10. Becoming the Person Your Goals Require
What’s new:
We’re back with Season 2—and kicking off with a powerful mindset shift: Your goals don’t just need strategy—they need a new version of you.
Why it matters:
Most of us chase success by doing more. But what if lasting success came from growing into the person who can actually hold it?
In this episode:
Michelle breaks down the real work of transformation—what it actually takes to uplevel your career, leadership, and life.
You’ll learn:
Why goals don’t work without capacity
How to stop defaulting to burnout, self-doubt, and over-functioning
The 4 steps to becoming the person your next level needs
🔑 The 4 steps:
Know What You Want – Define success on your terms
Know Yourself – Spot patterns that hold you back
Disrupt Your Patterns – Practice conscious response over reactivity
Stay With It – Build endurance for long-haul growth
The big picture:
85% of job success comes from soft skills—not technical know-how. But no one teaches us how to build them. This episode is your roadmap.
Correction: the 85% statistic is widely cited, but after recording I learned that the 85/15 claim is more a historical anecdote than hard fact. The source seems to stem from a 1918 report by Charles Riborg Mann, published by the Carnegie Foundation, titled A Study of Engineering Education. Specifically, data from pages 106–107 is cited as the source of the 85/15 split. This report focused on engineering education and suggested that personal qualities (like communication and interpersonal skills) were mentioned far more often than technical knowledge when assessing success factors in engineering. However, the report itself doesn’t explicitly state the 85/15 percentages in the way it’s commonly quoted today. Instead, these figures appear to have been extrapolated or interpreted later, possibly by other researchers or organizations.
Go deeper: Modern research does back up this claim, if not with exact percentages - emphasizing soft skills like adaptability and communication but not quantifying them so precisely. If you’re looking for current data, studies like the 2017 Future of Jobs report by the World Economic Forum or Google’s 2013 internal study on hiring both highlight soft skills (e.g., collaboration, problem-solving) as critical.
What to watch:
Next week: How to create a bold, clear vision of your rich life—without overwhelm.
💬 “You’re not behind. You’re becoming.”
Let this episode be your permission slip to grow into the leader you’re meant to be—fully, honestly, and with heart.
Listen now, and don’t forget to follow, rate, and share if this resonated.
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Transcript
Podcast Theme with music:
What if success wasn’t about working harder—but about expanding your capacity? Welcome to Upleveling Work, where we explore the real strategies that help leaders and professionals step into their full potential. This season, we’re decoding personal growth: how to overcome fear, navigate uncertainty, and build the habits that lead to lasting success.
I’m Michelle Kay Anderson—executive coach, systems thinker, and your guide to making work more human. Whether you’re leveling up in leadership, shifting careers, or just trying to stay sane in a high-pressure world, this podcast is here to help.
Let’s break old patterns, build new possibilities, and make work work better.
Opening
We’re kicking Season 2 off with a conversation I think we all need at the beginning of a new season: the fantasy we have about who we’ll become once we “finally” reach our goals… and the very real process of becoming that version of ourselves.
At the beginning of every year—or every new quarter—we tend to make these quiet little promises to ourselves.
This will be the year I finally step into my leadership.
This is the year I get clear, find flow, stop second-guessing myself.
This is the year I launch the thing, get the promotion, hit six figures, whatever…
But here’s what I’ve seen over and over again:
We don’t get what we want just because we set a goal.
We get what we’re willing to grow into.
And that’s the part no one tells you: There’s a process. A becoming.
We think hitting the milestone will make life easier—but bigger dreams require deeper roots. If your goals expand, but your capacity stays the same… you’re going to keep running into the same patterns: burnout, overthinking, avoidance, comparison, self-doubt.
So instead of chasing external results this season, what if you focused on becoming the kind of person who could actually hold what you’re building? The one who could handle more visibility, more money, more meaningful work—without spiraling…
That’s what I want to walk you through today.
A process for building the inner and relational skills that make sustainable success possible.
We call them ‘soft skills,’ but there’s nothing soft about having a difficult conversation, navigating feedback, or holding your center in chaos. These are real leadership muscles—and they’re often the hardest to build. In fact, a study from Harvard, Stanford, and the Carnegie Foundation found that…85% of job success comes from well-developed soft skills, while only 15% comes from technical knowledge. And yet, most of us are left to figure those skills out on our own. No wonder people feel overwhelmed!
The Process of Growth: 4 Steps to Build the Capacity for What You Really Want
I used to think growth would feel… cleaner. Like a straight line. Like once I got the strategy or the insight, I’d be off and running.
But real transformation isn’t like that. It’s cyclical. Iterative. Sometimes messy.
And over the years—through my own experience and working with clients—I’ve come to see a clear process that people move through when they’re building the capacity to hold bigger dreams, lead more powerfully, or feel more grounded in their work.
Let me walk you through it.
Step 1: Know What You Want
One of my clients—a brilliant woman in her late 30s—came to me saying she felt stuck. From the outside, everything looked amazing. She’d built a solid career, had a team she genuinely liked, checked every box. And still, she kept wondering, “Is this all there is?”
That sense of dissonance is so common.
Maybe you’ve felt it too—that low hum of dissatisfaction that creeps in when you’ve been climbing a ladder that was never quite yours.
