A late one this week. My brain went on strike, more accurately on “medical leave”. Sucks, but (sh)it happens.

Why these women inspire me

Mary Anderson, Shirley Ann Jackson, and Ann Tsukamoto.

Three women you probably never heard of (unless you’re in their respective fields).
Three women whose ideas the culture surrounding them wasn’t eager to hear.
Three women who pushed past being ignored and dismissed.

They delivered. Created what we take for granted now.

Their research and inventions shaping much bigger fields than people imagined they would at the time.

Three indispensable women contributors who are still little-known.

And, infuriatingly, if I were to ask you who created what they did, you’d probably come up with the three male names.

Even women would.

Heck, if asked before researching this piece, I would have.

Because we suffer from the same conditioned biases as men do. The fact that I enjoy and am surprised at the same time seeing a woman in a “man’s” job says enough.

That’s why I like to tell these stories.

Because they’re uplifting and do a lot of bias-countering.1 Though I do hesitate to do so sometimes.2

Why you want to think of and thank them

Mary Anderson: You want to think of her every time you drive in the rain and turn on your windshield wipers. She invented (and patented them all the way back in 1903) having seen drivers struggling in bad weather.

Shirley Ann Jackson: You want to think of her every time you pick up your phone and see who’s calling or put a call on hold to answer another coming in. She invented caller ID and call waiting.

Ann Tsukamoto: You want to think of her every time you are (or someone you love is) treated with a regenerative medical procedure or taking medicine for a blood disease.

How they persevered and kept contributing

All three women are uplifting and inspiring to me.

They refused to self-censor.
They trusted their own observations and spoke up about it.
They refused to be censored and give up when they faced a culture indifferent to their ideas (because they came from a woman, if you even doubted that).

And they didn’t stop there. They kept building after the first win.

Mary Anderson

We take windshield wipers for granted now, but Mary Anderson instigated the concept she delivered on with them: safer visibility in bad weather. No one back then thought it was a problem that could be solved! She proved it was and could.

She didn’t stop with sketching her idea. She got the patent (1903). She went around to manufacturers to get it into production. They all rejected it. No commercial value (cars were still a rarity then).

Windshield wipers only became standard mass produced standard issue after her patent ran out in 1920…

Mary Anderson put car and driver safety on the map and expectations and requirements around it have only grown broader since.

Shirley Ann Jackson

Shirley Ann Jackson’s work on semiconductors and optical-physics fed into solar-cell development. We wouldn’t be enjoying solar energy quite the same way without her contribution.

She didn’t restrict herself to that field.

She served as chairman on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (appointed by Bill Clinton), chairperson of the International Regulators Association, and led the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as its 18th president.

More important (to me definitely) than the exact roles, she broke a lot of barriers in STEM and influenced science policy, nuclear safety, and higher education leadership.

Ann Tsukamoto

Ann Tsukamoto stem-cell work opened doors to several treatments like treatments for blood cancer and recovery after damaging chemotherapy.

She also contributed to applying stem-cells in liver tissue and damaged neural tissue, like for spinal cord injuries and neurodegenerative diseases.

She holds 13 patents. Not surprising then that her work became foundational for and shaped the field of regenerative medicine and influenced advancements in gene therapy and tissue engineering.

Share your own irrepressibility!

They were irrepressible. Without a doubt.

They trusted themselves, trusted a simple observation, and built something (a lot of somethings) useful despite living and working in a culture not eager to listen to their ideas — too often not because they lacked merit but because of their female source.

How irrepressible are you?

When was the last time you stuck to your guns ideas, didn’t back off, and (eventually) reaped the rewards? The satisfaction and confidence of accomplishment? Maybe (finally) even validation and recognition?

Share them here in the comments!

Positive role models have power beyond your wildest imagination far into the future.

You have a more ideas than you know what to do with. Would make sense to share them. So someone else can run with a few.

But you don’t.

Not because you think they’re worthless. Quite the contrary. You know full well what your ideas are worth.

It’s just that you’ve seen too many of them ignored, dismissed out of hand, and only later implemented when someone else re-surfaced them. And got the credit. Usually a male.

So you keep your ideas to yourself, implement what you have control over, and leave others to come up with their own ideas.

Totally reasonable.

You’ve correctly read the water you (and everyone else) swims in. The biases, the incentives.

It’s heavily skewed in favor of males and against females. Judging them against different standards, applying different norms, punishing one for what’s lauded in the other.

Some hard numbers that illustrate the mismatch

Women get interrupted (rude at any time) three times as often as men. And when they share their ideas, they’re 20% less likely to receive credit when they’re acted upon.

Women in executive functions who speak up get rated 14% less competent by their colleagues. Male executives doing the same thing gain 10%.

The numbers are undeniable. The math says to stay quiet.

I get that. I’ve been there. When I was naive enough not to notice it. When I did, I turned to facts and data. Only to learn that those don’t win arguments.

We won’t change the biases any time soon.

But like it’s a ridiculous notion to think it’s futile to save a single living being (flora or fauna) because you can’t save them all, not taking any action towards change is just as ridiculous.

Because there’s a cost to keeping your ideas to yourself that not only hurts you and the organization you’re a part of it, but everyone on this Earth.

Because patriarchy has promoted a profit and extraction mindset through its indoctrination of males into comparison and competition for a very limited definition of “success”.

And the world is and will remain short of ideas for reversing that and repairing the damage done while women keep their ideas to themselves.

Humor me while I dive a little deeper

The tax no one audits

When you keep your mouth shut, your idea either disappears (the moment passes, the context never is that relevant again), or the alternative route you try (sharing it with someone you think is it’s safe to do so with) comes back to haunt you.

Almost two-thirds of multiracial women report having their ideas presented in a meeting by someone else. As theirs.

Not out of malice. Usually.

More a case of having heard it, mulled it over, and made it their own. They probably don’t even remember who planted the seed.

And you wonder whether it’s worth calling it out. Will anyone even believe you genuinely mentioned it a couple of days ago? Wouldn’t it sound like you’re trying to get in on it? And even if that didn’t happen, it would definitely still cost you. (Being labeled “difficult”.)

This is the “workaround” tax.

It compounds the interruption tax.

On top of the credibility tax.

Every route through a room that isn’t prepared to receive women’s contributions directly has a surcharge attached.

While virtual rooms removed the most obvious obstacles for women to speak up, 45% of women business leaders say it’s still difficult to speak up in those.

All three taxes follow you home.

The “lag” tax no business sees clearly

Apart from the taxes women incur, businesses incur taxes too.

The first of these (more later) is a direct result of the workaround tax.

Women know it only too well. But they keep their mouth shut because calling it out comes with more costs for them.

The idea that got “rolled out company-wide” this quarter?

It was actually suggested three or four years ago. By a woman. Who watched it get ignored, resurfaced through the workaround tax, tested quietly by the resurfacer(s), adopted, and then announced as an initiative.

Three to four years.

Imagine what other ideas are languishing in obscurity that could have been acted upon and generating benefits if businesses (and organizations) had the sense to take women’s ideas as seriously as they do men’s.

Gone without a trace

The thing about a suppressed idea is that it leaves no trace.

No one can hear what isn’t said.

You can’t calculate the opportunity cost of an opportunity you didn’t hear.

No post mortem looks into what could’ve been done that wasn’t.

Innovative ideas that don’t get spoken, don’t generate data.

Makes it hard to figure out what women’s (self-)silencing is costing us. But hard isn’t a mission impossible. The workaround is to look at companies and organizations that get the diversity thing more right than others.

Making it safe and rewarding for women to speak up, pays you back with interest and then some

The other taxes business incur when they don’t make it a point to make speaking up safe and rewarding for women, have been measured by comparing them against organizations who do.

The Boston Consulting Group found that companies with above-average diversity in management report 19% higher innovation revenue.

McKinsey (doing a slightly better job for women than with their ”Broken Rung” report) found that companies in the top 25% when it comes to gender diversity are 39% more likely to outperform on profitability.

Closing the gender gap could add $12 trillion to global GDP according to McKinsey’s Global Institute.

Self-censorship is rational. The incentives are real.

The standard framing says women need to speak up more — lean in, build confidence, develop executive presence.

That framing is aimed at the wrong audience entirely.

It puts the onus squarely on women, while ignoring the ways in which males and culture incentivizes them to keep their mouths firmly shut.

Would you willingly put your hand in the hive of killer bees? (Unless it’s necessary to stay within your integrity?)

Women have the nerve to speak up. They don’t hold back because they lack confidence, or ambition, or ideas. They hold back because the cost-benefit calculation tells them to.

Women have been burned too often to do more than sneer at the “lean in, build more confidence, develop executive presence”. They know, having felt the consequences, that showing up with more “male” behaviors backfires.

Perhaps unless they own the company. Then they still incur all the penalties, but aren’t affected as much because, well, they’re the boss.

What’s at stake

We are living with the consequences of a long period in which one half of humanity’s competencies was systematically called into question and their potential contributions to society actively scorned.

Patriarchal definitions of success — growth over sustainability, hierarchy over connection, output over wellbeing, competition over collaboration — have gotten us where we are now. And I’m not at all convinced that we’re in a desirable place.

Where could we have been if we had appreciated every human the same way?

Where could we have been without the patriarchal mindset and thinking?

Though I’ve often been called a pessimist because I tend to start at the beginning, the problem and its costs, I’m actually a stout optimist. I firmly believe everything can be changed, turned around, fixed. (To my great dismay my brain’s wiring has proven resistant to this belief.)

We need every available mind on this planet to reverse the mindset and repair the damage of the extractive nature of what Angell Deer calls “Empire” and I call patriarchal thinking.

At all levels. The physical, mental/spiritual, familial, economic, natural, community/societal, etc.

Some people cheer that patriarchy is dying. It is. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. It’s going to take another century to a century and a half. And in the mean time, those who feel most threatened by it being under stress will get more and more extreme in their thinking and insistence on restricting women’s autonomy.

Navigating the water while it’s still favoring men

Women have a well-honed sense for reading what’s being missed. The connection no one else in the room made, the problem identified before it became a crisis.

Without it we got where we are now and where we as a species are headed, taking every other species (flora and fauna) along with us.

We need women to speak out. We need the wisdom accumulated in women.

Like the San people, with a 20 thousand (!) year long culture that still lasts recognize.

But the room and the water we all (women and men alike) swim in, will eventually change but it’s not going to be any time soon. That’s why I won’t tell you to lean in and speak up anyway.

But I won’t leave you hanging either. A few suggestions that actually work:

The paper-trail workaround: Put it in writing. Share your ideas in a document, an email thread, a presentation deck. Get your name on the idea record before anyone else can appropriate it. It’s the paper-trail workaround.

The double-punch: State your idea in a meeting. Watch what happens. If it’s ignored and then later gets applause when repeated by someone else: jump on it. Without crying foul. “Yes, that’s the direction I was pointing at earlier. Glad it landed.” Matter-of-factly. No (visible) emotion. It calls out what happened without making a fuss and getting other’s hackles up while still positioning you for credit.

The battles rooms triage: Some rooms simply aren’t worth the trouble or the toll. Invest in rooms where speaking up has the best chance of moving your ideas forward. Triage is an effective strategy outside of an emergency (room) too.

The idea journal: This is another type of paper-trail workaround. Keep a record, a log of what happens with/to your ideas. Makes it easier to spot patterns. About the rooms, about the people in it. Helps with triage. Fun part: you don’t risk forgetting your ideas and can carry them with you wherever you go. Bonus part: a log is a form of what’s legally known as contemporaneous notes. They carry more weight than memories recorded (much) later. So if anyone should question your double-punch, you can ask: “Want me to get my logbook?” (That’s why my employer, back in the ‘80s insisted we keep logs of what we did when working at a client.)

Tedious? Yes. And still the smart move.

Yes, all these suggestions are tedious. None of them should be necessary. None solve the structural problem.

That’s unfortunate. But denying reality won’t get you anywhere. And the structural part is beyond your control anyway (unless you’re at the very top of the heap).

Whatever you do, please don’t hold your breath waiting for them to change. That would be self-defeating if not down-right dangerous.

I suggest using my suggestions to navigate the waters without incurring the penalties associated with common “lean in” advice. Other women will notice. And, you can let them in on your tactics. So it spreads. Which is likely to speed up structural change. Because the room (then) can’t help but notice.

I genuinely believe we need more female brains contributing their ideas if we are to fix the consequences of 400 years of “Empire” and ~2000+ of patriarchy.

Is getting labeled difficult... difficult?

Or is it you being you, doing what you like to do, and women and men (both thoroughly conditioned by patriarchal ideas) stamping a label on your forehead because you remind them of the freedom they don’t take, or that you’re your own person and not easily controlled?

The ten women in this list did things they weren’t supposed to do as “good women”.

And they clearly enjoyed what they did.

Read on, and you might will be inspired.

You’re using her invention right now

Hedy Lamarr was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 1940s. She was also, in her spare time, a co-inventor of the technology behind Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. She and composer George Antheil developed a frequency-hopping system originally designed for torpedo guidance — the US Navy rejected it. The patent expired before anyone realized what she’d built. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. Posthumously. Your wireless world is partly her side project.

Every school said no, she went to France

Every flight school in the United States refused Bessie Coleman — she was Black and she was a woman, and both were apparently reason enough. So she learned French, moved to France, earned her pilot’s license, and came home as the first Black female pilot in the world. Then she barnstormed the country doing loop-de-loops and wing walks as “Queen Bess.” The schools that had turned her down got to watch from the ground.

She was twenty, she beat all of them

In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel. She also beat the existing men’s record. By two hours. She was twenty years old. New York gave her a ticker-tape parade. The men’s record never quite recovered its dignity.

She packed a pillow and climbed into a barrel

Annie Edson Taylor was a 63-year-old retired schoolteacher. She celebrated her birthday in 1901 by becoming the first person in history to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She packed her lucky heart-shaped pillow. She emerged with a small cut on her head, her pillow intact, and a story nobody could touch. The men who’d called it a reckless stunt said nothing much after that.

Three ships, three disasters, same woman every time

Violet Jessop was a ship’s stewardess. In 1911, she was aboard the Olympic when it collided with a warship. In 1912, she was aboard the Titanic when it sank. In 1916, she was aboard the Britannic when it exploded. All three ships from the same fleet. After each disaster, she went back to sea. Because she liked the work. The ocean, by all appearances, eventually gave up.

