For the last 2 years, I have led a women’s community called Quietly Becoming for ambitious women who are dating high-performing men.

On the surface, the community is about relationships. The women come to learn how to communicate better, understand masculine and feminine dynamics, navigate dating, and eventually build healthy relationships with men who have considerable ambition of their own.

But the real work we do has nothing to do with relationships themselves and everything to do with the kind of woman you want to be.

The women inside QB are truly 1% women - they are ambitious, intelligent, have always felt a bit different from the rest, struggled to meet like-minded women who are actually pleasant to talk to, and have very high standards for their life.

They also want love.

Over the last two years, I have noticed that the women who seem to get the most out of the community tend to share one quality: dynamism (aka the ability to be dynamic).

Allow me to explain.

Imagine a day where you put on your favorite playlist and start dancing in the kitchen while your coffee brews. You feel light and playful. You savor every sip, bask in the morning sunlight, journal about the dream you had the night before, and take your time getting ready. You feel like a true fairy princess.

Then the workday begins and you’re locked the f*ck in. You open your laptop, scan the numbers, answer the emails, and walk into your first meeting knowing exactly what needs to happen. You tell your team what needs to change. A deal falls through, a client is difficult, and something you spent three weeks working on needs to be redone. You handle it. You ask the right questions, make the call, and keep moving.

Sure, the day is a bit stressful, but you’re on top of it and take a mid-day breather to reset. By the end of the afternoon, the important things are done. You shut your computer and leave work at work.

By the time you get home, you are not thinking about quarterly targets or tomorrow’s meetings. You put on your pajamas, make a cup of tea, crawl under a huge blanket, and put on Gilmore Girls while you wait for Uber Eats to arrive. You text your friend about the ridiculous thing that happened at work that morning and laugh about it from bed.

This, to me, is dynamism.

You can be highly competent without needing to be serious all the time. Your ambition does not smother your playfulness, and your softness does not diminish your ability to gracefully handle pressure.

Doesn’t that sound like the kind of woman you want to be? Doesn’t she sound so incredibly magnetic and sexy and inspirational?

It’s Simple, But It Sure As Heck Isn’t Easy

This topic came up during one of our group calls, and we collectively concluded that truly becoming this kind of dynamic woman is much harder than you might think.

It requires actual skill.

One brilliant member used the analogy of oceanic pressure levels.

Let’s compare fully pursuing your ambition to diving 100 ft below sea level. Very few people can swim that deeply without scuba gear just like very few people will actually do what it fulfill their potential. The harder it gets, the fewer people you’ll experience there.

Ahhhh - but to then swim back up to the surface isn’t as easy as simply swimming back up. At 100 feet below sea level, not only are you experiencing 3 times more air pressure than you are at the surface, but it requires knowledge and strategy to safely ascend to the surface. If you come up too quickly, you can get seriously hurt.

This is called decompression, and I think it’s a useful way to think about dynamism.

Most women I work with struggle with decompression - they’re so used to dealing with a lot of pressure and responsibility that they forget what it’s like to not be under pressure. But they are women after all, and something inside their soul longs for playfulness; at some point they can’t ignore their heart’s plea. But God they’re scared. What are they useful for if they’re not competent, on top of things, impressive? So they start to feel burnt out and easily irritated by the work they used to love.

Hence, why simply being successful and impressive isn’t the marker of the most incredible women I know. Ambition has no natural stopping point. If you allow it to, it will consume every available piece of space in your life.

What use is it to be able to swim to deep depths if you can’t come back to the surface? No use. You’re dead.

At the same time, oscillating between extreme ambition and relaxing also requires knowledge and structure.

How To Become The Kind of Dynamic You Want To Be

When you spend long periods operating under high pressure, you cannot expect yourself to immediately switch into complete relaxation the moment the work is finished. Your body and mind have adapted to operating at that level. You need a process , a system, for decompressing.

Ahhh the irony - all you want is to be swept up in the arms of a big strong man and be told that he’ll take care of everything from here. But, my sweet girl, please don’t hate me for telling you that you actually need to push for one last stint before you can be whisked away.

The more ambitious you are and the more you want out of life, the more structure you need in order to experience freedom.

Let me tell you how to create that structure.

Step One: Know the somatic indicators of both playfulness and pressure

Before you can change anything, you have to be able to feel it. This sounds obvious, but most of the women I work with are so used to living in their heads that they've lost the ability to notice what's happening in their bodies until they're snapping at their partner or crying in the car or lying awake at 2am tossing and turning.

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk explains that being able to perceive visceral sensations is the very foundation of emotional awareness.

Just like anything in life, the more of an intimate relationship you have with something, the more aware you are when something is off.

So let’s get specific.

Pressure has a physical signature. For a lot of women it's a tightness in the chest, a shallowness in the breath, a low hum of urgency that makes you feel like you always need to be doing something. Your shoulders creep toward your ears. Your thoughts speed up and start to loop. You get irritable at small stuff.

Playfulness also has it’s own signature. Your body feels more relaxed and less inflamed. You’re more present. You feel lighter and more resilient.

