How Smart Women Accidentally Lose Influence at Work

Some power is taken. But a lot of it? We give away without realising it.

If you’re constantly second-guessing yourself after meetings, rewriting emails that are already fine, or waiting for reassurance to feel okay — you might be outsourcing your emotional regulation at work. And it’s quietly draining your influence.

In this episode:

•  What emotional outsourcing looks like in high-achieving women
•  Why smart, capable women fall into this pattern
•  How it chips away at your confidence, clarity, and authority
•  What to do instead to lead with more trust in yourself

This episode helps you stop leaking power and start leading from within.

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⚠️ Disclaimer:   This podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical, legal, or psychological advice. Any stories, examples, or scenarios discussed are illustrative and may be composites or anonymised accounts. They do not refer to any specific individual, client, workplace, or organisation. 

Transcript

Michelle Kevill: 0:37

Hello, my corporate survivalists, welcome back. So today, we are unpacking what I think is one of the most important but a very overlooked pattern in high achieving, poor quit women. And that is how smart, capable women are unintentionally giving their power away, and this is often by outsourcing your emotional regulations to other people without really even realizing it, and giving away your power in the process. Now, if you're listening and you're like, I don't have any power to give What do you mean by emotional regulation. I want you to pause. So firstly, you have power, okay, but you have been taught to leak it. So every time you are over, checking your work, every time you send a message, hoping for reassurance, every time you panic and then push harder instead of pausing, you're not just really being thorough. What you're doing is you're outsourcing your ability to feel calm, and that is what I mean when I refer to emotional regulation. You're handing over your emotional safety to other people, hoping that they'll be the ones to make it okay and you are not alone. Okay? High achieving women do this all the time, especially if you grew up in like emotionally unpredictable, perfectionist households or people who made you responsible for their comfort. It's not a personality for It's a survival response. And again, I want to emphasize emotional regulation. Yeah, it's the ability to feel calm, to hold steady, to not let panic, guilt or self doubt hijack those strategic decisions you need to make. So if that phrase has felt confusing or clinical in the past, just know we're talking about the skill, really, of staying emotionally grounded and calm when stakes feel really high. And I really wanted to dive into this because I could see it in my clients. And if you've been following me for ages, yes, really what I'm going through right now is in the intentional model and the eight line, but in a way that's going to resonate for you and how you are unknowingly giving your power away and getting other people to regulate for you, and how you can start to do it for yourself. So so this episode isn't to show you how broken you are, it's to show you how you may be stuck in a survival loop, and once you see this pattern, you can start to change it, and that is what we're doing here. So really, the goal of today's episode is to help you spot those hidden ways you may be outsourcing your calm or emotional regulation, so you can start to reclaim your power, back your clarity and ability to actually just calm down for yourself, and if you're ready to actually stop spiraling and start owning your own emotional world and be able to be more strategic, then I would strongly suggest joining my email list where I give you some no BS corporate tips that you're not going to get in your HR inbox. So you can do it through Instagram show notes. Anyway, you can find me. Okay, so what we are going to cover is I'm going to tell you what you outsourcing your emotional regulation or your calm actually looks like, and why you might not even notice that you're doing it, some of the internal beliefs that drive this pattern, even for smart and capable women, again, this is not an episode to Shame anyone. It's to uplift what is extremely common, and to just highlight that and how to move through it consciously. Also, I want to touch a little bit on how people, consciously or not, can actually exploit this in the workplace. This you outsourcing your emotional regulation. Also, why this pattern? It's actually not good for your career, and it's benefiting other people more than it's benefiting you. And lastly, what are you going to do instead including some real world tools that you can use to bring your sense of calm back into the house? Okay, so what does it look like to actually be giving this power away? Let's start with, like, a familiar scene, like, maybe you have presented some work to a senior stakeholder, right? And maybe they're like, Yep, this is great. Maybe they say, thank you. Maybe they move on. Maybe they're looking a little bit flat, like there's no major feedback, nothing terrible. But on the inside you are spinning. You're like, was it good enough? Did I miss something? Why didn't they say more. So you start reaching out. You message a colleague, you reread the deck, you call someone to talk it out. You stay late to polish something else that doesn't really need polishing. You delay