Redefine Success: What does Success Really Mean to YOU?

For high-achieving women, success can become tangled with titles, money, responsibility, and other people's expectations. But what happens when the definition that got you here no longer fits the woman you're becoming?

When I was growing up as the first-generation daughter of Puerto Rican parents in New York City, success had a fairly clear definition: get the title. A title meant you had made it. It represented education, respect, financial security, and becoming someone who would be seen as important. More importantly, it meant creating a life in which you did not have to depend on manual labor simply to survive.

As I got older, I began to understand that my family's definition of success wasn't really about status. It was about survival, opportunity, and wanting the next generation to have choices the previous generation didn't have.

My grandmother came to the mainland and worked in factories doing manual labor. My mother entered the hospital system, began working in Human Resources, and eventually made her way into management. Each generation was trying to move the family a little farther forward. The message I received was essentially: Look how far we've come. Now you go farther.

I don't resent that message. Quite the opposite. I understand it now as an expression of love. My mother wanted me to be able to stand on my own two feet and have opportunities that the women before me had worked incredibly hard to create.

There was just one complication: we didn't have the financial means to simply send me off to college.

So I had to start figuring out for myself what success was going to look like—and what I was willing to do to create it.

When the Traditional Path Isn't Available

I knew I wanted to do better and become more, and I wasn't willing to let finances or time convince me that it was too late or impossible. Eventually, I found an employer that offered tuition reimbursement, so I used it. I went to college in the evenings while continuing to work full-time during the day.

It wasn't glamorous, and it certainly wasn't easy. There were seasons when doing what I wanted required doing double-time. Yet one of the lessons that experience taught me was that sometimes the path does exist; it simply doesn't look anything like the path you thought you were supposed to take.

I eventually built a 31-year career in Corporate America, primarily on Wall Street. I worked hard, built my reputation, advanced professionally, and yes, the titles eventually came. The difference was that somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing the title itself as the definition of my success.

One experience in particular profoundly changed that perspective.

The Moment Success Changed for Me

I was 29 years old when I survived September 11, 2001. An experience like that has a way of rearranging what matters.

Until then, I had been chasing the million-dollar Wall Street career. I was ambitious, working hard, and trying to build the kind of successful life I believed I was supposed to want. After 9/11, however, I began asking myself different questions. Was I happy? Did I actually like the life I was creating? What difference was I making in the lives of the people around me? If tomorrow wasn't promised, what exactly was I working so hard to build?

I didn't abandon ambition, and I think that distinction matters. I continued building my career, advancing professionally, and taking pride in my work. What changed was my relationship with achievement. The title was no longer the destination. I wanted the fruits of my labor to support a life that actually felt meaningful to me.

Twenty years later, life would invite me to redefine success again.

Success Changes Because We Change

By the time the COVID pandemic arrived, I had built a career I was proud of and held a position I genuinely loved. I was also approaching 50, married to my now-husband, and beginning to look at life through a very different lens.

We had already purchased a home in Puerto Rico. Our original plan was practical: use the house as a short-term rental for approximately ten years, continue working, and eventually move there when the timing seemed more sensible.

Then the pandemic brought us home and slowed life down enough for us to hear ourselves again.

We had built the careers. We had worked. We had saved. We had achieved many of the things we once believed we needed to achieve. Eventually, we looked at each other and asked a very simple question:

Why are we waiting another ten years to live the life we already know we want?

That question became another turning point because my definition of success had changed again. Success was no longer simply about how much I could accomplish.

Success was becoming freedom.

Sometimes Redefining Success Means Holding the Pen

Now, before anyone reads this and decides I'm suggesting that you walk into your office, tell everybody to go f— themselves, quit your job, and run away to Puerto Rico to find yourself... please don't use me as your explanation to HR.

That is most definitely not what I did.

What I did was far less dramatic and much more strategic. I became honest about what I wanted, considered the realities of my situation, and spoke up for myself.

After 18 years with my organization, I knew we were emerging from the pandemic and that reductions in force were occurring. I also knew that my own calendar had me working approximately another 18 months before leaving Corporate America. Rather than quietly waiting for life to make the decision for me, I approached my supervisors with a proposal.

