PART 1: Addressing Childhood Wounds in Business: Unravelling Perfectionism, Imposter Syndrome, and People-Pleasing to Unlock Your True Potential.

Is your inner child secretly sabotaging your business success? Explore how unresolved childhood issues manifest in the professional lives of female entrepreneurs, leading to imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and people-pleasing behaviors. Discover how high criticism or feeling overshadowed by siblings in childhood can shape your decision-making, self-esteem, and relationships at work. This episode emphasizes the importance of addressing these root causes to enhance your confidence, assertiveness, and overall business success.

Learn how attachment theory and cultural variations, like Japanese parenting practices, influence professional behaviors. We dive into the complexities of perfectionism and its impact on burnout, procrastination, and delegation. Understand how early life experiences with conflict-ridden households or emotionally neglectful parents lead to people-pleasing tendencies and boundary-setting difficulties. By recognizing and healing these patterns, you'll gain the self-awareness needed to transform both your business and personal life, unlocking your true potential.

Chapters

• 0:10 Healing Your Inner Child in Business
• 9:32 Perfectionism and Fear of Rejection
• 18:26 Overcoming People-Pleasing in Business

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hello and welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about how your inner child shows up in your business, in your job, in the things, because your inner child is a fundamental part of you. So it doesn't matter if you're with your friends in a relationship, if you're at work, if you're running a business, your inner child just doesn't turn itself off. It is constantly a part of you. So today I really wanted to focus in around your inner child showing up in either your workplace or in running your business. Okay, because, especially for female entrepreneurs, like it can get in the way of decision making, your overall success. It can really affect your self-esteem, how you build relationships in your business, how you build relationships at work. And you know, what I want to say to you is that this episode is going to be more about, like, raising awareness. Below I'm going to link a bunch of other episodes about where to start with healing your inner child mother wounds, father wounds, things like that. Okay, so I'm just going to jump straight in. There's so fucking many of these things to go through today, but stick with me and some of these are going to resonate. Some of them are not. So the first one that is up is called imposter syndrome. So imposter syndrome is when we feel like we're a fake. We feel like we're going to get exposed for being a fake. We feel like we're inadequate at what we're doing. We're constantly doubting our abilities and there's probably a part of fear in there which is about deserving success. Right, and this can lead to you underpricing your services. It could be like over delivering to prove your worth or just avoiding opportunities that could lead to growth. You may feel like I'm not going to reach out to that client, I'm not going to say that thing in a meeting, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do that because it's really going to get in the way of me feeling safe. And don't forget, your subconscious mind was formed from the point of you being zero to eight, so whatever experiences you had during that time really shaped your ability to feel safe and nobody really talks about this, like the importance of how being safe and feeling safe is because if you don't feel safe, you always act from a pace of fear and scarcity and worry, rather than feeling safe and making really truly logical decisions. And don't forget your subconscious mind. It pulls the trigger on everything. When you're presented with a situation, your subconscious mind will go. I've kind of dealt with something like this previously. This is how I reacted then. That floods into your conscious mind. That floods into your thoughts, your feelings, your actions and then how you behave. So your subconscious mind is so, so important. Okay, this is why I do so much subconscious reprogramming with my clients, why we do nervous system regulation with my clients. Because, with all of this stuff, this is the only way to fix it.

Speaker 1: 2:57

And what I want to say is that you can take a single one of the things I'm going to talk about today and work on them individually with a coach. Guess what, unless you go back and you pull out the root, you are wasting money. You are with coaches who are like oh yeah, I'm going to teach you how to love yourself for who you are, or I'm going to teach you how to not be a perfectionist anymore, how to overcome imposter syndrome, these types of things. But actually what happens with me is that you go back to the root, we go back to the root, and when we pull out the root, other issues collapse around it, right? So, for example, if there are fears of like imposter syndrome, I've gone right off on a tangent, but let's just go with it. Somebody else needs to hear this. Let's go and be like okay.

