This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 147 / People-Pleasing & Being “Needy” with Mara Glatzel

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

When under stress, overwhelmed, or feeling burnt out, it is incredible how quickly many of us default back to perfectionism and people-pleasing and abandon ourselves. On this episode of TIWW, we’re going to talk about how to advocate for YOUR needs… first to yourself and then to others. I’m joined by Mara Glatzel, author, intuitive coach, and host of the “Needy” podcast. Mara helps humans stop abandoning themselves and start reclaiming their humanity through embracing their needs. Because you’re a human living a human experience, you have needs. Those needs don’t make you selfish, weak, or a burden. It may have been awhile since you acknowledged them. Maybe you’ve been setting them aside for the sake of another. Maybe you’re scared they’ll never get met. Maybe someone told you you were wrong for wanting what you want.  The time has come for you to ask for what you need. And then expect it, first from yourself and then from others. Then advocate for it. Because you’ve always been worth it. Connect with Mara: Book: maraglatzel.com/book Instagram: instagram.com/maraglatzel Click here to access her “What Do You Need Right Now” quiz  To join Nicole’s pod (to get all the inside scoops, free stuff, and the occasional rant), click here

There is so much good stuff in this episode that I'm popping in a little early to tell you to get ready to take some notes. Here we go. Well, I think the first thing is these are my needs and my needs are my responsibility. I am Nicole Khalil and I am a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser. For most people who know me, the perfectionist part is not shocking, but the people pleaser part might be. But it's absolutely true.

I spent a large part of my lifetime trying to prove my value and my worth to others, and a lot of time trying to prove my value and my worth to others and a lot of time trying to gain their approval. This showed up in childhood, at work, on social media, in relationships, and definitely in dating. I highlighted, lifted, shaped, emphasized, hid, revealed, confined, squeezed, starved, and consumed in the unhealthiest ways possible, all in an effort to become perfect so that the people around me would finally see how worthy I am and that I could finally feel good enough. And yes, I did this with my physical body, but also with everything else. My personality, my opinions, my beliefs, my communication, basically

my entire being. I believed that my needs would be met if and only if I got the approval from others. So I stopped considering my own needs. I dismissed them. I ignored them as selfish, as stupid, as wrong. In doing that in big ways and in small ways, I dismissed myself and gave permission to others to do the same. They were just following my lead. And to this day, it is my biggest regret of my life. And while it may not look the same for you as it did for me, perfectionism and people-pleasing are things a lot of women are struggling with today. Me too, by the way, still. When I'm under stress, overwhelmed, or feeling burnt out, it is incredible how quickly I default back to those tendencies and abandon

myself. So on today's episode of This Is Woman's Work, we're going to talk about how to advocate for your needs, first to yourself and then to others. I'm joined by Mara Glatzel, author, intuitive coach, and host of the Needy Podcast. Mara helps humans stop abandoning themselves and start reclaiming their humanity through embracing their own needs. Her superpower is saying what you need to hear when you need to hear it. And that might be one of my all-time favorite superpowers. Mara, I want to jump right in because this conversation is so necessary. So thank you for being here. And I want to start by asking about your work, talking about how humans are inherently needy. Tell us about that. that I was a person, I was just a person who didn't have needs or whose needs didn't matter as much as other people's needs. Because of course I was prioritizing, acknowledging,

making space for, mind reading other people's needs all of the time. And that piece that you shared about always striving to earn your needs being met is something that I think so many of us experience. That feeling of, if I was good enough, other people would be meeting my needs. Because I see them as good enough, and here I am meeting their needs. And so much gets left unsaid. And yet, we're all humans. We all have needs. We have physiological needs of our bodies. We have emotional needs. We have needs in our relationships. We have spiritual needs. We are needy, for lack of a better word. And yet, that concept of neediness brings up an image in all of our minds. I know that sort of hungry ghost that never satisfied that thing that we do not want to be because then nobody will date us. Nobody will love us. Nobody wants us around.

We're a burden. And so we begin this automatic association because of the way we've been socialized to see our needs as burdensome. And so we hide them and we diminish them and we squeak them into the corners of our lives. And you, as you so aptly put in that intro, we are in doing that, we are diminishing ourselves. We are, you know, folding ourselves up into shapes and pushing ourselves into these teeny tiny nooks and crannies of our lives. And then wondering why our lives don't feel the way that we want them to. Why people don't see us and appreciate us the way that we want them to. Why we don't have space to meet our needs the way that we want to. And that really, I've learned the hard way that acknowledging my needs is essential if

I want anyone else to acknowledge them. And that began with that understanding of I have, I'm in a human body, human bodies have needs, right? For rest, for hydration, for movement, for nourishment. So even if I could just accept that, that was a starting place, you know, I could kind of wrap my head around that. And I think many of us think that we're doing that, but how often do we not get up and go to the bathroom until we finish five more emails or drink nothing but coffee until 11 a.m. and not eat breakfast, right? Not sleep. All of these ways that we're not even meeting our physical needs.

