How to Stop People Pleasing Before Burnout — Iris Muche

Welcome. This show is for people in the middle of something difficult. If you're navigating burnout, a career change, or rebuilding something that stopped working, you're listening to Share, Inspire, Explore. I'm Chris Wilson. I've been through it. And I built the Where I'm At community because I couldn't find the conversation I actually needed. Season two is guest-led. In each episode, I sit down with someone who's lived it or studied one of these phases. Recognize. Reset. Reinvent. Real conversations. Nothing packaged. Let's get into it.

One more note before we begin. This episode contains a personal account of burnout, including a period of intense despair. If you're struggling, please reach out to someone you trust. You'll also find crisis support lines linked in the description.

A quick note before we begin. This conversation is grounded in lived experience and educational content. It is not therapy or professional advice. So if anything we discussed today surfaces something you'd like support with, please do reach out to a qualified professional. Welcome back to Share and Inspire, Explore. My guest today is Iris Mucha, a psychosocial counselor, trainer, and published author based here in Vienna, Austria. She is the founder of D. Max Musterman, which in English translates to Miss John Doe, built around one idea. Your version of normal is the only one that actually counts. Before this work, Iris built a serious career across the private sector, non-profit organizations, and infrastructure. She knows from the inside what it feels like to have

your sense of worth completely tied to how much you're doing, how well you're performing, and how little trouble you're causing anyone around you. That is where her burnout came from, and it's exactly where the work she now does with others begins. Iris, a very warm welcome to Share and Inspire, Explore.

Hello, thank you for the invitation. I'm really happy to be here. So Iris, before your burnout, would you have described yourself as a people pleaser? No, back then I've never heard of that word. And honestly, I would have called myself empathetic, dedicated, reliable, a team player, someone you can rely on and get things done. So people pleasing had this connotation of being weak or insecure. And I definitely never saw myself it that way. I was successful, I was performing, but the tricky part from the outside, and from the inside, it looked different. Yeah.

So what words would you have maybe described yourself instead? Ambitious, committed, responsible, someone who takes her work seriously. And all of these were true. And none of them were the full picture.

But when did that story, you know, stop being so accurate? It was when my body stopped cooperating. I could override my own needs for a long time. And that's actually a skill that people pleaser often develop. But at some point, the exhaustion became impossible to ignore for me. And I had to ask, who have I actually been doing all this for? And the answer wasn't comfortable. Yeah, I remember that question myself. I mean, you had the corporate career, as I mentioned. And obviously, these are the environments that reward exactly this kind of person. So what did people pleasing look like in those contexts?

Mm-hmm. It was very sophisticated. It wasn't about being submissive. It was about reading the room perfectly and knowing what the stakeholder needed before they articulated it, adjusting my communication style, my energy, even my opinions, depending on who I was talking to. And I was extremely effective with that. And it was extremely exhausting because it was essentially running against my background processes. And what does this person need from me right now was always on top of my head. Yeah. And is there a pattern how high-performing organizations select and reinforce this behavior?

Yes. And they often don't even know about it. People who get promoted are often the ones who never push back, who absorb pressure without complaining, who make everybody else's job easier. And these organizations are looking for people-pleasers consistently and consciously. They're looking for low-maintenance, high-performance. And it's basically the same thing.

Yeah, I can relate to that. The quiet doers, compliant, right? How does it feel to be that person that everyone can rely on? And what is the part that nobody talks about?

I mean, it does feel good to be needed, to be honest. And that's the part people often don't say out loud. There's a real sense of value of being needed and mattering. And that feeling becomes a kind of currency. And the part that no one talks about is what happens when you stop it. When you say no, or you're uncomfortable, or you're having a bad day, and suddenly you feel like you're broken, like you've broken an unspoken agreement. And that's the guilt, is the mechanism, and that keeps the pattern running.

Mm-hmm. And for someone listening, who maybe has never thought of themselves as a people-pleaser, like you said in the beginning, but they're definitely exhausted, always being on, available, delivering, saying yes. What would you want them to hear right now? So, it's a very good question. And I would say you don't have to break down to be allowed to rest. I know it's a tough one. And the exhaustion you feel is information. So, your body is telling you something that your mind has been overriding for a long time. And the fact that you're good at what you're doing, that you're dependable, people love working with you, and none of them means that you're fine. It might actually mean the opposite.

