113: What If They Get Upset? Did I say it wrong?
When you need to say something but fear making it worse, the conversation can feel impossible. Learn what makes tough conversations so difficult—and how to return to your Grounded Self before you speak.
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Welcome back, my friends. I’m Liz Jolley, and this is The Great Leader, Great Mom Podcast. I am so glad you are here.
Today is Episode 113. We’re going to talk about why we often stay silent to keep the peace. I think this is something many of us women do all the time—maybe without even realizing it.
A Night in the Kitchen
Let me start with a story. I remember standing in my kitchen in Alaska a few years ago at about 10:30 at night—which is late for me. I’m a morning person, and I had endured a really brutal day. I had been at work for nine or ten hours, moving through high-stakes meetings, presenting, solving complex problems, and working through everything that was going wrong and how to fix it.
My brain was completely fried that evening. I was ready to go to bed and sleep until morning.
As I stood there and looked around my kitchen, the counters were dirty and all the dinner stuff was strewn everywhere. I’m not sure how one person—me—can use every pot and pan to make a simple dinner, but I had. It felt like the physical manifestation of the overwhelm inside my head was living in my kitchen.
My husband was sitting in the living room, looking at his phone and appearing completely relaxed. What I really wanted was to ask him to help clean the kitchen—or suggest that we do it together. The reality was that he did not want to do that.
In that moment, I thought, “I want to bring it up, but how do I say it so he doesn’t get upset?” The primitive side of my brain began spinning through every worst-case scenario: He’s going to get defensive. He’s going to think I’m criticizing how he contributes. What if he rolls his eyes? What if he tells me I’m too uptight and should figure it out on my own?
I was terrified of triggering his defensiveness and discomfort. So what did I do? I didn’t say a single thing.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t act out my frustration. I chose to feel resentful and upset that I was the one doing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen—and I did it aggressively. I washed the dishes loudly. I slammed cabinet doors. I worked the dishwasher dramatically. I wiped down the counters while silently wishing he would magically know exactly what I needed, jump off the couch, and say, “I see you. You’re such a good mom and wife. Let me help.”
But here was the reality: That was not going to happen.
I was willing to disappoint myself in that moment so I wouldn’t disappoint someone else. I worked out my resentment around the kitchen sink, and I felt awful—totally awful. Stuffing it down didn’t solve anything. It only made me feel terrible.
Silence Isn’t Peace
How many of you have stayed silent and buried a boundary or a request? How often have you hypermanaged your tone or overly placated someone because you were afraid of how they would respond? This might happen with your spouse, your boss, or your kids. You’re worried about how they are going to react.
This is how we’ve been conditioned. Growing up, we were taught: Don’t upset anybody. Don’t hurt their feelings.
But believing this creates so much suffering, annoyance, and burden in our own lives—especially because we cannot control someone else’s response. Their response is not ours to manage.
I want to talk about how we can separate these things so we can stop abandoning ourselves in an attempt to control everyone else or keep the peace.
If we break this down in almost mathematical terms, the thought running through our minds is often: “If they get upset, that is bad.” Our brains don’t like that possibility. We interpret it as unsafe—not physically unsafe, but socially unsafe. We think we aren’t supposed to do anything that might upset someone.
So our brains freak out and tell us: Don’t say anything. Stuff it down. Be passive-aggressive. Maybe it will magically go away.
But when we don’t tell ourselves the truth—when we claim, “I’m just doing this to keep the peace,” while remaining silent, avoiding the conversation, and becoming resentful—we aren’t keeping the peace. We are creating a war within ourselves. Instead of being authentic in the moment, we’re pretending.
We trade our internal peace for someone else’s temporary discomfort. A phrase I often use is: We disappoint ourselves instead of being willing to disappoint others. We don’t let them have their own response to our authentic truth, our words, or the things we want to do.
I’m not saying that you should work out your resentment on them. I’m saying we need to clean it up so that when we do have the conversation, we come from a grounded, calm place of love—not a place of reactivity.
Other People’s Feelings Are Not Yours to Manage
One of the key concepts I return to inside The School of Courage is that we are 100 percent responsible for our own results. Our results come from our actions. Our actions are created by our feelings, and our feelings are created by our thoughts—the sentences in our brains.
