Have you ever caught yourself noticing that slight tension in your manager’s voice during a Zoom meeting that no one else seems to be picking up on? Or maybe you are still replaying last Tuesday’s team conflict in your mind, while it seems like everyone else has long moved on?

When things like this happen, you don’t just hear the words. You catch shifts in tone, facial, micro expressions, and the energy that seems to fill the room. The moment someone says, I have some feedback that I wanna share, you are processing everything at a level. Others simply aren’t. You’re the one who spots the potential flaw in the roadmap weeks before it becomes an issue. The one who senses when a client is dissatisfied before they have said anything.

And this heightened awareness, it serves you brilliantly until it doesn’t. Because you may also be the person who is carrying the weight of every tense interaction for days afterwards. You are revisiting it while brushing your teeth, during your morning run, as you’re trying to fall asleep at night.

You perceive criticism as a full body experience, not just as details to process. You are absorbing the stress, the emotions of your colleagues, like a sponge, you can spiral into self-doubt after the slightest hint that your work doesn’t meet expectations.

If all of this is sounding painfully familiar, then welcome. You are in exactly the right place, and you are in very good company. You are likely what I call a Sensitive Striver. Someone who has a nervous system that is wired to notice more, to feel more deeply, and to process everything more thoroughly than the average person.

I want to invite you to join us inside of Resilient. This is my signature three month group coaching program, specifically designed to show Sensitive Strivers like you, exactly how to go from insecure, helpless, overwhelmed, feeling broken compared to your colleagues. To finally feeling self-assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work. So you can feel comfortable in your own skin.

Enrollment is open now through May 15th. The next cohort, we start on May 22nd. So I want you to think if we just flash forward to Labor Day of this year, here’s where you can end up. You could be walking into your mid-year review with solid confidence, actually feeling proud of the accomplishments you’ve achieved so far this year.

You could be saying no to that project that lands on your desk without a hint of guilt or second guessing yourself. Leaving the office at a reasonable hour to enjoy time with your family, and feeling energized rather than completely drained like you have nothing left for them. And maybe you would even be getting praise for your boss of how you handled that high pressure situation, with both empathy and decisiveness.

Our alumni constantly tell us that this program is life changing. It is transformational. It is unlike anything they have tried before. And that is thanks to our best in class teaching and coaching experience, which includes highly actionable lessons, weekly coaching calls, a high level private community, templates, scripts, worksheets, so so much more. So head to melodywilding.com/resilient to learn more. You’ll find all of the details there and you can grab your spot. Remember though, enrollment is only open until May 15th, and doors will not be open again until much later this year.

I’m gonna make a wild guess that if you relate to being a Sensitive Striver, you have probably tried most of your life to fix your sensitivity, right? You have told yourself and probably heard a lot from others that you need to toughen up, you need to care less, you need to not take things so personally.

Maybe you have tried to mimic that friend of yours who seems to just brush off criticism like it’s nothing. Hoping that their thick skinned approach would somehow just become yours through osmosis.

Or maybe you’ve gone the opposite route. You have just embraced that, just be authentic advice that seems to be everywhere nowadays. You’ve told anyone who will listen that you are more sensitive than others and certain things are tough for you. And then you feel frustrated though when the people around you treat you with kid gloves. Like when you get left out of important projects because people don’t wanna stress you out. Or when colleagues carefully edit themselves around you like you are some ticking emotional bomb.

Here’s the thing, both of these approaches set you up for failure. Trying to toughen up is just fighting against yourself, literally how your brain is structured, which if you have tried that, you know that it is exhausting, it is unsustainable, and frankly, it is completely a waste of time and energy. And that just accept yourself approach is also problematic because while pure unbridled self-acceptance. It sounds very lovely in theory. It doesn’t help you in those moments where you’re frozen before delivering a big presentation, or when you just can’t seem to let go of that snide comment that some stakeholder made.