If another reduction became necessary, I wanted them to know that I would be open to discussing my departure rather than having the position of someone who still wanted or needed to remain eliminated.

My husband initially thought I was crazy. From his perspective, I was voluntarily putting a target on my own head. I saw it differently. I trusted the work history, relationships, and professional reputation I had spent 18 years building with that organization, and I also knew what I wanted next.

A few months later, another reduction came. We talked, negotiated the timing of my departure and an early retirement package, and created an outcome that worked for both sides. After 31 years in Corporate America, I successfully retired at 51 and returned my attention to the work that had been calling me for years: yoga, wellness, writing, teaching, and eventually supporting other professional and executive women as they navigate their own questions about purpose, success, identity, and what comes next.

I didn't abandon my career. I completed a season.

More importantly, I participated in writing what came next.

What Yoga Philosophy Taught Me About Redefining Success

This is one of the reasons I continue to find yoga philosophy so relevant to modern life. The teachings are ancient, but the questions they invite us to explore are remarkably current. The Yoga Sutras don't need to remain abstract ideas discussed only in teacher trainings or contemplated on meditation cushions. They can offer us practical frameworks for examining work, identity, ambition, purpose, and the lives we are actually living.

When I look back at my own relationship with success, four principles in particular stand out: svadhyaya, satya, tapas, and ishvara pranidhana.

Svadhyaya: The Courage to Study Yourself

Svadhyaya, or self-study, asks us to turn inward with curiosity. In the context of success, that means asking a deceptively simple question: Whose definition of success am I actually living?

Maybe it came from your parents. Perhaps it came from your culture, your industry, your education, or the version of yourself who created a five-year plan fifteen years ago. There may be absolutely nothing wrong with the life you've built. You may simply have outgrown the definition you used to build it.

Self-study gives us permission to notice that without immediately judging it or blowing everything up.

Satya: The Courage to Tell Yourself the Truth

Then comes satya, truthfulness. Sometimes the hardest person to tell the truth to is ourselves.

You can be grateful for your career while admitting that you want something different. You can love your family deeply while recognizing that somewhere along the way you disappeared from your own priority list. You can be incredibly proud of what you have achieved while acknowledging that your next season requires a different definition of success.

Changing your mind does not mean the previous chapter was a mistake. It means you are paying attention to the woman you have become.

Tapas: The Discipline to Participate in Your Own Dream

Then comes tapas: discipline, commitment, and the willingness to do the work. This is where my version of spirituality becomes very practical.

You can make the vision board, journal about your desires, meditate, pray, manifest, and tell the universe exactly what you want. I believe all of those practices can have value. But at some point, you also have to get off your ass and participate in your own success story.

Manifestation without active participation is just a wish.

I worked full-time while attending college at night because that was the path available to me. Your next season may require some double-time too. Perhaps you need additional training, a financial plan, a difficult conversation, a certification, a side business, a new boundary, six months of saving, or the humility to become a beginner again.

Don't become so attached to how you think the opportunity is supposed to arrive that you fail to recognize the path when it appears in a different form.

Ishvara Pranidhana: Do Your Work and Surrender the Rest

Finally, there is ishvara pranidhana: surrender to something greater than ourselves.

For me, this is the practice of working, preparing, asking, planning, speaking up, and showing up while also recognizing that I cannot control every outcome. Eventually, I have to loosen my grip and let God handle the rest.

That isn't passivity. It is the balance between effort and surrender.

Some seasons will challenge you. Some doors won't open. Some plans will fall apart. What looks like a setback today may eventually reveal itself as a redirection, although we don't always have the privilege of understanding that while we're living through it.

Our responsibility is to remain engaged with our own lives without believing that we can control every detail of how the story unfolds.

Redefining Success Doesn't Mean Giving Up Your Ambition

I want to be particularly clear about this because conversations about wellness and work can sometimes swing too far in the opposite direction.

I am not telling you to stop wanting the promotion.

Make the money. Build the company. Earn the title. Buy the beautiful house. Create generational wealth. Become the first. Break the ceiling. Pursue whatever genuinely calls you.