She looked like nobody’s idea of a record-breaker

Junko Tabei was a small, soft-spoken Japanese schoolteacher. In 1975, she became the first woman to summit Everest. Then she kept going — Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, Denali, Elbrus, Mount Vinson, Puncak Jaya. First woman to complete the Seven Summits. A feat most avid male mountaineers never manage. Nobody saw her coming. That was probably part of the fun.

Nobody gave her a seat, she took several

Danica Patrick was the first woman to win an IndyCar race, the first to lead the Indy 500, and the first to take pole position at the Daytona 500 — all in a sport that nobody built for her, handed to her, or expected her in. She competed for years. She clearly enjoyed every second of it. That, apparently, was the problem.

She showed up like that, then she won

Florence Griffith Joyner arrived at the 1988 Olympics in a one-legged unitard, four-inch nails, and full glam makeup. Then she set world records in the 100m and 200m that still haven’t been broken — 38 years and counting. The records stood on their own. So did the nails.

She had four careers, one was space

Mae Jemison had degrees in chemical engineering and African-American studies from Stanford and a medical degree from Cornell. She served as a Peace Corps doctor in West Africa. She trained as a dancer at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. In 1992, she became the first Black woman in space. She retired from NASA at 36 to start a technology company. She’d apparently run out of things to try at NASA.

Oh, and fun fact: she appeared on Star Trek! I just love that.

She struck out the two greatest hitters in baseball, and got fired

In 1931, 17-year-old Jackie Mitchell was brought in as relief pitcher in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. Her first batter: Babe Ruth. She struck him out. He flung his bat in frustration. Her second: Lou Gehrig. Three pitches, three swings, three misses.

The Baseball Commissioner voided her contract shortly after. The official reason was that baseball was “too strenuous” for women.

Some historians think the strikeouts were staged. Others think that theory exists to protect male egos.

You decide.

When you earn the “difficult” label, you’re in good company!

Jane Goodall got it too. Though she didn’t think it an accomplishment. In fact, she noted it takes very little to earn the title “difficult woman.”

Every woman on this list did something they weren’t supposed to. Not one of them asked permission. Most of them had a fantastic time.

“Difficult” is about inconvenience — specifically, the inconvenience of a woman who won’t stay put.

So go ahead. Be inconvenient. Have opinions. Take up space. Earn the label.

It doesn’t take much, apparently.

All my life, I’ve had a hard time sticking with any habit.

Not because I don’t care.

Not because I don’t know how to build a habit (I’ve read The Power of Habit, Tiny Habits, Atomic Habits, and tens of eBooks on habit building).

Not because I don’t see the value of habits or what the habit would bring me.

And I’m not going to blame my neurodivergence for it, although it is a huge factor.

Tedium and repetition collude against me

Anything that has the teensiest of tedium or induces boredom purely from the repetition that’s inherent in a habit, stands little chance against my ADHD-er’s and gifted-er’s propensity to bore easily and lose interest faster than a race car.

My autist likes repetition, structure, and predictability, but is vetoed by the other two.

Any habit I start usually lasts three days, weeks, or months. Then I’m done.

Not the most effective trait to have when you want to build something that’s going to take several months just to gain some traction.

Add SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome), FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) around the “best” way forward, and crickets (little if any feedback on what you’re publishing, or all from the same two people) into the mix and you have a perfect recipe for shooting yourself in the foot on a regular basis.

Boringly regular to be precise.

Maybe the solution is in avoiding the boring regularity of changing my mind.

Never considered that before (actually just thought of it right now writing that previous paragraph). But no. That ain’t gonna work. Boring + boring does not interesting make. It mostly inspires exasperation with myself.

And yet, I’m a creature of habit

Ironically, I also stick with activities long past their sell-by-date. Often continuing for up to two years after I start to lose interest.

Out of sheer habit. Now, if that isn’t ironic, I don’t know what is.

So, I can stick with stuff. I can do this habit thing.

Which made me wonder. What was the difference between the things I did and didn’t stick with?

Obviously, tedium. But not repetition in and of itself. Repetition without tedium isn’t half as bad.

When, the type of activity is repeated, but what I’d do during the activity was different almost every time, I’d be fine. Like Taiko practice for 12+ years.

And not all tedium is born equal.

Some tedium gets me into a meditative state (running, which I’d still be doing if I wouldn’t injure myself all the time tripping over a blade of grass), or changes the object I’m working on before my eyes and that’s a wonderous process to watch (like sanding wood).

If repetition isn’t the problem and tedium can become meditative, what else is keeping me from sticking with what (I’ve said) I want to do?

Like losing weight.

I know I want to and not just because of the health benefits. I like the idea of having a lean body, losing the jowls, enjoying seeing all of myself in the mirror not just my face. Still, sticking to an eating plan (if I even have one) usually lasts for 3 weeks. But... I also _have_ lost 25+ kilos and 10+ kilos on numerous occasions.

What’s the difference between them, then?

Decisions eat desires for breakfast

Deciding what you want is essential.

The times I stopped after 3 weeks (or 4 or 6, the exact number isn’t the point), I started with a desire more than a decision. I don’t knock desire, it’s great fuel.

But it’s also fickle and tends to get snowed under by other desires. Like desiring the taste and mouth-feeling of a delicious snack. Chocolate, fudge, anything sugary, smooth, and creamy.

Decisions cut off all other options.1

You need a strategy, tactics, and OODA loops

Without a strategy I’d be all over the place, chasing every “that sounds good” idea that serendipitously crossed my path.

I’d be looking for shortcuts because the result was what mattered.

Like I have done in my business.

The long term plan is very clear to me. The strategy to get there as well.

The tactics are more flexible, but I’ve learned, the hard way, that you need to give tactics a reasonable time to show results.

And I used OODA loops before I knew the abbreviation (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act).

What got in the way every time, however, was the short-term: the perceived need for “now-revenue”. Chasing that result to the point of neglecting my long-term goals.

When life gets in the way, habits fly away

Now here’s something that fundamentally changed how I approach any change in everything I do: contingency planning. Which is a fancy term for thinking in advance of what I’m going to do when life inevitably gets in the way.

For me that’s predictably unpredictably often. Meaning I know (predictable) migraines will hit, but not when (unpredictability). One thing is sure though: they crop up at the least convenient of times.

Without contingency planning, my streaks are interrupted.

When the interruption lasts for longer than a day or two, it gets harder to restart. Ten times more so without a decision supporting steeling your resolve.

With contingency planning, you decide (!) -- in advance -- what you’re going to do when the rug gets janked out from under you or you’re simply too tired from whatever to even contemplate spending energy on your (new) habit.

When a really bad migraine hits, cognitive capability flies out of the window and walking gets torturous, every step reverberating throughout my skull. Don’t even suggest running, though I have done it and sometimes it helped clear the migraine (sometimes being the operative word).

So I now plan for contingencies like that. Some examples:

• If my plan said “run 30 minutes” the contingency plan could be “walk 10 minutes”.

• If my plan said “do 50 kettlebell swings every day”, the contingency plan could be “do 5”.

• If my plan said “write for an hour every day”, the contingency plan could be “write three sentences”.

The point is that you do something, the tiniest execution possible given the circumstances, so you can celebrate and reinforce the habit.

To go anywhere, do anything, you need to start

Quite often getting going, starting an activity is the biggest hurdle to get over. Getting up from the couch is the biggest mountain to climb to keep any habit going. Unless you can do it on your couch, of course, but that’s beside the point.

Once you’re in motion everything becomes easier, the momentum carries you forward.

When I was running and doing 2 and 3 hour training sessions, I’d often dread the idea of spending that amount of time before going out.

So, I’d give myself permission to head home earlier if that’s what I needed to do (made a lot easier because my route was always some kind of circuit around my house).

I never (really, never) did.

Closing in on a point where I cut my training short, I’d think “Come on, just a bit longer and then you can stop if you want”. Reaching it, I’d think: “Oh, no, come on, we’ll turn in at the next point” (we being myself and Sofie - my four-legged running mate at the time). And at the next opportunity to return early, the same scenario unfolded.

The one thing that precedes starting

To do anything consistently, you need to show up. Physically. To a location where you can do it.

To the gym, to an office, to a co-working space, to the kitchen (if preparing a healthy meal is the habit you’re after).

And that is where Nina comes in.

Working on her anxiety around being without me (unless she chooses to) I started giving her a small chew stick or some other treat when I sat down at my computer to signal I was going to be unavailable for some time.

At the time, I worked from my dining room table. I’d moved my office downstairs, because Nina had injured a biceps tendon, wasn’t allowed to go up or down any stairs.

So my upstairs office was out of bounds.

Seemed the perfect time to re-finish my self-built solid cherry-wood desk... It turned into one of those projects I’d start enthusiastically but found hard to finish for all sorts of reasons - ligit and not so much.

When I finally did finish it and moved my computer and monitors back upstairs, the chew stick ritual continued.

Within days Nina being Nina, started sitting with her butt towards the couch where I was eating my breakfast, her face pointing to the hallway door. Every now and again she’d let out a tiny, very soft whimper.

They say dogs can’t talk, but actually it’s more a case of us not being very good listeners and it took another couple of days for the quarter to drop for me. Quickly confirmed by her response when I stood up and moved into the hallway. She was right ahead of me, front paws on the first step, looking at me expectantly.

What? Caving to Nina? That’s crazy, right?

No way it’s crazy. And, though I’m sure I could redirect the classical conditioning I unconsciously trained into her, I don’t want to.

I’m using it to my advantage.

Because it’s how Nina, unwittingly, keeps me showing up for work.

And when you show up... what’s the point in not actually doing some work?

You want to say no more often.

Maybe you’ve already started. A bit tentatively, slowly gaining some skill and the first minutes (hours?) of your time back. Good. Keep going.

Setting boundaries is one thing. Sticking with them despite pushback, quite another.

But that’s exactly what’s needed to limit the attention, time, and effort you spend on others - on their requests (demands even perhaps?). Stuff that is theirs to do, not yours. (Unless you really, really want to do what they’re asking.)

So, I’ve put together 4 surprising tactics that can also bring a lot of fun and a sense of mischief to what may still daunt you.

1) Bore them out of it

You know how it goes. You say no. They push back. You stick to your no. They leave. A couple of hours/days/... later they’re back. Same request. Slightly different phrasing. Rinse and repeat until you cave. As you’ve done most times up until now.

Chances are you’ve given them the ammunition to make their push back more effective.

By explaining. By justifying.

Every word you utter beyond your no is material they can use against your no.

Not out of malice. Out of habit. And because it has worked.

The answer is simple (not easy): bore them out of pushing back and reiterating their request every other day.

A boring, flat toned “No”, “I can’t”, or “That doesn’t work for me.” is matter of fact. Doesn’t invite negotiation.

What if they ask “Are you sure?” or “But why not?”?

Remain boring. “Yes, I’m sure.” And “Because”, “Because I can’t”, “Because it doesn’t work for me.”

My father used to say “Om toch niet” (Dutch phrase I can’t translate that boils down to “because”) when I asked why I couldn’t do something. Shut me right up.

Boring works because pushback, negotiation, needs something to grip onto. When you don’t provide anything they can latch onto, they’ll have to think of reasons why you should agree all by themselves. And that’s often harder work than doing the thing they requested.

What this week’s LinkedIn post on boring answers didn’t cover: the harder problem is doing this in writing.

In person is much easier because “all you have to do” is repeat the delivery of a boring, flat-toned no. But when you’re sitting at a keyboard, staring at a blinking cursor, you can’t help but think of the arguments they could throw at you. And the urge to counter them before they happen can be ridiculously strong. Combined with the conditioned urge to apologize, explain, and justify, you’re on the verge of caving every second you don’t send your flat no.

A flat no isn’t cold. It isn’t rejecting or denying the person making a request. It’s rejecting what’s on the table. That’s all it is.

What’s more, it’s not open to misinterpretation and doesn’t require follow-up. No one can read between lines you didn’t write.

And anyone who thinks you unkind, even calls you that, usually is someone who relied on your long-winded answers to inspire their negotiation tactics.

2) Kiss your guilt goodbye

As long as you’re not fully okay with delivering a no to anything you don’t want to do, one thing is sure to happen.

Guilt.

When you wanted to feel good about saying no.

No matter how often you hear and tell yourself: “don’t feel guilty, there’s nothing to feel guilty about”, it still does. Every single time.

Bummer.

Don’t guilt (sorry!) yourself about it. You can’t override decades of conditioning with affirmations and journaling (if that’s your thing). It’s gonna take time and practice.

In the mean time, you’ll have to deal with the emotions your conditioning evokes.

How?

Well, the one thing you don’t want to do is to suppress it. That’s like trying to keep a balloon under water. It’s going to pop right out of it the second you let your guard down.

What I do is give it space. Let it breathe and dissipate. That only takes 60-90 seconds unless you re-activate the emotion with thoughts. (Which happens quite a bit to me as my autist likes to repeat and rehearse conversations.)

But I don’t let it breathe forever. I limit the time it gets on stage.

Used to be 24 hours. Now, it’s a night’s sleep.

Then it’s “done”. No second chances regardless of what my autist has to say about it. When she pipes up (and she does for weeks) I tell her “no longer relevant” and rope in my ADHD’er to distract myself.

Oh, and remember that the guilt you feel is not telling you that saying no was wrong. It’s your subconscious running an old tape. The one about the perils of not meeting expectations.

You may want to thank it for keeping you safe. It’s a bit stuck in the past. Hasn’t registered yet that you no longer need that protection. So thank it. Reassure it that you can handle it now, that you’ve learned to have your own back.

One thing worth sitting with: if the guilt is still loud after 24 hours, ask what it’s protecting.

Most often it’s the old wiring. Sometimes there’s something worth revisiting. Something you did or didn’t do that you felt guilty about and haven’t fully processed (or accepted that you too can fluke). You’ll know which it is.

Do note that the time limit on the “I said no” guilt still starts from when you said it.

3) Short circuit their expectations (and enjoy the view)

Have you ever looked at someone when you delivered an unexpected response?

