Is It Normal to Be Successful and Miserable?

When someone is successful, you expect them to be happy, right?

I mean after all, if you’re successful then you’re doing well, and you have everything you want in life. So why wouldn’t you be happy? Sadly, it’s a very common thing. You can look like the most successful person in your field, but still be miserable on the inside.

This week I talked to Janine Aurichio, a fellow coach I met in training and her mission is to be a part of healing the world. Grand aims indeed, but I think if anyone could do it, it would be Janine!

Janine helps women lead more joyful and purposeful lives, and she’s so good at it that she calls herself ‘the Joy Master’. I love it! And since she has experience working with people who appear successful, but feel miserable, I thought she was the best person to have this discussion with. So without further ado, let’s dive in.

What we’ll cover:

• Appearances can be deceiving

• How do we define success?

• Is success a societal problem?

• Your body knows success

• The pillars of joyful success

Meet Janine:

Janine is a Joy Master, Intuition Medicine practitioner, Whole Person Certified Coach and Recovering Approval Seeker. Her mission is to bring healing to the world by helping women step away from “shoulds” and step into their undeniable magnificence, their YUM. 

www.yes2yum.com

Linkedin: Janine Aurichio

Meet Up Group - California

Looks can be Deceiving

‘I think our culture is so keyed into going at high speed, griding and producing, and that’s what we envision when we talk about success. But I’ve walked that path, and I see it with clients and even with friends and family. But when being so busy and overwhelmed has become the ‘norm’, we don’t thrive. Instead, all of that acquiring and achieving and grinding leads to stress, exhaustion and depletion. And there’s not really an emphasis on doing your hearts work.

“I was living someone else’s dream.”

For me, I made a lot of big decisions based on wanting to get other people’s approval. Things like what I studied in college and where, what jobs I took, who I married, where I bought a house, what kind of house. And I realised I was living someone else’s dream – not my own. But to everyone else, I had everything.

I was a principal of a really high-end interior design firm in San Francisco. I co-owned it with a partner, and we had Rockstar clients. From the outside, it looked like I had a dream life. But on the inside, I wasn’t happy. I was 35 pounds overweight, I hadn’t slept well in four or five years, my body ached, and I realised that something had to give. So yes, you can check all the boxes of success but still feel like something’s missing. And that doesn’t mean you’re crazy. And while it’s not necessarily healthy, it is normal.’

I found as Janine was talking about her previous career, I was thinking ‘Oh my goodness, that sounds so amazing and glamorous! I want to know more about that.’ And I think that my reaction reinforces exactly what she was saying. The fact that, to me, that seemed like an amazing life, but in reality she was deeply unhappy, shows us just how easy it can be to assume what makes other people happy. And how, if someone is feeling unhappy despite having all the trappings of success, that view can actually make them slip further into their misery.

Defining Success

How do we, as a society, define success? It’s a truly difficult question. Having money, nice things and a high-powered job all certainly end up at the top of the list.

’15 years ago, to me, success would have been a certain amount of paycheck, having a certain amount of stature, like a title, or just that what I was doing was highly regarded. It would also have been about what my place looked like and what kind of stuff I had – very surface level, much as I hate to admit it. And being, or appearing to be busy.

“Comparing your inside to other people’s outside, dims your own light.”

The glorification of being busy as a sign of success – which makes me a bit sad now. I think I would have included friendships and relationships in there too. And honestly that’s the only thing from there that I would still consider a part of a successful life. But now, instead of looking for status and money, I look for serenity, joy, loving myself and those I’m surrounded by, and being in touch with my own needs. Being aligned with my own core values is a big sign of success for me now. And I think if more people put aside time to do some introspective thinking, the way society defined success would definitely change.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now – comparison can be the thief of joy. It’s a message always worth remembering, and for Janine, it hit home. She talked about the idea of comparing our inside experience and feelings to other peoples outside, what we see as their reality, does nothing more than dim our own light. And just because it looks shiny and glamorous, doesn’t necessarily mean it is. Instead, success should be more about being fulfilled on a deep and personal level. And so everyone’s definition of success is different. It’s our own responsibility to check in with ourselves, to ask ourselves if we are thriving, and why? Or why not?

“Are you thriving? Why? Or why not?”

Is Success A Societal Problem?

I don’t know about you, but I feel like part of why we seek success, or why we seek success in specific ways, is partly due to a need to please other people. If you’ve been a reader a while you’ll know I’m a recovering people pleaser, and I know a lot of readers and listeners struggle with the same thing too. I wrote here about how being successful can ruin your relationship choices.

“Has your success been driven by what you want, or by what you think others expect of you?”

So I wanted to ask you to look back on the ways and reasons you sought success, and ask yourself if all of that was really for you? Did it bring your soul joy? Or was it what was expected of you, and what you felt you should do to make other people happy? To meet someone else’s needs?

For Janine, it was more about ‘getting the acknowledgement and approval’ of other people instead. Rather than trying to fulfil her own needs. And this is something a lot of women particularly are susceptible to.

After all, we’ve been trained by society to be the ‘good girls’ and do what you’re supposed to do, in return for the approval of others. It’s a social need, and makes us feel like we’re part of a group, and we get so stuck in thinking about that that we get disconnected from what we feel. Janine put it beautifully:

‘For me a lot of it had to do with low self-worth, and feeling like I wasn’t good enough just by being. And I think that’s a symptom of society really – for some reason we have to produce something of ‘value’ in order to be valued ourselves. And so we do things that will make us successful, but won’t necessarily make us happy. So I did a lot of work around self-esteem, letting go of what other people thought, and learning that it’s actually none of my business.’

“The idea that we will be happy when we’re successful, is a falsehood.”