Speaker 1: 3:40

So people pleasing certain boundaries, being assertive, having low self-esteem right, they can all really interconnect into root cause problems. So, for example, with that you may have been in a household where you feel like you had to just go along with things. You might have ended up being stuck in foreign where you just go along with things to avoid conflict. So you don't set boundaries because you've been taught, or maybe you've seen by your mum or your dad to just go along with things because it's easier. That means your throat gets blocked. That means it's really hard for you to be assertive. Your low self-esteem can come from the fact that you know that you have to keep yourself small to be safe. So there's so many things that you can do. So there's so many things that you can do. And when you actually go into the fact of like, okay, this was based around the childhood home, how mom and dad reacted. When you go in and you start to heal that, you heal all four of those issues. So this is why I always say, like, go back to the root issue. And, speaking of going back. Let's go back to imposter syndrome now, so imposter syndrome. Speaking of going back, let's go back to imposter syndrome now. So imposter syndrome.

Speaker 1: 4:47

So this could be, from high, like being highly criticized. As a child, you might have felt like you didn't really deserve success. You may have had siblings who were really, really successful with their achievements and always getting getting the praise, always being seen as maybe the favorite child. Um, whilst you kind of just carried on doing with what you were doing, you might have felt like the house was really unsafe to express yourself and to really own your own, your achievements. So what does that look like? Your parents might have gone. Oh, that's good, but you could have done better. You know it could have been.

Speaker 1: 5:21

You may have felt there were high expectations from your parents, the need to be perfect. When we need to be perfect, it's often from a safe, um, a thing of safety, but I'm gonna talk about that because perfectionism is its own thing. You may have been compared by your parents to your peers, to your siblings. Why are you not doing better than that? Like them, and also like it didn't matter what you do. Your parents didn't give you any praise or validation.

Speaker 1: 5:45

You might have experienced failure or rejection early on. So, like you may have experienced failing exams in school, you may have, you know, felt like a bit of a failure when you read something wrong out loud in class that one time I got made fun of. There may even be a cultural or social pressure as well, and this is where, like marginalised groups, I often social pressure as well, and this is where, like marginalized groups, I often feel it as well, and obviously I'm not from a marginalized group, so I'm not going to talk too much about this because obviously I don't understand it. But I do understand that cultural and social pressure can lead to people not feeling good enough or feeling like they're going to be exposed as a fraud, depending on what culture that you're in. You may have had the complete fucking opposite. You might have had an overprotective parent who, like, is micromanaging every single culture that you're in. You may have had the complete fucking opposite. You might have had an overprotective parent who, like, is micromanaging every single thing that you do. And this is really hard Like, because if they're micromanaging everything you do, you feel like nothing that you do is ever good enough. Everything is really fucking hard and with childhood trauma or abuse. It can deeply, deeply affect a child's sense of self-worth and identity. Okay, and survivors of abuse or trauma they often feel inadequate, they have self-doubt, they believe they are fundamentally flawed, they may believe that they're broken and this can all contribute to imposter syndrome as well. Okay, and also there are issues around attachment with this. So, for example, if you are anxious or avoiding attachment, again, this can contribute to feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt.

Speaker 1: 7:16

So quickly about attachment theory fuck, and this was meant to be a short podcast do you know what this might have to be? A fucking two-parter might have to be a fucking two-parter because I feel like there's so much knowledge I really want to give on this. There's so much I want to say so with, like the attachment study. So, oh, my god, why can't I remember the person who did the attachment study? Right? A quick google Rudolf Schaefer and Peggy Emerson back in the 60s looked at 60 babies and worked out what is known as attachment theory. So if you're in this inner child healing space, if you're in different things, then you would have heard about attachment theory before. You might be like, fuck, I don't even know what attachment I am. There are some online quizzes. Um, you can do if you want to work out what your attachment theory is, um, or your attachment type, which can tell you a lot, and what.

Speaker 1: 8:06

No matter what people tell you, it is possible to heal and come back to a secure attachment, or it's possible for you to come into a relationship with somebody who is a secure attachment and that actually helps you heal as well. But that's beside the point. See what I mean when I tell you I want to give you so much about this for fuck's sake. Right, let's get into the attachment theory. So basically, there was a study that was done 60 babies and this worked out the attachment between mum and baby. So, for example, um, for a secure, attached baby, the mum would be with the baby in the room. Then mum would leave the room, the baby would cry and be really, really upset and then when mum come back in, the baby would be fine and would be secure and would calm down. So the second baby of your anxious attachment type, the anxious baby. So mum would leave the room, baby would cry and then mum would come back and the baby would still continue to cry. Then, if we're having the avoidant, then what would happen is that the baby would be in the room, the mum would leave and then the mum would come back. You know the baby would be upset and then the mum would come back and the baby would calm down, but he or she would avoid. Mum would just basically ignore her and that is your avoidant okay. And there is like another thing called disorganized attachment.

