58. Is Your Loyalty Actually Self-Abandonment? How High-Achieving Women Over-Give at Work
Who have you been loyal to lately? Your company? Your boss? Your team? Your family? Or yourself?
Loyalty is one of women's greatest strengths… and one of the biggest reasons we burn out. It's what makes us the reliable ones, the go-to problem solvers, the ones who stay late, hold it all together, and fill in the gaps no one else sees. But here’s the truth: loyalty without boundaries isn’t loyalty at all. It’s self-abandonment dressed up as service.
Join me this week as I explore the shadow side of loyalty: when your loyalty to others outweighs your loyalty to yourself. You’ll learn how women are socialized to equate loyalty with virtue, how this unspoken contract keeps us stuck in patterns of over-giving and resentment, and reflection questions that will help you conduct a personal loyalty audit.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why loyalty becomes a survival strategy when it's not rooted in self-worth.
How systems reward what you reinforce when you keep saying yes.
The three systems where loyalty shows up and what each teaches about your relationship with yourself.
What grounded loyalty looks like versus loyalty that comes from conditioning or guilt.
How to conduct a personal loyalty audit with four powerful reflection questions.
Why being loyal to yourself makes you sustainable, not selfish.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Let me ask you something. Who have you been loyal to lately? Your company? Your boss? Your team? Your family? Or yourself? Because loyalty is one of women's greatest strengths and one of the biggest reasons we burn out. It's what makes us the reliable ones, the go-to problem solvers, the ones who stay late, hold it all together, and fill in the gaps no one else sees.
But here's the shadow side no one talks about. When your loyalty to others outweighs your loyalty to yourself, it's no longer devotion, it's depletion. And when that imbalance goes on long enough, it turns into resentment, and that resentment grows into disconnection with yourself, which turns into burnout. Today, we're going to talk about what happens when loyalty becomes a trap and how to reclaim it as a grounded, self-respecting choice.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode on loyalty. I wanted to share because actually, I don't know if you guys have, like know about enneagrams, but it's kind of like one of those sort of personality things, and I am a loyalist. That is what I am known for, the reliable one, the one that holds it all together.
So I'm sharing this because I remember a season in my life when I prided myself on being loyal. I was loyal to my company, loyal to my boss, loyal to my team, loyal to my family, but I wasn't always loyal to me. I said yes to everything, every project, every new challenge, every fire drill. Because that's what good leaders do, right? They show up. They hold the line.
But underneath it was something deeper, a belief that my worth came from being needed. That saying no meant letting people down. And over time, that loyalty, the thing that used to make me proud, started to cost me peace. That's when I realized loyalty without boundaries isn't loyalty. It's self-abandonment dressed up as service.
And here's what's tricky. Most women are socialized to equate loyalty with virtue. We learn early on that being dependable, agreeable, and self-sacrificing earns us belonging. Notice it in your mother. Notice it in other women that are around you. So we internalize this unspoken contract. If I'm loyal to you, you'll value me. If I keep giving, I'll be safe.
But organizations, like families, like relationships, are systems, and systems don't always love you back. They reward what you reinforce. So when you keep saying yes, the system doesn't say thank you. It just learns you'll do it again and again. This is why a lot of women that come to me that are coaching with me feel like they are so disconnected with themselves, or they're so angry, and they don't know what to do with that anger, or they feel so apathetic to the things around them because they have lost this connection with themselves.
And companies, listen, companies are there for a reason, right? But I will tell you, being a corporate person, especially an executive in the corporate world, it is relentless. A company is always going to ask you for things. There are always things that are going to be needed, whether it's from your boss, your peers, especially if you're in a very senior level role that you run a whole department. Like, there's a lot of things on your plate.
But this is also how resentment builds up if you keep saying yes to things. We start feeling used, unseen, unappreciated. Not because we weren't good enough, but because we gave loyalty that wasn't earned or reciprocated. And that's the hard truth. When your loyalty isn't rooted in self-worth, it becomes a survival strategy. You're on this hamster wheel that keeps saying, I need to keep going, I need to keep going and proving and proving. And after time goes on, you're like, who am I? Why am I doing all this proving?
