Adulting - #97 Selfishness, Communication & Taxes with Michelle Elman

Episode Date: April 4, 2021

Hey podulters, I hope you’re well! This week I speak to life coach, author and TedXSpeaker, Michelle Elman. The three things she wishes she was taught in school are that women can be selfish, how to communicate and how to do taxes. Michelle’s new book The Joy of Being Selfish, all about boundaries and how to set them, is out now, and will definitely be right up your street if you enjoy this conversation! As always please do rate review and subscribe, bye! X Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Hello, poddleters, and happy Easter if you're listening to this on Easter Sunday. Wow, that was an exciting crack in my voice. I hope you're well. This week, I'm speaking to Life Coach author and TEDx speaker, Michelle Ellman. Her three things that she wishes she was taught in school are that women can be selfish, how to communicate and how to do taxes. Michelle's new book, The Joy of Being Selfish, is all about boundaries and how to set them. And that is something that we speak about a lot in the episode. In fact, I really, really enjoyed this conversation. And her book is out now and it'll be right up your street if you do enjoy listening to this conversation as well. So as always, please do rate, review and subscribe

and I really hope you enjoy. Bye. Hello and welcome to Adulting. Today I'm joined by Michelle Ellman. Thank you so much for coming on. How are you? Good. I am living lockdown alone. That is my only big problem in life. But apart from that, I'm great. Oh, that's so good to hear. I mean, I'm feeling much better now that it's, although it's really gloomy today, but yesterday, the weather and on, was it Saturday? Oh my God, it was amazing. It was so sunny. I know it's starting to become spring and I feel like the first lockdown last year, God, it's starting to become spring and I feel like the first lockdown last year, God that's depressing to say but whatever, it was so much nicer because of the weather so I'm really hoping that will lift the mood this time as well. But apart from living on

your own, tell us a bit more about Michelle, what you do and who you are. So a lot of people know me online as Scarred Not Scared. I am a life coach, author of two books and I am a public speaker and that's largely what I do. Pretty much all my content revolves around personal development and improvement and basically living your life to the fullest potential. And so how did you get into this? Because I can remember, I think I might even have met you at an event years ago. I'm trying to think what it was, like an Instagram event. And I remember coming across you and finding all of your posts so like at that time really revolutionary because I feel like you were talking about things to do with like body image and things that you'd been through in your life and I honestly think this was like five years ago and at that time it was quite new to me how did you get into that and where was your inspiration

to start sharing your story and your journey? Well because it was I have been in this like social media game, I guess. It's not really a game, but whatever. For six years, seven years now. And back then you literally went viral for one photo and it became a career. It wasn't intentional, but I did want to talk about scars. And that's essentially, well, that's where the username scarred not scared comes from, because I've had 15 surgeries before the age of 20. And I had a lot of surgery scars on my stomach. And I saw this body positive conversation growing. And I just found that for a movement that says all bodies are beautiful, I still didn't see any bodies that talk about mine. And anytime I saw the word scars mentioned in an Instagram

caption, they would be talking about like stretch marks and cellulite, but they weren't actually talking about surgery scars. And I think unless you've gone through surgeries, you actually don't consider that that could be an insecurity. And because there's so much shame around, or at least at the time there was around surgery scars. It took me until I was 21 to see someone with a surgery scar outside of a hospital setting, which considering how many people go into hospital every single day is kind of shocking. And so I wanted to make sure the conversation of surgery scars, but not just the scars, but the surgery, the illness, the trauma around that started coming into conversation. So when I started creating

that content and when I went viral for that first picture and grew a little bit of a following, I guess it's kind of what you're saying around like the kind of content I created was so drastically different to the content that was on Instagram at the time, because it was still in a phase of very highly curated. It was almost still a photograph app. And I was putting up makeup free selfies and all of that things, which are very normalized now. And there were so many body positive pages doing that. But at the time it was, it was literally 10 of us. So there were 10 of us who were doing that stuff. And like, we all were, became really close friends and a lot of them are still my really good friends to this day but we're kind of the oldies now like there's a whole new crop of people and we're like

I was joking with one of them the other day being like oh he has fiends now because like we've all kind of moved on in different directions and I've gone back to my life coaching roots and I mean I loved it I love posting about that stuff. But when you feel like you've said everything you need to say on a topic, I feel like there were also moments, especially in the last few years, where I was just like, I feel a bit limited by it because I didn't expect when I launched Scarred Not Scared that I would be talking about my trauma every day. And part of me just wanted to give

myself the opportunity to use my brain more and challenge myself more and unfortunately it's not challenging when you've been talking about the same thing for the last five years. I was just about to say it's I I had a similar but almost like opposite thing where I used to talk about like fitness the whole time but in a funny way the similarity is that you it was always focused on your body and images of you and at the beginning I thought it was really helpful and I loved doing it and then after a while I started to be like god I've really got to show up and be really vulnerable kind of every day in the hopes that it's helping other people and whilst that can be really helpful as you say you kind of lose a little bit of yourself that is outside of that whether that's your bit of trauma

like you were saying or for me whatever it was I was talking about and the difficulty with social media is once you're in that niche it's really hard to break away did you struggle to kind of like reframe what your audience were expecting from you because that can take a bit of time oh 100% it definitely took around two years and And this new book, The Joy of Being Selfish, has really helped me move into that new area. But I almost felt like I hadn't until this book came out. And I think it's because being vulnerable online at first was a really good thing. And then you realize from the influencer side, how much that actually impacts you, because it does feel like you're giving away pieces of yourself. And if you think about a normal interaction, and maybe I'm coming

from this from a very much psychological life coach perspective, but if you were to share that level of vulnerable information with someone in your life, that would be after years of friendship, right? Or after years of knowing someone and building up that trust slowly. That can't be replicated on the internet. So actually, there's a level of unsafety in being that vulnerable online. And I think after a few years of doing it, I started noticing the impact of it on me. And as much as it made other people feel better, it's why boundaries became so important to me because I was like, actually, I don't need to be divulging all of this and I don't need to be giving so much of myself. And it's okay for me to say,