In order to pay attention to these indicators, you have to be so insanely in touch with yourself. This is a deeply feminine energy skill. Masculine energy overrides the body and pushes through.

Paying attention to the sensations moving through you and letting them inform what you do next is the essence of feminine energy. It's one of the most powerful forms of awareness there is.

Step 2: Identify What’s Needed

Generic advice would tell you to simply take your foot off the gas pedal when you can sense you’re on the verge of burn out. But sometimes that’s just not reasonable. You can’t stop working just because you’re tired - that’s not how you become incredible at what you do.

Knowledge is power - you need to be able to identify between seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and pushing through the final stretch or knowing if you can take a break.

But awareness on its own will drive you a little crazy. Now you can feel the pressure but you still don’t know what to do with it.

This is where you need actual education and actual systems.

Decompressing after high pressure isn't something your body does automatically. There is no genuinely helpful advice for the ambitious woman who wants to be fully feminine without losing her edge.

We teach women how to achieve, how to push, how to hold it all together.

We don't teach them how to decompress effectively. So most women do the best with what they know: They pour a glass of wine, mindlessly scroll, and binge-watch reality TV. Then, surprise surprise, they still feel wired and empty at the same time.

Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL, built an entire philosophy around three words: discipline equals freedom. “No Lauren! I want less discipline! I want to frolic through lavender fields and swim in the wild sea and forget I have responsibilities! I don’t need more discipline!”

I know it sounds like a contradiction. How could putting boundaries and structure around your life be the thing that sets you free? The more pressure you experience, the more deliberate your structure has to be, because the structure is what gives you permission to fully let go.

This is the heart of what we do inside Quietly Becoming. I'm opening a new cohort soon, and this is exactly the work we'll be doing together. More info coming soon.

Step Three: Be willing to do what’s needed

You can know your somatic indicators and build the perfect system…and you will still, at some point, resist it all because a part of you is afraid that softness makes you useless.

Chances are high you’re a high-achieving/oldest daughter/Capricorn-dominant woman and you’ve adopted the belief that your value lives in your competence; in being on top of it, impressive, the one who handles everything.

You desperately want to lose control and be told what to do, but the second you lose control, you freak out.

You want to feel playful, but what if someone takes advantage of your aloofness? You want to rest, but what if someone calls you out for being lazy? You want to be soft, but what if your softness makes you forgettable?

You have to essentially rewire your brain and the identity you adhere to. You have to know, clearly and specifically, what kind of woman you actually want to be.

The reason Quietly Becoming attracts the kind of women it does it because it’s for women who think they know what they need to do, but have no one holding them accountable or that’s on the same journey as them. When they join QB, they realize they’re not alone and often realize the things they think they need to do are still based on the need for control versus truly being dynamic.

The reason being dynamic likely sounds so appealing is because it gives you full permission to fully dive into every alter-ego you’ve ever imagined.

You can be the wild-hearted mountain girl who lives in a cabin and rides horses. You can be the single city girl who shops too much and laughs over boys with her friends at the bar after work. You can be the free-spirited surfer living in Hawaii who’s biggest concern is if the waves are good enough. You can be the elusive man-eater who men crawl on their knees for. You can be the nurturing mother who pours her soul into her baby.

But living all these lives requires extreme dedication, deliberation, and awareness - it won’t be possible by coasting with “good enough” ways of living. You will have to tackle limiting beliefs, show yourself immense compassion, and deliberately feed your mind and soul truly nourishing sustenance.

The other day, I watched a reel where the creator was declaring that as humans, we would feel less stressed if we stopped obsessing about what our purpose is.

Instead, we should realize WE ARE ALL JUST ANIMALS!!!!! So chill the f*ck out, lay in the grass, and eat good food!!!!!!

God, that sounds nice, doesn’t it?

To not worry that you’re living your life well enough? To take your foot off the accelerator and just enjoy the view? To just enjoy?

For those who understand astrology, I have both a Capricorn and Sagittarius stellium ie. I have an inherent propensity for simultaneously caring about achievement, legacy, and tangible results while also wanting my life to feel expansive, purposeful, and alive.

The battle between “Achieve! Be successful! Grow!” and “Reflect. Wonder. Enjoy.” has always existed in me. I’ve thought a lot about how my life has been affected by this and what true fulfillment looks like for me.

In this essay I hope to clearly illustrate, for the person who has reached the point of having accomplished something with her life while also feeling the pull towards slowness, softness, and happiness, what is required to actually live an incredibly fulfilling life that you look back on 50 years from now and are happy to reflect on through illuminating for you the ideas of hedonism, dharma, and eudaimonia.

first off, what is humans’ obsession with purpose?

The idea of ‘finding your purpose’ isn’t a modern invention designed to make you the most efficient machine to feed capitalism.

Long before self-help, personal brands, optimized morning routines, and job promotions, humans were asking what makes life worth living. The questions appears across ancient philosophy, religious scripture, and spiritual traditions because it emerges from something distinctly human: our awareness that we are alive, that our time is limited, and that we can choose what to do with it.

