Overcoming People-Pleasing with Amy Green Smith

Becky Mollenkamp: Hi Amy, thank you for being

Amy Green Smith: Hi Becky, I’m excited to hang out today.

Becky Mollenkamp: Me too. I am excited to chat with you about all things enoughness and people pleasing and confidence and all. I mean, really, you’re going to hit on a lot of the big topics, I think, that come up for business owners. So it should be really great. Before we do that, though, the first thing I ask everyone is, what’s your relationship with feminism?

Amy Green Smith: Ooh, I love this question. I think it is constantly evolving. As a fellow Gen Xer, I think we can both relate that sort of the first concept around feminism was always very negative in my upbringing, because I grew up in a very, very conservative born-again Christian family. The idea of feminism was that they were male haters, they wanted to forward this liberal agenda that we clearly didn’t subscribe to in my household. Things have changed quite a bit, but it has really evolved. And I think where many of us have gotten to is sort of this crazy righteous anger and righteous rage for all of the oppression that has happened for our ancestors and for our families of origin. And I really think now we’re starting to see it through a different lens. It’s not as much about women overpowering men, which is what it’s never really been about, but looking at the softer qualities that are called for in all of humanity. And I think many times we think in binary terms, right? It’s either-or, men run the country or women run the country. And the feminist perspective is one of equality, equity, all the ships get to rise kind of thing. And I think really that’s what I’ve been looking at a lot more recently is that this is not necessarily about anybody paying or taking out vengeance on an entire gender or anything like that, but rather, what do we want to usher in more of? And what I want to see more of is emotional intelligence and softness. I have a real issue with the languaging of masculine and feminine. And I would much prefer that we use semantics like soft and strong because I think those elements are a little bit less charged for people. And that is something that I think we can all buy into, as opposed to trying to get a bunch of people to buy into this idea that there’s this masculine part of me or there’s this feminine part of me. What if we just said we’re an amalgamation of all of these different soft and strong qualities and they’re just called for at different times? So that’s sort of where I’m landing these days.

Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, I love that. And the idea of masculine and feminine drives me a little bonkers too, because it’s so rooted in the binary and this idea that there are ways that are that we are somehow biologically different, that men are biologically stronger and women are biologically softer. And anyway, there’s a lot of things about that that are not helpful, and language matters. And speaking of that, actually, that’s sort of where I want to start, which is around language matters. Because I was, as I was doing more research for this interview, I saw on your podcast, which is called the Bold-Faced Truth, so people should check that out as well, that you were talking about the difference between feeling not enough and believing you’re not enough. And I think for many people that would sound like the same thing. And so the language matters. So tell me a little bit about what you see as that difference.

Amy Green Smith: Well, I am so glad that you brought this up because it’s something that we skip over so much. And it really comes down to emotional intelligence. So most often when we experience something that is emotionally painful, like being rejected, somebody saying they want a divorce or they don’t want to see you anymore, or being passed up for a job opportunity or a business venture, we have a subsequent emotion that comes with that. So that, I think, is grief. It’s grief around there was something here that I thought was going to go my way, and now it’s not. But far more often, we take that feeling that we’re experiencing and we annex it to a belief about who we are. And so it sounds something like this. If she doesn’t love me or he doesn’t love me, then I must be unlovable. If I get passed up for this promotion, then I must be not enough. We take an isolated situation or a circumstance that carries a very limited amount of emotional pain and we make this grandiose assessment about who we are and we further anchor into that belief. So, I have this sort of house metaphor that I use around this. And the idea is that our worthiness is sort of this house, this structure that we are, that there’s nothing else like us. We’re unique. And there are people who are going to come along to our home and leave a giant pile of shit on the porch of our home. That is like experiencing rejection, criticism, people not liking our choices or being mean to us, whatever it might be, being offensive. And we can stand there and go, okay, I’m going to take this giant pile of shit and bring it into my house, sullying my house. The house still has the same value, but now it just stinks to high heaven, right? Now it’s like, this isn’t fucking fun. And conversely, there will be people who leave a beautiful gift on the porch of your house. And you might choose like, this feels really good, right? This is like when people give you adoration or accolades or acknowledgments, promotions, love, etc. And we go, okay, that must mean I’m worthy. But no, it just means it gives you a specific emotional frequency. You just feel better. So both of the piles of shit or the gifts don’t affect the value of the house. They just feel differently. And so the more we can say this situation sucks, but I don’t suck, or, you know, this really hurts, or I’m so proud of myself for accomplishing this thing, and I’d be enough even if I didn’t. The more we can anchor into our worthiness, not necessarily being about a feeling, but rather about a belief, that changes everything. Changes everything.

Becky Mollenkamp: Well, no one chooses to believe that they are worthless. People aren’t sitting around going like, I just really want to feel unworthy today. I really would love to feel like I’m not enough. This isn’t something that people are like just simply choosing between. And yet so many of us have this little voice all the time telling us that we’re not enough and they’re all going to figure it out and we don’t deserve this thing, all of that. It’s not something we’re actively choosing, yet so many of us have it. So what’s causing it? And I’m hoping that you can speak to this as something larger than just an individual action. But again, it’s like that stuff that’s being done to our house, not just us doing it to our house.

