What Was Really Holding Me Back
I’ve been struggling to show up.
Not in the way people usually mean when they say that. I know my work. I know my value. I know what I believe about project management and people and the way businesses should treat their teams.
But putting myself out there by producing content, claiming authority, or just being visible, has felt like something close to terror.
I chose that word deliberately. This wasn’t just nerves. It’s stronger than anxiety. It’s terror.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to logic my way out of it. Telling myself the fear isn’t rational. That no one is going to hurt me for posting on LinkedIn. That the worst that could happen is someone disagrees with me, and I can handle that.
The logic was right. But the terror didn’t move.
That’s because the pattern wasn’t coming from my intellect. It was older than that. No amount of rational thinking was going to reach it.
What Behavioral Intelligence Taught Me About Myself
Recently I worked through a deep coaching exercise built around the framework of Behavioral Intelligence. It’s the science of understanding why you do what you do, rooted in the conditioned patterns absorbed from your environment, your upbringing, and your lived experience.
It’s not mindset work or positive thinking. It’s pattern-level work.
What came up stopped me in my tracks.
The terror I feel around visibility isn’t about judgment. It isn’t imposter syndrome. It isn’t even really about business at all.
It’s a survival pattern. One encoded so deeply that my nervous system responds to the idea of being fully seen as a bold voice, a strong opinion, an authority, the same way it would respond to a genuine physical threat.
The body doesn’t reason. It just protects.
Here’s what makes survival patterns so persistent: they find current-life evidence to confirm themselves. Every piece of criticism, every cold response, every moment of pushback becomes proof. The pattern says “see, I told you.”
The logical mind knows the stakes are incomparably lower. The pattern doesn’t measure magnitude. It just confirms itself and wins by exhaustion.
The Real Origin Story
When I went looking for where this pattern began, I found something I wasn’t expecting.
It wasn’t one moment. It was a lineage.
My father worked in a factory. A hot one. No air conditioning. So hot, in fact, that the plant would shut down for three weeks every July because it was simply too dangerous to keep workers inside.
Someone, somewhere, had done the math. And the math said the cost of cooling the building was higher than the cost of closing it for the summer.
My father’s comfort and safety was a line item in a spreadsheet. It was something to be calculated against profit.
That made me angry then. It makes me angry now.
My mother carried a different kind of weight. She was working, raising kids, and running a household — all at once, all the time, because that’s what society expected of her. There was no room to drop anything. No permission to say “this is too much.” We watched her push and push until she was at her limit, and myself and my sibling had to be the ones to tell her: it’s okay to let some things go. You don’t have to carry all of this.
Picture two teenage girls telling their mother that they would rather have no presents under the Christmas tree and Mom happy rather than gifts and Mom going insane trying to get everything done during the holidays. That conversation happened, in those words.
She heard us. But the expectation that had been placed on her quietly, culturally, and relentlessly, had already done its work.
And then there was me.
I became a working mother. I had a career, children, and a household to run. And I felt every bit of what my mother had felt: the pressure to hold it all together, to not let anything slip, to be everything to everyone without complaint.
At the same time, I was navigating workplaces that had their own version of that message: we don’t care what problems you have. Just get it done.
So I got it done. At the cost of my health. More than once.
Three generations. Three versions of the same pattern. The external system that grinds people down. The societal expectation that does the same. And the internal voice — inherited, absorbed, reinforced — that says you have to keep going no matter what it costs you.
And somewhere in all of that anger, the exhaustion, in the watching and the living and the repeating, a conviction was born.
Your people are the most important part of any project. And I want to be sure they are treated as such.
That’s not a tagline I workshopped. That’s not a brand message I crafted with a consultant. That is the thing I believe more deeply than almost anything else. The thing I have been building Pastel Fire around.
The thing I have been afraid to say loudly.
The Part That Hurt Most
Here’s what the coaching process also surfaced.
I haven’t just witnessed people being treated as resources. I’ve lived it.
Projects where the message was clear: “We don’t care what problems you have. Just get it done.”
And I complied. I pushed through exhaustion and illness, because it needed to get done. I was the one who would get it done.
I didn’t just watch my father’s story. I didn’t just witness my mother’s. I repeated them both.
I became the person I was trying to protect others from becoming. And somewhere in that repetition, Pastel Fire was born — not just as a business, but as a correction. As the thing that should have existed for my father in that factory, for my mother carrying a job, and a household, and children. For every team member who was told their humanity was inconvenient.
Pastel Fire is the answer to the question I wish someone had been asking in those rooms a long time ago: “What about the people?”
The Breakthrough
At the end of the coaching session, I was asked whether I was willing to show up anyway, even if the fear never fully disappeared. Even if the vulnerability hangover never went away. Even if the world never gave me explicit permission to be fully visible.
My answer surprised me with how quickly it came.
“Yes. Or I wouldn’t be here.”
And then: “The world won’t stop and neither will I.”
Those two sentences didn’t come from strategy. They came from somewhere beneath the pattern. From the same place the conviction came from. From my father’s factory, and my mother’s overcrowded shoulders, and every project where I pushed through anyway, and from every person currently on a team somewhere being told their problems don’t matter.
I realized in that moment: the commitment to show up is already there. It has been there the whole time. I’ve just been feeling the cost of it in my nervous system while my soul had already moved on.
What This Means for How I Show Up Now
I’m not writing this post because the fear is gone. It isn’t.
I’m writing it because the world won’t stop, and neither will I.
Because somewhere right now there is a project manager being told to just get it done. A team lead absorbing pressure from above and passing it down. A consultant watching a client grind their people into exhaustion in the name of delivery.
And they deserve to know there is a different way.
That servant leadership isn’t soft. That protecting your people isn’t weakness. That the most sustainable path to getting things done is treating the humans doing the work as the most valuable asset in the room rather than a cost to be managed.
My father didn’t have a voice like that in his corner. My mother didn’t either. And for a long time, neither did I.
I’m choosing to be that voice.
Not perfectly. Not without terror. Not without the occasional vulnerability hangover.
But consistently. Loudly. And with everything that’s brought me to this point.
Denise is the founder of Pastel Fire Business Consulting, a project management consulting practice built on servant leadership and the belief that your people are the most important part of any project. Based in the Netherlands, Denise works with businesses ready to blaze through projects without burning out their teams.
Connect on LinkedIn or visit pastelfirebusinessconsulting.com/contact/ to learn more.