Prefer to listen? Listen to Episode 36: Stop Performing Your Life: How to Show Up Authentically in Summer
Summer is a season of visibility—long days, outdoor gatherings, and endless opportunities to be seen. But for many of us, this increased visibility comes with a hidden cost: the pressure to perform. We smile when we're tired, match others' energy when we don't have it, and carefully manage how people perceive us instead of simply being present.
In this episode, Blaze dismantles the exhausting habit of "performance mode" and invites you to explore what it feels like to show up authentically with your real emotions, your actual capacity, and your true self. She shares personal stories about parenting, social exhaustion, and the liberation that comes from being "caught" not performing. Whether you're navigating loud gatherings, feeling pressured to amp up your joy, or struggling to leave an event when your capacity is full, this conversation offers a compassionate framework for being seen without managing how you're perceived.
🌿 In this episode we explore:
- What "performance mode" looks like and why it costs more energy than being honest.
- The difference between being seen and managing how you're seen during summer.
- How sensitive people slip into performance to protect others' comfort and belonging.
- Practical ways to notice when you're pretending interest, enthusiasm, or energy.
- Why children often notice when we're faking it—and how that can be liberating.
- How to handle the discomfort of being "caught" not performing (tired, annoyed, quiet).
- Strategies for participating in social situations without matching everyone's energy.
- The freedom of building relationships where you can show up authentically without apology.
- Why your actual lived life is enough—you don't need to amp it up to belong.
- How to trust that people will still invite you and value you when you're honest about your capacity.
All right, my friends, I am so happy to be back and speaking with you today because this week I want to talk about performance and what it feels like to be on all the time and how a lot of us put on a performance without realizing that we are because either we're protecting ourselves or we're protecting a perception of how things are or we're trying to set an example.
Or it just became the thing that we did long enough that we forgot that we were doing it. And if you're ever feeling like there's just this level of underlying frustration about what's going on and how you're showing up and where you're going and what you're doing,
Some of that might be tied into feeling like you have to be on all the time and that you're always putting on a face or acting or behaving or expressing emotions that aren't actually real or how you're truly feeling at the time.
I want to take some time this week to talk about how it's okay to feel how we're actually feeling and how sometimes we feel just as frustrated when the expression of emotion is only slightly off as we do when it's really off.
So we all know that if I go somewhere that I don't want to be and I'm angry about it and I put on the face of I'm happy to be here and isn't it wonderful to socialize,
We all expect that I'm pissed off and angry and it feels very uncomfortable and I'm building resentment while I'm there.
But it's equally true that if I show up someplace that I want to be, and I'm not actually having as much fun or being as enthused about a conversation that's happening and I put on the face of being more interested than I am, and I kind of want to move over to another conversation...
So I'm still in an environment that I like. I'm still doing something that I want to do and I maybe even I'm with people that I really care about and want to be there.
I still have a dissonance going on and I'm still putting on a performance in that moment, trying to project either more ease or appreciation or whatever interest may be in a topic that I'm not as interested in.
And it gives me the feedback of feeling like I've not wasted, but I've expended a lot of energy to do that.
It always costs us more energy to pretend something than to actually feel something.
And for many, many reasons, right? Like just being in social circles, we do learn to do that. And it's probably coming from a great place, which is we want everyone to be...
I don't know. Having a good time feeling like we connect and we care about each other and we're interested in each other's stuff and a lot of times it's true.
And sometimes it's not. And if we're continually, many, many times a day or in many situations, pretending interest where it's not there, pretending enthusiasm, where maybe we just don't have that much energy.
Kind of damping down how tired we are to be able to give someone else a better experience. At the end of the day, we're even more exhausted than we would have been if we had just been honest about it and participated at the level that our capacity was actually there for.
So this week, I want to talk about being present and how we can be present without performing.
Because I think that would bring so much relief to so many interactions to realize that it actually is safe and okay to show up with your friends in particular and with your family, often, as the person you really are
Without putting on any kind of airs of interest when you're not interested, of excitement when you're not excited, to just show your real emotions and give yourself some practice in doing that so that it becomes more normal for you, more expected.
And you realize that it isn't usually the end of the world if we just actually are the way we are.
And that when we give ourselves permission to have the space we need and build that capacity back up, we actually show up more often and more frequently with enthusiasm like genuine joy.
Genuine interest, more happiness about everything that we're doing because we've had the time to build up that energy and have the ability to even feel that.
Mmm, it's so good. So here's what performance mode looks like.
It can look like smiling at everybody when you're tired and getting up and like starting cleaning the room even though you don't really want to do it, but it's just so that you're kind of showing that you're caring for the space or you're just trying to get people to leave, whatever it is.
It can be staying longer than you want to do when you go out with a group of friends.