I used to share this information in the past, but I'm not sharing it anymore. And whether that's someone asking, why did you have 15 surgeries or someone asking what your scars from it's okay for me to say well if you want to know that answer go go get my first book it has all the answers in there but I don't have to keep repeating it and regurgitating my trauma because someone's curious online and has just discovered me yeah that's really interesting because I think this too sometimes I do an Instagram post and I think because I was so desperate to like you feel like you really owe your audience what they're hoping from you and you have a really great relationship and it can feel like a community

so I would find myself like being vulnerable in a way that I probably wouldn't say to my really close friends and would write things on my Instagram for how many people to see and then I would be like really embarrassed thinking about if my friends read it, but also at the same time was openly putting it on the internet for anyone to read. I don't understand like what, it's a really weird dichotomy, but I still get it now sometimes where like I'll do Instagram stories being silly. And then I see someone that I know watching it. I'm like, oh my God, this is so cringe. It's really odd. Oh, I totally have that moment where like, it happens a lot where I get I'll put

something in my Instagram stories but it's actually delayed because sometimes I just save stories and put it out like a few days later and it'll be me saying something like oh I've had a really rough day today and then I'll get a bunch of texts on my phone being like for my friends being like are you okay I saw your stories and I'm oh, I recorded that two days ago. It was just like, I forgot to put it out. Because especially now, because they annotate my stories, a lot of the time I save them and then will annotate it later. And then by the time I've remembered to annotate it later, it's actually been a day and a half or something. But I've never gone to text my friends like, oh, I'm feeling down.

But then I went on Instagram to do the same thing. So I've never gone to text my friends like, oh, I'm feeling down. But then I went on Instagram to do the same thing. So I totally understand that. But also, I think it's why there's this stereotype of sharing so much more online, because it feels like you're not actually sharing to a person, or at least for me, when I create content, I would never put anything out if I thought about the fact that it was going out to hundreds of thousands of people. So I don't think about that aspect. I kind of just put it out, which helps to be authentic because I don't really overthink my content and anyone who scrolled through my page. It's all quite in the moment stuff. I don't really overthink my captions. I just put it out there. But I do have now a filter where I go, if this is controversial

in any way, I do save it until I'm in a good mental health space because I've had too many experiences in the past where I didn't overly think about my content, which is a good thing. But then I put out something that I didn't quite realize was controversial until everyone wanted to have a debate about it. And I was like, oh, I just don't have the energy to have this debate. But then I started the conversation kind of thing. So now I save those more controversial moments. I remember one, for example, was I tweeted out this thing about how if you have butterflies, that's actually a sign that the person that you're dating is actually quite unsafe, which I put it as a tweet. So I probably didn't fully explain

myself and just got bombarded with like, no, that's not like people can just have butterflies and blah, blah, blah. I was just like, oh, I should have said that was, that was more controversial than I thought in my head. But essentially what I was trying to say was like, like true love or healthy love should feel like safety, not like that nervous energy of butterflies. And but the Internet misinterprets things and maybe I miscommunicated it or didn't say it perfectly. But it's things like that. And then you're already having a bad day and then you're like oh I'm spending all this time and energy on this when if I had just saved it and made sure I had written it slightly differently tomorrow then I wouldn't have to go through all this like waste of energy this is so funny because I spoke to Shona Virtue about this on another episode that we did recently and she was saying how like on the internet everything has to be put into a really absolute soundbite so what you did like there you've written

a really good tweet like whatever it was if you're with someone they shouldn't give you butterflies which I know what you're saying it's like we're told that love is all about passion and excitement but actually it should feel calming and the opposite like yeah it doesn't make sense but what's interesting is if you're someone who's the people who are like really good at like going viral online are the ones who can say those absolute statements and then not care when people are like this doesn't make sense whereas you sound like you're like me and I want to caveat everything and then be like no let me explain here you go here's like a 600 word reply about why I didn't mean to offend you or whatever and so it's interesting how the internet it works for some

people but if you're someone that really doesn't want to be not misunderstood but you you mean what you're saying and you're not just trying to go viral or whatever it can make quite a complicated space that's why I love things like podcasts and books because you have the room to explain your ideas and the space for nuance which is definitely not there on the internet in the same way. Oh 100%%. Everything has nuance. I mean, the latest thing that was a controversial thing that I did was I made a podcast episode on ghosting. I was talking about ghosting, which to me is like, it's a very specific definition. And somehow loads of people took away from it that I was saying that if you, it's this internet thing of putting words in your mouth that you did not say. So a lot of people replied being like, well, what if you're an abusive relationship and

sometimes going no contact with an abuser is necessary? And I was like, what? I didn't talk about what? Like, of course, of course, I understand that. Like I'm a life coach. Of course, I understand that. But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about, for the most part, I was actually talking about when you ghost, like that you should be having the hard conversations rather than just leaving. I wasn't talking about your physical safety in terms of that. Of course. Like if you have to, like, I guess, technically ghost an abuser, of course go do that. But like, do you get what I mean? It was things like that but everything has context and nuance but it's why I like I mean it's why I love books because what else in this world

do you get to have that length of time with a person it actually gives so much room to learn from books because I mean you never get that length of time because even with things like TikTok it's 15 seconds. You don't get their attention in the first three seconds. Whereas when you sit down to read a book, you give it more patience inherently. Yeah, I totally agree. And you really invest your time. And I just think there's that space for if you say something that isn't fully fleshed out immediately, it'll be fully rounded and formed as an idea at the end whereas I think you also can't respond to a book like you can't comment and the author you can't like comment to the author immediately so where there's that might