Really, this is the shadow side of loyalty. This is where loyalty is actually causing you self-harm. I actually had a woman, she came to me a few years ago and she really wanted to make a splash in her career. She wanted to do something bigger, bolder, and she was willing to go out and find another job. Well, she did. She went out and found another job. And she was excited about the job, although it was a big pay cut from where she was at. But she could see herself growing. She was like, I know this is a pay cut, but I'll be leading a big team and the management team actually seems like they really value what I can do and impact. And even if it's a pay cut, I still see myself, you know, growing. And she was like connected to herself.
She was like feeling, you know, not really activated. And I don't often times tell people to leave companies, right? I'm always like, you got to work on yourself. If you are not connected to yourself, you're not going to be connected to yourself in another job, right? Or with other people. Like this is an internal work thing. But in this way, she was actually really exploring. She was working her relationships in the current company she was in, and she was exploring this next level role, which again, came with a pay cut, which doesn't always feel great, right? And she was negotiating hard to get that pay cut to be as small as possible, right?
But there was also her activation in herself, her engagement with herself, her excitement for this. And she was really considering it. And we talked about the steps that she would do to really consider it. And in the end, what happened was when she went and talked to her family about it, and she was supporting her family members at this point, her parents, she was also supporting her child who was in athletics, and she was supporting, I think she was the breadwinner as well. So there was a lot of pressure at home to make money.
And of course, in her company, they were like, well, you know, this is a smaller company. You could stay with us and grow, or you can go to this company. They weren't really ready to make a counter offer. They knew that she was being compensated well, but they also knew, hey, if this is where you want to go, if this is the expansiveness of your career, we can't do anything to stop you at this point. So it's your choice.
And she actually was really considering it. Then she went to talk to her family, and her family told her that it was a terrible idea. They were like, of course you should chase the money. Of course that matters more. And she came to me really distraught and upset. And what I noticed was that she wasn't being loyal to herself in this way, right? She was really holding the role of being loyal to her family and making sure that they had what they needed. And even though this pay cut wouldn't have been like crazy for them, it's still something, right?
And I bring up this story because I'm not saying that it's right or wrong. I'm just saying that there is a point in our lives as women where we need to be loyal to ourselves. And we need to see ourselves clearly, and we need to see the system around us clearly, because the system will not want to change. And it's more of a neutral way of looking at things. Nobody's right or wrong or good or bad, but when disruption happens, right, in our systems, we want to go back to loyalty. And loyalty may look safer, but over time, that disconnection with yourself means something. It actually creates something internally within you and how you show up and how energized you are, and how you interact with people, and how present you are.
Because if you are not connected to yourself and you're not loyal to yourself, this actually creates a lot of emotional labor for yourself and mental labor. Everything feels harder when you don't feel connected to yourself. And oftentimes, I think women just ignore that voice. They quiet it down. They think that we want too many things. And we have a way of abandoning ourselves when we think that way.
So what does grounded loyalty look like? I want you to just think about what this could look like for you in your life. It's loyalty that comes from choice, not conditioning, not from the systems around us, but from true choice, from clarity and not guilt. Guilt comes from wanting to be something somebody else wanted for us, wanting to not disappoint others. This comes from alignment, alignment to yourself, who you want to become, not attachment to the role that you played in the past.
Grounded loyalty asks, does this relationship still honor who I'm becoming? Is this company still aligned with my growth? Am I staying because it serves me or because I'm afraid to disappoint?
Now, I have another client that I'm working with and she is doing her best to make changes, to shift the organization, to culturally shift things. But there is a leader in power who goes against a lot of what she does. And she has a really hard time managing her career, managing what's next for her while doing this work to be valuable and loyal to the company. And I'm not telling you not to be valuable or loyal to a company. I'm just saying both can exist.
