THE EX-GOOD GIRL PODCAST
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I will help you learn to stop making other people comfortable at your own expense. I can show you a roadmap you can use to train yourself to stop abandoning your own desires and let go of the fear of what others will think. If you’re ready to stop pretending everything is fine, get out of the cycle of doubt, guilt, and resentment AND step into a life of power and freedom, tune in to The Ex-Good Girl Podcast!
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What Do You Say When... You're Unhappy With How it Turned Out?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
What do you say when you’re unhappy with how it turned out? You get your nails done or have new bathroom tile put in, and the work isn’t what you expected. Still, you hesitate to say anything because you don’t want to be viewed as picky, difficult, or demanding. You’ve learned that being agreeable is safer than asking for what you really want, so you might say “No, no, it’s fine” and live with the disappointment instead. But the cost of avoiding that uncomfortable moment is more than paying for something you don’t like. This is the sixth episode of a series called “What Do You Say When…” These short episodes will each give you one concrete thing you can say when you’re stuck in a difficult moment.
If you want more, join Sara live for one hour this week for a free workshop, SPEAK UP. There’s no replay, so bring the conversation you keep avoiding. You’ll learn the Three Speak Up Skills and figure out what’s keeping you stuck.
Register for SPEAK UP: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
What do you say when you're unhappy with how it turned out?
01:04
You're standing in the bathroom doorway and the handyman is packing up his tools in the hall, and the grout line is crooked.
01:12
You can see it from here, which means you're gonna see that every single time you walk past this door or use the bathroom. He's ready to go, and here's what's happening in your head.
01:24
You're trying to decide whether it's really a problem that needs to be addressed. You don't wanna be picky. You don't wanna be difficult. This is really a first world problem, right?
01:34
There's other people worrying about much bigger things than straight grout lines. He worked hard, he's nice, and maybe you can just call someone else to fix it later.
01:46
It's probably not worth bringing it up with him. He's ready to go, and bringing it up now is going to feel like a whole thing.
01:54
Now, maybe you're not struggling with a grout line, but maybe it's your nails that aren't done in a way that you really like, or a meal that isn't cooked the way you really want, or some other service provider who provides a service but then it's not what you wanted.
02:09
You pay for it, and then what happens after? You either don't use that bathroom anymore or you have to pay to have the whole thing redone.
02:19
You go get your nails or your facial or your hair done somewhere else and hope they don't notice, but then subconsciously worry that they will.
02:27
Many of us learned that being agreeable is safer than asking for what we really want, and you learned it so well that you know how to smooth moments over and make everybody comfortable.
02:39
But again, just think about where this pattern is showing up in the rest of your life. How many times have you accepted something that wasn't what you agreed to or wasn't what you wanted?
02:52
How many times have you said, "No, no, no, it's fine," and then just lived with it along with the resentment that you are now carrying because you won't speak up for yourself?
03:02
Silence will buy you a friendly goodbye. There's no tension in the nail salon or in the restaurant, but here's what it is costing you.
03:15
You paid full price for work, if it's your grout in your bathroom that you're gonna be looking at for the next 10 years or your nails for the next seven days.
03:25
And one more time you have taught yourself that their feelings matter more than you having a product that you are happy with.
03:36
Your standards become negotiable when someone else might get uncomfortable. This is why you need to come to my free workshop.
03:43
It is live, it's 60 minutes, and the whole reason I'm doing it is because I want you to understand why you get stuck here in conversations like this.
03:53
I wanna let you know what you should be practicing, and I wanna fill you in on the missing piece that will make all of these conversations easier. Now, back to our situation.
04:04
The fear is that you will be seen as difficult.
04:08
You would rather pay for bad work than be seen as a woman who complains or who is demanding because somewhere along the line you learned that being easy to deal with was just what people expected of you.
04:24
You were praised for not having needs, being so easygoing. Here's what you say instead: "This isn't what I thought it was gonna look like.
04:35
Can I have you take a look at this right here?" And then you point it out.
04:40
You show him the line or you show the nail that doesn't work or the part of the meal that doesn't look like what you wanted, and say nothing else. Stop talking. Let them ask questions.
04:52
Let them explain something. And if they try and brush you off, say it again, "I understand. I still would like it to be fixed," or, "I still need something else.
05:05
What are my options here?" If they push back more than that, then you definitely know this is not somebody that you want to be doing business with, but you just keep saying, "I hear what you're saying.
05:18
I still want it to be fixed." So no one else is gonna stand up for the job that you want, and you're the one who earned the money and has to live with it. Come to my free workshop.
05:31
Let's make these conversations easier for you in the future, 'cause we all know this is not the last time this is gonna happen. I'll see you then.
What Do You Say When... Your Kid Wants the Money Before He Does the Work?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
What do you say when your kid wants the money before he does the work? You know the lawn hasn’t been mowed, but when he comes asking for $40, it feels easier to say “yes” than to deal with his disappointment or an argument. You want to have a good relationship with your kid, and every “no” can feel like it costs you closeness. But when you keep bending the rules to avoid that discomfort, the real cost is a relationship where you’re constantly reminding or doing things yourself instead of building the trust and mutual respect you really want. This is the fifth episode of a series called “What Do You Say When…” These short episodes will each give you one concrete thing you can say when you’re stuck in a difficult moment.
If you want more, join Sara live for one hour this week for a free workshop, SPEAK UP. There’s no replay, so bring the conversation you keep avoiding. You’ll learn the Three Speak Up Skills and figure out what’s keeping you stuck.
Register for SPEAK UP: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
What do you say when your kid wants the money before he does the work?
01:03
It's Saturday morning, and he comes into the kitchen, and he is already talking a mile a minute. He needs $40.
01:11
He needs it in 10 minutes because everybody's buying their tickets right now, and if he doesn't buy his ticket right now, he's gonna be the only one who isn't able to go.
01:21
You look out the window and you know that the lawn hasn't been mowed, and you were just in that bathroom, and you know it hasn't been cleaned.
01:29
Sometimes you wonder if he does this on purpose, just kind of avalanches you with a bunch of words and pressure and friends, all the things that you know really matter to him, and they matter to you, too, just so that you'll say yes.
01:43
He sees the look on your face and says, "Mom, I'll do it tomorrow, I promise." And in your head, here's what's happening. You're going back and forth. You tell yourself it's $40. You have $40.
01:57
This is not the end of the world, and it's certainly not the hill that you want to die on with your teenager, who can turn really sullen when you don't do what he asks.
02:08
You don't wanna have that happen this morning. You tell yourself he's a good kid, and most of the time he really is.
02:13
It's just this jobs thing that he keeps putting off and putting off, and sometimes it doesn't get done at all, and that's frustrating to you.
02:21
But then you tell yourself if you make this a big deal, the whole week is gonna be ruined. He's gonna get mad, and you're gonna be the villain in his story. So you say okay.
02:36
You mention the lawn before he leaves that night in a light voice, and he says, "Yeah, I know, Mom, I know." And then the next day when he doesn't get up and do it, you send him a text.
02:47
And then by Sunday evening, the lawn's not done.
02:51
Maybe you are even out there mowing it yourself because you are tired of hearing your own voice ask, and you know that at this point it's just gonna be a big fight.
03:02
This one's hard because if you don't give him the $40 and he's disappointed, there is a very real consequence, and it's hard to disappoint your kid.
03:15
Somewhere along the way, you learned that having a good relationship and a peaceful house was your responsibility and that keeping people happy is the same thing as loving them.
03:28
But I want you to think past the lawn. Think over the last couple years. How many times has the arrangement been one thing and the outcome has been another? How many deals have there been?
03:42
How many times has he promised, and how many times have you bent the rules for him? And then how many times did you end up doing the thing yourself?
03:53
When you don't bring it up, you get a teenager who likes you, and there is no scene, and you don't have to disappoint him and feel how bad that feels.
04:03
What it is costing is that he has learned that your rules will move if he pushes.
04:10
And then to get the thing done, you have to either be the person who just reminds him so, so sweetly or who nags and then maybe ends up doing it herself.
04:21
And the relationship you really want with him, one of trust, one of confidence, and one of mutual help, isn't turning out to be that way.
04:32
These conversations can be tender for parents, but they don't have to be. Come to my free live workshop that is happening this week.
04:41
I will show you exactly why you are getting stuck here and what to practice so that you don't get stuck anymore. Now, back to Saturday. Here is the thing that is causing tension.
04:53
You love him, and you want him to love and like you. He's getting older.
05:00
The time that he's gonna be in your home with you is getting shorter every day, and every no feels like it costs you a piece of the closeness that you have left.
05:14
So you're buying that closeness for $40. Here's what you say instead. "Listen, son, I love you. I really hope you can go tonight, but the money comes after the work.
05:28
Mow it this morning, and I'll send it to you before you go." He will push back, of course.
05:33
He'll tell you he doesn't have enough time or that everybody's buying their tickets right now or that, "Why are you being so hard about this, Mom?" Or that so-and-so's mom just gives him the money.
05:44
Say it again, same words, same voice. "I love you. After the work." If there's more pushing, then it's time to own something. "You know what? I need to own something.
05:56
You have seen me cave in many, many times when we have been in this similar situation, and I know it's frustrating for you, but that's not something I want to do anymore.
06:07
It doesn't feel good for me, and it doesn't teach you to keep your part of agreements, and that's a really important skill. So I love you.
06:16
Money comes after the work." Maybe you'll say it multiple times. Maybe he will be upset, but he can be annoyed with you and still love you, and you can love him and hold the boundary.
06:31
Come to my workshop. I would love to help you figure out how to make this easier. I'll see you there.
What Do You Say When... You're Done Being the Family Peacemaker?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
What do you say when you’re done being the family peacemaker? This pattern has probably been going on for years. You may tell yourself that someone has to do it or that it’s just easier when you handle things. You’re worried your family will fall apart if you don’t mediate conversations between your siblings or your parents, but constantly managing everyone else’s emotions is costing you time and energy. This is the fourth episode of a series called “What Do You Say When…” Over the next week, these short episodes will each give you one concrete thing you can say when you’re stuck in a difficult moment.
If you want more, join Sara live for one hour this week for a free workshop, SPEAK UP. There’s no replay, so bring the conversation you keep avoiding. You’ll learn the Three Speak Up Skills and figure out what’s keeping you stuck.
Register for SPEAK UP: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
What do you say when you are done being the family peacemaker? This one's for my oldest girls out there. You know how it happens.
01:07
That group text goes off at 7:04 in the morning, and before you've even had your coffee, your sister has said something about Thanksgiving, and then your brother replies with one kind of snarky sentence and a period, and nobody is typing.
01:24
Everybody is silent. You're standing at the counter, and you read through it a couple times, and you already know how the next couple days are gonna go.
01:32
Your sister's gonna call you, and your brother's gonna text you separately.
01:37
You'll end up on the phone with each of them saying some version of, "I think what they meant was..." And here's what's happening in your head.
01:47
You tell yourself with a big sigh that somebody has to do this. You're annoyed, of course, but if you don't do this, then nobody will, and then what?
01:58
You tell yourself it's just easier when you handle it. You know both of them. You know how to say it so that each of them will soften and that this can get fixed.
02:08
You begin to worry if you don't say something, they might stop speaking to each other, and some part of you believes that that might even be true.
02:16
So you pick up the phone and just decide to get it out of the way. You call your sister first because she's the one who's typically more upset.
02:23
She vents for 40 minutes, then you call him and translate what she said into something softer that he can hear without getting defensive. You make sure that they're both fine.
02:34
By Sunday, it's smoothed over. Nobody thanks you because nobody actually knows what happened, and that's the job that you have done for many years under the radar.
02:48
You learned when you were young that someone needs to be watching the moods of the people in the room, and you got really good at knowing what upset everybody and how to smooth it over.
03:01
Thanksgiving is just one example, but this is a pattern that has been showing up in your life for a long time. How many holidays have you managed? How many family reunions? How many family trips?
03:14
How many phone calls? How many funerals? How many times have you found out something before everyone else because you were the one that everybody tells? Here's what the peacekeeping is buying you.
03:28
The family stays in one piece, and your place in it is secure. Everybody needs a peacekeeper, and nobody has to find out what happens if you decide to stop. But here's what it is costing you.
03:45
You have never had a relationship with any of them that wasn't about managing someone else. Some of them don't even know you and your frustrations and the burdens you carry, but you know theirs.
03:59
And you are always on edge at family reunions because you know that if something happens, it's going to be yours to manage.
04:09
You might even truly believe that the family is only intact because you're the one holding it all together.
04:16
That's the real thing that's underneath all of this, and it's why stepping back feels like something you cannot do, maybe even a betrayal. Yes, you resent having to do the extra work.
04:31
You're afraid of what will happen if you stop. So here's what you say instead to whichever one calls you first. "You know what?
04:39
I know that you're used to me talking things out like this with you, but I'm not gonna be in the middle of this one. You two can work it out." That's it. No explanation, no announcement.
04:52
She might push. She might say something like, "I'm not asking you to be in the middle.
04:55
I just wanna tell you what he said." And that's just the same thing wearing different clothes, and so you say it again.
05:03
"I hear you, and for a long time I've managed things like this, but I am not gonna get in the middle of this.
05:11
Love you." You might have to repeat yourself a couple times before anyone believes you because you've been doing this job for a long time. But just let it be uncomfortable.
05:22
Thanksgiving might be tense. There might be more arguments and disagreements, but that's information about the family that was always true.
05:31
You have just stopped stepping in to prevent it from happening or smoothing it over. If this is a situation that you find yourself in, come to my free workshop this week. It's live.
05:44
There's no replay, but you will wanna be there because I'm gonna help you understand two really important things.
05:50
Number one, why you get stuck when it's time to speak up, and the one missing piece that you can learn and practice to make these conversations and all of your hard conversations a lot easier. I'll see you then.
What Do You Say When... You're the One Who Always Reaches Out?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
What do you do when you’re the one who always reaches out? If you’re the one who always sends the text, makes the plans, and keeps the friendship moving, you may eventually start to feel tired or resentful, wondering why the effort isn’t more balanced. You can tell yourself it’s okay because she’s busy or you’re just better at planning, but the issue goes deeper than fairness. You’re ultimately wondering whether the friendship means as much to her as it does to you, and that uncertainty and loneliness you feel come at a cost. This is the third episode of a series called “What Do You Say When…” Over the next week, these short episodes will each give you one concrete thing you can say when you’re stuck in a difficult moment.
If you want more, join Sara live for one hour this week for a free workshop, SPEAK UP. There’s no replay, so bring the conversation you keep avoiding. You’ll learn the Three Speak Up Skills and figure out what’s keeping you stuck.
Register for SPEAK UP: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
What do you do when you're the one who always reaches out?
01:04
You're typing it again, "Hey, are you free on the 14th?" This is the third date you floated because she canceled the first one, and you sent a text about date number two, and then she never responded.
01:17
You notice the pit in your stomach. You don't like being the one to always reach out, but what if you don't?
01:23
So you hit send, and then you watch the three little dots appear and disappear, and appear and disappear. Your stomach sinks, and here's what happens in your head.
01:35
You start telling yourself she's busy, her job is a lot right now, and her mom is sick, and you know that. She's got a lot on her plate. And then you remind yourself, you know what?
01:45
You're just better at this. You're the one who plans. You're the one who knows the good restaurants. You make the reservations. Some people are just better planners, and that's okay if she isn't.
01:58
But is it? You also tell yourself, and this is the part that hurts, that if you stopped reaching out, you don't know if she'd reach back out to you. So you send it. She responds. You book the table.
02:11
You have a nice dinner, and she's warm and funny, and you laugh together, and then you hug in the parking lot, and she says, "Thank you so much.
02:18
This was so fun." And you drive home feeling something that you can't quite name. It's...
02:23
You don't feel bad exactly, just like she had a different evening than you had because you feel a little alone even though you just spent time together.
02:35
Being the one who holds things together is how you've always done it, and secretly, it's how you've earned your friendship. You don't wait to be chosen.
02:44
You make sure that you're the one moving things forward. You make yourself necessary.
02:50
Now, I know that this is just one friendship, but I want you to ask yourself, think about your relationships in general. How many of them run on your effort? How many group texts do you start?
03:04
How many birthdays do you not just remember, but plan for all your friends or all your family? Your silence here is buying you something. It's buying you a place in a friendship that stays intact.
03:19
You never have to wonder if they would reach out to you because you always reach out. You get to keep believing that it's just the circumstances that keep people from reaching out to you.
03:33
But here's what it is costing. You have a friendship that you are maintaining instead of one that is reciprocal.
03:42
You are lonely even when you're with the people that you want to be with because you wonder if the connection is as strong both ways as it is from you to them.
03:55
And there's that little voice of resentment that is starting to show up in small ways, especially when they cancel plans that you have gone to a lot of trouble to make.
04:08
I wanna invite you to the free live workshop that I'm doing this week. There's no replay, but here's why I want you to come.
04:16
I want you to figure out why this is happening for you, and I wanna show you the one missing piece that would make this conversation easier. Now, back to the text you just sent.
04:27
You've been treating this like a fairness problem, like the issue is who does more work, and that's not really the issue. You want to know that she wants you.
04:40
You want to know that she wants to be in a friendship with you just as much as you want to be in the friendship with her.
04:46
That's the real thing that's underneath all of this, and that's why it's really hard to just stop texting because then you would know. So here's what you say instead, not in a text, in person.
05:02
"Hey, I notice that I'm the one who does most of the planning, and I've done it for a long time, and I've been happy to do it.
05:10
Spending time with you means a lot to me, and I want to know, does it mean as much to you to spend time with me?" And then stop talking. Let it be quiet. Whatever she has to say, just hear her out.
05:26
And then if there's a follow-up, it could sound something like, "You matter to me, and I want our friendship to keep going. I also want the effort to be put in by both of us.
05:38
Is that something you're interested in as well?" Asking gives you an answer.
05:42
You know where you stand, and then you can make decisions about what you wanna do with your time based on what she actually feels and what she actually means instead of what you're guessing.
05:54
Come to the workshop.
05:55
It will help you figure out why this is so hard and why you get stuck here and tell you the missing piece that will make this and all of the conversations in your life a lot easier. I'll see you there.
What Do You Say When... You Have to Tell a Client Something She Doesn't Want to Hear?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
What do you say when you have to tell a client something she doesn’t want to hear? You know something isn’t lining up during a presentation, but you hesitate to point it out because you don’t want to disappoint her or be the person who ruins the meeting. You might tell yourself it’s not your responsibility or soften what you really need to say, but protecting yourself from her reaction costs more than you may realize: your professional integrity and the confidence that comes from speaking up. This is the second episode of a series called “What Do You Say When…” Over the next week, these short episodes will each give you one concrete thing you can say when you’re stuck in a difficult moment.
If you want more, join Sara live for one hour this week for a free workshop, SPEAK UP. There’s no replay, so bring the conversation you keep avoiding. You’ll learn the Three Speak Up Skills and figure out what’s keeping you stuck.
Register for SPEAK UP: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
What do you say when you have to tell a client something she doesn't wanna hear?
01:04
It's Thursday, you're on the call, as is your whole team, and she's presenting the numbers and the timeline, and she's very happy about it. The project is gonna be done.
01:14
It looks like it's gonna be a grand slam, and then slide six comes up, and you know that the date for the timeline is wrong.
01:23
You also know that she's probably already taken it to the people on her side for approval, and she might have told other people about it, so you hesitate, but then she looks up and says, "This all tracks, right?" Here's what happens next in your head.
01:42
You tell yourself that you are not gonna be the person to bring this up in front of everybody and ruin the sale.
01:48
You're gonna have to figure out another way to get the information to her or concoct some kind of situation where the timeline has to change.
01:57
You tell yourself that this isn't even entirely your job, and it's definitely not your fault, and is it even your responsibility? So you hedge and you wait.
02:08
Then you say something like, "You know, there's a couple things we're gonna need to keep our eye on," but you don't say anything specific.
02:16
Now, of course you hedged, of course you didn't say it because you learned early on that being easy to work with was the one thing that your clients love about you, and being liked feels not only really good but safer than being right.
02:35
And what I'm wondering is, is this pattern bigger than just this client? I want you to think for just a second over your whole career.
02:43
How many times have you known something that should be said and either not said it at all or delivered a softened version of it?
02:54
I want you to just think about that because the hedging, it buys you something important.
03:00
It buys you a pleasant call, the client keeps liking you, and you don't have to be the person who ruined the meeting. But here's what it is costing.
03:10
She is making decisions about timelines that she is paying you to help her understand.
03:17
It's also costing you your professional integrity and the confidence that comes from knowing that you can speak up and not only guide your clients in the way that they've hired you to do, but that you are the person with the confidence and courage to do that.
03:34
You're protecting yourself from her reaction.
03:37
You don't wanna watch her be disappointed or embarrassed or annoyed at you, so you trade her outcome for your comfort, and I understand why you're doing that, but I also know that you are tired of being this person.
03:52
Here's what you say instead on the call right when you see it.
03:57
"You know, I hate to interrupt, but there's a problem with this number and I would rather that you hear it from me now so we can make our best decisions moving forward." Then say what's wrong.
04:08
She might go quiet. It might cause a little kerfuffle. That's okay. That's integrity, and that's you developing the skill to be the person you want to be.
04:20
If it's already gone to other people, then you can say, "I know that this went to your board or your colleagues with a number that I now think is wrong.
04:30
Here's what I think we should do about it," and then you offer a solution.
04:34
You bring the problem and the next step at the same time because when it comes right down to it, clients are not paying you to make their Thursdays pleasant.
04:43
They're paying you to give them the information that they need for a successful project. I'm doing a free workshop this week. It is live.
04:51
There's no replay, and if you come, I will help you understand why you are getting stuck in conversations like this. It'll be worth your time to be there.
05:01
You'll figure out exactly why you're stuck and the one missing piece that can help all conversations get better. I'll see you there.
What Do You Say When... He's on His Phone During the Show?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
What do you say when he’s on his phone during the show? Maybe you tell yourself it’s not a big deal, so you don’t say anything. There’s no argument and no chance of being hurt by what he says when you bring it up. But your silence is still costing you something: connection. This is the first episode of a series called “What Do You Say When…” Over the next week, these short episodes will each give you one concrete thing you can say when you’re stuck in a difficult moment.
If you want more, join Sara live for one hour this week for a free workshop, SPEAK UP. There’s no replay, so bring the conversation you keep avoiding. You’ll learn the Three Speak Up Skills and figure out what’s keeping you stuck.
Register for SPEAK UP: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
For the next few days, I'm going to be releasing a short seven-minute or less episode in a series I'm calling What Do You Say When...
01:07
Short and sweet with one concrete thing you can say. Let's dive in. What do you say when he's on his phone during the show? It's 8:40 PM on a Tuesday night.
01:18
You are sitting down to watch the show that you picked together. You've been looking forward to it all day.
01:23
It's finally time when you can sit down with him and just be in the same room, in the same space. And then his phone lights up, and then again, and then again.
01:35
And you watch him look down, start to thumb through something while the scene plays out on the TV. You say his name. "Yeah, yeah, I'm still listening," he says. And technically, he is.
01:47
He could probably summarize the episode if you quizzed him, and that's the part that makes it hard to say anything. Technically, he is listening. But here's what starts to happen in your head.
02:00
You tell yourself, "It's not a big deal. It's a TV show.
02:04
Grown women do not pick fights over TV shows." You tell yourself that he works hard and that this is just how he unwinds after a long day, and if you start policing how this man relaxes on a Tuesday, it's gonna become something bigger.
02:19
You tell yourself that if you say something, you'll sound needy, and this is the one that feels the most tender.
02:26
You don't want to be clingy, like the kind of wife who monitors her husband and is always attention seeking. So you don't say anything and you're hurt. But then you go quiet.
02:39
You stop laughing at the funny parts in what you're watching, and you stop engaging and asking him questions, and you watch the rest of the show with your jaw set and with your hands in your lap.
02:51
And then around 10:15, you say you're tired, you go to bed. He says good night, and you say good night with that tone that is just one degree cooler than your normal voice. He notices.
03:04
He doesn't know what it's about, and he doesn't say anything because what he has learned is that when you get like this, it usually passes by morning.
03:15
So he gives you a kiss, and you roll over and go to bed. It makes a lot of sense what you're doing, because no one can call you difficult if you're not saying something that's difficult to hear.
03:28
No one can call you needy if you're saying something that another person might interpret as needy. But here's the thing. Step back from the TV for just a second.
03:37
This is just an example of a bigger pattern. You want something from him.
03:42
You want his attention or his help or his interest in something that matters to you, and then you decide against telling him because you don't wanna seem needy or clingy or demanding.
03:55
Think back over your marriage or partnership or the time you've been together. How many versions of this scene have there been?
04:03
How many times over how many years have you squished those wants down because saying it out loud just felt like too much? You don't need the exact number to feel the size of that.
04:17
That's what the silence is buying you. There's no argument.
04:21
There's no chance of him saying, "I didn't realize that mattered to you," which would confirm the thing that you're most afraid of, that it doesn't matter to him. But here's what it costs.
04:33
Being seen, being understood, being close to the person that you choose, and then you're building a case in your head against your husband that he has never once been told about.
04:45
He's losing an argument that he doesn't even know he is in. That is costing you closeness in one of the most important relationships in your life.
04:55
I wanna invite you to something, doing a free live workshop every single week. It's live and there's no replay. I'm going to help you figure out why you get stuck here.
05:05
It's worth your time to show up and figure out why this is such an issue for you, especially where it matters so much. So back to Tuesday night.
05:16
I know that you want him to put down the phone on his own. You want to be interesting enough or for him to be interested enough in you and what's going on that he puts it down on its own.
05:27
And that's the real thing. That's why this feels so much bigger than a TV show and why it's so hard to think about saying it out loud.
05:35
Because if you ask for his attention and he gives it grudgingly, you'll feel bad. So you protect yourself from the answer by never asking the question. Here's what you say instead.
05:47
"Hey, I would love to have your attention throughout the TV show tonight. We chose it because it's interesting to us.
05:54
I really wanna be able to talk about the characters and what's going on, and I just wanna feel like we're together watching it. Can you put your phone down tonight?" That's it.
06:05
In the present tense about tonight. You don't have to bring up all the times that this has happened.
06:11
And if you want to own your part, you can say something like, "When you're on your phone during something that we plan to watch together, it hurts. It hurts my feelings.
06:21
I get quiet and I pull away because I don't want you to see that.
06:25
I've been doing that for a long time without telling you why, and I don't wanna do that anymore." That one takes a little more guts, but if it feels like something you can do, what do you have to lose?
06:38
The silence that you are using to protect yourself actually doesn't protect anything. It doesn't protect you, and it doesn't protect your marriage.
06:46
And so why not find out how close you can really be? That's the work. And if you want help knowing what to do next, I will see you at the free workshop this week.
Episode 175 - Good Girl Math
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
Is it normal for you to spend several hours a day thinking about a conversation you’re avoiding? Three hours each day adds up to 1,095 hours a year, which means that’s more than 45 days of your life dedicated to thinking about something you haven’t even said out loud yet. If you’re stressed, exhausted, and overwhelmed, you may be spending far more time and energy on difficult conversations than you realize by doing the good girl math: the internal cost-benefit analysis of whether speaking up is worth the risk. You’re rehearsing what you’ll say, looking for the right words and the right time, and trying to predict how the other person will respond before you ever open your mouth. Today, you’ll learn why all of that thinking feels productive and what’s actually happening underneath it so you can get those hours back and have the freedom and confidence that comes from knowing you can have any conversation you need to.
How long have you been putting off the hard conversation? Join Sara live for one hour on September 9th at 12PM PT or September 15th at 2PM PT for her free workshop, SPEAK UP. There’s no replay, so bring the conversation you keep avoiding. You’ll learn the Three Speak Up Skills and figure out what’s keeping you stuck.
Here’s what you’ll uncover in this episode:
Why you can speak up when someone else needs you to but struggle when you’re the one who has something to gain
What starts running through your head the moment something matters to you and someone else might not want to hear it
Two compelling reasons why you may be doing good girl math whenever you have something to say
Why all the researching, rehearsing, and gathering evidence still can’t tell you how another person will respond
How the younger part of you that learned to calculate the risk of being rejected still impacts your thinking
Register for the FREE workshop: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
Hey. I wanna talk about where thousands of hours of your life are going. Does that sound like a fun conversation?
01:07
Um, I hope so, because I'm not talking about your job, or your kids, or the laundry.
01:15
I'm actually talking about a conversation that is running on repeat in your head, and why it is so important to know what is happening so you can fix it and get those hours back.
01:28
Every single week, I talk with women who are stressed and exhausted and overwhelmed, and when we dig into what's actually going on, so much of their energy, effort, and brain space are being taken up by conversations that they're not having.
01:44
And so, because it is my personal mission to help you get those hours back, we're gonna continue the conversation today.
01:52
Before I get into it, I wanna tell you that I'm going to use the same two stories that I used last week in the episode on deadline and drift conversations, and I'm doing that on purpose.
02:03
Last week, I used those conversations to show you the two different shapes that an avoided conversation takes, and this week, I'm gonna take you inside your head to what is actually happening while you are doing the avoiding, because that is where the real cost lives.
02:21
That's where your energy gets sapped and used.
02:24
And once you see it, I hope that it's gonna be really helpful, and it's gonna make you want to fix it, because when we get down to, like, the real cost, it is your life, hours and hours and hours of your life.
02:39
So let's get into it. Quick catch-up from last week so that you know the stories and can remember the context for today's episode.
02:49
Laura had hired a contractor, and he had done some work in her home. So he was coming back on Monday, and Laura knew that there were things that had to be addressed.
02:59
She made the appointment for Monday, and then started worrying about the conversation the minute she solidified the time he was coming back.
03:07
So all day Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, she was spinning about this conversation. This is a deadline conversation. It is something in the world that forces your hand at a specific time.
03:25
Other examples, your boss needs an answer by Friday. Your mother-in-law is coming into town next week.
03:33
Your child has an IEP that is not being enforced, and your parent-teacher conference is on Thursday, for example.
03:42
So each of those are when time has backed you into a corner and tells you, like, "This is happening whether you feel ready or not, and if it doesn't, something bad is going to happen, a consequence that you don't want." That's a deadline conversation.
04:01
Then there's Carol.
04:03
Carol is the woman I told you about last episode, whose son is starting his senior year, and as he is getting ready to start school and talking about his last year, and, "I'm gonna go to away to college after that," she is starting to realize that the closeness and the intimacy that she felt in the beginning of her marriage has kind of evaporated.
04:25
She and her husband act more like roommates.
04:27
They talk about, you know, things that need to be done, who's taking the dog to the vet, who's picking up dinner, but they don't really have the closeness and connectedness that she wants.
04:39
This is a drift conversation, because there is nothing on the calendar that is going to make her have that conversation anytime soon.
04:49
There's nothing bad that is gonna happen if she just waits and says nothing. So a drift conversation goes on the shelf, and Carol begins to tell herself, "You know what?
05:00
Maybe I'll talk about it after the holidays or after this big project at work gets wrapped up, when I feel a little less stressed and there's, you know, a better energy about this." That conversation, I call it a drift conversation because it matters, but you can also have it at any time.
05:21
One of the other things I want you to know about both of these women is that they are both capable, they both get a lot of shit done for a lot of people, and that this isn't a courage problem.
05:34
When Laura needs to have a conversation and when Carol needs to have a conversation, they can do it.
05:39
They don't love having to jump into what feels to them like conflict, but when it is for someone else, they can pay that cost because they know that staying quiet means failing someone who needs them.
05:56
But it's when it's for themselves, the only one paying for the silence is them. And they're used to paying that cost.
06:04
They're used to being a little lonely, a little disappointed, a little disconnected, and they've just spent a lot of years absorbing that.
