Choosing yourself sounds empowering, until you actually try to do it.
We see the phrase “choose you” often in social media soft-living trends. You’ll also find beautiful collages on Pinterest of ways to choose you, but it’s harder than most women think.
Because choosing yourself doesn’t always look like confidence. Sometimes it looks like hesitation. Like second-guessing. Like sitting with a decision that feels unfamiliar in your body, and staying with it anyway.
For many high-achieving women, choosing yourself isn’t natural at first. It’s something you have to learn.
Especially if you were taught, directly or indirectly, that your value came from being dependable, easy to work with, emotionally available, and low maintenance.
Choosing yourself disrupts that pattern. And disruption doesn’t always feel good at first.
Why Choosing Yourself Feels So Uncomfortable
If you’ve spent years prioritizing other people’s needs, expectations, or comfort, your nervous system has learned something important:
Connection is maintained through self-sacrifice.
We have been conditioned to believe choosing others means safety while choosing ourselves is perceived as a risk. When you start to choose yourself by saying no, setting a boundary, resting without guilt, speaking honestly, it doesn’t feel like freedom right away.
It feels wrong.
Not because it is wrong. But because it’s new.
This is where nervous system healing becomes part of the process. Your body isn’t resisting growth. It’s responding to a shift in what it has learned keeps you safe. The discomfort is information, not a stop sign.
For high-achieving women, this pattern often runs deep. We have been wired long before the workplace ever reinforced it.
Choosing Yourself Isn’t Always Visible
A lot of people think choosing yourself looks like bold, dramatic decisions. Sometimes it does, but more often, it’s quiet. It’s not a dramatic ephiphany that leads to overnight change.
It looks like:
— Not over-explaining your no.
— Not volunteering yourself for something out of habit.
— Noticing when you feel overwhelmed and actually responding to it.
— Letting someone else be disappointed without immediately fixing it.
These moments are small. But they are significant.
Because they interrupt patterns that have likely been in place for years. Each quiet act of self-choice is a data point your nervous system is collecting, evidence that something different is possible.
The Internal Conflict No One Talks About
You can choose yourself and still feel guilty.
You can set a boundary and still feel like you did something wrong.
You can slow down and still feel like you should be doing more.
This doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re unlearning.
For many high-achieving women, self-abandonment isn’t a conscious choice. It’s a survival strategy that got mistaken for identity. Choosing yourself requires releasing the belief that your worth is tied to how much you give, fix, or carry.
And that belief doesn’t disappear overnight.
The guilt you feel when you choose yourself is not proof that you did something wrong. It’s proof that you’re doing something different.
Rebuilding Self-Trust Through the Process
Choosing yourself consistently is how self-trust is rebuilt.
Not perfectly, but intentionally. Each time you listen to your body, honor your limits, or choose honesty over performance, you’re reinforcing something new:
“I can be here for myself.”
This is also where inner child healing becomes meaningful. Because parts of you may still be operating from the belief that choosing yourself leads to disconnection, to being too much, too difficult, or no longer loved.
Those parts don’t need force. They need reassurance. They need to see, over and over, that choosing yourself doesn’t end relationships. It clarifies them.
A Different Way of Relating to Yourself
Choosing yourself is not about becoming selfish. It’s about becoming honest. It’s about recognizing the moments when you’re abandoning yourself to maintain comfort, approval, or stability, and slowly, intentionally, choosing differently.
This is the practice of soft living — not as passivity or avoidance, but as a deliberate shift away from urgency and performance. A shift toward presence. Toward awareness. Toward yourself.
Soft living, for high-achieving women, is the practice of building a relationship with yourself that doesn’t require you to earn your own care.
It’s one of the quietest forms of reclamation there is.
Reflection Questions to Explore Gently
No urgency. Just an invitation to notice.
— Where do I feel the most resistance to choosing myself?
— What am I afraid might happen if I do?
— When have I chosen myself recently, even in a small way?
— What did that feel like in my body?
These questions don’t need answers right away. They need space.
You Are Allowed to Choose Yourself — Even When It’s Uncomfortable
Choosing yourself won’t always feel empowering right away. Sometimes it will feel unfamiliar. Sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes like you’re doing something wrong.
You’re not.
You’re doing something different, and different is where change begins.
For high-achieving women, this work sits at the intersection of nervous system healing, inner child healing, and the daily practice of soft living. None of it is linear. All of it is worthwhile.
You don’t have to wait until it feels comfortable to begin. You just have to be willing to stay with yourself while it’s not.
I explore this more deeply in Episode 24 of the Shift Happens with Shay podcast, what choosing yourself actually looks like when it doesn’t feel easy or natural, and what it means to stay with yourself through the discomfort.
Quiet shifts change everything.
