To Our Core with Katie Murray

Episode 43: The Good Girl Tax

• Katie Murray • Season 1 • Episode 43

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This episode dives into how the subconscious "Good Girl Tax" influences your energy, sense of self, and connections with others. Whether you struggle with saying no or feel exhausted from people pleasing, this conversation offers powerful insights and practical tools to break free.

Main Topics Covered:

  • The internal cost of constantly accommodating others and suppressing your true desires
  • How agreeableness can become a strategic habit that erodes identity and vitality
  • The three forms of "tax": energy, identity, and relationship costs
  • Recognising the signals your body and mind send when you're paying the tax
  • A simple audit to catch yourself in the act of silence or over-compliance
  • Practical steps to reclaim authenticity and set honest boundaries

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Remember, reclaiming your authentic voice and boundaries isn’t about drastic overhaul - it’s about small, consistent steps. Start with one honest no this week and see how your energy and relationships transform.

SPEAKER_01

Welcome. This is to our core with Katie Murray, and this is the place where we peel back our layers to uncover who we really are at our centre, at our core. And think of it as a chat with your bestie, the one who can make you laugh until your belly hurts, who is ridiculously unfiltered, and will lovingly call you forward to help you cut through the noise and get real with yourself. Around here, nothing is off limits. And we are mixing this up with equal parts of humour and heart. So let's dive right in. Okay, I want you to think of the last time someone asked you for something and you said yes before you'd even finished hearing the question. Maybe it was a colleague asking you to take on, you know, just one more thing, or maybe it was your mother-in-law asking you to host Christmas again, or maybe it was a friend asking if you could pick up a kid's, or what are her plants, or read her resignation letter, or hold her secret. And you said yes. Course you did. And somewhere underneath the yes, with its rapid fire, like so fast it's almost too quick to even notice, there was a no.

SPEAKER_00

Like a real one.

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A no that had information in it, a no that knew you were tired or stretched, or you know what, you simply didn't want to.

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And that didn't get a vote. Here's what I want to talk about today.

SPEAKER_01

Not the yes, it's the no that never got spoken. And you know what? The bill that shows up later for silencing it. I like to call it the good girl tax. And I promise you, by the end of this episode, you're gonna start seeing it everywhere. It's gonna be in your calendar, in your relationships, in the version of you that shows up exhausted at 9 p.m. wondering where your whole self went. This is to our core. I'm Katie, and we are gonna do a deep dive into this today because you know, here's the thing about taxes. You know, the official kind, like the government type. You don't often get a choice about whether to pay them. They get taken before the money even reaches your hand or your bank account, because you know, cash is a thing of the past. And most of the time, you don't see the deduction unless you're looking at your pay slip. You just notice, like eventually, that maybe that there's less than you thought there'd be. And that is the exact way that the good girl tax works. It's it's the toll that's levied on you. And it happens very quietly and very automatically and often invisibly. And you know what? It's for the privilege of being endlessly easy to get along with. For not being the difficult one, for never being too much, for making sure that everyone else around you stays comfortable, even when their comfort, you know what, is funded entirely by your discomfort. And here's the cruel design of it.

SPEAKER_00

You don't actually experience it as a cost in the moment.

