How High-Achieving Women Heal Their "Success Wound"

Career Contessa

Executive coach and former Google leader Brooke Taylor joins the Career Contessa podcast to discuss her concept of the 'Success Wound,' a psychological pattern where high-achieving women unconsciously tie their

Key takeaways

• Brooke Taylor managed $80 million in ad revenue at Google by age 24 before experiencing burnout and sexual harassment, which prompted her pivot to executive coaching and sobriety.
• The 'Success Wound' is defined as the false belief that worthiness of love and belonging depends on what you produce rather than who you are inherently.

Main topics

• The Success Wound concept
• Burnout and perfectionism as symptoms

Notable quotes

"The success wound is the false belief that your worthiness of love and belonging is contingent upon what you produce, achieve, or do rather than the inherent goodness of who you are."

Conclusion

Listeners gain a clear framework for recognizing how external validation traps high achievers

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Before we jump into today's episode, I have an important Career Contessa update. After more than 13 incredible years, the Career Contessa website will officially close on December 1st, 2026. If you've purchased a Career Contessa course or coaching session, please make sure you complete your sessions and download any course materials you want to keep before the site closes. If you have any questions or need help, you can always reach us at info at careercontessa.com. This is definitely a bittersweet ending to an incredible chapter, and I'm so grateful to everyone who has visited the site, taken a course, worked with a coach, or used Career Contessa as a resource over the years. And don't worry, the Career Contessa podcast is still here. Now let's get into today's episode. Hi, Contessas. Welcome to the Career Contessa podcast, your shortcut to being more fulfilled, healthy, and successful at work. I'm your host, Lauren McAdwin. Have you ever reached a big goal, maybe a promotion, that raise, a new title? or just a major career milestone, only to find yourself asking, now what? Or maybe you've spent years checking all the right boxes, building an impressive career, and doing everything that you thought would make you feel successful, yet there's still a lingering feeling that you're somehow falling behind. If that sounds familiar, you're definitely not alone. Today's guest believes that many high-achieving women aren't struggling because they're not successful enough. They're struggling because they've unknowingly tied their self-worth to their achievements. The result? No accomplishment feels like enough. No milestone lasts for long. And the pressure to keep proving yourself never really goes away. Joining me today is Brooke Taylor, former Google marketing leader, executive coach, and author of the new book, Healing the Success Wound. Align your ambition, find lasting career fulfillment, and end the cycle of never enough. In this conversation, Brooke introduces the concept of the success wound, the hidden belief that our value comes from what we achieve rather than who we are. We discuss why so many successful women still feel like they're failing, why burnout, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome may actually be symptoms rather than the root problem, and how to pursue ambitious goals without sacrificing your well-being in the process. You'll also learn about Brooke's five types of quote, unfulfilled achievers, how to identify which one sounds most like you, and what it means to develop what she calls aligned ambition, a way of pursuing success that doesn't leave you feeling exhausted, anxious, or constantly chasing the next accomplishment. If you've ever felt like your achievements should feel more satisfying than they do, or if you're questioning whether success is supposed to feel this hard, I think you're going to get a lot out of today's conversation. And now this is the Career Contessa podcast. Speaker 1 (2:32) Hi, Brooke. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Okay. So for the listeners who may be new to your work, can you tell us about your career journey from Google to coaching? And then what made you realize that you really wanted to write a book? Speaker 2 (2:47) Yes. So I grew up in Silicon Valley in the 90s, was very much like inundated with tech culture in both a great way. And so far as I knew tech was a career option, but in another way where I knew that so much was required around to be successful in tech. It required a lot of hustle and sacrifice. And all around me growing up were these images of people who were kind of like making it big, coming from around the world to this Mecca, this promised land of Silicon Valley, and working really hard and sacrificing a lot in order to have success. So that kind of cultural upbringing really framed my relationship with work and achievement. I took that kind of gold star chasing mentality to a good college, to my first job at Google where I really felt like I had arrived and I got this seal of approval from the world that said I was good and interesting and, you know, driven. And, you know, a lot of people hate Speaker 1 (3:40) the, what do you do for work question? I loved that question for people to Speaker 2 (3:44) ask me what I did for work so I could make their eyes, you know, get really big and, um, impress them. Um, and had, you know, a couple. really informative experiences early on. By the age of 24, I was managing $80 million in ad revenue. And my work week looked something like this. Monday through Friday, I felt like every answer to every question, every answer to every email was a referendum on my worth as a person. And I would bend over backwards to please my clients, to please my boss. And in order to kind of tip the scales or even out the scales, And Friday through Sunday, I would drink and party. And I was very much in this work hard, play hard mentality of, you know, working really hard Monday through Thursday and partying on the weekends. And it took me to some really dark places really quickly. Speaker 2 (4:38) eventually kind of hit this rock bottom of both burnout, but also disillusionment with the corporate system. I was sexually harassed by my manager and didn't report it because I was up for promotion and didn't want to rock the boat, which is a story that a lot of people have. And, um, kind of hit my knees and realized that I needed not only to get sober and reevaluate my relationship with alcohol, but that I also had this untenable relationship with achievement, productivity, and external validation that I was just as addicted to as the alcohol. So it's caused me to really pause and reevaluate both my relationship with work and my career trajectory quite early on in my career. And that's really framed my coaching, helping women and other people who, like me, were at odds with their ambition and unsure of how they could continue working in a way that both honored their big goals for their career, but also their sense of self as a person, if that resonates with you. Speaker 1 (5:36) It totally resonates with me and in so many levels. And thank you for sharing that with all of us. And, you know, the addiction to sort of extremes like the, you know, external validation from others than the like partying to sort of make up for the intensity of work. I feel like, you know, work hard, play hard was a badge of honor. Like people. especially in like the tech world, you know, like I remember my first tech job, they would do these like away weekends. Like we were in college, we were not. And they would like party hard in this like incredibly inappropriate way and big bear and everybody from, you know, the executives to the youngest person on the company would be like a hot tub together. You're just like, what is, I never went on one of those. Thank God. I like cringe even thinking about the fact that that was part of that culture at that time. and you're nodding your head because I'm sure like that was it back then. That was it. That's what I Speaker 2 (6:33) thought it took to belong to that culture. And I wanted to belong there because I wasn't sure where I belonged in general. And so it offered an identity and a sense of place that I could latch on to and be like, okay, I have my work family and this will give me a sense of ease and peace, but it never could. Speaker 1 (6:55) Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, I want to talk about, you know, the question at the center of today's conversation, which is. Why do so many successful women still feel like they're failing despite the accomplishments and the achievements? And to your point, like, you know, you make it to Google and you get to say, I work at Google at a cocktail party, you know, Speaker 2 (7:15) those kind of things. It's because the whole system really socializes us to feel this way from birth. And it's not a personal flaw. It's very much the water that we swim in and the air we breathe. Starting from a young age, school optimizes for output. You know, grades become the measure of your worth. You learn early on that good grades gets you the big hug, the big eyes, the approval, the kindness from teachers even. And that, you know, maybe lesser grade gets you a question like, well, did you really try your best? And these subtle cues help us. develop the habit of tying success, productivity, and achievement to self-worth. And then, you know, we are socialized around perfectionism and chasing gold stars. And those messages that are said and unsaid, for example, like a parent giving 20 years of loyalty and sacrifice to one company or growing up in an immigrant family even where success equals survival. These are two different models of what our young childhood brains take on to mean what. goodness and what failure means as people. And then of course, there are kind of two other confluences here, whereas like, you know, as our, in general, our culture. traditional religion has declined in our culture. And in order to take its place, work has filled that vacuum. This is called workism, the idea of treating work as a place where we can experience meaning, community, identity, peace, transcendence, all these big human needs that at one point were answered through religion, but have now been projected onto work. And so no wonder we keep kind of coming up short and feeling like no matter what we do, we're still not grasping that elusive promise that we've gotten through all of this cultural messaging from a young age all the way up to where we are now, that work is meant to give us