Episode 139 - A Four-Step Plan for a Holiday That Actually Feels Good
We all want the holidays to feel meaningful and connected, but the pressure to meet expectations often pulls us away from what truly matters to us. Between obligations, traditions, cooking, cleaning, and planning, we often miss out on quality time with the people we care about or a chance to rest. If you’re exhausted just thinking about putting on another holiday for everyone else, this episode will walk you through a simple four-step framework to help you create the holiday season you actually want. Here’s what I cover:
Why people-pleasing is at an all-time high during the holidays
Three questions to help you pause and ask yourself what you truly want
How to predict the discomfort that comes with prioritizing yourself
An exercise to write down what support you need to make the holiday you want possible
How to mentally rehearse the holiday and regulate your nervous system beforehand
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Transcript
00:58
Somehow, it's November, and somehow Thanksgiving is next week. And despite my shock that here's where we are in 2025, I wanted to do a short and very useful episode about how to have the holidays you want without people pleasing, because it is one of the times of the year where I hear the same thing from a lot of my clients and a lot of women.
01:29
I want my holidays to feel meaningful and connected. I want to enjoy the people that I'm with. I want to have time with family that I don't get to see during the rest of the year. My kids come home from college or my family comes in from out of state.
01:47
I take time off work. Like I spend a lot of time and effort on the holidays, but somehow I always end up feeling overwhelmed, resentful. And it feels like there's like years of backlogged resentment that comes up and doing things for other people that either weren't on my list or I don't really want to do and I don't know how to get out of that.
02:10
So if you have felt like that, this episode is for you because the holidays are a very normal time when people pleasing can be at an all-time high. We are wrestling with the expectations that everybody has, right?
02:26
And not just the family members, but our cultural expectations that holidays should be magical, that holidays should be peaceful and connecting and where there's just so much expectation and hopes and dreams kind of tied up in the holiday seasons.
02:43
There's traditions that we're trying to navigate. There's my family's traditions. There's other people's family traditions. There's obligations. This is when a lot of holiday parties and gatherings and events pop up.
02:56
And there's the feeling like I want to be at all of them or I should be at all of them, obligation, fear, guilt, fear of missing out, fear of disappointing people. So it can really kind of be a pressure cooker time for a lot of us who want to have the magical holiday and who are also kind of tired of putting on holidays for other people, right?
03:22
We have a lot of years under our belt where we're the ones who do all of the back end work, all of the planning, all the organizing, all of the inviting, all of the scheduling, all of the buying, all of the wrapping, all of the cooking, all of the cleaning.
03:34
I mean, I'm exhausted. And that's just, you know, beginning of the episode where we're talking about everything that we end up making ourselves responsible for. So I want you to know, if this has been your experience of the holidays, you're not doing it wrong.
03:49
There's nothing wrong with you. It's the perfect storm of all of that internalized pressure and external pressure, social pressure, family pressure, expectations pressure. So what I want to do today is walk you through a pretty straightforward four-step framework that will help kind of put a structure around creating the holiday season you want.
04:16
It's not going to go perfectly. So let's just, let's just let that go right now. Okay. You're going to take from this episode a couple of ideas that feel really relevant to you and you're going to try it out.
04:28
And you're going to have a little bit of a different experience. And then you're just going to keep trying it in your daily life. Okay. So this comes straight out of a workbook that I have created for past holiday workshops that I used to do around this pressure.
04:44
And I'm going to figure out how to get that workbook to you. So stay tuned for that. So step number one is your job to do. You have to pause. You can't stop people pleasing if you don't know what you want.
05:01
Because if you don't know what you want, you're just going to default to what everybody else wants. So instead of defaulting to the holiday you think you are quote unquote supposed to have, I want you to pause and ask yourself three questions.
05:14
Number one, what would make this holiday season meaningful for me? Question number two, who do I want to connect with? And question number three, what values matter to me most right now? And that can be gathering specific.
05:36
If I choose to go to a work holiday party, what would make that meaningful for me? Who do I want to connect with at that work gathering? And what values to me matter most at that work gathering? Family gathering, same questions.
05:52
What would make it meaningful? Who do I want to connect with? And what values do I think are important that really need to come to the forefront during that particular gathering? By doing a little bit of this thinking beforehand, we can actually make decisions that will get us the outcome that we want.
06:13
So for example, last year, what mattered most to me during my Thanksgiving gathering was that I got to spend time with my college-age kids and that I didn't have to contribute to a lot of the cooking and cleaning up.
06:27
And so answering those questions ahead of time was what allowed me to make the decisions that I did that made last Thanksgiving my most meaningful Thanksgiving yet. And so if you could only prioritize three things this season, what would they be?
06:47
That's another way of kind of scaling down because I know each of you are looking at possibly a mountain of other people's expectations, a mountain of things that you've done in the past, all the decorating, all the cooking, all the shopping, right?
07:02
And it's not that those things are bad. It's that when we aren't specific about what we want, what we, what you want, we're going to default to what everybody else wants. So step number one is to pause and answer those questions.
07:17
Step number two is to predict. Every holiday choice has an emotion attached to it. And avoiding discomfort is what fuels people pleasing. So if I choose, let's go back to the choices I made last year for my Thanksgiving gathering, that I want to prioritize people over food, what that means is I might get some questions about why we're having non-traditional, easier to make food or why.