We are not wild animals, merely experiencing life, responding to our hunger and thirst, then lying down until another primal urge hits us.

No, our lives are coupled with our ability to imagine. Interpret. Compare. Evaluate. We are capable of asking whether our pleasure is deserved, whether our suffering means anything, and whether the person we are becoming is someone we respect.

Read any ancient text on the topic of life and fulfillment and you’ll find that it’s never suggested that the highest human life consisted of feeling good as often as possible.

Ecclesiastes wrestles with the apparent futility of achievement, wealth, pleasure and wisdom. The Bhagavad Gita asks how a person can act wholeheartedly without being possessed by the fruits of her actions. Sādhanā highlights that those who pursue their highest selves must seek something that transcends themselves. The Stoics argued that a good life depends upon the quality of one’s character and choices, including (and especially) when circumstances are unpleasant.

And so for the person who hears “take a break, relax a little, finding your purpose isn’t the sole reason for living” and feels a bit of relief, please allow me to educate and bring insight into why pleasure and self-indulgence is necessary, but not wholly nutritious to a truly fulfilling life.

let’s agree on something

The main purpose of this essay is to come to a conclusive definition of true fulfillment.

To do this, I want to share my understanding of what the signs are of vitality. That’s what we want, isn’t it?

The allure of “relax and stop worrying about your purpose” is that focusing so much on your purpose has become deteriorating and exhausting. You instinctively know that is not how you want to live nor is it beneficial to you.

That being said, here are the qualities I am focusing on when I say “a fulfilling, vivacious life”:

Curiosity: By this, I mean a certain psychological openness. To be curious, you must be willing to admit that your present understanding is incomplete. You must be able to encounter something unfamiliar without immediately dismissing it, categorizing it, or defending yourself against it. I.e. you are still reachable by life.

Frustration tolerance: This is the ability to remain engaged when reality does not immediately cooperate with your desires. You can experience boredom, difficulty, disappointment, frustration, or uncertainty without treating them as reasons to withdraw. You remain in relationship with life even when it is inconvenient.

Gratitude: Recognizing and receiving what is good while life remains imperfect. You can desire more without making the present feel inadequate, and appreciate what you have without needing it to be extraordinary.

Desire: Desire reveals that some part of you is still moving toward life. You want to know someone, create something, experience something, or become more capable. Wanting makes you vulnerable to disappointment, which is why apathy can feel safer. The presence of desire shows that you have not protected yourself from disappointment by ceasing to want anything at all.

the allure of hedonism

Hedonism, for those who are familiar with the word but don’t completely understand it’s meaning, is the philosophical doctrine that pleasure and happiness are the ultimate goods and the chief aim of human life.

To the person who’s been living an extrinsically motivated life aka doing what society and/or your parents expect of you, then living a hedonistic life sounds attractive. It’s an act of rebellion against the thing that is giving you so much stress while encouraging you to live a pleasurable life - something you were previously told you had to earn. Hedonism, in a way, is a soft balm.

Now, the argument for hedonism could be that living a life dedicated to your own pleasure and satisfaction could be parallel to the idea of a person who wants to lose weight, so they quit smoking.

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg tells the story of a woman whose decision to quit smoking instigated a seemingly non-similar transformation. She began running, changed how she ate, lost 60 pounds and eventually completed a marathon. Duhigg describes quitting smoking as a “keystone habit”: one change that reorganized several others around it. The significance of her story is not that quitting smoking automatically makes someone healthy, but that developing agency in one area can alter what a person believes she is capable of in the rest of her life.

For someone who was raised to believe she needed to earn her right to desire more for herself or to simply relax and enjoy, adopting a more hedonistic philosophy may function similarly; giving herself permission to pursue pleasure could become the keystone change that improves the rest of her life.

Additionally, being able to enjoy life’s simple pleasures with no guilt has been shown to be an important contributor to well-being. Psychologists call this capacity savoring: the ability to notice, appreciate, and deepen a positive experience. Research has found that people who view leisure as wasteful enjoy it less and also report lower happiness and poorer mental health. (So interesting!) Pleasure, no matter frequency or amount, cannot restore us if we remain internally resistant to receiving it. The value of a slow meal, an afternoon with friends, or an hour spent doing nothing useful lies partly in our ability to let the experience be sufficient unto itself.

Positive emotions can make us more open, curious, and socially available. A person who no longer treats her own enjoyment as morally suspect may become less resentful, more generous, and better able to tolerate the inevitable discomforts of life.

So through your self-indulgence, you may actually begin being able to connect with others more intimately, hold space for discomfort, and have an overall more optimistic attitude!

In this way, an initially self-directed pursuit of pleasure could produce effects that are not entirely self-serving. By learning to receive nourishment from life, she may become more capable of offering something back to it.

So woohoo! One point for hedonism!

hedonism sounds great, what’s the cost?

