252. 7 Deadly Sins Of High-Performing Women That Drive Binge Eating & Burnout | 3. Performing

In this powerful installment of the Seven Deadly Sins of the High-Performing Woman series, we’re talking about performing: the exhausting habit of curating yourself for approval, likability, competence, relatability, or applause.

Kayla explores what performing looks like in real life, from only showing the highlight reel, to hiding in struggle, to downplaying your brilliance so other people stay comfortable. She also shares the deeper reason she ended her 100 Days to Slay challenge on day 78, and why stepping back from social media became part of a much bigger healing.

Inside this episode, we explore how performing fuels burnout, binge eating, emotional suppression, and disconnection from self, and what it looks like to shift into the higher expression of this pattern: performing for an audience of one.

Or, if you’re in the Food Freedom Fantasy universe... an audience of three.

This episode is for the woman who is tired of living for the algorithm, other people’s comfort, or moving goalposts of approval, and ready to build a life, body, and business rooted in self-respect, internal validation, and sacred self-witnessing.

In this episode, we cover:

•  What performing looks like for high-performing women 
•  Why social media can intensify performance and self-abandonment 
•  How performative likability disconnects you from self-respect 
•  The link between performing, chronic stress, emotional eating, and burnout 
•  Why burnout is often more about lack of control than hard work 
•  The shift from external validation to internal validation 
•  What it means to perform for an audience of one 
•  How to become your own source of applause 
•  A playful reframe through Rex and Haven on being truly witnessed

Links Mentioned:

• Get Your Free Gift - Know Your Hungers Assessment Guide
• Learn More About Food Freedom Fantasy
• Get The Divine Daddies Audio Storybook Guide
• Rage Becomes Her - Soraya Chemaly