But what's the smallest sign, you know, that someone is in the pattern without really having named it? Mm-hmm. Maybe I would say they feel a split second of relief when plans got cancelled. Not because they didn't want to go, but because they said yes before they even checked in with themselves. And that automatic yes, before there's even a question, that's the sign.

Yeah, I guess it's not only in the corporate setting, right? It's even in, you know, your personal life, right? The social event get cancelled. And you can feel that relief. Yeah. I didn't actually want to go to it anyway, you know? True. But you also work with companies directly. Do organizations unknowingly build people-pleasing into the culture? And maybe you've maybe given a hint already previously. Yeah, absolutely. And if so, how do they do that?

So, every time a company rewards availability over boundaries, every time going above and beyond is praised without asking what it costs the person, that's the culture that's being built people-pleasing. It's structural.

Yeah, it's so common, right? And what does people-pleasing culture look like from the inside? A bit more, please. Everyone is super nice to each other. Conflict is avoided or handled very indirectly. No open conflicts. And people say yes in meetings and then went in private, in the coffee kitchen.

And there's a lot of unspoken pressure to be seen as a team player and be easy to work with, especially for some groups of the society. And Bernard is treated as a personal failure when it happens. And it's not a signal that something in the system might not be working. And that last part is the one that I find most important. Yeah. To name.

Totally. You know, it's if the culture is this avoidant, but on the outside or at least internally, internally, this team and organization department looks like everyone's working, everyone's doing the talk, but actually there's so much performance in that, right? It's so exhausting. So exhausting. Walking on eggshells. Yeah. Yeah. I remember you can, you can sense that, you know, going into meetings and then the hierarchy. So it's like the juniors, so to say, afraid to speak up the truth. And I've been in healthier organizations as well. And no one can be 100% authentic in the workplace, or at least in my experience, but you should be able to at least be approaching that. And if you're all operating around the 50, 60%, then at some point things are going to creep up on you.

So now we'll cover the inner driver for this. So you use the concept of inner drivers in your work. Can you explain what those are and where they come from?

Yes. I really love this concept as it can explain so much. So short disclaimer, it's not a diagnosis or something. It's an assessment on where you stand on the spectrum of different forces working within you. So the inner drivers. In German, it's the antreiber. It comes from the transactional analysis, a psychological framework developed by Eric Byrne. And the idea is that we all internalize a certain message or certain messages in childhood. I know it always starts in childhood. And it usually comes from caregivers or significant adults near us about what we need to do in order to be accepted, loved. And be safe. And be safe. And these messages become unconscious scripts that drive our behavior in adult life. And we never even know about it. And there are five classical drivers that Taibikala analyzed. And these five drivers are be perfect. We all also know that one.

And there are five drivers. And there are five drivers. And there are five drivers that are not pathological. And there are adaptations. And they have helped us at some point. They are coping strategies, if you wish. And the problem is when you wish. And the problem is when we keep running on autopilot and contexts where they no longer serve us. That's when they get harming.

The clear sign is that your emotional state is tied to how others are doing. That's a tough pill to swallow. I know sometimes. If someone in the room is unhappy, you feel responsible.

If there's tension, you move to resolve it. Even if it has nothing to do with you. You monitor, you adjust, and you find it genuinely difficult to be comfortable when someone around you isn't. And often you don't experience it. And often you don't experience it as a choice. It just happens. It's, like I said, these forces.

Yeah. My tactic was always trying to make a joke of difficult situations, try to bring humor, you know, to change the course back to some sort of normalcy. Is that the kind of direction you're talking about here?

It's kind of manipulation, as I've read, you know, because you're manipulating the situation. I see what you say, and you could frame it as manipulation. And I think manipulation is seen as such a bad word, but everything can be seen as manipulation. And when you get a massage, it's manipulation, you know. I don't know. So, it's not conscious what doesn't make it, like, the intention is not harmful, but the intention is to be safe and loved and connected. Exactly, yeah.

