attention is given to whether the way we are succeeding can actually support the life we want to live.

After that night, I became determined to find a better way.

At first, I thought I needed a company with better work-life balance.

I joined Target Corporation, where I found a healthier culture and better balance. My hours dropped to 40 to 45 a week while I remained a top performer.

That mattered. For the first time in a while, I could breathe again. It taught me that my results weren’t directly tied to the hours I worked.

But it still didn’t fully solve the deeper issue.

I still cycled through frustration and wondered how to keep growing without losing balance.

I thought maybe I needed more autonomy and a bigger challenge.

That led me to Stitch Fix.

It was exciting.

And yet, I found myself repeating familiar patterns: overworking, under-resourced, and pushing through, trying to create success the same way I always had.

Eventually, realizing it was no longer sustainable, I left corporate leadership and became a business owner.

Surely then, I thought, freedom would be the answer.

It didn’t take long before I found myself repeating many of the same challenges.

This time, I could no longer blame the industry, the boss, the expectations, or the company.

The only consistent thing in those circumstances was me.

I kept changing my external circumstances while bringing the same beliefs and ways of working into each one.

I believed my value came from what I produced.

I believed slowing down would cost me results.

I believed sacrifice was simply the price I had to pay.

Those patterns had helped me succeed early in my career, but they had also made success far heavier than it needed to be.

I was spending too much time working in ways that drained me and not enough time in the areas where I naturally created the greatest value.

I had confused effort with effectiveness.

What changed my life was not lowering my ambition.

It was realizing ambition never required the version of success I had been living.

When I started understanding how I work best, where I create the greatest impact, what drains my energy, and which beliefs were keeping me stuck in old patterns, everything changed.

I became more effective, not less.

I was able to create better results in less time.

I had more space to think strategically. More presence in my personal life. More clarity in my decisions. More energy to lead well.

Most importantly, I could help others rise when I was no longer running on empty.

There is sadness for the version of me who believed struggle was the price of success. There is also gratitude for how far I’ve come and for helping others learn sooner than I did.

Many women are still asking themselves, Is this as good as it gets?

I understand the question, but it is no longer the most useful one.

A better question might be:

What if success was never supposed to cost this much?

Because fulfillment and achievement are not opposites. Sustainable success is not reserved for someone else.

Sometimes the next level is not doing more, but succeeding without losing yourself.