Mantra with Jemma Sbeg - I Am Not Too Much
Episode Date: September 15, 2025This week's mantra is: "I Am Not Too Much." So often, we dim our light, quiet our voices, or shrink ourselves to fit into what we perceive as acceptable. This belief—that we are somehow "too much" f...or others—can hold us back from truly showing up as our authentic selves. In this episode of Mantra, we'll explore how to release the pressure to conform, embrace your unique qualities, and stand confidently in your bigness. Realizing you are not too much means honoring your emotions, your passions, and your energy without apology. This Mantra will inspire you to shed self-doubt, celebrate your full expression, and trust that your true self is exactly enough.Mantra is an OpenMind Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to OpenMind+ on Apple Podcasts. Don’t miss out on all things Mantra! Instagram: @mantraopenmind | @OpenMindStudios TikTok: @OpenMind Facebook: @0penmindstudios X: @OpenMindStudios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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This is Open Mind.
Welcome to a brand new week. Here is your mantra. I am not too much.
I'm Jemmisbeg and every Monday I give you a simple but powerful phrase to consider and bring into your life a philosophy to guide you in the week ahead.
and hopefully even beyond.
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Okay, so let's just get straight into it.
It's time for this week's very powerful, very important, very well-timed mantra.
I am not too much.
So this episode today, this one's for anyone who has ever felt like they had to shrink
themselves, whether it's your emotions, your ambition, with your personality, to make other
people feel comfortable, or because you were too afraid that if you didn't, you wouldn't be
liked, you'd be excluded, you'd be taunted. This episode is for you. I know the feeling very well,
and it has taken me a long time, I guess, to unlearn some of that conditioning that is brought
on by feeling like you're too much. And we're going to talk about it today. Often, you guys know
this. I like to save the personal stories for the second half of my episodes for a little bit later on,
make you guys wait for them, but today it felt like this story kind of needed a place at the top
of the episode. I've definitely spoken about this before, about how, you know, I didn't have
the easiest childhood growing up in terms of being socially accepted by others and that
was a lot of exclusion and bullying when I was a kid and I felt very alienated and I was always
made to feel weird and unwanted and ugly and strange and awkward. I think where that really
stem from was that I was a very sensitive child, but I was also a very boisterous child. And I had a lot of
big feelings and I had a lot of big thoughts and I was loud and I was kind of bigger than all the other
kids and I don't know. I was jovial unhappy. And that never felt particularly accepted during that
time in my life. I remember in particular there was this group of girls who were all very
polite and very beautiful and very cute and very well behaved. And they would always be like,
you're always so loud. You're always so loud. You're always so annoying. Use your inside voice.
Like their parents had obviously told them they were like projecting it onto me. And there were even
teachers who it's so strange like now that a teacher could have like an issue with a child,
but who obviously now like showed just like kind of disdain for me because I was this loud kid who
trying to fit in and who was really struggling and who concealed that struggle with just
more noise and more attempts to be funny and more attempts to be seen. Really, I just felt,
I think, quite excluded because of my presumed muchness. And that was a very formative
experience for me and continues to be. This carried with me for a lot of my late teens, my early
20s as well, in ways that it's kind of hard to explain unless you went through it. I was constantly
replaying conversations. I was incredibly hypervigilant when it came to people's, even their
smallest responses or reactions to me. I would not speak up even when I had something to say.
I would make sure to ask at least two questions for every question someone asked me. I would feel
so embarrassed if my voice was too loud or too irritating. And it meant that
I never felt like I could be authentic, especially when I was a teenager, or I would lose
friends. I wouldn't be invited places. I wouldn't be liked. I guess I wouldn't be treated
well. This then kind of further manifested in my dating life, in work, in everything, even in
how I would drive. Like, I know this is going to sound strange, but I became and was for a while,
like, quite a passive driver. I would never like beat people because I was like, oh, I don't want
anyone to be offended by me. I don't want anyone to like know that maybe I'm dissatisfied or I'm
unhappy. But let's back it up. Let's talk about why it is that being too much has become an
insult, has always kind of been an insult. In what ways have we been conditioned? You and I,
but also the people who criticize other people for their muchness, how have every single one of us
been conditioned to associate being expressive, being ambitious, or being sensitive,
and having emotional depth, with being overwhelming.
