Leadership is Feminine

WITH KRIS PLACHY

The Striver’s Dilemma: Who Are You Without the Push?

Aug 04, 2025

   


In this fourth installment of the
Seven Transitions Every Successful Woman Must Navigate series, Kris explores the fog that can settle in after years of striving, building, leading, and achieving.

When the urgency fades, when the goals have been met, when your days are no longer dictated by survival or ambition... who are you now?

This is the striver’s dilemma.

In this episode, Kris shares reflections from two recent retreats—one with Arthur Brooks, one with Rebecca Campbell—that offered wildly different but equally profound insights. She weaves together data, mysticism, and lived experience to guide you through the discomfort (and deep potential) of Transition Four: Reclaiming Future Clarity.

You’ll hear:

  • Why dreaming after success feels murky, not magical
  • How the absence of urgency can feel disorienting instead of freeing
  • The one question to ask before launching into your next project or business
  • Why the next version of you won’t be found in a revenue dashboard or your to-do list

If you’re standing in the in-between—done with what was, unsure of what’s next—this episode will meet you there. Not with answers, but with the kind of questions that can change everything.

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Transcript

Well, hello. And hello and hello. Welcome to this week of Leadership Is Feminine. I'm so happy that you're here. I just got back from a week of retreating as an attendee. For the last week, I was back east, and I have a few things I want to share with you because the world is just so interesting and magical and also so timely for this week's installment of moving Beyond the CEO, beyond where you've been, to where you are standing, and then where you are going next. And I'm a little tired because I got home late last night, but I wanted to I really want to share with you a few. A few things because what I'm hearing from you is that the podcast episodes I'm recording are very potent and powerful for you. Just a shameless request. If that's true, would you write a really quick review either on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you listen? It would mean the world to me to do that. It makes a huge difference in helping this podcast get fed up to more people. And I'm in the focus right now of doing as much as I can to help as many people as I can without it having to me be just like me in the room with them. Like, I know that there are some ideas that we're all sharing here together that are really profound, but honestly, and also not that different from what I believe is very. It's like core wisdom.

It applies, like. And I can say that because now I just went to two different retreats, which I'm going to tell you about, and it doesn't really matter if you're. If you're pursuing wisdom for wisdom's sake. The vessel, the person that's. That's bringing it to you. There's like this core sort of truth to being a human that I think people are all tapping into and then sharing back, and then. And then it resonates for you, and then you feel heard and seen. Right? And that's why we love thought leaders.

We find people that we can listen to and they make sense to us. And I don't believe that what I say is. Is new. I believe what I say is, is really sort of this truth that the way I say it just happens to resonate for you. Right. And so a couple things just to set up my backstory. And then we're going to talk about transition number four, which is reclaiming future clarity.

And before I get into all of it, here's what I'll do. I'll read to you what I wrote as the sort of in this, whatever this will be book guide thing that I know I've told you about, but this is what I wrote just to sort of give you sort of the cue up.

The most paralyzing question for a well-resourced woman is what do you want now? Because you could do anything. And that power, unmoored from urgency, can feel really terrifying. Your wisdom can't rise through noise. It needs silence, it needs change, and it needs new textures to sneak in and whisper. This is next. There is a peculiar fog that forms in the wake of success.

You've spent years, maybe decades, focused on the world you were building, the business, the team, the vision, the mission, the endless motion forward. And somewhere along the way you stopped looking up, you stopped looking, looking at the horizon. Not because you lost your edge, not because you're uninspired, but because you've been consumed with the mechanics of what already exists. That's what no one tells you. It's hard to dream when you're busy maintaining the dream you already manifested. You were once so clear, so certain, so lit up by what you wanted to create. But now, now you have options, resources, freedom. And paradoxically, paradoxically, that is what makes everything murky. Because when you've become a well-resourced woman, financially, emotionally, experientially, you no longer dream in desperation or in urgency. You no longer hustle to survive. And that absence of urgency can feel disorienting.

