Find Your Outside Voice Part 5 - The Two Things That Will Try to Stop You
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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 unpacking the two biggest things that will try and stop you from saying what you need to say.
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
Transcript
00:59
Episode number five of the mini podcast series, Find Your Outside Voice. All right, you've been listening to this series. You know that it comes down to your yes and your no, and you've given yourself permission to say it messy.
01:15
You're ready. And then something happens. Something always happens. But I want to talk to you about this thing that is so normal that happens when we try and speak up because it shows up for every woman that I work with.
01:31
And I want you to be ready because most of the time we misinterpret when this obstacle shows up. So what are the obstacles? The first one is this. What if they don't like my yes or my no? Very normal.
01:48
Humans need to be in groups. And what if I say something and they don't like it and I get kicked out? This is the fear that shows up before you say anything. You worry about them being disappointed or frustrated or pulling back.
02:03
And sometimes this obstacle is enough to stop us before we even start. Imagining their reaction, we decide that the whole thing just isn't worth the risk. And here's what I want you to hear about this one.
02:17
Are you ready? You are managing other people's reactions before you've even said it. You're putting in an enormous amount of emotional labor for a conversation that hasn't even happened yet.
02:35
And you're protecting people from reactions they haven't even had yet. That's exhausting. That's why you're exhausted. And it's not your job. Their reaction to your yes or no is about them. It is information about them, their stories, their limitations.
02:59
And it is not evidence that your yes or your no was wrong. The second obstacle is a little sneakier. It shows up after you say it. We have the conversation, we say yes or we say no, and then we get clearer or we get more information and we realize we wish we had chosen differently.
03:23
And we immediately start telling ourselves that we did the wrong thing. We made the wrong call. You start second guessing. You start criticizing and judging and you wonder, do I even know what I want?
03:35
Because it feels like failure. But here's what I want you to hear. This is not failure. This is what it feels like to be a woman who is learning to trust herself when all of the programming that we've been given about saying what we want tells us not to.
03:56
The discomfort of someone else's reaction is not proof that you were wrong. And you realizing that you wish you'd said something differently is not proof that you were wrong or that you did it wrong.
04:10
It is just information. Information that you could not have gotten without saying something. Hey, have you ever had a moment where you really wanted to ask for something? You wanted to maybe set a limit or tell someone about the support you needed and you just couldn't make yourself say it.
04:33
Almost like the words got stuck. Me too. And actually, I lived that way for years. 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?
04:50
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.
05:06
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.
05:19
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.
05:36
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.
05:50
I want to tell you about a client. Let's call her Rachel. Rachel wanted to talk with her husband about how labor was divided up in the home. She felt like for too long, she had been doing too much. She wanted to have the conversation.
06:05
So she said it clearly and as kindly and honestly as she could. And on his face, she could see his reaction. He got quiet and she was a little scared. So of course, immediately she starts thinking, I shouldn't have said it.
06:23
I made it worse. I should have just kept handling it. It's not worth it. He's going to be mad. So obstacle two hitting full force. But here's what happened next. He took some time and came back to her and said, this is a conversation I do want to have with you.
06:41
Yes, I'm feeling a little attacked and like I should be doing more, like you're mad at me, but it's a conversation that I think is worth having. And so the conversation that followed changed how the labor was handled in their home.
06:55
Rachel didn't do it perfectly. She second-guessed herself all the way through, and it still worked because she said the true thing. I want to talk to you about how the labor is divided up in our house.
07:10
Now, both of these obstacles, knowing what to do when they hit full force, knowing how to handle your body when it's flooded, knowing how to take care of yourself, that is deeper work. And that is what I teach inside Connected.
07:26
I teach you how to find exactly the right words, how to develop the capacity for real inner sturdiness when you say them, and how to handle everything that comes after you have the conversation. But today, I just wanted to name those two obstacles so you recognize them.
07:45
And so you can know that it doesn't mean you have failed. It is just information. And information can help you decide next steps. One more episode to go in this series. It's the best one. I'll see you there.
08:00
Don't forget, say what you need to say. Free workshop coming up. You've got lots of different options to choose from. The link is in the show notes. It's absolutely free. Be there.