It can be trying to match everybody's energy. Have you ever been in that group of people where everyone's really enthused and they're excited and they're talking about things that maybe you don't really know as much about, but you try to match how excited they are and get into it as much as them?
This also, it's a little bit unnatural and sometimes it's great, but sometimes it's really just performing and it's tiring.
It can look like feeling that you need to contribute something socially in every interaction that you find yourself a part of. So you run into someone at the grocery store, you feel like you need to come up with a story or something important to share with them or you're trying to connect deeply when you actually only have five minutes and you want to get out of there.
And most of all, performance looks like monitoring how everyone is perceiving you.
It's not even necessarily about what you're doing. It's about your energy being expended on awareness of what every single thing you do, posture that you take, word that you say.
might impact someone else or change what they're thinking or how they're feeling and really that then translates into you modifying everything that you want to do.
So again, sensitive women slip into performance a lot because, you know, you're reading the room, we're adjusting our energy to match other people, and we really want to have this feeling of belonging and feeling included and not wanting to be the quiet one or the difficult one.
And it's a learned social behavior. We have spent a lot of our lives learning how to be an easygoing person or the helpful person or the one who keeps everything running smoothly when we're in these big groups of people.
So I don't think that any of this stuff is inherently bad and I would never advise anyone in a million years to just give up monitoring what other people are feeling or thinking. I think that's so deeply human and that's so important to the way that we relate to the world around us and how we care about people. It's just innately going to happen. You're going to care.
What I do want to introduce is the concept of allowing your actual feelings to be more present in those moments. So, for example, like being at a party and there's a big loud social group and everybody's talking about something that they're finding really interesting that you're not as interested in.
And instead of trying to force yourself to come up with ways to participate in the conversation, allowing yourself to recognize, "Oh yeah, I'm about to try to do that," but instead I think I'd rather just fill up my water, or get a drink and listen to everybody and not put so much energy into relating to something that might not be that important to me as soon as I leave this room that's probably never going to come up again.
So it's kind of recognizing the moments that it's happening and being with yourself with compassion in those moments and going, "Oh, hey, here I am."
I'm about to smile when I don't mean it, or I see that I am smiling, but I can feel that there's so much tension in my jaw, and it hasn't reached my eyes.
And here's something that I can say is true. Children notice when we're faking it so much better than adults most of the time, or they've just, they never learned not to call it out.
Maybe as adults, we notice that other people are performing too, and we've learned that it's socially nicer not to go like, "Oh, you clearly aren't having a good time." Like, we just go with it and say, "Oh, you want me to believe that you're having a good time, so I'm just gonna give that a pass."
But a kid will show up and be like, "You seem pissed off." Or just say whatever it is that they know that you're radiating already.
So I have found my experience of parenthood to be really liberating in that when she points out stuff like that for me, instead of thinking like, "Oh no, this is terrible. My kid's being so annoying," I go, "God, what a relief to be seen as I actually am,"
To be given permission to just like - why fake something that I clearly am not faking very well anyway, and just go with it, and it's actually teaching me how to be with my own discomfort or my own social awkwardness.
And just call it out as what it is instead of trying to make it better in an artificial way or be someone that I'm not.
If you've listened to this podcast for a while or my previous one, you know that I get quickly overwhelmed in social situations when there's a lot of a crowd.
So I love being around all my people. I love gathering them to me. And I get super overwhelmed once the loudness level goes beyond a certain level, and also if I've been interacting deeply for many hours.
And I feel like I've judged myself in the past for that because it seems like my fuse is so much shorter than everyone else's or like my ability to get through it is just like a longer line.
My husband can hang out with people all day and be perfectly fine and not feel like he needs to go on a very long walk afterwards. And then for me, I can sometimes be in an intense interaction, be having a great time and then being like, well, I'm gonna go for a walk now because I need to just re-regulate myself and get myself back to having enough capacity to come back and deal with everyone.
And what it looks like for me in those moments is if I don't give myself that, if I don't build in the break or recognize that it's about to happen, I start getting snippy. I start to...
It's almost like pretending to be tired because I've learned as a kid it's safe to say you're tired, but not to say I'm annoyed with you, please go away. (laughs)
It's so funny. I tell you guys everything on this podcast like all these inner thoughts that I have because I think they are deeply human and the more that I interact with children and my kids' friends. I recognize that actually
This is the human experience. I'm not actually a bad person for feeling that way. Everyone feels that way at some point to some degree.
And we all just have learned how to pretend and put on a performance about how we really feel. Here's something else that I can say that is incredible is that in being the mother to my child and having all these deep discussions about feelings.
I've recognized that for her, it's no big deal and she is building such a language of being able to say, "I'm angry" and then bounce back from it in two or three minutes.
