#208: Trusting Yourself When Everyone Else Has Opinions About Your Life

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, my beautiful humans.

​

Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I'm still Melissa Parsons, your favorite podcast host and your favorite general life coach for women.

​

Today, I wanna talk about the exhaustion of trying to make a decision about your own life when everyone around you, and likely it feels like half the internet, has an opinion about what you should do instead.

​

So let's just look at a quick sample of advice circulating right now on my feed with equal confidence. "Eat 130 grams of protein a day." "Oh no, don't do that. It's most important just to make sure that you're watching calories in versus calories out." The next one, "Get 15,000 steps." "Oh, nope. Actually, your body needs to rest as much as possible." The next one, "Take all of your PTO, and also be a team player." And finally, "Be there for your child's every moment, but don't be their friend." Every piece of that advice was delivered like it was simply obviously correct, which means a lot of it has to be wrong, or at least it's probably wrong for you specifically.

​

So today, I want to talk about how to trust yourself anyway in the middle of family opinions, strangers' opinions, and of course, the internet that can't even agree with itself.

​

So let's start with the opinions that usually carry the most weight because they come from the people who shaped you, your family. I see this constantly in my work.

​

I have clients who are actively healing their relationships with themselves, and usually that relationship with themself was hampered by how they were parented, while their own parents are standing right there commenting on how they're raising their kids differently.

​

They say things like, "You're too soft on him," or, "We never coddled you like that." And every comment lands with some extra weight because it's not just a parenting critique.

​

It's coming from the exact people whose parenting is the reason that you have some healing to do in the first place. Here's what I would love you to hear.

​

Their discomfort with your different choices is not proof that you're wrong. Often, it's the opposite.

​

It's proof you're doing something different enough to be noticed, which usually means you're actually changing the pattern instead of simply repeating it.

​

Their opinion can carry history, but it does not have to carry authority. Then there's the completely different, equally exhausting flavor from the stranger.

​

So women everywhere are going to recognize this statement, "You should smile more." "Maybe say it a little nicer," or, "Why don't, why aren't you smiling?" Zero contact, zero relationship, zero anything, and somehow total entitlement to weigh in.

​

What's wild is how much weight we let that carry given how little it's built on, like zero. The opinion of someone who knows you least should logically weigh the least.

​

In practice, it often doesn't, and that gap is worth noticing. Let's go back to that list that I said at the beginning.

​

So protein versus calories, steps versus rest, PTO user versus team player reliability, endlessly present parenting or maintaining authority and distance parenting.

​

Every one of these has an equally confident, equally credentialed piece of content behind it, delivered like it is doctrine, the final word.

​

Here's the thing that it took me a long time to internalize. The fact that this advice contradicts itself isn't a bug. It's the whole tell.

​

If everyone genuinely knew the one right answer, there wouldn't be 100 competing versions of it, all equally certain, all equally dogmatic. There is no everyone.

​

There's just a very large number of individuals, each convinced their one data point is the universal rule.

​

Once you see that, you can stop searching for the correct answer hiding in the noise because you realize the noise was never going to resolve into one answer. It's not about you.

​

It's typically about clicks and content, someone else's certainty performed at you, which means the only reliable source left standing is the one you've been taught to distrust the most, which is you.

​

You are the source. So let me get specific about a few times I had to trust myself against the opinions of other people. The first one's probably pretty obvious.

​

After 22 years in pediatrics, I left to become a full-time life coach. Not everyone in my life thought that was wise, and there were strangers who didn't think it was wise.

​

There were plenty of raised eyebrows, plenty of, "Are you sure?" that wasn't really a question.

​

And I had to trust something quieter than all of that, a knowing that had been building in me for a long time. Here's another.

​

A year and a half or so ago, I decided not to massively scale my business. I am keeping it small on purpose, so it's just me, my assistant Jenny, and my podcast producer Grace.

​

And this is happening in a world that constantly is telling me in a whisper or a shout or whatever that bigger is better. I decided that I didn't want a big business.

​

I didn't want people who were on my team who were depending on me to, you know, make their salary, and, you know, if their kids got fed that week, it was on me.

​

That's a different kind of trust than the medicine decision. Trusting myself against an entire industry's definition of a success, or at least the people that I was hanging out with at the time.

​

And then a more personal one.

​

So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while or you've listened to several episodes, you probably know that I made the decision to stop drinking alcohol eight years ago even though I didn't have what most people would consider a problem.

​

And this was well before mocktails were on every restaurant menu, before every major city had its own alcohol-free bar, before sobriety had a lot of cultural cover at all.

​

There was no trend to point to and say, "See? Other people are doing this, too." There was just me in New York City after the Bruce Springsteen concert deciding with no social proof anywhere in sight.

​

The assumption that many people make is that the decision to take on sobriety needs to come from a rock bottom place enough to justify it, and mine didn't look like that at all.

​

I just knew with striking clarity that I wanted something different, and I didn't need anyone else's definition of bad enough or anyone else's permission or a single mocktail menu to exist yet to make that change.

