There’s a story behind this podcast episode: a story that intertwines what we learned about friendships during our formative years, with caring what other people think. The two are connected, and in this podcast episode I share how I spent years carrying around emotional armor and buying into a good-bad binary where people were concerned (one that I had to drop, if I wanted to truly love and be loved).

We all do it—stick with habits, patterns, or choices that aren’t working. But at some point, we have to interrupt the cycle.
It takes real courage to stop doing what isn’t working and say, “This isn’t working—and I’m the one keeping it going.”

I have been saying, "The resistance needs your resilience." We cannot draw water from an empty well. We cannot give what we do not have. This means that it's imperative for all of us to do our own personal work to vent the excess stress and fear that keeps us from feeling capable of creating positive change.

In a different episode of the Your Courageous Life podcast, I talked about "how to be tougher." In that episode, I shared that being "tougher" isn't about harshness. In this episode, I'm talking about how to be softer, and especially this--being softer doesn't mean being weaker, though for someone like me (who is far more experienced with cultivating toughness) it might mean that I get walked on a few times as I learn the nuances of discernment.