I Can't Like Myself If I'm Who You Want Me To Be

Tired of contorting yourself into a pretzel so you’re liked? Or so you don’t make others feel uncomfortable by being YOU? In this week’s episode (which is our first ever video podcast!), Gervase dives deep into why women have been conditioned to “perform” and prioritize being liked over being authentic. You’ll learn practical tools and a few hard-hitting truth bombs to help you break free from this hypervigilance so you can come home to yourself.

Watch This Episode To Discover:

• Why you're taught that likeability is the gold standard for women (while men aren't held to the same expectation)

• What this hypervigilance on everybody else's comfort level is doing to your nervous system

• The real cost of abandoning yourself to please others (hint: no amount of external validation can make up for the 3 things that you’re losing)

• Why other people's triggers about you are actually reflections of their OWN discomfort, and have nothing to do with you

• How to stop making yourself responsible for others' emotions and reclaim your power and agency

• A practical exercise to transform your relationship with triggers so you can use them as data for self-discovery

• The intoxicating freedom that comes when you focus on liking yourself rather than being liked by everyone else

Want Gervase’s personal guidance?

If you’d like to become who you’re really meant to be (instead of who they told you to be), you’re invited to join Gervase’s upcoming Inner Knowing Mastermind. During these 8 group calls, you’ll get an embodied sense of who you are, what’s right for you, and how to choose it.

But hurry: the first call starts April 30th - and to keep them intimate, there’s only a limited number of seats left!

Visit GervaseKolmos.com/inner-knowing-mastermind to reserve yours now.

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Follow Gervase

• Connect with Gervase on Instagram: www.instagram.com/gervasekolmos

• Visit her website: www.gervasekolmos.com

I Can't Like Myself If I'm Who You Want Me To Be

Episode Full Transcript

Welcome back, friends, to the Modern Phoenix podcast. I am your host, Gervase Kolmos, and I'm very, very grateful for your time here. This is our first episode that is live on video streaming platforms, of which I'm not absolutely positive which ones we're live on yet, but I’m sure it is linked in all the show notes, and I will find that out before the next episode. That's when you know you have a really amazing team running things for you, and you get to just show up and do your thing, which is this.

If you are new here, my hope is that by listening to this podcast episode and every episode of the Modern Phoenix, you drop a little bit deeper into yourself, into your own inner knowing. You walk away from these episodes knowing who you are, what you want, and how to choose yourself and make choices for yourself out there in the modern world that honor and support your authentic expression and all the things that you actually truly deeply desire, if you believed you could have them. And a lot of the reasons we don't believe we can have these things or be the versions of ourselves who is unapologetically authentic is because of our conditioning, and that's why we always start there.

And today's episode is no different. We're going to talk about why so many women that I know and work with—and I've been doing this for 11 plus years, okay? And I'm no stranger to being a woman myself, obviously—so many women have this fear that if they are not liked by someone else, that they can't survive.

The gold standard of being a woman in today's culture seems to be likability. Men don't have to be liked. Men have to be rich. Men maybe have to be powerful, but they don't have to be liked. Women are trying to be rich and powerful and liked all at the same time because popularity is that core ingrained standard that we take on at a very young age. And then we're conditioned for an entire lifetime to be nice, to be polite, to be charming, to be pretty, to be pleasing to the eye and the ear and to be pleasing company. We're taught to take care of everybody else, to anticipate other people's needs, to emotionally tend to all those around us, to clean up other people's messes, and, like I said, to do everything a man can do—except with way higher, less tolerant standards.

What this looks like from a nervous system lens is hypervigilance. I work with a lot of women who enter the room with this way of womaning, which is focused on scanning the room to check how are other people experiencing me—which is really code for: what can I do, how can I bend myself into a pretzel, to make that person more comfortable, to give that person an impression that I am (fill in the blank) the version of me that they want me to be. And this hypervigilance creates a lot of stress in a woman's body—not just in her system, with her hormones, with her mental health, but also just that literal pressure and pushing going through her life.

Modern life is already busy. It's already crazy. There's already a lot of stress. My latest stress is that robots are going to take over the world, and I am high-key stressed about it. So there are a million super valid reasons to be stressed already. And then we don't even realize that this hypervigilance on everybody else's comfort level, on everybody else's experience of us, is also ticking up our stress another notch. And also we're holding it in our nervous systems. We're holding it in our bodies. It's creating patterns of behavior and holding and pushing and fighting and fawning that we don't even have any control over—though we feel bad about ourselves for that. But it's not our fault because we've literally been conditioned from a super young age to bend ourselves into a pretzel, to be who everybody else wants us to be, at the cost of being ourselves.

So let's think about that for a minute. Let's just think about one scenario in your life. For me, when I went to therapy at the age of 18, I walked myself into a therapist's office and I said, how come I feel like I am responsible for everybody in my life and also like I'm letting them down? I felt like I was responsible for both of my parents' happiness and stability. I felt that my choices as their daughter determined whether they would be okay. I felt like I was emotionally responsible for my siblings. I felt like I was emotionally responsible for anybody I was related to. All of my friends—I had a hyper-dependency on my friends. I was so hypervigilant and so busy noticing how other people were feeling and doing and also focusing on being liked and loved and popular that I was in a perpetual state of depression, anxiety, or performing.