06:14
So the thing that pushes them through the fear for someone else isn't there for them. Let's talk about what's going on in their heads when they're waiting. I call it good girl math.
06:28
Good girl math is the internal cost-benefit analysis of whether speaking up is worth it. Is it worth the risk? Is it worth potentially upsetting someone?
06:40
Is it worth changing the relationship in some way that you're not gonna be able to predict or get back? And it starts with something very, very small.
06:51
It starts the moment that something matters to you, and there's another person on the other end of that who might not wanna hear about it. That's it. Something matters, and the math begins.
07:05
What if he gets defensive? What if she thinks I'm selfish? What if I'm wrong about this? What if I have the wrong story or there's something I've misunderstood?
07:14
What if I say something and it damages a relationship that, for the most part, is mostly good, or maybe it changes their opinion about me and they think I'm bitchy, bossy, mean, or rude?
07:27
And then you start to think maybe I should wait. And all of that thinking is the part that eats up your life. You're analyzing it. You're rehearsing it.
07:38
You're collecting more evidence so that you're sure you're justified. Maybe you run it past people that you trust, your sister, your best friend, and maybe your therapist.
07:50
You're looking for the right words and then the right time, and then some amount of certainty that will let you finally know how this is gonna go before you open your mouth. That's good girl math.
08:04
It is taking up hours of your life. It is taking up so much of your energy. And I know that some of you think that this is a personal flaw. It is not.
08:15
This calculation, this running this math, is part of our good girl programming, and it actually makes sense because you are trying to figure out is it going to be worth it.
08:30
The problem is it's costing you enormously, and it's what is keeping you stuck. That's the word that they use to describe themselves most often, "I feel stuck." And so let's just settle it.
08:44
There's nothing wrong with you. You learned to calculate because you had to, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about why in a little bit.
08:51
But I wanna talk about two really compelling reasons why we do the good girl math. The first one is it feels like effort. I want you to think for just a minute about how you have built your life.
09:07
You are competent and capable. You prepare. You anticipate problems before they show up.
09:13
You figure things out, and you are almost always the person who is three steps ahead, and that has worked for you.
09:21
More effort has reliably produced better outcomes for you at work, with your kids, in every logistical mess that you have ever untangled. It got you through college.
09:36
It got you through maybe your graduate degree. It got you promoted, and it got you recognized as somebody who was reliable and capable. And so effort really matters to you.
09:49
It's one of the foundations of how you get so much done. So when something feels risky, thinking about it harder feels like you're working on the problem, and it feels productive.
10:03
It feels like the responsible, the careful, the thoughtful, or even the mature thing to do.
10:10
This is where you search for podcast episodes or look on Instagram for people who are talking about how to have the conversation, and all of that is adding to the good girl math because good girl math is really effort disguised as thinking.
10:29
And here's where the strategy breaks. Every other time you have applied more effort, you were working on something that was knowable.
10:38
Maybe it was a schedule, a budget, a plan, or a problem with an actual answer that was somewhere at the end of all of the efforting. But this time, it's different.
10:52
You are trying to work out how another human being is going to respond when you tell them something that they may not want to hear. You can't know that in advance.
11:04
There is no amount of preparation that produces that answer, and there's no number of rehearsals that is going to get you closer to that.
11:16
So the only thing in the world that produces the information that you're looking for is actually having the conversation, which is the thing you don't wanna do because it feels so risky.
11:28
So instead, you spend weeks on it and sometimes months, and you arrive with exactly as much certainty as you had in the beginning.
11:40
You've lost time, but you are just as unsure as when the conversation deadline first came up or the drift conversation first came up.
11:52
And this is the part that makes so many women believe that something is wrong with them.
11:57
This problem-solving strategy has worked your whole adult life, and here it just fails over and over and over, and you read that failure, you interpret that failure as evidence that there is something wrong with you.
12:12
I'm smart. I have done so much work. I've been to therapy. Why is this hard for me? Why can't I do this one thing of just have a hard conversation?
12:23
It's actually evidence about the tool you are using to try to solve the problem.
12:28
You are using a tool that is built for problems that can be solved and not a problem that involves humans' reactions that can't be solved in advance.
12:41
The second reason why the good girl math feels so compelling is that sometimes waiting works. Circumstances change. The person moves away. The project ends. The season passes.
12:56
Or the problem just resolves on its own or it loses its urgency without you ever having to say a word.
13:04
And that's the thing we keep hoping for, that something outside of us changes and just makes it easy to pick up again or easy to address.
13:14
And we also hope to get to the point sometimes where we just don't care. And sometimes we do. That's real and that actually happens. And so your brain is not being irrational when it hopes.
13:27
I have a lot of evidence and I know you do too that sometimes waiting can pay off, which means that every time you decide to wait, you are making what feels like a reasonable bet based on your own lived experience.
13:44
But while you are waiting to find out whether or not this is one of those times when it will just resolve on its own, you're still doing the good girl math, sometimes every single day.
13:56
And that is a cost. Before we get into counting that cost, I want to address something because I know that some of you are saying, okay, I know this.
14:07
I know logically that I cannot control how the contractor responds. I know that I can't control how my boss or the teacher or my friend responds. I know that intellectually.
14:19
I believe you and you are still doing the math anyway. And here's why. The part of you that is running the calculation is not the intellectual part. It's not the logical part of you.
14:34
That part is much younger. And she learned somewhere along the way exactly how devastating it feels to be rejected. She learned how it feels to be laughed at in front of other people.
14:48
She knows what it's like to be misunderstood and to watch people treat her differently after being honest about something. She knows what it's like to be liked.
14:59
And then she knows what it's like to be not liked. And she does not want that to happen again. She's not being dramatic. She is being protective. Those things did happen and they did feel terrible.
15:15
And so when you sit down to think about this conversation, you have an adult part that shows up with reasonable analysis. I know this is silly. I know I shouldn't be doing this.
15:25
I know I can't control them.
15:28
But that part is having a tug of war with the younger part of you that has the memories of when it was devastating and so painful and so hard to know what to do with all on her own.
15:42
And she is louder because her job is to protect you. And she's been doing it a lot longer.
15:49
And so she is not going to give up on that good girl math because she's hoping it produces a safer situation. There's one other layer I want to talk about.
16:02
Women are judged by the quality of their relationships. That's a rule that we live with and not something that was really ever pointed out to us explicitly.
16:12
But think about when a relationship struggles or when it gets tense, look at where the blame tends to land.
16:21
When a child is struggling, when a family fractures at the holidays, who gets evaluated about that? Who is made responsible to fix it?
16:35
Women are conditioned to monitor the emotions of a marriage, a family, a friend group, a workplace. If something goes wrong in a relationship, women are conditioned to feel responsible for it.
16:53
So good girl math is not only asking if the conversation is worth the risk. You're managing a relationship that you have been made to feel responsible for.
17:05
And the possibility that speaking honestly will damage that relationship feels like a possibility that you will fail on one of the things that women are graded on.
17:17
And so this is a really heavy thing to carry into a conversation with your contractor or with your husband about the quality of your relationship because there is guilt and there is responsibility already present in the conversation before it even starts.
17:36
So I want you to think about one conversation that you are carrying around. Just one. Maybe it's a deadline conversation that's coming up. Maybe it's a drift conversation. Either one is fine.
17:49
I want you to count the time and it's going to be higher for a deadline conversation because it's coming at you soon. But I want you to count the time that you are already spending on it.
18:00
I want you to count the hours when you're rehearsing it, maybe in the shower, on the drive to work. I want you to count the time that you are rehearsing different scripts that you could say.
18:12
I want you to count the time where you're checking with friends, where you're googling it, or maybe using AI to help you kind of formulate something that works.
18:21
For most of the women that I work with, it is between three and five hours a day. That is not sitting in a chair just thinking.
18:29
They are driving carpool, they are showing up to work, they are doing the things that they need to do. But on the low end, let's just do a little bit of math.
18:39
Three hours a day times seven days a week times 52 weeks a year is 1,095 hours a year. That is more than 45 days a year.
18:52
45 days given to a conversation that hasn't happened, that is just keeping you stuck in that place.
19:02
After all of those hours, the conversation is still unchanged, and you just continue to pay the price. So I want you to notice here what is actually happening.
19:15
You are not deciding whether to spend some time on this. You are already spending the time, and you have been, sometimes for months.
19:27
The only thing you get to decide is if you are going to use the time that you're already spending on good girl math to do something else.
19:38
If you want help with the specific conversation that you just thought of and you counted the hours that you're already spending, I want you to come to my free live workshop this next week.
19:48
It's happening on September 9th at 12:00 PM Pacific. I'm gonna walk you through exactly where you are getting stuck and what to work on so that you can get unstuck this week.
20:01
If you're listening after September 8th, check my website and check my Instagram bio, check the show notes. All the information is there.
20:09
Here's what I wanna leave you with before I tell you what to do about it.
20:15
What stands between you and just having this conversation is the good girl math, which is trying to get information you cannot give. You are waiting to feel certain about their response.
20:28
That is why thinking has not moved this. That is why the books and the therapy and the podcast episodes haven't touched this particular problem that is costing you so much time.
20:40
You're trying to answer a question that has no answer available. Underneath that question, there's a second question, and it's a little quieter, and it's also keeping you stuck.
20:54
If I say this and it goes badly, can I handle that? Can I handle their response? Can I handle the emotions that I'm gonna feel?
21:05
That's the real question, and most women were never taught how to do that. We were never taught to trust ourselves that we could handle.
21:15
We were never taught the skills to process our emotions, to let other people be disappointed in us.
21:21
Nobody sat us down and showed us how to start a conversation that we are dreading, or how to stay in it when the other person gets defensive and starts pushing back, or when your emotions take over the conversation and you cry or get upset, or how to stay with your body and with your values when someone you love is hurt or disappointed and you can see it on their face.
21:49
It's insane that we're just supposed to know this. We don't because no one taught us. But that is also the good news. It can be learned. These are skills, and they can be learned.
22:05
So go back to that number of how often the good girl math is running in your head.
22:12
That's what this week costs you, and next week, and the week after that, and for as long as the calculation keeps running.
22:22
Those deadline conversations, those are gonna come because there's some external timeline that you are feel, feels like held hostage to, right? The drift conversations, those are also gonna come.
22:38
Sometimes it's a death or a diagnosis or an accident or some other kind of life-changing event that makes those drift conversations be something you wish you would've done.
22:51
So come to my live workshop because not only do I not want you to be losing that time anymore, but I want you to have the freedom and the confidence that comes from knowing that you can have any conversation you need to anytime.
23:11
You can start it, you can get through it in a way that is consistent with your values and connected to what you want, and you can handle whatever happens. I'll see you there. Have a good week. See you back here next week.
Episode 174 - Two Types of Hard Conversations
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
Most of us know when we need to have a hard conversation. It’s more difficult to notice the ones we’re quietly putting off because we think there’s always more time. There are two different kinds of hard conversations, and understanding which kind you’re dealing with can make a difference. A deadline conversation has urgency built in: avoiding it can lead to unwanted consequences. A drift conversation is about something important, but it's easy to postpone because nothing terrible happens today if you don’t say what you need to say. In this episode, I’m breaking down both types of conversations, why drift conversations can be especially easy to avoid, and how to start participating more intentionally in the relationships that matter to you. Because whether there’s a deadline or not, the same skills can help you start the conversation, stay in it, and handle whatever happens next. Here’s what I cover:
Why deadline conversations can actually be easier to act on when time and external consequences make avoiding them harder
The reason drift conversations are so easy to put off and why your relationship continues to change even when you decide to “deal with it later”
How the thoughts and stories you keep to yourself can become part of the drift in a relationship
Why recognizing that you have a finite amount of time in every season of a relationship can help you decide what’s worth saying
How to participate in creating the relationships you want without needing to control how the other person responds
Reserve your seat for Sara’s next workshop: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
I was having a conversation with a client in a session the other day, and it was so helpful I wanted to share it with you.
01:06
There are two different kinds of hard conversations, and understanding which kind you're dealing with I think is helpful, and it matters. So let's get into it.
01:18
The two different types of hard conversations, I call one a deadline conversation and the other a drift conversation. Let me give you a definition of a deadline conversation.
01:30
It's gonna be very obvious to you. It's a conversation with a deadline built into it. Let me give you an example. I've been coaching a woman, I'll call her Laura.
01:40
Laura hired a contractor to come and do some work on her house, and a lot of things were not turning out the way she had wanted and were not what she had paid for.
01:50
She made an appointment, and the contractor was coming to her house on Monday. That was the deadline.
01:57
At some point, she had to decide what she was gonna say because if she didn't say it, there were consequences that she didn't want.
02:07
She would have to hire someone else to come finish the work, or she would have to be stuck with work that didn't meet her standards. That is a deadline conversation.
02:16
It's where time kind of has you backed in a corner, and if you don't say what it is that you wanna say, there's gonna be consequences that you don't want.
02:26
Maybe your boss needs an answer by Friday, or the opportunity is gonna go to someone else.
02:32
Your mother-in-law is coming next week, and you're gonna have to do what she wants to do because you haven't proposed an alternative activity.
02:41
The parent-teacher conference has been scheduled, and you're gonna have to talk to the teacher about how she's not enforcing your child's IEP.
02:51
Those are all consequences that you don't want, and that combined with the deadline creates urgency. Now, sometimes we hate that urgency.
03:03
It's what is waking us up in the middle of the night because the contractor's coming on Monday, and we don't know what we're gonna say.
03:09
It's what is making us rehearse on the way to work or on the way to the parent-teacher conference. But there's actually something very useful about that urgency.
03:20
It makes avoiding the conversation sometimes impossible, if not harder. Time is making the decision for you, and if you don't do it, something's gonna happen that you don't like.
03:34
Now, those types of conversations we need help with. We need to know how to start the conversation, how to stay in the conversation, and how to handle whatever happens.
03:45
That's work that I'm teaching every single week in a free workshop called Speak Up. Look for the link in my bio, and I'm gonna come back to it in a second. Drift conversations are the other kind.
03:58
Let me give you a definition. Drift conversations are really conversations that don't have a deadline. They're about important things, but they don't have to happen immediately. Here's an example.
04:11
I have another client whose son is graduating from high school in a year. He just started his senior year. He plans to go away to college.
04:21
And as she is beginning to think about this transition to empty nesting, she's also thinking about her marriage.
04:28
Raising kids has occupied an enormous amount of time and energy and attention, and as she's beginning to experience the last kid who's not taking all the time and the energy and attention, she's noticing, "It's just gonna be me and my husband, and a lot of our interactions feel more like roommates now than lovers, than husband and wife." And she's starting to ask herself questions.
04:58
"Do I like the relationship we have? Do I wanna be closer?
05:02
What's gonna happen when we're no longer organizing so much of our life around, you know, taking care of kids or when they're all gone?" But there's no deadline.
05:14
No one is telling her, "You know what? We need to discuss the state of our marriage by Friday at 5:00." She could talk to him tonight. She could talk to him next month.
05:25
She could wait until the son literally graduates or until he moves out. She could even wait after that. That's what makes drift conversations so interesting.
05:36
Nothing terrible necessarily happens today when you don't have the conversation. That's why postponing them can feel so easy.
05:47
It almost feels like we're putting something on a shelf that we're gonna get to later, but it isn't, because the relationship keeps happening while you are waiting Your child grows up.
06:02
Your marriage keeps taking shape. Your friendship keeps developing the patterns that it has. And time is passing inside the relationship, whether you're actively participating in it or not.
06:19
That's what I mean when I call it a drift conversation. Think about an actual boat that drifts. It seems to be stationary on the water.
06:29
You don't have to be having-- You don't have to have the motor on or be turning the wheel for it to go in any direction.
06:35
The boat still moves just by the nature of the ocean creating waves and currents. Relationships do that too.
06:44
And I think sometimes we unconsciously don't realize that we're not able to pause our relationships. They keep happening. We say things like, "You know what?
06:56
I'll figure out how to talk about that eventually," or, "I'll deal with this when things calm down," or, "We'll work on our marriage after the kids leave." But that relationship is not just sitting on a shelf.
07:11
You're continuing to have a relationship during that entire time because, in large part, our relationships are the thoughts that we have about each other.
07:22
So if I'm worrying that my husband and I are dri- have drifted apart, that now we're more like roommates than husband and wife or lovers, then my mind is finding evidence for how that might be true.
07:34
I begin to tell myself stories about what's happening in our relationship, and I'm having that all inside my own brain, not necessarily sharing it. But that's where the drift is actually happening.
07:49
The drift happens in my mind before it happens in real life. The truth about the drift conversations is that it's a choice. It just doesn't feel like one we are actually making.
08:05
Now, I don't say this because we all need to panic and immediately start having conversations with everyone that we have an unresolved issue with. That's not what I'm asking you to do.
08:16
I'm actually asking you to become more conscious about something that is much more simple but also much more useful and profound, and it is this.
08:28
We have a finite amount of time with every person that we love.
08:33
That is very simple and also profoundly useful when we're thinking about the types of relationships that we want to be creating and how the, how we need to be doing that.
08:45
This came up in a recent coaching session with someone I'll call Molly.
08:49
Molly was divorced, and during her divorce, her father expressed a couple of opinions about what he thought of her and the way that she had conducted herself during the divorce.
09:01
He didn't approve of some of the decisions that she had made, and she had always meant to address it with him, but she kept putting it off, putting it off, putting it off.
09:11
Then he had a series of small strokes that didn't do any, um, permanent damage.
09:17
He did have to stay in the hospital for a few days and then a rehab facility while he recovered, and when she came to the session right after that had happened, the first thing she said was, "I've gotta talk about it with him because I don't know if this is gonna happen again." So what she had learned was that sometimes in these drift conversation scenarios, where it's really something that doesn't have an urgent timeline on it, sometimes life will give me an urgent timeline that I didn't realize was gonna happen.
09:55
When people perceive their remaining time as more limited, emotionally meaningful relationships become more important.
10:07
We've all heard somebody who has a death or something happen in their family, and they say, "You've gotta reach out. Tell people you love them. Hold your children close," right?
10:17
Those kinds of situations really put our time into focus.
10:23
Aging also helps bring time into focus because I'm sure it will make sense that an eighty-year-old thinks very differently about time than a twenty-year-old. But here's what I want you to hear.
10:36
Sometimes life will create deadlines for you if you don't have these conversations on your own, just like the ocean creates movement for a boat and causes it to drift.
10:52
Your kid starts senior year, right? Suddenly, there are only so many ordinary Tuesday nights before they leave. Your best friend tells you she's moving.
11:03
Your parents start aging in ways that become very obvious, and suddenly something that felt unlimited, there's edges around it.
11:14
There's limitations, and you can see the ending of a particular chapter, and that can really change what matters.
11:24
I think there's something very useful about creating that awareness before life creates it for us, not as a scare tactic, but as information.
11:36
For example, if your daughter is fifteen, there are three more summers before she's eighteen. Now, does that mean that every summer has to be magical?
11:47
Maybe she spends half those summers in her room. Who knows? That's not the point.
11:51
The point is to make it conscious that this version of your relationship has a time limit, and if there is something that you want to say- You need to say it because every version of relationships that we have with the people around us have those time limits, with our parents, with the season of our marriage, with friendships, even with coworkers, brothers and sisters.
12:22
We want to be able to look at time in a way that is helpful because if the only conversations that you prioritize are the deadline conversations, some kind of external deadline is making you have the conversations, some of the relationships that matter to you the most won't get talked about.
12:47
There's always something else that is calling for our attention. There's work deadlines, there's appointments, there's laundry, somebody needs a ride, somebody needs dinner, right?
12:57
Deadline conversations will grab your attention because the urgency is yelling at you. The contractor is coming back on Monday. But drift conversations don't yell. Drift conversations whisper.
13:14
They say, "I wish we were closer. I miss him. I don't know if we're okay. I wish I could tell her this. I don't want this relationship to keep feeling this way.
13:28
I want something different between us." And none of those things necessarily require action by Monday, so they can stay at that whisper level for a long time.
13:41
So here's a question I want you to think about. What would you do differently if you stopped unconsciously treating this relationship as though you had unlimited time?
13:55
I do not mean what would you do if this person died tomorrow or this was your last day to live. I don't think that's useful. That creates a lot of unnecessary fear and panic and urgency.
14:06
What I mean to call your attention to is just your participation in this relationship.
14:14
What do you want that to look like before the kid leaves home, before your parents get to the point where you're not able to communicate as well with them anymore, before a friendship chapter closes, before you're empty nesters?
14:33
Did you say the things that mattered to you? Did you ask for what you wanted? Did you try to repair what you wanted to repair? Did you let someone know that you wanted more closeness?
14:47
Did you establish some limits when limits were needed? Did you participate in creating the relationships you wanted instead of just waiting to see what the relationship became?
15:01
The goal is not to guarantee an outcome because let's be honest, you could reach out to your husband and he could say, "You know, that's not something I'm interested in." You can try to repair something with a friend and discover that that relationship is not gonna be able to be repaired.
15:18
The goal in having the conversation is not to guarantee that the other person responds the way you want.
15:26
The goal is to be able to look back and say, "I participated in trying to make that relationship meaningful for me on whatever level I choose. I did what was mine to do.
15:39
I said what was mine to say." So I want you to think about a drift conversation that you might want to have.
15:50
It's probably something that could remain exactly the same if you don't talk about it for another six months, maybe another year even.
16:00
I want you to just ask yourself, "What do I want to do with this relationship? What do I want it to be?
16:08
Is the way that I'm participating right now moving us in that direction?" Because if the answer is no, you have options and you don't have unlimited time.
16:23
We need to begin to think in concrete terms about the reality of the way time passes for everyone because those deadline conversations, those are almost actually a lot easier to have because of that external consequence that's forcing us to take action.
16:43
If you need help having a deadline conversation, I need to see you in my next free workshop because that's what we do every single week.
16:50
We figure out, "How do I have this conversation that's bearing down on me soon?" And here's the secret.
17:01
The same skills that will help you have the deadline conversations in a way that is less urgent with taking up less of your time, less brain space, less hand-wringing, less rehearsing, less feeling terrible until you get to the day when the conversation's happening, it's actually possible to have deadline conversations in a very non-stress way.
17:25
That's what I'm teaching women how to do every single week in the coaching that I do, and we're starting with the free workshop Speak Up. Find the link in my bio. Sign up for this next week.
17:34
And here's the secret. The same skills that make it easier to have those deadline conversations make it easier to have these drift conversations as well.
17:45
Knowing how to bring something up in a way that feels good to you, knowing how to stay in the conversation and say what you want to say without collapsing or without the emotions taking over, without freezing, and knowing how to handle what happens after, those are actually the three steps of every conversation.
18:05
So as we end, wrap up for today, think about two things. Number one, what would be different in my relationships if I actually acknowledged the limitations of time? What would I do differently?
18:19
How would I participate differently in my most important relationships? And number two, which skill do I really need to work on? Do I need to work on starting the conversation?
18:31
Do I need to work on staying in the conversation? Or do I need to work on handling what happens after?
18:37
And if you want some help with that, that's why you show up for one of the free workshops that I'm doing every single week. The link is in the bio. I'll see you there. Thanks for listening.
18:45
See you next week.
Episode 173 - The Motivational Triad: Why Avoiding the Hard Conversation Feels So Good
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
Is there a difficult conversation you know you need to have but keep putting off? You may have noticed that every time you decide to wait, you feel a little better even though you’re avoiding something you actually want to do. That relief is real, and in this episode, we’re breaking down the motivational triad and why people-pleasing and avoiding conflict can feel so good in the short term, even when they’re creating results you don’t want. Because once you understand what’s happening, you can start practicing a different response: having the hard conversation instead of dropping hints that something is wrong, waiting for the other person to change, or continuing to endure a situation you don’t want to be in. Here’s what I cover:
A framework called the motivational triad that describes the three things human beings are strongly motivated to do: seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy
Why knowing something isn’t working long-term doesn’t erase the short-term reward
How overthinking can become another way of avoiding discomfort while making you feel like you’re solving the problem
What it looks like to have compassion for your brain while you learn a new way of responding
Why the capacity to tolerate discomfort and take care of yourself matters more than false certainty that a difficult conversation will go well
Reserve your seat for Sara’s next workshop: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
One of my clients has come to our group sessions a couple of times with the same conversation that she knows that she needs to have.
01:09
She's known she needs to have it for a long time. She owns about 20 rentals, and it's with her property manager. This property manager was recommended by a friend, and is not doing a great job.
01:24
There are complaints that are piling up from her renters. There are repair tickets that are taking a long time to actually get resolved, and it's starting to show up for my client in stress.
01:37
She's waking up in the morning worried about checking her email because she doesn't know who's gonna be, like, upset or angry with her.
01:46
She has started to feel really uncomfortable around the friend who recommended this particular property manager because the friend is always talking about, "Hey, isn't she doing such a great job?" So the stress is piling up.
02:00
She's been thinking about it for a long time. She has a couple different versions written out of how she wants to bring this up with the property manager.
02:10
And in our last session, we were catching up about what had happened since the time we previously met, and I asked her, "Were you able to have that conversation?" And she said, "No, I just decided to wait until after school gets back in session." You know, she's got a couple kids.
02:27
Maybe, maybe that'll make things better. And I said, "Okay. How did you feel after you made that decision?" And she said, "Ugh.
02:38
I felt a lot better because it's gonna give me a little bit more time to think about it, and it's gonna give her a little bit more time to maybe, you know, get her kids back into school." And I said, "Okay.
02:49
Tell me what it is that you still need to think about. What are you still thinking through?" And as we talked about it back and forth, nothing has changed factually.
03:01
It's just that every single time she goes to do it, there's a part of her that talks her out of it, and then she feels better.
03:10
And that particular kind of relief is what caught my attention, and it's what I wanted to talk about today because once you understand where that relief comes from, it makes a lot of sense, and it's a lot easier to know what it's costing you and what you can do instead.
03:29
So she's telling me about this conversation that feels like it has a lot of implications. It might affect her friendship with the person who recommended the property manager.
03:40
It might affect the way her property manager thinks about her.
03:44
She's not ready to fire her yet, but she is definitely ready to ask her to change some really important behaviors so that her renters have a better experience.
03:55
And every time she goes to do it, she just-- it feels like there's something in its way, and then she puts it off, and this is what I pointed out.
04:06
Your brain just got rewarded for avoiding doing something that you actually want to do, and we need to make sense of that.
04:18
And so I've taught her what I want to talk about with you today, the motivational triad.
04:24
There is a framework that is sometimes called the motivational triad, and it describes the three things that human beings are strongly motivated to do. Number one, seek pleasure.
04:38
Number two, avoid pain, and number three, conserve energy. And these are actually incredibly useful things. These are the things that help human beings survive.
04:52
They still keep us alive today, and I, I want to be clear. The problem isn't that our brain does these things.
05:00
The problem is that it is a system that is designed to protect us and help us survive in the short term, and this system doesn't actually know or care about you creating the life that you want in the long term.
05:20
So there's a real trade-off between short term and long term, and we need to better understand that.
05:27
Let's start with just seeking pleasure, and when I say pleasure, I'm of course talking about chocolate cake, shopping, or Instagram.
05:35
But I want you to just think more broadly about what feels like a reward to your body and to your brain. It's food when you're hungry. It's warmth when you're cold.
05:48
It's connection and belonging with other people. It's sexual attraction. It's being held. It's being accepted. It's being successful when we accomplish something.
06:01
It is getting our curiosity satisfied, being able to play, being able to just be. All of these experiences can create a reward.
06:12
And reward is super useful because it motivates us to repeat behaviors that support our survival and our reproduction.
06:24
I mean, I want you to imagine just for a second, imagine if you were starving and if eating felt terrible. That would be a problem because we need to eat to survive.
06:35
Or if connecting with another human being produced no reward or revulsion or, or, or something bad, right?
06:43
It would not motivate us to connect or to care for the people around us, to care for our children if it felt meaningless.
06:52
So a species whose brains didn't encourage those life-sustaining behaviors would not do very well. And so we do an action, and then our brain learns, "That felt really good.
07:08
Let's do that again." And so this learning isn't just limited to the obvious pleasures, because something like relief can also feel like a reward. Approval can feel like a reward.
07:26
Someone saying, "You're such a great person for saying yes to that project," can feel like a reward. Seeing someone else's face relax after you agree with them, that can feel like a reward.
07:43
Restoring harmony when someone is mad at you can feel enormously rewarded.
07:48
And this is where it gets really interesting for people pleasers because the reward isn't just, "I got something wonderful." Sometimes the reward is, "Oh my God, thank God.
08:03
Everything is okay again." Everything is returned to a peaceful place, and our brain pays attention to that and says, "Do it again. Do it again. Make yourself smaller. Agree with them.
08:19
Don't say anything. Just let it go. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again." That's seek pleasure. The second part of the motivational triad is avoiding pain.
08:28
And again, this is essential, pain is information. If you put your hand on a hot stove, pain tells you to move it.
08:37
If you are hiking and injure your ankle, pain changes how you move so that it doesn't injure yourself further.
08:45
If you hear something that's threatening in the dark, your body prepares to protect itself.
08:51
Fear, discomfort, and pain help direct our attention toward the things that are potentially dangerous and potentially threatening to our survival.
09:04
If we were somehow rendered indifferent to threat and injury, that's like a terrible survival strategy. So these systems have been designed to help us notice danger and respond quickly.
09:21
But physical pain isn't the only kind of pain that human beings experience. Social pain matters too.
09:31
Rejection, humiliation, exclusion, disapproval, loss of status, conflict and tension with people that we depend on or who matter to us.
09:44
And for most of human history, belonging wasn't just like a nice thing to have. We only survived because we were in groups.
09:55
Other people helped provide the things that we needed as a community, food, protection, care, information, support.
10:05
And so it makes a lot of sense that human beings are highly responsive to social connection and social threat. That's what keeps you in the group.
10:18
Keeping the rules, not doing anything to get kicked out matters a lot. So let's think about how that applies to having a hard conversation.
10:29
It's not that you are facing a life-endangering threat like a tiger or a large pre- predator. You're thinking about telling maybe your mom that you're not coming for Christmas.
10:44
You are going to ask your boss for a raise. You're gonna tell your husband that you want more out of your intimate sexual life together. You're gonna tell a friend that something she said hurt you.
10:56
And so intellectually, these aren't physical survival threats on par with a bear or a tiger, but your nervous system can still respond strongly because now it's looking at rejection, disapproval, or disconnection.
11:18
So then your brain decides, "You know what? Let's just wait until later. Maybe I don't have to bring this up." And the threat decreases. Your body starts to settle.
11:30
It produces relief, and then your brain learns something. Avoiding that worked, which brings us back to pleasure, right?
11:42
And so your body is always trying to bring you back to relief in the short term, and these three tendencies or these three parts of this triad, they don't operate separately, they reinforce one another.
11:59
The last one, the third one, conserving energy. This one I think is a little misunderstood because we tend to moralize effort. The more effort, the better the person.
12:13
Less effort means that person is lazy or unmotivated or undisciplined. But conserving energy Also has a very intelligent biological strategy.
12:26
For most of human history, we didn't DoorDash our calories to us, right? We didn't have endless sources of calories. We couldn't get a churro at Costco.
12:37
In fact, I don't think you can get those anymore, sadly. But we couldn't get a cookie at the gas station.
12:42
We didn't have refrigeration that kept our food for a long time, and so energy was expensive. Finding food required energy. Escaping danger required energy.
12:58
Maintaining our body temperature, pregnancy, nursing, healing, moving, hunting, gathering, and caring for the people in your tribe all required energy.
13:11
So organisms that use energy efficiently end up having a huge survival advantage.
13:19
So our brain, which is itself an energetically expensive organ, is constantly looking for ways to make repeated behavior more efficient. This is part of why habits are so useful.