And so, you know, we have a boatload of needs. Our needs shift and change with the seasons of our lives, with our circumstances. But one thing is absolutely true. And that's, we all have needs. We're all having needs all of the time. So why is needy such a bad word, right? Like you're right. The word needy, we think of something and it's not good. Why, how do we begin to shift our lens to our needs as being empowering? That's the first part of my question. And how do we know when there, I don't know if it's a fine line between like, these are my needs versus being that bad side of needy that we think about. How do know when we're in in that healthy place well i think the first thing is these are my needs and my needs are my responsibility that's empowering that's

empowering and that's important because when we go to that shadow side of needy it's when we're trying to outsource our needs to everybody around us in increasingly intense ways, because we want to matter. We want to be seen. We want to be acknowledged. And I have been that needy person, certainly. And in looking back in my own life, I'm able to see that during those moments, I was trying to outsource something to somebody else that I wasn't able or willing to acknowledge or take responsibility for myself. And this doesn't mean that we're islands. This doesn't mean you're, you know, we are hyper-social species. We need one another, but my needs begin and end with me. So I have it. I ask for it. You respond, whether or not you have the capacity or the desire to meet me in my need. And after your response,

if it's a no, especially, that need remains with me. Then I get to get curious and creative about how else I might be able to meet that need or how might I be able to look at that differently or who else might be available to meet that need. Too often we leave the need with the other person and we say, oh, they said no. So I'm shit out of luck, right? Too bad for me. But once we realize that our needs are our responsibility, and also when we realize that expecting one person in our lives to meet all of our needs is a setup in and of itself, then we can take our needs from that conversation and ask ourselves, what now?

You know, there are things that I do with my sisters, but not with my partner. There are things I do with friends that I don't do with my sisters, right? Being able to look at your life and think about what might I want? What might I need? And maybe I don't have a group of people or a person to do that thing I want to do it. That's that instead of making that everyone else's problem or my problem, then the question is, well, how do I meet people who are interested in the same kinds of things that I am? And so I think this piece is empowering that I get to choose. I get to do with my needs what I want. And that doesn't mean I don't need help, but it does mean that it doesn't live in somebody else's hands as so many of us were raised to believe. Mara, that was all one big, massive mic drop. Thank you for that. And I know I'm

going to listen to this back and rewind and re-listen like 17 times. I hope you all do too. That was so powerful. Okay. So I want to talk about how we even figure out what our needs are in the first place. I know there are some that might be obvious, like, you know, having to pee or we're hungry or whatever, but I find, so my mom is visiting right now and we were talking, it's like, you somewhere forget when you're taking care of your children and your

partner and running a business and all these years go by. And then you're like, what are my needs? What is important to me? What do I like to do? I find for myself, I was talking to my mom about it and with the other women I connect with, it's like, we've become so disconnected from them, or we've put them in such a bad place in our mind. We don't even know what they are anymore. So how do we figure out what we need and how do we tell ourselves the truth about what it is that we want? Yeah, great questions. So one of the reasons that I started my podcast, which then grew into my book Needy, is because what I was hearing over and over again from my clients is that they didn't know anybody who was talking about their needs. And I think that over the last four years, there

is more conversation about needs than there used to be, but I don't think we can talk about this enough. And so part of it is that we don't have a vocabulary. So we might ask ourselves that question, what do I need? Or other people ask us, what do you need? And we feel unsure. I remember myself like, well, what's even on the table? What am I even allowed to choose from? And I didn't have the language. It was two things. I didn't have the language to describe the needs. And also I had this deep uncertainty around what I was allowed to ask for, what was okay to ask for within kind of a social landscape. And so, you know, one of the things that I sought to do with Needy was to write, you know, a lot of words, 65,000 words, I think, about needs and share stories. And, you know, this is when I got my, my book deal, my dad asked if I

was ready to be the neediest woman in America. And I am this, you know, this is, I talk about my needs professionally. That's what I like to say. And the reason I do that is because we need to hear it. We need to hear somebody else saying, yeah, this is how I make it work. You know, I have two young kids. They're four and seven. I'm running this business. I wrote this book. My relationship with my partner is fraught in these ways. And this is how I am in conversation with myself each day. Because I think essentially staying in conversation, starting a conversation with yourself and staying in conversation with yourself is how you know what you need. It's by getting curious, like, well, what does my body need from me right now? How can I best support myself in this situation? How am I feeling?

