217. The Hidden Career Costs of Fawning

The fawn response is a nervous system survival mechanism that many of us have unconsciously learned and refined, especially in professional environments where fighting back or walking away isn't an option. It shows up for us as over-apologizing, conflict avoidance, and volunteering for tasks that hold us back from advancing. Together, we can learn to recognize these patterns, challenge the beliefs that sustain them, and build the internal validation that restores our agency and credibility.

We're raised to be peacekeepers, to smooth over conflict, to prioritize everyone else's needs before our own. Along the way, we lose the opportunity to even get to know who we are, what we need, what we actually like and prefer.

Are you automatically saying ‘yes’ to requests before you've even considered your workload or whether you actually want to help? Are you spending more energy monitoring the emotions of those around you than focusing on the technical work that would actually advance your career? Are you waiting for your manager or leadership to validate that you're worthy, capable, or ready for the next level?

You'll learn that the fawn response is not a character flaw or weakness, but an unconscious nervous system reaction to perceived threat — and that recognizing when you're doing it gives you the power to choose a different response.

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

• Why credibility erosion is one of the most damaging hidden costs of chronic workplace fawning

• 4 red flags that reveal when you're fawning unnecessarily, along with 3 old beliefs to reframe so you can begin breaking the pattern for good

• Why changing jobs won't resolve fawning patterns if the underlying nervous system response hasn't been addressed

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode two hundred and seventeen. I'm your host Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way. 

You know that moment when your boss casually asks if you can take on just one more project? And before your brain can even process the fact that you're already drowning in deliverables, you hear yourself saying, "Absolutely! Happy to help!". And then, about thirty seconds later, that queasy feeling hits—that cocktail of resentment mixed with anxiety that you can't quite name but definitely can't shake. You're mad at yourself for saying yes, again. You're worried about how you'll actually get it all done. And somewhere in there, you're also weirdly anxious that if you hadn't said yes, something bad might have happened. 

In this episode, we're diving deep into workplace fawning—what it actually is, why it happens disproportionately to women in male-dominated fields like engineering, and most importantly, what it's costing you professionally. We'll unpack how this unconscious nervous system response shows up at work, why external validation feels so satisfying yet so fleeting, and how to build internal validation systems that actually strengthen your self-trust and decision-making power. I'll walk you through the warning signs that you're fawning when you don't need to, and practical strategies for breaking free without burning bridges or blowing up your career. Because here's the thing: this isn't about becoming less nice or less cooperative. It's about recognizing when you're operating from fear instead of choice, and reclaiming the credibility and agency you've been quietly giving away. 

So, what is the fawn response? Let's start with the basics, because I think there's a lot of confusion about what fawning actually is. Most of us have heard about fight, flight, and freeze—the classic threat responses our nervous systems deploy when we perceive danger. But there's a fourth response that doesn't get nearly enough attention: fawn. And honestly, it's probably the most relevant one for those of us navigating professional environments where we know fight, flight, or freeze aren't the appropriate response. 

Here's what you need to understand: fawning is not people-pleasing. It can look a lot like people-pleasing, and people-pleasing can be one of the behaviors that result from fawning, but they're not the same thing.

Fawning is a nervous system response that happens in a nanosecond. It's your body's unconscious, automatic reaction when it detects a threat, whether that threat is real, like an abusive boss standing right in front of you, or perceived, like that sense that someone might be mad at you or your manager is being a bit standoffish today. Your body doesn't stop to analyze whether the threat is life-or-death or just socially awkward. It just reacts in a way to keep you safe. 

The fawn response comes online when the other threat responses—fight, flight or freeze—either aren't available or would make things worse. Think about it. In a professional setting, what are your options when conflict arises? Fighting back against incompetent leadership? That's a great way to get labeled as 'difficult' or 'not a team player'. Flight? Where exactly are you going to run to when you need this job and the paycheck? Even if you can remove yourself from the situation to collect your thoughts, you'll just have to go right back in there. And freeze—just shutting down and not doing your work—isn't exactly going to fly as normal professional behavior. And it definitely will have consequences. 