So that's the beginning. So now let me back up. My whole family is from upstate New York and thereabouts New England. When I say my whole family, I mean my dad and my mother's side and then all of their family. We have some. And most of my family on both sides are relatively early settlers of that part of the world. In, in fact, I was inspired by the author Rebecca Campbell from one of her most recent books, Your Soul Had a Dream and Your Life Is It, which is one of the retreats I just went to that I'm going to talk about. And I was very inspired by how she talks about doing the work of really going back through your ancestry and ultimately finding sort of that original mother. And there's a lot of lore around that, but that I won't talk about right now. But I did do that. I went and I used Ancestry and I found my eighth great grandmother who was born in 1655 in Flat Flatbush, New Amsterdam, which of course was New York, Brooklyn, New York at the time or later in 1655. And she appears to be the very first relative I can find that was actually born here. So all this is to say that I have always felt quite grounded and rooted in the land of upstate New York. I spent a lot of my summers there. My dad is from way upstate, close to Burlington, Vermont. And so this past December, my husband and I took our kids to Saugerties. Shout out Saugerties. Shout out Hudson Valley. I've always wanted to go there. So we stayed in Saugerties. We stayed there because, well, I wanted to.

It was December and I wanted to see all these cute little Christmas towns. And it was also just two hours from everywhere we wanted to go. We went to Westport to show my kids the house my dad grew up in. We went to Boston because we love Boston. And we spent the day there and had a wonderful time in a blizzard. And then we went to New York City and took the train because that's where my family is now. I have cousins and an aunt and we had a wonderful time. So I've been reading Rebecca Campbell's work for several years.

I started with Rise, Sister Rise. Then I went to the Light is the new Black. And then she just released Your Soul Had a Dream and Your Life Is It. She also makes beautiful wisdom and oracle cards, if you're interested. She's a beautiful writer. She's a mystic. She has a way of expressing the feminine experience that I find very, very enriching and fulfilling and honest. And it just drops in for me and it doesn't for everyone. I get that.

But her words I find quite lovely. And she seems to really understand at least the experience I'm having as a woman in this present time. And maybe it's my age, but there's something about that reaching back into my ancestry to find the wisdom that I seek a super powerful. So I got a notice that she was hosting a three-day retreat rooted in her new book, Your Soul Had a Dream and Your Life Is It. And it's in Rhinebeck, New York, which is in the Hudson Valley. And it just felt like, oh my gosh, I have to go to this. This is like my part of the world that I love. And this beautiful author thought leader. I don't know what this is going to be like, but I'm going to go. So I signed up and it was at this really cool place called the Omega Institute, which is, you know, not a kind of place I normally stay. I'm more of a Ritz and Four Seasons kind of girl. But I really, it was, it was great. It was a great experience to have. And the Actual venue is gorgeous. I'm sure it's even gorgeous in the winter. It's just beautiful and it's sacred land, and it's really lovely.

So I was all set to do that, and then I got an invitation just a couple weeks ago that Arthur Brooks, who's an author, he's written several books. He wrote Build Your Life on Purpose, I think, oh, God, now I'm messing that up. Build Your Life on Purpose with Oprah. And then he also wrote Strength to Strength, which is a really good book. He's a professor at Harvard, and he teaches happiness. He teaches people the science of happiness. And he was hosting a retreat at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, Massachusetts, which is just about an hour away from Rhinebeck. And so. And it was the three days preceding the retreat that Rebecca Campbell was hosting. So I was like, oh, I'm supposed to go to both of these immediately. So I did. And they couldn't have been different. I mean, they were. They were like, so. So Canyon Ranch is, you know, high four,- five-star, beautiful facility, amazing, you know, five star meals all included with all this gorgeous spa services, along with all sorts of other ritualistic things that they do that are beautiful. One of my former clients came and she and I hung out and we just had an incredible time.

