[117] Good Girl Conditioning: How It Shaped a Generation of Women - and How To Unlearn It

The ladder felt clear, the gold stars kept coming, and the performance reviews said it all - until the applause stopped. Emma shares what happens when a 20-year corporate career powered by “good girl” conditioning collides with the realities of entrepreneurship, where truth beats polish and leadership comes from grounded presence, not perfection. This is a candid look at identity shifts many women face when leaving corporate: losing external validation, navigating sneaky people-pleasing, and learning to value your work without permission slips.

We unpack how childhood rules - be nice, be neat, be early - morph into behaviours that corporate culture rewards, then quietly sabotage a business: over-delivering, undercharging, and diluting your message to avoid offence. Emma breaks down the subtle practices that rebuild self-trust: pausing before yes, listening to your body’s cues, setting clean boundaries without essays, choosing imperfect action, and validating your own gifts. The result is leadership that feels calm and clear, pricing that reflects value, and offers that align with your voice and vision.

You’ll hear language for the shift from performance to presence and leave with practical ways to stop proving and start leading. If you’ve felt soul tired from holding it all together, this conversation offers a grounded path back to yourself - one small, honest choice at a time. Subscribe for more conversations on authentic leadership, share this with a friend who’s tired of chasing gold stars, and leave a review to tell us which practice you’re trying first.

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Chapters

• 0:01 Welcome And Core Promise
• 0:32 From Corporate Rules To Identity
• 1:17 The Good Girl Conditioning
• 2:45 How Corporate Rewards Compliance
• 7:22 Leaving Corporate And Losing Gold Stars
• 9:05 Why Good Girl Energy Hurts Business
• 11:23 Reclaiming Truth Over Performance
• 12:58 Practical Ways To Self-Validate
• 14:49 The Modern Leader Way
• 15:59 Closing And Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

This is the Modern Leader Away, a podcast from ambitious driven career women who want to feel good on the way to the top.

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

I'm Emma Clayton and I'll be sharing with you tangible advice to help you stop sacrificing your soul in the name of success and experience more balance, confidence, and fulfilment both in and out of work.

