Am I too much? If you are a high achieving woman, I would bet you have asked yourself that question at some point. Maybe someone said it to you directly. Too intense. Too driven. Too ambitious. Or maybe you just felt it, that quiet fear that the size of your wanting makes you hard to love.
I sat down with Denise Love Hewett on her podcast, which is literally called Too Much, to talk about ambition, worth, and my book Healing the Success Wound. And I want to give you my answer up front.
You are not too much. But your ambition might be plugged into the wrong power source. Let me explain.
Where the fear of being too much really comes from
When I was researching my book, I surveyed over 5,000 women. They had something striking in common. Each one had a childhood experience where she learned that the more she achieved, or the more she lived up to a cultural or familial definition of goodness, the more love, approval, and belonging she received.
Love, approval, and belonging are core human needs. And the absence of love and belonging is what causes shame.
This is what I call the success wound: the false belief that your worthiness of love and belonging is contingent on what you produce, achieve, or do, rather than the inherent goodness of who you are. At its core, it is a shame wound. It is the engine underneath the perfectionism and the self doubt, the reason no achievement ever feels like enough.
And here is what I need you to hear.
Our success wound isn\u0027t our fault, but healing it is our responsibility.
The word wound is almost a misnomer, because it implies that we are broken. In reality, it is the culture that is broken, and the culture causes the hurt within us. You did not invent the idea that your output determines your worth. You absorbed it. So the question “am I too much” is not really about your personality. It is about a wound that taught you to prove your way into belonging.
Your ambition has two power sources
Here is the framework that changes everything for my clients. Unlike the lamp in your room, which can plug into any outlet, your ambition can only plug into two places.
The first is your success wound. When your ambition is powered by fear, scarcity, and the need to prove, it feels frantic. It looks like intensity from the outside, but it feels like survival on the inside.
The second power source is your true self. That is the part of you that is naturally confident, clear, capable, present, and persistent. When you work from that place, you can enter a state of flow. You have more creative ideas. You respond instead of react. You do not lie there with anxiety before you go to bed.
My goal for my clients is to work from the true self just 51 percent of the time. That is it. Not perfection. A slight majority.
How do you know which outlet you are plugged into? Ask yourself if your career feels like Groundhog Day. If you are repeating the same patterns over and over without feeling or sensing any real progress, that is how you know there is a toxic pattern or wound underneath that you have been avoiding.
So the real question is not “am I too much.” The real question is, what is my ambition plugged into?
Healing will not shrink your dreams
This is the fear I hear constantly. If I heal this, will my dreams get smaller? Will I lose my edge? Will I still make it?
Denise said something on the show that I loved. When she got healthier with her ambition, the scale of her dreams did not change. Her relationship to her work changed, and that made the work more enjoyable. She still wants to achieve big things. People ask her all the time, you are still doing all this? Yes. Because she loves it.
I lived the same experiment inside Google. A few months into what I called my aligned ambition experiment, working from creativity, regulation, my strengths, and my values more often than not, I got promoted a year faster than my previous promotion. I became a manager. People came up to me asking how I was doing it, saying I seemed happy. And I stayed another five years, practicing those principles exactly where I was.
Aligned ambition is not smaller ambition. It is sustainable ambition.
You do not have to burn your life down
Here is a number that surprises people. About 60 percent of the people who come to me desperate for a new job end up staying where they are. Not because they were lazy or could not find one, but because they changed how they work. Fulfillment comes from the how, not the what.
Two places to start.
First, find your zone of genius, the place where your natural gifts meet your experience. Ask yourself: What do I do where time expands and I slip into flow? What do people usually come to me for? What did I do naturally as a kid? You can even text those questions to a few people who love you.
Second, name your core states of being, the feelings you want to live in more often than not. Grounded. Ablaze. Radiant. Effervescent. Then deliberately choose the activities, conversations, and people that create those states. We need to shift how we feel on the inside in order to have our external realities reflect that back to us.
Readiness is a choice
If you are the type who keeps deferring the dream, after this busy season, after the next promotion, after the baby, hear this.
Readiness is a choice. It\u0027s a decision to take the first step, and the readiness comes afterwards.
I was not ready to get sober at 24, single, living in New York. But I had a vision for what my life could be like without alcohol, and I decided to be ready in that moment. Same with starting my family. Same with your career. You will never feel ready. You decide, and the clarity follows the movement.
And as Denise reminded me, almost no decision is permanent or binary. You are allowed to try something and change your mind. The lighter your touch, the more fun the whole thing gets.
If you want to go big, go deep
The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan found that about 65 percent of adults stay in what he calls the socialized mind, defining themselves through external feedback and accomplishments. Only about 35 percent reach the self authoring mind, where identity comes from their own values. That leap, from outsourced worth to authored worth, is the leap from the success wound to aligned ambition.
Denise closed our conversation with a line from the end of my book: if you want to go big, you have to go deep. Picture an oak tree. The bigger you want it to grow, the deeper its roots have to run.
So no, you are not too much. You are a woman with big branches who was never taught to tend her roots. Your ambition is not the problem. What it is plugged into is.
If this hit something in you, my book Healing the Success Wound walks you through every tool I shared here, and plenty more.
YOUR AMBITION IS NOT TOO MUCH. LEARN TO POWER IT FROM YOUR TRUE SELF. BOOK A FREE INTRO CALL TODAY.