What would change in your life if you stopped trying to meet everyone else’s expectations and finally chose yourself? Could speaking up be the first step toward true authenticity? How much of who you are today is genuinely you, or a collection of old coping mechanisms?
In this podcast episode, Jennifer Froemel discusses going from perfectionism to authenticity with Amy Green Smith.
Meet Amy Green Smith
Amy Green Smith is an award-winning leadership coach, master hypnotherapist, speaker, and creator of the WORTHY. Method™. A former corporate overachiever, she now helps high-achieving women break free from perfectionism, people-pleasing, and burnout by developing stronger self-worth and boundaries. With more than two decades of experience working with women leaders, Amy is passionate about helping people build lives that feel as successful on the inside as they look on the outside.
Visit Amy’s website and connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
In This Podcast:
- How Amy Green Smith started choosing herself
- Be proactive in having difficult conversations when needed
- Amy’s EIC system
How Amy Green Smith started choosing herself
Amy unfortunately suffered from a lot of religious trauma. As the eldest daughter, she was expected to perform incredibly well, while her two younger siblings were not judged as harshly as she was.
The relationship between Amy and her parents came to a head around the time of her father’s death, when her mother essentially said that since the children didn’t follow the faith, they had failed as parents.
In that moment, Amy realized she would never be able to meet her mother’s standards and decided to start living for herself, not for others’ opinions.
The floodgates had opened, and I really still feel that most of the time [when you are] speaking up for yourself, advocating for yourself, establishing boundaries, is often not an ultimatum. However, if it does come down to, “I need to either make you happy or I need to make me happy,” that was the day I decided that I’m going to choose me.
Amy Green Smith
This life event led Amy into the work that she does now: she teaches others that their voice matters, that they should believe in themselves, and how to self-advocate for their needs and boundaries.
Be proactive in having difficult conversations when needed
In perfectionism, there is a tendency to be people-pleasing and engage in the fawn response whenever there is tension or difficulty.
A part of moving from perfectionism to being authentic includes being proactive and direct – with compassion – when you need to have hard conversations with loved ones.
“Oh, well, my mom’s just a narcissist,” or, “my partner is just toxic,” and that might be true … However, I have found more frequently than not … that it’s easier for us to brand somebody toxic and unknowingly relegate ourselves to victimhood so that we don’t have to have a difficult conversation.
Amy Green Smith
You can advocate for yourself without harming the other and without protecting them from the consequences of overstepping your boundaries.
Amy’s EIC system
E – Experience: There’s something that we experience in an incident, whether in our childhood, that we commonly witness in our culture, or within a chapter in our life.
I – Interpretation: What did you interpret from this experience about life at large, or yourself as a person?
C – Coping: How do you cope with the belief you created from the interpretation of the initial experience?
We can look back and see all sorts of situations like that. You might have had an experience of having a volatile caregiver, and so you learned; your interpretation was, “If I take up too much space, harm is caused,” and so your coping became people-pleasing, shape-shifting, moving out of the way … So it’s a useful tool.
Amy Green Smith
You can use this tool to examine and evaluate the experiences, interpretations, and coping skills you developed throughout your childhood, because they may start holding you back in adulthood.
Dialing it down means that I’m not being myself and I’m faking it, and I think that’s so important … We can show up as our natural, genuine self, but so many of us don’t know what that looks like, because of the layers … All those protective layers.
Jennifer Froemel
Rescources Mentioned in this Episode
Visit Amy’s website and connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Donate to Jennifer Froemel’s Lifesaving Work in Nepal
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ABOUT THE FEAR OF CHANGE PODCAST
Change can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. The Fear of Change podcast is all about helping you embrace change and live a more fulfilling life. Hosted by Jennifer Froemel, LCPC, a therapist with nearly 30 years of experience, we cover topics like mental wellness, holistic health, and improving relationships.
Jennifer’s down-to-earth approach makes it easy to understand why we fear change and how to move past those fears. Whether you’re dealing with anxiety, relationship issues, or just feeling stuck, there’s something here for you.
