Masks Off: Inner Freedom For People-Pleasers and Perfectionists

Kim Gross
  • 4.9 (36)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

A podcast for people pleasers and perfectionists ready to drop the masks. Kim Gross shares simple tools to calm the inner critic, set boundaries, and live with confidence, clarity, and inner freedom. www.kimgrosscoaching.com

  1. 2d ago

    Freedom Begins When You Stop Trying to Control Everything

    In this episode of Masks Off: Inner Freedom for People Pleasers and Perfectionists, Kim Gross closes out the June Inner Controller series with a powerful conversation about overthinking, control, and why we cannot think our way into freedom. The inner controller believes that if we can figure everything out, predict every outcome, and prepare for every possibility, then we will finally feel safe. But overthinking often keeps us trapped in mental loops, disconnected from our bodies, our intuition, and the present moment. Kim explores how overthinking is often an attempt to create certainty — and why certainty is not the same as safety. She shares how the inner controller uses thoughts like “What if something goes wrong?” “What did they mean by that?” “What if I make the wrong choice?” and “What if I can’t handle it?” to keep us looping in fear. This episode will help you understand the difference between solving a real problem and trying to escape an uncomfortable feeling. You’ll learn a simple practice to interrupt the spiral and begin building safety from within. Because freedom does not come from controlling every outcome. Freedom comes from knowing:“I may not know exactly what will happen, but I can trust myself to meet what comes.” In this episode, you’ll learn: Why overthinking is often a form of controlHow the inner controller uses mental looping to avoid uncertaintyThe difference between real problem-solving and fear-based spiralingWhy certainty is not the same as safetyHow to begin building inner safety instead of chasing controlA simple practice to come back to yourself when your mind is spiraling👉 Connect with Kim (the host): 👉 New Book: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/free-to-be.php 👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimgrosscoaching 👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimgrosscoaching/ 👉 Website: www.kimgrosscoaching.com 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.gross.104 👉 Facebook Masks Off Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/masksoffcommunity 👉 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCaWJfO7ZFd4aYBX3e-clj9Q 👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Et9BMqdFriIQ9bUxcfQeg 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masks-off/id1513846583 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all 👉 Unmasked Newsletter: http://subscribepage.io/masksoffnewsletter 👉 People-Pleasing Quiz: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/quiz.php

    41 min

  2. Jun 18

    The Prison of Perfectionism in Relationships

    What if the very thing you are doing to protect your relationships is actually keeping you from the connection you deeply desire? In this episode, Kim Gross explores how perfectionism becomes a prison in relationships. When we are afraid of being judged, criticized, rejected, or misunderstood, we may begin to perform, edit ourselves, suppress our needs, and avoid saying what we truly think or feel. The inner controller convinces us that if we can just be easy enough, agreeable enough, strong enough, or perfect enough, we will be safe and loved. But the cost is loneliness. Kim shares personal reflections on motherhood, people-pleasing, empty nesting, and the ache of wanting to be seen as good, loving, and perfect in the eyes of the people we care about most. She explains how people-pleasing and perfectionism can create pseudo-connection while quietly disconnecting us from ourselves. This episode is an invitation to stop abandoning yourself in order to be chosen by others. Through compassion, loving kindness, and small moments of honesty, we can begin to unmask from perfectionism and experience the true connection we have been longing for. 👉 Connect with Kim (the host): 👉 New Book: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/free-to-be.php 👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimgrosscoaching 👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimgrosscoaching/ 👉 Website: www.kimgrosscoaching.com 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.gross.104 👉 Facebook Masks Off Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/masksoffcommunity 👉 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCaWJfO7ZFd4aYBX3e-clj9Q 👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Et9BMqdFriIQ9bUxcfQeg 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masks-off/id1513846583 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all 👉 Unmasked Newsletter: http://subscribepage.io/masksoffnewsletter 👉 People-Pleasing Quiz: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/quiz.php

    34 min

  3. Jun 12

    You’re Not Fine — You’re Overriding Yourself

    Are you really okay — or are you overriding yourself? In this episode, Kim Gross introduces a new concept on the podcast: override. Override is what happens when you push past your emotions, your body, your needs, or your truth in order to keep going, stay pleasing, stay productive, or stay in control. Kim explores how the Inner Controller often uses override as a survival strategy, especially for people-pleasers and perfectionists. She explains the difference between healthy regulation and harmful repression, how many of us were trained to override as children, and why pushing through may actually be keeping us disconnected from freedom. This episode will help you notice where you may be saying “I’m fine” when you are not fine, calling yourself strong when you are actually self-abandoning, or confusing control with safety. Connect with Kim: 👉 Connect with Kim (the host): 👉 New Book: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/free-to-be.php 👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimgrosscoaching 👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimgrosscoaching/ 👉 Website: www.kimgrosscoaching.com 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.gross.104 👉 Facebook Masks Off Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/masksoffcommunity 👉 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCaWJfO7ZFd4aYBX3e-clj9Q 👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Et9BMqdFriIQ9bUxcfQeg 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masks-off/id1513846583 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all 👉 Unmasked Newsletter: http://subscribepage.io/masksoffnewsletter 👉 People-Pleasing Quiz: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/quiz.php