You can be loyal and valuable to a company, and you can also be loyal to other career opportunities that may come your way, that may be more aligned with you, that may help you to see that you have other options, which actually helps you be more connected to yourself. So in the job you're doing, you're actually more engaged, more loyal to yourself and the job because you're more present to solve problems. You're not just doing things out of autopilot, you're engaged with it.
But this is a choice, right? When you're loyal to yourself first, your decisions get cleaner. You stop over giving. You give the right amount. You stop waiting for permission to move on. And you stop harboring all this resentment for the company, right? All this emotional labor because you feel like you're giving way more than you're getting. So this is a really powerful choice and you start choosing what's right for you, not what looks right to other people. This is where real power and empowerment happens when you start engaging with yourself in a really honest way.
That's not betrayal. That's self-trust in action. But it may feel like betrayal to other people. It may feel like pushback from other people because people are used to you being a certain way. And I want to share the three systems of loyalty because it's important for us to notice that if we look at the system as neutral, right? It's not with judgment. It's just to say this is how things are. I like to think of loyalty as showing up in these three systems. You can use other ways, but I think this is an important way to look at it, right?
They all teach you something about your relationship with yourself. So, let's start with work and corporate systems where loyalty often looks like overperformance. The invitation here is to separate your contribution from your identity. You contribute, you create value, you do things for this corporation and system. It's not who you are. It's not your full identity. Oftentimes, when we feel lots of pressure or like I have to do this, I have to do that, it's because our identity is so intrinsically integrated with that corporate system and the rewards and the reinforcement that happened when you do things and say things and you show up in a certain way.
And what women often do is they over perform and they are overly loyal to this corporate system. More so than other relationships that are in their lives, more so than networking, right? There's a reason why men are really good at networking. They give themselves space, they give themselves time to connect with other people inside and outside of the work.
The other place where this shows up is family systems where loyalty can mean carrying expectations that were never yours. I know this deeply. I mean, as a child of immigrant parents who were Asian, I literally thought in my family system that my role was to create safety for my family, that I was responsible for their money, their retirement, their financial life, right? I took on so much responsibility. And it is, in some families' cultures, they want you to believe that. They want you to be loyal to that family system.
And I'm not saying you can't have great connecting relationships with people, but it becomes more authentic and more real when you feel like you want to versus you're obligated to. My relationship with my family is much more real than it was many years ago when I felt like I had to be a good girl, a good daughter, a good sister, all these things that I felt like I had to be loyal to this system, this role, right? So the invitation here is to release the roles you outgrew and redefine what love looks like to you.
Here's just a simple example of this. When somebody gives you something and you really don't want it, and you say yes to it because you're like, I'm meant to say yes to this, but you know saying yes to it, you actually don't want it at all. And often times people say yes, like give me this thing. It's not easy to say no. Thank you for thinking of me, but I actually don't want this, right? That's not easy. And I want you to just think about that, right? I'm not pushing you to do one thing or the other, but I just want you to notice how many rules that breaks for you, right? When you say no to something you actually don't want. And I've learned how to do this in different ways. I don't always do it. Sometimes I, you know, am under the pressure of being loyal or being people pleasing. So I'm not going to lie to you about that.
But more often than not now, and I'm doing it more and more consistently, I'm telling people how much they matter to me, how much them thinking of me makes a difference to me. And I'm also letting them know I don't particularly like these things, but I love that you thought of me. There's so many things in our system and society that says, no, you should just take that thing and be happy with it. You should just lie.
But you get to decide who you are and what you're really loyal to. And then of course, in relationships, that's a system too, where loyalty sometimes means tolerating misalignment in the name of harmony. I don't want to rock the boat, so let's not speak up when my husband has other plans or I'm not going to rock the boat. My friend wants to do X, Y and Z. I don't really want to do that. This is your invitation to choose truth over comfort. Again, mutual respect over avoidance. In your relationships, being more real, being more you. In every system, the question is the same. Am I being loyal to my values? Or am I feeding into my fears? And am I scared of what's going to come up if I say who I am or tell the truth of who I am? But in that question is also your ability to see your own self-worth because in the context of loyalty to systems, your self-worth is basically defined by what you're willing to do versus who you're being in that moment and who you're being towards yourself.
