Audacity, Disappearance & Redefining Success

This post pulls from a conversation with Ash Coleman Hynie, founder and CEO of CountrPT, recorded for Episode 15 of the podcast. We talked about the cost of staying visible on other people's terms, the right to disappear, and what happens to your definition of success once you stop needing an audience to confirm it. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾 

Somewhere in the last year, the scoreboard stopped working. The metrics that used to feel like proof, the follower count, the panel invite, the way a room shifts when you say what you do, started to feel thinner than they used to. Redefining success sounds like a phrase you'd find printed on a tote bag. In practice it's closer to grief. You have to lose a version of yourself that worked, that got you the corner office or the client roster or the stage, before you know what's supposed to replace it. Nobody puts that part in the caption.

Playing Small Is a Learned Skill, Not a Personality

Before we got anywhere near the word success, I asked Ash where in her life she was playing small even though she knew better. Her answer had nothing to do with confidence. She traced it back to conditioning, the specific way the world teaches women, and Black women in particular, to stay behind the curtain while other people tell the story and take the credit. She'd just come out of a team meeting where she caught herself hedging her own ambition out loud, softening "we're going to land this partnership" into "we're hoping to explore this partnership," and named the pattern for what it was on the call.

What she said next is the line I keep returning to. Ash pointed out that the men she watches online never bother hedging. They claim outcomes with total confidence and zero proof, because the world has spent their whole lives telling them anything is possible for them. Her question back was simple:

"Why can't I be the one who goes out there with the overconfidence of a mediocre white man and say, yeah, I'm gonna work with this company, because I already know I have a solution?" — Ash

That's not a bit. It's a diagnosis of where the hedge comes from, and it's the reason "just be more confident" advice tends to land flat. The hedge was never a personality trait. It was trained in.

The Sacred Right to Disappear

My own answer to that question went somewhere Ash's didn't. Where I'm playing small is in how I defend my right to disappear, to be unreachable, undone, unproductive. I've spent years teaching rest as a practice, and I still catch myself abandoning it the moment someone needs me. Ash named the shape of that pattern before I could finish describing it: the caregiver instinct that convinces you it's your job to prepare a soft landing for everyone else's disappointment before you're allowed to make a decision that's actually yours.

She's been sitting with the same tension while planning a move overseas, watching herself over-explain a decision to people who were never going to be okay with it no matter how gently she delivered it. I recognized the pattern because I'm mid-transition too. I'm currently moving abroad myself, and I recently told my business partner at HmntyCntrd that I need a break from the high-touch corporate consulting engagements that fund most of our revenue. Saying it out loud, and giving myself permission to actually mean it, felt like relief before it felt like risk.

What Redefining Success Actually Requires

The second question I brought to the conversation was harder to answer than the first: what belief about success are you starting to question, even if it still scares you to say out loud? Mine was this. I've quietly believed I have to stay constantly visible to stay relevant, that going quiet for even a season might cost me my business, my income, my relevance. Ash's answer reframed the whole premise. She reminded me, and I'm passing the reminder to you, that we're already successful, and that the work of redefining success is less about achieving something new and more about refusing to let anyone else hold the definition.

She described it through her CountrPT team, where the current chapter looks less like visible momentum and more like a submarine going underwater. Still powerful. Still doing the thing. Just moving differently, out of sight, because the work doesn't require witnesses to count.

You Don't Have to Be Visible to Matter

Here's the part that actually changes how you operate day to day. When I write a LinkedIn post or take a speaking gig, I've stopped writing for an audience. I write for one person. Even on the days the algorithm hates me, even when the view count barely clears double digits, I remind myself that one person walking away with a little more clarity is the entire point. Ash calls back to the same idea through the old starfish story: a girl on a beach throwing stranded starfish back into the ocean, told she can't possibly make a difference given how many are stranded, tossing one more anyway and saying, I made a difference for that one.

I built moonpaws, my astrology app for pets, with a specific person in my head who I've never met. Someone told me once that their friend, who lives with chronic pain, gets through hard days because of how much they love their dog. I think about that friend when we're deciding what moonpaws should feel like. Not entertainment. A moment of relief for one person having a hard week. That's the whole design brief.

How to Start Redefining Success for Yourself

Redefining success isn't a mindset shift you talk yourself into once. It's a practice you return to every time the old scoreboard tries to reassert itself. A few honest starting points from this conversation:

Name the audience you're actually performing for. If you can't name a specific person, you're likely performing for an algorithm or a room full of strangers, and that's a scoreboard built to keep moving the goalposts.

Notice where you're preparing a soft landing for someone else's disappointment instead of just making the decision. That labor is invisible and it's expensive.

Ask what success looked like before anyone outside your household was watching. That earlier definition is usually closer to true than whatever you've absorbed since.

Give yourself one season where you measure impact by the one person it reached, not by the room it filled.

Where This Goes Next

Ash and I didn't fully answer the question of what it costs to walk away from a definition of success other people already trust you to perform. That's the conversation we're circling back to in a future episode, about measuring your own value when nobody's issuing the scorecard anymore.

If the sentence "something's off but I haven't named it yet" sounds familiar, that's diagnosing work, not deciding work, and it's exactly what How to Audit Your Life Before It Falls Apart was built for.

Originally aired as Episode 15 on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.