231. Becoming Someone Your Younger Self Didn't Know Was Possible

Our nervous systems often default to fawning, shrinking, appeasing, and over-functioning, especially in workplaces that reward invisibility over voice. Wholeness, unlike perfection, lets us hold fear and growth at the same time as we reconnect with childhood curiosity and rebuild trust in our own instincts. Together we learn that reclaiming our value isn't a single leap but an ongoing, nonlinear practice of pausing, reorienting, and choosing what's true for us.

Fawning is what happens when your nervous system reads a threat, and fighting back isn't an option, running away isn't a good choice, and freezing isn't going to help either—so your body does something else instead.

Are you achieving success at work but still feeling like you're operating with the volume turned down? Are you saying yes to extra projects, smoothing over tension, or over-apologizing before checking-in with what you actually want? Are you chasing a perfect, polished version of yourself instead of feeling whole exactly as you are right now?

You'll learn that the instinct to diminish yourself, over-apologize, and keep the peace isn't a confidence problem—it's a nervous system response called fawning, and it can be unlearned.

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

• Why fawning gets quietly costs high-achieving women at work

• 3 practical tips to interrupt automatic people-pleasing

• Why choosing wholeness over perfection leaves room for growth, mistakes, and curiosity

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode two hundred and thirty-one. 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. 

Close your eyes for a second, if you're somewhere that you can. I want you to picture yourself at ten years old—or seven or thirteen—whatever age feels the most YOU before anyone explained to you what was practical, what was realistic, what girls were good at and what they weren't. What were you exploring or building? What were you taking apart to see how it worked? What did you get lost in for hours? The kind of 'lost' where somebody had to call your name three times before you heard them. Hold that image for a second. 

Now, think about your career today—your title, your projects, the meeting rooms you sit in, the things you've actually designed, solved, or shipped. If you showed that ten year old a snapshot of your life right now, my guess is she wouldn't believe it. She would not have imagined it. Some of what you do today probably didn't even exist as a job when she was dreaming. And yet, if you're anything like a lot of the women I talk to in engineering, there's a 'but'. But something still feels smaller than it should, quieter than it should. Like you're doing all of this with the volume turned down. 

In this episode, we're taking a closer look at that gap—between what you've actually become and what you still won't let yourself reach for. We're not talking about becoming a different person. It's about becoming the person your younger self didn't even know was a possibility. 

Think about that for a second—becoming who your younger self didn't know was possible. It's not about achievement. My guess is you already have many of the achievements. It's about permission. It's about what you let yourself see as available to you going forward versus what you were told should be "enough", or "realistic" or "not in the realm of possibility" for you. 

And for women in engineering, this isn't an abstract feel-good idea. You've spent your career in organizations where you had to prove your competence before anyone would consider extending you the benefit of the doubt that your male peers got by default. Rooms where being "right" wasn't enough, you also had to be "right" in a way that didn't make anyone else feel uncomfortable.

You learned to do excellent work and manage how that work landed with other people. That's two jobs. Most of your colleagues are only doing one. 

So, when I talk about reaching higher, about seeing your actual value, about refusing the limit someone else decided was reasonable—I'm not talking about vague inspiration. I'm talking about undoing a very specific, very learned habit of playing small. And to undo it, we have to talk about where it comes from. Which means we have to talk about how your nervous system tends to respond when you feel unsafe. 

Most people know the common threat responses as "fight or flight". Some people know that "freeze" got added to that list at some point. Fewer people know about the fourth one: "fawn".

Fawning is what happens when your nervous system reads a threat and fighting back isn't an option, running away isn't a good choice, and freezing isn't going to help either—so your body does something else instead. It appeases. It smooths things over. It makes itself less threatening, more agreeable, and less detectable in order to reduce the danger. This isn't a decision you make consciously. It happens in a fraction of a second, unconsciously, because your body's main job is keeping you safe by whatever means necessary. 