When people say too much, often what they mean is that our presence is disrupting the comfort
or the established order or disrupting what they would like to see, what they think they need
to be more comfortable, what they want from their environment, what they expect from other people.
And it's really just saying that their needs trump our own.
their desire, I guess, for a certain behavior from us, they think that that should mean more than our desire to be authentic.
It's really kind of twisted and a bit selfish when we get into it, but often we don't dig past our natural aversion to someone else's rejection to fully understand that this dynamic is super weird.
How come you have to be silent to make them comfortable, but they don't have to tolerate what they don't like about you to make you comfortable?
The thing is, is that we just take their demands for truth.
And we just end up becoming like everyone else and silencing ourselves
because of how deeply this ingrained response to muchness and loudness and sensitivity
has been formed in us.
From a young age, many of us are taught that the qualities that make us stand out can
also make us a problem.
Expressiveness, you know, that is reframed as attention-seeking.
If you are ambitious, you're arrogant.
Any kind of emotions that you have that are too big and large for other people's tastes, that's instability.
This conditioning is reinforced in a lot of subtle ways.
In classrooms, you know, the quiet student is praised, the outspoken one is criticized.
Even if they aren't necessarily interrupting other people's learning, you know, just seems like a teacher preference sometimes.
In workplaces, assertiveness is tolerated from some people, but not from others.
In the media, you know, it often depicts the media in general depicts passionate or ambitious characters or women, especially, as selfish or destructive,
but then other kind of passionate and ambitious characters as admirable.
Over time, these repeated cues teach us implicitly and explicitly that the safest way to belong,
is to dilute the very parts of ourselves that might be misunderstood or provoke discomfort
to make sure that we don't become a target.
We basically end up wanting to be the average of everyone else.
We don't want to stand out.
We don't want to be noticed.
In Australia, we have a special term for this, tall puppy syndrome,
which basically says the flowers that grow and bloom tallest are the first to be cut down.
This is exactly what's happening in this situation.
Our muchness is punished.
The belief that our emotions, our needs, or personalities make us too much often comes down
to relational experiences. Many people learn to self-censor when their natural expressions are met
with withdrawal, criticism, or even punishment from caregivers, teachers, or peers. Gender
socialization, we've kind of been tiptoeing around it for a while, but this plays a massive
insignificant role. Certain emotions or ambitions are encouraged in one group, specifically in young
boys and young men, whilst discouraged in young women and girls. Politeness often seems something
that only young girls learn very, very young, because society wants to promote the fact that women
should be small and quiet, whereas boys and men are allowed to be loud and outgoing and celebratory
and passionate.
The thing is, it's not that men shouldn't be allowed to do those things.
It's that men and women should be allowed to both equally do them
without one group being told that they're too much
or that they're a drama queen
or that they're annoying or overreacting.
This process, like I said, it starts super young
and we begin to absorb these expectations into our sense of self,
believing that our worth is tied to how small or palatable,
we can make ourselves in the eyes of the people who judge us. Soon, as this continues to be
repeated, we don't need an outside force anymore. We begin to take on the role of that force
and we self-censor and we self-silance. This belief does not arise in a vacuum. That's basically
what I'm trying to say. It is built through years of observing who is celebrated and who is silenced,
even if we don't experience it directly ourselves. When we ask ourselves, who taught us this,
You know, the answer is rarely a single person. It is a culture. It is a culture of compliance
that repeats this message over and over and over again. Like I said, there are multiple ways
that this is enforced. Obviously, there are the overt ways that we are taught to be small. You know,
someone's going to tease you to your face. A teacher is going to scold you directly. But there
are quieter ways as well. The silent ways we are told to be smaller are often the most insidious
because they do not come with a clear moment of confrontation that we can name and
reject. They happen in the pauses after we speak, in the quick glances exchanged between
others, in the way our enthusiasm is met with nothing or a change in subject. They happen when
our ideas are ignored until someone else voices them, when our achievements are downplayed,
or when our presence is kind of met with polite intolerance, and you can tell that someone
doesn't really want you there. Someone doesn't really like your vibe. These subtle cues communicate
that our full expression is inconvenient. So either we tone it down or we have to find a way to
process this social discomfort of not being included. Another quiet enforcement comes through
absence rather than action. When certain emotions, ambitions or perspectives are never represented
in the stories we consume, we internalize the idea that they do not belong. If television,
only shows powerful leaders as loud and dominating men, or if books never depict ambitious
people of color or women who are loved and accepted, we learn to question whether those
traits can coexist for us. The lack of representation creates a silent boundary or a silent
barricade around what is possible, and we basically just adjust ourselves to fit in around that
without even noticing.
