What It Actually Means to Flourish: A New Framework for Self-Development for Women

You are good at this.

You know how to set a goal. You know how to work hard, stay focused, show up — even when it's inconvenient, even when you're tired, even when no one is watching. You have a track record of figuring things out.

So why does something still feel missing?

This is the question most self development advice for women refuses to answer honestly. Instead, it hands you another framework for productivity, another morning routine to optimize, another five steps to your best self — all of it aimed at the same narrow target: your career, your output, your visible accomplishments.

What it leaves out is everything else.

Your finances outside of your paycheck. Your sense of who you are when you take the title away. The quality of your relationships — not just whether they exist, but whether they sustain you. The question of what you're actually building and whether it means anything. The parts of yourself that have been waiting quietly for years for permission to exist.

Self development that only touches one layer of your life isn't development. It's maintenance.

Flourishing is something different. And this post is about what that actually looks like.

The problem with how we've been taught to grow

Most of us were handed a script early. Work hard. Be excellent. Achieve. The script was specific about what mattered — career, income, credentials, status — and largely silent about everything else.

So we followed it. And many of us followed it well.

The promotions came. The income grew. The résumé filled in. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a quiet question started surfacing: Is this it?

Not because the achievements weren't real. They were. But because achievement in one area of life, pursued relentlessly at the expense of all others, eventually produces a very specific kind of exhaustion — the kind that doesn't go away with a vacation or a new goal.

It produces a life that looks complete from the outside and feels incomplete on the inside.

This is not a failure of ambition. It is a failure of the framework.

When we measure growth by professional metrics alone, we end up optimizing a single layer of a five-layer life. The other four gather dust. And no matter how much you accomplish in the one area you've been focusing on, the other four don't disappear. They just get quieter and more expensive to ignore.

What flourishing actually requires

Flourishing — real, sustainable, whole-person flourishing — requires five things to be working, not just one.

I call them the five foundations. Together, they make up what I've come to think of as the WHOLE framework: a way of looking at your entire life, not just the part that shows up on your LinkedIn profile.

Here they are.

W — Wellness: Your foundation

Wellness is not your gym routine. It is the financial and physical foundation that makes everything else possible.

This means having income that doesn't all come from one source. It means building financial security that gives you options — the option to leave a job that's costing you, to take a risk on something you believe in, to make choices from strength rather than necessity.

It also means your body. Not as an aesthetic project, but as the instrument you use to live your life. The woman who is physically depleted, chronically stressed, and running on empty does not have the same capacity to build, to create, or to connect as the woman who is genuinely sustained.

Wellness is the layer most women know they need to address and most consistently deprioritize. It is not indulgent to build it. It is foundational. Without it, everything else is built on sand.

The question to sit with: Am I making choices from financial strength — or from financial fear?

H — Harmony: Your identity

Harmony is the layer where you come back to yourself.

It is the work of knowing who you are outside of what you do — your values separate from what you were taught to value, your desires separate from what you were told to want, your sense of self separate from your job title, your relationship status, your role in other people's lives.

Most ambitious women have spent years performing a version of themselves optimized for external approval. The version that fits in the room. The version that doesn't ask for too much or take up too much space. The version that is endlessly capable and rarely vulnerable.

Harmony is the practice of closing the gap between that performed self and your actual self. It is not a one-time event. It is a daily, sometimes uncomfortable, always worthwhile practice of choosing your own truth over the easier performance.

When Harmony is low, you feel it as a persistent sense of inauthenticity — like you are playing a role in a life that was written for someone slightly different than you.

The question to sit with: Whose blueprint am I living — and is it actually mine?

O — Oneness: Your community

Oneness is about belonging — real belonging, not proximity.

You can be surrounded by people and still be profoundly alone. You can be in a marriage, a workplace, a social circle, a city of millions, and still feel that no one really sees you. This is one of the most common and least discussed experiences among high-achieving women.

Oneness is the layer where you build the relationships that can hold all of who you are — not just the accomplished, capable, has-it-together version. The relationships where you are fully known and still fully valued. Where you can struggle out loud without it costing you something.

It also means being in community with women who are building toward the same kind of wholeness you are — women who challenge you, inspire you, and refuse to let you play small.

This layer does not build itself. It requires investment that many high-achieving women have been systematically deprioritizing for years in service of the other goals.

The question to sit with: Do the people around me see all of me — or only what I let them see?

L — Legacy: Your purpose

Legacy is not about what you leave behind when you die. It is about what you are building right now and whether it means something to you.

It is the difference between going through the motions of a successful life and living with direction. Between doing excellent work because excellence is expected and doing it because it connects to something you genuinely care about.

Women who are low on Legacy often describe their lives as mechanical. The work gets done. The goals get hit. But there is no animating sense of why underneath any of it. Just the next task, the next deliverable, the next goal to replace the last one.

Building your Legacy layer means getting honest about what you actually want your contribution to be — not what sounds impressive, not what makes sense on paper, but what genuinely matters to you when no one is evaluating you.

The question to sit with: What am I building — and does it matter to me?

E — Expression: Your full self

Expression is the last layer and in many ways the most personal.

It is the part of you that creates, contributes, shows up fully, and takes up space without apology. It includes your creative life, your personal brand, the gifts you haven't yet given the world, the version of yourself that has been waiting for permission to exist.

Many accomplished women have a deeply developed professional self and an almost entirely unexplored expressive self. They have spent decades becoming excellent at what they do and very little time asking what else they are.

Expression is also about joy — not productive joy, not joy that earns something, but joy for its own sake. The things you do because they make you feel alive. The parts of your life that exist outside of achievement and obligation.

When Expression is low, life starts to feel two-dimensional. Accomplished, perhaps. But flat.

The question to sit with: What parts of myself have I been leaving out of my own life?

This is not a checklist. It is a compass.

The WHOLE framework is not a prescription. It is not five more things to optimize or five more areas where you can fail.

It is a way of seeing your life completely — of noticing which foundations are strong and which ones have been quietly neglected, and of making intentional choices about where your energy goes next.

Most women who encounter this framework for the first time find that they are genuinely strong in one or two layers and significantly underdeveloped in others. That is not a problem. That is information. And information, honestly faced, is where all real growth begins.

The goal is not perfection across all five layers. The goal is awareness, intention, and the willingness to build a life that works — not just in the area you've been focusing on, but completely.

That is what flourishing looks like. Not a destination. Not a milestone. A practice of building, layer by layer, a life that is entirely and unapologetically yours.

Where are you on the path to flourishing?

If this framework resonated, the best next step is to see where you actually stand.

The free Flourishing Assessment takes about five minutes. It measures where you are across all five WHOLE layers and gives you a clear, honest picture of which foundations are holding strong and which ones deserve more of your attention right now.

No right or wrong answers. Just clarity.

Take the free Flourishing Assessment at jaylabastien.com/assessment →

And if you want honest, practical thinking about all five layers delivered to your inbox every week, Notes by Jay is where that conversation continues.