Episode 354: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Stand in Your Truth, with Tracy Litt

Tracy Litt on How to Stop People-Pleasing by Working With Your Nervous System

Tracy Litt is a global transformational speaker and the founder of The School of Becoming®. After twelve years as a VP of Human Resources, she went back to school at 38 and built her life around one mission: loving women back into life. In our conversation, she shares how to stop people-pleasing in a way that actually lasts, so you can finally live in your truth.

I’m Sarah Walton, a wealth consciousness coach and the host of the Game On Girlfriend® podcast. Here, we talk about wealth in every area of life, including money, health, relationships, and personal growth. Maybe you’ve read all the books and taken the courses, and only one or two things ever stuck. It’s so annoying. You catch yourself saying, “Ah, I know better than this.” So what’s a girl got to do to get something to actually stick? Tracy has the answer, and it starts in your body.

Right now, a lot of women are carrying economic uncertainty, packed schedules, and the pressure to keep everything looking fine. If that’s you, girlfriend, listen for the moments where you overperform, overfunction, or keep the peace at your own expense. Tracy fires people up in such a gentle way. By the time you’re done listening, you’ll know exactly how to step into your next moment without freaking out. So pop in those earphones, and let’s get to it.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• What brought Tracy to this work, from single motherhood to losing her mom at 24
• Tracy’s first step when you feel called out, and why it’s slower than you’d expect
• How high-functioning codependence gets praised, with a nod to Teri Cole’s Boundary Boss
• What to say instead of “What’s wrong?” when someone is emotional
• How Tracy turns down an invitation honestly, without making up a story
• The two layers of your nervous system, and why “just change your mind” doesn’t work
• Why your thoughts are options, not facts
• The story of The Becoming House, and why “Let go and let Tracy” became her motto
• Tracy’s free live virtual event, The Disco Ball Effect

Listen to the full episode

Watch to the full episode

Why Tracy Can’t Stomach a World of Women Half Living

Oh my gosh, you guys. I’ve never had an interview move this quickly. Tracy covered so much ground, and when I asked why she chose this work out of every path in front of her, I got head-to-toe chills.

“I cannot stomach a world of women half living. I can’t stomach a world where we continue to perpetuate our foremothers’ paradigms.” — Tracy Litt

Her reasons are personal. Tracy walked through her own unworthiness, including years of ignoring red flags and making excuses for them. When her daughter was eight months old, she became a single mother. That’s when she realized she was the environment her daughter would create from.

Losing her mother at 24 shaped her, too. It taught her there are no guarantees. We like to think we’ll get to be old and gray, but none of us know for sure.

Eventually, Tracy began guiding women, and she started to see what happens when a woman “unlocks.” Her spine straightens. She has the shoulders of a queen. In Tracy’s words, her amnesia is gone, and she knows who she is and what she’s capable of. Tracy has witnessed that moment a gazillion times, and she says it’s like the first time every time.

The Physical Cost of Not Telling the Truth

Dancing around what we actually need to say is exhausting. It’s painful, too. A couple of weekends before we recorded, I hosted a retreat. The day before it started, someone I hadn’t talked to in a while sent me a photo from a retreat I’d led 10 years ago.

My face was so puffy and so unhappy. When I looked at it, I thought, that’s the physical effect of not telling the truth. I actually passed the photo around at the retreat, and everyone said I look younger now. That’s what we carry when we don’t live in our truth.

How to Stop People-Pleasing: Start by Slowing Down

When I asked Tracy where a woman should begin, she gave two answers. The highest one is to come into The School of Becoming and do her Neuro-Identity Evolution® work. This work blends neuroscience, somatics, energetics, and healing. Through it, she teaches what, quite frankly, everyone should have learned in school. That includes how your neurobiology works, how you became who you are, and how to rewire yourself.

Her second answer is something you can start today: slow down. Notice how fast you walk from your bed to the coffee pot. Then pay attention to the rush after the car line, when you’re on the phone, grabbing the Amazon package, and running into the house. And yes, Tracy says that includes standing while you eat lunch, even though you promised yourself you’d stop.

As you slow down, you can build the skill of noticing. Tracy calls this interoception: your ability to sense what’s happening inside your body. That might be a hunger cue, a racing heartbeat, or your shoulders cowering because you’re about to shrink.

You can also notice how you’re showing up. For example, maybe you got an invitation, and everything in your body said, “Oh, hell no.” And then you said yes. Tracy’s response is, “That’s fascinating, right?” Noticing is the skill of awareness, and it’s the first step if you want to stop people-pleasing. Plus, the higher your awareness, the higher your consciousness goes.

I talk about wealth consciousness all the time, and it all comes down to this: consciousness is awareness.

