00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 215, "Being Seen and Being Heard." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, hello there, welcome to the podcast today, my friends. So glad to have you here with me. Really quick, if you are loving this content, please feel free to share it with friends, with family, with people that you feel could benefit from this content and who would like this content. The only way that we can start healing our relationships, creating the kinds of life that we want, is to have the tools to create it. And many of us are completely unaware of our lack of tools. I know that I was for years and years and years and not only are we completely unaware, but even when we start becoming aware, we just don't know how to fix it. I remember for so many years in my marriage just going, "I don't know what's wrong, I don't know what's happening here," and these kinds of tools would have been so beneficial to me. And so if you know somebody, share, and if you don't know anybody to share with, one thing you can do is get online and leave me a review because then that helps people that you don't know who are looking for the content to find the content. So the more reviews that I get, the higher it pops up on people's list of podcasts to listen to. That will help them. And I just believe and feel so strongly in this content and the ability that it has to change lives and that's why I do what I do. That's why I do this podcast, because I love it so much. I love coaching. I love this content and this place. So if it's helping you, please share it. 

02:00 

We are going to be talking today about being seen and being heard. And I will tell you that this is a topic that I have this podcast in the works for four podcast sessions now, and I keep changing the number on it because I want this to be a good podcast. I really want you to feel the importance of the concept that we're talking about here, because we will not be able to create the kinds of equal partnerships that we want until we learn to be seen and to be heard. We will not, as women, be able to make the impact in the world that we want to make and that our souls feel so driven to create, regardless of how big or how small that drive is or that spaces that you feel driven to feel, until we figure out how to be seen and be heard. We will not make that impact. It is up to us to do our work and to create the kinds of relationships and the kind of contribution that we want to in the world. So this is something I guess that I feel very strongly about because I feel like I was not seen and heard for a lot of years. Though I felt my spirit really desperate to be seen and heard, I felt like I had so much to offer the world, and I didn't know how to put it out there. So I've worked on this podcast and then I've set it aside, and written a different podcast, and worked on this podcast and set it aside, and did a different one and worked on it, because I just I want this to be so good and I just pray that it's everything that in my mind I want it to be. 

04:00 

So I'm gonna start off today by talking about the fact that as middle-aged women, I feel like we grew up with a lot of social pressure to negate ourselves. So many of the messages, outright and subversive, growing up in the 70s and 80s were "the women are secondary to men," that we were there only to serve men and children, that our wants and our needs were really never to be put on the table and be considered. This message was distributed through the roles that women played on TV shows and in movies and in books that I read. It was also expressed in Church talks and lessons. I found young women's lessons specifically. I found this subversive message in the way that the boys in my church congregation could do all sorts of traveling and expensive and amazing, fun activities all in the name of scouting, and the young women were on a tight budget and we couldn't travel more than 20 miles in my congregation. I heard this message when it was talked about that men were the head of the family and that they had the last say in a discussion between husband and wife. I saw it in the traditional gender roles played out all around me, where the women would give up their career to stay home and take care of children and the home. I saw it when women would drop out of university in order to put their husbands through university. I heard it when I was told that I needed a university degree but only in case something happened to my husband. 

05:37 

The point is, women from our generation were exposed and continue to be, I think sometimes, to so many circumstances that seem to say that men were more important than women. And for me, because I saw it and heard it from a young age, I didn't question it for a long time even though it didn't feel right to me. I remember feeling the injustice of it keenly while in  high school, okay? Because remember the Boy Scout situation, right? But because of my social conditioning, I also accepted it for what it was: reality and truth. But it always was unsettling to me. I always wanted to speak up and sometimes I would and then it seemed that I often kind of got this reputation of being a troublemaker. And I wasn't a traditional troublemaker but I just came with this idea that I was outspoken in a very negative sense. And when I was 22 and at BYU, I took a women's literature class and we read so many books on how women were treated unequally and unfairly about how men took advantage of women in so many circumstances, about how women were not allowed to learn and be educated and follow their dreams, the most impactful experience of that class was when we read a document written to the generic term "man." This is where it's written to people in general, but the wording was always man or men, meaning personkind, but we use that as like man or men, oftentimes, and the pronouns were he, him and his. And we read it first that way and then we read it a second time changing out all of the man/men wording to woman/women and all of the pronouns to she, her and hers. 

