GUA News: Building a Sustainable Relationship with Success
Living and leading that respects your energy, your values and your wellbeing.
November 10, 2025
Connor O’Rourke & Joeli Ramirez
Building a Sustainable Relationship with Success
In our last article, we explored how many of our definitions of success are inherited, shaped by family, education and culture, and how they often run on toxic fuel: the energy of fear, comparison and unworthiness. This kind of fuel can propel us to achieve, but it burns fast and leaves us depleted.
The invitation now is to move from that state of striving to one of sustainable success, a way of living and leading that respects your energy, your values and your wellbeing.
The transition from toxic to sustainable success is rarely a dramatic one. It begins with awareness and the simple realisation that what once motivated you no longer feel right, or effective.
The transition from toxic to sustainable success is rarely a dramatic one. It begins with awareness and the simple realisation that what once motivated you no longer feel right, or effective. Maybe the rewards don’t land the same way they used to, or the pace that once ignited you now feels heavy. Or perhaps success looks good on paper but feels empty on the inside.
This moment of self-awareness is not weakness, it is inner wisdom. In psychological terms, this shift mirrors what Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory describes as moving from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation relies on external validation, such as praise, money, and status, while intrinsic motivation arises from internal satisfaction: curiosity, growth, and purpose. When we begin to orient our lives around intrinsic values, we find energy that is self-renewing rather than self-consuming.
Before you can change your relationship with success, you have to notice the energy behind your drive. Is it expansion or contraction? Freedom or fear?
You can often tell by the way it feels in your body with toxic fuel creating a tightness of sorts, the shoulders tense, breath shortens and rest can feel like guilt. Clean fuel feels different, it moves through you, not against you, and it brings calm focus with it, but not urgency.
Cognitive-behavioural psychology, highlights the power of recognising automatic thoughts and reframing them. When you notice the inner voice that says, “I need to do this to prove I’m enough,” you can replace it with, “I choose to do this because it aligns with my values.” Over time, that subtle reframe transforms performance pressure into intentional and purposeful engagement.
Moving toward sustainable success
Moving toward sustainable success requires rewriting the very definition of what success means to us. If our current definition is measured in external milestones, like income, recognition, or advancement, you may always feel like you’re chasing. Sustainable success isn’t about lowering ambition; it’s about deepening it and gaining clarity.
Psychologist Shalom Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values tells us that people experience the greatest wellbeing when their goals are aligned with their core values. This alignment is the bridge between achievement and fulfilment. In practice, it means translating your goals into meaningful language. Instead of “I want to be promoted,” you might reframe it as, “I want to keep growing and expanding my capacity to make a positive impact.” The external milestone remains, but it’s now rooted in internal purpose.
In spirituality, this shift reflects the movement from ego to essence, what Eckhart Tolle describes as the difference between “doing to become” and “doing from being.” When you act from being and wholeness rather than lack, your actions naturally carry more integrity, impact, and power.
To build a sustainable approach to success, you must nurture what Deci and Ryan called the three psychological needs that drive intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
● Autonomy means feeling that your choices are self-directed and that you’re not performing for approval, but acting from authenticity.
● Competence is about growth and mastery, through learning, stretching, and developing skills that genuinely matter to you.
● Relatedness connects you to something larger, such as relationships, community, or a contribution beyond yourself.
When these three needs are met, success stops being a race. You move at the pace of purpose, not pressure. In a professional context, this may mean setting boundaries around your time and energy, cultivating environments that allow you to learn and contribute meaningfully, or intentionally balancing doing with being. In personal life, it might mean rediscovering the joy in curiosity, learning something new purely because it lights you up.
Toxic fuel often lives in the body long after the mind has used it up.
You might still feel the instinct to overwork, to say yes when you mean no, or to prove yourself even when you’re safe. The process of shifting into sustainable success requires bringing the body back into balance. Research in somatic psychology and neuroscience shows that practices like breathwork, mindfulness, and grounding can calm the nervous system and reduce the physiological stress response that accompanies chronic striving. When the body feels safe, the mind doesn’t need to push so hard.
Try beginning your day with a brief centering ritual, as simple as a few deep breaths, a moment of silence, or even writing down how you want to feel rather than what you want to achieve. Over time, this simple practice retrains your system to value being present over performance.
Sustainable success has a rhythm
Sustainable success has a rhythm, an ebb and flow that respects and balances both effort and rest. It’s not a permanent state of perfect balance, but a continuous dance between doing and being. Hustle culture glorifies linear growth, it is always up, always on, but nature teaches us that sustainable growth is seasonal. There is time to bloom and time to rest, time to rise and time to root.
The ancient Taoist principle of wu wei, meaning effortless action, captures this beautifully, it means action that is in harmony with the moment. When you align with this rhythm, you discover that effectiveness comes not just from force, but from embracing the flow of your life.
In leadership, this approach mirrors Heifetz’ s modern concept of adaptive capacity, the ability to adjust intelligently rather than reactively. Leaders who operate from grounded self-awareness can navigate change more effectively because they are not driven by egoic urgency, but by conscious responsiveness.
The Root & Rise Way
At Root & Rise, we teach that success should feel sustainable, rooted in awareness, guided by purpose, and expressed through aligned action.
It’s about fuelling our ambitions differently because when our energy comes from meaning, our work becomes an extension of who we are rather than a performance of who we think we should be.
If you want to begin, start small. Before your next big goal or decision, pause and ask: What’s driving me right now, fear or freedom? If it’s fear, slow down. If it’s freedom, move forward with trust. Over time, those small, conscious choices become a whole new way of living. Return to this practice daily, through reflection, boundaries, and being present.
