EP 204 - "She Thinks She's Better Than Everyone Else": Tall Poppy Syndrome, Your Nervous System, and the Real Reason You Keep Making Yourself Small

Someone said 7 words to Jessica  - 7 words that sent a multi-six-figure business mentor into months of self-censorship, shrinking her energy, softening her content, and quietly revisiting every moment she had shown up with confidence and clarity in her work.

 You think you're better than everyone else.

And that response - the sickness in the stomach, not the fire - is exactly what tall poppy syndrome looks like when it has been encoded in your nervous system since childhood. 

In this episode, Jessica goes all the way in. Not the surface-level cultural commentary version. Not the just-be-confident version. The real version: body-level, nervous system encoded, showing up directly in your revenue.

If you have ever minimised a win before someone else could, rewritten a post until it said 40% of what you actually meant, known your prices needed to go up and felt your body say no anyway, or wondered whether your confidence reads as arrogance to the people around you - this is the episode you have been waiting for.

In This Episode

• What tall poppy syndrome actually is and why Australian and New Zealand women carry it in their cultural DNA in a way that directly impacts how they run their businesses
• Why the cultural conditioning was installed before you ever sent your first invoice - and how it is showing up as undercharging, over-delivering, shrinking your positioning, and apologising for your own visibility
• The UCLA neuroscience study that proved social rejection activates the same brain regions as physical pain - and the 2015 follow-up that found social pain, unlike physical pain, can be relived at full neurological intensity years later
• The Harvard and Wharton research on the self-promotion gap: why women rate identical performance at 46 out of 100 while men rate it at 61 - and why knowing about the gap does not close it
• Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory applied directly to business: which nervous system state is running your content, your pricing, and your launches
• The fawn response - the fourth survival strategy that women are socially rewarded for, and how it is running your business in ways you have probably been calling humility
• What nervous system recalibration actually looks like: somatic work, titration, co-regulation, and identity work - not affirmations, not pushing through, not one breakthrough session

The Key Concept: Tall Poppy Syndrome Is a Nervous System Problem, Not a Mindset Problem

Most conversations about tall poppy syndrome keep it at the cultural level - it's something that happens at barbecues, in comment sections, at family dinners. And yes, it does. Jessica talks about watching it play out publicly just recently, when the comments section under a successful female founder's post became a textbook example of cutting in real time.

But the version that is costing ambitious women the most is not the external cutting. It is the internalised version. The one your own nervous system runs without any outside trigger.

You were not born afraid to charge. You were not born with a reflex to minimise your wins before someone else can. You were conditioned into all of it by a culture that decided, long before you ever sent your first invoice, that women who want too much are a problem.

The encoding happens early. In school, where the unspoken rules say: don't put your hand up too much, don't be the one who always knows the answer, calibrate your capability to the room. In the teenage years, when belonging is everything and the nervous system is running a constant calculation: what does this group require of me? For girls, there is an extra layer - watching what happened to women who got too visible. You did not need anyone to explain the rule. You just watched it operate.

