Womanhood & Growth
The conventional Nigerian metric for a woman's success is remarkably specific: marriage to a good man, children (and ideally sons), professional achievement sufficient to demonstrate intelligence but not so prominent as to be threatening, the maintenance of a beautiful home and a well-presented self, financial stability, and the ongoing maintenance of family and community relationships.
This definition has several features worth examining:
It is almost entirely external. It is heavily weighted toward relational status. It carries an implicit ceiling (not too successful). And it says almost nothing about internal experience — about whether the woman inside the successful life is actually well.
Genuine fulfilment. A woman can achieve every metric of the conventional definition and experience her life as largely empty. The external architecture of success does not guarantee the internal experience of it.
Alignment with genuine values. Success, properly understood, involves living in accordance with what you actually value — not performing what others value at the expense of what you genuinely care about.
The experience of being known. The relational success metrics focus on marital status rather than on the quality of love and connection actually experienced. A woman can be married and profoundly lonely; a woman can be single and profoundly, meaningfully connected.
Creative and intellectual flourishing. The expression of genuine intellectual, creative, and professional gifts — not just to the degree that meets the standard, but to the degree that genuinely satisfies.
Physical and emotional wellbeing. The ability to inhabit your life in a body that is cared for and an emotional interior that is tended to.
If this stirred something in you, start with my book, The Good Girl Delusion →
What does success look like for a Nigerian woman who is honest about her entire self?
It includes some of what the conventional definition includes. Marriage and family, if that is genuinely wanted, genuinely matter. Professional achievement genuinely matters. Financial stability genuinely matters.
But it also includes what the conventional definition misses: the internal quality of the life being lived. The degree to which the woman inside the life feels genuinely known, genuinely fulfilled, genuinely alive.
Success, honestly defined, is the life in which you are more fully yourself than you were. Not the life that looks most successful from the outside — the life that is most genuinely, sustainably, satisfyingly yours.
Related: On Being a Woman Who Wants More · The Pressure to Have It All · Intentional Living Guide
Nancy GLO
Reflective storyteller & style curator for women becoming
Continue Reading
Womanhood & Growth
One of the most disorienting discoveries available to a woman in her 30s is that the life she has been pursuing is not actually the one she wants. Here is the honest guide to making that discovery — and deciding what to do with it.
ReadWomanhood & Growth
Ambition, for women and particularly for Nigerian women, often comes with a specific coating of shame. Here is a direct, honest engagement with that shame — where it comes from and the permission to want what you genuinely want.
Read