The Pressure to Be Enough Isn't Motivation — It's Something You Were Taught

Ever feel like your worth is tied to how hard you work out, how "perfect" your nutrition is, how you look, or how smart you sound? In this episode, I'm getting real about the invisible pressure I've carried for years — to look a certain way, to say the right thing, to earn my value through achievement — and what changed when I finally started releasing it. We're talking body image, the "shoulds" running your life, why your workouts don't have to be about how you look, and how to find a motivation that's actually yours. If you've ever felt exhausted trying to be enough for everyone else, this one's for you.

Timestamps: 

00:00 Intro — the pressure to earn your worth
 02:00 The pressure to sound smart and "earn" value
 07:00 The pressure society puts on how you look
 10:00 Where the pressure to be "enough" really comes from
 15:00 Releasing pressure through self-worth and faith
 17:00 Releasing pressure through weightlifting
 20:00 Releasing pressure around food and nutrition

Instagram: @lainijojo
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lainijojo 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You love yourself so much more when you stop living and making decisions because of all the pressures that either you're putting on yourself or you're letting society and other people put on you. Welcome back to Her Revival. I'm your host, Lainey Gibson. And if you're new here, I'd be so excited to hang out with you for the next however long we chit chat for. We talk all things fitness, nutrition, mindset, personal development, creating a body, a mindset, a life that you are just so happy and loving and excited to just wake up in. All the things that I love to talk about and wish that I had when I was first starting my fitness, figuring my life out journey. I guess we're just getting right into this. We're talking about pressure and value and worth today. And I wanted to just kind of be like an honest, chit-chatty conversation. And I think for you guys to get to know me a little bit better too. Because I feel like I haven't done a great job. Maybe it yeah, maybe it seems like it on the other side of the phone, but I feel like I haven't done a great job of really just showing and being me on the internet. I feel like I've always felt this little bit of a pressure. And I don't know, let me know if you can't relate to this. I feel like we all can to some degree, but just like a pressure to show up a certain way. And then especially with the podcast, for example, I have always risking really deep now, always put my value and my worth in like being smart and knowing things and achievement, especially when you're younger, if you're praised for doing really well with school or a sport or how you look or different things that you do, you tie your worth a lot to that. So I've always felt like I need to get my value from it, and therefore that's how I give value to other people, not necessarily just who I am and the other things about me that I have to offer, and just this pressure for having to make it sound a certain way, make it look a certain way to be like pleasing for other people, to get their I guess stamp of approval on it. And I don't know, it's exhausting. It has made me kind of stressed and put off. I've had weeks where I completely fall over. I probably had a year where I just wasn't making episodes because it felt like it had to be this pressure of justice education, and that was the value that I could give, and I had to give it a certain way, and then a pressure to have to say the exact right thing to make sure it sounds the exact right way so it makes sense, or people take it right, whatever it was. And it just put all this pressure on me for this and for I mean other content stuff too, and other areas of my life that it takes the joy out of it and it makes it not fun, and it just got me thinking that number one, I just need to say it, I just need to get it off my chest and say it out loud. And I've just deep down really wanted to be able to just chit-chat and share a little bit more of all the stuff that I love and not need it to look a certain way or strategize and think however many steps ahead and all that kind of stuff, and just like be and chit-chat and share all the things that I'm learning and going through, and just always trying to grow. And I know that y'all are similar to that. I would assume at least that's why you consume some of my content. And I just want to be able to show more of that and find the other people that really vibe with that kind of stuff and not worry about like that perfectionism. And all of that got me thinking because I've been wrestling with this for like a year or longer, like a long time. And I feel like I'm finally now able to get through it. I will say thank you, God. He has he has been very helpful and instrumental in all this, but I just can't help but see the similarity with our fitness journeys. And this is a conversation that I have with so many of my clients in our check-ins or just will mess their message me between check-ins because I always say, like, hey, if something's coming up between check-ins, like talk to me. I don't want you to feel like you have to go through this alone because that was why I started coaching, that's why I started making content, is because I felt so alone trying to figure out and learn all these things just by myself. And a lot of times they'll say, I don't want to go to the gym because I just don't mentally or physically have it in me to have this crazy leg day and it just feels like so much pressure, and like I don't want to have a bad workout, and I just feel overwhelmed and