What did it cost me to focus more on how other people were doing and how other people were experiencing me than on my own experience of myself? Immediately, dissociation. And dissociation is not bad or wrong. This isn't to make any nervous-system state bad or wrong or to make it one fixed point. We're always changing. We want fluid, flexible, responsive nervous systems. Hold this lightly. It's just data. Get curious. Notice: what is my optimum state? I know when I feel totally dissociated that it's costing me my vitality, my pleasure, my connection, my feeling grounded and connected to my inner knowing. And I know when I'm doing it—oh, it's helping me right now. Okay, cool. We can work with all these things. Nothing is a forever sentence.

The point is: what does it cost me? What is it costing us to focus more on being liked than on how we ourselves are doing in any moment? It's costing us our peace, our connection to ourselves, our sense of self, and that deep, unshakable inner knowing of who we actually are.

When I started to shift this—from looking at myself through the eyes of other people to turning my eyes inward, listening to my body wisdom and my soul voice, connecting to my inner knowing—it changed my life. The level of self-trust and sovereignty that I began to notice in big and little choices was unmistakable. And that's why this matters. We think, what's the big deal? I'm really good at making other people comfortable. Could that be such a bad thing? Yes, and… What about when it causes you to abandon yourself?

When I abandon me and my authentic expression in favor of who you want me to be, what is the cost? I lose trust in myself. I lose my anchor. I lose my connection to my inner knowing of what to do next, who I am. My body signals—“I need to pee,” “time to rest,” “you’ve been dissociated for so long, time to show up for your job today”—all these big and small ways that our inner knowing is always communicating with us. Those become credible mentor voices guiding us toward what is for us and what is not.

Any experience that pulls us immediately out of our inner knowing into “I’m going to look at myself through your eyes, I’m going to behave so you like me,” means I lose access to me.

I’m using this language because I’m running the Inner Knowing Mastermind (starts April 30th). This is not too late to learn. This was my journey home to myself. And here was a sticking point: I can come home to myself, but wait—am I going to lose people? Gain new people? Disappoint people? Be misunderstood? Yeah. That’s part of the gig of being humans in these earth suits, in these awkward relationships, on this crazy planet. You’re going to be misunderstood. Some people won’t like you. Some people won’t get you. Some people won’t feel comfortable when you are yourself.

Let’s talk about what’s happening in the micro when who we are makes another person uncomfortable. What are we so scared of? Triggering other people. God forbid a woman trigger someone else.

But what’s actually happening when we make ourselves responsible for someone else’s experience of us?

One: I take her power away. I remove her agency. I believe each person has power and agency to change their own life. Yes, privilege matters; internalized systems matter. And with the right resources and support, every person is here to learn their earth lessons. Every trigger is an earth lesson.

When we rush in and say, “You’re uncomfortable? I’ll carry it; I’ll do it better,” we’re taking other people’s power away because we’re uncomfortable with their discomfort.

Two: it’s false security. A trigger is a reflection. If someone’s triggered by who you are, it’s because it’s making them uncomfortable with who they are not. If they’re triggered by your choices, it’s making them uncomfortable with the choices they’re not making. Five people can have five different experiences of the same person. So is it “you,” or is it their lens?

Here’s something to try. If you want more permission to be your authentic self, start by giving others the same thing. When you’re triggered by someone, get curious: what about her choices or expression is reflecting something in me that I’m uncomfortable with? Make how someone makes you feel into data about you—not a verdict about them. That practice makes it easier to give others their power back and let them have their own experience of you—without your manipulation, overthinking, or performance. Let them have their lesson.

This kind of embodied learning is what we practice in the Inner Knowing Mastermind. It’s missing in our culture. Understanding the wisdom of our cells and tissues and triggers and soul voices happens in relationship. Just because your husband’s anger makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean you should get divorced; it means there’s information.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if everybody likes you. It matters if you like you. You can’t like yourself when you’re bending into who you think I want you to be. That shrinking breeds shame and erodes self-trust. We want to bring back self-trust for the modern woman who is willing to feel anything. When you’re willing to feel the discomfort of being disliked—and to be yourself instead of controlling others’ experience of you—you’ll experience unshakable self-trust. You’ll feel unwavering clarity, intuition about next steps—from what to eat and wear, to who to talk to, to what business model to implement. Everything runs through your inner filter because you’re willing to feel what it feels like to be you.

Once you reckon with the paradox inside you, you increase your tolerance for humanity in general. No one is one thing. No one is universally adored or hated. We’re all multidimensional, all evolving. In that place, you can anchor back into your own experience and believe: it doesn’t matter if they like me; it matters that I like me. What does it feel like when I like me? When I’m in tune with joy, pleasure, power—and I kind of forget the rest of the world? It’s intoxicating, additive, and no one can take it away. You offer that to your relationships and to the world. Even with people triggered by you, you’re no longer taking ownership of their experience. You like you. You know who you are. They feel that. Sometimes it becomes aspirational for them: “I’m triggered—maybe because it’s possible for me, too.”

If you want to take this work deeper, the Inner Knowing Mastermind is in its last week of enrollment. We start April 30th. Eight weeks, eight modules. Each 90-minute call: first half embodied learning, second half live group coaching and Q&A. There will be embodiment exercises and connection with other like-minded modern phoenixes. I’ve been building this for six months; I’m proud of it, and I know it will help you feel comfortable in your skin, come home to yourself, and feel safe trusting yourself publicly in real relationships.

All links are in the show notes. Website: gervasekolmos.com/inner-knowing-mastermind. On Instagram: @gervasekolmos. Email: hi@gervasekolmos.com.

Thank you for being here. I know your time is precious. I’m so grateful for this community. See you in two weeks.