“If we can actually dial in what we’re paying attention to, everything changes.” — Sarah Walton

Why It’s So Hard to Stop People-Pleasing When We Get Rewarded for It

One of my favorite books is Boundary Boss by Teri Cole. Inside it, she talks about high-functioning codependence. As women, we hear over and over that our emotions bother other people and that they’re inconvenient. Meanwhile, we can do 15 things at once, and we get rewarded for it. People say, “Oh, she’s so selfless.”

Tracy knows Teri and calls her “a magic woman.” She also explained why this pattern keeps going. We live in a society built on lack, fear, and separation. So it keeps cheering us on, saying, “Yeah, girl, go ahead. Exhaust yourself.” It’s as if we’re competing for a warped award for who’s the most burnt out.

When you think about it, we’re rewarding women for not having a self. That’s exactly why each of us has to do our own work to stop people-pleasing.

“Our culture and our society and the collective cannot change if we all stay the same, hoping for change outside of us.” — Tracy Litt

Two Ways Women Can Stop People-Pleasing Together

Because we model for one another, Tracy shared two things we can start doing right away to help each other stop people-pleasing.

1. Stop Asking “What’s Wrong?”

When you see a woman, feeling her feelings, skip “What’s wrong?” and “Why are you crying?” Those questions call up the ego and suggest something is wrong. In reality, you have no idea why she’s emoting. It could be grief, joy, or overwhelm.

Instead, Tracy suggests you say, “I see you. I’m here.” You could also say, “I’m here. Let me know what you need.” Or you can simply sit with her and say nothing. Each option models something different, and none of them treat emotion as a problem. That’s actually one of Tracy’s specialties: shifting women’s relationship with expression, whether it’s emotional, energetic, physical, or vocal.

2. Be Honest, and Don’t Make Up a Story

Next, be honest when you don’t want to do something. Say a friend invites you to a dinner party and you said yes. Then, as it gets closer, you realize you need the night to yourself. Tracy tells her friend she loves her, and that her truth is she needs a bath, some quiet, and an early night. Then she says it plainly: “I’m not coming.”

She could write 17 books on how women respond to that kind of honesty. Most often, they say, “Oh my god, thank you.” Many didn’t want to go to the thing either.

“If we’re gonna model something different, we have to become different.” — Tracy Litt

Tracy is clear that this isn’t easy, because your body will push back even when your mind knows better. Your adaptive behavior, your fawn response (that urge to please and appease when you feel unsafe), and your people-pleasing will all chime in with, “But what if they…?” Still, there’s so much conversation about how to stop people-pleasing, and what drives her nuts is that we keep talking instead of acting. Her advice is simple: be different.

Of course, not everyone says thank you. Some people get upset. In those moments, Tracy says, “Okay, thanks for sharing. I appreciate that you feel that way.” Then she leaves it at that, without changing her truth.

What It Really Costs When You Don’t Stop People-Pleasing

We avoid our truth because we want people to like us and include us. Nobody wants to feel abandoned or betrayed. Yet in the process, Tracy points out, we’re betraying, rejecting, and abandoning ourselves. I think that’s at the heart of most of the healing we have to do. We have to forgive ourselves for betraying ourselves.

Tracy has worked to stop people-pleasing in her own life, too. Over the last couple of years, she’s practiced one phrase in particular.

“It’s safe for people to misunderstand me. It’s totally cool if they don’t get who I am or why I made that choice.” — Tracy Litt

Coming Home to Your Wholeness

When you’re that okay with yourself, someone else being upset about it has nothing to do with you. I told Tracy that’s planet shifting. She agreed, because a woman who operates that way knows she’s whole. That wholeness means your worthiness, your lovability, and your significance. You’re whole because you’re breathing. As a result, there’s nothing you can do to earn more of it, and nothing that takes it away.

Think about how many hours you get back when you stop people-pleasing. No more hemming and hawing, no more second-guessing, and no more playing the “I’m not enough” game.

“The exhaustion comes from people-pleasing and placating and betraying yourself, thinking that being externally validated and externally resourced is the way we’re going to get anywhere.” — Tracy Litt

Tracy loves the moment when a woman finally gets it and says, “Wait. So the fastest path to fulfillment and success is to be me all the time?” Yes. I see something similar in my work. A woman realizes, “Oh, I can make money once I realize I’m whole.” From there, she gets to generate it.

Your Identity Is Creating Your Reality

Next, I asked Tracy what’s actually happening in our brains as this conditioning takes hold. She started with the foundation.

“Your identity is what’s creating your reality. Period. End of story.” — Tracy Litt

Your identity includes your self-image, the language you choose, your beliefs, how you carry yourself, and what you believe is available to you. The command center of all of it is your nervous system. That’s why personal growth can feel good for a while and then fade. If the work doesn’t reach the nervous system, you end up regressing back to who you were. That’s also why so many women try to stop people-pleasing and then slide right back into old habits.

