Episode 192: 5 Little-t Trauma Responses Capping Women CEOs (And How They Show Up in Your Business).
Episode Summary
Most women CEOs don’t realize they’re operating from trauma responses because the behaviors often feel productive, familiar, and completely justified.
In fact, many of the patterns that create the most friction at higher levels are the very same ones that helped them succeed, achieve, and earn approval earlier in life.
This episode will help you recognize how these patterns quietly shape leadership, decision-making, growth, and day-to-day business experience, and why so many smart, capable women unknowingly build businesses around them.
You’ll also discover:
How seemingly positive traits like perfectionism, independence, and being 'easy to work with' can create growth ceilings at higher levels
Why smart, capable women often optimize around patterns instead of resolving the thing actually creating the drag
The powerful shifts that happen when you stop treating your reactions as reality, and start recognizing them as patterns
Why the issue often isn't strategy, intelligence, or capability, but an invisible operating system shaping how you lead, decide, communicate, and grow
Press play to understand the invisible operating system shaping your business, and what becomes possible when you finally step outside the fishbowl.
Who This Episode Is For
Women entrepreneurs who look highly capable on the outside but secretly feel like business is heavier, slower, or more emotionally draining than it “should” be at their level.
CEOs and founders who keep trying to solve operational problems with more strategy, discipline, communication skills, or productivity tools, but still feel stuck in repeating patterns.
High-achieving women who recognize themselves in perfectionism, hyper-independence, overexplaining, people-pleasing, internalizing rejection, or difficulty trusting and delegating.
Leaders whose businesses technically work, but where growth feels capped by burnout, inconsistent visibility, team friction, slow decision-making, or an inability to fully step into authority.
Entrepreneurs are beginning to realize their business may be organized around protection patterns rather than clean leadership, trust, visibility, and power.
Women ready to stop optimizing around old survival adaptations and start dissolving the underlying operating system shaping how they lead, decide, communicate, and scale.
Core Concepts in This Episode
Power Consolidation in Scaling
How trauma responses disperse power through over-accommodation, overexplaining, perfectionism, and lack of boundaries, weakening authority and slowing momentum as businesses grow.
Leadership Capacity in Business
The idea that scaling requires becoming someone who can hold more visibility, trust, authority, delegation, and decision-making capacity, not just learning more tactics.
Identity-Based Business Constraints
The business reflects the founder’s nervous system, identity, and subconscious operating patterns more than strategy alone; growth ceilings are often identity ceilings.
Optimization vs. Resolution
Smart women often become highly sophisticated at compensating for patterns (through systems, communication frameworks, overwork, or avoidance) instead of resolving the underlying source of friction.
Visibility & Authority Calibration
How fear of judgment, rejection, or taking up space shapes pricing, messaging, leadership communication, launches, delegation, and visibility strategies in subtle but powerful ways.
Business as a Mirror for Personal Expansion
Entrepreneurship surfaces unresolved patterns with unusual precision, making business growth inseparable from emotional resilience, nervous system recalibration, and personal transformation.
