claiming my power

We are often told we need to be assertive.  Assertive, but not aggressive.  And that can be a tall order for many of us, especially those of us that learned to make our way through life as the pleaser/appeaser.  For those of us that fall or have fallen at some point into this category (myself included) when we try to make a conscious shift, we may find ourselves over correcting and drawing a much harder line than we intended.  Imagine a pendulum swinging all the way from the left to the right.  We feel guilty about it, and may find ourselves going back and forth in our heads thinking – “Did that come across as rude?  “Did I overdo it?”  “Do I need to apologize?”  Maybe we do end up apologizing, maybe we’re not sure, but things are awkward.  This assertiveness thing is too hard, too sticky.  And maybe we’re better off just doing what we do best – going along to get along. Or maybe the shift is an unconscious one and perhaps the resentment we have shoved down for so long finally boils to the surface and we blow our top like a fiery volcano.  This explosion becomes another mess we need to clean up and we find ourselves full of shame, guilt, we over apologize, maybe we beat ourselves up about it and punish ourselves and we double down on trying to be the pleaser, because good people don’t do things like this, right?  If I was a better person, I would have been able to keep my cool and wouldn’t have reacted that way, right? In my opinion, assertiveness is one of the hardest things to get right, mainly because we have so much baggage around it.  When I really started looking at the roots of this for myself, I had to go deep.  Find the root cause If you’ve never met me in person, outside of the virtual world of zoom, there is something about me you will notice instantly.  No, not my dazzling smile or my bright blue eyes, as lovely as they may be.  I’m 6 foot 1.  If I were male, you probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid.  But even though humans are getting taller and taller these days due to better nutrition and living standards, 6 foot 1 for a woman is still really tall.  And I didn’t shoot up like a weed later in life.  I’ve always been tall.  All my baby records were off the charts.  I was always in the top 1% of height for my age, since about birth. So you can imagine that when I started elementary school I definitely stood out in the room, pun completely intended.  And I bet you can guess what happened.  I got teased.  Bullied is the word we would probably use now.  And it was relentless.  It was every day, so much so that in the mornings I’d be nauseous and never want to go to school, because I knew what […]