The People Who Benefit Most From You Playing Small (And How to Stop Letting Them) - ep. 228

The people holding you back aren't always who you think they are. Sometimes they're the people who love you most, and that's what makes this conversation so necessary and so rarely had.

This isn't an episode about cutting people off or finding a new tribe or “just letting them”. It's about understanding what's actually happening, what it's costing you, and how to keep building anyway, even without the permission, the applause, or the people you most wanted in your corner finally coming around.

What we cover:

• Why the people who benefit most from you playing small are often the ones who love you most
• The four relationship dynamics where this shows up, and how to recognize each one
• What it actually costs you to keep performing smallness for the people around you
• Why their discomfort with your growth is not a sign you're doing something wrong
• How to stop seeking permission from people who aren't able to give it
• Why "just find your tribe" is incomplete advice, and what to do instead

Plus, personal stories from navigating an unsupportive marriage while holding everything together financially, and being blindsided by a mentee who worked against me behind the scenes.

If you've been building something real while feeling unsupported by the people closest to you — this one is for you.

Take the next step:

Book a free 30-minute Subconscious Strategy Call → BOOK YOUR SESSION

Join me on Substack → SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE OR UPGRADE

Let's get social → INSTAGRAM (@_brendajohnston)

Take the next step

When the woman shifts, everything shifts. Twelve months of subconscious and energetic work, personalized to how you're actually designed, that creates real, noticeable change every month, so by the end of the year, you're not maintaining a new version of yourself. You are her:  The Limitless Life Collective 

Your voice has a specific frequency. Find out exactly how yours is designed to work: Get your free personalized Voice by Design Guide