Amy Green Smith: That’s right. It’s like who’s regulating the land and what else is going on systemically. So yes, I’m really, really glad you brought this up. And this is what I talk about when we do belief work and we talk about beliefs that we didn’t consent to. So we have subscribed to a bunch of belief systems, societal norms, obligations that we never chose, that we never consented to and kind of got grandmothered into. That piece, that discernment of, hey, why do I think this is a man’s job? Or why do I think this is not afforded to me because of my upbringing? Where did that belief come from? Or the enoughness issue? And I will say, as somebody who is a survivor of pretty extreme religious trauma, that there is a lot that is rooted in Christianity and a lot that is embedded biblically. And when you have one isolated religion that has been sort of the blanket compass for an entire government system, you are going to have an infiltration of belief systems centering around men, specifically white men of privilege. So when we have systems of oppression like that, and I’m sure this is something that you talk about many times on the show, when we have systems of oppression like that sets up a hierarchy of enoughness already. So we say male is better than female. We say thin is better than fat. Straight is worth more than queer. And we do it for every part of marginalized identities. So by virtue of how this system is constructed, for somebody who is in a queer body, a Black and Brown body, a disabled body, fill in the identifier, for you to act, and I’m getting chills, for you to actually stand up and say, no, in the face of all of this opposition, I’m still going to choose that I matter just as much, that I’m valuable just as much, that I am enough and worthy despite this hierarchical structure that we’ve been not consenting to this belief system. What a ‘fuck you.’ What a giant ‘fuck you’ to systems of oppression. So, and I know you’ve talked about this a lot too, how there’s stuff that can be done individually, but the collective, when there’s a group of women, when there’s a group of queer folks, when there’s a group of Black and Brown folks who are standing up saying, no, I matter just as fucking much, that’s where we really move the needle societally. And to the detriment of this whole individual perspective, we think it’s a me problem. And I say it’s a systems failure. Like, yes there’s shit that’s going on that you can work on in your own mind. And we cannot ignore that there is a systems failure around us that’s creating a hierarchy already of enoughness.

Becky Mollenkamp: Yes, and yes to all of that. I know everyone listening is like, yes, this exactly. And yet, right, we can all like, I think many of us can be in that place of like, fuck yeah, I’m ready to say fuck you to patriarchy. And I get that me saying as a woman, as a queer woman, as a fat woman, as whatever the things are that you know, you have the identities that you hold, like that’s like that extra special fuck you to these systems. Great, and it’s really fucking hard and it’s really fucking scary. And one of the things that I love that I saw that you talk about is like you, I think, I do not love the word fearless. It makes people believe that the only way they can begin to take that action to say fuck you, to show up big and bold, is they have to wait until they’re not scared anymore. I have to be fearless, which means without fear. That is ridiculous. Fear is an absolutely, not only normal human emotion, but an important one that keeps us safe, right? And that’s what it’s doing. It’s trying to keep us safe in a world that very much wants to cause us harm, which like in the current political climate, we know is incredibly true. So you talk instead about being fear optimized, which I haven’t heard that term and I like it. I want to hear more, but I’m liking it because I don’t like fearless, and I’ve always sort of figured a ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ kind of thing, but what does fear optimized mean?

Amy Green Smith: So this is a term that I coined specifically because I can’t fucking stay out of the fearless thing. And I get it. It’s kind of akin to the whole girl boss. Like I’m like, no, just a fucking boss.

Becky Mollenkamp: Well, exactly, I hate the girl boss and all that too, right? So yes, we’re on the same page.

Amy Green Smith: It’s the sort of the vernacular of social media psychology kind of is what it really is. So the idea behind fearless, you’re absolutely right, it actually doesn’t exist. And so I don’t think like perfectionism, we need to have another thing to shoot for that actually doesn’t exist because so many people think like, okay, I will accomplish that thing or I’ll get back into the dating scene or whatever it is as soon as I don’t have fear. and that’s incredibly unrealistic. In fact, I believe that there is one study or one known case of a woman who was born without a fear response. And it was the most unbelievably damaging, scary, because she would just walk into the middle of traffic. She would just grab knives. She just wouldn’t register any impending threat or danger. So the idea behind being fear optimized—to optimize is to make something as useful or as effective as possible. So if I’m going to have fear, I want to make it as useful and effective as possible. And really all that is is a fancy term for courage. It’s a way for us to look fear in the face and choose courage anyway. And I like to say that courage can’t exist without fear. So if you like the idea of being a courageous, brave individual, then you need to start making friends with fear. But here’s another element of this intersectionality that we have to look at. Fear shows up when you are actually legitimately in danger, and it shows up when something is just new. So the first time you go to an interview, the first time you speak on stage, the first time you go on a date with someone, that same mechanism, the critical factor of the mind is going to kick in and say, Becky, are you sure? Are you sure? We haven’t done this before, this is new. And it will kick out all of the warning signs. It will also do that when you’re in the face of danger, when somebody is about to attack you or when you do need to get to your car really quickly, right? It’s the same exact mechanism. So one way to discern if courage is being called for here is to ask yourself, am I actually in danger or is this just new? Because that will usually give us the compass of like, I’m just really scared to go to this interview. I’m really scared to put myself out there again. I’m not actually about to lose my life. Again, fear is a discernment. It’s giving us the ability to decide, do I need to take care of my physical vessel because I might not survive this or am I outsourcing my worth in some way and going, I’m not enough to go on this date, right? Send in all the inner critic chatter.