Speaker 1: 9:32

Now where you have elements of all this different stuff. Remember, we are human beings, we don't clearly fit into a box and also culturally, it's really really important to acknowledge that this is what happens in western culture. In other cultures is different, like, for example, in japan with. This is super interesting to me. I feel like I get just get on my shit about attachment theory. But in Japan, for example, when the mum, what are typically anxious attachment type would still be secure in Japan because of the way that they parent and the fact that actually the way that they parent is that mums wouldn't necessarily be away from their babies at all, so that would still be like classed as a cure. So yeah, if you're from like a different culture is also to be mindful that if your culture maybe isn't a traditionally western culture, then to be mindful that this can cure up differently in your culture.

Speaker 1: 10:26

Anyway, I was talking about imposter syndrome and I feel like I've covered that in extreme detail. 10 minutes of me talking about various things to do in imposter syndrome this is gonna be the longest fucking podcast ever. Okay, let's go into perfectionism. So perfectionism is literally about having unrealistic high standards for yourself that often stem from a feeling of needing to be worthy and to avoid criticism. That was present in childhood. Okay, so what this could show up like in your business, in work, or whatever is about procrastination, burnout, difficulty, delegating tasks, which can really, like, stifle your business growth. How is this showing up in work? The exact same thing. You're saying yes when you really need to say no. You're getting burnt out. And when like and I want to talk about burnout for a second and talk about how burnout is a really fucking serious thing it's not just something where everyone's like, oh my god, I'm so burnt out. I just feel like being burnt out, being depressed and being and like, like trauma. These are words, oh yeah and narcissism these are words that are just thrown around in society now, but I'm like, if you understand the true fucking meaning of it, then you know it's a really serious thing. So burnout means that your body physically cannot function anymore because you have literally completely fried your fucking nervous system. Okay, so don't be that person who willy-nilly throws these words around, because they're really serious and actually I feel like it takes away the the value or not value, but kind of the seriousness around these words when when we're talking about them and it's not fair for the people who are actually going through it. So that's my, that's my opinion on that. Babe.

Speaker 1: 12:11

Now, perfectionism you may have had very critical or demanding parents. Okay, it may be impossible to please them. Nothing is ever good enough or I'd be like, oh, that was good, but yeah, actually, no, that's not great. You may have had conditional love and approval. So, for example, if you were doing really great in your achievements, you might have felt love and approval from your parents then, and then you may have developed these like perfectionist tendencies, because then you always feel like you're worthy of love and acceptance. But I'm here to tell you you're worthy of love and acceptance regardless of what you do, okay, and when we have parents who give us conditional love, it can be so confusing. And then what actually happens is that like we ingrain that with us, and then what happens is we end up with emotionally unavailable friends, partners, other relationships in our lives. Then we may end up in work, and guess what?

Speaker 1: 13:05

A lot of the time I find that some clients actually work in organizations where the boss, theo or whatever actually mimic relationships of their parents, like I have been there before where I've worked for a woman oh, my god, she was like very conditional in her approval of me and, yeah, I think it just depended on what bloody mood she was in on that day. But she absolutely like mimicked this mother figure that I thought like I wanted. But actually she was very emotionally unavailable. She was very much like cut throat at work. She'd obviously worked her way up the ladder so much and she had like been very ruthless to get to the point where she was at and like part of me saw that as like you had to work really hard to get to get to where you are, and I respect it. But she had lost a lot of empathy and compassion along the way as well. So when I'm like sitting there crying because, um, a 16 year old had been murdered, she's telling me you're too sensitive, you need to get a grip. So, so yeah, and then often I would have that sort of response from my mum when I would be in like overly emotional about something. She'd be like oh, just pull yourself together. You know that, that typical phrase, so yeah, it can really show up in different parts of your life.

