Bryan McAnulty [00:00:00]:

What if the success that you worked so hard for wasn't actually yours to begin with? Today's guest knows this question from the inside out. Becca Pierce built the career that many people would aspire to. She climbed the corporate ladder, led teams at major organizations, and was eventually appointed CEO of Maryland's Health Benefit Exchange. On paper, it looked like she'd made it. Then everything changed. After losing her role in a very public way, Becca was diagnosed with a brain tumor that forced her to stop and rethink what success really means. That experience led her to write the book you don't have to achieve to be loved and then to dedicate her work to helping high achievers let go of somebody else's definition of success so they can build lives that actually feel right. In this episode, we talk about how to recognize when you're chasing the wrong version of success.

Bryan McAnulty [00:00:44]:

Why time matters more than titles, how money fears can keep people stuck, plus what it really takes to change direction before life forces you to. If you've ever thought I should feel happier than this, this is the episode for you.

Becca Pearce [00:00:57]:

But what I realized is that previous definition of success, of title, of money, I was the breadwinner of accessibility to high powered people. Like all of those things that I thought were success no longer fit. So that's what my definition is now, is living within my values.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:15]:

Welcome to the Creator's Adventure where we interview creators from around the world, hearing their stories about growing a business. Hey, everyone. I'm Brian McAnulty, the founder of Heights Platform. Let's get into it.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:31]:

Hi, Becca. Welcome to the show.

Becca Pearce [00:01:32]:

Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:35]:

My first question for you is what is the biggest thing that either you did or you are doing to help you achieve the freedom to do what you enjoy?

Becca Pearce [00:01:45]:

That's easily for me, being very clear about what it is that matters in life. For me, that was thrown at me, this recognition that what I was working on before wasn't really what mattered, but understanding exactly what matters to me and being unapologetic about it and having the boundaries to put in place around it. So very funny. But real example is, and if you're watching, you can see my dogs behind me. I walk my dogs for an hour every day, period. End of story. It's non negotiable. That is a boundary.

Becca Pearce [00:02:16]:

It's important for me to be outside. It's a core need of mine to be outside in. Even in 30 degrees, I have to do it. It's a core native mind to be moving so to meet all of those things in the middle of the day, non negotiable. So the thing that allows me to be happy and live the life I want is understanding what I want and standing by the boundaries that I'm putting in place to make it happen.

Bryan McAnulty [00:02:40]:

I love that. A couple things there that stood out to me. Yeah, I think not enough people actually understand what they want. And I think. I don't know if you did. You used the word unapologetic, but you mentioned that you want, like you're not going to be concerned with what other people think of the thing that you realize you want to do.

Becca Pearce [00:03:02]:

Exactly.

Bryan McAnulty [00:03:03]:

And I think that that's, that's really important as well. For me, a big thing in my entrepreneurial journey has been figuring out, like, okay, how can I achieve this freedom that I'm after? And yeah, realizing that there are certain constraints that I want to have. Because when I started out I was like, oh, I'm an entrepreneur. That means I get to like, I can respond to people at any time and with my emails or whatever. And as I got older, I quickly realized, like, that's not a good idea and people don't really need that. People don't really need that either. Um, and so then like, yeah, setting specific boundaries, like, okay, if it's after regular business hours, I'm not going to look at the emails and I. That's just the thing that's going to happen.

Bryan McAnulty [00:03:53]:

Um, but also like specific things not even related to work at all, but in your life that you want to do, like walking your dogs every day.

Becca Pearce [00:04:02]:

You know, I think it's interesting. I'm sorry. Especially for entrepreneurs. Right. Because the definition of the entrepreneur is somebody who will work 80 hours a week just so they don't have to work 40 hours a week for somebody else else. Right. And so there's this expectation that the business is going to run you, but if you know what you want and you're clear about what it serves for you, it's easier to make those boundaries.

Bryan McAnulty [00:04:24]:

Yeah. Yeah. I've been thinking about recently that it would serve many entrepreneurs to kind of hear, especially those who are starting out, hear how they can avoid like building a prison for themselves essentially. Because, um, I feel I've done pretty well in, in my journey to avoid that and very consciously trying to avoid that, even if that meant like constraints or struggles along the way to ensure that wouldn't happen. But yeah, it's very, very easy to even completely unintentionally and with the best intentions, like have something happen where you realize you've created this in a way prison for yourself with your business or whatever you're doing day to day.

Becca Pearce [00:05:10]:

Absolutely. I think that it's easy to feel like the business is running you and that becomes that prism.