Becky Mollenkamp: So great. There’s so much in there that was really helpful. I can’t wait for people to listen and then re-listen. So thank you for sharing that. But one of the things you said early on that I want to make sure I don’t forget to get to is you talked about social media psychology and boy, do I ever feel that it’s, you know, it’s in that ‘girl boss’ world. This is why you’re a coach, I’m a coach. I love what we do and I find our industry to be deeply problematic for a lot of reasons, because there are too many people who are basically practicing unlicensed therapy, one, and then two, too many people who are trying to, out of the best of intentions, help people, but they don’t understand these bigger systemic issues. And they are inadvertently causing a lot of harm by not being able to speak to the fact that there are some people for whom that fear really is necessary to shut them down. They need to be shut down because they know that their safety is truly threatened in ways that maybe those white ladies can’t understand. So when you talk about self-help going wrong, what are you talking about?

Amy Green Smith: I think there’s a handful of them. One of them is when we collect a bunch of ideas that we love, we become a collector of personal development, but we don’t implement. And I like to call this doing the field work, right? It’s like you can consume every podcast, read every book about Pilates, let’s say, but you aren’t ever going to get a stronger core unless you hit the mat. And it can feel a bit more nebulous and kind of ambiguous when we’re talking about something related to your mind. But what we mean is you can’t just listen to a podcast, turn off your phone and be like, okay, cool, I’m done. I just consumed a concept. Now you actually have to engage with the person in the mirror differently. You have to choose to speak up in situations when you’re uncomfortable. You have to talk to yourself differently. Conditioned beliefs—you have to eliminate people from your life who are not supporting you. So there’s some stuff that goes on with that, being a collector. And very close and analogous to that are the folks who collect and then they want to tell everybody else what to do. So they have a friend who says, hey, I’m going through this thing. And then they’re like, I know what you need to do and they basically prescribe as opposed to saying, how can I support you the best? Conversational consent. What do you need the most from me right now? Even saying something like, my instinct right now is I want to fix it. But that’s probably not what you need. How can I support you the best, right?

Becky Mollenkamp: That’s great language. I love that. Thank you for sharing that.

Amy Green Smith: Yeah, absolutely. I think sometimes just acknowledging what our instinct is, my gut reaction is, I want to tell you about this podcast that I just learned about, but you might need a hug. Tell me what you need so I’m not just cavalier with this. Another way that personal development can go wrong is when we become boundary bullies. And this is when we, and this can actually be weaponizing personal development as well. Let’s say I committed to you, Becky, that we were gonna do a joint venture together and we’re just about to launch our program. And I message you the night before and I just say, you know what, I’m just not feeling it. It’s not in alignment with who I wanna be. I get exponentially more Valley Girl from California when I’m a boundary bully. It’s just not in service of me and I really need to take care of myself. And then if you kick back and say, you know, we had an agreement, and like, ‘you’re just not respecting my boundaries.’ It’s weaponizing personal development in some way. Something that we see on social media all the time is all-or-nothing thinking around a concept, like perfectionism being always wrong. People pleasing being always bad, control being bad, right? Like we have these ideas, or I know you’ve talked about recently, self-care always looking like a specific bath or fucking yoga class or some shit when that’s such a myopic view of what self-care really is. So yeah, there are a handful of ways where it can go wrong.

Becky Mollenkamp: For sure. And I think most of us can recognize in ourselves having been on the receiving end of those. And perhaps if we can get really honest with ourselves on the delivering end of those things, too, you know, and I certainly know that I have. It’s been a while, but I used to be pretty bad at that ‘let me fix it for you.’ And we’re really, I think, conditioned to be that way. And so it’s helpful to know that it’s not necessarily your fault, but when you know better, you do better, which you also talk about helping women leaders finally believe they’re enough that they can create unshakable boundaries and communicate with power, no guilt included, which makes me think of that piece of like, we have to let go of the guilt of where we’ve messed up, where we’ve got it wrong and start doing it. Once we know better, we do better. So how does this enoughness tie into the more practical, let’s say, pieces of what you do around boundaries and communication? Do we need to feel enough first to assert boundaries, to improve our communication, or does, it could be a chicken and egg, but, or is it that you learn to assert boundaries and improve your communication and then you begin to feel more?

