#183: Rock the Boat

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey there again, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. 

I'm still Melissa Parsons and I'm so grateful you're here again with me today listening to the podcast. I want to tell you why I wrote this episode. In the span of about two days, I coached three different amazing women, three, and all three of them in completely different contexts with completely different situations were being held back by the exact same part, the same voice, the same deeply familiar instruction, which is don't rock the boat. And I just thought, okay, I definitely need to talk about this because if it showed up three times in two days in my coaching practice, I can guarantee it's showing up in your life right now too. 

And I told the third client, I was like, okay, I'm writing a podcast on this. So let me take you back. I'm going to go way back to Sister Bernadine's first grade classroom at St. Mary's School in my hometown. 

This was early in the 80s. I think it was probably 1980. I'm seven years old, sitting at my desk, very still, very quiet, very much doing everything right. And across the classroom is my classmate, David. 

David could not sit still. He was always getting up, always acting out, always drawing the sharp end of Sister Bernadine's attention. And every single time it happened, my little seven-year-old body would flood with stress. 

Not just for David, though I hated watching him get in trouble, but because when David acted up, sometimes all of us lost privileges. And because some terrified part of me was absolutely convinced that if I wasn't careful, if I wasn't perfect, if I so much as shifted in my chair or coughed at the wrong moment, I would be next. 

In hindsight, and with 22 years of practicing pediatrics behind me, I'm pretty sure that Sweet David had the hyperactive type of attention deficit. This was in the, like I said, the early 1980s. Nobody was diagnosing it. 

Nobody was supporting him. He was just a little boy whose nervous system worked differently in a classroom in a school that had absolutely no capacity to make any accommodations for him. And I was a little girl watching him, learning a lesson that nobody was teaching out loud, but it was stay small, stay quiet, stay agreeable, don't rock the boat. 

So that part formed to keep me safe. And today we're going to talk about what it costs us to keep letting that part run the show. So in internal family systems or IFS, it's understood that every part of us develops for a reason. 

There are no bad parts. There are only parts doing their best with what they know at the time. That don't rock the boat part is a protector. It showed up because at some point in your childhood, in your particular environment, keeping quiet and keeping the peace and making yourself agreeable kept you safe. 

Maybe it was in a classroom like mine. Maybe it was at home where conflict was dangerous. Maybe it was a family where being the good one, the easy one, the one who didn't cause problems was how you got love and approval. 

And maybe it was all of the above. And it worked. That part did its job. It got me through Sister Bernadine's class and Sister Carmeline's class in eighth grade and every other environment where rocking the boat had real consequences for a child with no power and no to very few options. 

We are not here to shame that part. We are not here to tell it that it was wrong. It wasn't wrong. It was doing exactly what it needed to do. But here's what I want you to sit with. That part formed when you were a child. 

It was built by a child for a child's circumstances with a child's understanding of what was possible and what was safe. And for a lot of us, and most of us, I would argue, that part never got the memo that we grew up. 

That part is still in there running the same calculations it ran in 1980, still scanning for Sister Bernadine, still convinced that if you say the wrong thing, step out of line, take up too much space, challenge the wrong person, something bad will happen. 

You will lose something, you will be punished, you will not be safe. And this part has absolutely no idea about everything you've lived through and done and survived since then. Here's the thing I want to say, and I want to say it very clearly. 

Keeping this part in charge is not neutral. It feels like playing it safe, but it isn't. It has a cost to you, to the people around you, and right now in this particular moment in history, to something much larger than any of us individually. 

When this part is running the show, you don't ask for what you need. You agree with things you don't agree with. You let things slide that deserve to be named. Make yourself smaller in rooms where your presence is needed. 

You might hold back in relationships, at work, in your own life, because some part of you is still convinced that the consequences of being fully, honestly, and loudly yourself are too high. And for those of us in midlife, with the lives we've built and the wisdom we've earned and the particular moment in the world we're living in right now, especially in the U.S., especially as women, I want to gently but directly say we cannot afford to let a seven-year-old run this show anymore. 

I do want to pause here and say something important. And it's something that I mean with my whole art and my whole self. Sometimes it is genuinely not safe to rock the boat. And I do not say that lightly, and I don't want to gloss over it. 

For some women, speaking up carries real physical risk in a home, in a relationship, in a community where the consequences of dissent are not just uncomfortable, but dangerous. For some women, rocking the boat means job loss, professional retaliation, reputation dismantled by people with more power. 

For some women, it means losing relationships they cannot afford to lose financially, emotionally, practically. For some women, the financial cost of standing up is a cost their families simply cannot absorb right now. 

If that is your situation, this part of you that says stay quiet, stay safe, it may not be running 1980 software. It may be reading the room accurately. And I honor that. I honor you. Survival is not smallness. 

Knowing when to hold on and when to let go is wisdom, not weakness. What I'm talking about today is the other kind of not rocking the boat, the kind where you are actually safe, where the consequences, while uncomfortable, are survivable, but the protective part of you can't tell the difference anymore, can't distinguish between Sister Bernadine's classroom and the board meeting. 

Can't tell the difference between the child who had no power and the grown-ass woman who does. That is the part we're talking to today. The one that's keeping you small out of old habit, not out of genuine present danger. 

The world doesn't need us quiet when we have the safety to be loud. It needs us and all of us. And before we get to what to do about it, I want to show you something because I think a lot of us are walking around not realizing something really important. 

You already know how to rock the boat. You've already done it many times. You just haven't shown your younger part the evidence. I'm going to tell you about some of the women I know. And I want to start with 16-year-old me because I think she deserves to be in this episode. 

If you've been following along, you know that I grew up Catholic. I'm a recovering Catholic. I was in church just about every Sunday, and we took it seriously. Faith was real to me. And one Sunday, when I was 16 years old, the priest stood at the altar and said that divorced people did not deserve to receive communion. 

