Telling Yourself The Truth

People pleasing can make you look “low maintenance” while you quietly abandon yourself. Today I’m continuing the permission conversation by getting painfully practical about what it takes to step into your own authority, especially when honesty feels risky and saying no makes your stomach drop.

I unpack why we avoid telling ourselves the truth about what we want: conflict avoidance, fear of disappointing people, fear of being judged, and the brutal self-judgment that shows up when your life looks good on paper but doesn’t feel good inside. I also share a key reframe I live by: you’re allowed to do whatever you want, I just want you to like your reason. That shift moves you from autopilot to choice, which is where self-trust starts.

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Transcript

Catching Up On Content Creation

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey Bestie, how are you? How's your week been? I've been really busy, but like in a good way. I'm feeling very accomplished. Um, I've been recording podcasts and I've been making Instagram posts and I did a TikTok. I am still trying to figure that one out. I don't really know if TikTok is the place for me. Um I'm not really good at like off-the-cuff video content and I don't want to spend a lot of time editing. That's one of the reasons why I don't record my podcast with video. I do a whole lot of editing out silences for one. And like when I mess up, and I mess up a lot. So I can't imagine having to do that with video as well. So we'll see. We'll see if um TikTok becomes a part of the machine that I'm working with over here. For right now, it's looking like maybe not. Anyway, today I want to continue our conversation about permission. Um, this has really become the base of the work that I'm doing right now with clients, and I want to dive in a bit further. So, what permission is really about is about stepping into our own authority. And that's work that like I feel like has been a thread throughout my work forever. Like, even if we think about going back to intuitive scheduling, right? Like, that's a prime example of following our own intuition,

Permission As Personal Authority

SPEAKER_00 1:30

following our own energy, um, our needs, and creating a life and a schedule that looks like us, right? And like we need to give ourselves permission to do that. So owning our own authority is something that is at the heart of this work. But how do we even really do that? So I think one thing that we do is we start being honest with ourselves. And this can be really, really scary. I think a lot of us don't tell ourselves the truth about what we truly want for so many reasons. As people pleasers, we're usually trying to avoid conflict or confrontation. And it's that avoidance that makes us essentially lie to ourselves and to others. Right? Like if we never really confront what we want, then we won't have to ask for it. If we don't ask for it, then we can

Why People Pleasers Avoid Truth

SPEAKER_00 2:20

continue to kind of fly under the radar. We get to be like easygoing and not too much for anybody. We don't have to inconvenience anybody. Um, we don't have to disappoint anybody. And then sometimes we don't tell ourselves the truth because we're afraid of what we are gonna think about ourselves, right? Because, like, if the truth is that I'm like deeply unhappy in a life that looks good on paper, then like what does that mean about me? Does that make me ungrateful or difficult? Or what if the truth is that you've been staying somewhere you should have left a long time ago? Does that make you foolish or weak or someone who should have known better? This is what really sucks about people pleasing. We don't just perform for others, we perform for ourselves. We tell ourselves these stories like I'm fine or this is fine or I can handle this. Because the alternative means sitting with a self-judgment, we're not sure that we can survive. And then for others, it is about what other people think. We might be afraid of the judgment of others. If I change direction, what will my family think? What if admitting what I want disappoints people? What if they decide I'm not enough? These are huge fears for those of us who felt like we needed to prove ourselves to get the love of the people around us. But when we're focused on what other people think, right, it's all about trying to control their thoughts and feelings. We want them to view us a certain way, whatever that is. Nice, agreeable, successful, accomplished. We're afraid if we start telling the truth, that people will start to have their own opinions about us that we can't control. But the truth is, we could never really control them in the first place. How people react to your truth is on them and only them. If they decide not to support us, that is something that they will have to reckon with on their own. That is not work that we can do for them. Another reason we don't tell ourselves the truth about what we want is because if we knew what we wanted, then we'd have to do something about getting it. At least that's what we think needs to happen. But the truth is, we don't need to act on anything right away or ever if we don't want to. But we do need to be honest with ourselves. That way, whether we choose to act on it or not, we're doing it consciously. I always say you're allowed to do whatever you want. I just want you to like your reason. So if you decide not to act on the truth that you have uncovered, that is completely up to you. Just know why you're doing it and like the reason. So, in terms of telling yourself the truth, what is one thing you can be honest with yourself about today? I already mentioned that knowing what I want has been hard for me. So I'm working on honesty around things that I want. Like simple things like what I want to eat or what I want to do with my downtime, right? Like, sometimes all I want to do is sit in front of the TV and binge drag race. Like, that's all I want. And that has been hard for me to do because of my own judgment about productivity. I feel this need to be constantly busy. And this has a few reasons. One of them is that like ingrained capitalist idea that our worth comes from our output. I definitely struggle with that. I've told stories in the past about the work I've done surrounding

Productivity Guilt And Busyness

SPEAKER_00 6:04

not needing to be doing all the time and what it's been like to just sit with the discomfort of doing nothing. But the other side of it is that constantly moving is a kind of dissociation. Busi a holism keeps me out of my body, in my head, and on my feet, doing, just doing and doing and doing. This can be another way of hiding from the truth. So I'm doing the work of really honoring what I want to do with my downtime and not judging it. Another layer to this work is boundaries. Boundaries are really hard for people pleasers. They're definitely hard for me. Our least favorite word is no. We don't want to say no to anybody. It can feel dangerous to us to be non-compliant with what others want, especially if you learned at an early age that not giving others what they want means that they withhold their love and care. But the thing is, any yes we say to someone else is a no to ourselves. And that can be hard to swallow, especially if you have