Bryan McAnulty [00:05:18]:

Yeah, real quick, Brian here. You know me as the host for this podcast, but what you might not know is I'm also the founder of Heights Platform. It's an all in one platform that over 10,000 creators have used to build their online courses, communities and digital product businesses. We recently added some awesome updates to Heights AI to help you turn your idea into a viable business. I'd say I can build entire product offers, review your content and even coach you on how to grow. You can try it for free for 30 days links in the description. Now back to the podcast.

Bryan McAnulty [00:05:48]:

So how do you define success at this point in your life?

Becca Pearce [00:05:55]:

I love the fact that you just clarified that with at this point in your life because it has changed. At this point in my life I define I have a big thing in front of me right now that says impact equals success and I wrote down my actual definition of success and it's I'm going to read it to you. It's on my other screen. It's to make a kick ass living, changing people's lives and delivering impact for everyone I touch while also living my best life where my best life means I'm fully present for myself and those I love, doing things on my own terms and within my own time frames, living within my values and always learning and growing as a person. So like being very clear and writing that down for myself. Because for those of you who don't know my whole story, I grew up in corporate America. I spent years and years and years chasing title, chasing achievement. I was a CEO by the time I was 39.

Becca Pearce [00:06:53]:

Lost my job quite publicly when that failed on the day that it was supposed to turn on and fortunately landed on my feet and got back on that train of oh, I'm going to be a CEO again. I'm going to chase these things again. But in 2015, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I went in for a hearing exam, walked out, finding out I had a brain tumor the size of a ping pong ball and I needed surgery imminently. It was five weeks from the time that I was diagnosed to the time that I was in surgery. Thank God it was benign and operable, the best two words you can hear after somebody says you have a brain tumor. And at the same time it was still a really big deal. Turns out I had to learn to walk again.

Becca Pearce [00:07:37]:

My face was paralyzed for an entire year. I'm deaf in my left ear and mostly blind in my left eye. It was as if I had a stroke on the table. It took me months and months and months of recovery to learn to be myself again. And so during that time, as I was recovering, that's when I began to realize, oh, this isn't success. My definition of success is very different than it used to be. I did go back to work and I, to prove to myself that I could do the job. I was the vice president in the hospital system at the time.

Becca Pearce [00:08:11]:

But what I realized is that previous definition of success, of title, of money, I was the breadwinner of, you know, accessibility to high power people. Like all of those things that I thought were success no longer fit. And so I think it's really important for people to recognize that your definition of success will change at different points in your life. And that's okay, it's okay for you to change what that means. So that's what my definition is now, is living within my values.

Bryan McAnulty [00:08:45]:

Yeah, well, I think your current definition is pretty much perfect and resonates and feels very similar to my own. I, I feel that also looking through the lens of somebody maybe just starting out on their journey of whether they're, they have a regular traditional kind of employment right now or becoming an entrepreneur, it's easy maybe to overlook the importance of what you just said about what your definition actually is. It's like, oh, well, okay, I guess I could write, write down a sentence or two and, but it's hard to actually state how important it is to have that for yourself. Because I think that myself, I realized that I thought at first, okay, is freedom for me and success for me. Does that mean I just get to do things on my own time and do something I enjoy and that, that part of it. And I kind of tried that out for a year and kind of almost retired and realized that is not, definitely not it. It's. There's something missing.

Bryan McAnulty [00:09:57]:

This is not fulfilling. And that's when I realized that the impact part that you mentioned, that has to come with it. And so for me it's, it's very similar of being able to do the things that I enjoy and being able to make the positive impact. And it's unfortunate that many people never get the opportunity even to kind of think for a moment and realize that for themselves. So I think if you're watching or listening to this right now and you don't Feel maybe super clear on that, or you don't feel satisfied with where you are. It's a good time to take a moment and think about what does success actually mean to me.

Becca Pearce [00:10:36]:

Yeah, for sure. I think it's very interesting because I think about prior to this happening to me, I had never thought about defining it. And I just wrote a book called you'd don't have to achieve to be Loved. And in that book, we get into where definitions of success come from and the idea that we're chasing something that society tells us to chase as opposed to really taking that time to internally figure out what does success actually mean for me. And let me give you. Let me give you one example of how this shows up as an entrepreneur as well. Like a very kind of small way. When I left corporate America to start my executive coaching firm, I didn't do my business plan for.

Becca Pearce [00:11:24]:

It probably took me three to six months, something like that. Three months. I would have fired myself five times. As a former CEO. Right. I was yelling at myself, I can't believe it's taken you this long to do your strategic plan. This is what you do. You were a strategy person.