Their expression is quite funny. Like they have been short-circuited. And it becomes more pronounced and confused as you repeat a no.

Want to enjoy saying no a bit more? See some truly remarkable expressions?

When they come back around for a third time, don’t just repeat your no, also call out what they’re doing: repeating their request (until you cave, but don’t mention that).

You can’t blame them for doing it, really. They’re not even doing it consciously. It’s what you taught them works. And what works gets repeated.

No wonder they’re confused and their wiring is short-circuited when it no longer does.

Apart from the fun of looking at their expressions, naming the pattern also serves to interrupt it.

“I’ve noticed that when I say no, you come back a little while later and ask again. And again.”

Most people have never had a pattern named back at them before. They don’t have a script for it.

Patterns are habits running on autopilot. When you call them out, maybe even give them a name, you introduce a witness, you bring them into the light and that usually stops it as then they can’t unsee it anymore.

Nor can you.

Naming your own patterns works just as well. “When someone asks me something and I feel put on the spot, I say yes — and then resent it by the time I’m actually doing it.”

Seeing it, naming it, often is enough to widen and use the gap between impulse and response enough to consciously take another path than the habitual, conditioned behavior.

If, when you call it out on someone else, they deny doing it, don’t argue. That would only spiral into a useless debate. You only have to remember it’s not your problem to solve and your challenge is yours: sticking to your no.

The face they make in the half-second before they respond, by the way — briefly short-circuited, almost rebooting — is one of the more privately satisfying things I’ve experienced when I started honing my “no” skills.

4) Ask the right questions

The questions that women tend to ask themselves when they’re asked to do something they don’t want to:

• Should(n’t) I do this?

• Am I (not) obliged to agree to this?

• I’ve said yes before, how can I say no now?

I’m telling you they’re the wrong questions.

The first puts you in territory where your conditioning, through the guilt and shame it induces, always wins. The second implies you should say yes and are looking for an excuse. The third says you’re not allowed to change your mind.

None of them are helpful. None of them are true.

The first question to answer is always: “Do I want to do this?”
The second: “Do I have the bandwidth and energy to take it on?” (After you’ve taken care of your non-negotiables!)

The first honors your own wants, needs, and desires.
The second honors your limited resources of attention, time, and effort.

Neither puts your character in question.

In fact, they both help you to stay within your integrity and remain reliable. Both essential ingredients of (self-)trust.

Overriding an empty tank because you couldn’t come up with a “good enough” excuse (trust me, I’ve been there too many times), is saying that “I don’t want to” isn’t a good enough reason not to do something.

When it actually is the ultimate best reason! I didn’t learn that until well into my 40s. Hope you’re getting the message a little sooner.

Get the reps in

None of these tactics require you to become a different person, or to become callous, inconsiderate, and uncaring.

They work because they’re practical rather than principled — about timing, framing, and small deliberate mechanics rather than willpower or character overhauls.

Keep in mind that denying requests is essential for proper self-prioritization and -care.

And also, perhaps surprisingly, the best thing you do for someone else. It gets (forces) them to build their confidence and resilience through practice when you doing it makes them dependent.

Maintaining boundaries is a skill. You don’t need confidence to start. In fact, that’s backwards. Confidence follows action.

So take action because practice, getting the reps in, is how you build any skill and grow the confidence in it you’re longing for.

A friend sent me a message about Penthesilea — an Amazon warrior queen. She’d come across the name in “Villette” by Charlotte Bronte and decided to look into her. Buried in a Wikipedia entry she found this snippet:

*”A Netherlandish list of 101 strong women published between 1465 and 1480... circulated at the court of Mary of Burgundy and was read by members of the Brussels administration.”*

Say what? A list of strong women. In the Middle Ages?!

What would the medieval courts need a list of strong women for?

The more I looked, the clearer the answer became. And the more uncomfortable.

Patriarchal men can’t stomach independent, autonomous women

They’ll go to extraordinary lengths to lessen the uncertainty it raises within them.

They can’t change the facts. A woman who wins a war, builds an empire, commands armies — that happened. Trying to erase the facts is an exercise in futility.

So they go for what they *can* change: the narrative. Not what she did. What it *means*. What it says about *her*.

Victory becomes vengeance. Command becomes cruelty. Achievement becomes evidence of deviance. The story gets adjusted until the uncomfortable reality becomes manageable.

Men’s patriarchal conditioning makes them incapable of dealing with reality when that reality is a woman who exceeded every boundary they impose on women.

What’s left is to go for the jugular: attack the woman’s character and why you, as a woman want to avoid being labeled similarly.

It’s not a new trick. It’s an ancient one. And I can’t fault their psychological horse sense.

Lists of strong women? In the Middle Ages?!

**In 1361, a man named Boccaccio published the first major Western collection of famous women.**

*De Mulieribus Claris*. Translated: On Famous Women.

It’s been called proto-feminist. A celebration. Evidence that even in the 14th century, women’s achievements were recognized and recorded.

Right?

Read the fine print.

The women Boccaccio praised most warmly were the obedient ones. The chaste ones. The ones who sacrificed themselves heroically for husbands, fathers, or kingdoms. The ones who subordinated themselves with sufficient grace that a man found them worth preserving.

The “troublesome” women — the ones who ruled, conquered, refused, exceeded — appeared too.

But as warnings. By design.

What Boccaccio built wasn’t a celebration of women. It was a classification system. Here are the ones you’re allowed to admire. Here are the ones you should fear. Here, helpfully, is the difference — so you know which kind to be.

The list went on to influence every similar compilation for the next century: the 1405 Netherlandish chronicle, the 101 strong women circulated at Mary of Burgundy’s court, Philippe Bouton’s *Miroir des dames* in 1480. All using the same pattern: praise women, sort them, contain them — especially the high-achievers.

Medieval courts ate them up. Women included.

Which makes sense. We all — women *and* men — like not having to think too hard about fundamental questions. A moral framework disguised as a reading list is highly appetizing. And a very efficient way to keep women in line. You don’t have to tell women 1:1 what you need them to be. You just hand them a book. Scales much better.

Three women. Three tactics. Same strategy.

Tomyris, defeated and killed Cyrus the Great. The most powerful conqueror of his era. Not by luck, not trivially. Total, decisive military victory over the then most feared ruler in the world.

So, obviously, something had to be done. Call her savage, bloodthirsty. Not strategic. Not brilliant. Not the woman who did what no army had managed to do before.

Semiramis ruled Assyria, built Babylon, ran military campaigns across the known world. Her story so incredible (to men) that historian decided it must be a myth. She wasn’t. So something had to be done to defang it.

Gradually, across centuries, the accounts filled up with sexual excess. Cross-dressing. Madness. Embellishments to avoid having to explain how a woman could possibly have done all that.

Penthesilea, Amazon queen, commanded armies. She stood for sovereignty and courage. In the hands of moralising male tradition she was made to look suspect, tragic, or doomed — as though a woman’s power itself were the problem needing explanation.

The tactics differ, the strategy is always the same: If you can’t erase the record, attack the character and sow doubt.

It’s called an ad-hominem attack. Usually employed by those who can’t argue their way around what causes them cognitive dissonance.

And the message in it is never subtle: admire her. Do not become her.

Its effectiveness is troubling.

A woman who refuses obedience gets renamed “excessive,” “dangerous,” or “tragic,” so the next woman thinks twice before claiming the same ground. And the one after her. And the one after her. It goes on until, eventually women themselves take on cautioning, nay policing, other women.

That’s how efficient the system gets.

This devious trick still works

In 2003, Britney Spears was the biggest pop star on the planet. By 2008, the narrative had changed her into a pitiable heap of failure that couldn’t even legally represent herself. The media had a field day with the legal conservatorship that stripped her of control over her finances, her body, and her career for thirteen years. Never once acknowledging that the relentless media pressure was a factor in her breakdown.

Thirteen years. Thirteen bloody long years.

The “crazy Britney” narrative was more than gossip. It was the instrument of control.

It wasn’t until the 2021 documentary *Framing Britney Spears* that she was vindicated and her story re-reframed. Not mental illness, but media-induced trauma and systematic financial exploitation. The initial story was the mechanism.

In 2021, Simone Biles — the greatest gymnast in history, full stop — withdrew from the Tokyo Olympics team final citing the “twisties,” a dissociative phenomenon where the brain and body stop communicating.

Her own words: *”I’m more than my accomplishments and gymnastics which I never truly believed before.”*

She was immediately called a quitter. A coward. The GOAT became a cautionary tale about weakness within hours. Hours! The reframe was instant and vicious — and perfectly timed for the moment she exercised autonomous judgment about her own body.

Top-women lists aren’t pure celebration

The “Top Women in Leadership” lists multiply on LinkedIn every year.

They look celebratory. Until you look closer.

They’re highly sophisticated psychological instruments — even if the patriarchal men producing them aren’t aware of it.

They tell you who you can admire. And simultaneously caution against becoming like the more “dangerous” ones. Notice who consistently makes these lists. Warm leaders. Collaborative leaders. Those who made the room feel safe. Who succeeded by being — and this will sound familiar — not too difficult.

The women who are sharp-elbowed, who take up space without apology, who refuse to soften their opinions? They appear with qualifiers. “Polarizing.” “Divisive.” “An acquired taste.”

Tomyris was an acquired taste too. They called her savage.

Labels suck but they don’t have to stick

In January 1976, the Soviet military newspaper *Red Star* published a piece calling Margaret Thatcher “the Iron Lady”. Obviously not a compliment. No, 100% intended as an insult.

Too hawkish. Too hard. Too unwomanly in her refusal to soften.

Margaret Thatcher’s counter-move is as brilliant as it was sharp and effective. Not a week after that piece hit the news, she stood in front of an audience and proclaimed:

She took their insult and turned it against them, wearing it as armor. Before they could weaponize it, she’d already made it a badge of honor.

Pull a Margaret Thatcher before the label hits

“Difficult” has been doing the same job for centuries that “savage” and “bloodthirsty” and “dangerous” did in the medieval lists. It’s the word patriarchal men reach for when a woman won’t shrink, soften, or self-cancel to make them comfortable.

I claim it. And pull my nose at anyone who seeks to contain me with it.

Margaret Thatcher’ idea isn’t to be scoffed at!

What’s one label you fear getting stuck on you — difficult, too much, divisive, intense, a lot — that you could claim as a badge of honor instead? And stick your tongue out at whoever tried to use it against you.

If you’re a woman, you’ve been conditioned most, if not all your life, to “serve”. To help everyone around you but yourself.

There comes a time when the thought “why did I agree to this again?” becomes louder and more frequent.

It’s not an angry voice. Maybe a bit. But most of all, it’s tired. Fed up that you’ve done it again.

Don’t beat yourself up about it.

Your “yes”es are conditioned responses with lifelong reinforcement.

The good news is you can change it. The bad news: it’ll take some work.

You need subconscious reflex speed

The standard advice — “say no more,” “protect your energy,” “know your worth” — is not wrong. It’s just too slow.

Thinking is slow. Conscious thought, that is.

Your subconscious is way, way, way faster.

Which is exactly why you find yourself having said yes before you even realize it.

And your subconscious starts actions before you’re consciously aware of them (yes, really!).

That said, there’s also always a tiny gap between intention and execution, between the stimulus and the response. And that’s where your opportunity for interruption sits.

Which means any interruption technique needs to be ridiculously simple and fast. Conscious thought (like the standard advice) isn’t it. Nowhere near, in fact.

Your body knows before you do

The first step isn’t interruption. It’s recognition — catching the pattern earlier in the sequence, before it completes.

Most of the signals are body-level. They happen before conscious thought, which is exactly what makes them useful.

Watch for these:

• Solutioning before considering whether you want to solve the struggle someone told you about.

• You feel relief when someone’s request is a reason not to indulge in a frivolous pleasure. That relief signals how you’ve been rating the worth of doing something for fun, solely for yourself.

• You rephrase what you need or want as a question. That’s apologizing for having needs and wants before anyone thinks of negotiating or objecting. (And the very fact you phrase it as a question actually invites that).

Ironically and sadly, you feel resentment about acting in these ways and immediately feel ashamed of the resentment.

The shame shuts down any objections you have to staying in line with your conditioning. It’s you self-censoring your wants and needs.

None of these are character flaws. They are habits. Deeply grooved, extensively rehearsed habits — learned in conditions where they were genuinely adaptive.

They can be interrupted. But only once you can see them.

What interruption actually looks like

As I mentioned above, your subconscious starts actions before you’re consciously aware of them (yes, really!). But even so there’s always a tiny gap between intention and execution, between the stimulus and the response.

That’s where your opportunity for interruption sits.

Which means it needs to be simple and fast.

Three I’ve found to work for me:

• The good old count to ten. Buys you time to answer “Do I want to do this?” before answering the request. Pro move: slow your breathing while you count.

• The wristband slap. Comes with AA recommendation. They teach addicts to wear an elastic wristband and pull and release it when the craving for their specific poison hits. The pain snaps them out of it. It works for stopping any habitual pattern.

• The other good old bite your tongue. Combines the other two without any visual clues that might spark questions you don’t want or are not ready to answer.

Interrupting an old pattern isn’t enough

Interrupting your unconscious agreement to requests is the first step. But unless you’ve an alternative answer lined up in advance, you’re still likely to cave.

Having a few rote phrases at your fingertips (uh, at the tip of your tongue) is remarkably effective to make your pattern interrupt count (and buy you even more time).

Some sweet and short ones:

• So? (Lets them make an explicit request if their phrasing was more like an assumption that you’d solve their struggle for them.)

• I can’t. (Doesn’t say “no”, doesn’t provide any “reason” to push back on.)

• What’s stopping you? (Puts their request back on them and makes it clear that they can and should do it themselves.)

• When? (Decreases your sense, interpretation, of urgency and gets them to think about it.)

• What would you like me to drop instead? (Makes it clear your plate is full enough and taking this on means dropping something else.)

Pro-move: do not ever say “maybe” or “not now” in any way shape or form. That only prolongs your agonizing over a request and makes it harder and harder to refuse (in your mind, at least).

What actually makes it stick

Women I know who’ve genuinely changed this — not perfectly, but substantially and durably — don’t share a personality type or a particular backstory. But they share a few things.

