I'm Lisa Bilyu and this is Women of Impact.

Now here's a hard truth that a lot of us women don't want to hear, but we must, must, must talk about it in order for us to actually break free of the velvet handcuffs I like to call them and live their life on our terms. Now here's the truth. Most of us women don't lose our confidence because we're weak. We actually end up losing it because let's face it, we are somewhat trained to abandon ourselves. We weren't born, second-guessing our words, we weren't born afraid to set boundaries,

we actually learn early that being liked was actually safer than being honest and that lesson will end up following us around and leads us into either toxic relationships, burnout, people pleasing and that gut feeling of why do I keep betraying myself? Ugh, there's so freaking heartbreaking guys, but once you actually understand how this conditioning happens, you can actually undo it and that's the best news. And that's why you come to women of impact so that we can learn the skills to undo the wiring that doesn't serve us. And that's why today I'm sitting down with the air pick one of my favourite humans on the freaking planet Dr Mindy Pels. guys if you don't know who she is, she's a best-selling author, researcher on one of the few voices actually calling out the invisible rules that us women live by and she's showing us how to freaking break them once and for all. Now today we're diving into why your voice actually starts to disappear way earlier than you think and how you can stop blaming yourself and finally see the rule or the patterns so you can unwire them. We also talk about the invisible bag of expectations that we've all been carrying and how we can actually stop dropping it immediately to free us up to have the beautiful energy, confidence and self-respect that we actually all dream about having. And finally we go into the first concrete steps that you can start to take immediately to get your voice and your opinion back. So you can stop people pleasing and you can start actually trusting yourself and feel grounded in who you are and how you show up every day. Do you feel like that you're too much? Maybe that's okay that you're too much. Do you feel like that you're not enough? Maybe that's just a mindset that you've had for so long and it isn't actually true. So ladies, if you've ever thought, what do I keep doing this? Or why do I keep beating myself up? Or how the hell do I stop abandoning myself just to keep the peace in the family? This episode, ladies, is for you. And by the end, you're never going to find yourself saying that again. So let's dive into it right now with Dr. Mindy Pills here on Women of Impact. At age 9, girls spoke with confidence, certainty and passion. By 11, hesitation crept in. By 13, many were second-guessing their words, filtering their truth, and prioritising relationships over their own needs. This is also known as the silencing of the female voice. So is the silencing of a girl's voice when we're young? Exactly what makes us lack boundaries, ignore red flags, incapable of standing up for ourselves, and perfect targets to be vulnerable to narcissism and manipulators later in life? So Carol Gilligan, she's in her 80s now, she is a feminist psychologist. And back in the 1980s, what she wanted to do was study the differences between boys and girls. So at age nine, she would gather a group of boys and a group of girls and she would say, what do you want to eat? And they both would tell you exactly what they wanted to eat. The boy would say, I want this, the girl says she wants that. By 11, she would ask the same question. The boy would still, right out of his mouth, I want this and the girl might hesitate just a moment, but then she'll tell you what she wants. By 13, the boy still says exactly what he wants and the girl says, I don't know, what are you gonna have? And so what Carol started to realize is that as a girl goes through puberty, there is a cultural messaging that she starts to take on and here's what it is. The messaging is that you are worthy if you are selfless. If you behave and do what everybody around you wants, then you will be loved. And that messaging stays with us. That is the messaging I got as a teenager was this is how you act and then the people around you will love you. So we spend our whole lives trying to be worthy by pleasing everyone else. That is an incredible burden that is not only making us sick, but it is causing us mood disorders, it is causing us to connect with the wrong spouses, it is causing us to live in a place of chaos. And I want to show you, I have a really good visual to show you what this looks like. So let's do it. Okay, so let's, I'm gonna use this as the bag of burden. And I really want women to understand this because so many of us are carrying this bag around and we don't even realize that we collected what goes in it. So what's the first thing that women are always trying to do in order to be left? Look pretty. Look beautiful. So how many hours, in fact, I bet there's a statistic out there that we actually look in the mirror and we're like, oh my gosh, I need to change something about me. That's a really important one because every time we look in the mirror, we rarely sit and tell ourselves nice things. We're like, oh, this isn't good enough. This isn't good enough. So we have so much around beauty. If you're beautiful, you are worthy. Then what do we do with child bearing? You're a woman, you're supposed to have a baby. And if you are have a baby, then you're worthy to the culture, then you're fulfilled. You're fulfilled if you have a child. So there's this expectation, not only do you have to be beautiful, but you need to bear babies. Okay, then you got to be tough.

Like, don't be it.

