EP124: Why Ambitious Women Never Feel Safe in “Supportive” Spaces

In this episode, I break down a truth that ambitious women were never taught to name. The mainstream definition of psychological safety doesn’t work for women who think fast, carry emotional responsibility like a second skin, and lead with conviction. I talk about why our bodies tighten in so-called “supportive” spaces, how early conditioning shapes the way we show up in leadership, and why emotional safety is actually rooted in the absence of self-betrayal, not the absence of conflict.

I walk you through how personal history, cultural expectations, and professional norms collide for high-performing women, and how those layers change the way we understand safety, belonging, and power. You’ll hear the real reasons why rooms want us softened, slowed down, or “reasonable,” and why ambitious women instinctively scan for emotional risks before saying a single word.

I also name the specific emotional needs ambitious women carry but hide because we’ve been conditioned to believe they’re “too much”: the need for autonomy, honesty, challenge, mental space, directness, and being taken seriously without having to prove ourselves over and over.

Finally, I offer five concrete actions you can take this week to stop abandoning yourself and start rebuilding emotional safety from the inside out.

If you’re ready for real talk on leadership, identity, boundaries, emotional safety, and what it means to operate at your full capacity without apology, this episode is for you.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Bold Premise
• 0:30 Why Traditional Safety Fails Fast Women
• 2:10 The Unspoken Rules In “Supportive” Rooms
• 3:20 Truth As A Disruptor Of Hierarchy
• 4:05 A Working Definition Of Real Safety
• 5:12 Personal Conditioning Bleeding Into Work
• 6:20 Calm Isn’t Safe, It’s Contained
• 7:20 What Actually Makes You Feel Safe
• 9:05 The Reframe: Presence Of Truth
• 10:15 Quiet Losses That Erode Identity
• 11:29 The Needs Ambitious Women Hide
• 13:20 One Action This Week To Recalibrate
• 15:00 Name The Need And Claim Space
• 16:05 Closing And Community Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Welcome to this space where bold truths, real strategies, and unfiltered stories fuel ambitious women who want more power, leadership, and legacy on their turns. Because in too many circles, a woman doing what she wants, how she wants, and winning is to blasphemous as fuck. Welcome to Business Blasphemy. Hello, hello, blasphemers. Welcome back to Business Blasphemy. I am Sarah Kahn, your blasphemous host. Let's start with a truth that most women were never given language for. And that is that the version of emotional safety, also known as psychological safety, that we were taught to accept was not created for women who think quickly, who are able to read a room instantly, who are able to anticipate needs before anybody asks, who carry emotional responsibility like a second fucking skin, and who lead with a level of conviction that can make other people uncomfortable. We are told that safety means being calm and agreeable and adaptable and predictable, but the definition has never made sense for women who grew up socialized to manage everyone else's reactions and excel at everything at the same time. Not once. Not in any space where you ever showed up fully. I personally didn't understand this at first. I used to walk into rooms that were marketed as supportive and welcoming, you know, leadership circles and women's groups and masterminds, and I would feel my chest tighten before anyone even said a friggin' word. I just had that familiar pull of, ugh, like deep in my ribs, that the one that your body sends when something in the room doesn't quite match what is being presented overtly. It was never anything dramatic, but it was always there and it was unshakable. And over time, what I learned is that the tension wasn't coming from the room itself. Like there was nothing wrong with the people, there was nothing wrong with what they were doing or sharing. It was coming from what the room expected from me. Because even in those supportive spaces, there was always an unspoken agreement. Do not be too direct. Do not outpace the room. Do not rock the dynamic. Don't bring the kind of clarity that forces people to actually face what they've been avoiding. Don't be the woman who changes the tone of the room just by being honest. I could feel those expectations the minute I sat down. And once I was able to articulate that, that's when everything started to make sense to me. These rooms didn't need me to be smaller or shrink because they disliked me. They needed me to be small because my full presence disrupted the emotional balance that the group relied on. So my intelligence, my speed, my directness, my ambition, all of the things that make me powerful also have the power to expose what's not working in a group dynamic. And some spaces cannot handle that. Not because I'm too much, but because truth has this really bad habit of rearranging the hierarchy in a room. Truth removes the permission structure that everybody uses to avoid responsibility. Truth is what shifts who actually gets to lead. So the room instinctively pushes back ambitious women and requires them to shrink or soften their tone or slow down, not for her safety, but for everybody else's comfort. And that is the exact moment when the supposed psychological safety actually unravels and becomes psychological unsafety. Because psychological safety is not built by protecting the room. It is built by allowing the truth to exist without penalty. Let me define psychological or emotional safety in a way that makes sense for women who are actually ambitious and who have lived both personal and professional conditioning. First of all, you need