I Teach This. I Still Fell Into It.

On rejection, external validation, and the voice that pulled me out

I’m officially in my third week of doing very little.

Not by choice. A bunny rabbit. I stroked my rabbit, did something fairly catastrophic to my back in the process, and that was that. Two weeks of lying horizontal, unable to work, unable to move without wincing, unable to do the things I normally do to feel like myself.

And if you work for yourself, you’ll know: there’s no phoning in sick. No sick pay. No HR to notify. You just... stop, and the world keeps moving without you.

Last week, while I was lying there, an email arrived.

We’d applied for an HR award. The programme we submitted was the Elevate programme we ran with AND-E - twelve women, twelve months, results I can still barely believe we achieved.

44% average reduction in Good Girl conditioning scores.

100% of participants would recommend it.

Eleven out of twelve rated it as transformational.

Ten out of twelve set a boundary that changed their workload.

These weren’t survey-happy participants giving easy tens - these were women who had, by their own words, fundamentally changed the way they move through the world. Inside and outside of work.

The email said: not shortlisted. No feedback available.

And dear reader, I cycled through every single one of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. I messaged Pam, my gorgeous client and friend, who helped co-create the programme. She joined in. We had a reaction. Let’s leave it at that.

Because here’s what made it worse: about a month ago, we’d found out we were finalists at the British Insurance Awards. We’re going to the Royal Albert Hall in July, a genuinely glittering evening, recognised in the insurance sector for the same work. So the logic seemed airtight. Obviously, if we were good enough for that, we were good enough for this.

We had the data. We had the evidence. We had the stories. Of course, we’d be shortlisted.

And then: no.

Somewhere around hour three of lying in bed catastrophising, a small voice piped up from somewhere in the back of my brain.

I’ve started calling it the unfuckwithable part of me. The part that’s been through enough deprogramming to know when the Good Girl conditioning is doing the talking.

And it said, fairly bluntly: Dude. You literally spend your life telling women not to look for external validation. What are you doing right now?

It’s one thing to know something intellectually. It’s quite another to feel it land in your body at 11pm when your back is spasming and an email you were quietly hoping for has just told you no.

But the voice had a point.

Because here’s what the rejection actually told me: nothing. Nothing objective. Nothing about the quality of the programme. Nothing about the impact on those twelve women.

Nothing about whether what we built was worth building.

What it told me was something about what those particular judges, on that particular day, in that particular room, were looking for. And I don’t know what that was. I wasn’t there. I have no visibility of the criteria weighting, the other submissions, the conversations, the priorities.

An award panel is not a truth panel. Rejection from a shortlist is not a verdict on your work.

I know this. I teach this. I have said versions of this sentence to women in my programmes probably hundreds of times.

And yet.

The (not so fun) thing about Good Girl conditioning: it doesn’t care how much you know. It doesn’t evaporate because you’ve read all the books, written a couple of books, built a whole methodology and spent your professional life helping women unpick it. It’s in the water.

It’s been there since the moment we took our first breaths, and people started teaching us, in a thousand tiny ways, that our value was located outside ourselves - in what we produced, what we achieved, what other people said about us, how well we performed against criteria we didn’t set.

So when an external body says “not good enough,” the Good Girl circuitry fires. It reaches for the familiar interpretation: this means something. This is evidence. This tells you who you are.

It doesn’t. But it takes a minute.

The unfuckwithable voice knows this. It also knows (and this is the part that eventually pulled me out of the spiral) that I already have the evidence. It’s sitting in a thirty-page impact report. It’s in the words of women who came into the programme not trusting themselves, not trusting other women, going through the motions of lives that had been designed around everyone else’s needs.

And it doesn’t stay in the workplace. It never does.

One woman came into the programme in the middle of one of the hardest years of her life - navigating her father’s neurological disease, advocating for him as a vulnerable adult in a system that assumes you’ll defer to the professionals.

She told me that Elevate gave her the confidence to trust her own judgement. To stop following advice simply because someone else must know more. To say no when no was the right answer, even when it felt uncomfortable, even when the stakes were high.

That is not a workplace outcome. That is a woman learning to trust herself in the moments that matter most.

That is not “nothing”. That is not “not good enough.” That is the entire point.

I’ve also had the results back from Rise Above - the public programme I ran alongside the corporate one. Different context, same methodology, same messages, same invitation to understand the conditioning underneath the behaviour.

Same results.

Women quitting jobs they hated.

Women leaving relationships that had been slowly diminishing them.

Women setting boundaries they’d been too frightened to name for decades.

Women finding, often for the first time, that they can be in community with other women - that women aren’t scary, that they don’t have to perform, that they can be known and supported and challenged without it being dangerous.

One woman told me she's now being called her own Emily Pankhurst by the people around her. After forty-seven years of doing what other people wanted, she said no. The people around her didn't like it. She held the line anyway.

No awards panel gave them that. I didn’t give them that. The methodology created the conditions, and they did the work, and they changed their own lives.

If that’s not shortlist-worthy, I’m genuinely fine with that assessment. Because the women know. I know. Pam knows. And the Royal Albert Hall in July will be quite nice regardless.

I’m telling you all of this because Rise Above 2026 is coming.

It opens in September. It runs for twelve months. And I know (with a certainty I haven’t always had) that it works. Not because I’m telling you it works. Because I have data. Because I have the voices of women who came in stuck and came out sovereign. Because I have thirty pages of evidence and a growing community of women who found each other through this work and refuse to go back.

When you join Rise Above, you join the community immediately. We’re currently in the about to start a twelve-week read-along - working through the book together, every Wednesday evening. If you join now, you can come in and play with us.

And in September, the twelve-month programme begins: twelve sessions, Power Circles, co-working, coaching. Everything we learned from Cohort 1 has been built into something better.

This isn’t: feel better about yourself. This is: understand why you’ve been the way you’ve been. Understand the conditioning - all of it, from girlhood onwards - that taught you to shrink, to accommodate, to earn your place. And then, with that understanding, start making different choices.

Not because someone gave you permission.

Because you finally stopped waiting for them to.

Rise Above 2026 opens in September. You can find out more and join us here - https://www.michelleminnikin.com/rise-above-the-group-experience

And if you want to come and dabble now, the Good Girl Deprogramming Community is open. £29/month or £290/year - https://www.michelleminnikin.com/work-with-michelle/community

Mx