Speaker 1: 14:16

And you know, when it comes to perfectionism, we have the fear of rejection, we have the fear of punishment. We like feel like we don't want to be rejected. We, we are fundamentally like community beings and we always want to be in a sense of belonging, and so fear of making mistakes can really drive us for perfection. And you know, it could just be because you didn't want to have an argument with your parents, you didn't want to argue with your siblings, you didn't want to feel like a failure, like because nobody likes to feel like a failure, and I feel like failure only really exists within us. Like remember the last time you went? Oh, my god, sandra, you're a fucking failure. When the fuck did anybody do that last time? Nobody, nobody does that. We only do it to ourselves.

Speaker 1: 15:00

There may be high expectations of pressure. Again, this can be a cultural thing. I even see it like in my clients from Scotland and Ireland. They have very high expectations from their parents. And, yeah, when success is expected rather than celebrated, it must be like such an intense pressure to always meet and exceed expectations to be valued. So, yeah, tough, tough one. You may have trauma or emotional neglect. So if you're emotionally neglect, you may be striving for protection, for perfection, because this is a way to feel safe, to feel valuable, to feel in control of chaos. This leads into that need to constantly be in control of something, because if we're not in control, it's incredibly difficult to let go. It really really is. So, yeah, um, I feel like that's all I'm going to say on perfectionism, because that's a lot. That is a lot.

Speaker 1: 16:00

And we've kind of touched on the next one already, which is about fear of rejection. So if you're an entrepreneur, if you're in your business, you're going to be really sensitive to criticism and failure. If there is that fear of rejection, it may prevent you from taking necessary risks, launching new products, reaching out to new clients, you know, expanding your business. Why? Because you're afraid of rejection. You don't want to fail, and that's okay. Everybody doesn't want to fail, nobody likes to be rejected Okay, nobody. But it's really really important when we understand this in our business and how it's blocking us. Again. The fear of rejection comes from excessive criticism, conditional love, high parental expectations, the fear of failure. What happened when you were a kid and you failed an exam? What was the outcome of that? You may have had a lack of positive reinforcement, there may have been emotional neglect, comparison to your siblings, social, societal pressures like all of these things that we've talked about really show up under the umbrella of fear of rejection, which really impact us and our ability to step forward.

Speaker 1: 17:06

And, um, I feel like I want to say something as well about being a woman specifically. Being a woman specifically means that we have got years and years of oppression and that is passed down through our DNA. So epigenetics is a real fucking thing. It's a scientific study about how traits get passed down through generations, because 98% of your DNA is your emotions, your behaviors and your personality traits. Okay, it's not just about how you look. It's all about how you feel, how you act, how you behave, and that is then reinforced by the spoken word that is spoken in your family, your family story, your family identity, about how it is to work, how it is to own a business, how it is to work, how it is to own a business, how it is to have relationships. Like that narrative is spun for you before you even arrive, like we even arrive on this earth plane, and then you get born into this family, who already have a story, and you adapt to that story and I find, like a lot of the people that I work with around breaking the ancestral lineage and things like that, they are rewriting their story, they are changing their trajectory, which is a really, really hard job. So if that is you, I want you to just remind yourself that you're healing your entire family lineage and that is a big fucking job to do. Okay, so let's move on.

Speaker 1: 18:26

I'm going to do another two and then I'm going to cut it. I'm going to do a part two because there is so freaking much, so freaking much to talk about here. There is so freaking much, so freaking much to talk about here Because I want to make you super, super aware. So then you have the self-awareness and you're able to go away and do something about it, okay. So next up, we've got people pleasing, okay.

Speaker 1: 18:47

So if you have always learned to seek approval to avoid conflict, fuck me, and you may end up kind of prioritizing other's needs on over your own. I really can't talk all of a sudden. Um, so yeah, this can lead to like difficulty setting boundaries with clients or employees or with other people at work. You may be over committing and agreeing agreeing to unfavorable things, unfavoravourable clients, unfavourable tasks because you feel like, yeah, well, I have to say yes because I feel guilty if I say no. So this can come from role modelling with your parents as well, like if your mum was somebody who just went along with things for the sake of peace and quiet. Yes, that's the thing that helps the people. Pleasing right, you may have emotional neglect. So where your emotional needs are being ignored, downplayed, means that you suppress your own emotions because other people's needs and other people's priorities are more important than your own. That's just what you've been taught and that's okay. That's okay. It served you to a point and now we're changing it. Okay.