to understand that emotional and psychological safety are not the absence of conflict. They are actually rooted in the absence of self-betrayal. It is the ability to bring your entire self, your speed, your depth, your clarity, your passion, your fire, being able to bring them into a space without needing to dilute any of those parts in order to be tolerated. Psychological or emotional safety comes from knowing that your competence is not going to be punished. Your ambition is not going to be weaponized against you or against someone else. Your directness is not going to be misread as aggression. Your boundaries are not going to be interpreted as being difficult or having an attitude. Your standards are not going to be labeled as, you know, too much. And your full intelligence is not going to require constant translation. And when you do have emotional needs, they're not going to be dismissed as you being dramatic. When your upbringing, when your socialization, when your conditioning taught you to anticipate everyone else's needs, when your career taught you to be twice as competent for half the recognition, when your relationships taught you that you have to regulate the feelings of other people, your system is now wired to scan the room and adjust before you even realize you're doing it. And that is the personal now bleeding into the professional. And it's why emotional safety is a completely different experience for women who carry both histories. We've been sold this myth that safe spaces are peaceful spaces. They are quiet, they are kind, they are conflict-free, and everybody is smiling and everybody is agreeable. But women like us learned very early on that peaceful rooms are often the ones where we're expected to shoulder the emotional labor that keeps things peaceful. So in your family, that may have looked like not upsetting anybody, anticipating needs before they were ever spoken, or being the responsible one, or being the one who didn't cause trouble. In your career in the workplace, maybe that looked like, you know, being the team's stability, being the one that everybody goes to, being the one who communicates well because you smooth over other messes, or being the one that people emotionally rely on or strategically rely on, being the one who adjusts when the room can't keep up with your ideas, so you dumb yourself down or quiet yourself out. This conditioning taught you that calm doesn't actually mean safe. It means contained. It means controlled. It means don't bring anything that challenges the status quo or the dynamic of the situation. So when people talk about emotional safety or psychological safety, like it's some pastel room full of soft voices and perfect harmony, of course it doesn't resonate with you. Because harmony that requires you to silence is not harmony. It's erasure, it's self-abandonment. So here's the pattern that I've observed that ambitious, high-performing women often live with, both personally and professionally. And I want you to really hear yourself in this. Okay? You feel grounded when your brain is fully switched on. Because you were raised to be responsible before you were ever allowed to be soft or vulnerable. You feel secure when communication is direct, because you grew up interpreting tone, interpreting silence and nuance and emotional shifts, like your life depended on it, because sometimes it did. You relax when you are trusted with autonomy. Micromanagement bugs the shit out of you because you've always had to fight for the right to make decisions for yourself. You settle into yourself when you are around people who understand your pace, because the world has repeatedly told you to slow down for the comfort of the people who don't move like you. You feel emotionally safe when nobody expects you to carry the group emotionally, because you have learned early that holding everyone's feelings was part of, you know, being the good girl. And you feel unsafe the minute somebody masks their intentions or avoids accountability or weaponizes niceness, because you have lived with the consequences of trusting inconsistency. Your nervous system responds before your brain ever does. And it is not because you are too sensitive, it is because you are too fucking experienced. Because you have decades of evidence that rooms that want you quiet are the rooms that are eventually going to punish you for being honest. So, what is the reframe? It is that emotional safety for ambitious women is not the absence of risk. It is the presence of truth, both internal truth and external truth. It is the ability to trust what your body is telling you without gaslighting yourself. It is the freedom to let yourself be fully present to take up space the way it naturally wants to. It is the knowledge that you're not going to pay a price for being honest or being competent or being ambitious or even just being direct without having to couch everything you say in platitudes so people don't feel uncomfortable. But most importantly, emotional and psychological safety is the moment you stop negotiating your identity for access. The minute an ambitious woman feels that level of alignment, everything changes. Relationships shift, your tolerance drops, your boundaries get sharper, your clarity comes back. Because you finally understand the difference between being included and being safe. So here's what I want you to ask yourself. Without softening it, without gaslighting yourself, without minimizing it, without defaulting to it, it's not that bad. I can handle it. Because I know you can. But the point is you shouldn't have to. So I want you to ask yourself, where are you acting like you feel safe when you know you don't? Where are you accepting emotional crumbs because you've gotten used to surviving on them? Where are you playing the