This is episode 260, and it’s my final one of 2025. Not the final one of the entire podcast. So welcome to this special end-of-year episode because it really is a special one, because my amazing podcast team, Digital Freedom Productions, have put together something really special for you. They have created a best-of collection. They’ve pulled short clips from all sorts of episodes throughout 2025, all the ones that have made a real difference for many of you this year, and put it together in one bumper edition.

So you can think of this as just a really powerful reset for your mind as we step into a new year. And if listening to this sparks that feeling inside you that you’re ready for more and that you want 2026 to be your year, in whatever way you want that to be, then I want to invite you to join me for Design Your Decade, which is happening in a few days time, but you’re not too late to sign up for it.

It is my three-day goal-setting intensive that’s happening on January 2nd, 3rd, and 4th at 1:00 p.m. UK time. And yes, the recording is going to be available. This is where you’re going to map your next decade, step into that future version of you who’s going to make it all happen, and choose a big, bold goal for 2026.

So if you want to start this year feeling grounded but ambitious and very intentional and really powerful, then this is the place to be. The link is in the show notes. But for now, just settle in, enjoy this special episode, and I will see you in the new year and inside Design Your Decade.

If you want to do things differently but need some help making it happen, then tune in for your weekly dose of coaching from me, Maisie Hill, Master Life Coach and author of Period Power. Welcome to The Maisie Hill Experience.

The fear of what people will say is rooted in your thoughts. And if you address those, if you meet those with compassion and truth, then those fears stop running the show because you see them for what they are. And then you can know, well, yeah, people might say that about me, but I know that’s not true.

And on the occasion that maybe there is some truth in what your fears are or what someone actually says, then you can make peace with that, too, and work through it. But often people’s reactions have nothing to do with your decision. It’s all about their fear.

Right? Maybe they’re scared that you’ll grow and leave them behind. Maybe they’re scared of their own desire to leave something, but they haven’t really let themselves acknowledge that and be with that. Maybe they’re scared of the mirror that you’re holding up in trusting yourself and the reflection that they see in that. You don’t have to take that on.

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Before I could get into the rebuilding, I had to decompose and go on my own journey into the depths. And I want you to hear this not just as my story, but if you are in the messy middle right now, where what worked before doesn’t fit you anymore, but the next version isn’t there yet, that hasn’t been revealed to you. This is your reminder that nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. You’re just in the goo, and the goo is fertile. So you don’t need to rush your way out of it. It pays to be in the goo.

You also don’t need to love it. I’m not saying you need to love being there, but you do need to respect it. So can you respect it?

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When was the last time that you luxuriated in something? Because savouring is a brief practice in which you notice something pleasing to you. Right? Something that brings you joy, contentment, love, anything like that, and then you extend that feeling by amplifying and deepening it within you. And remember, you already know how to do this because you already know how to stew. So that means that you already know how to savour things because they’re running on the same circuitry. Attention, focus, and repetition. 

The question is, what is it that you want to amplify? So if you’ve ever noticed when you’re frustrated with someone, you can start thinking about all the ways that person has annoyed you in the past. And in doing so, you turn the volume up on that frustration, and maybe it turns into anger. Right, this is the same except it’s with positive emotions. And those of you who’ve been around for a while will have heard me say, I’m not a fan of labelling emotions as positive or negative because they all serve a purpose, but you get my point.

So when you savour someone or something, you create a moment of ventral vagal activation, which is that sense of inner safety within you where the world feels all right, and you are all right. And because of that, you’re able to connect with yourself and with others, and your thinking brain is online. You can think creatively and problem solve and enjoy your life.

So every time you savour something, you’re training your body to come back to safety and openness more easily. And at the same time, you’re balancing out negativity bias, which is the tendency that we all have to focus on negative things or things that could potentially be a threat.

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So just because you don’t see the example of what you want to be or how you want to be doing things, doesn’t mean that it’s not possible. You just have to decide if you’re willing to be the example or if you’d rather wait around for someone else to be. It’s that simple.

