Are You Living in Fake Resilience™? What High-Achieving Women Need to Know

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

There’s a question I want you to sit with before you read another word.

Are your achievements energized by joy — or are you holding it all together on sheer willpower and calling that strength?

If you hesitated on that question, this post is for you.

On a recent episode of the Visionary Womenpreneurs Podcast, I sat down with Barb Varcl Smith — trauma recovery educator, therapist, speaker, and creator of The Ascendance Method™ — and she introduced me to a concept I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

She calls it Fake Resilience™.

What Is Fake Resilience™?

Fake Resilience™ isn’t weakness. It’s actually a sign of how capable you are. It’s what happens when achievement, productivity, perfectionism, and caretaking become survival strategies rather than genuine wellbeing.

From the outside, it looks like strength. From the inside, it feels like exhaustion.

Barb describes it this way: high-achieving women who are running on fake resilience are often exhausted, anxious, overthinking, not sleeping soundly — and underneath the achievement, not really happy. Not really joyful. Because they’ve learned to numb their feelings to keep going.

“If we’re running on that fake resilience, we are exhausted, anxious, overthinking. We’re achieving maybe — but we are not happy, we are not joyful.”

— Barb Varcl Smith

The hardest part? Most women don’t realize they’re living in it until something cracks. Burnout. A health crisis. Relationships falling apart. The moment when holding it all together suddenly becomes impossible.

Trauma Is an Explanation, Not an Excuse

One of the most powerful reframes Barb offers is this: trauma is not an excuse. It’s an explanation.

And here’s what that means practically: the patterns holding you back — the perfectionism, the people-pleasing, the hyper-independence, the constant productivity — aren’t signs that you’re broken. They’re adaptations. Survival strategies developed earlier in life that are still running the show, long after they’ve outlived their purpose.

“Trauma is not what happened to us. It’s how we reacted to it.”

— Barb Varcl Smith

That distinction matters because it gives you agency. You’re not broken. You adapted. And if you adapted once, you can adapt again — this time consciously, this time toward the life and business you actually want.

The 5 Pillars of Self

At the core of The Ascendance Method™ are what Barb calls the 5 Pillars of Self — the foundational elements of who you are that can get thrown out of balance by survival patterns:

• Inner Strength
• Self-Love
• Wisdom
• Intuition
• Purpose

When these pillars are in balance, you have access to your full self — your energy, your clarity, your capacity to lead. When they’re out of balance, you compensate. You push harder. You achieve more. And you wonder why it still doesn’t feel like enough.

The 4 Steps of Ascendance™

Moving out of survival mode and into authentic agency isn’t a quick fix. Barb’s framework walks people through four distinct steps:

• Recognition — Getting honest with yourself about what actually happened and how you responded. Not blame. Honest awareness.
• Release — Letting go of the stored patterns and emotions that have been running on autopilot.
• Regret and Grieving — Accepting the past choices you made from a survival place — and forgiving yourself for them.
• Rediscovery — Coming home to who you actually are, underneath the survival strategies. Embracing what you want and moving forward from that place.

One Healed Adult Can Change Generations

Perhaps the most powerful idea in our entire conversation is this one: healing yourself doesn’t just change your life. It changes the people around you. Your children. Your clients. Your community.

“If you change your action, the reaction has to change. That’s a universal law of physics.”

— Barb Varcl Smith

The ripple effect of one person’s healing is extraordinary. And for women entrepreneurs — women who already have outsized impact on the people around them — that ripple goes even further.

What This Means for Your Business

Here’s what I know after 20+ years of working with women entrepreneurs: you cannot build a thriving business from an empty well.

The Center of the Business Growth Compass — the YOU at the core of everything — isn’t a soft concept. It’s strategic. When you’re running on survival patterns, those patterns show up in your pricing, your marketing, your client relationships, your capacity to grow.

Sometimes what looks like a business problem is actually an alignment problem.

That’s why this conversation matters so much. Barb’s work and the Business Growth Compass framework are pointing at the same thing from different directions: when you understand yourself, when you lead from alignment rather than survival, everything in your business gets easier.

Listen to the Full Episode

This is one of those conversations that stays with you. I highly recommend carving out 35 minutes and listening from start to finish.

🎧 Listen here:

🌐 Connect with Barb: your-steps.co.uk

And if you’re ready to find the real gaps in your business — not just the surface symptoms, but the alignment issues underneath — grab my free Business Growth & Profits Field Guide below.

➡️ Download the Field Guide free at compassroseconsulting.com/field-guide