EP103 What If Your High Standards Are Actually Your Biggest Block? How to Flip the 5 Scripts Keeping You Small

You look fine. You look like you’ve got it all handled.

But underneath? You’re running on grit, caffeine, and dry shampoo.

This episode is for the high-functioning, high-achieving woman who’s secretly f*cking exhausted from performing strength.

We’re talking about the “survival scripts” that get you praised, promoted, and depended on… but keep you playing small. The ones that look like power but quietly cost you your peace, your joy, and your freedom.

Inside, I break down….

• Overfunctioning: when carrying everything feels like worth
  
  
• Productivity addiction: why you can’t stop, even when you’re bone-deep tired
  
  
• Perfectionism: fear disguised as “high standards”
  
  
• Emotional detachment: the fortress that keeps you safe (and lonely)
  
  
• Silence: the sparkly disguise for self-abandonment
  
  

And I don’t just call them out… I give you the flips. The messy, human, doable ways to trade those outdated coping patterns for something that actually supports your reinvention.

If you’ve ever thought, “I should be fine, so why do I feel like this?”…
If you’ve ever worn your burnout like a badge…
If you’ve ever wanted to smash the invisible glass ceiling you built for yourself…

This one will light a fire in your gut.

Do let me know too what you think by texting the episode and/or leaving a review 🥰

Loads of Love

Sarah x

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P.S. If you love the conversations we have here, you’ll love the Badass AF Book Club. Each month we read a life-changing book, break it down in private podcast episodes, and actually live the lessons together. Think bold conversations, powerful shifts, and the kind of soul nourishment you can’t buy in WH Smith. Doors are always open…. grab your spot and join us inside. 

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Transcript

Sarah Elizabeth  00:00

Hello. Hello, and welcome to the reinvention era podcast, where we're all about turning just fine, mediocre vanilla into fucking fabulous darling, or our Fuck yes era only. What I've found with the women that I've worked with is that as much as they have absolutely delulu dreams and desires. Delulu, beautiful delulu, live on the Isle of deluli. They often actually almost cock block, or should that be, vag block themselves. They say they want love, success, wealth, health, but there's always a but I want this, but. I's like a ready made, invisible script we're living that unwittingly, unintentionally puts back in that sparkly old glass ceiling, and we do this shit to ourselves by acting out these, what I call survival scripts, because this is what fine really fucking looks like, and why it's not fucking fine anymore. Because actually, you know, sometimes reinvention doesn't have to start at rock bottom. Sometimes reinvention starts with high functioning over achievement, not broken, but rather more almost too together, which sounds a bit contradictory, I know, but hear me out right? Because there is so much of this, and this episode is for you. If you look externally like you've got your shit together, but in reality, you're holding it together with grit and dry shampoo. You know, this is for you because I know really, because I've lived this bullshit for the longest time, overachieving, equating success with high performance, productivity, fucking perfectionism I've lived through the poxy burnout to tell the freaking Tale, which is why today I really wanted to look at some of these key survival scripts that we live our lives by, but that actually stop us from getting where we truly want to be with no buts. 

Sarah Elizabeth  03:09

So let's start with one of my own survival scripts, and that's over functioning and fucking hell, this has plagued me my bloody life. So what is over functioning? Well, it kinda looks like power. It kind of looks, looks like you have it all. But really, you forget that you are a human being. Be ing and go all in on the human doing. You work, you produce, you take action. You're always switched on, always on on. You can't switch off. You can't say no, your boundaries buried somewhere in the should pile. You can't possibly delegate heaven forbid you ask for help. Oh my good god, no. Thank you, sir. You've got it all damn handled. And look somewhere along the line, you learned this, right? You learned that productivity equals worth. You learned that mental toughness equals success, rest equals weakness, failure, flaky, lazy, and meanwhile, your nervous systems hanging on for dear fucking life. It hasn't hit rest and digest in forever. You're living on cortisol cocktails and to do lists, running on fumes powered by pressure and yet And yet. Underneath it all, you feel fucking. Depleted. You resent the load. You actually resent it. But still, still, you wear that invisible martyr crown like it's a goddamn Oscar. It's like your human swiss army knife, multi purpose, multi faceted, multi freaking dancing. But no one ever asks you how you're doing today, so you just quietly resent it and carry on doing, doing doing, doing doing until you forget how to be, 