Have the apology or just move on. And it has become so regulating for both of us and normal.
And we both also celebrate each other when we recognize that we're mad or we're sad, but we handled it in real time with each other and we'll kind of almost narrate it to each other and that's been really helpful for us.
So one day she came up the other night and she was angry about something and then she ended up making me mad because she interrupted what I was doing. I'm like, "I'm trying to write the story. What are you doing?"
And she heard me get angry in my voice. And then she heard me kind of pause, take a breath, and then my voice kind of came back down and I reregulated and I moved on with the conversation. She saw me turn away from what I was doing and set it aside.
And almost immediately she said to me, "Mom, I'm really proud of you. Like I saw how angry you were and you really just... regulated it so fast in that moment."
And I thought, wow, how awesome would everyone's life be if you were getting that kind of feedback in real time? So you might not have a kid who's able to like
project that and reflect it to you in your life or a partner that can.
But certainly we can all start to be that person for ourselves and notice when we're actually having those moments and think and really make that sentence in our mind.
Hey, I just noticed that you were really angry and upset. And I saw you handle it in a way that worked.
And I'm so proud of you. Man, it makes such a difference and it makes showing up without having to perform so much easier because you realize like you can break the script, you can be interrupted and have a real life reaction and it's not going to make your world fall apart and it is going to be okay.
Something else I wanted to bring up for this particular episode is about
There's a distinction between being seen, which is happening a lot in the summer, versus managing how you're being seen. So it's natural this time of year because there's so much going on and there's so much daylight and people are out doing things, everything's open later. Like there's just so many more chances for interaction.
You are being seen all the time.
Managing how you're being seen means that, you know, you're afraid to leave your house without putting on your makeup and dressing up and wondering about like, "Oh no, what if the neighbor sees me and what will they think if I'm in a rush or don't talk to them or whatever?"
Or realizing you're in a rush, putting yourself together really quickly, going out and maybe running into that person or maybe not, and not worrying so much about what their interpretation of your life is.
Or being able to, if you're not able to just let that be, knowing that it's okay to say, "Ah, yeah, I was kind of in a rush this morning and I don't have a lot of time to talk. You can even see that I didn't dress up like I've got to go, but I'll catch up with you later."
Learning those skills and recognizing that it is okay to have those kinds of interactions.
One, I think it definitely gets easier as you go through life. And I don't know if it's that you stop caring as much about what other people think, although maybe that's part of it.
Or that you recognize that what they think is rarely tied to you actually at all.
Maybe that's something that happens as we get older is when we're younger,
We feel like every interaction we have is so deeply impactful and meaningful with everyone around us. And they are, but not in the way we think.
As you get older, you recognize the way people interpret what you do and see what you do is so tied on their knowledge, their experience, what they're expecting and where they're going.
That they might not even have actually seen you at all. And I'm going to relate this to going to the zoo because my daughter and I decided this summer
that instead of doing a lot of summer camps, we were going to have a Zoo membership and be able to go and cultivate some relationships with the animals that I used to know many years ago when I was tattooing. I used to go up to the zoo quite a bit on my Mondays and spend time with the animals, so we're doing that.
And within only a couple of visits,
My daughter again, very observant as she is, points out, "Hey, did you notice that if we sit for any length of time, like beyond five minutes in front of any animal. People come and people go really quickly. They are loud and they're boisterous. They believe they're having an interaction with an animal whether they actually are or not.
And the things that they say, like what they get out of that experience has almost zero to do with what's actually happening in front of them."
And I said, "Bing, bing, bing, good job, great observation!" What do you want to do about that?" What do you think is interesting about being here at the zoo?
And she said, you know, it's really...
She goes, "I thought it would be boring to sit with an animal as long as we were going to do."
Because sometimes we'll just sit for 10 to 15, 20 minutes by an enclosure and just hang out and see what the animals are doing and mimic what they're doing or interact in some way and just see what's happening.
But the average person comes to the zoo and they have an agenda. They're bustling past really fast. And they want to make sure they see everything and maximize their experience.
And for them, that means I don't want to miss anything. I need to see it all. But what ends up happening is
They're in front of the lion enclosure and they're calling them tigers or leopards. They're meeting an animal and saying, "Oh, look at that tiger. He's taking his afternoon nap. Look at him stretch out. What a big powerful animal." And you're like, "Oh, well, that's a female."
Like that, I know this animal's name, I know her history, I know what's going on with her and they...
They're not really interested in being corrected. They don't actually want to know as much as we know about these animals. They just want to be here, see an animal, feel like they've had that connection to move on.
And it made me think, wow, we do that a lot in our lives, and I don't necessarily think there's anything terrible or wrong about that.
But there is something different that happens when we slow down and when we're actually present with ourselves and with other creatures that are in our presence.
