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When Success is Unfulfilling
Do you think more success and status are the keys to lasting fulfillment?
What happens when our achievements leave us feeling empty?
And what does it mean to be dangerous?
Today, my wife Alyson and I explore a life beyond constant comfort and how most men are stuck in a trap — striving to play a game they can’t win.
In this interview:
- Alyson recovers from her bathroom noises
- Getting over ourselves can be painful
- A threat to our self image feels like a threat to our lives
- What it means to be responsible for your life
- Tolerating bullshit vs saying “no”
Plus:
- Settling because “this is just the way it is”
- Blaming others and playing the victim
- Do victims enjoy feeling powerless?
- Why someone with a victim mentality isn’t coachable
- The addiction to sadness and suffering
And:
- When success leaves us feeling empty
- “What’s wrong with me? I thought I’d feel fulfilled.”
- What would feel expansive?
- What do I want more than being comfortable all the time?
- Developing a guidance system based on what you value most
About Alyson Lanier
Alyson Lanier is a guide, coach, mentor, asskicker, counselor, and teacher. She received her BA, MA, and LPC in psychology, and has extensive training and certification in attachment work and Gestalt therapy, Transpersonal psychology, and Shambhala Buddhism. She has over 50,000 hours of therapeutic experience with individuals, couples, families, children, and adolescents in clinical and private settings. Halfway through her second decade of working in clinical and trauma informed therapeutic settings, Alyson realized psychotherapy alone was incomplete. In order to better serve her clients, Alyson broadened her professional toolbox with trainings and certifications in somatic sex education, energy work and consciousness development, and Ancestral Medicine work, a lineage repair approach to healing personal, family, and cultural burdens.
Adding alternative and spiritual practices to her therapeutic offerings made sense for Alyson because her experience with animist traditions and supernatural encounters began at a very young age, and set the foundation for her life’s study and practice. Her encounters with other-than-human beings, Old World traditions, Shambhala Buddhist practice, and subtle energy work over the years have given her a unique and layered perspective that plants her feet firmly in seemingly antithetical worlds: clinical and transpersonal psychology; Eastern and Western philosophy; clinical diagnosis and energetic and spiritual traditions of healing. Alyson has learned to fully embrace this duality, and to use it to understand the lenses her clients are seeing through, how they’re metabolizing what’s coming through for them, and to lovingly stir shit up to help them level-up.
Alyson delights in supporting her clients as they navigate their growth processes on psychological, physical, energetic, and spiritual levels. Her knowledge of psychology, development, and integral, energetic, and somatic studies give her a centered gravity, and her formative experiences and practices give her a rare wisdom. Her passion and humor spring from a desire to make the sacred profane and the profane sacred. Alyson approaches her transformative work with creative and dynamic interventions, serving her clients and groups as if the world depends on the fulfillment they are seeking, because it most assuredly does.
For over a decade, Alyson has been married to Tripp Lanier (who is also a coach and the host of The New Man Podcast which has been downloaded millions of times by men and women all around the world). Together they have a daughter and live on the coast of North Carolina.
