You Call It Personality. I Think It’s Something Else

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If you've recognised yourself in the patterns we've explored in this episode and you're ready to move beyond awareness into real change, we'd love to support you. Find out more and book a conversation with our team here: https://www.balanceinstitute.com/balance-and-beyond

You can be wildly capable and still feel like something unseen is running you. We talk about the kind of fear that doesn’t look like panic, it looks like competence: the way you rewrite the email, keep the pace frantic, say yes before you check in with yourself, or soften your truth after you “read the room”. If you’re a high-achieving woman who looks fine on the outside but knows the old model of success no longer fits, this conversation puts language to what’s been happening under the surface. 

We unpack four patterns that commonly show up as fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses in modern life, and why they’re so easy to mistake for personality traits. Urgency can masquerade as being driven and reliable. Busyness can masquerade as productivity while you outrun insecurity and the fear of not being good enough. Over-researching can masquerade as being thorough and intelligent while you avoid committing to a decision. And “emotional intelligence” can slide into smoothing, people pleasing, and self-abandonment when you edit yourself to avoid someone else’s reaction. 

The core takeaway is simple but confronting: the problem isn’t the behaviour, it’s what the behaviour is protecting you from feeling. Awareness helps you spot the pattern, but lasting change comes from learning to catch it in real time, in the meeting, in the conversation, and in the moment your body starts to rush, freeze, or comply. If you’re ready to stop living on autopilot, listen through and then subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so it reaches the women it’s meant for.

The Balance & Beyond Podcast Hosted by Jo Stone, founder of The Balance Institute

For women who are already succeeding, but beginning to wonder if they're willing to keep losing themselves in the process.

We know high achievers, because we are one. This podcast draws on Jo's 20 years in global leadership and thousands of hours coaching executives and ambitious women: the patterns she sees, how to untangle them, and what it actually takes to keep your success without paying for it with yourself.

If something landed today, there's more where that came from.

And if you know a woman this would resonate with, send it her way.

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Transcript

Jo Stone (Host) 0:04

Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for women who've outgrown the old model of success. The ones who look fine on the outside but know the way they've been living no longer fits. If you're standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming, this is for you. I honor the space you've created today. Let's dive in. There's something running underneath your behavior that you haven't named yet. It's not your personality, it's not who you really are,

Welcome To Balance And Beyond

Jo Stone (Host) 0:36

but it's been making decisions for you in meetings, at dinner, in your inbox, in conversations you've been avoiding for a really long time. And once you see it, you'll start seeing it everywhere. In that meeting where you rewrote the email again, in the dinner you cooked that was like a Formula One race, in that simple decision you've been carrying

Fear That Looks Like Capability

Jo Stone (Host) 0:59

for three weeks, and in that thing you said yes to before checking if you meant it. This, believe it or not, is all fear in disguise. Not fear like panic or paralysis or anything like that. This is fear that is quiet, functional, and dressed up as competence. Fear that has become so much of who you are. It's dressed up in so much of your capability that you've completely mistaken it for your personality. There are four specific ways that this shows up in high-achieving women. And a heads up, you're probably going to recognize yourself in more than one. You're probably a high achiever like that. So let's talk about pattern number one. This is when everything feels urgent. You probably can't explain it, but everything you do has a franticness underneath it, like a frenzied energy. You find cooking dinner feels urgent. Brushing your teeth feels fast. Even when you try to rest, there's a certain peace that comes to it. You might find that you sit down and instantly scan for what you missed. The washing

