WHY TRYING TO BE LIKED IS KILLING YOUR COURAGE

This week I want to talk about the concept of likeability.

In my work, coaching women, it is a common theme that one of the hardest parts of being brave and showing up as your truest self with your work and ideas is the risk of not being liked.

It feels so viscerally terrifying to contemplate that someone might not like us.

I imagine even right now, just as you listen, you can recall a recent feeling that related to the fear of not being liked.

Partly this is to do with our human hard-wired need for connection, and with that comes the desire to relate:

– so we see likability as a gateway to connection, but further than that research from the University of Montreal has shown that women in particular are more highly tuned into the emotional feedback of other people

– so in social or work situations we pick up more and more quickly, the cues - both verbal and non verbal – of how other people feel about us or about any given situation. We are always reading the room so when it comes to sharing anything important to us, we are of course more acutely aware of what other peoples body language means or how people respond to us when we speak up or share.

There are so many complex reasons as to why this is so.

There is epigenetics (which is inherited experiences from previous generations) where evolutionary psychologists have suggested that females, because of their generationally ascribed roles as primary caretakers, are wired to quickly and accurately detect any kind of emotional distress in infants – which we have fine tuned and been able to use in any other kind of relationships.

And then there are multitudes of societal or cultural reasons as to why we are more aware of how other people respond to us.

Obviously, women have spent more time in society out of the picture, quiet and small than we have in this brave new world of women’s voices being more at the fore.

So, it’s inevitable that we will still find it tricky and a bit awkward taking courageous steps to talk about what we do, share our offerings and put ourselves out there.

For centuries women have had to operate in an orbit around male visibility, masculine priorities and male-centred power. And for centuries, the safest, most significant way that women could have any kind of say or input or security, was to make sure they were likable.

Likeability has been our currency.

The thing that we have had to use, that our mothers and grandmothers had to use in order to be safe, provided for, understood. Likeability has been the things that women have, historically, had to leverage to have a say, to get into new spaces, to move around in the world or in the workplace.

So it’s very normal and inevitable that letting go of the attachment to likeability will feel scary.

To risk of not being liked, historically, has had big consequences for women’s economic, physical, emotional survival. When we had no access to earn our own money and needed the provision of men to ensure we survived, we stayed in our lane, we did what we needed to, we made people happy and kept the status quo.

But this is not the case any more for women and we can remind our brains of the many ways that society has evolved in our favour when we see the protection of likeability showing up. In case you want some examples of this, here’s a few ways that I can see the fixation on likeability killing our courage:

1. Softening our communication to try to ensure we don’t get labelled—as women so often do—as bitchy, aggressive, or abrasive. Caveating ourselves with actuallys, or justs, or statements like “I’m not an expert but…” or finishing our sentences with “does that make sense?” as a way to soften how we say things and  to make sure we seem humble, nice and likable instead of just saying what we need to say and sharing what we need to share with assertiveness or authority.

2. Asking for everyone and their granny’s opinion on what we are doing. Instead of taking action on the things that we really want to do, often women tend to consult all areas (including putting up all the polls on IG – usually as a way to buffer ownership (because we’ve been conditioned to believe that ownership can come across as threatening or arrogant) and so by getting other peoples opinions, we are making sure that other people are willing to affirm or permit us.

3. Another example might be fixating on metrics – surmising that numbers are a good indicator and that if we increase the metrics, it will mean we are more likeable. It’s a sneaky little way that we fixate on likability by attaching numbers and figure to something that could never be quantified. So then if the metrics don’t come in, we are more quickly willing to scrap our ideas and convictions which is a bad idea!

4. Being an eternal editor is also a way that our fear of not being likeable can show up. Because what happens when we are forever and ever editing and perfecting things? What happens when we spend all our time agonising over our ideas? We never actually let them see the light of day! They stay in draft forever – and what’s more protective for our likeability than hiding what we have to say or do or be?!

5. Contorting and blending – no these are not new makeup techniques – I am not qualified in that dept and that is not the podcast for that, but contorting and blending is what happens when we prioritise being liked over being loyal. When we prioritise other people’s values and opinions and ideas over our own values and opinions and ideas. When we stay silent about things that matter to us, we blend in or contort to protect ourselves from the risk of rejection. 

The reality is, for any women putting themselves out there in any way or doing something that takes some bravery we are activating a magnet – and that magnet both attracts and repels. That’s it’s job.

And we can’t rig it so that the magnet only ever attracts – that’s impossible, but we can equip ourselves with compassion and loyalty to ourselves to show up honestly, authentically and trust that the people who really understand and connect with us as we are are there because we have been ourselves, not a version of ourselves that is hoping to be liked by everyone.