For the last two years, I have worked as a relationship coach for women who are dating successful entrepreneurs. This work has given me behind-the-scenes insights into the worlds of “stay-at-home-girlfriends” aka women who don’t have to work and have the luxury of spending their days taking care of themselves, their homes, and their partner. A lot of the women lived what could be considered very hedonistic lifestyles: they wake up when they want (unless they have a 6am pilates class), they aren’t concerned about the grocery bill, and they’re taken on all expenses paid luxury vacation multiple times a year.

That’s what every woman wants, right? The soft life where her biggest problem is the nail salon not having availability when she chips her nail.

Au contraire.

While hedonism promises is pleasure and happiness, the insidious dark side is that it can turn into gluttony, fragility, and the despair of purposelessness. When you wake up when you want, eat what you want, buy what you want, and look out the window of your $30k/month apartment and see a picture-perfect view, what is it all for? At what point does hedonism morph into gluttony?

This is the plight of so many women I’ve worked with. They are living the life they thought they wanted, but have no purpose.

Eventually, this lifestyle of ease and non-friction becomes boring and redundant. One day, you look up and see people doing things with their lives and you, once again, start to feel like you’re behind.

The answer is not necessarily to pendulum swing back into hardcore achieving. Rather, it is to participate in life in a way that expresses your values and develops your character. Hedonism may give us pleasure and even life satisfaction, but can it give us qualities to sustain said pleasure and satisfaction when circumstances make it hard? Does it give us resilience, fortitude and competence?

Dharma as an alternative to conventional purpose

Dharma is the principle of living in harmony with your gifts, values, actions, and responsibilities. However, contrary to hedonism, your dharma may require an action that diminishes your comfort, pleasure, or even personal prospects. You do it because the good of a life cannot always be measured solely by how well it goes for the person living it.

The modern idea of purpose often implies that you must identify one extraordinary contribution and organize your life around accomplishing it. Dharma is more dynamic. It can be expressed in the quality with which you perform the ordinary roles already entrusted to you.

Your dharma may include your work, but it is not reducible to your work. You can fulfill your professional ambitions while violating your dharma in the way you treat people. You can also live an outwardly ordinary life that is profoundly Dharmic because your actions consistently express truth, courage, responsibility and care.

Dharma gives pleasure and ambition their ethical shape. It asks whether the way you seek enjoyment or success sustains your integrity, your relationships, and the wider life around you. Pleasure pursued within dharma belongs to a good life. Pleasure that violates dharma may feel good while gradually producing disorder.

When I think about living a life I can look back and think “Wow, I lived life well. I am happy with the decisions I made, even if I made mistakes” I like to think that Dharmic thinking is what makes that happen.

The Greeks have a word for this ultimate alignment of your gifts, your actions, and you yourself.

They call it Eudaimonia.

eudaimonia: the balance of pleasure and fulfillment

Ahhh, after reading all this, eudaimonia will actually feel like a breath of fresh air.

Some of the ancient Greek philosophers called the point of life: eudaimonia. It’s commonly translated as happiness, but i believe a more accurate translation would be that eudaimonia is the result of living according to your dharma.

Interestingly, there are quite a few studies about hedonism and eudaimonia.

While hedonism has the potential to result in someone experiencing more satisfaction with themselves, a research article shared that “For individuals who prioritized hedonia over eudaimonia, the benefits related to well-being from both orientations decreased or disappeared. These findings suggest that orientation priorities are of equal importance in regard to hedonic and eudaimonic orientations.” - When Do Hedonic and Eudaimonic Orientations Lead to Happiness? Moderating Effects of Orientation Priority

So basically, the researchers looked at two orientations:

• Hedonic orientation: seeking pleasure, enjoyment and comfort.

• Eudaimonic orientation: seeking meaning, growth, excellence, and the development of your potential.

and they concluded that people who prioritized meaning and growth also experienced pleasure, those who prioritized pleasure experienced less overall well-being.

People who organize their lives mainly around pleasure (aka hedonism) may experience more inner conflict and emotional confusion while also making sacrifice, discomfort, and delayed gratification harder to integrate, which can reduce life satisfaction. People who organize their lives around meaning, growth, and becoming a better version of themselves tended to feel more satisfied with their lives because their goals feel more aligned and coherent.

So if we are to tie this back in to the topic of live a life dedicated to finding your purpose versus relaxing and enjoying the pleasures of life, it’s fair to say that it’s not that you don’t not want to have a purpose. It’s just that your purpose has been driven by what you think will give you the most rewards in society based on what you’ve learned give you access to love, safety, and belonging.

what I think

I advocate for pleasure found in meaningful direction, close relationships, aligned action, and the pursuit of joy.

It’s blatantly obvious that pleasure contributes to a good life, but meaning, growth, relationships, and purpose give that pleasure structure and durability.

Another research article I found while studying these topics shared that humans have “three innate psychological needs--competence, autonomy, and relatedness--which when satisfied yield enhanced self-motivation and mental health and when thwarted lead to diminished motivation and well-being.” - Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being

Pleasure may make a day enjoyable, but it cannot, by itself, make us feel capable, self-directed, or meaningfully connected. A fulfilling life needs both: pleasure that allows us to enjoy being alive, and meaningful activity that gives us a reason to participate in life.