13:37
Within the last 12 months, I taught my youngest son to drive, and I was reminded again of how much energy it takes for something that I don't even think about, and watching him, like, literally have to think hard to put the car into drive and take his foot off the gas and put it on the brake and back and forth, I watched him expend a tremendous amount of energy every single time we got in the car, and I was reminded again of, wow, this is this amazing part of our brain that learns how to just autopilot so many things.
14:19
It learns how to take decisions that we make over and over and over again and just make them very familiar so we don't have to think about it.
14:31
You actually don't want every familiar decision that you have to make every single day to require 20 minutes of conscious analysis and thinking.
14:43
Your brain gets very good at automating the things it has done before, and that matters enormously for our behavior because if you've spent 30 years responding to tension by smoothing things over, your brain already has something that works.
15:04
It's a very well-practiced route. Someone is unhappy, you accommodate, and tension decreases. Done. Easy.
15:15
Now, let's compare that for just a second to someone is unhappy, you notice what you're feeling, you figure out what they actually want, you regulate your body, you decide what needs to be said, you say it clearly as you take care of your nervous system, they react, you stay present, and you respond without abandoning what matters to you.
15:36
I mean, that sounds really great, and it's what I want to teach you how to do, but that takes a tremendous amount of energy, especially when you are learning.
15:47
So when your brain says, "You know what? Just say it's fine. Just say, just don't bring it up. I know you're upset, but it's not gonna...
15:57
Just, just say it's fine," that's not necessarily revealing your character. It's not telling you who you are. It's a well-practiced, energy-efficient solution.
16:13
So this is where the motivational triad becomes incredibly useful. Imagine that you need to tell someone you're upset. Your brain is going to see the potential conflict and tell you, "You know what?
16:27
Don't bring it up." So you decide not to bring it up, and your anxiety immediately drops.
16:34
Seek pleasure or reward through relief, and you get to use the familiar response that you've practiced 100 times. Conserve energy, and your brain has just literally hit the jackpot.
16:49
From just the perspective of your brain, that was a fantastic decision. You avoided a potential threat, you produced immediate relief, and you used an efficient, familiar behavioral pathway.
17:05
Amazing. Home run. And meanwhile, there's another logical part of your brain that's asking, "Why do I keep doing this? What is wrong with me?
17:16
Why do I keep saying that when I know it's not working?" Here's what I want you to hear.
17:23
Knowing something isn't working long term doesn't erase the short-term reward, and that's the tension that I want you to notice and to have some compassion for because your brain can be doing exactly what it has learned works while also producing a result that you no longer want.
17:51
Your brain can be doing exactly what it has learned works, and you cannot want that thing anymore, and that is very different from this is just who I am.
18:06
I just want to be really clear because this is where we can misunderstand what that avoidance really means, and instead of understanding it as part of a survival mechanism, we make it mean something about who we are.
18:19
I have women say all the time, "I am just conflict-averse," or, "I'm an overthinker." Or I'm, you know, I'm just really sensitive to other people's emotions, or I'm terrible at confrontation, or I've always been a people pleaser.
18:35
And what I want you to consider is that all that has happened is that you have been programmed with the good girl rules, and your brain has learned that keeping those rules produces relief, and that relief feels like a reward.
18:56
So when you soften or you say yes, or you don't ask for what you want, or you apologize even though, uh, you didn't do anything and you might still be upset, you feel the relief that you are programmed to seek.
19:12
It's part of what you have been wired to do to survive. But the problem is that it's now being misunderstood as like a part of your personality. It's not your personality.
19:25
It's a survival strategy that doesn't take into account the long-term plans that you have for your life, the long-term relationships that you want.
19:37
The motivational triad is optimized beautifully for right now, for the short term. But the life that you want and the relationships that you want often require that you optimize for something else.
19:55
For example, if you want an honest marriage, that is gonna require some uncomfortable conversations today.
20:04
If you want employees who respect your expectations, they're gonna require some feedback, and that might feel difficult. Maybe you want friendships that feel connected and reciprocal.
20:17
That is gonna require telling someone when they've hurt your feelings. Maybe you wanna stop carrying everything at home.
20:26
That is definitely gonna require a conversation where you ask someone to do something differently.
20:35
And so every single time we want something that requires discomfort, that introduces two competing rewards. Because the immediate reward that our bodies and our brains will always seek is relief.
20:52
But the long-term reward, which is the relationship that I want, the career that feels really satisfying, self-respect, or the life that I actually want to be living, those require us to understand long-term consequences.
21:11
And when our brain is still trying to get us and steer us toward that short-term reward, we have to really understand what is happening so that we can do something different.
21:21
I wanna focus for just a second on overthinking, because this connects directly to overthinking.
21:29
So many women that I work with, myself included, we tend to go inward when there is something that we need to solve, and we actually think we're solving the problem.
21:41
We are trying to eliminate the emotional cost. We are looking for the right words so that we can guarantee he won't get mad or she'll understand and nobody will think we're selfish.
21:52
And once we find that sentence, or once we have, like, the magical equation that makes it certain that we are not going to get in trouble when we have this conversation, then we'll speak.
22:07
Except, I, I don't wanna say this any more than you wanna hear it, those magical sentences and magical circumstances don't exist.
22:17
And so thinking just becomes another way to avoid pain while you feel productive.
22:26
All of that inner good girl math, where you're calculating and trying to find the right sentence and trying to make sure that it's the right time, and the way that you're measuring and weighing and trying to make sure that you're not going to have a conversation that results in something bad can feel like you're actually doing something important.
22:50
Here's what I want you to hear. You don't need enough certainty to make the conversation comfortable, because it doesn't exist. You can't control how the other person is gonna respond.
23:04
What you need is the capacity to have the conversation and take care of the part of you that is scared, and to be able to tolerate that discomfort while you are honest and while you say the thing that needs to be said, and that is a very, very different skill.
23:26
The goal is not to wait until we know exactly how to have the conversation in a way that nobody gets mad and everybody agrees with us, because that's not gonna happen.
23:38
The goal is to be able to stay with yourself and not abandon yourself in the middle of the conversation and be able to be honest. That is what gets you the relationships and the life that you want.
23:56
So one of the women that I worked with in a different workshop was divorcing, and her soon-to-be ex-husband did not want to sell the home that they had shared.
24:08
In fact, he wanted her to make a lot of accommodations and let him live there for a little while, while he figured out what he was gonna do next and possibly, you know, do some different things.
24:18
And as we talked through what she wanted to say, she was very clear. She knew exactly what it was that she wanted. But what was hard was that she kept thinking, "What if he reacts this way?
24:32
What if he reacts this way? What will I do? What will I say?" And again, all of that internal energy was costing her a lot. We talked about what she wanted. She seemed very clear.
24:46
We decided that whatever it was that happened in his reaction, she could handle it, and I got an email from her, and she said, "You know what?
24:55
I did it." She handled it, and the win wasn't controlling his reaction because we both agreed, and it's obvious she can't do that.
25:07
The win was that she had trusted herself to just have the conversation, and she had it, and now she was one step closer to the life that she really wanted to be living.
25:21
So the next time you find yourself thinking, "Why am I like this?
25:29
Why am I doing this even though I know it doesn't work, even though I know it's not helpful?" I want you to try a different question. I want you to try this instead.
25:39
Ask yourself, "What is my brain getting rewarded for right now? What am I getting relief from? Am I accommodating? Am I staying quiet?
25:51
Am I thinking instead of acting?" And then ask yourself, "What do I want to teach my brain is rewarding instead?" Telling the truth, asking, being clear, letting someone else be disappointed in you, and learning how to tolerate that.
26:15
Maybe it's trusting yourself to handle whatever happens next. Because every time you practice that, you're giving your brain new evidence.
26:27
You're teaching yourself, "I can do something uncomfortable, and I can still be okay." And eventually, something that once felt dangerous can be something that you simply know how to do.
26:41
That is how I feel now about the conversations that I used to 100% avoid. I used to drop hints. I used to hope that the other person changed.
26:53
I used to kind of try to manipulate and arrange the perfect circumstances so that I'd have a better chance of not making anyone mad at me or not ever disappointing me.
27:03
But what I can tell you is this: It is now something that I feel not only really good at, but I enjoy getting on the other side of a hard conversation because now one of two things always happens.
27:18
I'm either very clear on what the relationship can or can't do, or I'm closer, and sometimes it's both.
27:27
Sometimes I'm closer to a person because we've been able to have a hard conversation and work through it together, and sometimes I'm clear on, "Okay, that is...
27:36
That's not somewhere we can go." Either way, it has become a skill that I, I really believe it is the most important skill that a woman can have.
27:47
And so if you're interested in developing this skill, check out the link in my bio. It's sarahfisk.coach/voice because I teach three steps every single week. I teach it live.
27:59
You come to the workshop.
28:01
I am there with you for an hour talking you through these steps and helping you see where this breaks down for you and where you can start using the power of teaching your brain different rewards to master skills, because that's all this is.
28:21
You're not conflict-averse. You're not just a people pleaser. You're just missing some skills, and I would love to teach them to you. So check it out, sarahfisk.coach/voice.
28:32
It's also in the show notes, and I'll see you next week.
Episode 172 - Are Your Thoughts Keeping You Stuck?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
How often do you have thoughts like, "I hate doing this," "I'm bad at this," or "What's the point?" and brush them aside? We often push through our days without stopping to question the stories running through our minds, but what if those seemingly small thoughts are pointing to something much deeper? In this episode, I'm sharing why learning to notice your thoughts and getting curious about what's underneath them can change the way you move through your life. The next version of you is possible, and creating the life you want sometimes starts with uncovering the beliefs you've been holding onto so you can finally let them go. Here’s what I cover:
A recent thought that led me to uncover the deeper fears and beliefs hiding underneath
How somatic work helps reach the thoughts that can’t be accessed by cognitive behavior therapy alone
How reflecting on a 12-year cycle inspired me to let go of old patterns and cultivate new energy
Why you can choose what you believe on purpose and how that can transform your life
How my upcoming free workshop will help you find the conscious and subconscious beliefs quietly running the show
Reserve your seat for Sara’s next workshop: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
So the other day, I was sitting down to write a sales page, and in this business, and in many businesses, there's a lot of writing to be done.
01:06
And as I was sitting down, I said out loud, under my breath, "I hate this." And my whole body tensed, my shoulders, my jaw. I was just...I was mad that I had to do it. I wanted to do something else.
01:21
And I caught it in a way that I haven't before, and it changed my trajectory in a really interesting way, and I want to tell you why that exact moment mattered so much.
01:36
And to understand that, we need to go back for a little bit. When I first became a coach, I was trained in something called the Model, which is a cognitive behavior therapy tool.
01:48
Cognitive behavior connects your thoughts to your feelings, then to the actions that you take, and then the results that you get. And when I first learned this, it felt revolutionary.
02:04
This was a structure, a real, like, learnable structure for something that had always just felt to me like the weather, right? Moods that arrived out of nowhere, reactions I couldn't really explain.
02:18
But what the model and what cognitive behavior therapy said was, "No, that's not random. There's a thought under that.
02:26
If you find the thought, and if you can identify the feeling, and if you can see what that makes you do, that explains why you are getting what you are getting." And I started using it on myself.
02:40
I used it with clients, and it was amazing. And it was amazing because that whole world of, like, inner emotions, I was very disconnected from.
02:50
I was very disconnected from my body, and I often had the feeling that I was, like, army crawling my way through something forcing myself to do something on the outside that did not match how I felt on the inside.
03:04
And so I think that's really familiar for a lot of us, is that we know that we are supposed to do something, right? I'm supposed to make dinner. I'm supposed to, uh, go to work.
03:16
I'm supposed to enjoy being with my kids. But inside, something doesn't match, and so that mismatch was what I felt a lot but I couldn't name, and I didn't know why it was happening.
03:28
And so the Model really gave me that first look into there's something that happens, and the thing that happens isn't good or bad.
03:40
There's some kind of situation, and then I have a thought about it, and then that thought produces a feeling, and then when I'm feeling that, I do certain things, and I don't do other things, and then that's what gets me my result.
03:54
So if we go back to, "I hate it," you know, that I said about the sales page, a sales page isn't good or bad. It's neutral. But my thought, "I hate this," produced a feeling of tension in my body.
04:10
And so then I would have normally, you know, sat down, made myself do it, forced my...That's the army crawling feeling, right?
04:18
Just kind of forcing my way through this activity that had to be done but I didn't really want to do it.
04:24
And then I would have gotten a sales page that needed a lot of work because of that unresolved tension. I loved it.
04:32
It was a structure that I understood, that I could use, and it worked, and it kept working.
04:39
First, I was a weight loss coach, and there was a lot of conscious thoughts that keep people from losing weight, and that was really helpful.
04:49
But then later on, when I went to help women stop people pleasing, I felt like I ran into a wall. This was the wall.
04:59
A lot of the thinking that was driving my clients' feelings to lose weight or to stop people pleasing wasn't conscious. They didn't have access to it.
05:09
They weren't saying it out loud like I said, "I hate this" about the sales page. And what I learned was you can't work with a thought that you don't know you're having.
05:20
You can't fix a belief that is buried under there so far that you don't even know it's running the show, driving the bus. So then I got further training.
05:32
I got trained in somatics, somatic experiencing, and parts work, and then learning to listen to the body when the mind doesn't have words for what's happening.
05:44
The body was such a rich source of information and connection, and it felt like I had really found another missing piece.
05:55
It was genuinely, and has genuinely, provided some of the most important work I've ever done with myself and with the women I coach, because now we can look at your conscious thoughts, that's cognitive behavior therapy, and we can find your subconscious thoughts.
06:13
And so after having those two kind of pieces of the puzzle, I leaned more heavily into the somatic work and the parts work. And recently something interesting is happening.
06:24
I've been coming back around to kind of the next level of cognitive behavior therapy.
06:31
And it's, it's sharper now because I can see how much those pieces interact and kind of what's running underneath it.
06:41
And I've noticed a cycle in my own life, and I'm wondering if you're gonna recognize it too. So let's talk about it.
06:49
Since I have left the Mormon church, I would describe myself as someone who is spiritual but not religious. And one of the things that I've enjoyed learning about is astrology.
07:03
I don't want to overstate it. I don't think it's a huge part of my life, but I have really enjoyed seeing patterns and recognizing things that feel true from my experience.
07:15
And something interesting is happening right now.
07:18
Right now, in late July, there's something happening called a Jupiter cazimi, and that's when Jupiter sits at the exact heart of the sun, and it marks a kind of reset in Jupiter's cycle.
07:32
Jupiter takes 12 years to move through the full zodiac. So a cazimi like this lines up with the start of a new 12-year arc.
07:43
And I have been feeling that kind of letting go of old energy and wanting to cultivate new energy all over my life before I even knew what this astrological event was and what it meant.
07:59
And do with this what you may, right? Like I said, I like seeing patterns. I like seeing things that assign meaning to my life.
08:08
Um, that's probably some of the vestiges of, of religion actually, but I enjoy it. And so astrology is just one of the things I enjoy learning about.
08:17
But this particular 12-year arc led me to do something that I haven't done before. I looked back 12 years. 12 years ago was 2014. My faith was starting to break apart.
08:34
Um, there were pieces of it everywhere, and I just felt like I was hanging on to a life raft that was breaking apart in the ocean, and I was just frantically trying to keep as many pieces of it together because I did not know what else to do.
08:54
My husband had already left the church, and I hadn't.
08:57
I was still holding on, trying to figure out what his decision meant for us, for our marriage, for our family, for the whole architecture and the structure of the life that I thought I was building.
09:11
Now, Mormonism didn't exactly teach me how to let someone else be an autonomous agent.
09:20
You would think it would, but it really didn't because in Mormonism, what really matters is keeping the rules and everybody staying inside the structure and everybody making it work, and sometimes you don't like it 'cause, you know, that's normal.
09:32
But in the end, we have to stay in this structure because that's how we get the eternal reward at the end.
09:42
So clinging to the pieces of my life raft, clinging to the pieces of my life raft and seeing that he had completely jumped overboard created a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, and I dealt with it the way that I had been trained to deal with everything.
10:01
I tried harder to look fine. I look back at some of the pictures in my camera roll from 2014, and I am smiling.
10:12
I am pretending, and I know I can remember some of those moments where I was actively just pretending to look fine. I could talk to my husband about some of the things, not all of them.
10:27
I had a lot of anger toward him. I had a lot of grief. And I not only wasn't always fully aware that that's what I was feeling, but I didn't know how to talk about it with him.
10:41
And I knew he was carrying his own weight too, and I didn't know if there was room for mine as well.
10:49
I didn't know if we could talk about it and still be fine because so many of the conversations we were having was just about getting through, you know, the day-to-day of five young children at home and homeschooling them and all of the kind of pressure and stress of just normal family.
11:09
And on top of it, he was leaving the church that we'd belonged to for our whole lives, and so it was a lot.
11:16
My inner world felt like it was just constantly churning with worry and fear, trying to appear fine because my friend group at the time was a group of women who were all LDS Mormon and very suspicious of my husband having left, suspicious of me in some ways because faith and obedience was, like, the main...
11:48
The things that were the most important to them in their lives as well.
11:52
And so I look back to pictures of me with them. I just remember feeling terrified that they would find out that I had more doubts than I really had, that there were all of these things going on. I just I just tried harder and harder and harder to look like I was fine, to look like I was managing it, to look like, "No, no, no, it's gonna be fine, it's gonna be fine, it's gonna be fine." And then in 2016, my daughter came out.
12:22
That just kind of threw gasoline on everything. It didn't make it instant that I could leave.
12:32
I was still hiding, but now I was not just managing my own fear about myself, I was managing my fear for her as well.
12:43
More secrecy, more holding it together on the outside while the inside felt like it was just cracking, and my worries for her about what this meant for her life, especially inside the community that we were a part of.
12:57
And so it was kind of with all of that pressure, all of that holding it together that I found coaching in 2018.
13:06
And I learned that model that taught me that the way I was thinking was shaping how I felt and how I acted and the results that I was getting in my life, and it felt like a structure that I could hold onto while the life raft, you know, the last pieces of the life raft were breaking apart and floating away.
13:29
And so I really held onto it, and then I started teaching it.
13:33
And as I said, I used it with clients, and I saw how much a- of a difference it made for them, and then I saw the pieces that we were missing. Which brings me back to the sales page the other day.
13:48
Here's what I want you to see.
13:52
As I noticed that sentence that came out of my mouth without even me really thinking about it, and the tension in my body, I could have just pushed through it the way I pushed through 2014 and '15 and '16 and '17 and '18, and I could have decided that it doesn't matter, I've just gotta get this done.
14:11
But I stopped, and I decided to take a look at it. I found more underneath it.
14:20
Fear of failure, fear of not really knowing what I'm doing, worry about the future, and even underneath that, a specific kind of shame.
14:35
My coaching business used to be a lot more financially successful than it is right now, and there was a quiet subconscious part of me that had decided that that meant something was wrong with me.
14:48
And none of that was conscious until I caught the sentence and the tension and then stopped to look underneath it.
14:58
So after a few days of sitting with that work and realizing, okay, there's a lot of value in, like, really keeping track of my thoughts, it felt like it was a piece of this next 12-year cycle, the next version of myself, and I made a decision.
15:20
I decided that that next version of me is possible. That is the sentence that I am taking to believe on purpose, because that's the other part of cognitive behavior therapy.
15:33
You can actually decide what you want to believe on purpose. If it feels true, it can guide you in the direction of the change you want.
15:43
If it doesn't feel true, you need to back it off a little bit until you find something that feels true, because what this isn't is just blowing smoke and trying to get rainbows and daisies and unicorns when you don't really believe that that's possible.
16:00
So it has to feel believable, and this sentence that I came up with feels very believable. The next version of me is possible, and I am deciding that it's possible for me today.
16:12
I also decided I don't have to know exactly how it shows up. I don't have to decide that right now.
16:19
I don't know the special combination of circumstances and people and opportunities and challenges and obstacles that are going to shape the next version of me.
16:29
My only job is to show up and to do the work that I have in front of me, to cultivate the feelings that I want, which are calmness and groundedness and passion that I also feel very naturally when I am talking with clients and working with people inside of Connected and in the free workshop Speak Up.
16:53
It's where I feel, like, really the best in terms of energy and alignment, and so I'm gonna go with that, and I'm gonna let the rest work itself out.
17:04
And that's the decision that I decided to make when I felt kind of called back to this belief work, thought work.
17:16
12 years ago, I was holding pieces together with duct tape and terrified of what would happen if I let any of them go. And duct tape is actually pretty strong, so that's probably not the best.
17:27
I was holding pieces together, right, just with my bare hands, and I was afraid of what would happen if I let it go.
17:37
I didn't know what was coming next, and today I am telling you I could not have imagined how beautiful life could be. I'm so grateful that that past version of me let those things go.
17:59
I'm so happy with the choices that I made that I didn't even know at the time what the consequences would be. It felt, it felt like jumping off a cliff, literally diving into the unknown.
18:18
And it was terrifying. And 12 years later, I could not be more grateful. And so to honor this in myself and to honor this in you, I came up with a plan that is not even fully formed yet.
18:38
I haven't picked a date, but I wanna teach you this model, and I wanna do it for free because once you see it, once you get it, it is so powerful.
18:48
So my goal in this workshop is to help you find those conscious and sometimes unconscious thoughts that are running the show, that are underneath that tension.
18:58
Because when you see them, when you find them, you can decide something different for yourself.
19:03
You gotta be on my email list to find out when registration for this free workshop is going to take place. So use the link in my show notes to get on my email list.
19:14
If you rate and follow my podcast and you come to the workshop and let me know that you did, I'm gonna have a special gift for you. So thank you so much for listening.
19:23
Thank you to so many of you who have been a part of the journey, not just of this podcast, but of me and my coaching business.
19:31
And here's to the next 12 years, because I know that when we look back, we are gonna be so grateful for the choices that we made because we can make them on purpose.
19:45
We don't have to wait for anyone else to create the life that we want. We can do it. Our relationships can become clearer. They can become closer.
19:56
We can have so much more of what we want, and sometimes it starts with letting things go and finding out the reasons why you're holding onto them. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
Episode 171 - The Small People-Pleasing Behaviors That Add Up
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
Most women are familiar with what people-pleasing looks like. You say yes when you mean no, avoid conflict, or never ask for what you need. But some of the most exhausting people-pleasing doesn't happen in those big, obvious moments. It happens in tiny ways that have become so automatic we don’t notice them. In this episode, we're looking at these subtle habits through the lens of micro people-pleasing: the invisible, everyday behaviors driven by your nervous system that quietly steal your time, energy, and attention. Once you understand these small tendencies, you can begin interrupting them before they add up. Here's what I cover:
The surprising math behind how much time we spend replaying conversations and trying to keep other people happy
What micro people-pleasing looks like in everyday life and how it differs from more obvious people-pleasing behaviors
A self-assessment exercise to help you identify your own micro people-pleasing patterns
Why micro people-pleasing behaviors aren't conscious choices but responses designed to help you feel safe
How practicing "the pause" helps you interrupt both big and micro people-pleasing habits
Reserve your seat for my next workshop: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
Today's episode, getting back to my people-pleasing roots, because I want to give you a different lens to look through some of the people-pleasing behaviors I'm going to be calling micro people-pleasing.
01:13
And most women, especially if you have been listening to this podcast, you know what the bigger people pleasing looks like. You know, it's saying yes when you mean no, it's avoiding conflict, it's never asking for what you need and it's keeping everybody happy.
01:28
And yes, all of those are people pleasing behaviors. And a lot of the people pleasing doesn't actually happen in those big moments. A lot of it happens in moments that are so small that we stop noticing them.
01:43
It's the way that we are adjusting what we do, what we say, how we look, how we present by like three to seven percent of what we would actually do if nobody cared. It's softening your opinion. It's apologizing before you've done anything wrong.
02:03
It's offering the solution to a problem that nobody asked you to solve. And these are sometimes small, sometimes tiny. They are very automatic, sometimes invisible. And because they're so small, they rarely feel like or they might not get the same attention that big people pleasing normally does.
02:26
But I want to call your attention to them today because when you start looking for these and you realize how many of them are happening every single day, it really adds up and it adds up in a way that really matters.
02:41
Before we go any further, I want you to do a little math with me because this is the math that I do with women when I'm talking to them about coaching or in my group coaching programs. I ask them to tell me how many hours a day they spend worrying, rehearsing, thinking that somebody's mad at them, talking to other people about whether or not they were too much or too offensive or if they should go back and fix it, dreading moments in the future where they think they're going to people please or replaying moments in the past where they're disappointed in themselves that they didn't do something better. They're feeling resentful and anxious and fearful.
03:19
And then because they're feeling all of that, they scroll or eat or distract themselves. It's a lot of time. And when I ask them to just ballpark it for me, most of the women that I coach and talk to say that it's somewhere between three to five hours a day where they are not in the present moment of their life.
03:44
They're either replaying yesterday's conversation or rehearsing tomorrow's. And one important thing to remember is that that doesn't mean that this is happening like sitting in a chair. Their body is doing other things, going to work, driving carpool, making dinner, you know, whatever, but it's the internal ruminating loop that just keeps churning and churning and churning.
04:08
And so most of the time they tell me that that is between three and five hours a day. Let's just kind of play that out a little bit. Three hours a day becomes 46 days a year. Four hours a day is 61 days.
04:28
And five hours becomes 76 days. That's an enormous amount of your time, energy, and brain space that just leaks out adjusting and trying to predict and wondering if someone is upset. That's gone because your mind is busy managing relationships and situations that aren't even happening in the present moment.
04:58
And here's the part that really fascinates me. Most of that time isn't spent on the big conversations. You've heard me do a lot of talking lately about the big conversations that I'm working with women on being able to have in a really comfortable, easy way.
05:12
What I'm talking about today are the tiny moments. It's not obvious people pleasing. It's invisible or internal people pleasing, the kind that is stealing your attention, your energy, and then so much of your life.
05:27
I want to tell you a quick story about a client of mine. She had received a text from her brother asking if she could watch their dog over Christmas. She got the message. She already knew it was a no.
05:40
But instead of saying no, her brain like immediately went to work. You know, maybe I could do this or what if I did. And that should feel familiar. My brain has done it 100 times. And so she offered to come another weekend so that the brother and his wife could still get away for a different trip.
06:01
She hadn't even said no yet. No one had expressed disappointment in her. No one was pressuring her. And no one had even suggested that she do it a different day. But her brain went full bore forward, solving a problem so that the brother didn't feel any discomfort.
06:23
The people pleasing didn't start when she offered another weekend. This is important. It started the minute her nervous system decided that it wasn't safe for her to let him feel uncomfortable or disappointed.
06:41
And it made her responsible for preventing that. So you're going to notice that same thing. You're going to have little teeny tiny flares of discomfort, or you're going to notice rules that are just kind of running in the background where you have already decided because of our good girl programming, our nervous system sends up a little signal.
07:04
Oh, we can't do this. It's not safe. It's not good. They won't like it. You're going to start noticing that. Or sometimes you're just going to notice that there's just this default habitual way you respond because that's just what good people do.
07:20
I had an incident like that happen. This is several years ago. I was sitting in the dentist's chair and the hygienist was cleaning my teeth and it was really hurting. And I think in the moment, if I had thought about it, I would have felt comfortable saying like, hey, this is a little uncomfortable.
07:38
Or when she asked me, how you doing? I would have said, actually, it's hurting a little bit. But I just had this internal rule going that I needed to pretend like it didn't hurt so that I didn't hurt her feelings or so that I didn't look weak.
07:51
And so I sat there, right, in pain for who knows how long now. I can't really remember. So I sat there in pain because that's what my kind of internal rule told me to do. These are instances of micro people pleasing.
08:08
Editing yourself to manage someone else's emotional experience. And once you see that pattern, you're going to start seeing it everywhere. For example, maybe you walk into work. Before you've even put your bag down, you're just, you notice yourself scanning everyone's mood.
08:27
Who's stressed? Who's irritated? Who's quiet? Then without realizing it, you've already started adjusting yourself to match the room. Or someone asks a question about a decision you've made. Maybe they're curious.
08:42
Maybe they just want some more information. You don't know because all they've done is ask the question, but your body hears criticism. And so you're already gearing up to explain yourself. You haven't been asked to defend your decision, but your nervous system is telling you we have to defend our decision here.
09:02
Again, it takes leaning into, is this a nervous system reaction or is this just a rule that I have been taught that I need to manage? Am I just following the rule here? Maybe somebody asks you to help with something and you know that you don't have the capacity.
09:18
But instead of saying, I can't, you feel like you have to leave a door open. You say, you know what, let me look at my schedule, which sometimes that is a perfectly legitimate thing to do when you don't actually know.
09:31
But if you know, that's not what you're doing, right? You're leaving that door open so that you don't hurt their feelings or disappoint them by closing it firmly. So you say, you know, maybe, or I'll see what I can do.
09:44
And you don't decide anything and nothing is clear, but that door stays open because closing it feels harder. Or maybe you're around someone who makes a joke that is at someone else's expense or isn't funny.
10:00
Maybe you laugh and you're laughing not because it's funny, but because your nervous system decides that smoothing over the awkwardness is safer than letting it just be silent. Or maybe you're using sorry a lot.
10:16
Someone bumps into you, sorry. You ask a perfectly reasonable question. Sorry. You need to get around someone who's taking up the entire aisle at the grocery store and you say, sorry. And again, individually, these might seem like small moments.
10:31
They're not very significant. But collectively, I want you to just think about the amount of time that it's taking. Every single one of them is time and energy that you are devoting to managing other people's discomfort.
10:49
So that's a great question. I want to just give you to start asking yourself. Whose discomfort am I managing right now? Just start asking. Just give yourself a space that is free of judgment. Now, we got to say that.
11:04
Yeah. Because if you're just going to like shit on yourself because this is coming up, no, then no, I don't want you to do that. But if you can make this into a little experiment, a little investigation, whose discomfort am I managing right now?
11:18
That is so valuable to just look around and see. Am I managing it because my nervous system is telling me that this isn't safe or because it is just a habit? Here's what I think is so important to understand.
11:33
Most of these decisions aren't conscious. You didn't sit down and decide to explain yourself or apologize or soften your opinion or solve someone else's disappointment. Your nervous system made that decision in milliseconds.
11:47
It detected possible danger, possible discomfort. Somebody could be mad. Somebody could be disappointed. Somebody might think you're selfish. Somebody might misunderstand you. So before your conscious mind even catches up, you're editing.
12:03
And that's what makes this work actually feel really frustrating sometimes, because consciously, I know women, and I have said this to myself, like I am a 45-year-old or now 52-year-old woman. Why am I doing this?
12:20
I shouldn't do this. It's okay to say no. I know I'm allowed to take up space. And of course you do. Knowledge and logic aren't the problem. It's the fact that your nervous system protection gets in there faster than your thinking brain can intervene.
12:41
I want to make an important distinction. Accommodating people you love isn't unhealthy, right? Healthy relationships require flexibility. Sometimes you move things around. Sometimes you help when you don't really have time or energy to help.
12:56
And sometimes you inconvenience yourself because somebody you care really needs you. And that isn't people pleasing. The question isn't whether or not you're adjusting. The question is, am I choosing it for reasons that I like or did it get chosen by a fearful nervous system?
13:16
Remember, on the outside, the behavior looks identical. It's only by looking at our internal experience can we really know the difference. On the one hand, if it's really from a place of calm and groundedness, then it feels like I want to do this.
13:37
If it's from a place of nervous system fear, it will feel more like if I don't do this, something bad will happen between us or something bad will happen to the relationship. One behavior where we accommodate and we give ourselves freely, that creates connection.
13:56
And this other kind of pure nervous system reaction where we are afraid, that actually erodes relationships with ourself and eventually with the other people as well, because we end up feeling resentful and lonely after the fact.
14:16
And so it is really ironic that in a lot of the ways that we are trying to protect the relationships with these little micro adjustments ends up undermining them. Okay, so I want to give you a little self-assessment.
