A Life That's Yours

Lauren Kappel: When the Life You Built Is No Longer the Life You Want

In this episode of A Life That's Yours, Chelsea Simpson sits down with Lauren Kappel to unpack something ambitious women know all too well: the exhausting pursuit of a life that looks successful on paper but doesn't necessarily feel like yours.

Lauren had the career, the accomplishments, and the external validation. But underneath it all, something wasn't adding up. And like so many high-achieving women, she'd become incredibly good at meeting everyone else's expectations while quietly ignoring her own.

Sound familiar?

Lauren shares the pivotal experiences that challenged everything she thought she wanted, including a transformative trip to Peru that helped her reconnect with her intuition and begin questioning the rules she'd been living by.

In this episode, we get into:

• The expectation trap: How chasing the life you're supposed to want can disconnect you from the one you actually want.
• When success stops feeling successful: Why achieving more isn't always the answer to feeling fulfilled.
• The power of listening to yourself: What happens when you stop ignoring that little voice telling you something needs to change.
• The messy middle: How Lauren navigated her corporate career while exploring a new identity and building a coaching business.
• Reclaiming your agency: Why changing your life doesn't require blowing it up overnight. Sometimes it starts with giving yourself permission to want something different.

Here's the thing: You can be grateful for the life you've built and still want something different.

You don't have to quit your job, move to Bali, or have a five-year plan for your next chapter. But you do have to get curious about whether the expectations you're working so hard to meet are actually yours.

Because the goal isn't to build a life that impresses everyone else.

It's to build a life that feels like yours.

🎧 Listen now, and if this conversation hits a little too close to home, share it with the woman who's doing everything right but wondering why it doesn't feel right.

Welcome to A Life That's Yours. Where we question the expectations, rewrite the rules, and redefine what it means to live well.

Connect with Lauren Kappel at YourBossVibe. Learn more about Lauren at: yourbossvibe.com

Join the conversation with Chelsea on Instagram or YouTube.

This podcast is brought to you by Broken Antler Marketing.

In this solo episode, Chelsea Simpson explores how fear keeps high-achieving professionals stuck in careers, routines, and definitions of success that no longer fulfill them, and why the habits that helped you become successful might be the very ones keeping you from creating a life that feels like yours.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why fear keeps high achievers stuck: How overthinking, perfectionism, and the need for certainty can prevent meaningful change.
• The productivity trap: Why gathering more information can become a sophisticated way of avoiding decisions.
• The hidden cost of conventional success: What happens when you've spent years building a life around external validation instead of personal fulfillment.
• The power of tiny experiments: How small, intentional experiences can help you explore who you are beyond your job title—without blowing up your entire life.
• How to move forward without having all the answers: Practical ways to navigate uncertainty, challenge limiting beliefs, and start making choices that reflect what you actually want.

Because here's the thing about fear: It doesn't necessarily disappear when you're ready. Sometimes you have to move before you feel ready.

Join the conversation with Chelsea on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

This podcast is sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.

What happens when you get the degree, the prestigious job, the impressive résumé, and realize none of it feels the way you thought it would?

In this episode Chelsea sits down with Alisia Gill to talk about the high-achiever’s pursuit of success and what happens when achievement stops being fulfilling.

For years, Alicia followed the path that was supposed to lead somewhere: Ivy League schools, prestigious jobs, career accomplishments, and the external validation that came with them. On paper, she was successful. Internally, she was burning out.

Eventually, she had to confront a much harder question than how to achieve more:

What if the version of success I’ve been chasing isn’t actually mine?

Alisia Gill shares what it took to separate her self-worth from her accomplishments, recognize the cost of constantly striving for the next achievement, and begin making career decisions based on what she actually wanted, not simply what looked successful from the outside.

In this conversation, Chelsea and Alisia explore:

• Why high achievers can feel unfulfilled even when their careers look successful
• The connection between external validation, self-worth, and burnout
• How to recognize when ambition has shifted from energizing you to consuming you
• Why stepping back can be necessary before deciding what comes next
• How Alisia created a personal “North Star” to guide future career decisions
• What it means to redefine success around fulfillment, values, and the life you actually want

If you’ve ever thought, “I worked this hard to get here. Why doesn’t this feel better?” this episode is for you.

Connect with Alisia on LinkedIn, and send her a DM, she'd love to connect with you!

Join the conversation with Chelsea on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.

This podcast is sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.

You worked hard for this life. So why does wanting something different feel so ungrateful?

In Part 2 of What’s Holding You Back, Chelsea Simpson explores guilt, the voice that shows up the moment you admit that something you once wanted may not fit anymore.

Because when your life looks successful from the outside, questioning it can feel almost impossible.

You have the title. The salary. The career. The life you worked hard to build. Maybe you even have everything a past version of you desperately wanted.

So who are you to want something different now?

That’s where guilt gets tricky. It can turn gratitude into obligation and convince you that honoring what you built means you have to keep wanting it forever.

In this episode of The Rewrite, Chelsea explores:

• Why gratitude and desire can exist at the same time
• How guilt keeps accomplished women loyal to versions of success they may have outgrown
• The difference between recognizing what isn’t working and giving yourself permission to want something different
• Why changing your mind doesn’t invalidate everything it took to get here
• Three questions to help separate what you genuinely want from what you feel obligated to want

You can be grateful for what you built and still question whether you want to keep building it.

Maybe wanting something different isn’t ungrateful. Maybe you’ve changed.

Join the conversation on Instagram and YouTube.

This Podcast is sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.

Shannon Kellum didn't choose to become the breadwinner overnight. The 2008 crash did that for her. But somewhere between scaling a salon through economic freefall and rebuilding her life through divorce, she hit the question this show is built on: was the success she was holding together actually hers, or just the version she'd been handed by circumstance?

