Why You Don’t Speak Up - Jayson Gaddis - 567

0:00Welcome back to the Jason Gettys podcast. I'm your host Jason. What's up? And welcome back. Why do you not speak up in your relationship? Why is that the case? Well, if you think about it, something bad's going to happen, right? Otherwise, you would speak up. And I want you to write down a list of what bad thing is going to happen in your mind because everybody's a little different here. Here are some examples people have told me over the years. I'm afraid it's going to make it worse. I'm afraid it's not going to go well. I'm afraid he or she will get defensive. I'm afraid I don't know how to communicate it. I'm not clear. So I'm afraid I will just

1:04bumble my way through the conversation and not make sense. It's not going to help anyway. It's not that big of a deal. I'm afraid of conflict. I'm afraid that if I say something, they're going to get upset and they will go away. And then what am I going to have to feel? I don't want to feel that abandoned, perhaps. A lot of discomfort, you know. I write a lot about this in my book that the fear of speaking up is often driven by an old fear, meaning very young, that when you're a kid, when you try to use your voice, it didn't go great. The parents, the big people didn't receive you well. They shamed you. They ignored you. You got hurt. They went away. Enough bad stuff happened, which could have been one time or hundreds,

2:06that you were like, it doesn't help. It only makes it worse, screw that. I'm going to go along to get along. That goes a lot better. And so is developed a strategy for you to keep connection and avoid rejection. This is a human thing. It's not a you thing. This is a me thing. We all do a version of holding back out times when the stakes are high. We do it the most when the stakes are high. When the stakes are low, like sitting next to a person on an airplane that you don't even know, and you find yourself opening up, it's just like, I'm never going to see this person get big deal. Or you go to a personal growth workshop and you just let it all come out and you feel really safe. You're like sweet, but you can't do it at home. What's up with that? Because when the stakes are high, we have the most to lose. The most could go wrong in our attachment relationships.

3:09And we don't like that. So we hold back. And the cost, of course, of holding back is years and years of resentments and diminished connection. A divide between us that gets hard to name and hard to cross. I don't know. We just feel off. I don't know. We get along fine. No, we just can't talk about blank family, money, sex, fill in the blank. We get along great as long as we're not bringing up blank. You know, this is a limited way of living and being. And at our recent couples retreat, we talked about speaking up and how to do it well. Why we're afraid. And it was amazing to see these courageous couples lean in and have hard conversations about money, about conflict,

4:10about an old resentment and old hurt from 2023 or earlier. And the beauty is when you learn how to bring difficult things up and how to repair if it goes messy and go sideways, you can handle any hard conversation. Like there's, I'm finally to point my life where I can feel almost, I think, any hard conversation from someone else. I know how to have them feel understood. And I know how to set down my defensiveness and actually care. Now, if they're an impossible person, it's a little different because impossible people won't move an inch on anything. And they're very hard to work things through because they are so inflexible. And they're not willing to take any responsibility. That's not a relationship. I'm talking about fielding things from people who are in a relationship with that the relationship goes both ways, right? I care about you, you care about me. Oh, okay.

5:15But I have fielded a lot of negative feedback over the years from my wife all the way to down to my parents, to students and clients and listeners. And I get to choose who I field those complaints, you know, who they are, who those people are. And I get to close my door just like you on people that I have zero interest in hearing about or from haters, for example, don't deserve a second of my attention, just like you in your life. You shouldn't give a troll or a hater a second of your time. But someone from 20 years ago that maybe you hurt that you actually still, like you had a good time back then, it could be an ex lover, it could be an old friend. If they, one of you wants to build a bridge, you can come back into connection. It's pretty incredible.

6:17And I've had to do that a lot and own how I was absent and how I went away and I didn't, I was completely inconsiderate. So there's a lot of ways to rebuild a bridge after it's been burned down. Believe it or not, you can with the right skill and capacity and interest. Again, both sides helps. But you don't speak up because the bottom line is bad stuff. You perceive bad stuff is going to happen. And remember in my analogy of two shitty choices, like choice A is speak up. It could go bad. So I'm not going to speak up. So I'd devolve to choice B, which is to not speak up. I keep the relationship, but I create resentments and I ultimately betray myself and my own truth. Now, finally, when you want to speak up and you begin speaking up, you must be considerate of impact. You must care about the other person's feelings. I'm not talking about speaking up where

7:20you're lobbying grenades from across the room or behind your Facebook wall. I'm talking about the kind of speaking up where you meet someone's eyes and you say, Hey, can I be honest with you? I'm scared, but I'd like to tell you the truth about what's going on over here. Right. There's a vulnerability in that that invites the other person to become more disarmed and less walls up ready to fight. It doesn't always work, but it definitely can help. Yeah. All right. So it's understandable why you're scared to speak up. And I'm going to give you a final tip on how to just a skeleton that you can riff off of. Okay. One idea is when you blank, I feel blank, right? When you did blank, I felt blank. Always good to start with one sentence instead of a monologue. Another one is to lead with empathy. Yeah, I care about you. And I can

8:24imagine that my silence has been really difficult for you because I have been silent. So what did I do there? I empathized with the impact of my silence on them and I own that I've been silent. So I call this the ownership empathy statement or another way to say it is, I want to own that I have been really judgy of you. And I can imagine you felt pretty scared to open up with me. So it makes sense that you've been kind of guarded around me. Okay. Lots and lots of ways to do this. Well, of course, many people do it poorly or don't do it at all, but you have to decide, do I want good relationships, good, secure, solid relationships. And if so, I must make a commitment internally to speak up no matter the cost. And to speak up is skillfully and as heartfelt as possible. And then to be willing to listen to whatever comes back,

9:25or maybe I listen first and then I speak up, you decide. But keep the end goal in mind. I want secure, strong relationships with my most important people, cool, truth telling and speaking up must be a part of that. And next good thing to learn is how to repair well because conversations like this can go south and sideways and get messy. And people who know how to repair well can handle when things get messy and go sideways because they know how to clean it up. If you don't know how to speak up and you don't know how to repair well, you're probably going to stay silent. All right, your choice. I wish you well. I got lots of courses over here that you can take to learn how to do this better. And yeah, just email us. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being a subscriber. Talk soon.