Why Success Still Feels Empty and What It’s Really Telling You | Aneta Kuzma
We've been taught to measure success by how much we can carry, how much we can do, how much we can accomplish, how much we can endure, and how much we can accumulate. But rarely do we pause and ask ourselves, how fully am I living?
And that's what we're gonna talk about today.
Welcome back to Live the Width of Your Life podcast. I'm so excited that you are here. And this is my second solo episode for the month of January. And today we're going to talk about why successful individuals can feel empty and what it means to truly live the width of your life, not just the length of it. And I want you to take yourself to a moment in time. Maybe you remember what it felt like when you were doing everything right. You built the career.
You have a family, you're responsible, you were successful on paper, and maybe you still feel quite empty inside. And for a long time, I thought that I was the problem, that I needed more discipline, better habits, maybe a stronger mindset. And after 25 years in the corporate world and years of coaching high-achieving men and women, I realized something simple.
is that we've been measuring our lives by the length and not by the width. We've been measuring it by how far we've climbed, what we've achieved, and what we've been able to accomplish. We've ignored the width. And when I say the width, it doesn't mean that we don't go deep. It means that we look at our days, and every single day is an opportunity to say, how can I savor all of it?
So when we're measuring our lives by the width, we can look at all the different areas of life. So I want to walk you through a live, the width of your life assessment that I created. I use it for myself. I actually look at it every single month, and I use it with all my clients. It's a wonderful way to use at the beginning of their engagement and also at the end, and just notice the progress that we've made. And it's a tool that's really helped me understand why success can still feel empty.
and how we can expand our life without needing to blow it up or burn it all down. So if you are new, my name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma. I'm the host of Live the Width of Your Life, and I'm so grateful that you are here. By the end of this conversation and this solo episode, you'll understand why success alone can leave you feeling disconnected and also how you can start to gently widen your life without having to quit your job.
without starting over, without feeling like you have to fix yourself. This isn't a motivation problem. It's not a gratitude problem. It's an alignment problem. So let me describe a day that might feel familiar to you. You wake up, maybe you reach for your phone. You start moving quickly, jumping out of bed, and right away checking your email.
Looking at your phone just to notice what may have come up, your text messages, you show up, you deliver, you hold it all together all day long. And from the outside, your life works. Maybe it even looks envious. Maybe others look at your life and go, gosh, I wish I had what he or she has. And inside, when you get quiet enough, there's a low-level exhaustion. And maybe actually,
you're really exhausted. Maybe there's a sense of disconnection that you can't quite name, a wondering, is this it? That's the question that would wake me up in the middle of the night over and over again. And there was a fear and a dread that this is all that there is. And it's not failure. It's not ingratitude. It's what happens when we build an impressive life,
but not actually built on what matters most to us. It's not in alignment with our values. We've been taught to measure success by how much we can carry, how much we can do, how much we can accomplish, how much we can endure, and how much we can accumulate. But rarely do we pause and ask ourselves, how fully am I living?
And that's what we're gonna talk about today. And where the idea matters most, this with the idea, is when we start asking ourselves, are we living the life that we love? It's not just about balance. Balance implies that everything gets the right equation, the right attention, and that can be exhausting just in and of itself and unrealistic, but it's about alignment.
It's about ensuring that our daily choices align with our values, align with the goals that we have for ourselves, not just an accomplishment, but in the things that matter most to us. And noticing where we feel most alive, some of the areas that maybe we've neglected, the areas that we didn't even know we had to pay attention to. And that's what this assessment that I've created really does. It looks at 10 dimensions of your life, not to judge you, but just to bring some clarity
to bring some things to the surface that maybe you haven't looked at in a while. And then what I see over and over again with high achievers, men and women, is that maybe their work and their financial stability could be high. Like maybe it's an eight or a nine or a 10, but maybe their joy is at a three, or creativity or presence is like a two. Maybe they don't even know what joy is, and they give themselves a one. And maybe their
connection is inconsistent. Success often masks any imbalances that we see. And it goes unnoticed until the body starts to speak up. And we're seeing this over and over again, continue to increase burnout, people stressed, hard to focus, maybe exhausted. Your nervous system already knows what's happening way before the mind necessarily catches up, or even when the outside circumstances can still look pretty good, and our nervous system knows that something's happening. So when I first did this assessment, I was actually surprised because one, I'd never looked at all of those areas of life so intently, like with such great intention. And on the outside, my professional life looked strong. I did this with a coach. I was doing what I was supposed to do. I was being promoted. I was recognized.
Finances were stable. We were on track to hit a lot of our goals that we had. My joy was really low. My creativity was nonexistent. I wasn't doing anything that felt creative at the time. And my spiritual practices, my spiritual alignment was inconsistent. And for someone of strong faith, that didn't feel great. That felt like I was leaving God as an afterthought instead of making him front and center. And I hadn't failed at life. No one would actually look at that and see it.
I was living life on a really narrow lane. I was just focusing on my lens on very specific areas and not looking at the breadth and depth of life. And that's where the realization came that this was not going to work long-term. This was not sustainable. And I actually felt a sense of relief because I knew that something was amiss. I just couldn't pinpoint what it was. And once you start to notice and you see these things for yourselves,
you can start to choose differently. You can start to do something different with the information that you have. So the assessment doesn't ask you to fix everything. It just starts to notice patterns, and there are questions in there that get you to be reflective, to prioritize, and to think. And maybe your body is asking for more care because you prioritize output over your vitality, over your health, over your strength.
And maybe your relationships feel a little bit strained or thin or distant. Maybe you feel disconnected from a lot of people that you care about because you've been living in survival mode or working towards deadlines or something else that's really important. And maybe your joy has gone quiet. Maybe you didn't even know how to prioritize joy or have forgotten the things that actually bring you joy. This will help bring that to the surface as well.
And maybe that's because you've been chasing a version of success that never was truly yours. It was just something you adopted or inherited from others. Your life is always communicating with you. My life is communicating with me constantly. This tool will help you to listen and to see what it's trying to tell you. And the work, it begins gently by choosing just one area that you want to make.
and impact in one area that you want to focus on. You don't have to do it in all 10 of them. You don't have to overhaul everything. Just start to expand. And it requires us sometimes to say no to certain things before we can start saying yes to other things. So here's my invitation to you. Take the Live the Width of Your Life Assessment. It is free. It takes maybe 10 to 15 minutes, depending on how long you spend on the reflection questions. You can answer honestly.
You don't have to share it with anyone. I don't get to see it. It's not something that we should use as a judgment tool. And then once you do it, ask yourself, which part of my life is asking for me to focus on, to be more kind to right now? You don't even have to say what you would change. You just identify that maybe this is an area that you want to focus on. And then watch how your body, your mind, and your heart respond.
When you acknowledge that you are going to focus on something else. That's where all of the goodness, that's where the next chapter happens. So living the width of your life isn't about doing more. It's about living more fully across all the dimensions of your life that make you human, all the important areas. It's about aligning your outer success with your inner truth, your inner guidance, your inner wisdom that we all have.
And if this conversation resonated with you, I invite you to subscribe to the channel. Each week, I will be coming here exploring what it means live the width of your life, not just the length of it. You'll find the link to the assessment in the show notes. And it's free, it's easy, it's designed to bring clarity, not to add any additional pressure.
And if you are so-called moved, I would love for you to leave a review if you feel inspired to do it or to share this episode with someone else who could benefit from it. Thank you so much for joining today. I'm so grateful that you are here.