be a knee-jerk reaction when you're reading a book and you think oh I'm not sure about that you keep reading and then you go oh okay that makes sense whereas I think on the internet what happens is there'll be a piece of writing or someone will say something and our immediate reaction is oh my god no this goes against my belief about this well I better say something and then you've kind of reacted before you've even sat with that thought because I think we've created a culture as well where like we have to be seen as doing the right thing so people calling out on the ghosting thing probably think they're being really smart and you know encouraging you to engage in conversations around abusers but as you said like that that should be implied it should be obvious that contextually what you're talking about is dating and ghosting in a really like normal dating

scenario there's always going to be like parameters around that so yeah I do think that's interesting and I don't I don't know if that's going to change anytime soon but it it definitely is um but it also creates this like um filter in your brain which I'm not sure if you have but like I now have this filter in my brain of reading through anything I post online for any way it could possibly be misinterpreted which is so exhausting to do because until someone mentioned like the the ghosting thing for example until someone mentioned that my brain did not even go there because I was like for me when I was talking about ghosting I was talking about dating apps largely like my brain was in a very specific area that and also it's kind of the benefit of the doubt thing that if you had a relationship with

someone in real life you would be like well of course she didn't mean that because we've have a relationship and we have that trust between us. And we, I know what that person's like, whereas on the internet, that's removed. And so it's like, well, obviously I didn't mean that. Like, why would I mean that? I've, I've spoken about gaslighting. I've spoken about narcissists. Like I've had those conversations, not in that specific podcast, but in other podcasts, in other Instagram posts, I've talked about this stuff, but there's this expectation online that you have to talk about every single aspect of everything within one post, which is impossible. There's a really funny thing that's like, I'm sure Shona shared this as well where it's like oh you said you like apples and oranges but what about melons and mangoes and

and it's like that's the internet if you go I really love bananas it's like someone DMing you and going but what about light cheese you've never mentioned light cheese it's like it's just not sometimes you just you can't talk about everything but um I feel like we could talk about this all day so I'm gonna I'm gonna start with your first thing it's it's such a mind fill talking about that topic but it is interesting but I'm going to go on to three things that you wish you're talking to school because your first thing really links into your book which I've just started reading and I absolutely love it and it's being really it's interesting because I I'm really familiar with the concept of boundaries and I follow

people online you talk about them but the way you put things in the book certain things I hadn't really thought about in relation to boundaries it's been really helpful anyway so on to your first thing you said you said I think the first one would be that women can be selfish and put themselves first I wonder if you could expand on what selfishness means to you because I know that's the beginning of the book and I think people would really benefit from hearing that and and more about this point and what you've learned on it, I guess. Yeah, so when it comes to the word selfish, everyone's like, oh, that's going too far. But we are always on board with self-love and self-care. Yet, if you actually put other people before yourselves, to the point where you're so low down on your priority list, by the time you

get to your needs and what you want, then you don't have any time and energy left. So I actually believe being selfish is necessary. And this compliment of being a selfless woman, we hear women being complimented as being selfless, I don't believe should be a compliment because why should I have to forget myself in order to be worthy to society? And I actually think a lot of the time when someone is selfless, it is actually a sign of insecurity and less a sign of being a good human. If you've ever known a selfless person, usually they do so much for others because they actually don't believe in their value as a person. And so they give so much to others to almost guarantee a place in their

life. And so it's why I think in order for us to take care of ourselves, we do need to put ourselves at the top of our priority list. And I think the reason why I wanted to learn that in school, or wish I had learned that in school, is because I grew up in a school that literally taught me the opposite. I went to an all-girls school that pretty much raised you. Well, they would tell you, you were bright young ladies. And essentially, you had to be smart to get the education requirements to find a husband, was the message we were told. And and that essentially then you'd marry off and then you don't need these education requirements anymore but I mean our school life came with

cookery lessons and sewing lessons and things like that so it was very much like training you to be a wife and I think it was just always there's a reason why you should be educating yourself is for someone else like even things like that were always implicit in the way we got brought up so I just wish I got told like you can want this stuff for you and you can want this stuff because you want to build your own life and not because of attracting someone else. And I think it took me years to unlearn that kind of training that, especially when you grow up in an all-girls school, the relationship with like male attention is so warped because it's put on such a pedestal because you've not had that male interaction for seven years. And then you leave to

go to university and suddenly, like, because of that training, your male relationships, for example, like having guy friends within our school was like so much more important than having girlfriends. So like the popular girls will have the most guy friends and things like that where like it's always putting men higher than women which if you live your life according to that it's again that thing of like you have to be completely selfless and give yourself to everyone else and you should think about how everyone else is perceiving you and not how you perceive yourself or what you want and what you need this is quite a personal question I don't know what your relationship's like with your parents and stuff but now that you're older and you've kind

of because that's quite um I know people that went to girls schools and I guess I've never really heard it framed quite so extremely but have you gone back and said to them like this is such a warped way for a girl to be brought up or not really is that something you've broached to my parents my parents completely agree I just don't think I was very honest with my experience in school with them right I mean the most extreme thing is I had quite a number of awful things happen with teachers and they actually didn't know any of it until my memoir came out which was my first book and I got a call from my mum like being like why did you tell us any of this like we would have taken you out of school immediately um but I think