They got bored with sacrificing their own wants and needs. Until that behavior starts feeling tedious, you’re probably not quite in the place to stop it.

They practiced new behavior without announcing they intended to change it. That takes away any “we’ll see about that” incentive to test your resolve.

They stopped explaining and justifying. This one surprised me when I first learned about it and started applying it. Thing is, explanations and justifications signal uncertainty and open the door to negotiating you out of your decision. What’s more, they provide the arguments for it.

Virtually all women who made lasting change did it quietly. They didn’t draw attention to it and they let other people sit with their confusion. That can be uncomfortable. For both. Letting someone sit with their emotions (about you/r behavior) without resolving it for them goes squarely against your conditioning.

But keeping their planned behavior change quiet, afforded them the luxury of experimenting without an audience.

When they slipped, and they all did regularly, that was information, not a disaster. They met it with curiosity: “What was going on that day? What triggered it? What was I afraid of?”

Most importantly: they rose and tried again.

If these women did share traits, they were curiosity and the resolve to keep at it.

Change, lasting change, is a process. It takes time. The women who succeeded were willing to muddle through the messy middle between old and new.

Are you?

Ever noticed how setting boundaries is always what you want other people to do or not do?

Like they and their behavior is something to fix.

That’s not the issue. Not one bit at all.

The real, uncomfortable as it is to hear, truth is that they’re not the problem but you suck at sticking with the boundaries you decided to have.

Every time they ask and you cave: that’s you abandoning one.

Never announce a boundary

Boundaries are private decisions, you don’t need to inform anyone about them directly.

In fact, you don’t want to do that at all.

Just imagine how that might put ideas in their heads...

More seriously though, you’ve now drawn a line in the sand and that, inevitably, gets people to test your willingness to stand by it.

Say, you tell your coworkers: “I only answer work emails during work hours.” Great policy. I recommend it highly. But don’t expect them to believe you. And don’t expect them to now not send any emails outside of working hours.

Your boundary. Your responsibility.

And the first weekend or evening you check your mail, find a a work-related and you decide to answer it because it’s marked ‘urgent’ and it’ll only take you 5 minutes?

You just communicated that your boundary is window-dressing.

Don’t rely on others to respect your boundaries. You need to respect them. Only you. When you do, others have no choice but to live with them.

The paradox determining the value of your time

Ever felt you were being taken for granted, treated like furniture?

It’s so unfair that other women get vocally and publicly appreciated when they didn’t even do half as much as you.

There’s a paradox at work here. The unavailability paradox. It says:

👉 the more accessible you are, the less valuable your attention.

👉 the more of service you are, the less valuable your contribution.

When you’re always available, always ready to help, always present, you fade into the background. Noticed only when absent.

When you’re not always available, strategically refuse requests for your time and effort, and don’t respond the minute you receive a text, you stand out. (Until we all do, but no worries that’s still a long way off.)

You may not be the most liked, but you will be more respected and taken seriously. Your time and contributions will be more appreciated and considered genuinely valuable.

That’s because scarcity increases value. Not just in economics.

And as a bonus, you seem a lot more interesting as you obviously have more going on!

Respecting your boundary around your time communicates the value of your time to you. And that inevitably increases it to others.

The jump-in habit: compulsive volunteering that sends all the wrong messages

Your behavior speaks louder than words. And it’s not usually saying what you think it is.

Take the jump-in habit: anytime someone talks to you about a struggle, you jump in to fix, organize, solve, or smooth over whatever is troubling them.

You want to help. I get that. But it’s not the message that’s received. That message is: you need help.

I was like this for years. Decades, actually.

I saw a problem and solved it before anyone else had registered it as a problem. More importantly: before anyone had had a chance to consider whether they thought it was a problem, let alone a problem that needed solving.

I had to stop. Not because I was enlightened — I genuinely had less capacity. The enlightenment came later.

Coz, whadda you know? Nothing collapsed.

Other people fixed what needed fixing. And what didn’t get solved, didn’t need solving.

When someone comes to you with a personal or other struggle that, hardly ever, is a request to step in and take over. Most of the time, they just want to talk it over. To get the situation straight in their own mind or clarify their feelings around it.

When you support someone through that without jumping to their rescue, you’re respecting their capacity to fix and solve their issues. You send the message: you got this.

(Also, you get hours back. Which is nice.)

Decrease your availability — 3 fun, revealing experiments

1. The 48-hour experiment

Pick one type of request you normally say yes to immediately. Don’t say no — just don’t say yes for 48 hours. Watch what happens. Most of the time? They solve it themselves. Or the “urgency” evaporates.

(Napoleon ignored his mail for two to three weeks. Most of the crises? Gone by the time he opened the letters. I’m not saying become Napoleon. The principle holds.)

2. The minimal words answer

Try: “I’m unable to help you with that” or even shorter: “I can’t”.

Then, keep your mouth shut. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t justify.

Notice how long it takes before you find the silence uncomfortable and struggle with the urge to apologize, explain, justify.

Keep your mouth shut anyway. (It’ll pass quicker than you imagine.)

3. The out-of-service experiment

Notice something that’s not being done or differently from how you’d do it (and thus wrong, obviously 😇).

Resist the urge to step in and fix it. Watch. Observe.

Does someone else step up?

Is the result sufficient? Not how you’d do it, but still sufficient? Maybe even better?

If it didn’t get done, did the (your) world fall apart?

Fair warning: noting that you’re not needed as much as you think or would like to be can be a sobering experience.

Nail holding your boundaries

Once you understand that the boundary is yours to hold — that you are the police — it gets both harder and simpler.

Harder because there’s no one to blame when it fails.
Simpler because there’s no one to train, persuade, or wait for.

Just you. Quietly. Consistently. Deciding who you are.

I know you can. Not perfectly perhaps, not at first. But it will get easier with practice.

Every time you hold it: that’s you, showing up for yourself.
Every time you abandon it: that’s information, not a moral failing. It’s data about where you’ve still got some work to do.

Difficult women who get this right aren’t heroic boundary-setters. They’re just consistent. Boring, almost. They said no last time. They said no this time. They’ll say no next time.

Not because they’re rigid. Because they know what matters to them.

That’s always the key to holding a boundary.

Be honest, if not with me, with yourself: when one of your boundaries was last tested, did you hold it or did you hand the keys to your kingdom?

You’ve been sitting with a request for three days now.

You don’t want to do it.

You should “just” say no.

But...

You can’t help thinking about everything bad that will happen if you do.

You know what?

It’s “just” your imagination running riot with every message you’ve been fed since you were born. Refusing something hardly ever blows up in your face.

People will still love you, you get to keep your relationships, and what you didn’t do gets done by someone else or didn’t matter at all.

That said, you’ll likely fumble when you first start.

You’ll likely fumble more than you’d like at first

If it goes sideways, it’s usually because when you start refusing requests, you’re likely to make one (or more) mistakes.

Like not keeping your mouth shut and riding out the few seconds of awkward silence that follow your “No.” And instead fumbling your way out of your “No” with one of these three.

Fumble #1: Explaining yourself.

“I can’t because...” / “I would love to, but...”

Don’t.

Explanations open you up to push back, to every counter-argument imaginable. To emotional appeals, to “but you always...” moping.

“No” is a full answer. And if that is still a bridge too far, “That doesn’t work for me” works as well.

Fumble #2: Refusing things you actually want to do.

Having decades of “yes”-ing behind you, you’ll likely overcorrect and refuse more than you need to. When that includes activities you genuinely enjoy? That’s self-punishment wearing a power move costume.

The whole point about building your refusal muscle is to reclaim time for things you like. Including those that present themselves as requests.

Fumble #3: Staying in the shallow end forever

Yes. Start small.

But don’t set up camp there.

If you only refuse the small things, but keep saying yes to the big ones, you’re not going to get very far.

Saying no to coffee but yes to chairing the committee?

That means depriving yourself of all the small pleasures you could have been enjoying in the time you’ll now have to spend on that committee.

Gifts you get when you practice past the fumbles

When you stop justifying, stop overcorrecting, and stop hiding in the low-stakes zone — you get time back.

Hours and hours of precious time you can use any way you want to.

Wild? Nope. Entirely within reach.

Gift #1: Playful pleasure contagion

My favorite part is kind of mischievous, maybe even rebellious. (Yay!)

When you start practicing strategic refusal, and enjoying your reclaimed time, the impact goes way beyond your personal pleasure.

Don’t get me wrong. Personal pleasure is a good enough reason any day.

But just in case you need a little more justification...

When you give yourself permission to prioritize enjoying yourself over serving and catering to others, you’re leading by example. In a way, you’re handing out permission slips to the people around you to do the same.

Gift #2: Getting saved by your bullshit detector

When you (finally) remember what genuine pleasure actually feels like, your bullshit detector comes back online. Noticing the gap between real enjoyment and going through the motions, is powerful motivation to stop signing yourself up for the second kind.

Acting on that saves you and those around you from ‘fun’ nobody actually enjoys.

Gift #3: Free therapy

Let’s not forget your nervous system. It thrives on pleasure!

Your thinking when you’re in a good mood beats your thinking under stress every single time.

Imagine what that brain power can do for all your activities in life.

Plus, it could save you tons of money you’d otherwise spend on expensive therapy programs.

Money you can put towards indulging in the frivolous pleasures that you now have time for <evil grin>.

Start practicing!

So, you see, it’s a self-perpetuating cycle of joy.

Refuse → more time → frivolous pleasure → regulated nervous system → money saving → more for frivolous pleasures → added motivation for more strategic refusal.

Oh, and of course the joy and satisfaction of inspiring others to do it too!

—Marjan

P.S. If the word “difficult” is what’s stopping you — claim it. It costs nothing, it fits perfectly, and the people trying to use it against you aren’t as confident as they’d like you to believe.

The myths about what women can and can’t do are remarkably well-maintained.

Every year, around International Women’s Day, they come back out. Dusted off. Refreshed. The usual suspects: women are too emotional. Too risk-averse. Too physically limited. Too irrational under pressure. Too [whatever the situation requires].

What I find most interesting about these myths is not that they’re wrong. It’s how specifically, repeatedly, thoroughly wrong they are — and how little that seems to matter.

People don’t update their opinions. When they meet evidence to the contrary, confirmation bias files it under “exception” and your subconscious gets to wallow in comfort.

So during this week leading up to International Women’s Day (8 March), I’m not celebrating abstract women’s traits. We don’t need applause for existing and being capable individuals.

No. Instead I look at what it looks like when myths meet evidence. And how some men go out of their way to keep them alive.

It’s more entertaining than you might expect.

The myth that needed a co-driver

In 1962, Ewy Rosqvist-von Korff entered the Argentine Turismo Standard Grand Prix. She was a factory driver for Mercedes-Benz, which had bought out her Volvo contract because they wanted her specifically. She was also a three-time European champion at that point. Her co-driver was Ursula Wirth. Also a woman.

They won all six stages of the 4,626km race.

Not just won — they set a new speed record, raising the average winning speed from 121 km/h to 127 km/h. In a two-ton Mercedes 220 SE. Across Argentina.

Ewy’s whole career: not a single accident. Not a crash. Not a broken car. She stopped competing in 1967. Entirely intact.

The myth that women can’t drive persisted anyway.

Here’s what that tells you: inconvenient evidence doesn’t kill myths. People file it under “exception” — she was special, she was different, she doesn’t count — and the myth continues, unmolested. The myth was never a hypothesis being tested. It was a conclusion being protected.

Ewy died in July 2024. She was 94. I imagine she had very little patience for the Myth Maintenance Department.

The myth that needed a race director to intervene

April 19, 1967. Boston Marathon.

Kathrine Switzer signed up as “K.V. Switzer.” That was how she always signed her work. There was nothing in the official rules explicitly barring women from the race — mostly because no one had thought to write it down, possibly because the idea seemed too absurd to need prohibiting.

Partway through the race, the race director, Jock Semple, spotted her. He ran onto the course, grabbed her by the bib, and screamed: “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!”

Her boyfriend — running alongside — body-blocked him. She kept running. She finished.

Women were officially permitted to enter the Boston Marathon in 1972. Five years after the race director physically attacked one for running it.

The myth wasn’t that women couldn’t run marathons. The proof was there in real-time, bib number 261, crossing the finish line. The myth was that they shouldn’t. That there was a category of things that belonged to men, and women running through it needed to be physically removed.

Kathrine Switzer has since run the Boston Marathon many times. Including at 70, in 2017 — fifty years after the attack — in the same bib number. Four hours, 44 minutes, 31 seconds.

The myth that needed an entire country to stop

October 24, 1975. Iceland.

90% of the country’s women stopped. Not just paid work — all of it. Housework. Childcare. Cooking. Everything.

Fish factories closed. (Most of the workers: women.) Newspapers couldn’t print. (Most of the typesetters: women.) Schools and nurseries shut. (Most of the staff: women.)

The men took their kids to work. Reports from that day describe offices full of small children and bags of sweets that someone had bought in haste at a petrol station. Hot dog sausages, apparently, for the ones who managed to find a grill. Iceland’s businesses were running on emergency confectionery.

In six hours, Iceland found out exactly how much of its functioning depended on labour it hadn’t fully counted.

The following year: the Gender Equality Act.

Five years later: Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the world’s first democratically elected female president. She held office for four terms — sixteen years.

All from one day off.

Every ten years, Icelandic women do it again. As a reminder. They’ve done it in 1985, 2005, 2010, 2016, and 2023 — sometimes the full day, sometimes leaving work early. The message is the same: we remember what one day cost you. Do you?

The myth that needed a press statement

Garry Kasparov, 1990: “She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche. No woman can sustain a prolonged battle.”

Judit Polgar was fifteen when Kasparov said this. She became a grandmaster that same year, the youngest in history at the time.

In 2002, she beat Kasparov. Competitive rapid chess. The only woman ever to beat the sitting world number one in competitive play.

He later revised his position. Slightly. He said the Polgar sisters had “shown that there are no inherent limitations to their aptitude — an idea that many male players refused to accept until they had unceremoniously been crushed by a twelve-year-old with a ponytail.”

The twelve-year-old with a ponytail, for her part, went on to beat eleven world champions in competitive play. She retired undefeated from competitive chess in 2014.
Kasparov had said no woman could sustain a prolonged battle.