There is also the way that silence itself can be used as a form of control.
Being met with withdrawal or emotional distance when we express ourselves can basically
train us to associate openness with loss, pain, rejection, disappointment.
You know, that's especially the case in relationships, right?
You ask for your needs to be met.
You are loud about what is upsetting you and someone just ignores you.
over time you learn maybe that behavior won't be tolerated by them either i can keep the
behavior or i can keep them and that's not an easy choice even if we know what the right one is
it says a great deal about our culture right that we can't cope with people feeling deeply
and being themselves and being alive and true to how they feel what is really so bad about
any of that really what is so bad about someone just being expressive what it comes
down to, I personally believe, is that our self-assurance is a threat rather than a strength
to some people. It means we don't follow by the rules. And people don't like that because we
aren't easily controlled. We don't easily slot into the stories they want to tell about
our society or about the people around them. This mindset, I think just represents that as a
collective, maybe not all of us, but all of us in general, there is a discomfort.
with authenticity that's been definitely nailed in from birth.
We are born within systems that value predictability,
conformity, control, and when that is pushed,
when we allow ourselves to be out there and alive and vibrant,
that goes against the status quo,
and the people who are loyal to the status quo, they don't like that.
The thing is, whoever taught us this, whoever believes this,
they have it all wrong and in their desire to make everybody smaller they're actually making
everybody more miserable and more boring and less connected and i want to explain why exactly
this backfires but also how you and i can start rewriting this narrative internally for ourselves
and then externally after this short break
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Welcome back. Now that we've looked at the meaning behind today's mantra, I am not too much.
It is time to go deeper and also discuss how we can personally revolt against this idea that
muchness is bad or is offensive.
So let's start with the question that I asked at the end of our last segment.
What has society gotten wrong about its intention to punish?
muchness. That's the first question we really want to answer. So what society has gotten wrong,
it's a long list, but we're going to start with this. It has assumed that the size of someone's
personality, feelings or dreams or expressions, or whatever it is, is inherently a problem
rather than a reflection of their humanity, basically. The label implies excess, as if there is a
correct quota for joy, grief, ambition, happiness. Someone has made some rule saying this is how
much you are allowed to express and crossing it is somehow dangerous. In reality, what we call
too much is often simply someone refusing to shrink themselves to fit within arbitrary limits.
That is well within their rights. They are allowed to behave how they want to behave if they're
not hurting someone. And someone being too much is not hurting someone. Anyone who claims that it is
knows that they are wrong. They know that someone else's enjoyment and love for life is not costing
them a love for theirs. And it's not like we have to be scarce. It's not like we need to
ration our access to these emotions, as if we need to leave some for others, as if the universe
has a limit on how deeply we can each feel. I don't know about you, but I never got that
memo that said, you are only allowed 50 bars of happiness. You are only allowed 60 grams of joy and
this is the max decimal point you should go up to, otherwise you become an inconvenience.
Why does the ability to feel so intently and intensely exist if it's not beautiful and if it's
not something that human should be allowed to access? There is nothing wrong with being
a bright, vibrant, loud person.
In fact, you don't owe anybody not doing that.