tired, so I'm just like not gonna go, or like this pressure to me to be perfect with our nutrition, and it turns into this obsession or this restriction and then this all or nothing yo-yo pendulum swing, or maybe we just avoid it altogether and we're totally in that like effort mindset because we're like, I don't want to deal with the restriction and the perfection and this pressure of it needing to look a certain way, but I feel like there's this pressure on social media to need to look a certain way, and it's all about like your your body or like your outfits or what your house looks like, or all these days, like there's just this pressure, and I feel like not only for someone who makes content to try to be like, why am I making this? Where is the motivation for this coming from? Is there a pressure that's driving this? And this isn't just me wanting to share this, and that's something that I've realized I really want to be so intentional with when I make some content because I don't ever want it to be like number one, I'm conforming to a pressure, but I don't want to give that pressure to anybody else. And I'll see so many influencers, which like a lot of people make their money online by promoting things for other people to buy, and then there's this like FOMO, or there's like a clothing company, and they'll have a launch, and then there's this FOMO, and you feel this pressure to need to get something from it, or to have all the gym wear that cute outfits or whatever that everybody else has, or to be able to go out and do all these fun trips or fancy dinners or fancy cars or all that kind of stuff, and there's just this pressure in the in the world and in society that I didn't realize I was growing up in, and that there was a different way to even think about it until probably about like I don't know, maybe a year or two ago, but it's honestly the past couple of months that I've just really been, I don't know, I guess like my eyes have really been open to it. And it just makes me so honestly, it makes me sad. It makes my heart feel heavy. Not only for myself having to realize, oh my gosh, I've been having all this pressure that's keeping me from being able to actually focus on things that actually are fulfilling and make me happy and live a good life and like love on others because of this invisible pressure that either the world or a lot of times like myself, like I'm putting on me, and then it makes me sad for other people knowing that they're going through something like that too. And when we have that pressure, we're not able to do things just solely because we want to, and it's what makes us happy, and I'm not saying everything is gonna make it sometimes. You're like, I don't want to go to work or I don't want to, we still need to go, right? Doing stuff because it makes us happy, not from the influence of the pressure of other things on us in the world. And I guess there's a few different things that I want to be able to talk about with this, and just what I've been kind of thinking on and and I guess like praying about working through is first, I guess, the pressures of the world and everybody else. And I feel like, especially in my little corner of the internet, we talk a lot, or I've talked so far in the past I don't know, seven years I've been on fitness social media about like workouts and nutrition and changing your body composition and your relationship with food. And for a while, I didn't think as deeply into this as I do now, but I really feel like there is so much unhealthy pressure on how we look, and I feel like that's all the fitness industry has really turned into is how do I look, and then also how can I get people to like me for how I look, and how can I earn things or move up in life because of how I look, and that's what it's about, and just the aesthetics of it all. And I am absolutely I'm it might sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. I am all for physical goals. I think that it is the human body is so incredible. I think about that often. I'm such a nerd, you guys. I should show y'all what my notes looked like from like biology and a Nat and Fizz classes, but I think the human body is so cool, and I think it is incredible that we can shape it and build muscle and get it to look a certain way and achieve those goals and how strong it is. And I think that's so cool, but I do not think that that should be our driving force for everything that we do, and that should absolutely not be where we get our worth from, and that shouldn't be why we decide to do all of the things that we do, especially if we are making sacrifices in life, for it to come from that place of looking a certain way for that validation. And I know that's definitely where a lot of it was for me at first, is that's how I thought I was supposed to look to be validated, to be at a certain status or level or whatever it was. And when I had all my health issues happen, which y'all have heard me talk about, it took all that away from me. My body is very like bent through the ringer. And it's really humbled me and just taught me and helped me understand what I didn't understand because that's all we really see in magazines. I remember you would look at a magazine when you were little, and it was, or at least I would when I was little, and it would be all these celebrities about, oh my gosh, she gained weight, she can't stop gaining weight, or that's a photo of her at the beach, and she looks, you know, like she's gained weight. And I'm like, oh my goodness. First of all, why do we give a crap about these celebrities and what their body looks like? That is not the value that they're giving to the world. But just seeing that, and that's where