As someone who values ambition and growth, I really like that prioritizing pleasure being beneficial has some scientific backing. It’s one of those things that always seemed obvious to me, but I was never able to put into words how to weave together the pursuit of “success” while doing it in a way that was enjoyable.

In all of this, I think the answer is to create an inner world that is maturely responsive and flexible. Where joy and personal fulfillment are prioritized, but not at the cost of needing everything to be perfect for this to be achieved. (I will talk about how to do this in my next essay).

For now, I hope this has illuminated and potentially exposed you to new ideas and philosophies that make it easy to recognize your own Dharma at this time in your life and reorient what it means to have a purpose.

My former partner recently made a public post about my infidelity and the end of our relationship. It reached hundreds of thousands of people and included claims about my character, motivations, and work that I do not believe conveyed the full truth. (He has since deleted the video.)

This essay is the first public response I have made. Before making a public response on social media, I felt a responsibility to address it directly with the women in my community who work with me and have placed their trust in me. I held a private call where they could ask questions, express concerns, and speak honestly with me.

I have been navigating what could reasonably be considered a public-relations crisis without a public-relations team. I have had no group of professionals helping me decide what to say, how to respond with both honesty and discernment, or how to continue showing up while people debate whether I deserve to.

Navigating incredibly difficult situations alone is not entirely unfamiliar territory for me. One of my oldest beliefs is that I have to figure everything out by myself. If I created the problem, I must solve it alone. This is the bed I made, so I have to find my own way out of it.

For the purpose of this essay, the most important facts are these: Three years ago, I had one affair and did not tell him until one month before the wedding ceremony we had planned. Though it was planned to feel like a real wedding, it was never intended to be a legal marriage. I told the truth far later than I should have, and I caused enormous pain to someone I loved.

In the years since I cheated, I have attempted to understand how I became capable of it, change the patterns that led to it happening, and ensure that I never repeated it. It’s through all of this that became part of how I lived, how I loved, and eventually, what I taught online and in my community.

What I had not fully confronted was the harm and how deceitful it was to continue to withhold the truth for so long.

After the affair, (in the 3 years since) I dedicated myself to ensuring it could never happen again. I changed the boundaries I had around other men. I became vigilant about the situations I allowed myself to enter. I tried to be the most loving, loyal and supportive partner I could possibly be, but there were other forces driving my devotion to the relationship: guilt and shame.

I knew how much pain the truth could cause him, and I became determined to protect him from ever having to feel it. Somewhere in my mind, I believed that if I loved him well enough from that point forward, I could simply contain the betrayal inside myself. I would carry the guilt, he would remain protected from the pain, and the relationship could continue without the worst thing I had done ever becoming part of his reality.

I tried to compensate for the truth through goodness.

If I could become the best possible partner, perhaps I could make what I had done less consequential. If I could give him enough love, loyalty, and support afterward, perhaps it would lessen the pain if I ever did tell him the truth. (It did not.)

For three years, I tried to make myself worthy of the relationship again.

My desire to protect him was sincere, as was my remorse. I genuinely believed that telling him would only transfer the pain from me to him. I told myself that because the affair was over, because I had changed my behavior and because I would never allow it to happen again, carrying the secret alone was the most loving thing I could do.

But protecting someone from the consequences of your own actions by withholding the truth only deprives them of agency.

I was also protecting myself. I was protecting myself from watching him suffer, from being seen differently, and from having to confront what the truth might reveal about our relationship.

This is where my experience of guilt became tangled with denying myself.

I believed I had forfeited the right to question the relationship because of what I had done. How could I admit that I was uncertain about the relationship after he had loved me so well and I had betrayed him? How could I cause further pain by acknowledging that, beneath all my efforts to become the perfect partner, part of me felt like this wasn’t the right relationship?

So I tried harder.

I became more devoted and more determined to be the best version of myself in the relationship.

I was trying to protect him from my betrayal, protect myself from the consequences, and protect the identity of the woman I wanted to believe I was. In doing so, I sustained a relationship whose full reality only one of us knew.

For a long time, I believed I was taking responsibility by making sure it never happened again and loving him as well as I possibly could. Now I understand that responsibility also requires me to confront the actual consequences of what I did.

I did change after the affair. I did not repeat it. I became a better partner in many ways.

Telling him the truth, ending our relationship, and then having it exposed so publicly, brought me into a new stage of a reckoning that began three years ago. It put me, once again, face-to-face with the distance between the woman I believed myself to be, the woman I presented to the world, and the woman I had proved capable of being.

What I’ve written here is about what I’ve experienced regarding dissonance with my identity, the suffocating, selfish shame I experienced, shadow work, and the difference between punishing yourself and actually changing.

It is about learning to see yourself whole, which includes bringing the light and acknowledging the parts you would give almost anything not to possess.

devastatingly, I am not who I wish i could be

I have always felt deeply connected to a specific version of myself.

