Winning on Your Own Terms
- 23 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Belle Brookes
For a long time, I thought success was something you reached by ticking boxes other people handed you.
A good job title. A certain salary by a certain age. Being busy enough to look important. Visible enough to look impressive. Calm enough to look like you were coping.
I didn’t consciously choose those standards, I think I absorbed them. From LinkedIn feeds, dinner-table conversations, and the quiet pressure to prove that I was “doing well”, even from my successfully self employed mother and my high achieving father.
I redefined success when I realised that chasing those markers made my life look good on paper, but feel wrong in practice.
There was no dramatic burnout moment. It was subtler than that. I noticed that even when I hit the milestones I’d been aiming for, the satisfaction was brief. Relief evaporated quickly. There was always another bar to clear, another comparison to win, another version of “enough” just out of reach. I couldn't just sit there and enjoy my work, it was tinged with longing for something else too. My diagnosis with a chronic illness, followed by a series of sudden loss made me realise I needed to start taking care of myself too.
That was the moment I stopped asking, “Does this look successful?” and started asking, “Does this actually support the life I want to live?”
The win that meant the most to me wasn’t a revenue milestone or a title change. It was building work that gave me autonomy over my time, my energy, and my nervous system.
Success became being able to say no without panic. Structuring my days around focus instead of urgency. Walking away from opportunities that looked impressive but felt misaligned. Those wins don’t photograph well, but they compound.
They also changed how I related to ambition. I didn’t become less ambitious, I became more selective.
Comparison is the hardest thing to unlearn, especially for women. We’re conditioned to measure ourselves against timelines that were never designed with us in mind, and to treat other women’s achievements as silent benchmarks for our own progress.
Detaching didn’t come from pretending comparison doesn’t exist. It came from understanding what it actually does: it externalises your definition of success. It hands your sense of worth to people whose lives, constraints, and values you don’t fully see. My entire personality was tied up in being a business owner until one day I realised I didn't have anything else left after that.
What helped was narrowing the lens. Instead of comparing myself to everyone, I started comparing my life to my own priorities. Does my work support my health? Does it allow rest without guilt? Does it leave room to grow without constant self-surveillance?
Another practical shift was curating what I consume. I stopped following people who made me feel behind, even if they were inspiring. I paid attention to how content made me feel after I’d scrolled past it. Motivation that leaves you anxious isn’t motivation, it’s pressure in nicer packaging from women who are not trying to do what I do.
Redefining success isn’t a one-off decision. It’s a practice. You’ll be tempted to outsource it again when things get uncertain. The work is noticing when you’re chasing approval instead of alignment, and gently course-correcting. I constantly have to remind myself to step back.
For women especially, rejecting external success standards isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about choosing a bar that actually belongs to you.
Success, as I now understand it, is living in a way that doesn’t require constant justification to employers, to peers, or to an invisible audience keeping score.
That kind of success is quieter. And once you feel it, it’s very hard to go back. The older I get the more I realise it never mattered that much anyway.
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