people's worth was, and like people were judging you for how you looked, and like you needed to look a certain way to be acceptable, and we don't even realize this pressure that's put on us until we kind of get to this point for me, like looking back, and it's the past couple of years, because I worked with hundreds of women helping them work through this because I had to get myself through it and just seeing like where this all came from because I'm like, this is absolutely crazy that I thought I was the only one dealing with all this, but no, that's majority of us, like so many of us deal with this, and this pressure that's put on us because of the world that we grow up in and the the culture and diet culture, and it is so toxic not only to our mindset and our relationship with ourselves and our bodies and food and each other, but it's so toxic to our health, like our actual internal health and our mental health. And I don't know, I just I just want to change that so bad. So I guess the thing that I'll say to this is especially if you are maybe hearing this or you're resonating, and you're either that's something that you're working through too, or maybe you're realizing, okay, maybe that's where this is coming from. That's why I have so much stress, and things just feel way harder. There's more struggle than it needs to be with our relationship with food or our body or exercise. I feel like that's where a lot of that comes from, is that invisible pressure on it and it needing to with the where it's coming from, like where that drive and where that motivation is coming from, versus it being from a place of I just want to be the best version of me. I don't want my relationship with food to feel like it has these chains over me where it makes me either fear food or feel like I lose control and I can't just use food as is like nourishment and fuel for my body sometimes, like wanting to overcome those things so they don't hold us back from living this incredible life, and we're not making them these idols, and they don't have this hold and this influence over us in a way that it shouldn't. That was something that was I really had to work through, and that's part of why I do what I do because I like I said, like I realize that that's so big for so many women, and helping them have this drive come from a healthier place. So if you're hearing this and you're thinking, like, okay, I definitely that's something that I'm working through, or maybe I'm realizing is influencing me, I would totally, totally encourage that you take a second, like just sit, sit because like we're always rushing. Like, we I feel like we never give ourselves a second to just like sit with ourselves and be like, why do I think the way the things I think? Why do I do the things that I do? Why am I doing all this? And see where you maybe are having pressure coming from other things in your life, where like external to look a certain way or do things a certain way, and figuring out like what's what's a better motive motivation for me? What's a better, deeper why and reason for me to do this? And if I'm trying to get this validation or this value or this worth from how I physically look, what can I focus on instead? Because I think it's like we can't just say don't do this, like you need to like do this instead. Like we we gotta have like where do I divert my attention and my energy to? And then finding your worth from the person that you are, and that's why I'm so big on overcoming that relationship with food to be in this really healthy spot where it's fuel nourishment because we're doing it out of this like love for ourselves and the self-discipline, which is something that we're all called to have, that is essential to be able to steward your body and your finances and everything else that you have in your life, being able to have that healthy self-discipline. And then if we're looking a certain way for validation from other people, instead of them liking us, if it's a boy or friends or people on the internet, how we liking us for how we look, can they like us for our character, for our heart, for the things that we love to be able to share with other people, with all the information that we want to just be able to give to everybody because we know how much it changed our lives, with the impact that you can make in other people's life and being able to have that be where your drive is coming from of this is the value I want people to get from me, not from how I look. And I feel like for me, working through that has been super, super freeing, and it's definitely been like a process to get to that point. And I I do still sometimes like transparently have to sit and think, okay, why am I doing what I'm doing? Like, I just want to make sure that's not where my motivation is coming from, because that's not giving value to the world. Like, it's not to inspire or to empower or to educate or anything positive. It's solely just for like, I want to get validation for this. I don't, I don't love that feeling. That's not what I want to give the world. You know what I mean? Um hoping y'all can resonate with what I'm talking about here. So we have the pressures of the world and society needing to look a certain way, and I feel like the other pressure, like I said, is from ourselves and us needing to look a certain way to be enough, or to earn get a certain income level to be enough, or to get a certain title, or to get a partner, or to have kids, whatever it is to be enough, and we have this pressure on us that we need to achieve those things because we are not whole or okay or worthy without those things. But if we're having that pressure on us, that's not allowing us to spend time, number