Permission To Be You

As a recovering people-pleaser one of the most important things I have done for myself is to give myself permission to live the life want instead of the one everyone else wanted. In this episode I talk about: 

• the “permission” question and how it unlocks change 
• how people pleasing forms for queer and marginalized folks 
• perfectionism as a strategy for approval and safety 
• growing up with an identity built around one praised talent 
• why we cannot control others’ happiness or opinions 
• boundaries as the antidote to being endlessly “likable” 
• practicing wants in small ways to rebuild self-trust 
• saying no and learning to tolerate guilt 
• permission to feel negative emotions without panic 
• permission to be bad at something and stay a beginner 
• permission to take up space instead of shrinking 

And if you're ready to be the permission you were always looking for, but don't know where to start, book a consultation call with me. We'll explore where you're stuck and how you can move forward on your journey to freedom from people pleasing. 

Where to find me: 
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Transcript

Friday Recording And Quick Check In

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey Bestie, how are you? I am having a good day. Um, it's a Friday. I don't normally record on Fridays, but here we are. I got inspired and I wanted to record this podcast. So we're recording it on a Friday. We're gonna upload it on a Friday, and that's just what we're doing because who cares about schedules? So, first of all, I want to thank those people who reached out with sweet messages about my Benjamin. I really appreciate knowing that I'm not alone in this. I think it's so important. Um, we need community when we're grieving, and having other people acknowledge that and just be witness to it is really healing. So thank you. Like I said, we don't need to be fixed. Grieving a loss does not mean something has gone wrong, and we need to be allowed to feel our way through it. So I'm sending hugs

Grief Needs Witness Not Fixing

SPEAKER_00 0:54

out to anyone carrying the pain of loss right now in their lives. So today I want to talk about permission. A while back, I mean, we're talking over 10 years ago, um I did this little course uh by Brene Brown. And now I know she can be problematic for some people. I'm not really here to argue about that. Yes, she is a white woman. Her takes lack intersectionality and don't really address the structural and systemic issues that face marginalized groups. That sucks.

The Permission Question That Sticks

SPEAKER_00 1:30

But that doesn't mean that her work has not helped me in certain ways. The Gifts of Imperfection helped me immensely back in the day. I really loved that book. Um, would it resonate as strongly now? I don't know. I'm further along in my perfectionism journey, and now I have a therapist that does address and understands the issues I face as a mixed race, black, queer person in the world. So who knows? What I do know for sure is that one of the questions she asked in this course was what do you need to give yourself permission to do when you're trying new things? And this question has stuck with me over the years as I've tried so many new things, like being a real estate agent, teaching at a university, becoming a coach. I love this question. And what I love even more is the idea of permission and what it has the potential to unlock in those of us who maybe never felt like we had permission to live our own lives. Many of us struggle with people pleasing, especially as marginalized folks. In a very early episode of the podcast, I talked about this and how we don't, as queer people get to grow up as ourselves. Um, most of us are hiding our true selves from a very young age. And we're even encouraged to do this in some cases by our families, by peers, definitely by society. And we grow up seeking validation from the outside world and doing everything in our

People Pleasing And Perfectionism Patterns

SPEAKER_00 3:13

power to get it. One of the ways that we do this is by being very high-achieving. We are perfectionistic about things and never really have the chance to be fuck-ups. This is a problem because in order to grow, we need to fuck up. We need to fail. I know for me personally, I have always put a lot of pressure on myself to be the best in any room that I'm in. I've done so many things that like I did out of joy, like I really enjoyed doing them, but there was always this part of me that needed to become like an expert in the thing. And then I would oftentimes make a career out of the thing. I did it when I was studying gyrotonic, I did it with SoulCycle, uh, real estate, even coaching. With coaching, I wasn't satisfied with being a good coach. I had to become a coach instructor, like always chasing the highest level of anything I'm working toward. And what was driving that was this need for validation from the outside world. And because I was always seeking this validation and recognition, the thing I really never learned how to know was what I wanted for myself. Because I grew up doing what others wanted me to do. From a very young age, I showed promise as a dancer. I started dancing when I was three. Um, it was the one thing that everyone could agree I was good at. So it really became who I am. It I got a lot of positive reinforcement from the outside world. Um, and it really became like the thing that I was meant to do. And I did have other interests, but none of them was ever really encouraged the way dance was. No one really ever asked me

When Talent Becomes Your Identity

SPEAKER_00 4:56

what else I like to do. When people heard I danced, that instantly became the most interesting thing about me. Um, the world definitely has a fascination with dancers. So as a queer kid with low self-esteem, not a lot of friends, and growing up in this very heteronormative world, I leaned into dance because of this positive reinforcement I got in that space. Cut to me graduating high school and not wanting to go to college because I had a hard time at school. Hello, undiagnosed ADHD. I was left with only one choice pursue a dance career. It was the default. It was expected. I thought it was the only thing I was good at. And of course, the prerequisite for anything that I did had to be whether or not I was good at it, not whether I liked it or not, not whether it interested me. It was all about whether or not I was going to be able to be the best. Because of that, in a way, it feels like I lived most of my life for other people. I never really got to ask myself the question of who I wanted to be. It was chosen for me by the world around me, and that need to be validated. The desire to be loved. In my mind, if I wasn't the best, I would be rejected. And the only thing I knew how to be the best at was to dance. And I know that like this has to resonate with some other people out there. Like, who was it that you were taught you needed to be? Um, it could be like the good girl, the nice boy, the star athlete, the straight A student. These expectations are put on us, or we pick them up. They're implied. And this is where we learn to be people pleasers. We grow up believing we will not be loved and approved of if we cannot be who others want us to be, and we get stuck living lives that don't look like us. The biggest problem with this is that we can't actually please others. We're not responsible for other people's happiness. They're responsible for it. When we people please or seek validation, we are essentially trying to manipulate others into seeing us a certain way. We want them to like us. We want them to have a high opinion of us, but they're not obligated to respond that way. They get to like or dislike us for whatever reason, and no amount of trying to make them happy is going to change that. But this is what I have attempted on a large scale with