because I I went to boarding school so I went to boarding school I was in um in England and my parents were in Hong Kong it's just like and back then you didn't have things like FaceTime you didn't have Skype like I would call them maybe once a week and it was it was and back then you didn't have things like FaceTime, you didn't have Skype. Like I would call them maybe once a week and it was, it was different back then. But I do think they made the best decision that they made knowing what they knew about the school. But I guess they didn't realize. And I mean, it's a bit of a joke now that we joke about. Like, I mean, even just with my school friends about this like young ladies thing of like being told you're a young lady at 11 years old is like weird in itself oh I definitely

had similar experience so I also went to a school that was a private school but I didn't board but it was boarding and I do think that in those environments as well sometimes there can be slightly more old-fashioned and there was definitely this idea that because I was blonde and little like I would get away with stuff like the male teachers would be like oh but Anoni you're so like pretty why would you smoke and I'd be like what what's like why am I not getting told of and that's such a but that's such a weird thing to teach a young girl that like if you act small and diminutive and blonde you can kind of like get away with like that's just fucked up when you think about it so I definitely had

experience as well at school where my my femininity was put as the number one above like academic or sport it was like as long as you like act pretty you'll be fine that is just not what we should be teaching young girls at all oh 100% like within school, it was very much like, I was always told, like I was very boisterous, which I don't even know what that word means. It was just, I was a very vocal person and I would say what I would think and mean what I say and kind of thing. Whereas I think the demureness, I think that was a word used a lot being brought up in that school was like you had to be demure and ladylike and all of these things it's so old-fashioned well I want to go back quickly then to your definition of selfishness because there's a bit actually the bit you said about insecurity just then was something

I found really interesting because there's a bit in the book where you talk about how if someone kind of talks about themselves a lot or um I'm trying to remember what the other thing was it's probably not because that that's not real selfishness that's insecurity that's actually a completely different thing and the way we define selfishness in society is actually like we've misunderstood what selfishness like self-absorbedness is normally like insecurity whereas selfishness is I mean you know better than me I'm trying to butcher what you said. Yes. So I know exactly which part of the book you're talking about. So there's a part where I talk about the fact that when you think of selfishness, you might consider a person who always talks about themselves or doesn't give you consideration. I don't think that's a selfish

person. I think that's an insecure person. So that person who goes on and on about themselves for 20 minutes without stopping to ask how you are, I think that's an insecure person. So that person who goes on and on about themselves for 20 minutes without stopping to ask how you are, I think that's an insecure person. Like an insecure person is the kind of person who doesn't consider other people in the room. A selfish person might ask a lot of someone, but is it so bad that they ask a lot or is it the problem that you don't know how to say no? And so it's about learning the difference between the two. And I go through a load of examples of like what someone might consider a selfish person. But one of the things that I got told I was selfish is when I stopped making my life so convenient for the people around me. And when I was younger, I was, well, I phrase it as a pushover in the book, but essentially a people pleaser. And I think the reason why I'm so anti-promoting selflessness is because that's what I did for

years. And I would drop whatever I was doing or whatever I needed to do in order to be there for my friends. And my highest priority my entire life was to be a good friend, but it was almost always at the detriment of myself. And I don't think me being so selfless towards my friends was actually a good thing for our friendship in the long run, because there is no way you can give so much of yourself without feeling an element of resentment. And it wasn't because I didn't want to do those things. It's because I was doing those things because I genuinely wasn't sure they would still want to be friends with me if I wasn't doing those things. So all my friends would joke that I would pick up the phone after one ring, that like,

if you needed a friend, I was that go-to friend. But it almost formed this belief in my mind that if I wasn't so reliable, no one would be friends with me. So it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy of like, I was doing all these things because I was insecure about my friendships. But then it kind of confirmed to me that all the things I did, the fact that I was the most reliable friend, the fact that if you're an emergency you knew Michelle would pick up the phone then I started worrying that if I didn't do all those things would they still be there this was such an interesting thing to read because I did the exact same thing and also I think sometimes when you I would really cringe normally at saying that I used to be so

selfless because it sounds like you're saying you're an amazing person was actually a bit like what you said when I was going through this phase of like being desperate kind of to make everyone like me I wasn't really the best version of myself because I was so hung up and dependent on being like oh my god yeah that's fine or like I'll come meet you at a really far away place that's like nowhere near where I live and I'll always do that and never ask you to come and meet me or whatever and I think that we think that selflessness I definitely my mum's super selfless because she was brought up in that era of women have to do everything for everyone and never ask for anything back and as you say it goes back to that really basic saying of like you've got to put your oxygen mask on first whatever it just means you're running on empty

and actually it has so many negative repercussions later down the line that you could never have foreseen because we look at women and we go oh my god she just doesn't even have a minute to herself she's so wonderful she just runs around after everyone else and it's like how can you be like that's such a good thing you're literally watching someone like run themselves into the ground that's such a good example about what you said about always making the journey to someone else but they never make the journey to you because because that was also something I did. But I also think when I look back to that point in my life, I don't think I could have defined who I actually was because I was so different around different

people because I was so busy being the person that they wanted me to be, that I would change so much in different audiences. And to the point where I remember a housemate saying like, there was one friend who I was always around and they said, every time you're around her, like you turn into a different person. But I actually think I did that with everyone, that I turned into the person they wanted me to be. And so it was only once I started setting boundaries. And when you do that, you get rid of a lot of these people who take advantage of your lack of boundaries. But I actually started defining who I was because when you set boundaries, you become more certain in your identity because you're not

changing depending on who's in the room. What, give us an example of like the boundaries that you first started to set for people who maybe haven't really been introduced to boundary setting yet. I set a lot of boundaries around dating at first because I had a lot of, it's like revolving doors of people coming in my life and then dropping me and then coming back out of my life so I made this a new policy of like once you're out of my life you're out of my life I delete your number I delete your messages we're not doing this thing of um rereading old messages and over romanticizing a past relationship that really was not as good as you're making it out to be so that was one of the things that I said I also um was growing on social media and I'd had

one or two experiences bumping into old school friends and because of this whole people pleasing thing I was a very different person in school and I understand that all these people in school were now talking about me and how I suddenly have this following and blah blah and this wasn't the Michelle they knew in school well of course because like the Michelle you knew at the school was pushover so like so I had all these like passive aggressive comments coming in my direction so another boundary I set was um I unfriended anyone who didn't have my phone number and that was the rule I set was why would I let someone have access to my Facebook for example when I wouldn't even give them my phone number? Like your Facebook has so much more information. So I unfriended so many people.