Key Takeaways
How seemingly positive traits like perfectionism, independence, and being 'easy to work with' can create growth ceilings at higher levels
Why smart, capable women often optimize around patterns instead of resolving the thing actually creating the drag
The powerful shifts that happen when you stop treating your reactions as reality, and start recognizing them as patterns
Why the issue often isn't strategy, intelligence, or capability, but an invisible operating system shaping how you lead, decide, communicate, and grow
Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome, welcome back to The Uncommon Way. I spent the first chunk of my life believing I was either smart or I wasn't. And it mattered, because being smart was the only way I'd have any power and autonomy in life and escape the fate of my ancestors who were completely dependent on their husbands. That belief drove everything—the perfectionism, the high performance, the relentless pushing to prove something. Now, in the beginning, it was helpful. I got into a great school. But when I arrived and found myself surrounded by people just like me, I became depressed. Because maybe I'm not that smart after all. The idea that intelligence was something I could build, that it was a skill and not a verdict, genuinely never occurred to me. I share this only because this is typically our default way of thinking and experiencing ourselves in the world. We assume our patterns are reality. We assume our reflections and our reactions are truth. We assume the way we've always operated is simply who we are. But the kind of fixed thinking that says, this is just who I am, or this is just how things are, is exactly what keeps the patterns I'm about to share locked in place. In this episode, you'll discover how seemingly positive traits like perfectionism, independence, and being easy to work with can create gross ceilings at higher levels. Why smart, capable women often optimize around patterns instead of resolving the thing actually creating the drag. The powerful shifts that happen when you stop treating your reactions as reality and start recognizing them as patterns. And why the issue often isn't strategy, intelligence, or capability, but an invisible operating system shaping how you lead, decide, communicate, and grow. Most of us develop stories very early in our lives about how the world works and what it takes to win at life. What was safe, what was expected, what happened when we took up too much space, or needed too much, or got things wrong. Oh, I know you know this. I'm just setting the scene. We adapted in ways that made sense at the time until it became second nature and we gathered a lifetime of evidence about how this behavior makes the most sense. And before we get into the five patterns I'm going to bring up today, I want to address something I hear constantly. Many of the women I speak with are quick to assure me that nothing in their childhood was particularly traumatic. As if they need a reason, a real reason, right, to explain why they operate the way they do. But here's what I want you to know. Your mind isn't particularly interested in your classification of events. Set with love, little t-trauma doesn't require a dramatic origin story. It simply means that at some point your brain encountered something it didn't have the resources to fully process and it adapted. That adaptation became a pattern and that pattern followed you here. The problem isn't that you adapted. Well done. The problem is that those adaptations follow us into our businesses. And now they're running the show from the background. Most women I work with are not struggling because of a bad strategy. They're not falling short because they lack intelligence, drive, capability. They aren't struggling to keep up with their workload because they lack discipline.
They have all of those things in abundance. What they have in common is a pattern running in the background that might not show up or announce itself as a pattern. It announces itself as a slow quarter, or a team that won't step up, or a business with such complexity that they are of course overworked and nearing burnout. It shows up as a business that technically works, but feels far heavier than it should for someone this capable.
These underlying patterns might not create problems in the beginning. In fact, early on, most of them look like strengths. The woman who won't delegate looks like someone with high standards. The one who can't stop over-explaining looks like someone who's thorough and cares about being clear. And the one who internalizes everything looks like someone who takes her work seriously. It's at the next level, when the business needs her to show up differently, to trust more, to hold more authority, to be more visible, that the pattern brings friction and drag.
That is when a gap opens up between what she's capable of and what she's actually producing. None of these patterns are character flaws. They are adaptations. They are very intelligent responses to real circumstances, real environments, and they developed long before you started a business. But until we name them, they run the show. And that's the part I really want you to hear today. These patterns don't just affect how you feel. They affect what becomes possible. Let's talk about pattern one, the faun response. This is when you abandon your own needs, clarity, or authority in order to keep others comfortable and prevent conflict. It often develops in environments where a girl learned that her value was tied to how pleasant and agreeable and accommodating she could be, and that asserting herself or disagreeing created risk. This is the pattern we went deep on last week, so we'll move through it quickly here. But let's name some specific business fingerprints so you have recognition points. Overexplaining in sales conversations, layering in so much context and qualification that the offer loses authority and clarity for the person you're talking to. Communication styles full of I think and in my opinion and being self-deferential. I had a client whose copy we went through line by line, striking every one. Her letter was full of them. She was unconsciously asking permission to be taken seriously and to be taking up the reader's time.
I remember when I worked alongside the chairman of the board of a fashion conglomerate. One of my favorite things to do, I'm a little weird, but this was my favorite thing to do, was observe how he wrote. Not a single I think. I'm not kidding you. Not a single one. Just strong declarative language. It wasn't arrogance or posturing. It was just someone who'd never learned to doubt his right to take up space. Most women have to unlearn the opposite lesson. We were often scolded when we held the spotlight for too long or framed our opinions declaratively rather than as mere suggestions. Then there's the version that shows up as overdoing it at our own expense, like giving away lots of free or discounted expertise or services. Or I had a client who came to me with over 30 coaching sessions on her schedule every single week. She was so exhausted, but she couldn't turn anyone down. She didn't raise prices to match demand. She continued with clients who would cancel last minute because managing their disappointment felt less painful than enforcing a boundary. Looking at this through the power lens. In these situations, you are giving power to the people around you, and that disperses the power that you're able to direct and use. So it makes sense that momentum stalls. The leader is present, but she's not the center of gravity in the organization. Something else is. And over time, that becomes exhausting because the business starts organizing itself around other people's comfort instead of your leadership. Pattern number two, hyperindependence. This is an I'll do it myself operating system rooted in a belief that help is unsafe, unavailable, or a sign of weakness. It can develop when a girl learned that depending on others led to disappointment or that needing help was either disapproved of or was in some way dangerous. Self-sufficiency became both armor and identity. I see this pattern constantly, A, because I've lived it most of my life, but B, I see it walk through my door constantly. And it almost always announces itself in the same way. Woman arrives, visibly depleted, and says some version of, I should be able to figure this out on my own. As though the fact that she hasn't solved something that she has never studied, never done before, and has no direct model for is a character verdict.