Sarah Elizabeth  05:39

which then leads us on to survival script number two, productivity addiction. We get so damn hung up on over functioning that we end up addicted to the results, addicted to the gold stars, addicted to the hit we get every time we achieve, and this looks like you have to succeed. You have to be non stop. You have to be Miss fucking reliable. Your to do list is probably colour coded, because the satisfaction from ticking things off is almost better than sex, albeit still not quite as rare as a completely empty to do list. Does that even exist? Who knows? You can't possibly stop, because if you stop, you might crumble, or worse, worse, you might be seen as useless, lazy, worthless. Who even are you if you're not getting results, huh? It's like you're sprinting uphill on a treadmill with no stop button, and the speed gets higher and higher. Keeps increasing, gets faster and faster. But God help you if you slow down, someone might see the cracks. Might know you might see the cracks. So you keep going, keep proving, keep performing. Because somewhere, somewhere deep inside you, you learned that rest is dangerous. Stillness is shameful. Slowing down means you're falling behind and underneath it all you're done, you're brittle, you're bone deep, tired, but you still don't stop because being busy makes you feel safe. It makes you feel worthy. It drowns out the voice in your head that says, Well, if you're not enough when you're not producing, and that's not ambition anymore, that's addiction. It's costing you your peace, your presence, your joy, you're not a fucking machine. You're goddamn human being, and you deserve a break, not just when you've air quotes earned it or when you think it's hashtag good enough. 

Sarah Elizabeth  08:08

Which brings me on to survival script number three, perfectionism, good old perfectionism, the sneaky little fucker of them all. Because unlike productivity, which looks like action. Perfectionism is performance. It's polished, it's pretty it's fucking poisonous. This one is that void in your head going, if you just get it perfect, they won't reject you if you don't mess up, they can't leave if you never make mistakes, ah, you'll be safe. You're finally safe. Only a loving bitch that time as much of myself as you, believe me, it's not about doing things well. It's actually about trying to control the outcome of everything, your work, your image, your emotions, your entire goddamn life. And it looks so bloody respectable on the outside, high standards, excellent results, always right? But inside, your knackered. You're exhausted. Nothing is ever, ever enough, and neither are you, because that's the problem with perfectionism, is that it's never, ever satisfied. The bar just keeps on moving. You finally reach it. It's gone again, higher outreach, and then again and again and again. So you keep tweaking and editing and overthinking and triple checking, and you delay starting stuff, delay launching the business. This, you don't post the thing. You never press send on that badass idea because it's not quite ready. It's like you're constantly polishing a version of yourself. You don't even like sprinkling glitter on the shit. Because, spoiler alert, you're never, ever gonna feel ready, because perfectionism isn't really about standards. It's really about fear, fear of failure, fear of judgement, fear of being seen, really seen, and it not being good enough, you'd rather self reject first than risk someone else doing it for you. But the somewhat brutal truth is perfectionism doesn't protect you. It prevents you from being real, from being seen for fucking living and the woman you want to become, she imperfect, because there's no such thing as perfect. She's powerful, she's messy, she's in motion, she's out there getting shit done, flaws and all while perfection waits on the sidelines and misses the old damn show. 

Sarah Elizabeth  11:19

So let's look now at survival script number four, emotional detachment. This one doesn't quite get the gold stars or the applause like the others we've talked about so far today, because this one flies a little bit under the radar, but it's just as heavy and just as harmful. Emotional detachment looks like strength, like you're calm, you're in control. Nothing rattles you. Nothing shakes you. You're the rock, the anchor, the unbothered one. I mean, you're not really unbothered, are you? You're unavailable. You've learned to put your feelings in a vault, lock them up, smile on the outside, shut down on the inside, like you're watching your own life from the outside, because somewhere along the line, your system decided that feeling equals danger, emotion equals weakness, vulnerability, oh, it's exposure. Emotion wasn't safe, so you shut it off to cope, and then just disconnected, numbed, not just from pain, but from everything, joy, desire, connection, intimacy, all of it, you start to live life from the neck up, all head, no heart, master of logic, but emotionally, Mia, and The World rewards you for that. Oh, you're so strong, you're some level headed, you're amazing in a crisis. But what they don't see is how fucking lonely it is inside that fortress, how heavy that Armour has become, how tired you are of pretending you don't feel anything when inside you feel everything. It's like living behind glass safe. Yes, I'm very fucking isolated. You're not cold, you're scared, you're tired of being hurt. And I get it because when you've been through some shit, detachment feels like self protection, doesn't it? But the thing is, numbing the pain also numbs the fun. You can't cherry pick your emotions. You either feel it, oh, I feel nothing, and you're meant to feel you're meant to cry, to get pissed off, to get angry, to love, to want to be messy, to be honest, to be real. You're not here to be a fortress. You're here to be freaking free, right? 

