The Silent Weight of Success: How Women Leaders Are Breaking Free By Dr. Sonja Jahn, Ph.D. She was brilliant. Articulate. Driven.
From the outside, Sarah had it all together – the kind of woman other women admired. But on that Zoom call, I saw the crack behind her polished exterior. She took a breath. Her eyes welled up. Then came the truth she hadn’t voiced out loud in years:
“I’ve spent five years trying to eliminate the belief that I’m not enough.
I’ve worked with psychologists and coaches, completed mindset programs, repeated affirmations… you name it. But I still feel it – every day. In my stomach. It feels heavy. Tight. I can say the right words, but I don’t feel different.” And then she asked me, “Am I supposed to just live with this belief, like some people have told me to?” That moment broke my heart. But it didn’t surprise me. Because Sarah’s story? It’s not unusual. It’s typical. Especially for high-achieving, mission-driven women who are carrying success in one hand and silent self-doubt in the other. The Myths We’re Sold Here’s the thing: most of us are told to manage our limiting beliefs.
Reframe them. Affirm our way out of them. Visualize something better. But coping isn’t conquering. You wouldn’t tell a woman with a broken ankle to just repeat, “My leg is strong,” and go for a run. You’d treat the root injury. So why do we treat deep-seated beliefs – “I’m not enough,” “I don’t deserve this,” “I’ll never be as good as…” – with mental duct tape? Over the past 25 years, working with people from all over the world, I’ve seen this again and again: Limiting beliefs are not just mindset problems. They’re deeply anchored emotional imprints – subconscious scripts written in childhood or through painful, repeated experiences.
And here’s the real problem: most traditional approaches – positive self-talk, reframing, even reprogramming – only address how the belief shows up on the surface. They don’t reach the root. They can’t access the subconscious where the root cause of the belief actually lives. That’s why, despite your best efforts and arsenal of coping strategies, the same beliefs keep resurfacing. You still feel stuck. Because what’s driving the belief hasn’t been touched. The Inner Blocks Even Accomplished Women Face Behind boardroom brilliance, entrepreneurial success, and
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