We don't want you to be too emotional. Because if you're too emotional, we don't know what to do with you. So just be, don't rock the boat too much. So there's this expectation of it. I call it Teflon. It's like we put on this Teflon like,

everything's okay, everything's okay.

And that's what, to me, the toughness is,

is that we are standing up and being like,

I'm not hurting, don't worry, I don't want you to think that there's anything wrong with me. How many of us do that? Oh, and then if you get married, you know, make sure that you're the happy homemaker. You see how this starts to build. So now all of a sudden I've got to be not only beautiful, tough, bare some children but

I better be good in the kitchen.

And otherwise I'm not a good wife. So we have the expectation of what we should be doing in the kitchen. I'm just going to shove that in there. Okay, then if one child wasn't enough, let's make sure we have a few more, because then you might be loved, then you might be worthy if we have a little more. And by the way, make sure that you don't get heavy, don't get fat, so you gotta go to gym because you're not worthy if you're not a size two or a size four, and now even like in our culture right now, it's all about strength training for women. And so there's this expectation like you better go and lift weights or you're not worthy. Then we'll add into that, oh, but make sure that you are a certain weight. How many women get on the scale just like the mirror? They get on the scale every single day and they judge their worth off the scale. I used to use the scale kind of like what people check the weather. Where it's like, okay, is it cold? How should I dress?

I used to check my scale every morning to see how I should feel about myself. If I'd lost a pound, I feel greatly so I can cloud. If I'd put on half a pound, I'd be like, you're fucking big, you know what I'm saying. But that's culture. Like, when the culture wants you to be as certain as taught you that if you're a certain number number on the scale. You are lovable. You are worthy. And that's what I really want to point out. Is all these things we have completely consumed ourselves? We didn't even choose these things. These things were told by us at a very early age, at age, that you will be loved if you have these qualities. Then now in the modern world,

you better do all of this and work. Make sure you're working. Yeah, as a woman, oh, go ahead. Now that we've fought for the rights, you're going to be able to work and be an entrepreneur. You better have babies, be the right size, go home and cook, be a bad-ass business woman. You gotta do all of that. And then, I always, My, one of my favorite characters is Rosie, the Riveter,

because one day when I couldn't do this,

and- You gotta do all of that. And then, you know, I always, my, one of my favorite characters is Rosie, the Riveter, because one day when I couldn't do this anymore, I remember coming home and looking, I had Rosie Riveter in my kitchen, and I remember looking at her and being like, no, I can't do it. I can't do it all. This is too fricking exhausting. And you know, those of you that are watching this on YouTube, like put in the comments, how many of us just go, this is exhausting, I can't do everything. So this, but this was the model of health and well-being and happiness for women for decades. This we can do it. And then make sure you still do it while being sexy. Like we don't like our women to not be sexy. So you gotta do all of this in order to be loved, in order to feel worthy, in order to be a woman on this planet. And this is so exhausting, and we gotta do it looking good. And what I really wanted to bring forward in this book is that I realized in this one study, this one woman's research back in the 1980s that I had spent so much of my life wrapped up in carrying this around and just walking around the world going, do you love me now? Do you love me now? Am I worthy now? Am I enough now? Because that is the benchmark and the rules that the culture has set for us. And it's exhausting. It is so exhausting. I don't know if you feel that way, but every woman I talk to is like, I'm not okay. And I'm not okay because I'm trying to hit a standard that was set for me by a culture that said, this is how you get love. Wow, holy smokes. Okay, let's move this UK's out, please. So that heavy luggage that all of us women carry now take me to the next step. What does that then lead to? How does that

negatively impact our lives from a relationship standpoint, from a boundaries, from a confidence, like the thing that a lot of us women really see? How does that hold us back? I call that outside in living where you are going through your day looking for love and appreciation outside of you. And so what it does is many things. First, is it causes us to harm ourselves. So let's just talk about dieting. Like how many of us, you and I were just talking about this, like we get on that scale and we decide if we're loveable based off that number on the scale, I ran into a friend of mine who had done a ton of plastic surgery and she's my age and I was like, why, why so much? And she said, well you know when you show up and you see somebody they always say, oh my god you look so good. And I said to her, why is that important? And she said, I don't know like it feels good to have, and I agree, it does feel good.