You can also count yourself out with binary thinking, thinking that there’s only one way to do something and that if you can’t do the 100% version of that, then there’s no point doing it at all. And that’s not you being practical or realistic. That is you keeping yourself small and being in that fixed mindset of, well, if I can’t do it exactly how I want, then I can’t do it at all. If it can’t be perfect, then it’s not worth doing. And if you can’t do the full version or have the ideal version, then why bother?

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You know how women are often spoken about at their funerals? When someone gives a eulogy or when people are just talking about the woman that died, they say things like, oh, she was always there for everyone. You know, she’d never complained. And it’s said like it’s the highest compliment. But are you telling me that she never had complaints or felt resentful, that this woman never raged inside? Of course she did. She just swallowed it. Maybe it came out when she was having a gin and tonic with her girlfriends, or it came out when her period was due.

But largely, she kept going because that was the role that she had been trained into. Remember, this is like previous generations, and don’t forget that it wasn’t long ago that we couldn’t have bank accounts or credit cards without men. So our mothers and grandmothers, great-grandmothers probably needed to keep their husbands and male family members on side for lots of reasons.

But when you are making yourself pleasant to everyone, you’re not protecting anyone. You’re erasing yourself bit by bit by bit. And the whole time you’re doing it, you’re training the people around you to think that your self-erasure is normal, and of course, it benefits them.

But this fear of being selfish or lazy or not committed enough is what’s kept you in line. Okay? You were trained to think that way because it keeps these systems stable, the systems that are going to benefit from you being this way. So for the most part, patriarchal and capitalist systems reward women who over-function and then punish those who protect their capacity.

Now, we don’t typically get rewarded financially. We’d be great if we did. I hope that’s starting to change, though. But we get rewarded in terms of social currency, usually in the form of praise that is some version, some flavour of being a good girl, being so helpful, not having needs, seeing what needs to be done without being asked. Gosh, I remember so many times when my teachers have praised me for this.

And this continues into the workplace. Workplaces also generally glorify people who say yes and who never take leave or sick days. There’s like great pride in that. Families and social systems rely largely on women’s invisible labour in order to keep running. And often protecting the asset means disrupting this unpaid and unseen economy. So this is where the politics of capacity and protecting the asset come into play.

So if you’ve been socialised as female, you will have been taught to make space for others by shrinking yourself in all sorts of ways. This can show up in so many places. You’ll have been taught to prove your goodness and your value by how much you can endure. And it’s as if your worth is measured by how quiet your needs are, as is the example I gave with women at their funerals.

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What was being described as demanding behaviour from women was just women having standards. So, between what was going on in my home and then just the cultural soup of the 90s and the 00s and whatever else, I learned to be low maintenance and to avoid inconveniencing anyone.

And of course, this comes at a cost. You deprioritise your own needs to the point where you don’t acknowledge that you have them, or you’re so quick to dismiss them and apologise for them. And then the relationships you end up in don’t nourish you, and not necessarily because the other person is unwilling to meet you in that kind of relationship. They might be very willing and able to if you were able to allow yourself to have needs and standards and to bring them to the relationship. They just don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know that’s what you want.

And in work situations, you will end up being underestimated or over-relied on because you are the steady one, the uncomplicated one, and the invisible glue that holds everyone together. And that can lead to a lot of resentment and also exhaustion, not just because of how much you end up doing for others, but also because you’re suppressing parts of yourself that need to be expressed.

So this is really very costly. This is something to work on because the result of it all is that you’re emotionally undernourished. People don’t know the real you. They know the agreeable version of you who’s polite and unbothered. And that means that there is an inherent lack of connection in your relationships. There has to be because you’re holding yourself back from connection and joy, and also risk and visibility and things like creativity as well.

When you’re more focused on potential threats, you’re not going to see opportunities right in front of you, whether they’re professional ones or personal ones.

