ADITI GOYAL — SELF-TRUST COACH & ISB ALUMNA
Are You the Last Person on Your List? Part 3
Welcome to Thrive with Aditi. Each week, I share practical insights and personal reflections to help high achievers overcome imposter syndrome, self-doubt, people-pleasing, and build unshakeable self-trust so you can live a life where you stop second-guessing yourself.
This is Part 3 of “Are you the ‘last’ person on your list?”– a 10-part series exploring self-abandonment. In this series, we unpack the hidden daily betrayals we commit against ourselves, how they keep us stuck, and what it actually takes to finally come back home to yourself.
In this third article, we trace the voice of self-abandonment back to its origins—examining how childhood dynamics, classroom settings, and early work environments taught us that shrinking our feelings and needs was the only way to belong.
I was in class 2, we were on a trip to the mountains. Two cars- My parents, my siblings, an uncle, an aunt and their kids.
As a kid I was always fascinated with the front seat. Sitting right beside the driver felt like the best seat in the house. Being the youngest, I rarely got it.
This time, with two cars, I saw my chance and so, I asked.
My aunt said no, she gave me a reason. To an 8-year-old, the reason wasn’t enough, so I pushed back. I was not rude, but honest, curious, the way children are before they learn ‘the ways of life’.
That’s when she said it. “Why can’t you be nice, like your parents? You are so disobedient.”
I looked at my mother.
She said nothing but her face said everything. I could see she was embarrassed. And in that moment, her silence felt louder than anything my aunt had said. Later that day, she confirmed it. She told me how other people could now see my rebellion too.
I didn’t have words for what happened that day. But my 8-year-old brain made sense of things the only way it could – asking for what you want is disobedience. Disobedience makes the people you love uncomfortable with you.
For the rest of that trip, I went quiet. I made sure I didn’t cause any ripples.
I became a yes girl that day.
In the last piece, we looked at the six faces of self-abandonment – the ways it shows up in your daily life. This piece is about going to the root of it all, and see where it began.
Where Does the Voice of Self-Doubt Actually Come From?
Nobody is born this way.
Watch a 2-year-old. Ask them to eat something new, go somewhere, try something different – their default answer is no. Every single time, without exception.
Because nature, in its wisdom, wired it that way. If you don’t know how to say no, your yes has no value.
Children don’t think about the five people around them before asking for something. They don’t lower their voice when they cry, or curtail their joy when they finally manage to sit up on their own. They don’t label their accomplishments as small because everyone else around them can already do it. They ask for what they want, refuse what they don’t and celebrate without comparison, without inhibition, without apology.
But then, slowly, they get moulded – Into a good girl; A good boy; and sometimes a bad one. And their natural instincts take a back seat.
Self-abandonment is learned. And for many people-pleasers, overthinkers and high achievers, it started much earlier than they realise. And it is dressed up so well, in so many familiar clothes, that we rarely recognise it for what it is.
It comes in the name of respect. And I am all for it, but oftentimes, unknowingly, it is taken too far. It becomes: don’t ask questions, don’t disagree, accept the elder’s word as final. When respect starts to mean silence the voice in your head, it has crossed into self-abandonment.
It comes in the name of culture. As children, if we are only ever exposed to one way of being, we never think to question it. And that tiny voice inside, the one that whispers something doesn’t feel right, slowly stops speaking. And we never get to know if it was right or wrong, because we never even said it out loud. And because nobody listened, it learned to stay hidden.
It comes in the name of discipline. Structure has its place. But when discipline means overriding your body’s need to rest, to move, to play; when it means staying on the path that was decided for you long before you had a say; it becomes one more step away from yourself.
The people who taught us these things were often living by the same rules. This isn’t about blame. It’s about seeing it clearly – recognising the shape of it, so we can finally decide what we want to do with it.
The Roots: When Expressing Yourself Felt ‘Too Loud’
The Good Child Trap: Learning to Keep Your Opinions Small
Our family systems are made up of overburdened adults who never had enough time – or permission – to pause and question the way things were done. So they ran on autopilot. And on autopilot, this is what it looked like.
Our needs felt like burdens. No one is ever told this directly. But when you asked for something and the response was often a sigh, a “not now,” or “an annoyed look that said “ why do you always have to want something?” – you get the message. So you learned to read the room before you opened your mouth. You started pre-rejecting, filtering out your own needs so nobody else had to. The kid who stopped drinking water on a long drive because he remembers the last time he caused a stop, everyone complained about it. The teenager doesn’t even mention the school trip because she can already see the stress it will cause. These are small moments with a very consistent message and they shape our behaviour more than we know.
Our emotions were too big, or too inconvenient. We are told – “Stop crying”, “Stop ruining everyone’s mood”, “You’re so sensitive”, “Why do you always have to make everything dramatic?” The child who cried was told to stop, the one who was angry was sent to their room, the one who was too excited was asked to calm down. So we learned to manage our emotional volume – turn it down, tuck it away, perform the feeling that made the room more comfortable. And we got so good at it, we eventually stopped knowing what we actually felt.
