“The problem with women and why they don’t feel fulfilled is because they’re typically living a life that someone else has designed or desired for them. Fulfillment is when you’ve achieved YOUR desired life.”
Finding Fulfillment in Life
For many go-getter women, the more they succeed, the emptier they feel.
They’re taught that checking off society’s typical boxes (like a good education, job growth, marriage, kids, etc) is the way to a fulfilled and happy life, yet when those things are achieved, life often feels not as good as it looks in pictures and on paper.
They think there’s something wrong with them to not feel as good as their life looks and that they’re “high maintenance” and “ungrateful” to ask for more.
These thoughts couldn’t be further from the truth. They just haven’t learned yet how to find fulfillment for THEM.
Finding fulfillment is actually a lot easier than it sounds (if you know the process on how to do it).
Today, on the podcast I’m sharing with you what that process looks like so you can start to recreate it for yourself.
IN THIS EPISODE, I SPECIFICALLY TEACH:
- Why go-getter women tend to be the ones that have the most outward success but the least inner fulfillment
- How to find inner fulfillment for YOU
- Why your brain will continue to self-sabotage you from fulfillment
…and so much more
Listen to this episode at the top of this page so you can find YOUR deeply fulfilling life.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
→ Continue the conversation in my free online community
→ Get The 4-Day Accomplish Your Dreams Free Training
Full Transcript
This is the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast with Lindsay Preston Episode 95, Find
Fulfillment.
[music]
Welcome to the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast, the show for goal-getting, fearfacing women for kicking ass by creating change. I’m your host, Lindsay Preston. I’m a wife,
mom of two, and a multi-certified life coach to women all over the world. I’ve lived
through enough in life to know that easier doesn’t always equate to better. We can’t fear
the fire, we must learn to become it. On this show, I’ll teach you how to do just that. Join
me as I challenge you to become even more of the strong, resilient, and powerful woman
you were meant to be. Let’s do this.
[music]
Hi, there, Ms. Unstoppable. Welcome to another episode of the show. Today we are talking
about how to find fulfillment in your life. This is a topic I’m coaching my clients on all of
the time. Literally, all of the time, every single time we are coaching it is because they
want more fulfillment in their life. Yes, do they want to achieve stuff? Absolutely. Yes, do
they want to feel better? Absolutely, but at the end of the day it’s really about fulfillment.
So funny because, oh, gosh, I think it was last year, 2020, I was thinking about redoing this
podcast a little bit and I was just getting a little antsy with it. Should it still be called
Become an Unstoppable Woman, because I do so much more than just helping someone
become “unstoppable”, right? At the time a name that I was considering was changing it to
Fulfillment Finders. [chuckles]
I know you might be like, “Lindsay, it’s a horrible name,” right, but that’s really what I’m
doing at the end of the day is, again, I’m helping people find fulfillment because so many
of my clients, they come to me and they have a good life, if not a great life. It’s not like
they’re in all of this pain. Now, they are suffering a little bit because of their mindset, but
it’s not like it’s a horrible life. Most people would be like, “Why is she hiring a life coach?”
kind of thing, but they’re coming to me because it’s like, “Damn, there’s got to be more to
life than this.”
I remember feeling this way from a really young age. Even as a kid I was like, “Man, there’s
got to be more to life than this.” I thought once I leave my parents’ house, then I’ll find it,
I’ll find it when I’m at college, and then I got to college and I was like, “No, still feeling like
it’s not that fulfilling.” Then I got my first job. No. Found my “dream guy”. Nope.
It just kept going. Every box that I checked of these great successes that we all deem in
society, man, I felt empty. By the time I was in my mid to late 20s, it was like, my gosh if
this is all there is to life then I don’t know what I’m signing up for. Again, it wasn’t like my
life was bad.
Now granted, I had the divorce in there and the double life with the man and all that stuff.
That’s what shocks people, she was in such a bad place. It was hard for a few months if not
for a year or two in there, but at the end of the day, if we take that away, I still just wasn’t
fulfilled, even when I had a good life. This is common, my friends.
High-achieving women especially feel this because in our society so many people think I’m
not fulfilled because I don’t have a lot of money or it’s because I have this health issue or
it’s because I haven’t met the guy. It’s, again, they haven’t checked off a lot of boxes in
their life and boxes meaning just these typical boxes that we’ll tell everybody will make
you “happy” and “successful.” When you don’t have those you tend to just think when I
have them that’s when I’ll be set, right? For those of us who have them, it’s like, “Damn, is
this it? I thought I’d be feeling better by now.”