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Transcript

1:55

Welcome to the Fuck Yes. Frequency. The podcast where strategy meets energetics and your business gets to feel like a full body. Yes. I'm Jessica Re, frequency first business mentor for the woman building a sustainable, scalable, and sexy business grounded in her unapologetic self-expression, authority, and embodied leadership. Let's drop into the episode. I feel a bit vulnerable talking about this, which is probably the exact reason why I do need to be talking about it because someone said something to me, someone who I care about, not some random person on the internet said something to me not so long ago, and this was this one sentence, this one sentence that when I reflect has actually the way I took it, has had me shrinking my energy, being really careful about who I am until recently, and that one sentence was 'You think you are better than everyone else'. Now that hurt. I didn't get angry. I didn't fire back. I didn't stand tall and think to myself, I feel quite emotional, you know? That's their wound, not mine. I didn't think that. What I did was I felt sick in my stomach. I thought in my head, I am such a genuine person who would not ever actually have that line of thought processing, and it got me questioning every single time that I stood in a room or that I stood in a conversation or that I was there with my mentees or I showed up on here. And I was confident and I was clear on what I stand for, and I was passionate about what I'm talking about. And then I was, so confidence is not even the right word, but so embodied in what I was teaching that yeah, maybe I couldn't see another pathway at that point on those topics, but it got me questioning like everything. It got me questioning every single time that I have showed up and going over it and thinking, was that how I was being perceived? Because here's the thing, it didn't actually start for me with this one sentence from this one person. It's actually been a theme that I can reflect on through my whole life. Right back to high school, just in different ways. Like she's untouchable. She looks a certain way, therefore she must be. And then I've been thinking about this and I'm thinking about the term Tall Poppy Syndrome. And if you are in Australia or New Zealand, if you're in the US you're thinking, what on earth is that? Don't worry, I'm gonna tell you, but if you're in Australia or New Zealand, you know what that means. And when I'm thinking about this, I'm actually thinking this is Tall Poppy Syndrome. This is why for so much of my life, or a big contributor to why for so much of my life, I felt like I couldn't be as big, as vibrant, as confident, as sure, as smart, as capable as I am. There are certain people, I always felt like I had to make myself small around. There were times where I knew the answer to something and I didn't wanna say it. And so we're actually gonna talk about Tall Poppy Syndrome today because what I discovered over the last couple of weeks is I've been unpacking this because what I want you to remember here too, I know better. I know better. I have been embodying into this full expression, which has made me really deeply see how this has impacted me. Not just from that one comment, but through my whole life I teach this stuff. I have done years of identity work, somatic work, nervous system work, and still five words from someone who potentially felt threatened by my growth or about I'm not sure you know what their line of programming and perception is or was, but five words from someone that I cared about actually sent me into this shrink that lasted for months, and as I said, had me reviewing and going back through so many different scenarios where I had felt that level of confidence as I did when I was speaking to this person. Now let me tell you about Tall Poppy Syndrome. It is not a mindset problem. It is a nervous system encoding. And today we are going really deep into this because as I have been unpacking this for myself, I have actually realized, that there is an unbelievable amount of research studies evidence that this is a real thing. There is a reason why female entrepreneurs feel like they need to make themselves smaller than they actually are. In my research, I actually realized that it is one of the most googled term in Australia or New Zealand in my industry, one of the most googled terms. But here is what you don't get when you google that. You don't get any kind of explanation as to what's going on in your nervous system. And because when we understand this. And then the work that I do, we can actually find safety and overcome it while simultaneously growing our business. It's just gonna be so powerful to understand and explore. So I'm really excited to share this with you because today I also get to share research that I found as well, which is something a little bit different. I don't often do that in an episode, so, yes. This is exciting and I think this is also gonna be so validating for so many of you as well. So by the way, if you are new, welcome to the Fck Yes Frequency. I am Jessica Read, frequency strategist, business mentor, and someone who has personally felt every single pattern than I am about to name. This is episode 204, and this one has unconsciously been playing out or energetically for me actually playing out for quite a while. And I love it when these patterns come to surface because then I can see how it's all come together and why we are now talking about this today. Not just for me, but because you need this too. We are talking about Tall Poppy Syndrome and I'm not just gonna talk about the surface level cultural commentary version. We