SPEAKER_01

In the moment, it can often feel like virtuous, like kindness. It feels like you're simply a good person who is flexible, who is easygoing, who doesn't make a fuss. The tax doesn't announce itself as a tax. It comes wrapped in who you think you are, like a personality trait. And I want to be really clear about something before I go any further, and that is this is where I think a lot of conversation about people pleasing goes wrong. This is not a conversation about there being something wrong with you, or you needing fixing, or how being agreeable is some kind of like character flaw that you should be ashamed of. Agreeableness, if that's even a word, and and it is because I said it is and we're going to use it for today. Agreeableness is not the problem. Agreeableness, when it's chosen, like genuinely freely chosen, with your no, you know, that little internal no that goes, mm-mm, I don't want to, that's still intact and available to you when you want to use it. Agreeableness in those circumstances is the most beautiful thing about being a human. That we can come together in unity about something. The problem isn't that you're capable of accommodating other people. The problem is when accommodating stops feeling like a choice for you and becomes the only like setting on your dial or your internal thermostat. That's the tax. It's not kindness, it's this sense of compulsory obligation. Like kindness with no exit. I just gotta keep doing this, I've got to keep saying yes. And like any tax, it gets collected like in instalments. In this setting, in this conversation, it's like across three different accounts. And today we're gonna open all three. Yay! And one of them is your I can your energy account. The other one is your identity account, and the final one is your relationship account. Because the good girl tax doesn't just take from one part of your life, oh no, it doesn't. It takes a like a little from everywhere. It's so sneaky, which is exactly why it's hard to spot. You know, like a small withdrawal here, a small withdrawal there. You know, none of them are big and bold enough or dramatic enough on their own to like set off an alarm until one day you look at your life and you can't quite work out what the hell you want or where you went to. So let's start first with one that I think is the most obvious one, and that is the energy tax. Because it's the one that your body, like it already knows. Your brain just hasn't caught up yet. Every time you say yes when your whole nervous system is screaming, I don't want to, that costs you something. Like, actually, physiologically, like I'm not talking metaphorically, actually on a biological level in your body, your nervous system has to work over time to override its own signal. It's the equivalent of pressing the accelerator and slamming on the brakes at the same time and wondering why your engine is smoking. So I want you to picture this. If you're not like driving a car or doing something that needs your eyesight right now, even close down your eyes. I want you to picture this. Someone asks you to take on a project at work that you do not have capacity for.

SPEAKER_00

Your body knows immediately.

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You might sense a little tightening in your shoulders or even your gut, or a dip of energy, like someone just took the wind out of your sails, or this like little internal wince.

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That's information. That's your system telling you something true. And then your mouth says, Yeah, no worries, yeah, yeah, no, I'll I'll fit it in. Yep, no, no, I can do it. And in that half second, between that wince that you felt and the words, an entire negotiation has happened.

SPEAKER_01

Your authentic response gets vetoed by a much louder, much older voice. The one that learned a long, long time ago that disagreement was dis like dangerous in some way, that having needs was inconvenient. Probably both for you and for other people, that the safest place to stand was wherever made everyone else comfortable.

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That override that's happening in your body, it's not free.

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It runs on the same fuel as everything else you do in the day. Your focus, your patience, your capacity to be present with the people that you actually love. So when you spend hours of your day in that override state saying yes with your mouth while your body says, no, fuck no, don't want to do it. You are not just adding a task to your list. You are running a parallel system in the background that constantly is suppressing your own internal signals. And that is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with how busy you are. And this is why so many high-functioning women I work with tell me, like I, it's not even like I'm doing that much objectively. I'm still wiped up out, I'm still waking up each morning feeling like the battery has not gone on charge, no matter how much I sleep. And I've looked at my day and I've looked at my calendar, and there's not enough to make me feel this tired.

SPEAKER_00

It's not what's on the calendar. It's what's happening underneath the calendar. The Goodgirl tax isn't levied on your time.

SPEAKER_01

It's levied on your nervous system. And here's the part that really grinds my gears.

SPEAKER_00

The part that I want you to sit with.

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Chronic suppression of your own no doesn't just cost you energy in the moment. Over months and probably years, it teaches your body that your own signals aren't reliable enough information to act on.

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And there's a cost to that because your intuition is going to get quieter.

