The Success Gap Explained: Why High-Achievers Struggle to Feel Enough
- Karen Allen
- Sep 26
- 8 min read
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you just wrapped up a big project or landed that promotion you’ve been working toward. You’re celebrating the win when a small voice sneaks in: “Okay, but what’s next?”
I’ve felt it too. One moment I’m soaking in a success, the next I’m already chasing the next thing. Many of my clients describe the same experience. It’s not just ambition talking; it’s how our brains have been trained in today’s nonstop culture.
That little voice seems harmless. It might nudge you to check your email or remind you of the next meeting. It feels logical—even productive. But in reality, it’s the first dip on an emotional roller coaster: soaring highs that crash into anxious lows, keeping your nervous system stuck on edge.
That’s not your inner drive—it’s your inner critic in disguise, and it’s creating a pattern that’s keeping you stuck.
The good news is, once you recognize it, you can quiet it and shift your energy into a calmer, more grounded perspective.
The Success Gap Explained
See, that little voice is echoing a message you’ve absorbed from the outside world—the one that glorifies the nonstop race to the next big thing and whispers that no matter what you’ve accomplished, you’re still falling behind.
Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation: our tendency to quickly return to a baseline after a win. Social media makes it worse, constantly feeding us everyone else’s “next big thing” and reminding us of what we haven’t yet done.
That tension, friend, is what I call the Success Gap. It’s the gap between your accomplishments and your sense of enough—the feeling that you’re never quite where you should be. And when you live in that gap, it keeps you from fully enjoying your life and your work in the here and now.
In working with my clients, I see that Success Gap show up in two common ways.
Sometimes it takes the form of Career Comparison—that feeling of not measuring up when you compare your journey to someone else’s. Other times it bubbles up as Aspiration Agitation—comparing your current reality to your future aspirations, leaving you feeling like you're falling short.
Feeling the pressure of that Success Gap can leave us in a state of constant reactivity. We think we’re just pushing toward our goals, but the focus on the future prevents us from getting grounded in the present.
In fact, focusing so much on the future actually keeps us stuck in the past.
If you had to read that sentence twice, it’s okay!
Let me break it down for you:
When we put so much pressure on the future, we also end up constantly beating ourselves up over choices we made in the past. When we feel like we’re not where we “should” be, we keep looking back at all the opportunities we think we’ve missed and all the mistakes we think we’ve made.
Being constantly pulled out of the present—because you’re looking at someone else’s past or focusing on our own future—keeps your nervous system on edge, leaving you emotionally reactive.
Every. Little. Thing feels like a big deal because we feel out of control, for good reason. We can’t change the past. We can’t predict the future. As long as we’re intentionally focusing on things that we cannot control, we’ll be stuck feeling overwhelmed and helpless.
What you need is to find ways to stay grounded in the present, which is the one place you do have control.
Find Your Footing and Stay Light on Your Feet
So, how do we get off this emotional roller coaster and start enjoying the present? The antidote is an agile mindset—one that keeps you light on your feet.
Think about an athlete. They train for years to be ready for the game. But when fear takes over—the fear of letting people down, of losing, of messing up—it paralyzes them. They stop trusting their instincts, overanalyze past mistakes, and obsess over avoiding future ones.
In the process, they stop being agile.
We face the same pressure. No matter how much we plan, we can’t predict the future or rewrite the past. That worry keeps us stressed and reactive, draining the energy we need for the moment in front of us. The truth is, the only path to your end goal is a series of small, present decisions.
And here’s the key: agility isn’t just about moving fast or adapting quickly. It’s also about creating calm—for yourself and for your team—when things feel uncertain. Staying light on your feet is as much about emotional regulation as it is about decision-making.
The Power of Being in the Moment: A Growth Mindset in Action
I’m not telling you to abandon your goals. Keep them. But shift your focus away from trying to predict outcomes. Put that energy into flowing in the moment.
When you feel yourself spiraling into overthinking, pause, take a deep breath, and say to yourself: "Stay light on my feet."
When we learn to live in the present, it’s easier to find our way. And we can practice this by recognizing and celebrating the effort it takes to get to our goals, not just the outcome.
In other words, instead of letting that pressure weigh you down and keep you from moving forward, think about how you can respond to it productively in the moment.
For example, if you feel that Career Comparison creeping in as you scroll through LinkedIn, notice it and acknowledge it.
Then Stop & Shift: Remind yourself that you're only seeing a curated highlight reel of their successes—the new job, the impressive awards, the company they just launched. You aren't seeing the whole story, including the projects that failed, the jobs they didn't get, or the setbacks and struggles.