14:32
Inside my group coaching program, we call this shitty bingo because I'm just going to give you some examples and I want you to just keep track. And if you get a blackout, it just means you're normal.
14:44
So I don't want you to ask yourself, am I people pleasing or do I do this? I want you to ask yourself instead, how many of these just feel automatic? Okay, here we go. Do you start explaining your decisions before anyone has questioned them?
15:02
Do you leave invitations open because saying a clean no feels too harsh or too mean? Do you offer solutions when someone is disappointed, even though that's not, they never asked you to? Do you scan the room when you walk in and immediately start adjusting yourself?
15:19
Do you say sorry when someone bumps into you? Do you stay quiet when something hurts because you don't want to inconvenience or make the other person feel bad? Do you soften your opinions with phrases like, you know, this might be a stupid idea or I could be wrong even before you've said what you think?
15:40
Do you change your restaurant order because everyone else is getting something different? Do you check your phone after sending a text and then start rewriting the conversation in your head? Or feel responsible for finding a way for everyone to leave the interaction feeling okay?
15:59
Do you research something for 30 minutes before asking a simple question because you don't want to bother them? Do you rehearse or rewrite a text message five different ways before you actually send it?
16:12
Do you wait until you are 100% sure that you are right about something before speaking up? Do you offer to do extra work because somebody else just looks stressed? Do you pretend that you're flexible when you actually do have a preference and you actually do have limitations, but you're going to work on redoing those behind the scenes so that you can accommodate this person in front of you.
16:37
Do leave a conversation wondering if you've talked too much. These behaviors might not look related. They're happening in different places, you know, at the dentist, over text, at work or at dinner, but they're all running on the same nervous system programming, which is if I can manage everyone else's emotional experience, I will stay safe.
17:02
That really matters. And it's something that we can work on together. Because the goal isn't to become someone who never accommodates anyone. The goal is to stop automatically making yourself responsible for everyone else's emotional experience.
17:20
And it starts in a place that is much simpler than you might think. It starts in the pause. The pause is a tiny moment that you take on purpose when you start seeing these patterns between the request or what you're seeing happen and your response.
17:41
It's where you take a tiny beat in between the question that they're asking or the request that they're making and your explanation. This is a practicable skill to just pause for a second and notice, is this just a rule that I'm following?
17:59
Do I feel unsafe here? Is this just a rule that I'm following? Or do I actually feel a little bit of discomfort here? And can I calm that discomfort for myself? That pause is where self-trust begins.
18:15
It's where you remind your nervous system that disappointment is actually survivable, that awkwardness is not the end of the world, that someone else's feelings can exist without becoming your responsibility.
18:29
So that's the value of the pause. It gives you a moment in big people pleasing scenarios and in these micro people pleasing habits and reactions to have a different experience that costs you less time and energy.
18:49
My free workshop, Speak Up, is happening every week. This is what we are practicing. We are practicing that pause until it becomes available to you in real conversations in real time. It's free. Come join me.
19:03
You can come as many times as you'd like because I want you to be able to have the pause, to know how to use it, and then to start using it in your own life. The link is in the show notes. I would love to have you there.
19:16
Last thing, if this podcast has been helpful to you, I would really be grateful if you took a second to rate it and then share an episode with someone that can benefit. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week.
Episode 170 - The People-Pleasing Conversation I Had With My Teenager
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
People-pleasing tendencies start much earlier in life than many of us realize, and there comes a point when children need to begin unlearning those behaviors so they don't carry them into adulthood. Inspired by a conversation I recently had with my 16-year-old son, I’m breaking down people-pleasing in a way that teens can understand and showing how the same tools I use with my coaching clients can help younger generations too. Learning to recognize these patterns and find your voice early is such a gift. Whether you're sharing this episode with a teen in your life or using these concepts to help guide and encourage them, I hope this episode gives you both more confidence to start speaking up. Here’s what I cover:
The conversation that inspired this episode and why so many teens struggle to speak up
Why people pleasing begins in childhood as a survival strategy before it starts holding us back
The difference between the discomfort of staying stuck and the discomfort that comes with growth
Why people pleasing can actually damage the relationships you're trying to protect
Three steps to help your teen practice speaking up and build confidence one conversation at a time
Reserve your seat for my next workshop: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
This is going to be a fun episode because it is inspired by a conversation that I had with my son just a couple days ago. And here's how it rolled out, which is actually kind of funny.
01:10
He is in theater at his high school. He is in production, you know, behind the scenes, meaning he's building sets and figuring out where all of the props go. And he is going to be a stage manager for a coming production in the fall.
01:26
And he was talking with a friend of his about some of his worries. The stage manager has to direct a lot of other people to do their jobs and make sure that things are getting finished on a timeline.
01:37
And then he has his own work to do. And so he was talking with her about the difficulty of that role and his worry that people would not like him if he was really firm with them about getting their things done.
01:53
And how in the past, he had noticed that he ended up doing a lot of other people's jobs because he didn't want them to be mad at him. And she said, isn't your mom like a coach for people pleasers? Maybe you should talk to her.
02:08
So so funny, he comes home and says, my friend said I should talk to you. And we both got a good chuckle out of that because, you know, I don't know what he thinks I'm doing yammering away in my office all day, but it was the first time he had come to me directly.
02:24
So I hope this episode serves as two things. Number one, it could be something that you play for a teenager in your life when they are asking some of these same questions or confronting some of these same issues.
02:40
Because right around those, you know, teenage years, I would guess 14, 15, 16-ish, he is 16, they're going to start to notice the discomfort of staying quiet when they have something they'd like to say or doing things that they don't really want to do because they feel obligated.
02:59
They're going to start to notice people pleasing popping up. It's also something that you can listen to as the parent or auntie or friend of a young person to encourage them. Either way, I hope it's useful.
03:13
And what I want to do is start with a little bit of background, actually the same kind of background that I gave him, because it is essential that when you are looking at the discomfort that you are feeling, when you are stuck in people pleasing dynamics, where you are doing things that you don't really want to be doing, where you are staying quiet, when you really don't feel comfortable staying quiet,
03:38
you wish you could say something, but it feels too risky. When you are pretending that you are something that you are not, or performing, like putting on a performance for other people that isn't really you, but it's what you think they want.
03:52
It's really, really, really important that you understand how that happened. So this is exactly what I told him. Remember when you were born? And he's like, well, yeah, kind of. You depended on me completely.
04:05
You depended on your dad and you depended on other big people to take care of you. And so for your survival, it was essential that you figure out what we liked. Now, this wasn't something that we explicitly said or that we explicitly told you and you agreed to, but it's just how being a human works.
04:25
So a baby has no ability to take care of itself. It is completely and utterly dependent on the care and concern of big people. And without care and concern from big people, a baby will die. And so you did a really good job of watching us, of learning what we liked, of listening to us, the rules we gave you, the limits we set, of watching our moods, of watching what we expected from you that we said out loud and what you could tell we expected from you that we didn't say out loud.
05:00
And you did a really good job of learning how to do that. You kept the rules. And in a lot of ways, you did the things that we wanted you to do. And that created this relationship that we have where we gave you care and concern.
05:17
And now you're this 16 year old boy and you have gotten through a really critical part of your survival. Now, we weren't doing that on purpose. We weren't trying to coerce you. We weren't trying to manipulate you.
05:31
It's just that humans have preferences and humans have things the way they like them. And so it's not manipulation or coercion. It is very normal. In fact, this is the way that it goes in family settings is that you have to learn the rules and your role in that family.
05:54
And later you have to unlearn it. And it just seems to be the way it is. I don't know a really good way around it yet because little kids don't have a fully developed brain. They don't fully understand choice and consequence.
06:07
And they have to be given limits and boundaries and structures by adults. And those adults don't always know that what they're doing is programming a child to be a people pleaser. In fact, people pleasing when you are young is fantastic.
06:24
You need to do it. Because again, the more big people who care about you, the more big people who will help you and invest in you ensures your survival. And so it starts with your parents, but then it's your teachers.
06:38
Then it's your coach or religious leaders or other people in your community. And you're trying to do what they want you to do so that you can get better at skills and things. And so that they continue to help you.
06:52
So you did a fantastic job. Now it's time for you to understand that while becoming a people pleaser was inevitable, it's inevitable for all of us. It happens because you are dependent on adults to survive.
07:09
And now you're not at the place where you're completely independent, but you have a lot more ability to take care of yourself and a lot more ability to handle things that happen. It's time now to unlearn some of the people pleasing that now doesn't work for you anymore.
07:30
So it's totally normal. This makes sense. That was the first thing I wanted him to understand. I don't want him to think there's anything wrong with him. The fact that he can't set boundaries or doesn't know how to speak up perfectly yet, it's totally normal, right?
07:43
And at his phase of adolescence, it's where friendships matter a lot, where belonging matters a lot. And so this is totally appropriate and normal for him. The second thing I wanted him to understand is the difference in the types of discomfort that he is feeling here.
08:04
So I said, you'll notice that there's actually two different kinds of feeling uncomfortable that are coming up for you. There is the discomfort of doing other people's jobs for them, of not saying anything about what they're supposed to be doing and just kind of doing it for them.
08:24
Tell me a little bit more about that discomfort. And he said, well, you know, it means I have less time for my own work. It means that I end up staying late. It means that I get frustrated with other people.
08:35
It means that I end up feeling kind of alone, like no one's really helping me. I mean, this feels so familiar, right? And I said, okay, so yeah, that is one kind of discomfort that we're going to talk about here.
08:48
The second kind is the discomfort of possibly saying something. The discomfort of speaking up and saying, you know, so and so, that's your job to do and it needs to be done by this time. Tell me how you feel when you think about just being very clear, but kind, respectful, and saying that's your job and it needs to be done.
09:10
And he kind of got that, you know, cringy face feeling and kind of scrunched up his shoulders. He's like, I don't know, I just feel really anxious. Like they're not going to like me. They're going to be mad at me.
09:20
And I said, yes. That discomfort is very normal because we want to belong. We want to have friends. And so anytime we're going to do something that could possibly threaten our connection and our belonging, there's parts of us that speak up to say, hey, don't do that.
09:38
That's going to be terrible. They're not going to like it. They're going to be mad at you. Because those are the parts that were programmed when you were little to help you win the care of more capable, competent adults.
09:52
But remember, you're not there anymore. And it's time, if you want, to develop some skills that are really going to serve you. So going back to these two discomforts, there's the discomfort of staying the same.
10:07
He's actually already been through a theater season where he did just the thing that he was describing to me, where he does everybody else's job and ends up not having enough time for his own. And so he's stressed and staying late.
10:20
I said, that discomfort, you know, well. It's something that you've already done. It's something that is very familiar to you. And in a lot of ways, that's why we keep doing it. It's because we already know it.
10:31
We're familiar with it. What we're less familiar with is the discomfort of growing, the discomfort of developing a new skill. We talked about those two discomforts, and he got that. So if you're a parent talking with your own child, helping them understand they're feeling the same thing.
10:50
There is the discomfort of staying the same, the people pleasing pattern, the discomfort of codependency, of shrinking, of making ourselves smaller, not speaking up. And there's the discomfort of saying something, of speaking up, of setting a boundary.
11:08
The third thing I wanted him to understand was that there is a personal cost to him. And he isn't actually protecting the relationships in the way that he thinks he is when he doesn't speak up about what he wants and needs.
11:29
This is how I said it to him. I want you to just take me back to the last time that you did this. And he went through, you know, some scenario where something had to get done. He felt like they were going to get mad if he pushed them doing it.
11:44
And so he just did it. And I said, tell me a little bit about what was going on inside of you. He said, well, I was really frustrated. I had asked them before and I thought that was going to be enough, but then they didn't do it.
11:56
And so I was frustrated. I didn't have enough time to get my job done and their job done. So I ended up getting behind on my own work. And I said, okay, how are you feeling? And what we landed on is that he was feeling really frustrated and resentful that they would not just do their jobs.
12:18
And I said, yeah, I know how that feels. Wink, wink. So the resentment, I said, when you feel resentment, that is part of the personal cost to you. That feeling of resentment, the extra time that you now have to take to do your own job because you used all of your time doing their job, the working late, the feeling frustrated.
12:42
That is what this is costing you. Now, the second part, how it's not really protecting the relationships, I asked, what do you do when you are feeling resentment and frustration with your friends? And he said, you know, I withdraw.
12:58
I don't talk to them. I don't really feel like hanging out. And I'm just kind of bugged quietly. And I said, so that is really important to pay attention to, because what you said is that you're doing their work because you're afraid that they won't like you and you're trying to protect the relationship that you have, right?
13:19
I said, yes. I said, but what is actually happening is the resentment and the frustration and the loneliness that you feel makes you withdraw, makes your friendship not as strong, not as connected, and not as honest.
13:40
And that was a light bulb moment because I know that a lot of us fall into this trap. We think that by not saying anything, we are protecting the relationship. But then we feel anxious and frustrated and resentful and alone.
13:55
And we want to be supported the same way that we are showing up to support other people. And it's actually damaging the relationship from the inside. So once he understood those three things, number one, that where he is is totally normal.
14:13
Number two, that there are two different types of discomfort. And number three, that there is a personal cost to you and to the relationships that you're trying to protect. Then he said the magic question, which is, so what do I do about it?
14:32
I took him through the exact same three steps that I teach clients, that I'm teaching in my free workshop, speak up, that have to happen for you to be able to have a hard conversation. First of all, you have to know what you want.
14:50
What do you want? And he said, I want them to do their jobs. Okay, so you're clear on that. Number two, you have to use the power of mental rehearsal to practice saying it in your imagination. And so we walked through creating a little movie.
15:07
Where are you when you are telling them that it's time for them to do their jobs or however it works as a stage manager? And we walked through that. I said, you'll notice as you imagine saying it, you're going to feel that discomfort of growth come up in your body.
15:24
And here's how you take care of that. You put your hands on your chest or you squeeze your own hand and you say, and we came up with a couple of phrases for him that felt really good. Like number one, you're learning new skills.
15:37
You're doing a great job. I'm right here with you. I'm taking care of you. I know this is stressful. You're doing a great job. And then step number three, you say it, you speak up. And if it feels too much to speak up in the particular situation with your friends, then you practice it somewhere small.
15:59
And so we came up with a couple of places that don't feel as high stakes as the situation with his theater friends that he could just begin to lean into this discomfort of growth. It was such a fascinating conversation because his young brain is just at the beginning of being able to see, oh, okay, so these patterns that I have don't really serve me in this particular situation.
16:31
And getting to walk him through the same steps that I'm teaching my clients who that's what we're realizing as well, right? Like these people pleasing patterns, this way that I am codependent isn't helping.
16:43
It's actually hurting the relationships that I want to be connected and alive and reciprocal and really, really rich. It was the same thing. And so if you have a kid who is in this same place, they're beginning to recognize in friend groups, in personal relationships, or at work, in other places that they want to be able to speak up, either share this episode with them or help them understand those first three things that I explained and then the three steps that they can start practicing to have any conversation that they need to have.
17:25
It's so inspiring to do this work with kids because they see it differently. They haven't been in it for long enough. It felt really doable for him. So I hope this episode helps you have conversations with your teenagers or with other people you know about how they can speak up too.
17:44
And speak up free workshop where I teach those three steps is happening for free every single week. I'd love to see you. Use the link in either the show notes or in my Instagram bio to find a time and I'll see you there.
Episode 169 - What I’m Working On Right Now: What Will They Think of Me?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
We all assume other people have it more figured out than we do. But beneath so many of our struggles is the same familiar good girl question: How am I going to be perceived? In this episode, I'm sharing three places where that question is still showing up in my own life: aging, body image, and using my voice. It’s easy to look at someone else’s life and think they have it all figured out, especially in the self-help world. That's why I think it matters that you know I'm on the same path, working through many of the same struggles I teach about. Today, you’ll hear how I’m working through it just like you. Here’s what I cover:
How the beauty industry profits from teaching women that the way they look is a problem to solve
What coaching women through weight loss taught me about body image and good girl conditioning
The difference between what you logically know and the programming that still shapes your self-perception
Why women speaking up without worrying about how they're perceived has the power to change the world
How learning to love both your logical self and your conditioned "good girl" creates more peace
Reserve your seat for my next workshop: sarafisk.coach/sayitwithclarity
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
I was on a coaching call with one of my clients and she's also a coach. And so we were talking about her business and some challenges that she has been trying to figure out and I'm trying to help.
01:10
And partway through, she said something that it just made me laugh because we were talking about like what her ideal situation would look like. And she said, well, when I look at what you have, everything seems, you know, so great.
01:24
Like you have exactly what I want. And in the moment, I just laughed. And it was maybe not the most professional thing to do, but it was just so automatic, not because I was flattered or I just couldn't believe it.
01:43
It just didn't seem true because at the exact same time that I was coaching her on some of the things that are coming up for her, I have been struggling, right? I think entrepreneurship and owning your own business is, in some ways, a lot of struggles and a lot of problems that you just have to work on and figure out.
02:07
But I hadn't talked about it with anybody. And it just, in that moment, it was just so interesting that what she was looking at seemed to her to be what she wanted. And yet on the inside of it, for me, it's been really hard.
02:23
And so I knew it was time again to do another episode about what I am struggling with and working on, because I think it matters that you know that inside of this kind of self-help world, it's very easy to look at other people and think that they either aren't struggling or aren't struggling with the same things or that they've somehow got everything figured out.
02:50
And I don't. I am not past all the hard parts. I am on the very same path, working on the same things that I teach, sometimes succeeding and in some ways, you know, not succeeding yet, still having a lot of things that I need to work through.
03:14
And so here are three things that I am genuinely working on right now. And when I look at all three of them, there's one kind of worry that are showing up underneath each of them. And it is this. It's such a classic good girl question.
03:29
How am I going to be perceived? How are people watching me going to be thinking about me? And that's just such, you know, classic good girl. It's seen in my clients. I still very much see it in myself.
03:46
And so one of the places is aging. And I'm turning 53 this year. That still feels like wild to say. I think you have several decades where it just doesn't seem like things are changing all that much in terms of aging.
04:02
I mean, I've had five kids, right? So there's plenty about my body that is not the same. In some ways, I expected that or I knew it was going to happen. And aging has kind of snuck up on me in a really interesting way.
04:16
I'm noticing sagging and wrinkles and things shifting in a way that are totally out of my control. And at the same time, I used to think that my phone was, you know, just listening to me, but now I'm convinced it's like reading my mind too, because I am getting a ton of ads for fillers and plastic surgery and fat freezing and the whole kind of landscape of products and procedures.
04:48
And in my mind, right, I know that those products and procedures were designed in boardrooms of men to sell me the cure for the problem that they also created, right? The message that my aging body is a problem, that something is going wrong, that I need to preserve my youth for as long as possible to still be attractive, to be pretty, to be wanted, to be desired.
05:23
And here's the crazy thing. I know who built that landscape that I'm living in. And I know why. Men decided what female bodies are supposed to look like and supposed to do, and then built an entire industry to profit around having the problems with their bodies pointed out and when women believe they're not doing it right.
05:47
And I still feel that pull. An example, I have been coloring my hair for years. I started going gray actually in college and it really ramped up, you know, maybe four or five years ago. And so I've just colored it because I don't want to go gray.
06:06
A couple of days ago, I just noticed how resistant I was. I had several, you know, an inch and a half of gray grown out that I had just been kind of covering up. And my husband said, why don't you just let it go?
06:19
Just let it go, Gray. And my boys, the two that still live at home, were like, yeah, mom, it would look so cool. You'd look so good. And I couldn't do it. I even went and had AI like generate an image.
06:33
I put a picture of myself in AI and asked it to make up a picture of me with gray hair just to see. And it was interesting because it was just like, no, I don't like that. And then I went and colored my hair.
06:48
And so I'm just sitting with what it means that I'm not ready for that, that I'm not ready. I don't want to go gray. I don't want to be perceived as someone older than I am. In fact, I'm doing something to hold on to looking younger.
07:08
And it's such a mind fuck, right? Because on the one hand, I can honestly, from a place I genuinely believe, tell you aging is normal, that so many women that I admire are older and radiant and free in their bodies in a way that looks completely beautiful to me.
07:28
I believe that and I want that. And I still have a part of me that is still trying to meet beauty standards. It's this loud, trained part of me. And the standard is that beauty is young. And so sitting with how both of those things are true, same time and same body, the logical part knows what it knows, and then the good girl conditioned part still wants what she was taught to want.
07:58
That is a tension I have not resolved. And I'm just kind of living into it. And so one of the things that I decided to do was turn off some of the filters that I have been, that I've used in the past.
08:12
I'm not filming reels with filters anymore. I'm not, you can turn Zoom filters on that make you look, you know, your skin smooth and all that. And I, I turned them off as a way of just really seeing myself and letting myself be seen.
08:29
And so I'm sitting with the questions and giving myself opportunities to really see and experience myself differently. And there's another way that it is also showing up around my body, and it is weight loss.
08:45
I started coaching as a weight loss coach. I have, ever since having kids, been about 20, 25 pounds over the bullshit BMI obesity weight loss standard. We'll get into that in a second. And I really thought that telling everyone that I was a weight loss coach would force me to lose weight.
09:05
And I didn't like it. And what I learned through being a weight loss coach was that I didn't want to lose weight. I wanted instead to really love and appreciate my body. And I felt like I got there. And once I got there, I changed my focus and didn't had no desire to talk about weight with anyone anymore.
09:28
It just felt settled. It felt really good. And then about three, four months ago, I started taking Adderall for my late diagnosis, ADHD, that I just, it was like trying to herd cats, getting things done.
09:45
And one of the side effects is that I forget to eat sometimes and I've been losing weight. And when I noticed the weight loss, I felt something I was not expecting. I was secretly delighted. And this is the honest version of me talking about this with you, because yeah, I had tried other things before kind of coming to that place of peace.
10:09
I had tried lots of things for years that hadn't worked. And coming to a place where I just felt kind of settled and good about it, like I had made peace with the shape and the size and the fact that I didn't, you know, match whatever number or pant size I was supposed to.
10:30
That honestly felt good. And then the weight started coming off and something in me just got really excited. And I started asking questions that I'm still sitting with. And I'm sitting with the fact that, first of all, that I care.
10:46
And second of all, these questions that I don't really know how to answer, which is like, am I skinny now? Do I quote unquote qualify? And for what? It's the good girl rules. It's those beauty standards, right?
11:00
On the one hand, again, that's good girl programming. Those are those parts of me that always felt like that standard was kind of out of reach. And it's the part of me that was trained to measure my body against a bullshit standard that someone else invented.
11:19
And that's, again, kind of that back and forth between the logical part of me that knows exactly where this came from, that knows it's bullshit. I mean, BMI is the scale that categorizes bodies as healthy or unhealthy, was invented in the 1830s by this Belgian mathematician using data from white European men.
11:44
It was racist and bullshit from the beginning. And it was designed to measure like averages. And so it's been part of our discussion about health and body size for decades without ever even looking at, is it measuring what it's supposed to measure?
12:07
And since then, there's a lot of data about health and health at many, many different sizes. And so, again, my brain knows that. There is logic and there is programming. Even knowing that, even having been taught about body image and the beauty standard and the whole like industry that is around that, even having real conversations with women for years about this, the conditioned part of me still feels the pull of the standard.
12:44
So again, I don't have a super clean answer. I'm realizing that the body kind of, I don't know that I want to call it body dysmorphia. Again, I don't know. Is that it? I might have to look into that.
12:57
But this inability of me to see my own body as separate from the standard completely has resurfaced again. And so I'm just sitting in what to do with that. Number three, third place where this is showing up a lot is in using my voice.
13:17
And this one actually might be the hardest one to talk about because I genuinely, genuinely believe in my whole body, without a doubt, that if women were empowered to speak up about what they want and what they need without apology, without worrying about how they would be perceived, we would live in a fundamentally different world.
13:43
The biggest problem we have right now is women who do not feel like they can. I feel that. I know it in my bones deeply. And I almost get a little embarrassed by how earnestly I want to talk about it when I'm working with a client or when I'm thinking about it throughout the day.
14:04
And so when I go to speak in public on a podcast or social media, or even when I'm talking about it with other people, I feel a part of me get careful. And I start to think, is this too much? Am I being weird?
14:22
Is this, am I awkward? Am I being too earnest? What if someone disagrees? You know what? People already know this. What if they think I'm naive or wrong or if I'm just too passionate about this? I mean, the good girl is still in the room, right?
14:42
And I see how I have gotten comfortable with like a certain level of speaking up, of putting my ideas into words, of putting them out into the world. And I still feel careful about it sometimes. I still feel like I want to be perceived as someone who is smart, like I want to be perceived as somebody who knows what they're talking about.
15:05
And even in my own work, even when I am just literally recording an episode about the cost of staying quiet, I have that thought. How is it going to be perceived? Am I going to be perceived as somebody who is intelligent and knows what she's talking about?
15:22
Because I don't want people to think I'm weird or strange or overly earnest. And sometimes I feel that way about me. And so I'm still learning to love that part of me and still learning how to work with the limitations that I am placing on my own voice and where I get to use it and what I get to speak up and say.
15:52
And so aging, weight and voice, those are kind of where I am right now and really asking the question, how am I going to be perceived? How am I going to be thought of? And since I always want to be honest and forthright that I am not the finished product by far, I offer this episode in the spirit of transparency.
16:23
And also, if you have these same questions, if you notice there's a really logical part of you that knows it's bullshit, that has the information. And then there's the other part of you that still wants what the good girl rules teach you to want.
16:42
It's totally normal. It's totally normal. And I think the value is in noticing the tension and in letting all of those parts of us be loved equally. I can love the logical part. I can love the good girl part.
17:01
And as I love both of them, they settle down. I feel more peace. And I feel like I'm able to just keep going. And in some ways, I don't actually need to fix anything because when I notice and when I love those parts, it's easier to keep going.
17:20
And so if you're in that too, and if you're someone who knows better and still feels the pull of what you were taught, that's, it just makes complete sense. So that's what I got for today. Thanks for listening.
17:33
I'll see you next week.
Episode 168 - What is Your Silence Teaching Your Relationships?
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
We often think of relationships as something we have: a marriage, a friendship, a relationship with our parents. But relationships are more like living things—they have their own patterns and ecosystems that two nervous systems create together over time. Every conversation shapes them, and every silence does too. In this episode, we're exploring what your silence is teaching your relationships and how speaking more honestly can build the intimacy and connection so many of us want, instead of isolating us from the people we care about. Here’s what I cover:
How psychologist Carol Gilligan found that many girls grow up believing they have to choose between having a voice and preserving relationships
Why staying quiet was a brilliant survival strategy in childhood but can keep us from building intimacy as adults
How your silence quietly teaches people what does and does not belong in your relationships
Practical examples of how speaking up can strengthen relationships instead of damaging them
Questions to help you notice what your relationships have learned from your silence and begin changing the pattern
Reserve your seat for my next workshop: sarafisk.coach/sayitwithclarity
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
I was sitting in a training. I really at this point can't even remember where. I know it was about relationships when the presenter shared a piece of research from psychologist Carol Gilligan from her book, In a Different Voice, that was published now, I think over like 50 years ago, that just when she said this, it landed because it was one of those moments when something really simple kind of takes a piece of your experience and puts it into words.
01:27
And it was this. Carol's research found that many girls grow up feeling like they have to choose between having a voice and having relationships. Pretty simple, but pretty profound, right? They have to choose between telling the truth, telling what is actually happening for them and their experience, and belonging.
01:53
And they learn that if telling the truth risks the relationship, I better stay quiet. And it doesn't have anything to do with being weak or passive, but it's because preserving connection is more important.
02:10
And so you can have girls who are very outgoing and very gregarious and very, you know, this isn't just like shy, passive girls. It's all girls who learn that there is this tension between telling the truth and belonging.
02:26
And here's the part that I found really fascinating. Gilligan also argued that over time, that becomes a trade that we make over and over and over and over again. We trade the honest thing that we want to say for belonging instead.
02:43
And we don't think about it consciously. We don't think, you know what, I'm choosing to have connection with my friend instead of telling her how I really feel. We just start to think it's part of our personality.
02:57
I'm just easygoing. I don't like to rock the boat. I'm just not confrontational. I'm not good at conflict. And it begins to feel like personality. And that's the way we describe it. That's the way so many of the women that I work with describe themselves.
03:12
But it's not. It's a learned behavior. And in fact, it's a brilliant strategy that protected us while we were little. You may have heard me talk about this before. It's important to always remember when we are eight years old, the adults around us are the bigger, more capable humans that we depend on.
03:32
And our nervous system is designed to protect our attachment to them because we need them. So if staying quiet keeps you connected to the people that you depend on, not only is that brilliant because we need that, but it's also teaching us what to do and what not to do.
03:52
So if we learn there are some things I talk about and I'm rewarded, your brain says do that again. And if there are other things I talk about that I get punished for or I notice other people getting punished for, your brain learns don't do that.
04:09
And that strategy makes perfect sense for an eight-year-old. The problem is eight-year-olds and 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds have fundamentally different situations and different jobs. As adults, we are trying to build some of our most important relationships around intimacy, not dependence.
04:31
And intimacy requires something different. It requires being known. Which brings me to a question I want us to think about and talk about today. What is your silence teaching your relationships? I think a lot of us think about relationships as something that we have.
04:52
I have a marriage. I have a friendship. I have a relationship with my parents. But I think relationships take on a little bit of a different meaning when you think about them as like a living system.
05:05
They are patterns. They are ecosystems. They are something that two nervous systems create together over time. And every interaction changes them, informs them, gives the nervous systems there some information.
05:22
And every conversation teaches the relationship something. And every silence teaches it something too. I want you to imagine that each of your relationships, just think about the 10 most important relationships to you and imagine them sitting in chairs all around you.
05:40
And they each get to ask you four questions. Think about the relationship with your girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, spouse, maybe a romantic relationship. And that relationship is sitting in the chair in front of you and it asks you, is honesty welcome here?
05:59
Are my needs allowed here? What happens when we disappoint each other? Can we survive discomfort together? And think about how you would answer those four questions if your most important relationships were asking you with your children, with your siblings, with your parents, with friends, people you've known for a long time.
06:25
I'm not saying that all of those relationships should be your most important relationships, but for a lot of people they are. So just imagine that your relationships were asking you. I think this gets really interesting because if every time I'm disappointed in a relationship, I swallow it or I ignore it, then the relationship learns disappointment does not belong here.
06:48
If every time I have a preference, I keep it to myself, then the relationship learns, your preferences don't matter here. If every time I'm hurt, I pretend that I'm fine, then the relationship learns.
07:02
Hurt, that's something you deal with by yourself. It's private. So when we think about it this way, silence is not neutral. Silence trains relationships. It trains expectations. It trains nervous systems.
07:18
It teaches people what is welcome and what is not. And over time, the relationship starts reflecting back what we've been teaching it. Let me give you an example. I have a client named Jenna who travels every year with the same friend.
07:36
And in the beginning, it was really fun that this friend would plan everything, the flights, the itinerary, the restaurant. She would pick it all, activities and everything. And Jenna just got to go along on these amazing trips.
07:50
And then after a little while, Jenna had preferences too, but she just didn't feel comfortable sharing them because she didn't want her friend to think that she was ungrateful for what the friend had planned, and Jenna didn't want to seem difficult.
08:06
And as we were talking it through, she realized that every time she decided her preferences mattered less than her friends, she was teaching that relationship, her needs matter more than mine. And that realization helped her see that she was unconsciously building a relationship where one person's preference had a place and mattered and the other person's didn't.
08:34
So she wanted to change that. She spoke up, they talked, they planned the next trip together, and the friendship didn't actually get weaker, it just got more honest. I've told this story before about my dad not coming to my birthday party because it fell on a Sunday and he had church responsibilities that day.