SPEAKER_01

That gut feeling, you know, it stops bothering to show up as strongly or loudly because it's learned, you know what, nobody's fucking listening anyway. You don't run out of energy because you're doing too much. You run out of energy because you're fighting yourself the whole way through. In fact, I did a reel the other day that I said for the people that are saying they need to take stuff, more stuff off their plate all the time to get more energy. I call bullshit. I know unpopular opinion, controversial even. You don't need to do less stuff. You just need to look at your plate and go, how much of this is actually lighting me up? How much of this is actually things I want to do? Because when you do those things, your energy grows, doesn't decrease. You are so in it. People have asked me, how do you like, you know, have a job where you're an employee? Because I do. Part of that reel was talking about how I got offered a government position. And it like lit my heart on fire. Like, there's so much good work that I believe that I can do in that space. And the conversation would come up because people were like, what does that mean for your business? Are you going to need to close it down or are you going to need to curtail how many clients you see? I'm like, how come it's either or? Like this expectation, this identity piece that people look at, where it's one or the other. You can be an employee or you can be a boss. Like entrepreneur running your own business. What if I could do both? People have said to me, I don't know how you, you know, you have a part-time job, so to speak, if we want to call that, because that is, it's a job. And also my business coaching is like it's a heart piece. And also I do this podcast because I really believe with integrity that if you've got resources to offer people, then you should offer them. And not all people have the financial ability to work with me right now. So how can I help them in a way that doesn't cost them anything? Do a podcast. And I can still be a present mom and a wife and a friend and have girls' weekends away. Because the everything that I'm doing, whether it's being an employee for this job, or whether or not it's working in my business as a coach, or whether or not it's doing the podcast, or whether or not it's being present with my family and my friends in connection, they all light me up.

SPEAKER_00

So I have more energy rather than less. You don't run out of energy because you're doing too much. It's that you're not doing enough of what lights you up.

SPEAKER_01

That's the end of my little controversial pep talk. And then the next one is the identity tax. So let's go a little bit deeper because the second, this like second apartment is much more insidious in that it doesn't just cost your energy, it costs a sense of who you actually are underneath all of the accommodating. And here's a question that I often ask my clients tends to land somewhere quite uncomfortable. And I'm wondering what it brings up for you when you hear it. And that is if I said to you, if you said no to every single thing you actually wanted to say no to over the last five years. So every invitation, every favor, every, yeah, no worries, sure, yeah, I can make that work, who would you be right now?

SPEAKER_00

And most people in that often go quite quiet.

SPEAKER_01

And it's not because they don't know, although their immediate response might be, I don't know. That in itself would suggest that their unconscious mind knows.

SPEAKER_00

Because in order to not know, you need to know. In order to not be able to do something, you need to know what the thing is that you're not going to be doing.

SPEAKER_01

Often for clients, some part of them actually suspects the answer, and that's where the discomfort comes from, because the answer can be quite unsettling, and that is that that'd be someone that they don't fully recognize.

SPEAKER_00

Someone who has different friendships, maybe a different job, maybe different relationships.

SPEAKER_01

When agreeableness becomes your dominant strategy for moving through this world, you start making decisions about your career and your friendships, your time, even your values based on what will keep the peace rather than what is actually true for you. And decision by decision, version by version, you build a life that is technically yours and yet somehow does not feel like yours at all. And this is the part where the good girl tax stops being about individual moments. And it actually starts being more about identity. Because every time you silence your authentic response in favor of the easier one, you are casting a small vote for who you are. And if you cast that vote enough times, you know what happens? The tally starts to define you. Not because of who, like that's who you actually are, it's instead because that's who you've been showing up.

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That's who you've rehearsed over and over again.

SPEAKER_01

And I think this is what this is what and why so many women hit a wall somewhere in their 30s or 40s and describe it as some kind of identity crisis when really what's happening is much simpler and often much sadder. And it's that they are meeting themselves for the first time in years and they don't recognize the face. The tragedy of the identity tax is that you become someone that you don't recognize anymore. And yet that person is not necessarily a bad person. It's just that it maybe is a stranger to the person who was actually quite wonderful. The one underneath all of the management and controlling and trying to respond in a way in which you think other people will accept you. That person, the person that had the nose firmly embedded in who they were and they listened to it, that person's pretty wonderful too. Yet we don't honor her in the same way we honor the, yeah, yeah, no, I can help you out to the sacrifice and detriment of ourselves. The third department that I want to talk to you about is the relationship tax. And this is one that a lot of people, when I'm working with them, they're not necessarily expecting this one because it runs completely counter to the story that we often tell ourselves about why we do this, saying yes when we mean no in the first place. We pay the good girl tax because we believe somewhere deep down that it is actually protecting our relationships. That if we are easy and agreeable and accommodating and absolutely making sure that we are never the difficult one, people will love us more. They will stay closer and they will leave less. Yet here's the part that we are not like warning ourselves about. Constant agreeableness doesn't build closeness, it actually builds distance. I want you to think about real intimacy and what it actually requires. Real intimacy, it requires being known, like properly known, including the parts of you that might disagree with something or might have preferences, or you know what, might sometimes have needs. And those needs might be somewhat different to what's being offered to them. And if you're never showing anyone your no, you're never actually being known by them.