07:31 

And as we read that, something shifted in me. All of the questions in my soul that I had been ignoring and pushing aside for my whole life started to surface and I started to feel some empowerment stirring inside of me. I knew that I mattered and just the shift of the language in that paragraph gave me a sense of empowerment and I realized that that's what men must feel all the time when they hear these kinds of comments about, you know, "if man does this..." meaning, "if all people..." but in using the "man" term, I just really started to wonder, do men feel this empowerment all the time? If I was a child of God, I started to realize that I could not be less valuable than a male. The God that I knew loved me as much as He loved his sons. I was created in God's image as surely as the men in the world were. So my value had to be the same. And I started to wonder why I had been given talents and ability and intellect if God didn't want me to use them, if my only job was to stay in the home and serve all the people in my circle. 

08:59 

And I started to feel a little resentful that I felt that I had so much possibility and that my "God-given role" was to leave it untapped while I stayed home and raised children. And this was a hard thing for me. I really struggled with it in the first few years of my marriage before we had children. And then I had my first child and I was so enamored and so in love that I set aside my questions to be a stay-at-home mom. And I will tell you that I loved it. I found so much fulfillment in taking good care of my children and creating a home for our family. So I set my questions and my concerns on the back burner for a lot of years because it seemed detrimental to me to address them. I felt like I could either believe that I had this great potential and this great ability to do things, or I could be a stay-at-home mom. I saw that either/or, the black/white, I could not see that there was a middle space. 

10:06 

And to be honest, I was scared of what it would bring up if I pulled those questions and concerns out again. My husband at the time grew up in, and expected ,a very traditional home. And I kind of expected one too for all the reasons we talked about. And I didn't want to rock the boat there either, even though I felt these longings and these pushings. And I find it fascinating that I was raised with ideas that women were less important, that our voices mattered less, that we weren't really meant to be seen much in the world. And even though I felt some pretty hefty internal resistance to those ideas, my social conditioning kept me silent. And it kept me afraid to rock the boat, because that's not what women did. Although can I share with you the fact that my mother did rock the boat? My mother pushed these boundaries all the time and yet the social conditioning outside of my home was very loud and I wanted so badly to do what was "right" that I moved into this space of staying silent. Women didn't rock the boat. They did what they were supposed to do and they did it happily and with a smile. To be a good person meant that I needed to fit into the mold that I saw exemplified all around me. 

11:35 

Now, there is absolutely no part of me that regrets being a stay-at-home mom. I really loved it. What I do regret is being afraid to explore other ideas. But here's the deal. Of course I was afraid to explore. When I look at all of the fear-based teachings of the 70s and 80s, it's easy to see why I was so afraid to question the ideas. Society and culture fed us a diet of "less than" ideas about our worth, and it was so prevalent that it was hard not to ingest it. So of course we were afraid to explore. No need to beat ourselves up for that one more minute. Okay? It's time for us to just say, "okay, that is what it is. I created what I created. Now what?" Okay? But in my head at the time I had two options. Being a traditional stay-at-home mom or being a bra-burning feminist who hated men. So the logical explanation to me was to stay-at-home mom since I knew I wasn't the hardcore feminist the 70s taught me that feminists were. Either end of the spectrum, right? It's fascinating that our brain likes to go there. 

12:43 

And then out of necessity when my youngest child was four years old I started working full-time outside the home. Not teaching, doing other jobs because I didn't feel ready to jump into the commitment of a teaching contract. But then when she was eight, I decided to go back to teaching school full-time, which I did until just the end of June, so 12 years of teaching. And during these years I started to get brave enough to start asking the questions again. And moving into this space I started to acknowledge a lot of the injustices and resentment I felt in my then-marriage. I was tired of not being seen and not being heard. Now I want to be very clear here. I wasn't being seen or heard not because my ex-husband wouldn't see or hear me. I actually don't know whether he would have or not. And the reason I don't know this is because I was not standing up and I was not speaking up. I was harboring all of this anger and resentment toward him for something that I wasn't doing. I also want to be clear that this was not the extent of our marital struggles, but this definitely played into it. This is a big piece that I brought into our marriage frustrations. And when I felt I wanted to bring up a tough, scary topic, I chickened out almost every single time because we had not created a safe space for either of us to bring up the tough topics. And I know that on my part, when I did garner the courage to do that, I would come out with guns ablazing, blaming him for not seeing and hearing me. And he, rightfully so, would have defended himself from my accusations and also started blaming me for something else and then the fight was on. Both of us so unable to see our own responsibility because we were so blinded by blaming the other person for the dysfunction in our marriage. Again, for my part, so many of my accusations came because I didn't feel seen or heard. 

