The untold truth about success

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing psychologist and best-selling author Gay Hendricks for my podcast.

In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the mind behind The Big Leap, a book that made major waves in the self-evolution space.

The book highlights a concept called the upper limit, which essentially speaks to our unconscious tendency to self-sabotage by setting limits on our potential, for reasons we don’t fully understand ourselves.

The insights from this book, combined with all my observations and interest in human behaviour, confirm one truth for me:

Success is an emotional game.

If people make it big, it’s because they’ve nailed the art of channeling their emotions- including the heavy hitters like anger, fear, and self-doubt, constructively.

For those who collapse after soaring high, that mostly involves an emotional issue too- i.e not being able to regulate themselves well and for long enough.

If there were such a thing as emotional culprits, it would be anger, judgment, and shame. Few of us realise just how painfully paralysing these emotions can be.

And as much as we love judging others, we actually inflict a lot of judgment on ourselves, which, of course, inhibits our growth even more.

Fun fact- the brain believes that judging ourselves will protect us from being judged by others; and so the saga of self-criticism, self-bashing, and stagnation endlessly carries on.

All of this boils down to a deeper truth:

Our relationship with ourselves sets the ceiling for everything else.

But instead of healing that, we get trapped in chasing strategies and solutions in the external world.

Waking up to this fact calls for pausing that chase and asking:

What if your next big leap came not from blindly following the conventional metrics of success but feeling better about who you are, where you are, and what you’re truly capable of?

Here’s to a new definition of success:

Love thyself, and the rest will follow.

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