And What Else?

Shattering Unwritten Rules

• Wendy O'Beirne (The Completion Coach)

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We explore the unwritten rules and conditioning that shape our behaviors and identities without our conscious consent. Most of us play life by rules we never agreed to, continuously diminishing ourselves to appear more acceptable to others and overextending in the hope of winning approval.

• The invisible conditioning we absorb through everyday experiences shapes our limitations and sense of belonging
• No matter how you show up in life, someone will perceive you as too much or not enough
• Self-development involves pausing to examine the parts of yourself you're avoiding
• Burnout often stems from exhaustion with performance, not tasks
• True growth means burning down the game of constant adjustment and performance
• Becoming "better" means increasing your capacity to be authentically yourself, not optimizing to external standards
• The freedom comes from knowing who you are beneath social expectations and trends

If you're struggling with these issues, drop me a DM at The Completion Coach or email wendy@thecompletioncoach.co.uk


If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and subscribe! And if you want to learn more from me, come and say hello on Instagram @thecompletioncoach or via email at wendy@thecompletioncoach.co.uk or find out more about working with me on my website, thecompletioncoach.co.uk.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to and what Else the podcast with me, wendy O'Byrne, also known as the Completion Coach, and by now the email and the Instagram post about being a woman would have been sent out on Sunday, so you're receiving this podcast a couple of days after that. I'm not going to repeat that here it is on my Instagram page for those that haven't read it. But basically, what I was talking about was the unwritten rules of being a woman and, realistically, what I'm talking to everybody about, whether you're male or female, is the unwritten rules and conditioning and bias and ideas about yourself and the perception of you that you are trying to micromanage and control to belong. Long ass sentence that one. But ultimately, what I'm saying is nobody has directly sat me down and said you need to perfect the art of wearing makeup that doesn't look like makeup. You need to have Botox, but don't make it look like you've had it. Nobody has directly sat me down and had this chat. Nobody directly sat me down and said if you go for a run at 5am, it will be considered dangerous. If you walk here in the dark, it will be considered a risk. Nobody sat me down and told me these things.

Speaker 1:

So when anybody's coming to me and they're experiencing a part of their lives where they are in struggle, a part of their lives where they have limiting beliefs, where they have conditioning, where they are frustrated and yet they are conforming. I just want you to think about the fact that it doesn't always have to be. I just want you to think about the fact that it doesn't always have to be ongoing direct messaging that you received in the sense that somebody sat you down and told you this. It is what you have inhaled into your subconscious through ongoing conditioning in so many micro ways, be it from watching people in the school playground, your family dynamics, overhearing conversations, the TV programs, the marketing on the side of the bus, the marketing in that magazine, the way that tabloid press speak about anything, the books that you read, the books that you didn't read all of these things create these limitations and perceptions of safety and belonging. Alongside, then, our lived experiences, alongside the things that have happened that have actually added to that in one way or another, because, as much as we can say, the wellness industry is booming and everybody's into self-development, everybody's in therapy all of the things that we now hear.

Speaker 1:

What we are still not truly exploring is why this kind of development is not a school curriculum, why we're not encouraging everybody to understand how they operate and how they can optimize their performance, how they can be so much happier in their own skin, how they could live without this element of internal, ongoing struggle, and why we are annoyed that there's more and more talk of it. Now, not everybody is annoyed, but there are definitely generational perceptions around it and there is definitely a divide with the people who believe self-development is rubbish, spiritual development is rubbish, emotional development is a load of rubbish, and people that are on board with it. Because, if we're truly honest, most of us are playing this game of life with a set of rules we were never directly given that we never would have agreed to, and yet we are playing by. We are still being less of ourselves in the hope of being more acceptable to other people. We are still overextending, over-functioning and over-giving in the hope that we will be accepted by other people. We are still overextending, over functioning and over giving in the hope that we will be accepted by other people, and what we have established is there's no right way to do this.