Becca Pearce [00:11:41]:

I was yelling at myself. I was angry at myself. I was. And that kept me in such a small place where really that new definition of success was. I'm still having an impact. Just because I don't have the strategic plan doesn't mean necessarily now doesn't mean necessarily I'm a bad person. Right. So really kind of taking a look that.

Becca Pearce [00:12:01]:

For that. For yourself, you have a totally different relationship with yourself as an entrepreneur, as you ever did, wherever, whatever you did prior to being an entrepreneur. And so recognizing that and giving yourself the space to define what success looks like allows you to expand and grow faster.

Bryan McAnulty [00:12:19]:

Yeah. That's great. I'm curious if, looking back, are there any earlier signs that you were kind of living someone else's version of success? Even if things look good on the outside now, now when you look back, can you see some of those things or think about what they. They were.

Becca Pearce [00:12:39]:

I think about once I lost my job at the Exchange and then was working within that hospital system. I don't think I was happy then either. This was. I was diagnosed. There were 14 months in between losing my job and being diagnosed. I don't think I was happy during that time period, but I was the breadwinner of the family. Everybody else thought I had a great job. You're a vice president, hospital system.

Becca Pearce [00:13:04]:

Oh, my goodness. Like, that must mean you're smart and you have power and all of those things. So it was the external motivations that really kind of kept me going, even though inside I knew I wasn't happy. Right. I didn't want to get up and go to work every day. And so that's when I began to start thinking. Like, even before the brain surgery, I started thinking, okay, what am I going to do? Because I don't know if this is where I want to be. But it wasn't until after the brain surgery when I woke up that I really was able to kind of look and be like, oh, this is what really matters.

Becca Pearce [00:13:41]:

My family time, not title, not money. We'll figure all that stuff out later. That's when I really knew.

Bryan McAnulty [00:13:51]:

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I think being an entrepreneur is almost the opposite, that you. You don't have those external motivators or validators. You have only the internal ones. Because at the beginning, no one's telling you that you're, oh, it's a great idea. In fact, you might have people telling you that may be a little bit risky. You should go, maybe get a regular job or something like this.

Bryan McAnulty [00:14:17]:

Interesting.

Becca Pearce [00:14:17]:

Yeah, I'm gonna use real job anyway. Go ahead, quote Real job.

Bryan McAnulty [00:14:26]:

Your wake up call came through. Very major life events for people who feel maybe more of like a quiet sense that like, just this isn't it, but they haven't hit some kind of crisis. How. How would you say that they can recognize or be able to figure out for themselves that it's time to make a change?

Becca Pearce [00:14:48]:

You know, it's interesting. So I outline this in the book as well, but over the last years that I've been coaching people, what I realize is everybody goes through four stages. And the phase that you're talking about right now is the very first phase. It's unfortunate awareness. It's when you wake up in the morning and you have a. You know, there's something in your gut, you know, it doesn't feel right. You know, punch in the gut or, you know, and it just doesn't feel like you're happy or you're proud of yourself. Right.

Becca Pearce [00:15:20]:

There's something happening for you that just doesn't feel right. There's something feels. And for a lot of people, it just feels off. I'm going to air quote again. It just feels off. And they don't know necessarily what it is. But that's when you know, okay, maybe I'm living somebody else's definition of success here. Maybe I'm not living within my own values.

Becca Pearce [00:15:40]:

Maybe something is missing. And the way that I also think about it too is if, if you're shoulding yourself into it, if you're saying, oh, but other people think that I should be happy, right? Like from the outside I have my white picket fence and my four, four bedroom house and you know, this, that and the other. And that's what I'm supposed, if you're feeling like you're supposed to want something and it doesn't feel good or you're shoulding yourself into, but I should be happy, that's when you know that deep down something's not right.

Bryan McAnulty [00:16:16]:

So I think there's a lot of many, like high achievers may feel trapped by this lifestyle that their success so far has created for them. Like the further along you go down this path, then you have all these, these things like what you're talking about, like, okay, I've got a nice house, people say that this should be good. What do you see these kind of people fearing most when they do start thinking about changing direction?

Becca Pearce [00:16:45]:

It's interesting because there are two or three and they come right after one another. And the biggest one is money. I make amount of money, I have to make X amount of money. And you know, there's so many things where, like you said, I have a mortgage, I have a house, I have kids sometimes in school or a kid going to college, whatever the case may be. There is that fear of the lack of money. I think we're, many of us in America are raised at bigger, better, more, right? And whatever your relationship with money growing up was probably had to do with saving. Saving, saving. We're taught we need to save and have as much as we can, but we're never taught how to look at our money.