There’s also another cost to all of this that I have to talk about because it’s huge. You end up confusing lack of conflict with relational health. And I raise my hand up here because I have been in relationships where I took great pride in how we never argued and got on so well. I thought that constituted a good relationship. I wish I had been told these things when I was 20 because it doesn’t. Because I was certainly arguing in my head with these people. It’s just that I wasn’t saying those things out loud. There’s a big difference there.

You can also end up just waiting for other people to notice what you’re not saying. And let me tell you, expecting other people to read your mind is futile. It’s not going to happen. Again, ask me how I know.

If this is you, then please let me help you. I spent years and years and years waiting for people to magically see what was going on with me, and of course, it never happened. So much unnecessary pain and mental bandwidth was taken up with this kind of thing. What a waste.

Wouldn’t it be great to go from, oh no, don’t worry about me, to just saying, well, here’s what I need, to be able to express your needs and preferences instead of just bottling them up all the time and just being able to say what matters to you without it being a big deal, because it’s not a big deal.

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Intellect wants things like reasons and explanations and spreadsheets, whereas intuition is something that’s alive in you and is giving you very clear answers. And both of these ways of knowing are useful, but not in the same situations. And part of discernment is knowing which voice to listen to and when.

But I want to be really clear when I say that discernment has to be clean. What I mean by that is if you find yourself being defensive, argumentative, proving your case, that may not be discernment. And I say maybe because it could be discernment, but we’re just used to having to justify ourselves. But it could also be that where that is coming from is fear and ego.

So clean discernment actually doesn’t need to defend itself. It’s just something that you know. It’s really grounded, it’s really straightforward. It just feels like a very settled no or a yes.

And this is where coaching comes in, because sometimes what you think is discernment is actually a protective strategy that’s a way to keep yourself safe from potential rejection or risk. So part of the work is untangling things and learning to identify what’s your true knowing and what’s your fear that you’re telling yourself is knowing. And so you just have to be onto yourself with this.

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If you’ve ever felt like your job in every group, speaking of herds, whether it’s at work, your family or with your friends, if you felt like your job is to smooth things over all the time and to keep everyone together as a group, then you might be wearing what I call your emotional support tights.

So just like actual support tights, they smooth over the lumps and bumps, but they’re tight. They’re uncomfortable, and you can’t keep wearing them on forever. Okay, you can’t keep them on forever. They stop you from moving in the way that you really want to.

Being this way looks and can feel generous and caring, okay? And it can be, but it can also be exhausting, and it limits you and keeps real resolution from ever happening because you’re just always smoothing over those lumps and bumps.

But when you’re first putting them on, they don’t feel so bad. In fact, they can feel kind of good. So when you put on these tights, you get a little compression. There’s a sense of feeling contained, and everything feels held together. It’s both subtle and supportive. And that’s exactly what it feels like when you slip into smoothing over group dynamics.

You become the invisible buffer, keeping things smooth, making sure no one else has to experience any kind of discomfort. And you notice tension before anyone else and just immediately try to patch it over.

And don’t get me wrong, being able to do that is a skill, and there’s lots of environments and situations where that’s really called for. But this we’re talking about the overuse of this, where you notice tension before anyone else and just immediately try to patch it up.

So you’re picking up on everyone’s moods, stepping in to smooth over conflict before it gets to that point, before it happens. So you’re acting as a shock absorber, making sure no one else feels the bumps of the situation. And also the glue that’s holding everyone together, whether they asked for you to take on that role or not. That’s important.

So you’re always adjusting yourself so that no one else has to feel uncomfortable. And it feels useful, like you’re helping. Sometimes it is, that can be true. But just like tights or shapewear, it doesn’t stay feeling supportive. After a while, it gets restrictive.

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Sometimes self-trust can sound like, well, I’m tired. I’m fed up with this, but I’m not done. And you can decide that you won’t abandon yourself in order to keep the peace, that you’ll stay in this, even in the discomfort of it, because it’s yours to work with, and that is a choice that you are making. No one’s forcing you to. You’re not doing it out of obligation.

