For many years my life was all about work. I worked long hours, went to bed thinking about work, and often awoke with work on my mind. During interactions with others, I was often thinking of the next thing on my to-do list, rather than being totally present with the conversation. I was like a spinning top; always doing and rarely being. I didn’t take time to ground myself and quiet my busy mind.
Of course, I had my good excuses. I was an entrepreneur who started and ran a business with limited resources and was responsible for all the risks of the business venture. I followed my dream to create something new and innovative in the language teaching sector in Hungary.
Since I’m highly persistent, repeated failures, dead ends, and periods when it seemed like no progress was being made couldn’t discourage me. I felt I had the inner energy and intensity to keep myself motivated and going through these tough times. Even after I gave birth to my son.
From the outside it looked like I had it all: own growing business, loving husband, happy child. But on the inside, I was a mess. Moreover, I pushed myself into a cycle of mother’s guilt. I felt I couldn’t fit into the pre-defined, gendered notions of nurture and caregiving while trying to fulfill the financial needs of the family.
Constant stress left me frazzled, restless, and emotionally depleted. I couldn’t even celebrate that my dream came true: I built one of the biggest and most acknowledged corporate language schools in Hungary.
Walking on the edge of burnout forced me to step back and take a hard look at the feelings, thoughts and behaviors that had brought me to that point.
I realized that the problem was that I had never felt myself ’good enough’. No matter how much I achieved it was just never enough. There has always been an inner critic in my head telling me that I can always be better than I am now. Its purpose was to keep me in line and to keep me productive. Under all circumstances.
As a result of this I had ignored my well-being and personal goals in favor of pursuing what I assumed I should be doing without ever pausing to consider if it would actually be fulfilling to me.
It took years of work for me to gradually free up the mental and emotional bandwidth to admit that burning the candle on both ends wasn’t aligned with what I needed and wanted as a hard-working woman but also a sensitive human being.
In the meantime, I handed over the management of the language school to my husband who is a great leader of it and started to build my coaching practice to reach out and support driven women who are struggling with problems like perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and poor boundaries. Who need to create more balance in their life and to experience more clarity, focus on their own well-being and fulfillment.
I can’t wait to help you too discover your ways to enjoy success – however you define it – without self-doubt, stress, and emotional overwhelm.