All right. So I want you to have a reflection and think about this episode because this is really to ignite you and activate you. It's not about shaming you. It's not about judging anything. It's really to create space for you and permission to notice yourself. So many times, like even I am not thinking like what's going to be best for me in this situation. I do that more and more as I work on myself and as I coach others and I coach myself. But I want you to give yourself some space to do this loyalty audit of yourself. Ask yourself, who or what have I been loyal to lately? Notice what comes up for you.
What has loyalty cost me? Time, energy, peace, disconnection with myself, maybe authenticity. And of course, the way I define authenticity is not just comfort. It's that you are becoming more and more the person you want to be. The next question is, what might loyalty to myself look like in this same area? Right? Find yourself in your corporate context, in your family context. Ask yourself, what would it look like for me to be loyal to myself? Both can be true. You can be loyal to systems, right? In a way where your boundaries are in line and where your value matters. It's not an all or nothing game here. I'm never telling people to cut off relationships unless they really want to. It's that their choice, right? I'm really telling you to work within the system, but make sure that system works for you.
And the last question is, what would change if I started practicing that today? Right? What would change if you started being just a little bit more loyal to yourself today? Loyalty to yourself doesn't make you selfish. It makes you sustainable. This is how women advance without burning out. You being really clear on your boundaries, your values, and knowing that loyalty is not a negotiable for you, right? That you can be loyal and you can be loyal to yourself. You can be loyal to the system and to yourself because when you're loyal to your own well-being, you can serve others from fullness, not depletion.
At its core, loyalty is about worth. When you forget your worth, you give loyalty away hoping it'll buy you belonging, hoping that it will buy you rewards. When you remember your worth, you offer loyalty as a gift, not a transaction. And less resentment shows up because you're like, I want to do this. I'm doing this out of pure, you know, love for it or pure service, right? I'm not doing this from an unclean place.
So if you've been overextending, over delivering, overstaying, ask yourself, what if the most loyal thing I could do is not stay, but stay true? You can love the people, respect the mission, and still choose you. That's not quitting. That's leadership. If this episode resonated, share it with another woman who's learning to be loyal to herself again, who wants to connect with herself deeply. And if you're ready to lead with power without losing yourself, you'll find ways to work with me in the show notes. Until next time, remember, the most powerful form of loyalty is self-loyalty.
All right. Have a beautiful week ahead. Go and be loyal to yourself. Be kind to yourself and make things happen for you. Reclaim that self-worth. I'm thinking of you. You can do this. I will talk to you soon. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
But here's the shadow side no one talks about. When your loyalty to others outweighs your loyalty to yourself, it's no longer devotion, it's depletion. And when that imbalance goes on long enough, it turns into resentment, and that resentment grows into disconnection with yourself, which turns into burnout. Today, we're going to talk about what happens when loyalty becomes a trap and how to reclaim it as a grounded, self-respecting choice.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode on loyalty. I wanted to share because actually, I don't know if you guys have, like know about enneagrams, but it's kind of like one of those sort of personality things, and I am a loyalist. That is what I am known for, the reliable one, the one that holds it all together.
So I'm sharing this because I remember a season in my life when I prided myself on being loyal. I was loyal to my company, loyal to my boss, loyal to my team, loyal to my family, but I wasn't always loyal to me. I said yes to everything, every project, every new challenge, every fire drill. Because that's what good leaders do, right? They show up. They hold the line.
But underneath it was something deeper, a belief that my worth came from being needed. That saying no meant letting people down. And over time, that loyalty, the thing that used to make me proud, started to cost me peace. That's when I realized loyalty without boundaries isn't loyalty. It's self-abandonment dressed up as service.