    35 min

  4. Jun 4

    From Prison to Paradise: How Your Inner Controller Keeps You Trapped

    Have you ever wondered why you can’t fully relax, even when life looks good on the outside? In this episode, Kim Gross introduces the “inner controller” — the part of you that seeks safety by managing everything: other people’s emotions, your performance, your appearance, outcomes, uncertainty, and even your own feelings. For people pleasers and perfectionists, the inner controller often develops as a nervous system adaptation. It learns that if you can just be good enough, prepared enough, pleasing enough, perfect enough, or in control enough, maybe you’ll finally feel safe. But over time, this protective part can become a prison. Kim explores the shift from prison to paradise — not as a perfect external life, but as the inner freedom to be present, peaceful, authentic, and connected to yourself. She shares personal examples from family vacations, holiday over-functioning, social media approval-seeking, and writing her book Free to Be, while naming the four prisons of the inner controller: approval, perfection, certainty, and emotional avoidance. This episode is an invitation to stop shaming the part of you that controls and begin understanding what it has been trying to protect. Connect with Kim: 👉 Connect with Kim (the host): 👉 New Book: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/free-to-be.php 👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimgrosscoaching 👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimgrosscoaching/ 👉 Website: www.kimgrosscoaching.com 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.gross.104 👉 Facebook Masks Off Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/masksoffcommunity 👉 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCaWJfO7ZFd4aYBX3e-clj9Q 👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Et9BMqdFriIQ9bUxcfQeg 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masks-off/id1513846583 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all 👉 Unmasked Newsletter: http://subscribepage.io/masksoffnewsletter 👉 People-Pleasing Quiz: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/quiz.php

    47 min

  5. May 28

    You're Not a Problem to Fix

    In this final episode of Inner Child Month and the six-year anniversary month of Masks Off, Kim Gross welcomes somatic practitioner Lori Montry, creator of the Freedom Framework and author of You Are Not the Problem. Kim and Lori explore people-pleasing, perfectionism, overthinking, control, shutdown, emotional eating, and hypervigilance as intelligent nervous system adaptations — not proof that something is wrong with you. Lori shares her personal story of overwhelm, sexual abuse, high achievement, and learning to work with both the mind and nervous system for sustainable healing. Kim also shares how a childhood choking incident shaped her health-related panic and how she now uses inner-child reassurance and body-based support to calm her system. Together, they discuss why familiar patterns can feel safe, how to access the “sacred self,” why internal safety matters more than external validation, and how five daily nervous system check-ins can help you begin building trust with yourself. This episode is a powerful reminder that you are not broken. Your patterns make sense. And healing begins when you stop fighting yourself and start creating safety within. Connect with Kim: 👉 Connect with Kim (the host): 👉 New Book: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/free-to-be.php 👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimgrosscoaching 👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimgrosscoaching/ 👉 Website: www.kimgrosscoaching.com 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.gross.104 👉 Facebook Masks Off Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/masksoffcommunity 👉 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCaWJfO7ZFd4aYBX3e-clj9Q 👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Et9BMqdFriIQ9bUxcfQeg 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masks-off/id1513846583 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all 👉 Unmasked Newsletter: http://subscribepage.io/masksoffnewsletter 👉 People-Pleasing Quiz: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/quiz.php About Lori:  Today’s guest is Lori Montry, a somatic practitioner and creator of the Freedom Framework. Lori’s work begins with a simple but powerful premise: you’re not the problem. The patterns you struggle with are intelligent adaptations shaped by stress, overwhelm, and experience. When you understand what is driving them, you can stop fighting yourself and start creating meaningful progress toward what matters to you. Through the Freedom Framework, people move from survival mode and burnout into what Lori calls the Expansive Self — steady, clear, self-trusting, and capable of meaningful progress without constant strain. She is the author of You’re Not the Problem and helps people understand themselves through a nervous system lens, so growth becomes sustainable rather than exhausting. Connect with Lori:  Get the free Introduction to You’re Not the Problem: https://www.lorimontry.com/book-intro Website: www.LoriMontry.com  Youtube: Lori Montry -Somatic Healing Practitioner - YouTube Facebook:  You're Not the Problem! | Facebook Instagram: Instagram