And here's what matters: fawning is not weakness. It's not a personality flaw. It's a completely legitimate survival strategy that your body reaches for when the other options aren't available. If you grew up having to navigate an unpredictable caregiver, or a boss you couldn't push back on, or any ongoing situation where fighting back would make things worse and there was nowhere else to go—fawning is what got you through it. It worked. You have to give your body credit for doing what needed to be done, at that time.

The problem isn't that fawning exists. The problem is when it becomes our only setting. When it runs constantly in situations that aren't actually dangerous because your body never got the memo that the threat level changed. 

Let's look at how this situation shows up for us at work, because I'd bet a lot of this is going to sound familiar. 

It looks like flying under the radar, quietly doing excellent work and hoping nobody looks too closely, because being seen feels riskier than being overlooked. It looks like saying yes to taking on yet another troubled project, doing the note-taking in meetings, feeling responsible for the emotional labor of smoothing over a tense meeting, before you've even asked yourself if you have the bandwidth or even the desire to do these things. 

It looks like over-apologizing for things that were never your fault. It looks like sitting in a meeting with a better idea than the one that's currently being discussed, but not speaking up because raising your hand feels like a risk that you can't quite put into words.

It can also look like something as small as not taking up your full armrest on a plane, or not unsubscribing from a newsletter because you don't want whoever's on the other end to feel like you don't support them. Tiny, almost invisible acts of making yourself smaller so no one has any reason to be unhappy with you. 

And here's the trap: a lot of workplaces reward this. Fawning gets relabelled as being a "team player", or being "easy to work with", or being "low maintenance". And who doesn't want to be known for that? No one in the working world calls it a threat response—they call it professionalism. So you get praised for the very thing that's quietly costing you in so many ways. 

This is not a self-esteem issue. I know it's tempting to hear all of that and think, okay, so I just need more confidence. I need to believe in myself more. But that's not quite it either. You can know your own worth intellectually and still find your body automatically softening, agreeing, and being more accommodating, before your conscious mind has had a chance to catch up. That's not a belief problem. That's your nervous system that adapted to what it perceives as a threat, and doing what it was trained to do. 

Which means the goal isn't to shame yourself out of it. Shame doesn't help anyone heal from this. If anything, it just gives the pattern more fuel. The goal is awareness. Noticing when it is happening, understanding why it's happening, and starting to ask, in each specific moment, is this actually a threat to me right now, or is this an old alarm going off in a building that isn't on fire anymore? 

You were never broken. Your body built a very sophisticated system for staying safe in circumstances that called for it. The work now isn't demolition—it's flexibility. It's about learning that you're allowed to move in and out of that state, instead of living in it permanently, by default. 

Here's what becomes possible once safety isn't what's driving your every move. 

You start to actually see your value—not the version of your value that's been filtered through what feels safe to claim out loud, but what your knowledge, your judgment, your years of hard-earned expertise genuinely bring to the table. Most women in engineering I know underestimate this by a wide margin. Whatever number you'd put on the value of what you've contributed, it's probably higher than that. Considerably higher. 

You start to reach for more, not because someone gave you permission, but because you stop letting others set limits on what's possible for you. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us absorbed a quiet, specific idea of what was "acceptable" or "realistic" for someone like us to want in the workplace. It's not something that was necessarily said out loud. Sometimes, it was just the absence of anyone who looked like you at the level you were aiming for. But you can move beyond these imaginary limits. They aren't real, they're just what's familiar to you. 

And growth takes time. That's not a caveat, that's just how these things work. You are allowed to still be growing into this. You don't have to have it all sorted out by some invisible deadline that's imposed on you, or better yet, self-imposed. There is time to grow, and no, you are not falling behind. 