Is it possible to have this driver, you know, without identifying as someone who struggles with limits? Absolutely. So, this is actually where very common for a high-achieving context. So, many people with strong, please other drivers have very professional limits on paper and they know how to say no to the wrong clients, to bad projects.

But in relationships, in teams, with people they care about or depend on, these limits often dissolves. And they say no and then spend three days managing the guilt. So, the boundaries may exist, but the cost of everything to hold it, yeah, is expensive.

And you're lying there in bed at night and this is all playing out in your head, right? But your own insight is one of the most honest I've encountered, actually, on this topic.

You know, being lovable, tied to productivity. When did you first see that clearly? This one, I didn't arrive at intellectually. I arrived through crisis. And as I said, my body stopped performing. I wasn't performing anymore. When I was burned out, I couldn't deliver. I noticed that I felt fundamentally worthless.

And that was not just professionally, it was personally. And the gap between I can't work right now and, yeah, I don't deserve to exist or to be seen worth, full, is not there right now. And the gap was too large to ignore. And when I understood that, somewhere along the way, and it was really not an easy insight, that my value as a person had become completely fused with my output.

So, in my work, I often say it's really important to have more pillars for your identity than work. How long would you say you were running in that cycle before you could name it?

I think most of my life, to be honest. But I would have no way of seeing it while I was working. Well, while it was working. And I was working. The system was functional. I was succeeding. I was like, I was getting results. And you don't question a strategy that appears to be working. And when you don't know it differently, it was only when it stopped working that I saw what it was. When you stopped, did you feel that engine was continuously running?

When you removed yourself from the workplace? And it's just like this hyper alert, anxious self. Yeah. It's not easy to stop that. It's not like it just doesn't end when you leave or stop working, right?

Well, what made you able to see it, you know, when you did? Partly the crisis itself. It truly removed the noise. It pressed the emergency exit button. But also the therapeutic work I did at the time.

Having someone to sit with and to ask you the right questions without an agenda, without needing anything from you, that created enough space to actually look. And I couldn't have done this alone. I was too close to it.

I think you hinted already. Something that starts early, you know, childhood, school. Does it actually develop? I mean, you said maybe it's just the trigger, but does it develop in your professional life?

So, as we already said, the roots are almost always early. And the professional environment doesn't create the driver. It activates it and it rewards it. It reinforces it. Changes in professional life is the stakes. And currently there's money, status, identity attached to the behavior. And so it becomes, yeah, rewarded. And if you trace it back, it usually is a child who very clearly learned that a certain vision of them is more welcome than others.

I mean, does it look different in people who came from high achieving families, you know, let's say versus the people who were maybe first in their family to succeed professionally? I would say the pattern exists in both, but the flavor is different. In high achieving families, the driver often sounds like I have to maintain the standard.

I can't be the one who drops the bar. And there's a legacy to hold up. And in first-generation success, it often sounds like I have to prove that I'm worth it. I can't let the people down who sacrificed for me. And both forms are, both are forms of performing for others. But the internal voice has a different texture.

What they share is that a person's own desires are somewhere further down the list than everybody else's. Yeah, I can imagine this is like for Olympic athletes and their children that follow, you know, it's like you see that playing out in the school.

But what's the difference between someone who's, you know, genuinely generous and someone who's just compulsively giving? Is there a clear line or does that blur? So the clearest distinction I know is that what happens when the giving isn't received well or isn't acknowledged or reciprocated? So genuine generosity can tolerate that. It doesn't need feedback.

It doesn't rely on others. Compulsive giving needs a response and needs to land well. Because the giving was never really just for the other person. It was regulating something internally.

So that was what you previously always also said about manipulation. So it's not a moral failing. It's a mechanism. And can you be both at the same time? Yeah. So most people I work with are, there are moments of real clean generosity where they give freely and it feels good that there is no cost. And there are other moments where they are given is driven by anxiety or the need of being needed, the fear of what happens if they don't. Yeah. It's about being able to tell the difference from the inside, the intention.

So you described your burnout as a direct consequence of this pattern. What was that sequence and how did the people-pleasing turn into burnout for you specifically? So the sequence was very gradual. So that was exactly what made it that dangerous. It wasn't one bad job or one difficult period. It was years of consistently putting my needs last. And it was not dramatical, just quietly every day.