Why Your Nervous System Makes It Hard to Stop People-Pleasing

Tracy breaks it down into two layers. 

The first one is true for every human being. It’s basic survival wiring, and it says anything unknown is unsafe. Its job is to keep you the same so you wake up tomorrow and take a breath. The catch is that everything about becoming different is unknown.

Here’s how that plays out. Say you decide, “I am a woman who says no when she means no.” Then the moment comes to actually say it. Your brain scans for evidence that you’ve ever spoken your truth and lived to tell the tale. It finds nothing, so it trips your fear response. Suddenly you’re thinking, “What are they going to think? What if they get mad at me?” Meanwhile, the adaptive behavior you learned as a child shows up to keep you safe. You fawn, you control, or you overfunction. No wonder it can feel so hard to stop people-pleasing, even when you know better.

The second layer is unique to you. It includes your family of origin, the environment your parents and grandparents grew up in, your birth order, your financial status, and the experiences that shaped you. All of that lives in your nervous system, too.

“If you’re not working at the level of the body, you are not working at the level of the nervous system. It is not a mindset component. It is a body-based experience.” — Tracy Litt

Why “Just Change Your Mind” Won’t Help You Stop People-Pleasing

This is something I always push back on inside the coaching industry. “Just change your mind” is not what we’re doing here. Not even close. And if someone brings up SMART goals with Tracy, she jokes that she might lose her mind.

As Tracy puts it, our world likes it when we’re a floating head. We overthink, overanalyze, ruminate, and create 17 hypotheses of what might go wrong. Tracy explained that our biology often disconnects us from our bodies at some point, because of pain, rejection, or abandonment. Most of us stay disconnected until we realize it’s time to come back in.

Tracy says our two places of power are from the neck down and in our connection to something bigger than us. Whether you call it Source, God, the universe, or something else, she loves it. She’s also clear that mindset is fabulous and necessary. It’s simply a tool, so the question is where you place it and how you use it.

Your Thoughts Are Options, Not Facts

Tracy reminds us that you are not your mind. You are the being with a mind, and your thoughts are options, not facts. Your automatic thoughts are working on behalf of your nervous system, not your dreams or your vision.

That’s also why self-doubt shows up the moment you move toward something new. It’s fear’s first line of defense. Tracy even calls imposter syndrome a lie. If you believe those thoughts, you sit back down and do nothing. Your nervous system wins, because it kept you the same. In Tracy’s words, it’s “employee of the month every month,” while your dreams fall to the wayside.

Tracy calls herself a “how girl.” In Neuro-Identity Evolution®, she teaches six practical ways to apply this work, because nobody needs more inspiration. I love that. It’s easy to nod along, feel good, and walk away.

She also loves the story of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile after experts said it couldn’t be done. Once he did it, other runners followed. That’s modeling and expansion. I love telling that story, too, and I say the same thing about the Declaration of Independence: not a country, not a country, and then, boom, a country.

The Becoming House: When You Move, the Universe Can Move

Tracy also shared the story of The Becoming House, and it’s a great example of the universe doing more for you than your need for control ever could.

After Tracy and her husband became empty nesters, they moved into a condo in downtown Delray. A year and a half later, her husband wanted a house again, and her daughters didn’t love visiting a place they hadn’t grown up in. On top of that, Tracy wanted to stop working out of her living room. Her husband suggested moving back to their house in the suburbs. Everything in her body said no.

So she asked the universe for another option, and then she took action. She started walking through neighborhoods near the condo. One night on Zillow, she found a main house plus a 1938 guest house that no one had touched in decades. Her whole body flushed. She showed her husband, who asked, “Do we really need all that?” Tracy told him to go back to bed.

“You’re responsible to protect your energy. If you allow yourself to be influenced by the people around you that are going to pull you out of it, that’s on you, not on them.” — Tracy Litt

Let Go and Let Tracy

Protecting your energy is part of how you stop people-pleasing, too. When Tracy toured the property, the foundation was dipping, and the guest house smelled like mildew. Her realtor and her husband said they didn’t see her vision. Tracy described women on swings, parties around the mango tree, and a mixer by the pool. Then she gave them a new motto: “Let go and let Tracy.”

They moved in that January, and renovations started in February. Today, The Becoming House hosts private retreats, intensives, small curated retreats for eight women, and community events. In fact, Tracy recorded our interview from her olive-green office there.

She also made a point I want you to hear. It happened because she didn’t need it. She’s whole, so this was gravy.