14:57 

And then learning to own my own on this didn't come until after my divorce. But now I can see and understand the situation from a completely different perspective. I'm so grateful that coaching has led me to a place where my awareness has increased to the point where I can start to take responsibility for this one. I was not standing up to be seen, nor was I speaking up to be heard. I was expecting my wants and needs to be miraculously understood without any effort from me. But as my coaching toolbox grew, I began to understand that if I wanted to be seen and heard, that is up to me; it's my responsibility to be seen and heard. And I first need to see and understand myself. I have to acknowledge that I am a person who is valuable, who is worthy of being seen and heard. I need to acknowledge that it is my responsibility for being seen and heard. Shifting out of blame was a huge step for me. So how do we go about moving into being seen and being heard? 

16:09 

First, it's imperative that we begin to see our own patterns of stepping down and not speaking up. For me, the biggest reason was fear of the confrontation. I considered for a long time, a different opinion as being a confrontation, rather than just a difference of opinion. I was scared of a difference opinion. I felt attacked by a different opinion. And many of you don't. Good for you, right? That was a place I lived in for a long time. And I hated confrontation, so I just wouldn't go there. Fascinating, though, in retrospect, that in being afraid to go there because of the confrontation, being afraid of the confrontation, I was actually creating confrontation. I was creating the resentment in myself, right? Isn't that crazy how that works? So here's where I was afraid to ask for what I wanted. Whether it was in communication, in our sexual intimacy, or in our emotional intimacy, or something else, I felt that asking for what I wanted was selfish. That social teaching that women's needs should always come last. 

17:21 

And I will honestly say that in some areas I would ask for what I wanted when it came to our home and getting furniture or decorating or even the clothes or other things. To look good, I would buy it for myself and I would speak up and say this is what I wanted. But this all seemed to fit in with the societal role that I felt was appropriate. I was a homemaker, a mother, and a wife, and part of my job description was to create a beautiful home and to look good so my husband could be proud. 

So that makes sense to me, right? But here's the deal. So how do we overcome the fear of speaking up, of asking for what we want or standing up for ourselves? We start by creating awareness of where we aren't speaking up and yet we're feeling angry or resentful about it. Then we summon the courage and have that incredibly excruciatingly painful first discussion. So here's a huge tip: this has to be done with owning your own stuff. Absolutely no blaming. 100% taking responsibility for it all. 

18:32 

When I first started dating and I was doing the 90 Day relationship and I knew that this was a space I needed to move into, I was terrified to ask for what I wanted. My fears stemmed in selfishness, a shame that I would need or want something, fear that I would be seen as weak. And then what if he rejected my request and validated the thought in this context that I wasn't worth it? But I will tell you, thankfully, the first Mr. 90 Days of my relationship was an amazing person and he completely validated my requests. He was open and kind and fully gave me the space to be a person whose wants and needs were valid and were important. I will say though that that first conversation where I brought up my needs had me sliding into the sofa in shame. I was so scared to say what I wanted, not because of him, but because of my own fears. But I did courage up. I knew that this was the next step for me to learn how to create the kind of relationship I wanted. So I couraged up and I did it. 

19:47 

And then I did it again and again and it got a little bit easier each time. And every time I was validated in my desires by him, but more importantly by me, I felt more empowered with every time I spoke up and it became easier and easier so that now I'm married with my husband, I can't imagine not speaking up because I know that not speaking up will only damage and destroy our relationship. And I want to protect this relationship from the resentment and anger. I want to create a space where openness and honesty thrive, where true emotional intimacy can grow and that can only happen with two equal individuals. If I see myself as a step or two down from him, there can be no equality and hence no intimacy of any kind. 

20:49 

So I'm going to share with you an experience that I had with my husband's Sione about two months after we got married that really drove this home for me. I was going on three months of not having received alimony and my finances were feeling it. I was struggling. I had more on the Visa than I was used to, which usually not any. I would pay it off. So I just did not have enough money. I was still living in Utah and my husband was living in Indiana. So we didn't have this shared space, and so we didn't have the shared money. We didn't have all this stuff going on. I knew that I needed to ask him for some money to make up for the difference of me not getting alimony anymore. But I was terrified to do so. 