are definitely not talking the just be confident version, but the real version, the body level nervous system encoded in childhood and showing up in your revenue version. So this one is gonna be a bit bigger than normal. It's really important that we unpack this. Grab a cup of tea, coffee, a wine, if that's what you need. Sit down for this one and really maybe even take notes and use this as a beautiful opportunity to really reflect on how this has been impacting you. So let's actually name what this is because I think a lot of people have heard the term, unless you're over in the US you probably haven't heard the term, but I know, as I said, Australia and New Zealand, Tall Poppy Syndrome Entrepreneur is one of the most googled terms in my industry, and we still don't know exactly what it means. So Tall Poppy Syndrome is the pattern, cultural, social, deeply personal of cutting down people who stand out. Oh, I just feel this emotion as I say that because I have felt it so deeply. And when you hear and you understand this, you see it everywhere. People who get too successful, people who take up too much space. People who rise up above the field, and it is especially common in women. Now, for my US listeners, this is a term that you might not have grown up with, but I promise you you'll have lived this at some point. For my Australia New Zealand listeners, we carry it in our cultural DNA in a particular way. There is a reason we say not getting too big for your boot. It's there is a reason our most successful people learn to perform ordinariness. I want you to think about that again, and I want you to actually think about this with you, and I know I think about it with me. There are things that I have done in my life. There are things that I can do that are extraordinary. Extraordinary in the way that my energy works to get things done. And I've talked about this. I've talked about moving with the frequency of my emotional wave and when everything falls into alignment and how I just move and how I can achieve more in that time than most people can in a month. There are things that I can see and then bring to life. There are things that I can do that are extraordinary that I never allowed myself to see as extraordinary. Do you know that one of my mentors the other day, she's a psychologist and she has worked with countless, countless high level entrepreneurs over her professional career, high level, ambitious women. And she said to me, Jess, you have one of the most brilliant strategic brains that I have ever seen. The things you tell me about, I just sit there and I'm like, do you realize that's not normal? And I just sat there and I remember I cried. This was only a couple of weeks ago. As I was unpacking all of this, I started crying and I was like, no, I don't realize that's not normal. But also I don't let myself see how extraordinary it actually is, and that's the Tall Poppy Syndrome. Why? Because if I stand here and I say I am really f*cking good at what I do, if I stand here and I say, I know this about myself, and I stand in that energy, and sometimes you don't even need to say it. Sometimes it's just the energy, right, that you bring to it. Then it is so ingrained in me that I'm gonna be cut down, not get too big for my boots, not let people think that I'm better than them. Here's a little news flash to all of my Aussies who are suffering with Tall Poppy Syndrome. If you wanna teach someone something, if you wanna lead someone in something, if you want to guide them to a place where they haven't been yet, and you have to be better at that thing. You have to like, oh, I don't know why we have made this like such a scary thing to be better at something. Or to really, as I said, not be extraordinary, and where I really just got on a little tangent there. But what really, really hit me, like right, like a knife in my stomach was about the concept of learning to perform ordinariness. That hit me so, so hard because there are certain circles that I have intentionally put myself in where I can be that energy and everywhere else it feels like I can't. So, thinking about this in your own life, to be self depreciating before the room gets uncomfortable, to joke about your wins before someone else makes a joke to pass him off as luck. We are literally conditioned to stay at the same height as everyone else. You can see how tense my shoulders are talking about this. And the thing that really, really gets me about this is that the same culture that produces extraordinary women, world-class athletes, business builders, creatives, leaders, it's the same culture that punishes them for being extraordinary. Make it make sense so you can be great, but you just can't act like it. What the f*ck? Now most conversations about Tall Poppy Syndrome keep it at that cultural level, and yes, it is something that happens at barbecues and in comment sections at family dinners. You know, we saw it even just recently. If you follow, Georgie Stevens, the founder of Naked Harvest and all of the amazing businesses that she has, and they were talking about how she rents out her family home as a way to bring in additional income stream to pay the mortgage. And the comments were disgusting. They were literally like, oh, good for her with four houses. Like, yes, good for her. Yes. Yes. Good for her. You see it everywhere. Once you see this, you can't unsee it, and honestly, it makes me sick to my stomach. What I wanna talk about really more specifically now, if you are an entrepreneur, because for women in business, the cost of this isn't just social. And I know I've certainly felt it socially, but this also shows up in your revenue. So when I'm talking about