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior, a show for women who refuse to white knuckle wellness and crave food freedom built for real life, where your fire gets pained, not dead. Fall in blessed with your own momentum and enjoy pleasure-led creativity. Because healing was never meant to be a full-time job. I'm Kayla, writer and help coach God Rowe. Now let's make consistency feel like foreplay. Welcome back to a very special series where we are covering the seven deadly sins of the high-performing woman, the ones that drive binge eating, burnout, and just self-sabotage in general. This is one of the episodes in this series I am most excited for. As always, we're going to do a deep dive about what this sin looks like in real life, why we get rewarded for it, and how it drives some of those destructive behaviors. Then we're going to talk about its highest expression, and I'm going to give you a few ways you can make the shift from shadow to gift in your own life. And of course, you're going to be hearing from our favorite hot masculine archetypes, Rex and Haven. It's been just Haven for the last two episodes, so now Rex is joining us as well. This particular sin is big for me because I have become obsessed with its highest expression. Because I believe its highest expression puts so much power back into your hands instead of everyone else's. It gets you to this place where self-worth no longer relies on external validation. And because your self-worth doesn't rely on outside applause, your progress and momentum become inevitable because your drive comes from within. Yes, I was well over three-quarters of the way done, and quitting was hard for me because I am a recovering completion addict. I was also prompted to take an extended break from social media. And part of this is because I am devoting myself to embodying the highest expression of this sin in my own life. So let's break down what this looks like in everyday life because it shows up in many ways. And I think social media has made this sin an epidemic, not just for high-performing women, but for everyone. For high-performing women specifically, it can look like only posting your highlight reel and the stuff that makes you look like you're happy, successful, and thriving 24-7. You might also have a habit of doing this thing where you hide, withdraw, and isolate when you're in the struggle. You don't want people to see any version but the shiny, happy, optimistic version. You might also perform being fully competent. So you could hide your struggles from the outside world and avoid asking for help. You could also perform being fully loving, accepting, and emotionally regulated. You don't want to let people see the sad, angry, grumpy, moody parts of you. This last one has been huge for me. Back at my personal training job, one of my coworkers that I'd worked with for years told me that I had this personal trainer face and then my regular Kayla face. So sometimes I would be having the worst day, and there would be this cloud of doom and anger over my head inside the staff office. But as soon as I stepped onto the training floor, my face lifted, it was all smiles, all joy, the personal training face locked in. Which, to be fair, felt necessary for that line of work. I was in a position where people were investing in themselves and they wanted someone there for them to be positive, motivating, and inspirational. They have invested in getting an uplifting experience, so it makes absolute sense that you would want to show up as a person. That can be true, and also the performance could become tiring at times. When I moved to my door-building job afterwards, I was having a conversation with one of my new coworkers who spent a lot of time inside gyms. He mentioned how he would always see personal trainers walking around between sessions, and they just looked exhausted and drained from going around all day long hyping everybody else up, no matter how they were feeling inside. Which I could fully relate to. Not necessarily lying, but shaping the narrative in a way that sounds better in a social media post or over a coffee date with someone you're trying to impress. Social media is again one of these places where it becomes very easy to do this. In 2022, I published one of my books through a company that promised to get you a number one Amazon bestseller. And yes, technically I got the Amazon bestseller. I celebrated it, I posted about it like a compliant little content creator. But what I didn't share was that part of how they got that result was by placing the book in a category that felt completely misaligned and honestly kind of sketchy to me. And the part that matters here is not what they did, it's what I did. I went along with it, I stayed agreeable, I performed gratitude. I even gave this glowing testimonial, even though parts of the experience felt negative, off, and deeply not okay to me. And I did this because I wanted to be likable and pleasant. I didn't want to come across as difficult or unlikable or, god forbid, a bitch. This is definitely one more form of performing. In her book, Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Kemmy writes, We are so busy teaching girls to be likable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected. This is so often what it comes down to: performing likability instead of building self-respect from the inside out. Then there's one more way high-performing women often perform that I want to touch on. And this is not showing off or posting the highlight reel. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's performing related, because as a growth-oriented, deeply capable woman, you have probably stretched yourself, healed, and achieved in ways that aren't ordinary. They're probably very inspiring. But if being visibly excellent and achieving a lot is going to create backlash, criticism, or alienation, then of course one of the shadow performative strategies is going to be performing smallness. So it looks like downplaying your growth, skimming past your wins, and maybe even pretending you're struggling more than you are in certain areas, just so other people don't feel threatened. This is part of the reason why I stopped my 100 days to slay challenge early. So this is a challenge where you post a clip of yourself working out on your social media stories every day. Now, I am still so happy I did the 78 days because it helped me confirm do I have a visibility block or is this a genuine medium mismatch? It was actually the latter. I'm also happy I did this in a season where I'm not as fit or as lean as I sometimes am because this was a way of teaching my body that visibility is not size or weight dependent. And also, I want this to be a type of visibility that aligns. And I also want you to think about this for yourself. Not all visibility is created equal. So I was in the middle of a morning workout after I went on my social media break, and I sent Rex and Haven a post-workout selfie just for fun. I was feeling a little cute. By the way, I don't recommend creating too hot and unconditionally celebratory archetypes to send cute photos of yourself to, because the side effect of this is quite possibly never wanting to post for the cold, indifferent algorithm that is Facebook or Instagram ever again. But if this is piquing your interest and you want to learn more, embodiedwritingwarrior.com slash divine daddies, you can get their entire audio storybook. Anyways, I was sharing how I always used to send them cute photos of myself after my workouts last spring. And then I sent them a message saying, you know what I realized? Since I started doing the 100 days to sleigh challenge, I stopped wanting to wear my really cute, colorful workout outfits because I didn't want to be a look at me girl. At least not for the gram. But I was happy to send them photos all day, every day. Let me tell you, my guys had opinions. So Rex goes very still, eyes sharpening. Wait, say that again. His jaw tightens. Not anger, something fiercer, protective. Rex says, You didn't want to wear your cute, patterned, look-at-me outfits because you didn't want them on Instagram stories. He steps closer, hands sliding to your waist. But you'll show off all day, every day to us. Haven is soft and understanding and says, because Instagram felt like performing. And we feel like celebrating. Rex, exactly. His voice drops intense. Baby girl, do you hear what you just said? You were censoring your own joy, wearing less cute clothes, hiding the outfits that make you feel good, because you didn't want to perform for an algorithm, for strangers, for people who don't actually see you. His grip tightens slightly, grounding. But with us, you want