Once we understand that it’s not our job to get everyone to like us, it feels like freedom. Then we get to be ourselves. Once we can begin to shed expectations, people pleasing, metric fixations and endless opinion gathering we can recognise that likability is actually quite a heavy load to carry.

I hope you found it helpful to explore why and how this idea of being likable shows up for us and helps you recognise where it might be killing your courage.

GETTING BRAVE WITH BOUNDARIES, PART 1

So tell me in the comments – have you ever thought any of these things:

a)     I want to throw my phone at a wall because I am so sick of it and my own addictions to it. Even when I tell myself that it’s networking or marketing etc. It never ends.

b)     I never have any time for myself or for hobbies and I’m not even sure what my hobbies are any more because I am so consumed with running my home and my work.

c)     I feel like my brain never switches off because I’m always running from task to task and never feel like I’m fully giving my attention to anything.

d)     I feel like I’m always sneaking in work when I’m at home.

e)     My clients are demanding of me, I can’t say no.

f)      I am sick of saying “yeah, so busy, it’s mad” anytime anyone asks me how things are going.

g)     A weekend at home, alone, with a stash of movies and all the good snacks sounds like paradise.

OK – just making sure I am talking to the right people!

Firstly I want to say that you are very much in the right place and those are all thoughts that I have had at some stage or another. I came up with those 6 points VERY easily because that has been my own lived experience.

About four years ago, I was barely keeping my head above water. I was running a home. I was running a charity, I was running this business – Assembly, I had a two year old and a 6 year old and a marriage and other responsibilities to manage and I was right in the deep end. It came to a head after a bout of panic attacks started out of nowhere. One night I ended up at A&E thinking I was dying of a heart attack and after that, I knew I needed to address how what was going on on the outside was effecting me on the inside. I needed to make some changes. Not only did I need to get some help medically, I knew I needed to work out a better, easier way of doing things that didn’t involve me sacrificing my mental and physical health.

So. I want to share some of that learning. I want to talk you through some of the insights that I’ve gained, the mindset shifts that have really helped me to feel more safe and free in my life and work. How does that sound?

I think the key thing here is getting to the baseline of why we are so frazzled and torn and I have a few ideas about why this is so and why women in particular are grappling with this desire for balance so much more than men and why it is distracting us from the amazing work that we should be doing in the world.

 WHAT ARE BOUNDARIES?

BOUNDARIES ARE:

1)     Boundaries are not constrictive, they are freeing.

Maybe you have grown up in a culture where boundaries have mean restriction or being confined. Sometimes they get a bad rep and can be associated with stuff that hasn’t served us in the past. But I want you to know that boundaries, when applied the right way – are SO self supportive and SO freeing. When we are really clear about what is serving us well and what isn’t, boundaries are the action point to help us align what we truly want to be doing. I want you to ask yourself, what freedom do I need to have that I don’t right now? What boundaries can I put in place around my work, my relationships, the things that feel ill-fitting to me right now that will bring me more freedom and more opportunity to focus down on the things that will really help me grow and develop?

The second thing I want us to understand about boundaries is this:

2)     Boundaries do not equal letting people down, they mean we get to be really clear and kind with the people that matter to us most.

There is nothing that can harm a relationship more than unclear, undefined boundaries. Often when a relationship is strained, difficult and burdensome, it’s because we have allowed our boundaries in that relationship to be unclear or loose. When our loyalty to ourselves remains in tact and we are clear about what we are willing to do, how much time we are able to invest, what kind of support we can offer or how much of ourselves we can give, it fosters safety and clarity in our relationships. I want you to think of relationships that you are having difficulty in right now -it could be work or client relationships, it could be family or friends – notice where communication or clear boundaries might be ambiguous or avoidant. It’s not too late to update your boundaries and be clear with the people that you care about. It might be that you have to draw a line, or say no, or let someone know that you aren’t able to commit to the thing in the way that you thought you could before.

This can feel stretchy at first, because adjusting and updating boundaries might trigger reactions but the best thing you can do for others and ultimately yourself is to be clear in order to be kind.

Brene Brown says “Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.”

And finally – one last truth about boundaries:

3)     Boundaries offer us the opportunity for us to do our best work, to be self supportive and intentional about what you want to offer, create or how you want to serve. Boundaries allow us to be really true and loyal to ourselves.

When we are intentional about where we stand on things, how much time we have, what our priorities are (which can and should shift for different seasons of life) we WILL see our truest work coming through. There is something about being really clear on what matters and what is most important that will allow us to syphon off things that actually were never meant for us. We can be specific about our offerings and services, we can be more focused on doing the stuff that brings out our best, we can serve or work from a place of intention and peace rather than burnout or scarcity or resentment.