You're living your story from the inside, which makes it feel messy. But I promise you, there’s someone else looking at you and only seeing your accomplishments, not your behind-the-scenes challenges.
If Aspiration Agitation has you beating yourself up, catch yourself in that mental spiral.
Then Stop & Shift: When you start looking so far into the future, you stop being able to see the incredible progress you’ve already made. Here’s the key thing to keep in mind: You’re not supposed to be there yet.
The future is where your goals live. You are in the process of becoming, and that’s exactly where you are meant to be right now.
Those small shifts are really a growth mindset in action. When you choose to celebrate effort, you ground yourself in the present, in the progress you are making right now.
Ask yourself: When was the last time you overlooked progress because you were too focused on what’s next? Write down three moments from the past month that show you’re moving forward. This is how you train your brain to see effort as progress.
Be intentional about where you spend your energy. When you stop pouring it into the past and the future, you have more to invest in those game-time choices that can really make all the difference.
Your Ticket Off the Emotional Roller Coaster: Living in the Neutral Zone
So how do you get off this ride? You learn to create a calm, consistent emotional baseline and you intentionally keep yourself in that space as much as possible.
I was recently working with a high-achieving client who had just faced a setback at work. A deal his team had been working on fell through. In the grand scheme of the company's yearly revenue, it was a relatively small deal, and he knew that intellectually. But he told me, "I can't figure out why I'm taking this so hard."
He’s been one of my clients for about 3 years, so he has a full toolbox, and he’d been using all of them—Stop & Shift, visualization, confidence checkpoints… But he was still in a funk.
Here’s what I told him: It’s not about experiencing highs and lows. It’s about how high and how low you allow yourself to go.
We all have a baseline for our nervous system. I call it the neutral zone—a space where we’re calm and regulated.
We live in a culture that glorifies extremes—viral highs, dramatic lows, headline wins and losses. The neutral zone doesn’t get celebrated, but it’s where resilience is built. That’s the space where leaders actually earn trust and influence.
Too often, though, we live from one big swing to the next: soaring with our wins and crashing with our losses. That keeps the nervous system constantly activated, leaving us reactive and exhausted.
But when you live mostly in the neutral zone, you can flow through your experiences with a sense of equanimity, or inner smoothness. In this space, good moments feel good without needing to be euphoric, and disappointments feel hard without being devastating.
Three Tools for Finding Your Footing in the Neutral Zone
How do you tighten those curves and create a calm baseline in the neutral zone? Here are three techniques you can start using today. By the way, these aren’t new practices—but what makes them powerful is how you combine them consistently. The more you practice, the easier it is to default back to calm instead of reactivity.
Practice Gratitude. Notice the small moments of joy and contentment in your life—the warmth of the sun on your shoulders, the taste of your dinner, the sound of your kid's laughter. Gratitude grounds you in the present, so you don't need constant highs to feel content.
Acknowledge Your Emotions Without Judgment. When a tough feeling arises, simply notice it. "I feel angry." "I feel sad." That's enough. You don't need to label it as good or bad. You don't even have to act on it; you can just experience it as a natural human response.
Stop Trying to Generate Responses. Avoid exaggerating your reactions to everyday moments. Notice frustration without fueling it, and enjoy excitement without forcing it higher. These over-the-top reactions keep your nervous system on edge and stuck in fight-or-flight.
Your Path Forward: Finding Your Peace in the Present
The next week, my client told me he had started noticing the toll those big swings were taking on his mental state. Even small mishaps—like dropping a fork—sparked an out-of-proportion, “Oh my gosh!” reaction.
Again, this is a guy who is positive, optimistic, and intentional. He asked me, "How did I get this way?"
The answer: it wasn’t about his character. It was the natural effect of living in a constantly spiked state. When your nervous system is on edge, everything feels like a big deal.
The more you can intentionally keep yourself grounded in the neutral zone, the less energy you need to spend trying to find your footing and regulate your mental state. Instead, you can stay agile and flow through life’s ups and downs without letting them send you hurtling out of control.
Natural big spikes and dips are always going to happen, my friend. Winning the lottery will be exhilarating; losing your job will be heartbreaking.
But when you practice equanimity, you learn to quiet that voice. You no longer need to be on high alert because your inner state isn't tied to external circumstances.
This is how you navigate the Success Gap. It’s how you stay light on your feet. It's how you flow through life. By choosing to live in the neutral zone, you don’t just cope with the messiness of your journey—you learn to see the beauty in it.
Start practicing today: notice one small moment where you can choose calm over reactivity. Each choice strengthens your neutral zone. And if you catch yourself spiraling, remember you always have tools—like Stop & Shift—to help bring you back to center.
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