Judit Polgar’s sustained battle lasted decades. She was not consulted about her limitations before she started.

The myth that needed an updated rulebook on ageing

At the 2024 US Olympic Swimming Trials, Gabrielle Rose was the oldest competitor in a pool of 949 athletes. She was 46.

She swam personal bests in both the 100m and 200m breaststroke. Made the semis.

She had first competed in the Olympics in 1996 — for Brazil, in Atlanta. Four years later, at Sydney, she competed for the USA. At 46, she was faster than she’d been at any point in either of those careers.

Twenty-eight years of improvement.

She didn’t qualify for Paris. But personal bests at 46, against competitors young enough to be her children, in one of the most competitive aquatic environments in the world — that is the story. The Olympic place was never the point.

She said: “Age is a big way that we limit ourselves.”

I still submit that’s an understatement.

What the myths are actually doing

Here’s what connects all five of these: in each case, someone needed the myth to be true.

The men who wanted to drive needed women to be bad at maps. The Boston Athletic Association needed women to be too fragile for marathons. Iceland’s employers and government needed women’s domestic labour to be invisible so they didn’t have to pay for it. Kasparov needed women to be constitutionally unsuited to chess so the world he’d excelled in stayed legible to him.

The myths aren’t hypotheses. They’re conclusions that someone put up fences around.

And “difficult” women — the ones who drive anyway, run anyway, stop working for one day to make the point, beat the world number one in rapid chess, swim faster at 46 than at 22 — they don’t argue with the myths.

They just make them untenable.

That’s not a strategy. It’s not a movement or a message. It’s just women doing the thing they wanted to do, and the myths looking increasingly stupid in comparison.

The Myth Maintenance Department has been working overtime. The evidence department has been busier.

Happy International Women’s Day. Be inconvenient.

— Marjan

If this landed — forward it to a woman who needs it, or a man who might learn something. 42 Sidenotes publishes every Tuesday.

You push yourself until you crash. And then wonder how that happened.

It’s not like you weren’t paying attention. You were. But you weren’t getting anything that told you were running on fumes.

That’s what happens when your nervous system doesn’t send loud-enough signals. Oh, and when you’ve been listening too much to hustle culture and patriarchal messages about work ethics.

Like: rest is earned.

Work hard enough, do enough, produce enough. Then, and only then, have you earned the right to stop.

It’s a belief so common it barely registers as a belief.

For most of my working life, I held it without question.

The problem was I had no working definition of “hard enough.”

It was always more than what I’d already done.

When you’re neurodivergent, your interoception (the ability to sense what’s going on inside your body) is likely compromised.

When you register “tired,” you’re probably already well past exhausted.

That’s a problem.

And combined with “rest is earned,” it puts you in danger of overextending yourself forever and always.

Like it did me.

My threshold was always out of reach.

Whatever I’d done was still — somehow — never enough.

Now layer hustle culture on top of that.

Hustle culture doesn’t care about your signals. It promotes one idea: you always need to hustle if you want to achieve anything.

For a neurotypical, pushing past tired is uncomfortable.

For someone with compromised interoception, pushing past tired is invisible.

And so, you just keep going. Until your body ultimately slams on the brakes. That usually isn’t pretty. And recovery takes more than an afternoon off. By that time, you’re talking months if not years. (I know. I’ve been there. Multiple times.)

**You’re not ignoring your body’s discomfort. You’re rocked to sleep by silence.**

Compromised interoception doesn’t mean you’re doomed. While you can’t raise the volume, you can raise your sensitivity.

You do it through deliberate, conscious, slightly tedious practice. I worked hard (ha!) at it for about a decade.

At first, I’d hear nothing. Over time, I started hearing whispers. Discomfort in my belly. Brain fog increasing. Untypical disquiet.

The signals got louder. Or I got better at hearing them. Hard to say which.

The harder part was believing what I heard.

Even now, I crave objective measures and norms.

Is a 5k walk far? No idea. I’ve engaged in 20k walks because that sounded more like an achievement. (Why did I even want that?!)

My self-talk still pushes me. “That’s not hard, [X] is hard.” Just like with my emotions: I’m not angry until I’m rolling on the floor frothing at the mouth.

I’m still re-calibrating. Consciously honoring what I hear even when my inner-critic laughs at me for being a wimp.

Rest because my body whispers it’s done, regardless of whether I’ve finished what I started.

Rest is a prerequisite, not a prize.

You don’t qualify for it by working hard enough, any more than you need to qualify for breathing.

If you’re neurodivergent, take hustle culture with a kilo of salt. At least until you’ve grown your skill in sensing what your body and brain are whispering.

The hardest part? Acting on what you hear. Without questioning it.

Especially when you’re a neurodivergent woman who’s still tied into the “always be in service" conditioning without regard for your own wants, needs, and desires.

Put your own oxygen mask on first.

If that gets you labeled a “difficult woman”, claim it as a badge of honor!

Mid January a friend sent me a link to McKinsey’s “Five-Fifty” report “Overcoming the broken rung” on the findings in their 2024, 10th Anniversary “Women in the workplace” report.

Reading it, I got pissed off.

I turned to Claude to do a deep dive on that report, its sources, and their sources.

Its finding were unsurprising and confirmed the thoughts that got me pissed off. When I sent Claude’s report to my friend she said:

I actually immediately disliked the approach of this article. it makes it seem that it is all in the control by women of their own careers and that is just not the case. Why do they work less? Because men don’t pull their weight in sharing the burdens that cause women to ‘break the rung’. The article should be about putting men on educational programmes or something like that.

It really makes it sound almost as though it is women’s fault that they fall behind.

So i sent it to you to let off the steam!

She was as pissed off as I was, but she’s also British and tends to be less direct.

TL;DR (by Claude)

Bottom line up front: McKinsey’s “broken rung” framework accurately identifies where women fall behind—that critical first promotion to manager—but systematically avoids investigating why. Their own research explicitly states they “do not directly investigate the reasons” career paths diverge, then offers individual-focused solutions (”build your experience capital”) for what the academic literature overwhelmingly shows are structural, systemic problems. After a decade of tracking, the broken rung has barely budged (79 women per 100 men in 2018 → 81 in 2024), yet McKinsey continues advising women to navigate around bias rather than addressing the mechanisms that create it.

In case you didn’t get it, you don’t solve structural, systemic problems with individual actions. The most you can do is navigate it around it. And “build your experience capital” is not the way to do it. It’s absolutely useless advice.1

Willfully ignoring the reasons and and not addressing the mechanisms that create the broken rung — not even mentioning them! — says to me they’re more interested in keeping their clients comfortable and themselves profitable.

Unsurprising, probably, as they’re a male-dominated consulting organization, but still disappointing and annoying as hell.

Especially considering McKinsey has the position, reputation, and the clients to make a real difference.

And it’s unlikely to change.

I’ve long held, and still hold, the belief that as long as “the bottom line” only looks at financial aspects, publicly held businesses are incentivized to maximize profit over everything else.

Sure, they may talk about important other stuff — like their carbon footprint, their DEI initiatives, etc. — in their annual reports, but until they’re forced to report accurate YoY (and Quarter-on-Quarter) bottom-line numbers on those, I fear that’s mostly posturing to polish their image in their shareholders’ eyes.

Still get pissed off every time I return to this.

So much so, I’m in no place to give you a level-headed analysis of what they “miss” and what’s more effective for you to focus on (if you're still convinced you want to work in corporate) and what might be better options for women.

I’ll get to that in future issues.

Women scientists face a rough deal.

Not surprising perhaps in earlier centuries, but I bet this is still going on and much more so than gets out in the public eye.

If only because nowadays doing it openly is politically incorrect. No one — including scientists, scientific institutions, and universities — wants a reputation for politically incorrectness. And scientists tend to be smart enough to come up with “plausible” reasons that at least sound politically correct.

Science regards any findings that go against “common” knowledge with skepticism, whether of female or male origin. But what happened to the 12 women in this article series goes way beyond that.

I’ve grouped them in three “societies”:

• The “they used my data” club: 4 Women scientists who had their work appropriated and taken credit for by men.

• The “ignored until I proved it twice” brigade: 3 Women scientists who faced incredulity about their findings, often having to prove it more than once, or have a man corroborate (repeat) their findings before being accepted.

• The “low status, high impact” collective: 5 Women scientists who had to take positions at lower status institutes to be able to pursue their interests.

Note that many many women in the brigade and the collective are also members of the “they used my data” club.

This week’s society is the “low status, high impact” collective. Last week’s was the “ignored until I proved it twice” brigade. And the week before that it was the “they used my data” club’s turn.

8. Henrietta Leavitt, Astronomer

In 1893, Henrietta Leavitt was hired as a “computer” at Harvard Observatory—a job reserved for women, involving tedious data analysis for low pay.

Male astronomers made discoveries; women did calculations.

Henrietta Leavitt was assigned to study variable stars—stars that brighten and dim at regular intervals. Over years of painstaking work, examining thousands of photographic plates, she identified over 2,400 variable stars.

Then she noticed something the male astronomers had missed: a relationship between a star’s period and its luminosity. This meant these stars could be used as “standard candles” to measure cosmic distances.

Her discovery changed astronomy.

It allowed scientists to determine the size of the Milky Way, measure distances to other galaxies, and understand the structure and scale of the universe.

Edwin Hubble used her work to show the universe was expanding.

Henrietta Leavitt died of cancer in 1921 at age 53, still a “computer.”

Hubble got famous. She got a crater on the moon.

9. Alice Ball, Chemist

In 1915, Alice Ball became the first Black woman to earn a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii.

She was 23. A year later, she developed a breakthrough: an injectable treatment for leprosy using oil from the chaulmoogra tree.

Previous treatments didn’t work because the oil couldn’t be absorbed by the body.

Alice Ball figured out how to isolate the active compounds and make them water-soluble. It was revolutionary—the first effective treatment for a disease that had plagued humanity for centuries.

Then she died suddenly in 1916 at age 24, possibly from a lab accident.

The university president, Arthur Dean, took her research, made slight modifications, and published it as the “Dean Method.”

For decades, it was the standard treatment for leprosy—saving thousands of lives—and Alice Ball’s name was forgotten.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that a historian uncovered the truth. Now the University of Hawaii awards the “Alice Ball Scholarship” in her name.

10. Mary Anning, Paleontologist

In 1811, at age 12, Mary Anning discovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England.

She was from a poor family; fossil hunting was how they survived. Over her lifetime, she discovered the first plesiosaur, the first British pterosaur, and countless other specimens that revolutionized understanding of prehistoric life and extinction.

Scientists from across Europe traveled to Lyme Regis to buy her finds.

They published papers describing “her” fossils—without crediting her.

The Geological Society of London excluded women; she couldn’t join, couldn’t present, couldn’t publish under her own name.

She learned French to read scientific papers, taught herself anatomy to understand what she was finding. When male scientists visited, she corrected their interpretations—they rarely acknowledged it in print.

She died in 1847 at 47. One scientist wrote: “She contributed more to the science of geology than almost anyone.” Her reply, had she lived to hear it would probably have been something like: “I know.”

11. Nettie Stevens, Geneticist

In 1905, Nettie Stevens discovered that sex is determined by chromosomes—specifically the X and Y.

She was working with mealworms, using a microscope to study their chromosomes, when she observed that males had an XY combination and females had XX.

It was a fundamental discovery about heredity and sex determination.

Her paper was published—second author, after her male colleague Edmund Wilson, who had made similar observations in insects around the same time but without the same clarity.

Thomas Hunt Morgan, a prominent geneticist, took particular interest.

He wrote textbooks. He wanted to magnify his contributions. Stevens’ name gradually disappeared from the narrative of sex determination’s discovery.

When she died of breast cancer in 1912 at 51, Morgan wrote that she “didn’t have a broad view of science.” His letters to her, discovered later, told a different story: he was constantly asking her for experimental details. She was answering.

12. Marthe Gautier, Physician, Geneticist

In 1958, Marthe Gautier discovered that children with Down syndrome had an extra chromosome.

She was examining cells under her microscope, carefully documenting what she saw.

But her microscope wasn’t powerful enough to identify which specific chromosome was duplicated. She needed help. She “naively”—her word—lent her slides to geneticist Jerome Lejeune.

Six months later, Lejeune published the discovery of trisomy 21.

His name was first. Hers was second—misspelled.

He presented the findings at conferences. He became famous. He received awards, honorary degrees, and was proposed for the Nobel Prize.

Gautier watched from the margins. It wasn’t until 2014, when she was 88, that she publicly stated Lejeune had taken credit for her discovery.

That same year, an ethics committee at France’s medical research institute concluded Lejeune was unlikely to have played the “dominant” role in the finding.

Gautier died in 2022 at 96, still fighting to set the record straight.

Sources

Henrietta Leavitt: A Mighty Girl (2025), JSTOR Daily (2025)

Alice Ball: TED Ideas (2024), White House Archives (n.d.)

Mary Anning: BBC Science Focus (2025), A Mighty Girl (2025)

Nettie Stevens: National Geographic (2021)

Marthe Gautier: Physics.org (2022), AFP (2022)

Women scientists face a rough deal.

Not surprising perhaps in earlier centuries, but I bet this is still going on and much more so than gets out in the public eye.

If only because nowadays doing it openly is politically incorrect. No one — including scientists, scientific institutions, and universities — wants a reputation for politically incorrectness. And scientists tend to be smart enough to come up with “plausible” reasons that at least sound politically correct.

Science regards any findings that go against “common” knowledge with skepticism, whether of female or male origin. But what happened to the 12 women in this article series goes way beyond that.

I’ve grouped them in three “societies”:

• The “they used my data” club: 4 Women scientists who had their work appropriated and taken credit for by men.

• The “ignored until I proved it twice” brigade: 3 Women scientists who faced incredulity about their findings, often having to prove it more than once, or have a man corroborate (repeat) their findings before being accepted.

• The “low status, high impact” collective: 5 Women scientists who had to take positions at lower status institutes to be able to pursue their interests.

Note that many many women in the brigade and the collective are also members of the “they used my data” club.