Arthur is so smart, and the retreat was such a powerful exercise. And he talks about sex science. He talked a lot about science and data and really on the unearthing of why people are or aren't happy and what happy means. And what I loved so much about what he does that I didn't really recognize is he focuses on the same thing I'm focusing on here in Beyond the CEO. He focuses on sort of this other part of our lives. And he started studying it because he himself started to go through this in his 50s. Like when, what's this all for? And who am I? And when the noise slows down, what do I want? Right? What am I here to do? And so I didn't really recognize that ahead of this, that that was his primary area of focus. And so the timing was just exceptionally perfect. And he, of course, he said a lot of similar things to what I say to you. He just has a lot of really cool science that. That supports it. So I can assure you that things I talk about, I feel even more validated because the things I talk about now he has done. He does all this great research. So if you don't know about Arthur, I highly recommend you follow him, check him out, read a book. I think you'll if you like what I'm talking about. I think you'll like what he's talking about.

He has some of his things that I, that don't drop in. He, he is a 60 early 60-year-old white male. He has some bias. I don't, I don't hold that against him. I see it as he talks about it. His primary examples are men who are navigating this time. And I actually brought that up and talked about how especially Generation X is a, is a, is a group of women who are really facing this for the first time in mass. And he acknowledged it.

But I can tell there's not a lot of science yet behind it, although I don't know that it would be much different. It's different, but it's not different. Yeah. And he's high intellect, high prefrontal cortex, which again I, I like that and I think he uses a lot of intuition and taps wisdom, but he speaks through intellect. And so it's just, it was just a, it was very good. I had incredible facial. I did all the things. Then I went to Omega, from there to the Rebecca Campbell retreat.

And one of my, two of my clients were actually at that retreat as well, which was super fun and I had a couple of really powerful experiences. So the Rebecca Campbell retreat was meditating, chanting, dancing. I was so out of my comfort zone. It is not something I normally do. It was very, very genuine. I didn't feel like it was a co-opted sort of spiritual experience. I, I think you might know when I say that I felt like it was a very powerful experience and I think there were a lot of people who come to that who genuinely are needing to heal and this was quite therapeutic for them. I don't, I didn't stay, stand from that point of view.

I didn't stand in a position of needing healing. I was there as, as, as a curious person and as an, as a result I, I had a very curious and powerful and lovely experience. And the same was true in that there are so many of us asking the questions, what are you, what is your soul yearning for? What are you yearning for? What are you not giving permission to have? You know, just, just sort of that depth of, of wondering. And so I found the journey that Rebecca walked us through to be very similar to what I'm going to talk to you about today in terms of reclaiming future clarity. And that is that all of us through the course of building a life. I think we, you know, and this is, what's, this is where the overlap my brain is having a hard time making this all make sense. So I apologize if I'm driving you crazy. But this is what's so fascinating about what Arthur teaches.

And then what I learned with did with Rebecca. And then what I'm talking to you about is that there is actual science that says that through from the time we're about 25 to the time we're about 53, we are head down, we're not experiencing a tremendous amount of happiness. We are, we are experiencing meaning. We're also in really high creative phase of our lives where we're really tapping a lot of our ability to innovate and curate and envision and critically think and do all these things that it's a natural part of our lives. And so when I'm talking about reclaiming future clarity, I'm talking about that we have been so busy building a life and in many cases a career and a business, right, that we've had that point in mind. I will build this business, I will build this career, I will build this family.

And then we stand now as a woman who has built a dream come true. What do you do after you've built a dream come true? Because you've. You've had this point in your mind all the time. Now you're here. What is. What do you do? And so this is that moment where you realize, I don't know. And so if I don't know, what do I do? And that's right. Like, that's historically, like, we have the quintessential stereotype of the man who has a quote unquote midlife crisis, right? And he buys himself red sports car and he goes and gets himself a girlfriend.