Wearing your sensitivity like it’s some badge of honor for being fragile just creates a different prison. One where people treat you like you are made of glass instead of leadership material. Someone who can do their job well.

If you are listening to the show, it’s because you have goals and ambitions that you are not willing to settle on.

Whether you are aiming for a promotion, you are trying to lead your team through some difficult transition, or you just want a bigger, say you want to voice your ideas without your nervous system going into overdrive, your sensitivity is getting in your way.

It can feel like you’re trying to walk this impossible tightrope. You need to be perceptive enough that you’re anticipating needs, you’re reading the room really well, but not so sensitive that you’re knocked off balance by every setback. You also want to be authentic and true to yourself enough so that you can build real trust with the people around you, but not so real that your colleagues treat you like you may shatter at any moment.

You don’t want to choose between being powerful or being perceptive. You want both. You want to be able to harness your sensitivity as the competitive advantage that it can be. Without costing you your sanity or your shot at getting what you want at work and in your career.

In today’s episode, I am not going to blow smoke and tell you that you are perfect just as you are and the world should adapt to your needs. You’ve read the Instagram posts about embracing your authentic self. You’ve attended the feel good workshops that are nothing but fluffiness telling you that you just need to be more of who you are and let that shine. Like, somehow that is going to magically make your career path smooth.

The industry unfortunately, has sold you a very comforting lie. You have been told that acceptance is the end goal. That’s all you need to do is just own your sensitivity and everything else will fall into place. And then you’re just sent back into the work world with nothing but some positive affirmations. So we’re not gonna do that today. Here’s what we’re going to do.

I want to completely challenge how you’ve been thinking about yourself. Because the breakthrough moment I had in my own career and that we have seen for hundreds of our clients inside of resilient, it wasn’t figuring out how to fix my sensitivity. It was realizing I had been trying to solve the wrong problem all along.

I hear all the time from listeners of the show, from alumni of our programs that they joined because they trust me, they trust my credibility. Which unfortunately is becoming harder and harder to come by. My background is as a social worker. I started my career as a therapist. I have been an emotions researcher, and now in addition to running this company, I also teach human behavior at Hunter College in New York City. I’ve done that for the past decade as well. And so all of this gives me legitimate expertise on these challenges. I’ve spent the last decade plus translating what’s been locked away in ivory towers, research papers, academic journals, and have given you concrete tools to find your professional power position.

That is the sweet spot where confidence in yourself and influence with others where those two things come together. The confidence in yourself piece has to come first though, because if you are constantly getting in your own way, insecure, if you are overthinking everything, then how can you possibly advocate for yourself, persuade someone else, or make bold moves in your career?

Our clients also work with us because I am a Sensitive Striver myself. I say all the time, we teach what we most need to learn, and that is absolutely true in my case. I know what it’s like to feel like an oddball or a weirdo and not be able to put your finger on why. To wonder why you’re the only one who seems to be carrying yesterday’s difficult meeting, like it’s a 50 pound weight while it just seems to run off of everybody else’s back.

For years, I tried fixing my confidence struggles from the outside. I jumped to new jobs, thinking that a different environment would solve it. I collected more and more certifications thinking that expertise, feeling more qualified would quiet that self-doubt. I tried every productivity system on the market thinking that would help me feel less overwhelmed and feel more in control.

But the late night thought spirals, the constant second guessing the Sunday night dread, it seemed to just follow me everywhere. Here’s where I was going completely wrong and where you might be too. I was trying to solve the wrong problem. I thought the problem was my sensitivity itself, that this was just something I had to get over, and if I couldn’t train it out of me, then this was just a burden I had to live with.

So I tried all of the techniques. You probably have too. Fake it till you make it. Which just left me exhausted from pretending like I wasn’t affected by things when I clearly was. Or just let it roll off your back, as if my wiring was a choice that I could just simply opt out of or flip off like a switch.

And of course the classic, don’t take it personally, which is probably the most useless advice ever given to someone whose brain is literally designed to process information at the level of assessing its safety and its risk.