SPEAKER_00

You're being liked, you're being appreciated, you're being quite frankly, convenient. Yet known, yeah, not so much.

SPEAKER_01

Known requires risk. And risk is exactly what the good girl strategy is designed to avoid.

SPEAKER_00

And what happens over time in relationships that are built on a person constantly accommodating everyone else.

SPEAKER_01

Resentment. This quiet, slow-building, often unconscious resentment, because some part of you is keeping score, even when you've told the rest of you that scorekeeping is not allowed, that that would make you a bad person. What happens for you is that you start to feel taken for granted. Even though technically you're the one who kept saying yes. You might start to feel really unseen in your own life, even though you were the one in the room the whole time, yet you were just never actually showing up as yourself. And the people on the other end of your agreeableness, they often have no idea any of this is even happening. Because you didn't tell them. You managed it quietly and often very alone, which means that they are actually relating to a version of you that's curated for their comfort, and you're slowly becoming a stranger to the very people that you're trying to keep close. The very people that you're trying the hardest to keep close. And that's the cruelest irony about it, is the tax that we pay to protect connection is actually the very thing that is most likely going to erode it. So why do we keep paying it? Because the good girl tax it often comes with a promise attached to it. You know what? No tax system actually survives without one. And there is always a story about what you will get in return for what's taken. And the promise here in the topic that we're discussing is quite seductive because it taps into something very genuinely human, and that is the promise of safety. The promise that is if you are agreeable enough, if you are easy enough, if you are just low maintenance enough, you will be safe from rejection, safe from conflict, safe from abandonment, safe from ever being told that you're too much. And here's what I want you to make sense of. Because I think it's the most important thing in this whole episode. So down tools, my friends. Listen up. That strategy made complete sense at some point. For most of the women I work with, this pattern was built very early for them. And it might have been in the home setting, or it might have even been a classroom, might have been in a relationship, where being easy genuinely was the safest available option for them. Where having needs got them labeled as difficult. Where disagreement got met with withdrawal or anger or some kind of consequence that taught a very young nervous system a very efficient lesson.

SPEAKER_00

You smooth things over and you'll be okay. That's intelligence.

SPEAKER_01

A part of you built a strategy that kept you safe in an environment that needed to be managed at that time. You can give yourself some credit for that. The problem isn't actually that you built a strategy. The problem is that most of us are still operating and running it decades later in completely different environments with completely different people who would actually probably welcome honesty if we ever gave them the chance to meet it. So here's a question that you could sit with, an invitation per se, and that is is the thing that you're protecting actually still under threat? Or are you running this old security system in a house that's been safe for years? Because here's what the good girl tax is never going to deliver, despite all the promises, much like our politicians, it promises safety and what it actually produces is exhaustion. It can promise you closeness, and what it actually produces is distance. It promises being loved for who you are, and what it actually produces is being loved for who you're pretending to be. Which isn't quite the same thing, no matter how much you pretend, like how good you become at performing, how good you are as an actress or an actor in your own life. You can't be fully loved for a version of yourself that you never let anyone see.

SPEAKER_00

So, what are we going to do about it then?

