What is up? I'm Grace Beverly and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast

shared guide book on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing,

because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice.

What is up and welcome back to working hard. Today we are talking all about asking for what you

want and more importantly how to do it without feeling shame or feeling like a bitch.

It sounds very simple but in practice I just don't think it is. Maybe it's

asking for a raise, maybe it's pitching your work, maybe it's setting a boundary or even just saying

no. And then that little voice kicks in, will I sound rude? Will I come across as difficult? Am I being

ungrateful? And here's the thing. That voice isn't just in your head. It is cultural.

Female assertiveness has had a terrible

PR problem for centuries. We're taught from the moment with little girls to be agreeable, polite, and

accommodating, to be good girls and to put other people's comfort before our own. And I feel like

while being kind and accommodating can absolutely be real strengths, and definitely strengths I like

to develop over time. They also

can become shackles when they stop us from advocating for ourselves. Because let's be honest,

what is seen as leadership in a man is often seen as bossy in a woman. A man setting boundaries is

respected, and a woman setting the exact same boundary is labelled difficult. Research backs this up

again and again, unfortunately, but honestly, most of us also

don't need the stats because we've lived it. I wanted this episode then to be about reclaiming assertiveness

from that narrative, about making directness feel powerful but not pushy, and learning how to

ask for what you want clearly, confidently and without the guilty aftertaste, because asking for

what you need is not rude or selfish, and our lack of being able to do so is quite frankly holding us back but before we get into it you know what i'm about to say i looked at our stats this morning and it said that only 24% of people who we listen to this podcast every week actually follow us on their podcast app which is an absolute tragedy and a drama because we all love habit stacking over here and hitting that

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