There is a particular kind of self-doubt that lives inside people who are, by every measure, a valuable part of any relationship. People who care, who are capable, who others can count on – and yet, who feel compelled to over-give, over-promise, over-perform, as though they need to win their place over and over again.
Not long ago, I was working with a lovely young woman who had signed up for coaching. She had been marked as “high potential” in her workplace and wanted to step into a managerial role. “I need help with my confidence,” she said, disarmingly. “I feel I’m not ready.”
I knew this readiness gap well, and I see it most often in women. It’s a gap between abilities and trust, where you keep upgrading your skills, becoming more qualified than necessary, and yet remain unwilling to take the leap. She told me that her boss didn’t want to let her go, because he said he’d never find someone like her. She was a fast learner. She took on more than her share. She made sure nothing ever slipped.
But to step up, she would have to do the very things she had spent her life avoiding: say no, delegate, make decisions, and sometimes be disliked for them. And that terrified her.
I asked her about her past, because this I know: almost always, when we feel stuck, or need to put ten times the effort for a fraction of the results, we are operating from the past. She told me she had grown up with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Life, love, peace – everything was unpredictable. As the oldest, she had often put her own needs aside to meet those of her siblings. She had also felt responsible for keeping her mother happy so everyone felt safe. She became the good girl. The people-pleaser. The over-giver. The over-performer. The one who often ends up feeling burnt out, underappreciated, and resentful.
This pattern is common for those of us who grow up where love and safety felt unreliable. We learn that we are somehow “less than” because we are at the mercy of other people’s moods and emotions. We learn to keep ourselves small and undemanding. We learn to be good at everything because we know that disappointing others comes with a price. We value other people’s needs and dreams over ours and believe we exist to help them shine. And when we genuinely want something, we push and overwhelm ourselves to make sure we don’t fail – proving ourselves in jobs we’ve already earned and relationships we’ve already built.
If some of this sounds familiar, I invite you to reflect on your particular patterns. Do you say yes when you mean not really, and soften your opinions before voicing them? Do you do more for others than they expect – which raises their expectations of you and puts you in a double-bind? Do you work harder than a thing requires, take on more than you can carry, and end up feeling less capable rather than more?
Maybe you tell yourself the pleasing is kindness, or the over-doing is conscientiousness, or simply what it takes to stand out. And sometimes it genuinely is. That is exactly what makes this so hard to see.
But here is what I know. You cannot find clarity while you are standing on the ground of inferiority. It isn’t possible, because fear narrows the view. And fighting the fear, arguing with it, trying to fix it, is its own quiet form of gaslighting. Your fear is real. It exists for good reason. Denying it doesn’t help you trust yourself more. It makes you trust yourself less.
The way forward that actually empowers you is to find a ground that runs deeper than the fear. Not a ground that denies it, and not one that depends on it. The ground of what is also true about you.
When you stand on that deeper ground, something opens. You can hear your intuition again. You can make decisions from genuine discernment instead of self-protection. You start to feel the difference between warmth that flows freely and warmth that has become a performance you’re exhausted by. Between the diligence that is truly yours and the treadmill you can’t get off. Between the yes that means something and the yes that has quietly turned to resentment.
So take a moment to reflect: what do you value about yourself that you’re not noticing? What do you now know about yourself that the younger version of you didn’t? Look at yourself with the eyes of appreciation, and I promise you will find things that reveal the kind of power worth building. Not the power of controlling and fixing and proving. But the power of standing on the ground from where everything is possible.
This is the work we do here, season by season. We take one of these deeper truths at a time: what it is, how to find the one that lives beneath your particular fear, and how to nurture it until it becomes the ground you stand on. If you’re not subscribed yet, I’d love for you to be. Because it’s time to move from the old power to the new.