She is loving, intelligent, competent, honest, generous, discerning, and good. I have spent much of my life trying to become her, and much of my work helping other women become the women they sense they are capable of being.

There is something beautiful about having a vision for your character and also danger in becoming so attached to an identity that you cannot tolerate evidence that contradicts it.

I did not know what to do with the fact that I was capable of betraying someone I loved. It was incompatible with the story I held about myself.

But this has been a theme in my life - knowing I’m capable of things that I don’t want to be capable of.

I want to believe that because I value loyalty, I am loyal. Because I value honesty, I am honest. Because I care deeply about being a good woman, my behavior naturally reflects goodness.

Then I acted against those values.

I think many of us spend our lives trying to create an identity secure enough to protect us from what we’re secretly scared of being capable of.

We believe that if we can place ourselves firmly enough on the right side, we will never have to reckon with the qualities we condemn in other people.

“Oh no, I would never do that.”

But the parts of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge do not simply cease existing.

There is a line commonly associated with Jung, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

If you know anything about the subconscious, then you know that just because you’re not aware of it doesn’t mean it’s inactive.

For years, I wanted so badly to be loving, grateful and good that I struggled to admit when I was unhappy, resentful or unwilling. I interpreted difficult feelings as parts of myself I needed to overcome. I thought goodness meant overcoming my reluctance and making myself want what I believed I should want.

Understanding this absolutely does not absolve me of those choices.

There’s something I read that said (and I’m ad libbing a bit here) “An apology is genuine when it inspires responsible change.”

And that is what I am dedicated to: paying attention the conditions I created within myself that made my betrayal possible, so I can recognize those patterns before they govern me again.

how i’ve used shadow work

For me, shadow work has been the work of looking squarely at the parts of myself I wanted to believe myself incapable of: my selfishness, my cowardice, my capacity for deception, my hunger for validation, my resentment, my fear of disappointing people, my fear of being seen as a ‘bad’ person.

It is understanding that the desire to see myself as good did not always make me behave well. It made me conceal the evidence that I was behaving against my own values.

If I believe, “I am not the kind of person who lies,” then I have no framework for confronting myself when I lie. I have to minimize it, rationalize it, or hide it because the alternative is the collapse of my entire identity.

Rather, I have (and am continuing to) recognize and acknowledge that:

I am a person who values honesty and has been dishonest.

I am a person capable of genuine love and significant harm.

I am a person who has offered wisdom and life-changing teachings while failing to live some of it fully.

I am a person who has betrayed her values and still has the ability to return to them.

Holding these contradictions is still uncomfortable for me.

But, my God, I no longer want my goodness to depend upon the denial of everything in me that is not good.

I want it to come from intimately knowing the parts I have wanted to be ashamed of and becoming responsible for what I do with them - not trying to hide or shame them.

extreme ownership or another version of self-denial?

If you’re at all familiar with my teachings, you might have heard me talk about extreme ownership. It’s the idea that no one else is responsible for your feelings or circumstances.

After everything became public, I felt an immediate need to take extreme ownership.

Some of that instinct was necessary, of course. I had caused harm and find it necessary to take ownership of that.

But I began noticing something else that made me reflect on why I want to take extreme ownership…

If I accept every criticism, absorb every accusation and make myself entirely responsible for everything that went wrong, perhaps I can make sure it’s known my remorse is genuine.

I could avoid asking whether some claims about me were unfair because defending myself felt incompatible with accountability. I could avoid feeling hurt because I had decided that being the person who caused harm meant I had to forfeit the right to have feelings of my own.

I was kinda using extreme ownership as another form of control - something I’m also learning about my relationship with.

If I punished myself severely enough, perhaps other people would not need to. If my shame were visible enough, perhaps the person I hurt would know that I understood the consequences of my actions. If I accepted the harshest possible interpretation of myself, no one could accuse me of evading responsibility.

Yeah…that is not accountability.

Real accountability requires me to identify exactly what I did, examine the qualities and patterns that made it possible, accept the consequences, make whatever repair is available, and live differently.

I am responsible for being unfaithful. I am responsible for withholding the truth. I am responsible for the ways fear, avoidance and self-deception shaped my choices.

I am also responsible for learning to speak when something is true, even if that truth disappoints someone. I am responsible for recognizing when I am living from obligation instead of conviction. I am responsible for asking for help before I find myself hiding within the confines of secrecy.

shame is selfish

Shame makes quite a compelling, yet empty promise: if you punish yourself enough, you will prove that you are sorry.

I have felt the temptation to remain visibly ashamed so that no one mistakes my decision to keep living for indifference.

Perhaps if I see myself as broken, the person I hurt will receive some comfort from knowing I understand the gravity of what I did. Perhaps if I refuse to forgive myself, other people will see that I am taking accountability seriously.

But feeling shame cannot return what another person lost. It cannot rewrite the past. It cannot heal someone else. It cannot guarantee that I will never cause harm again.

My shame also changed the way I saw other people.