​

Three different decisions, three different kinds of opinion I had to set aside.

​

So professional expectation, industry logic, and the cultural rule that change only counts if it's dramatic enough to justify itself. All three require the same skill.

​

Thrusting a knowing inside of me over a consensus outside of me. Now, this trust muscle isn't only for the big decisions.

​

It gets built or it atrophies in the small choices that nobody's watching closely.

​

When my kids were in school, I didn't sign up for all the alerts, not the assignment notifications, not the real-time progress updates.

​

I knew that stream of information wasn't going to make me a better parent, just an anxious one in a new, more granular way. Plenty of other parents chose differently, and that's fine for them.

​

I trusted what I knew about myself over the responsible-looking default.

​

I also decided to show up on social media sweaty, messy, greasy-haired sometimes instead of you guys only getting the polished version of me. Not because messy is superior.

​

It's because it's more true.

​

It's how I live my life more often, and I got tired of curating a version of myself that might make other women feel like they were the only ones who ever looked like that.

​

So, you know, nobody sent me a strong, strongly worded opinion about my hair on Instagram, but this is exactly where that muscle of self-trust actually gets built, in the choices where nobody's commenting or grading or, you know, making me know their opinions.

​

I do want to, to make a quick note on bodies and appearance.

​

I want to name one category of opinion that is so damaging that it deserves its own moment here, even though it deserves a whole episode, too. And I promise I'll get there eventually.

​

I just had a coaching call with my group this week about this, and I was like, "I need to add this to this episode." And that note is comments on other people's bodies.

​

The obviously negative comments are typically easy to spot. "Wow, miss, it looks like you've put on some weight." That needs no explanation for why it's not okay.

​

But I want you to notice the ones that come dressed as compliments because those are the ones we let slide. "I haven't seen you in forever.

​

You look so muscular," quietly implies that you weren't muscular before, as if that needed correcting.

​

"Look at you, skinny mini," treats smaller as an accomplishment worth announcing, whether or not the person wanted their body discussed at all, whether or not it's even healthy for this person to be at that body habitus.

​

Positive or negative, both are the same act. Someone deciding your body is a topic open for public commentary. It isn't. Please never comment on someone else's body. Full stop.

​

We'll come back to this one, but I didn't want another episode to go by without saying it. I want to be honest about why it is genuinely hard to build your self-trust muscle.

​

It's not that every opinion aimed at you is wrong. Sometimes people see something real that you might not be able to see yet.

​

The hard part is tolerating the discomfort of being seen as different, of disappointing someone, of knowing some people are going to quietly decide you did it wrong.

​

Most of us were never taught to sit in that discomfort without immediately changing our behavior to make the disapproval stop. Trusting yourself also doesn't make the disapproval disappear.

​

It means you get better at staying in your own decision while someone else's face does whatever it's going to do. So practically, notice your body's signal when an opinion lands wrong for you.

​

The tightening, maybe a little flush of heat, a small internal recoil that happens before your mind even catches up and finishes processing it. That signal that your body is sending is data.

​

Then ask yourself whose voice that actually is. Is this genuinely my own concern? Is this one of my parents' voices? Is this a stranger's voice? Is this something I heard on the internet?

​

Is it the Internet's voice borrowing my mouth for a minute? You'd be amazed how often the answer is, "This voice is obviously not mine." And treat your own track record as evidence, because it is.

​

Every time you've trusted an instinct and it turned out well, even in some small forgettable way, that's data about your own reliability.

​

Most of us are keeping pretty exhaustive records of the times we were wrong and almost no record of the times we ended up being right. So start correcting that ledger. Okay.

​

Opinions are never going to stop. Your family will keep having them.

​

Unfortunately, strangers will keep saying their opinion to you, either in person or more likely behind their keyboard where it's safer. The Internet will keep contradicting itself forever.

​

That's not a problem you solve by finding the one correct answer buried in all of that noise. Remember, there isn't one. That was always the tell.

​

What you can build is a relationship with your own knowing that's sturdy enough to hold steady while the noise around you keeps happening, not by ignoring good counsel.

​

You'll still know the difference between someone who genuinely sees something you can't and someone performing certainty at you.

​

But by finally weighing your own voice as evidence, too, instead of the one voice in the room that never gets a vote. So here's your permission slip for today.

​

You are allowed to trust yourself, especially when everyone else's opinions contradict each other. That contradiction was never a reason to keep searching out there.

​

It's always the sign to come back into yourself and into your knowing. And if you're sitting there thinking, "Well, Melissa, that's exactly my problem. I don't even know how to tell the difference between my own voice and everyone else's anymore," I want you to hear this. That is not a character flaw, and you don't have to figure it out alone.

​

If you have trouble noticing when you're not trusting your own inner knowing or if you want guidance as you start to build that trust with yourself, I would love to be your guide.

​

That's the whole work I do with my clients. I love you all so much. Thank you for listening to Your Favorite You. I'll see you again 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!