What would feel good and comforting or exhilarating right now, depending on the flavor that we're looking for, it's turning towards ourselves. You know, relationship theory is always talking about turning towards your partner instead of turning away. And yet so many of us are turning away from ourselves every single day. So starting to turn towards yourself and really engage in a conversation. And what is beautiful is that for many of us, this is a transferable skill. We are doing this all day long, but we haven't taken the time to turn that energy or attention towards ourselves. And so it's checking in and asking what you're really hungry for instead of just, you know, throwing a piece of toast in the toaster

or pouring another cup of coffee. It's checking in to see, you know, I a piece of toast in the toaster or pouring another cup of coffee. It's checking in to see, you know, I said I was going to do that thing this afternoon. Do I still want to do it? Or is there something that I need to be able to do it more sustainably or more kindly? And with time, information starts to come forward and you start to notice, okay, you know, I do better when I eat a savory breakfast. I prefer my coffee in that kind of mug. You know, the information can come from any angle, but being in conversation with yourself is where that information comes from. And I think it's bolstered by putting yourself in the way of other people who are having these kinds of genuine conversations. Like this podcast is fantastic. So, you know, plus one for everyone

who's already here and putting themselves in the way of listening to these kinds of authentic conversations. And we need that, right? We need to hear from other people about how it works. Every single time I interview somebody on my podcast, before that we interview, they say, I don't really know why you asked me because I'm not that good at meeting my needs. And that's perfect. We don't have to be experts.

We just need to talk more about how we're making it work because in the absence of conversation, we make the presumption that we are the only person who is burdened by needs and that everyone else is just flying through their lives as if everything is green lights only. And that's not the case. We're all meeting our needs in a myriad of ways. And we would have more language and more skill around that the more that we have those conversations. Okay. I feel like seven questions popped into my head as you were talking. So in no particular

order, you talked about listening to others, example on this podcast, where do other people's like paying attention to other people's needs play a part. So in the past, I took on other people's needs as my own, either because I was trying to support them or because I thought if they had that need, then I should have that need too. And I think now I use other people's needs as like, oh, that's interesting. That made me feel this. What does that tell me about my needs? So the question first is what do other, how do other people's needs play a part in us figuring out our own and also determining, you know, what we want to give or not give? Yeah. So I think that being in working relationship with other people's needs gives us a greater understanding and we can kind of check ourselves

against it. Like, oh, that person needs this. Do I need that? You know, when we get in a fight, my partner wants alone, like swaths of alone time, which is great, but that's not at all what I need. So that's an opportunity to notice that would not, that's not what I need. I need this, right? But it's also an opportunity to notice, especially if you are the type of person who gives great care to other people's needs to notice, oh, wow, I make space for people to need all kinds of things. I get a sort of thrill even myself professionally out of people needing just the wildest and most farthest reaching and most audacious things. Why would I not give myself that same permission? Or why would I assume that when it comes around to me, nobody wants to hear what I have to say, or nobody cares what I need. And I want to be totally clear, not everyone cares what

you need, but that is not your fault or your problem necessarily, right? When you're doing this work of bringing your needs to the forefront of your life, there will be relationships that do not continue working because those were relationships that were geared towards you meeting somebody else's needs. And that person maybe wasn't interested in reciprocating and that can be painful. But again, somebody else not having the capacity to meet you in your need is not a referendum on your need itself. It's just a lack of compatibility in that moment. Okay. I'm going to circle back on that. But before I do, we talked about needy sort of being a bad word or having that negative connotation. And then

the flip side for us as women, especially the word nurturing has this more positive, you know, wonderful connotation, but I find that nurturing can very easily for me and others slip into self-sacrificing martyrdom, you know, and I always think big hint martyrs get dead. Right. So that's obviously not the direction we want to be going. How do we prevent ourselves from slipping into that self-sacrificing, keeping our needs on par with other people's needs. Any thoughts there? Yeah. So I think about it this way for myself. There are many things in my life that I care about deeply. I care about my partner, care about my kids, care about my work. I have probably too

many volunteer positions that I care about intensely, and I'm the vessel for all of that labor. And so if I am not in good working order, I'm inherently shortchanging or creating an unsustainable environment for those things that I care about, right? Because if I am the conduit of, you know, me showing up, me being able to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wipe my kids' tears and snuggle them at night depends on me being in good working order. And this is a sea change for many of us because many of us are taught to give without any thought to our own needs, with our own kind of restoration. And what many of us find in that model is the bottomless pit of burnout, which I did find, right? That was the cost of taking care of everyone else without