It genuinely hasn't occurred to her that getting support and guidance isn't failure. It's just leverage. This is one of the reasons that many women-owned businesses are undercapitalized. Many women believe they can't spend money on their business until it's profitable or that they should never have to borrow money at all. But they never noticed that most of the companies they buy from every day, the software, the tools, the services, were deeply in the red during their startup phase. The standard they're holding themselves to rarely exists in the real world. It only exists as a way to keep themselves operating inside this pattern. I had a client carrying a multi-million dollar business entirely solo. She had massive expansion potential, sitting completely untouched. Not because she lacked the revenue to hire, because she didn't trust anyone enough, and didn't trust herself enough to hire well. The ceiling wasn't a capacity problem. It was a trust problem wearing a disguise of a capacity problem. Which is important, because if you misdiagnose the problem, you'll spend years solving for the wrong thing. And then there's the version that breaks my heart a little every time I see it. Like a CEO I coached who was putting enormous pressure on herself for not performing at a higher level, while simultaneously managing a business, an ADHD four-year-old, a seven-month-old in sleep regression, a mother with mental health issues, and the cooking and cleaning at home. Without childcare. She could not sleep from the stress, but her primary concern was that she wasn't doing enough. This pattern carries a huge cost for your business, because growth requires leverage. Financial, yes, but also your brain trust. But leverage is hard to attain when deep down you equate it with failure. Pattern three. Internalization. This is when you turn external events inward, reading neutral or ambiguous situations as personal evidence of inadequacy, invisibility, or unworthiness. You might see this show up in women who were taught, either overtly or not, that their feelings were too much or they were misguided, that their reactions were overblown, or that difficulty was something to manage quietly and privately. Over time, the nervous system learns to look inward for the source of every problem. But even though this is happening internally, there are outward expressions of it. I had a client who would feel depressed for days after someone said no to working with her. Not disappointed, actually depressed, because each rejection confirmed a belief she was carrying, that she wasn't good enough, and that people were rejecting her. Not the offer, but her. This is actually very common. Another client came to me after launching a new service offering that nobody bought, feeling exactly the same way.
But when we did some forensic analysis, we found that when she started feeling that way, she stopped marketing. Of course, because what smart brain would willingly recreate that painful feeling of rejection. The marketing she did put out was subtly needy or even resentful in ways that really undermined authority. The people on her email list or the audience on LinkedIn who were reading it might not have been able to name what was happening, but they could feel it. At night, she'd lay in bed feeling embarrassed and imagined what her audience was probably thinking. Some variation of how they didn't like her or could see that she didn't know what she was talking about. And then defensively start judging them. They weren't serious buyers. They're only looking for the cheapest price. Notice, she was questioning her value, but it manifested as assuming everyone else was questioning her value. The disengagement she feared, she was beginning to create for herself. Yet all of this was nothing more than patterned behavior with origins way before the offer launch. So again, this wasn't a flawed strategy. It was a natural result of an adaptive pattern. There's also a version of this that rears its head with money issues. I had a client who felt so embarrassed to receive the full amount of what she was charging that she'd compensate subconsciously by showering prospects with free content beforehand and then go overboard once they were working with her. Deep down, she internalized that she wasn't really worth that price. She had one client that she didn't invoice for months, actually about four months. The fee felt like an imposition rather than a value exchange. She couldn't take up that space even when someone had explicitly invited her to do so. The pattern often manifests in physical consequences, unfortunately, in insomnia, anxiety, a panicky feeling before sales calls or launches or any moment of visibility. It's your nervous system treating exposure as a threat. But in business, it keeps you from seeing your data cleanly and from deciding cleanly. It shows up as inconsistency in the business, low sales cycles, inconsistent visibility, undercharging and more. And because the pattern feels emotionally true, most women never realize they're making business decisions from inside it. Pattern four, relational challenges. This is a dysregulated