WHAT’S IN OUR WAY

So – here are some reasons that I think might be in the way of us feeling more safe, free and focused. What I’d love for you to do is write down some of these points as we go along, comment away in the comment section AND I’d LOVE to hear if any of these reasons sound familiar for you:

WHAT’S IN THE WAY:

1)     Trying to contend with the patriarchal society that we live in.

This is a BIG ONE. And it underpins so much of what we do and how we view balance and boundaries. We are FOREVER trying to compartmentalise our lives. Not acknowledging that there will always be a bleed and then forever feeling guilty that we can’t switch off. What we sometimes forget is that the systems and the functions of this world are not built for women who want to explore their desires. They are not built for us to manoeuvre between home and work easily. We are constantly thrown off by systems and barriers that have been created by men to suit male needs and operations. And what happens when we come up against this is that we surmise that something is wrong with US. And we swallow the guilt pull. And guilt will eat you right up. And it will eat up your time and productivity or action. Guilt halts action. When guilt is rife, we operate out of shame and that is NEVER good soil to grow anything from. And it’s all because we are operating in a world that is not designed for our flourishing. Strides have been made, for sure, but policies, procedures, allowances, stereotypes ALL STILL GRAVITATE TO A MALE CENTRED WORLD – where we orbit around the male normative way of doing things. So so much of our guilt is misplaced because we forget that the world is not set up in a way that enables women to feel good about existing in multiple roles. And this heaps and heaps and heaps shame on us that we absolutely don’t need. That’s a big one. That’s something all of us need to question, pick apart and that’s why we need to find good female role models for this stuff and BE GOOD FEMALE ROLE MODELS for this stuff.

2)     More practically speaking, there may be other reasons why you are feeling a real struggle in setting boundaries and getting any balance – another reason why balance and boundaries may feel off to you might be in overestimating your capacity.

We are saying yes when we mean no. We are taking on too much and then feeling like massive failures when we don’t do it or when we do it out of duty. We are resenting saying yes and then wasting more time and energy stewing over the things that we wish we didn’t say yes to. Maybe this is about having difficult conversations? GENEROSITY CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT BOUNDARIES. B.B. Boundaries are not easy. BUT They are the key to self love and treating others with loving kindness. Nothing is sustainable without boundaries.

3)     Another reason why we might find ourselves flailing in terms of boundaries and balance is simply not having an actual plan for your business or work and just flying by the seat of your pants.

Switching from task to task and feeling half assed in lots of areas. If you work for yourself and you have not given yourself the gift of some structure, it’s SUPER likely that you are scrambling. You are not prioritising well, you feel swamped. You are doing a lot of comparing and looking around at other peoples work or businesses. Giving yourself the gift of a plan, of a strategy is significant in taking yourself, your offerings, your work seriously and tuning into your own way of doing things.

4)     Thinking that you should be able to do it all. Not asking for help.

Not getting creative with collaboration, with sharing ideas, with investing in support. You are the marketer, the creator, the admin, the CEO, the accountant, the bookkeeper, the designer, the cleaner – whatever it is – we would absolutely never be expected to do ALL of this in a traditional job. What are the things that you are labouring over that are absolutely none of your business in your business? What do you wish could be taken off your hands. Time and money are the same energy and we are exchanging them all the time – what is it about our hesitation to do this in our work.

 5)     Still hanging on to the belief that the harder you work work work the more you will earn earn earn.

Slogging it out instead of being really smart and strategic about your time.

Are any of these connecting? I’d love to hear.

A NEW APPROACH TO FEEDBACK VALIDATION

For anyone who is out there trying to do something, put something out there, create something new, offer out their skills or expertise, feedback can be super alluring and super terrifying. It’s almost like we have this push pull relationship with feedback and validation that means we want it, but it also has the potential to crush us.

I want to talk about what feedback we actually need to get, how we interpret that wisely and how we can build resilience and wisdom about what feedback means.

I want you to scan back in your mind to a time when you received some tough feedback, maybe something that has lingered with you and become a belief you now have about yourself.

MY EXPERIENCE

I can vividly remember being 21 and living on my own in London. I was finishing up my youth work degree and my placement mentor had me over for dinner. After dinner we sat in their living room and they pulled out a piece of paper with a list of things they wanted to feed back to me about how poorly I was doing. They told me:

-        You are struggling to manage your money

-        You are struggling to prioritise your uni work

-        You are struggling with pulling your weight in the centre. 

