Episode #047 · Catherine Zack
Being Disliked, Being Misunderstood, and Boundaries That Protect Your One Precious Life
What would change if you stopped managing everyone else’s experience of you?
Many women have been conditioned their whole lives to be “good,” agreeable, emotionally available, and endlessly accommodating. Those patterns, while useful in some situations, disconnect us from ourselves.
Catherine Zack shares her transition from practicing law into yoga, and meditation, but this conversation goes far beyond career pivots. It’s about what happens when your identity has been built around being liked, understood, useful, and needed—and the uncomfortable reality that growth often requires disappointing people.
How Being the “Good Girl” Can Shape Your Identity
When Catherine describes herself as a recovering good girl, she's talking about a pattern that extends well beyond being nice.
She learned early to be dependable, achieve, care for people, and pay close attention to what others needed from her. She did well in school and found satisfaction in hitting the next mark. She also watched her mother give enormous amounts of herself to work, family, and volunteer commitments.
Those instincts followed Catherine into adulthood. She became someone who could handle a lot and who other people could depend on to handle a lot.
She also became highly attuned to whether people were happy with her.
Catherine describes the good-girl pattern as avoiding ruffled feathers, caring for people beyond what they've asked of her, and feeling responsible for making sure everyone around her is okay.
The pattern has served her in plenty of ways. She's warm, thoughtful, and deeply invested in the people she works with. Over time, she's had to examine how easily those qualities can expand into managing other people's experiences at the expense of her own.
Leaving a Successful Career in Law for Yoga and Meditation
Catherine went from NYU to Penn Law and graduated during the Great Recession, when coveted law firm jobs felt especially valuable. She landed at one of the country's top firms with a starting salary of $165,000 plus a substantial bonus.
The intensity had begun in law school. Catherine stopped eating as a way of controlling her stress and started practicing yoga twice a day. She eventually landed in the ER with what she now believes was a panic attack. She continued hitting the marks.
By the time she entered Big Law, she had the salary, the Louboutins, the prestigious job, and a vision of a future that included the house, the country club, and the successful partner.
Then a relationship ended, a case settled, and Catherine looked around at the life she'd built.
“I don't think I want this.”
At 28, she decided to leave law to work in yoga and meditation. The decision came without evidence that the new path would work, and she was walking away from the security of a career she'd spent years building.
What weighed heavily on Catherine was the possibility of disappointing her parents and the other adults in the room.
She made the move and began building an entirely different kind of career.
When Caring for People Becomes Taking Responsibility for Them
Catherine saw her instinct to manage other people's experiences show up again in her yoga career.
While teaching a gentle yoga class, she would occasionally have a student arrive with needs that were very different from the rest of the group. Catherine found herself changing what she was doing to accommodate that one person. A regular student eventually pulled her aside and told her: teach to the room.
Around the same time, one of Catherine's teachers noticed her rushing across a crowded class to physically help a student. “You cannot fix or save anybody,” he told her.
Catherine has spent years returning to the question: What is actually my job?
The question became particularly relevant while hosting residential retreats. Catherine could teach and facilitate the work she'd come there to do. She also found herself worrying about accommodations, meals, someone's air conditioning, and every small detail of everyone's experience. She would return home depleted, with her family receiving whatever energy remained.
Catherine is now structuring her work with clearer limits. For an upcoming retreat, participants are arranging their own accommodations. She's holding it during the week while her children are in school.
She's paying closer attention to the point where caring for someone begins to feel like assuming responsibility for them.
Learning to Let People Be Disappointed in You
Catherine is currently putting those boundaries into practice through a business decision she knows some people don't like.
It has brought her directly into one of the hardest parts of shedding the good-girl identity: allowing someone to be disappointed without immediately trying to repair their experience of you.
Catherine knows people outside a private situation may not have all the information required to understand a decision. Explaining herself fully could require disclosing things she doesn't believe are theirs to know.
She's learning to tolerate the possibility that people will create their own version of the story. That becomes especially difficult when you've spent years being seen as the nice person, the accommodating person, or the person who will take care of everyone involved.
Catherine and I also talk about how quickly women can judge other women for making these kinds of decisions. She wonders what another woman's willingness to set a boundary brings up in the person watching her do it.
I've been confronting my own version of this. I tell Catherine that I've spent much of my life carrying responsibility for avoiding other people's disappointment. I learned early to consider how my decisions might make someone else feel, and that instinct can easily follow you into adulthood.
Catherine is practicing making the decision she believes is right and allowing another person to have whatever response they have to it.
Setting Boundaries Before You Reach the Breaking Point
For two people capable of holding a lot, Catherine and I recognize another familiar pattern in each other: we can hold something for a very long time before finally deciding we've had enough. Catherine is trying to intervene earlier.
She wants to communicate more directly, establish expectations sooner, and notice when she's taking on responsibility that doesn't belong to her. She also wants more separation between her identity and the work she does.
“I can't control how people see me.”
Other people's reactions still affect her. She can find herself thinking about them at her son's baseball game or lying awake in bed. She uses meditation, gratitude, friendships, and deliberate reminders to help herself put down what she's carrying. She's also thinking about what could fill the space created by carrying less.
When I ask Catherine what her work might look like 12 years from now, she tells me she'd like to write novels. She's already written roughly 20,000 words of one and has another idea connected to her family's history in the Adirondacks. She can picture a life with fewer appointments and more time alone in a room reading and writing.
For now, she's becoming more deliberate about deciding what she wants to carry with her—and what she's ready to put down.
Catherine Zack
Catherine Zack is a former Big Law litigation attorney turned executive coach, meditation teacher, and the creator of The 40 Portal -- a podcast and community at the intersection of midlife, identity, and the raw potency of a woman stepping into her power in her 40s. She left a top Washington DC law firm twelve years ago -- not because she failed, but because she succeeded and realized it simply wasn't her truth to stay on the path to the partnership. The pivot became her life's work. Cath coaches high achieving women through threshold moments, speaks to organizations on burnout and nervous system regulation, and hosts her weekly 40 Portal podcast and writes a weekly meditation Substack called Let's Sit Together. She lives in Kinderhook, NY with her family, where she also runs a brick-and-mortar, mom-and-pop, yoga and meditation studio, Village Yoga, with her husband Sam.