And saying yes when I meant no, staying later than I should, taking on more than I could because someone else needed it. And each individual decision was completely reasonable, but the accumulation was not.

Was there a single tipping point or was this a slow burner over time? It was slow with a final trigger. And what I realized, the trigger gets all the attention. It's the thing you can point to.

Yeah. But it was really just the last item in a very full container. So what I've come to understand is that the tipping point is almost never the real cause. It's just the moment the system finally stops compensating.

You can reflect on that now, right? But did you feel the anger or from the trigger at the tipping point? You know, there's a lot of hyper-focus on that event, right? It was great. You can reflect now, actually. This was a collective accumulation.

Looking back, were there signs you missed or dismissed? Yeah, definitely. I became less patient. I told myself I was just tired or stressed, sleep problems. I was exhausted, but I couldn't rest, which I now understand that my nervous system wasn't able to downregulate and a kind of emotional flatness also. So the things that should have felt meaningful started to feel like tasks.

And a very specific thing was that I stopped being able to enjoy my free time. I would have a feeling I would have a weekend and feel nothing. That was a significant sign, but I completely ignored it.

The difficulty with that pattern is the depletion. It's invisible from the outside, right? Keep performing, delivering, and saying yes, as you said. But how does that work? People pleasers are often very skilled at managing perception, presenting well, being present, being responsive.

These are core competences. And even when the internal experience is becoming increasingly difficult, the external performance continues and there's also something else happening because when your sense of worth is tied to being reliable, available, admitting that you're struggling feels like admitting that you're failing.

So you hide it even from yourself. So the mask isn't just for others, it's also for you. And that's the hardest part to see. Why is it so hard to stop? You know, even when you can see what it's costing you.

Yeah, because the driver isn't rational. So you know intellectually that you're overextended and still be completely unable to say no in the moment because the anxiety of disappointing someone is more immediate than the abstract cost to yourself. You don't see it. The discomfort of letting someone down is right there in front of you.

And your own depletion is something you can deal with later. It comes on the to-do list that's never ending. And yeah, that later keeps moving, moving, moving. Ah, yeah. You hit a nerve there. For me, it was my reputation.

You know, it didn't respond well to criticism. Didn't even, wasn't able to take praise very well either. But the reputation kept me going. But what if, what if, what a restaurant that means, okay, high quality, high output.

Well, that's the perfect storm, right? But I mean, your energy is flowing out constantly to these other people and the demands. What happens to the person at the center of the flow?

They're, yeah, it seems like they're not a person anymore. They become a function. And that's the way, the best way I can describe it. You are no longer a person with needs and experiences and limits.

You are a role, a mask. And at some point, you genuinely lose access to what you really want, what you actually feel, what actually could restore you, what could help you. And that's not because it's gone.

It's because you've been ignoring it for so long that the signal in your body gets very, very quiet. And that's exactly the point where people come to me in this state sometimes and they don't know what they enjoy anymore. And that's not a small thing.

Yes, the moment the tank runs on empty, right? What does that actually look like in your experience and through your clients? Yeah, it's not, it's usually not how people expect it. It's rarely a dramatic collapse. It's more often, it feels like nothing. And you wake up in the morning and there's just no drive, no energy to perform. And the things that used to feel important now feel completely flat. And you might function technically, you go to work, respond to emails, but something essential is gone. And that absence is the burnout. It's not always loud.

But what are the early signs that someone's wired this way and how they should pay attention to it? So the first one is resentment. If you find yourself feeling quietly resentful of people you actually care about, that's the sign. So resentment means you've been giving more than you had.

And the second is the fantasy of disappearing. Not in a dramatic sense, just the recurring thought of not wanting to be available, not to be reachable, not to be needed for a while.

That's the self telling you something. And the third is when rest stops working. You take a holiday and you don't recover. That's not tiredness anymore. That's depletion at a deeper level.

I used to fantasize about a remote island and just me. Because, yeah, you don't have to answer to anyone. You don't even want to explain why you feel this way, right? Hmm.

