Is This Life You're Chasing Really Meant for You?

Is This Life You're Chasing Really Meant for You?

"Is this life you're chasing really meant for you?"

The question came from Penny Power OBE during a recent episode of the ActionCOACH Podcast, recorded at BizX. It's the kind of question that sits uncomfortably in the mind of any business owner who has spent years building something impressive while quietly wondering whether impressive and meaningful are the same thing.

For many entrepreneurs, the answer is harder to reach than it should be. Not because they lack self-awareness, but because they've been moving too fast to stop and ask. The business grows. The team expands. The revenue climbs. The profile rises. And somewhere in the acceleration, the original reason for starting fades into the background, replaced by a version of success that was never consciously chosen.

Penny Power knows this territory well. She built a social networking business that was valued at £60 million during the dot com boom. From the outside, it looked like the kind of success story every entrepreneur dreams about. But she admits now that she was unconsciously driven by that number, even though it was never her goal. "I was chasing something I didn't even want," The high pressure of a global .com didn’t enable her to have the intimacy with her clients that she was committed to, she says. The realisation came slowly, then all at once. She stepped back, sold her shares, and over time, built something smaller, quieter, and far more aligned with the life she actually wanted to live.

The Success No One Chose

Business owners rarely set out to chase the wrong life. They start with intention, energy, and a clear sense of what they want to build. But the definition of success they carry can shift without them noticing. It gets shaped by what they see other people doing, by the metrics their peers celebrate, by the language used in business networks, and by the assumptions embedded in phrases like "scale up" and "exit strategy."

Ambition is not the problem. The problem is when the target becomes inherited rather than chosen. A business owner might find themselves chasing a seven-figure exit because that's what successful founders are supposed to do, or building a team of fifty because anything smaller feels like staying small, or posting relentlessly on LinkedIn because visibility has become conflated with credibility.

Penny describes this as living someone else's version of success. "We're can so busy looking at what everyone else is doing that we forget to ask whether we actually want what they have." The result is a strange kind of exhaustion. The business might be growing, but the owner feels increasingly disconnected from it. The numbers go up, but the sense of purpose doesn't follow.

This is not about rejecting growth or ambition. It's about recognising when the life being built no longer fits the person building it. And that recognition requires a level of honesty that many business owners find difficult to access, particularly when the business looks successful from the outside. This realisation led Penny to write her book “Business Is Personal” in 2018, encouraging business owners to ‘lead the life and business they want”.

Wired to Connect, Programmed to Disconnect

Penny Power believes we are living through an age of emotional disconnection. The irony is that we have never been more contactable. Business owners can message their teams instantly, video call clients across continents, and maintain hundreds of connections on social media. But being reachable is not the same as being known and liked, trusted and followed for the right reasons.

She describes couples sitting on the sofa together, both on their phones, physically present but emotionally absent. The same pattern shows up in business. Meetings happen, emails get sent, Slack channels buzz with activity, but the deeper sense of being seen, heard, and understood is often missing. Relationships become transactional. Conversations become efficient. Connection becomes a box to tick rather than something that actually happens. This is why Penny writes about ‘Significance’ and her Keynote at BizX, Significance in the Age of AI, shared the power of ‘ensuring those that matter to you in business and life, know they matter’

This disconnection, the sense of being ‘insignificant’, affects every part of a business. Clients feel like account numbers. Team members feel like resources. Family members feel like they're competing for attention with a business that never switches off. And the business owner, caught in the middle of it all, can feel profoundly alone despite being surrounded by people.

Penny calls this "boiling the frog." The period from 2009 to now, when we have all slowly disconnected emotionally from people that matter’. The disconnection happens gradually, so gradually that it's easy to miss until the damage is done. A business owner might look around one day and realise they don't really know their team anymore, or that their most important relationships have become shallow, or that they've been having the same surface-level conversations for years without ever saying anything that matters.

The tools that were supposed to bring people closer together have, in many cases, made it easier to avoid real connection. Now in the age of AI, we must consider ‘are we using AI to create more human time’, or are we using it to increase human pressure and disconnection. It's simpler to send a message than to have a difficult conversation. It's safer to post an update than to admit vulnerability. And it's faster to move on to the next task than to sit with someone and ask how they're really doing.

Why Significance Matters

At the heart of Penny Power's work is a concept she calls significance. It's the fundamental human need to know that we matter. Not in a grand, world-changing sense, but in the small, everyday sense of being seen, valued, and understood.

Significance shows up in leadership when a business owner takes the time to notice what's going on with a team member beyond their output. It shows up in client relationships when someone feels genuinely cared for rather than processed. It shows up in family life when a partner or child knows they are more important than the business, not just in theory but in practice.