This is that point in a lot of people's lives where if we can't find the meaning and the fulfillment and the enjoyment in what we do, and we don't have clarity in terms of vision, we go backwards to find it. But that one doesn't really work either. Have you noticed? So many of the women I'm talking to are happy with the. What they've created, but they don't want to do it anymore in the way that they have. They don't want to run it anymore in the way that they have. That doesn't mean they want to abandon it, but the role they have in it doesn't. It's not who they want to be defined by anymore. I've been saying a lot, right? Like, how do we step aside? That's what those first two transitions were about, right? Are you Ready? Is the business ready? And how do we get you into that advisory role? How do we help you step aside so that you can step into, like, whatever this next vision is? And I was having this conversation with a few women because a lot of women, what they start to do when they're, especially those of us who are, as Arthur Brooks calls all of us, strivers. We're strivers. It's like, strive, strive, strive, strive, strive. Right to the point where we don't know what to do if we're not striving. And so I talk with a lot of women who know that, okay, this part of my work, this part of my career, this part of my business is over. I really can tell. Like, it doesn't stimulate me anymore. I don't have any new ideas anymore. Like, I know, I know it's time to segue, to step aside, but I don't know what I want to do. And so, but what, what we. Because we're all strivers, we start thinking about, like, I gotta figure out what my next job, quote, unquote, will be or my next business will be. I have to have a thing, I create, right? And so what I've actually started asking women first now is before you get there, before you start being like, oh, I think, well, I've always been interested in this, and I've always been interested in this. So maybe I'll start this, or I'll start a foundation, or I'll. I'll do this. And it's like, it has to be a thing, right? You have to give your passion a job, right? Before we do that, I want you to first, if this is resonating, I want you to first ask yourself, do you even want to work, my love? Do you even want to work? Now, don't get all in the weeds on me. I have to work.

 

 

I can't survive. I'm too young. Blah, blah, blah. All the things. Don't do that. Stop. Stop it. So you don't want to work. And if the answer to that is, I don't really know if I want to work, then allow that to be present. That actually can become part of the vision. As someone said to me, you're describing a vision, not a fantasy. But I think we're such freaking strivers, Mama, that strivers, that when we, like, say, like out loud, I don't know if I really want to work. We feel like, what? Losers? Lazy. Your worth, your value, your contribution, your purpose is not always through your work. So if what I'm saying is like dropping in a little bit, can you just let that be there for a minute? And if you didn't work, what would you do? What would fill your day? Where is that on the list? And for some of you, you're like, no way. I still want to work, I still want to make a shit ton of money, I want to do all this stuff. Whatever, whatever, whatever. This is the best news because what we want to do is cultivate that next horizon. The next thing that excites you, doesn't drive you, right? It's like when you're a well resourced woman, you, you don't have to create out of hustle. I met these two guys at one at the Arthur Brooks retreat and they were so cool. They're technology guys and they've already created and sold a very successful business and they're in the process of building a new one and has this AI, come on. It's all really, really cool.

 

 

And I couldn't get enough talking about them. And to them I was like, can I be an advisor on your board? Like, what can I do? I was so stimulated to have this conversation with, to be a part of their thinking process, to contribute to sort of analytical part of this space because I'm so excited about it, right? You guys have all heard me already talk about that. I've already built my AI clone my twin that you can access right now if you want to. It's completely available, right? So we'll put the link in the show notes if you're interested, but then you can talk to me anytime you want. And I think that is so powerful. If you like the way that I could help you with leading and managing and making decisions about how to be the best leader you can in your team and they're building something similar. And so I just was like, this is so cool. So I'm noticing, like that's really cool.

 

 

That that intrigued me, that got me excited that I would not have seen that, like if you had told me three weeks ago, hey, do you think you'd be interested in being part of a startup? I'd say yeah, no. And I'm not suggesting I'm going to be a part of their startup, but I just didn't even. That wasn't on my radar. And that part of what I'm talking about here is going to come up in our next transition when we meet next week. But right now I want to honor that. For many of you listening to this, the original dream has concluded. This is what I wrote. You must come to Know who you are.

 

 

Now, this part is tender because the woman who got you here, she's incredible. She's tenacious, resourceful, unstoppable. She had her eye fixed on one thing, which was there, and she got you there, which is now here. So now what? This is the moment where you stop asking, what should I do next? And you start asking, who am I now? Not based on what you've done, not based on what you've achieved, but based on what is quietly calling to you now. It's not going to be in your calendar. It's not a revenue dashboard, it's not a to do list. That version of you, she doesn't live in there. She doesn't live at your desk.