Just know why you're doing it.

For first-generation women especially, and for women whose families sacrificed enormously to create opportunities they themselves never had, redefining success can carry a surprising amount of guilt. Choosing differently can feel like rejecting everything our parents or grandparents worked to give us.

I don't see it that way.

My grandmother's labor helped create greater possibilities for my mother. My mother's progress helped create greater possibilities for me. Their sacrifices ultimately helped give me something enormously precious: choice.

Perhaps honoring the women who came before us doesn't require recreating their struggle.

Perhaps one of the greatest ways we can honor them is by using the choices they worked so hard to give us.

Today, My Definition of Success Is Freedom

At this stage of my life, success looks very different than it did when I was 29.

Success is freedom.

It is the freedom to have greater choice over how I spend my days and the kind of work I do. It is writing, teaching, walking Luna, drinking my coffee, sitting beneath a tree, spending time with my husband, living in Puerto Rico, creating work that matters to me, and having the ability to say yes when something feels aligned and no when it doesn't.

It also means that when I'm stressed, I have enough agency in my life to ask myself, How do I need to fill my cup today?

None of this diminishes the professional achievements that came before it. In many ways, those achievements helped create the freedom I have now. My definition simply changed because I changed.

Yours is allowed to change too.

The Sacred & Practical Success Audit

Before you move on with your day, I want to invite you to take your own definition of success out of the abstract and put it on paper. Grab your journal, open the notes app on your phone, or use the back of an envelope if that's what you have nearby.

Most importantly, don't give yourself the impressive answers. Give yourself the truthful ones.

1. The Success I Inherited
What did your family, culture, education, community, or environment teach you that a successful woman was supposed to become? Which parts of that definition still belong to you, and which no longer do?

2. The Success I Pursued
What have you spent the last 10, 20, or 30 years building? Why did you want it? Be curious about whether the original reason still matters to you today.

3. The Success I Have Already Created
What have you accomplished that you rarely stop long enough to honor? Not everything in your life needs to be improved. Some things deserve to be celebrated.

4. The Success I Desire Now
If nobody needed to approve of your answer, what would a successful life actually look and feel like during your next season? Think beyond money and titles. Consider your time, health, relationships, peace, purpose, freedom, joy, contribution, and how you want an ordinary Tuesday morning to feel.

5. The Success I Am Willing to Participate In
What are you willing to learn, change, negotiate, release, sacrifice, ask for, or begin to help create that life?

Then choose one action. Not twenty. One.

Take the step.

You Are Allowed to Change Your Mind

You are allowed to want more. You are allowed to define the trajectory of where you want to go, what you want to do, and who you want to become. You are also allowed to change your mind and start again.

We live in seasons, and not every season is meant for relentless forward motion. When life becomes quieter, don't automatically assume you're falling behind. Use the space to listen, study yourself, tell yourself the truth, and get clear about what the next season is asking of you.

Then, when clarity comes, participate.

You can honor everything it took to become the woman you are without requiring that woman to remain who she once had to be.

Maybe success isn't simply reaching the destination somebody handed you.

Maybe sometimes success is looking at everything you've built, everything you've survived, and everything that still calls to you—and remembering:

You still hold the pen.

Make This Your Sacred Pause Moment

If this reflection has you reconsidering what success means in your own life, I invite you to stay connected with me through The Sacred Pause Moment.

I have no interest in flooding your inbox simply because someone told me that's what good marketing requires. When I show up there, I want it to mean something.

Think of it as an invitation to grab your cafecito, give yourself ten minutes, and come back to the woman underneath the responsibilities, expectations, accomplishments, and titles.

We'll talk about leadership, purpose, yoga philosophy, holistic wellness, ancestral wisdom, life's transitions, and the practical work of creating a life that feels as meaningful on the inside as it may look successful from the outside.

Because wellness with soul and power in purpose isn't something we merely talk about.

It's something we learn to live.

With gratitude... always,

Erica Garcia Abergel
Founder, Nueva Alma ®

Ancient wisdom. Modern life. Real transformation.