Their desire to control your behavior
means nothing compared to your desire to be a certain way.
I think this misunderstanding also stems from the belief that
harmony comes when everybody else and everyone around us is equally muted.
When in truth, it comes from everyone being allowed to exist in their full complexity.
By treating expressiveness as a threat, society prioritizes comfort over connection.
It confuses any kind of emotional depth with instability, and it ignores how qualities like self-expression and
sensitivity and joy and empathy drive so much about society.
They drive innovation.
They drive cultural change.
They drive creation.
Rather than recognizing too much as a reflection of someone's aliveness, it is really.
really framed as a flaw to be corrected, which keeps people from exploring the full spectrum
of who they are and what they have. You know what's wild about that is that the people who suffer
are of course the people who are told to be small and to be silent, but also society in
general because they miss out on what this person would have been able to do with these talents.
We've also seen study after study after study that this actually harms people, not in ways
we've already mentioned before, but more complex ways as well. For example, the consequences of this
for mental health are astonishing. We know that emo diversity, so being able to access and feel
all of our emotions, is really critical for contentment, for life satisfaction, for joy. So when we
strip people of their right to that, and it is a right to that, we are basically guaranteeing that
they will become insecure, they will have an increase in negative emotions, they may even become
anxious and depressed, or any other number of deep-rooted psychological problems may or may not come
to the surface. That is way more harmful than whatever society has to say about muchness and
shows how ultimately, once again, society gets it wrong because it sees too much through the lens
of its own discomfort, rather through the lens of someone else's truth. Calling someone too much,
I firmly believe this and I have believed this for a long time.
That says so much more about the speaker's capacity to receive
than it does about the worth of the person being described.
It is a projection of someone else's limits
and probably the limits that they have been imposing on themselves.
So how do we start to unlearn this
and hopefully let kind of the change
and the empathy towards sensitivity and muchness
trickle through everyone around us.
If we began to see our intensity and our passion as gifts,
I think we would really open the door to a culture where people are celebrated
for the full range of their humanity rather than punished for it.
Intensity could be recognized as deep engagement with life.
The ability to care fiercely and commitfully
would be something that more people would strive for.
Shifting this perspective also means reframing the discomfort that often accompanies
someone else's bigness because sometimes we know that we ourselves have been conditioned so deeply
that we start to criticize others. And that's a hard thing to admit. But there have probably been
times where you have cringed at someone else's muchness or someone else's right to self-expression.
And yet someone has also done that to you and that's why we are in this position. All it takes is
a couple of people who feel like they have the power and they have the authority to make you feel
bad about yourself, to suddenly make the whole world feel bad about themselves as well.
It's that saying, hurt people, hurt people. If you have been conditioned to not be too much
and you see someone else be too much, it's not that you don't like them, it's that you kind
of secretly want that, but you have been taught to follow the rules, and you have been told
that that's not allowed. Maybe you kind of are jealous of their freedom. I think when we call
out our own critiques of muchness, our own ways that we kind of reject it sometimes.
we are better able to respect it within ourselves
and to just let people exist as they want to be in front of us
which then will give us a permissiveness or a sense that we can act
as ourselves in front of them.
I think this would just create such a beautiful change in our communities
where people aren't just rewarded for conformity and for being nice and polite
and good little obedient people,
they would be rewarded for courage
and for saying what's right and for being themselves.
In such spaces, the diverse,
of emotional expression and ambition, I think that it would honestly change so much about how
those societies operate. I think they would be able to access so much more of their power.
We also have to recognize when we take this ingrained feeling of discrimination against
our muchness and then apply it to ourselves, when we actually start to self-correct and self-censor.
This means really examining our language, examining our reactions to ourselves,
examining when we try and silence ourselves, when we dismiss certain reactions as overreactions,
when we stop speaking, stay silent, when we subtly shame ourselves for enthusiasm and
disparage ourselves or make ourselves small? In what moments are you doing that? How can you
become conscious of these patterns? Can you link it back to perhaps a moment or a series of
moments where you first learnt this is what you were meant to do? Again, redirecting onto ourselves
once more, I have a few more strategies we could try.
