Last week I threw my own pain relief out the window to keep coaching my clients. Bad neck, real medication, and I still showed up, because stopping felt like failing someone.
I called that dedication. I want to be honest with you: some of it wasn’t.
Some of what I call service is amanah, a gift I was entrusted with, spent the way it was meant to be spent. And some of it, if I’m truthful, is something else entirely, wearing service’s exact same clothes so well that even I couldn’t always tell the difference from the inside.
There’s a name for that something else. Two names, actually. Positive Intelligence calls it the Pleaser. I call it the good-girl complex, the good-person complex, whichever fits the voice you already know.
Here’s what makes it so hard to catch: it doesn’t feel like a flaw. It feels like being a good person. And that’s exactly the problem I want to unpack with you today, because the two can look identical from the outside and be built from completely opposite foundations underneath.