cultural conditioning, you were not born afraid to charge or afraid to be successful or afraid to live and be seen in your full potential. You are not born with a reflex to minimize your winds or edit yourself before you speak. You are conditioned by all of it. By a culture that decided long before you ever sent your first invoice. The women who want too much are a problem. The women who know their worth and act like it are arrogant. The women who rise above the average height of the room need to be brought back down. And you didn't get a say in it. You absorbed it, and now you are here dealing with the repercussions of it. You absorbed it in the same way that you absorbed language. Through watching, through repetition, through seeing what happened to women who didn't play by the rules. By the time you started your business, the conditioning was already installed. You were already running a program that you never consciously agreed to. Undercharging not because you don't know your worth, but because premium pricing makes you visible, which visible makes you a target. Oh, who is she to earn that kind of money, she needs to struggle like the rest of us. Overdelivering to the point of depletion. Because if you're indispensable enough, generous enough, nobody can justify cutting you down, but you've gotta work yourself into the ground to stay there. Shrinking your positioning. So saying that you're really passionate about your work, instead of just saying, I am excellent at this and I get results that most people in my industry can not get. Feel that difference. Oh, I'm so passionate about what I do versus, well, actually, I'm gonna say this for me. I have been doing so much market research lately and strategy alongside nervous system, alongside identity. Alongside somatics and energetics, there are not many people who actually combine all of that together, specifically for entrepreneurs. There is not, and as I have been doing this market research, I have really been sitting in this space that's like, holy sh*t, if I actually do not get over this feeling in my body, just because that person said something that made me feel sad and made me feel like maybe people were thinking something bad about me. If I don't stand and own this and confidently say I am the mentor. That does not make you choose between strategy and growth, spiritual growth, personal growth, identity growth, subconscious healing, subconsciously programming. If I don't confidently stand and say, the thing that your therapist doesn't get is the fact that you're an entrepreneur in the way that your brain works in your business. And the thing that your business coach doesn't get is the fact that you are an emotional, cyclical human being, whose life is not linear, and you are terrified that your personal life is gonna bleed into your business. And I am excellent at this. I get results at this that most people in my industry cannot get. That sentence feels dangerous. But if I don't stand there and say that and stand in the gap that is so clearly there waiting for me, then no one's gonna know what the f*ck I do and no one's going to work with me. But it feels dangerous, even though it isn't. The conditioning says that it is apologizing for your visibility. Sorry for all the posts. Oh, I know this isn't for everyone, but sorry to bother you. Just popping in with. Performing uncertainty that you don't actually feel, oh, I don't know. I'm not sure, but really you are. Just so that no one accuses you of being too sure of yourself. Like think about these things that would definitely be showing up in your life in some way, shape, or form. And I really wanna hear from you guys with this episode. Like how is this impacting you at the level that you are at? Because this is something that we have to work through, whether we are brand new in business, or whether we are at half a million dollars a year or at a million dollars a year or above. This is not a you problem. This is a cultural download. Every ambitious woman in this part of the world got it whether she wanted it or not. So the question is not whether it happened because it did. The question is whether you're going to keep running the program or start looking at where it actually lives because your business isn't struggling because you're not working hard enough. It's not your strategy, it's not your offer. It's not the d*mn algorithm. If you were handed a ceiling before you even started, there was a study in 2023 called the Tallest Poppy. It was done by Dr. Ramit Bien, hope I pronounce that right. Ramit Bien, um, with Women of Influence, and they surveyed over 4,700 women across 103 countries. 86.8% had been undermined for their achievements at work and the finding that really, really landed with me, was that the more successful a woman is, the less likely, less likely she's to promote herself. And she might call it humble. She might call it values driven, but she's less likely to promote herself, not more likely, less. The cutting works. It works so well that the most accomplished women hide the most. And a nervous system with that encoding will do everything it can to keep you in the field, not because it's broken, but because it learned that. So what I want you to really understand about this pattern is that it didn't arrive when you decided your business. It was long been there before you registered your business name and your ABN and took that first terrifying yet exhilarating step towards your dream. Think about school, particularly if you grew up in Australia or New Zealand. There are unspoken rules that get handed down without ever having to say them out loud. Don't put your hand up too much. Don't be the one who always