So, what does your brilliant, adaptive nervous system do instead? It fawns. It leans into the very relationships and situations that might be causing you harm. It tries to become more appealing to the threat, more likable, more helpful, more agreeable—whatever it takes to make you feel safe. And this response is something we learn early in life and it gets reinforced as we get older, especially for women. It's taught to us under the guise of being respectful, being a good employee, or being a team player. We practice it. We hone it. And over time, it becomes as natural as breathing. 

For me, realizing that fawning is a nervous system response and not a character flaw was absolutely transformative. For years, I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. Why didn't I have a voice? Why did I struggle so much to set healthy boundaries? Why did I care so intensely about what people thought of me? I'd gone down every rabbit hole—people-pleasing, codependency, low self-esteem—and while those concepts touched on aspects of what I was experiencing, none of them fully explained it. They all made it sound like the problem was me, like I was just too weak or too needy or too desperate for approval. It finally made sense when I realized that what I was doing was trying to feel safe. 

By resorting to fawning, my body was adapting to dysfunctional environments and dysfunctional relationships. My nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do, keeping me safe in situations where I couldn't fight back and there was nowhere else to go. That reframing from "I'm broken" to "I adapted brilliantly to difficult circumstances"—that's what finally reduced the shame enough for me to start moving out of these chronic patterns. 

So, what does workplace fawning actually look like? Because I guarantee some of you are sitting there thinking, "I don't do that. I'm just being professional". And listen, I get it. I thought the same thing for decades. The thing about fawning is that it's so normalized, especially for women, that we don't even recognize it as a threat response. We think it's just how we're supposed to behave in the working world. 

Let's start with the obvious stuff: over-apologizing. You know, those preambles that we use to soften whatever it is we want to say next, like "Sorry to bother you" or "Sorry, just following up", or even "Sorry if this is a dumb question". That's fawning. You're preemptively trying to minimize any potential threat of someone being annoyed with you, even when you're really just doing your job. 

Then, there's the conflict avoidance and chronic need to keep the peace. Many of us who have learned to fawn have formed this deep-seated belief that if we have conflict in a relationship, that means the relationship is over. It's ruined. There's no coming back from it. This usually happens because we didn't witness conflict being handled or repaired in a safe way, either in our families growing up, or in our workplaces as we developed professionally. 

So, we naturally learn to avoid conflict at all costs. We become the ones who smooth things over, who read the room obsessively, and who adjust our communication style to match whomever we're talking to. 

Here's where it gets interesting though. There's an aspect of fawning that is absolutely a performance. You're morphing yourself into what you think other people want or need, because you're terrified of the alternative. You become a bit of a chameleon in social and professional situations. And honestly, a lot of the time you're doing this with people you don't even like, people you don't respect, or people you would never actually care what they thought of you, under normal circumstances. But it's not really about trying to gain their approval. It's about your deep, unconscious need to feel safe. 

Which brings us to the hypervigilance piece, because this is huge. When you're in fawn mode, you're hyper-attuned to the external world, to the point where you seem to lose connection with what's going on inside yourself. You're constantly scanning for information, asking yourself: What do they think? How are they feeling? Did that email come across wrong? Is my manager upset? Did I take up too much time in that meeting giving my status report? You're so focused on monitoring everyone else's emotional state that you have no bandwidth left to figure out what you actually think or feel about anything. 

Here's another pattern I see constantly with women in engineering: volunteering for all the emotional labor and administrative tasks that aren't actually part of your job description. You're the one organizing the team lunches, taking notes in meetings, onboarding new hires, and mediating conflicts between team members, and tasked with remembering everyone's birthdays. Meanwhile, your male colleagues are focused on the high-visibility technical work that actually leads to promotions and recognition. And you tell yourself you're just being helpful, just being a good team player. But really, you're fawning. You're trying to make yourself seem indispensable, trying to prove your worth, trying to ensure everyone likes you so that you can feel safe, at least for the moment.

So, we've covered what fawning is and how it shows up. But here's the critical question: what is it actually costing you? Because I promise you, the costs are higher than you think, and they compound over time in ways that can genuinely derail your career trajectory. 

Let's start with credibility erosion. When you're constantly accommodating, constantly deferring, or constantly seeking approval before you share your technical expertise, people stop seeing you as an expert. They start seeing you as support staff. Your ideas get dismissed or attributed to someone else because you've presented them tentatively, hedging with things like, "I might be wrong..." or "This is probably a stupid idea...". You become known as helpful instead of brilliant. You're seen as the person who makes things run smoothly, but not the person who drives innovation or makes critical technical decisions. 