And here's what's tricky. Most women are socialized to equate loyalty with virtue. We learn early on that being dependable, agreeable, and self-sacrificing earns us belonging. Notice it in your mother. Notice it in other women that are around you. So we internalize this unspoken contract. If I'm loyal to you, you'll value me. If I keep giving, I'll be safe.
But organizations, like families, like relationships, are systems, and systems don't always love you back. They reward what you reinforce. So when you keep saying yes, the system doesn't say thank you. It just learns you'll do it again and again. This is why a lot of women that come to me that are coaching with me feel like they are so disconnected with themselves, or they're so angry, and they don't know what to do with that anger, or they feel so apathetic to the things around them because they have lost this connection with themselves.
And companies, listen, companies are there for a reason, right? But I will tell you, being a corporate person, especially an executive in the corporate world, it is relentless. A company is always going to ask you for things. There are always things that are going to be needed, whether it's from your boss, your peers, especially if you're in a very senior level role that you run a whole department. Like, there's a lot of things on your plate.
But this is also how resentment builds up if you keep saying yes to things. We start feeling used, unseen, unappreciated. Not because we weren't good enough, but because we gave loyalty that wasn't earned or reciprocated. And that's the hard truth. When your loyalty isn't rooted in self-worth, it becomes a survival strategy. You're on this hamster wheel that keeps saying, I need to keep going, I need to keep going and proving and proving. And after time goes on, you're like, who am I? Why am I doing all this proving?
Really, this is the shadow side of loyalty. This is where loyalty is actually causing you self-harm. I actually had a woman, she came to me a few years ago and she really wanted to make a splash in her career. She wanted to do something bigger, bolder, and she was willing to go out and find another job. Well, she did. She went out and found another job. And she was excited about the job, although it was a big pay cut from where she was at. But she could see herself growing. She was like, I know this is a pay cut, but I'll be leading a big team and the management team actually seems like they really value what I can do and impact. And even if it's a pay cut, I still see myself, you know, growing. And she was like connected to herself.
She was like feeling, you know, not really activated. And I don't often times tell people to leave companies, right? I'm always like, you got to work on yourself. If you are not connected to yourself, you're not going to be connected to yourself in another job, right? Or with other people. Like this is an internal work thing. But in this way, she was actually really exploring. She was working her relationships in the current company she was in, and she was exploring this next level role, which again, came with a pay cut, which doesn't always feel great, right? And she was negotiating hard to get that pay cut to be as small as possible, right?
But there was also her activation in herself, her engagement with herself, her excitement for this. And she was really considering it. And we talked about the steps that she would do to really consider it. And in the end, what happened was when she went and talked to her family about it, and she was supporting her family members at this point, her parents, she was also supporting her child who was in athletics, and she was supporting, I think she was the breadwinner as well. So there was a lot of pressure at home to make money.
And of course, in her company, they were like, well, you know, this is a smaller company. You could stay with us and grow, or you can go to this company. They weren't really ready to make a counter offer. They knew that she was being compensated well, but they also knew, hey, if this is where you want to go, if this is the expansiveness of your career, we can't do anything to stop you at this point. So it's your choice.
And she actually was really considering it. Then she went to talk to her family, and her family told her that it was a terrible idea. They were like, of course you should chase the money. Of course that matters more. And she came to me really distraught and upset. And what I noticed was that she wasn't being loyal to herself in this way, right? She was really holding the role of being loyal to her family and making sure that they had what they needed. And even though this pay cut wouldn't have been like crazy for them, it's still something, right?
And I bring up this story because I'm not saying that it's right or wrong. I'm just saying that there is a point in our lives as women where we need to be loyal to ourselves. And we need to see ourselves clearly, and we need to see the system around us clearly, because the system will not want to change. And it's more of a neutral way of looking at things. Nobody's right or wrong or good or bad, but when disruption happens, right, in our systems, we want to go back to loyalty. And loyalty may look safer, but over time, that disconnection with yourself means something. It actually creates something internally within you and how you show up and how energized you are, and how you interact with people, and how present you are.