Today we’re going to dig deep into that of why you feel that way, how to overcome it, and
how to find deep fulfillment instead. I’m talking deep, like you just feel like man, I love my
life and I love all of it. I love the good, the bad, the ugly, because I just feel so deeply
fulfilled. You ready? It’s pretty cool. It’s a pretty amazing place to be at once you’re there.
Fulfillment, what is it?
It’s different to everybody and I could sit here and look up the definition and let’s do it.
You’re going to hear me type because I want to see what does Webster define this as?
Fulfillment, “The achievement of something desired, promised, or predicted.” Interesting.
We look at it from the basic definition of again “The achievement of something desired,
promised, or predicted.”
I would define fulfillment as you have achieved your desired life. This is the problem with
women and why they don’t feel fulfilled. They’re typically living a life that someone else
has desired for them. I just mentioned these typical societal boxes. You graduate from high
school, you make good grades, you go to college or university. Then you start a career and
you move your way up the corporate ladder, or whatever it is, and then you mean the man
and la-la-la.
What happens is a lot of time they’re just checking those boxes because many of us are
taught that we have to be “good girls.” We have to follow the rules, we have to be quiet,
we have to respect our elders, which are great qualities, but we also want to teach our
children, especially our young girls, to listen to themselves, to trust themselves, to speak
up and be heard, know what their desires and their passions are.
I see this so much in my daughter. I’m not going to take credit for it that much. I mean,
obviously, she sees some of that from me, but she is a master at knowing what her desires
and passions are. If she wants to eat something, she just knows it. She’s like, “Mom, I really
want waffles this morning,” and she’ll go and she’ll make her waffles and it’ll be a whole
experience of how she does it. She’ll even create these little side things on her dishes.
She’ll cut up her strawberries a certain way and just make everything look so beautiful.
I get so inspired by that because, granted, yes, she’s 10 and we are more like that as kids,
but I have lost some of that and it’s been a very intentional practice to go back to that and
to say, “What do I want?” and to slow down and live in that desire and that passion and
that pleasure that she just seems to do so naturally. I’m just so glad that she is in a space
where she can do those things and she feels comfortable to do those things, because many
environments growing up as a kid we’re just trying to in essence survive. We may be
growing up in an environment that’s not that healthy.
I know in my household, it was not always the best. My mom is very emotional. We were
walking on eggshells a lot. My dad was present physically, but emotionally was not, so I
didn’t feel comfortable to be myself. In fact, people would leave the house and I would
turn on music and I would dance. That’s when I felt most like myself, but the second
people came home I turned that off or if somebody entered the room while I was dancing,
God forbid, I shut it down real quick. I did not want them to see that at all, because I just
didn’t feel safe with them.
Then if we take it to even more extremes in some households there’s deeper abuse there
or they’re just so busy trying to make ends meet. I think about my husband growing up. He
didn’t have a lot of time and space to live in pleasure and joy and figure out what he
wanted.
They were just trying to pay the bills. He was doing a ton of chores around the house every
day. When he was older, he was delivering newspapers and cleaning offices at night and
really working on his running game because he was a cross-country runner, because he
knew one of the only ways he was going to go to college was if he had a scholarship. He
had to turn off, again, what he wanted and what he desired in his life.
When I’m working with somebody in a coaching agreement, meaning they’re my client, I’m
their coach, I’m trying to figure out what is it that they want. They come to me, they do a
life fulfillment assessment. You’ve heard me talk about this many, many times on the
show. Basically, we’re just taking every area of their life and they’re ranking it from 1 to 10.
I ask them sub-questions on each section, so if we think about relationships one of the
questions is, “How would you rate the quality of your most intimate relationship?” How
would you rate the quality of your work relationships? How would you rate the quality of
your friendships?” It goes on and so forth. From there, when we get these scores of how
fulfilled are you in that area of life, then I ask them, “What would be a 10 life to you?”
What’s so interesting is that as I work with somebody, especially if we work longer term
beyond the typical nine months I work with somebody. If I were working with them in my
Live in the Dream program where it’s just ongoing maintenance. We’re doing this exercise
over and over again. Every year especially we’re tracking in on it, but every quarter we are,
too. Their vision expands. What they once dreamed of, they start to obtain and it’s like,
“Wow, let’s go bigger.”
