[00:00:00] Welcome back to Corporate Fuckery, stories of Survival, psychological Warfare, and choosing What's best for you. I'm Lauren DeGolia certified success coach, subconscious strategist, astrologer technologist, and former corporate insider turned truthteller. And today we're talking about something subtle, seductive, and wildly misunderstood.
And that is success. Specifically what happens when the success you work so hard for becomes your safety net and then becomes your cage. This episode is for the woman who did.
Everything right, who built the resume, earned the bonuses, climbed the ladder, and still feels like she's quietly drowning in a life that was supposed to be proof she made it. Let's talk about what it means to be seduced by corporate success and how to unravel yourself from a version of ambition that was never built to hold your full humanity.
No one tells you that you're [00:01:00] signing an invisible contract. When you start your career, it's not in your onboarding paperwork. It's not in the employee handbook. It's encoded in your nervous system, and it goes something like this. If I work hard enough, stay useful, stay visible, stay busy. Be safe. And for a lot of us, especially women, raised to be high achieving, hyper responsible and helpful. That agreement starts early. You learn that productivity earns you praise that being reliable gets you love that.
Being perfect keeps you relevant. So when you land in corporate life, it feels like a natural fit. There's structure, goals, recognition, feedback loops, compensation. You hit the milestones, title bumps, stock grants, performance awards. Each one gives your nervous system a dopamine hit that says, see, you're safe.
You matter. You're doing it [00:02:00] right. But what you don't realize is that every reward is reinforcing the contract, and eventually your career isn't just a job. It's where your worth lies. And let's tell the truth for a minute. A lot of what you're feeling right now isn't burnout. It's grief. Grief for the relationship you thought you had with your company.
Grief for the future. You planned that hinged on the promises. They didn't keep grief for the self. You became in order to survive the system. It's kind of like a death by a thousand betrayals. Bedtimes miss because of just one more email deck update or late night review. Weekends numbed out because your soul needed to go on silent mode just to survive dreams that were deferred to maybe next quarter for years at this point.
So when the company shifts your review cadence or quietly cuts bonuses or clawbacks perks, it's not [00:03:00] just business. It's betrayal because the truth is you gave it your all your weekends, your health, your creative spark, and in return you expected more than a paycheck. You expected care, reciprocity, maybe even loyalty.
And now the tide is turning. Your nervous system is noticing every goalpost that moves, every budget line that erases your wellbeing. Every manager who says, thanks for being flexible while extracting just a little more from your already withered bandwidth, you're not overreacting, you're not making it up, and you're definitely not crazy. This is grief, but underneath that grief is something even more disorienting. Identity loss. Because if you're not the high performer, the problem solver, the one woman op center.
Then who the hell are you? You've spent years perfecting your lane only to [00:04:00] realize the whole track was never built for you. And even though you know you're smart, you don't know your next move, it feels like you've become a one trick pony in a world that no longer wants the trick. And that's not just confusing.
That's destabilizing. The woman who always had the answers doesn't even know what questions to ask. Now, welcome to the place between two identities, between performance and illusions. The good news is that the grief happens before the rebirth and you're becoming, it happened shortly after that.
I remember the moment I named it for the first time I was in my therapist's office circa 2017, frustrated beyond belief that everything felt hard. Like a battle. If it wasn't work falling apart, it was my family. In chaos, it was broken bones, unexpected bills, or a mini house crisis.
I had [00:05:00] enough. I couldn't keep this pace or the emotional rollercoaster that came with it. In a moment of surrender, I pleaded with my therapist to give me the cheat code, the life hack or the pro tip that sounded like this. How on God's good earth do I put the knives down? Because that's what it felt like. Like I'd been in a knife fight with myself for years. She looked at me and said something I'll never forget, Lauren, you've been seduced by success. Empty promises, burning the candle at both ends thinking you were creating safety. She was right.
I grew up with massive financial instability and somewhere along the way I made a subconscious vow. I will never need anything from anyone. I will earn my own safety and I won't stop performing until it pays off. And you know what I did? [00:06:00] It promotions every 18 months there for a while, bonuses over target for multiple years in a row, and praise that felt like heroin.
But underneath it all, I was silently bleeding out. Corporate success became my protection, but the longer I wore it, the more it became my prison. The funny thing is the system isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do. Corporate life doesn't seduce you by accident. It seduces you with precision, with status, with equity, with performance reviews, with the feeling of being needed and the reassurance of being irreplaceable, especially if you've spent your life or career trying to prove that you are.
So the thing is, you're not actually addicted to success. You're addicted to what? Success represents a sense of safety, belonging, power, and [00:07:00] visibility. And the system is engineered to make you question your value the moment you start waking up. So you stay and gaslight yourself and you say things like it's not that bad or compared to others, I'm doing really well.