Becca Pearce [00:17:24]:

So there is a fear of money that. But connected with that. A lot of people don't honestly know what their financial situation is. They don't have a financial planner. They've never taken a close look at how much they spend versus how much they earn. And so they get, they remain stuck in this fear space because our brains are made to keep us safe. So our brain is always going to default to a negative. Our brain's always going to default to.

Becca Pearce [00:17:50]:

You're going to live in the back of a Honda Accord Civic or a Honda Accord 1986 because you're going to lose all your money, right? Like so, so the fear, fear of financial ruin, I think is really the first fear or the fear of not having what you have today, followed very closely by I've spent my entire life doing this I don't know what else to do. Nobody else is going to pay me. There's an assumption that any kind of reinvention or any kind of shift is an automatic going back to zero. I don't have transferable skills. There's nothing else I could possibly do. So those two fears, one of them money related and the other one a little bit identity related, in who am I and who am I going to be followed very closely is the third with what's my family going to say? Who are my friends going to be? Right. Like for yourself. When you decided to go ahead and do this, did you wonder what is my family going to say?

Bryan McAnulty [00:18:48]:

A little bit. I do think maybe one of my skills in particular was being able to become comfortable with like, whatever everybody else thinks doesn't matter. But definitely I had concerns like around how am I going to actually make a living with this and all of that.

Becca Pearce [00:19:07]:

Yeah. So I think those are, those are the big ones, especially for people kind of going out and doing something different than what they're doing today.

Bryan McAnulty [00:19:17]:

Yeah, I think we saw you said that time, not titles is the real currency. Yeah, I, I agree with that as well. I, I wonder how would you answer that? Like, a lot of times people feel discomfort and how can they know for themselves when it's assigned to push versus assigned to maybe choose a different path.

Becca Pearce [00:19:44]:

So people only change when the pain of where they are is more painful than the pain of change. So if you're at that point where, you know, and I often in my coaching will say it can get worse. Right. If you're in a situation right now where you are just like it is not you can't get out of bed or, you know, that's a very extreme example. But like, it can show up that like, I just, you're. You've already quiet quit, you've thinking, you've been thinking about what it is that you want to be doing with your time differently, you've mentally left your marriage, you've mentally done whatever it is, you've mentally left. It's time for the rest of you to go.

Bryan McAnulty [00:20:30]:

Yeah. How would you help people separate? Maybe like from who they are, from what they've achieved, Especially after like years of being rewarded for like their job and their performance.

Becca Pearce [00:20:43]:

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. When I lost my job at the exchange, I had been so ingrained for two years. I worked tirelessly. My daughter was five and six. For the two years that I worked at the exchange, I never went to her school. I didn't show up as a mother. I walked in the house at 10:30 at night.

Becca Pearce [00:21:05]:

My husband said, you're home early. All because I was so sure that I was Obamacare in the state of Maryland. It was so much a part of my identity. So when I lost my job, it was like, you know, somebody's like, oh, everybody loses a job. I was like, you don't understand. Like, this is my identity. All of those things. I don't know how to do anything else.

Becca Pearce [00:21:27]:

I don't know who I am without this. And so it took me several months. And the things that I say to people now is the first and foremost thing is just breathe. Just honestly turn off the amygdala. Your amygdala is in fight or flight at this point because your identity has been shocked. The second thing is look around. When I told my then 6 year old daughter, I said, you know, mommy's not working at the exchange anymore. She got on the couch and started jumping up and down.

Becca Pearce [00:21:58]:

She was like, yay, Mommy's home. There are so many people that love you for who you are. Nobody gives that you just lost your job. Nobody cares that you are no longer. And think about your friends. Do you care that they have a title? Do you care what they do? Do care what their job is? No, you love them for who they are. So in this space, what I tell people when they are really in this horrible space of I've lost my identity, your job is to trust what other people see, not what you see. And that begins once you start to see what other people see, you can start to remove yourself from who your identity used to be.

Bryan McAnulty [00:22:44]:

Yeah, I, I think that's really excellent advice and I think it's a hard skill to. You definitely have to practice it maybe especially for some people to realize that. I think like even somebody who started out as an entrepreneur, there's, it's very common for there to be so much fear of, oh, I'm about to launch my website for the first time. What if something's not right? What if somebody judges this thing about my logo or something like that? Right? And the truth is that nobody actually cares about it. And it's not to be like cynical or anything about that. It's just people. There's a lot of things that everybody has going on in their individual lives and they're not going to care about this in the way that you're worried that they might. And if somebody does care about something and if they care about something in a way enough to even maybe express some kind of criticism to you.