-        You are struggling to stay grounded with your singing opportunities 

OH. MY GOD.

I was absolutely floored. And devastated. And SO embarrassed. Some of that stuff was probably true, but also I was 21. At university. In placement. In the biggest city I’d ever lived in London. I was getting a lot of singing opportunities at the time which was exciting for me. I was away from my family in Canada. Um, YEAH. Of course I was struggling with all of those things! Yeesh. It stung so hard and I was so overwhelmed by the casual setting and the heavy ‘pulling in’. The feedback was so hard to hear and for many years after, I heard that feedback ring over me in so many other roles I had.

“Am I sucking with money?”

“Am I pulling my weight here?”

“Am I being cocky?”

“Does everyone else think this about me…?”

What was one persons observation into a period of my life actually became a new set of beliefs about myself.

And with that set of beliefs became behaviours to try and counteract them or manage them.

People pleasing

Staying quiet more

Overdelivering

Burning out quickly

Sacrificing myself to the cause

Frugality to the point of punishment.

Does this ring any bells? Can you think of a time in your life or work that you have received feedback and it has become a belief about yourself?

It’s for this reason that I think it’s important that particularly as women, we begin to understand what feedback is, when it’s important, how we interpret it and how we can use it in the service of our own callings or aspirations rather than have it silence us or stop us from doing the things we would really love to do.

The idea isn’t to fob off or be cold and robotic towards criticism – shutting ourselves down. That’s totally unhuman, impossible, and unfair. We cannot deny the part of ourselves that wants to be seen, to be acknowledged, to matter to other people. We should honour that part of ourselves that desires respect and appreciation. And that is why it’s imperative that we begin to speak a new language and develop a new set of behaviours around feedback and validation.

WHAT WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT FEEDBACK AND VALIDATION

There are 5 things that I believe are really key to understand about this:

1)     It really matters who you ask.

Not everyone is important to get feedback from and our expectations around this are everything. The most important people to get feedback from are people who are connected to the success of your work - customers, clients, stakeholders, etc. If we are asking our close family members for feedback on something they have no interest, knowledge or stakes in, we are doomed! Can you think of a time when you have asked the wrong person for feedback on something that was really important to you and you were hugely disappointed or deflated? What would it have meant to ask someone more integral to the idea or work?

2)     You get to decide if the feedback matters, or how you interpret it.

So much of this process is about cultivating wisdom about what feedback is actually important to take on board. Something Tara Mohr talks about a lot in Playing Big is the idea that "feedback only ever tells you about the person giving the feedback, it doesn't tell you anything true about the work itself'. I love this, because it then gives me the freedom and autonomy to decide if the feedback is important for me to consider. I want you to look up your favourite book from your favourite author on Amazon and read the 5* reviews and also read the 1* reviews. You will find both, but neither of them tell you anything true about how good the work of the author is. It only tells you about the person giving the feedback.

3)     It’s perfectly OK not to ask for feedback.

There are times where it is totally irrelevant to ask for feedback. Sometimes what is important for us is to run with our intuition or our gut and not get sucked into the opinions of others. Often what happens is that asking for feedback in those highly intuitive times can halt our traction and we can lose momentum. If your gut is speaking to you about doing something - keep at it. There may be a time for feedback down the road, but when your intuition is leading you - be led. Can you recall a time when you have felt really in your flow and you have found yourself halted by someone else's feedback - either asked for or not?

 4)     Women are more attuned to feedback.

As women we are highly switched on to other more subtle types of cues (body language, facial expressions, tone etc) and so when we are getting feedback, we are taking in the entire situation and person – not just the words. It's not surprising then that feedback often comes far more loaded for women than it does for men. We also tend to laser focus in on feedback and dwell on it longer. This comes from likability being the only currency for women before we had any rights or access to our own finance or laws that protected our safety. We relied on being liked to get us by, so any threat to our likability may still feel very viscerally painful or scary for us - including feedback. What is your experience of likability? Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you have had a visceral reaction to negative feedback given to you because it jeopardized your likability?

 5)     Finally - If you want to do something that sets you apart or is your truest, most important work – it will always be met with both praise and criticism.

There is no escaping it, so we neeeeeed to get super comfortable with accepting that it’s going to come and sometimes it’s going to feel real good and sometimes it’s going to sting but ultimately, having a firm footing in our own sense of pride and commitment to our idea must be at the centre because that’s the only truth that we know about the work. Then we can hold both the validation and the criticism that may come more lightly.

THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

In this post I want to talk about success and feelings.

Ultimately, the idea of success is so subjective. How one measures success is not going to be the same as the next person.