Ready to go deeper? Apply to work with me

Join the conversation on Instagram: @_brendajohnston

Substack, The Limitless Life Uncensored, for deeper conversations beyond the podcast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome back to the Limitless Life Podcast. And welcome if you're new here, I am your host, Brenda Johnston. I decided to sit down and record another episode to get a little ahead of things. And also, my dog is having a nap. So this is a great time to do this because she's just over a year and a half old and she's slightly hyper. So I take advantage of her nap time whenever I can. So let's get into this. I want you to grab your coffee or whatever you're drinking. I want you to settle in because today I'm going someplace where a lot of people tend to tiptoe around it. And well, I'm just not a tipper of toes. I don't even know where that came from. We are talking today about the people who benefit most from you playing small. Now, before you assume this is going to be one of those episodes where I tell you to audit your circle, cut the dead weight, go find your tribe, or just let them, I need you to stay with me because that is not what this is at all. And honestly, if one more person tells you to just find your people without acknowledging that you still have to go home to your actual life sometimes, and you can't have your people everywhere that you would like to have them. Yeah, I get it. I understand the frustration. And in this episode, I'm gonna be talking about the people who are not strangers to you. Not talking about the people you found on the internet and that you can just click unfollow. I'm talking about the ones that could be at your dinner table. The people who maybe knew you before, or maybe they're people that you love. And I've had many of you ask me about this in the past, and I've done some basic episodes around this and what to do, like when people are just dragging your energy down. But I just I keep hearing more and more of this. I'm experiencing some of it. Like, I just feel like this conversation needs to be had, so that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna talk about things that people like to not talk about. And here's where I want to start with it. And I want you just to like take this in, okay? When somebody in your life needs you to stay small, it's never actually about you. It's about what your growth could be making visible in them. And when you start building something and you start stepping into a bigger version of yourself, or when you start to genuinely believe that you are capable of more, you can become a mirror or a reflection. I hate that metaphor, but it's true. And for the people around you who, for whatever reason, have decided that they feel safe for settling, or they shelved their own dreams, or they've made kind of like peace with the smaller life, and at some point decided that you know, playing it safe was the reasonable choice. Your expansion can make their unlived life very difficult to ignore. Now, before you get all uppity, not everybody is here to have a big, expansive, crazy, amazing life. Some people are perfectly happy having smaller, quieter lives, and that is okay. But here's what I know that's not how I am, and if you're listening to this, that's also not how you are. So your courage to step into something bigger and do something bigger and not settle, that courage is like a confrontation that those people didn't ask for. Makes them very uncomfortable. And so unconsciously, usually, and sometimes consciously, they like they need you to stop. And they don't need you to stop because they're assholes or bad people or they intentionally wish you harm, usually, but because your growth is costing them something. It's costing them the story that they've been telling themselves about why they can't do something or why they shouldn't do something. I know this well because I lived it when I was in corporate, starting to believe there was a different life available to me. My ex-husband didn't want me to leave corporate, didn't want me to put myself out there, and for a really long time, I made it about me, about whether he believed in me, whether I was worth believing in. I spent honestly, I spent a truly impressive amount of energy on that question, which, in hindsight, was not the best use of my time. But what made it especially frustrating, and I can say this now, only because I'm at a distance from it now and I can see things much differently, I spent years putting my own dreams on hold so he could pursue his. And maybe there was a piece of me that felt guilty at some point because when we first got together, I ended up moving and he followed me and he wasn't working, so I was a breadwinner, and I was a breadwinner for a good chunk of our relationship. So I don't know, maybe that's why I did it. Because I had to hold things together financially. I was the one showing up reliably while he figured out what he wanted. And then when it was finally my turn, when I started to say, okay, you got your shit in order. Now I want to build something, that honestly was the moment it started to become a problem. And the particular irony is not lost on me. It just took me a while to stop internalizing all of this as a reflection of my own worth and start seeing it for what it actually was. So when he finally got his career under control and all the things, and he was about to start making more money, yeah, that's basically when we got divorced. It's a thing. So what I had to eventually understand, and it took me a while, was that it wasn't ever really about me. My belief that things could be different was deeply uncomfortable for him because he was somebody who had decided that he preferred the safety of settling and staying smaller. And I remember as we were separating numerous times, he told me how high maintenance I was. I am the least high maintenance person you will ever meet in your life. But because I wanted something different and I wanted something bigger, the only way he could deal with that was to be like, well, you're just high maintenance. Now, having said that, that wasn't the only reason we ended up getting divorced. That's a whole other podcast. But like I was saying, I'm sharing this because I sit across from brilliant, capable women every single fucking day who are so frustrated. Frustrated because their partner isn't supportive, because their family undermines them, because the people closest to them seem to sometimes quietly and sometimes not so quietly, work against the very thing that they are trying to build. And before we get to what you're gonna do about that, we need to understand what's actually happening. Because it is impossible to navigate something that you haven't fully named or gotten honest about. You're just gonna keep bumping into that thing like you're walking in the dark, wondering why you keep getting bruised because you're hitting walls that you can't see. Okay, so this shows up differently depending on the relationship. So I'm just gonna walk you through some ways that this can show up. First, we're gonna talk about