And it was passive aggressive things. Like I remember going to a party with a few school friends and there were other people from our school year. And one of them said, walked up to, literally walked up to me, hadn't said anything else it just went so you know you're following you bought your followers right and I just I think it was moments like that I just went like how the hell do they know this information about me they know this information about me because I'm giving them access to it on my Facebook and yes my Instagram account is public but there are things I can limit from them. And so it was things like that, which I was just like, I just don't need to put up with it. I think the greatest boundary I realized or the first one I set was I was surrounded by so many

people who made me feel unlovable or made me feel like I was difficult to be around or like there were so many phrases like good in small doses or a lot to handle but fun on a night out. There were so many things that were passive aggressively said to me. So actually one of the first things I did is I cut a lot of people out of my life. I set boundaries when those boundaries were broken or violated then I would cut them out of my life. And I'm really big on not cutting people out without setting the boundaries first. Because I think if you're cutting people out without communicating boundaries, then you are just running away from the hard conversations. And that's just like living through the fear of intimacy and all of those things. So I did have the hard conversations of setting boundaries, but when they weren't respected, I took that to mean what it's

literally telling you that they didn't have respect for me. And what I realized is there's no way in hell that I could build up my self-esteem when I was surrounded by people who treated me awfully. And so a large amount of boundary setting was not just setting boundaries around privacy and limiting information, all the things I've just mentioned, but also around how people talk to me. There were a lot of like passive aggressive comments I used to receive like that one about the followers. And I would just laugh it off. And so one of the first boundaries I set was saying, don't speak to me that way. Or if you continue, if you continue saying things like that, I'm going to walk out the room. Like I'm going to leave this conversation and realizing I don't deserve to be treated like this. I don't

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com. Please play responsibly. It's so interesting because it's something I learned as well. Not even just like people treating you badly, but people you don't necessarily get on with that well. When you are

a people pleaser or someone that really thinks that being selfless will like get you what you need which is I don't know community or friends whatever you kind of force yourself to want everyone to like you which means you open yourself up to friendships that would never really work if you weren't kind of so desperate for them to happen and so it's really like almost relieving when you realize of course it's like with anything like you can never please everyone you can't be friends with everyone but I think as women we're taught that we're meant to be loved and liked and affable towards everyone and anyone that comes around and it can be really I think when you're a teenager especially really disconcerting when you do come across people as everyone will that you don't just get along with and getting comfortable with this idea that not everyone is for you

is such a massive thing to learn I wish that that's something that I'd learned younger because it can make me even now really uncomfortable when I just fundamentally don't it doesn't matter I just don't get on with someone it might be someone I met at an event for five minutes and I'll think about it for like a week like why I can tell they didn't like me but I didn't like them either but what's funny is that even if I didn't like them I would still want them to like me yeah and that was the part I never really understood that like I didn't like them, I would still want them to like me. And that was the part I never really understood that like, I didn't want to be like, I wouldn't choose them as a friend, but I still didn't want them to dislike me. And so it was about realizing that I actually had a choice.

And as silly as that sounds, because it sounds like common sense up to up until that point in my life, what until the age of 20 20 I can't say I actually ever asked myself if the guy I was dating I actually liked because I kind of thought the way it works is they like you and therefore that should be a high enough compliment that that's you date them like if anyone likes me I date them whereas I never actually had the filter in my brain to be like but do I actually like them back? Because I never asked myself that because you're just so grateful for having relationships in your life or friendships in your life. And it's that thing of wanting to be accepted and wanting that connection.

So you'll do anything in your life to make their life easier easier to have that connection and realizing actually it doesn't lead to the best quality of relationships and I used to joke that I was if you wanted to feel better about your life I was that person in the friendship group who you would compare your life to because you'd feel better about yourself but what that leads to is you have a bunch of friends where the dynamic depends on you being the mess or the person who needs fixing but then what happens when that person doesn't need fixing anymore the whole dynamic shifts and it just doesn't work anymore because unless I continue to be broken or continue to be a mess it doesn't work because the whole relationship is based on the fact that you boost your self-esteem

by having me around yeah I think that this is something interesting as well as like as you saying earlier about fitting like adapting to whichever friends you're around I think it's something you do when you're younger where there's kind of like hierarchy and you will to your own detriment put yourself in that position of like whether it's even just not trying at things or not I know that like loads of me my friends out there older we would like on purpose kind of self-sabotage in order to make room for those other people in your group that would like need that extra space whatever I definitely think lots of this is so prevalent as like teenagers but maybe it shouldn't

have to be and I definitely think the more I learn about attachment theory and obviously people who are brought up maybe with more secure attachment in their families maybe suffer less with this kind of thing so I think it's all sort of tied into your history of I don't know like fear of abandonment but I also think I also think there's there's a a thing where in childhood whether primary school secondary school university you kind of have a limited pool of people who you can get to know and you don't really have much option so your only option is to get those people who are in your life to love you whereas once you actually become an adult you realize actually if these people don't love me I can find new people who love me and so it's realizing that like this limited pool isn't so

