Erin Thomas Wong (00:00)
Hi, and welcome back to the Life-Friendly Business podcast. I'm Erin, the Life-Friendly Business mentor, and I help female solopreneurs build businesses that work with their real lives, not against them. And in this season, I'm sharing a different way to think about your entire business. So if last week's episode got you thinking a little differently, this one is going to take that even deeper.
In the last episode, we talked about capacity before strategy, looking at what's actually possible in your life before deciding what your business should look like.
But when you do start to do that, there's something else that still trips so many women up. And it's this. The way that we define success.
Because most of us are measuring ourselves against the version of success that we didn't consciously choose. It's what we see online. It's what we've been told we should be aiming for. It's what's praised, celebrated and talked about the most. More money, more growth, more visibility, faster results.
And I'll be honest, I've fallen into this myself. I think for me, it really started when we were living in London and on paper, everything looked great. We both had good jobs. I worked in TV. My husband worked in marketing. We had a lovely house, two kids, a nice car, but it never quite felt enough. There was always this underlying pressure, this sense of needing to keep up with the Joneses.
And when we moved to Abu Dhabi 10 years ago, if anything, that was amplified. We were living an expat lifestyle, living on a compound with private pools, a beach, sunshine, palm trees, everything that you would look at and think, that's success. But it didn't make me happy. In fact, I felt quite empty inside.
And it made me realise that you can achieve what the world defines as success, but still feel deeply misaligned.
And that was a really big moment for me because it made me start questioning what am I actually building here and who am I building it for?
And I think this is something that we don't talk about enough. There's an invisible cost to the way that we've been taught to build businesses. Think about some of the things that we've normalised. Working after everyone's gone to bed, even though you're exhausted. Checking your emails on holiday because you need to get back to people ASAP. Saying yes when your body's saying no. Feeling guilty when you're working and feeling guilty when you're not working.
missing the moments that you cannot replay and we've been taught that this is just what it takes. We've been sold this idea that if we hustle now we'll achieve balance later,
that if we just push hard, keep going, success will come. And then we can enjoy our lives. Then we can get balance. But what I see time and time again is that that promise doesn't hold up. Because when you hustle your way to success, one of two things tends to happen. One, you burn out. Or two, you miss the very life you're working so hard to build.
And this is where I think we need to be really honest, because money isn't always the primary measure for everyone. And sometimes it can feel quite uncomfortable to admit that, especially in a world where success is so often defined by revenue.
But I can tell you from working with hundreds of women, so many of them are not chasing more for the sake of more. What they actually want is flexibility, freedom, time with their family, space to breathe, a business that fits around their life.
And you can have a business that looks incredibly successful from the outside, bringing in great money, but feels exhausting behind the scenes. And you can also have a business that might look smaller on paper, but feels calm, sustainable and fully aligned with your life.
So the question becomes, which one is actually success?
And this is the permission I want to give you today. You get to decide. You get to define what success looks like for you. Not based on what you're seeing online, not based on what someone else is doing, but based on your life, your capacity and your priorities.
Because when you don't do this, you end up chasing something that will never feel enough. And when you do, everything starts to feel lighter, clearer and more intentional.
And this is something that I call the Align move in my Life-Friendly Business framework. But really it's about something much simpler than that. It's about deciding what actually matters to you, not to someone else.
So I want to leave you with a few questions to think about today. What does like for you in this season of your life? What are you currently chasing that doesn't actually fit? And what would change if you gave yourself permission to define success differently?
Because when you combine this with what we talked about last week, your capacity, you start to build a business that actually makes sense for your life.
And if this is resonating with you, if you're starting to realise that maybe you've been chasing a version of success that doesn't actually fit and you want support to redefine that and build your business around it, then The Cocoon is where to start. It's my membership for female solopreneurs who want more clarity, more focus and a way of doing business that actually works for them.
You'll find the link in the show notes.
And remember, you get to do this your way. See you next week.