And sometimes these strategies, the worst part is that they only made things worse. It’s a little like trying to keep a beach ball underwater. The more you keep trying to push it down through sheer force, eventually you get tired. And finally, when you let go, it’s not like it just floats up gently. That beach ball explodes upward because of all the force you’ve been using to suppress it.

My wake up call came when my body literally broke down. If you have read my first book, Trust Yourself, I talk about this in the introduction. I had burned out so badly that I could not get out of bed. I was having heart palpitations, my hair was falling out.

Rock bottom is something I never want another person to deal with, but it forced me to confront the truth of the situation. I will never change who I am fundamentally. I will always be someone who is paying attention more, who is more reactive, who is more deeply processing everything more than my family, my friends, my colleagues.

Even more importantly was this revelation that really changed everything for me.

My sensitivity is not a superpower or a weakness. It’s not either of those. It’s a neutral trait. Just like I have brown hair, I have green eyes, I just have a more active and reactive nervous system. That’s it. It is a neutral fact.

And that neutrality is what freed me. Not trying to fix myself, which was a losing battle, and not just plastering affirmations everywhere, which honestly is a cop out. It’s a way to avoid addressing the very real ways this trait was holding me back. When I talk about neutrality, I am describing that ability to see yourself more objectively without judgment.

And this is actually an advanced mental skill. Because our brains default to binary thinking. That’s easier, right? Our brains wanna save energy, and so we naturally want to categorize things as good or bad, helpful, harmful. Neutrality is tough because it requires you to sit with the gray areas. To embrace that there is a both and, rather than an either or.

You have to acknowledge that your qualities can sometimes be your greatest assets in one situation and your biggest obstacle in another, sometimes in the very same day or in the very same hour. So it’s building the discernment to recognize that, yes, my heightened awareness is helping me. Whether it’s read some client’s unspoken concerns right now, and my tendency to absorb everybody else’s emotions makes it hard for me to stay calm in this negotiation. It can be both of those things.

It’s developing the ability to pull yourself out when you notice you’re spiraling, not because spiraling itself is bad, but because it’s not serving you in that particular moment. And make no mistake here, I am not talking about resignation. Neutrality is not throwing up your hands and saying, well, I guess this is just how I am, so everyone else needs to deal with it.

That’s the opposite of what I am talking about. True neutrality also includes radical responsibility. It’s saying, this is my wiring and I am going to become an expert in understanding and directing it, channeling it. It’s about opportunity agency. Recognizing that while you can’t change the fact that you do notice and feel more deeply, you can absolutely change how you respond to what you notice and feel.

So in other words, my sensitivity wasn’t the problem. How I related to and managed it was, and that was something I could control and influence. When I thought the problem was my sensitivity itself, I was fighting this impossible battle. But when I realized the issue was my relationship with my sensitivity, suddenly I had agency again.

You can’t change the fact that you process everything more deeply, but I could change how I responded when those experiences happened. I could learn to recognize when this trait was giving me valuable information, versus when I was just getting into rumination. I could develop tools to regulate myself, when I went into overdrive in high stake situations. I could practice responding, not reacting when criticism triggered that deep wired threat response.

So think of it this way, it’s kind of like the difference between trying to stop a river from flowing, which is almost impossible, versus building paths to direct where that water goes.

Your sensitivity is that river. It is a natural force that is just part of your inner landscape. And how you direct it determines whether, does it just flood and take over everything, or can you harness it as a resource?

So when I started using the tools for my psychology background to work with my heightened awareness, instead of fighting it, everything changed. I found my voice in difficult conversations. I advocated for my value. I made decisions more quickly with less hesitation and fear.

And this is the pivotal shift that we see our clients step into within just a few weeks of being in Resilient, and it’s night and day from how they approach themselves before.

