Done Being Last

Done Being Last is a podcast for high-achieving women over 40 who are ready to stop putting themselves at the bottom of their own list.

Coming last is a habit.Habits were learned.They can be unlearned.

New episode every week. Hit subscribe and you won’t miss it.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Hi everyone,

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how you became the person who handles everything while secretly feeling disconnected from what you actually want, this one is for you.

Registration for Interrupt Yourself is officially open. I’m talking about the shift from high-functioning self-abandonment to actually coming home to yourself.

Watch the video above, and if this resonates, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And if you’re ready to step off the exhaustion treadmill, you can find all the details to join us below.

Sending support,

Carolina

Save your seat by clicking on the button below.

If you’ve ever read a book about boundaries, tried a script, done the journalling, understood the pattern intellectually — and then found yourself doing it again anyway — this episode is for you.

Because the thing I want to say first is this: it’s not because you didn’t try hard enough. It’s not because you lack willpower or self-awareness or the right information.

It’s because the tools were aimed at the wrong thing.

FOUR REASONS THE SCRIPTS KEEP FAILING

Most of the advice out there for women who over-give, people-please, and say yes when they mean no — it targets behaviour. It gives you language. It teaches you to set a boundary, to say the thing, to hold the line.

And it keeps failing. Not because the advice is wrong, exactly. But because of four problems.

The first one: wrong target. The tools are aimed at the behaviour. The pattern lives in the nervous system. Those are not the same address.

The second: wrong timing. By the time you’re thinking about setting a boundary, the pattern has already fired. The yes is already on its way out of your mouth. You’re not making a decision in that moment — you’re completing a reflex.

The third: wrong tool. Awareness does not override a nervous system response. You cannot think your way out of a physiological reaction. Knowing better does not produce doing better. If it did, none of us would still be here.

The fourth: wrong level. Surface changes cannot reach a pattern that was built decades ago, at the root. You can put new behaviour on top of an old structure all you like. The structure remains.

Knowing better does not produce doing better. If it did, none of us would still be here.

WHERE IT ACTUALLY COMES FROM

So if it’s not a knowledge problem, and not a willpower problem — what is it?

What we call people-pleasing, over-giving, difficulty saying no, and constantly putting yourself last often have the same root: self-abandonment.

That’s the thing I most want you to hear in this episode, and to really let land. Not as a concept. As something that is true about your specific history.

At some point — probably when you were very young — your system learned that being needed was safer than being yourself. That love felt conditional on being easy, being good, being manageable. That conflict was dangerous. That being too much had consequences.

So you adapted. You learned to read the room. You learned to anticipate needs before they were spoken. You learned to adjust before anyone asked you to. You became exceptionally good at being who other people needed you to be. The problem is that somewhere along the way, you stopped asking who you needed to be for yourself.

And it worked. That’s the part that gets missed in conversations like this. The adaptation worked. It kept you connected. It kept you safe. Your nervous system did exactly what it was supposed to do with the information it had.

THE MISREAD

The pattern is still trying to protect you. But what once protected you is now costing you your energy, your clarity, your confidence, and your connection to yourself.

It doesn’t know you’re no longer that younger version of yourself who needed those strategies to feel safe. It’s still running the same program — still reading a moment of tension or disapproval as danger, still reaching for the old response that once kept you safe.

You are not failing. You are operating from a pattern that once protected you. And now it’s time to decide whether that pattern still gets to lead your life.

But you can’t teach a nervous system something new by thinking at it. You teach it through experience. Through new evidence. Through tiny, repeated moments where you do something different and survive.

THE ONE PRACTICE THIS WEEK

I’m not going to give you a tool to use yet. That comes next episode.

This week, the only practice is to notice.

Not change. Not fix. Not perform differently.

Just — when the pattern moves through you, say quietly to yourself:

There it is.

There is the moment I leave myself.

That’s it. Just see it.

Don’t make it mean anything. Don’t judge it. Don’t try to do it differently in the moment.

Just let it be real.

Because you can’t change a pattern you haven’t learned to see.

And you can’t return to yourself until you recognize the places you’ve been leaving yourself.

As mentioned, I’m hosting a 3-Day Workshop called Interrupt Yourself. Register below.

I want to tell you a story.

Not a coaching story. Not an example I use to illustrate a point. A real one. One I carried with me for years before I could say it out loud without feeling the shame of it again.

We were at a small club. A group of us — friends, music, that easy kind of night where everyone’s relaxed and you feel like yourself. I was with a man I was seeing. And at some point in the evening, he turned to me and said: go get me $200.

I laughed. I said no.

And then the badgering started. The sulking. The petulant silence that I knew, by then, how to read. I knew what it meant and I knew what it would cost me not to end it.

And I went.

I walked away from that table, away from my friends who were watching, and I got the money. My money. And I handed it to him.

THE WEIGHT OF IT

I hated myself in that moment. Not in an abstract way. In the very specific, physical way that shame lives in the body — in the chest, in the throat, in the way your face feels when you sit back down and pretend nothing happened.

Some of my friends looked away. A couple looked at me with something I didn’t want to name.

And I just adjusted. I smiled. I went back to the night.

Because that’s what I did. I was very good at adjusting.

WHAT I DIDN’T HAVE THEN

I didn’t have a word for it then. I just thought it was what you did to keep the peace. I thought the alternative — the fight, the scene, the coldness for days — was worse than the thing itself. So I weighed it up, the way I always weighed it up, and I chose the easier path.

Except it wasn’t easier. It just had a different kind of cost.

Every time you override yourself to keep someone else comfortable — every time you swallow what you know to avoid the fallout — you make a small withdrawal. From your self-respect. From your trust in yourself. From the version of you who knows what she’s worth.

I made a lot of withdrawals in that relationship. That night was one of the more visible ones. Most of them were quieter. A shrug when I had an opinion. A yes when I meant no. A silence that started to feel, after a while, like my personality.

The silence that started to feel like my personality. That’s the line that stops me. Because I remember when I thought it was just me being easygoing.

WHAT CHANGED

I’m not going to tell you there was a single moment where everything shifted. That’s not how this works. It was slower than that, and messier, and there were a lot of places along the way where I almost went back.

But something did change. And what changed wasn’t that I became a different person. What changed was that I started listening to the person I already was.

That woman — the one who laughed and said no in that first moment — she knew. She always knew. She just didn’t trust that her knowing was enough.

I go inside now. Before I respond. Before I adjust. Before I hand something over that I’m going to want back later. I pause long enough to ask: what do I actually think about this? What do I actually need?

And then — not always perfectly, not every time — I act from there.

WHY I’M TELLING YOU THIS

I’m telling you this because I know I’m not the only one with a night like that.

Maybe yours didn’t happen in a club. Maybe it happened at a dinner table, or in a meeting, or in a thousand small moments that you can barely name because they happened so automatically you barely registered them as choices.

But somewhere in you, there is a moment you know.

A moment where you knew what you needed and did the other thing anyway.

That moment is where this work begins.

WHAT’S COMING

Over the next four episodes, I’m going to walk you through what I’ve learned — from my own life, and from the women I work with — about why this pattern exists, what it actually takes to interrupt it, how to find your voice again when it’s gone quiet, and what it looks like when the whole structure of your life has been shaped by it.

Not theory. Not scripts. The real thing.

I’m glad you’re here.