Speaker 1:

You could be successful and brilliant and driven and give to charity and wonderful with your family and gorgeous to every stranger you meet on the street and you may still be perceived by somebody as too loud, too obnoxious, too ambitious. You could be the greatest listener, who's easygoing, who has nothing but creativity on their mind most of the time, and you may be classed and perceived by some people as not serious enough. Whatever you choose, whatever way you do it, there will always be a perception somewhere that it's wrong. And yet we're still playing along. We're still spending a lot of time narrowing down our field of judgment, looking for the people and the situations and the limitations of where we might be wrong, rather than really filling up in the spaces and the places within ourselves that we feel right.

Speaker 1:

And it is flabbergasting to me with hindsight that this stuff isn't explained to people at a younger age, that we certainly have people that have understood how the mind works. We have developed understanding on the nervous system, we have developed understanding on the subconscious and yet still this is kind of classed by a lot of people as something the self-absorbed do. And you know what? The reason I claim that is because I genuinely think now that the people who don't like it are very uncomfortable with it. It makes them uncomfortable that you're having the conversations with yourself that you are. It makes them uncomfortable because they do not wish to confront those conversations within themselves.

Speaker 1:

And so, working out who you are, working out your identity beneath the masks, beneath what you have needed to be, beneath what you have been conditioned to be, beneath what you have been rewarded to be, beneath what you are validated to be, underneath that understanding how you perceive you, how that identity has shifted, how it needs to be grounded back into you and explored so that you can be a fuller, more capable version of yourself for yourself, rather than somebody who are just based on the invisible, ever-changing, completely unattainable expectations of everybody else. And the reason that I am really, really passionate about people doing this work is because the more we tweak ourselves just a little bit, the more we adjust just slightly based on other people's perception and expectations, the less you get to just be, to relax, to share your voice, to share your, to relax, to share your voice, to share your creativity, to share your passion and to live in a way that actually lights your soul up. What we tend to do with all of this conditioning, with these limiting beliefs, with this pressure and expectation and perception is that we don't question the rules that we're living by. We enforce them because it feels safe, it feels like we're keeping ourselves in control and we think it's going to keep us from being judged or perceived badly, which again comes down to safety. We're trying to control the, we're trying to control the environment, we're trying to control the image, we're trying to control the idea of us, and it's uncontrollable. It's so far beyond our remit of control, especially when we haven't got a true grip on that for ourselves.

Speaker 1:

Only when you can say I know who I am, I know what I stand for, I know what I stand against, I know what my desires are, I know what my flaws are, I know where I want to grow, I know where I'm deeply challenged, I know where I have morphed and bent and changed myself to belong. And although some of that might be parts that I want to keep in my life, there might be parts that I do enjoy and need to do it in a way that feels more like me, less like a performance, and so when we're doing self-development, what we're actually saying is that we want to stop and pause. We don't want to play that game with ourselves anymore. We want to stop enforcing expectations and performing and we want to stop being so goddamn palatable, because the greatest power we have in self-development is not in perfecting balance, but it is about burning that whole game that we've been playing down to the ground, because you do get to do that and your life might still look exactly the same to everybody else. And I just want to stress that on repeat.

Speaker 1:

I I've lost count of the amount of times I could say a lot of people might look at my life and think, well, what's changed? But everything has changed internally. And, yes, lots of things have changed externally, but those people might not notice, those people might not know that. And so this has to be non-performative, because if it is to show people, look what's changed, look what's happened, look at me then it's still under the mask of the performance. It's under the mask of please accept me now. It's not deeply rooted in. I can do all of this. And it doesn't matter how I'm perceived. It matters that I know who I am. And in knowing who I am and what I stand for and what I stand against and what drives my passion, my soul, my desires in this life, they're coming from a place that is true to me, because if I do know that, then I know I'll never intentionally be causing harm, I'll never intentionally be sat in judgment of somebody else that's doing the same thing, because I guarantee you, somewhere, somewhere deep inside of you, there is a version of you that wants to exist on its own terms, and that's the version that scares your nervous system, your subconscious, the one that isn't going to play nicely to play the game, and the one that isn't going to adjust a mold just to belong to fit within these rules and limitations that have been handed down, but not necessarily how you want to be, because it's exhausting.