Sarah Elizabeth  14:14

So let's look now one more survival script before we move on to re scripting this shit so our reinvention becomes truly limitless, and that final script we're looking at today is silence, not literal silence, but The silence of shrinking, of staying small, of hiding, of swallowing your truth and no one gets uncomfortable, of editing yourself so you stay likeable, manageable, non threatening. ooof runs deep don't it, and that stuff. When you first learn that it was safer to keep the peace than speak your piece, it starts when don't rock the boat gets louder than what you want. You tell yourself you're just being easy, going flexible, low maintenance, but really you've become invisible. You don't ask for your needs to be met, you don't share your opinions. You don't say what's really on your mind. Just let things slide, put up with the shit that hurts. Convince yourself that silence is strength when really it's more like self abandonment in a sparkly fucking disguise, and it costs you. It costs you your confidence, your clarity, your fucking voice. Because silence isn't neutral, it slowly erodes your sense of self, and the longer you go unexpressed, the harder it is to even remember what you really think or feel or want. It feels like walking on eggshells in your own fucking life. And you know what for sure? Yeah, speaking up feels a bit risky. Sometimes it might piss people off. It might change relationships. It might mean some people don't like the real you. But the truth is, silence isn't going to save you. It's going to strangle you. It will keep you playing a role in someone else's story, instead of writing your own drowning quietly so no one gets splashed. And revenge, and it demands. Voice, your voice, all of you, your full volume, full fat, take up space, disrupt the peace. Voice, the one that says, I'm not fucking shrinking anymore. I'm not sorry for having needs. I'm not staying quiet. So you stay comfortable. You don't have to scream, you don't have to get angry, but you do have to speak to yourself, to others, to the world, because your power doesn't live in silence imperfection. It lives in expression. 

Sarah Elizabeth  17:21

So now, just before we flip these scripts right, let's just take a hot minute to get one thing straight, because you did not create these survival scripts because you're weak and you need to know that you created them because actually you're fucking brilliant. You actually are because your brain and body and your nervous system some part of you, and it might have been the eight year old version of you, or the 18 year old version of you, or the version of you who barely made it through that toxic relationship, but somehow, in all of it, a part of you was brilliant enough to figure out how to fucking survive that part just a part. It's not you, it's just a part that decided at some point in your past, if I just do more, I'll stay safe. If I'm perfect, no one can reject me. Abandon me. If I stay quiet, I won't rock the boat if I don't feel it can't hurt me. And those parts are not bad. They're not the enemy. They were brilliant, protective parts, strategic, smart as freaking hell. They were what you needed at that time, but they're outdated now. They were written for a life that you've outgrown, and if you're here in this reinvention era with me, then some deeper part of you does know, another amazing part of you knows it's time for new scripts, scripts that aren't about survival, but about being a freaking badass queen, scripts that honour who you're becoming, not just who you had to be. So here's what we're going to do for every survival script we've just unpacked. I'm going to give you a new lens, a new choice, a new reframe, a flip, not because healing is linear or easy, but because every time you choose something different, even just once, you start to rewrite the story. So let's fucking go. 