Part of using that time well is getting ruthless about what actually matters to you, instead of what other people have told you matters most. A lot of energy gets spent maintaining things that don't move you forward—appeasing people who are never going to be satisfied, chasing metrics that don't reflect your real contribution, or saying yes to things out of habit rather than desire. Focusing more on what matters most isn't about doing less; it's about spending your finite attention on your actual priorities instead of everyone else's. 

Now, here's a distinction that I think is one of the most useful reframes available to anyone building a career on their own terms and that's the difference between wholeness and perfection. 

Most of us were trained to chase perfection, me included. I was always somehow hoping to have a perfect performance review, as ridiculous as that sounds when I say it out loud. I also wanted to have perfect composure under pressure. And unfortunately, that hasn't happened either. Perfection has one very specific problem in that it's fixed. It's a 'finish line'. Once you define what perfect looks like, anything that isn't it, is by definition a failure. Perfection doesn't let you evolve—it just confines you to a smaller and smaller box. 

Wholeness is a completely different thing. Wholeness is a sense of completeness, but not yet complete. It's not 'finished'. It's the experience of being comfortable in your own skin, right now, at this exact point in your career—including the messy parts, the contradictions, and the parts of you that are still in progress. 

Perfection is fixed. Wholeness is expansive. And that's a big difference. 

And here's the part that surprises most people: wholeness is not the same as happiness. It's not being in a perpetually good mood. As you evolve, as you get more comfortable in your own skin, you are going to have to confront some genuinely painful things about yourself and about the environment you work in. And here's the counterintuitive part: it's often in exactly those moments, the hard ones, where you feel the most whole. Not despite the difficulty, but sometimes because of it. 

It's a "both/and". You can be standing fully in your wholeness and still be afraid, still be in the middle of three different experiments that haven't resolved yet, still be iterating, adjusting, and occasionally getting it wrong. Wholeness was never about having it all figured out. It's about being fully present for whatever you are experiencing. 

So, if it's not about arriving at some polished, finished version of yourself—what is the work we need to be doing on a daily basis? 

A lot of it starts with something almost embarrassingly simple, like following our curiosity. Getting interested in things again. Following the thread just because it's interesting to you, not because you can immediately justify the return on investment.

Go back to you as a ten year old, or however old you were when you felt the most YOU, the most free. What did she like to do? Not what she was good at, necessarily—but how she liked to spend her time. Maybe it was taking things apart to figure out how they worked. Maybe it was drawing elaborate diagrams of imaginary machines. Maybe it was trying to build a replica of something you saw in a movie, just to see if you could. Maybe it was asking, "but why?" until the adults around her ran out of patience. 

Whatever it was, there is very often a version of that thread still running through your life, usually disguised, and very likely underused. And one of the most radical things you can do for your career is to ask: how could I do more of that now, as an adult, in a form that I could actually get paid to do? I'm not suggesting that you quit your job to engage in that just yet. Sometimes, it's smaller—steering your projects toward the parts that light you up, picking up the skill you've been curious about for years, or letting yourself be a beginner at something again, whether it's at work or outside of work. 

Curiosity and creativity are the building blocks of a career that's actually sustainable over the long haul. Because a career built entirely on keeping yourself safe and proving to others that you're competent might be where you're currently at, but it won't feed you long-term. But exploring more of what you're genuinely curious about will feel more fulfilling. 

Now, I want to be honest with you about something, because in my experience, this is not a one-and-done process. 

If you put some effort into this, you are going to make real progress and then, out of nowhere, find yourself falling back into old patterns. You'll end up taking a detour, or two. You'll find yourself wanting to prove people wrong, again, and suddenly you're white-knuckling towards some impressive outcome instead of building something more sustainable. You'll get impatient. You'll try to brute-force a result—by pushing harder, attempting to control more of the uncontrollables, forcing the timeline—and it will not work. It never does. Brute force doesn't tend to be the mechanism that gets you anywhere good. 

When that happens—and it will happen. This is a "when", not an "if". You'll need to reorient yourself. That's it. Not start over. Not judge yourself, because this too didn't go as planned. Just make some minor adjustments. 

