Why Ambitious Women Fear Success
Life coach Jennifer Davy has watched it happen again and again: women get exactly what they wanted, then quietly shrink from it. She takes a forensic look at the fear nobody names, the fear of success, and who you have to become to keep it.
In every room full of successful women, there is a fear nobody will name. On the outside, it's dressed up in a power suit, looks busy and replies with "everything is great" when asked how business is going. But lurking underneath the front is a fear they don't even know they're carrying. It isn't a fear of failure; it's a fear of success.
The thing is, we've all been given the same BS stories about fear and how we should feel about it. That we should hold back because we're scared it won't work, that we don't go for the bigger contract or the higher fee because some part of us feels it's not allowed, or that we'll be condemned, ostracised, for wanting what men get every single day. Sometimes that's true, of course. But after years of sitting across from women who are clever and capable and already further along than they'll ever admit to themselves, I can tell you the deeper (real) fear of success runs the opposite way. Psychologists have been tracing this pattern in women since the 1970s. They're not afraid it won't work. They're afraid it will.
What success expects of you
Success asks you to become someone you can't quite imagine yet, a future version of you you haven't met. She earns more than the man she's married to. She says "no thank you" to the work that drains her. She walks into the room and doesn't bite her lip, instead of speaking up, and she doesn't ask herself whether saying or doing this will make everyone else feel uncomfortable. She isn't the woman your mother raised, or the friend your group chat knows, or the colleague who could always be relied on to ask for nothing in return. You don't have a picture of her, and you're struggling to believe she exists because you cannot yet picture yourself behaving this way.
Photo: Jennifer Davy
I went blasé about my own success
A few years ago, everything I'd asked for started arriving at once: the bigger stages, the real money, my name in the Irish Independent and Stellar, on RTÉ and Newstalk, on Fox News in Detroit. Do you know what I did with all of it? I went blasé. A friend actually pulled me up on it. There I was, mentioning that I was writing a book and speaking on American stages in the same flat tone I'd use to say I'd booked the car in for a service. She looked at me and said, "Do you hear yourself?" I was dimming the whole thing down, making it smaller as it came out of my mouth, because some old part of me had decided it was safer to act like none of it was a big deal than to stand fully in the fact that it was. That's the fear nobody recognises as fear. It doesn't always look like hiding under the duvet. Sometimes it looks like being suspiciously blasé about the best, most exciting year in your business, because if you don't make it matter, then you don't have to change, and you don't have to risk others seeing you differently, or worry it might cost you a friendship.
I’m not an exception to the rule
I see the same thing in the women I work with, again and again, and it almost never looks like what you'd expect. These are not women who are failing. They're the capable ones, the ones everyone leans on, successful on paper and quietly running on fumes underneath it. They say "I'm grand" while they're drowning in the different roles they're playing. They over-give until there's nothing left. They hold boundaries that leak like a sieve and say yes without even moving their lips, while fatigue makes their limbs feel heavy. Staying the reliable one who holds it all together is a known entity. It's recognised as good behaviour. Becoming the woman who puts herself first is the stranger she can't picture, so she runs from her by staying busy and being indispensable to everybody but herself.
This is the part I am sick of seeing women do, and it has to stop because society benefits from women behaving this way. The closer you get to what you want, the louder the old voice gets. Expect it. Don't be scared or surprised by it as it’s actually a really good sign that you're igniting change in your thoughts and behaviours. I call my inner voice Maggie. She's the toxic bestie who turns up dressed as concern, all "who do you think you are" and "don't be getting notions" and "sure, you were grand the way you were." Your version of Maggie isn't protecting you; she's holding you back. That voice was planted in your mind long before you were old enough to question it. It's inherited, it's cultural, and in my case, it's a whole island raised on the idea that wanting more is bad manners, that a woman should be grateful and quiet and never, ever above herself.
So you go blasé. You over-give, over-function, and stay the woman you've long outgrown, because at least it's a version of you that you recognise.
Why is success so uncomfortable?
The discomfort you feel when things go well, the urge to make yourself fit in or be amenable as the good news leaves your mouth, isn't a warning at all. It's a growth signal. The gap between who you've been and who you're becoming will, of course, feel strange because you've never met the future you. You're not losing your mind or being a silly girl; you’re changing your perspective, you're growing and changing, and that is absolutely fabulous, and I am cheering you on from my corner of Ireland.
The woman you can't picture yet isn't a fantasy, and she's not someone you have to fake your way into being. She already exists; you just need to ignore Maggie and listen to the version of you who has already stepped into her success instead. She's the one who will tell you to go for it, to ask what's the worst that can happen. She'll send a lovely warm feeling through your body every time you say exactly how you feel out loud, every time you let a "no" be a full sentence. You're not becoming someone else. You're becoming the real you, the one before other people's BS shaped how you live your life.
If you've caught yourself being blasé about something good lately, or pouring yourself into everyone else this year…
Name the voice in your head guiding that kind of behaviour, then write down exactly what she said to you, word for word.
Then ask yourself the only question that matters: whose voice is that, really, and how do you feel about it? Does it get to stay, or is it time for her to leave?
One day soon, you'll catch a glimpse of the future you, the one who earns it, says no, takes up the whole room without dying with embarrassment on the inside, and you'll realise she was never a stranger at all. She was just you, before they told you not to be her. So get ready to meet her.
