90: Overcoming Fawning: How to Set Boundaries in Your Career

"Stop protecting the people who treat you poorly." Are you the person who jokes about being a "people pleaser" but goes home feeling drained, anxious, and deeply resentful? You might not just be "nice"—you might be experiencing the "fawn" trauma response.  Most of us know fight, flight, or freeze, but fawning is the lesser-known, often more dangerous response where you literally prop up people who don't deserve it just to survive the interaction.  In this episode, we're doing the "shitty work" of peeling back those layers to understand why you learned to sacrifice your own needs just to avoid conflict. If you're tired of self-gaslighting and are ready to stop setting yourself on fire to keep others warm, this is your wake-up call. Here, we explore: - What the fawn trauma response actually looks like in high-performance careers. - How to differentiate your adult self from the "exile" parts of you that learned people-pleasing as a survival mechanism. - Tactical ways to set boundaries and pause before you say "yes." - How to detach from the outcome when setting boundaries (spoiler: their reaction is theirs, not yours). - Moving toward a freer, more fulfilled life by embracing authentic relationships  Timestamps: 01:17 Personal Story: Hannah's Workplace Fawning 02:45 Defining Fawning & Why It Happens 03:38 Taking Action: Stopping the Cycle 04:42 Why We Self-Gaslight at Work 06:15 The IFS Approach to People-Pleasing 07:00 Managers vs. Exiles: How Our Parts Work 08:30 Connecting Old Survival Strategies to Today 09:15 The Power of the Pause 10:33 How to Find "Expanders" to Model Boundaries 12:30 Detaching from Other People's Reactions 14:10 Why This Work is Uncomfortable (But Worth It) 15:10 The Freedom of Authentic Relationships 15:55 The "Cruise Ship" Analogy for Change 16:18 Life & Work Transformation Program Info #fawntraumaresponse #internalfamilysystems #peoplepleasing #selfrespect #healthyboundaries #authenticrelationships #workplaceculture #careeradvice