This week’s society is the “ignored until I proved it twice” brigade. Last week’s was the “they used my data” club. Next week it’s the “low status, high impact” collective’s turn.

5. Barbara McClintock, Geneticist

In 1948, Barbara McClintock published her discovery: genes in corn could change positions on chromosomes.

She called them “jumping genes.”

The scientific community’s response was hostile, dismissive. Genes didn’t move—everyone knew that.

For years, she presented her findings at conferences to rooms of skeptical, often openly hostile male scientists. She stopped trying to convince them. She kept experimenting, kept documenting, kept publishing in obscure journals.

She worked in relative isolation for decades. By the 1970s, molecular biology had advanced enough that other scientists “discovered” transposable elements—and realized Barbara McClintock had been right all along.

In 1983, at age 81, she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The award committee noted her work was “initially met with puzzlement, even hostility.”

Barbara McClintock’s had already moved on to her next research question.

6. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Radio Astronomer

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a graduate student who’d spent two years hammering posts into muddy ground, soldering copper wire, building a radio telescope that covered 57 tennis courts.

She was the first to operate it, analyzing 96 feet of chart paper every night.

One night, she noticed a “scruff” in the data—a signal occupying 5 millimeters in 500 meters of paper.

Her supervisor suggested it was interference.

She insisted it wasn’t. She tracked it, documented it, found three more.

She’d discovered pulsars—collapsed stars emitting regular radio pulses.

In 1974, her supervisor Antony Hewish won the Nobel Prize for the discovery, shared with Martin Ryle. Jocelyn Bell Burnell wasn’t included.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle protested. She didn’t. She said students don’t win Nobels, moved to X-ray astronomy, and kept working.

In 2018, she won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize—and donated every penny to fund scholarships for women, minorities, and refugees in physics.

7. Frances Arnold, Chemical Engineer

Frances Arnold doesn’t waste time proving herself to detractors.

As a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, when male colleagues wanted to convert the women’s restroom into a clean room, she and her advisor proposed it to the dean—turning discrimination into leverage.

She pioneered “directed evolution”—using the principles of natural selection to engineer better enzymes.

It was controversial.

Many scientists thought protein engineering should be done through rational design, not evolution.

Frances Arnold let her results speak. Her enzymes worked.

By the 1990s, her directed evolution methods were revolutionizing biotechnology, creating enzymes for everything from biofuels to pharmaceuticals.

In 2020, she retracted a paper after discovering errors. No excuses, no deflection—public accountability.

When asked about criticism throughout her career, she said: “Luckily, I’m pretty good at letting criticism go in this ear and exit the other one.”

In 2018, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She was 62.

Sources

Barbara McClintock: A Mighty Girl (2025), National Geographic (2021)

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Wikipedia (2025), Cambridge University (n.d.), Physics World (2020), Smithsonian Magazine (2018)

Frances Arnold: CalTech (n.d.), Chemical & Engineering News (2025)

Women scientists face a rough deal.

Not surprising perhaps in earlier centuries, but I bet this is still going on and much more so than gets out in the public eye.

If only because nowadays doing it openly is politically incorrect. No one — including scientists, scientific institutions, and universities — wants a reputation for politically incorrectness. And scientists tend to be smart enough to come up with “plausible” reasons that at least sound politically correct.

Science regards any findings that go against “common” knowledge with skepticism, whether of female or male origin. But what happened to the 12 women in this article series goes way beyond that.

I’ve grouped them in three “societies”:

• The “they used my data” club: 4 Women scientists who had their work appropriated and taken credit for by men.

• The “ignored until I proved it twice” brigade: 3 Women scientists who faced incredulity about their findings, often having to prove it more than once, or have a man corroborate (repeat) their findings before being accepted.

• The “low status, high impact” collective: 5 Women scientists who had to take positions at lower status institutes to be able to pursue their interests.

Note that many many women in the brigade and the collective are also members of the “they used my data” club.

This week’s society is the “they used my data” club. The other two follow in the next 2 weeks.

1. Rosalind Franklin, Molecular Biologist

In 1951, Rosalind Franklin produced Photo 51—the X-ray diffraction image that revealed DNA’s double helix structure. Her crystallography work was meticulous, her data irrefutable.

Without her knowledge or permission, Maurice Wilkins showed the image to James Watson. James Watson and Francis Crick used her findings to build their model, publishing in 1953 with no acknowledgment of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution.

When confronted, Rosalind Franklin didn’t fight for credit—she moved on to groundbreaking work on the tobacco mosaic virus and polio. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, likely from years of radiation exposure in her research.

Four years later, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize.

Franklin’s legacy? The work speaks louder than the theft. Her techniques form the foundation of modern molecular biology.

2. Lise Meitner, Nuclear Physicist

In 1938, Lise Meitner was forced to flee Nazi Germany despite being one of Europe’s foremost nuclear scientists.

From Stockholm, she received a letter from her longtime collaborator Otto Hahn describing his latest uranium experiments.

She immediately understood what he didn’t: uranium was undergoing nuclear fission, splitting atoms and releasing tremendous energy.

She sent him the theoretical explanation. Hahn published without her—first author, no mention of Lise Meitner’s interpretation. In 1944, he alone won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Einstein called her “the German Marie Curie.” Niels Bohr stated she was “instrumental” in the discovery. But her name wasn’t on that initial paper, wasn’t on the Nobel citation, and gradually faded from the narrative.

She never stopped working. At 89, still conducting research, she declined attending the dedication ceremony for a German nuclear reactor—wanting no association with nuclear weapons.

3. Eunice Foote, Climate Scientist, Physicist

In 1856, Eunice Foote conducted a series of elegant experiments: glass cylinders filled with different gases, placed in sunlight, temperature measured.

Her results were clear—carbon dioxide trapped more heat than any other gas she tested. She theorized this had massive implications for Earth’s atmosphere and climate. She published her findings in the American Journal of Science.

But she wasn’t allowed to present at the scientific conference—a male colleague read her paper for her.

Three years later, Irish physicist John Tyndall published similar findings. He got credit for discovering the greenhouse effect.

For over 150 years, climate science textbooks cited John Tyndall, not Eunice Foote.

It wasn’t until 2011 that a researcher stumbled upon Eunice Foote’s original paper.

Now climate scientists are fighting to restore her name to the discovery that defines our era.

4. Chien-Shiung Wu, Experimental Physicist

In 1956, theoretical physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang proposed that a fundamental law of physics—the conservation of parity1—might not hold in weak nuclear interactions.

Chien-Shiung Wu designed and executed the experiment to test it.

For months, she worked at near-absolute-zero temperatures with cobalt-60 atoms, building the apparatus, calibrating the instruments, running the trials. Her results were definitive: parity was violated.

The physics world was stunned.

In 1957, Lee and Yang won the Nobel Prize for the theory.

Chien-Shiung Wu, who did the experimental work that proved it, was excluded.

She never complained publicly, never demanded recognition. She kept working—on the Manhattan Project, on beta decay, on weak interactions.

Interesting trivium: “Wu was shocked at the sexism in American society when she learned that at Michigan women were not even allowed to use the front entrance, and decided that she would prefer to study at the more liberal Berkeley in California.”

Colleagues called her “the Chinese Madame Curie.” She called herself a scientist who happened to be doing the work.

Sources

Rosalind Franklin: National Geographic (2021), Smithsonian Magazine (2019)

Lise Meitner: National Geographic (2021), Oxford Royale (n.d.)

Eunice Foote: TED Ideas (2024), Oxford Royale (n.d.)

Chien-Shiung Wu: Physics.org (2022), BBC Science Focus (2025)

What no one offering a transformation tells you: Between “before” and “after” there’s a long, awkward “during” where you’re not good at this yet.

It sucks. And it sings.

At first it sucks more than it sings.

That’s my “fair warning”.

But if you focus on the singing more than the sucking, the singing will get louder and more frequent. The sucking will recede into oblivion.

That’s my promise.

Take the neighbor who hates my guts.

I wish I could tell you there’s a moment where you “arrive.” Where disapproval rolls off your back like water of a duck’s and you’re free.

Nope. Not how it works.

It’s a practice. And some days you’ll fail at it spectacularly.

However, I can now let him hate me without it ruining my week. Okay, it took two years and multiple ugly moments. I still backslide sometimes — recently over our dogs (hate at first sight).

And that’s... actually fine. The hijacks gets shorter. Used to be weeks of obsessing. Then days, then hours. Now? Sometimes minutes.

How? Putting in the reps. Reigning in Audrey (the autist part of my brain).

Here’s the — much abbreviated — story.

Put in your reps — taste sweet progress

You wouldn’t expect to be good at anything without some practice would you?

So, practice. Put in the reps. You’ll make progress. Here’s how putting in my reps (not just with that neighbor) enabled me to stay level-headed and hold my ground in increasingly intense situations.

Incident 1 — cats

I changed my mind about his request about my cats. His reaction: Pouting, feeling passed over (”We’re your neighbors too”). My internal experience: Throat constriction, second-guessing, days of rumination. What I did: Held the boundary, though barely.

Incident 2 — weeding

My neighbor returned the key to my house over me not doing my bit weeding the path between our gardens.

He spouted judgments left, right, and center. About me, about my garden, about my gardener, ... He was clearly angry with me.

I was definitely uncomfortable, but less all-consuming. And Audrey helps in these situations. Her autist naïveté puts me at a loss for words. And that’s great because it means I don’t react, giving my ADHD- and gifted-ers time to catch their breath.

Later, via email, I set a firm boundary on his behavior.

In that email, I also stated that I hoped, for his sake, he didn’t expect any spontaneous change on my part because that would only lead to more disappointment and frustration. Not because I was unwilling but because of reasons that weren’t a secret (neurodivergence, different priorities, and a worn out back) but I wasn’t in any mood to make him a party to them at that point.

And, in a PS, I told him that if he felt it necessary to return my key, it was probably also time to get their washing dryer out of my garage (after 8 years or more).

Incident 3 — our dogs having a disagreement

When my dog and theirs met for the first time, it looked fine at first, but Nina (my dog) had to escalate her “no”s because Kai (theirs) didn’t respect or even heed them.

That’s when he stopped greeting me.

I noticed it. Felt the discomfort, didn’t get hijacked by it. Even giggled about it. And moved on with my day and life.

Incident 4 — his ill-advised attempt to get his dog to stop reacting to Nina

To give you a good sense of what he did and why it was ill-advised would take too long. Besides, it’s beside the point.

The point is he thought Nina was “challenging” his. When, in fact, his was verbally abusing her over the fence and the path between our gardens and Nina didn’t feel at all comfortable with that.

When I didn’t agree with his assessment, he lost it once more. “I’m not talking to you anymore.” “You headstrong...” And more fuming. I was concerned that he might start foaming at the mouth. Maybe even surprised he didn’t.

So, another email or WhatsApp — who cares.

Pointing out that what they saw from their side was only the final part of the interaction. Plus that I wasn’t interested in a conversation as long as he was throwing out the message before hearing it because of his dislike for the messenger.

He still hates that I have boundaries — more importantly police them — and I won’t humor false accusations.

Possibly he just can’t take having his mistakes and mis-interpretations pointed out to him. I get that. I don’t like it much either. Still no reason to let your emotions run riot.

And me?

I still feel the discomfort. I still ruminate and have fantasies about putting him succinctly in his place (Audrey can be hard to shut up).

But I no longer let feeling the discomfort dictate my choices.

The unsexy truth is this didn’t happen through an epiphany. It happened because I did it badly, then did it again, then again. Each time: a little less hijacked, a little more grounded.

The reps are the work.

Why transformation stories lie

Transformation stories, especially the ones intended to draw you in and spend money, shorten reality beyond recognition.

Not intentionally. Landing pages (and content pointing you to them) are intended to sell. And who wants to buy something that’s hard? Not many in my experience.

Unfortunately, it makes them peddle a myth:

• Before: People-pleaser, unable to set boundaries, exhausted

• [MAGIC MOMENT]

• After: Confident boundary-setter, unbothered by disapproval, free

The reality looks less glamorous:

• Before: People-pleaser, unable to set boundaries, exhausted

• [DURING]: Awkward attempts, lots of backsliding, uncomfortable as hell

• After: Still imperfect, still uncomfortable sometimes, but no longer hijacked

Knowing and accepting this matters. A lot.

Because, if you’re waiting for the magic moment, you’ll wait forever. If you think you’re doing it “wrong” because it still feels hard, you’ll quit.

The discomfort doesn’t disappear any time soon but you get better at doing it anyway.

What’s also important to know and accept: progress isn’t linear.

Some days you’ll nail it. Other days you’ll apologize for something you didn’t do and hate yourself for it. That’s normal, that’s being human, that’s being perfectly imperfect.

How do you know you’re getting better then?

Ask yourself: “Am I doing it more often than I used to?”

The courage-building practice

Here are 4 steps to help you build your courage to set and police your boundaries.

STEP 1: Notice the pull

When do you feel the urge to explain, defend, smooth over? That’s your cue — you’re about to prioritize their comfort over your boundary.

Examples:

• Neighbor shows disapproval → urge to over-explain or accommodate

• Friend misinterprets → urge to explain endlessly until they “get it”

• Family member criticizes → urge to defend your choices or shrink

What to do: Notice. Don’t judge yourself for the urge. It’s decades of conditioning. Of course it’s there.

STEP 2: Use the STOP framework

I introduced the STOP framework in

TL';DR":

• Spot (observe the situation)

• Tune into (what’s yours to do)

• Open hands (release what’s theirs)

• Pour energy into yours only (commit)

Remember

• Your task is to state your boundary/truth/action clearly.

• Their task is to manage how they feel about what you do (and did) and choose their response (if they can manage to respond instead of reacting).

Taiko friend example:

• MY task: Communicate my actual intention, set boundary about being told what I meant

• HER task: Believe me or not, manage her feelings, decide if she can respect my boundary

• What I did: MY task. Then stopped.

Neighbor example:

• MY task: Set whatever boundary needed to be set, address any false accusations.

• HIS task: Like it or not

• What I did: MY task. His reaction? Not for me to manage.

STEP 3: Do your task regardless

Even when your throat constricts. Even when you want to cave. Especially when you want to cave.

The first few times?