Hear the difference there, that you’ll stay because you choose to. Because then, when you do that, staying is an act of choice. It’s not passive. You’re not just going along with things. It’s not weak, it’s not settling. It’s a practice of deep self-leadership.

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Instead of letting people see our mess, we delay getting help until we’ve tidied ourselves up. And this can be tidying your mindset up, or it can be tidying your home. How many of you clean the house before the cleaner arrives, or you know someone who does this?

Or you try to solve the problem before you bring it to a coach. And by the way, for those of you in the membership, that is different to you doing some self-coaching first and then going deeper with a coach, because the place you’re doing it from is different.

So one is self-exploration that’s coming from curiosity, and one is coming from self-judgment where you’re trying to make yourself presentable, and you’re hiding the overwhelm and hiding your mistakes and your tender parts and the stuff that you feel ashamed of because being seen like that feels like exposure.

And you’re thinking, well, if I can just get through this part, then I’ll be ready for someone to help me, or then I’ll be worthy of receiving help. But what happens is you get through it, which, you know, there’s other ways to experience life other than getting through it. But then the next hard thing arrives, and then the next and the next.

Meanwhile, your nervous system, your body, is holding everything alone without community and quietly believing that this is how it should be. So you keep reinforcing this pattern, never getting help when you need it.

So here’s what I want to offer instead. The time to receive support is when you need it. Not when you’ve earned it, not when you’re calm, not when you have time, and not when you’re polished and presentable, but in the middle of the mess. That is what coaching is for.

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I’ve made lots of high-ticket investments in private coaching, in business masterminds, now in this apprenticeship. And the thing I want you to really hear is that I challenge myself to show up to the investment, whether I’ve spent $50,000 on it or I’ve spent £50.

Because the tendency is if we’ve invested more money in something, then we do show up to it differently. I think that’s fair to say. So I like to challenge myself to show up to a £50 investment in the same way I would for ones that I’ve paid £50,000 for.

Not because they’re the same thing, but because I’m the same person and I’m able to have that kind of experience with it. It’s not about the cost, it’s about the relationship. So do I enter the space as a consumer expecting to be impressed and for someone to guarantee my results, or do I enter as a co-creator knowing that the energy I bring shapes the transformation I get and even the transformation that other people experience?

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The real problem isn’t the timeline. It’s what you’re making the timeline mean about you. Right? If you believe that achieving the goal proves your worth, you’ll rush it, you’ll pressure yourself, maybe burn out, needing the result to happen quickly is you trying to feel good about yourself, and that is the fastest way to sabotage the goal itself.

But if you take your ego out of the equation, just park it to one side for a moment, if you don’t make the timeline mean anything about your competence, your value, your likelihood of success, then the urgency disappears.

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Whenever I want to give up, it is connection to my purpose, to my clients, and to all of you that plugs me back in and gets me going again. And every obstacle or undesired result is a source of information. It’s valuable feedback, so try to see it as that rather than the end of the road. You can analyse what’s happened, understand what you can do differently in future, and redefine your approach. Right? There’s still, it’s like acknowledging what’s happened but continuing to move forward. It’s not going to stop you.

So, questions you can ask yourself in those moments are, what can I learn from this? How can I adjust my strategy to overcome this obstacle? Who do I need to become in order to get past this?

These are all ways for you to turn challenges into opportunities. And it’s this continuous loop of feedback and improvement that is crucial for any visionary in order to keep going. And visionaries love to problem solve, so just embrace it. But no visionary achieves their dream alone, including me. Even those of us who tend to be hermits and act alone, you know, we often still have peers, coaches, mentors, and other forms of support.

Hey, if you love listening to this podcast then come and check out my membership, Powerful, where you get my best resources and all the coaching you need to transform your inner and outer life. Sign up to the waitlist at maisiehill.com/powerful, and I’ll see you in the community.