SPEAKER_01

I am not asking you to have a complete personality overhaul where you go from swinging wildly from someone that is always agreeable to like constantly difficult. Do not walk out into the kitchen after listening to this podcast episode and be highly argumentative and disagreeable with your partner, or in the work setting where you literally listen to this on the way into work, and then you just think my number one objective today is to be fucking difficult. Just to prove a point. I'm not asking you to change who you are. I'm instead going to invite you into something that I would call the audit. And it's a really simple, repeatable practice for noticing the moment that that tax is about to get deducted. Giving yourself the chance to make an actual choice instead of like just operating on autopilot. And here's how it works. The next time you feel that very small internal flinch, you know, that half-second wince before you go and agree to something that you don't want to do. I just invite you to pause. I know it's a strategy I offer a lot on this podcast and also very effective. Just pause internally for a moment and ask yourself one question. If you're going to answer yes, is it a genuine yes, or is this the good girl tax talking? That's it. You're not required to change your answer. Sometimes the answer really is yes. You want to help. You've got capacity. It aligns with what matters to you. And a yes can be a wonderful thing. And this is not about eliminating your generosity or kindness from your life toward other people. What you are doing, though, in creating that half-second awareness is a process that has been running often on autopilot for years, sometimes decades. And that half second is everything in interrupting that. Because once you see that transaction happening, you have access to choice. And once you have access to choice, agreeableness stops being a tax and starts being a gift, you're actually giving. Which feels completely different in your body. Even when the answer on the outside can look really identical to your audience. So I'm going to ask you to maybe even, if you're willing, to do a slightly bigger version of this audit at the end of each week. Just ask yourself, where did I pay tax this week? Where did I say yes when the truth was no? And I really want to caution you that this is not just another opportunity to whip yourself. That's just another version of the same old pattern. Punishing yourself in a different kind of way. I'm asking you to notice because noticing is data, and data is power. Information is power. And power is actually what lets you make a different choice next time. And instead, that that can actually come from a place of clarity rather than this compulsion to do what you've always done. So here's what I'm going to leave you with: the version of you underneath the good girl tax, the one who has actual preferences, actual opinions, an actual no within you that's allowed to exist in the room. She's not gone. She's not lost. She's not even something that you need to completely rebuild from scratch. She's just been there quite quietly for a while because that quietness actually was the most efficient way to keep things running smoothly in the way that she's always known. And I want to honor all of the protections and in best intentions that that version of her has had for you.

SPEAKER_00

Because that's okay.

SPEAKER_01

That made sense. And also, it can be different now. Starting is something as small as one honest no this week to one thing or one person or one moment where you would normally override yourself before you had even finished your sentence. So much of what you probably see on social media is transformation and rebuild yourself and, you know, stir a revolution within yourself. I don't think you need to do that. You don't need to become someone unrecognizable overnight. I am instead inviting you in to do something that is really tangible and really available to you. And that's to start letting the real signal through. Just one little transaction at a time. And then notice and watch what happens to your energy and your sense of self. And probably your relationships. When the people finally get to meet you. Like truly you, instead of you just managing their perception of you. This good girl tax is actually not compulsory. There you go. There's a permission slip if you needed it. You don't have to play it anymore. It just can often feel that way because you've been paying that tax for quite a long time and you forgot that there may be another way of doing things. And if this episode landed for you, I'd love to know which department you recognized yourself in most. Was it energy, was it identity, or relationships? And come find me on Instagram, Katie MurrayCoaching, and tell me what department you saw yourself in. And if you know someone who has been running on empty, trying to keep everyone else comfortable, send this one to her. Send this episode. It might be the permission slip that she didn't even know she was waiting for. Except, of course, she never actually needed a permission slip in the first place. And until next time, I'm Katie. And this has been To Our Core. Thanks for spending time with me today on To Our Core. If something landed in your heart or gave you a much needed giggle, consider sharing it with a friend who also may need this as a timely reminder. And go on. You know you want to. Give me a five-star review so that this podcast can land in the ears of many, many more people. Because remember that life is too short to stay on the surface. Keep living, loving, and laughing all the way to your core. Go make life great. And if you want support around this, go to the show notes to find out more. Until next time, I'll meet you back here with more truth, laughter, and a whole lot of heart.