I mean, I’ve seen this happen in my own life. If we just look at career, I know I’ve talked
about this so many times but it fits here. When I went to my coach, my very first life coach
when I was a client, I said I just want a job that I love, that makes me feel good because
I’m so tired of just feeling like I was slowly dying a slow death at work every day. If I can
have that and just have it minimally pay my bills, which at the time I think was 32,000, I
will be so happy. Then, I hit that [laugh]. I was like, “Okay. Well, now I have a job where I
help people. Wow. How crazy is that?” It was like, “Let’s see how much more money I can
make and more impact I can have.” It just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Granted, I’m so fulfilled now because I got really clear on what my base level of what I
wanted in my career fulfillment to look like. Because again, that was for me just having a
job that I enjoyed and I could pay my bills on a basic level because anything after that was
just sugar on top. I was like, “Man, I help people and I can make more than 32,000 a year?
Great. That’s awesome.”
I was just joking with my husband. We went to Missouri over Christmas to see his family.
We go through a country area of Missouri where there’s lots of smaller homes and trailers
and things of that sort. I turned to him and I said, “I think I would be pretty happy even if
www.LindsayEPreston.com | © Lindsay E Preston Coaching LLC 5
we lived in a trailer.” I reminded him of that because so many times, him and I get so
wrapped up in hitting certain goals, especially financial goals.
At the end of the day, fulfillment really doesn’t come from that stuff. It comes from this
inner place. I will tell you, one of the most fulfilled times I ever had in my life was that
time when I was going through coaching as a client for the very first time. I had very little
money to my name. I was so happy because coaching was teaching me all this inner work
to start to feel different. That’s when I started to feel fulfilled. It was almost like– I don’t
know. When you get your first kiss [chuckles] or you have a first of some sort. It was so
exciting to me to be able to feel so different in what seems like a very short amount of
time of just a few weeks because I was tasting what fulfillment felt like to me for the very
first time.
Again, for everyone, it’s going to be different of what fulfillment looks like to them. But it
starts with you getting very aware of what you want, what your desires are. A way that I
help my clients do this, if they don’t already know, is we do something called the Puzzle of
Them and we take a lot of assessments. They take a values assessment, a strengths
assessment, a way of thinking assessment, so many others, a needs assessment. I can’t
think of all of them but those are the ones that come to mind.
We start to look back and say, “Based on these things, here are what you value. This is the
kind of lifestyle that you would probably most enjoy. These are your strengths. These are
the things that you’re going to want to do day in, day out because they feel so natural to
you. It’s going to feel like you’re not even working or you’re not even really using any
effort because again, it’s just so easy for you to do these things. This is your way of
thinking. This is how you process information. If you can set up information to come at you
in this way, again, it’s going to feel so easy for you and you’re going to be able to
maximize your brain to its highest potential.”
I’ll say, “Here are your needs. Right now, these are the things that you feel you need to
most in order to live a very not only comfortable life, but a very thriving life, a fulfilled
life.” We go on and on and again, there’s more puzzle pieces there. I think it’s something
like 10 or 12 pieces that we do. That starts to teach them just from a logical perspective of,
hey, based on these assessments, here’s what likely a fulfilling life is going to be for you.
But as I’ve said many times over in this podcast, the other thing I’m teaching my clients is
listening to themselves. The best way we can start to listen to ourselves is to have
someone hold space for us and ask us questions and dig deeper and say, “Here’s what I’m
hearing that you’re not seeing.” Or, “Do you realize that you say this, this, and this?” Seeing
the connections and then seeing their brain from outside of them.
But then also, allowing them to shed the layers of that societal programming and to let
those things go. It’s not just society. Most of the time, the biggest society we have is our
immediate friends and family. They’re the ones programming in as much as possible in our
brains because we’re around them the most. Many a times they mean well and they want
us to have fulfilling lives. What parent says, “Man, I can’t wait to mess up my kid today?” I
know it boggles our mind sometimes when parents do certain things or anybody does
certain things.
It’s like, “Why would you do that?” Obviously, that’s going to be really hard on somebody,
but that’s a different topic for a different day, will get me all fired up, but [chuckles] I’d like
to think, deep down, everybody means well, especially our parents for the most part. Don’t
fight me on that, because, let’s just say, for the most part.
They’re saying, “Okay, here are my beliefs and here are the things that have worked for me
so that you can go out and have a successful, fulfilling life.” I know from my parents, they
were really programming into me the corporate ladder is the way to go. It’s like, “You get a
job and you just stay there. You just work hard and you keep working your way up and
that’s the way to do it.”
When I went against that, it was so hard on my brain. It was like, “Lindsay, oh, my gosh. Are
you going to mess up your entire life here? You have these good jobs, these opportunities
here in the corporate world. Why are you turning away from that? Entrepreneurship isn’t a
guarantee.” It took a lot for me to really dig deep into that, but I was glad that I had those
two skills. That one, of having that puzzle of me in essence of this is why this is so
important to me because I have a value of freedom.
