📍 If you're building a business with heart, but constantly feel overwhelmed, over committed and resentful, today's episode is for you. 📍 By the end of the episode, you'll know why you keep saying yes when you mean no. Why sitting boundaries can make your whole body feel like it is in danger, and then exactly how to reorient your nervous system.

So that saying no actually feels not only safe, but is completely automatic. If you're working on all of these things and you want real time support, you can download Soma ai, which is a chat bt, but you can literally like a voice message or text and be like, oh my God, I'm dealing with this thing. I have to respond to this message in like three minutes.

And I, I don't know, like I, I don't really wanna do it. Or maybe I do wanna do it. I'm not really sure. I'm feeling really overwhelmed. Can you help? And Soma is going to access. All of my book, somatic Intelligence for Success and all of that, my content, all of my information, she, I've taught her how to coach like me, and she's gonna coach you in real time using trauma healing, trauma informed practices.

She's incredibly validating. She makes pip. Cry, you'll cry. Download her with link below. If you wanna take it deeper and really learn about this, make sure that you are grabbing my book, somatic Intelligence for Success. You can get that for $10 on Kindle, on Amazon, and it will teach you everything you know about how to leave an impact without burning out.

And if you wanna put that into real time, make sure that you're inquiring and looking at the academy, you'll find that link down below. But it is this really special and sacred space where females come together and we build business without burning out. And it is incredibly amazing like that, that those women It is, it is magical.

But let's get on with the episode today. So. The problem is you keep saying yes, right? You say yes to something, whether it's just like going in for a meeting or a project or a coffee chat or a client discount, and it. You might immediately feel overwhelmed or resentment. Maybe you feel annoyed at yourself or you feel annoyed at the other person.

And if anything, like myself and the women in the academy that gets to this point where you're like, I know that I should, I know that I should change. I, why do I keep doing this? I know that I should charge full price. Or, but, but, but, but why do I keep doing it? You might know, you may not. That you saying yes is actually your body's way of trying to survive the life and the way that it understands it.

Your nervous system is always answering two questions. Am I safe and am I loved? And particularly females or estrogen based bodies. We have a tendency to do what we call fawn, which is when the body isn't sure it's going to receive love and safety. So it does these things like appeasing, accommodating, avoiding conflict, avoiding conflict overgiving or slight self abandonment.

And that self abandonment might be as simple as, I really wanted to go to the gym today, but I said I would have coffee with this person because I think that networking is a good idea for my business. And a lot of the time the. We can end up in these cycles of behavior because we've had past experiences where we said no to something and the other person was really disappointed in us, and we were too young to feel that feeling of disappointment or we felt that they, they disconnected from us, they left us.

We felt abandonment. Or we literally just weren't able to say no, like that wasn't an option. Mom and dad would've had a too big of an emotional response. Or you couldn't, like, you had to go to school even if you wanted to stay at home because you didn't feel 100% right. Sometimes it can be because you said no, and then you were ignored and you got the silent treatment by even a boyfriend when you were a teenager or even experiencing a pain, of physical pain.

Particularly if you have a, if you have a background in trauma, so you, basically, your body has learned that no equals danger, and it's just simply running that program, running that software today because it's trying to support you.

That program that it's still running may be fawn. That's when we say yes, when we mean no. It is a fourth nervous system response that on polyvagal theory sits between fight and flight and freeze, where we have a little bit of energy in our system that we can do something, but things are beginning to become overwhelming and we just need to kind of like, like make peace almost.

It's common in women because we have less, less physical strength than testosterone, and so we. And we also have garnered survival through community where they're gatherers of the hunters and gatherers. I like to think of it as the act of abandoning, or not even checking in with what you need to maintain connection with another person, because for the female nervous system, connection equals safety.

This might look like saying yes before you even ask yourself. It's that feeling that you have of like, I'm sorry. I don't wanna be a burden. It's that feeling of like, Ugh, I don't, I'm sorry that I need this. It looks like really wanting to justify and overexplain your boundaries and really have other people understand and not being okay with them not understanding.

And particularly in females, I would say that are in work, it's offering discounts or bonuses or doing work that you don't have the capacity for or would put you under pain over working or accepting payment that is less than what your life requires to survive. Sometimes we're celebrated and it feels like we're being kind and nice, but it's like this weird self portrayal wrapped in this nervous system logic.

I recently went into this with a client, I'm gonna call her Debbie, because I. I don't want to say her actual name, and she was a brand consultant, loved her work, but she was like, consistently depleted. Doesn't make sense because brand consultants, have a high, like it's a highly paid job. Every single client call left her drain, even though she used to like it.

She was completely afraid to change anything because she was afraid that she would lose clients or that she would disappoint people. When we went inside and we did this somatic inquiry, which was simply just what happens in your body when you think about saying no, she noticed that her chest tightened, her jaw locked.

She started feeling like choked up like that tears, and it was like people weren't like me. Her body was running this story, and so. What we had to do was kind of teach her body. Okay. Well I can just like for her it was on those calls, just instead of saying what she. What she thought they wanted her to say.

She would kind of like move her belly around a little bit, breathe a little bit deeper, so undo that physical bracing and then feed the strength inside of her and just say that one sentence that she wasn't quite sure about. We didn't jump to her completely changing her prices, even though that is something that has happened over the past couple of months, and we continue to work on because we needed her body to feel safe doing it so that she wouldn't like.

Self-sabotage and go back. And so the first thing means like now she has energy after her client calls. 'cause she feels like she can just be herself and she's beginning to earn more money because she can feel like she can charge more. And she, because she's in that safe space, she's not worried about like, oh, what if there's not another client?

That's just not really a question. It's just, ah, how do I do this? One of my favorite ways. To practice this when I notice myself going into it, which is sometimes fairly often, is like a, what I would call like a boundary body scan, and it's simply when somebody asks, do you want something or somebody says something, or I'm in a client call and I notice my own desire for you guys to like me, come mom.

I come into my body and it literally looks like just what am I feeling in my body right now? What am I aware of? Particularly I go, wait, is there any tension? Is there any tension inside of my body, in my chest, in my throat? Or am I annoyed, frustrated, and angry? Or like a little bit, a little bit annoyed, a little bit frustrated, a little bit pissed off a little bit.

Like if something feels like it's grinding inside, because that really soft no is the beginning of a full no.

And so I'm just kind of checking in and then it's like, okay, what, what need do I have here that that tension is telling me about? Am I afraid about what would happen if I said no? Am I unsure about what it would look like to say no? Below all of that, what do I need? What do I need? What do I need? What do I need?

Identifying our needs is a skill. We talk about it a lot inside of somatic intelligence for success. I think it's chapter 11. And I give you a map for that, and we practice this consistently every single week inside of the academy because it's a skill. Okay, what do I need? Sometimes we think we need one thing, but it's something else.

Meaning that sometimes we think we need, more time, but what we actually need is to be kinder to ourselves so that we have more energy and we can use our time.

As always, if you wanna do this work in 📍 a supporters structured way, doors to the academy are open. As a follow up to this episode, I really recommend that you listen to the episode on Burnout Boundaries and the nervous system. This is one that I made after two people in one day, asked me to work for free and I got angry and I went into some of the science, particularly around women in helping, professions and how we get asked to work for free.

It's number 201, and I'll link it down below. Thank you for your time today. I'll speak with you soon.