Because no matter whether you're feeling like you've somehow fallen behind, you've probably done more than you're giving yourself credit for. And at some point, you're going to surprise yourself—a new situation is going to arise, something that would have flattened you a year or two ago, and you're going to realize, mid-crisis, that you know exactly what to do. You're going to confidently swing into action and do what needs to be done. 

So, I want to assure you that you don't have to be afraid of getting lost, or stuck, or sidelined for a while. Because when it happens, you will know how to reset. This isn't a single ladder you climb once. It's more of a practice. Some people even plan to sit down and revisit it once a year because there are always more layers of the old, inherited patterns still waiting to be uncovered. It's easy to slide back into what's familiar, even when you know it's not serving you anymore. That's not a personal failure. That's just what familiarity does for all of us. 

So, practically speaking, what are we to actually do with all of this? 

Start small and start closer to home than you'd think. Some advice might tell you to jump in with both feet and go set a boundary with the most difficult person in your life immediately. But if you don't yet have the internal stability to hold that boundary, or to tolerate what happens if the other person doesn't like it, that could backfire on you. It could trigger people to lash out, leading you to backtrack into your old patterns as a method of self-protection. So sometimes, the better starting point is to look internally. 

When someone makes a request of you, and your instinct is to give an immediate yes—because you're looking for someone's approval, or because saying no feels dangerous even when it isn't—take a pause before you answer. Say something like, "Let me check my schedule and get back to you." That pause interrupts the automatic override and gives your brain a moment to catch up and actually weigh in, before you resort to your default response. 

When you notice yourself overthinking—whether that's bracing for a repeat of something that you didn't enjoy the first time around, or trying to get out in front of a threat that hasn't actually happened yet—bring yourself back to using your senses. Actually look around the room you're in, or take a walk outside. Notice what you see, hear, feel with your hands, and smell in the air. It sounds almost too simple to be effective, but it's one of the most direct ways to ground yourself. 

And build the habit of checking-in with yourself, honestly, before you give someone an answer, to reflect on what you think about the situation. Don't just default to what you think is expected of you, or what you think will keep the peace. Ask yourself: what do I actually think about what they're asking of me? What do I actually want to do? Most of us override these types of questions and give the answer we think they want to hear. 

None of this is about trying to control every outcome. It's more about trading that desire for control for more of an experimental approach. Trying something. Watching what happens. Adjusting. Trusting your own instincts as important data, instead of constantly outsourcing the validation you seek to someone else.

And here's what tends to happen as this shift takes hold. You become less anxious while achieving more, not less. Your relationships help you feel more connected. They become more reciprocal because you're not keeping people at a distance. People notice something different in you, and they don't pull away from it. They might even lean in. They want to support you. Because someone who trusts their own instincts, who isn't operating from a place of chronic appeasement, is genuinely a more valuable collaborator.

And there's a wider effect, too. You start to become proof to those looking up to you, just by showing up differently. You become an example of what's actually possible. That matters more than most of us realize. Someone, right now, is watching how you handle yourself in these types of situations—even if you never hear about it. 

This isn't about controlling every last thing about your career, or developing some polished, unshakeable version of yourself. It's about choosing curiosity and joy as the actual building blocks for your career decisions, dedicating yourself to what excites you, and building something that's unmistakably yours—instead of a lukewarm version of what you were told you should be. 

So again, go back to that ten year old version of yourself. My bet is she didn't know any of what you've achieved to date would be possible—not the job title you've earned, not the expertise you've amassed, and not the confidence with which you walk into that boardroom. But I would also bet she also didn't know she'd spend so many years managing everyone else's discomfort with her success. Both of those things are true. 

The version of you that's still ahead is not predetermined. You don't have to know exactly what that looks like yet. You just have to stay curious enough to find out. 

And that's it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Becoming Whole at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode two hundred and thirty-one.

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.