Trailer

Hi there, and welcome to the very first episode of Success Reimagined. I’m your host, Dr. Amna Shabbir, and I’m so excited to have you here with me on this journey. This show is for you if you feel stuck in that never-ending cycle of chasing achievement after achievement, only to feel… tired and empty once you get there. It’s also for you if, despite being given the label of being successful, you don’t actually feel that way inside.

Maybe, like me, you’ve found yourself wondering:

Is this all there is?

Is success supposed to feel like this?

And it is also for you if you want to become successful and feel lost about where to start your journey or wondering what your next steps will be.

You are all welcome here and all parts of you are welcome here. Every week you will get small digestible episodes that will help you truly lean into authentic success.

Today, I want to share a bit of my story—how I fell into the trap of chasing productivity and external success, and what led me to start reimagining what success means for myself. This journey has been messy, imperfect, and deeply personal, but if any part of my story resonates with you, I hope you’ll stick around because you’re in the right place. Here’s a bit about me. I’m a physician—a board-certified geriatrician-internal medicine doctor. I’m also a Master Certified Life Coach, a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and a Duke Certified Integrative Wellness Coach. I empower high achievers to thrive, not just survive - as we often are doing, merely cruising by life. I’m also a fierce mental health advocate. I’m a mom to two young girls and the wife of an entrepreneur.

I’ve faced and overcome some physical and mental health challenges along the way. And honestly, like so many people in high-pressure careers, I was juggling a lot.

Being a mom, supporting my husband’s entrepreneurial journey, and navigating my own professional and personal goals—it often felt like life was one big balancing act. For the listeners who work in healthcare- you know the very struggles of burnout and moral injury!

So No matter how much I did, it never felt like it was enough. I was constantly moving from one task to the next, from one goal to the next. I couldn’t afford to slow down—there was always something that needed to be done, something else to achieve.

As a medical student, then a resident, then a fellow, and even after I became an independently practicing physician, I lived by this internal script that told me: success is something you earn. It’s something you achieve by working harder, pushing further, and striving constantly. I believed that when I finally got there—wherever “there” was—I’d feel complete. Fulfilled. Like it would all finally make sense. But it didn’t.

Every time I reached a goal, I immediately set my sights on the next one. There was this constant pressure to do more, be more, achieve more. And when I did achieve those goals, instead of feeling fulfilled, I just felt… tired. And it wasn’t just physical tiredness—I felt drained inside.

There was this persistent feeling, like something was missing. No matter what I achieved, it felt like there was this gaping hole in my heart, and nothing external could fill it. That’s when I learned about something called the arrival fallacy. It’s the belief that once you reach a certain point in your life, you’ll finally feel happy and content. And let me tell you, living with that mindset is exhausting because the moment you “arrive,” you realize it didn’t fix anything—and so you set a new goal, and the cycle starts all over again. Looking back now, I recognize that I was suffering from extreme perfectionism—more on that in future episodes.

I tied my sense of worth to what I could accomplish, and anything less than perfect felt like failure. Eventually, I reached a point where I had to stop and ask myself: Is this what success