I would look at other couples, relationship coaches, or people who seemed deeply principled and think, “I bet they have never cheated. I bet they have always been loyal. I bet they are exactly as good as they appear to be. I wish I wasn’t capable of doing things I wish I wasn’t. I wish I was as good as I want to be, like they probably are”.

Strangely, if I learned that one of them had done something they were ashamed of, I knew I would try to understand. I would want to know what fear, pain, or unexamined pattern had contributed to their choices. I could believe that understanding the context did not excuse the harm and that one decision did not contain the entire truth of who they were.

I could extend that complexity and compassion to everyone except myself.

When it came to my own behavior, understanding felt too much like excusing. Empathy felt like evading accountability. I believed the morally responsible thing to do was to deny myself the grace I would have readily offered someone else.

Shame is selfish. It turns my attention toward myself: Am I terrible? Am I forgivable? Do people still respect me? Am I allowed to continue my work? Have I suffered enough?

This makes me the victim of my actions and also dissolves me of the ability to really face the repercussions of my actions.

When I talk about taking accountability, I mean directing my attention toward my behavior: What allowed this to happen? Where was I dishonest with myself? What must I practice now? What conversations do I need to stop avoiding? What parts of my identity am I trying to protect? What would integrity require from me the next time truth becomes scary to tell?

The shame spiral is repetitive:

Trigger (a mistake/criticism/perceived failure)→ Negative Self-Talk (I’m a monster/I’m useless/I’m a failure) → Internalized Shame (Shift from “I did something bad” to “I am bad”) → Withdrawal and Avoidance (Pulling away from people/opportunities. Avoiding being seen. Hiding mistakes) → Overthinking and Self-Blame (Replaying events endlessly) → Emotional Collapse (Feeling trapped in a negative identity)

Moral of the story: I cannot shame myself into becoming someone I respect.

being seen in one dimension

We now have another element to all of this - the fact that I am going through this publicly as someone who’s brand is built on relationships and becoming a certain type of woman.

Most people online know me through one dimension of my life.

I became known for speaking about relationships, femininity, and ambitious men.

Through that work, people understandably formed an understanding of my character. Some trusted me. Some admired me. Some saw aspects of themselves in the woman I appeared to be.

When my past behavior has shown to contradict that image, some people experience it as evidence that everything I taught was fraudulent.

I have also been thinking about what it means to reduce any person to the dimension through which we first encountered her. A teacher can possess wisdom she has not completely embodied, a person can help others in an area where she is still confronting her own deepest failures, someone can be sincere in what she believes and still lack the courage to live it consistently.

My work has genuinely helped women. I have watched it transform lives and relationships. I deeply believe in its value.

After all, a lot of what I teach has come from identifying the ways I was operating from fear and insecurity in my past relationship and equipping and holding space for women who resonate with my experience in their own relationships.

I understand that some people may no longer feel comfortable learning from me, and I understand and respect that.

For those who continue to place their trust in me, I feel an even greater responsibility to ensure that my work embodies greater honesty, humility and responsibility.

the woman I want to become now

For a long time, becoming a woman of excellence meant becoming more accomplished, more intelligent, more loving, more competent, and more refined.

Like I said earlier, I’ve thought a lot about the woman I want to be - my sister and I use to lie in bed as children and dream about the kind of wives and mothers we want to be. It was all rooted in kindness and selflessness and a desire to be admirable.

And in doing so, I created this preserved identity that didn’t really allow any room for imperfection.

Now, I realize that being a woman of excellence could be better defined as a woman who isn’t afraid of any part of herself, and as a result can connect with others more deeply and genuinely because she’s not trying to uphold and protect her picture-perfect identity.

I want to become a woman who does not need to see herself as perfect in order to respect herself. A woman who can recognize selfishness before it becomes betrayal. A woman who can ask for help instead of disappearing into the belief that she has to figure everything out alone.

I want to live with less division between what I know, what I say, and what I do.

I want to become trustworthy to myself.

That will not happen because I write an ~eloquent~ essay about accountability. It will happen privately. It will be visible in the conversations I choose to have, the support I allow myself to receive, the boundaries I communicate, and the decisions I make.

I cannot ask an audience to verify that I have changed. Time and behavior are the only evidence I can offer.

responsible, lasting change

As much as I wish I could, I cannot return to the past and not cheat or become honest about it sooner.

I cannot answer every question people have about me. I cannot make my public image contain the complexity of an entire human life. I cannot control whether people forgive me, trust me, or decide that the worst thing they know about me is the truest thing.

Rather, I can take responsibility, I can feel the weight of the pain my actions created without choosing to suffer and make it mean I am a bad person. I can and will allow this experience to change the way I live and the way I teach.

I intend to continue the work I do, although it will evolve.

Relationships will remain part of that work because I continue to believe they are one of the clearest places we encounter ourselves. But I also want to explore the questions beneath them: identity, self-deception, moral courage, ambition, femininity, discernment, and what it means to become a woman of excellence.

I understand that some people may no longer feel comfortable learning from me, and I respect that. I know that I cannot assume that my explanation equates to trust being given again - that trust is something I can only earn through the honesty of my work and the consistency of how I live.