going for lunch. You scroll your inbox. You're checking messages like you're doing all these things to try settle this anxiety storm that's happening within you that. Is not productive, that is not diligence. That is your nervous system screaming, I don't feel safe. Help me regulate and what you are trying to do is regulate your internal panic by changing the external environment. Yes, for any of my clients, for anyone who has been a longtime listener, you know what we're talking about here, right here, when I'm talking about thoughts, impacting feelings and our actions, because you're looking for someone else to tell you it is okay. This is emotional outsourcing, and it is fucking exhausting. It feels helpful in the moment, right? Like it feels like control, like you are being responsible, right? Like if you're rechecking something, or you're going, you know, staying back late to work, but it's actually eroding your sense of power, because the only place you haven't checked for safety is within yourself. And this is how smart women are accidentally giving away their power, not because they're weak, but no one has likely ever taught you how to hold it, how to regulate from the inside out. So some signs here, if I call it out really clearly, even more detail, like you might reread the same message like six times before sending it, you might message people for input when you already know what you want to say. You might spiral after meetings if you don't like even with like no feedback. You might feel panic when someone is cold in a message you skip lunch without realizing because your body doesn't feel allowed to pause, you start to feed off other people's stress in order to feel productive, and maybe you second guess praise, because you yourself don't even believe it. It's not really just annoying. It's draining. It steals your time, your creativity and your sense of inner calm. And if this list feels like your average Tuesday Girl, you are not alone, and this isn't about fixing yourself. You're not a bad person. It's about reconnecting to yourself. Because now I want to tell you why smart women like yourself do this. Because let's be real. You're not doing this because you're dumb. You're doing this because you were not properly taught how to self regulate, and it is extremely common, especially in our environment, where we have all these devices. We're taught that we should be happy all the time. But here is what likely is true. You do not trust your internal sense of what is enough. You've likely learned to equate productivity with your worth, and you've had to preempt, perform and prove to yourself and to others to stay safe. You might even pride yourself on being like reliable good under pressure, but the truth is, being good under pressure often comes from you never being allowed to show the pressure. You learnt to keep it all inside. And the most painful part is you don't trust that maybe you won't get punished yourself if you get something wrong. You might be scared that if you stop double checking, or if you make a mistake, it's not that your manager will punish you, but you will punish you even harder than anyone else could. So you overwork to avoid your own self judgment. You try to get ahead of the feeling that says I failed. Because when that voice, that inner critic, comes in, it comes in hard, so your body is scrambling to avoid it. This isn't just even emotional outsourcing. It's actually self abandonment disguised as professionalism. It is a way, and it's a very common way to avoid emotional pain and those feelings that come up inside yourself, but it ends up blocking growth. It keeps you stuck, and it leaves you wondering why your job feels so unsafe, even when technically, nothing is going wrong. So I want to briefly touch on some root thoughts that keep us alive. And I've talked about this in many of my episodes, but in the previous episodes, if you've been listening, a root thought we all just have one thought underneath everything that wears different masks and like, you know, hides underneath other thoughts that drives this form of over functioning. My one is, I'm not good enough. So some that keep driving, that I've heard from, like past clients and other people, is like, if I slow down, I'll lose control. If I don't check it, I'll get in trouble. I can't relax until someone says I did okay, if I rest, I'll fall behind. If I mess this up, they won't see me as like good enough. And they may sound super dramatic when you say it out loud, loud, but like your nervous system, they feel like truth, and this is what I've been saying. My God, listen. My earlier episodes like this isn't logical. This is emotional memories. This is belief wired into your system from years of uncertainty, criticism or like very conditional safety, ieor safe, if you perform like X, you may have inherited these from childhood from a critical parent from school or a system that punishes mistakes from workplaces that rewarded perfection and punished vulnerability, these thoughts are not you, rather, they are strategies, but they are old, tired, and they are ready to be released if you want to move into the next stage, and this isn't again to shame you. I worked with many people who are quite high up in their career and are still keeping these thoughts like you can do a lot with a messy mind still, but it's so much. There's so much more ease and enjoyment to life when you're able to see what you're doing and do the work to let it go. I'm going to get