limited anymore and it starts at university where you realize well okay there are now thousands of people I can choose from whereas I don't know in my school year there was 11 people in my house who I had to live with and have breakfast lunch and dinner with every day so there's not much to choose from and then realizing oh wait so I don't actually have to force these 11 people to love like me or like in my hall in university in my corridor there was like 45 people I don't actually have to force these 11 people to love like me or like in my hall in university in my corridor, there was like 45 people. I didn't actually need those 45 people to like me because there's a in university and that was when I truly actually think I came into my own was when I was allowed to be me and liked for who I was naturally rather than trying to fit into almost what the like set rules are or like the set codes of conduct in

order to be popular or to be liked by the people who I was forced to be around. I definitely had the same experience where I made like my best friends for life at university and I'm still friends with lots of my school friends but I think this is such a crucial thing to talk about because on Instagram I'm sure people message you about this like one of the main things people always ask me is like how do I make friends in my 20s that I'm not really friends with the people I was at school with and we really romanticize those school friendships as like the be-all and end-all and the really top tier friendships whereas actually as you just said like if you didn't necessarily forge lifelong friendships at school that's not really anything wrong on your part it's just that as you said the sample size of people that you could hang out with was really small and probably really specific and like if you're all in the same area

there'll be lots of similarities I guess with people at certain schools so if you did feel like you didn't get on that's sort of fine and I wish that we had more I wish we were as okay with like making new friends as we are with dating I feel like it's so normal to be like I'm gonna go on dates and like date loads of different men or women but it's not as normal to be like I'm gonna go out and look for friends do you know what I mean but also I wish we normalized friendship breakups because we always talk about romantic breakups, but friendship breakups are a thing. And in my experience, friendship breakups sometimes hurt a lot more than romantic breakups, or at least like the best, the ex best friends that I have definitely broke my heart a lot more than any guy has. And it's okay

for that friendship to end. And it's okay to see that friendship as a positive thing in your life, just because it did end doesn't mean it was a failure. And so I've kind of changed my whole relationship with friendship where I've gone like, just because we were best friends for seven years and we're not anymore doesn't mean I can't have positive feelings towards them. Just because I miss them doesn't mean I want them back in their life. Just because I ask about them to a mutual friend and ask how they are and hope for the best for them doesn't mean I want them back in my life. But we can have that period of time where we were the perfect people for each other, but not anymore and that's okay. And I think you're right when it comes to this thing of,

it's almost like a personal failing if a friendship ends. Because I think we've glamorized these long-term relationships, but we stop looking at the quality of it. Whereas in a romantic relationship, when the quality of that relationship goes down, we're a lot more likely to detect it whereas with friendship it's almost like well you don't really have an option they're your friend for life which I don't believe is true no I think that's really true and I definitely had

some really devastating friendship breakups in my life and sometimes even just friendships that just suddenly one day you wake up and oh my god I haven't spoken to that person for like months and then it's really sad to think that you speak to them every day there's lots of really weird things with friendships because again there isn't that same level of commitment in some way it's just kind of like an unspoken rule that like you said you'll be there forever but you're I don't think we take as many active steps in friendships as we necessarily would with a relationship in the same way where we might be like oh we're going to try and really work on my relationship I think with friendships sometimes you let can let them fall away in a way that you wouldn't you maybe would fight harder for romantic

love I'm not sure it's actually quite funny because once I started realizing I had a choice in my friendships and I could actually end friendships. I actually invested in the friendships I do have more because I realized the importance of them. And I think because also I've been single for a while, like I realized that they're actually the relationships that held me together in like my most important moments in life. And I mean, it's even stuff like my whole apartment at the moment is covered in flowers. My house looks like a greenhouse because all my friends were just so incredible around my book launch. And I like, I've, I've always had like dating relationships, but they're just not the ones that I, if I look back on my life, they're not the ones that I think of when I think about the big moments in my life. And so actually cutting friends out, ironically, is what led me to investing more in them and not taking friendships for granted and

realizing, no, you do actually have to call and check in your friend. And even especially right now in the pandemic, where we don't have a much emotional capacity, sometimes it's literally just texting a friend saying like, thinking of you, have no energy at the moment but let's catch up soon just a touch base because you would do that with a romantic partner that's so true this actually leads us on really well to another thing that you wish you were taught in school which is communication um and like as you say so much of the book is teaching things you wish you things to say and you wish you had that when you were younger can you give examples of like that's a really good example of communication that doesn't demand a reply which I always think especially right now is really crucial

what other forms of communication have you learned like as you've got older that you wish you'd had before I just wish like we we all normalize because unfortunately the norm is bad communication whereas so like things like the silent treatment is really normalized whereas I wish instead of the silent treatment if you need time to process something send someone a text being like I'm still really angry about this I need a few days can I text you on Monday about it that means you're not punishing someone with your silence and you're not leaving them in this anxiety. But also a lot of the time when you use the silent treatment, the other person doesn't actually know why you're upset. And so when it comes to communication,

essentially, I mean, this is me massively simplifying it, but I say what I mean and I mean what I say. And as cliche as that is is it simplifies your life so much but when I was in school the normal way of communicating was passive-aggressive the silent treatment was used a lot um like things like gossiping and bitching were normalized whereas if we actually were taught at a young age if you have an issue with someone you talk to that person because that's the only person who can fix your problem and that you don't create uh what i call a triangle dynamic so you don't go to a third party to bitch about the person that you actually have an issue with because actually a lot of the time that comes out of insecurity as well it's

you wanting someone to take your side because you don't feel valid enough in your feelings or around the issue that you have. And so you want someone to validate that you have a right to be upset or you have a right to be angry. But in turn, it's now creating a two versus one situation, which is never nice, no matter which part of that dynamic you're in and so it's things like that where um I've just learned over the last few years that it's turned my my relationships into just I mean the word I keep coming back to is simple where like I say to people I work with I say to my family I say to my friends if you know if I'm annoyed at you you will know because I will tell you so there's no second guessing there's also none of this testing relationships and I must say this is my biggest pet peeve at the moment especially do not do this

