Episode 175 - Good Girl Math
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.