Amy Green Smith: I think you can go any direction. I call those entry points. So I think you can go through an entry point of thought work. I think you can go through an entry point of recognizing your emotions. I think you can find entry points through behavior. So for example, in Amy Cuddy’s work, if you’re familiar with her very popular TED talk about body language, it’s basically a study on can we hold our body in a specific way that helps elicit confidence. even if we don’t feel confident. And I’ve never been a huge fan of fake it ‘til you make it, but I do like ‘imagine as though,’ ‘act as though.’ If I was somebody who believed I was enough, how would I hold myself? Would I have a repressed, depressed posture? No, I probably would have my shoulders back. I think you can kind of go through the body. I think you can go through the mind. I think you can do a handful of different things. But let’s talk about the connection specifically with enoughness and communication. So I’m going to lump communication into sort of a container of boundaries, tough conversations, saying no, speaking up. That’s one pot. And then we have this other idea of enoughness, or some synonyms we’ll use are value, mattering, worthiness and sometimes even deserving or lovable that is in that self-worth bubble. So a lot of times when I’m doing podcasts like this and I’m talking about steps to enforcing a boundary or how to have a difficult conversation or saying no, it seems like it’s just this arbitrary, good personal development exercise. And it’s really not. It’s actually because your worthiness is actually dependent on that behavior. This is what I mean. Every time you choose to silence yourself, every time you are offended and you don’t speak up, every time that someone does something that bothers you and you choose not to address it, you are sending a subconscious message to your mind over and over and over again that your wants, needs, and opinions just don’t matter as much as these other people. Now we don’t consciously think that. We don’t go, ‘I don’t matter as much as that person.’ We think things that are rooted in our past history, but things like, I could never say that to her. I could never do that to him. Or, don’t rock the boat. We have a shit ton of idioms like no use crying over spilled milk. Don’t, you know, open up a can of worms, sweep it under the rug, right? We have a lot of ways to say shut the fuck up. So, If we want to change that narrative that everybody else matters more than I do, we have got to start behaving in that way. So one of the behaviors that we can nurture is speaking up with other people. And it doesn’t always have to be this massive come to Jesus. It could be something as simple as saying what you really want for dinner. If someone goes ‘wherever you want go.’ Don’t just say ‘whatever you want.’ If you are in the mood for Thai, say, fucking Thai. ‘I’m in the mood for Thai.’ If you aren’t able to attend something, instead of saying no and then trying to build some sort of noble lie like my grandmother’s in the hospital or I have Beyonce tickets, say, ‘I’m just not available. Thank you so much for thinking of me. Please ask me again.’ You don’t have to give a reason, y’all. If you are offended, you don’t have to go into this diatribe and read them the Riot Act. You can say, hey, listen, I don’t share that opinion. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention that around me. Or we certainly don’t need to get into that right now. There’s a lot of ways to begin speaking up for yourself, and that is directly related to how valuable you feel. Because when you do that, when you say that boundary, when you speak up for yourself, you’re likely going to have what I call dichotomous emotion. where you on one hand feel so proud of yourself, and then on the other hand, you’re in grief or you’re disappointed or you’re sad about how you were received or how the other person took that information. And again, we come back to emotional intelligence, but it’s recognizing, no, no, no, I deserve to take up space and here’s one way that I can do that through communication.

Becky Mollenkamp: And when you have been told, overtly or perhaps more subtly, that you don’t deserve to take up space, that you should not take up space, which I think is very much the case for women who are told not just to be quiet, but to be physically small. We learn early on, we are meant to take up as little space as possible. But also I think that that’s incredibly true, obviously, for anyone who’s got a marginalized identity, anyone who’s not a white rich man. We learn we are meant to be smaller. So it can be incredibly hard to take up space, to claim space when you feel, when it’s been reinforced for decades for you that you’re not supposed to or allowed to. And so I think, and then I think what happens to many people is they feel I will do that someday when, right? And often that when is when I’m not afraid anymore, right? When it doesn’t feel scary, then I will. So we’ve talked about not being fearless. So I like that you’re talking about, we can’t wait. It’s like this mutually reinforcing thing where we can’t necessarily change the systems around us. We can vote, we can do the things to hopefully dismantle eventually white supremacist patriarchy. But right now we live inside of this system. So we can’t change the system. We can’t change the past. We can’t change what’s happened to us that helped to inform who we are. But we do continue to have some agency over the choices we make. And what you’re saying is every time that you make that choice, even if it doesn’t feel like a choice, and again, you have to go back to that evaluating true safety vs. is this new, have I never stood up for myself in this way before? And so it feels scary. But in those moments where we have a choice and we make the choice to not say the thing, not do the thing, we’re reinforcing all of those things that were given to us. And so that choice in that moment is not just a choice about that moment. It’s also, like you said, it’s a choice to say, I’m done with the systems. I’m done playing the part that you’ve given me. I’m done consenting to be someone I never agreed to be, which is a great thing that Erica Courdae talked about in another episode this  season. And so I love that. Thank you. I don’t know if that brings anything up that you want to speak to before I ask you another question.