When they begin seeing their sensitivity as a neutral trait, not some curse to overcome, or some magical ability that would just solve everything on its own. That’s when they see the biggest gains in progress, because before they come into the program, they’re wasting an enormous amount of energy trying to hide their sensitivity, apologize for it. It can feel like you’re constantly at war with yourself, which leaves you almost no bandwidth to be willing to try anything new. But when you swing to the other extreme and you romanticize sensitivity as just this superpower, you miss the critical skill and step of developing the skills to manage its challenges.

One of our past Resilient alumni, Dan gave us this great metaphor for this that really clicked for me. Dan, like many Sensitive Strivers, he felt like his insides were going a hundred miles an hour at all times. Overthinking, experiencing every interaction more intensely, putting so much pressure on himself to get things perfect, to keep reaching higher. And he told me for years I felt like I was driving a Ferrari, with no brakes and no instruction manual. And the breakthrough moment came for Dan when he realized something huge. And during one of our sessions he said, I don’t actually want to trade in my Ferrari for a minivan. I just need to learn how to drive it better. Boom. That was a huge unlock for him. Dan didn’t wanna become less thoughtful or less passionate.

Dan happens to be a tax director. He’s in a really specialized area. Those qualities made him exceptional at anticipating problems, developing creative solutions, building deep relationships with his team and his clients. He didn’t need a personality transplant. He needed the tools, to harness his wiring more effectively.

And it’s the perfect metaphor because a Ferrari’s responsiveness isn’t some flaw to fix. That’s why you buy a Ferrari. When you own a high performance car, you don’t resent the fact that it needs premium fuel or more frequent maintenance. You just see those requirements as part of the deal. They are neutral facts. They are just part of what makes a car special. So you plan for them, you budget for them, you learn about them.

Being a Sensitive Striver is the same. It’s incredibly valuable insight to help you make different, better decisions about how you manage yourself. For example, if you know you have to go into a meeting with that colleague who always seems to rub you the wrong way, you can rearrange your schedule so you’re not running into that meeting already stressed out and frantic.

When you make sure you’ve got that buffer built in, just like you would make sure your Ferrari has the right oil, you set yourself up for success. You don’t just say, Ugh, why do I have to spend so much energy managing myself? You start seeing it as almost a puzzle to solve as this like fascinating opportunity to develop a level of self-mastery that most people never achieve.

And that’s actually the hidden gift here. Most people never have to develop this level of command over their inner world. They don’t build the subtle discernment that allows them to recognize exactly what’s happening inside of them, and choose how to respond rather than react. But as a sensitive striver who is learning to work with your wiring, you develop that. You develop that command of your own psychology, and that has ripple effects across everything you do.

It translates directly to how you show up externally. Because when you’re no longer at the mercy of your sensitivity, but you are directing it, you bring a grounded presence that others notice. You speak with more conviction because you’re not burning mental energy on self-doubt. You make decisions with greater clarity because you’ve separated what are legitimate concerns for more of that fear driven overthinking.

It’s this mastery, this ability to work with, rather than against your natural wiring, that is what transforms not only how you feel, but also how others perceive and respond to you. This is what resilient shows you how to do, how to master your own inner psychology so you are ready for any opportunity. Not as someone else, but as the best version of yourself.

You know that I always try to be honest with you, so I have to tell you that your tendency to take things personally, it’s not going away on its own. Neither is your habit of ruminating, of saying yes to everything too much. Those traits won’t just one day become easier to handle. Someday never comes. And in fact, without the right tools, it might just intensify, which ends up moving you further and further from the confidence you want from the compensation, the recognition you deserve. Because the only thing waiting guarantees is more of the same, more stress, more doubt, more feeling overlooked and undervalued.

You don’t have to wait for the life and career you want. You can’t afford to. Your future self is counting on you to take action now. Enrollment and Resilient is open at this moment, but only for a few more days until May 15th, and we get started on May 22nd.

So remember, head to melodywilding.com/resilient for all of the details and to secure your spot. That’s melodywilding.com/resilient.

I hope to see you inside. I hope this episode left you with a lot of food for thought, and a lot of different ways to see yourself, and I’ll see you in the next episode.