Speaker 1:

When I work with people who are in burnout, they're not necessarily burnt out from the amount of tasks they're performing. They are burnt out from the way they are performing, from the emotional exhaustion, from the high functioning anxiety that drives their behaviors that they never meet and deal with, from the way that they are continuously scanning every room, trying to monitor and control everything for everyone so things don't fall down. That's exhausting and eventually that will lead to burn off, and no holiday or day off or day of nothingness will shift that Shifting. That is an internal job, and so if you are exhausted. If you are somebody that struggles to rest. If you are somebody that's hypervigilant all of the time. If you are somebody that has to second guess everything from every angle on the way it's going to be perceived or received. If you are living within a limitation loop, that is driving you a little bit crazy but you're not dealing with you a little bit crazy but you're not dealing with.

Speaker 1:

If you are frustrated that you're not doing the thing that you really want to do whether it be for fun, for joy, for a hobby, for a pastime, for a career then instead of looking at the external obstacles to it and the frustrations you have, I want you to really look internally at that pause that you won't take. There's going to be a podcast on why we struggle to stop again next week because it's so important, but I want you to pause and look at the parts that you don't want to meet, necessarily inside yourself that we need to, to really address why you are feeling the way that you feel, the expectations you are trying to meet that could never be met, and what perception of you exists in the world that you are desperately trying to take down in some way or another. Because they're really interesting questions, and I say it on repeat, as I do most things, but self-development isn't about having a problem-free life. It's about the challenges being the right challenges, and it's about knowing when the problem is not your problem. It's about knowing what ways are best to tend to you, to look after you, so that you can be a better human being. And by better human being, I don't mean more optimized or a better person per se. I mean better at being your fullest human, which, when we come down to it, has far more curiosity, is calmer, has more compassion for themselves and therefore for other people, who is able to listen and isn't highly reactive, who is able to stand up and speak out on things that they are passionate and believe in, and who can do it in a way that isn't attacking.

Speaker 1:

There are ways that self-development increase your ability to handle the challenge of being yourself, the challenges that will present, and also enable you to deal with the shit that life will throw at you, because that would also come to and when I talk about being a better human, I am not talking about the fact that you need to be better, work harder, do do more. I'm not that. I'm talking about, as I just described, the more we care and pay attention to the parts of us driving our behavior that aren't creating the conditions that you want to be in, the conditions of humanity, that you want to be in the conditions of yourself, in family situations, in friendships, in work situations, in relationships, in money, in health, whatever it is, the way that you get better is by being more you, by meeting the parts of you you're avoiding at all costs, by working on your emotional capacity and agility, your mental capacity and agility, your nervous system capacity and agility, in order to be able to have more capacity for yourself. I'm going to leave this one here, but you know that post that was about women and those unspoken rules. As I step into the 47th spin around the sun, one thing I know for sure is that a lot of those unspoken rules led me.

Speaker 1:

Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I have grown through so many eras of trends, from tomboy being super thin, the supermodel, the ladette. Bring back the curves. Everything will come in and out of fashion. Everything will shift its trend.

Speaker 1:

You knowing who you are, so that you don't have to jump on every trend to have an identity. You knowing who you are, so that you don't get swept up in anything and everything that comes along looks popular. You being able to hold into your integrity of who you are enables you to make decisions from a much deeper place inside of you, and that does not mean that at times you won't look in the mirror and go. Maybe my face could do with an iron, but it will stop you from making decisions from that place. I will leave this here, but I would love you to think about where within you, where you are trying to be everything to everyone in the best of ways and measures. Right now, if you weren't trying to be the right amount of everything and if you weren't worried about how you would be perceived, what would you want to change? As always, you can drop me a dm at the completion coach or send me an email, wendy, at the completion coachcouk. Sending you lots of love.