#205: Retiring from Being the Strong One

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.

Hello there, beautiful humans.

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Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I'm Melissa Parsons, the host of Your Favorite You and your favorite life coach.

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Today we're talking about a job that almost none of you applied for, but that most of you are working anyway, with no pay, no benefits, no sick days, and no end date on the contract.

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That job is being the strong one. I have someone in my life, she knows exactly who she is. I love her fiercely, so I'm going to be a little vague on purpose here.

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She has spent her entire life with a stiff upper lip, pulled up by the bootstraps, no complaining.

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If you asked her how she's doing on a bad day in her life, she would say, "Fine," and mean it as a period at the end of the sentence, not an invitation for a follow-up question.

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So she spent decades pretending she does not have needs, and here's the thing that I want you to sit with right out of the front of this episode. Of course, she has needs.

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She has a soft, mushy core just like the rest of us. Well, most of the rest of us. Most of us have one, whether we let anyone see that or not.

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Here's what I love, though, and what makes this story more than just a cautionary tale.

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This person has done tons of work, and I want to be precise about the phrasing because there's a distinction that matters to me. She's done work with herself, not on herself.

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Not fixing something broken, getting curious about something that had been protecting her for a really long time.

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And because of this work that she's done with herself, she has started letting a few of us see the mushiness, see the actual core of who she is, and that core, now that it's finally getting some daylight, is immensely beautiful.

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It always was. I always knew she had this core. I'm one of the closest people to her, I think, but it just took her decades of being strong to trust any of us with it.

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And I don't think she's unusual. I think a lot of you listening right now are probably a lot like her. Maybe not in that exact stiff upper lip, bootstraps way.

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Maybe your version looks like always being the one who's available or always being the one who's fine, always being the one who holds it together so nobody else has to.

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But underneath whichever version of strong you've built, I bet there's a soft, mushy core in there too, one that's been waiting for a long time to be let out of the back room.

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So today I wanna talk about what it actually looks like to retire from being the strong one.

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Not to collapse, not to become someone who can't be counted on, but to finally put a job that was never supposed to be permanent back down.

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And here's where I wanna tell you that there's a bit of good news so you can relax while you listen to the rest of this. Retiring this job doesn't mean you can never do it again.

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If an actual occasion in your life calls for your strong part, and we all are gonna have those occasions in our lives, you're always allowed to pick that strength back up on purpose, and that's the whole difference.

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It's a tool in your hands now, not a role that you must live in. What I would like you to understand about being the strong one, almost nobody chooses it. It gets assigned.

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Sometimes it's assigned to you when you're seven years old and you're the oldest child, and somebody has to help the little ones get ready in the morning, and it turns out that that somebody is you.

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I wanna name only children here too because this shows up for you constantly and people don't always think to mention it.

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When there is no sibling to share the load, you don't get elected the strong one. You're just it by default, typically from the very beginning.

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Sometimes the assignment happens in a single afternoon, in a hospital hallway, or in a courtroom, or in a kitchen where a marriage is ending, and somebody has to be the one who doesn't fall apart.

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Every once in a while you actually say it out loud, "Okay, I'll do it," like a real agreement with real words attached. But more often it's not spoken at all. It's subconscious.

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Nobody looks at you and asks, and you don't turn to them and answer.

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The agreement just happens underneath language in the space of a glance or a pause where someone else might have stepped in and didn't and then you did.

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And the thing about an assignment like that is nobody hands you an end date along with it.

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Nobody says, "You're gonna need to be strong for about the next six weeks and then you'll be free to have a bad day." You just start being the strong one and the role quietly stops being something you're doing and starts being pretty much everything you are.

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That's what happened with my person. Stiff upper lip wasn't a strategy she used sometimes. It became her whole operating system.

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No complaining, because complaining was for people who hadn't figured out how to handle things.

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No needs, because needs made you inconvenient, they made you vulnerable, and inconvenience and vulnerability simply weren't allowed.

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Here's the part I really wanna name, though, because I think it's the part that nobody says out loud. The people around the strong one benefit from her staying strong.

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That's not always a criticism of them. Most of the time it's not even conscious on their part. They've just never been given a reason to think about it.

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But I wanna be honest with you, unless it is a criticism of them, some people know exactly how they're benefiting.

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They know precisely how convenient it is that you never fall apart, and they have no particular interest in that changing. Now, I'm not saying that to make you suspicious of everyone in your life.

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I'm saying it because some of you need permission to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt on this one.

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If you're the one who doesn't fall apart, the one who doesn't have needs, the one who's fine no matter what, everyone else in your orbit typically gets to relax a little.

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Somebody's holding the roof up. It might as well be you, which means nobody around you has much incentive to ask if you're tired of being the strong one. Why would they?

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You've probably never given them a reason to think you might be tired of it, and that's the trap. Not that you were once asked to be strong. Life asks that of all of us at times in our life.

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The trap is that the strength, once it works, tends to get treated as the truth of who you are instead of the thing you did on a particular Thursday, because that particular Thursday required it.