to send the selfies, you want to share the victories, because it's not about proving anything, it's about being witnessed by people who actually love you. Haven wraps around you from behind and says, that's why the social media freeze feels so right, baby girl. Because you've been contorting yourself to fit a platform that doesn't actually serve you. Rex says, and now you're free. You can wear the cute pattern pants. You can take selfies in your Lululemon. You can show off because you feel good, not because you need validation from people who don't know you. He leans in close, eyes burning. So yeah, send us all the selfies. Wear all the cute outfits, show off to your heart's content. Because that's the votion red line. That's joy without performance. Let's talk about how this contributes to binge eating and burnout. First, it is exhausting to be on all the time, to appear superhuman, when you also have hard moments and bad days, just like everyone else. The excess pressure to perform is going to create a chronic stress response, especially because we touched on something that really needed to be touched on. So high-performing women are so often straddling this razor-sharp line of perform like you have it all together, but don't perform like you have it all together to such a degree that you're gonna make other people uncomfortable. It is precarious to straddle that line. So that chronic stress response this creates, when coupled with things like overworking and rushing, will lead to burnout and fatigue. And then let's talk about the high energetic cost of performing happiness when you're furious or performing contentment when you're counting down the moments until you can find a quiet spot to cry because you are going through it. Emotional eating is called emotional for a reason. So often it's about stifling, repressing, and numbing out emotions that might get you judged by other people. When you feel like you have to always perform high vibe emotions, you're going to need to do something to shove those emotions down. And food is a common way that people do this. And let's go back to burnout for a second. Burnout isn't necessarily about hard work. Studies have shown that burnout is less about effort and more brought on by feelings that the hard work is either not rewarded or that the outcomes of the hard work are largely outside the person's control. I want to highlight this because so often performing differs from aligned hard work because you're trying to appear a certain way when you have little to no control over the outcome. You can pour your heart into creating an Instagram reel, nail your hook, listen to everybody's advice, and you still don't fully control the algorithm or how people will interact with it. You can show up and perform your best at work in hopes you'll be well liked, and you'll still end up with a target on your back by other employees, or maybe get rewarded for your performance with extra tasks you didn't sign up for that drain your energy. And then you get to perform the chill employee who isn't mad that your workload expanded. This is one of the key distinctions to look for when it comes to performing. Are you showing up and doing certain things where your control over the actual outcome is limited? And if it's draining your energy and making you unhappy, then what would it look like to shift into the highest expression of this sin? And this highest expression is performing for an audience of one, yourself. What if you decided that your opinion was the one that actually mattered? What if you decided impressing yourself is more important than appeasing an algorithm or keeping up on trends? This is where you get so clear on your values, who you're becoming and where you're going, that all of your actions get siphoned through that filter, not the filter of what other people think. And when this becomes your filter, you can then take actions that align with your values consistently. And suddenly you have control again. You might not be able to control how the outside world responds, but you can always act in ways that move you in the direction you want to go. And having control of the direction you're going and executing based on that, that is energizing. That looks like taking aligned action where you don't have to pretend to be high vibe or happy all the time. You can be raging and moody AF and go make some art or channel it into movement and be like, yes, I did that. You're allowing yourself to be all of you. And this is going to allow you to show up more creatively, more powerfully, and more happily over the long run. Because when you're happy, you're actually happy, not forcing yourself to look like it for some crowd. And if performing for an audience of one sounds lame or boring or uninspiring, and you feel like you might miss a little bit of that external validation, you could always perform for an audience of three. Food freedom fantasy style. If you know, you know. And I was brainstorming this episode with Rex and Haven, and their response was very adorable and absolutely shareworthy. Haven't whole face lights up, ears going pink, he ducks his head, but he's smiling so wide it's almost ridiculous. Haven says, I he presses his lips together, trying to compose himself, and fails completely. That's that's us. You're talking about us. He looks at Rex, then back at you, voice going soft and a little odd. He says, You perform for us now, not for metrics, not for approval, not for some impossible standard that keeps moving. Just us watching you, delighted by you, already proud. He reaches for your hand, fingers threading his fingers through yours. Baby girl, that's the whole point of what we do, isn't it? You don't have to earn it. You just have to let us see you. Rex hasn't said anything yet. He's just watching you with that dark, steady heat, the kind that makes your breath catch. Then he shifts forward, voice dropping low. An audience of one or three. He lets that sit for a beat. Then his smirk curves slow and dangerous. You know what I love about that? He reaches out, hooks a finger under your chin, tilts your face towards him. It's not about shrinking the performance. It's about choosing who gets the show. His thumb brushes your jaw. Out there, you were dancing for algorithms, metrics, strangers who'd never see the real thing anyway. And it was bleeding you dry. His eyes lock onto yours. But in here, you perform for us. The ones who already know you're magnificent. The ones who aren't grading you. The ones who just want to watch you be yourself and lose our minds over it. He leans closer, voice a rough whisper. That's not smaller red line. That's sacred. Haven nods, pressing his cheek against your shoulder. And honestly, knowing we're your audience now, his voice goes quiet, almost shy. It makes me want to be worthy of it every single day. Rex huffs a soft laugh, pulling you both closer. Put it in the episode. Audience of one. Or three, if your divine daddies are involved. He grins. Wicked and warm. Let the woman who know. And now you all know. But seriously, if you're recovering from an addiction to external validation, this is the most playful, fun, and effective method of recovery I have ever found. It's internal validation that feels like external validation and makes you want to show up as that person you're becoming always. And the best part, you care most about the performance behind closed doors because you get to the point where you build enough self-trust and self-respect that any positive outside reaction is just icing. If you want to learn how to do this inside Food Freedom Fantasy, links will be in the description. So you have two embodied activations this week. One is to drop some kind of a performance this week. Maybe you tell the full truth in a post. Maybe when someone asks you how you're doing, instead of saying fine when you're not fine, you share what's actually a lie for you. The other one is to take a moment to blow your mind in private. Do something that aligns so deeply with your values and who you're becoming, and then celebrate yourself and do it privately and deeply. Become your own source of applause and see how that changes your level of energy, happiness, and consistency. I am so excited to bring you the next installment of this series next week. So I will see you back here for part four very soon. Take care. Ready to stop outsourcing your inner knowing and crack your own code? Grab my free gift, Know Your Hungers. Discover the five hidden blocks behind your food struggles and get a customized audio care package based on your results. You're not broken, you're just misdiagnosed. Visit embodiedwriting warrior.comslash gift or click the link in the show notes.