Penny makes the point that people remember how you made them feel far more than what you said to them. A client might forget the details of a proposal, but they'll remember whether they felt like they mattered. A team member might forget a specific piece of feedback, but they'll remember whether their manager saw them as a person or a function.

This has direct commercial implications. Businesses that make people feel significant build loyalty, referrals, and long-term relationships. Businesses that treat people as transactions might grow quickly, but they struggle to retain clients, keep good people, or build a reputation that goes beyond competence.

The challenge is that making people feel significant requires time, attention, and emotional presence. It requires slowing down in a culture that rewards speed. It requires being present in a world that constantly pulls attention elsewhere. And it requires vulnerability, because making someone else feel seen often means being willing to be seen yourself.

The Exhaustion of the Highlight Reel

In the years from 2000’s and 2010’s, Penny Power appeared ultra-successful online while privately dealing with significant financial hardship. She was on TV, countless podcasts, speaking globally, her speaking engagements were exhausting, and behind the scenes she and her husband Thomas were carrying £750,000 in personal debt to keep their social network strong, while social media was taking over our hearts and minds. The gap between the public image and the private reality was enormous, and maintaining that gap was exhausting.

This is the personal brand trap. Business owners feel pressure to be seen, to project confidence, to lead positively. The fear of looking weak or struggling or uncertain keeps them locked into a performance that becomes harder to sustain over time.

Social media has amplified this pressure. Everyone is sharing their highlight reel, and it's easy to compare your behind-the-scenes reality with someone else's carefully curated public image. A business owner scrolling through LinkedIn might see peers celebrating funding rounds, award wins, and team expansions, and feel like they're falling behind even if their own business is doing well.

Penny observed 650,000 business owners through her Social network, Ecademy, ‘it was like a social experiment’, we watched the shift towards clients, from friendships, from conversation to transactional mindsets’.

Penny describes this as ego and perfection working together. The ego wants to be seen as successful. The result is a version of success that exists primarily for external consumption, and a business owner who feels increasingly disconnected from their own life.

The irony is that the moments when Penny, took time out in 2018, wrote her book and her and her husband and business partner, reassessed their future and the work they wanted to do. She started being honest about her struggles and ambitions and this was the moment when people connected with her most deeply. Vulnerability didn't make her look weak. It made her look human. And it gave other business owners permission to admit that they were struggling too.

But breaking out of the personal brand trap requires courage and close community, finding the place where honesty and trust is the highest value. It means being willing to let the image crack. It means admitting that the business isn't always growing, that the strategy isn't always working, that the confidence isn't always there. And for many business owners, that feels like too much to risk.

When Business Stops Giving Life

On a daily basis, Penny Power would get up, drive her kids to school, and on the way to the train station meetings and events in London and beyond, she would listen to Whitney Houston singing ‘I don’t know my own strength’ on Spotify to release her stress. From the outside, her business looked successful. From the inside, it was costing her everything.

This is the question that sits at the centre of Penny's work: does your business give you more life, or does it take life away?

A business can look impressive on paper while quietly draining the owner of time, health, relationships, and peace. The revenue might be strong, but the owner hasn't taken a proper holiday in years. The team might be growing, but the owner is working longer hours than ever. The profile might be rising, but the owner feels more anxious, more isolated, and more disconnected from the people they love, and something many would relate to, her and her husband would be sacrificing their income to secure the exit they believed was possible.

Penny describes this as the slow cost of chasing the wrong version of success. It doesn't happen all at once. Penny describes the moment she decided to be a ‘small business’ rather than a ‘scale up’. To build a business that provided intimacy with clients and income, over scale and disconnection through developing a ‘machine’ based business.

The business can become a weight rather than a source of energy. The owner starts to resent the thing they built. And the people around them start to feel the impact. Having time with family can be neglected. Children feel like they're competing for attention. Friends drift away because the business owner is always too busy, too tired, or too distracted to show up.

Penny's turning point came when she realised she was chasing a life that didn't fit her. The global social network that stopped her from knowing her clients as they were served through a machine, the big business, the constant need for growth to feed the cost of the technology`. None of it was making her happy. So she made a choice that looked, from the outside, like a step backwards. It was time to step away, and build something smaller yet richer. Something that gave her life back instead of taking it away.

That choice required her to let go of the version of success she thought she was supposed to want. And it required her to get comfortable with other people not understanding why she would walk away from something that looked so good.

The Comfortable Discomfort

Penny Power has a counterintuitive piece of advice for business owners who feel stuck: when life feels uncomfortable, the way back to comfort often involves getting even more uncomfortable first.