Personally, I wonder sometimes if part of the misery that comes with success is because we see success as the end goal. Once you reach that paycheck and level of success, then everything will be good. And so when we see celebrities who are struggling emotionally, we think ‘what have they got to be miserable about? They have the big successful career and all the money and fame’. But if you take a step back, you realise that those things don’t make a happy person, and there’s so much else that goes into the equation than that end goal.

“If you aren’t enjoying the process, what are you doing it for?”

One of the things I do is use a productivity app to keep all of my stuff together and keep me on track day to day. And each day I have a quote at the top of every page to remind me of what’s really important. Last week one of those pages said ‘If I’m not enjoying the process, why am I doing it?’ And yes, we can’t love absolutely everything we do, but I used to pile a lot of pressure on myself to slog through the bad feelings and get things done, because if I didn’t get things done I wasn’t going to succeed. It’s that producing something of value to be valued thing again. But I do sometimes need to ask myself what I’m doing it for, and if I’m enjoying it,

Your Body Knows Your Success

‘We are born into the world with so many more ways to sense the world than just five or six senses. And for whatever reason, our society valued the thinker, the analyser, the number cruncher. We value the brain over the other senses. But there is so much information there! The body is an incredible source of information if just stop and listen to it. So being able to be truly happy, you need to get in touch with their intuition.’

This was really interesting to me, because I was in a leadership workshop just before I had my chat with Janine. And one of the things we did was a guided meditation, and looking at what we wanted for the future in a very visual way. So it wasn’t a ‘think of all the things you want to achieve in 5 years’ but instead we were asked to close our eyes, breathe deep and look inside. It’s 5 years’ time, and where are you? What does it look like? What are you wearing? What colour is it? If you have time, I urge you to try this out for yourself, it’s a really eye-opening experience. I certainly don’t think I would get the kinds of insights I did from just listing things off. After all, our frontal lobe is really great for processing information, but with our intuition we can tap into so much more of our consciousness. So I would take that over analysing a pros and cons list anytime!

Janine experienced similar things;

‘I’ve really come to trust the sensation vs the logical, figuring things out. Because the inner critic, the ego, is always going to shoot holes in things and take the path of fear and worry. The secure path. Rather than the one that might bring me real fulfilment. So I’ve learnt to trust the gut feeling, and I can feel it in my bones now. And that gut feeling is important, because your thoughts can twist things 1000 ways to Sunday, but once you have that knowing in your body, you have the answer. Success is an inside job.’

The Pillars

In talking with Janine, she often mentions her ‘pillars’ – the things that underline her way of working and helping people discover success. I thought these were interesting, so I asked her to explain a little bit about them.

Beauty is the first one, and I think of beauty as a spiritual principle. Yes, it can be about beautiful things, but it’s more vibrational, about what’s beautiful to you, and surrounding yourself with those things. Like attracts like, and when you surround yourself with things at that higher vibration, you attract them too.

Then there’s the Wisdom piece, which is all about getting in touch with that innate wisdom inside us. We’re all made of energy, so it’s using that energy and the energies of the universe to heal ourselves, to create boundaries, and to do a lot of inside work.

Then we have Purpose. This is all about getting to know your purpose, to be intentional, come up with a mission statement and know what you want and how to get it. That could be anything from spending money more wisely, to understanding what it is you want from life.

And finally there is Self-Care. Really making ourselves a priority, and to every day take care of ourselves. I’m a true believer in having a daily practice of some sort, a quiet time for you to just connect with yourself and take care of yourself. And yeah, those are the four buckets I like to splash people around in.’

I love these pillars, because it’s really nice to piece together how you define success for yourself, your whole self, your whole body, your whole mind – your whole presence really. And if one piece isn’t thriving, or is suffering, then it can bring down the whole system. So it’s important to pay attention to all of those parts.

The way Janine explained that, stirred something for me, and it was something I’d resisted for a long time. And that’s that I like having nice things. But I would fight myself, because I would associate wanting, say, an expensive handbag instead of giving that money to charity, as being a bad person. But I also found it strange that people would define success in that way – that if they could afford that handbag then they were successful. It was kind of like they were trying to fill an empty hole inside them. But if you’re being intentional, you’re feeling good about what you’re doing, you’re putting yourself first and you want that handbag, then go for it! If you like the design, it makes you smile, and it fills a purpose, then why not enjoy it?

What about in relationships?

To link things back to relationships, which we all know I love to do, how does this all fit in? There seems to be a societal expectation that for your relationship to be a success, you should do X, Y and Z. And for your career to be a success and to be classed as a successful person, then you should do X Y and Z. Follow the rules and disconnect from our intuition. And suddenly you’re wearing a mask, and it might not fit you all that well, and you might feel miserable.

But what if it’s the connected, joyful and happy people that are truly successful instead? Of course, you can be happy and successful and still have some moments of misery no matter what you’re doing. Nobody’s exempt from that, no matter what you’re doing. But that’s the natural waves of life – that’s not where you live most of your life, and it’s very different from being truly miserable in yourself.

To wrap things up, I asked Janine what her words of wisdom would be for people who are maybe feeling like they’re on the path to success, but still feel unfulfilled. And her advice was this:

‘Going inward and taking that time for yourself, the time that can cause tremendous shifts? It’s not selfish. It’s really not. So many of us are taught that it’s selfish. But it’s healthy to get quiet, go within, and dream a little. Bring some joy and creativity into things instead.’

I don’t know about you, but I have a completely different perspective on success now. And I understand just how easy it is to see other people as successful and think they couldn’t possibly be miserable – even though the opposite might be true. As always I’d love to hear your thoughts if any have stirred during this blog, and you can find the podcast here. Until next time, stay safe.