Anna Kai: “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got is that no one is ever going to ask you if they can do more for you if you don’t tell them they’re not doing enough; If you’re telling your man it’s fine, they’re going to assume it’s fine, because men don’t fix problems they don’t think exist; That goes for everything in life, people love low maintenance friends, low maintenance partners, low maintenance employees because it means they get to do the bare minimum and still look like a hero. And we accept the bare minimum because we would rather be loved and starving than a bitch that’s fed.  People will keep underdelivering if you keep overcompensating. Took me 34 years to realize that the key to getting what you want in life is not by being loved, but by being loud. Because you don’t get points for being easy, you get forgotten.  And if nothing else today, I’m just here to say rest in not peace to the years where I tried to be the kind of woman someone would want because now I’m the kind of woman who gets what she wants.”   There is so much to say on this piece yet I find myself searching for words.  We have to learn to be ok with whatever people think about us because that is only a perception of a tiny fraction of a minute percentage of the world.  How we feel and operate is what determines what we get out of the universe and if we are constantly telling the universe that we have enough that we got it, we will never get more and we will constantly shoulder the burdens of, well,… the universe.

I think the nuance of Anna’s words is important.  It can be taken literally to the point of being a total bitch and doing whatever it takes to get what we want but it can also simply be that we need to give voice to what’s on our minds.  As I shared from Sarai Speer yesterday, misplaced humility has long term consequences on the nervous system up to and including the habit/tendency to overcompensate for those who underdeliver.  Humility isn’t a bad thing but when that is our knee jerk reaction and we misinterpret silence as humble, we lose our autonomy to those who will speak for us because they think we can’t.  We were given brains to generate ideas and voices to share them and bodies to execute them so I’m not sure where along the line it was told/believed that it was better to do as we were told than as we knew.  There was a point when we found out that being quiet was better and safer than making noise and we took that into our DNA.  We’ve evolved long past that lizard brain where we’re afraid of being eaten because we make a little peep yet we still behave that way.  If we want to get what we want, the universe doesn’t know what that is until we give voice to it.  I don’t believe it is up to others to fix our problems but I do believe it takes two to tango and if there is an issue then we need to somehow find that balance between reasonable expression and appropriate delivery as well as discretion as to whose problem it really is (ie, is this something for that person to fix or is this just something I WANT them to fix).  There is enough space in this world for us all to get what we want, we don’t need to be assholes to get it. 

So to the latter and former points about not being an asshole while keeping our voices strong enough to speak when needed and HEARD, using our voice is a gift that does have responsibility behind it.  Use our voices intentionally and often.  Let the humility we feel come from the fact that we GET the opportunity to be heard and that we CAN be heard, not when someone deigns that you’re worthy of it.  Don’t let someone choose the moments we step up as the moments we quiet down.  We have a voice and every much the same right to use it.  We don’t need to be a bitch to get what we want but we sure as hell have every right to be a bitch when someone tells us we can’t have what we want or that we need to prove/earn it.  We are all worthy just because we are here—we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have a purpose, and because we have a purpose written on our souls, we don’t need anything else.  So we don’t need to waste any time trying to be a picture of what someone else wants to be in order to prove that we deserve what we want.  And the things we want are no indication of our value in someone else’s eyes.  We have a purpose and a point and a voice that we are meant to use to get there.  If someone consistently tries to shut us down or shut us up, ask the question of what don’t they want someone to hear?  How are we disrupting their story?  Then we need to let them do their thing because even if we are changing a story they tell themselves, that doesn’t mean ours is any less valid.  Speak the life we want into existence.