one, with just ourselves, to get to know ourselves and actually truly love ourselves and know that you are absolutely enough is who you are. And if you don't feel like that or you don't have that self-love, which I definitely didn't for I'd say in my like adolescent and young adult life, I feel like I didn't really have that. And being able to spend the time to actually work on that, I mean, this sounds corny, but like changes your life, like absolutely, like your whole experience of life changes when you finally can say, like, okay, I actually love myself, and I'm not needing all these things external to me to be enough. And I feel like the biggest thing that's helped me through that is my relationship with God and Jesus and being able to letting that be what my focus was on, and letting God just change my thoughts and my heart posture and the things that I focused on and where my worth was coming from, and not needing to earn it, and not needing to be anything other than just me. And I feel like keeping my focus on that and on God and on just kind of changing my mind with all that, like that's helped all that pressure just kind of fall away because it's no longer about those things. That's not what I'm focused on, that's not the lens that I'm looking at the world, or it's most importantly, I feel like like myself through of having all these pressures on me and changing where I've gotten my worth and what I'm putting my worth and my value in. And I feel like that's a big part of what's really changed my philosophy and my mindset when it comes to how I view nutrition and how I view exercise and how I view discipline and taking care of your body. Because when I first got into nutrition and fitness, it was it was all just to change my body to look better, to look different better, to lose weight, to lose body value. That's all the focus was on. And it turned into this really unhealthy relationship with food and exercise in my body because that's where I was putting the focus and the value in of making my body look different and it not being okay the way that it was. And obviously, all the bad misinformation from like diet culture and everything. But then when I found weightlifting and it was so empowering to be, I think it was like 40 pounds on the leg press. It was not anything crazy, but it just felt like the most empowering feeling because for once it wasn't exercise, it wasn't about how I looked to change that to feel like I liked myself or my body better. It was a I this is super cool that my body can do this. And it felt really hard and it was enjoyable. And if you're not at that point with working out or weightlifting, I want to encourage you to try to find that because I think I first found that through running, and then I found it through weightlifting, and just that like high that you get from doing something really hard, and you're like, I'm not sure I can do this. I remember I couldn't do a burpee, I couldn't get down and press my like I didn't have enough upper body arm strength to do that, and I was like, whoa. So when I could finally do push-ups or pull-ups or bench press or all those exercises, it was the most fun thing ever. I loved it. I'd be busting out decline Spider-Man push-ups between sets of whatever in the gym, not knowing what was going on. But I loved it so much because I could finally do, I could finally do this thing that I wasn't able to do, and workouts were suddenly this place to, it was so fun to push myself and do something hard and to see my effort and my pushing myself outside of my comfort zone and expanding my capacity of what I was capable for. That changed my body because that's like physiologically how we grow muscle and our body changes, is like actually pushing it outside of our that growth happens outside your comfort zone, like is so true for building muscle. You all have heard my episodes about that. If you happen to go listen to those about building muscle, so that changed my body, but it changed like what I was doing the workouts for in the first place, and it helped with that relationship with exercise, or even for running, instead of it being for burning calories, it was so euphoric to be able to like I I love doing like sprints to music, so it's called like fartlick training where you sprint when the beat drops and then you either walk or jog after. And that feeling of I don't know if I can keep going, but the chorus is still going, so I gotta keep running, and just my lungs, my legs feel like they're giving out on me, but I'm able to make it all the way through and knowing you made it past that point feels so good, and it's not about how you look, and it's not about burning calories or anything other than just being able to prove to yourself that you can do something hard, and that just makes the it makes exercise so much more valuable for you, like as a person, but it makes it more enjoyable and it helps you grow as a person, and it takes that pressure off of my workouts need to look a certain way, or I need to always be progressing, or I should be further along in my fitness journey by now. And it's truly just about instead of that being this like invisible pressure on you that's making it unenjoyable, making it hard to enjoy the process or stick with the process or actually see changes by doing the discomfort, like uncomfortable things, it changes your perspective, and that pressure is just released off of you, and you're able to say, Okay, I'm doing this because yes, I'm gonna get the physical benefits, yes, I'm gonna get the health benefits from doing this, but I just want to do this for me, and I want to be able to withstand that discomfort and I want to be able to prove to myself that I