21:45 

Finally one day it came up that I was in a financial spot and I needed some help. And Sione was so great about coaching me and walking me through this. We got down to the thought that was creating me feeling weak. The thought was about me not wanting to ask him for money and the fear, and the thought was that it made me feel weak to have to ask him for money even though we were married. This is a concept I often refer to as one-upping or one-downing. In this case I was one-upping him and one-downing me because I was putting him above me because he had extra money to share and I was putting me below him thinking that I was less-than because I needed to ask him for money. And in that case I was putting us on an unequal level. And he said something to me at that point that shifted everything for me, and he told me that by my putting him above me financially and thinking that I was weak and he was strong in that area I was creating inequality in our relationship and there was no way that we would be able to create the emotional intimacy that we wanted if I didn't see us as equal partners. 

23:11 

And his statement hit me like a punch to the gut because we had talked so much about the kind of relationship we wanted, how we really wanted this equal partnership and I wanted that more than anything. And I realized that I was doing something that was hindering that equality space by not speaking up for my wants and needs. And it really hurt to realize that I was holding us back. I was the one who was keeping us from creating what we really wanted to create. And so right then I asked him for what I needed. And this is one of those times that one thought shift can change everything. It completely shifted the way that I saw the necessity of me standing up and speaking up. And I had already made a lot of shifts, but I was still struggling at some level. And this thought completely clinched this for me and helped me realize how important it was. 

24:25 

So now if the thought occurs to me not to speak up, I remind myself that by holding back, I will begin to destroy our relationship. We cannot have an equal partnership if we are continually one-upping our spouse or one-downing our spouse, or whatever relationship we need to work on. If we are one-downing ourself or one-upping ourself, we will not have an equal partnership. To create the relationships we want, we have to stand next to the other person. We have to step up and be seen and speak up and be heard. If we are unwilling to do that, too scared to do that, we are destroying our relationships from the inside out. We are creating a relationship of unequals and that is not a relationship at all. So now I rarely feel fear about speaking up because I have seen countless times since that experience with Sione how standing up and speaking up is the key to creating the relationship that we both desperately want. 

25:44 

So now my fear around this is about not speaking up. And here's the thing, even if your person is not on board with this  concept, meaning you don't talk about this kind of stuff, everything will shift in your relationship if you start standing up and speaking up. It will shift because you will have a newfound respect for yourself. You will feel seen and heard by you, at the very least. But in the talking I've done with men around this topic, so many of them desperately want their wives or their partners to stop slinking in the background and step up to equal partnership. 

26:31 

So give it a try. If you need some help, this is what I do. I help you see patterns of behavior that are not serving you and I help you learn to lean into new patterns that will. In this case, recognizing where you are not standing up and being seen and learning to speak up and be heard and stand up and be seen. And knowing when and how to begin to do it. This, my friends, is a space of growing up that we cannot afford not to do. It is imperative that we start being seen and being heard. 

Our self-respect is on the line. Our relationships are on the line. And I've worked with several people in this last week who this is their struggle. We have to value ourselves enough to be seen and to be heard, to stand up and to speak up, to create what we want, to create these equal partnerships, so that we can create the intimacy that we desire in our in our relationships. This is what it's about. 

27:55 

Okay, that's gonna do it for today. I just pray that the intent of what I shared here comes across and that you feel empowered in your ability to start creating the kinds of relationships that you really, really want, this equal partnership. And because only in that equal partnership can we have the intimacy that we also desperately ache for in our marriages and in our relationships with our children and and other people. Okay, so there we go. If you have not left me a review, will you do that on Apple and on Spotify? You can leave me a quick review. It does not need to be long, but give me five stars. That would be awesome. And leave me a short note so that other people can read through that and they can get an idea of how beneficial this content is. This is great stuff, my friends. It has completely changed my life. And I know that it will completely change yours. So if you would like to meet with me, you can go to tanyahale.com. You can sign up for a free consult. We can talk about how coaching can help you, all the ins and outs of what I do when I work with you. And you can interview me. You can see if you feel that I would be a good fit for you to help you move into the space that you want to and to accomplish the things that you need to. This is what I do. I coach people and I'm good at it and I love it and I can't wait to help you create what you really want to create in your life. This is what coaching is about. Okay, have an awesome, awesome day my friends and I will talk to you next time. Bye. 

29:49 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.