Find Your Outside Voice Part 2 - The Hidden Tax
Save your spot for my upcoming workshop HERE!
How to Find Your Outside Voice is a miniseries leading up to my free workshop, Say What You Need to Say. This series is driven by my deep belief that when women learn how to speak up in ways that feel safe and doable, it can change everything. In this episode, we’re talking about the hidden tax of not speaking up and how it drains your time, energy, and connection until you start asking yourself what you actually want.
Register for Say What You Need to Say, a free one-hour workshop for women who are ready to finally ask for what they want and need in their relationships.
You have three options to join me LIVE: Thursday, April 9th at 5:00pm PT | Monday, April 13th at 12pm PT | Friday, April 17th at 9am PT
You’ll get three steps you can use this week to find your yes or no — and say it out loud.
This workshop is free. No catch.
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
What happens inside the free Stop People Pleasing Facebook Community? Our goal is to provide help and guidance on your journey to eliminate people pleasing and perfectionism from your life. We heal best in a safe community where we can grow and learn together and celebrate and encourage each other. This group is for posting questions about or experiences with material learned in The Ex-Good Girl podcast, Sara Fisk Coaching social media posts or the free webinars and trainings provided by Sara Fisk Coaching. See you inside!
Transcript
00:58
Episode number two of my mini podcast series, Find Your Outside Voice. We're going to talk today about the hidden cost, a tax that you're paying that you have just become so used to paying that you might not even see it anymore.
01:16
And the reason that I want to talk about it is so that you can catch it and do something about it. When you don't know how to say what you need to say, whether it's something you need to ask for or the truth about an experience that you're having, you are spending an enormous amount of energy.
01:34
Let's get into it. I want to tell you about a client of mine. Her name is Maya. And Maya knew for months that she needed to have a conversation with her sister. And by the time she and I talked, she had been carrying this conversation for four months.
01:50
Now, this hidden tax happens before the conversation, during, and after. And I'm going to walk you through exactly what it looks like because I'm willing to bet that you are paying some version of that right now.
02:05
So going back to Maya's example, the first layer of the tax is what happens before you ever say a word. For Maya, it became this constant, almost background noise. She would be in the cereal aisle in the grocery store, and then all of a sudden it would pop into her brain and she would start to rehearse and refine and imagine what would happen if she said this and her sister responded this way.
02:29
She was carrying it to bed. It was often the last thing that she thought about or worried about at night. Sometimes it even woke her up. And it was often something that was on her mind the minute her feet hit the floor.
02:41
She would be half present at dinner or at work or in meetings, and she would just notice that part of her brain was always taken up by this conversation she hadn't had yet. She would catch herself rehearsing, rewinding, ruminating, imagining how it was going to go, playing out different versions and trying to find the one that would make the conflict go away.
03:08
She would imagine it going badly. She would imagine it going fine. And when she came to me, the first thing she said was, I feel like I am losing my mind. And she wasn't losing her mind, but she was noticing this enormous price that she was paying.
03:24
At the time, she didn't even have the language for what it was costing her because it was just the background noise. It was like the weather or the wallpaper. It was just what it was like to be her. She hadn't even said a single word to her sister yet, but mentally and emotionally, she had been in that conversation almost every single day for four months.
03:48
That is the hidden tax before, the dread, the carrying, the way that it just follows you into every room and never quite leaves you alone or lets you be fully present anywhere. The second layer, that's what shows up when we go to have the conversation.
04:07
Because Maya did try once. A couple months in, she started to bring it up and then she noticed her sister's face. She said that it wasn't like a big dramatic change. There was just a shift. But Maya's body felt it.
04:22
And she caved. She retreated. She said, you know what? It's actually okay. It's not a big deal. And then she changed the subject. That flooding, the moment when your body just like evacuates the conversation, just retreats before you've actually made a conscious decision to, that's part of the hidden tax.
04:43
The caving, the shape-shifting, the moment when you open your mouth and something that isn't quite true comes out because the true thing feels too risky. That is part of the tax during the conversation.