Now, I knew that this was bullshit because my aunt, who I love dearly, had just gotten divorced. So I stood up and walked out. In the middle of mass, in front of everyone, I walked out. I want you to understand what that cost a 16-year-old girl who had spent the better part of her childhood learning to stay still and stay quiet and not rock the boat. 

It cost everything that part had. And I did it anyway, because something in me, my capital S self, though I didn't have that language yet, knew that staying in the pew was not an option. And I also had a part that liked to rock the boat, if I'm being honest. 

But that was me rocking the boat. It cost me something and it was worth it. Now, let me tell you about some of the women that I've had the privilege of working with. I have a client who is a surgeon. 

Every single day, she advocates for her patients and for patient safety in environments that do not always make that easy. She speaks up in rooms where speaking up might have professional consequences. 

She says the thing that needs to be said, even when the easier thing would be to let it go. She rocks the boat because people's lives and their quality of life depend upon it. It has a cost to her, and she keeps doing it anyway. 

I have a client who's a mom. Her child is transgender, and she shows up at protests, at school board meetings, in her community, in every space that she can go to fight for her child's right to exist fully and safely in this world. 

She is rocking a boat that desperately needs rocking. It's tiring and scary, and she does it anyway, because love is louder than fear. I think about the women, and I know some of you listening are among them, who are out there right now demanding accountability, demanding the full release of the Epstein files, refusing to stop saying it, refusing to stop asking people to believe women in a world that has made that ask very costly, 

changed by it and committed anyway. I have a client who shows up to protest ICE every chance she gets, who has decided that her comfort is less important than her conscience. She rocks the boat with her body, with her presence, and with her refusal to look away. 

It costs her sleep, and she shows up anyway. I have a client who's going through her divorce. I have a client who is going through with her divorce, not because it's easy. It is not easy, any of it, but because she looked at her life and her children and decided that they all deserved to live in a home that felt like peace instead of a home that felt like chaos. 

She's choosing herself and choosing her kids at the same time. It's one of the hardest things she's ever done, and she's doing it. I have a client who left traditional hospital medicine to start her own direct primary care practice. 

She walked away from the system that was grinding her down to a nub because she wanted more time with her patients, more autonomy over her own work, more of herself left at the end of the day. Everyone had an opinion about that decision. 

She made it anyway. It was scary and it was the right one for her. I have a client who left a prestigious position, the kind that looks awesome on paper, the kind where people assume you would never leave, because her heart was pointing her somewhere else, somewhere that would give her greater joy and a better quality of life. 

She chose herself over the title. People didn't understand it, but she did it anyway. Beautiful humans, do you see what I see? Every single one of these women has a don't rock the boat part. Every single one of them felt it. 

Every single one of them rocked the boat anyway, not without cost, not without fear, not without the voice that said, are you sure? Are you really sure? And they did it anyway. And in so many of these cases, their courage is rippling outward and helping others find their voice too. 

The boat rocking didn't destroy them. It helped them make things very clear for themselves. So here's what I want to offer you. This is an invitation. In IFS, one of the most powerful things we can do for our protective parts is to update them, not to argue with them, not to shame them, not to try to force them out of the way, but to genuinely show them what they don't yet know. 

Your don't rock the boat part developed when you were small and had no power and no choices. It learned what it learned because that's what was available to learn in the environment you were in. And it has been doing its job faithfully ever since. 

But it doesn't know about 16-year-old you who walked out of mass. It doesn't know about that hard conversation that you were terrified to have and that needed to be had. It doesn't know about the time you said no when you'd always said yes. 

The time where you asked for what you needed. The time you chose yourself, even though it was uncomfortable. The time you stood up or spoke up or showed up in a way that cost something and you survived it and something good came from it. 

Your younger part has never seen any of that. Nobody showed her. She's been in there running 1980 calculations without any of the data from the last 40 years of your life. What have you showed her? This week, I want to invite you to do something. 

Sit quietly for a few moments and see if you can find that part, the one that says, don't rock the boat, stay small, stay quiet, don't cause trouble. See where she lives in your body. See how old she feels. 

And then from your capital S self, from the wise, calm, compassionate part of you that's not seven years old and not in Sister Bernadine's classroom, speak to her. Show her what you've done. Show her who you've become. 

Show her that you have rocked boats before and that you're still here, still safe, still you. Tell her that she did a great job. Tell her that you appreciate that she kept you safe when you needed it. 

And tell her gently but clearly that you've got it from here. She can still stick around and watch you, but she doesn't need to do this job. She doesn't have to work this hard anymore. My beautiful humans, here is what I want you to know. 

You have a part that learned to keep you safe by keeping you quiet. And it loves you in its own way, in its limited understanding of what the world requires of you. It has been trying to protect you your whole life. 

And you have a capital S self that is wise and grounded and capable and brave. A self that has already rocked boats. A self that knows the difference between a boat that should be left alone and a boat that needs to be rocked with everything you have. 

The next time you hear that little voice, are you sure you want to rock the boat? I want you to recognize it for what it is, a younger part of you doing her best, working with old information. Thank her and really mean it. 

And then let yourself take the wheel. Because some boats need to be rocked. Some boats have needed rocking for a long time. And the world, this world right now in this particular moment, needs women who are willing to do it. 

You are not seven years old in class anymore. You haven't been for a very long time. It's time to rock every fucking boat that needs rocking. Thank you for being here today. If this one hit home, please share it with a woman who needs to hear it. 

And of course, if you're ready to do some work to meet your parts, to lead from self, to become a new actual favorite version of yourself, please reach out to me at melissaparsonscoaching.com. I would love to hear from you. 

I'll see you next week. 

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!