FTBM Podcast Ep303: The Three Shifts that Change How You Show Up

FTBM Podcast Ep303: The Three Shifts that Change How You Show Up

[00:00:00] Have you ever noticed how quickly many of us respond to a compliment with something like, "oh, it was nothing," or "I just got lucky," or my personal favorite, "oh, anybody could have done it " because apparently in that moment we're fully committed to the idea of yes, literally any random person on the street could have done exactly what we just did. Truly a masterclass in humility, right?

Or maybe when someone asks you to do something, when you genuinely don't have the capacity to do it, and instead of saying no, you launch into something that feels like a full on TED Talk, and you've got bullet points, you've got a timeline, supporting evidence. You're practically offering to reschedule your entire calendar and submit a written proposal just to explain why you can't attend an optional meeting on a Thursday afternoon.

Today we're talking about something that so many women navigate every single day, and that is what it actually feels like to take up space. And not take up space in a loud, aggressive, demanding kind of [00:01:00] way, but in a simple, honest, everyday kind of way that says, listen, I'm here, and my perspective matters, and I don't need to apologize for that. Let's get into it. 

You are listening to the Free to Be Mindful podcast, where busy moms get practical tips and real talk conversations to find calm joy in a little more breathing room in everyday life. I'm Vanessa Licensed therapist, mom, coach, and a mom to a tween and toddler. Each week we get honest about motherhood and mindset helping you live with more presence, less pressure without losing your well, you know.

Here we go.

Hello and welcome to episode 303 of the Free To Be Mindful Podcast. I hope that you're feeling good, looking good and doing better in this world than you were yesterday. So if you were with us last week for episode 302 we kicked off Women History Month with three invitations that were reclaim, restore, and rise. And we explored what it means to reclaim the parts of yourself that you've [00:02:00] quietly put on the shelf, the dreams, the boundaries, and we leaned into the possibility of rising and of the version of yourself that is genuinely ready for this next chapter.

But here's the thing about rising. It does sound beautiful in theory, and it is beautiful until you actually start doing it in real life. Because rising in real life often means allowing yourself to be seen, and allowing yourself to be heard. Allowing yourself really to take up space. And for many women who lead and who deeply care about others, who hold a lot together behind the scenes, that can feel surprisingly uncomfortable and sometimes even threatening.

So today as we just celebrated International Day of Women, we are going to talk about what this actually looks like in everyday moments. Not in a motivational quote kind of way, but in the real specific, sometimes uncomfortable moments where many of us quietly shrink without [00:03:00] even realizing it. And by the end of this episode, we're going to practice a few simple ways to begin to shift that. Not in a way that's dramatic or that requires a total personality overhaul, but in a way that requires small but powerful shifts.

So let's start with something important, and I wanna say this gently, but clearly, and that is that most women are raised to be thoughtful, considerate, accommodating, right? And these are genuinely beautiful qualities that I love that we have, because they help us build relationships, and support the people we love, and create environments where others feel cared for.

But sometimes, amigas, this is where it gets interesting. Some of those same beautiful qualities then quietly turn into habits that actually work against us. Habits like minimizing our accomplishments the moment that somebody notices them, like overexplaining our decisions as if we owe the [00:04:00] world a detailed rationale for every choice we make. And apologizing for boundaries that are completely reasonable. And softening our opinion so carefully that by the time we finish saying them, they barely even register as opinions at all.

And what happens is that over the course of time, these small habits accumulate into something bigger. They can turn into quiet, ongoing patterns of making ourselves smaller. And not smaller because we lack confidence, and I wanna be really clear about that because this is really important, the confidence isn't the problem. It's actually a conditioning pattern. Because somewhere along the way, many of us internalized the message that being too visible, too direct or too certain might actually make other people feel uncomfortable. And then because we are naturally thoughtful, caring people who genuinely don't wanna make others feel uncomfortable, then we just learn [00:05:00] to adjust. But then in that adjustment, what we actually end up doing is shrinking.

So here's a moment that I think a lot of women leaders will recognize, because honestly it still happens to me too. You're sitting at the table, whatever type of conference table or dinner table that is, and you have a clear thought, like a solid idea, a real perspective of what everyone is discussing. And you pause because you tell yourself, let me see where the conversation's going, right? , Or maybe I'll wait for the "right moment" said in quotation marks. And then five minutes later someone says almost exactly the right thing that you were thinking. And then of course everybody nods and the energy shifts and then people start building on it. And you're sitting there thinking, wait, I was actually thinking that same thing word for word. And it's not that you weren't ready, but it's just something quietly inside told you to hold back. And then you listen to it, the way you've been trained to listen to it all these years, without even [00:06:00] questioning whether it was worth listening to it at all. And it's not being incapable, but it's being careful almost to the point of too careful. And today we're gonna start noticing the pattern so that then we can actually start doing something about it.

 So we need to think of where does shrinking actually show up? And the honest answer is everywhere because it tends to show up in very small, very normal, very easy to miss moments.

These moments that are so ordinary that we don't even flag them as something worth examining, right? Because they just feel like we're being polite or we're being reasonable or humble. And those things, those moments aren't bad, but sometimes what we call humility is actually invisibility.