But here's the truth. Ambition isn't the enemy here. The attachment to this identity and this relationship is, especially when it's to a system that never cared about your wholeness. AKA, that doesn't mean it doesn't care about you in some way. But it doesn't care about what's best for you, only your output and their bottom line.
And that comes in the form of golden handcuffs. So let's talk about that for a hot second, because perks are not just benefits. They're psychological levers, free lunches, executive coaching, training, stock grants, flex work, travel perks. They're not generosity, they're retention [00:08:00] strategies. As one. Forbes psychologist put it, the very incentives designed to keep top performers happy, also trap them emotionally and psychologically. You start shaping your entire life around your paycheck, your worth to your comp plan, and your identity to your output, and it works until it doesn't. What happens when the perks start to feel like payment for silence and you start sensing something's off, but you don't feel like you can afford to lose what you've built. And that my friend is corporate fuckery and it's how the cage gets gilded.
Eventually the cracks become too loud to ignore. You cry before your meetings are on your way to work. You fantasize about quitting. You snap at your kids before you've had coffee. Your bodies whispers become a scream, and you spend countless hours in therapy working through the bs. You're navigating on the clock and [00:09:00] the scariest part.
You don't have a plan B because you were so good at Plan A. The resume stacked, the title is senior. The team depends on you, but the truth is you're quietly unraveling in a system that praises your reliability and ignores your reality. And it's here in this in-between where most women freeze because this doesn't just feel like a career shift. It's the makings of an identity death. The good news is I'm bringing a reframe with me today because I've been here, I've done that. I got the T-shirt, I blew everything up, and I'm a strong believer that you can still thrive in an environment that you call the shots on.
There's nothing wrong with wanting success. There's everything wrong with defining success as self abandonment. Real success. It's nervous system, safe.
It feels like [00:10:00] integrity, clarity, agency, and the strength to hold a boundary where there's never been one before. That's a tall order for most high achieving people, pleasing women. And I say that with full transparency because that was me. Let's get one thing clear. Safety is an inside job.
It's the difference between grit and resilience. . Grit is pushing through short bursts of challenge, knowing it's not the long term standard, but for many of us, grit has become a way of life.
Resilience, on the other hand, is something else entirely. It's building the internal capacity to roll with the punches to accept what you can't change and to shift your energy without bulldozing yourself. In the process, because let's be honest, if grit alone could save you, you'd be saved by now. And like Einstein said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Now, I'm not gonna sit [00:11:00] here and say there's a magic switch that moves you from career as safety to inner peace. But if you're ready to make this shift, I want you to know that it's possible. Here are three of my pro tips that are gonna help you get started. Number one, I invite you to start tracking your emotional patterns.
Where are you repeating yourself? Where are you carrying the emotional load of the workplace? The subconscious stories you're telling are shaping the way that you feel and that my friend can be shifted. These micro shifts are how you take your power back.
Number two. Audit your energy like currency. Stop investing in stupid shit that doesn't matter. Meetings, that should be emails, decks that are over designed perfectionism that isn't moving the needle. You are being paid for the metrics you're measured against. Let the rest go.
And number three, ask your future self what success looks like. Six months, 12 months, two years. Let [00:12:00] her be your go-to expert, the woman who's already navigated what you're in and what you're going through.
That subconscious shift helps you embody what's possible instead of reinforcing what's been, because small shifts create massive change over time, and the more you learn to live in alignment with your nervous system, your energy and your future self.
The less you care about Bob in accounting and his bad attitude, and the more likely you are to keep that corner office or build something better on your own terms. So newsflash, you don't have to keep sprinting, you don't have to keep proving. You just have to start listening to what you already know.
Safety isn't something you earn. It's something you create one boundary, one belief, and one breath at a time.
If you've been sitting in the silence after the script, wondering why your calendar is full, but your soul feels bankrupt, I want you to hear [00:13:00] this. You're not behind, you're not broken, and you're definitely not crazy. You're waking up to a truth that your nervous system has known for a while.
Success that costs you your safety isn't success. It's survival, and here's the good news, you don't have to stay here when you learn how to work with your nervous system instead of constantly overriding it. When you learn how to start to reprogram the stories your subconscious clings to out of habit.
Not truth. You stop living your life as a performance review and start living from a place of permission. That's when you begin to create real options, the kind that don't require choosing between achievement and aliveness, the kind that let you walk into the boardroom without abandoning yourself.
Or your boundaries, the kind that let you lead and rest. Win and feel. Stay or go on your terms because what you're craving [00:14:00] isn't escape. It's energetic clarity. It's the ability to feel steady in your body while everything else shifts around you to stop outsourcing your worth to feedback loops that don't see your value, to stop proving and to start choosing.
So if you're sitting on the edge of what no longer fits, here's your invitation to take a deep breath. This isn't the end. It's the beginning of you learning how to trust yourself more than the system you were ever taught to survive. And when that shift happens, your life starts to feel like yours again.
That's not magic my friend. That's mastery and we are just getting started.
