Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast.

I want to talk about opting out of playing small.

We've talked about the ways that we may be hiding ourselves, whether it be in

work or relationships or just even from ourselves. But playing small is really a different

kind of hiding. Playing small means that we know what we're capable of, but we aren't expressing it, or we're

scared to be ourselves, our whole self.

Maybe we've been made fun of or retaliated against in the past.

Playing small means that we shrink our goals down. We limit our potential.

We don't allow ourselves to dream big. Today I want to talk about how to opt out of playing small

and opt into living a full life. There are many ways to do this, but I always kind of talk about what my journey has been.

When we talk about living a small life, it's not something we may do intentionally. It's just

something that happens. I think about the world around us and how we are constantly

telling, having these messages hit us that tell us what who we should be physically

and how we should be physically what jobs we should have what our goals should be in our dreams

and then we have some really subconscious messages that tell us what we shouldn't be and what

isn't for us playing small can show up in our relationships. When we see

rom-coms and people getting the happy ending, there is still so many stories written for white

women and very little written for black women and people of color to have their happy ending in a

healthy way.

It's playing small at jobs.

We know the glass ceiling is real.

And so it may be easier just to say,

...