07:47
And actually what I did last year was I just asked for help and my brother-in-law stepped in and he made almost the entire Thanksgiving dinner with some help from kids. I didn't do a thing, but it wasn't until I knew what I wanted and I was willing to feel uncomfortable asking for it that I got that great Thanksgiving that we had last year.
08:10
So step number two is really just about predicting the discomfort that you're going to feel when you narrow it down, when you prioritize what you want. There's going to be some discomfort there. There is no version of the holidays that doesn't include uncomfortable emotions.
08:32
Because right now, you're the one feeling most of the discomfort because you're doing all the cooking, the planning, the cleaning, the scheduling, the shopping, the wrapping. See what I mean? Like you're carrying all of that discomfort right now.
08:45
And so in this new version of the holidays, you are choosing to switch to a different kind of discomfort where you feel maybe a little guilty that you're not offering the 14 course Thanksgiving meal that includes all of your family favorites and traditional foods.
09:02
That is a choice you can make because the discomfort of overextending yourself, that's one type of discomfort that happens when we say yes to everything. And when we say no, you might have to deal with the possible discomfort of knowing you're disappointing people or knowing that they were wishing things were different.
09:23
But this particular step stops this fantasy idea that there's a perfect painless option because you've just been paying the full price of the discomfort. And so by narrowing it a little bit and by putting some of what you want into the holiday, it spreads that around a little bit.
09:41
Step number three, you're going to plan. You're going to choose your discomfort on purpose and you are going to identify specifically where you feel the pressure to overextend yourself. Write down the changes you want to make.
09:58
Write down and decide what support you will need and what conversations need to happen. And if you need to script the words, you're going to want to use the say what you want to say process. And I have a whole podcast episode just on how to do that.
10:16
So I'm going to give you some example phrases right now. You might say, you know what, I'm going to keep the holidays a little more simple this year. Or, you know what, I'm not able to host, but I'd love to bring a dish.
10:30
Or thanks for understanding. Rest is really a priority for me this season. Or my priority this Thanksgiving dinner is really connecting with so-and-so or really spending some time doing such and such.
10:44
Once you identify what you want and identify the changes and support you need, write it down and put it into words. Then you're going to spend a little bit of time letting your nervous system process and practice whatever new discomfort you're going to step into.
11:06
Because if you don't practice and process that emotion, that's when we abandon the plan. So what that means is you're going to notice how it feels in your body to think about putting your new holiday plan into motion.
11:23
You're going to connect with your body, hands on your chest, if you don't have anywhere else that feels really good. And you're just going to breathe in and out intentionally and notice, oh my gosh, I'm feeling really nervous because I've told everybody that I'm not going to do a big Thanksgiving dinner anymore because I'm prioritizing connection with my college kids.
11:46
I'm noticing I'm feeling really nervous about this asking for the kind of help that I want preparing the dinner. I'm noticing some guilt coming up. And you're just going to give yourself a chance before you even have any of these conversations, give yourself a chance to feel it on your own, hands on your body, love and generosity, and talk to yourself with compassion.
12:11
I'm right here with you. Gosh, that makes so much sense that you're feeling nervous about this. You know what? You're not alone in this. I'm going to be right here with you and I'm listening. Your nervous system has to feel supported if you're going to say new things, right?
12:28
Make new decisions, set new boundaries, or create new traditions. And it really matters that you take the time to do that behind the scenes first. The next step, you're going to do some mental rehearsal, right?
12:43
I want you to visualize yourself in the holiday that you want. Mental rehearsal is one of the most powerful tools for changing habits. I want you to see yourself prioritizing. Let's go back to the Thanksgiving example I've been using.
13:03
So I want to picture myself asking for help. I want to just let that discomfort and that guilt be there. I want to picture myself intentionally making choices to spend time with the people that I want.
13:18
And then I'm going to rehearse it like a movie so my brain can stop resisting the change and my body gets a chance to feel the emotions that need to happen so that I can actually say and do things differently.
13:37
So when you're watching this movie, you're seeing yourself having the holiday you want. You're seeing yourself saying the hard things, the different things, feeling the emotion and staying connected.
13:50
That is the behind the scenes work. And then the last step is you just got to say the words. I'm so happy that we get together for Thanksgiving. And this year, I don't want to do all of the cooking and cleaning up.
14:04
What can we do about that? Or I'm so happy you're all coming home for Thanksgiving. I want to make sure that I spend some time one-on-one with you. How can we make that happen? Because saying those words, that's actually the last step after we take really good care of ourselves behind the scenes.
14:24
So hopefully this will give you some holiday clarity. Pausing, predicting, planning, and then processing those emotions, and then all before you say that will really help you create connection without self-betrayal, which is where we end up feeling resentful and angry that I'm doing it again this Christmas or this Thanksgiving or this Hanukkah or whatever, just like I did last year.
14:49
And we want to break the cycle of having holidays that don't feel fulfilling where we feel like we end up just putting on a holiday for someone else. So you deserve a holiday that feels like you. And if you want the workbook that I mentioned, go ahead and just send me an email so that you can do this work for yourself behind the scenes.
15:14
So that when we get to New Year's Day and beyond, you look back at a holiday season that was deeply fulfilling and deeply impactful for you and your loved ones. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