Amy Green Smith: Yeah, you know, one of the things that I think is really important to discuss around all of these topics is the nuance in personal lived experience. Because what came up for me is oftentimes antithetical to speaking up, antithetical to boundaries is typically people pleasing, right? And that’s one thing as a buzz term that we hear that it’s awful. You don’t do it, it’s subservient, whatever. You’re not a good feminist if you’re still people pleasing. And again, I think that’s a really myopic view of people pleasing. If we look back to our primitive ancestors and how we survive, and I know you’ve talked about this a lot too, it was not a tribe of one. It was a community. We had to belong to a group. And this is also where we get Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. One of our core needs being ‘belonging’ and the reason we are searching for approval from our families of origin or from people that we’re dating or friendships is because it’s rooted in our humanity and our biology. So when somebody doesn’t approve of us or our family doesn’t like a decision that we made, at a cellular lizard-brain level we are thinking I might die. I might not survive this. And I know that sounds hyperbolic, but on a more surface level, it’s just there’s a threat detected. Threat detected. And for many of us, we developed a very positive association with people pleasing because it kept us safe in our childhood. So it could be that you grew up in a family with a very volatile caregiver, where you learned that walking on eggshells was how you survived. Or maybe you grew up in a family where you had a sibling who needed a lot of care. And so maybe you became the delinquent or maybe you became the overachieving perfectionist or maybe you became the people pleaser. But again, we are using that as a behavior in order to stay safe. So still it’s called upon. I had an interview with an amazing Black woman who was the host and she asked me, ‘do you think, I’m going to give you a scenario, tell me if you think that I people please.’ And she was talking to me about giving birth to her child and that when she went to the hospital, she made it a point to be overly friendly and accommodating and kind with all of the doctors, all of the nurses, etc. And I said, sure, that could be in the category of people pleasing, but it’s from the motivation of self-preservation because I’m sure I don’t need to tell everybody who’s listening that we have the highest mortality rate for women in pregnancy and it’s exponentially worse for women of color, especially Black women. What she’s doing is doing that specific behavior from a place of self-preservation as opposed to outsourcing her self-worth. I need you to approve of me so that I find value in myself. It’s very, very different. I think everybody listening, if you are a woman or you’re femme presenting or have been socialized as a woman, we know what that’s like to acquiesce or placate an aggressor, a man, in order to not get murdered. So in those situations, that defense mechanism, which now we oftentimes will call fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fawning is kind of akin to people policing. We do that sometimes in order to actually stay safe. So again, we have to use that discernment because fawning or people pleasing is usually in the face of fear. Am I in danger or is this just new? In order to figure out, is this people pleasing something that I actually need to change or is this what’s keeping me alive in this workplace or in this family or in wherever it is? So I think that nuance is incredibly important.

Becky Mollenkamp: It’s so important. I have issues with the term self-sabotage for the similar reason because it’s often self-preservation that we then describe as self-sabotage and it’s all these things that are systemic, global kind of issues that go well beyond me that get turned into a personal problem, a personal failing. And that is so problematic, but I think it’s by design because it keeps us stuck. It keeps us from taking action. It helps to preserve the systems. When we stay in this place of operating out of self, you know, being told that the things that we’re doing to save ourselves are actually things that are harming us or that make us bad. Well, then we’re not going to take action. We get into a shame place. We don’t take action. So I think it’s just I think it’s such great nuance that unfortunately in that social media psychology space is always lacking and nuance is really so important when we talk about these kinds of things, because there is no one size fits all self-help solution, because we all have such different lived experiences. You brought up people pleasing or emotional caretaking, putting others first, whatever it looks like for people. Again, often a trauma response or a self-preservation tactic. But if someone does that activity, that exercise of thinking about, is this actually safety? Or is this just new? Or am I ready to say, can I now acknowledge that maybe at one time it was about safety, but no longer is, and I can take care of myself here? If they are used to saying no, how do you start saying yes? Because again, it’s one thing to get it intellectually, it becomes another to actually do

Amy Green Smith: Let me ask you this. Do you mean if they’re used to always saying yes and placating, how do they start saying no? Okay, okay, perfect.

Becky Mollenkamp: Yes, right. I guess sort of it’s to me it really is how do you start setting boundaries, and-or stop people pleasing.

Amy Green Smith: I would say though, far more often than not, are people pleasing to outsource our self-worth more than we are actually trying to stay alive. And that’s totally understandable, right? But another question, another inquiry that you can use to start catching yourself is to say, who do I chronically complain about that I have not taken any action on? And this is usually more interpersonal. I’m not talking about, I’m complaining about the state of our country. It’s like, I’m always going to complain about that. I’m talking about, do you come home from work and your partner gets an earful every day about Suzy in accounting and how much you cannot stand her and Suzy has no fucking idea. If it’s worth getting pissed off about, then it’s probably worth taking some action on. And if that other person has no idea or has a very saccharine view of what your issue is, the sugar-coated view of what your problem is, then they probably don’t have an understanding of the impact that this is having on you. So that’s usually where we can go. Who pisses me off the most? Where do I chronically complain where I don’t take action? And maybe where am I speaking up where someone else knows about it, like my therapist or my coach, but my mom doesn’t know, the person who can actually do something about the grievance isn’t privy. That’s one place for us to go, okay, there might be some speaking up to be had here.

And then with regards to starting to say no, just start by buying yourself some time. That’s all you have to do. If you can return a question back to them, for example, if somebody says, hey, would you be able to handle that report that we have going out next week? Turning it back on them with a question saying, how soon do you need an answer? Or do you have other options? What else is available for you to handle this, right? But just saying, how soon do you need an answer can give you so much more space. Now, if they say, it’s really tight, I need to know right now, then here’s my favorite canned response: Thank you so much for asking, I really wish I could say yes, but if you have to know today, I would hate to have to pull out last minute and let you down so I’m going to have to politely decline. Just say no. But if you’re in a public place, you’re with your family, wherever you are, if you can even just say, hold that thought really quick, I’m going to be right back. Run to the bathroom. Just give yourself some space before you say yes. Because it’s habitual. It’s already wired into our subconscious. It’s just gonna come out. So if it does, and you go, yeah, yeah, totally, I’ll do that for you. Walk it back as quick as you can. So if you’re at an event or it’s later on in the day or something like that, go back to that person and say, you know what? I think I messed up. I think I preemptively over-committed myself with that thing that you asked for earlier. And if you are doing that, if you’re walking it back right then, like pretty quickly, I don’t think there’s really a big deal. To the example that I used with you earlier, if you and I had been building this program for months and then I just decide to change my mind, that’s not really of integrity. But going to somebody and saying, listen, I think I messed up. I should not have said yes. And you can use vulnerability if you’re in a safe situation with somebody and saying, to be honest with you, if I add one more thing, I think I will absolutely implode. And you deserve to have somebody who’s going to come through for you. So giving yourself some of these stock phrases and you literally have to rehearse them. You have to write them down. You have to get in front of your mirror and you have to rehearse them like you’re in a goddamn Christmas play. You have to. Because, again, this is going to be just consuming shit and going like, that’s a good idea, and then never doing anything with it.

Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, I talked to people about practicing the pause. Same thing. Learning to like find a way to push pause to get out of that mode. Because like you said, it’s a habit. You’re just your knee jerk reaction is what you’ve always done, which is sure, yeah, how? I’m happy to. What can I do? And so learning to start saying, can I have a moment to think about that? Whatever that looks like for you. Right. And I always tell people do it even when you know it’s a yes. Even when your certain it’s a yes, and even when it’s something small like, hey, mom, can you go do this thing for me when your kid asked and of course, you’re going to do it. Learn to start saying and even the easy moments. Just give me a second to think about that, because then you start to develop the habit. It’s hardest to do it when it’s hard. It’s easier to start developing the habit when it’s an easy situation. So I love that. And I think it’s so important. One of the things you mentioned was vulnerability. And I had seen that you talked about using vulnerability to have more effective conversations and I think for a lot of folks, especially women, when we live in an environment that tells us, you know, that’s already hostile towards us for being emotional or weak, that the idea of being vulnerable, most especially in professional settings, can be very scary and, on the face for many people, may not sound effective, right? It may sound like I’m just going to get judged for being weak again or too emotional again. So talk to me a little bit how being vulnerable is important for effective conversations, most especially in that professional environment.

Amy Green Smith: Well, I think one thing that we have to really dismantle right now is the idea that vulnerability always looks like crying. Because that is not the case. Vulnerability is really an honest assessment or statement about what’s going on with you at a given time. And that usually involves emotion. But like we were talking about earlier, it can be relative depending on what your lived experience is. So if you’ve seen the book, “You Are Your Best Thing,” which was curated by Our Lady Brené of House Brown and Tarana Burke, who founded the Me Too movement. This is a collection of essays from Black individuals. And at the very beginning, Brené talks about, or Tarana actually talks about how there was a disconnect around this concept of vulnerability for her every time she would listen to Brené’s work. Because for Tarana’s lived experience as a Black woman, vulnerability meant death and harm and you have to keep your guard up at all times. So there was this massive disconnect in understanding even what Brene was even talking about. So I think that’s incredibly important to recognize is this a space where vulnerability is warranted? And if you are in an occupation or a workplace environment where vulnerability is weaponized, then it might not be your specific tool. It can be a tool. Is it always the tool? Not necessarily. But I just did this with one of my long-term clients. So she is a very loud, gregarious, outspoken sass pants. And she’s a badass. She’s a nurse practitioner. And she, like many people who are listening, gets penalized for being excellent. Where you know, just give it to her, give it to Amy, give it to Becky, she’ll take it, she says it’s easy. So her method of conveying her frustration has been through passive aggressive comments sure, I’ll just take that, I guess. And they’re like, ha ha, she’s so funny. And I said, we need to go in with some vulnerability. And so we just prepped for a conversation that she had. And she’s given me permission to share. She went into this conversation and she had all of her bullet points. And you know, I have a whole rubric of prepping for conversations, etc. But one of the pieces is to ask for what you need and is to say, please just let me get through this. You know, it took me a lot to compile these things that I want to share and say, I would really appreciate it if you just let me get through that. That already is vulnerable. That’s a vulnerable statement. It doesn’t have to look like unhinged fucking behavior. It can just be a statement about what’s going on with you that’s genuinely real. And then as she went through all of her bullet points, she would acknowledge intent. I’m sure it’s not your intent to cause this, but here’s how it lands with me. Here’s how it lands over here. And to say, you know, here’s the impact of that not getting rectified. And here’s how that feels for me. And to say it more anecdotally as opposed to embodying that emotion, but here’s the ripple effect, almost as though you’re reading it third person. And the response that she has gotten from that delivery that was different than her normal sassy, fun self that can kind of make it a joke. And really what that other person and the logical rationale to conclude is I’m sure if it was that big of a deal to Becky, she would tell me. Or Becky seems to make a lot of jokes about it. I’m sure if it was that serious, she would really let me know, right? That makes a lot of rational sense. And we’re always just focused on our own shit. We’re not always thinking about the impact on other people. So if you go in vulnerably and saying, I doubt you would calculate this, but I want to give you a real clear snapshot of what this looks like for me, for my team, for how we’re handling things, that is vulnerability. That is being vulnerable. And I will also say, you are far more likely to be written off if you come in guns blazing, if you come in yelling and screaming, if you come in with a wall up. It is so much easier to be like, ugh, she’s such a pill. It’s a lot harder to argue with somebody saying, I want you to understand the magnitude of this initiative. That’s vulnerable, right? 