relationship with trust. Sometimes it shows up as walls that keep everyone out, but sometimes as an absence of boundaries that let the wrong people in. This can come from early experiences where relationships felt conditional, inconsistent or unsafe. The nervous system learns either that people can't be trusted or that keeping people close requires erasing yourself. Here's what it looks like with an absence of boundaries. I worked with a luxury marketing and operations consultant, someone with real expertise whose clients had her running personal errands. It started with one small ask and then another. Not because she thought it made sense within the context of the job, but because the fear of losing the relationship overrode the boundary every time. She let people in without clear expectations, so then couldn't enforce them once they were breached. Both versions come from the same place, a nervous system that never got to experience trust as something safe and reciprocal. One built a wall, one left the door wide open. Different expressions, same wound. Sometimes you even see both manifestations in the same business. It can show up as burnout, as micromanaging or attracting people who need to be micromanaged, or as attracting clients or team members who take way more than they give. All of this leads to capped growth because eventually the business can only expand to the level that trust exists inside the system. Pattern number five, perfectionism. Hello, my old friend. Perfectionism is when you have a performance standard that's so high it becomes a form of self-protection. If nothing goes out until it's flawless, then there's nothing to be judged, and there's no shame. For lots of women, perfectionism is not a personality trait, but a neurobiological adaptation to environments where love, safety, or approval felt conditional on their performance. The child who learned that getting it right kept things stable will become the adult who cannot tolerate getting it wrong. So I'll start with myself here as an example, because I think it matters that you know these patterns show up for everyone and you can relate to them with curiosity rather than shame. I spent six months building my first website, not because I couldn't master the tech, but because as soon as I'd write the copy, I needed to rewrite the copy. It had to be perfect from day one, because after all, releasing it meant being seen, and being seen meant being evaluated. I was so delusional at the time. I thought as soon as I launched the thing, everyone would rush to read it. But I'd been afraid of that verdict on the other side my whole life. So I kept adjusting, meanwhile telling myself that I was just being smart, because I'd be more successful if the copy was on point, and I was thinking of the future health of the business because I wanted to bring in the right clients. Now I know I'm not alone. I've had two creative clients who wouldn't produce when it came to their own brand. For others, yeah, no problem. But when it came to putting their own name on something, nah. There were stacks of paintings or a fully functioning website that was ready to go, but never released, because they imagined they'd be judged so harshly by their peers, and they were already judging themselves. It just wasn't quite good enough yet. So the content existed. The courage to be imperfect in public did not. And then there's a version of this that almost no one sees coming. Contagious perfectionism. I had a client whose team took so long to get the work produced, and she would complain that they weren't self-starters and everything always got passed by her. They couldn't seem to make even the smallest decisions. But then we started to notice the perfectionist tendencies of my client herself. She'd become really distressed if she sent out something with a grammatical error. She'd seethe if someone else dropped the ball. Of course her team had absorbed that standard. Her intolerance of imperfection had become the culture. And the culture was slowing everything down. This pattern also shows up as risk aversion that disguises itself as strategy. Never launching the offer until it's perfect. Never raising the price until the time is right. Never entering the market until conditions are ideal. Which they never are, so nothing moves. In business then, you'll see this as slowness. A very cautious team, low visibility strategies, lower prices, and a feeling of striving but never arriving. It's just never quite good enough to allow yourself to feel like you made it. Perfectionism often masquerades as high standards. But at higher levels, it becomes a ceiling on your speed, your visibility, your leadership, and your growth. Now my friend, if you have recognized yourself in any of those patterns, maybe one, maybe three, I want to offer that you have potentially been solving the wrong problem. Like the client story I shared last week where she came to me for communication coaching, but it wasn't really about knowing the specific words to say. Or the client who feels her business is capped because of her team, but then it turns out the team is just a reflection of her.