knows the answer. Don't make the other kids feel bad by being too good at something. Be capable, but calibrate your capability to the room. Like we've all done that. And then you hit your teenage years. The ages where belonging is everything, where being included in the group is literally the difference between okay and not okay. And that is when it goes the deepest, because your nervous system at that age is running a constant survival calculation. What does this group require of me? And if the group's answer is stay at the same height as everyone else, your nervous system writes that as the law. For girls, there is an extra layer. You watch what happened to women who got too visible. Maybe it was your mom downplaying her wins at dinner, so nobody felt uncomfortable. Maybe it was the girl at school who was talented and got called a try hard for it, or a show off. Maybe it was watching a woman in your family shrink every time her success started to outpace the room. And you didn't need anyone to explain this rule. You just watched it operate. Bright is okay, but don't be blinding. Success is fine, but look surprised about it. Oh, that just, you know, I was so lucky. Lucky after I just spent like 10 years learning about this thing and working with hundreds of people to practice it, but so lucky I got that person, that result. So lucky I've just made a million dollars in my business, so lucky, right? I'm being sarcastic. Ah, I'm so emotional about this. Ambitious is acceptable, but only if you stay relatable enough and nobody else feels left behind. Again. Make it make sense. No wonder. No wonder we find stepping into the identity that is going to lead our business to the level that we want it to. And by the way, can we just say think depending on your financial conditioning, earning 10 grand a month as a business owner, 20 grand a month, 30 grand a month. That is actually not that much money. And I'm gonna say that when we look at the reality of taking away your taxes, your superannuation, all of your operating expenses, and then paying a mortgage and buying groceries, I'd say 30 grand a month at minimum is what a business needs to be owning to really keep ahead above water if you need to support a family at minimum. So this is all going to come down to, but if you went and said to someone who doesn't understand that, oh, my business is earning 30 grand a month, and they're like, oh my God, she's getting too big for her boots. It's 30 grand. Come on, let's look at this realistically. There is research that really, really hits this home for you. Harvard and Wharton economists studied what happens when men and women self-assess identical performance. They're doing the same work, they're getting the same results. Men rated themselves at a 61 out of a hundred, women rated themselves at 46, and when the researchers told the women about the gap and showed them the data and explained that they were underrating themselves, that gap didn't close. Because this is not a knowledge problem. You cannot think your way out of something that your body has learned as a survival pattern before you could even articulate it. So the confidence, the fake until you make it, or the mindset coaching around this is not going to shift it. This is an encoding. This is actually work to be done at the deepest cellular level of your body. And directly in the subconscious of your programming. So let me talk to you about the part that actually really cracked it open for me, and I need you to stay here with me because this is honestly the piece that changed everything. There is a study from UCLA, Naomi Eisenberger, published in Science Journal in 2003. So this has been around forever. Where they put people in an FMRI machine and had them be left out of a virtual ball game. The scans showed that social rejection activates the same regions of the brain as physical pain. Literally the same circuits. The study was called Does Rejection Hurt? and neurologically the answer was yes. And then a 2015 follow up by the same lab, found that while physical pain fades in memory, okay, you stab your toe in a week later, you can barely recall the intensity of it. And yes, that goes for the little toe too, which I'm only reminded of as I kicked mine this morning. But social pain can be relived. Oh, I feel so emotional. Social pain can be relived at full neurological intensity years later. The same circuits fire as if it is happening right now. I want you to really let that land. That's why if you work with me, you know that when you are telling me a story, I'm not letting you just tell me a story. I'm actually getting you to tap. I'm getting you to use EFT. As you're just talking to me because I don't want your brain firing off those same neural pathways, reliving that same emotional intensity experience and reaffirming that even more. And EFT is one of the techniques that I use and it interrupts that emotional process. It essentially sends a message up to your brain to say, actually, we can reprocess this as safe. I know that was probably the least scientific explanation, but that's what it does. Cuts the cord between the emotion you've associated with something and the memory that you're thinking of. So this means that when you sit down to write a bold post, to raise your price, to pivot your business model because you have these big, ambitious goals and dreams, and you are ready to scale. To put yourself forward as the expert to put your hand up and say, yes, that is me. I'm really d*mn good at this. Then your nervous system is not just responding to today. It is re-experiencing every single time that you were cut down. Every classroom, every friendship group, every comment by