Becky Mollenkamp: You mentioned in there about intention impact. I know that something you have said is that you are responsible for your intention, not your reception. And I’m curious what you mean by that and how that plays with or it goes with the idea that intention doesn’t matter, impact does. Most especially because I mean, that’s something that comes up a lot, especially for people who are trying to learn about privilege and the ways that our lived experiences are different. It may not matter that you didn’t mean to hurt someone with a microaggression or something and didn’t realize it, but the impact is what matters. So talk to me about that.

Amy Green Smith: Yeah, this one can be a little hairy for that exact reason. And I think it’s kind of a semantics thing. Because when I talk about you are responsible for your intention, not your reception, it’s the idea that you are responsible for who you are being, how you are showing up, the choices that you make about course correcting. So for me, my intention is always to show up with the utmost grace and kindness, but also with a nice heavy dose of assertiveness. Now, if somebody says to me, hey, you know, that really was offensive to me, and it was a lived experience that I was not privy to, and I had no idea, my intention to be a better person is going to say, hey, thank you for that. I’m going to do better. Now, If it’s a different situation where my mom, who is extremely religious, tells me that me having Buddhas in my home is incredibly offensive to her, I am going to state my intention is never to cause harm. However, I don’t have a problem with that behavior. So I will not be course correcting it. And that’s where it gets really fucking sticky in the social justice spheres because what we have to be anchored into, and I learned this from an incredible educator named Dr. Tee Williams and took a social justice course with him. And he has you really get aligned with your core values and your business values in order to have a jumping off point because I found that any activist that was talking to me, I felt like they became my new Bible and that I was going to become just as heretical in a new field of study. So I’ll give you an example. In 2016, I did a podcast episode that was around the 2016 election. And it was basically about how do I deal with this? And it had somewhat of a provocative name. So it looked like I was very aligned with one side, which I was, which was clearly not fucking Trump.

Becky Mollenkamp: You don’t have to dance around it here, we are all in the same boat.

Amy Green Smith: I would not think so. I would not think so. But I knew that I had a swath of my audience was going to be navigating difficulties during the holidays and things like that. So I talked about this concept of you are responsible for your intention, not your reception. So my intention was to give, it was to not ever show up in a place where I disrespected people in the way that I wanted to be respected. If I was going to be someone’s first glimpse at a liberal queer lady, I wanted it to be a surprise to them that they liked me and what I was saying. I want to be a good ambassador to the cause. I felt really good about this podcast that I put out. Well, my reception was all across the board. Some people loved it and said thank God, I had no idea how I was going to traverse the holidays, now I have a rubric, thank you so much. Some people were indifferent. I don’t follow politics, head in the sand, didn’t catch it. Other people were incredibly upset. You’ve lost a listener. And I asked if they listened to the episode because it was very inclusive and about how to respect each other even though we have such polarized views. And they were just vitriolic about it. So I went back and evaluated my intention and who I was being, essentially asking myself knowing what I know now, would I change my stance or behavior or anything to accommodate. I went no,. I wouldn’t change anything. I am at peace with how I showed up. So that’s what I mean by evaluating what can I control and what do I need to let go of. There is no way to cater to all the ways you can be received. You cannot do it. I’m curious what your perspective is on that as somebody who talks about intersectionality and social justice.

Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, I mean I’m glad you talked about values because that for me is where everything starts. We have to know what our value system is and if you are acting fully in alignment with your values, then ultimately, I totally agree with you that you’re not responsible for how that’s received. But I do think it’s important to maintain curiosity, to be checking in to ask yourself, is there something I might be missing in my experience with this based on my own lived experience where perhaps I feel like it’s aligned with my values, but maybe I’m missing something? And the answer may be no, but I think it’s when we become too closed off to do that thing that you’re talking about, which that weaponized pop psychology stuff around like, well, that’s my boundary or that’s my value system, and not even allowing yourself to be curious about is there something here I could be missing? But I think, like you said, you went back and you reflected. And I think that piece is what’s so important if you’re doing that work and really evaluating, getting curious and making sure there’s not something you’re not seeing just because of your own, we all have a filter from our lived experience. Could there be something outside of that that I’m missing? And if you still feel good about it, then yeah, at some point we have to own our choices because otherwise, again, we’ll go into that fawning. And when you’re trying to fawn to everyone, you can’t. So then you shut down and you do nothing. And what is that doing for the world? 

Amy Green Smith: That’s right. And I think there’s also another nuance here in choosing to stand up for yourself vs. specifically causing harm. So for example, when I go to my mom’s house where there’s like white Jesus everywhere and there’s all sorts of Bible verses and all of this stuff that I find unbelievably harmful to me and my religious trauma, etc., I know that she doesn’t put that stuff out specifically to hurt me. That genuinely is what she believes, the same way my home is, you know, full of Obama’s book and queer flags and all sorts of stuff. I’m also not going to change that, but I’m not going to buy her a book about understanding your queer daughter who is in a straight-presenting relationship. I’m not going to do any of that because that would be hurtful to her. But it also means that I’m gonna take up just as much spiritual space. So if she, and she has invited me to a bunch of different church events and things like that, and so my conversation with her to stand in integrity and what matters to me and let go of the reception is to say to her, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to have all three of your children not subscribe to the faith traditions you raise them with, that has to be painful. And I’m honestly so sorry that that is what you’ve had to experience. Please know my intention when I say no to these things is not to cause pain and not to hurt you. It’s from a place of standing in my own truth. So here’s my commitment to you: If my mind ever changes, you will be the absolute first person to know. But going forward, this is my request. Please do not invite me to any church functions. Please do not send me any materials or literature. The same way I do not invite you to Summer Solstice, nor do I try to give you a tarot card reading because I respect that boundary of yours. So I’m going to ask for the same in return. And that really did the trick. I’ll tell you what. And again, she’s hurt. There is pain that’s caused. And I cannot carry that burden. That is not something I am responsible for. I’m gonna allow her to carry that.