into how to, like obviously, regulate in a second, but this is where I want to touch on something really important. The reason I highlight around not outsourcing your emotional regulation is this. It's because this isn't just about you. Other people play into this dynamic, and when you are constantly giving away your emotional power, people, co workers, stakeholders, notice whether they realize it or not. They do respond to it and sometimes look that does look like genuine care, but often it can turn into subtle control, whether it's conscious or not, they know you need their approval, so they may stay vague. They see you spiral, so they may withhold feedback just long enough for you to start fixing things unnecessarily. They may dangle clarity or validation like a reward and watch you work harder to get to it again. Whether actually this is conscious or not, depends on the person. Some people are just manipulative, and some are just emotionally immature, and some just learn to survive by keeping others in a reactive state, and they don't even know they're doing it. If this does sound a little bit too familiar, and you're wondering if it's deeper or if there's a pattern of grooming, love bombing, mirroring and boundary testing, I strongly recommend you go listen to my boundaries broken series. But even outside predator dynamics, if someone is benefiting or even a system, an environment wherever you're working in, benefits from your dysregulation, if your anxiety makes their job easier, that is not a healthy system. Okay? What I mean by that, if your anxiety leads you to over clean like over manage everyone else's emotion, like your emotional volatility, it can be it's like, it's not a weakness to be weaponized. It's a signal, and once you learn to read it inside your body and to work on more healthier ways to stop giving up that power and regulate yourself, you actually stop being easier to control. And this is why I did this episode, kind of linking in a little bit with boundaries broken, because sadly, there are just some bad people out there that are going to take advantage of you. I would say a lot of people are not and are subconsciously just like walking around like, you know, doing some things, and they don't even know that they're being quote, unquote manipulative themselves. But it's still good to be able to regulate within yourself. That doesn't mean you can't speak to like a colleague or a friend, if you're like, not feeling great, it's just to know, in what areas, in what environments and certain situations, are you giving away this power? Because now I'm going to get into why this does hurt your career. Because here is the hard truth, emotional outsourcing doesn't just impact your well being, it is undermining your professional influence. When you constantly outsource your calm, you can appear less confident, even when you're very capable, become easier to sideline in a meeting or a project, overwork on low impact tasks, instead of moving more strategically, because again, you're stressed, and I talk about this all the time. Your thinking brain, prefrontal cortex, it turns off, and then you're just operating from your limbic system. From stress. You then start to take on other people's stress, urgency or ambiguity as your own. This keeps you busy, but not seen, reactive but not respected. You burn energy performing competence instead of owning it. Meanwhile, the people around you, they benefit. They get you over functioning, your silence, your endless prep and clean up work, your emotional labor, without having to offer clarity, direction or support in return the benefit to them. Um, they don't have to manage some of the hard parts, because you're managing the panic and their mess. You're absorbing the stress that was never yours to carry. So let's be very clear, letting this go does serve you, keeping it going serves them, but you're the one paying the price, okay? And this is not again I keep reiterating this. I just don't want you to feel shamed if you're doing this, because I used to do this for years, and I still did relatively well in my career. It's just it sucks over time, like it's so draining, it's very laborious, and there are so many better ways to be, and there's so much more calm and clarity now that I have let this go. So this is what I want you to do instead. I want you to number one, I want you to ask yourself, what like in this situation, when it happens, right? What are you trying to fix the situation or the feeling like, when you're about to send a message like, check something, rework a doc, ask yourself, Am I solving a real problem, or am I just trying to feel better? If it's the latter, I want you to stop breathe and be with that emotion. You're in a loop, not a logical problem. Okay? And I'm going to actually recommend, at the end of this some episodes that can help you, because some people are like, you know, Matt, just watch the emotion go. And sometimes the emotion doesn't go, because if you are in a highly functioning state of feeling, everything, that can be a challenge. But this next part will actually help as well. So I want you to actually start to go to the basics, right? And this is hard. This is very hard, but I want you to go eat, walk, touch some grass. Literally, your brain cannot think clearly when your body thinks it's in danger. You're not lazy. You are emotionally dysregulated, and you are acting from a place of emotional dysregulation, and that is leading you to dig a deeper hole. But that's