You’ll feel like you’re going to die. Your nervous system will scream that you’re in danger. Do it anyway. Badly done is better than not done at all.

What “doing your task” looks like:

• State your boundary ONCE, clearly

• Don’t over-explain (they’re either willing to hear you or they’re not, it doesn’t matter)

• Let them have their feelings about it

• Walk away if needed

STEP 4: Document your “Yay!”s

Justin Welsh uses a practical tool to avoid designing his business around the “Nay” sayers. He keeps a “Hell Yeah” folder.

You can (and should) do something like it: Every time someone responds positively to your authentic self — save it. Email, text, comment, conversation — document it.

It works because when the critic’s voice gets loud (internal or external), you have evidence to remind yourself of all the positives to offset the negatives. To remind you that your authentic self does resonate. Just not with everyone. And that’s okay.

Personally, I used to keep a journal with thoughts and screenshots. Moments when setting a boundary felt worth it. Times when someone thanked me for being direct. Reminders that people-pleasing wasn’t actually serving anyone.

When I was well, I often stopped journaling. Not so smart of me.

Then again, like me, you’ll find at some point you don’t need it anymore.

Looking at that evidence time and again while putting in the reps made it easier to stop my ruminating, conversation-repeating autist. It’s now (almost!) become second nature to stop Audrey dead in her tracks.1

Desensitizing yourself from what scares you

When I studied behavior therapy for dogs, I learned about desensitization and counter-conditioning and quickly saw how it applies exactly the same to us humans despite all our cognitive abilities. You can’t think your way out of hijack by your nervous system.2

When something scares you, avoiding it makes it worse. Every time you do, your brain learns “Pfew, I got away from it”. That (negatively)3 reinforces the avoidance and ultimately makes your fear worse.

Face your fears.

It may sound like a cliche4 but it’s the only way to beat them.

You have to experience it and actively notice that you survive it. Maybe something bad or uncomfortable did happen, but you’re still alive for another day.

Desensitization works like this:

• Expose yourself to the discomfort in small doses

• Survive it

• Notice you survived, you’re still okay, maybe a little rattled but okay

• Notice any and all positives you can take away (and put in your Hell Yeah folder)

• Do it again

• Each time: nervous system learns it’s not actually as dangerous as it thinks

How you apply this to courage building?

Set a small boundary, experience the disapproval, notice you survive, notice any positive effects. Once. Then once again. Then one more time. And another, and another, and another. Your nervous system slowly learns: “Oh. We don’t die from this. It’s actually not that bad.”

Mind you, it’s hard.

Every instinct screams to avoid the danger (brain doesn’t distinguish between physical and emotional threats). Accommodation feels safer in the moment. But it’s a trap: short-term relief, long-term erosion of self.

The trade-off you face:

• Short-term: Discomfort of setting boundary

• Long-term: Integrity, self-respect, less resentment

vs.

• Short-term: Relief of accommodation

• Long-term: Resentment, exhaustion, loss of self

Mistakes you want to avoid

1. Expecting to “arrive”

You won’t. The practice continues. I still fall prey to the old mindset quite often. I’m getting better — quicker — to get out of it. But I’m not fully consistent. Accept it.

Perfectionism is just another way to keep yourself stuck.

2. Beating yourself up for backsliding

You will backslide. Guaranteed.

You’ll apologize when you don’t need to, maybe even shouldn’t. You’ll over-explain when you know better.

Expect it — it’s the process.

Old habits die hard, they say. Actually, they don’t, I’ve changed and seen old habits turned around on a dime.

The ones we’re changing here, however, have a lifetime of reinforcement weight behind them. Beating yourself up about sliding back is more self-rejection. Stop it.

3. Waiting until you’re “ready”

You’ll never feel ready.

Comfort comes after the reps, not before.

Do it scared. Do it awkwardly. Do it badly.

Still counts. And your brain notices!
(Especially when you deliberately notice the positives that happen as a result.)

The brutally honest payoff

My neighbor still hates me. Probably even more now.

My friendship with my taiko friend is permanently changed. May never recover.

But I wouldn’t want to live without the positives nor the overall benefit: an enormous and delicious uptick in my mood and self-image.

• I can look at myself in the mirror (without disgust or even dissatisfaction)

• I sleep better.

• I’m less resentful.

The people who stick around? They’re showing up for the me, the real me, not the performance I put on for years and decades.

Is it worth it?

Some days, absolutely. Some days, it mostly feels sad. Most days? Both.

The courage to be disliked is about:

• Deciding your integrity matters more than universal approval

• Choosing your boundaries over their comfort

• Building a life that’s yours, not one designed by committee

Choose you. Be you. Unconditionally. Unapologetically.
And do it with empathy and compassion, for you and others.

By the way... remember Eleanor Roosevelt?

She absolutely had the courage to be disliked.

You can grow it too!

Remember, you’ll be bad at this before you’re good at it. Do it anyway. Imperfect courage still counts.

The path forward is always strewn with perfect imperfection.

Ready to start shedding the indoctrination and start showing up as the only one you need to be? Get the Women Over 50’s Unmasking Kickstart Guide — your first step in the unsexy, ongoing practice of choosing yourself.

No one wants to hear this, yet I’m saying it anyway: You can’t control whether people like you. Nor how they react to your behavior.

But, you do control whether their dislike or discomfort hijacks your life.

I’ve quoted Eleanor Roosevelt’s “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” for years. People hate that quote. They say it’s gaslighting, that it lets jerks off the hook.

I get it. I really do.

It was my instinctual initial reaction too when I first hear someone say “You are responsible for your own emotions.” (I wanted to clobber him over the head at the time. I didn’t, but suppressing the urge wasn’t easy.)

So to be clear:

This quote (now backed by science) is not a free pass for behaving inconsiderately or worse.

It’ doesn’t absolve anyone from taking responsibility for their behavior.

Weaponizing it by telling someone who got upset over something you did, that they are doing that to themselves, is gaslighting and shirking that responsibility in the worst possible manner.

Deliberately pushing someone’s buttons isn’t far, if at all, behind.

Let’s not even think about someone doing both…

When you’re on the receiving end of any kind of misbehavior, from mere inconsideration to full-on abuse, it’s hard to disassociate. To keep your cool, to respond instead of reacting.

Still, even when the critic IS present, even when they’re deliberately pushing your buttons — they’re still your buttons, you installed them. Unconsciously most likely and in response to (early) experiences of others’ messages and behaviors, but you still put them in your brain.

The upside? If you installed them, you can disconnect them.

And ultimately, wouldn’t you rather rely on yourself than others to keep you emotionally safe and sane?

Taiko was a safe haven until… a friend lost it with me

Taiko drumming has been my refuge for over a decade. The Yamato Taiko School was the first place I felt fully accepted. Unconditionally. I was safe there. Free to be me, quirks, warts, and inconsistent drumming and all.

Until it wasn’t.

Thanks to a friend I’ve known for years. Someone I trusted. She was going through a rough time but never mentioned it to me.

During a class, she explained something about a piece to two others. I offered an addition to what she was saying — a build on her point. She took it as criticism and adopted a dismissive, increasingly hostile tone. When I walked up to her after class to say I wasn’t happy about the way she’d responded, she accused me of putting her down, making her look like a fool and incompetent.

Old me would have bent over backwards to explain myself. Scared out of my wits that being misunderstood would earn me rejection.

Not anymore. I disconnected that button.

Mostly anyway. The signal doesn’t get through as loud anymore.

I refused to explain what I had intended and also refused to be pulled into a tit-for-tat conversation. Made it very clear that she had interpreted my words in the worst possible way, that that was on her — her own doing, then left the situation.

Later, we talked over WhatsApp. She berated me for “not listening” to what she’d said about her experience. “No, I didn’t, I refuse to listen to people who tell me what they can’t know: what my intentions are.”

You no longer get to tell me what I meant. No one does.

Our friendship hasn’t fully recovered. I no longer feel emotionally safe around her because I can’t predict when she’ll trigger again. And she has done so since.1 The emotional and energetic price I pay when she does is enormous. So I pulled back.

It still hurts that our friendship cooled. Yet I’m proud of how I handled it. Because I prioritized my wellbeing and took the consequences.

Whose job is it to keep someone from losing it?

Or feeling any other emotion for that matter?

Adlerian psychology talks about “separation of tasks.” Fancy name, but it means someone else’s tasks are not yours.

Breaking it down:

• My task: Act with integrity, communicate clearly, set and guard my boundaries

• Their task: Form their opinions, manage their feelings about my boundaries, decide how to respond

You get trapped when you try to control what’s their task. When you twist yourself into knots trying to manage their feelings. To avoid their disapproval or not to ‘cause’ them to feel uncomfortable emotions. And when you fail in that, you’ll explain, defend, apologize for things you didn’t do.

If you want to stay grounded and balanced, it helps to ask: Whose task is this?

There’s a difference between “I/you caused your/my behavior” (FALSE) and “I/you control my/your response to it” (TRUE).

My friend attacked me. I didn’t cause that. Sure, I spoke the words that riled her up. But she riled herself up all by her lonely. Her emotions, her interpretation of my words, her behavior. All her task.2

My task was similar: notice my emotions, examine my interpretation, pick my response. Old me would have reacted. Current me responded.: “I no longer listen to people who tell me what my intentions are.”

How does this connect to the Eleanor Roosevelt “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” quote?

Neuroscience caught up with her.

You, and only you generate your emotions and feelings. You do it unconsciously and consciously. Based on your beliefs, experiences, temperament.

Yes, others may know which buttons to push to trigger emotions in you. But they’re still your buttons. You can choose to respond instead of react.

You can disconnect your buttons, cut their wiring. Though it’ll feel more like slowly withering them down.

It’s hard to stay centered in the face of an onslaught

I know how hard it is not to react to other people’s emotions.

I know the throat constriction, the obsessive replaying, the 3am spiral. Accepting your buttons are yours doesn’t make disconnecting them any easier.

And women struggle more with this than most men because as a woman you have been indoctrinated since birth to manage — be responsible for — everyone’s comfort and emotions. You quickly got the message that our value was only seen when being pleasant, accommodating, undemanding.

Setting a boundary, prioritizing ourselves, now even feels like you’re doing something wrong, that you’re being egoistic.

Well, a healthy dose of egoism is exactly what most women need.

To stop performing, to stop acting in someone else’s play.

I get it. When you’ve spent decades as a people-pleaser, that’s who you’ve become — almost. Almost, because deep down, you know that who you are and who you “do” are not the same. Still, your entire nervous system is wired for the “doing you”. “Being you” activates your threat response. Your body thinks you’re in danger — of rejection, of disapproval, of being unlovable.

As with anything new, if you wait until you’re good at it, heck even if you wait until you’re slightly comfortable with it, you’ll never start.

Comfort, competence, and confidence come after putting in the reps.

So, start. With small steps, tiny acts of rebellion, becoming a little more “difficult”.

Or better, STOP.

The STOP framework can help you to stay unphased in the heat of the moment

Adler’s separation of tasks inspired my framework to help you stay centered and pick your response. That is, if you can already pause long enough not to react.3

It has four elements (like that’s a surprise with a 4-letter acronym).

Spot (observe the situation)

• Friend attacks you for something you didn’t intend

• Neighbor’s disappointment and disapproval are clear

• Family member criticizes your choices

Tune into (what’s yours to do)

• Usually: Communicate clearly what I meant/need/want

• Set or guard a boundary

• Act with integrity (do what aligns with my values)

Open hands (release what’s theirs)

• Form their opinion about what I said/did

• Manage their own feelings about my boundary

• Decide how to respond to me

Pour energy into yours only (commit)

• Stop trying to control their task

• Focus 100% on your task

The P in STOP is the hardest. It’s where the self-work is.

Because being or becoming a “difficult” (assertive) woman means you need to get at least somewhat okay with being disliked.

Which, by the way, almost never happens.

Yes, you may face an emotional storm, especially from those not yet used to you speaking up for yourself and not catering to their every whim. But even when it does, it’s often short lived anyway. In the rare cases it isn’t, ask yourself whose task that is!

Let me give you two examples to make STOP more concrete. The first I talked about above, the second I talked about in part 1 of this series.

Taiko friend:

• Spot: Her increasingly dismissive and hostile behavior.

• Tune into: Communicate my actual intention once, set boundary about being told what I mean

• Open hands: She’d have to believe me or not, manage her feelings, decide if she can respect my boundary.

• Pour energy into yours only: Stated my boundary clearly, then stepped back when she couldn’t respect it

Neighbor’s request about cats:

• Spot: His request meaning that I’d pile what he finds a problem onto my other neighbors (which he apparently was ok with). Note that I only realized this after initially agreeing to what he wanted me to do to see if that would have the desired effect.

• Tune into: Tell him (on second thought) what I was not okay with doing.

• Open hands: He’d have to accept that I’d changed my mind and he wasn’t getting his way.

• Pour energy into yours only: Set my boundary and stick with it without apologizing for it. Accept he wouldn’t like it.4

Mistakes you want to avoid making when separating tasks (with STOP or otherwise)

Three mistakes I’ve made countless times before I finally “got” it (and still make sometimes).

1. Confusing empathy with responsibility

You can understand why someone’s upset AND still know it’s not your job to fix it.

Empathy: “I see this is hard for you.” Responsibility: “I’ll take it upon myself to keep you from feeling this.”

2. Explaining endlessly

If someone is determined to misunderstand you, more words won’t help.

I could have written a dissertation on my intentions with my Taiko friend. It would not have mattered the slightest bit. She couldn’t hear it as she was hijacked by the emotions and feelings stemming from her interpretation.

One clear statement, then stop. More words will only muddy the waters.

3. Prioritizing the relationship over your wellbeing

Sometimes the relationship needs to cool for you to survive. And then thrive.

Prioritizing yourself is necessary. You need to put your own oxygen mask on first.

What happened next

My friend did come to see my side of it. And she did understand why I pulled back.

But then came: “Yes, and how you did triggered all my insecurities.”

My first interpretation of her words was that she was again holding me responsible for her feelings. But did she? She may just have made an observation. That’s the interpretation I elected to go with. And I left it there, didn’t apologize for my way of pulling back. Her insecurities are her task.

Protecting and asserting myself is mine.

Yes, it cost me a friendship that may never fully recover.

