When Did Being Good Start Costing Me So Much?

0:00Welcome to Thera Fireside where feminine leadership gets rewritten. I'm your host, Dr. Cory Blake, nervous system educator experienced business strategist and founder of the Thera Collective, helping women lead from pleasure instead of pressure. Every week we gather here by the fire for a quick, po and hit of truth, strategy, and primal wisdom. If you're ready to lead without burning out, to trust your body as deeply as your brain, and build a life and business that feel like freedom, you're in the right place. Here at the Thera Collective, we blend grounded science with primal wisdom, feminine energetics with strategic leadership and rebellious self-care practices that actually move the needle in your business, your body, and your life. This is the feminine leadership revolution. Let's dive in. Hey, love. Okay, so this week we are

1:01going to be talking about a topic that is really interesting. Okay, so we're going to play a little bit with self-sacrifice. So self-sacrifice, people please, and they kind of go together in the same kind of world, right? So what is self-sacrificing, right? So my definition is when we are having to choose between ourselves, what we need, and the needs of someone or something else, okay? And when we choose the needs of someone or something else over the needs of ourselves, then we end up self-sacrificing, right? So why do we do that? Why ever would we choose other people or other things over ourselves? Well of course because we want to be good people, right? We want to do the right thing. We want to be supportive. We want to help others. We have a strong moral compass, right? And it's also been really shown that the more connected we are to other people,

2:02the healthier and the happier we are. So a lot of us actually see self-sacrificing as a way of connecting with others. So I really want to actually speak to that a little bit so that we start to actually think of it in a little bit of a different way, okay? So let's look at the consequences when we are self-sacrificing or when we're people pleasing, right? So the short term, we're going to feel good about it. We actually might feel less stressed because we feel like we're making an impact. We're actually doing something that matters or that's helpful to someone else, which makes us feel useful. It makes us feel grounded, and it makes us feel capable, right? And so those are the short term effects of self-sacrificing. But in the long term, what can happen is it can actually feel internally really shitty, okay? Because what you're doing is you're choosing between yourself and someone else. And if you are consistently choosing someone else over your own

3:04needs, you end up starting to disconnect from yourself and you actually lose trust with your own ability to protect yourself and to keep yourself happy, okay? So it breaks down the relationship between you and you. Number two, you can become really resentful of those people, right? So like, especially the people that are regularly in that sphere, that you are regularly sacrificing yourself for, because you may want something. And consciously, you may be choosing, I'm going to help this, I know I'm choosing to help with other person in this moment, even though I need to do this instead, or this is really important to me, but this is what they need. If you're constantly making choices that are over here, then what happens is you start to resent the fact that you can't make the choices that you need to keep yourself balanced and healthy. And lastly, that whole losing trust with yourself thing, and I was talking about, it can really manifest as grief, right? There is a sadness that happens when we don't feel like we

4:08have the support. There's an actual loneliness that can manifest from sacrificing ourselves and giving parts of ourselves away. We can feel a sense of loss because we're losing the things that we want, the things that are important to us, the things that help keep us balanced and make our sure our needs are met. And so there's there's naturally going to be some grief that can come up in that. So you can see with self-sacrifice, you can see people that are chronically self-sacrificing that are super angry and snappy and grouchy and resentful all the time. And you can also see people that are really good at self-sacrificing that are just restrican. They're sad, they're sunken back into themselves, they're shut down. And those are the long-term sequela that can happen. So it can actually end up causing personality changes the longer we do it. Okay? So the other thing is that the more you do self-sacrifice saying things, right? And agreed. We want to help each other out. We want to be

5:12supportive. We want to have a strong moral compass where we are helping those that are less fortunate and those that are in need. The question is what is the cost, right? What is an acceptable cost in order to do that? The more you self-sacrifice, okay? You will start to notice a pattern, okay? One, the beginning of the pattern is people seem to be grateful. They're grateful for the things that you're doing, which is a energy boost. It's a confidence boost. It makes you feel good about yourself, right? Naturally, of course that's what would happen. The more you do it, the more people might even expect you to do it, right? So the more you do something nice for someone, next time they kind of expect you to do the same thing, right? Okay? And then, do it longer, they might even start to ask for it without you offering, right? So you've put yourself out there. You've sacrificed for them. You may not have told them you sacrificed for them. You just did it. And then they come to expect it. And then

6:16they either start asking for more or they ask for that thing before you even decided whether you're going to do it. Okay? And so there's there's kind of two components to that. One is, did you tell them that you were making an exception to the rule the first time you did it? And if you didn't, you're setting yourself up for resentment and feeling like you're being used later on down the line. So it's really about the more you sacrifice yourself and what you want, the more you are either going to lose who you are, lose touch, lose that trust with yourself or to resent what you're doing. Resent the fact that you're helping people, which then ends up backfire on you because then you're pissed off and annoyed or you're disconnected and numb. And neither one of those is a situation that you want to be in, right? When we resent what we're doing, it turns into an energetic, an energy that's repellent to other people.

7:20People don't want to be around other people that are resentful, that are pissy, that are annoyed. There's an energy that you can feel when you walk into a room with another person who's just resentful as fuck. Okay? Or they can end up wanting you for the function that you're providing. And that's it, right? So people may want your attention, they may want your input, they may want your help purely because you are providing a function to them. It's like a transactional relationship, right? And when that happens, they're reaching out to you for a purpose. It has nothing to do with you as a human. They just want to get that thing that you're providing for them, right? And when that happens, what we're doing is actually promoting a situation in which we're going to feel more and more used, right? And feeling used ends up feeling resentful, it

8:20feels like you're not being seen in a situation either, okay? So what all comes back to why we're doing this in the first place, okay? And where are value comes from? If our value is coming from taking care of others, if it's coming from doing for other people, if it's coming from self-sacrifice in yourself for the greater good, in the long term, the sequela of that are a major problem. So what we want to do is we want to rewire that and break the cycle so that what we're doing is we're finding a solution that honors both. It's not about not helping others, it's not about being selfish and only focusing on yourself. It's about how do you hold both of those things, support both of those things, and find the ground where you can be both honest, true to yourself, and have the positive impact that you want to have on the world. So let

9:25me know, how does this show up in your life? Drop a comment and I'll see you next week. Thank you for joining me at the fire today. If this conversation sparked something in you, make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an episode. And if you want to take this work deeper, join us inside the Ferrer Collective, where we turn these insights into embody leadership, real strategy, and lives that feel like freedom. So you can lead from ground to power, not from burnout. Until next week, take exquisite care of your energy and keep leaning like the badass you are.