But when I broke it down, it's because she felt worthy when she got that attention and that compliment from somebody else. And my response to her was, how about you just feel worthy about for yourself? What if there's an inside out feeling of, I am worthy, I am good enough. How do we train women to do that? You know, there's a whole, we do not care club that just came out last summer. And women were like, I don't care. I don't care. And I started to watch that and I saw women freeing themselves from looking for external validation. Quick polls, ladies, but when we come back, Dr. Mindy breaks down why chasing validation is quietly destroying women's self-worth. Now, if you've ever tried to fix yourself just to feel enough, this part is going to explain exactly why to stay with us. Alright guys, we're back. Let's get right into it. That external validation, I think, is such a big trap for so many of us and so many areas of our lives.

So there's something that you talk in your book which I'm obsessed with that I think anyone can use right now if they're struggling with self-esteem or confidence or self-worth. And you call it the way to embrace the neurochemical state of freedom. I've done 8K8 ways to get your voice back. So you've got number one is mini-axe of rebellion. Yeah. I was an athlete and I loved every kind of sport and I went out to surf out in Malibu and I paddle out and one of my friends's dads was teaching me and a boy I liked was out in the water and he turned to me and he said, Mindy, girls don't surf. This is in the 1970s and I was like, oh, I don't belong. And so I paddled back in and I never went surfing again. Fast forward till the moment I'm 55 years old and a friend asked me to go surf again. And I'm like, I had so much anxiety. I had so much anxiety. 40 years ago and I still have that message in my head. I don no, no, I can't go surf, but my 52 year old female friend was like, yeah, women surf. We should go out and surf. And so it was a mini act of rebellion to go back and go, what was taken from me that I want to bring back? Wow. I love this so much. So the mini active rebellion, why not have someone's list and they can go back to something

and maybe they wanted to do before they hit 13 and that voice came in or they lost their voice. And that's kind of re-igniting that younger version of the... That's right. Take that. Take back. All right. Let's move on to number two. So no moment of peace.

Okay, so in all the research that I did, we have over 450 peer-reviewed studies in this book that are really...

Oh, it is small. I'm really proud of. It is packed with research. We are highly intuitive. We might even say we're psychic. I've heard so many women say, I have all these strange premonitions, but so many women I hear say, I just have a hunch, something's not right. I have a hunch that maybe I shouldn't do something. And that is also by design. As we start to age, I think we become more and more highly in tune with where we belong and where we don't belong, what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing. So the solitude, when we remove ourselves from an environment, we get to know ourselves and we get to come back into that intuition. Whereas when we're around a lot of people, we're still sort of working at, like, is that person upset? What do they think? Or they were still outward focused? But when you go back to moments of yourself and being by yourself, there's nothing to gauge yourself against except your own thoughts. And the example in story I'll use with this is after the fires, like I was so overwhelmed, trying to perform for the world that I had massive anxiety. I wasn't sleeping. My life felt like it had just been completely turned into an unknown. For context, this is the L.A. Foyers. You were actually living in the palisades and had to evacuate three times. You ended up staying with me. Yeah. Yeah. So I got basically kicked out of the town that I wanted to live in. So, you know, all of a sudden I was very disoriented. And everybody kept asking me, what do you want? What do you want? Where are you going? And I'm like, I had nothing. There was nothing. I really recommend everyone should do this. And I'll talk about different ways you can do it. I found an Airbnb in Santa Cruz. I wrote this book and I had a date with myself. I got to know myself. I got to feel, what does it feel like to be by myself for like day after day after day? And then when somebody would come into my environment, I would know right away, oh, this is supporting me, this is not supporting me. So I had to remove myself from the environment because my nervous system was so frazzled. So one of the ways we start to come back to ourselves is to get ourselves out of environments with other people. And the any specific types of questions you can ask yourself when you're doing that peaceful in a work that can help guide your heart wants. So when you go into solitude, you start to hear your voices in your head. And I just wanna point out you might not like it in the beginning. Now my kids were grown, but my husband was like, what are you doing? Cause you've been mad for a long time. Yeah, for 30 years. So I had to go into isolation so that I heard my voice only not his. So the first thing I thought is, God, I'm letting him down. He's so upset. And then I had to come up with a new voice. And this is what I want your audience to know. As I recognized that my pain in that moment was coming because I thought he was unhappy. I was like, I've displeased him. Now, I've done enough work on myself to know that that is actually a father wound. I always wanted my dad to be proud of me, and then I just put that on top of my husband. And so when the pain came in, this is really important. I asked myself over and over again every day, what do I want? What do I want? When do I want to eat? How do I want to dress? What weight do I want to be? How much do I want to work? Do I even like the way I dress? Did somebody make me dress this way? I literally asked myself what do I want probably a hundred times a day. And that what shocked me the most was the first, first like 30 days I asked that.

I'm like, I don't know what I want.

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