What If Happiness Isn’t What You Were Taught to Pursue?
Today is International Day of Happiness—a global invitation to pause and reflect on what it really means to live a good life. On the surface, it seems simple. Of course we all want to be happy. But if we look more closely, a deeper and more uncomfortable question begins to emerge:
What if much of what we’ve been taught about happiness is incomplete?
This is not just an abstract question for me. It is one I have lived into—and one I see reflected again and again in the lives of the women I work with: brilliant, accomplished women with PhDs and other doctorates who, by every external measure, have built successful lives… and yet find themselves quietly wondering why something still feels off.
When Success Doesn’t Feel Like Happiness
In positive psychology, happiness is not defined as fleeting pleasure or the absence of difficulty. It is understood as something far more expansive—what we might call thriving: a life that includes meaning, engagement, relationships, accomplishment, and vitality.
And yet, even with this richer definition, many high-achieving women find themselves asking: Why doesn’t my life feel as fulfilling as it looks on paper?
Part of the answer lies in the cultural blueprint we have inherited. In the United States, happiness is often equated with success—achievement, productivity, recognition, and security. For women with PhDs, this message is reinforced over decades of training. We learn how to perform, how to deliver, how to excel. We become the ones who figure things out, who carry responsibility, who keep going.
And for a long time, this works.
Until it doesn’t.
There comes a point—often at midlife—when the strategies that once propelled us forward begin to feel insufficient. The work that once energized us may now feel draining. The clarity we once relied on gives way to questioning. The life that looks good from the outside no longer feels fully aligned on the inside.
I know this moment intimately.
After decades in higher education, the pandemic and my husband’s near-death illness created a profound and unexpected pause in my life. For the first time in years, I was no longer commuting 20 hours a week. The constant motion stopped. There was space—quiet, unstructured, and, at times, deeply uncomfortable space.
And in that space, something essential surfaced. A knowing that the life I had built—while meaningful and accomplished—was no longer fully aligned with who I was becoming.
The Shift from Achiever to Creator
For much of my life, I operated from what I now understand as the Achiever identity—driven, responsible, high-performing, and externally oriented. This identity served me well. It allowed me to build a meaningful career, to contribute, to succeed.
But it also came with a cost.
It required constant effort. It prioritized productivity over presence. It kept me oriented toward expectations rather than toward my own inner truth.
Through my work in women-centered coaching, particularly through Claire Zammit’s framework, I began to understand that this moment of dissonance was not a failure. It was a threshold.
An invitation to shift from Achiever to Creator.
The Creator identity is not driven by proving or performing. It is internally sourced. It is grounded in values, desire, intuition, and a deeper connection to self.
Where the Achiever asks, What is expected of me?, the Creator asks, What feels true? What am I here to create?
Where the Achiever seeks certainty and control, the Creator is willing to move forward without having everything figured out.
This shift is not immediate. It requires unlearning patterns that have been reinforced for decades. It asks us to trust ourselves in new ways. To listen more closely. To move, at times, without external validation.
But it also opens up something entirely different.
Redefining Happiness as Something You Create
From this perspective, happiness is no longer something we arrive at after we have achieved enough.
It becomes something we create.
It is the experience of living in alignment with who you are. It is the feeling of being fully engaged in your life—not just productive within it. It is the integration of meaning, joy, connection, and vitality.
It allows for both ease and effort. Both clarity and uncertainty.
And it asks a deeper question:
What would it mean to build a life that not only looks good—but feels deeply right?
For me, this has meant making choices that are more aligned with my purpose, my values, and the work I feel called to do in the world. The coaching practice I am building now is not simply a career pivot. It is an expression of who I am. It is deeply aligned with my desire to support women with PhDs in reclaiming their voice, their power, and their possibility.
And it is connected to something larger.
I believe this work matters not only at the individual level, but at the level of systems and society. When brilliant women step out of roles that diminish them and into work that is aligned with their truth, they do not just transform their own lives. They contribute to creating new structures, new ways of leading, and new possibilities for how we live and work together.
This is, in its own way, part of the work of healing and reimagining our world.
A Clear Invitation
On this International Day of Happiness, I invite you to pause and consider—not what you think you should want, but what you are genuinely being called toward.
What part of you is ready for more—not more achievement, but more alignment, more truth, more aliveness?
Are you willing to take one step toward that—without needing to have the entire path figured out?
What is it that you feel pulled to create, explore, or step into… that your Achiever self may have set aside?
This is your threshold.