None of this happens because you're not smart or you are flawed in any way. It is just biology. These patterns are specifically designed to be invisible. They don't feel like patterns. They feel like reality. I have a way of describing this that I come back to often. We think we're swimming in an ocean of possibilities, but really we're in a fish bowl inside the ocean. That fish bowl is our operating system. It controls our perceptions and the opportunities we're even able to see for ourselves. Which means the problem was never that the ocean was too small. It's that we didn't know we were in the bowl. When that pattern is driving how you think, behave, and operate, you optimize around it. You hire to compensate around it. You build systems to work around it. You push harder in the places that you see drag, but then you wonder why the needle doesn't move or it feels like you're in Groundhog Day. You become incredibly intelligent at surviving inside the pattern instead of dissolving the pattern itself. What maybe you're starting to do now is look at the pattern. Because here's what I've seen consistently with the women I work with. The business doesn't change first. They change first. Specifically, they change how they think, behave, and operate. And then the business catches up, sometimes very quickly. The business shifts are just what happens after the nervous system adjusts or the identity adjusts. From the outside, it can look like the person hired someone new or changed the offer, and that's what created the success. What they don't see is that in order to leave the status quo, to ever decide to do that thing, they had to change first. I am hoping this episode has brought you some awareness and a feeling of relief. Because now you can see the path to a solution. You no longer need to tear your hair out over the symptoms, and you can get to the root. Now to be clear, recognizing the pattern is not the same as dissolving it. Awareness is the beginning of the work. Seeing it for what it is makes the rewiring and the behavioral shifts and the business changes that follow. It makes all of that possible.
And yeah, it's not nothing. But that is the true work we are all called to undertake as entrepreneurs. I have always believed that entrepreneurship is the greatest personal development journey available to women. Precisely because it surfaces all of these patterns so reliably. You can't get away from yourself. The business becomes a mirror. And what gets reflected back if you're willing to look at it, is the exact thing that needs to change. Which is why so many women keep trying to solve operational problems with operational solutions, while the real issue is happening at the level of identity and nervous system and trust and visibility and power.
When I sit down with clients to review their biggest wins, something really, really interesting always happens. The ones who came to me ostensibly for business growth, more revenue, better team, bigger client roster, whatever it is, they don't lead with the numbers. They talk about how they feel, how they're no longer carrying that invisible weight, how they become emotionally resilient in ways that surprises even them, how they become so mentally tough, how they show up differently at home in relationships, in how they see themselves, in how they walk through the supermarket. It's like they've taken off a heavy backpack they didn't know they were wearing. And then I have to be the one to be like, well, hey, making more this month than you did in a single quarter last year, that's pretty great too, right? Let's celebrate that. And they shrug. Of course, that's great. But that alone wouldn't have changed how I experience my life. That is the work, my friend, and it's available to you too. Now, before you close this episode, I want to ask you to do something. Think of someone in your life, a friend, colleague, someone you admire who also happens to be a bit hard on herself, who might just be carrying around an old pattern that needs to go, something that you used to serve her and is now just in the way. Share this episode with her. That might be the most helpful thing you do all week. As always, so fun hanging out with you, and I'll talk to you next time.
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The Uncommon Way is a leadership and business podcast for ambitious women entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders who are scaling companies and expanding their influence.
Hosted by business and leadership coach Jenna Harrison, the show explores how power, authority, and leadership capacity shape business growth. Episodes focus on decision-making, founder leadership evolution, team stability, and the structural shifts that allow companies to scale without overwhelming the person leading them.
This podcast is especially relevant for women navigating:
• Business growth and scaling challenges
• Increasing leadership responsibility
• Team expansion and higher-stakes decisions
• Founder authority and executive presence
• Identity and leadership evolution during scaling
The Uncommon Way approaches growth differently.
Not through hustle, constant self-optimization, or endless inner work — but by upgrading leadership, strengthening decision structures, and expanding the capacity required to run the company you’re building.
Topics include:
• Founder leadership capacity expansion
• Decision-making at higher levels of responsibility
• Authority and power dynamics inside scaling businesses
• Structural business leadership
• Founder psychology and identity shifts during growth
• Sustainable scaling and operational clarity
Whether you’re an experienced founder, a rising leader, or building something that’s starting to matter at a bigger level, this podcast helps you access more power and lead accordingly.
