Welcome back to Tuff Love with your host, Rob Kandell. This week the guest star is Brandilyn Tebo and she’s here to talk about the concept of the achievement trap. She teaches workshops for women called The Shift, and has a book coming out in January about the Achievement Trap concept.
Brandilyn is an acclaimed transformation coach, retreat host, writer and speaker. Once a Type A perfectionist who struggled with anorexia, she knows first hand how destructive attachment to external validation can be through years of inner work, meditation, training, studies. She learned how amazing life can be once you let go of limiting beliefs and false identification with achievement. She has travelled the world teaching empowering workshops for high schools, Fortune 500 companies, and colleges. Today she coaches clients on how to remove internal barriers to following their hearts to be the fullest expression of themselves.
Rob and Brandilyn explore the achievement trap, her journey and the steps she took toward awakening:
The Achievement Trap is when we get completely dependent on needing outside approval and needing external validation in order to fell worthy
Brandilyn was so far deep in the Achievement rap that she was numb. She was sleeping 4 hours a night, had an eating disorder, was working a job, modeling and in school getting straight As, as well as in leadership positions. She was disconnected from herself and her heart, lived completely in her head and didn’t give herself permission to do much of anything for the sake of joy of it.
The turning point came when she wasn’t going to be allowed to go back to school unless she started gaining weight. So she did some soul searching, started meditating and doing the inner work needed for transformation. In the process, she flipped her entire life upside down.
After doing this work and getting reconnected to her joy and the ability to play and express self and be vulnerable and connected to heart, Brandilyn started wanting to give back to others. She started teaching workshops in schools and after school programs, and prisons and colleges, coaching people one-on-one, leading retreats, writing and doing everything she could to get the transformational work out in the world.
Brandilyn got stuck in the mindset of trying to be the best model, and achieve extreme thin-ness, as a way to succeed and then make a difference. She was depriving herself of food because that was the only thing she could control in that situation.
Eating disorders happen to all genders, not just women, however it’s most concentrated in young women. She thinks this is because we’re told that’s the pathway to success and fulfillment.
The first step to healing for Brandilyn was in realizing that the questions haunting her—am I good enough? Am I doing enough? What do people think of me?—are unanswerable. It’s an optical illusion: you just see whatever your perspective is, you don’t see what’s actually there.
Then, the question was ‘Now what?’ and the answer for her was to be the most loving person possible, to connect and make a difference. Service has been the savior. Putting attention on other people has been the thing that’s really transformed her life.
Rob says service to him is a selfish act. It’s a way to get out of his own way and stop thinking about that repeating loop.
Brandilyn made gaining weight about other people and being able to serve more. She recontextualized it. Putting weight on would help her think more clearly, be healthier, be more present and more available to help others.
When you’re stuck in deprivation you’re a prisoner of your own mind and you can’t get out. You’re constantly in survival mode. Brandilyn believes we should nourish ourselves so that we’re able to be present and not have to focus on the body sensations over here.
Food is a metaphor,
