Episode 4: Conditioning Doesn't Care About Fulfilment

EPISODE 4

Conditioning Doesn't Care About Fulfilment

Radical Recentring with Nonie White

This is Radical Recentring with me, Nonie White. The show for ambitious women who are done pushing, proving and performing, and who are ready to build something unshakeable from who they are at their authentic best. If you're at an inflection point, ready for your next level of success, personal power and impact, and you want to do it differently, you're in the right place. Let's go.

Episode 4, Conditioning Doesn't Care About Fulfilment.

What if I told you that the decisions you make to lead yourself and others aren't wholly yours? That your operating system, the way you work, the way you push, the standards you hold yourself to, most of it became part of how you operate before you had any say in the matter. This is conditioning. Stories, beliefs, and waves of thinking that have created your self-concept, who you believe yourself to be right now. But it's not the full story of who you actually are, because your conditioning doesn't care if you're fulfilled. It only cares that it keeps you safe.

What conditioning actually is. Conditioning is the collection of beliefs, patterns and behaviours you've absorbed growing up. Conditioning comes from your family of origin. What you learned growing up about what was acceptable, what was valued, what was rewarded. Messages about rest, achievement, emotions, needs. Messages like, don't be selfish, work hard, don't rock the boat, stay safe, don't show emotions, put others first. What you absorbed from what your caregivers modelled.

It comes from culture and society. The messages about what success looks like, what leaders should be like, and for women in particular, the messages about what women should be like. Selfless, nurturing, caring, empathetic, great at communication. Whilst ageless and beautiful, capable of doing it all and not needing any help.

It comes from the education system we were raised in, rewarding compliance, achievement, fitting in, following the rules, the idea that we get gold stars for being a good girl.

It comes from workplaces, what's normal, what gets rewarded and what gets promoted. Often being present at your desk, overworking, always being on, these being the things that get rewarded and promoted, whereas boundaries, rest and saying no are not.

And conditioning comes from past experiences. What worked before? What kept you safe? What got you praised? Even if it no longer serves you. None of this was chosen consciously. It was absorbed and assimilated without question. And now it runs in the background, the operating system in your internal world, silently shaping your external world.

There are many ways that conditioning shows up in high achievers. You may recognise one or many of these drivers as familiar. Perfectionism. I have to get it completely right or I'm just simply not good enough. Failure is the enemy. As a side note, that's my Achilles heel. I call myself a recovering perfectionist. Over functioning. If I don't do it, it won't get done properly. Control. If I'm not in control, things will fall apart. People pleasing. I can't upset anyone. I need everyone to be okay with me. Proving. I have to prove myself, even if that means working harder than everybody else to deserve success. Hyper independence. I must not ask for help. Needing support means showing weakness. Urgency. I must work faster. There's never enough time. Rest is lazy. Self-sacrifice. My needs can wait. Everybody else's needs come first. And there are more, but you get the picture and you'll know your own.

These aren't personality traits, by the way. They're conditioned, unquestioned responses.

One client I had, let's call her Clare, was a former exec turned founder, and she'd spent decades performing who she thought she needed to be in life. She had fight or flight anxiety every single morning for decades. Chest pressure that never went away. Tingly fingers. Two decades of exhaustion that she thought was just life. Her marriage was buckling under the weight of it all. She described her experience as being naked in a school play, making it up every day without a script. She was terrified someone would see through her. So she just performed harder and said yes to everything and kept going.

Through our work, she discovered that one of her top character strengths was actually leadership. The very thing that she'd been running from for years. She'd associated leading with being wholly responsible for everything. On the hook, she called it. Exposed. And it terrified her. But when she stopped performing leadership and she realised that being a leader actually came really naturally to her, it was one of her signature character strengths, and she started leading as just herself, the shift was immediate. Her anxiety went from an eight out of 10 to a three out of 10. The physical symptoms she'd had for 20 years disappeared. Her marriage got stronger and now she's leading nationwide projects that she's genuinely proud of. She told me, I know who my authentic self is, what I stand for and how I can tap into my strengths. She didn't feel like a fraud anymore. She knew she was a brilliant leader who'd been running an exhausting performance.

Seeing your conditioning clearly and separating what you inherited from who you actually are comes under Stage 2 of the Unshakeable Method, my four month one-to-one coaching programme. If you're listening to this and you know it's time for you to do this work, head to the show notes to find out more about how you can work with me. Now back to the episode.

So conditioning is designed to keep you safe, not fulfilled. It's designed to help you fit in, not stand out. So you can be wildly successful by conditioning standards and completely miserable and unfulfilled by your own. If your value came from being useful, it makes sense that you over deliver. If you only feel validated if you're a top achiever, it makes sense that you're going to keep working really, really hard striving to achieve. If you were praised as a child for handling everything without complaints, it makes sense as an adult, you're never going to ask for help.

And this is why identity work matters. Because until you can see what's conditioning and what's actually you, you're not really leading yourself authentically.

The first step. The first step isn't to fix your conditioning. It's to become aware of what's going on. The humanistic psychologists call these introjected values, which I love. It's like they're almost injected into us. Messages that came from outside of us that we absorbed so completely that they feel like our own values, our own voice. They become the conditions we believe we have to meet in order to be good enough. So in Clare's story, she'd introjected the message that a good leader never gets found out. Her condition of worth was, I'm enough if I perform perfectly.

So our first step is to build self-awareness so we can notice when we're operating from something that feels like an I should rather than I want. We must become used to asking ourselves, is this belief, feeling or way of operating mine? Or is it something I inherited? Is it serving me or would I rather change it up for something that would serve me better?

So my question to you as we end this episode is, do you know what shoulds you're living by that aren't actually yours?

In the next episode, we're going to talk about what happens when you're depleted and those patterns get triggered. Because awareness is one thing, and knowing what to do when the inevitable curveballs come your way and fear activates these default ways of being is another.

I'm Nonie White. This is Radical Recentring and I'll see you next episode.

Thank you for being here. If today's episode resonated with you, check out the Leadership Identity Quiz. The link is in the show notes. It's free, takes two minutes, has 10 questions, and it will show you exactly how you're leading yourself and others now, as well as which patterns might be stopping you from reaching your next level of success. And if you know you're ready to do this work, there's a link to find out more about the Unshakeable Method, my four-month one-to-one coaching programme. I'm Nonie White. This is Radical Recentring, and I'll see you next time.