08:53
But when I look at it through this lens of what am I teaching the relationship, I have a little bit of a different take. So background, my birthday fell on a Sunday. He is a very devout member of the Mormon church, which I love that for him.
09:08
I love that he's able to have something that really fulfills him. He had some church responsibilities that he had scheduled to take place on the same day as my birthday. When I brought it to his attention and asked if he was going to come, he said he couldn't because he had these responsibilities.
09:26
And what I had taught our relationship in the past was, I take care of dad's discomfort by not making a big deal of it. I don't require him to explain decisions that don't make sense to me. And I would have said, it's okay.
09:45
We'll celebrate another time. No big deal. I totally would have protected him from my disappointment. I totally would have tried to protect him from my disappointment by not making him explain himself.
09:59
But I also would have left thinking, man, am I important to him? Is the church more important than I am? So in that moment, I decided to just ask, Dad, are you willing to reschedule? And at first, he explained why he couldn't and gave me some more excuses.
10:17
And so I just said, Dad, I think everybody would understand if you had to reschedule for a family birthday. Are you willing to do that? And eventually he said, no. It wasn't the answer that I wanted.
10:29
I let myself have a good cry after that because I was disappointed, but I wasn't uncertain anymore. The conversation had taught our relationship something important. That conversation taught our relationship something important.
10:46
And it was this. We don't hide from disappointment. We don't try to protect each other from disappointment. We don't pretend that everything's okay. We tell the truth. And that gave me something that was really valuable.
11:02
It gave me clarity and it taught our relationship something really new and really valuable. We tell the truth about how we're feeling and we don't pretend that everything is okay and we can survive it.
11:16
Now, I want to add some important nuance here. I'm not saying that every relationship needs this level of honesty. Not every relationship is meant to be deeply intimate, right? There's all kinds of relationships that are fine at different levels.
11:32
Situations where keeping part of yourself private is actually pretty smart. But privacy isn't self-abandonment. But privacy is something you decide on purpose. And so it's not the self-abandonment that I'm talking about where you are editing and performing in the relationships that you do want to be intimate and vulnerable and have a high level of connection.
11:58
Of course, discernment is healthy and boundaries are healthy and you get to decide who earns access to the deepest parts of you. I am not arguing for more honesty everywhere. I'm arguing for more honesty where intimacy is the goal, because intimacy literally means you know me.
12:20
If my closest relationships don't know what disappoints me, they don't know me. If they don't know what I long for, if they don't know what my dreams are, they don't know me. If they only know an edited version of me, they don't know me.
12:39
And if we have relationships where all of us is not welcome, we eventually start wondering why we feel lonely inside of relationships sometimes that we've had for years. And it's because the relationship only knows the version of us that we've allowed it to.
12:58
So here's what I'd love for you to think about this week. First of all, just think about one conversation that you've been avoiding and ask yourself, is my silence actually protecting this relationship or is it preventing us from becoming fully known?
13:18
And second of all, just notice every time this week when it feels like you have to choose between telling the truth and keeping the peace. What are you afraid will happen if you have a voice here? What is staying silent already costing you?
13:36
And then I want you to think about one relationship that deeply matters to you. And I want you to finish this sentence. This relationship knows and then finish it. This relationship knows I'm dependable.
13:52
This relationship knows that I'll show up, that I'll help. But then ask yourself, is there anything that this relationship doesn't know about me because I haven't told the truth? Those three questions might change the way you see your relationships, and it might bring more sharply into focus what you are teaching those relationships.
14:15
Because every time you tell the truth, you're teaching the relationship. The truth belongs here. Every time you repair after a disagreement, you're teaching the relationship. We don't hide from disagreement.
14:26
We can survive it. We can learn from it. We can totally get through it and be connected. Those are the kinds of relationships I want to build. They're the kinds of relationships that I want for you to be able to build if you want, because for so long, that tension between honesty and connection meant that we were silent and that that silence somehow protected our relationships.
14:50
But it doesn't. It actually makes intimacy impossible to achieve. My favorite thing that Esther Perrell has ever said, the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our life. It is so true.
15:03
So if we want a deeply satisfying life, we also need to have deeply satisfying, connected, vulnerable, intimate relationships. And then the last thing I just want you to remember that speaking up is not a personality trait.
15:20
It's a skill. If this episode resonated with you and you want to learn how to speak up, I am doing a free workshop every single week called Speak Up. It's where I teach the first three things that have to be in place before you can speak without having to wait until the resentment is unbearable or the relationship feels like it's hanging by a thread.
15:42
Because again, remember, speaking up isn't just something you're born with. It is a skill. You can learn it. I would love to teach it to you. So if that is of interest to you, find the link in my bio and sign up for the next workshop.
15:56
It is happening next week and every week thereafter. Thanks for listening. See you next week.
Episode 167 - The Skill That Improves Every Difficult Conversation
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
Most hard conversations don't start with an invitation. They start with something that sounds more like a verdict: You never listen to me. You don't respect my time. You don't care about my feelings. By the time we say those things, we've already decided what happened, what it means, and who's responsible. But those assumptions rarely resolve conflict. In this episode, I walk you through a shift that can completely change the quality of difficult conversations: moving from certainty to curiosity. When you learn to ask questions rather than make statements, you create more opportunities for connection. Here's what I cover:
Why certainty feels so convincing and the psychological biases that make us believe our interpretation is the truth
How to make observations without turning them into stories about someone else's intentions
A three-step formula for approaching difficult conversations without certainty: observation, impact, and curiosity
Why curiosity can be hard to access when your nervous system is activated and certainty feels safer
Practical questions you can use to create more understanding and meaningful resolution in your relationships
Reserve your seat for my next workshop: sarafisk.coach/sayitwithclarity
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
I just got back from a family reunion. 30 of the people that I love. Yeah, 30. I'm the oldest of six. My grandparents have 22 grandkids. So yeah, 30 of us piled into a bunch of condos, Southern California.
01:13
We've been going to the same place for 25 plus years. It's an amazing week. And when you get that many people in one place, of course, feelings are hurt, assumptions are made, expectations are not met, and there's miscommunications.
01:28
And so it was a front row seat again to number one, how important it is to know how to have difficult conversations. And number two, that managed well, conflict is the doorway to connection. It's the doorway to better understanding each other.
01:47
It's the doorway to increased intimacy and vulnerability and really being known and seen in our most important relationships. So I want to talk about a really fundamental skill that I think is going to be easy to understand and even easy to implement once I show you how to do it.
02:08
And it can make a huge difference. And the skill is learning to ask questions instead of making statements. It's making the switch from certainty to curiosity. Here's the thing about certainty. It feels like clarity.
02:28
It feels like confidence. It feels like you know exactly what happened and who did what and who meant what. But it's a problem when we are trying to have conversations with people who matter to us, whose relationships matter to us, because when we are in certainty, we stop asking questions.
02:50
And so we're going to talk about the shift that can completely change the quality of difficult conversations. And that is the shift from being certain about something to being curious about it. Most hard conversations don't start with an invitation.
03:10
They start with something that sounds more like a verdict. You never listen to me. You don't respect my time. You always do this. You don't care about my feelings, right? Those aren't openers. Those aren't invitations.
03:22
That is what you would say as like the closing argument of a trial that's already over. The conclusions have already been reached, right? And this makes a lot of sense because when we're hurt or disappointed or frustrated or scared, our brains want answers.
03:39
We want to know what happened. We want to know what it means. We want to know who is responsible so that we can fix it. And that's what creates the story that we start to tell ourselves. So when we walk into a conversation, we have been telling ourselves, we know what happened, we know what it means, and we know who's responsible.
04:01
And that story has become our reality. I want to suggest something different today. It's not only smarter, but it makes the possibility of connection go way up, which again is the gift of conflict. When it is done well, it leads to more connection.
04:20
So instead of leading with certainty, lead with curiosity. We're going to get into how exactly to do that in just a second, but because I want you to know that you make sense, I want to tell you a little bit about what psychologists have already identified that makes certainty feel so incredibly convincing.
04:43
The first one is called naive realism, and it's just the tendency to believe that we are seeing things exactly as they really are in reality. Now you can understand why it's called naive realism, right?
04:57
Because it's naive to believe that we see things factually. We are seeing our interpretation. We are seeing our perspective. And when we forget that, we think we're just seeing things as they really are.
05:15
So when someone disagrees with us, it doesn't feel like a difference of opinion. It feels like they are missing something very obvious that we can see. It feels like they are wrong or they are stupid or they are intentionally doing something to misinterpret because we have seen things clearly.
05:36
It's really insidious and it's happening unconsciously. Naive realism. Number two is called fundamental attribution error. And once you see this one, it's actually kind of funny. When I'm late, it's because of traffic.
05:51
When they're late, it's because they disrespect my time. When I'm short-tempered, it's because I'm exhausted and I've had such a long day. When they're short-tempered, they're selfish and they're mean.
06:07
When I forget something, it's because I'm overwhelmed and I'm managing a lot of things. And when they forget something, it's because they just don't care about me. So you can see the pattern, right? We explain our own behavior with circumstances that are very easy to understand.
06:24
And we explain their behavior with character or character flaws. We do this constantly, right? If a guy cuts me off in traffic, he's an asshole. If I cut someone off in traffic, it's because I wasn't paying attention and that's the exit and I need to get on it.
06:43
So funny once you see it and it's happening subconsciously below the surface. The third, my personal favorite, confirmation bias. Here's how it goes. Once I've decided what something means, that's the end of it.
07:00
And my brain is now going to collect the evidence to prove that I am right. I'm going to remember all of the things that support my story. I'm going to notice all the moments that fit my theory. That's part of confirmation bias.
07:16
But the more insidious part is that my brain is actually going to ignore or overlook the things that disprove my story. So if I have the story that my feelings don't matter to my husband, I'm going to be collecting all the little bits and moments and texts and exchanges and things he said and what his face looked like to prove that I'm right.
07:40
And I'm literally not even going to notice the times when he is doing things that show that my feelings do matter to him. And here's what's crazy about it. I'm not lying to myself because I'm collecting things.
07:55
I'm not lying to myself. I'm building a case, but I'm only using selected evidence. And if you put all three of those together, here's what happens. I believe that my interpretation is just reality. It is honest.
08:13
It is factual. It is just the way it is. I believe their behavior is about their character. And I have all the proof to bolster my story. So you can see it's so human. And it makes a lot of sense that if I'm bringing all of that into the conversation, there is no room for curiosity.
08:35
Curiosity has no place at the table. I'm literally a prosecutor carrying my case file into the conversation. And it has a real impact on how that conversation is going to go. Two psychologists that I love and respect a lot, John and Julie Gottman, they spent decades studying conflict in relationship.
08:58
And one of their most important findings was that the way a conversation starts strongly predicts how it ends. The Gottmans could watch literally the first three minutes of a conversation and predict with crazy accuracy how it was going to end.
09:17
A harsh startup where it was critical or there was an accusation created a predictable chain reaction. Criticism led to defensiveness and defensiveness led to escalation and escalation led to distance.
09:37
And all of that happened within the first three minutes of the conversation. They could tell how it was going to end. So what this means is the opening of a conversation, especially a difficult conversation, really, really matters.
09:54
There's a different group of researchers. They wrote a book literally called Difficult Conversations, and they described the approach that I am talking about, moving from certainty to curiosity. Instead of assuming you know exactly what happened, you investigate.
10:12
Instead of assuming you know what someone meant, you get curious and you ask. They offer three questions that I think are incredibly useful. Question number one. What did the other person actually say or do?
10:31
That's kind of tough to answer, especially when you're thinking about confirmation bias and naive realism and fundamental attribution error, right? Because those things are constantly going in our brains.
10:42
The first question is what actually happened? Without any adjectives, without any assumptions, like just the facts. What did we observe that they said? Or what did we observe that they did? Number two, what was the impact of that on me?
11:01
Because the impact is important and we need to put that into words as well. But the third question is where a lot of us get into trouble. And so here's the question. What assumptions am I making about what they meant?
11:15
So yeah, that third question is where we go from that hurt to they meant to hurt me. We move from I felt ignored, which is impact, to they don't care, which is assumption. We move from I felt dismissed, which is valid and deserves to be said, to they don't respect me, which again is assumption about their meaning and intention.
11:44
Good intentions don't erase bad impact. And I want to be very, very, very, very clear about that. Impact is what matters. Good intentions don't erase bad impact. But here's what I want you to consider.
11:59
Bad impact doesn't automatically prove bad intent. And we need to pull those two things apart because they are two different things. One last book that I read and loved, Crucial Conversations, the researchers who wrote that book talk about something called a shared pool of meaning.
12:21
And a shared pool of meaning is essential to have a crucial conversation, to resolve differences, to use conflict to become more connected and to know each other better. Think about it like this. If you and I come into a conversation together, we are each carrying our own facts, our own experiences, our own interpretation.
12:45
I have mine and you have yours. But when we stay locked in our own silos and we don't create a shared pool of meaning, we are not going to be able to resolve things. So it is essential to ask questions to create that shared pool of meaning.
13:07
What did you mean by that? What was your intention? How do you define that? Because those questions are what invites the other person to come out of their silo of all their own facts and interpretation and to create something together.
13:24
So before I give you the way that I teach it to my clients, I want to give you an important distinction. Just like I said before, good intentions don't erase bad impact. I really want you to hear that.
13:35
The second thing I really want you to hear is that I'm not suggesting that you stop making observations. I'm not suggesting that you stop talking about what happened and just ask questions. And the goal is to express your feelings and experience and to avoid turning your assumptions into facts.
13:57
I'll say that again. The goal is to express your feelings and experience and to avoid turning your assumptions into facts. Most of us don't get in trouble in conversations because we've noticed something.
14:11
We get into trouble because we assume we know what it means. Let me show you some differences. Noticing something would sound like, I've noticed that you've canceled our plans the last three times that we've put something on the calendar together.
14:28
We don't say that. We say, you don't care about this friendship. We don't say, you've interrupted me three times in this conversation. We say, you never listen. We don't say, this is the observation, you didn't respond for two days.
14:46
We say, you don't respect my time. And so the observation disappears and the assumption takes over. And once the assumption takes over, the conversation becomes about defending our identities instead of understanding our experiences and pouring them into that shared pool of meaning.
15:08
I am not suggesting that observations are not important. I am suggesting that they need to be balanced with curiosity. So here's the formula. Observation impact curiosity. Observation. What happened?
15:28
What is the factual representation of what happened? I was talking with my husband. He interrupted me three times. So that's the observation. And it is clean of any adjectives or assumptions about him or his character.
15:44
Number two, impact. How did that affect me? I felt like you weren't listening. I felt like what I had to say wasn't important. Step number three, curiosity. What am I missing? What might I not be understanding here?
16:00
So, again, observation, impact, then curiosity. Here's how it might sound. I've noticed that this has happened a few times. And when it does, I feel frustrated and disconnected. Can you help me understand how you're seeing it?
16:18
Or when I didn't hear back from you for two days, I started telling myself a story that this wasn't important to you. Can you help me understand what was happening on your side? Or I've noticed that we keep ending up in the same argument and I'm feeling really discouraged.
16:37
Are you seeing it that way too? Or what are you seeing? And just notice what changes. You're still being honest. You can still be very direct and very clear. You are still addressing the problem. You're simply leaving some room for information that you might not have.
16:55
Because as humans, we don't always have all the information. We don't always know everything that's going on. One of the reasons why this is hard is because when our nervous systems are activated, certainty feels safer than curiosity.
17:14
When you're hurt, certainty creates the illusion of control. And we love to go into these conversations thinking that we can control them. That just feels safer. Curiosity actually requires uncertainty.
17:31
And uncertainty can feel really terrifying when you don't know how to take care of that. Especially if you've spent your life trying to stay safe by reading people, by predicting the outcome, by managing relationships, by avoiding surprises, by trying to manage everyone's emotions so that everybody feels safe and comfortable, which that's all of us, right?
17:55
It can be really unsettling to feel uncertain. The moment you become convinced that you know what's happening, your nervous system actually gets some temporary relief because that story feels safer than marching into a conversation that's unknown.
18:17
So, in addition to asking questions, another essential part of this skill is staying regulated enough to remain curious, to be able to tolerate the feeling of not knowing, and to gather information before reaching a conclusion.
18:37
Two, ask more questions before you decide what it means. And so if you want to learn more about how to regulate your nervous system, about how to handle and tolerate that feeling of uncertainty, I've got a great workshop for you.
18:55
It is called Say It With Clarity. And in that workshop, I'm going to teach you two things. Number one, how to find the exact right words for any conversation you need to have. And number two, how to take care of your nervous system, how to take care of the part of you that is scared to have the conversation so that that part can feel calm, so that your nervous system feels calm, and that you can stay in curiosity longer.
19:24
The link for that workshop is in the show notes. It's in my bio. It's two hours of live working workshop with me where you will leave that workshop knowing exactly what to say and how to work with your nervous system so that it doesn't hijack the conversation that you really want to have from curiosity.
19:44
A quick comment about some questions, because some questions don't connect, because not every question creates connection. Some questions are accusations that are kind of just dressed up with a question mark.
20:00
You might have heard this. Why would you do that? What were you thinking? Do you even hear yourself? Those aren't questions. Those are accusations. And so a real question, again, has that uncertainty built into it.
20:16
You genuinely don't know the answer and you are genuinely interested in what the other person might say. A very useful way to test this is, would I be surprised by their answer? Just ask yourself that question.
20:32
If the answer is no, you're probably not asking a question. You're probably making an argument or making a statement. And so go back to observation, impact, and curiosity. I love to have a couple questions in my back pocket.
20:49
And here are a few of my favorites that really create understanding. Number one, am I missing something here? Number two, help me understand what happened from your side. Number three, what am I not seeing yet?
21:08
Number four, can you walk me through how you got there? Those questions really open up an opportunity for the other person to help me better understand something that I might not understand. There are also some questions that I love that check assumptions, and I'm going to give you a couple now.
21:28
Number one, this is how I'm experiencing this. Is that what you meant? Number two, what's your version of what happened? Number three, if I got this wrong, where did I lose the thread or where did I make a mistake in how I'm thinking about this?
21:50
Question number four, what do you think I'm not understanding here? Notice how each of those questions invite understanding, they check assumptions, they give the other person a chance to respond, and if those are asked in a genuinely curious way, they will change the outcome of your conversation.
22:12
Now, just because I think questions are fantastic, I'm going to throw in a few extras that really create connection. Here's my favorite one. What's it like to be in a relationship with me? Number two, what is something you wish I knew?
22:30
Number three, is there anything that you've been afraid to bring up? Number four, what's one thing I could do better? Or what's one thing that you wish I better understood about you? I love to ask those questions when things are good, when it's an opportunity to build or deepen the connection or vulnerability, when it's outside of any kind of conflict happening.
22:56
I love asking my kids those questions. I have been really brave and asked some of my friends those questions, and I always get back two things. Number one, they're always so happy I asked, and it feels like I'm genuinely interested in it.
23:10
And number two, they usually have something very useful for me. And because I love them and because I want our relationship to grow and deepen and be a part of my life, I want to know the answer to those questions.
23:23
So the next time you walk into a difficult conversation, pay attention to what your brain wants to do. It's going to want certainty. It already has a story. It wants a conclusion. And maybe your conclusion is right.
23:40
I'm not saying that it's not right, but connection isn't built on certainty. And I will say some conversations are just about laying out certainty. This episode is not about those conversations. This episode is about conversations where the relationship is something that you want to build on and to deepen.
24:04
And so that connection is built on understanding. So before you start the conversation, just ask yourself these three questions. Number one, what happened? Number two, what was the impact? Number three, what might I be missing?
24:23
That will help you walk in with less conclusions and more curiosity, less certainty and more opportunity for both people to be seen and heard and to create that shared pool of meaning that really is essential when we want conflict to help us have better relationships.
24:45
Thank you for listening. I hope I see you at that workshop. If any of this resonated, if you have a question that you love, I would love for you to DM it to me. I read everything that comes in either to my Instagram DMs or you can email me hello at sarafisk.coach because I do read every single one.
25:03
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
Episode 166 - There is No Time Limit to Talk About It
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
How often do you finally realize what you want to say hours, days, months, or even years after a misunderstanding or disagreement? Some people need time to process, but it's easy to think you've missed your chance once the moment has passed. Learning how to have hard conversations has changed my life more than almost anything else, and I've noticed a rule many of us follow without ever questioning it: after enough time passes, you're no longer allowed to bring something up. In this episode, I'm unpacking where that rule came from, who it benefits, and the rule I've replaced it with so more women can stop carrying unresolved hurt alone and start saying what they need to say. Here's what I cover:
How so many of the rules we live by were just made up and never questioned
What I call a “crockpot brain” and why some people need more time to respond
Two questions to help you decide if something still needs to be addressed
The steps to starting a hard conversation, no matter how much time has passed
A conversation that allowed me to resolve my hurt after carrying it for four years
Join me LIVE for a free workshop on June 11 at 9am PT or June 24th at 1pm PT. Register for Speak Up here: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
If you were to ask me, what has changed my life the most, I would have to say learning how to have hard conversations. It has really defined the last maybe 10, 15 years of my life personally and the last eight, nine years that I've been coaching.
01:17
So professionally, that has been the thing that has moved the needle the most in giving me freedom and the power to create the kind of life that I really want to be living. And that involves a lot. It's about a couple of different things.
01:34
It's about how do I find the right words? How do I know what I really want to say? And then how do I develop the inner sturdiness to stay in the conversation, to not accommodate or collapse or explode?
01:48
How do I learn to say what is true for me and also stay in the conversation when the other person's reaction maybe isn't what I hoped? Because of course, sometimes that happens too. This is at the center of what I teach.
02:01
It's the center of my work. It's how do we have the conversations that we need to have to make our experience better, whatever it is. And as I am teaching this, there's something that I keep running into with my clients.
02:17
And there was a time that I ran into this a lot myself, and I want to talk about it. It is a made-up rule that gets in the way of having these hard conversations. As a side note, we swim in rules all the time that we never chose and that we've never questioned.
02:36
They're just part of the wallpaper that we live with all the time. And most of them are completely made up. They are invented by someone somewhere for some reason that has nothing to do with our lives.
02:50
Let me give you an example. Gender roles. Completely made up. There was a point in time when men wore high heels and skirts and makeup and powdered wigs, and some of them still do. And then one day they just didn't, right?
03:05
Someone decided. And then now it just feels like, oh, these gender roles have always existed this way. And it's simply not true. Rules change and rules are made up. And so I want to talk in particular about one made up rule about how women are supposed to behave in relationships, because it's really causing a lot of discomfort.
03:29
Here it is. When something happens, there's a fight or a misunderstanding or some kind of hurt or something that needs to be addressed, when something like that happens, there is an amount of time after which you are no longer allowed to bring it up.
03:47
The window has closed, the moment has passed, and if you missed it, too bad, the conversation is now over. And that rule has cost a lot of women a lot of things that they wanted and deserved to say. And today, I just want to dig into where did it come from?
04:06
Why is it completely made up? Who benefits from it? And the rule that I replaced it with. Here's something that I've learned about myself that you might identify with. My brain works more like a crock pot.
04:21
It is slow. It takes a long time. It'll serve you something delicious. It just takes eight hours. In contrast, I've often joked with my husband that his brain works more like a microwave, right? He can come up with how he feels about something or what he thinks pretty quickly.
04:38
And so I spent a lot of time envying people like him who could say things with clarity and with cleverness and connect things really easily. And I just didn't feel like I could. I felt like I needed time to cook.
04:56
And for a long time, this felt like a deficiency. I would walk away from a conversation thinking, gosh, why didn't I say that? Or why couldn't I get there faster? Or, oh, you know, it occurred to me two or three days later.
05:07
I wish I had said that. But here's what I figured out. The problem wasn't my brain. The problem was this made up rule that there's an expiration date on when you're allowed to bring something up. There's this expectation that you have to say it now or you somehow lose your right to say it forever.
05:30
That was the problem, not how my brain works. And so maybe you've heard of this rule. I actually started asking people just out of curiosity, how long is too long before you can bring something up? And the answers I got were all over the board, fascinating, 48 hours, two weeks, a month.
05:50
One person even said, like, if you don't address it in the moment, that ship has sailed, too bad, you're out of luck. And everything was made up. Nobody had a reason. Nobody had a source. There was just this feeling, this social norm that kind of came out of nowhere that we had all absorbed, but that kind of pointed to the same thing.
06:11
There is a certain amount of time. And after that passes, you can't bring it up. That rule, this arbitrary expiration date on having your say, who does it serve? It serves the person who already got to say what they wanted to say.
06:29
The person whose brain was the microwave, who can come to conclusions and opinions faster. The person who has the crock pot brain is not served by that rule. And so I made a different one up. And here it is.
06:46
No conversation is over until I get to say what I need to say. That rule is permission. And it's the right that I retain. It's a right that never expires. And the reason that it's so important to have that is because this arbitrary timeframe keeps a lot of women quiet.
07:11
A lot of us with the crock pot brain. A lot of us who need a little more processing time. A lot of us who feel frozen in the middle of hard conversations. And we need to have our nervous systems out, come back to a regulated space, and then our prefrontal cortex kicks in.
07:29
And then we're able to think more clearly about the things that matter to us. This rule stops a lot of us from getting the closure that we need. Unresolved hurt is actually an open loop. It's an emotional thread with no closure, with no end, with no resolution.
07:52
And a part of us is gripping that thread and holding on because that's what an unresolved thing does inside of a person. It stays open. It stays present. And I want to be clear about a differentiation.
08:07
There are people who keep a mental file folder in every argument, right? They pull it out and they read from the long list of everything that they have collected or remembered about this thing to try and make a point or to win the argument.
08:23
That is about control. This is something different. What I'm describing is this. Something happened and a part of me is still carrying the weight of it. And I want to put that weight down. So when I feel that weight, there are a few questions that help me decide when something is worth addressing.
08:48
Does it surface often? Does this thing come back over and over and over again? Is there like a part of me that seems to be knocking, hey, hey, hey, this is still here. This still hurts. I'm still carrying this.
09:02
Number one, does it surface often? Number two, can I feel it in my body? Is there a heaviness, a tension, a feeling in my stomach when I think about it? Or when I encounter something that reminds me of the person?
09:17
Or when I see the person, do I feel tension? Or do I feel afraid? Do I feel worried? Do I want to avoid that person? I think that's something to pay attention to. If there's a yes to either one of those things, then I think this is something that you should consider in some way.
09:37
And I'll get into some different ways that this can be addressed because I don't think it's always a conversation. But if that weight is still there, if it comes up and up and up over and over again, I think that means something.
09:50
This is also not to say that everything needs to be addressed because not everything does. It's going to be a very personal decision. There is not going to be a solid rule on when to have a conversation.
10:02
If you're really curious about your situation, send me an email. I would love to hear it. I'll give you my opinion. But for the most part, you're going to just ask your body, is this something that we need to resolve?
10:14
Is this something that we are carrying alone that we want to put down? And if the answer is yes, I think it's worth it. Here's the part where the good girl rules come in, though, that I think you're going to be familiar with.
10:28
Because oftentimes, let's say the answer is yes, and there is something that you actually want to consider bringing up and you feel that pull to go back and say the thing that you didn't get to say. There's rules that are going to pop up because what are good girls?
10:45
Good girls are easygoing. Good girls are low maintenance. Good girls let things go. Easy peasy, water off a duck's back, right? Good girls are the last ones to make a scene or cause drama or require extra emotional work from the people around them.
11:04
We're not going to be a burden. We're not going to rock the boat. And so bringing something up violates every single one of those rules. So if you're thinking about bringing something up and something inside of you says, uh-uh, that's a bad idea, those are just the good girl rules trying to stop you, trying to keep you in compliance.
11:24
If the feeling that is stopping you is saying like, this is too long ago, this is too small, I'm making too big a deal out of this, I should just let it go, that is not your intuition. It's just those rules.
11:38
A rule that was handed to us that we do not benefit from. It's made up and you are allowed to break that rule. So a couple of things that matter when you're going to have this conversation. When it is with someone where the relationship really matters to you, I ask for what I call conversational consent.
12:02
All that means is asking the other person, is this a good time to talk about this? Here's how I say it. It sounds a little bit like I say something like, hey, I was wondering if we could talk about something that happened a while ago.
12:19
Part of it is still a little sticky for me, or it still hurts a little bit, and I would love to feel better about it. Would you be open to that? And then I wait. The ask is direct. There's no apology for bringing it up.
12:32
There's no softening it into something smaller. And there's definitely no preemptive, like self-deprecating to cushion the other person's reaction. This is what I need. Is now a good time. That's it.
12:47
And I found that overwhelmingly people say yes. And for the relationships where maybe the stakes are a little bit lower, where deep connection is really not what you're after, is kind of beside the point, I'm still direct.
13:00
Something happened. I want to address it. Is now okay. Both are very honest. And I use both of those approaches when I want to resolve something. Because more than anything, I just don't like the feeling of something being between us, of carrying a weight that both of us created or both of us contributed to, but I'm the only one carrying it.
13:28
That doesn't feel good to me. That doesn't feel fair to me. And it is the motivation behind the story I'm going to tell you. I randomly went to the gym at three o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday.
13:41
It's usually when I'm working. I didn't have any clients that day. And so I went to the gym. And as my workout got started, I looked up and saw my old bishop. If you are unfamiliar with that term in Mormonism, the leader of a congregation is called a bishop.
14:00
And so he's like the pastor or the priest. And he's in charge of what happens in the congregation. He, you know, leads and guides and kind of sets the mood for a lot of what goes on. And at the time that I saw him, it had been almost, yeah, at least four years since our family had gone through one of the hardest seasons of our lives.
14:25
My husband had left the church. It was a really kind of rocky time. I was somewhere in the middle holding on and also kind of letting go at the same time. I went to church looking to be supported, to have community.
14:41
And this man, my bishop during that season, had really not shown up for us. When we needed care and generosity and graciousness, he was in many ways the opposite of that. And it really hurt. It was confusing.
15:00
It felt like I was being punished for my husband leaving. And it didn't feel good. I carried the weight and the sadness and the grief of not being taken care of during such a hard, tender moment. And not even just not being taken care of, but having some things done to our family that felt just really terrible.
15:24
And every time I would see his wife, I would, you know, see her from time to time at the gym actually in the morning. I would feel that. And it was just like this resentment. I could feel it. But I had never really gone beyond, you know, just feeling and noticing it until I saw him that day.
15:42
I saw him and then I looked away and then I noticed him notice me and he started to come over to me. And so I knew I needed a minute. So I pretended to get a phone call because one of the crucial things that I teach in all of my programs, all my clients is you have to have a pause.
16:03
You have to pause to connect to yourself. What do I want? What do I want to do here? What are my reasons? Can I handle it if it doesn't go the way I want? So those were the questions that I was asking myself when I was pretending to talk on the phone because I needed a second and I knew I had some options.
16:20
He was going to come over. I knew that. I could pretend. I could be warm and kind and just kind of let it be brief and move on. I could also leave, just leave the gym, walk out, come back at my normal time in the morning and, you know, never see him.
16:34
Also an option. And then option three, I could be honest. And so what I asked myself was, can I handle it if this goes sideways? If he gets defensive or doesn't understand, could I handle that? And I decided I could.
16:50
So I got off my fake phone call. And as he came over, I smiled and we started to talk. We exchanged, you know, a few pleasantries. And then I said, do you have time for some honest conversation? And he said, yes.
17:09
And I said, even if it feels a little prickly at first. And he said, yes. And so I said, in the moment when our family really needed to be loved and taken care of, to be welcomed, to be understood, we didn't get that from you.
17:30
And I really feel like we deserved more. It had a really profound effect on me and on my kids to feel like in that moment of being so vulnerable with all of the faith transition things going on with Dan, that we didn't have a place in our ward.
