Episode 111: The Freedom You Actually Need This Summer

This weekend the whole country celebrates freedom, and a lot of us will spend it proving, pleasing, and performing through a backyard full of people, then wonder why a holiday about freedom leaves us feeling everything except free. If a day off has ever failed to feel like one, this episode is for you.

You will understand why an open calendar and a long weekend do not deliver the freedom you are hoping for. 

You will see the named pattern underneath the urge to prove and please, and why it is more common than you might think. 

And you will leave with one obligation you can set down before the cookout even starts.

Scripture: Galatians 5:1 (NIV)

Research note: On socially prescribed perfectionism, the perception that the people around us expect us to be perfect (Hewitt and Flett, 1991), a pressure researchers have tracked rising over recent decades (Curran and Hill, 2019).

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to your next best step. I'm Coach Janet J. It's 4th of July weekend. The whole country is talking about freedom. And you may be standing in your kitchen feeling everything except free. Let's talk about the kind of freedom you can carry into a weekend like this one. America turns 250 this weekend, and the theme of the entire holiday is freedom. So here's a strange question to start with. When was the last time you felt truly free? There's a specific reason a cleared calendar and a long weekend do not deliver the freedom you are hoping for. Two researchers gave that reason a name back in 1991. Picture the weekend ahead. Maybe you are hosting. Maybe you are the one bringing the dessert, organizing who sits where, keeping an eye on the relative who gets prickly after the second hot dog. Maybe you are not hosting at all, and you are still running a checklist in your head of how to make sure everyone has a good time. The calendar might even have a gap in it. The whole afternoon with nothing scheduled. And somehow that gap fills up anyway, with the sense that you should be doing something, fixing something, smoothing something over. So the day off arrives and you spend it working anyway, just without anyone calling it work. That is what today is about. The freedom that the open calendar does not automatically deliver. Here is where Galatians gives us the language for it. Galatians 5 1 in the NIV. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm. Then do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Look at that one word. Again. Paul is writing to people who were already free. They had been handed the real thing, and they were sliding back into a system of earning it, proving it, performing their way into an acceptance they already had. The yoke in that verse is not always something other people strap onto you. Sometimes it's the one you reach down and pick back up yourself, out of habit, because it feels safer than trusting that you are already accepted. In 1991, two psychologists, Hewitt and Flett, put a name to this pattern. They called it socially prescribed perfectionism. The plain language version, it is the belief that the people around you expect you to be perfect, are watching to see whether you measure up, and will think less of you if you fall short. That belief is the engine underneath proving and pleasing. It is the voice that says the gathering has to be flawless, the mood has to stay light, and any crack in the day is somehow yours to fix. Of the three kinds of perfectionism they identified, this socially prescribed kind has been shown to have some of the strongest links to anxiety and low mood. I will be careful here. That link is a correlation, drawn largely from clinical and student groups. It's a pattern rather than proof that one thing causes the other. A later study makes the picture bigger. In 2019, two researchers named Coran and Hill looked at nearly 42,000 young adults across nearly three decades and found this exact kind of pressure, the sense that others demand perfection has been climbing. That study followed young people, so I'm not going to stretch it into women our age. The pressure itself, though, is shared, a wide current and a perception of what others expect. And perception is something that you can examine and question. So bring that back to your weekend today. A holiday hands you a stage. There's a spread to put out, a house to keep nice, a circle of people whose comfort you have appointed yourself to manage. Every one of those is a small audition for an audience you imagine is grading you. The freedom you actually need this weekend is freedom from that audience in your head, a lighter grip on the day, whatever the schedule looks like. Touch this across all four pillars for a moment. Mentally, it's the running tally, the constant monitoring of whether everyone is okay. Emotionally, it's the flood of relief that comes when you let one thing be imperfect and the sky still stays up. Physically, your body knows the difference. The shoulders drop, the jaw unclenches, the breath gets deeper the moment you stop bracing for judgment. And spiritually, this is the heart of Galatians 5:1, you are resting in an acceptance that was already given rather than auditioning for it. So here is your next best step. Pick one obligation you are carrying this weekend purely to prove something or to please someone. One and set it down. Maybe it's the homemade dessert that could be store-bought. Maybe it's managing a relative's mood that was never yours to manage. Maybe it is the silent rule that you have to be the last one cleaning up. Name it out loud or break on the back of a receipt. This weekend I'm setting down blank. One thing for one weekend. That is the whole step. Let me anchor the three pieces. The pressure to prove and please has a name: socially prescribed perfectionism. And it is a perception of others' expectations, which means you can hold it up to the light and question it. Galatians 5 1 says the freedom was given to you rather than earned by you. And your step is to set down one obligation this weekend that exists only to prove or please. On Monday, we stay in the holiday and look at something a lot of you live every year. Being the one still wiping down counters while everyone relaxes. It helps other women find this show, and I'm so grateful for every single one. I will see you Monday. Take your next best step.