And that distinction is worth sharing for a second, especially if you grew up in a culture where making yourself small was not just encouraged, but it was expected, right? Where being seen as too much or too loud or too direct was [00:07:00] considered a character flaw. And if you were raised hearing something like, "Calladita te vez mas bonita," a phrase that literally translates into "you look prettier when you're quiet," then that conditioning to shrink just didn't come from this outside world that we all experienced, it actually came from inside your house, from the very people who loved you. And that adds a whole lot of layers to this work because you're not just unlearning social habit, you're unlearning a message that was handed to you in a form of love.

And one of the most common places that shrinking shows up is around compliments. Someone tells you your presentation was excellent, or that you handled a really difficult situation beautifully, or maybe somebody tells you that they love your podcast, right? Like I shared last week. And instead of simply receiving that, instead of just allowing it to land, something almost kicks in immediately and you say like, " oh, it was nothing, oh, I just got lucky, or I still have so much to [00:08:00] learn." We automatically deflect things almost like a reflex. It's almost as if we've been conditioned to treat appreciation as something slightly dangerous that needs to be neutralized before it gets too comfortable.

And I'm not saying that we need to respond with every single compliment with the TED Talk about our own greatness, but there is a lot of space between deflecting every compliment and becoming insufferable. And that space is called, are you ready for this? Very complicated- thank you. Two words, full stop. Thank you. Period. And it turns out that for many of us, those two words are genuinely hard to say without immediately attaching a but to them. Right?

Another place where shrinking shows up is how we communicate our own limits. Someone asks you if you can take something on, and instead of simply saying, "I can't take that on right now," we construct this like dissertation to justify [00:09:00] it. We explain our schedule, our kids schedule, our workload, our existing commitments. We're practically submitting a formal case for prosecution, complete with exhibits. And the thing is that most of the time the person asking just needs a yes or a no, not a paragraph long explanation, right? It's just us trying to preemptively manage how we're gonna be perceived or how our no is going to be received, as if having limits is something that we need to apologize for.

And then there's a way that many women handle disagreements before we even share a different perspective, we preface it with so many qualifiers, like, well, maybe I'm wrong, but... or I could be off base here, or, this is just my opinion, but... And we completely undermine ourselves before we even said a single substantive word. And there's a version of this that's genuinely collaborative, of course, and thoughtful. But there's also a [00:10:00] version of this that's quietly self erasing ourselves, and that's the difference that we need to pay attention to.

Now for those of you who lead, whether it be in your workspace, your family, your community, your field, because you know very well that I strongly and firmly believe that moms are leaders. I wanna add another layer to this, because leadership introduces a particular kind of complexity around taking up space.

Women leaders are often extraordinary at creating space for others. Because we mentor, we advocate, we celebrate the people around us and genuinely mean it. We notice when someone on our team is struggling before they even say a word. And we hold a lot of the emotional infrastructure of the rooms that we're in. Again, whether it be conference rooms or our kids' bedrooms. And we do it so naturally that most people don't even realize it's happening. Which is beautiful, but friends, it's also quite exhausting.

And the [00:11:00] question that I wanna sit with the moment is, who is holding space for you? Because leadership can genuinely be fulfilling and also it can be profoundly lonely. We talked about that a few episodes back, that that can be true even when you're surrounded by people. And even when you are the one that everyone comes to, there can be a quiet kind of isolation that comes with being the person who holds it all together. Because often there's this unspoken expectation that you don't need what everyone else needs, that you are the leader and you've got it handled, so you are good.

And I'll share with you that this happens to me too. Like when someone asks me to speak at an event, of course it's flattering. I look at all the details. More often than not, I know immediately when it's a good fit and when it's not the right fit, right? When it's maybe the wrong audience, or the wrong timing, when something just feels off. But instead of simply saying, it's not a fit for me right now, [00:12:00] sometimes I go back with a paragraph explaining my current season, and my podcast schedule, and my commitments. Then when that happens, the response is sometimes like, oh, no worries. Maybe next time, right? Short explanation for my long paragraph that I just provided, which isn't necessary.

Another example can be when a colleague asks you for a favor,? When a professional contact asks you to review something, or to weigh in on something, or to lend your name to something. And you read it, and you know immediately again, that it's not something that you wanna do, and instead of saying that, you spend like 20 minutes crafting a response that explains your bandwidth, or validates your work extensively, or offers an alternative, and you probably apologize a few times in there. And then the response you get is like, oh, no worries, I figured that it was a long shot. The person asking probably has zero emotional investment, and here you had written them a huge care package.[00:13:00]

And when these types of things happen, I sit here thinking about how much energy we spend on a conversation that required little to none. Because the explanation wasn't really for them, right? They were completely fine with the no. The explanation was entirely for us. For trying to make sure that we were still being perceived as a good person, a caring person, a person who tries to take things seriously. And even in the act of saying, I couldn't do the one thing, we almost need to justify the good character that we have within us.