the partner who feels threatened. This one can be subtle, which makes it particularly fun to deal with. Can you hear the sarcasm in my voice when I say that? This one does not always look like opposition. Sometimes it looks like, or should I say, sounds like, oh, well, I'm just worried about you. And sometimes it's those practical concerns that appear every single time you talk about your vision or what you want to do. It's almost like clockwork. You talk about something awesome you want to do, oh, I'm just worried you're gonna be disappointed. I'm just worried about you. Sometimes it can seem like support on the surface and a complete absence of it when it actually counts. So they can feel like a partner being supportive or sound like a partner being supportive, but underneath it all, that's not really what's going on. And the partner who feels threatened by your growth, typically or often, they're gonna have their own sense of worth tied to a particular dynamic. One where you need them, where the balance feels familiar and comfortable. And so when you start to rise or step forward or grow or whatever, that dynamic can shift. I'm not saying it does all the time. I'm just saying in cases where you might have a partner who's not actually supportive, this is what can happen. And so the partner, they feel that dynamic start to shift because energy, right? You're vibrating in a different frequency. And then we have the family who mistakes your smallness for loyalty. And in a lot of families, there's this unspoken contract that, oh, we don't outshine each other. We don't get too big, we don't leave the pack. And success, like real success, the kind that changes your life, can actually feel like betrayal to some of them. And also goes towards the partner thing we were just talking about. It's like you're saying that their choices weren't enough and you're better than them, or that you think you're better than them, which isn't what you're doing at all, because we all know the more successful you are, the more it can benefit other people. But the family member who starts to question like every decision, who brings you back to every time something happened when you started to fly, who has this talent for finding that one fucking thing that could go wrong, they're not doing it out of malice or trying to hurt you intentionally. They're doing it out of a loyalty to the framework that has confused love with sameness. Everybody's gotta be part of the tribe, we've all got to be the same. Something that's really interesting, and one of the things I see a lot, especially in women, and I had to deal with this too, is this subconscious belief that if we earn more money than like our parents or somebody close to us, then we won't be loved. And I see this money belief in so many people. So this whole this whole one can be very expensive one too. Because if you're not willing to allow yourself to step into this next version of you and create the things you want to create and make the money you want to make, because on a subconscious level, you're afraid of hurting people's feelings, yeah, that can be very expensive. Next, we have the friend group where you've always played a very particular role. Every friend group has roles: the funny one, the responsible one, the one who has it together, the one who's always a bit of a mess. And when you decide, unilaterally, without a group vote, to step out of the role that has been assigned to you, it can disrupt the whole ecosystem. Friends can experience this as a kind of loss, even if they never say it out loud. And it will show up as, oh, are you sure? And girl, I just don't want to see you get hurt. And there can also be a lot of talk about like what you're gonna miss out on. What you're gonna miss out on if you move forward, if you do this, if you get bigger, oh well, you're just gonna miss out on this, you're not gonna have any time. It's interesting because sometimes it can be very warm and very loving because they're trying to make it seem like they're protecting you, but it's just actually not very helpful. This is one of my all-time personal favorite ones, the colleague who benefits from your self-doubt. This is one of the most transactional, but let's be honest about it. The person who gets the opportunities when you don't put yourself forward. The one whose authority feels a little bit more solid when yours feels shaky, and your confidence is quite literally a professional inconvenience for them. Nothing personal, just business, except it's extremely fucking personal when it's your career. Can you hear the tone in my voice? Yeah. Sometimes, and this is the one that really stings, it's not even somebody you'd think to watch out for. I had one of those. Somebody I genuinely invested in, mentored, thought of as a protege, worked my ass off to make sure he got hired full-time. He even became one of my best friends. Like the kind of person you champion really loudly and without hesitation, because like you honestly see their potential and you want good things for them. And it turned out that while I was doing that, he was working behind my back. I remember him saying to me at one point with a totally straight face, like he was doing me some kind of favor, because I was talking about how I was gonna leave corporate and do the things I want to do. He looked deadpan, looked me in the face, and he was like, Yeah, you've been saying you're gonna leave for 10 years. And I was just like, huh. Because you know what's interesting about that sentence? It's not a threat. It's not even obviously unkind. It's just a little seed of who do you think you are? But it's dressed up as an observation, which doesn't make me reactive, and those are the most dangerous ones. Those statements that are dressed up like observations, the ones that sound neutral, the ones you can't quite call out without looking like you're oversensitive, the ones that rent the most space in your head. Yeah. That one took me a minute to process because the betrayal wasn't just professional, it was personal. Like when it's a rival, at least you can make sense of it. When it's somebody that you truly believe in and care about, and somebody you help build, and somebody you just watched grow, that honestly requires a completely different kind of recalibration. But what I'll say is this people who are threatened by you will always find ways to manage that threat. And the ones who smile while they do it, they are not as rare as you would like to hope or like to think, like to hope. I don't, you know what I'm trying to say there. But here's what all of those people, all of those types have in common. None of those people are sitting in a room somewhere consciously plotting your limitation. Like it's not some conspiracy theory. This is just what happens when other people's unprocessed material meets your growth. Their reaction to your expansion is not a reflection of your worth, it is a reflection of their own unfinished business. And unfortunately, you're the one standing closest when it surfaces, usually, because you are out there going, I want to be bigger.