Because if you are not connected to yourself and you're not loyal to yourself, this actually creates a lot of emotional labor for yourself and mental labor. Everything feels harder when you don't feel connected to yourself. And oftentimes, I think women just ignore that voice. They quiet it down. They think that we want too many things. And we have a way of abandoning ourselves when we think that way.
So what does grounded loyalty look like? I want you to just think about what this could look like for you in your life. It's loyalty that comes from choice, not conditioning, not from the systems around us, but from true choice, from clarity and not guilt. Guilt comes from wanting to be something somebody else wanted for us, wanting to not disappoint others. This comes from alignment, alignment to yourself, who you want to become, not attachment to the role that you played in the past.
Grounded loyalty asks, does this relationship still honor who I'm becoming? Is this company still aligned with my growth? Am I staying because it serves me or because I'm afraid to disappoint?
Now, I have another client that I'm working with and she is doing her best to make changes, to shift the organization, to culturally shift things. But there is a leader in power who goes against a lot of what she does. And she has a really hard time managing her career, managing what's next for her while doing this work to be valuable and loyal to the company. And I'm not telling you not to be valuable or loyal to a company. I'm just saying both can exist.
You can be loyal and valuable to a company, and you can also be loyal to other career opportunities that may come your way, that may be more aligned with you, that may help you to see that you have other options, which actually helps you be more connected to yourself. So in the job you're doing, you're actually more engaged, more loyal to yourself and the job because you're more present to solve problems. You're not just doing things out of autopilot, you're engaged with it.
But this is a choice, right? When you're loyal to yourself first, your decisions get cleaner. You stop over giving. You give the right amount. You stop waiting for permission to move on. And you stop harboring all this resentment for the company, right? All this emotional labor because you feel like you're giving way more than you're getting. So this is a really powerful choice and you start choosing what's right for you, not what looks right to other people. This is where real power and empowerment happens when you start engaging with yourself in a really honest way.
That's not betrayal. That's self-trust in action. But it may feel like betrayal to other people. It may feel like pushback from other people because people are used to you being a certain way. And I want to share the three systems of loyalty because it's important for us to notice that if we look at the system as neutral, right? It's not with judgment. It's just to say this is how things are. I like to think of loyalty as showing up in these three systems. You can use other ways, but I think this is an important way to look at it, right?
They all teach you something about your relationship with yourself. So, let's start with work and corporate systems where loyalty often looks like overperformance. The invitation here is to separate your contribution from your identity. You contribute, you create value, you do things for this corporation and system. It's not who you are. It's not your full identity. Oftentimes, when we feel lots of pressure or like I have to do this, I have to do that, it's because our identity is so intrinsically integrated with that corporate system and the rewards and the reinforcement that happened when you do things and say things and you show up in a certain way.
And what women often do is they over perform and they are overly loyal to this corporate system. More so than other relationships that are in their lives, more so than networking, right? There's a reason why men are really good at networking. They give themselves space, they give themselves time to connect with other people inside and outside of the work.
The other place where this shows up is family systems where loyalty can mean carrying expectations that were never yours. I know this deeply. I mean, as a child of immigrant parents who were Asian, I literally thought in my family system that my role was to create safety for my family, that I was responsible for their money, their retirement, their financial life, right? I took on so much responsibility. And it is, in some families' cultures, they want you to believe that. They want you to be loyal to that family system.
And I'm not saying you can't have great connecting relationships with people, but it becomes more authentic and more real when you feel like you want to versus you're obligated to. My relationship with my family is much more real than it was many years ago when I felt like I had to be a good girl, a good daughter, a good sister, all these things that I felt like I had to be loyal to this system, this role, right? So the invitation here is to release the roles you outgrew and redefine what love looks like to you.