someone who thinks differently is threatened by your growth or just doesn't get it. And remember, that's just their conditioning, but it hurts, right? So we then make changes in who we are and how we show up because of that pain. Because most humans will do anything to avoid feeling something that is deeply uncomfortable. Every moment that someone looked at you and said, with either their words or their energy, or what you perceive to be a judgment, an energy of who do you think you are? That full voltage, oh. This is why I can feel so wildly out of proportion. Posting something or saying something big and then feeling sick for three days, hitting a new visibility level, new income level, and an immediately self-sabotaging, going to claim something like a title or a price point or a platform, and your body says, no, this is not drama. It is neuroscience. I want you to even think about the polyvagal theory. Stephen Porges, who developed a polyvagal theory, a lot of you probably familiar with it by now, but he describes three states that your autonomic nervous system moves between ventral vagal, which is safe, connected, grounded. The state where you are fully yourself, you can speak clearly, leadership can come naturally. We can access our creativity. Socialize. There's a sympathetic activation, which is what we probably known as fight or flight. So that racing heart before you do something big or scary, the hyper vigilance before a launch, I'm even feeling it as I stand in here and say, I am boldly claiming this and I have to really not give a f*ck if someone says that you think you're better than everyone else, I know in my heart how I feel and how I think. The anxiety that shows up every time you try to raise your prices and then there's dorsal vagal shut down. This is freeze. The entrepreneur who goes blank in a media interview, the woman who can't write content for weeks, right when her biggest opportunity is right in front of her, who on paper knows exactly what to do but can't physically do it. And there are blended stages of these, but that's not what we're talking about now. I just wanted you to see how these nervous system states then come into your business because Tall Poppy conditioning has trained your neuroception, the part of your nervous system that scans for danger before your conscious mind even registers anything to read success and visibility as a threat. So the scan runs before you've even thought about it, before you decide anything. Your body has already put in its vote. And the thing that probably I don't see many people talking about is your window of tolerance, the range of arousal your nervous system can hold without tipping into panic or shutdown, and that's shaped by every experience of being cut down. When you approach your next level, when the expansion starts to outpace what is actually familiar for you. Your systems read the unfamiliarity as danger. Creates distress to pull you back to the temperature that has always felt safe. So picking a fight the week before a launch, getting sick right before a speaking opportunity, the overwhelming urge to rebrand or pivot or restructure anything that halts your growth. This is your nervous system executing a protection protocol that keeps you safe for a long time. The ceiling is not your strategy, it is in your nervous system's thermostat. So let's get really, really specific now, because I think this is where it's either going to land or stay abstract for you. Tall Poppy Syndrome gets talked about as something that happens to you. Someone takes a shot, and yes, that's real. I've already told you my experiences in that, but the version that is costing you the most in your business is the internalized one, the one your own nervous system runs. So let me walk you through what this looks like. This is the compulsive self deprecation. This says you have a month that would have made past you cry, happy tears, but your first move is to minimize it. It was a good month, but oh, I got lucky this time. I'm still figuring it all out. You are not being humble. You're making yourself smaller before anyone can do it first, or maybe you get like the pricing paralysis. You know your rates need to go up. You know this, and every time you sit with it, something in your body just says no because charging what you're actually worth makes you a target. It makes you, the woman that someone might look at and say, who does she think she is? Oh gosh, she's greedy. Isn't it $18,000 to work with her? Did you know that the RRI on that could be millions, but your body already knows how that story ends. And so it votes no, no, we're not gonna be seen in this. And then there's maybe the softened message. Maybe you're in this one where you write something that's real that says the actual thing. And then you read it back and you start editing, and then you edit more, and you edit more, and then eventually you've taken out 40% of what you actually meant. You've done the verbal equivalent of walking into a room and physically shrinking so that no one is threatened by the space that you take up. Maybe you identify with the achievement amnesia, someone asks you what you've built, and your mind goes blank. Not because the list is empty. But because your body is predicting what might happen when you actually claim it. So it just shuts the door before you can even get there. Maybe you identify with the leadership suppression so you have something to say, a real take, a disruptive truth, something that your industry and your people actually need, and you wait, and then you wait until someone else says it first. You draft it, delete it. Wonder if it's too much. This is not being thoughtful. This is