And that's exactly what we're talking about today, because sometimes the way that we shrink isn't in these big visible moments. It's just in these quiet daily negotiations that we have with ourselves about how much space we're allowed to occupy before someone decides that we're too much. And amigas, I want you to know that you are not too much.

So let's talk about what we can actually do with all [00:14:00] this, right? Because awareness without action is just a very informative way to feel stuck. So these are three small, practical shifts I'm about to share with you- and I wanted to emphasize that they are small because we are not trying to add a lot to our plate, and we're not trying to become entirely different people by Friday, right? We're just practicing something new in the moment where old habits wanna take over.

So the first shift is around compliments. The next time somebody offers you genuine appreciation for your work, your leadership, something you created, something you navigated, or geez, even your outfit, practice responding with just two words- thank you. Period. No qualifiers. Deflections. No, but I still have so much to learn. No. Oh, I found it on sale. Just thank you. Let the appreciation land. And if you feel slightly awkward at first, especially if deflecting has been [00:15:00] your default for such a long time, that awkwardness isn't a warning sign, but it's just the feeling of doing something unfamiliar. And that does fade with practice, as you're building that habit.

The second shift is around limits. When you need to decline something or communicate that you don't have the capacity for something right now, practice saying simply, " I can't take that on right now," or if it feels better for you, you can say, "I can't take that on right now, but thank you." That's the whole sentence. You're not required to submit a brief, hire a defense attorney, or justify your schedule to anyone who simply needs a yes or a no. Being clear is not being rude. Actually, it's a form of respect both for yourself and for the person that you're talking to. Because they deserve a clear answer and you deserve to give one without it costing a full paragraph and half an [00:16:00] hour of your time.

And the third shift is around perspective. When you see something differently. Try to lead with, "I see it a little differently." Not, "oh, I could be wrong, but maybe just a thought. Probably nothing." Just my friends, "I see it differently, right?" A calm, clear sentence. You can disagree and still be respectful. You can hold a different perspective and still be a wonderful colleague, a thoughtful collaborator, a kind human being. Your perspective doesn't need a disclaimer before it's allowed to exist.

So as we bring it to a close today, I wanna lead you through a short practice, having to do with rehearsing. About giving your body a chance to feel what these shifts actually feel like before the real moment arrives where you have to put something into practice, into play, so that you have something to draw on [00:17:00] when they do come up.

So in this moment, regardless of what you're doing, take a deep inhale in, and a slow exhale out. If you can, even if you're in the car, feel your feet on the floor. Feel yourself here present, taking up the space that you're meant to take up.

Imagine someone in your life offering you a genuine compliment. Maybe they say you handled that situation beautifully. And notice what that first instinct is that comes up within you. Just observe it. And now try something new, either out loud if you can, or quietly in your mind, say "thank you," and pause. And let it actually land on your body. And notice what it feels like when you don't push that compliment away.

And now imagine [00:18:00] someone asking you to take on something that you genuinely don't have capacity for. Feel that familiar pull to justify, to explain, to make it okay. And instead practice saying, "I can't take that on right now, but thank you." And say that calmly, and notice what happens when you don't add anything else.

And now imagine you're in a conversation when you see something differently than the people around you. And don't add a disclaimer or pre- apology, just practice saying, "I see that a little differently." Stay present, stay you.

And if in any of these three examples, if any of that felt slightly uncomfortable or maybe even a little scary, it's okay. That's actually the point.. That feeling isn't a signal to stop. It's actually a signal that something is beginning to shift.[00:19:00]

And this is what rising actually looks like in real life. It's not this extravagant, dramatic moment. It's just this honest thing, paying attention to what happens in our minds and in our bodies, and practicing it so that it becomes second nature.

Last week we talked about reclaim, restore, and rise. And today we walked through it, right. As we shared these everyday moments where rising actually lives. Receiving appreciation without immediately apologizing for it. And setting limits without constructing a defense. And speaking your perspective without a disclaimer attached. These are small shifts, but over the course of time, they're not small in what they actually build. Because they build a version of you that takes up space for what she's truly meant to occupy.

And if something in today's conversation stirred up something in you, if [00:20:00] you've recognized yourself in these moments that you've quietly been carrying more than you've let on, I want you to know that I created something specifically for moms who are in that place.

It's called the Reset Experience, and it's a 90 minute in-person gathering designed for moms who've been holding a lot- mentally, emotionally, and then sit quietly on it. It's just a space to slow down, to breathe, to connect with other women who genuinely get it and take one intentional pause. Because most moms aren't struggling because they did something wrong. They're just overwhelmed because you're doing everything, all the things. And sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is simply to stop long enough to actually notice what we need. If a little voice inside you is saying, oh my goodness, that's exactly what I need. I want you to trust that instinct and figure out how you can take time for yourself. That reset [00:21:00] experience is happening Saturday, March 15th in Ridgefield, New Jersey. And you can find more about it in the show notes.

And if today's episode resonated with you, I would love for you to share it with a woman in your life who needs to hear this.

And you can share your thoughts with me on Instagram or on LinkedIn @counselorvdejesus. I would love to connect with you there.

Until next time, remember that in a world where you're free to be anything, you're free to be you, and you are always free to be mindful. See you next week. 

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