    52 min

  6. May 21

    You Can’t Shame Yourself Into Healing

    You can’t shame or force yourself into healing—especially if you learned to criticize yourself before you learned to comfort yourself. In this episode, Kim Gross continues Inner Child Month by exploring what it really means to reparent your inner child as a people-pleaser or perfectionist. Building on previous episodes about perfectionism as protection and inherited approval scripts, Kim explains reparenting as becoming the safe, loving, grounded adult your younger self needed. She shares a three-part framework for reparenting: safety, soothing, and structure. Safety means learning to stop self-abandonment and self-attack. Soothing means being present with emotions instead of numbing, fixing, or controlling. Structure means creating loving boundaries, routines, rest, and values-based decisions. Kim also shares a personal example from a kitchen renovation, where her inner controller showed up through overwhelm and pressure, and how she practiced compassionate self-soothing instead. She closes with a simple exercise to use when triggered and clarifies what reparenting is—and what it is not. This episode is for anyone learning to stop abandoning themselves for approval and begin becoming emotionally safe within themselves. Mentioned in this episode: Free to Be: A Pathway to Inner Liberation by Kim Gross. 👉 Connect with Kim (the host): 👉 New Book: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/free-to-be.php 👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimgrosscoaching 👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimgrosscoaching/ 👉 Website: www.kimgrosscoaching.com 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.gross.104 👉 Facebook Masks Off Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/masksoffcommunity 👉 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCaWJfO7ZFd4aYBX3e-clj9Q 👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Et9BMqdFriIQ9bUxcfQeg 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masks-off/id1513846583 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all 👉 Unmasked Newsletter: http://subscribepage.io/masksoffnewsletter 👉 People-Pleasing Quiz: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/quiz.php

    51 min

  7. May 14

    Why You Keep Chasing Approval — And How to Rewrite the Script

    What if your people-pleasing and perfectionism are not who you are — but approval scripts you learned in childhood? In this episode, Kim Gross celebrates six years of the Masks Off podcast during Inner Child Month and explores the unconscious rules many of us learned about how to be loved, safe, and accepted. These approval scripts can sound like: don’t upset anyone, be good, get it right, blend in, and make sure everyone else is okay. Kim shares how achievement and external validation reinforced her own “good girl” identity, and how these scripts can show up today through saying yes when you mean no, overthinking conversations, avoiding conflict, struggling with boundaries, and feeling responsible for other people’s emotions. She also explains how the Inner Controller tries to protect you from rejection, criticism, and disconnection by keeping you in control and constantly monitoring everyone around you. Using a personal example from a family trip for her daughter’s master’s graduation, Kim walks listeners through how old scripts get activated and how to begin rewriting them with awareness, compassion, and small shifts. This episode is an invitation to stop living by the old rules and begin creating a new way of being — one rooted in truth, freedom, and self-worth. 👉 Connect with Kim (the host): 👉 New Book: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/free-to-be.php 👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimgrosscoaching 👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimgrosscoaching/ 👉 Website: www.kimgrosscoaching.com 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.gross.104 👉 Facebook Masks Off Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/masksoffcommunity 👉 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCaWJfO7ZFd4aYBX3e-clj9Q 👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Et9BMqdFriIQ9bUxcfQeg 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masks-off/id1513846583 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all 👉 Unmasked Newsletter: http://subscribepage.io/masksoffnewsletter 👉 People-Pleasing Quiz: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/quiz.php

    27 min

  8. May 7

    You’re Not “Just This Way”—The Truth About Perfectionism & Control

    Perfectionism isn’t who you are—it’s who you became to feel safe. In this opening episode of Inner Child Month, Kim shares how her perfectionism and people-pleasing weren’t personality traits, but protective adaptations formed in childhood. She introduces the concept of the inner child and explains how unmet needs around love, safety, and worth shape the patterns we still carry today. Through personal stories—including a pivotal moment at age 10—Kim unpacks how the drive for validation, fear of rejection, and need for control are all rooted in protection. She also introduces the “Inner Controller” and how it creates a false sense of safety through hypervigilance, including how it shows up as health anxiety. This episode is about understanding—not fixing—your patterns. Because awareness is where freedom begins. 👉 Connect with Kim (the host): 👉 New Book: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/free-to-be.php 👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimgrosscoaching 👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimgrosscoaching/ 👉 Website: www.kimgrosscoaching.com 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kim.gross.104 👉 Facebook Masks Off Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/masksoffcommunity 👉 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCaWJfO7ZFd4aYBX3e-clj9Q 👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Et9BMqdFriIQ9bUxcfQeg 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masks-off/id1513846583 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all 👉 Unmasked Newsletter: http://subscribepage.io/masksoffnewsletter 👉 People-Pleasing Quiz: https://www.kimgrosscoaching.com/quiz.php

    24 min
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4.9
out of 5
36 Ratings

About

A podcast for people pleasers and perfectionists ready to drop the masks. Kim Gross shares simple tools to calm the inner critic, set boundaries, and live with confidence, clarity, and inner freedom. www.kimgrosscoaching.com

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