17:50
We didn't have someone who was loving and kind and generous. And then I stopped talking and he started crying. And he acknowledged it. And in that moment, something huge shifted inside of me. Something that had been sitting there in like the middle of my chest for four years just wasn't there anymore.
18:19
And here's what I understood more clearly in that moment than any other. I had been stuck in a relationship dynamic with him that he had no idea existed. I was carrying resentment that he couldn't see and pain that he couldn't see that he had contributed to.
18:41
He was not going to come to me and make it right because he didn't know it existed. And that dynamic was never going to change on its own. Could I have just carried it or figured out some other way to deal with it?
18:55
Yeah, I probably could have. Time would have just, you know, worn it away. I get that. But the moment presented itself, and I didn't want to carry all of that dynamic that both of us had contributed to by myself.
19:10
He had been unkind, uncaring. He had lacked understanding. And he had done some things that were just genuinely mean-spirited. And so in naming those things, he had felt some things that genuinely just felt mean-spirited, like totally unnecessary.
19:34
And so in that moment, what I felt like happened was I had been carrying all of that myself. And in that moment, when I shared it with him, I shifted what belonged to him to him. And I wasn't carrying it anymore.
19:54
There might be people out there who would say, well, you know what, Sarah, if you're hurt, if you're upset about that, that's yours to own and that's your responsibility to deal with. And I don't think that that's necessarily wrong.
20:06
What I think that that misses is that relationships are between at least two people and that we are capable of having effects on each other in the relationships that we're in. And we need to be able to take responsibility for the dynamics that we help create.
20:26
And so that's why it felt so important is that in that moment, I invited him to take responsibility for what he had contributed to our dynamic, and he did. I know it doesn't always go that way, but here's a story that had a little bit of a happy ending because he did own it, he did apologize for it, and it really changed the weight of what I was carrying.
20:51
To me, this is the feeling of freedom. And it is this. I never have to be stuck in a dynamic, in a relationship. Again, I can talk about it. I could bring it up. Even if the other person disagrees or doesn't feel the same way about it, we can talk and I can at least share what is on my mind in a way that feels relieving.
21:21
So if you are interested in this rule for yourself, a couple of pointers. It doesn't always have to be a conversation. It could be a letter. Sometimes the other person we want to talk to is actually not safe to talk to or they're not around.
21:36
They're not available. A letter. You can write it to them. You can send it or not send it. You can burn it or bury it. You can keep it, right? But getting the words out is the important part. You can send a text.
21:51
You can make a phone call. You can ask a friend that you have to role play the other person and let you just talk to them as if you were talking to the other person. You can talk to yourself in the mirror.
22:06
There is more than one way to use this rule in your life. It doesn't have to be a conversation with that other person physically there if that's not the best route for this. What I want you to take away from this is that you have the right to say what you need to say and it never expires.
22:30
And once you know that, once you really, really know that, you stop swallowing things that need to be spoken. You stop letting this arbitrary timer run out on when you're allowed to name things. And you speak up.
22:49
And then you carry less. You carry less resentment. You carry less confusion or anxiety or sadness because you share it with the other person who created it. And whether or not they take responsibility for it, that's not even your part of the problem.
23:08
Is it great when they do? Of course. But when you become the person who can have any conversation that needs to be had, that is freedom. That is freedom. And to me, that has been the gift of doing this work over the last decade and a half of my life and the gift of doing this with women because so many of us end up feeling held hostage by our own silence.
23:39
And that is a painful place to be. So if you've been listening to this podcast episode and you are thinking, I also have things I need to say. I know that I need to start speaking up and saying something, but I don't know how.
23:54
I have a workshop for you. This workshop is going to be happening on a weekly basis, but the first time is this Friday at 9 a.m. Pacific. This workshop is called Speak Up. It's simple, it's easy, it's three steps that you can start taking immediately to start building the muscle, start building this communication muscle so that you can have any conversation you need to have.
24:19
The link is in both my Instagram bio and it's going to be in the show notes. But just in case, it is www.sarahfisk.coach backslash voice. You can register there for the workshop this Friday. And if this Friday doesn't work, it's going to be offered weekly.
24:38
Just check that same page, sarahfisk.coach backslash voice for the next time it's offered, because we are going to be doing this work together for this report. We are going to be doing this work together for the foreseeable future.
24:52
Thanks for listening. See you next week.
Episode 165 - The Good Girl Rules are a High-Demand System
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
A high-demand system is any structure that requires a significant amount of your time, energy, and identity in exchange for belonging. We often think about high-demand religions, workplaces, families, or cultures, but there is one system that is hard to recognize because it’s so ingrained in society that it just feels like the way things are supposed to be: the good girl rules. The unspoken expectations women absorb throughout their lives function like any other high-demand system. They reward compliance, create fear around stepping outside the rules, and keep us so focused on being good enough that we never get the chance to fully discover who we are. But understanding the systems we live in is the first step toward finding our way back to ourselves. Here’s what I cover:
The characteristics that most high-demand systems have in common
How high-demand systems reward compliance and discourage deviation from the rules
Examples of high-demand systems and the ways they shape identity and belonging
Three of the biggest things women lose when living by the good girl rules
Questions to help you examine the systems you live in and what they may cost you.
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
When I was Mormon, I had an almost constant undercurrent of anxiety. And I woke up almost every single day wondering if I was enough. And it was in a religious context, for sure.
01:16
It was like, am I doing enough to make God happy? Am I doing enough to be saved the way that Mormons teach and talk about that? Am I doing enough for my community? Am I doing enough for my family? Am I doing enough for my kids, for my parents, for my friends?
01:33
And this constant like grinding anxiety actually came alongside being a very good Mormon. I wasn't half-hearted about it. I was all in and I was doing all the things. In Mormonism, there are few places where women actually get to hold positions of influence.
01:53
And I had them all. Those are only given to women who can prove that they are worthy and very observant. And so I had a lot of standing in my community. I had a very clear identity and I had like a very clear answer every single day to the question of who am I and what am I supposed to be doing?
02:19
And everything felt very certain. And even though there were things that would go wrong, the certainty that I knew who I was, that I knew what I was supposed to be doing was really, really helpful. But then there was the constant anxiety that kind of made it hard.
02:39
But I didn't know that I was so anxious. In fact, a couple of years ago, my husband found some of my old journals and was reading them out loud to me. And over and over and over again, I would say things like, I've got to try harder.
02:53
I know God is disappointed. I know I'm not measuring up. I know he expects more. I know that there's more I could be doing. I know that, you know, I just need to buckle down and try harder, which is so interesting for me to reflect on now, because if you had given me like a list, and there are lists of, you know, all of the things that a Mormon woman has to do to be quote unquote worthy and obedient,
03:18
I was doing all of them, but it was never enough to arrive at that feeling and then just have it. And then there was the resentment, because I would look around at people who in my judgment weren't working as hard as I was, weren't doing as much as I was.
03:39
And I would feel simultaneously like jealous and also angry. And it sounded in my mind like, listen, I am over here bussing my ass to do all the things right. Why aren't you? And then, of course, I would feel ashamed of myself for feeling that way because good Mormon women don't feel that way.
04:01
Good Mormon women feel, you know, it's like you keep your eyes on your own paper and you feel grateful and you just do your own get to work, put your shoulder to the wheel. That's literally a song we used to sing about.
04:13
You just, if anything is going wrong in your life, you just put your shoulder to the wheel and you get to work. And so when I left the church, it was a loss of lots of things at one time. My belief system, my worldview, my identity, my community, a lot of my friendships.
04:37
And it was the loss of that system that rewarded me for keeping the rules. And I wasn't prepared for that. I had to come face to face with how desperately I wanted other people's approval. I didn't recognize it as desperately wanting other people's approval because it was God's approval that I was after.
04:59
And so it was a little fuzzy for me there. Like you're supposed to seek God's approval, but also that approval translated down to all the other men who were running the show in my congregation. I wanted them to approve of me.
05:11
I wanted them to think I was worthy. And then the women too, and everyone else. So I really did not know how desperately I wanted other people to approve of me and validate me. And I also did not yet know how long and how much effort I had spent protecting myself from them knowing how badly I wanted them to approve of me.
05:39
I had really built some high walls, protective structures around like how much of myself I let other people see because it felt really dangerous. And so that is the work that I had to do, first of all, to get to know myself, because myself was gone.
06:02
And that's how I came to do the work that I do now. I did read about it, right? I did hear about it. I did have some really great coaches and therapists who've helped me a ton. And I had to do it myself because I had no choice.
06:17
And as I have been kind of reflecting on those early years of how did I figure out who I am and what I want, those are two of the most common questions that I hear from women. And they're not all ex-Mormons, right?
06:35
So as I have been thinking about that this weekend and writing a specific program that you're going to hear more about in the future around that really critical early identity piece. Who am I when I'm not in a structure that is telling me who to be?
06:52
Who am I when I'm not in a community or other group that is handing me all of these rules? Who am I? Outside of other people's expectations, outside of my resume. I had a long Mormon resume. Who am I outside of just all the things I've been told to be?
07:12
And I've been thinking about the good girl rules and about every system that demands compliance in exchange for belonging. And they all work the same way. We often refer to Mormonism as a high demand religion, but high demand is a definable term that can be applied to many systems.
07:38
Yes, religious, but also cultural, professional, familial. And it's any structure that requires a significant portion of your time, your energy, your identity, and compliance in exchange for belonging.
07:57
That's it. That's the definition. And high demand systems have a few things in common. I mentioned rules. They have lots of rules. Sometimes some of them are written, but a lot of them are unwritten.
08:10
And you absorb them just by osmosis, just by being around other people. And oftentimes, in an effort to comply, people will take the written rules and then raise the ante a little bit to make it even more restrictive or even harder so that there is extra reward in meeting the even stricter rules.
08:33
And so lots of rules. They also have a very clear hierarchy of who is doing it right and who is not. Sometimes that who is doing it right is openly rewarded and who is doing it wrong is openly punished.
08:51
And sometimes it's not such a featured element of the system, but it is always there. And those who are doing it right have extra rewards. They have extra privileges. They are given consideration in a different way than the ones who are falling short.
09:10
High demand systems reward compliance visibly and punish or make examples of any kind of disobedience or deviation. Sometimes it's overtly, and sometimes it's just through the slow withdrawal of that belonging piece.
09:32
You just get pushed to the edges or pushed to the margins. And these systems are so fascinating because they have a way of making you feel like the system's demands aren't because of the system. This is just how it is in a lot of religious contexts or familial or cultural contexts.
09:55
It's like, this is just the right way to live. This is the right way to do this. And in professional systems, like this is just the right way to be a doctor, a lawyer, or any of these other, you know, potentially high demand professions.
10:10
But here is a part that is really important. A high demand system makes you feel like there is going to be a loss if you step outside of these bounds. The loss is belonging. The loss is relationships.
10:27
The loss is community. The loss is having a place. And a high demand religion is a little different. I would say, you know, when people picture high demand religions, they picture something extreme, you know, living in a compound, very isolated.
10:47
And sure, those exist. And those are at the extreme end of the spectrum. But other organizations and other religious organizations that we are just so used to in our society look normal-ish from the outside, right?
11:03
It isn't something that really grabs people's attention because there is an overt difference. It is inside that all of that high demand really lives. And it becomes an inside policing system. There are high demand professions.
11:23
I mentioned medicine and law, right? Systems where kind of the implied contract is you're going to give us everything in exchange, you get to belong to something important. Maybe the hours are brutal and the culture kind of just treats that brutality as a badge of honor, but you get to belong to this very exclusive, very unique group who are obeying these rules.
11:54
And this kind of brings up another feature. When you are in some of these high demand professions or families, anytime you ask for a break or some kind of exception or even just some balance, I'm thinking about, you know, lawyers or doctors asking for a balance, this, you know, elusive work-life balance.
12:16
That actually is an admission that you're not serious about this, that you are not willing to rise to the high standards. And so asking for any kind of leniency or grace or generosity is always met with suspicion and punishment because now you don't belong.
12:37
There are high-demand family structures. There are families where everyone is organized around one member's needs. Maybe it's the mental illness of a parent, the addiction of another family member, or a chronic crisis that keeps happening.
12:57
And everyone in the household is kind of arranged around managing that person. This is where children learn really early that their job, their role, is to do something to hold the family together and that having their own needs is not allowed.
13:16
It's a disruption to that system. And so you can't do it. I think there are even high demand cultural identities. There are definitely high demand political identities. There are groups where the price of belonging is like total agreement, total alignment.
13:35
I agree with everything you say, all of your ideologies, all of your ideas. And if I criticize any of them, or if I ask again for some of that balance or nuance, it's proof that I'm not a real whatever it is, right?
13:49
And this happens across the political spectrum. So anytime you're thinking about a group where asking for any kind of nuance or generosity or trying to find ways to balance multiple people's needs, that ends up being coded as disloyalty.
14:13
That's a high demand system. And another part of it, anytime there is a system that requires total agreement, where any kind of nuance or questioning is disloyal. And when leaving the group or even questioning, it means that you lose people.
14:34
I really think these systems are everywhere. And there is one high demand system that is so normal. I talk about it a lot. You're about to not be surprised at all, but the way I'm going to talk about it, I hope kind of gives you a little bit of a different perspective on it.
14:52
This high demand system is so normal that a lot of the women living inside it never have a clue that they are. And they're the good girl rules. Being a woman, specifically being a woman who has absorbed all of those good girl rules, is its own high demand system.
15:12
Let me tell you what I mean. I demand systems, again, have unwritten rules that function as the price of belonging. The good girl rules have those. Don't take up too much space. Don't ask for too much.
15:27
Make yourself useful. Manage everyone's comfort. Be grateful. Don't be angry. Put yourself last. And there is not a class that we get where everybody sits us down and they're like, listen, here are the good girl rules.
15:41
In every single workshop I have given over the last eight years of my career, in every single coaching session where I ask the question, what are the good girl rules? Unanimously, everyone can name them.
15:55
Isn't that fascinating? It's like there was a class, but there really wasn't. And yet we all observed and absorbed the exact same things. High demand systems reward compliance visibly. The good girl rules do that too.
16:14
If you're agreeable enough, capable enough, selfless enough, you get approval. You get belonging. You get to be called good, a good woman, a good mother, a good friend, a good employee. And you get to feel like you are doing it right.
16:31
High demand systems punish disobedience. Again, not always overtly, but through the withdrawal of belonging. The good girl rules do that too. If you speak up too directly, you are difficult. If you want too much, you are selfish.
16:49
If you set a boundary around the way you want to use your time and energy, just watch the reaction that people will have. And the punishment usually isn't super dramatic, but every single woman knows when it's happening.
17:04
It's just this slow, cold feeling that you have violated something, that you are in trouble, and that you need to repair it. Otherwise, people are going to have thoughts about you. They're going to think that you're a bad girl.
17:21
And high demand systems, again, they don't make you feel like the demands are coming from the system, right? Like we sat down and wrote this system together. It's just the quote unquote right way to live.
17:34
It's the right way to do it. And the good grill rules do that better than almost anything because they don't come from a church or from a boss or from some type of class or written contract. They are everywhere all at once for your entire life.
17:56
I'm 52. I'm now starting to bump up against the good girl rules of aging, right? When I see wrinkles in my face, when I see sagging things that didn't need to sag, I have the automatic reaction that I need to fix it.
18:10
Nobody taught me that, but yet everywhere taught me that. And so the weirdest thing about these rules is that they come from everywhere. And by the time we're adults, it just, it can feel like they're just my own values.
18:29
No, I just want to be skinny because I want to be skinny. I just want to be agreeable and nice because it's just what I want. It just feels like you. And that's how a high demand system works when it's at its most sophisticated, I think, and most insidious, because it gets really hard to tell the difference between who you are and who you're taught to be, what you want and what you're taught to want,
19:02
what you want to create with your life and what you're told to create with your life. It becomes really hard to tell. When you live inside of any high demand system for long enough, all of your time and energy go to keeping the rules, complying.
19:19
And that leaves like no time or very little time for growing, for knowing yourself, figuring out your wants or what matters to you when nobody's watching. I used to have this idea that while I was busy learning how to be this amazing Mormon, all of the other women were out learning how to be feminists, how to know who they were and what they wanted, and know, you know, how to spend their time and energy so that they could really create these authentic,
19:49
amazing lives. And I would say, like, yeah, I don't have any of that because I was busy trying to be the good Mormon while everybody else was finding out who they really are. And that's actually not true because the, again, one of the most common things that women say to me is, I don't know who I am.
20:10
And I don't know what I want outside of everyone else's expectations. I have a very hard time knowing, is it me that wants this? Or is it because I've just been taught to want this? It can't just be Mormonism because everybody knows them.
20:22
And so there has to be a bigger answer. And the fact that the good girl rules are their own high demand system, to me, explains a lot, because when women have all of their time, their attention, their capacity, and their life, their interior life, everything that is going on inside of them going to meet the system's demands, going to keep the good girl rules, they're not finding out who they are either.
20:51
We are spending so much time trying to be good enough, trying to stay safe, trying to meet expectations that things get lost. And as I've thought a lot about it, there's really, there's three specific things.
21:05
This is not, of course, this is not the definitive list, but I think it matters enough to do a podcast episode about. So first thing is your sense of self. If you think about toddlers and the way that they, as a group, of course, this is generalization, know what they want and what they don't want.
21:27
One of my favorite videos that we have of one of my sons is we're trying to get him to eat, I don't know, some kind of vegetable. And we kept putting like a small piece of watermelon on top of it to try to put it in his mouth.
21:39
And he would just spit it out and spit it out and spit it out and spit it out. And so we would have had to like forcibly, I don't even know how we would have done it, but we just laughed. But it just reminds me of how much toddlers, those two and three and four and five year olds, they really know what they want and what they don't want.
22:01
And at some point they don't anymore. It gets lost. It's quiet. It's gradual. You stop knowing what you want or what you think until you've checked in with what you're supposed to think first. You stop knowing what you want until you've checked.
22:20
Am I allowed to want this? Is this okay? And at a certain point, there's very cloudy lines between your values and the rules. At some point, you run into, maybe it's slowly over time, or maybe it's a sudden kind of collision, like it was for me leaving the church.
22:43
You look up and realize, I don't know who I am, actually. The most common thing I hear from women is I don't know. One of the most common things I hear from women is I don't know who I am or what I really want.
23:01
And this is not personal failure. This is what happens when a high demand system has had your full attention for decades. So that's the first thing that gets lost, a real sense of self. The second thing that gets lost is your emotional compass.
23:22
High demand systems are not interested in what you actually feel. In fact, there's a very prescriptive list of what you are supposed to feel, what you're allowed to feel. And the emotions that don't fit, which are often anger, resentment, rage, envy, those get pushed down.
23:43
And those are the exact emotions that are trying to tell us something important. Our anger tells us when something important to us has been violated. Your anger tells you where something important to you is being violated and needs to be better taken care of.
24:04
Your envy shows you what you actually want. And an emotion like dread tells us where our choices and our desires have gotten disconnected because now we're saying yes to shit that we really don't want to and we're dreading going.
24:23
But when you have spent years suppressing those negative emotions, you lose access to the most accurate navigation system you have, your emotions and what they are trying to tell you. High demand systems are so busy trying to tell you which emotions are okay and which get the rubber stamp of approval that we don't ever investigate.
24:48
Well, then why am I having all these other emotions and what are they trying to tell me? And that is the second thing that gets lost inside of high demand systems. The third thing that gets lost is the capacity to really be known for the unique, amazing individual that you are.
25:08
When you're in a high demand system, you learn, and this is for survival, that full honesty is a risk. That showing all of yourself, what you really want, what you really desire, what you really think, it's going to cost you something.
25:28
Probably the belonging that you need. I still remember the day that I had the realization, the personal realization, that the Mormon church was wrong in the way that it had been teaching about people who are gay.
25:46
So this is back in like 2008-ish, 2009, maybe as late as 10. The Mormon church was still teaching that being gay was a choice. And I was sitting in my front room when it just didn't make sense to me anymore.
26:00
I was like, this doesn't make sense. And I know it for myself. And my first reaction was fear and to lock that shit down because I knew that being fully honest about my questions, about my opinions was not okay.
26:22
So I locked it down. Another way that we learn to deal with this is that we just learn to only show the parts of us that will get approval and reward. It's curation. It's performance, right? We show the parts of ourselves that will stand the scrutiny of the rules and the other people in the system and hide the parts that don't.
26:48
And we get really, really good at it. So good that eventually you can't remember what it's like to be you, to be authentically, really you, and to just be real about something. One of the things that was so interesting for me to recognize in myself after I left Mormonism and leaving a high demand system is painful for many different reasons.
27:17
If you're leaving a profession, it's a lot of your identity. It's a lot of what you've spent time and energy developing and expertise and a lot of money becoming good at. If it's a family system, it's the family relationships that you thought were going to be a certain way and support you and look a certain way, you know, for the rest of your life.
27:36
But exiting is hard. What is also hard is that when you leave, the physical leaving is the thing that usually feels impossible. Then you do it, but then there's real work to do because that system just comes with you because it's internal.
27:59
It's an internal monitoring and policing system that gets installed over years and years. It can become a mental condition like OCD or scrupulosity, or it can just become what I had, which was this highly anxious system vibrating all the time with, am I enough?
28:19
Am I enough? Am I enough? Those rules don't disappear when you leave the structure that taught them to you. And your nervous system doesn't just automatically update and say, oh yeah, we don't believe that anymore.
28:33
We don't go there anymore. Those old rules no longer apply. All of those rewards that kept us compliant, the approval, the belonging, and the sense that we were doing it right, we still want those badly.
28:48
And our nervous system is still keyed to get them. And when the system stops providing those, I wish we could say that we suddenly just, that's freedom, right? Now you're free. It didn't work that way for me.
29:02
And it hasn't worked that way for a lot of the women that I work with who are finding their way out of their different high demand systems. It's confusion and disorientation. The need for approval followed me right out of the door when I left Mormonism.
29:19
The self-policing followed me right out the door. The measuring of myself against invisible standards came with me. And all of those things that I had learned between Mormonism and good girl rules, they just really felt like me, the me that had been shaped by decades inside of a system where some behavior is okay and don't do this or you're going to be in trouble.
29:47
And that's where the work actually begins. It begins with getting honest about the system you were in. Not just naming it, but seeing it really clearly. What rules are required of you to belong in that system?
30:04
What are the roles that you were handed that you just had to keep playing out and meeting or you'd get in trouble? How were you rewarded for keeping those roles and keeping those rules? We have to clearly see the deal that we made and what it cost to make it.
30:28
After that, I think the next most important step is beginning to hear your own emotions again. Beginning to not judge them. The three most important emotions, I think, for women to pay attention to, anger, envy, and dread.
30:48
Those are emotions that are actively discouraged, suppressed, because the system needs things from us, right? The system needs us to be agreeable, to be kind, to be serviceable, to give up our time and energy and effort.
31:02
You can't be feeling anger, envy, and dread when you're doing that, right? You have to suppress those, but they're waiting for you. When you start to see the components of the high demand systems that you have been living in, those emotions are there.
31:20
And when you can finally start to believe that those emotions want to help take care of you, that they are good, that there's not good emotions and bad emotions, that there are just emotions that help give you data about your life.
31:33
Then you can begin to learn from them. And it begins with asking slowly and with real curiosity, what do these emotions want me to know? What does my anger want me to better take care of? What does my envy want to point me in the direction of having?
31:53
What does my dread tell me about how I have been confusing compliance with what I actually want? There's so much to learn from the richness of the full spectrum of human emotion. And then lastly, I think it begins with spending some slow, curious time asking, who am I?
32:20
Not who was I trained to be? Not what are all the roles that I was so good at excelling inside that system. Who am I underneath all of that? When I'm not answering from my resume or my relationships or the things that I'm quote unquote good at, how would I describe myself?
32:44
What are my values when nobody is checking on it? Who am I when no one's watching? So many of these questions came up for me after I left, and it was heartbreaking. It was also in some ways exciting.
33:02
It was not clean and it wasn't fast, but it was the most important work I have ever done. Because here's what I know. You cannot ask for what you want if you don't know what you want. You can't speak up for yourself in relationships if you don't know who yourself is.
33:23
You can't have hard conversations with a lot of inner sturdiness about what you really want for your life if you've spent decades self-abandoning to belong. The good girl rules are a high demand system.
33:41
And like every high demand system, they take your energy, your time, your brain space, and then they give you belonging in return. And I think the question is, whether or not that trade is still working for you.
33:56
If you're listening to this, I'm guessing it's not. So as we move forward in the coming weeks, you're going to hear more about a program that I'm creating called Known, because knowing ourselves, knowing who we are outside of everything that has been placed on us is one of the single most satisfying things we can put time and energy into.
34:22
And asking yourself some of the questions that you have heard in this episode, if they feel like, huh, I don't really know the answer to that, that's where you start. Get honest about the system. Learn to hear your emotions again.
34:38
And then ask, who am I outside of who I've been told to be? Because the time and energy that you spend doing those things will pay huge dividends. You deserve to know who you are. You deserve to know what you want and what you need.
34:56
And it's a process that keeps evolving, that keeps growing. It changes over time. I'm in perimenopause and a lot of the things that were really important to me even a few years ago just aren't anymore.
35:13
So the process of becoming known to ourselves is something that I want to be in for the rest of my life that feels like true grounding connection with me. Because when I know who I really am, then I can have real connection and intimacy with other people.
35:36
Because I can create low demand systems and low demand friendships and low demand relationships where every part of me is welcome and it is known by me and it is loved by me. And other people can see who I am.
35:54
And they get to witness and they get to be a part of the good parts of me, the parts that I'm proud to show to anyone and the parts that maybe I'm not, because that is also just part of the human experience.
36:07
It's what I want for me and it's what I want for you. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
Episode 164 - What I Wish I Would’ve Told You About Your Body
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
Most women learn to experience their bodies through other people’s eyes before they ever learn how to truly live inside them. I’ve had a few conversations recently that brought up things I wish I had known about bodies when I was younger, and things I wish I had talked about with my own daughter. In this episode, I’m unpacking everything from the unspoken rules women absorb from a young age to the patriarchal systems that keep those rules in place. There is such a rich conversation here for mothers to have with their daughters, but also for us to have with the younger versions of ourselves who grew up inside these same systems of sexual objectification, shame, and discomfort in our bodies. Here’s what I cover:
5 examples of good girl rules that shape the way women think about and experience their bodies
The book More Than a Body and the “instrument versus ornament” reframe that changed how I think about self-objectification
How girls develop shame around their bodies when they don’t have anyone to talk to about what they are experiencing
The hidden trade women are offered between male attention and connection to themselves
What it can sound like to have important conversations with girls about their bodies
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
I've had a couple conversations lately that I want to talk about with you because they've brought up some things that I wish I had shared with my own daughter, some things that I wish I had known, and some things that I want to talk about with you about bodies.
01:18
I have a dear friend. We've been friends since high school. She called me and explained that she wanted to talk through something her 13-year-old daughter wants to wear short shorts and crop tops. And she didn't know what to do.
01:33
Now, her daughter also happens to have an older sister who's 16. And her 16-year-old sister has 16-year-old friends who are boys. And so younger daughter is hanging out with older daughter and kind of older daughter's group of friends.
01:48
And my friend's mind went to where I think a lot of mothers' minds would go of like, she's going to start having sex. And I'm not laughing because I think it's funny. I'm laughing because it is so familiar.
02:01
I've made that leap, right? When my daughter's body started changing as bodies do, and it's just natural process of maturing and going through puberty and boys start to notice. I think it is very ancient and wise that those alarm bells start going off inside of mothers and fathers' brains.
02:24
And those alarm bells are not necessarily wrong. I think the question is, what do we do about those alarm bells in a way that honors who our children are and what they need and what they're noticing.
02:40
And at the same time, what they're not prepared for, what they don't understand, the type of systems that they are entering and becoming a part of that they are completely unaware even exist. And so as we talked and we ended up talking for a long time, it became obvious to me that a lot of us think that the shorts are the problem.
03:04
I mean, I was certainly taught growing up, and I think in a lot of conservative religious communities, the shorts are the problem, just don't wear the shorts. But the shorts are only part of the problem.
03:12
And what is actually here is a really rich conversation for mothers or fathers to have with their own daughters and for us to have with the younger versions of ourselves who didn't know some of these things, who were also part of this same system of patriarchy and sexual objectification and feeling uncomfortable in your body and not knowing exactly what to do.
03:41
And so I just wanted to have a conversation about it with you because yes, this episode is for mothers of daughters, but it's also really helped me as I look back at my own girlhood and when I wanted to wear short shorts.
03:56
And it's for anyone who had those experiences and also just for anyone who grew up in a body where the world had opinions about it before you really could understand why, which is, I think, all of us.
04:13
I want to talk about the rules, the rules for good girls around their bodies. This is not something that people say out loud, but we are swimming in them. They are the ones that are handed to girls a million different ways, magazine covers, through the way they hear their mothers and other grown women talk about their own bodies, what gets seen on TV and movies, how they observe their peers responding to female bodies and who is popular,
04:42
who is not, right? It's so prevalent. And I want to name them because here's what I believe will help. Any girl who can see the system that she lives in has a fighting chance. And a girl who can't see it just lives inside of it and is thrown around by it without having any conscious awareness of what's happening to her.
05:09
So let's start with what we teach girls about their bodies. Again, not on purpose, mostly, but here's what they learn. Number one, your body exists to be looked at, not experienced, not inhabited, not listened to.
05:26
It exists to be displayed. And so if you go back to the crop top, that is the uniform of this rule, the push-up bra, the way that, remember when duck lips were like such a funny internet thing? Like the full kissable lips, the way we stand, the way we push our breasts out.
05:50
Like, so we look taller or smaller or bigger in places where we're supposed to be bigger and smaller in places where we're supposed to be smaller. There's tutorials that teach you how to stand in photos so that you look thinner.
06:03
None of this has to do with how your body feels. It has to do 100% with how it looks. And there's a book that I want to mention here that changed so many things for me. It's called More Than a Body by Lindsay and Lexi Kite.
06:20
And they are both PhDs, amazing. They're twin sisters. And they've spent their careers studying what this rule does to women and girls, objectification. And they offer a reframe that I think is really healthy.
06:38
Your body is an instrument, not an ornament. An ornament just exists to be looked at, to be displayed, to be judged as either, you know, beautiful or not beautiful, appropriate or not appropriate, enough or not enough.
06:53
An instrument exists to be used, to do things, to carry you through life, to climb things, to experience things, to have a rich human experience, to let you run and think and create and feel and connect.
07:09
But from the time girls are very, very small, we let them be instruments when they're young. But then at some point, they become ornaments. Think about little girls running around and going down the slide and swinging and not caring if they get dirty or if they fall down.
07:28
You know, maybe they cry, we pick them back up and they go to it again. That is a body that's being an instrument. Think of the way that little girls talk and share what's going on for them and the curiosity that is so prevalent in girlhood up to a certain age.
07:47
And then it becomes an ornament. So we're going to come back to that in just a minute. Rule number two, the attention that you receive from either the opposite sex or from the object of your desires, because again, we're not all heterosexual, that that gaze is the reward.
08:10
For the purposes of this conversation and this podcast episode, we're going to frame it heterosexually just because that's where the good girl rules really kind of come in hard. Because a boy's gaze gets coded as success.
08:27
And then that grows up into a man's gaze, a man's approval is currency. It means something. And this isn't a side effect. This is the design. Because when a girl wears something that gets noticed, something fires off in her brain that says, that's it.
08:49
I did it right. And I think it's important to be honest about this particular rule because I think there's a disservice that happens when we pretend that this rule and that payoff inside of a girl's brain isn't real.
09:04
Male attention is something. It feels like something. It feels like power sometimes. It feels like visibility. It feels like mattering in a room full of people. It feels like belonging. And we have to talk about it that way.