unknown 16:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

And here's where I want to slow this down a bit because I think we drastically underestimate this. When you're surrounded by people who need you to be smaller and you love them, and you want to keep the peace, and you're very aware of how quickly things can get uncomfortable when you don't, you start acting small. You will start to downplay your wins. You will edit your vision before you even say it out loud because you're trying to manage their discomfort by making yourself easier to be around. You will stop talking about what you're building or doing. You will go quiet in spaces where you used to be totally lit up. And over time, you start internalizing their ceiling as your own. And this is the part that genuinely breaks my heart when I see it. My clients come in already capable, already ready, and already knowing that they're more than enough. But they've spent so long managing other people's discomfort with their potential that they've started to mistake that discomfort for a signal or a sign that they're wrong or that they're delusional, or that they should just be grateful for what they have. And that version of themselves, the version that they're becoming because of this, that isn't even the real version of them. It isn't safe, it isn't them. And I want to be very clear about something. Other people's discomfort with your growth is not a sign that you are doing something wrong. I actually want to say it's probably the clearest possible sign that you're doing a bunch of things right. And the frustration that so many of you are feeling, it's real. And the reason the thing, just find your tribe, doesn't land for most of you is because you can't just cut people out of your life. This these people could be your partner, your mom, your best friend of 15 years, your brother, your sister. This is your life. And that gap between the support you need and the support you're actually getting, that gap is where a lot of women start to abandon themselves. And it doesn't happen in one foul swoop. It happens very slowly. Piece by piece. You get rid of one part of yourself and then another part of yourself so that you can keep things smooth, same, so you don't upset anybody. So I'd like to suggest that we stop doing that. And I'm gonna be up front with you because we're gonna talk about what you can actually do, but I also want you to know like I'm not gonna hand you five steps to fix the people around you because you can't fix them. You cannot do somebody else's inner work on their behalf, no matter how talented you are or how much you love them. Believe me, people have tried. Now, can your energetic frequency affect their energetic frequency? Yes, but that's not usually enough in these cases. But here's what you can do: stop looking for permission from people who aren't able to give it to you. The reason their lack of support stings so deeply, usually, is because you're still going to them for external validation. You're still presenting your vision, you're still waiting, consciously or not, for them to finally say, Yes, go, I believe in you. And when they don't, it lands like a hard verdict. But guess what? They are not the jury, and they were never the jury. And the moment you genuinely stop needing them to understand your vision in order to pursue it, their opinion becomes information instead of instructions. That's it, it's a very different experience. You get to detach your growth from their comfort level. Like I seriously, I got news for you here. Your expansion is not something you are doing to them. It's gonna feel that way to them sometimes, but you're not responsible for that. You are allowed to grow without anyone's blessing. You're allowed to want more without feeling bad about it or feeling like you have to apologize for it or feeling guilty for it. The idea that loving somebody means making yourself smaller so that they can feel more comfortable. That's not love. That's self abandonment. So find the support you need from places that can actually give it to you. I said this isn't about replacing people or blowing up your life all at once. It's about being honest with yourself. Being honest with yourself about what different relationships can and cannot hold in your life. Your partner can be the love of your life and not be the right person to process your business vision with. Your mom or your dad or your sister or your brother can be your safe place in every other context and completely unable to meet you in this one. And yeah, that's painful. And it's allowed to be painful. You're human, but continuing to go back to the same well, expecting different water, is a choice that you are making. And it is a choice that keeps costing you. Hold your vision close to you until it's strong enough to actually survive contact with some of these people. Like not forever, but in the early stages when something is new and you haven't quite proven it yet or figured it out, you do not owe anybody access to it. Especially not the people who've demonstrated that they are just gonna make you doubt yourself. Build it quietly, let it get stronger, and then let your results do the talking in the rooms where your words weren't safe before. Proof and evidence. Like, yeah, proof and evidence. Here's what I want to leave you with. The people who benefit most from you playing small, like I said, are often the people who love you the most. And that is genuinely complicated. It's a complicated thing to sit with. But you are not responsible for managing their journey. You're only responsible for yours. And if you are in it right now, if you are building something real while living with somebody who doesn't see it, or navigating family that needs you to stay in a little tiny box, or maybe you're showing up in a friendship where your growth feels like a massive disruption. I want you to know you are not alone in that. Not even a little bit. And more importantly, I want you to remember their ceiling is not yours. You get to keep going, even without the permission or the applause, or even without the people you most wanted to have in your corner finally coming around, you get to keep going anyways. But you have to make the choice to keep going, anyways. And that's the work. And you are more than capable of it. And if you're listening to this thinking, oh, I know I'm ready. I just can't seem to get out of my own way. Yeah, that's exactly what my subconscious strategy sessions are for. It's free, it's a 30-minute call. I'm gonna lead you through some very structured questions, a structured process to help you get clear on what might be limiting you subconsciously or energetically, and what your next steps are to shift that. If it's calling to you, the link to book it will be in the show notes. And I would love and appreciate if you could take 30 seconds to a minute to go leave a five-star rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast, because it is a great way to give back and show support and also to help other people who need to hear these messages find the show. Until next time, here's to creating your limitless life.