Are you a natural born giver? Perhaps you are one of the most generous people in the room, aware of what everyone else needed and making sure they got it. When it comes to yourself, you can’t remember the last time you asked yourself the same question.
If so, you are like me. For years I hid from being “needy” or “high needs.” I quietly ignored what I needed. Yet we all have needs, real ones. And somewhere along the way I learned that expressing those needs, even quietly, made me feel like I was too much.
As a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach with close to five decades of business experience, I was thrilled to learn what research had to say about our needs. When a high-capacity woman starts to feel off-kilter, unfocused or inwardly flat despite outward success; the first place I look isn’t her strategy, her marketing, or even her mindset. We look at her unmet needs.
Gallup research shows that people who can name their core needs, and honor them, demonstrate higher engagement, decision-making clarity, and overall wellbeing. You cannot lead well or experience true wealth from a place of prolonged self-forgetting. And surprisingly, for many of the women I work with, self-neglect has become a habit so deeply engrained it no longer feels like neglect. It has become so familiar, she’s stopped noticing.
We were taught, directly or indirectly, not to be “high-needs,” not to take up too much space, not to want too much. The result? We become the last person to benefit from what we pour out so freely to everyone else.
I see it constantly:
- Women who can hold space for an entire room but struggle to hold space for themselves.
- Women who are brilliant at reading what others need and blind to what stirs inside themselves.
- Women who have built something remarkable and are still waiting for someone else to confirm it matters
When you feel the friction, the restlessness, the resentment, the vague sense that something is off, ask yourself these two questions:
- What do I actually need right now?
- When did I last acknowledge it?
Not what you think you’re allowed to need. What do you actually need.
- It might be a guilt-free nap midday that you don’t have to justify.
- It might be a conversation where you are witnessed, not managed.
- It might be uninterrupted space to simply think; not to solve, not to produce, just to be with yourself.
- It might be the acknowledgment that your quiet diligence has been seen and appreciated.
Naming what you need is not a defect. It is not selfishness. It is where alignment begins.
And in my world, alignment is where everything changes.
You cannot pour from a life you’ve been quietly draining for years.
When you are resourced, truly resourced, you bring more. You think more clearly. You lead more generously. You create from fullness instead of depletion. You move through your days with something solid underneath you; unshakable, not because life got easier but because you stopped abandoning yourself.
That’s not a nice idea. That’s a biological, psychological and spiritual truth.
If you’ve been running on empty and calling it strength, I would love to have a conversation with you.
In a Discovery Call, we start exactly here with you. Not your business plan, not your strategy, not your goals list. You. What you need. What you desire. What has quietly been costing you more than it should.
And what becomes possible when you stop apologizing for being a woman of essence who deserves tending.
You don’t need fixing, my friend. You just need to come back to yourself.
Everything else follows.
This call is simply a conversation. No pressure, just a dedicated time that belongs entirely to you.