What would you have wanted someone to say to you at that point where it maybe have made a difference? Okay. Yeah. I don't know if I would have hurt someone at that point, but what I really liked to have hurt would be, you don't have to earn your place here and that's it. So, because underneath this whole patterns was the belief that my presence was conditional and that I was welcome because what I delivered and when I stopped delivering, something would have been withdrawn.

Someone would have named it clearly. Maybe I had been ready to hear it and that would have changed the thing. But I also think I had to arrive at myself so some things can be understood from the inside. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. You're not your job title, right?

So, when you started to change this pattern yourself, what was the first concrete thing you did differently? I started checking in with myself before responding and that sounds very small, but it was actually radical for me because my default was to answer immediately and to assess what was needed and to move forward and to move towards it before I'd even registered my own reactions. So, the first practice was to just pause and feel what's actually here before you decide what to do with it. So, what I was going to say to you, Iris, it's Friday, I need this presentation by Monday morning and you have a full calendar.

Well, let's go through that. Let's role play it, right? Yeah. I need the presentation. I want to see a draft by tomorrow morning, Iris. So, it's Friday and on Monday, you need the presentation.

So, when you said that, I immediately felt my stomach clench. My hands got a little sweaty and I was like, oh my God, so less time. I have to do the presentation immediately.

And then, I stopped a second and thought, wait, it's a role play. Everything is good. So, the body doesn't know. It's a fantasy. So, that's very interesting to me. And in that situation, I would also, maybe I have a glass of water by my side and drink the water. That's an awesome strategy to opt in for the pause or just really breathe if I'm comfortable with that.

And then, maybe I would try to understand the need behind that or why the person knows about that at Friday. But, yeah, at this point, I would be comfortable to say no because it's not my responsibility to save this mission.

Yeah. Do you recall the first time you did say no and held it and what happened in that case? Yeah. I remember it very well. I had the feeling if I do this, I will just, I don't know, burn in a huge fire or something terrible will happen. And then, I did it. In my head, I jumped off a cliff, off a bungee jumping cliff and it felt awesome. I was free. I was the hero of the world. And then, I was really proud of myself saying no.

It's so powerful. Yeah, two letters. Yeah, it's a practice. It's a practice, yeah. A psychotherapist I was seeing at the time says, think to yourself in that moment, is what I'm doing affecting the lives of others?

And that was enough to realize, actually, this is just a job, a project, a PowerPoint. But I was treating it like life or death, you know? And so, it was a nice perspective.

But what did you expect to happen that maybe didn't? Yeah, I mean, I just described that something dramatic would happen. But I also expected the relationship to crack or at minimum that there would be a coldness, a distance. But what happened was almost nothing. The world continued, nothing happened.

And I was, as I said, relieved and also disorienting because nothing collapsed. And that made me realize, wait a minute, what have I been protecting all this time? Yeah, exactly.

Don't you respect it when other people set boundaries to you? After all of your learnings now, right? It's like, I respect you saying no, do you know? What does it mean in practice to find your own normal?

You know, having spent years shapeshifting around everyone else's. It means starting to treat your own experience as data. It's not as something to be managed or minimized or explained away, but as information that is equally valid to what everyone around you is feeling. So, mind-blowing for me, it was mind-blowing. And in practice, it looks like asking yourself very basic questions that people, blazers, often skip entirely.

And this could be questions like, am I hungry? Am I tired? Do I actually want to go? Not as an obstacle to navigate around, but as inputs. Interesting. Is there a process or is it more organic? I would say both. I think there are concrete practices, particularly around noticing body signals, because for a lot of people, the body is where the truth lives before the mind catches up.

And the deeper shift is more organic, gradual reorientation, and you start to recognize yourself more clearly. And as that happens, the old patterns become very visible and less automatic, you know, autopilot there. And you can't rush that part, but you can create conditions for it.

And of course, you offer group coaching, right? Focused on people-pleasing. Can you tell us a bit more what that looks like and what do people tend to find hardest about it?

So my program, it's a contained group process over six weeks. And we work with the inner drivers framework, with body-based awareness, and with concrete situations from people's actual lives. So the group format is intentional because sometimes people are embarrassed and say, oh, do I have to share it in a group? But this pattern is developed in a relationship to others. And it often shifts significantly in relationship to others. So hearing someone else name your experience before you found words for it yourself is something individual work can't quite replicate.