SPEAKER_01: 0:22

Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Modern Leader Way where I'm continuing to reflect on my eight years since I left the corporate world. And last week I shared some of the kind of real pivotal things that shift when you make that transition from employee to self-employed, mainly around money and time or structure in our lives and business, or lives and work, should I say. And this week I wanted to talk about how we need to shift our identity when we move from being employee to self-employed, because what I now know in hindsight is that what got me success in the corporate world was actually being the good girl, which is what I learned from a young age in the home, and was later reinforced all the way through my schooling, and that's what I naturally took straight into my corporate career, and it served me really well. And actually, when I've tried to apply this same approach in business, I was wondering why it wasn't working, why it was a struggle to start with, and actually, I've had to unlearn so much of this and unpick it in order to get to a place where I can approach business from a genuine grounded authenticity and not from the place of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and playing that good girl role. So let's talk about this because if you too are transitioning from corporate to um your own business, for example, or even if you're transitioning within corporate, this is going to be really good for you to just listen in and see if you recognize any of these traits in yourself and see if this is an opportunity, a golden opportunity within the transition to actually unpick some of this, unlearn some of this, and change how you show up for the sake of your own sanity and um authentic truth, basically. So if, like me, you grew up in the 80s or the 90s, you know, the rules we absorbed without anyone ever really saying them out loud was all around be polite, say your P's and Q's, be seen and not heard, be kind, don't make a fuss, certainly don't have a tantrum in public. Smile, work hard, get good grades, don't bunk off school, you know, make sure you turn up on time. Five minutes late is late, one minute late is late. That's what I learned. So be on time, be punctual, be polished. So just hear that you know, approval was currency, and we learned from an early age that being liked, being good, being pleasing to other people, it was how you earned your place. It's how you earned that approval. When I started secondary school, there was three of us, three friends, me, Katie, and Louise, and we were quickly branded the three G's, the gay girl gang. You might as well have called us the good girl gang, because we were the ones that turned up to school on the first day of a new term with our crisp white ironed shirts and our ties done up perfectly, and our long white socks that were like rushed down, just so. I don't know about you, but if my handwriting didn't feel neat enough, then I would start again. If I was doing an essay or something like that, I would literally rather tear a page out of my book and start again than see something that was imperfect in my book. So the good girls were the ones with the neat handwriting, the quiet voices, the one that towed the line, turned up to class on time, didn't skip a class, and got all the gold stars, right? We learned that following the rules got you praise. Creativity, questioning or challenging authority, not so much. Then you had the good old teacher's pet who was a teacher's pet here, born, you know, the one that always puts their hands up, the one that always answers the questions, the one that always gets their homework in on time. They were the teachers that you knew when you took your parents for Parents' Evening that they would just give you that rave review and you would sit there all proud, knowing that your parents are like brimming from ear to ear with pride, too. And then at home, how many of us watched women do everything for everyone else? Often without thanks, without rest, without recognition. I think my generation were the first to see their mums be working mums, right? Oftentimes holding down full-time, part-time jobs and raising kids and doing all the housework and the cooking and the shopping and all that sort of stuff. You know, they did it all. And we absorbed that too, right? That that being good meant being self-sacrificing, agreeable, accommodating, all things to all people. And that was our conditioning. So a lot of it was subtle, we didn't know it was going on. But when it's consistent over time, things that we see like that, it becomes ingrained in us. We don't know any different, and we start to take on some of the traits, some of the habits that has been modelled to us very naturally. Then we take that good girl energy straight into our careers, and it works, and it certainly worked for me because corporate loves a good girl, you know, a good girl's dependable, she's diligent, she's polished, she's someone you can put in front of clients, someone that you can rely upon to manage teams to get shit done. She stays late, she picks up the slack, she anticipates everyone else's needs, and she often does so, making things look effortless even when she's exhausted and dying a little inside. But the thing is, you carry on because you get rewarded for it, you get promoted, you get praise, you get bonuses, you get the recognition through your annual performance review, you're praised for being such a safe pair of hands that it perpetuates the cycle, and you carry on because you think it must be something wrong with you, because everyone else is seeing the strength in that. But underneath the surface, it there's this like quiet pressure that starts to build up because it's the pressure to keep performing, to keep proving you're capable, to stay in everyone's good books, to be everything to everyone, and you start to equate success with approval and productivity with worth. And somewhere in all that performance, the real you starts to fade further and further into the background. And that was me. I built a 20-year career on being the one who could hold it all together, who'd get shit done, who'd beat the odds and deliver on the impossible, who'd always say yes, and who'd always deliver. And it got me the titles, it got me the salary, the status, but it also got me fucking soul tired. So when I left corporate after 20 years, it was a bit of a rude awakening, if I'm honest, because suddenly there are no gold stars, there is no boss to tell me I was doing a good job, there's no ladder to climb, no next promotion to chase. I had to face the part of me that didn't know how to validate herself without external approval. The part that still wanted to please, even as a business owner. And it showed up in really sneaky ways, you know, over-delivering, over-explaining, undercharging, saying yes when I meant no, making decisions based on how they'd be perceived instead of how they felt. So I realised, and it was only really more recently that I've been building a business with the same energy that once built my career, just you know, in different clothes. Now I'm no longer in my high heels and my um designer handbags with my suits on, I'm in my slouches at home all the time. But the good girl had come with me, she'd very much come with me. But here's the thing I've learned the behaviours that earned us success in corporate can quietly sabotage us in business. Because in business, your power comes from your truth, not your performance, your leadership comes from your groundedness, not your perfection. Your impact in the world comes from your ability to stand in your own voice, not in everyone else's approval. When you keep operating from good girl energy, you end up diluting your message because you don't want to offend anyone, you end up people-pleasing your clients instead of leading them, instead of coaching them, instead of telling them the cold hard truth that they need to hear that no one else has said to them before, that is actually going to change the needle for them. You end up doubting your prices, your offers, your instincts, and you end up measuring success by how others respond to you instead of how aligned it feels. And that's exhausting. At some point, you have to ask, like, who am I doing this for? And what would change if I stopped trying to police and started choosing what's true? So breaking out of the good girl pattern isn't necessarily about rebellion, it's not about being the bad girl, it's about a reclamation. And this is something I've always spoken about. It's not shouting, I don't care what anyone thinks, it's whispering, I trust what feels true to me. It's not about swinging from people pleasing to people repelling, it's about finding your own centre again. For me, it looks like pausing before I say yes and asking myself, do I really want this? Is it a yes? Does my body agree it's a yes, or is it a no? You know, sitting in silence rather than rushing to fill the void, setting boundaries and not needing to over-explain them, letting things be imperfect, showing up messy, human, real, always real. And the biggest one was really learning to give myself the validation I'd always chased externally. I had to see my own gifts, my own strengths. I had to see what I was good at and recognize that without needing to have that feedback from someone else. Yes, the feedback is always nice. Yes, the feedback and the testimonials and the reviews that I get from clients, that's wonderful to receive. But I don't need that to know what it is that I deliver, what it is that I bring to the room, what it is that I bring to the table in those relationships. But you know, the shift is not dramatic as such, it's not like a burning down of a part of you that used to be, and like stepping into this whole new identity. It's way more subtle than that. It's in the way you get really super grounded before you go onto a call with someone for the first time. It's in the way you breathe before you respond. It's the way you make choices for yourself without needing a consensus. It's the way you back yourself quietly but completely. It's the way you stop performing confidence. You know, you take off that mask of fake confidence and start being confident in who you are. It's when you stop proving your worth and start living your worth. It's when you stop chasing the gold stars and start giving them to yourself if that's what you need. And that to me is what I talk about with the modern leader way. It's leadership without the performance, it's success that feels like freedom, not fatigue. It's success that feels like fulfilment, not empty. And the calm confidence, the quiet confidence that comes from being rooted in who you are and not who you think you should be. So if you've ever found yourself stuck in that loop of overgiving, overdoing, over pleasing, this is your reminder that you do not need to rebel to break free. You just need to return to yourself. Because the world doesn't need more good girls trying to be perfect, it needs more grounded women willing to be real. And that, my friends, is what I've learned eight years on from corporate, and what I'll keep learning as I grow into this next season. I'm gonna leave it there today, keep it short and sweet. Thanks for listening, thanks for being here and for walking this journey with me. If you ever want to talk about your transition from employee to self-employed, from corporate to business, I am here. This is what I do, this is what I'm passionate about. I help mission-driven women who have big ideas of how they're going to change the world, to turn those big ideas into big impact in the world, to really turn the vision into a viable plan that they can implement with my support, using simple systems, structures, and strategies, and a whole lot of authentic expression and energy behind the cause. That's what I'm here to do. That's what the story of my last eight years has all been about in my own business. So I feel like I've kind of got a few things more that I want to say on this. But in the meantime, stay tuned if that feels like it's speaking to something deeper inside of you. And until then, take care.