How to Coach High-Achieving Women With Good Girl Syndrome
- Aug 8, 2025
- 4 min read
Empowerment Coach and founder of Own Your Life, Julie Vander Meulen pioneers in researching and applying personal development strategies to help ambitious women overcome the good girl syndrome and become the powerful individuals they were always meant to be.
Many high-achieving women appear to have it all together, leading teams, running businesses, and balancing family life with grace. However, beneath their accomplishments, many battle a hidden struggle: Good Girl Syndrome. This article delves into how this pervasive pattern manifests in high achievers, preventing true fulfillment. Discover how to shift the focus from surface-level coaching to deeper, more transformative work, helping these women break free from perfectionism, people-pleasing, and over-functioning to reconnect with their authentic selves.
The hidden struggle behind the gold stars
Some of the most accomplished women you’ll meet are quietly battling a deep inner conflict. They lead teams, run businesses, balance families, and collect praise like medals, yet feel strangely hollow, anxious, or stuck. They come to coaching with impressive résumés and packed calendars, but beneath the surface, something is off.
That “something” is often Good Girl Syndrome. And if you don’t know how to spot it, you’ll coach the surface when the real transformation lies underneath.
What good girl syndrome looks like in high achievers
The Good Girl archetype doesn’t look like weakness; it often looks like excellence. These women are the first to volunteer, the last to leave, and the ones who seem like they can handle anything. But their perfectionism is rooted in fear. Their people-pleasing is hidden under helpfulness. Their burnout is masked by over-functioning.
They’ve been rewarded their entire lives for being agreeable, responsible, self-sacrificing, and high-performing. So, they internalize the belief that love and safety come from being exceptional, not authentic.
And when they enter coaching, they often bring that same dynamic into the relationship: they want to “do it right,” get the gold star, and be the perfect client.
Why surface-level coaching doesn’t work
If you only coach the goals they bring in, you risk reinforcing the very patterns they’re trying to escape. You’ll help them organize their schedule, but not question why they never schedule rest. You’ll celebrate their wins, but never ask why winning never feels like enough.
Good Girl Syndrome isn’t about logistics. It’s about identity. It’s about who a woman believes she has to be to be worthy. And to shift that, we must coach beneath the mask.
How to coach the woman beneath the good girl
Here’s what changes everything: your presence. She needs a space where she doesn’t have to perform. Where she’s not praised for being nice or productive, but witnessed in her full humanity.
Ask deeper questions:
Who are you trying to please here?
What part of you believes you can’t say no?
If you didn’t have to be good, what would you really want?
Celebrate not just her achievements, but her truth-telling, her boundaries, her discomfort. Help her normalize the guilt she feels when she stops overgiving. And mirror back the strength in her softness, the wisdom in her resistance.
Good Girl Syndrome unravels not through performance, but through being met with radical honesty and love.
Coach the nervous system, not just the mind
These women aren’t just mentally attached to the “good girl” identity; their nervous systems are wired for it. People-pleasing feels safer than conflict. Overachieving feels safer than rest. So, coaching needs to be more than cognitive; it must be embodied.
Help her recognize when she’s going into “fawn” mode. Guide her through breathwork, grounding, and gentle pauses. Invite her to notice: What happens in your body when you speak your needs out loud? The body holds the truth even when the brain is rationalizing.
Rewiring her definition of power
Ultimately, coaching women with Good Girl Syndrome means helping them redefine power. Not as control or perfection, but as authenticity, sovereignty, and self-trust. It means supporting her as she unlearns the roles she was taught to play and reconnects to the woman she was before she was rewarded for disappearing.
Your job isn’t to “fix” her; it’s to walk beside her as she remembers who she is underneath the mask.
And when she does, she doesn’t just become a better leader. She becomes free.
Want more?
Sunday Sanctuary Newsletter. Each Sunday, I send a letter to women navigating the unraveling of Good Girl Syndrome, brimming with deep reflections, soft truths, and powerful new ways of being. Join here.
Take the Good Girl Syndrome Quiz. Discover how Good Girl Syndrome is uniquely wired in your clients, and how to support their most powerful breakthroughs. Take the quiz.
Book a Free Coaching Session. Curious how to integrate this work into your coaching practice or your own journey? Let’s meet. Book your free Meet & Greet.
Julie Vander Meulen, Empowerment Coach for Ambitious Women
Julie Vander Meulen is an Empowerment Coach for ambitious women and the visionary founder of Own Your Life Academy, a premier coaching platform dedicated to personal and professional development. Through her innovative research and holistic coaching strategies, Julie specializes in guiding women to break free from the 'good girl syndrome,' empowering them to claim their worth and step into their power. Her work is rooted in the belief that every woman has an inner powerhouse waiting to be unleashed. With a vibrant community and a track record of transformative coaching experiences, Julie's mission is to inspire women worldwide to embrace their true selves and create lives they love.