Boundaries As Simple Truths

SPEAKER_00 7:05

lived your life at the service of others. Boundaries can feel cold, like a hard wall we put up between us and other people. But a boundary is really just a truth, your truth. And the truth doesn't need to be a bad thing, and you don't have to present your boundaries in a harsh way. It's as simple as saying that doesn't work for me, or I cannot meet at that time, or I need some time to think before I answer. These are all truths that I've had to work on presenting because I'm just so good at acquiescing to others' needs that it's been really difficult to take a stand. And take a stand sounds dramatic. Like, um it's been way less dramatic. Like I'm not like taking a stand against anything. But um one thing I've had a hard time with is not rearranging my schedule for other people. In the past, um, if someone needed to change something in the scheduling with me, I would just make myself completely available to them and then rearrange things on my end because I could. But that only works if you have nothing else going on. And like, how often is that the reality for any of us? So when all of a sudden rearranging means having to reach out to someone

Stop Rearranging Your Life For Others

SPEAKER_00 8:27

else and ask for them to be flexible, then I'm stuck between two people who I'm trying to please. And I can't please both. So, like this situation literally, when it has happened, has made me sick to my stomach, knowing that I'm going to have to assert myself and speak the truth about what I'm capable of doing, like makes me sweat, honestly. But I had to learn how to honor the schedule that I had and put out the availability that was real. And in my mind, I was still risking making somebody unhappy, which the truth is, I was. I was risking that. In the end, it usually comes out fine. It's no problem. People are usually like grateful when you tell them exactly what you can do, right? It can make the interaction so much simpler. But for someone who is trying not to ever inconvenience anyone else, right? This feels like a very big deal. But it also allows me to practice not making their feelings my problem, right? Because if it doesn't work for them and they feel some kind of way about it, there's nothing that I can do in that scenario. That has been hard for me to do, but it's also been so rewarding. And so that brings me to like a really important thing about attempting this work, and that is having your own back, especially in situations like that, right? You're going to have big feelings when you start to say no or when you ask for what you need. Well, first of all, having needs will feel scary, right? When you've spent your life denying that you have any. Saying no is also going to feel scary. You might feel confused. Learning how to want what you want is a journey when you've been bottling it up for so long. How

Have Your Own Back Through Feelings

SPEAKER_00 10:12

do you even begin to know what you want? The important thing here is knowing that having these feelings does not mean anything has gone wrong. By now, if you've been following my work, you know that we are very big about feeling our negative emotions. So that's exactly what we're gonna do. We're gonna feel those negative emotions and we're gonna have our back while we do it. So we're not gonna say mean things to ourselves. We're gonna like be nice to ourselves while we go through these emotions. Having your own back looks like acknowledging the feelings, feeling them through. Maybe doing some breath work or meditation around what you're feeling. If you're in therapy, you might want to talk to your therapist about reparenting work. You need to make a safe space for that little kid that lives inside of you that did not get the support it needed. Maybe there's some grieving you need to do. We know from the episode about grief that that might include crying or angering, right? So these are all the ways that we can learn how to have our own back around these situations when we start to really acknowledge what our needs are when we really start telling ourselves the truth. And then it might be time for some baby steps. You might want to start with asking for what you need. You might want to start by practicing saying no when it doesn't feel like there's so much on the line. Or maybe if, like me, you find that you tend to help others all the time, but don't ever ask for help. You could try not giving help to people, especially if doing so would be at your own expense. And let's be honest, a lot of times, as people pleasers, we are giving

Baby Steps For Asking And Saying No

SPEAKER_00 11:57

at our own expense. But if that feels too scary, then maybe start with the asking part. Like ask somebody for help. You get to do this at your own pace. There's no rush. We're not trying to run the people pleasers race to the finish line where we like are all whole and healed. One thing that I've been instructed to do that like is not necessarily small, but isn't like the biggest thing in the world. Maybe it's manageable for you, is I've been instructed to share my preferences before I elicit the preferences of others. So, like when it's time to start thinking about dinner, and my husband asks me what I want before just going back to him and deferring to him and asking, Well, what do you want? Like, I'm learning how to share what my thoughts are about dinner. Whether it's like the kind of food I want to eat, whether we should cook, whether we should order out, like whatever.

Share Your Preferences First

SPEAKER_00 12:56

I'm learning that it's not that deep to just share that, right? It's not the end of the world. We're not gonna end up in a big fight just because I had an opinion. He's actually asking for my opinion. So why not give it, right? And that sounds simple, but it's not always simple because we're breaking a habit. For me, deferring to him is a habit. And so I'm having to break that habit. So I'm having to like just acknowledge that it's even happening. So whatever it is, don't worry about it being too small. There's no such thing as too small a gesture when it comes to relearning these habits and behaviors and honor yourself along the way. This is hard work, but you can do hard things. Okay, friends, that's all I've got for you today. Let me know what you're giving yourself permission for. I want to know. And if you're ready to take this work further, reach out, book a call. You don't have to do this alone. All right. Goodbye. I'll talk to you later.