any thought to my own needs. And in that space of burnout, what I realized is I'm creating conditions for this kind of all or nothing emergency self-care where either I am, you know, throwing everything at myself to get myself back to good working order, like just barely so that I can get back in the game and then using every last drop left until again, I've created such a crisis that I have to care for myself in this really intense way. And I was able to see at that point, the first time I became significantly burned out, I was in my twenties and you're pretty resilient in your twenties and you're less resilient in your thirties and you're less resilient as the time goes on. And so we need to be caring for ourselves more and not less. And that feeling of burnout is that the floor is being pulled out from under you. And all of a sudden you're forced to take these breaks or step back or change the way that you're caring for things. And so when we take care of

ourselves alongside everything else that we're doing, we. And so when we take care of ourselves alongside everything else that we're doing, we may do less. We may do things a little bit more slowly, but we are tending to the sustainability and the longevity of all of these things that we do legitimately care about. I think every one of us listening had a either visceral or visual or experiential reaction. When you said emergency self-care, all of us know you exactly what you're talking about, right? Where we burn ourselves out so far that it's like, we got absolutely nothing left in the tank.

And so we do something extreme. And I did that like in patterns in my life. And I'm really trying to break that pattern. Okay. I have two questions and I want to make sure to ask both. The first is any tips for communicating if our needs have evolved or changed? I think of a lot of women that I know that have gotten into specifically committed romantic relationships where maybe they didn't put forward their own needs or wants early on in their relationship and they sort of set it up a certain way. And now as you know, they've had children or life has gotten busier or they've just gotten tired. They are starting to want to put forward

those needs and those desires. Any tips of how to, and I'm going to put in air quotes, change the game, like how to communicate something that wasn't communicated before? Yeah. I think talking about things early and often, and in some ways talking about talking about it. So what won't go very well, generally speaking, is to wait until you absolutely can't take it anymore. And you're really, you know, hot and bothered about something and then trying to have a big conversation in that emotional and nervous system state, because you're going to mad and you're gonna be experiencing big feelings in that moment, rightly so.

And so what I think can be more effective is to try to have that conversation outside of an activated state and to say, hey, I've been thinking about some things and I'm going to try to do some things differently. For example, I'm going to start asking for what I need. And I don't expect that you're always going to have the capacity to meet my needs, but I'm going to start voicing them. And, you know, if you could think about whether or not, you know, that piece of whether or not you're interested, what you might be interested in instead, or if it's at a different time, like that piece can be talked about outside of an active kind of hot conversation.

And this is awkward. It is awkward to renegotiate your relationship contracts. And also it is necessary, especially if you're with somebody for a really long time, you've your 10,000 people in that time. And I can give you an example of how this one time this happened in my own life where I had, usually when I run retreats, the first thing that I say is I have a vested interest in all of you getting your needs

met to just the absolute max. I love doing that. And also I'm not a mind reader. So if you need something at this retreat, you're going to have to ask me. That's your work. And I hope that you can trust that I really want to know. And after one retreat, I was like, why don't I do that in my personal life? That is, that's, I need to be doing that. And after one retreat, I was like, why don't I do that in my personal life? That is, that's, I need to be doing that. And so I had this conversation with my partner. My kids are really little, but you know, I talked to them about it in age appropriate ways. But with my partner, I said, I'm no longer going to respond to things that are unsaid. I'm not going to read the room. I'm not going to presume to know. I'm not going to read your mind. I'm not going to read the room. I'm not going to presume to know. I'm not going to read your mind.

I'm not going to give you what you need before you need it. Any of those things that I have known to do my whole life, I'm going to consciously pretend like that information doesn't exist until you express something out loud to me. And I love you so much. And I really want to hear what you have to say. But going forward, I'm going to, you know, this is what I'm going to do. And there's awkwardness to changing those patterns. But I felt like being able to express, you know, I have so much love for you. And also, a lot of misunderstanding is happening between us that I want to avoid. So just you guys, you, and also this is your responsibility, right? You have to walk yourself in the front door. You have to be able to say, this is what I need and trust that I want to hear it. Um, but yeah,

it can be awkward and some people don't like it. And some people take a little while to come around to it. And no matter what, you still get to change the way that you need to. Yeah. So I, so many good things came from that. One of the things that I try to do with my husband is when I have something to talk about, I'll often say, this is what I need from you. Or this is like, I need you to help me problem solve, or I need you to just listen. So he doesn't have to be a mind reader. I don't do it as often as I