can, and to be able to allow that to be your driver and not have that pressure. Oh my gosh, it's so freeing. I tell it to my clients all the time. I'm like, if you feel like you can't give it to a hard leg day today, it's okay if the weights aren't as heavy. It's okay if you don't push yourself as hard. It's okay if maybe you just go do like a shoulder workout. Sure, I can't do legs. Like, if you like truly can't get yourself to go, go do something and just take the pressure off of it. Or still do your workout, but you don't need to PR on everything. That's normal. You're a human. Sometimes you're tired, sometimes you're exhausted, sometimes that a little bit is all that you have to give, but you're giving everything that you can, and that's enough. And again, just there's no pressure, there's no pressure on it. And from a nutrition standpoint, like the pressure of having to perfectly control every little macro or needing everything to look perfect, or that's a lot where it comes from, and it kind of swings us into that kind of all or nothing mindset because there's this pressure that like we we put all this pressure on each meal or every little thing, and when in reality, it's number one, our body's looking at accumulation of what we're eating over a period of time, not one meal doesn't determine anything of your progress. And I feel like a lot of times we get to this point where we put so much pressure on it and pressure on ourselves to be perfect or get it right and make it so unenjoyable, but then we completely forget the whole reason that we're eating in the first place, which is to nourish and fuel our body because there shouldn't be any pressure with that. It should be I'm choosing to be able to fuel my body, to feel my best, to honor this one body that I get that I'm experiencing the rest of my life in. And maybe I didn't know how to do that growing up, but I finally kind of get this owner's manual, thank you, science, for figuring out what we need to give our body and learning how to be able to do that and no pressure on it that you have to eat healthy because everybody else is, or you have to, for whatever reason, taking that pressure off of it and truly just having it be because you love yourself and you want to take care of your body. And if you have a bad relationship with food, whether that's being obsessive and restrictive or maybe the other direction, and you're like, I just can't get myself to eat healthy and to, you know, not give in to cravings, being able to say, I love myself enough, not for pressure to look a certain way or for anything other than I love myself enough that I don't want this to be something in the way of me having the healthiest body that I can. And of course the physical changes come from that, but that's not like that main driver of it. And then we stop putting so much unnecessary and unearned like value and weight on those little things that really shouldn't be what controls us and tells us how we should work value ourselves or how we should feel about how we look or how much we eat or don't eat that day. You love yourself so much more, you love your life so much more, you have so much more gratitude and joy and peace and happiness when you stop living and making decisions because of all the pressures that either you're putting on yourself or you're letting society and other people put on you. And that's something that I feel like we all kind of have to learn the hard way because unfortunately, we just grow up with that. We hear people saying those things and doing those things, and that's what we're modeled, and that's the message that we're given. And I think as we get older, we realize that we have free will and we can actually question stuff and say, I actually don't agree with that, or I actually don't want that for myself. That does not make me feel good, and I don't have to struggle with this anymore, but I also have to be the one to say, hey, maybe it's not my fault, but it is my responsibility to do something about it and do the work to be able to release those pressures from ourselves. If that's something that we've been dealing with for a long time, it takes work. If you have a relationship with God, or maybe you you don't and you are maybe he's nudging you or you're wanting to, I would encourage, bring that to him because he can he can do so much. He can do so much to help you do that. He has been, he did more in this past year than all of my years of consuming personal development content could ever have touched. But being able to actually take a second and figure out what do I actually want, what are my actual values in life, what's gonna actually make me happy, and what the reason for that is it because of the pressures of the validation or the worth that I'm thinking that I'm gonna get from having those things, or is that actually adding so much value and love to my life? And maybe it's not actually changing what you do, but it's changing why you do it, especially from like a health and fitness perspective. Then to not make decisions based off of worrying about how other people are gonna perceive it or what they're gonna think of you and you changing yourself to be able to match that. That's something that I still catch myself, I still have to ask myself, and I'm not sure that's ever gonna go away. I mean, let me know if you're someone that doesn't do that and you ever like give me your tips. I don't know if that ever fully goes away. I think just innately as humans, we think about what other people will think. And just if you experience this too, give yourself grace for this. That's how we're wired as humans. Because think about back when we lived in tribes, if you were different, or if