One way, of course, to embrace our muchness is through self-compassion.
This is a practice that research by the psychologist Kristen Neff has shown will reduce our shame
and does foster a more accepting relationship with ourselves.
Self-compassion, radical self-compassion, as it's called, invites us to treat our own
intensity, sensitivity, and passion the way we might treat those qualities in a friend with warmth,
with understanding, without judgment, when we catch ourselves labeling our traits as flaws,
we can pause and offer words of kindness instead and just remind ourselves that these qualities
are part of being fully human, and that's all we are here to do. We are here to have a human
experience. Over time, this shift in self-relating kind of softens the internalized criticism.
We have soaked up like a sponge from the outside world, and it makes space for others to feel
welcome, but also for us to feel welcome in our spaces and in our community spaces also.
Another very powerful tool is reframing our self-talk using just some pretty basic cognitive
restructuring. Basically cognitive restructuring asks us to become aware of our thoughts,
which of those thoughts are perhaps incorrect and how the incorrect thoughts, but also the
correct thoughts influence our behavior. So if you are having this thought, I am too much,
I am over-emotional, I am dramatic, and you think that that
that's going to make you less likable or you think that's going to make your life harder,
of course that's going to influence your behavior in a way that you stifle those things.
But if we start slowly restructuring those cognitions to think, gosh, I think that muchness is
brilliant, gosh, I think that people who are loud and boisterous make the world better,
gosh, I love when people feel deeply, that will also change our behavior.
By changing the words we use to describe ourselves, we do reshape the way our brain
encodes and recalls information about our own identity, but also about our environment and about
others. I know it can be difficult. I know for a fact you will likely come up against a few
uncomfortable barriers, such as that repetitive urge to self-censor before you've even spoken,
or the idea that you need to continue to be silent, the idea that you need to be small and you
need to wear the bland clothes and you need to not speak up in meetings, all of that has been
conditioned over years and years and years. It's hard to unlearn. You might also face the fear of
judgment where your mind just plays out the worst case scenarios and all of the embarrassment. There will
be an internal tug of war. But life is too short to not be exactly as you are. Life is too short to
continue to resist about and resist against where your character is being called to and where your
character wants to flourish in who you want to be. Yes, you might encounter pushback from others who have
grown comfortable with smaller versions of themselves. But you don't have to be comfortable
with that. Just because they're doing it, just because they want you to follow them along
and enter the same pact that they have doesn't mean you have to. There are plenty of people out
there. Many, many of them are people that I would say I'm friends with who have fully embraced
the power of just being every single thing that they promised themselves they would be and not
taking any criticism from people who don't agree with that. Because again, it's not their
life. Okay, when we come back, we are going to take everything we've explored and turn it into
real life, tangible action. So go get some water, go get a tea. Stick around for more after this
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Welcome back. I hope you all are enjoying this mantra so far. I've got to say it's definitely one of
my favorites. So in this last few minutes, we're going to take this mantra, I am not too much,
and bring it into real life. Starting with our deep thought of the day from Glennon Doyle,
this is her quote.
You are not too much. You never have been too much. You will never be too much. People who say you are
are simply not now and never were your people. I think this points to the importance of in our
muchness journey choosing to be around the right people, the kind of people who see other
people's brilliance and their energy and their spark and their vibrance and think, that's something
I want in my life. This is something that makes my life amazing. I just want a tiny piece of that
to float onto me. When you don't have those people, of course you're going to see this as an
issue because you have no representation or acceptance for these parts of you. It's that saying
one bad fruit can spoil the whole bunch. One self-hating person can make a million people hate
themselves. It is really so important to protect your space here. Ultimately, I think that this
quote really reframes too much as a matter of fit rather than floor. It's not a floor. You just
haven't found the place that you're meant to be yet. And so you're trying to fit a triangle
into a circle. It doesn't mean that the triangle won't fit elsewhere. It just means that this
isn't the place for it. Instead of seeing someone else's rejection of you or disappointment or
frustration with you as a personal failing, you can see it as a signpost pointing you towards
the exit of that relationship and towards spaces where you do not feel the need to apologize
simply for existing. You do not need approval from someone else about how you want to live your
life because it's not their life. Let's also talk through some of the journal prompts I have for
this episode because I truly love these. You guys know you don't actually have to write these down.