you waiting for permission that you are culturally trained to do before you open your mouth. And then there's this one, the one that made me really sit with it. Research on New Zealand entrepreneurs found that some were deliberately limiting their business growth to avoid becoming visible, not unconsciously, which a lot of us are doing. But deliberately choosing smaller on purpose because success felt too costly. I have a circle of the most extraordinary women. In fact, I'm about to go and spend a week with some of them. I have some in my mastermind too. A circle of extraordinary women, high achieving, building real things, and every single one of them still has their own version of this. The woman who won't post her results because she doesn't want her old world to feel bad. The woman who shrinks every time she walks into a room from her hometown, the woman who keeps pivoting right before the threshold of her biggest level, because her body literally cannot tolerate the altitude of her own success. Do you know, I heard something like only 2% of women owned businesses ever reach a million dollars in revenue. That is not a talent or a strategic gap. That is a nervous system gap. I want you name something here as well that I want you to be really, really aware of, and that is the fawn response. So, you know, fight, flight, freeze, the fawn response. Named by therapist, Pete Walker is the fourth survival strategy, and it's the one that most women are actually rewarded with, which makes it the most dangerous one to carry. The fawn response is, I'll make myself more appealing to the threat. I will merge with what you want. I'll become so agreeable. So palatable, so non-threatening. You see this a lot in workplace bullying. You see this a lot in domestic violence situations, but I will make myself so appeasing that you cannot cut me down because there's nothing to cut. Think about how you might be actually having a fawn response within your business. So in Tall Poppy context, the foreign response looks like maybe adding a, oh, I don't know if that makes sense. After every single powerful insight. Or crediting the team when you did the work, over qualifying your expertise in front of people who already paid you for it, or apologising for charging your prices, making a joke about your own success before someone else can make it for you. The brutal truth about a fawn response, it is socially rewarded enormously. Socially rewarded. The woman who says, oh, it wasn't really me, I just got lucky. She's told, oh, you're so gracious. You're so humble. You're so real. The woman who says, yeah, I did that and I'm proud of it. Well, she's arrogant, right? She gets whispered about, not in circles like where I'm about to go for a week. But in probably most other circles of her lives. That's why the people that you surround yourself with are so important. Maybe she gets tagged as someone who thinks that she's better than everyone else, being confident in what she's doing or saying. So your nervous system has done a perfect cost benefit analysis. And it concluded, fawning keeps me safe, gets me praised. Why would I stop? Because the answer to that question, because you're running your business from a trauma response because every time you fawn, you train your nervous system that your real voice is dangerous because you are literally practicing palace powerlessness every time you diminish a win. And your body reads its own smallness as an evidence of a threat. The people who celebrated you for your humility, they weren't celebrating your health, they were celebrating your compliance. Okay? I know that was big. So if all of this is running true, if Tall Poppy conditioning is nervous system encoded, if it runs below conscious awareness. If information alone doesn't shift it, then what actually does recalibration look like? So let me start with what it doesn't look like, because this is the kind of work that I do, not what it doesn't look like. This is the kind of work that I do every single day. It doesn't look like telling yourself that the limiting belief is wrong. You cannot think your way out of somatic encoding. You can know the pattern exists. You can name it in real time. Your body will still run it because it lives below where the logic level reaches. It doesn't look like pushing through, forcing yourself to be visible when your nervous system is in sympathetic activation doesn't build capacity. It builds a larger stress response, a longer term damage, and a stronger association between visibility and danger. It doesn't look like one breakthrough moment. There is no single session, no one conversation, no single activation that permanently dissolves a lifetime of encoding. The work is layered and it runs at the body level, not at a belief level. So what it does look like, it looks like somatic work, work that moves through the body rather than around it. Somatic experiencing EFT, hypnotherapy, nervous system informed coaching, trauma informed work. And I know that might seem excessive to some of you, but again, think about the nervous system's fight or flight response and what it is doing that stress response in your body and how it is physically reacting in the same way as if there's a snake in front of you. To putting up your prices work that allows the body to complete the responses it was never allowed to complete. And then work that reprograms your subconscious to believe something different and actually feel that we want the original impulse to push back to stand tall, to say, I deserve to be here. That impulse got suppressed every time the group cut the poppy, it is still there. It has to move through. It looks like titration, not flooding, not