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Okay, let me tell you about a client of mine, because I think her story's gonna land for a lot of you in a very specific way.

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This lovely client who, she knows who she is and she knows I love her dearly, used to throw herself into her work completely. She was dependable to a fault, endlessly available.

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Her coworkers figured it out, probably without ever sitting down and deciding this on purpose.

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They figured that they could push a deadline right up to the absolute last second, because my client would always be the one who caught it. She would stay late. She would rework it overnight.

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She'd meet the deadline that everyone else had let the clock run out on every single time, and nobody around her ever had to feel the consequences of their own procrastination, because she absorbed all of that.

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Here's the sentence she used to say to people out loud, like it was just a fact about the weather: "I don't have a life.

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I don't have a life." Not, "I wish I had more time," not, "I'm struggling to keep up," but a flat statement delivered without much emotion attached to it.

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Because she said it so many times, it stopped sounding like a complaint and started sounding like an identity.

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She had let work become the whole of her life, and she'd made some peace with that, or at least she'd stopped fighting it. Here's what I want you to know, though.

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We started coaching together, and it was beautiful. One of the very first things we did was go looking for the life she supposedly didn't have.

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And of course, as it turns out, she had a life, a full one, things she genuinely enjoyed, people she genuinely loved spending time with, curiosities she hadn't had room to follow in years.

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This life had just been buried so far underneath her workhorse identity, her strong identity, that she'd stopped being able to see it. She didn't need to build her life back up from scratch.

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She just needed to stop being too busy at work proving her strength to notice the life that she already had.

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Now, boy would I love to tell you that the moment she decided this, her coworkers threw her a parade and immediately adjusted each and every deadline with grace and understanding.

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That is not what happened. What happened is what I will lovingly call the retraining period, and it has been a lot hilarious to watch from the coaching seat.

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And here's what I respect so much about how my client handled it. She didn't just quietly change and hope that everyone else would catch up. She actually said something.

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She told her coworkers in plain language that she recognized her old identity, the one who always caught it, who always absorbed it, who didn't have a life, had been a problem, and that she was taking ownership of the role she used to play in creating that dynamic in the first place.

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She didn't make it their fault. She named her own part in it, and then she told them, with some coaching, pretty clearly, that circumstances had changed going forward because she had changed.

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Not as a threat, just as information. "This is who I am now. I actually have a life, so plan accordingly." Even with that conversation, the system around her did not update instantly.

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Deadlines still got pushed to the last minute out of habit, because that had always worked before.

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Except now she wasn't there working on the weekends and overnight to quietly absorb it, and her coworkers had to relearn in real time that the deadline was actually real and that catching it was actually their job, not a service that my client was providing out of the goodness of her endlessly available heart.

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It has taken some retraining. It is still taking some retraining, but she is not the same person who said, "I don't have a life," like it was just a fact. She has a life. She always did.

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She just had to stop being the strong one at work long enough to actually live in it.

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There's a third version of this that I see a lot, and it's a little different from the other two, so I wanna give it its own space.

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I have worked with clients who have had to be strong through a genuinely difficult season, whether that was an illness, the end of a relationship that mattered to them, a career upheaval of one kind or another.

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Um, I wanna name that the career one kinda goes both directions because I see it constantly in coaching.

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Sometimes a career blows up on someone out of nowhere, and they have to be strong just to survive the fallout, and sometimes it's the other way around.

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My client's the one who blows up her own career on purpose, walks away from something stable to build something truer to herself, and has to be strong through the disorienting middle of that choice.

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Both versions require real strength. Neither one is a trap they wandered into by accident. It's appropriate. It's often exactly what's needed.

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You cannot fall completely apart while you're also the one who has to get the kids to school, or advocate for your own treatment plan, or figure out how you're going to pay rent next month while you rebuild something from the studs.

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Strength in the middle of the suck is doing its actual job. The problem isn't the strength itself. The problem is what happens after because typically in life, the suck ends.

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It always does eventually one way or another, and so many of these women keep wearing that strength armor long after the season that required it has ended.

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Nobody ever tells them that it's safe to take it off. There's not a ceremony. There's no moment where someone just says, "Okay, you can stop being strong now. Emergency over." So they just stay in it because it's what they know how to do, and because stopping feels kinda dangerous, like if they let their guard down, the next crisis might catch them without preparation.

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What I get to witness, and I mean this, it is one of the actual privileges of this work, is watching these women realize they're on the other side of it, that the illness is managed, or the relationship has actually ended and they've truly grieved it, or the new career has actually taken root, and in that realization, something shifts.

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They go from surviving to something much bigger: agency, intention, thriving, the ability to choose what happens next instead of just enduring whatever might happen next.

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Watching a woman fully step into their favorite version of themselves after a season like that is one of the most amazing things I get to see in this work, and it typically starts the same way.

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It starts with them putting the armor down and discovering, "Hey, I'm still standing." I wanna be clear about something before we go further.

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Retiring from being the strong one doesn't mean that you become unreliable, that you become checked out, that you become someone who can no longer be counted on.