Sarah Elizabeth  19:56

Let's flip these fuckers. Because. Again, it's not about deleting parts of you. It's about giving those parts new jobs, new language, new levels of permission. So let's start with turning over functioning into asking, delegating. Receiving, learning. Now that you don't have to earn your place through output, we flip this to you don't prove your worth by carrying everything. You start healing by putting something down. Let someone else carry it. You know, to try it. Let someone help you, even if it's badly. Let the dishwasher be loaded, wrong. Let the towels be folded, stupid. Let it be imperfect. Let it be the goal isn't control. It's connection. Your value isn't in your usefulness. It's in your you-ness. So we go from overdoing to allowing being receiving openness. And whilst we're there, let's now look at turning productivity, addiction into rest, into pleasure into enoughness, because you are not your to do list. Rest can actually be a revolution, as I found recently, it's not a reward, it's a fucking right. You're not lazy for pausing. You're human. Even when we sit down right, we end up feeling guilty, or we'll still be doing shit like being on the phone scrolling or having one eye on Netflix and not taking either in properly. When was the last time you just sat in silence with no phone, no noise, no TV, just still and calm? So try it, maybe just block half an hour an hour this week, to just do nothing productive, no multitasking, no fixing, no justifying just being. Watch the panic rise, because it fucking will. It will at first, but then watch it pass, and connect back to being a human being, human being, not human doing. So what about perfectionism? Let's flip that one now. Shall we into self compassion and messy action? You're allowed to be real, not flawless. There really is no such thing. Perfection is just fear in fucking glossy red lipstick. It's not love, it's not safety, it's a mask, and you don't need it anymore. So a fix to try for this one do something badly on purpose. Do it shit intentionally. Post something that's unpolished. Let your kids see you fail and not spiral. Let it be messy. Let it be enough. You are not loved by all around you because you're perfect, you're loved because you're you. You're one in 400 trillion. Remember all of that it took to get you as exactly you, the unique you, is one in 400 trillion. And if that, then one in 400 trillion is completely incomparable to anyone else, then there's no measure right? Because there's 400 trillion ways to be perfectly imperfect, whatever, because no one else is you. So you, being you, is perfect for you, right? It's not comparable. So embrace, you fucked up this love, we've all got it. Okay. Now let's look at turning emotional detachment into emotional awareness and expression. Oh, question, because feeling is not failure. Feeling is aliveness. It's a part of living. Yes, numbing may well have been a part that has kept you safe, but now that part is keeping. You stuck. You don't have to fix your feelings. Just feel them. So try this once a day. Just take a moment, take a breath and ask yourself, What am I feeling right now? Not, why are you feeling it, not what you can do about it, just what you're feeling. Just name it. The problem is, as humans, we've become almost scared of our body's own defence and safety mechanisms, right? We go into fight or flight our bodies and nervous system is triggered by the threat of danger, right? Our bodies are literally designed to keep us safe. If the brain and the body detect a threat, the fight or flight trips in and to protect us. But what has happened is that, over time, we've become afraid of things that aren't really a danger, and now we're afraid of feeling that feeling. We don't want to feel the feeling. So we've become scared of our own freaking feelings and our own safety mechanism. So we've become anxious about being anxious, but at some point we have to experience the full range of human emotion. How do you know what happy feels like if you've never experienced sad? How can you understand peace if you've never felt chaos. And also, by the way, apparently I heard directories, but apparently emotions themselves, the actual emotion themselves, energy, emotion, the emotion itself, is only felt for about 90 seconds. 90 seconds, that's it after that. It's what we're thinking and feeling about, the bloody emotion, not the emotion itself. The emotion itself only lasts for that short time. Okay, so you're not too sensitive for having feelings. You're not too much feeling is just waking back up and fucking feeling into it, right? And then finally, we're rescripting silence into boundaries and our freaking voice, hell yes, speaking your truth is actually an act of self return. You know what? Yeah, speaking up might shake things up. It might, it, may, it may, well do but silence that erases you. So for flipping this, try this. Say one, just one, start, one honest sentence a day, even if it's just actually I don't agree, or that doesn't work for me, or just a hard fucking no with zero explanation. Say it. Just say it, let it land and survive it. Your truth doesn't need permission. It's just your voice needs a freaking comeback, love. 

Sarah Elizabeth  28:34

So there you have it, five survival scripts, five ways we trick ourselves into thinking we're thriving when we're actually just fucking coping. Five patterns that once maybe kept us safe, but now they're keeping us small. And I get it. Letting go of these is not easy. I know. I really know over functioning feels powerful, productivity feels purposeful, perfectionism feels protective, detachment feels safe, silence feels polite. But reinvention doesn't come from doing what you've always done. It comes from choosing something different, even when that different feels scary or messy or just so unfamiliar. Because when you choose something different, when you do that, that's when the magic happens. That's when the version of you who only ever wanted to be fine gets replaced by the one who is finally free, free to rest, free to receive, free to take up space, feel fully, speak loudly, mess up gloriously, and still know she's worthy as fuck you. You don't have to earn your reinvention. You just have to stop blocking it, your deulu dreams, they're possible. They're the blueprint for you. But to smash that glass ceiling, you've got to stop tiptoeing on it. You've got to unlearn the roles that you've been rehearsing so that you can finally, finally remember who the fuck you are. Because underneath all the scripts and survival modes and polished performances, there's a woman who knows she's meant for more more happiness, more truth, more fire, more life. And look love. I don't care how fine your life looks on paper, if you're not feeling it in your bones, it's time to flip the goddamn script. So if this episode's a little bit of a fire in your gut and you're ready to go from survival mode to main character energy. I've got something really special for you. It's my free audio. It's your very own badass AF badass as fuck pep talk. It's six minutes of raw, unfiltered power to help you remember what you're capable of, especially on the days you forget, especially on the days where those old parts, the Old scripts, try to think back in there like little fuckers that they are. It's just something to plug into your earbuds and get yourself right back to where you need to be. So the link for that's in the show notes. And of course, if you want to go deeper into being about us and freeing yourself from the limits, it's always the badass book club, but no which is, as we know, bold conversations, powerful books, and the kind of nourishment our soul needs that doesn't come from a journal in WH Smith just saying. So if you want to write a new chapter, burn the whole fucking damn script and start again. Just make sure this one's got your name on the cover. There's lots to suit you and help you. This isn't about your trauma, your survival, your silence. This is about you and your amazingness, and this is your reinvention era, which is gonna be fucking fabulous. I'm here for it. Here for it. So thank you, as always, for listening. If you want to share the episode with another bad ass? Then please, please, please do, and then I will be back in your beauts badass earbuds again next week for more to boost our reinvention era. Loads of love. Bye.