And this directly leads to the ceiling effect. You keep hitting those invisible barriers in your career and you can't figure out why. You're working harder than everyone else. You're probably even more qualified and you're getting great performance reviews, but the promotions and the high-visibility projects go to other people. And here's why: you've unconsciously communicated through your fawning behavior that you can't want too much, or that you can't have a voice, or that you're just not leadership material. You've spent so much time looking outward for validation, trying to prove to your manager, to senior leadership, and to your colleagues that you're good enough, that you never stop to consider that this is something you could decide for yourself. 

I spent my entire twenties and thirties putting my supervisors and managers on pedestals, genuinely believing that if I just worked hard enough, I'd find the person who would tell me I was worthy, smart enough, deserving enough to be taken under their wing and groomed into the engineer I truly wanted to be. I thought they were the gatekeepers. Unfortunately, it took me decades to realize that what I was seeking from others was simply what I needed to learn to give myself. I had prioritized everyone else's opinions of my capabilities, my competence, and my expertise over my own opinion. And that external focus kept me stuck and playing small for far too long. 

Then, there's the burnout and resentment factor. When you're constantly over-functioning, doing all the work nobody else wants to do, carrying the emotional weight of the team, it catches up with you. You feel unappreciated, but you also feel like you can't stop. There's this twisted logic where you simultaneously resent what you're doing and feel guilty about the resentment you're feeling. You hate that you're people-pleasing, but you're terrified of what might happen if you stop. And that anger and frustration? It doesn't have anywhere to go, so it festers in your body. It shows up as chronic stress, fatigue, that constant tightness in your chest, headaches, sleep problems, and anxiety.

But perhaps the most insidious cost is the loss of your sense of self. After years of being a chameleon, after years of morphing yourself to fit what you think others want, you wake up one day and realize you have no idea who you actually are. What are your technical interests? What kinds of projects energize you? What are your actual career goals, not the ones you think you're supposed to have? You've spent so much time looking outward that you've completely lost touch with your internal compass. And that disconnection makes you feel incredibly lonely. You're surrounded by colleagues, you might even have work friends, but they don't really know you. They only know the work version of you, the version that's trying to keep everyone happy and everything running smoothly. 

So, let's talk about context, because understanding why this pattern develops is essential for breaking free of it without adding more shame to the pile. And I want to be really clear about something: if you're a chronic fawner, it's not because you're weak, or broken, or fundamentally flawed. It's because you adapted brilliantly to the environments and systems you were navigating. 

For most women, fawning gets learned in childhood and then reinforced by society at every turn. We're socialized from day one to be 'good girls'—agreeable, accommodating, never too much, never too loud, and never too demanding. We're taught to do whatever we can to alleviate other people's discomfort. We're conditioned to overextend, over-explain, and over-apologize. We're raised to be peacekeepers, to smooth over conflict, to prioritize everyone else's needs above our own. Along the way, we lose the opportunity to even get to know who we are, what we want or need, along with identifying our own likes and dislikes. 

And then, we enter the male-dominated professional fields like engineering. And guess what? The fawning gets reinforced and rewarded. We're told we need to be 'likable' to advance, while our male peers are rewarded for being assertive and direct. When recognition and opportunities are scarce, we fawn all the more, trying to earn that validation, trying to prove we belong. But it never comes. Or, if it does come, it's in the form of being valued for all the support work we do, not for our technical expertise.

Here's something else that's crucial to understand: fawning is the only threat response that we don't tend to be punished for, especially at work. Fawning gets you called a 'team player'. It gets you praised for being helpful and collaborative. It creates the safety and external validation you're desperately seeking, which makes it incredibly confusing, because the very behavior that's keeping you stuck is also the behavior that's being reinforced by the system. 

There's also something I need to mention about the manipulation factor, because it's real and it's important. There are people who know how to exploit the fawning response in others. When you're fawning, you're kind of advertising your vulnerability, showing where you're susceptible to being controlled or manipulated. And some people—consciously or unconsciously—will use that to keep you compliant, keep you over-functioning, and keep you playing small, and using you as a pawn to further their agenda.