Bryan McAnulty [00:23:42]:

I think that's not even a bad thing because they're. They're gonna. They're helping you grow. And beneath whatever they're saying to you, even if they say it in, like, the absolute, like, wrong way, I think a lot of times their intention is that. That they inside want you to be able to overcome that or improve whatever that thing is.

Becca Pearce [00:24:05]:

Hallelujah, Hallelujah on everything you just said. Just absolutely true. And especially about, you know, everybody's got so much going on in their lives that it's not really going to impact them. Whether your website has a misspelling on it.

Bryan McAnulty [00:24:23]:

So what you kind of mentioned before, it's, I guess, kind of involves like, rebuilding that sense of self. Do you have any other recommendations as to, like, how someone would go about that and kind of rebuild their identity?

Becca Pearce [00:24:40]:

I think it's really interesting and important to. One thing that I always say to my. To people is, you know, look inside of yourself. What, what, how do I want to say this right now? What is it that happened that allowed you to lose yourself into this identity? What is it that. Because we were all. And I'm going to put myself in there because it absolutely happened to me, there was something that was so enticing about that new identity that allowed me to leave the mother, the wife, that all of the other things that I identified with. Right. So I only identified with being the CEO of this exchange in the state of Maryland because I believe so strongly in what it was.

Becca Pearce [00:25:24]:

But there must have been something that allowed me to walk away from the other identities. What was that? Until you come to terms with that, until you reckon with what it is that you walked away from and what you want to get back to, that's how you can figure out what it is that you want to get back to. But it's really some internal work of trying to figure that out.

Bryan McAnulty [00:25:47]:

So somebody who's kind of started to. They felt they should make this change. They started in some process to do that, or they're trying maybe what's one small step that they can take today, this week to move forward.

Becca Pearce [00:26:05]:

So I think that the first thing and I. And I'm going to go back to the three fears that kind of keep people stuck, that I think that there are some really small baby steps you can do in there. And the first one is the fear of money. If you're sitting here and you're thinking, I can't make the change because I have to make the money that I've been making the Smallest step you can do is what I call Becca math. How much do you make? How much do you spend? How much do you need? And being very clear, what that does is it gives you the data, removes the fear from the brain. Right. And when you have data, I have a coaching friend of mine who says data blows emotion out of the water. Right.

Becca Pearce [00:26:50]:

So giving yourself that space to be like, okay, can I make this change? Let me actually get tactical and like. Like, give myself the space to believe either it's true or it's not true. Is this a true barrier or not?

Bryan McAnulty [00:27:03]:

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. A lot of times, fear is just the kind of lack of information about something. And similarly, stress is something that exists because we know we have to do something, but we're maybe not doing it. And I think if you. If you look at those two things under that lens, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to. To overcome them.

Becca Pearce [00:27:29]:

Absolutely.

Bryan McAnulty [00:27:32]:

So on this show, I like to have every guest ask a question to the audience. If you could ask our audience anything, whether something you're curious about or kind of want to get people thinking about, what would that be?

Becca Pearce [00:27:46]:

So I think that it's really. We spent some time talking about success, and so I think my question to everybody is, what is your current definition of success? Recognizing, like we said, just like you asked in the beginning right now. And when's the last time you wrote it down?

Bryan McAnulty [00:28:11]:

Yeah, excellent question. All right, Becca, this was really great talking with you. Before we get going, I'm curious, where else can people find you online?

Becca Pearce [00:28:20]:

The best place to find me is morebeccapierce.com and Pierce is the P E A version. So P E A R C E. Not the pie version. Because if you go to morebeckapierce.com, the pie version, there's nothing there. So morebeccapierce.com you can find my book, you don't have to achieve to be loved there. You can also find a couple resources. One of the key resources is am I in the right job? And am I living the life that I want to live? So we have two different resources there to help you begin to recognize if it's time for you to make a change.

Bryan McAnulty [00:28:54]:

Excellent. All right, Becca, thanks so much.

Becca Pearce [00:28:56]:

Sure. Thank you for having me.

Bryan McAnulty [00:28:58]:

I'd like to take a moment to invite you to join our free community of over 5,000 [email protected] if you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, check out the Heights Platform YouTube channel every Tuesday at 9am US Central to get notified when new episodes release. Join our [email protected] until then, keep learning and I'll see you in the next episode.