the only way you know how to be so you think digging the hole is the way to get out of it, because it's kind of worked before, but you've died every time. It's kind of like you've digged yourself a hole and then you've crawled yourself out of it. And I'm like, you don't have to do that at all. The next thing I want you to look about at is, how do you like, can you start thinking about and looking at, what is this root thought underneath all of this. Like, what is the story that you're believing right now? Is it If I mess this up, I'm done, they're mad at me. Like, name it. Question it, is that for yours, or is that something you absorbed when you're a kid? For me, when I started to realize, Oh, my God, I've just lived my life, most of my life going I'm not good enough. I need to do x, it really helped me take my power back and look at all right, what are the things that I need to stop doing just to feel some sort of validation and start to create that safety within myself? The next thing you need to do is, I need it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be hard, but need you to do it. You need to delay that reassurance loop. If you want to ask someone for, like, a sense check or something. Can you, like, wait 15 minutes? Can you ride and be with some that, some of that discomfort, and offer that validation to yourself instead? If you can't, let's say, in after 15 minutes, it's still there, fine, go do the thing. But you know what you just did that's really fucking important, you were present with a really negative, painful emotion that your body typically is, like, I need to do this to get rid of it. That is, like, that's really strong, good work. That is strength, that is emotional resilience, so trial that it's totally fine. If the emotion doesn't, like, completely dissipate, then I want you to start shifting from spiral to strategy once you have calmed down a little bit okay, like you need to be as best as possible. I don't want you to be like, super Zen and chill. It's fine if you're a little bit agitated. And this takes practice. I want you to ask yourself, what is actually needed here? What is the next clear step? What would I do if I did feel confident? I want you to turn your emotional storm into direction. Because remember, emotional regulation isn't again. Like I said, it's not about being calm all the time. It's about being able to hold yourself steady enough to respond instead of react. Okay. Now I know that giving up your power emotional regulation. Look, it's like, I get it like I was there many years ago, and still, this day sometimes pops up and I'm like, there it is. There's just I need to go touch grass and calm down. So if you want to unpack this further, if some of this stuff is going to feel really, really hard to do. There are three key episodes I strongly recommend you go listen to that unpack this at a much deeper level, right? So again, as you've noticed, I'm more leaning into that mindset work, but really linking it in with corporate strategy, because that is what you need. Need as part of this. However, before I still even got to that point, I just wanted to, like, get through my work day without crying between a meeting. So if that is you, some of my earlier episodes delve into that in a lot more detail. So the first one I recommend is how to tame your stress response. Very important. You need to understand how your brain works. I do not know why this isn't fucking taught at schools. I'm going to tell you like, you know, I was talking about your thinking brain, your limbic system, all that you need to understand it. And then I tell you how to work with it so you can calm down better in the moment. The next one is how to stop rumination, or ruminating and worrying. You need to separate problem solving from like panic solving. And this is actually one of my, I think, second most popular episodes, and it is such a common one, because people want to stop, you know, ruining their weekend. So I give you some tangible tips there. And the next one is, Are you constantly needing validation at work, here's one tip to fix that, if you want to have a big habit of needing the validation like the things that I was saying, which is you typically trying to calm yourself down, I give you more practical advice and reasons why you do that, so they give you tools, but most importantly, it's going to help you understand your own patterns, because once you see that pattern, you can pause and then shift it, and trust me, you can I and my clients are evidence of that. But listen, in closing, look, you're not too much, you're not too sensitive, you're not unprofessional. You were just someone who learned to survive by scanning, fixing and feeling on behalf of other people. But now it's time to feel that for yourself, because outsourcing your regulation is going to keep you stuck in a cycle of stress and shame, and it is going to make it easier for other people to possibly manipulate you, and it will drain your confidence, and you deserve so much more than that. So if you are ready to stop spiraling and start grounding yourself in clarity, well, head to my website, book in a Career Clarity. Call and check out the I'm calling it the corporate glow up program. This is my at step program for really bringing you out of this, these types of things I talk about, but at a more personalized level, I've revamped my website as well, and I've got frequently asked questions and a whole heap more. Anyway, I will see you in the next two weeks.