09:20
We have to understand that it means safety and connection and belonging and having a place. Because if we don't, we risk talking about it in a way where a girl will think, well, that there's something wrong with me then because I like being looked at.
09:36
I like it when men notice me. I think it's important for me to look nice. And we don't want to diminish the power of that. What we want her to understand is in the context of it, that that noticing as a price, that that noticing comes with strings attached.
09:57
We're going to come back to that in a little bit as well. Rule number three, your body and a normal body is a problem to be constantly managed. Your body is too little, too fat, too thin, too hairy, too flat, too heavy, too much chest, not enough chest, wrong shape, wrong size, right shape, something wrong with your nose, something wrong with your eyelashes, something wrong with your lips.
10:22
And there is just this constant barrage of something that always needs fixing. I'm at the age where I'm starting to notice, oh, you know what? My skin doesn't look the same as it used to, or there's some wrinkles around my eyes or my mouth that I didn't used to be there.
10:41
That programming that my body is to look a certain way, and I'm supposed to measure it against this beauty standard, and I'm supposed to fix what doesn't measure up never ends. And the thing that no one tells us is it's not a one-time thing.
11:01
You don't fix it and then you're done. You fix it and then there's another thing and another thing and another thing and then you age and the normal life happens and there's another and another. I mean, I know women who are in their 60s and 70s and still wanting to feel okay in their bodies and they don't.
11:19
They're still waiting to feel like they got to the end of some list and can just be in their body and it still isn't there. And that's because of this rule. Lots of fixing all the time. Otherwise, you're not measuring up.
11:36
Rule number four, your comfort comes last. Whether you're comfortable wearing something or not wearing something, it's the last thing on the list because the things that are more important on that list is what will boys think?
11:52
What will men do? What will other people say? What will they think of me if I'm wearing this or doing this? Because a girl's physical ease in her own skin and her right to exist in her own body without apologizing for it, that is not on the list.
12:10
That's not the priority. The priority is everyone else's reaction to your body, and that's what you need to be paying attention to. We communicate this to girls thousands of different ways before they're even 10 years old in what we tell them to wear, in the way that we tell them to pull their shirts down, in the way that we tell them to adjust, in the way that we tell them that them being uncomfortable,
12:41
I know we say it flippantly, but you know, beauty is pain, is such a common thread in the media that we see and in the way that women are prized and held up for meeting beauty standards. None of that is about how comfortable they get to be in their body with what they're wearing, with how they're feeling, with the amount of explaining or apologizing that they should do when they don't meet beauty standards.
13:10
The message is your comfort is, if it's even on the list, it is dead last. Another rule, rule number five, sexual attention is the power you are actively encouraged to pursue. And in fact, it's the only power you are actively encouraged to pursue.
13:31
Let's just sit with this one for a second, because there's lots of different ways to be powerful. You could be very knowledgeable, right? You could have financial independence. You could cultivate authority in a room or expertise that takes years to build.
13:48
The good girl rules are not actively encouraging any of that. What we want you to do is be powerfully attractive. The hip-hop, the pushed up chest, the duck clips, the short shorts. These are the tools that women are handed and specifically encouraged to use because they give men something.
14:15
And what gives men the thing that they want, that's permitted and it is celebrated. The other kinds of power, being smart, being ambitious, being financially independent, being assertive and authoritative, we don't want any of that because it makes women less manageable.
14:37
It takes their time and attention away from cultivating their attractiveness as power. And we don't want that. And girls learn this so early. She learns that this power of attraction can open doors, that it can give her belonging, that it can give her an edge above other women who are not willing to meet beauty standards.
15:03
And that is powerful. And I think, again, if we can talk honestly about these rules, if we can give girls this context, it actually helps them to know how to navigate them better instead of just pretending that they don't exist.
15:22
Rule number six, your body has needs and those needs are shameful. Or your body has a natural state and that is shameful. Body hair, periods, hunger, you're supposed to hide all of that. Desire, your own actual desire, what you want, what feels good to you is not as important as what other people need from your body.
15:49
In fact, some of your own desires might even just be dangerous. We don't talk about periods. We don't talk about body hair. We don't talk about the normal bodily functions that are part of being a human and make them normal.
16:04
We don't talk about it in polite company, not at the dinner table, between boys and girls. And girls learn to be ashamed of the very body that they live in. I still remember my mom teaching me how to wrap up a pad or a tampon so that nobody knew what it was, as if the very fact that I was on my period was supposed to be hidden because it was, right?
16:31
She wasn't directly teaching me to be ashamed of my period, but I was ashamed of my period. She didn't say to me, Sara, you should be ashamed, but we do this all the time, teaching girls to hide things and not talk about things that their bodies have as needs or as very natural human developments and processes.
16:54
So I wanted to go through some of those rules, and there are others that I didn't name specifically. Those just seem like kind of the heavy hitters. They are not accidents. They are not some unfortunate side effect of a culture that just didn't know better.
17:10
They are a system and they are coherent. They are consistent. And it is an incredibly well-functioning system that has been designed by men for their pleasure and so that the capitalist arm of patriarchy can now come in and sell us all kinds of things that we need to make our bodies meet these beauty standards.
17:34
We have hair removal kits. We have push-up bras. We have things to make us look better and skinnier and lose weight and fix our nose and lip filler and everything else. So this incredibly well managed, well-functioning system benefits men and benefits the people who have products to sell us.
17:57
And here is the side effect for girls. This is what the system actually does. Inside a girl, inside her mind, inside the private kind of commentary of her own head, it splits her. And Lindsay and Lexi Kite describe it this way, which I just thought was so brilliant because I could remember when self-objectification takes hold, meaning when I become a person who is aware of my body and I'm aware of other people watching my body,
18:37
it takes, and again, this is happening in like middle school, a girl's identity literally splits in two. There is one identity that is living her life, and there's another that is watching and judging her.
18:51
She becomes her own internal critic because she's watching. She's watching how other people are watching her and she's monitoring how she looks. She's watching for signs of approval or disapproval from other people and then she's holding herself up to these standards rather than being able to focus just on what she's doing and how she's feeling.
19:19
When I read that, I was like, yes, that is exactly it. That is the thing that I had never been able to describe. Trying to do my life, right? Sit in class, walk down a hallway, make a comment, raise my hand in class and ask a question.
19:38
But part of my mind, a whole dedicated portion of my mental energy is running a separate track. Do I look okay right now? Is my stomach sticking out? Did he notice me? Was that okay? Was that the right amount?
19:51
Was it too much? Was it not enough? It is exhausting and it's constant and it starts so young that most of us don't even know what is happening. We think that voice is us. It's just what it means to be a girl.
20:09
I constantly have to be aware of what other people think of my body. But it isn't. It is what that system trained us to do to ourselves. So it would not have to do it anymore. This is so powerful and so insidious.
20:27
When a woman is busy monitoring her own body, monitoring all of the aspects of how she moves through the world with these standards, she doesn't have a lot of energy left over for other things. A woman who needs male approval to feel valuable is going to shape herself around what men want.
20:51
A woman who has been taught that her own desire is dangerous will not trust herself. She's going to outsource her own knowing to whoever outside of her seems most confident or whoever's attention she wants to capture.
21:07
She's going to ask permission before she acts. She's going to shrink and second guess and stay quiet in moments that sometimes really matter for her safety or for her comfort because she doesn't know how to risk their approval without causing something that feels really uncomfortable, not belonging, not meeting these beauty standards, not measuring up.
21:37
So when we have that split, when we become both the person in our body and the person watching our body, now nobody has to do anything from the outside because we're doing it to ourselves on the inside.
21:55
In my conversation with my friend, I remembered and I told her this story. When I was in high school, I got a hold of a pair of short shorts and my mother did not want me to wear them. Obviously, growing up Mormon, as I did, there were very specific rules about what I was allowed to wear and what I wasn't allowed to wear.
22:17
And I don't even remember where these shorts came from, but man, I hung on to those things for dear life. Those shorts meant that I could be like everybody else, right? Those shorts meant that I wasn't the weird, awkward Mormon girl.
22:34
It was about getting attention for something else, right? I had gotten some attention for being the weird, you know, awkward Mormon girl. But when I had those shorts on, now I could get attention for the way my legs looked in those shorts, the way that I felt changed.
22:58
And there were a lot of things that I still felt very self-conscious about. I mean, I got teased for having a visible mustache by another boy in my room in like fourth grade, maybe fifth, got teased for it.
23:12
Totally remember it. And there was no one I could talk to about that. I knew it was bad. I knew it was shameful, but I didn't, I also didn't feel like I could talk to my mom about it. She was a great mom in so many ways.
23:26
She also didn't talk to me about my body. We didn't talk about it. She didn't talk to me about her body. She didn't talk to me about what a body was supposed to do as it changed. If it hadn't been for, you know, the school district class about starting my period, I would not have known because those were just private matters.
23:49
And while she was willing to go to the store and get me pads when it was time, I had to tell her like, hey, I think I've started my period. And so I grew up feeling really acutely aware that there were a lot of things that I didn't know about.
24:06
I didn't know that you could get rid of body hair, right? Even just so that I could suffer a little bit less and not be teased at school. She didn't talk to me about makeup, right? When I could start wearing it, when I could, I remember begging her to let me shave my legs.
24:23
Listen, my brothers called me carpet legs. That's how bad it was. And my sixth grade class was going to the beach and I begged her to please let me shave my legs. And she said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
24:37
I finally wore her down. I went into the shower and just started shaving my legs with a dry razor. Totally took off a three inch strip of skin right there on your shin bone. I know we've all done it because I just didn't have, I didn't have any direction.
24:54
And so what I absorbed from all of her silence was something that I couldn't have articulated then, but I really understand it and see it in me now, which is your body is something to be ashamed of. It is something to be managed in private.
25:10
It is something that you're just going to have to figure out on your own. Don't ask for help. Just figure out how to handle it. And so when I finally got those shorts, it was about feeling normal. It was about being able to now belong to this category of girls who were sexy or cute.
25:33
And I didn't understand at the time, but looking back, me, my mother would have had to have like fried those shorts from my cold dead hands because I was not going to give them up. It was so important for me to have that belonging and matter in that way.
25:52
And so when I think about how I have absorbed and how I have tried to emulate the good girl rules about bodies, I have so much compassion for it. I'm not all the way through this. I don't have some existence where I don't notice the male gaze, where I don't notice my skin sagging and wrinkles happening and things changing, because all of us have just been swimming in these rules ever since we were little.
26:23
So when I was talking to my friend about my own short shorts experience, I also remembered when my daughter came downstairs in her own short shorts. And of course she did, because I think it is totally normal.
26:39
I remember feeling that alarm go off in my head and the instinct to question the wisdom of wearing those shorts and maybe to make her change, right? I felt all of that. But the one thing that I decided to do differently was to try to preserve.
27:01
And I didn't, I wasn't a coach at the time. So I didn't think about this in terms of like coaching and how I'm thinking about it now. But I just thought, she gets to exist. She gets to exist in her own body.
27:14
And I'm not really sure how I'm going to do this, but my fear is mine. And I need to manage that. And I need to talk about it with her in a way that doesn't kind of dump all of this fear on her. Because the problem is that the system makes the shorts bad or wrong.
27:36
And so then the opposite feels true. Like, hey, if the shorts are bad or wrong, then covering up is the way to protect yourself. And that's not right either, because right, that just teaches her that her body is somehow still bad and she has to cover it up or other people are going to have thoughts about it.
27:58
I wish I could say that I had a great talk with her, that I was able to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit. I don't think I did a particularly great job of having the kind of conversation that we're going to talk about having in this podcast episode.
28:14
But I think the best I was able to do is just not lecture her, not warn her, and not force her to change. Now, she was just here a couple of weekends ago, and I asked her about this. And she said, oh, I knew that you might not have liked some of the things that I was wearing.
28:31
I knew that you would not like, for example, she, you know, wearing her first bikini. I was aware that you didn't like it, but that you let me do it anyway. I'm not going to say I was able to have an amazing conversation about it with her, the conversation that I wish I had, that I'm going to kind of propose that you have with your daughters or with yourself now.
28:53
But that was progress. And I think whenever we're able to make progress, it's to be celebrated. So what do we actually say to the 13-year-old who wants to wear the short shorts? Going back to what Lindsay and Lexi Kite wrote, I remembered this quote and I think it is so essential.
29:15
Here's what they write. When we live our lives in this perpetual state of body monitoring, we are living passively. We are being judged and consumed by others and not as self-actualized humans actively making choices.
29:38
That is what I think the conversation hinges on. We need to help our daughters recognize when they are existing to be consumed and judged by others and when they are existing as the instrument. Because both things are going to happen.
29:58
I would go so far to say as it is unavoidable in the culture and the way that we are just so inundated in this avalanche of beauty standards that one of the most important things we can do is help our daughters recognize when they are in their bodies and feeling their feelings and doing things that make them happy and feel pleasure and feel proud of themselves.
30:24
And when they switch into that observer mode and they're picking up all the little bits of information around them of people who are watching their body and having reactions to it. We want to raise girls who are aware of when they default to managing their looks and how much time and energy that takes, not because it's bad, but because what it costs them is making real choices about their own bodies and just existing,
31:01
being able to make conscious choices, ones that actually belong to them. Because if I'm putting on short shorts because I think Chad is going to like it, that's not a decision that I'm making for myself.
31:15
But it's also not a bad decision. A decision makes a lot of sense when we think about how we're growing up. And I'm saying this kind of over and over in a couple of different ways because we also don't want to shame anyone who's putting on the short shorts because Chad will like it because it just makes sense.
31:37
We want them to understand the cost. And here's where that quote from the Kite sisters, I think, just matters is that when self-objectification really takes hold, and again, the research in their book says that it really starts hitting in middle school, the result is that girls start sitting out.
31:59
They start opting out of a lot of experiences that are really essential for them to have. And they don't opt out metaphorically. It is literally. They stop raising their hands in class because they're worried about how their arms look.
32:15
They quit sports because they don't want to sweat in front of boys. They skip things because they're on their period. They make themselves smaller and they begin to either literally try to make their bodies smaller or metaphorically disappear from rooms in which they should be learning, they should be experiencing, and they should be becoming and even developing some of those other ways to have power,
32:44
to have knowledge, to have the ability to talk with other people confidently, the ability to be in a room and feel like you belong there despite who notices you and who doesn't. So that's what's really at stake.
33:01
It's not just about the shorts. It's that when the shorts are the biggest thing that matter, girls make themselves smaller. And then decades later, when we're still trying to make ourselves smaller and fit in, all of that rage and resentment and sadness and loneliness, it's really a problem.
33:26
So when I was talking with my friend, here's what I said. You don't need to take the shorts away. I don't think that is the right move here. That's not the conversation that I would encourage you to have.
33:39
The conversation is, I want you to understand what is happening here so that you get to decide what you do with it. You talk to her about the system in language that is appropriate for her. You say something like, you know what, there are these rules that nobody says out loud about what girls' bodies are for and what they are allowed to look like, what they are not allowed to look like.
34:03
Tell me what you already know about that because I bet you are so smart. You have already observed some of this. Of course, they're going to have some answers for that, right? Because it is everywhere.
34:14
And so then you tell her that that attention from boys is real and it feels like power and it is something that sets off a very natural, very understandable reaction in her brain. And then you tell her that it has a cost, right?
34:36
When you are constantly getting that attention from boys, what you're not doing is thinking about how your own body feels. You're not getting to keep your body for you in service of what you want to do.
34:52
It becomes all about what they want you to do. And that's a trade that I want you to know you're making. And I want you to make it only in instances when you feel like it's worth it, because they are going to make that trade sometimes.
35:08
And we need to understand it and we need to have a lot of compassion for it and not shame her for it. Because what we want to do is give her correct information, invite her to talk about us with anything that happens, anything she notices, so that we can lovingly help her feel the difference between being an instrument and being an ornament.
35:35
Between pulling on those short shorts because she wants to feel cute and free and like herself, or putting them on because she wants a particular boy to look at her. Both of those things are real. Neither is wrong.
35:50
But what we want is to make it conscious. You want to teach her to notice her own feelings first. What does it feel like in your own body when you're wearing this? Do you feel powerful? Do you feel comfortable?
36:05
Do you feel seen? Do you feel used? Do you feel stared at? Do you feel consumed? All of those are valid. None of them are wrong. And plugging her in to what she's feeling is so powerful. Then you can teach her to watch the difference between what boys say and what boys do.
36:28
Words are easy and behavior is information. You give her the language. It might sound something like, you know, I notice that I feel really happy when Chad looks me up and down. Interesting. Okay, tell me why.
36:45
What do you think it means? No shame, no blame, helping her understand that, okay, when Chad looks at you and that little thing goes off in your brain, it does feel good. What are you also not feeling in that moment?
37:01
Oh, I'm not feeling how I feel. Do I even like Chad, right? Is the thing that I'm most concerned about getting his attention? Why is that? To help our girls become observers of the system and even little detectives so that they can see the way it works and the way it functions is so important because that allows her to see it.
37:25
And when she can see it, she can make different choices about it. One of the reasons why this conversation is so powerful is because this system is not going to change on its own. It's not going to take care of them.
37:42
It's not going to protect them. It's not going to help them have one wild, beautiful, and precious life. We have to do that as their mothers, as their friends, as the women who surround these young girls who are further along the journey from childhood to be able to see and name what we've all just been swimming in.
38:06
And when we pull back the curtain for them, we also pull the curtain back for us. And we understand more clearly that we are also, I'm still being offered a trade at 52. Am I going to maintain my body as an ornament?
38:23
Am I going to try and stop the aging process? Am I going to try and tighten and nip and tuck? And again, I'm not saying any of that is bad. I am saying that I now see that I'm being offered a trade. I can still go the direction of becoming more ornamental and more along the lines of what beauty standards expect of me now, or I can really double down on becoming an instrument in feeling and doing what my body wants and what my body desires.
38:57
I can make that consciously. And so that is what we are offering our girls. It is the chance to live inside this system consciously and to make choices consciously. Because I really think that the most dangerous thing that we inadvertently do for our daughters is not talk about this.
39:20
And so they just kind of participate in this system and they become comfortable in it and they have no idea that they're making that trade. So I'm dying to know as I was preparing this episode and, you know, kind of reminiscing, I had all of these experiences come back to me when I really was doubling down on noticing the male attention.
39:44
What do you remember growing up in your body? I would love to know. I think it's very different, you know, in terms of I came from a very conservative religious background that had its own rules. What do you remember about growing up in your body?
39:58
What were you taught either explicitly with words or in silence, in the looks on other people's faces? What did you have to figure out alone that you wish now you had had some help with? Or what do you wish that someone had told you about the system?
40:18
I'd love to know. Send me an email, sara@sarafisk.coach, or send me a DM. I read every single one because I really want to have an ongoing conversation because as I mentioned, it's not over for me.
40:32
I'm still making those choices between instrument and ornament. I think we all are. And the more we talk about it, the better able we are to live consciously. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
Episode 163 - The Hidden People Pleasing of High Achievers
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
There is a version of people-pleasing that hides behind competence, ambition, professionalism, and being the person everyone can count on. In this episode, I’m unpacking the patterns that show up in high achievers and what happens when competence becomes part of your identity. If the traits that brought you success are slowly starting to feel exhausting, it doesn’t mean you need to stop striving completely. It means there is a different way to experience achievement, one where you can be highly capable while also being supported, loved, helped, and truly known in reciprocal relationships. Here’s what I cover:
Why people pleasing in high achievers is often brushed off as “just being professional”
The childhood experiences that teach women that being useful is what makes them lovable
How competence can become a cage that leaves high-achieving women feeling lonely and resentful
The invisible contract women believe in when they keep overfunctioning and overdelivering
The sneaky ways people pleasing shows up through perfectionism and emotional responsibility
How to start supporting the younger part of you that learned that needing things was unsafe
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
Last Saturday, I spent the morning with a group of doctors and medical professionals are among my very most favorite people. Not only because I have received some amazing attention and care and my life has been saved, the life of Rachel, my firstborn was saved because nurses were paying attention.
01:20
And so I jump at the chance to spend time with medical professionals because they are caring a lot, right? They are caring a lot. And there's something I think we can learn from them because we're also carrying a lot in the various jobs where we are showing up and trying to give value and earn money and support our families.
01:42
And so what I want to do with you today is kind of look at that time that I spent with them because I think it has some really profound lessons for others of us who are not necessarily doctors, but who are living in some of the same dynamics and traps.
02:02
And these people are, you know, not struggling to be competent. They know how to perform under pressure. They are people who walk into rooms every single day and do everything from make life or death decisions for other human beings to just how do we take care of the fact that you are sick or not feeling well, or how do we get to the bottom of a health problem that you are having?
02:24
And so they are really competent. They're highly educated. They have so much to offer us. And yet, when I asked them, what is the biggest problem you face? Like, why did you come on a Saturday to give me two hours of your time?
02:43
What are you hoping to get? They all talked about why they can't speak up for themselves and the dynamics that they are in because they were never taught how to speak up. One of them, I'll call her Lori, she has been practicing medicine for over two decades and she came into her career as a very natural, clear, straight communicator, very direct, confident.
03:12
And in medicine, she knew exactly what she thought and she said it. And then she was told, too much. You are too much. You are too blunt. You are too direct. You are offending people. And so she softened herself.
03:28
And over the years, in ways that were gradual and maybe some she didn't notice and others she did, but she turned herself down and she became a version of herself that the system could tolerate. And then, you know, over two decades later, she's sitting with me on a Saturday morning telling me that she doesn't want to work in medicine anymore and she felt like a quitter for finally deciding to leave.
03:55
But she wasn't quitting. She was rescuing herself from a situation that had required her for two decades to be someone that she was never supposed to be. And I just kept thinking, this is not just a doctor problem.
04:09
This is a high achiever problem. And so if you are listening to this right now and you are someone who is good at things, who people count on, who figures it out, who makes it look easy, this is for you.
04:22
And I want you to stay with me through this episode because I want to describe a problem that's going to be very familiar to you and also where we start to unravel that. And let me start by naming something that I don't think is very obvious.
04:38
This is people pleasing. So there is a version of people pleasing that looks very competent, very strong, highly capable, driven. This is not a woman who can't say no to something. This is not someone who is even like a pushover or meek, right?
05:00
This type of people pleasing is ambitious. It looks like people who can just get something done, women who can just get things done, oftentimes with less resources and in less time than everyone else.
05:14
And it looks a lot like you, right? I've met and talked with so many of you who match this description. You are kind and nice and respectful, and sometimes you are direct and blunt, but what you have in common is this.
05:30
At some point, and for most of you, this was early on, there was some kind of childhood or adolescent thing that you noticed where you're like, wow, when I achieve, that gets me something. Maybe it was overt, a parent telling you, this is what is expected of you.
05:51
This is very common in immigrant households where parents sacrifice a lot to be here, to give their children new opportunities. And so the expectations are very explicit. Maybe it was less explicit. It's a teacher who you noticed paid more attention the higher grades you got.
06:09
Maybe it was a grade or a moment that you proved to yourself or to someone else that you were really smart. It was the feedback you got from peers about your intelligence or your capability. And that equated to belonging, belonging in an educational system, belonging in a system where people are measured against each other, where grades are given, and you were good at it.
06:37
So you went after it. And when things got hard, when there were problems maybe that you'd never seen before or moments where it might have been completely reasonable to ask for help, you just figured it out on your own.
06:53
Sometimes that's because the adults were not paying attention and they didn't know that you needed help and you didn't know how to ask. Sometimes it's because the adults were absent and you just knew you were on your own.
07:04
And sometimes it was because you got punished for asking for the help. Doesn't matter. You figured out how to answer a lot of your own questions, how to get the thing done that got you the belonging you were looking for.
07:21
And I know this feeling, that glow, that feeling of like, I handled it. I totally did it. And maybe you do too. The look on someone's face when they're so happy with you, so proud of you, so pleased with you.
07:37
And you got rewarded for that. Not just the result, but also for the independence, for needing less, for doing more with fewer resources, less support, less handholding than anyone else around you. And for some of us, this goes all the way back to childhood where we were literally praised for not needing.
08:01
You're so easy. You're such an easy child. And so that grows up to look like high achieving, where you learn to carry a lot and make it look good, make it look light. And that is not just ambition. That is not just drive.
08:20
That is not just wanting to be intelligent. That was actually how you learned to stay safe, how you learned to belong, how you learned to earn the thing that we all need, which is love and approval and connection and care.
08:37
Being useful created belonging. Being the one who figured it out, who didn't make things harder, who held it together, that got you something far more than just a grade or a promotion. Those things were fantastic.
08:52
But competence wasn't just a strategy to be successful. It was an attachment strategy. So I remember early being a student and being teased in my sixth grade class by two boys, Shane Farrell and Chris Brow.
09:11
Still remember their names. If you're out there, hello. And they called me the walking dictionary. And I remember being so embarrassed by their teasing. And my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Mario Guerrero, the best of the best, put his arm around me one time after noticing that that was happening to me.
09:30
And he said, you know what? You are smart. You are clever. You are impressive. You always do such great work. And that really matters. That is going to matter way more than what these two boys are saying in sixth grade.
09:45
You don't know this, but you're going to grow up and you're going to have this whole life and you're going to be so happy that you have put time into learning words. It is going to serve you so well.
09:58
And that special attention from him, I still remember it. I'm still getting a little teary as Mr. Guerrero rescued this, you know, awkward sixth grade version of Sara who needed to belong. And I ate it up and it became my superpower, getting things done, shining, delivering.
10:21
And I'm sure it's yours too. And I don't think we should pretend that it isn't valuable, that it isn't something highly, highly sought after, because it is. What we just didn't know is that there was something else also beginning to happen at the same time.
10:37
And it is this. We built our reputations around that. Job after job, role after role, class after class, relationship after relationship. We became the people who came through, who didn't drop the ball, who actually filled in the gaps of systems that had holes in them, who learned how to absorb the extra and show up when other people didn't.
11:06
And it felt genuinely good. There's a real satisfaction in being the one that people can count on and in proving that again and again and again. And what we don't notice is that it becomes the expectation.
11:22
What we don't notice is that the more we achieve and the more we give and the more we produce and perform, people stop asking if we need help because we had always assured them, oh, no, no, no, I got it.
11:35
I can do it. And so slowly we start to do more and receive less. We don't even notice it in the beginning. But at some point, there is a little voice that pops up in the back of our head, or maybe it's, it might even be subconscious for a while.
11:52
But we just start to wonder, huh, when is it going to be my turn? When is someone going to show up for me the way I've showed up for everyone else? And here's what happens. It doesn't because we are so highly competent and we have said, no, no, no, I've got it.
12:13
I'm fine. I can do this for so long that we become trapped by that competence. The resentment starts to build. It's quiet at first and then not so quiet. And because you don't have the words or you don't know what's happening, the resentment doesn't go anywhere.
12:33
It just builds and builds and starts leaking out sideways. You start snapping. You start shutting down or withdrawing. You start going cold in the middle of conversations that you used to be warm in, where you realize that things are being expected of you.
12:51
And then this is one of the things that we talked about on Saturday, you actually become the thing that you are afraid of becoming because you don't want to be mean. You don't want to be rude. You want to be nice and kind.
13:04
But when all that resentment just builds and builds and is not addressed, it starts coming out. And you become more difficult, possibly angrier. And that's what happens when we don't know what's happening to us and we aren't given skills to talk about it along the way.
13:25
You were never given that alternative. The only two options that good girl programming teaches us are these. You stay silent and you're good and you're nice and you keep the peace and you keep performing, or you speak up and become the bitch.
13:41
And no one ever said, you know what? There's a third option where you learn the skill to find the words and the inner sturdiness to say them in that moment. And that's how you take care of the resentment.
13:55
Here's the part that makes this cycle so hard to break. Subconsciously or otherwise, we begin to believe if I ask for what I really need, it's going to undermine the very thing that I have been the most celebrated for.
14:13
And I want you to really think about that for just a second. If you need help, then maybe you can't handle it after all, right? If you have limits, then maybe this image of capability and dependability, the one who figures it out, somehow either isn't who you are anymore or maybe never was.
14:37
And so instead of asking, we do all kinds of other things. We hint or we wait for someone else to notice or we do even more. We double down even harder to prove that it's not a lie and that we don't need the support, that this really is who we are and we can just double down and keep going.
14:59
And that's when our competence becomes the cage. And other people are looking in at us and sometimes they're admiring and they're saying, wow, Sara can really get it all done and she's amazing. And I'm lonely inside that cage.
15:17
I'm resentful and I'm stuck. One other thing makes this hard to reckon with. For a long time, for probably a lot of your career or wherever you've been doing a lot of work, that strategy actually pays off.
15:35
It doesn't just work. It pays off. There's promotions and titles and a reputation and more pay. There's more opportunity. And there's a sense that you were building toward something, that the output, the effort, and all of the competence was an investment in some future state.
15:58
And here's kind of how it sounds, even if it wasn't visible to you or wasn't spelled out. There's this invisible contract that says, if I keep performing at this level, eventually I'm going to arrive somewhere, somewhere easier, somewhere where I am respected enough that I don't have to keep proving it again and again and again.
16:21
Somewhere where people take care of me the way I take care of them. And somewhere that I belong so permanently that I can finally stop trying to prove it every single day. And I can just kind of exhale and enjoy everything I've worked for and built.
16:42
That was the deal. And you held up your end. You kept delivering. You kept being the one people counted on. And what I think a lot of us have found and what these doctors have certainly found, what so many women find themselves in, the position they find themselves in in their, you know, late 30s or early 40s, is that that contract was never real.
17:07
Because here's what actually happened. Every time you came through, the bar moved. What used to be impressive just became expected. What used to earn you goodwill now is just the minimum. And you weren't building toward a place of ease and belonging.
17:26
You were building a reputation that now requires that you maintain it relentlessly, constantly, day after day. Because excellence recalibrates expectations upward every single time. The system doesn't reward sustained excellence with rest.
17:52
And that system, to be clear, is capitalism and the Western way of doing things. It doesn't reward excellence with getting to take a break. It rewards sustained excellence with more expectations. And then this is the part I think is actually genuinely cruel.
18:13
The better you got, the more invisible the effort became. You made it look easy. And when something looks easy, people stop thinking about what it costs you, which means that it's possible that right now in your life, there are probably people who depend on you enormously, who could not function the way they function without you, who have absolutely little to no idea what it takes for you to keep showing up the way that you do.
18:44
Mothers feel this a lot, but that's different because these are children, right, that we're talking about. And sometimes we feel it even later into adulthood. But children and working with children, taking care of children who are dependent, who cannot take care of themselves, is kind of the template for what we expect of women everywhere, right?
19:04
And so even if you're at work, you are working with people who feel like they can depend on you, not because they're bad, but because you are so good at hiding the effort that it costs and you just keep doing it.
19:21
And here's what happens when you get good at performing and hiding the cost of it to you. You get crossed off the list of people who need to be taken care of. The more capable you become, the less people check on you, the more others lean on you emotionally, the more you become, you actually become part of the infrastructure, not a person, but the infrastructure that just the system needs to run on,
19:55
that nobody really thinks about until it stops working. There was a doctor in the room last Saturday, I'll call her Sam, who had recently gone to her hospital administrator and said, listen, we are drowning.
20:07
We need more physicians. The gaps in care are real and people are waiting a long time to be seen. And the administrator looked at her and said, actually, I think we're doing pretty great. And he then quoted back to Sam all the ways in which he had seen her filling in the gaps so completely and so consistently and so invisibly, staying late, taking on extra patients, answering messages after hours,
20:36
that that gap to him didn't exist or didn't exist to the same degree. The system had no problem because Sam was filling in the gap. And so what I said to her was, so just notice the more you bend and fill in those gaps, the system doesn't say thank you.