This episode isn't a resilience highlight reel. It's the story of what happens after you survive the crisis when the adrenaline fades and you're left asking whether "keeping it all going" was ever the goal, or just the habit.

We get into:

• Why a crisis can hand you a definition of success you never agreed to
• What it actually looked like to question her path mid-hustle, not after
• The role community played when she couldn't outperform her way through
• Letting go of ego as its own kind of agency, not weakness

Shannon's story makes the point plainly: you can hold a business together, survive a divorce, and still be operating from a definition of success you inherited from a crisis, not one you chose. Awareness came first — noticing the life she was managing wasn't fully hers. Then came the harder part: authoring what she actually wanted, and making the bold, unglamorous choices to live it.

If you've ever kept everything running and still wondered why it doesn't feel like winning — this one's for you.

Connect with Shannon on Instagram, website, or email: [email protected]

Join the conversation on Instagram or Facebook.

This podcast is sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.

What if the thing keeping you stuck isn’t fear of failure — but pride?

You worked hard to become the person who could handle the pressure, earn the title, lead the team, and collect the proof that you’re successful. So what happens when you realize you might not want the life you worked so hard to build?

In Part 1 of What’s Really Holding You Back, Chelsea explores the quieter side of pride: not arrogance, but identity protection. The pressure to keep succeeding at something because changing your mind might look like failure.

In this episode:

• How pride disguises itself as ambition, perseverance, and “sticking it out”
• Why accomplished people can struggle to admit when something no longer fits
• The difference between protecting your reputation and protecting your life
• Why changing your definition of success doesn’t invalidate what you’ve already built
• Three questions to help separate what you actually want from how you want to be perceived

You don’t owe your past ambition your future.

Success isn’t something you define once. It’s something you continually author as you evolve.

Join the conversation on Instagram or Facebook.

This podcast is sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.

Stephanie Magee did the thing everyone said would make her happy. Then she had to ask herself why it didn't.

In this conversation, Stephanie walks through the moment she realized she'd been measuring her life against a definition of success she never actually chose. One built around hustle, achievement, and other people's approval. What she found underneath it: faith, family, and fulfillment were the only metrics that ever actually mattered to her.

This episode is for anyone navigating the space between motherhood and ambition, between what you built and what you actually want, and the ongoing work of figuring out which is which.

In this episode:

• The moment Stephanie recognized she was outsourcing her definition of success
• How motherhood and entrepreneurship forced a real reckoning with her values
• What it looks like to let go of something that used to work, even when it still "counts" as success
• Why realigning isn't a one-time decision, it's a practice you return to

Success doesn't stay solved. It's something you keep authoring as you evolve.

Connect with Stephanie on Instagram

Drop any questions in the episode or email [email protected]-I read every one, and will pick one each week to answer.

Join the conversation on Instagram or Facebook.

This episode is sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.

You don't have a burnout problem. You might have a moral injury problem, and those are not the same thing.

In this finale to our series on toxic workplaces, Chelsea Simpson gets specific about the difference: burnout is exhaustion. Moral injury is what happens when the job asks you to keep operating against who you actually are, and you keep saying yes anyway.

Chelsea shares her own experience recognizing that gap, and walks through what it actually looks like to notice it before it costs you more than a bad week.

In this episode:

• Why "I'm just burned out" is sometimes the wrong diagnosis and what to ask instead
• The awareness work: naming when a workplace is misaligned with your values, not just your energy
• What it looks like to start authoring your exit, on your terms, not in a panic
• How to protect your integrity (and your brand) while you're still in the room

Here's the thing: staying quiet about the misalignment doesn't make it go away. It just makes you fluent in ignoring yourself.

This one's for the accomplished professional who knows something is off and has been waiting for permission to trust that instinct. Consider this your permission slip.

Drop questions in the episode comments or email Chelsea@successgetscomplicated-I read and respond to each one.

Join the conversation on Instagram or Facebook.

This episode is sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.

What happens when you’ve spent your career trusting logic and something inside you starts telling you logic is getting it wrong?

Ryan Stanley knows that tension well. A former CPA and corporate executive turned entrepreneur, yoga teacher and sound healer, Ryan has built a life that spans business, family, spirituality and service.

In this episode of Success Gets Complicated, Ryan joins Chelsea Simpson to talk about what happens when the boxes you’ve been checking stop leading somewhere you actually want to go.

They explore the tension between analytical thinking and inner knowing, what deathbed regrets can teach us about the choices we’re making now, and why discontent isn't always something to fix — sometimes it's information.

Ryan shares how he learned to listen differently, make room for intuition alongside logic, and rethink what a successful life actually looks like.

Because sometimes the hardest part isn't figuring out what makes sense.

It's trusting what you already know.

• Connect with Ryan at Soul of Yoga, Sacred Sound of the Soul, and TDFTest.
• Have a question this episode brought up for you? Email me at [email protected] — I read every one, and I pick a few to answer in future episodes.
• Connect with Chelsea on Facebook or Instagram
• This Podcast is Sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.

What if the real problem with a toxic workplace isn’t the toxicity itself—but what it slowly convinces you to believe about your own value?

In Part 2 of Toxic Workplace, Chelsea explores what sits underneath so many dysfunctional work environments: the experience of no longer feeling valued, heard, or seen as a human beyond what you produce.

This Rewrite is about separating their failure to value you from your actual value, accepting what may never change, and redirecting the energy you’ve spent fighting reality toward deciding what you want to do next.

• Join the conversation on Facebook or Instagram.
• This Podcast is sponsored by Broken Antler Marketing.