So I think there's a big opportunity for us when we think about performing or not performing or being seen versus trying to interpret how that's going to look for other people. It's that wild animals, animals at the zoo, domesticated animals, other people.
They're seen all the time, and they're not worried about how you're perceiving them. They're going to have their life anyway.
We're gonna have our life anyway, whether someone witnesses it or not. So, if that's true, how do you want to spend your time and what do you want to do?
There's so much freedom and relief in that to consider like, wow, I have so much control over my time and my thoughts and my energy in my space.
I will correct that and say sometimes we don't have a lot of control over our thoughts or our energy or space.
Thoughts happen all the time. Energy is what it is, and ebbs and it flows. But we are kind of the curator of that experience, and we get to decide at any moment how we're interpreting that. That's a beautiful thing.
Here's something else that I want to say is that there is some discomfort in deciding that you're not going to perform for other people anymore.
It is awkward to be seen to be bored or seen to be annoyed by someone you care about or your friends and have them point out to you like, "Wow, you just seem..." (usually people will be polite.) "You seem really tired." And sometimes I genuinely am, but sometimes I'm just annoyed.
And you can feel that and be like, "Oh crap, I've been caught," right? Like you've caught me not...enjoying what I'm supposed to enjoy, not being this beacon of energy and infinite compassion, wisdom, ability to clean my kitchen, like whatever it is that you're thinking that you wish you were projecting in that moment.
But it is very freeing to be like, "Yeah, I just, this week has been a lot and I am exhausted and I just don't have the brain for what we're doing right now."
And I love personally that I've cultivated a group of friends and people that come and hang out with us frequently.
Where I feel safe and fine just saying like, yeah, my whole being isn't at a capacity to do anything hard today.
But then I also feel completely free to say, "Hey, my energy has gone up and I actually want to tackle something really complicated. Is anybody down for that?"
The more honest I get about who I am and how I'm really feeling, the more I trust myself to communicate that to others and for it to be true. There is so much more energy freed up when I don't have to lie about my actual abilities or interests.
That when I say something I really mean it and I can trust that one other people say yes, like they're going to participate the way they want.
And if they ever change their mind and say, "Hey, I don't want to do this anymore," I'm like, "Hey, that's cool." Like, I actually appreciate that we're all being really clear about that with each other.
So to bring this all back to summer and the time of year that we're all in, is that it's a really bright and vibrant and busy season.
And I know we're all feeling the urge to kind of show off or perform or be
I don't know, I guess like the most energetic, most positive, most succeeding version of ourselves right now, particularly because we're being seen so much. And that's what we want to project and we want it to be true.
I want that to be true for all of us as well. It is okay to be who you really are and to recognize that you are succeeding and you are doing amazing things and your actual lived life is important and has its belonging in your community, in your family, in your world, in your business, in whatever it is that you're doing.
And that is enough. And you don't need to amp it up or lie to make it bigger than it is or diminish it in any way to fit in.
If it's, you know, like we do that, we amp ourselves up and bring ourselves down in order to kind of fit the container that we're in.
I think it's okay to just be us. And I would love to live in a world where everyone feels safe to be who they are as they are in each moment helping each other out through hard times and through good times.
That's what I want for all of us, and that's what I'm kind of sending out to all of you this week. So my friends...
You don't have to perform your life to be a part of it. You already are. I'm so glad that you're a part of this community. And I look forward to talking to you next week.
we're going to be talking about over planned joy and the trap that we can fall into that is over scheduling our summer, or trying to on purpose make happy things which can be...
ironically kind of difficult and dampening and make it worse. I'm excited to talk about it because I think it's something that we all do but there's easy ways around it and we're gonna get into that then.
Have an awesome week, and I'll see you next time.
Related Episodes
Series: Navigating the Heat of Summer with Ease As we settle into the peak of summer, the energy shifts from the initial surge of spring to the reality of sustaining our lives through heat, social demands, and fatigue. These episodes offer a compassionate roadmap for moving through the season without burning out, helping you refine your routines, protect your energy, and find joy in the ordinary moments.
- Ep 35: How to Protect Your Time & Energy During Socially Busy Seasons – Practical strategies for saying "no" and setting boundaries when the calendar is full.
- Ep 34: Summer Isn't for Doing More: How to Sustain Energy Without Burning Out – Why summer is about tending to what's already growing, not planting new seeds.
- Ep 33: Fun Isn't Frivolous: Reclaiming Joy for Over-Responsible Women – Why joy is a necessity, not a reward, and how to stop earning your happiness.
🌿 Want help building rhythms that work with your energy instead of fighting it?
The Living in Rhythm Starter Kit offers grounded tools for nervous system support, emotional regulation, burnout recovery, and understanding seasonal energy shifts more sustainably.
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