April 2026

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, everyone.

I want to talk about something that I think is very important to talk about, which is the art of being vulnerable and the art of communicating vulnerably, which is often mistaken when it comes to women for us being weepy and sad when really the art of communication is being able to be very direct and also vulnerable at the same time. So this is what I mean.

I recently got a letter submitted to me. I get many letters, emails submitted to me. This was something for the podcast.

And it was from a woman who has been in a relationship for about four months, maybe five months, and everything's been going great. But in the last month, her boyfriend, and they are both in their late 30s, early 40s, he doesn't really contact her during the week because he's, quote unquote, too exhausted after work, too busy. And she had to really fight for just a good night text or a text during the day just to say hello.

They'll see each other on the weekends, and this is a committed relationship. They're not apparently not seeing other people. And she described this as her becoming needier.

And then she went on to tell me about how she had a lot of father issues growing up, but she felt that she had really worked on that. And as I was reading the letter, I could sense, I could read and sense the anxiety going up and the self-doubt in her tone about, well, I thought that I had resolved this, and I don't want to be someone with insecure attachment. I don't want to have anxious attachment, and I'm not really quite sure what to do. How do I heal this in myself?

So the letter started off with her responding to an instinct that she was saying it just didn't feel good, that he wasn't taking the time to reach out to her during the week. And then the letter morphed into, morphed away from, I should say, sort of like went away from her questioning him and his behavior to questioning herself. And it was really interesting to kind of see how, in just a brief email, how the tone switched from I can trust myself to I blame myself.

And the truth is, if you're in a relationship and someone is telling you that they're too busy to reach out to you during the week, something is wrong. Either they're cheating on you, or they're married, or they're not that into you, or they are, for whatever reason, not able to put in what is required to put into a relationship. So they're selfish.

So they want to be able to have their sort of like alone time, like pretend like they're single during the week, and then when they're not so tired, then they can give themselves to a relationship. And that's not how a relationship works. But my biggest concern was the fact that she was seeing herself as needy, because so much of our programming, particularly as women, is that if you want more of someone's time, then you're needy.

And look, there is such a thing as being needy, there is such a thing as insecurity, there is such a thing of all of that. But it's more common that as women, we have an instinct about something and we should listen to it. So how does one then bring this up? Because she had been tiptoeing around it and saying, you know, well, I would really like you to, you know, it would really mean a lot to me if you would reach out to me. You know, I would like a little bit more checking in. So she was like, she was asking for, she was making requests for what she needed. And then he wasn't capitulating or he capitulated a little bit by like, okay, I'll send you like a good night text.

So you ask for what you need, but you're not getting what you need. You're feeling really terrible about it. The next step is not to then just question yourself and blame your dad issues.

The next step is to get very assertive, but without being obnoxious. So this is what I mean by the art of communication, of blending assertiveness with vulnerability. And so this is what I suggest that you do.

And, you know, this is something that you can use in your own communication with whomever. And I said, you have to tell him that something does not feel right. And you can be firm in your delivery.

You can be direct in your delivery. The vulnerability comes in as, “This is not making me feel good.” Or “It's making me really sad because I thought we were getting really close, and I thought we were moving in a certain direction. And I hate the idea of you not wanting to spend the same amount of energy on me as I want to spend on you. And that makes me sad. But I don't really know where your head is at. All I know is that not wanting to talk to me during the week because you're too tired feels kind of crummy and weird. Because I want to talk to you and I'm tired. And that doesn't mean that we have to have an hour-long conversation every night. But I want to hear from you. And I want you to want to hear from me.”

And so I think that there's some sort of imbalance here. And I know that this is so hard. But this is really so important: to learn how to be assertive while at the same time not pretending to act like you don't care.

Because sometimes in our assertion, we're angry. And then when we're angry, the walls go up. It's like, no, no, I don't actually care that you're, I don't care about you. I'm not hurt. I'm just angry that you're doing this. And let me tell you why this isn't right.

But if you can merge the assertiveness, if you can merge that level of assertion with, and that really hurts, and that really makes me scared about A, B, and C.

So this is not easy. This is not the kind of communication that we're taught.

It actually goes directly against the messaging that women receive. And that is why we tend to either feel so vulnerable to the point where we are not asserting ourselves and instead feeling like we're going to crumble, or asserting ourselves so much with so much vitriol and anger that that doesn't really yield any results either. And so my encouragement and my homework for you all is to practice this kind of communication.

And it could be done in very, very small ways. It could be with a partner. It could be with someone at work. It could be with anything.

How can you practice being assertive while also maintaining some humanity behind it, so that you can actually connect on some level emotionally with the human being that you're speaking to, without letting go of what it is that is really important to you and really important to you to express?

Anyway, I hope this helps, and I am more than happy to delve deeper into this in our next coaching call.

So let me know how this goes.