should, but that's really worked. But the next level of what you said to me was I have a need. Well, first don't have these conversations with when you're hot, great advice, right? Like these are not late at night or late. Yeah. Um, I think that's so important, but I think the next level of that for me, my big takeaway is to say, I have a need or a desire and here's what it is. Let me know what your capacity is for that. And then if it's not you or not now, can you help me even brainstorm or think about how I might be able to get this need met. Cause if it's not you, it doesn't change the fact that I have this need, gosh, the power of that. So puts the other person in a position where it's like, even if they, like you said earlier, it's like, I'm not available for

that, but I can still help in this way or something along those lines. So much power there. Okay. I have to ask my last question, which is how do we distinguish between a need and a want? And I feel like they're concentric circles and there's a lot of overlap, but like, what's the difference between a need and a hope or a desire in your mind? So I think that I want to first say that whatever it is that you think a need is, you who's listening to this conversation, whatever you think a need is, that those things are really important for you when it comes to you having a satisfying life, satisfying relationships. It's all data for you. And so it's all really important. The way that I think about wants and needs, though, is that a need is something that you require. And a want is something that you desire. And I see them working together. I love that

concentric circles in really beautiful ways where the need is the what and the want is the how. So to give a really basic example, I need to eat breakfast, but I want to eat scrambled eggs with sourdough toast and kimchi specifically right so that want is really important because giving yourself what you really want to eat makes that breakfast infinitely more satisfying if you think about it in a different way it like, I need to feel seen in my relationship. I need to feel loved in my relationship and how I want, how I desire to feel that is for you to take a moment and just say, I love you to verbalize it. Right. I am. Thank you for all that you do. Right. Thank you for all that you do something along. Yeah. It can be a text. It can be done verbally. It doesn't have to be a

whole kit and caboodle. It's not like a love letter. I need, it's like, I literally need one sentence from you once a day. Um, for other people, it might be, I feel that, I want to feel that love through you taking my hand when we're lying in bed at night, or you remembering to ask me if I need anything before you go to the grocery store. There are so many different flavors to this. And so knowing what you desire allows you to be a more effective communicator because you can tell people like exactly what door you want that that that love to come through and it's going to make it infinitely more satisfying for you to receive and also bonus infinitely more satisfying for that person to offer you because they get to know i'm giving you exactly what you want instead of making them guess or hoping that they get it right and silently being resentful that they don't.

Or my favorite, because it comes so naturally to me, trying to lead by example and show them what I want to receive by doing it obviously and really, really well and hoping that they kind of catch on and they won't. Or they rarely will. Um, and instead asking for that thing directly and, you know, really thinking about that piece of like the need is the, what I need to feel like I belong. I need rest. Um, but maybe I want an afternoon nap. Maybe I want, you know, how do I want that, that rest to appear for me? Mara, thank you so much for this incredibly powerful conversation. So many good tips and

just, you know, mic drop moments where I'm thinking of all the opportunities to implement and test out what you shared today. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you're listening, definitely go to maraglatzel.com. Get your hands on her book. It's called Needy. There's a quiz on her website. She hosts retreats and you can find her on Instagram. We'll put everything in show notes. Mara, again, thank you. Oh, thanks for having me. This is awesome. All right, friends. Here's what I know for sure. You can't people please your way into joy or confidence. It won't ever work. Not everyone is going to like you. And that is a, okay, you are not a pizza. You are not meant to be universally liked. The question that really matters at the end of the day is, do you like yourself? Because people will always have opinions

about who you are, but the opinion that really matters is your own, which is good news because it's also the only opinion you have any control over anyway. And because you're human, living a human experience, you have needs. Those needs don't make you selfish, weak, or a burden. It may have been a while since you acknowledged them. Maybe you've been setting them aside for the sake of another. Maybe you're scared they'll never get met. Maybe somebody told you you were wrong for wanting what you want. Maybe you're exhausted and drained from going so long without your needs being tended to. and you have no idea what to do next? I don't have the answers, but I do know that if anyone or anything has you abandoning yourself and your needs, has you liking or trusting yourself less, then it's time to reevaluate. The fastest way to get what you want is to ask for it. Now, I'm going to add the fastest way to get what you want is to give it to yourself, because your needs begin and end with you, as Mara said, advocate for your needs. You've always been worth it. When push comes to shove, you don't

need anyone else's approval when you have your own. And that you wonderful, magical woman is the most woman's work of all the woman's work. So say it with me. This is woman's work.