We want this to be true because it gives us the power to create our results throughout the day. We are no longer looking to the world around us to make us feel happy or give us everything we crave. As you may have noticed, the world isn’t very good at doing that for us.
Back in my kitchen in Alaska, I believed that if my husband got defensive, it would be my fault. I would have said the wrong thing or used the wrong words. Maybe I should have done it myself or found a better way to keep the kitchen clean—perhaps by using paper plates or ordering food instead of cooking.
I would have told myself that his defensiveness was caused by my words or my request. That isn’t true. If he had become defensive, his defensiveness would have come from what was happening in his own mind. I could say words, and he could make those words mean something that created defensiveness for him. But trying to control his emotions doesn’t work.
We have been raised to believe this lie, and it keeps us stuck when we need to have hard conversations or speak the truth about what is on our minds.
I know many of you are like me. You see yourself as the peacemaker—the person who needs to manage everyone’s emotions at work and at home.
We think that if our husband gets defensive or thinks we’re nagging, we shouldn’t have spoken up. We must have done it wrong, said the wrong thing, or needed to figure it out differently. We think that if our boss gets stressed because we reset a boundary or don’t answer an email at night, we are failing or not being a high performer. We think that if our teenager rolls their eyes and shuts down, we failed in the conversation because they didn’t listen or hear us.
But if somebody gets upset, it doesn’t mean you did it wrong, used the wrong words, or failed in the conversation. It means they are human, just like you, and they are responsible for their own feelings.
When we overexplain, excessively soften our message, or apologize before we even make a request, we underestimate the other person’s capacity. We treat our spouse, our team, or our teenager as if they are too fragile to handle the truth about what is on our minds.
Again, I’m talking about your clean truth—not a version of the “truth” designed to manipulate someone with your words.
Speak From Your Grounded Self
We don’t need to deliver our requests or boundaries like a bulldozer. This isn’t about being cold or unkind. It’s about finding your Grounded Self—being able to stay present in the room, state your truth, and allow the other person to feel whatever they need to feel.
Their feelings come from the thoughts in their mind about your words or behavior. We need to develop the ability to hold space for their response without trying to manage it, fix it, or apologize for it.
When we make a clean decision to speak from our Grounded Self, we deliver the message with directness, kindness, and love for ourselves.
You can look at your partner and say, “Hey, I’m completely spent tonight, and I need to go to sleep. Will you take care of the kitchen?” Then you let them have their reaction. They might grunt, look annoyed, or leave the dishes in the sink. They may not do anything at all. You need to be okay with that because you are deciding for yourself that you don’t want to clean the kitchen.
Or, if you decide that you are going to clean the kitchen, it is so much better to clean up your attitude and do it. The job will probably go faster, you won’t feel so miserable, and you may even fall asleep more easily afterward.
We need to let other people have their own experiences without allowing those experiences to dictate ours.
Every time we allow someone to experience their own emotional discomfort—whether they feel disappointed in us, annoyed, or something else—we stop rushing in to rescue them. That is how we build self-trust and stop people-pleasing.
When we prove to our brains that we can handle a moment of awkward silence or discomfort because we are speaking the truth—and that we will not abandon ourselves in that moment—we develop a superpower.
That is one of the most satisfying feelings, no matter how someone else responds, because you are acting from love for yourself.
A Practice for This Week
This week, pay attention to where you are holding back or people-pleasing. Where are you waiting, rehearsing, or repeatedly editing a text message or email because you are trying to outmaneuver someone else’s feelings? Where are you attempting to guess what is on their mind and control their response?
What if you allowed people to be upset—and stayed grounded anyway?
If you are ready to stop managing everyone else’s emotions and learn how to speak up while remaining grounded in any room—at home or at work—this is what we practice inside The School of Courage.
Every week, we dig into these challenges so you can apply what you learn to your own life. You can become the grounded person in the room—not just talk about it or hope it happens, but actually practice it.
To learn more, visit LizJolley.com/School-of-Courage. You can also go to LizJolley.com and follow the link there, or find it in the show notes. If you ever want to reach out, find me on social media and send me a direct message.
I hope you have an amazing week, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
