Originally published for Rebelle Society.

By everyone else’s standards, I was a great success.

People would tell me how lucky I was to be an expat in the happiest country in the world, to have a six-figure job, to have leadership and power and influence in the corporate world, to own a gorgeous apartment in the best neighborhood in town, to get to spend seven weeks a year exploring the world at my leisure, that I had time and energy to develop hobbies that required my full attention.

To them, I had made it.

For me, I knew something was missing.

No one understood me when I stopped fine dining and fine wining, and redirected those funds and that energy to coaching, personal growth courses, and self-care.

I wasn’t broken by society’s standards, so what was there to fix?

The answer? Plenty.

I had a really troubled childhood. Because of that, resilience and resourcefulness are things I have in spades. A childhood rampant with strife, I had developed an agile intellect, and I could literally survive and talk my way out of any scenario. And as an adult, I actually felt achievement and status and received accolades for the many times I had nearly escaped death and persevered despite it all.

Survival was not my problem.

But thriving definitely was.

There comes a point in every person’s life when they’re called to heal. I was called to heal my addiction to struggle and adversity.

Healing is particularly important to those of us who are high-functioning by anyone else’s standards, because at no point will someone else tell you it’s necessary. It’s a total inside job. Literally, the only thing to be done is to listen to what your intuition is saying and take that first step into the unknown. And then the next. And then the next.

For me, that meant hiring a coach, becoming a coach, starting a business, leaving the comfort of the life that I had built for myself in pursuit of true happiness.

And you won’t want to, and no matter how hard you look, you won’t ever find compelling reasons outside of yourself to go there. In fact, you’ll likely find a lot of compelling reasons not to. You may even struggle to find people who can meet you in this place of potential expansion.

Our very sophistication keeps us from looking at the things that truly matter, because we are celebrated so vehemently from the outside for our visible accomplishments.

So why bother, right?

It’s ultimately up to each of us, individually, but I will say this: until we get real with ourselves, we’re living in a house of cards. And to truly live in our purpose, one that may be even more aligned than the right now we are experiencing, we have to eventually make a choice:

Do we want to be like everybody else, or do we want to be like ourselves?

I’ll be totally honest: my 30% is most people’s 100%. I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying it because for a long time I didn’t think it was necessary to be better than good, because good for me was already better than most.

But I was out of integrity with my soul. I was not showing up for Me.

And at the end of the day, that is the singular most important thing that matters.