You don't actually have to journal with them, although I do encourage it.
You can even just think about your answers right now as I ask you these three questions.
First, when have you been made to feel like you were too much?
And how did that moment affect the way you see yourself?
Next, how is the fear of being too much held you back from saying what you mean,
asking for what you need, or going after what you want?
And finally, tell me what would it look like to,
fully show up as yourself without any fear, without the fear of being judged, rejected or
misunderstood. What would you be doing if you knew that that wasn't going to happen? Or you didn't
care if it did. Now that you've made that space to reflect, let's just give our mind a little
moment to rest, to kind of just integrate and process all the things going on. In just a second,
you will hear a custom music track. I encourage you just to take this opportunity to promote
Process this week's reflections in whatever way feels right to you, no pressure, no expectations.
And if this isn't something you connect with, that's totally okay.
Just skip ahead about 30 seconds.
But as you settle in, keep our mantra in mind.
I am not too much.
As the music plays, let this mantra shape your thoughts and take time to connect with whatever it is bringing up for you.
Beautiful. Thanks for joining me and that.
Now that I have you back, now that you've had your moment to reset and ground yourself,
it's time to take all of that energy that you hopefully have and bring it into action with our weekly
challenge. I'd love to hear how this challenge goes for you as always. So please reach out to me
at Mantra Open Mind with your responses, your thoughts, your queries, your questions. Again,
we also do a bonus episode each month. So if you do have any specific dilemmas or questions
you want answered in one of those episodes, you can again, DM me and perhaps be a part of it.
Okay, this week, your challenge is to take up space at least one time and unapologetically.
I want you to pick one situation this week where you'd normally hold back, maybe in a meeting,
a text, maybe in a confrontation, maybe with a group of friends, maybe when someone bumps
him to you and you say, I'm sorry when you don't have anything to be sorry about, and just intentionally
let yourself be in that space and let yourself be seen and be heard in whatever form you
are coming in. Say the thing you normally hold back on, wear the outfit you love but feel
others may judge you by. Ask the question that warrants you an answer. Just show up for yourself
in that moment, not worried if you're going to offend others, not worried how they think about you
or whatever it is, and allow that moment to be a quiet act of self-trust.
All right, as we wrap up this week's episode, my friends, I want to share a few final thoughts
that I have about this week's mantra.
I am not too much.
As someone who has been told they were too much since a child, it's been a long journey
coming to a realization that that is actually not an insult, but in fact, a huge compliment.
The fact that I can access so many sides of my personality and my mind and my thoughts and
my spirit, that is actually pretty incredible.
It's never going to be boring, that's for sure. I'm never going to have a boring life. I'm never
going to be bored in my own mind. And someone who doesn't like that about me, honestly, it's actually
okay. But what they feel about me is none of my business, especially when I am so dedicated to living
authentically and living, I guess, my own truth. So in case no one has ever told you this, let me be
very clear. You were never too loud. You were never too sensitive. You will never be too
ambitious or too much in other people's way. You were simply just too expansive for the spaces
that ask you to stay small and the relationships that ask you to stay small. At any place or
relationship or person or whatever it is that requires you to shrink in order to belong,
well you don't belong there period and you will find places that you truly do and which will embrace you
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I'll share another insightful and introspective mantra with you next Monday.
Until then, keep showing up for yourself and your journey.
I'm Gemma Spegg.
See you next week.
Mantra is hosted by me, Gemma Speg,
it is an Open Mind original powered by Payne Studios.
This episode was brought to life by the Incredible Mantra team,
Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro,
Stacey Warenker, Sarah Camp and Paul Lieberskin.
Thank you for listening.