you weren't doing exactly what everybody else was doing in the tribe and like conforming to that, then you maybe you're kicked out of the tribe. And if you're kicked out of the tribe, you probably wouldn't survive by yourself. So we have this survival instinct and this fear in ourselves of if people don't like us, if they don't accept us, if we're not conforming to this pressure of how we're supposed to, or we're not doing all the things that we're quote unquote supposed to, then we're gonna die. Like our brain perceives it as a threat, like we could die. And that hasn't changed even now in like 2026. So I think even realizing like it's okay for us to have those thoughts of, oh my gosh, like I'm so scared to just truly be me or do the things that I want to or to release those pressures. But if you're having those thoughts, like that's probably just because of that survival instinct in your brain, nothing bad's gonna happen, and you kind of just have to, you can remind your brain of that. You can give it proof of maybe seeing all the other people that have done that. So it's like, why actually have a little bit of evidence that that's not the case, but you kind of just gotta step out and do it. You gotta step out and you gotta prove to your brain that, oh, it's actually not scary to just be myself or to do things differently than what other people say, or to release those pressures that people are putting on me and not conforming to that, because then maybe those people just weren't the people that you were meant to be with anyway. Like if there's this pressure and you're not wanting to conform to that and you're rejected for not giving in to that, those aren't your people. If you have to live in a way that's not in alignment with who you actually want to be and who you are and the life that you want to live, then maybe that's not where you're meant to be. And maybe that's a sign that you're meant to go find somewhere else or go find other people, or maybe be okay on your own for a little bit to find yourself, and then you find those people, and then you know I'm not trying to conform to any pressures, I'm just who I am, and I can just be that with these people because I spent that time really being with myself to question all the pressures that was putting on me, all the pressures that the world and other things were putting on me, and I could get rid of those so I could just be me. My client Jenna, if you ever listen to this, it's like an inside joke that we have. So she would always say, I should do this. Like we always, I should do this, I should do that, I shouldn't do this, I shouldn't do that. And it's like, who said, who said that for real? Don't don't shun yourself into doing something or not doing something that you actually want to do and you know is in alignment with you and your values and what's important to you. So if you find yourself constantly saying, I should do this or I should do that, I would invite you to look at where are you getting that from? What pressure is telling you that you should or shouldn't do that? And is that actually in alignment? If you're saying, Oh, I should go to the gym, maybe you actually would be better to go to the gym, but then we look at hey, what's my motivation for actually going to the gym? That's my reasoning. We don't want it to be a oh, I should do this, and I don't really want to, so I'm begrudgingly going to go do it. It's like a no, I'm choosing to go to the gym even if I don't fully feel like it, because I know that it's good for my confidence and my belief in myself and my personal growth and my health and yes, my physical and fitness goals that I'm like working towards. But the motivation is from a different place, or I should eat healthy. It's well, no, I want to choose to, even though this sounds good, because yeah, burgers or an ice cream are always gonna sound good. They're not gonna not sound good, but I'm gonna choose to order something healthier because I've eaten out a few other times recently, and I want to keep in mind my health and honoring my body and what I put in it, and yes, the goals that I'm committed to right now, and not just the momentary pleasures that I used to maybe give into because my why wasn't strong enough. So I feel like that should is a really helpful place to figure out where you're maybe doing this in your life, where you keep saying like you should or like you have to, then it's not the like you truly want to be able to do that, and that's either questioning what if you should be doing it in the first place or why you're doing it. Maybe you need to change that why and kind of go deep and figure out like what I need to work through here, what kind of pressures and what kind of value and things am I tying to this that I can just release here. I promise they won't all be like this, but sometimes they might be. Sometimes I might just come talk and let the thoughts go, let the vibes go wherever they may go. Just kind of get something off my chest, have this podcast be something that's a little bit more just a place to process and share things that I'm going through, and that I want to be able to help other people, other women be able to hear if we're going through something similar. So, all right, I love you guys. Thank you for listening to my thoughts. I hope you got something from it, or at the very least, maybe it just felt like we were on FaceTime hanging out and you were a little sounding board for me. I appreciate you for that so much. I hope you guys have such a rest of your day. If you've never tried matcha, please try matcha. It's so freaking good. And just like I end every episode, go do something that your future self will thank you for. Bye guys.