Becky Mollenkamp: And there’s no one right way to do anything, right? We know that is a core tenet of white supremacy is the idea that there’s one right way, perfectionism, black-and-white, binary thinking. It is you as an individual get to make the choices that are right for you and how you set your boundaries, how you enforce your boundaries, what you do and don’t allow. You choose to go to your mother’s. You don’t have to make that choice. You make that choice. But then we have to make sure that we aren’t pushing our own what’s right for us onto others and deciding that the way I do it is the one right way. Like to say that if you’re spending time with your mom, then you’re not representing the queer community well. That is not for me to say, because that choice may be different for you. And for someone else, there may not be that safety to be able to be in that. And that’s their decision. So, yeah. And I think that’s why, again, with everything, nuance matters. It gets down to the nuance. And thank you for bringing the nuance into this discussion. I want to wrap us up for this. We are going to have a bonus conversation about self-care because I think you and I both relate on it, not just looking like bubble baths and how does self -care play into our self-worth and enoughness. Before we go though, I want to mention your ebook that’s free on your website or workbook, which is called Speak Up for Yourself Without Being a Dick because I think that really aligns with everything we’ve been talking about. Women especially are made to believe that being assertive means that they are rude or a bitch or a dick. And so you’ve shown a lot of examples, I think, just in ways you’ve spoken about how you can communicate assertively, vulnerably, with strength, with character and integrity without it being you’re an asshole or you are the other thing we learn to do, which is kind of be passive aggressive or dance around things, right? How to be really assertive without it being rude. So go get that. Is there another resource, a book or something that’s been really helpful in your own journey that you would like to share?

Amy Green Smith: Circling back to our very beginning of our conversation, have you checked out “Atlas of the Heart” by Brené?

Becky Mollenkamp: I’ve not read that one yet. That was the newest I know and I have not gotten that one.

Amy Green Smith: It is somewhat of a vade mecum, or gosh, like a dictionary of, I wanna say it’s around 80 some emotions or human experiences. So she puts perfectionism in there, even though it’s a human experience, not necessarily an emotion. And it really gets granular around having nomenclature for what we’re experiencing. So she did a study that I want to say was around 7,000 individuals asking them how many emotions can you name? The average, how many do you think, Becky? The average emotions.

Becky Mollenkamp: I’m hoping it’s more than just Inside Out, but I’m going to guess it might be like Inside Out and Inside Out 2, and so I’m thinking six.

Amy Green Smith: Well, you’re being generous because it was three.

Becky Mollenkamp: Oh my goodness. Well then that’s just Inside Out 1, which is like children who are, you know, up to about six.

Amy Green Smith: Right. And it is mad, glad, and sad, basically. And that’s it. And not nuances of those, not offshoots of those, like rage or fury. And so she breaks down all of these different types of emotions so that we have the verbiage, the vernacular to actually advocate for ourselves. So again, to what we were talking about at the very beginning, if I can say, I’m experiencing grief or I’m experiencing wonder or awe or no, that was envy, not necessarily jealousy. If we have the words around that, how much easier is it for us to traverse to actually go, okay, no, the situation sucks. I don’t suck. I’m just feeling all of this grief because I did not attain something that I wanted. That doesn’t mean I’m not enough, right? Or, wow I can see why I have a value around this, they have a value around that, and I’m feeling this disconnection with them. How do I want to go about that? I think the more language we have around things, and it can be dangerous too, because as soon as everyone heard about narcissism, now it’s like, my ex is a narcissist, or, that’s toxic. We can be hyperdiagnostic, of course, and I think it’s a yes-and I do find that when we have terminology for things, it can be incredibly expansive for us as well.

Becky Mollenkamp: For sure, that’s why I work with my child on it because it’s very different than when he tells me he’s sad vs. he’s disappointed. And I can do more when I understand more of the nuance of what’s going on. So I think that’s great. The last thing is, is there a nonprofit organization that’s doing good work in the world that you’d like to shine the light on? Maybe one that your company gives to or that you’d like to give to.

Amy Green Smith: Gosh, I feel like there’s so many. There’s, well, of course, Planned Parenthood. I mean, of course. And there’s one that I give to a lot called Act Blue, which is for a lot of blue-leaning folks.

Becky Mollenkamp: Yes, in the age that we are in, the election cycle, election year that we’re in, ActBlue is doing the work to try and save democracy, ultimately, with getting candidates that will actually care to save our democracy elected. So that’s great. Thank you for sharing those. I will make a donation. I already give to Planned Parenthood regularly anyway, but I will make a donation to ActBlue as a thank you for your time and ask others that are listening to do the same. And we’re going to stop here and go have our bonus conversation about self-care. So if you want to hear that, make sure you’re subscribed to the Feminist Founders newsletter. That content will be shared there. And thank you again, Amy, for your time. It’s been a great conversation.

Amy Green Smith: I’ve had a blast, Becky. Thanks for having me.