 

 

She lives in the breath, the body. She lives inside questions you've been too busy to ask. This is why, just as an aside, I wish every woman who listens to my podcast could join me for my Hawaii retreat. There is a magic that happens at that experience. There is a power that comes with the stillness you experience as I guide you and advise you. That magical little part of the world. It's all for you. It's not for anyone else.

 

 

And there really is like wisdom in the waves and the. It sounds so trite, but it's just true. The waves and the wind and the pine needles under your feet. And so if it has called to you, I still have some spots in September. I'm telling you that because I don't know, I feel like I had. Having just gone on these two retreats myself, I just am reminded again of how much you must invest in yourself. So if it isn't me, that isn't my retreat. You go to go find, carve out space and time to be with yourself.

 

 

One of the things that I have done in the month of July is I went off of social media. I still have my. My profiles are up there, but I'm not on there. And I honestly think it's changing me to not go on to Instagram or Facebook. I'm clearer thought it, thought it clear. I'm clearer thinking I'm not as emotionally affected and erratic. I don't think in terms of social posts. I don't know if other people do that, but I used to think in terms of like, what I could post on social media and I hated it.

 

 

I didn't want to do that anymore and I thought I would miss it and feel left out and like have fomo. I haven't missed a darn thing. I know what's going on in the world that I need to know about. Other people love to tell you stuff that's going on that you don't want to know about. So I'm plenty informed. I don't think I'm going to go back. And if I do, I'll be out and then I'll pop back off. But my, my.

 

 

What I'm trying to say here is that I'm not the woman I was a year ago. I am a woman who's achieved a dream come true. And now I, too, am trying to figure out what it is I want to do. And in order to do that, I have to be willing to accept that everything I have built, experienced, created, been known for may not be where I go next. I believe that we have to be willing to let those parts of us no longer lead. Arthur closed his retreat with something really powerful and profound to me. He showed a picture that was very, very messy and full of stuff. And he.

 

 

He. It's like a paint splatter. I guess it sold for like 3 million or $30 million. I have no idea what it was. I honestly don't care. The point was this painting had paint splatter everywhere, and it. There was no room anywhere for you to add more paint. It was full.

 

 

And so he was talking about how that's. That's kind of where we are when we get to the point that we've built a life that's so full, there's no more room. It's not about adding. So then he showed a picture of a big piece of jade. A rock, huge, big chunk. Like, you know, like big. Like, I don't know, 3ft by 3ft. It was big.

 

 

It was a big piece of jade. And he said, you know, this. This piece of jade, you don't add anything to it. In order to find the beauty in it, you have to remove parts of the jade. And then he showed a sculpture of a Buddha statue that was made from this jade stone. And his point was that as we move through this phase, we need to begin to sculpt, not add that. We need to explore who we are today and let go of habits and titles and wants that really are no longer a part of who we are. We need to continue to sort of ask the questions that help us chip away at this beautiful piece of jade that we've.

 

 

We are and allow us to find what is the beauty? What is this next version that's waiting to reveal itself? So he talks about creating a reverse bucket list, which is to actually remove things and a way to do that is to really look at all of that you have built and then let it go and say I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful to the woman I was who made this all happen, who realized helped me arrive to this place that I am, I'm where I am because of you. And there is a wisdom and a and almost a playful curiosity that we have to tap into to make our next discovery and that my friends will be what we talk about in our next transition. So I hope you have found all of this useful. Thank you for tuning in and if you would be so lovingly kind if you have to write a review, if you share your review with me at hello Visionary CEO, I have a little something something that I would send you but you have to send your review and we'll send it to you. All right my friends have a wonderful afternoon, morning, night, day, wherever you are.

Here, leadership is feminine, equity is non-negotiable, and every woman’s growth is vital; not optional. We believe love is love—and the more love, the better. Spirituality is personal, and every individual has the right to choose their own path. We respect facts, laws, and systems that create clarity and fairness for all. And above all, we know that the point of being human isn’t to judge or divide, but to expand—through connection, experience, and honoring what makes us different.