Urgency As A Coping Strategy

Jo Stone (Host) 2:22

machine does its first little beep and you're up and you're moving on top of it. When someone says, just leave it, your whole body is like, no, no, no, can't leave that. You find yourself picking up tasks that aren't yours and doing a whole lot of white knuckling of things that don't actually need gripping. Because if you keep moving, you don't have to feel the discomfort that sits underneath. Urgency becomes the strategy to actually avoid that. Now, here's why this fear can masquerade, because it looks like you're driven, you're on top of everything, you're reliable. But what it's really doing is keeping the feeling of danger at bay by staying in motion. You might have heard this called the fight response before, but in high-achieving women, it doesn't look like a fight. You haven't put your boxing gloves on. It ends up looking like someone who never ever stops. Pattern number two has probably been one of my biggest patterns. And this is staying busy to outrun the feeling. I had this huge to-do list. I was massively overwhelmed. I felt completely behind. And I was going, oh my God, I've got a and my calendar and I've got three minutes. And she goes, hang on, hang on, stop, stop for a minute. I said, I can't stop. I

Busyness That Outruns Insecurity

Jo Stone (Host) 3:59

have so much on. She just said to me, What are you avoiding right now? I went, excuse me. What do you mean what I've avoiding? Have you seen all this shit that I'm churning out? I'm not avoiding anything. Well, she said, you're spinning your wheels for what? And that question cracked something open. I wasn't busy because I had too much to do. I was busy because sitting under all of that movement and stuff and shit I was getting done was a question that I was terrified to answer. What if what I'm doing actually isn't good enough? What if they find out I don't actually know what I'm doing? I wasn't trying to get things done. I was trying to outrun a feeling. And if I ignored it long enough and pushed it away long enough and did enough that it would eventually go away. But it didn't. It just got louder. Now, this can be really deceptive because it looks like you're the get shit done person. You're productive, you're efficient, you're always moving. But it's bypassing this feeling of incompetence or what's inside of that is the fear before it actually has a chance to service. Now, some people might call this your flight response to fear. But in high-achieving women, it doesn't look like going, oh, I'm scared, I'm running away. It looks like someone who doubles down on getting shit done. But on the inside, you are running away very fast from the thing that you are really avoiding. Now, the third pattern is one that I see in my clients all the time. And this is the desire for just one more bit of information. Not quite ready yet, Joe. She knows what she needs to do. She's known for a while. But she's gonna double check it. Do a little bit more research. Wait until she has a bit more clarity. Wait until

More Information As A Freeze

Jo Stone (Host) 6:30

she feels ready, waiting until the timing is right. But this isn't an information problem anymore. She's collecting evidence for something she already knows. Have you ever been either in a meeting or received emails or comms where somebody has already made up their mind and they're just ceasing the world or going out to get more proof that they're right? The decision has already been made in her gut, but she just can't quite let herself land on it. She doesn't quite trust herself to make the call or make the decision and move forward. She overthinks, she gathers more information, she collaborates a little bit more. Because if you land on something, if you make a decision, that means committing. And if you commit to something, that's a decision. You could get that wrong. And getting a decision wrong or making a mistake has a meaning that she's not quite ready to look at. So it's much easier to stay in the loop, gather more, I'll just get more information. And this masquerade is a someone who's really thorough, great attention to detail, considered, intelligent, risk-adverse, gathering all the information. Hello to all my lawyers and accountants who get stuck completely in this one. But it's avoiding the discomfort of being wrong by never fully deciding in the first place. This can be really, really alluring place to sit because you have this false sense of productivity that gathering more information, collecting more evidence, mitigating your risk, ensuring that if they come back with response A, B, C, and D, you've got answers to all of them. You've considered all the scenarios. But you could also call this freeze response. It doesn't look like being paralyzed deer in headlights. It looks like due diligence, but it's just fear wrapped up in a whole lot more information. Now, the final pattern is one that many women have in some capacity. So I'm curious where this is gonna play out for you. Before you speak, do you read the room? Now you might have something to say. You're like, right, I've got an opinion. This is what I'm gonna say. But you notice that Andrew raised his eyebrow. And you realized in that moment that Sophie kind of adjusted