Why Approval Chasing Breaks Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 7:18

everything I've ever done. I was trying to get the entire world to approve of me. If I could just be good at everything, never fail, always come out on top, then I would be owed the love and respect of everyone. And unfortunately, it does not work that way. This is also a problem because while we're trying so hard to be liked by people at our own expense, we never learn how to set boundaries. Because likable people don't make other people uncomfortable. And to have boundaries, we might upset someone else. And because we think we're responsible for other people's emotions, and most certainly we are responsible for how they feel about us, we do all sorts of things that go against who we are and what we want. And forget about having needs. I was definitely taught not to have needs, and I still struggle with that to this day. So what do we do? Well, I think we start with permission. Permission to ask the questions we never knew we could ask. Who am I when I'm not being who others want me to be? What do I actually believe? What do I value? What parts of me got buried and when? Who was I before the world told me who to be? And most importantly, what do I want? That question gets me every time. I'm still learning how to know what I want. It's really hard for me. I'm at a sort of crossroads in my life right now,

Asking What You Actually Want

SPEAKER_00 8:40

with a lot up in the air, and it's very hard for me to really land on what I actually want versus what I'm supposed to want. So it really does, as with everything else, start with small things like what do I want to eat? What do I want to do with my free time? Who do I want to spend time with? As we know, I'm all about practicing things. So getting acquainted with what you want and practicing that is so powerful. We also get to explore what we don't want because living an authentic life isn't just about what we say yes to, it's also about what we say no to. No is a hard one for people pleasers. We do not like to tell other people no. This is one of those things that we do to not only control how others feel, right? We don't want them to feel bad because of us, but we also do it to avoid feeling bad ourselves. This is another big component to people pleasing. Avoidance of our own negative emotions. Which brings me to the next thing we need to give ourselves permission for. We need to give ourselves permission to feel. This is a big one. Many

Saying No And Facing Guilt

SPEAKER_00 9:49

of us learn that we aren't allowed to feel our emotions. I was a very sensitive child, and that was seen as a very bad thing. First of all, boys are not supposed to be sensitive, and being sensitive was inconvenient for the adults in my life. They couldn't regulate their own emotions effectively, so they definitely couldn't help me regulate mine. So it was best if I just didn't have any, and I got really good at not having any emotions. But

Permission To Feel The Hard Stuff

SPEAKER_00 10:16

why do we need to feel? Well, our feelings drive our actions. If we want to change our behavior, we need to learn to feel our emotions. And as I said in our grief episode, we need to normalize feeling negative emotions. So yeah, when you start to set boundaries and say no to people, you may feel guilty. Not because you did anything wrong. Guilt doesn't necessarily mean you have anything to feel guilty about. But when you first start down the path, you are going to believe that other people's negative emotions are your fault. And you're gonna feel guilty if they have a negative reaction to your no. I'm not sure we can stop that from happening. No amount of intellectualizing can stop our immediate emotions. So you need to let yourself feel that. And this is helpful for two reasons, right? It's practice feeling bad, and you get the opportunity to see that feeling bad is not going to kill you. It also makes it easier for you to handle conflict. One of the things as people pleasers love to do is avoid conflict. By practicing feeling these emotions, you teach yourself how to withstand them. So it makes confrontation and conflict easier to manage. And this helps us put an end to our people pleasing habit. It really does all come down to feelings in the end. In that Bren A course, the thing I needed to give myself permission to do was to be bad at something. That is something I work on to this day. My therapist is always asking me to do things poorly. Like, can I not make my bed for a day or just make it poorly? Um, like, do I need to have perfect hospital corners? Or he asks me to like try new hobbies and actually let myself be a beginner and be bad. But what is it I'm trying to avoid when I'm striving to be the best? I'm trying

Permission To Be Bad At Things

SPEAKER_00 12:06

to avoid feeling bad. So the permission to feel is at the center of this work. I think the last thing we need to do as recovering people pleasers is give ourselves permission to take up space. We spend so much of our lives making ourselves small, trying our hardest not to inconvenience anyone, fading into the background. If we're going to break free from this, we need to be able to stand tall in the rooms where we have previously been shrinking ourselves down to accommodate everyone else. Well, friends, that's all I've got for you today. I hope that you have an amazing week, and I'll see you when I see ya.

Permission To Take Up Space

SPEAKER_00 12:43

And if you're ready to be the permission you were always looking for, but don't know where to start, book a consultation call with me. We'll explore where you're stuck and how you can move forward on your journey to freedom from people pleasing. Bye for now.