That’s why I felt like I was rotting a slow death at work, because I just felt really caged. I’m
meant to be somebody who can make my own schedule and do all those things so I can
feel free. Then two, I was able to know enough to shed that societal programming and
know it was just programming and it wasn’t as big of a threat as my brain made it seem
when I was taking those first steps to go in a different direction.
Just know it’s a process to get to this fulfillment but it does happen faster than you think.
With my clients, I have seen them have life fulfillment scores when they start with me,
they’re typically around six to eight in all the different areas of life. They’re pretty fulfilled.
A 10 is the highest and that’s where we want to go. I’m like, “Six to eight is saying, “You’re
surviving and you’re just on the tip of thriving.” Because thriving to me is eight and above.
By the time we’re done working together, most of the time of those scores have gone up
from eight and above. Now they may have a few lingering areas that are below that
because maybe we really focus in on finances and relationships, but then their health is
something that they need to work on next. It’s not a perfect eight and above, but overall,
everything starts to improve because they’re just going through the coaching process,
which is naturally one that’s built for finding fulfillment. Fulfillment, again, is what they
desire most. Not what other people desire most. What they desire most.
One of my favorite stories was actually one that was shared on the podcast. It was Ciara’s
coaching story where she came to me and she had an engineering background. That’s what
her degree was in. She just could not find fulfillment at work and it was seeping over into
her personal life. Even after she became a Mom. She’s like, “I thought this would be better
than what it was.”
What happens, too, is when we think it’s going to bring us more joy, fulfillment, whatever
we want to call it and it doesn’t, it’s almost even worse of a feeling of, man, I thought I’d
feel better and I don’t. Then we start having even more thoughts about it. What’s wrong
with me? Why don’t I like this? All of a sudden, all this shame and guilt piles on and
criticism of ourselves. It just takes it to a whole another level.
I remember, even after I became a mom, I hadn’t started coaching yet, with my daughter. I
was like, “Man, I’m supposed to be happier. I’m a mom and granted, there are hard days
and I really love her and I love aspects of being a mom. I’m so glad I’ve done this, but I still
just don’t feel better.” Again, there’s that wave of guilt and shame there of what’s wrong
with me? Or, I wish I could enjoy this more. It’s so funny because Ciara and I have talked
about, she’s like, “Man, I wish I would have found this work before my son was born,”
because I think when we were working together, he was about four, because she said, “I
would have enjoyed his first three years more.” I was like, “Oh, yes, I totally agree.” Because
now I know being a mom with my daughter who’s 10 and my son is 2, obviously, I did the
work between the two of them and the way that I enjoy my son is so much different than
when I enjoyed my daughter the first 3 years, because I just didn’t know how to feel
fulfilled.
I just was again like doing all these should like this is what a mom should do. She should
be like this and she should do like that. I just had all the societal programming making me
feel like a robot and I just thought, okay, well, this is what everybody says is the quote-
unquote good life. Why does it just feel like I’m never enough and it feels like this life is
never going to be enough. God, am I just high maintenance, right?
Anyway. Going back to Ciara’s story. She came to me, she was an engineer. As we just
started to pull that puzzle of her and put all the pieces together, I was like, “Ciara, you are
not built to be an engineer at all. Now granted you can still rock an engineering career and
we can modify it in a way where you are going to find fulfillment if that’s where you want
to go, but you’re going to still need to have some of your strengths and your values met
elsewhere. Otherwise, it’s going to feel like a part of you is not alive.”
It took a lot of soul searching for her over a span of really just a few weeks of her deciding
do I want to go back into engineering or do I want to pursue something else. As you know,
if you listen that podcast episode, she decided to pursue something else, which fulfills
more of that puzzle of her. Granted, does she have hard days at work? Yes.
Does she think sometimes like who maybe I didn’t make the correct choice? Absolutely.
But overall, she’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so glad I did this.” Especially as she’s has this
transition piece of going to do some schooling and such, because she’s going into nursing
now, then she’s going to just have this life that’s going to feel a lot more fulfilled for her.
Now, at the end of the day, even if we set somebody up for their puzzle of them, as they
call it, of all their value, strengths, et cetera, and we shed some of that societal
programming, there still is mindset work involved.
The brain is always going to focus on what’s wrong, it’s always going to see the problems
in everything, it’s going to question the hell out of you it’s going to find criticism to throw
at you and of other people. That’s where– I mentioned in Ciara’s story. She has hard days
because I’m still coaching her, she’s in my Living the Dream program. She has moments
where she’s like, “Oh, my gosh,” but she has the tools to coach her mind through that and
she has me too to coach her so that she can look at the thoughts that are presented to her
from her brain and say, “Is this really what I want to think right now?”