We received love that felt conditional. On good behaviour,on achievements, on being easier than our sibling, better than the neighbour’s kid. We heard these remarks passed on casually – “See how well-behaved she is.”, “Why can’t you be more like him.” We received love when we met expectations and didn’t when we fell short of the expectations. And that taught us something very specific: who I am is not enough. What I do is what earns me a place here. And so we kept doing, and doing, until we forgot we are enough as we are.
The Classroom and Beyond: Learning to Shrink to Belong
Our school systems and our social setups did not contradict what we learned at home – they confirmed it.
Our teachers rewarded us for being compliant, for being the quiet ones, for always saying yes. They appreciated the ones who scored more, ranked high in extracurriculars – and reprimanded, sometimes publicly shamed, the ones who didn’t. Our peers ostracised anyone who was different, we were conditioned to reject differences and reward sameness. Belonging meant fitting in.
And while order, routines, structures help, they carry a grave risk. When we follow the rules set for us before we even know what we want we lose our autonomy and decision making capabilities. We lose our ability to ask ourselves what do I actually think? What do I actually want? Those muscles, unused, begin to weaken.
The Early Career Impact: Bringing Childhood Survival Patterns to Your First Job
And then we enter the workplace and find the same system waiting for us, dressed in a different outfit.
We reward people for over-working. We celebrate being always-on, always-productive, always willing to go the extra mile. The person who raises a point that doesn’t align with the group in a meeting often gets labelled a troublemaker. Sometimes excluded from the next discussion because it takes too long to bring them on board.
People wear business or exhaustion as a badge of honor. They hide their unique POVs so as not to step on any toes while they make their way up. They tell themselves – when I am leader, I will change this. But by the time they get there, the journey has already done its work. The inner voice that once had something to say, learnt over the years to stay quiet.
Why We Keep Shrinking (Even After We Achieve Success)
The purpose of this is not to stay stuck in the past and blame it. As that’s where most people stop. We understand it, pause and then go further.
Every single thing you did, the masks you wore to fit in, get approval or portray your needs don’t exist – it worked. It kept you safe, it kept you loved, it kept you belonging. And for a child, that is everything.
You were not weak for learning it. In fact you were just paying attention, reading a very complex room and figuring out the fastest way to stay okay inside it. And you did that largely on your own, without anyone explaining the rules to you. You just watched, and adapted, and got very good at it.
The girl in the car on that mountain trip – she wasn’t broken, she was smart. She learned that asking out loud came at a cost. She made a decision to stop doing it. No-one actually told her to, but she learned by watching and observing.
We don’t give children enough credit for how much they are willing to give up, just to keep the people they love close. How easily they reshape themselves and how little they ask in return.
So before we go any further, I want you to pause here. Not to feel sorry for yourself, but to feel something deeper than that. Look back at the version of you who figured all of this out, and recognise her/him not as someone who failed themselves, but as someone who was doing the only thing they knew how to do, in the world they had been given.
That deserves compassion, genuinely loving compassion.
Why something needs to change now
The problem was never that you learned it. The problem is that you never got the memo that this doesn’t have to continue for a lifetime.
The strategies that kept you safe at eight, at twelve, at seventeen – they followed you. Into your adult relationships, your workplace, your own home, the way you move through rooms full of people. They kept running, in the background, long after the original reason for them had passed.
I am not in that car anymore. And you are not a child who needs someone else’s approval to feel safe or loved or like you belong. You have your own life now, your own voice, your own ability to choose. And yet you still filter your needs before anyone else can reject them. You still turn your emotional volume down in rooms where nobody asked you to. You still feel like you have to earn your place through what you do, rather than simply through who you are.
The context changed, but the pattern didn’t get the memo.
And this is where it starts to cost you in ways that are hard to explain to anyone else. The exhaustion that a full night of sleep doesn’t touch. The low hum of resentment that has no clear address. The feeling of being slightly outside of yourself, like you’ve been watching your own life from just behind the glass for so long, you’ve forgotten what it felt like to be fully inside it.
You are not lost, you are simply running a very old programme inside a life that has long since updated to a newer OS version. And the first step towards changing it is exactly this – seeing it for what it is, without flinching.
This is what I call Recognize – the first step of RCE, the framework at the heart of my work. You cannot carve a new path or embody a new way of being until you have seen the old one clearly.
How to Heal the Voice That Says You Are ‘Too Much’
We started this series by talking about the many ways we leave ourselves. This piece was about tracing it back to its roots. We are not building a case against anyone or excavating old wounds for the sake of it; we are doing this to finally see the roots of the patterns clearly so that we stop mistaking them for who we are.
You were not born this way. You learned it, in small rooms, on long car trips, in classrooms and offices and family dinners, from people who were themselves never taught any differently. And everything that is learned carries within it the possibility of being unlearned.
But that begins with honesty. The kind you extend to yourself, about yourself, without immediately rushing to make it more comfortable than it needs to be.
So I want to leave you with one question, and I want you to sit with it rather than answer it right away. Just let it be with you.
Think back to the earliest moment you remember making yourself smaller. Not the biggest thing that ever happened to you – just the first tiny one. What did you decide about yourself that day? And is that decision still running your life, without your permission?
This piece was originally written as Part 3 of my 10-part series on Substack. If you would like to receive my raw, weekly reflections on self-trust directly in your inbox, you can subscribe to Thrive with Aditi on Substack