Speaker 1: 19:55

Again, we're talking about more of the conditional love, the fear of conflict. If you grew up in a house where there were shouting, screaming arguments, like fuck are you going to speak out? Okay, if there was arguments, if there were people shouting, if mum and dad were rowing every weekend, this is a trigger for you to not experience conflict. This is you going. Okay, I'm going to become highly attuned to other people's needs and emotions and try and keep the peace. We're pleasing everyone. But the truth is, when you start to please everybody else, you become absolutely miserable. And this is just the way that we. You coped and you survived and you dealt with the situation that was in front of you. But when it comes to your business and you know work environments and things like that you cannot do that. You cannot do that because you literally do put yourself like in such a in such a difficult place. So again, we're talking about criticism, rejection um, we're.

Speaker 1: 20:51

I want to talk about parentification here. This is when children are forced to take on adult responsibilities or emotional caretaking roles. So you may see this with somebody, like if one of your parents has mental health problems, if there was substance misuse, if there was just, yeah, a long lifetime pattern of people pleasing, um, that could have put a lot of emotional responsibility on you. I often see this a lot in older siblings as well, where they kind of feel like they've missed out on their childhood, or if they were kind of like the middle child and there were quite a few children underneath them. If you're part of a big family, there may have been this parentification, where you are responsible, you feel like you are an adult in the relationship.

Speaker 1: 21:36

Uh, trauma and abuse goes without saying. This is the way to protect yourself. This, you know. If you keep other people happy, then you can avoid further harm or maintain a sense of control, and we often see this a lot, don't we? We often see this a lot when women talk about relationships with men, how sometimes they feel like they have to just go along with things because that is the safest option, and that is probably likely to be a trauma response or fear of trauma. So what I want to say about that is that, whether the trauma happened or not, the threat of it can still be just traumatic, just as traumatic.

Speaker 1: 22:09

Okay. So when we are in our people-pleasing tendencies, we lack boundaries. We, you know, when we're, when we're not respected as children and we're not taught to assert ourselves, you know we're constantly put down, shut up, be quiet, don't say that then, yeah, we don't really have a strong sense of personal boundaries and we find it hard to say no without guilt. Okay, so you may have an anxious attachment style as well, so fear of abandonment can come up here. If you had a parent that did physically or emotionally abandon you, this is where the people pleasing comes up, because you don't want people to go away, you want people to stay and you want people to be loved and to provide stability, um, but yeah, if there's a fear of abandonment there, this will drive to pleasing others. And again, you know we talked about it. But role modeling of parents if you mum, you know I'm gonna just go along with things because it keeps the peace, then you're likely to do that too.

Speaker 1: 23:09

And last but not least, for what is coming up for you in your business, in your life, everything is difficulty with assertiveness. Okay, it could be really difficult to assert yourself for anything that we've talked about today. It's really hard to use your voice, especially if you've always been told shut up, be quiet. Children are seen and not heard. You know it could be something that is really really difficult, okay. So to stand up for your worth is hard when you don't feel like you have a lot of self-worth. You know, when you're in your business, it could be hard to negotiate. It could be hard to struggle. It to struggle hard to struggle. It could be a struggle to lead a team, it could be really hard to communicate what you want, not what you feel like you should say. And, yeah, being assertiveness is having those boundaries. It is saying fuck, no, stop it. Like it is saying that doesn't make me feel comfortable. It is standing up in a meeting and saying, hey, I absolutely do not agree with that. So, yeah, so a huge part of leadership is about being assertive as well, right? So if you want to go to that next level in your business, if you want to go to that next level in your business, if you want to go to that next level in your workplace, assertiveness is there. You have to be seen, you have to be able to communicate your voice and share your, your um, your value with the world. So that's what I want to say about that.

Speaker 1: 24:31

I'm going to draw this to an end now. I'm going to do a part two, because I've got another six I want to talk about. We've spoken about six. I'm going to talk about another six. Next week we will be talking about the other six, about how your inner child shows up in your business, in your workplace. So, yeah, let me know if any of these resonated with you, I'd love to know and, if you have any questions, if you have anything that you want to talk about, let me know if there's any. If you're like, oh my god, I'm, I need to know what to do about this, I'll drop some podcasts below for you to have a little listen to so you can binge in between now and the next episode. But yeah, connect with me, leave me a review, do whatever you know, just do what the normal podcast people tell you to do and I will see you next week. Lots of love.