To the women who continue to choose to trust me, I do not take your trust lightly. I feel an even greater responsibility to create work that is honest, rigorous, and capable of holding the full complexity of being human.

I am deeply sorry for what I did.

I forgive myself; doing so gives me the freedom, and the obligation, to become someone who lives differently.

The evidence of my remorse will be not in how completely I destroy myself or hide from the world, it will be found in the woman I become from here.

I mean, from a very young age, as long as I can remember, I’ve felt a deep connection to a certain version of myself - a woman who is effortless, successful, agile, competent, intelligent, loving, kind, passionate, and deeply fulfilled - and have wanted to do everything I can to maintain a relationship with her.

The problem is, it seems so much easier to be Her when I am alone.

It’s so easy to be kind when I’m relaxed on a beach versus when the car in front of me is driving 5 miles below the speed limit. It’s so much easier to feel empowered when I’m not struggling in my business.

“Calm in quietude is not real calm. When you can be calm in the midst of activity, this is the true state of nature. Happiness in comfort is not real happiness. When you can be happy in the midst of hardship, then you see the true potential of the mind.” - Hong Zicheng

Which has led me to ask - how legitimate are my qualities if, when challenged by the smallest of stress-tests, falter?

That cycle created so much shame in me.

I wanted to be sophisticated, but I was hyper.

I wanted to be intelligent, but hated studying.

I wanted to be kind, but I said mean things to my sister.

I wanted to be successful, but felt directionless.

All the fractures in my romanticized identity were revealed once they were no longer in a vacuum.

I so badly wanted to be someone who could be exactly who I wanted to be no matter the circumstances.

If this is something you’ve been wrestling with as well, here are some things that have helped me significantly:

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“Weak is he who allows his thoughts to control his actions; strong is he who forces his actions to control his thoughts.” — Og Mandino

ne of my favorite questions to ask myself is “Are you in control?”

I ask it when I check my phone for the 200th times, when I have an impulse to eat a gallon of ice cream, when I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what my boyfriend said in an argument, when I want to curse the driver in front of me for driving slow in the left lane, etc.

Anytime I feel I’m being controlled — whether, by my emotions or cravings, I try to reverse the picture.

This proves to be especially hard when it’s….nearly that time of the month. Why is that?

I revert to a quote that says “Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of these things, and still be calm in your heart.”

This, to me, signifies that I can certainly be in control when it is easy: my hormones are stable and I’m feeling productive.

But what about that week when my testosterone levels skyrocket and I feel lethargic, bloated, and irritable?

How do I stay in control when my emotions loom over me like a giant, heavy cloud?

Is it really just a mental game? Do I just have to always be mindful of overpowering my impulses? Wouldn’t that become exhausting?

How do we do this, then?

Human impulse is never going away — we must then become better at responding, not reacting. This is possible. It’s done by repetition.

Emotional Regulation Through the Menstrual Cycle

I have intentionally curated a lifestyle that allows me to slow down during the luteal & menstrual phases.

My responsibilities don’t change, just my approach.

I live within my rhythm. I have become so attuned with myself that I can easily sense when I’m feeling thrown off. I also have come to terms that feeling “off” is inevitable.

There are times we have a late night and my dog still wants to wake up at 5:30 to go to the bathroom or I’m aching from period cramps and I still need to host a masterclass for my community.

I don’t try to resist these moments anymore which alleviates half the battle. Yeah, it sucks. But is being angry or resentful about it going to help me?

“Bad” Emotions Aren’t Bad

The other thing that has helped me regulate my emotions has been following a rule of not allowing elevated emotions to dictate my actions.

Even feelings of great joy or peace aren’t good to take action from. (Ever been high on life and suddenly you’re tipping every waitress $100 and when you wake up the next day you’re wallet’s empty?)

When I’m feeling particularly angry or irritated, I see that as an indication of something else that’s going on.

We shouldn’t try to not feel emotions — numbing or avoiding admitting that we are feeling something never helps.

Rather, face it head on and deal with it.

“I’m feeling irritated. AHHH I’M FEELING SO IRRITATED. Blah.”

Especially during the luteal phase when I know I tend to be more easily irritated — I remind myself that it’s okay to feel how I’m feeling but it’s not okay to be mean.

If I do have a short temper I apologize to the affected person and take ownership of my actions. I don’t make excuses.

We’re Just Human

I’m not perfect. I don’t always handle situations the way I want to. There are times I feel like I have the emotional regulation of a 6 year old.

But, hey, we’re just human.

When I think about the kind of human I want to be — it’s one who is emotionally aware and is able to apologize when I’m out of line.

// Quietly Becoming is for the woman who is high-achieving, deeply self-led, and serious about building a life (and love) that matches her standards.

A lot of my work is teaching women how to date entrepreneurs and navigate that world… but the real transformation is who you become in the process: sovereign, magnetic, emotionally intelligent, and self-confident.

To learn more, click this link.

Xx Lauren