Show notes
The Hidden Cost of Success: What Are You Afraid Will Happen If You Put It Down?
You can hit every goal you set for yourself and still feel a very specific kind of dread the second someone suggests you stop. That's the hidden cost of success nobody warns you about: not the exhaustion, but the fear of what stopping might say about who you are. In this solo episode, Lisa turns the question she asks every guest back on herself: does this still feel the way you thought it would? She answers it by telling you exactly what happened when she quietly paused Congruent for a season, and what she was terrified would happen if she did.
What Happened When Lisa Pressed Pause
Before last summer, Lisa hit a point where recording episodes, seeing clients, and staying on the road stopped fitting together. Nothing was falling apart. Things were just getting heavy, and heavy is the word she keeps coming back to in this episode, because heavy doesn't mean wrong. It means pay attention.
A friend, client, and colleague was the one who said it plainly: stop. Build up an episode bank over the summer instead of scrambling weekly, and let herself get ahead without the pressure of a deadline attached to every conversation. The decision to listen was simple. What came after wasn't. A flood of questions showed up almost immediately: what does it mean about me if I stop? Will people think I'm flaky? Is this quitting? What if everyone forgets the show?
Lisa maps those questions straight onto the four Success Paradox archetypes and catches each one in real time: the machine insisting something bad happens the second you stop producing, the prover treating a pause as proof you were never good enough, the polisher deciding anything less than perfect weekly output isn't good enough, and the giver terrified of disappointing an audience it feels responsible for. None of that was really about the podcast. It was the identity built on top of it.
So she paused it anyway. And the result was nothing. Downloads dropped, understandably, since there was nothing new to download. Everything else, the client work, the business, the actual quality of her life, kept moving. She got her summer back, gathered interviews and case studies without pressure, and came back to record this episode from desire instead of obligation, which is the whole point.
What we talk about in this episode:
The four Success Paradox archetypes and how each one panics about stopping. The machine, the prover, the polisher, and the giver each tell a different story about what pausing means, and Lisa catches all four running in real time.
Why self-integrity is harder to keep than integrity with other people. Most of us break promises to ourselves far more easily than we'd ever break one to someone else, and Lisa unpacks what it means to stay integral to your own values first.
The difference between a commitment that's heavy and one that's simply hard. Heavy means something needs to change. Hard just means it matters. Lisa walks through how she tells the two apart in her own life.
Four questions to ask before you keep any commitment running. Is this still taking me where I want to go? What is it costing me energetically? Would I choose to begin this today if I weren't already doing it? Am I committed to the outcome or one particular way of getting there?
What actually happened when Lisa stopped producing weekly episodes. Not the fear. The real, measurable result, and why it was so much smaller than the story she'd built around it.
Why high standards need reviewing, not lowering. Lisa reframes "lowering the bar" into asking what excellence realistically looks like for this specific season of your life.
The real questions to ask about what's started to feel heavy. What are you doing simply because you've always done it? What are you afraid would happen if you put it down? Who would you be disappointing, and are you trying to prevent that?
Why pausing something is not the same as quitting it. Lisa makes the case for changing your mind as evidence of self-integrity, not the absence of it.
This episode is for you if:
You've built something real and you're still afraid of what it means about you if you stop doing it the way you always have.
You keep every commitment you make to other people and quietly break the ones you make to yourself.
Something in your life has started to feel heavy, and you're not sure if that means it's wrong or just that it matters.
You've set standards for yourself you never actually chose, and you've never gone back to ask if they still fit.
You're worried that changing your mind or slowing down will make you look inconsistent, flaky, or unreliable.
You know the difference between high achievement and high performance, and you're not sure which one you've been running on.
You're the person everyone expects to hear from on schedule, and the idea of going quiet feels like letting people down.
You've wondered what would happen if you just put something down for thirty days and gave yourself the space to find out.
What Are You Carrying Right Now Because You're Afraid to Put It Down?
Lisa isn't telling you to quit anything. She's asking you to go back and actually look at what you're still carrying out of habit, obligation, or fear of what people will think, rather than because it still serves what you actually want.
That review is exactly what the Success Paradox Assessment is built to start. It identifies which archetype, the machine, the prover, the polisher, or the giver, is running your current pattern around commitment and consistency, and what that pattern is quietly costing you to keep it running unexamined.
The Success Paradox Assessment will show you exactly which pattern has been driving your relationship to commitment, consistency, and stopping, and what it's costing you to keep running it. Take it at lisacarpenter.ca/assessment.
If you're ready to work through this directly, Lisa works with a handful of private advisory clients by application only lisacarpenter.ca/wwm
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