just post the big vulnerable thing and feel the fear, but gradual tolerable expansion at your growth edges. Working with identities to bring safety to a survival identity and bringing in a more resourced path. Micro doses of visibility that your nervous system can metabolize without tipping into overwhelm. Each small experience of being seen and remaining safe rees, the rewrites, sorry, the threat prediction just a little and over time, that accumulates into a genuinely recalibrated system. It also looks like co-regulation. This is probably one of the most underrated pieces of all of this. Your nervous system was not designed to regulate alone. It was designed to borrow safety from the other people around it. So when you are in a room where success is celebrated, where ambition is normal, there is a reason why we ask in my mastermind for celebrations every single Friday where nobody else is measuring you against themselves. Where your nervous system receives new data, not as a belief, but as a felt experience. This is also what rewrites the threat prediction. It also looks like identity work running alongside this, running alongside this somatic work because as the nervous system learns that visibility is safe, the identity needs to expand to hold the new level. There are parts of you, protector parts in internal family systems language, we would call them protector parts, who have been keeping you small for a very, very good reason. They need to be honored, not fought. They need to be shown that the landscape has changed. You found a different tribe that the rules of the old environment do not apply here. The recalibration is not become someone who doesn't care what people think the recalibration is become someone whose nervous system has enough evidence of safety that the threat response stops firing at normal growth level stimuli. Okay? You stopped making yourself small, not because you stopped caring about belonging. Belonging is wired into your survival system. You will always care. But because you found a belonging that doesn't require your smallness as the price of emission. I wanna end this episode by coming back to where we started. You think you're better than everyone else? I've heard something along those words a lot in different ways throughout different parts of my life. Whether it be referred to the way that I carry myself, whether it be referred to the way that I stand strong and what I believe, what I'm confident to talk about, the way that I wanna live my life, the standards that I have, the values that I wanna live by and over the last few weeks, I've really sat with what they revealed these words. And not just sat with what they revealed about the person who said them, but about the culture that made them land so hard in my body, about the years of conditioning. That meant that five words could send a multi six figure business mentor into months of self-censorship, months of spiraling about what people might have thought about me in all sorts of different situations. So here is where I landed. The Tall Poppy. The Tall Poppy does not get cut because she's arrogant. She gets cut because she makes people confront what they have not allowed themselves to want because her visibility activates everyone else's conditioning because her refusal to shrink is a mirror that some people can't look into. So when they cut her, when they say she thinks she's better, when they whisper about her being successful, when they find reasons to diminish what she has built, it is not information about who she is. This was not information about who I am. And also, let me just throw in, I have a defined ego center in my human design. When I decide I have constant access to willpower, I can't help that I'm designed that way. In fact, it's a gift. It's a gift. But you can see how having that and then Tall Poppy Syndrome, oh my gosh, that's a whole nother conversation we could have. This is information about the unresolved wound in that person that your expansion activated. So I want you to remember this. You are not too much. Your success is not arrogance. Your visibility is not selfish, and your ambition is not a character flaw. You are a woman whose nervous system learned quite correctly given the data that it was given. The standing out was dangerous, and now you are in a different era with different data available, and the question is not whether you are allowed to be tall. The question is whether you are ready to build the internal and relational environment that lets your nervous system finally learn that you are. That is the work. That's the frequency. That is what I am here for, and build and grow simultaneously at the same time. Now, if this episode landed for you, I want you to share it with a woman who really needed to hear it. Tell her which bit she needs to hear, and if you wanna go deeper on this work on what it actually looks like to recalibrate the nervous system, to dissolve the identity patterns that are capping your business and to build from frequency rather than survival. Then you can come and find me at jessicaread.com. Everything you need is there. I will see you in the next episode, and as always, come into my inbox over on Instagram @jessica.read.ilc and let's talk about what really landed. I cannot wait to hear it. Bye for now. If this episode awoken something in you, good. You are ready to lead from your fuck yes frequency, and you'll find ways to go deeper in the show notes. And before you go, I would be so grateful if you could leave a review and share this episode with someone who you know that is done leading their business from survival and ready to create and live in overflow. See you on the next one.