Then she can intentionally decide, “Okay, do, I want to think something else?” She has
enough information about herself and she has enough trust in herself to know, “Oh, okay,
is this truly a thought that I want to think or is this really something that my brain’s just
throwing at me that’s a bunch of bullshit?” She can decipher one from the other, and two,
because she has that puzzle of her, she doesn’t have to really question why things feel the
way they feel.
She’s like, “Oh, I know why I feel this way, because I have this value or I have this way of
thinking. This is why this problem is coming up for me because I prefer information to be
like this or I prefer to feel like this.” I’ll give you a real-world example there. After I had my
son, he was a planned pregnancy, and then I felt like I “did it right.” I got married first with
him and in a relationship that I wanted to be in.
Then when I had him, I just kept feeling all this anxiety of I love being here with him and
I’m so grateful I get to be at home because I took a year off from my business and I was
nursing him from my body that whole year, which was not an intentional choice just
happened to fall that way. There were just these moments where I just felt this anxiety of
like, “Oh, my God, I got to get out of here. I need freedom,” but because I knew that I
valued freedom so much, I could calm those feelings down and just say, “Oh, Lindsey, this
is just your freedom coming out.
You’re not fully living in this value right now because you’ve got a little one that’s
basically attached to your breasts all day. It’s okay.” I was able to coach myself through
that without my brain spinning in, “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel this way?” and
going into this whole thing that was going to consume my mind, bring me down, make me
question my whole life, because that’s what I did with my daughter.
Such a waste of time. So grateful I have these down. Again, then it’s just like, okay I can
call myself I know why it’s there, and then I’m able to move on and get back to living that
fulfilled life, because really, at the end of the day, fulfillment is just a thought. We decide,
in essence when we’re taking an assessment of a fulfilled life, we decide what is a fulfilled
life looks to us, and then we just think thoughts along the way of do I like this or do I not.
You could have a totally crappy unfulfilled life, but if you went in and decided that you
were going to see it as a fulfilled life, you could. I’ll give you another example here of
what I mean by this. I recently set a goal that I want a 10 marriage, and 10 meaning like
my most fulfilled marriage. Where I would rank my marriage at the time when I started this
school, which was about in August-September of 2020, I was like, “Well, I’ve got a seveneight.
Some days it feels a lot lower than that when we’re like going out each other, meaning like
there’s this tension between us. I was getting coached that one day. The coach said to me,
“You know you could just decide you have a ten marriage, right?” I was like, “Damn.”
[laughs] I mean I had to sit there for a minute and just like think about it. I was like, “You
were so right. I could decide right now I have a 10 marriage and just choose to look at it in
that way of having a 10 marriage, right?”
Again, I had my list of what a 10 marriage looked like and I saw where my husband and I
needed to go to get there. But because I had decided then from that place that I have a 10
marriage, you know what’s happened? I’ve gotten a 10 marriage so much faster. Granted, it
wasn’t a thought that a sudden overnight.
It’s a one that’s been slowly programming in my mind since that day I got coached, which
was, gosh, I think two or three months ago. It seems like every week that goes by I accept
that part more and more of, I have a 10 marriage. I have a 10 marriage, and then all of a
sudden again it’s like wow look at all the things that are in my marriage that make it a 10.
How incredible is that? It all went back to me changing my thought. Pretty cool, huh?
I offered you many different things today from that puzzle of you, to the one shedding the
layers of society to let that go to get fulfillment, to deciding you have fulfillment, to
managing your minds along the way so you can get back to those feelings of fulfillment,
take what you love here. Know I’m always here to help you get that fulfilled life. Again,
this is what I do all day every day. Reach out to me and my free coaching application. If
you want to get started on the coaching process, I would love, love, love, love to help you
achieve your most fulfilling life.
It brings me no greater joy in this world than to give that to my clients. Link always in the
show notes and on the outro. That’s it. That’s all I have for you today. I will see you back
on the show next week. Bye, my friend.
[music]
Hey there, Miss Unstoppable. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. If you enjoyed
it, share it with a friend. Send them a picture of this episode via text, via email, share it on
social media, I’m sure they would be so appreciative to know these strategies and tips on
how to accomplish your dreams. If you are ready to guarantee you’re going to accomplish
your goals and dreams, then it’s time to start coaching with me.
In my nine-month simple success coaching system, I am going to walk you every single
step of the way to ensure that you get the goals and dreams that you want. The first step is
to apply for a free 60-minute consult call. Just go to LindsayEpreston.com/apply to get
started. As always, my friend, remember, you’re only as unstoppable as you believe you can
be, so believe in yourself. You got this.
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