Why Smart Women Abandon Their Goals
(And What I Learned When I Finally Understood My Brain)
A few years ago I was in a peer coaching circle and I met a woman who was a master practitioner of NLP — neuro-linguistic programming.
I was immediately drawn to her.
Not only did we connect from a values perspective, but she was driven, a phenomenal storyteller, and gave really grounded, practical advice. She wasn’t fluffy. She wasn’t preachy. She wasn’t “just manifest it and it will appear.”
She was strategic.
One of the things that struck me was how, throughout her life, she had continually reframed things to help her achieve her goals.
And not the toxic positivity kind of reframing.
Not the “everything happens for a reason” or “this really painful thing was meant to make you stronger” narrative.
She was talking about the mental blocks that keep us stuck.
For example, at one point she had done door-to-door sales — something I would NEVER want to do. Instead of getting crushed by the no’s or the slammed doors, she made it a goal each day to get to 100 no’s. Then she’d quit for the day.
She turned rejection into a target.
The “no” became success.
And just like that, it released its hold on her.
And here’s the wild part: this was all BEFORE she knew anything about brain science.
The Identity Beneath the Goal
As an eternal optimist — who also deeply struggled with the “everything happens for a reason” platitude — I was fascinated.
Could we actually reprogram our minds?
Could we shift the internal narratives that quietly dictate our behavior?
When she offered a training program to become a practitioner of NLP (along with hypnotherapy and other modalities), I was all in.
Because at that point in my life, my goals were not coming to fruition.
On the outside, things looked strong.
On the inside, I felt stuck.
I had just gone through a really painful split with a business partner who had also been a close friend. I was grieving hard. There was loss, betrayal, disappointment, and confusion. And layered underneath that?
Fear.
Fear of repeating mistakes.
Fear of trusting the wrong person again.
Fear of being seen.
Fear of failing publicly.
I was still setting goals.
Still vision casting.
Still building.
But something invisible had its hand on the brake.
What NLP Helped Me See
Here’s what I began to understand:
We don’t abandon goals because we aren’t smart enough.
Or disciplined enough.
Or committed enough.
We abandon goals because our internal identity and survival patterns override our conscious intentions.
Your nervous system doesn’t care about your 5-year plan.
It cares about keeping you safe.
And “safe” doesn’t mean thriving.
It means familiar.
If success threatens your belonging…
If visibility triggers old rejection wounds…
If rest feels unsafe because achievement earned you love…
If expansion feels like betrayal of who you used to be…
Your brain will quietly sabotage the goal.
Not because you’re weak.
Because you’re wired.
NLP taught me how language, memory, identity, and emotion are intertwined. How the meaning we assign to events shapes the decisions we make next. How we can interrupt patterns — not with brute force — but with awareness and intentional reframing.
Not fake positivity.
Not bypassing.
But actually changing the structure of the story in your mind.
The Real Reason Smart Women Get Stuck
The women I work with are not lacking ambition.
They are high-capacity.
Strategic.
Visionary.
Resilient.
But they are also carrying:
Old identities they’ve outgrown
Survival strategies that once protected them
Internal rules about who they’re allowed to be
Invisible ceilings tied to belonging
And here’s the hard truth:
Sometimes the version of you who set the goal is not the version of you who can achieve it.
Growth requires identity expansion.
And identity expansion can feel like loss.
This Is What We’re Going to Explore
In the Why Smart Women Abandon Their Goals mini-series we’ve created, we’re not going to talk about productivity hacks.
We’re going to talk about:
The survival patterns that override ambition
Why “discipline” isn’t the real issue
How internal identity caps external achievement
And how to gently — but powerfully — rewire the story
Because once you understand what’s happening underneath the goal?
You stop shaming yourself.
And you start leading yourself.