reasonable woman because the room has no idea what to do with your full intelligence? Where are you holding yourself back because the truth is going to change the relationship? Where are you carrying emotional labor that was never yours to carry in the first place? Where have you normalized environments that shrink you? These questions matter because ambitious women do not lose themselves all at once. They lose themselves piece by piece. It's in the meetings where you stayed quiet. It's in the relationship where you took on more than your share. It's in the role where you stopped asking for what you needed because you didn't want to seem difficult or selfish. It's in that friendship where you were always the strong one, but never the one who was supported in return. Those moments accumulate over time. And before you know it, you're running a life from a template, from a blueprint that was never actually built for you. And that is why you feel so unfulfilled and so understimulated, even though your calendar is so busy and you've accomplished so freaking much. So let's say out loud the needs that ambitious women consistently hide because we have been conditioned to think that these needs are inconvenient. Okay? You need space to think. Why? Because you spent years thinking on behalf of everybody else. You make decisions for everybody else. You have decision fatigue. You need space to think. Quiet time. Time for yourself. Baby, you need to rest. You need to allow yourself the opportunity to not do anything or be anything and just let your brain do what it needs to do. You need space to think. You also need honesty because you grew up decoding people who couldn't communicate directly. So you need people in your life who will speak plainly, who will be honest when it's important, and allow you to do the same. You need people who move at your speed. Why? Because you have spent too long slowing yourself down to avoid making everyone else around you insecure. You need to stop carrying the emotional fallout. It's time to stop being the emotional backbone you were raised to be. And oh my goodness, you need challenge. Because stagnation is no different than disappearing, really. So you need to find spaces that actually intellectually stimulate and challenge you. But most importantly, you need to be taken seriously because competence comes naturally to you. Unfortunately, respect has never been automatically granted to you. And these are not dramatic needs, these are remedial repairs for women whose identity and ambition and emotional labor have been weaponized against them for years. So, how do we take that first step to remedying all of this? Choose one thing to do this week. Just one. And it and it's not to fix your life, it's not to be productive, but it's to stop abandoning the truth of who you are. And I'm gonna give you options like I always do. I want you to pick one thing. And if you're feeling really ambitious, you can do more than one thing, but start with one. So maybe this week make one boundary really explicit to the people around you. Because I know that you grew up keeping the peace, and it's time for this to be your first act of self-respect. Maybe the thing you do is end one situation where you overexplain. And I know that that has traditionally for you been a survival strategy. It's time to retire it because you don't need to survive anymore. You need to thrive. Maybe your one action this week is declining a request that actually drains you, that doesn't align with you. And I want you to sit with the discomfort of having done that, of having disappointed somebody, because that's where the unlearning actually happens. Maybe the move you make this week is calling one dynamic what it really is, putting a label on the tension and trusting that when you do that, you're gonna feel your power start to return to you. Or maybe it's giving yourself one space where your full self is welcome. Whether it's a space or one person, but somewhere, someone with whom you can stop editing yourself and let your real voice come back online. And I know that's gonna take time, but I kind of feel like you probably know where that space or that person is. So it's time to invest in that. And these are not things to put on your to-do list and check them off, they're not tasks. These are like mini recalibrations that are gonna allow you to step back into your own identity after years of conforming yourself and contorting yourself into shapes that no human should ever really be. And above all of it, underneath all of it, around all of it, is the question that really matters the most. And that is what emotional need have you been ignoring because you were taught it was too much? If you do nothing else, I want you to put a name on that. I want you to write it down. What is the emotional need that you've been ignoring? Because everybody keeps telling you it's just too big, it's too much, it's too needy. Let that truth exist outside of your brain. Because you, your power, your leadership, none of those things can keep growing on top of the parts of yourself that you keep silencing. Because no matter what you do, no matter how many investments you make, no matter how much work you put into something, your next level is not gonna come from being agreeable. It is gonna come from being your whole ass self. So let me know which one you're gonna pick and come hit me up on social media because you know that's where the work continues. I see you, I hear you, you are loved, you are safe, and you can have success without the BS. But it comes from feeling safe in yourself first. I'll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening. Hey, do us a favor subscribe to the show, rate your favorite episode, or share it with your friends. And remember, your blasphemy is necessary.