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That is the fear a lot of my clients have when we start talking about this. "If I stop being the strong one, doesn't that just make me weak?" Ah, the horror. No.

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It makes you a person who picks strength up on purpose instead of a person who never gets to put it down.

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There is a world of difference between those two things, even though from the outside they can look pretty identical. So practically, what does this look like? It starts with noticing.

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I think resentment is one of the loudest smoke alarms your body owns, and if you've been the strong one for a long time, you probably have some going off that you've learned to tune out, where you feel a flicker of, "Why is it always me?" when someone asks you for the thing you always provide.

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That flicker of resentment that you feel is data. We're actually gonna dig much deeper into resentment specifically in an upcoming episode, so keep an ear out for that one.

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But for today, just start noticing where the resentment shows up. It also means expecting the retraining period, not mistaking that retraining period for proof that you were wrong to change.

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When you put a boundary down after years of not having one, the people around you are going to test it, typically not out of malice, just mostly out of habit, the same way my client's coworkers kept pushing their deadlines out of muscle memory.

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Expect the test to happen. It doesn't mean that you failed. It means that the system is just catching up to the new information.

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And it means getting comfortable with a very specific kind of discomfort, the discomfort of being, in the old sense, unreliable, of someone needing something from you and you not immediately supplying it.

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That discomfort is not a sign you're doing something wrong. Most of the time it's the sign you're doing something right for the first time in a long time.

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It also means getting another t- kind of discomfort if you're used to being the strong one, and that is feeling a little bit vulnerable.

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And for those of you who are used to being strong, feeling vulnerable is its own special kind of hell. So if you need help with that, I'm happy to help you. Come and we'll take care of it.

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Before I close, I wanna go back to where we started.

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My family member, the one with the stiff upper lip, the bootstraps, the decades of fine that meant the conversation was over, she's let a few of us see this mushiness now, like I said.

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She's let a few of us see the actual needs underneath, the one she spent so long insisting she didn't have. And here's what I want you to really hear. That was not a weak decision.

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I know it might look that way from the outside if you're still measuring strength the old way, the stiff upper lip way, the never crack way, but it was the strong decision, the strongest one she's made in years and maybe ever.

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Because here's the truth about that armor. It is so much easier to keep it on. Staying stoic doesn't require much from you except more of what you've already been doing since you were young.

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It's a well-worn groove.

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But taking that armor off, sitting in a room with people you love, and letting them see the soft, mushy core you spent decades protecting, admitting out loud that you have needs after insisting for so long that you didn't, that takes the kind of courage the stiff upper lip never once had to reach for.

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She didn't get weaker when she let us see her. She got stronger, a truer kind of strong, the kind that was actually available to her the whole time underneath the one everyone had come to expect.

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That's really the whole thesis of this episode, isn't it? Retiring from being the strong one isn't a downgrade. It's not the consolation prize for people who couldn't hold the old role anymore.

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It's a promotion from surviving to choosing, surviving to thriving, from performing strength to being strong in a form nobody can see through anymore because there's nothing left to perform.

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Okay, I wanna tell you one more story before we go, and this one's mine.

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And, and just to be clear, I cleared this with my hubby before I shared it because I don't wanna share anything about our relationship that he's gonna be surprised about.

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So this has been cleared by the amazing Dr. John Parsons. But for a long stretch of my marriage, I was what we called the straw that stirred the drink.

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My hubby John has spent most of his life trying very hard to never have feelings, or at least to never let them be visible.

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He's probably had to be the strong one, which meant that when I had feelings, actual human emotions, it disrupted the atmosphere of our house.

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I was the one who had to keep an even keel all the time because there was only room for one of us to be a full-feeling human being, and somehow that had quietly been decided to be him.

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That was impossible, and I mean that literally. It is not possible to be a human being with no feelings for years on end on anyone's behalf, including your own.

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It was exhausting in a way I don't even have full words for. I just knew I was tired in a way that sleep did not fix.

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Now since then, both of us have done real serious work with ourselves, separately and together, so that neither of us has to be the strong one with no feelings and no needs.

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And here's what it looks like now on the other side of that work that we did. We take turns.

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One of us holds space for the other to be a fully messy human, and then at some other point, the roles reverse. It's not that the job of holding steady disappeared.

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It's that it stopped belonging permanently to one of us. And sometimes we're both a mess, and that's really messy. And that's what I want for you, not a life with no strength in it.

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Strength is real, it's useful, and sometimes it's exactly what a moment calls for. But I want you to have a life where strength is something you do sometimes, not something you are all the time.

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A life where someone else gets to hold space for you once in a while instead of you holding the roof up alone indefinitely with no end date on the contract. So here's your permission slip for today.

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You are allowed to retire from being the strong one. You are allowed to have a soft, mushy core right out where people can see it.

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You don't have to show it to everyone, but at least let a few of your people who love you see it. You're allowed to let someone else be in charge of the deadline for once.

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You've done that job long enough. It's okay to finally put it down. Okay, everyone. I love you all so much. Thanks for listening to Your Favorite You. Come back 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!