Awareness is absolutely the first step in changing any pattern, so let's talk about the specific warning signs that you're fawning when you don't actually need to. Because remember, there will still be times when it genuinely makes sense to fawn—as a safety mechanism when the stakes are high. The goal isn't to never fawn, it's to notice when you're doing it and recognize when you have other options available. 

Here are four major red flags to watch out for: 

Red flag number one, your immediate response to any request is 'yes' before you've even checked whether you actually want to do it or whether you realistically can. Someone asks you if you can help out or take over another project and you've already said 'yes' before you've had a chance to consider your current workload. That automatic 'yes'? That's your fawn response firing. 

Red flag number two, you spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about whether your boss or your colleagues are mad at you over relatively minor things. You're spending hours, sometimes days, or weeks, ruminating over interactions that the other person has likely forgotten entirely. This hypervigilance and catastrophizing is classic fawning behavior. 

Red flag number three, you avoid sharing your technical opinions or expertise because you're afraid of being disliked or disagreed with. You have insights that could genuinely improve a project or solve a problem, but you stay quiet because speaking up feels too risky. Or if you do share, you hedge it with so many qualifiers and apologies that your expertise gets diluted and dismissed. You're prioritizing being liked over being respected for your knowledge and capabilities. 

And red flag number four, you're doing a disproportionate amount of the meeting coordination, note-taking, administrative work, and emotional labor, which is taking away from focusing on the technical work that actually leads to career advancement. And when you notice this imbalance, instead of pushing back or delegating, you tell yourself it's fine, you don't mind, it's good to be helpful, but underneath you're resentful. You know you're being taken advantage of, but you're too afraid of the consequences of saying 'no'. 

I'm not here to scare you, but I do think it's important to be honest about what happens if you don't address chronic workplace fawning. Because the consequences compound over time and they affect both your professional trajectory and your personal well-being in significant ways. 

Professionally, you stay stuck. You remain at the same level while colleagues who are less qualified get promoted around you. You watch high-visibility projects get assigned to other people. You never build the reputation as a technical authority in your field because you've been too busy being the helpful support person. And your career decisions continue to be driven by what other people think you should do, instead of what you actually want. You spend your entire career looking for external validation, waiting for someone to tell you you're ready, you're good enough, or you're worthy, never realizing that that permission might never come.

And even when you do change jobs, thinking that a new environment will solve everything, you reenact the same patterns with different people because you're the common thread. You can't outrun yourself. I changed jobs multiple times thinking, "This time will be different", but it never was because I hadn't changed the fundamental way I was showing up. So I would eventually start feeling the same frustrations and resentment, all over again.

Personally, the costs are equally significant. Chronic anxiety becomes your baseline feeling. You're constantly feeling on edge, always monitoring those around you, worried about what they might be thinking. You lose connection with yourself. You don't know your own preferences, opinions, or desires because you've spent so long focused on what everyone else wants. Your relationships feel distant and superficial because people only see the version of you you've curated for the office, never the real you.

And each time you override your needs and wants to make someone else comfortable, it gets harder to trust yourself. The pattern becomes so automatic that you don't even realize you're doing it anymore. You've lost the ability to access your own judgment and instincts. And that compounds over time until you genuinely have no idea how to make decisions based on what you actually want, instead of what you think you're supposed to want.

There are some core beliefs that underpin chronic fawning, and until you challenge these beliefs, you're going to keep defaulting to the same patterns even when you intellectually know better. 

Here are three old beliefs that require your attention: 

Old belief number one, "Conflict means the relationship is over." This belief is what keeps you avoiding necessary conversations, smoothing over problems that need to be addressed, or staying silent when you should speak up. Reframe this as: Conflict is information and an opportunity for repair. Healthy professional relationships can handle disagreement. In fact, the strongest relationships are the ones where you can have hard conversations and work through them together. 

Old belief number two, "I need my manager or leadership to validate that I'm worthy." This is the belief that had me putting supervisors on pedestals for decades, waiting for someone to tell me I was ready for the next level. Reframe this as: I can determine my own level of confidence. I trust myself, my knowledge, and my skills. Leadership doesn't hold the keys to my worth. I decide what I'm capable of and what I'm ready for. 

