What Doing More Couldn't Fix
I was in the middle of building a conference with a team that barely knew me, and I noticed something old creeping back in.
A tightness in my chest. A thought running underneath everything else. “They aren’t going to like me.” Questioning, “Did I offend them?”
So I did what I’ve always done when those thoughts show up. I offered more help than anyone asked for. I made myself useful past the point of necessary.
I’ve done years of work to rewire that reflex. And there it was anyway, quiet and automatic, doing exactly what it was trained to do a long time ago.
Where the Training Started
The training started early. In sixth grade, my teacher nicknamed me Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. It was meant as a compliment, and I took it as one. I learned that acting older than my age, being the responsible one, the capable one, the one who didn’t need help, earned me something real. Praise. Trust. A kind of safety. By high school I was valedictorian, collecting every award I could reach. The lesson had already set in deep. I don’t get to be less than.
College loosened the grip a little. Nobody there knew the version of me that had to be perfect, and for a while that felt like room to breathe. But the pattern doesn’t disappear just because the pressure eases. It waits. It came back with marriage, and again with a career, and again when I became a mother, each time asking me to prove I could hold it all and hold it well.
Then I stepped into a career where being a woman worked against me. I was educated, prepared, and high performing, and it didn’t matter. I was still questioned. Still second-guessed. Still held back. So I did what my old training knew how to do. I decided that if I performed better, worked harder, achieved more, the bias would have nowhere left to stand.
During COVID, our senior leader had a medical procedure and stepped away for weeks. I held the organization steady in his absence. I thought, finally, this would be proof, that people would change what they see when they look at me.
It didn’t. It did the opposite.
My competence didn’t soften anyone’s discomfort with me leading. It sharpened it. The success I thought would earn me acceptance ended up costing me some of it.
Why Achievement Was Never Going to Close the Gap
That’s the part that took me the longest to understand. Hyperresponsibility and overfunctioning aren’t flaws. They’re strategies, and they worked, for a while, for a child who needed to feel safe and worthy of love. The problem is what they quietly cost an adult. For me, it cost the freedom to experience acceptance without achievement. I didn’t have room to be less than. There was no rest, only proving.
Here’s the part research backs up, and it matched exactly what I lived. Old emotional learning doesn’t update just because we understand it intellectually. Bruce Ecker’s work on memory reconsolidation shows that a fear like this only shifts when we have a new experience that directly contradicts it while the old fear is still active. Insight alone doesn’t do it. An experience does.
In other words, I needed an experience where I was accepted, especially when I wasn’t thriving.
What Actually Changed It
This came from a friend. I told him what was happening during the conference prep: the fear underneath the over-helping, the old thought that people wouldn’t like me if I stopped proving myself. He knew me in my insecurities and offered acceptance without asking me to change a single thing. That experience is what shifted the pressure. It wasn’t a mindset trick. It was a relationship.
This is what I want people to understand. It’s a relational interaction that helps us regulate and overcome a past trigger, not a better strategy, not more effort, not another framework to apply alone in a quiet room.
THE ASK: If you’re the one who’s always been the responsible one, the capable one, the one who doesn’t need help, I’d ask you this. What would it take for you to notice your own version of “they aren’t going to like me” the next time it shows up?
THE DO: This week, name the reflex out loud to one person you trust, before you act on it. Not the polished version. The real one, the moment you feel the urge to over-help or over-prove. Let them respond. That’s the experience your nervous system is waiting for, not another framework applied alone in a quiet room.
This is the exact terrain we work on inside The Regulated Leader, the cohort I built for leaders carrying more than they’ve said out loud. Enrollment opens September 2. If any part of this resonates, I’d love to talk.
Bravely on, Julia
Sources
- Ecker, B., Ticic, R., and Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation. New York: Routledge.