in the pandemic I don't know why people are doing it in the pandemic but I have heard enough stories where people are you know that whole um oh it's the quote around stop texting your friends and see oh no the one where it's like um the one where it's like stop texting your friends and see how many dead plants you're watering like to see whether they notice and whether they text you and I'm like no if your friend is not texting you enough and not making enough effort what you do is you send them a text and you say hey not heard from you for a while would love to speak to you soon miss you like don't wait to see how long. And like, it's that thing of not texting someone for a month and seeing if they notice. That's not good communication. Like, tests do not belong in friendships. They

don't belong in relationships at all. If you want something, ask for it. If a need is not being met, then tell them a need is not being met. And we need to stop expecting people to be mind readers. And it's this whole thing of, if they loved me, they would know what I need. Well, no, because what you need is different in different situations. And you're not a robot, you're human. And so you're not going to want the exact same thing. Like you might want a hug this time, but next time you might want to have a conversation about it. They can't know unless you tell them. Now, if you tell them what you need and then they don't fulfill it, then that might be giving you a message that you need to listen to. Like if you tell someone,

I need you to text me more often because I feel like we aren't connecting enough. Let's say you're saying that to a partner and then they don't change their behavior. Well, that's telling you something that you maybe need to pay attention to. But if you don't communicate that and you just sit in your resentment that your boyfriend never texts you and your boyfriend never communicates with you, but he's always on his phone and he's liking things on social media then your boyfriend doesn't know you're annoyed you you're the only person sitting in that resentment and that resentment's only affecting you that's such I haven't seen that thing but that's so weird because I know for a fact that if I'm not texting my friends or like there's a few of my friends are the same we all know that means something's happened or we're feeling a bit down

like there's if I go kind of cold on whatsapp I'm not talking to anyone that'll be because something's up with me and then I will get those check-in messages so the idea that you would like stop texting your friend to see if they didn't text you back scares me because I'm like what if something's happened or I don't know I find that really weird but that's also something that I've really actively learned about messaging and talking and things is how many times I've thought oh my god so-and-so hasn't messaged me for like ages. Then I go on a WhatsApp conversation and they were the last one to send a message and I hadn't replied. And then I've been thinking for ages,

I can't believe they never got back to me and realized it was me. And I feel like we do stuff like that all the time. I think so much of it is like basically our projection and we actually also aren't checking ourselves enough to see like not even necessarily about whether other people are being good enough to us but if we are actually reciprocating a hundred percent but also I totally agree with you where I'm the same way that if I drop off like whatsapp it I've done that to everyone it's not personal like there's something going on with me but if you decide to test me in that moment, and the example I use in the book is, um,

my best friend from university, like who has been there through everything, she got a new job and I completely forgot about it. I can't remember why, but I think I was like really busy with some work stuff. And then when I called her just to call her, and just said like how are you she was like yeah they're good the new job's going well and like she just said it that casually but I felt really guilty that I was like oh no I forgot that she started a new job like I didn't even think to text her good luck or like any of those things and she didn't care like she really didn't care but if another friend did care like then I would now I have the relationships with my friends where they would go hey you know I started a new job last week I think you forgot

and like it was kind of shitty that you forgot they would just tell me whereas like if I knew she didn't care because she mentioned it so casually but if she decided in that one week to test our friendship and see how much I truly cared about her based on this one thing, whether I remembered it or not. That's not a reflection of our friendship. That's more a reflection of my memory and my memory is awful. But if you look at that one thing that I didn't do in our friendship and take away a meaning that that means I don't care about you, I don't love you, then that meaning isn't accurate. All it meant was I just had a busy week and I forgot, I forgot for a second but

if she was annoyed about it of course I would apologize and I would be like sorry that was really shit with me but it's things like that where if you want to take away a meaning that's going to hurt yourself then you can do it but this is all that happens is with these testing relationships is because you don't actually know what the other person is going through and that's why I say especially in this pandemic like now is not the time to test your friendships like if you feel like you haven't spoken to someone in a while just text them and say hey miss you haven't spoken to you in a while but we are all dealing with a lot on our plate so to take it personally when someone isn't being as um engaged as they were before is just a you deducing a meaning

that's going to hurt yourself on that point that's so interesting because when I did used to be a bit like bit more of a people people pleaser and there's a bit that you say which I found really interesting which is when you're talking about how you said like selflessness often isn't about other people it's about the person making themselves feel like they're a good person or whatever it's actually derived from self-interest rather than selflessness interestingly and this was definitely true with me when I would try and go above and beyond for my friends in order to like be seen as I don't know really selfless and then they wouldn't reciprocate with the exact same level of vigor as what I had done and then I would take that to be like a personal um stroke again mark against our friendship because they weren't doing the same back for me when actually I had like really um disservice myself by doing that thing

like it really inconvenienced me or like they didn't want it anyway and it was really interesting reading that because I've had so many of these realizations over the years where we like we just aren't well it's just all about not communicating so we're doing things in like a roundabout way in order to get a certain reaction rather than just being like would you like me to do this for you or could you do this for me and it's so simple as you say but it just sounds so stupid when you look back and realize how many times you did things and didn't get the result you wanted because you did it in such a roundabout way does that make sense I mean just the number of times I used to do things for people and then I would get pissed