Reading The Room And Self Abandonment

Jo Stone (Host) 9:12

her shoulders, and you felt that the room deflated a little bit. And so you went, uh nah. What ended up coming out was a little bit softer. You made it a little bit safer, you made it just that little bit more palatable. You weren't lying, you just didn't quite tell the truth. Now, this happens so automatically that you probably barely notice it anymore. This is happening in your relationships, this is happening at work, it's probably happening with your mother, it's definitely happening with your boss. The version that you say out loud is never quite lining up with what you actually think or believe. Now, this makes you really easy to work with. You will swear blue murder that empathy and EQ is your superpower and that you're just reading the room and you're finding the right way to land. Yes, you can be a diplomat, but this is keeping you safe from the discomfort of someone else's reaction. And every time you swallow your words, every time you shove down your thought or put it aside in the guise of keeping the peace or making it safe or not rocking the boat, you abandon a little piece of yourself. You do that often enough over the years, and it really starts to stack up. Some people call this fawn response to fear, but in high-achieving women, it often doesn't look like straight up people pleasing. It is completely masqueraded as emotional intelligence. Now, these are four very different behaviors. Could say four very different masks, costumes, showing up in different ways at work, in relationships with your kids, with your family, but they are all the same thing underneath. That sense of urgency, the busyness, the over-researching, the smoothing, keeping everything calm. They're all doing the same job. They are all keeping discomfort at a distance before it arrives. So you don't

Catch It In Real Time

Jo Stone (Host) 11:37

have to feel it. It's not a character flaw, you are not broken. But this is a very fast, intelligent adaptation that worked really, really well. And so many women holding on to these strategies because they've got you to hear, they've got you a lot of your success. And let's be honest, it's running on autopilot. This stuff can be really, really hard to catch. But the problem isn't the behavior. Because I know you will stand on your pedestal all day go and go, EQ and risk management and all the things. But the problem is that the behavior is making decisions you don't know you're making. Once you start seeing this behavior and what's sitting under it, you're going to start noticing it everywhere. In that meeting where you swallowed your words, that inbox that suddenly you're in at 10 p.m. for no real reason, the pace that you realize you haven't actually taken a breath since you woke up this morning was there the whole time. You just didn't have a name for it. So here's what I want you to take from this. We never call it fear. We call it being driven, we're thorough, we're easy to work with, we're productive, we're efficient. But underneath every one of those patterns is something driving it that isn't the behavior itself. This is why all your attempts to speak up, to hold a boundary, to not say yes, to slow down, they won't work. It's like trying to stick duct tape on the Titanic. Fear is just one of those patterns sitting underneath. And it's probably not the only one running you. And so, what if the things that you've been calling your personality, sometimes even calling your strengths, are just signals from something underneath that hasn't been looked at yet. It's a completely different problem to the one that you thought you had. And it needs a completely different solution. So here's what I know after working with thousands of women on exactly this. Seeing the pattern and going, yep, Joe, got it. Yeah, I do that. I do all four. And you're gonna wake back up tomorrow morning and you'll be back in all of them by nine o'clock tomorrow. Not because you're not self-aware, you listen to my podcast. Of course you are, but because awareness only shows you what's happening. And it almost makes it more frustrating because now you can see that you are not changing. Because awareness can't change what happens next. What happens next is being able to catch it in real time. No good catching it after the fact, in hindsight, journaling on it at 10 o'clock at night and going, oh yeah, I did that thing that Jo mentioned. I need you to catch it in the conversation when you go to swallow your words. I need you to catch it in the meeting when you realize that you're pushing through, you're actually not listening, or when that franticness completely takes over your entire system and you don't know why. That's a completely different skill to actually understanding the pattern. And it's one most women never get to because they stay at the level of insight and wonder why nothing shifts. This is exactly the work we do inside Balance and Beyond. Not just theory, not just more awareness, real-time interruption of the thing that's been running you. If that's the work you're ready for, doors to Balance and Beyond are now open. Check out the link in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today. If this episode resonated, share it with a woman who needs to hear it. And if you want to be part of the Ripple Effect, leaving a review

Programme Doors Open And Closing Ask

Jo Stone (Host) 15:56

helps it reach the women it's meant for. I'll see you next time.