And perhaps most importantly, old belief number three, "Something is fundamentally wrong with me." This is the shame that underlies so much of the fawning response. Reframe this as: Fawning is adaptive. It protected me. My nervous system did exactly what it was supposed to do to keep me safe in difficult circumstances. It was protecting me. And now I'm choosing to respond differently because I have options I didn't have before. 

Now, let's talk about what you gain when you start breaking this pattern, because honestly, the benefits are profound and they extend into every area of your life. 

You build a sense of internal safety that you can return to when everything around you feels chaotic or out of control. This is huge. Instead of needing everything in your environment to be perfect and everyone to be happy with you before you can feel okay, you develop this quiet, stable place inside yourself. And that changes everything about how you move through the world. 

You also gain freedom from the exhausting, never-ending need for external validation. You stop needing other people to tell you that you're good enough, you're ready, or you're worthy. You feel it yourself. And when you do seek feedback or input from others, it's from a place of genuine curiosity, not out of a desperate need for approval. 

But perhaps the deepest transformation is this: you realize you were never broken to begin with. All that shame you carried around about being too sensitive, too needy, too anxious, too much, or not enough—it falls away when you understand that you were just adapting to your difficult circumstances. You reclaim your power. You recognize that you don't have to keep striving to be worthy. You already are. You always were. You're just finally allowing yourself to see it. 

Before we wrap up, I want to touch on a few things that people tend to overlook when they're working on breaking the fawning response, because these insights can make the difference between sustainable change and just temporarily white-knuckling your way through it.

First, this is not a character flaw or a self-esteem issue. I cannot emphasize this enough. For years, I thought the problem was that I wasn't confident enough or I was just fundamentally weak. And that framing kept me stuck because it added more shame on top of the pattern I was trying to break. Understanding that fawning is a nervous system response—an unconscious adaptive reaction to perceived threat—changed everything for me. It allowed me to approach this with curiosity and compassion instead of self-judgment. 

Second, awareness alone isn't enough, but it is essential. You're going to have moments where you become aware of your fawning and think, "Now that I know what the problem is, shouldn't that be enough to fix it?". But awareness is just the first step. The actual change comes through practice, through repeatedly choosing something different, through tolerating the discomfort of not defaulting to your old patterns. But you can't change what you can't see, so celebrate the awareness. It's not the end of the journey, but it's absolutely necessary as a place to start. 

And third, being uncomfortable doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. This is so important. When you start honoring your needs, setting boundaries, or speaking up, it's going to feel uncomfortable. That discomfort is not a sign that you should stop. It's a sign that you're doing something new, something your nervous system isn't used to, yet. The discomfort is part of the process. Each time you move through it and survive—each time you tolerate someone's disappointment or displeasure without immediately backpedaling—you're proving to yourself that you can handle this. You're building your capacity to be with discomfort, and that's what makes you stronger. 

So, here's what I want you to take away from all of this: the fawn response is not evidence that you're broken or weak. It's evidence that you're human, that you adapted well to the environments you were navigating. But adaptation that was necessary at one point can become maladaptive when you're using it in situations where you actually have more power and more options than you realize. 

You can't outrun these patterns by changing jobs or changing relationships. The common thread is you, but that's also your power. You get to decide to show up differently. You get to build the internal stability and self-trust that allows you to have flexibility in your responses, instead of automatically defaulting to fawning as a way of protecting yourself. 

Start where you are. Notice when you're doing it. Pause before automatically saying 'yes'. Ask yourself what you actually think and want. Practice in low-stakes situations. Build your capacity to tolerate discomfort. Show yourself through experience that you can handle other people's disappointment and you'll still be okay. Build relationships where people see and accept the real you, not just the curated version you think is more palatable. 

And remember, life is meant to be experienced, not solved. You don't need permission to be who you are. You don't need to wait until you're perfect or fixed or good enough. The only approval you've ever needed was your own. Everything else is just noise. 

And that's it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Recognizing Your Fawn Response at cindyesliger.com/ podcast, episode two hundred and seventeen.

Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I'm on Instagram @cindyesliger. My email address is info@cindyesliger.com. 

If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out The Confidence Collective. It's my monthly coaching program where we dig a little deeper into what's holding you back in your career and we find the workarounds. We help you overcome the barriers and create the career you want. Join me over at cindyesliger.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in The Confidence Collective.  

Until next week, I'm Cindy Esliger. Thanks for listening.