“When you move, God can move. When you move, the universe can move.” — Tracy Litt

How a Full-Body Yes Helps You Stop People-Pleasing

Since so many of us are disconnected from our bodies, I asked Tracy what she felt walking through the house. Her legs tingled. A flush of warmth came over her, and tears came to her eyes. It was a full-body “yes”, in the form of a knowing.

That knowing didn’t make her careless, either. She brought in every inspector and evaluator so she’d have all the information. But nothing could knock her off her knowing. Learning to trust that kind of knowing is a big part of how you stop people-pleasing. According to Tracy, living by external validation is our foremothers’ game. The new paradigm is internally resourced, with internal knowing and internal conviction.

What I Want You to Know About How to Stop People-Pleasing

Tracy is so clearly here to do this work, and you can feel it in her energy. Being a girlfriend means understanding that the game is on, and this is not your practice life. Part of that is remembering how whole you already are.

“You’ve always been whole. That’s real. That’s yours. And you’re just going to come home to what was always there before the world had its way with you.” — Sarah Walton

The world hands us limiting beliefs and a whole lot of scarcity. Coming home to your wholeness is how you stop people-pleasing, start trusting your own knowing, and build a life and business that feel like yours.

About Tracy Litt

Tracy Litt is a global transformational speaker, facilitator, and the founder of The School of Becoming®, a personal growth and evolution company redefining how high-achieving leaders rise. Her signature work, Neuro-Identity Evolution® and The Choice Method®, integrates neuroscience, somatics, energetics, and healing to guide leaders into the next version of themselves. Before this work, Tracy spent twelve years as a VP of Human Resources in the eldercare industry. She left the executive track, went back to school at 38, and earned certifications in professional coaching, master energy work, neuro-somatics, and hypnotherapy. Tracy is the international bestselling author of Worthy Human, a TEDx speaker, a Forbes-featured expert, and a SUCCESS Magazine Top 125 Global Thought Leader. She’s also a wife and a mother to three college-age daughters in a blended family.

Connect with Tracy

• Website: The School of Becoming
• Instagram: @thetracylitt

Book Mentioned in This Episode

• Boundary Boss by Teri Cole

Tracy’s Free Gift — The Disco Ball Effect

If you’re ready to start living these ideas instead of just nodding along, join Tracy for The Disco Ball Effect. It’s a free, live, virtual event all about shining the fullest expression of who you are. You guys, take advantage of this. You’ll meet with Tracy three times over seven days: a teaching session on a Tuesday, a second session on Thursday, and a wrap-up the following Tuesday. In between, you’ll put the work into practice. A VIP upgrade is also available if you want it.

Related Episodes You’ll Love

Episode 352: The Achievement Wound — Why Success Never Feels Like Enough — Tracy talks about overperforming and overfunctioning to feel worthy. In this solo episode, I explain why using achievement to prove your worth never gets you there, and how to start healing that wound. Listen here

Episode 263: How Your Nervous System Shapes Your Money Habits with Stephanie Crochet — Tracy explains why lasting change has to happen at the level of the nervous system. Stephanie shows how that same survival wiring shapes your money habits, plus practices to help you heal from the inside out. Listen here

Episode 172: Sick of People Pleasing? Childhood Trauma Might Be The Source with Kalpa Gupta — Tracy describes how adaptive behaviors like fawning show up to keep us safe. Kalpa shares how people-pleasing often starts as a coping mechanism from childhood, and how to stop judging yourself for it. Listen here

Let’s Talk About What Changes When You Stop People-Pleasing in Your Business

You might be noticing where you say yes when your body says no, or where you overfunction to keep everyone else comfortable. If so, let’s talk. As my gift to Girlfriends, I offer a free 30-minute discovery call. Together, we’ll look at where you are right now and what becomes possible when you lead from your own knowing.

Connect with Sarah

• Instagram: @thesarahwalton
• LinkedIn: Sarah Walton
• Free resources for you
• Join the Game On Girlfriend® community — subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube

Love This Episode?

Think about a girlfriend who’s running on empty from keeping everyone else happy. Share this episode with her. It might be exactly what she needs to stop people-pleasing and remember how alive and whole she’s allowed to feel in this one and only life.

About Sarah Walton

Sarah Walton is a wealth consciousness coach, strategic advisor, and the host of the Game On Girlfriend® podcast. Her mission is simple: to put more money in the hands of more women. She helps women entrepreneurs build profitable, sustainable businesses without burnout — working through both the mindset and the strategy sides of growth. Because when women have more financial power, they don’t just keep it — they use it to take care of their families, support their communities, and build something bigger than themselves. Through her programs — including the Abundance Academy and The Art of Receiving — along with her online courses and one-on-one coaching, Sarah works with women who are ready to build profitable businesses and use that financial power to make a real difference in the world around them.