Here's just a simple example of this. When somebody gives you something and you really don't want it, and you say yes to it because you're like, I'm meant to say yes to this, but you know saying yes to it, you actually don't want it at all. And often times people say yes, like give me this thing. It's not easy to say no. Thank you for thinking of me, but I actually don't want this, right? That's not easy. And I want you to just think about that, right? I'm not pushing you to do one thing or the other, but I just want you to notice how many rules that breaks for you, right? When you say no to something you actually don't want. And I've learned how to do this in different ways. I don't always do it. Sometimes I, you know, am under the pressure of being loyal or being people pleasing. So I'm not going to lie to you about that.
But more often than not now, and I'm doing it more and more consistently, I'm telling people how much they matter to me, how much them thinking of me makes a difference to me. And I'm also letting them know I don't particularly like these things, but I love that you thought of me. There's so many things in our system and society that says, no, you should just take that thing and be happy with it. You should just lie.
But you get to decide who you are and what you're really loyal to. And then of course, in relationships, that's a system too, where loyalty sometimes means tolerating misalignment in the name of harmony. I don't want to rock the boat, so let's not speak up when my husband has other plans or I'm not going to rock the boat. My friend wants to do X, Y and Z. I don't really want to do that. This is your invitation to choose truth over comfort. Again, mutual respect over avoidance. In your relationships, being more real, being more you. In every system, the question is the same. Am I being loyal to my values? Or am I feeding into my fears? And am I scared of what's going to come up if I say who I am or tell the truth of who I am? But in that question is also your ability to see your own self-worth because in the context of loyalty to systems, your self-worth is basically defined by what you're willing to do versus who you're being in that moment and who you're being towards yourself.
All right. So I want you to have a reflection and think about this episode because this is really to ignite you and activate you. It's not about shaming you. It's not about judging anything. It's really to create space for you and permission to notice yourself. So many times, like even I am not thinking like what's going to be best for me in this situation. I do that more and more as I work on myself and as I coach others and I coach myself. But I want you to give yourself some space to do this loyalty audit of yourself. Ask yourself, who or what have I been loyal to lately? Notice what comes up for you.
What has loyalty cost me? Time, energy, peace, disconnection with myself, maybe authenticity. And of course, the way I define authenticity is not just comfort. It's that you are becoming more and more the person you want to be. The next question is, what might loyalty to myself look like in this same area? Right? Find yourself in your corporate context, in your family context. Ask yourself, what would it look like for me to be loyal to myself? Both can be true. You can be loyal to systems, right? In a way where your boundaries are in line and where your value matters. It's not an all or nothing game here. I'm never telling people to cut off relationships unless they really want to. It's that their choice, right? I'm really telling you to work within the system, but make sure that system works for you.
And the last question is, what would change if I started practicing that today? Right? What would change if you started being just a little bit more loyal to yourself today? Loyalty to yourself doesn't make you selfish. It makes you sustainable. This is how women advance without burning out. You being really clear on your boundaries, your values, and knowing that loyalty is not a negotiable for you, right? That you can be loyal and you can be loyal to yourself. You can be loyal to the system and to yourself because when you're loyal to your own well-being, you can serve others from fullness, not depletion.
At its core, loyalty is about worth. When you forget your worth, you give loyalty away hoping it'll buy you belonging, hoping that it will buy you rewards. When you remember your worth, you offer loyalty as a gift, not a transaction. And less resentment shows up because you're like, I want to do this. I'm doing this out of pure, you know, love for it or pure service, right? I'm not doing this from an unclean place.
So if you've been overextending, over delivering, overstaying, ask yourself, what if the most loyal thing I could do is not stay, but stay true? You can love the people, respect the mission, and still choose you. That's not quitting. That's leadership. If this episode resonated, share it with another woman who's learning to be loyal to herself again, who wants to connect with herself deeply. And if you're ready to lead with power without losing yourself, you'll find ways to work with me in the show notes. Until next time, remember, the most powerful form of loyalty is self-loyalty.
All right. Have a beautiful week ahead. Go and be loyal to yourself. Be kind to yourself and make things happen for you. Reclaim that self-worth. I'm thinking of you. You can do this. I will talk to you soon. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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