She and Thomas were carrying £750,000 in personal debt. The weight of it was crushing. They could have kept going, kept trying to manage it quietly, kept up the appearance that everything was fine. Instead, they did something that felt terrifying. They went to therapy together. They had hard conversations. They faced the financial reality head-on.

Penny describes that period as one of the most difficult of her life. But it was also the beginning of the way out. The discomfort of admitting the problem, of asking for help, of being vulnerable with each other, was what allowed them to start rebuilding.

This pattern shows up repeatedly in business ownership. The uncomfortable conversation with a business partner that's been avoided for months. The admission that the current strategy isn't working. The decision to step back from a role that no longer fits. The choice to close a part of the business that's draining resources. The acknowledgment that the business needs to change direction, even if that means going backwards to move forwards.

These moments require a willingness to sit in discomfort rather than avoid it. And for many business owners, avoidance feels safer. It's easier to keep going, to hope things will improve, to wait for the right moment. But the right moment rarely comes. And the longer the difficult conversation is delayed, the harder it becomes to have.

Penny's message is that growth often requires going through discomfort, not around it. The business owner who wants a healthier relationship with their business might need to have an honest conversation with their team about feelings and personal choices. The business owner who feels trapped by their own success might need to admit that they want something different. The business owner who is struggling might need to ask for help, even if that feels like admitting failure. The loss of personal status among friends, in order to reduce the weight of debt.

The path back to comfort is not always comfortable. But it's often the only way forward.

Legacy Over Ledger

Penny Power has a clear sense of what she wants to be remembered for. "I'll be proud of what I've contributed, not what I gained."

It's a simple statement, but it reframes the entire relationship with business ownership. If success is measured by contribution rather than accumulation, then the questions change. It's no longer just about how much revenue the business generates, or how big the team grows, or what the exit looks like. It's about what the business gives to clients, to the team, to the community, and to the world.

This doesn't mean rejecting profit or growth. It means recognising that profit and growth are tools, not destinations. They enable contribution. They create capacity. They allow a business owner to do more of what matters. But they are not, in themselves, the point.

Penny describes this as a shift from personal gain to contribution. A business built around gain asks: what can I get? A business built around contribution asks: what can I give? The first creates a transactional relationship with clients, teams, and the world. The second creates something deeper.

This matters for entrepreneurs who want to build a legacy that goes beyond the balance sheet. A business that makes people feel significant, that solves real problems, that treats people well, that contributes something meaningful to the world. That kind of business might not always be the biggest or the fastest-growing, but it's the kind of business that owners feel proud of, even years after they've stepped away. In an AI world, none of us can keep up if driven by technology alone, when we become driven by humanness, then we find the balance of tech and being human.

Penny, with her husband Thomas, is now building something smaller than the one they built before. But it's more aligned with who they are and what they want to contribute. They work with business owners who are asking the same questions she asked. They see the expert within the business, and help those business people understand all the skills and connections they need to amplify their expertise. They measure success not by how much they earn, but by the success and joy of their clients, ensuring they are more connected, loved and leading more meaningful lives.

Questions Worth Sitting With

Some questions don't have quick answers. They require time, honesty, and a willingness to sit with discomfort. For business owners who are wondering whether the life they're building is the life they actually want, these questions might be worth considering:

What version of success is currently driving the business? Is it one that was consciously chosen, or one that was inherited, copied, or assumed? Does the business give more of the life that's wanted, or does it quietly take life away? Who in the business, the team, the family, needs to feel more significant? What uncomfortable conversation is being avoided? And what would change if success was measured by contribution as well as gain?

These are not questions that need to be answered immediately. But they are questions that deserve to be asked. Because the cost of not asking can be high. A business that looks successful but feels hollow. A life that looks impressive but feels disconnected. Years spent chasing a version of success that was never really the goal.

Return to the Beginning

"Is this life you're chasing really meant for you?"

The question is not an invitation to abandon ambition or walk away from success. It's an invitation to pause, to reassess, to make sure that the life being built is one that actually fits.

Business ownership should give more life, not take it away. It should create connection, not disconnection. It should be measured by contribution as well as gain. And it should be driven by a version of success that was consciously chosen, not unconsciously inherited.

For business owners who feel trapped by their own success, or exhausted by the performance, or disconnected from the life they thought they were building, the way forward might involve getting uncomfortable first. It might involve honest conversations, difficult decisions, and a willingness to let go of the image in favour of reality.

But the alternative is to keep going, to keep chasing, to keep building a life that was never really meant for you. And that cost, over time, becomes too high.

The question is worth asking. And the answer is worth finding. Before success costs more than it gives.