Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala: Perfectionism and People-Pleasing

Perfectionism and people-pleasing usually get treated as personality: this is simply how I am. Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala's research says otherwise. Personality traits move over a lifetime on their own, and there is evidence that a person can speed that up on purpose.

Our guest is Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology whose research is on developing interventions that shift the traits that are no longer serving someone. Much of her clinical work is with anxiety, depression, and borderline personality disorder. She also built Personality Compass, an assessment based on the five factor model, a framework that has been tested across languages and cultures for decades, which she offers free on her website because most of what people can take online is not grounded in the science at all.

In this episode she explains where people-pleasing usually starts: praise for being easy, for taking it all on, for the straight A's, until your sense of worth is filed under other people's reactions. She draws a clear line between being reliable and being rigid, and describes perfectionism as an anxiety process held in place by never having tested the feared outcome. Her answer is behavioral experiments, including one she calls doing eighty percent of your best job, where the point is to gather data rather than to argue yourself out of the belief.

Lisa turns the conversation toward parents in the middle of a drawn-out custody case, who feel they are missing their child's childhood while distracted by the legal process. Shannon's response covers black-and-white thinking about parenting, the values exercise she runs with clients across eleven areas of life before asking them to pick three, and why she rejects the language of balance in favor of deliberate choices about where energy goes. She and Lisa land in the same place BTGO does with clients: this stretch is your life, not a waiting room before it.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why people-pleasing and high achievement so often develop together
• That personality traits shift with age, and can be shifted deliberately
• The difference between being high achieving and being rigidly perfectionistic
• The fear underneath perfectionism: no data on what happens if you fall short
• The eighty percent experiment, and how to pick where to run it
• Values work: eleven areas of life, and what happens when you can only pick three
• Why "you have the same 24 hours" is bad advice for someone in survival mode
• Treating rest as an investment rather than something you earn

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why people-pleasing and high achievement travel together
3:00 Personality traits shift, and you can speed that up
5:00 What perfectionism is, and the fear that keeps it running
9:00 The 80% experiment: collecting data instead of arguing with yourself
13:00 Kids who are never allowed to fail
15:00 Parent guilt when a court case takes your attention
18:00 Burnout, values, and making hard choices about your time
22:00 Rest as an investment, not something you earn
25:00 Personality Compass, and why most online tests miss

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Personality Compass (free assessment): https://www.personality-compass.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.