The truth is, most of us have spent so long chasing other people’s definitions of success that we forget to ask: What do I actually want? What would feel deeply alive—not just impressive?
That’s the first part of this work: daring to tell the truth about your desires. Not just in terms of goals, but in identity.
Who do you want to become?
What kind of leader, parent, partner, colleague, creator?
Because success isn’t just about outcomes—it’s about becoming someone you’re proud of.
Step 2. Know Yourself
Once you name the vision, and get clarity on where you are headed, the next step is figuring out what’s in the way.
Sometimes clients say things like, “I should be past this,” or “I just need to push through.” But when we slow it down, we start to uncover deeper patterns—ways they’ve been adapting to survive, not thrive.
One client realized she’d been constantly shape-shifting to match the tone of her workplace. She was so good at reading the room, anticipating what people wanted to hear, being the reliable one. But it came at a cost: she no longer knew what she really thought or wanted.
Maybe this sounds familiar.
Self-knowledge isn’t just about personality tests or values lists—it’s about recognizing your natural strengths and your protective patterns. It’s about catching when people-pleasing, perfectionism, or old survival strategies sneak in and override your instincts.
Tools like the Enneagram, the Core Gift Interview, or even the Inner Development Goals can help you name those patterns—and reconnect to the deeper parts of you that have been quieted, but not lost.
Step 3. Disrupt Your Patterns - Stay awake + experiment with new responses
This is where things get really powerful.
One of the most underrated skills in leadership (and in life) is the ability to watch yourself in action—to catch the moment when you’re about to default into that old habit and pause instead of reacting.
For me, this was huge. I used to go on autopilot—especially under stress. I’d overfunction, try to fix everything, or just shut down. It wasn’t until I started practicing real-time self-awareness that things began to shift.
It doesn’t mean you never get triggered. It means you know what’s happening when you do—and you have the tools to respond with choice instead of reflex.
Emotional maturity isn’t about perfection. It’s about self-responsibility: owning your experience without shame or blame.
And it’s what makes you a more trustworthy leader, partner, or collaborator.
Step 4. Stay With It - Commit to growth when it gets hard
Here’s the part no one tells you: Just because you’ve named the pattern or can watch it play out, doesn’t mean it magically disappears.
Meaningful growth takes practice. It takes repetition. It takes failing forward.
And meeting the inevitable frustration or disappointment with gentle compassion.
I’ve had so many moments in my business where I’d launch something, get excited… then second-guess myself, pivot, or stall out. I’d think, “I should be farther along,” or “This shouldn’t be so hard.”
What I didn’t realize then is that I wasn’t failing—I was building capacity.
Capacity to tolerate discomfort.
Capacity to stay the course even when it wasn’t working yet.
Capacity to trust myself more than the latest formula or guru.
Most of us try to use willpower to push through the hard parts. But sustainable growth requires a different kind of strength—the kind that comes from changing how you think, feel, and respond over time.
That means reframing failure as feedback.
It means choosing progress over perfection.
And it means building habits that reinforce who you’re becoming—not who you used to be.
This is the real work of transformation. Step 4 is about grit, endurance, staying conscious on purpose, and choosing to grow even when it’s hard or unclear.
It’s about choosing your hard: do I stay stuck and exhausted by the status quo, or do I commit to something that actually moves me forward?
Conclusion
So those are the four steps you actually need to go through to create meaningful, lasting change:
1. Know What You Want
2. Know Yourself
3. Disrupt Your Patterns
4. Stay With It
If any part of this feels frustrating—if you’re tired of learning the same lesson again or feel like you’re behind—I just want to say: you’re not alone. You’re not broken. You’re becoming.
And becoming takes time.
That’s what this work is really about: building the inner and relational muscles to hold the life and work you’re reaching for. Not perfectly—but fully, honestly, and with increasing capacity.
So what about you—what are you becoming? 🦄
And what’s the boldest, most beautiful version of your life you can imagine?
What would change if you really believed that version of you was possible?
Whatever your answer is—that’s where we begin.
Because the truth is, the path to a more meaningful and empowered life isn’t a quick fix or a straight line. It’s a process of becoming—of building the emotional, mental, and relational muscles you need to hold the life you’re calling in.
And if right now that feels like too much—if you’re tired, unsure if you’re even capable of that kind of growth—I get it. I’ve felt that too. That moment when you look at everything you want and wonder, “Will I ever be the kind of person who can actually do this?”
This Season on Upleveling Work:
This season, we’re going to walk through that process step by step. We’ll look at what keeps you stuck and what helps you expand. We’ll explore how burnout, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, fear of success, and people-pleasing sneak in and sabotage you… and how to finally stop second-guessing yourself and start showing up like the leader you’re meant to be—calm, clear, and fully in your power.
You’ll also learn powerful tools to make better decisions, manage complexity, and actually move forward—without having to be perfect or have it all figured out.
If you’ve ever said to yourself, “I thought I’d be farther along by now…” or “Why does this still feel so hard?”—this season is for you.
Next week: we’ll dive into dreaming big—how to develop a bold, life-giving vision for your “rich life” without getting overwhelmed or shutting it down before it begins. You don’t need to have the whole map—just the next few steps. I’ll show you how to start.
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