Some days that feels worth it. Some days it feels mostly sad. Both can be true.

But. I can look myself in the mirror. I didn’t abandon myself. And I didn’t attack her.

Soft front, strong back, is what Brené Brown calls it.

Next time: Knowing your buttons are yours is one thing. Actually disconnecting them? That’s the unsexy, ongoing work nobody warns you about. No shortcuts. No epiphanies. Put in the reps.

Ready to stop having your buttons used against you? To stop avoiding and start showing up as who you are? Get the Women Over 50’s Unmasking Kickstart Guide.

My neighbor hates my guts. Not fun at all. But what if being disliked by the wrong people is a clear sign you’re doing something right?

He wanted me to close up holes in my garden fence. Keep my cats (one particular menace) from pooing in his garden. I agreed at first. When I realized: this just shoves the problem onto my other neighbors, I told him, “I’ve changed my mind.”

“But we’re your neighbors too,” he said.

“Absolutely. And doing something to solve what you think is a problem by piling it onto someone else—regardless of what they think about it—isn’t okay with me.”

It stings when someone you live next to decides you’re the villain. But I could have his approval OR I could have my boundaries. Not both. I did provide them (he’s married) with information on how to keep cats out of your garden and offered to help with doing it.

And I strongly felt the urge to win him back, appease him.

But: “Why am I giving him so much power over what I think, feel, and do?”

Turns out, I’m not alone in this.

Justin Welsh—entrepreneur with 175,000 newsletter subscribers—recently confessed he’d been doing the same thing. Except his “neighbor” was a handful of critical emails.

Are you performing to a ghost audience?

Justin Welsh can recite a harsh email from 2.5 years ago word-for-word.

Yet he cannot remember recent compliments verbatim.

What the...?

After writing a vulnerable newsletter about “micro-freedoms” that resonated with thousands of readers, he obsessed over a handful of negative replies. And then started writing safer, less engaging content.

The irony: those critics had moved on, unsubscribed while he was reshaping his entire newsletter for an audience that wasn’t even watching anymore.

Ok, that’s different perhaps, my neighbor is still my neighbor, but this pattern shows up everywhere.

Welsh mentioned a consulting friend who redesigned her entire service offering around ONE difficult client despite having 50 satisfied clients still working with her.

I did it too with that initial agreement to my neighbor’s request.

I don’t like digging up cat poop when working in my garden either. And I prefer us—me and my animals—not to “bother” others. But I caught myself trying to manage his comfort at the expense of my boundaries.

And I did it again.

A year or so later my neighbor returned my house key in an extremely foul mood, spouting judgments left, right, and center about me never having weeded the path between our gardens in 35 years. At first, I said I’d ask my gardener to do it. Later, after processing what had actually happened (including he’d never spoken to me about it before), I set a firm boundary around his behavior and told him not to expect me to suddenly do it now.

When you reshape your life around critics who have already left the building, that’s the ghost audience effect. You’re performing to an audience that has tuned you out.1

What fuels this?

Negativity bias.2 Our brains are wired to remember threats (criticism) more vividly than rewards (praise). I was an advantage: remembering the tiger that attacked you kept you alive. Now it’s a disadvantage: worrying about and accommodating a neighbor — or anybody — who disapproves keeps you small.

You dilute your authenticity to avoid hypothetical disapproval (you probably imagine everyone disapproving of you). You let your actual supporters—the people who DO appreciate you—and the appreciative comments fade into background noise. And before you know it, you’re building your life around phantom critics and not showing up for your real audience: your community.

If you’re a woman, you probably are 🫢

Women pay this price more. As a woman, you’re socialized from childhood to manage everyone’s comfort. “Good girl” equals likeable, pleasant, non-threatening. By midlife, you’ve spent decades reading rooms, smoothing over, making ourselves smaller.

The muscle memory of people-pleasing is strong.

What makes it worse: As a women, you’re punished for “difficult” behavior. Called bossy and aggressive. You’re rewarded for accommodation, pliability. Called nice, easy to work with, team player.

The patriarchal system trains you to prioritize others over your own existence.

By the time you hit 50+, you’re exhausted. You’ve contorted ourselves for so long you’ve forgotten what your actual shape is. And you’re still always worried about what the neighbor, the ex-friend, the critical family member thinks.

You don’t need my permission, you don’t need anyone’s, but just in case you can’t give it to yourself yet: Being disliked by people who want you small is not a problem.

It’s proof you’re no longer shrinking. Celebrate it.

Who are your ghosts?

Question for you. Actually, multiple questions.

• Who are you still trying to win over?
  For years, I kept trying to “make up” for (perceived) wrong doings. Going as far as avoiding repeating them with people who hadn’t been there and would probably not have been fussed over it.

• Whose disapproval keeps you up at 3am?
  My math teacher at high school, who once told me he wasn’t too pleased with something I did. Can’t even remember what it was, but the memory haunted me for at least a decade.

• Whose hypothetical judgment stops you from speaking up, setting boundaries, saying no?
  Too many to mention.

And some hard(er) ones.

• Are they even in your life anymore?
  Most of them aren’t.

• If they are, do they respect you? Not “are they nice sometimes”—do they respect you? Really, see _you_? Acknowledge and consider what’s important to you?
  Probably not.

• What would you do differently if their opinion didn’t matter?
  I wouldn’t inhibit myself. Definitely not “in advance” or “just in case”.

My neighbor doesn’t respect me. He never did. He liked my compliance and pliability. When I stopped accommodating him, the “relationship” evaporated. In hindsight, it wasn’t a relationship at all—it was a one-sided accommodation arrangement.

I can’t control whether he likes me.

When I first realized I couldn’t control what other people think of me, whether they like me or not, it took time for that to sink into my bones. To fully accept that trying is futile at best and detrimental to me at worst. I can only control myself and whether I let anyone’s disapproval dictate my choices. Or their approval for that matter. Acting one way to gain approval is just as big a trap as to avoid disapproval.

Because you know what?

And, his opinion of me is not my task.

Their opinions are not your task!

This “not my task” thing? It’s from Adlerian psychology’s concept of separation of tasks. Fancy name, simple idea: you have your tasks, others have theirs. Trying to control their tasks—what they think of you—is what keeps you trapped.

I wish I could say I’ve mastered this.

Nope. I’m still on the journey, still catching myself trying to win over ghosts.

But I’m getting better at asking: “Are they even watching? Do I even want their approval? Do I really need it?”

Next time: The uncomfortable truth about whose task it is to manage other people’s feelings about you.

Spoiler: it’s not yours. But your brain will fight me on this.

Ready to stop shrinking for people who don’t respect you anyway? Get the Women Over 50’s Unmasking Kickstart Guide.

“Know thyself” isn’t ancient wisdom anymore.

It’s a survival strategy. And if you’re constantly measuring yourself against what others expect, adjusting to keep the peace, or second-guessing what you want, you need it. Now more than ever.

Because your identity is under siege and you may not even be aware of it.

The Old World vs The New World

There was a time—not that long ago—when the direction you got about who you are and were supposed to be came from a pretty small circle.

Your family. Your friends. Your colleagues. People who actually knew you. People you knew well in return. Sure, they had opinions. Some helpful, some not. But the volume was manageable, and the sources were knowable.

Now? Identity direction comes from countless strangers.

Comments on your parenting from people in the grocery store. Opinions about your career choices from relatives you see once a year. Judgments about how you look, what you wear, whether you’re “doing enough” from acquaintances and social media observers. An endless stream of opinions from people who’ve never lived your life about what’s okay and what isn’t, who you should be and what you should care about.

The volume is relentless. The velocity is dizzying.

We all think we’re immune to it. We tell ourselves we don’t care what others think. But we’re lying.

If you’ve ever changed your plans because you were worried what your family would say, you’re not immune. If you’ve felt that little glow when someone praised you for being “such a good wife” or “so patient with the kids,” you’re not immune.

(I’m not either, by the way. I wish I could tell you I’m above all this. I’m not.)

We’re all susceptible to feeling pressure from other’s opinions. The question is whether we’re going to let it define us.

The Danger: Audience Capture

Gurwinder wrote about this brilliantly—he calls it “audience capture.” It’s what happens when influencers become trapped by their audience’s expectations.

They start creating content that serves the audience’s desires instead of their own vision. Slowly, they morph into who their audience needs them to be. They lose themselves in the performance.

[examples from the article]

But here’s what struck me: This isn’t just an influencer problem.

It’s an exact parallel for what happens to women through societal conditioning.

Anyone who attaches more value to what others think than what they think themselves is at risk. And for most women, that conditioning started early and runs deep.

The performance trap is subtle. You don’t wake up one day and decide to become someone else. It happens gradually.

You received the messages about what was expected of you, as a girl, a woman, a wife, a mother. You felt the approval when you complied and sensed the criticism whether it was outspoken or implied.

Before long, you started playing the role you were supposed to play, the one that wins you favor with your family and friends. But all the while you’re losing touch with what you actually value, believe, and want. The erosion happens slowly, but the cost is real.

You end up living someone else’s life while thinking it’s yours.

Why “Know Thyself” Is Your Antidote

Self-knowledge is your immunity to external definition.

When you know who you are—I mean really know—others’ opinions lose their power over you. They become data points, not directives.

Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

She was onto something. You can decide not to give anyone sway over your confidence or sense of self-worth. You can decide that their opinions about you are interesting, but not authoritative.

That only works if you’ve done the work of knowing yourself first.

Your values, desires, and boundaries need to be non-negotiable reference points. Not because you’re arrogant or closed-minded, but because you have clarity.

Clarity about who you are makes you immune to being told who you should be.

It’s not about ignoring opinions and direct feedback entirely. I’m not suggesting you become a narcissist who dismisses everyone. (That’s just another kind of trap.)

When you know your values, when you know who and what you want to be, and are clear on how you show up, you have something invaluable: a baseline against which you can evaluate all direction and feedback. So you can take what’s useful and leave what isn’t.

Without it you’re adrift in a sea of opinions, and they will shape you whether you realize it or not.

How to actually know yourself (not just think you do)

Okay, so self-knowledge is the answer. Great.

But how do you actually do it? Because most people think they know themselves, and most people are wrong.

Here’s what’s worked for me—and what I’ve seen work for the people I coach.

Get clear on your values

This is where you start. Your values are at your core. They’re what ground you.

And you need to know them to distinguish what you actually want from what others have told you all your life.

What do you stand for? What’s non-negotiable for you? What would you defend even if it cost you approval?

I’m not talking about abstract virtues you picked off a list somewhere. I’m talking about the lived values that show up in your choices.

Look at your life. What do you protect? What do you sacrifice for? What pisses you off when someone violates it?

That’s your values talking.

Write them down. Get specific. Because vague values don’t help you when you’re facing a decision and everyone around you is telling you what you should do.

Figure out what YOU want

Not what your parents wanted for you. Not what your friends think you should want. Not what earns you praise for being a “good woman.”

What do you want?

This is harder than it sounds. Most of us have been conditioned for so long that we’ve internalized other people’s desires as our own.

So start asking: If no one would ever know, what would I choose? If no one was watching or listening, what would I do? If I had 200 million in the bank, what would I pursue?

The answers might surprise you. They might even scare you.

Good. That means you’re getting close to the truth.

Track your reactions as data

Strong reactions—especially anger or frustration—reveal your values.

When something pisses you off, ask yourself: What got trampled here? What boundary was crossed?

Your emotions are information. They’re telling you something about what matters to you.

I learned this the hard way. For years, I thought I was just “too sensitive” or “too reactive.” Bollocks. I was reacting to violations of values I hadn’t yet articulated.

Once I started treating my emotions as information instead of intrusions into my rationality, I started gaining much more clarity about who I am and want to be.

Question whose voice is in your head

When you’re making a decision, whose voice do you hear?

Is it yours? Or is it your mother’s? Your old boss’s? The internet’s?

This is the work of disentangling yourself from conditioning. And it’s not easy.

We’ve all absorbed messages our entire lives about who we should be, what we should want, how we should behave. Those messages live in our heads and masquerade as our own thoughts.

Start noticing. When you think “I should do X,” ask: Should according to whom?

If it’s not yours, it doesn’t belong in your decision making.

Watch for the performance

Pay attention to when you’re performing versus when you’re being.

There’s a difference, and you can feel it if you’re honest with yourself.

Performing is when you’re stopping yourself from doing what comes naturally. When you’re thinking about how it looks, or what others would say.

Being is when you’re just... you. No filter, no performance, no second-guessing.

You probably perform more than you realize. I do. And the digital age has all of us performing more than ever.

But if you never stop performing, you lose touch with who you are.

So carve out time and space where you’re not performing. Where no one’s watching. Where you can just be. And take note of what comes up.

That’s where you’ll find yourself.

Regular audit: Am I doing this for me or to keep others comfortable?

Make this a habit. A ritual.

Before you agree to anything, like a request for your time, ask: Do I want to do this? What would I need to drop to do it? Because saying yes to one thing, means saying no to everything else for the duration.

I’m not saying everything has to be for you. Sometimes you do things for others, and that’s fine. That’s called being a decent human.

But you should know whether you’re doing it because you want to or because your default is pleasing others.

If you catch yourself doing something purely for the validation and approval, or out of fear that you’d lose those—that’s your signal. You’re drifting.

Pull yourself back.

The stakes are higher than you think

Your identity requires active defense.

It’s not enough to passively absorb direction and feedback from everyone around you and hope you stay intact. You won’t.

The default is drift. The default is becoming who everyone else needs you to be.

You have to choose differently. You have to do the hard work of knowing yourself—actually knowing yourself, not just thinking you do.

It’s uncomfortable work. It requires looking at conditioning you’ve carried your whole life. It requires questioning voices that have been in your head so long you thought they were yours.

But here’s what you get in return: You get to live your actual life. Not a crowdsourced version of it. Not a performance optimized for everyone else’s comfort.

Your life. The one that’s yours.

And in a world where women’s identities are still largely defined by how well they serve others, that’s radical.

So go do the work. Figure out your values. Decide what you want out of your life. Distinguish your voice from the conditioning. Build the anchor.

Because “know thyself” isn’t just ancient wisdom anymore.

It’s the only way to live your life instead of the one everyone else scripted for you.