20:58
The system says, Sam stayed late. That means we don't need anybody else. If we can count on Sam to do this, we can continue to save money. And as much as I want to go off on a capitalism rant here, we're going to stay here.
21:11
That's another podcast for another day. And Sam nodded like she had known it and she had felt it, but putting it into words, putting that invisible contract into words and seeing how it was failing her in real time was really important.
21:33
Your suffering becomes invisible because you appear so functional. And that's why this feels stuck, because of course, none of us want to appear less functional, less capable. But we also don't want to continue to suffer for another decade or two in a job or in a position or in a relationship where our capability is just being taken advantage of.
22:02
The support never comes because we have made ourselves look like someone who doesn't need it. And you just keep going. So I want to go back to something because I think it matters. And when I say that that invisible contract was invisible, I don't mean that it doesn't exist or that you were naive for believing it.
22:25
Most of us who run this pattern learned it very early and we learned it for a reason. Somewhere along the way, often before we had words for it, we figured out, I want to say this again, that being extraordinarily capable created safety, that being useful created belonging, that being the one who didn't make things harder, who held it together, who came through, that got you something far more than just the good grade or the gold star.
22:56
It got you connection, which also means that rest, need, asking for help, depending on someone, these things don't just feel uncomfortable or hard to ask for, they feel dangerous. They feel suspect because somewhere in your nervous system, they got coded as a threat to the belonging.
23:24
This is not a character flaw. This is actually a very intelligent adaptation that you made a long time ago under real circumstances, and it worked. The problem is those adaptations don't update on their own and you're still doing it long past the point where it works for you.
23:44
And now it's actually costing you. Underneath the resentment, underneath the burnout, underneath the exhaustion, there is grief. Because at some point, women who run this pattern arrive at a realization, no one is coming to take care of me the way I take care of everyone else.
24:03
And that surpasses, that's beyond frustrating. That is a loss. That is grieving a relationship and a reward and a payoff and a place of safety that we really believed in. We are grieving the version of the future where all that effort finally paid off with belonging that couldn't be threatened by anything.
24:26
And relationships that saw us and valued us for how much work we put in to our jobs and showing up for other people. And we have to grieve the relationships that could have been more mutual if we had known what was happening.
24:42
Underneath that grief, there is often this question. If I stop functioning at this level, if I stop being this person, who am I? The competence isn't just the strategy. It's an identity. It's that cage.
25:00
And it's not just the demanding job or the people who take you for granted or the systems that keep extracting from you. All those are real. The cage is that you cannot stop because now your sense of self is around not needing to and being able to just show up and keep getting it done.
25:20
The doctors in that room last Saturday are well into, and some of them are even past, the first five, maybe 10 years of their practice. And they're looking at maybe 20 more years. And they're doing the math and they know with perfect clarity that the way they have been operating is insustainable.
25:40
But then they also still felt stuck, not because they didn't see the problem. These women are brilliant. They totally saw it. But the stuckness happens because the solution requires them to do something that they have spent their entire careers learning not to do, which is ask for what they need and to stay in the conversation long enough to find out if they can have it.
26:08
So now I want to walk you through something because when a lot of people hear people pleasing, they immediately think that is not me. I'm not the pushover. I have opinions. I can say what I mean. I don't do things just to make people like me.
26:23
And you're right. That's not what this is. This is sneakier than that. This is the version that hides inside behavior that looks from the outside like it's totally reasonable and is actually professional.
26:37
But I want to describe some of the things to you that I have heard from clients, that I heard from these doctors and that I've heard from talking to you, because we need to understand that this is also contributing to this problem we're talking about.
26:52
It is overachieving, not just because you love the work, but because staying valuable feels safer if you are an achiever. If you keep performing, nobody looks too closely at what is underneath because that feels vulnerable.
27:10
So that overachieving to gain belonging. And it looks like difficulty delegating because somebody else, if they're going to do it wrong, you're going to get blamed. So it's easier to just do it yourself.
27:24
It looks like downplaying what you've accomplished or what you've done. Somebody congratulates you and you deflect and you try to be humble, not necessarily because you are humble, but because claiming it feels dangerous.
27:39
Owning it has the possibility of inviting people to look at you a little more closely, and you don't want to do that. It looks like always waiting for the right time or the right words. The right time never comes and there's always a reason to wait.
27:56
There is internal bargaining, you know, the relationship's okay right now. They're stressed. You'll bring it up later. Things never calm down. And so you're just constantly in this state of waiting for the right time to bring up some of the things that are bothering you.
28:13
It also looks a lot like smiling or laughing to cover up discomfort. Somebody says something that lands wrong and instead of naming it, you smile, you laugh, you move the conversation along. And then later, you wonder why you didn't say anything.
28:31
This happens all the time in professional settings and other settings where we work and where we volunteer. And what it does is it contributes another layer of performing easygoingness. This acting easygoing to where you deflect or smile and you don't address comfort, it adds another layer because it becomes also part of your personality.
28:54
Easygoing, easy to get along with, not someone who's going to bring up hard things and rock the boat. It looks like feeling responsible for other people's emotions. And that's beyond just being aware of them.
29:09
It's taking on responsibility for them. So instead of being honest, you manage, you calibrate based on what you think they can handle and you protect them from your experience of needing, your experience of being exhausted and wanting additional support.
29:30
It also looks like the person who always puts in the effort, who initiate, who remembers, who follows up, who shows up. And again, that quiet wondering in the back of your head, if I stop doing all of this, would anyone else reach out to me?
29:45
Here's maybe the sneakiest one of all. When someone asks you about a decision you've made, it feels like a challenge, like an attack. Sometimes it is, and I'm going to totally own that. But other times, it feels like they're questioning your competence, that thing that keeps you safe.
30:04
So you over-explain, you over-justify, possibly get a little defensive, because somewhere underneath, that competence feels like it's on shaky ground. And some of us are worried that we're going to be quote unquote found out, that that competence, our belief is that competence really isn't as high as it should be or needs to be to be bulletproof.
30:32
So one of the doctors in that room, a woman who had been practicing family medicine for over a decade, described how every time a patient asked her to address just one more thing before the appointment ended, she said yes, every single time.
30:46
Because saying no would have felt like she hadn't done everything she could have. It threatened her identity as a competent caring professional. And so she said, yes. And then she ran behind for the rest of the day, day after day after day of running behind and having to walk into every single room after that, already apologizing.
31:09
And then she gets home late and she's apologizing for being late getting home. And then she feels terrible the whole time. None of this feels like people pleasing from the inside. And it often doesn't even look like it from the outside.
31:24
It just feels like being professional, like being strategic, like being the bigger person. Maybe like someone who doesn't have time for the drama. I'm just here to work and work competently and not need anything from anyone else.
31:39
And competence has to be the thing that we sit with and question. There is something else that I asked the women in that workshop to think about, and I'm going to ask you to think about it now. When you picture a woman who says exactly what she wants to say, who speaks up, who is clear and direct, what kind of image comes to mind?
32:04
Right? Some of them had some great words like brave, she's queen, she's confident. But there were also some words like she's bitchy, she's brazen, she's too much. And I want you to just notice that because that list and that automatic gut level association between a woman who speaks clearly and a woman who is dangerous, that is the programming.
32:29
That is why your nervous system is scared. And as long as your brain believes that there are only those two options, right? Either stay silent and be nice or become the bitch, chances are you'll stay silent every single time while that resentment and that loneliness leaks out.
32:48
Here is what I want you to know. This is not a character flaw. This is not who you are. You are not uniquely difficult. Nothing has gone wrong. You are running a very logical program based on very, very real experiences that taught you some very understandable things about what keeps you safe, what keeps you valued, and what keeps you loved.
33:15
And it can be rewritten. I want to give you one way to start rewriting this, because here's the thing. So many of the doctors in that room described like this internal fight they were having with themselves.
33:30
And they said it the way I've heard hundreds of women say it over the time I've been working. I am a 42-year-old woman. Why can't I just speak up? I am a 38-year-old, whatever. I am a 54-year-old woman, professional, doctor, lawyer, mother, volunteer.
33:49
I'm intelligent. Why can't I just say it? The logic of it feels so obvious. The reason you cannot logic your way into speaking up is not because you lack information. You have the information, right?
34:07
So many of you have read all the books and listened to the podcast and been to therapy. You know intellectually what you should do. The reason that the logic doesn't work is that the part of you that freezes in those moments, the part that goes silent when you need her the most, the part that pretends, that part is not an adult.
34:30
Remember when you learned this? You were young. That part is young. That part is the kid who learned that speaking up gets you in trouble, that needing things makes you a burden, and that the way to stay safe and loved and connected was to be so capable, so useful, and so easy that no one would ever leave you.
34:53
They would never have a reason to because you were amazing. And when you are in a hard moment, when someone questions your judgment or your decisions or takes more than they're entitled to or treats you in a way that is genuinely not okay, it is that kid who is jumping into the driver's seat of your experience.
35:12
And she panics because this is the thing that could have gotten her into trouble, needing, wanting, having something to say and wanting to say it. And so when you yell at yourself, I'm a grown fucking woman.
35:27
Why can't I just say this thing? I want you to know and I want you to picture that you're actually yelling at a child, a younger version of you. And children, what happens when they're yelled at? They don't respond to that.
35:42
They go smaller. And what they need and what you need is to come down to that child's level and say, I see you. And I know you're scared. And I know that this has felt dangerous before. And I want you to know that I'm here, that you don't have to figure this out alone.
36:01
I have skills now that you didn't have then. And I'm going to take care of you. And I'm not going anywhere. I watched this happen in real time last Saturday. This is one of the most effective ways to bridge the gap between the logic of, I should speak up, but I'm scared to.
36:23
There was a doctor named Josie, and she and I were practicing something that she had never been able to say to the nurses in her practice who had been undermining her medical decisions. And she said it out loud in her full, honest, unfiltered version.
36:37
And I watched her nervous system flood. Her hands went up around her face. Her voice changed. And I asked her, okay, so there's that, there's that young part of you. What does that young part of you need to hear right now?
36:52
And she said, no one's going to hurt you. Your life is not in danger. This might suck, but you're going to be okay. It is safe to use your voice. And then I added one more sentence and I said, try this.
37:07
I'm going to be here with you the whole time. And she took a big deep breath and she said, there's less tension in my chest. That's amazing. Just hearing herself say it. This is what I want to leave you with.
37:24
Yes, learning the skill and learning the inner sturdiness, that matters. But you can always take care of the part of you that is scared instead of criticizing her for being scared. Because once she feels safe, once she knows that you are not going to abandon her in the middle of that conversation, that she won't be on her own, she will begin to let you feel more comfortable to say the thing.
37:53
This has worked for me. This has worked for so many of the clients that I work with. And as I worked on this specific skill, taking care of that little part with the doctors in the room, there was visible relaxation.
38:06
There were tears because this is one thing we can do to move the needle. And I want to offer it to you because even if right now you can just bring to mind a younger version of you that made the connection between being capable and belonging, being smart and being safe, and notice what she is worried about.
38:29
That's where you start. To just notice her, to talk to her in ways that feel good. That's a really meaningful thing that you can do for yourself in addition to learning the skill of how to find the right words and then how to continue to support that part.
38:47
That's the inner sturdiness that I'm talking about. If any part of what I said today felt familiar, if you are like, yep, that is me, I think that that is something worth looking at. Again, I will say it, this is not who you are.
39:02
You make complete sense. Giving everything that you've learned and been rewarded for. Yes, of course you're here. And of course this is hard. And it can change. Thank you for listening. Here is what I know.
39:16
The things that made you the most valuable, that brought so much joy and the glow and the recognition, you don't have to stop doing those things. But there is a way to have a better experience doing them.
39:30
And that is what I want for you, because the people pleasing that is in kind of woven through our experience as high achievers, it doesn't have to be that way. And we can be supported, we can be loved, we can be known, we can be helped, and we can have relationships that are reciprocal.
39:49
It is possible. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
Episode 162 - The Patriarchal Double-Bind of Motherhood
When you stop outsourcing your safety, belonging, and worth, you discover the freedom of authenticity–of knowing who you are and what you want.
Patriarchy asks mothers to hold themselves to impossible standards and then blames them when they struggle. In this episode, I’m revisiting the patriarchal double-bind through the lens of motherhood and unpacking the expectations women are expected to follow all at once. We’ve become accustomed to policing others and ourselves based on the rules we’ve been taught a “good mother” should follow, while the realities of exhaustion, isolation, grief, resentment, and needing help are treated as personal failures. But motherhood is beautiful and hard, and acknowledging that both things can exist simultaneously is what begins to set women free. Here’s what I cover:
Why motherhood is such a clear example of the patriarchal double-bind
How social media often pressures women to hide the difficult parts of motherhood
Why women are taught that needing help means failure and how that isolates mothers
The realities of parental leave and childcare that reveal how unsupported mothers actually are
How fear keeps women silent about motherhood and why telling the truth feels so risky
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:58
My sister sent me a reel last week, and a comedian is explaining this coping mechanism that she has for hard moments. And this is her strategy. I thought it was hilarious.
01:10
She mentally adds a baby to whatever awful thing is currently happening. So are you stuck in traffic? Mentally add a baby. Are you waiting in a long line? Add a baby. Is your flight being canceled or delayed?
01:27
Do you have diarrhea in the bathroom? Are you up against like a tight project deadline? Add a baby. And then mentally, she takes the baby away. And then suddenly everything feels manageable, right? That she's relieved.
01:44
Sometimes she was describing like genuinely physically relieved that it's only diarrhea or only a flight cancellation and not diarrhea plus an infant. And I watched it a couple of times. I thought it was funny.
01:57
And when I went to the comments, I was happy and then also not surprised because there were a lot of women in the comments saying, yes, you know, thank you. This is something we don't talk about enough.
02:14
Motherhood is hard. I agree. I have three kids and I agree. And then there were other comments. And I have no empirical evidence for this, but I think years ago, there might have been more comments like the ones I'm about to tell you about.
02:28
I'm hoping we're getting kinder toward women and mothers and motherhood in general. But it's interesting that there still are comments that were tearing the comedian apart and then shaming the mothers who were saying, like, yes, this is funny.
02:48
I sometimes have a hard time with my kids. And so I wanted to just revisit the patriarchal double bind. I talked about this in some previous episodes, and I can link to those in the show notes, where patriarchy gives women two impossible standards that are meant to be kept at the same time.
03:10
And motherhood is one of them. Because while there are some women in the comments of this video agreeing and, you know, happy that someone is empathizing with how hard it is to have a baby. The other comments were so emblematic of how we are taught to think about being a mother.
03:34
One of them said, you know, if this is hard, you're doing it wrong. Another one, being a mother is a privilege. Another one, you have no idea how joyful it is to be a mom. And another one, you're a bad mom if this is how you feel about your kids.
03:53
And I wasn't surprised. Like I said, I was happy that there were probably the majority positive comments and people were laughing. But women are completely unaware of how much internalized sexism and patriarchy we are carrying around.
04:11
And that comes out when women drag other women who don't follow the rules. These are women who are doing the work of the system, patriarchy, so that the system doesn't have to do it, right? We are policing each other and policing ourselves.
04:30
And I want to unpack a little bit of what's happening because it, again, speaks to the double bind that patriarchy puts women in, where they are supposed to act a very specific way to be quote unquote right.
04:46
And then that way actually defies the actual experience of the thing. And here's what I mean by that. A good example of a double blind is like a woman is supposed to be virginal and pure and also sexy and know exactly how to please a man, right?
05:06
You can't keep both of those at the same time. And being one kind of defies the existence of the other. And in motherhood, it works a little differently because the reality is motherhood is beautiful and also hard.
05:22
And patriarchy does not let you or it doesn't do a good job of letting you acknowledge that both things are true. And what ends up happening instead is that other women enforce a set of rules, shaming and policing everyone who dares to talk about the hard parts about motherhood because of what it means about them.
05:47
And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that. I also want to say this, this rule book that I'm about to describe, the rules of motherhood, is really specifically written for women who are white, Western, and middle class.
06:02
And this is the kind of woman whose motherhood has always been held up as the standard in parenting books, on social media, and in society. And social media in particular has done something particularly insidious.
06:16
It's taken this very one version of motherhood, the white, middle class, Western, curated, grateful, hallmark version, and made it the wallpaper of a lot of people's lives. You don't have to have grown up with these rules to absorb them when you bump into them all over the place in advertising, on social media.
06:44
And I just want to acknowledge that other cultural groups and communities have different rules around motherhood. And they have, in a lot of cases, a lot more communal, a lot more healthy, supportive rules around motherhood.
06:58
But this white Western version kind of seeps into everything. And so that's what I'm going to focus on today. So rules. The commenters in that reel were dragging the other women because they had broken these unwritten rules that women are handed in this culture.
07:20
And for the record, I am Latina, but I am white passing. And I grew up in a very white centric home, even though my mom's Mexican. And so I really identify with this. You don't have to be white. I don't consider myself white to have been infiltrated by these rules.
07:42
So these rules don't come all at once. They're not in like a syllabus that you get handed at one point that you can point to and read through and either accept or reject. It comes in pieces. It comes from your mother.
07:59
It comes from church, from television, from the way people respond when you tell them that you're expecting. And it accumulates quietly. And I think that we are not aware of how often we are bumping up against these rules because they're so subconscious.
08:19
And I want to name a couple of them. Number one, rule number one is you asked for this. Whether that is literally true is almost beside the point. In our very Western individualist, pull yourself up by your bootstraps culture, even if you're recovering from childhood, once you are a mother, your suffering is your own fault.
08:41
You chose this, which means that any complaint, any struggle, or any honest reckoning with how difficult it is is self-indulgent. Like, listen, you signed up for this. You don't get to be surprised. You don't get to be overwhelmed.
08:59
You chose this. We have this idea that individuals are the total of their own choices and not the choices of the system that they live in or the options of the system that they live in. And so that really comes out in motherhood.
09:16
If you choose to have a baby, then you chose every single thing about it that is hard. And that means you should just shut up about it. Rule number two, you are supposed to love being a mom so that other women also want to be moms.
09:36
And that love is supposed to be so totally overwhelming and encompassing that it transcends the physical reality of what is happening in your body and your life. I remember telling my husband after having a C-section and I said something like, my life is nothing but blood and shit right now.
09:59
And that felt accurate, but I'm not allowed to say that, right? I'm not allowed to say that to another woman because number one, I chose it. And number two, I'm supposed to let the way being a mom takes over your entire life be something happy that I protect other people from the reality of.
10:20
Because if I accidentally poison the well, so to speak, and they don't want to have children because of what I am sharing about my experience, then that's on me. Rule number three, you shouldn't need help.
10:35
This one is crucial, A, because you chose it, and needing help is evidence of failure. Good mothers figure it out. They find the system that works and they keep trying until they do. And they have to make it look easy or at least manageable.
10:53
You certainly don't get to be angry at crying babies when you don't know how to make them stop. If motherhood is natural, quote unquote, and women are born to be nurturers, if you're struggling with that, then there is something wrong with you.
11:09
And of course, that women are nurturers and that motherhood is natural are two of the biggest patriarchal rules for women. So if you're struggling, that's a you problem. There is this insidious kind of unspoken rule that can be traced right back to our puritanical roots as a country, especially in the United States.
11:34
When Eve fucked everything up by eating the apple and God said that her punishment, this is in the Bible, Genesis, that he would, quote, greatly multiply her pain in conception and childbearing. Basically saying, Ya Eve, as your punishment, having a child is going to be painful and childbearing is going to be painful.
11:58
And that is your punishment. And so suffering in childbirth and child rearing is part of the deal of being a woman. So you shouldn't need help with that. It's what is innate to your lot in life. Rule number four, you should be grateful that you get to be a mom.
12:20
And you can't just feel grateful. You have to demonstrate it. You have to think about all the people who want to be moms and can't. You have to think of how it will affect your children if they see you being frustrated or sad about how hard it is sometimes to be a mom.
12:38
When someone, this happened to me in church, I was holding a screaming toddler and chasing another one. I was frustrated. I was hot. I was sweaty. I had to pee. And an older woman walking down the hall looked at me and just smiled and said, you know, these are the best days of your life.
12:57
You're going to miss these. If someone says that to you, you have to smile and agree. You do not get to complain about the privilege of being a mom if you're going to be a good mom. Number five is kind of similar to number two about, you know, protecting other people from the truth about motherhood, but it goes a little deeper.
13:18
You have to protect everyone else from your reality. So women who don't have kids, your own kids, your mom, friends, your church congregation, you have to manage their experience of your motherhood so that it stays pleasant and doesn't disturb them.
13:39
Because there are two things they should not know about, how hard it really is to have kids and how you are experiencing being a mom. If you are grieving about your past life, if you are grieving about the way your body has gone through massive changes, traumatic changes, if you are grieving about having to make the decision to stay home with a baby because you don't have enough money for childcare,
14:11
like you have to protect other people from that because the fantasy of what motherhood is supposed to be has to be kept intact so that A, other people want to have children and so that they think you are a good mother.
14:30
Your job is always to make sure that they don't feel uncomfortable about something. And if you take all of these rules together, I imagine them forming like this perfectly little sealed container. And here's the thing about that container.
14:49
It is supposed to be love. It's designed to look like love because we tell ourselves, this is what love looks like. It is sacrificial. It is total. It is uncomplaining. It is grateful. And if you can't do that, your only other option is, do you really love your children?
15:12
Are you a bad mom? You can either be a good mom inside of that little sealed container following the rules, or your only other option is you're a bad mom. And that's the trap. Motherhood is hard and it is also beautiful.
15:29
Some of the most transcendent, memorable, bonding moments of my life happened in the very same hour as some of the most depleting and exhausting. I remember nursing a baby, don't even remember who, at, I don't know, 2, 3, 4 a.m.
15:45
in the morning, and just looking down at the little face and feeling so incredibly in love with this human, and then getting up and barely being able to make it back to my bedroom, leaning on the walls because I was so exhausted I could barely walk.
16:04
There is joy and struggle, explosive diapers and snuggles, tantrums and love. And what the rules do is they tell us how much of that struggle that is there, that is real, that exists, is acceptable to share and how much help and support we should give moms.
16:29
And here's what makes the rules so insidious. No one tells you where the line is. You know, the rule says you should protect other people. And clearly we've gotten away from that a little bit because some of the comments that I read were people sharing struggles.
16:46
And so it's okay to struggle a little bit. Like a little bit of struggle is allowed. That's appropriately human. That, you know, other moms kind of nod. But you never know where the line is. And you don't find out you've crossed the line until you've already crossed it, until you speak up and say something honest and other people look at you like, oh my gosh, she's a bad mom, right?
17:12
Until you admit how depleted and exhausted you are, how things don't feel right, how your body feels terrible and you get the comment section or the comments from friends and family. I remember my mom telling me, you know what, just focus on the baby, just focus on the baby, which not terrible advice, right?
17:35
But also certainly not advice that was helpful to me. And it just made me be quiet. And so a lot of women, when we are afraid of what will happen when we tell the truth, we err on the side of silence.
17:52
We say things carefully. We perform being fine. And oftentimes, especially in the case of mothers, we keep trying and trying and trying to figure it out because that's what a good mom does. That's what a mom who is a natural nurturer does.
18:08
Often waiting until we are so depleted that we can't pretend anymore. And by then it's a crisis instead of asking for help. And so my point about the rules is that they are vague enough that we worry about crossing it and receiving the backlash from other people.
18:33
And that is the point. The vagueness is a feature because when you don't know where the line is, you stay well behind it. You don't talk about how hard it is unless you're certain that the people listening to you will be accepting and kind.
18:51
And you certainly don't ask for help. And help is what I want to talk a little bit about now. When you look at what our culture actually provides for mothers and families, it sends a very different message than what patriarchy wants us to believe.
19:07
Patriarchy wants us to believe, again, you're a natural nurturer. It's your highest and holiest calling. It's the best thing you could do with your time, your body, your energy, your brain. And yet, culturally, politically, in terms of systems that actually support, you're on your own.
19:26
There is no guaranteed paid parental leave. Let me say that again. We are one of only a handful of countries in the world that does not guarantee paid parental leave. I mean, it's the United States and Papua New Guinea and a small number of others.
19:46
That's the company that we are in on this particular policy. Many women get 12 weeks of unpaid leave, and that's protected technically under the Family Medical Leave Act, if they work for a company with 50 or more employees, which means if you work for a small business or you're a contractor, you get nothing at all.
20:07
You might be back at work two weeks after a C-section because you ran out of time off. I had three C-sections and I scheduled every single one of them on a Friday because at least that way my husband could take Friday and then the following Monday off and I'd have four days of help because he didn't work for a company that was big enough to give him even unpaid time off.
20:32
There is no subsidized or free child care. In most parts of this country, full-time childcare costs more than rent. It is often more than a mortgage. It is common for families to pay $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000 a year for infant care.
20:50
And that's if they can find a spot. In a lot of states, there are two to four times as many children who need care as there are licensed child care slots available. And so most of the time, and that falls on mothers who then have to choose between a career that they might enjoy or need and staying home.
21:14
They stay home because they have to, not because they want to, just because the math doesn't work. There's no universal health care. Women are making decisions about whether or not they can even afford prenatal care, whether they can afford the follow-up appointments after birth, whether they can afford the postpartum depression medication or visit.
21:39
These are not hypotheticals. This is a daily reality for millions of women in the wealthiest country in the world. And lastly, there's no village. Like that saying, it takes a village. I think it really matters, especially here around women and childbearing.
22:01
We talk about the village constantly, but we don't honestly talk about where the village went. It's gone because we have built a society that prizes individualism and individual nuclear family self-sufficiency above everything else.
22:22
It's gone because the way capitalism works and you have to work harder and harder and harder to earn the same amount of money, you end up moving people away from their families for jobs. And then we make those jobs so demanding that it's nearly impossible to look for and build new community.
22:43
You're just so tired. And it's gone because we have designed suburbs and office parks and schedules that make it really difficult to be in real relationship with anyone outside your immediate household.
23:00
One of the things that I've been struck by as I have reflected not just on my own birthing experiences and motherhood experience is the lack of, I mean, the women were the nurses, right? I lived in Texas.
23:15
My parents lived in California. My mom came out for a couple of the births and then she had to leave. And it was just me. And I remember walking out of the hospital, carrying my oldest, Rachel, and just thinking, oh my gosh, are they just going to let me leave with this baby?
23:34
Who do I ask if I have a question or if I don't know how to do something? And that's what the village is for. That's what the community is for. And the village disappeared because we have built a world that doesn't have room for it.
23:52
And then we tell women, you have to keep these rules all by yourself. And it's your job to, if you want a community, you have to recreate that from scratch while also working, while also gestating a baby, while also managing everything that comes after the birth of the baby, doing the majority of the household labors.
24:11
And you should be grateful. This is not a personal feeling. This is a political choice. And this is the most frustrating part. It is straight white men who are making the rules about the system that we still live in.
24:28
White straight men created patriarchy, all the rules that we're supposed to be following, and they created now the system that doesn't allow us to have anything but the type of birth and child rearing experiences that we're having now, completely without support.
24:46
So I want to live in a very specific kind of world. I want to live in a world where mothers and babies are supported and loved, where families are supported and helped, where we get away from this increasingly insidious idea that humans are just the sum total of their own choices.
25:10
And because they chose it, you're on your own. I am going to be talking more about this world that I want to live in because I think that is a really important part of becoming an ex-good girl is that it's not just that I leave behind all the rules and the practices and the paradigms that kept me performing goodness, but that I actually find my voice and start advocating for the world I do want to live in.
25:43
I want to end on this. Those women writing those shaming comments were also women who have been shaped by the same system. They've internalized those same rules. In many cases, they're the ones who have organized their entire identity around being a woman who does this well and gladly.
26:02
And I know because that's what I was programmed to do. And that's what I tried to do to present this idea of this hallmark motherhood and to hide anything that exposed it as anything other than beautiful.
26:21
And so when we think about how women uphold these systems, it's a nuanced discussion because let's imagine that you run into me. And this is, you know, 15 years ago when I'm basically like a trad wife, conservative mom of, you know, three kids at home.
26:43
And you say something negative about motherhood. You kind of pull back that curtain just a little bit. Me, as a woman who had organized my entire sense of self around being a good, joyful, happy mother, I'm going to feel threatened by that because it's destabilizing.
27:02
Because if you're allowed to say that it's hard, why am I over here doing so much work to make it look easy? If I'm over here busting my ass to make motherhood look beautiful, why aren't you joining with me in keeping these same rules?
27:17
That is internalized patriarchy. Because what I'm going to do, rather than feel the emotion of being destabilized and like, whoa, maybe what she's saying has value. And do I feel some of that too? I'm going to yank that curtain back, right?
27:33
I am going to make sure that it gets put back up and stays firmly in place because I don't want to, or I don't know how to deal with the destabilization of seeing the double bind, of seeing the rules.
27:51
And that is internalized patriarchy doing exactly what it is designed to do. It is getting women to police each other and to police themselves so that the system doesn't have to, so that the structure never has to change, so that we never get together as moms and be like, hey, why don't we have paid parental leave?
28:13
That's ridiculous. Hey, why don't we have subsidized childcare? Why are we spending so much money on bombs and killing children in other countries? Why don't we take better care of our children here so that more of them can have a healthy, happy opportunity?
28:33
Patriarchy wants it to stay a you problem so that we never examine the systems, so that the political choices that create these systems are never examined. And instead, it's just a failure of individual woman.
28:51
She should try harder. She's a bad mom. She doesn't know how joyful it is to be a mother. It's not a we problem. It is a you problem. And that is why there's so much mom guilt. That's why that term exists.
29:06
Because you can't do it all. It is blood and shit. And you can't say that without being punished. And it's a you problem. And so the system cannot help you. You are on your own. So the women shaming others in the comments, they are as much a victim of this system as those who aren't, right?
29:31
We're in the same container. And the only difference is a mom who's willing to recognize the difficulty and the nuance and the both and of motherhood has gotten out of that container. And the one who's still shaming others is still in it.
29:47
And it comes from fear. The same fear that keeps women from asking for help, the same fear that keeps them saying that they're fine when they're not. And, you know, the belief underneath all of that is if I say this true thing, I will lose something.
30:06
If I say how hard this is, if I say how lost I feel, if I say how sad I am about my body changing and being in pain and just looking and feeling different, I will lose something. I will lose the respect that is afforded to good mothers.
30:23
And that belief does so much damage, not just in the world of motherhood, but to our relationships, to our marriages and friendships, to people with whom we could be in real, honest, sustaining connection with each other.
30:40
And instead of that, we're just kind of performing this idea that patriarchy wants us to. My youngest asked me something recently, and he's number five. And he asked me, he said, mom, if you had known how hard it was going to be to have five kids, would you have still done it?
30:59
And I thought, and I knew what he was telling me. Obviously, if we decided to stop sooner, he would not be here. But I decided to be truthful and I said, I didn't know how hard it was going to be. I had no idea.
31:15
And how isolating and how hard on my body to this day, right? If I sit a certain way, there's pain in my hips from having so many kids. And so I said to him, you know, honestly, I probably wouldn't have.
31:30
But then I continued. And I said, but knowing you, knowing each of you as you are today and having had the chance to be your mom, that's the best thing that ever happened to me. And so I am so glad that I did, even with the hard days.
31:46
I'm so glad that I did. And both things are completely simultaneously true. That's not being a bad mom. And that's what it actually looks like to hold this complexity in a new way. The women who have been the upholders of this patriarchy because they don't want to be considered bad moms, we need to give them another option because what they think is disloyalty to the high and holy calling of motherhood is really just pretending.
32:25
And it's stopping all of us from having systems. We are so busy policing each other and telling each other how to be good moms, wives, daughters, children, friends, that we don't question the systems that we live in because the systems that we live in do not support these experiences of motherhood, of womanhood, of bodily autonomy, of joyful, supported living.
32:55
And it is time that we start to question that instead of questioning each other. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
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