off because they didn't say thank you but they never asked me to do it like it's something as simple as that and they're like they didn't even realize I was doing something for them because like I didn't want to tell them because I felt like well you should know I did it and then I would get annoyed that they didn't thank me for doing it, but they didn't really want me to do it in the first place. Or like, for example, they didn't know how much it inconvenienced me to do that. And it's things like that. But also once you set boundaries, it's almost like a natural way to repel anyone in your life who isn't good for you. So like, I remember there was a situation where I was always the go-to friend, like in a club, if someone needs to be taken home, for some reason, I was the friend who always had to take everyone home. And I got really resentful

about it after a point. Cause I was like, it ruins my night. And I'm not the one getting too drunk that I have to be taken home, but I'm the most sober one which is why like I'm having to take you home so I remember one night being like um getting really annoyed because like I decided to drink too much that evening and no one looked after me and I was actually like excuse me I have taken you all home for the last two years I'm always the go-to person to make sure you get home safely I'll end my night to make sure you're okay. But when it was my turn, no one did the same for me. And then I realized who was asking me to take them home early. Like, of course you want to make sure your friends are safe, but like, could someone else have done it? A hundred percent. Did I let anyone else do it? I don't know because I jumped in so quickly. I didn't give anyone else a chance to do it. So it was like small things like that.

And then I kind of realized, okay, well, there were some friendships where like it wasn't reciprocated and the number of times I would make sure like I mean it's different with safety because I just feel like I'm just quite um when it comes to like nights out so I'm always quite big on make sure everyone gets home safe and like check everyone's okay um but then I had to recognize that that's for me because that is something that I'm concerned about I wasn't doing it for them as much as I was doing it for me and so then you start recognizing okay well then you have to do it from the goodness of your heart you can't do it because you expect them to take care of you in the same if it was the other way around and so it's it's not about like and I think sometimes when

people read my title especially they're just like, so you're never going to do anything for anyone else. And I'm like, no, just do it for the right reasons. Like if I could just take a moment back then and be like, no, the real reason why you take all your friends home and you're always the first person to jump to it is because you're concerned about safety. And like, that's a grip you don't want to have. So you're doing it for yourself as well as you're doing it for them but you're doing it for yourself and so it's having that moment to realize there are some friendships which won't reciprocate but also some of the times you will just want to do things for other people but then just check your intentions yeah I think as you're saying that it just made me think about like I

guess a good way of looking at it is if you really want to do something for someone else you've got to look at it like an investment where you're not expecting a return rather than what we do sometimes yeah it's a gift yeah which is where we sometimes do something for someone else in the hopes that that will then give us clout or safety within the fence or whatever but it's like you can't make deposits by doing little deeds that no one wants you to do and expect them to have like but also in its most extreme version it's actually a way of trying to manipulate someone because if you do enough for a person you feel like they owe you a certain amount and so you can control the relationship and so that's where if if a lot of people were honest

with themselves that's where a lot of it comes from is that especially if you've had a childhood where it was love was used as a control thing. So like love was given away when you did something good, but taken away when you did something bad, then that translates into adulthood by doing the same thing. So if I am such a giving and selfless friend to you, then at some point I can, I can get that. I can make sure there's like, you love me by doing all these things. Yeah, that makes complete sense. And I think that I, I sort of realized that as well, that there is, it's weird, but these things that we think we're doing in order to be kind to other people actually can have quite like a, not sinister, because you're not, I don't think people are being intentionally malicious but as you say there's that manipulative edge to it and things that we especially as women are taught to seem wrong like

boundary setting or being quite forthright about what you want those are much less harmful than some of the other ways that we've been taught to get things because they're as you say like manipulative and sly and it's just really interesting once you kind of like pick it apart and think about why we've been socially conditioned to be a certain way it's really interesting I know you've got a go-to so I'm going to go to the last thing really quickly so your last thing you wish you've been taught is how to do your taxes how are you getting have you learned that yet well so it's it's one of the things I'm just getting annoyed about in the pandemic where I was literally like why did we waste so many we had like phc classes and general studies classes

but we never got taught like how to do your finances and I'm getting like emails now because like I run a business but like I get emails and I'm literally like I don't even understand half these words and like wouldn't that have been a better use of it and I actually think it's often maybe it's because like I don't think schools teach it in general but I do think there is more of a conversation around money when you're a man and men talk about money a lot more men talk about salaries a lot more whereas with women it's not the case and so I think it does lead into how it affects our career opportunities but it's when you ask me like what's something you wish you were taught it's just one

of the things that first came to mind because I was like it's just so frustrating that I wasn't taught this at a younger age because I just wish I had more understanding around it. No I completely agree and every single episode almost everyone brings up some form of money because it does seem like I just can't believe we aren't taught it in schools because it is such a minefield and like obviously if you're I'm sure you just had to go through and do your tax return at the beginning of this year and every time it's like I freak out and I just want to bury my head in the sand I hate it it just stresses me out so much um that's just because we don't feel knowledgeable or like comfortable in knowing what we've got to be doing which is kind of pointless yeah I literally look

at this stuff and I'm like my brain shuts down like I just I don't understand it and it makes you feel really stupid but I I was talking about it earlier this week with someone and I was just like I have to remember it's like us all learning that's essentially what it is so it's you're not stupid for not knowing it to begin with but there is this weird expectation that suddenly you become an adult and you're meant to know this stuff when no one has actually taught you it completely I completely feel the same um but But I really think that people will be better at adulting through reading your book. I'm really enjoying reading it. It's called The Joy of Being Selfish, Why You Need Boundaries and How to Set Them. But if you want to find you online,

is there anything else that you wanted to direct people towards? So I'm scarrednotscared on TikTok,ok twitter and instagram and my podcast is in all honesty amazing thank you so much for joining me it's been such a pleasure and thank you everyone for listening bye bye We'll be right back. I do. Daily Jackpots. A chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11 p.m. every day. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only.

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