Yeah. That's why I created this community. Yeah, and you asked what people find hardest. So it's receiving, actually. So being in a group where others are holding space for you, where you're not the one taking care of anyone, where your job is just to be honest about your own experience. And that's sometimes generally uncomfortable for people with this pattern because they have focused so much on everybody else's struggle and staying with their own is the work. I can imagine there's a lot of resistance, the moments that are coming from your workshops.

Could you maybe explain a bit more about that? So as I already said, there's a lot of different fields of resistance when it comes to limits and also communication. So especially when I ask people to identify one relationship in their life where they want something different and to articulate what it is, then the resistance is enormous. I would say not because they don't know the answer, they do, but naming it feels what makes it real.

And real means that they have to do something about it. Obviously, with resistance comes breakthroughs. What's the most common breakthrough moment in your experience? When someone in the group says something they've never said out loud before and usually something they just thought was embarrassing or too much and the room just holds it. No fixing, no advice, no reframing, no toxic positivity, just I hear you and it makes sense. For people who have spent years making themselves smaller so others are comfortable being witnessed without having to manage their reaction is often where something opens.

That's very powerful. It must be very rewarding with the work you do to see that. I am so thankful for all the trust. Yeah. So for someone who's in, let's say, mid-burnout and still in the situation that got them there, what can they actually do right now?

I mean, not eventually, right now. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I would say stop spending energy you don't have on convincing yourself you're fine. That performance, the maintaining of the appearance, that everything is under control is costing you something and you don't have to blow anything up. It doesn't have to be huge, dramatic, but you can stop pretending at least internally and acknowledging what's actually there and actually true to you is not nothing.

Does you recommend journaling or just writing this all down? Yeah, I love journaling. It's a perfect mirror and it can bring you so much insight. What's the smallest move that matters?

I would say say no to one thing today. That you would actually say yes to automatically and it doesn't have to be a big thing. It can be a small thing. I mean, it may feel big to you in that moment.

But a request that you can decline without it changing something significant. And then notice what happens in your body when you do so. Not what happens externally. But you can also witness this. But also what happens in yourself.

And that noticing is the beginning of coming back to yourself. A lot of this people-pleasing behavior is not about learning how to be with yourself and blah, blah, blah. It's about remembering what you already know.

So, yes, you've described your vision as contributing to a connected and authentic society. I love that. What does that mean on an individual level? You know, in a person's ordinary life?

I mean, I don't want to put all the pressure on the individual. I mean, it's a societal issue. But when we also look at the individual level, it means someone who can walk into a room and not immediately start scanning for what's expected of them. Someone who has enough relationship with themselves that they can be in contact with others without losing the threat back to who they are. In an ordinary life that can look like knowing what you actually think, saying it, and be able to disagree without it feeling like a threat. Being present in your relationships instead of performing in them.

I totally agree. There's detachment, right? Yeah. It's less exhausting in that world. But is it a destination or a practice, would you say? Definitely a practice. Definitely. So, there's no arrival point where you've completed the work and now you're authentic. So, what changes is that the practice becomes less effortful. It's a muscle you train.

You catch yourself faster. And this gap between what you feel and what you express gets smaller. And it stays a practice. And I think that's actually very reassuring because it means you don't have to have it all figured out to start. What we often tend to think. Thank you. If we go back to maybe productivity for you, what does a healthy relationship with your own productivity look like? And, you know, not with the absence of ambition, but ambition that's not running on fear or approval.

I would say you can stop. That's the simplest version. You can close the laptop and not feel like something is wrong. It's not a threat. And the work is something you do.

It's not the condition under which you're allowed to be yourself. And when you're ambitious from that place, it has a completely different quality and it's generative rather than driven. And moving towards something rather than running from something. That's what we want.

How do you know the difference from the inside? It might be a little unusual for us. But ask yourself, if there's a low-level dread that has nothing to do with the actual work week ahead. That's usually a fear mechanism. And healthy ambition also has some excitement to it, even when it's hard. And fear-based ambition mostly just tests pressure. And for someone who spent a long time defining themselves in what they do and deliver, who are they when that is not the measurement anymore? Hmm, that is the question. And I want to say clearly, I don't think anyone should have to answer it alone or fast. Because for a lot of people, that identity was constructed very carefully over a long time.