04:59
And then Maya walked away from the conversation feeling worse than before she had tried, because now she's telling herself, I did it again. I didn't stand up for myself. I couldn't see it through. And that kind of self-judgment and criticism is another part of the tax.
05:15
It's why women stop trying sometimes. They're just so tired of the self-criticism and judgment, but it's a real part of what takes a significant amount of energy. Hey, have you ever had a moment where you really wanted to ask for something?
05:33
You wanted to maybe set a limit or tell someone about the support you needed and you just couldn't make yourself say it. Almost like the words got stuck. Me too. And actually, I lived that way for years.
05:47
I felt alone and exhausted. And it's the whole reason that I do the work that I do now. If any part of that sounds familiar, have I got a workshop for you? My next workshop is called Say What You Want to Say, and it is for you if you find that it is really easy to speak up for maybe your clients or your kids or your colleagues, but when it comes to your own personal life, you can't ask for what you want.
06:14
Or maybe you've noticed that you spend a lot of time, days, weeks, maybe even months, rehearsing what you want to say, but then the minute things get uncomfortable, you cave or you apologize or you retreat.
06:27
You're not the problem. You just never learned the skill. Say What You Want to Say is a free one hour workshop that's happening on April 9th at 5 p.m. Pacific. And here's what I can promise. You will leave with one skill and one thing you can actually do that week.
06:44
So you become the woman who can have any conversation she needs to have and handle whatever happens. Check the show notes for the registry link, or you can also grab it from my Instagram bio and I'll see you there.
06:58
And then there's the third layer. And this one is so painful. It's the tax after. So Maya spent the next week after attempting to speak to her sister in what she described as a spiral. Did I say it wrong?
07:14
Did I make it weird? What does she think of me now? Is she mad? Should I have just stayed quiet? Was I being too sensitive? Am I making this too big a deal? And then somewhere underneath all of it, that judgment and criticism really ramped up.
07:29
That after spiral can run for days. And it is exhausting in a way that I think is really hard to explain because on the outside, nothing happened. There was barely even a conversation and then it was quickly buried.
07:46
There was no blow up and no drama, but Maya was just alone with the ruminating, the replaying. She continued to pay that tax in the way she always does. Now, here's what I want you to understand about Maya's situation.
08:03
Maybe this applies to you too. She had spent four months thinking about what to say, how to say it, how to handle her sister's reaction, enormous amounts of mental energy and enormous emotional labor.
08:17
And she had never once stopped to ask herself the question that I asked her when we first started speaking. I asked her, what do you actually want here? Is this dynamic that's going on with your sister, is it a yes for you or is it a no?
08:35
And she went quiet for a long time. And then she said, I've never even actually asked myself that. I've just been so anxious for this to go away that I never even considered what I actually want here.
08:50
And that is another part of that hidden tax. She'd been spending all of her energy on the situation and almost none of it on what she actually wanted. The before, the during, and the after, all of it is the price that each of us pay when we can't speak up.
09:10
Notice that I'm not saying it's the price we pay for not having the perfect script or the courage or the right moment. Because while all of that is helpful, the very first thing that we need to ask ourselves is, what do I want?
09:25
Is this a yes or is this a no? That is where it starts. And that's where we're going to start in this workshop. Because to not pay this tax, we need to focus less on just making the conflict go away and more on focusing at the simple starting point.
09:42
What do I want here? Is this a yes or a no? So that's where it starts. In the next episode, I'm going to give you a reframe that my clients say is really helpful and it makes a really complicated situation feel, I'm not going to say easy, but clearer.
10:00
And then I'm also going to tell you about one of my favorite clients who spent six months not buying a car that she wanted. It's one of my favorite stories. And as you might guess, it's absolutely about a lot more than just buying a car.
10:13
Say What You Need to Say is the free workshop where I'm going to walk you through how to stop paying this tax, how to find what you want, find your yes or no, and say it within the week. It's a free workshop.
10:26
Link is in the show notes. I'll see you for episode three.