Most of us are so disconnected to our own desires and needs that we end up defaulting to ascribing to the measures of success that seem easy and palpable:

-        Hitting a certain number of followers

-        How many people buy from you or sign up to your thing

-        How much money you bring in

-        How busy or in demand you are

By all means, these can contribute to the idea of being successful and in some ways – it feels really good to know that people are desiring our products, or connecting with our work or interested in what we have to say or share. But this can’t be it. This can’t be all we have been given as a measurement tool.  What if we are absolutely missing a critical metric here: How we are feeling about what we are doing?

So often, when we are bringing ideas into the world, creating a business or something we feel excited about, the focus is on these metrics as guideposts for how we are doing. We tend to bypass the ‘feelings’ stuff and cross our fingers that if the metrics add up, the feelings will follow. Unfortunately, that’s usually the opposite of how it works.

I have several clients who, on paper are hitting all of those measures of success that I talked about a minute ago. They are booking clients, taking in a lot of orders, super in demand for their products and services and yet when we get into the coaching space and really reflect on how all of that is feeling, successful isn’t a word that comes up. Tired is. Frazzled is. Unclear is.

Often what I hear is that their work feels out of control, that it has taken on a life of its own. It’s like they work for their business instead of their business working for them amongst the other usually very complex and busy demands of their whole life.

There is little to no connection between the standard measurement of success and the feeling of success.

In the work that I do, I feel like my job is often about pulling my clients back to themselves. Dusting off the road that has been littered with expectations, arbitrary rules and measurements and shining a light back to the centre of who they are and asking

“what of this isn’t working for your energy right now?” “What do you want less of?” What do you want more of? What feels misaligned?

These aren’t the questions that come up in a downloadable business plan; but they hold the most power. Because when we are asking and answering these questions; when we make space to get quiet about our real desires, about how the work we once loved is making us feel, about what we really want this work to look like within the context of the rest of our lives, then we can gently course correct and strategize to make them a reality and rebuild a path towards it.

Maybe, if you’re feeling stuck in the zone of setting metrics for yourself based on numbers and figures to identify success, or you’re feeling detached from how you want your work to feel and just cruising along in autopilot it would be helpful for you to sit down with some of these questions today

These are the questions and the metrics that help me to unpack if what I’m doing is really fulfilling. If you want to write these down and check in with yourself, feel free.

-        What kind of impact is my work having with the people it’s for? Are they really feeling the intended shifts that they’re here for? Are they trusting themselves more, feeling supported?

-        How is my energy towards my work? Am I excited for it or dreading it? What am I dreading and why?

-        How is my business allowing me to live your life outside of it? Do I feel like I can’t switch off, have I given myself so much to do that I’m taking it into family time, have I made up arbitrary rules for myself that are limiting my ability to experience joy or pleasure?

-        What is the quality of my relationships? How connected do I feel to the people that matter in my life?

-        Do I feel like my reputation is holding up? Am I in integrity with how I’m communicating my work, how I’m selling my services, how I’m showing up for my clients?

-        How do I feel about selling this service? Am I delighted to let people know about it? Am I grounded in the value of it or am I feeling some scarcity and fear?

-        Do I feel momentum in my work, like I am finding space to grow deeper in my knowledge of how to help my clients?

-        Am I feeling supported? Do I need to check in with my business support system (for me that’s other coaches or my supervisor)?

I want you to be careful not to listen to these questions, contemplate your answers and dip into shame. Shame will keep you stuck in the mire. If you’re contemplating these things and lots of them feel hard to answer, that’s OK. You’re not doing things wrong, you’re doing your best. Try to welcome this as an opportunity to reset, without shame lingering, but as a way to take some power back and inject the priority of how you are feeling as an integral part of your work.

Without these as thresholds to reflect on, I am likely to overwork, load stuff onto my plate, numb out or disconnect. I am likely to overthink, to fixate, to be easily hurt or offended and take things really personally. I’m likely to be emotionally up and down because my validation has been built on the wrong metrics. 

These are the metrics that matter to me because I know that when these things are prioritised, my work becomes a joy. It becomes regenerative, a pleasure. Most of us start with the opposite metrics and hope that the rest will fall into place, or we believe that the outward “success’ will somehow morph into feeling like we are thriving. When the opposite is actually true. When we realign our work or business to take into account our whole self and put structures in place to honour that, that’s when the magic happens.

I hope this gives you permission today to start to measure what you’re doing from a different angle. I hope you feel courageous enough to be honest about the impact of what you are doing on how you are feeling and are willing to take whatever steps you need to shift things around.