And dismantling it without something to hold on to is genuinely destabilizing. And what I've seen in myself and in the people I work with is that underneath that productivity, there's usually someone with very clear values, real preferences, and things they actually care about that got buried under the performance. And so that work is not reconstruction, it's remembering.

Yeah, that's exciting, right? This exploration about what comes next? Who am I? What can I do going forward, right? But it's also very frightening. What would you say to someone who's sitting with that fear?

Yeah, I totally understand it. I used to feel that frightened of myself. But because if your value isn't in what you produce, then what has all this work been for? And that's when the grief sets in. And I think that this is not talked about enough. The grief of realizing you've been living someone else's version of a good life. Something you created in your fantasy. And I don't try to talk people out of that fear. I sit with them in that because it's valid and I see where it comes from. But I also tell them the fact that the question frightens you means you're already asking it. And that's already different.

I love that. Yeah. It's like an out-of-body experience when you're looking at things you were even purchasing. You know? As coping mechanisms maybe during that autopilot. I was like, why did I even buy that? What is that even for? What a waste of money. What was I doing with my waste, you know?

Hmm. But what do you wish someone had said to you earlier in your own story before the burnout, before this work began? I would say you're allowed to be inconvenient.

You're allowed to need things, to take up space, not to have it together all the time. And the version of you that is struggling is not a problem to be solved before you deserve care.

And that one is really something I needed to hear because I spent a very long time believing I had to fix myself into someone worthy of rest, of help, and of softness. You have to work hard. And I didn't say, yeah, neither does anyone listening to this need to be productive, to be worthy. Thank you, excellent. And, yeah, it's important not to feel shame, right? And to reflect in a positive sense, you know?

Things happen for a reason. I know, I usually hate that sentence, right? But, actually, it's a chance to realign with what's true to yourself, right? Yeah, yeah. And we're almost up, Iris. Thank you. And I'd like to ask, where can people find you and learn more about what you do?

Yeah, thank you, Chris. It was lovely. The best place is probably irismuche.com. That is where you find everything. My coaching work, my books, and how to work with me directly. But I'm also active on Instagram and LinkedIn.

When I talk about these topics, it's usually in a less polished way and, yeah, just honest opinions. And if anything in this conversation resonated with you, I would genuinely love to hear from you. So, just drop me a message. I'm happy.

Amazing. Amazing. Iris, thank you. You know, what you said about the grief of realizing you've been living someone else's version of a good life. I didn't want to rush past that, right? Because it's just not a small thing to name out loud. And you named it, you know, without stopping it. I also want to be honest, a lot of what you described today is territory I know. I obviously made reference to that. Not the same route in, but the same place, you know, the productivity, the identity.

It's just this whole system, right? I don't know how it can look like it's working perfectly from the outside, but something is quietly running down underneath. So, thank you for going there so clearly.

Thank you. And thank you for keeping the space. And I hope, yeah, that someone tries to say no today. Just say no. Yeah. And to you, the listeners, if any of this conversation landed for you today, and particularly if you've heard yourself in it, I want you to know that the Where I'm At community is open right now. Just a community of people doing the work, honestly. The link is in the show notes.

And if you'd like to work with Iris directly, she offers, as we mentioned, a six-week group coaching program specifically built around people-pleasing patterns alongside her individual work. Subscribe wherever you listen. And if someone in your life needs to hear this today, send it to them. One person. That's genuinely how this reaches people who need it most. Because they're not going to search for it themselves.

Once again, Iris, thank you for being here, being local, and being honest about your own story. I'm glad this conversation is in the season. Thank you so much. And continue your great work.

Before we go, a gentle reminder. If you feel unsafe or unable to cope right now, please contact local emergency services or a crisis support line. You'll find international crisis lines linked in the description.

Thanks for being here for this one. If something in this conversation has stuck with you, share it. That's genuinely how this reaches people who need it. The Where I'm At community is in the description of today's conversation hit home.

Everything else is in there too. Guest links, where to follow the show. I'll see you in the next one. I'll see you in the next one.