Series 3 - Who am I Trying to Impress?

Hello, lovely you!

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend who had been wrestling with a decision for months. We walked through every angle of it together, and as I listened, I noticed something I don't think either of us realized at first.

Nearly every question she asked was about someone else's reaction.

"What will my family think?"

"I don't know how I'd explain it."

"People are going to think I've lost my mind."

"I don't want to disappoint everyone."

For nearly an hour, we had talked about this decision from every possible angle, yet she had never once asked herself the question that mattered most: “What do I actually want?”

Driving home afterward, I couldn't stop thinking about our conversation because I realized how often I've done exactly the same thing. How many decisions have I filtered through someone else's expectations before I ever stopped to ask what felt true for me?

That question stayed with me.

Who am I trying to impress?

At first, I would have answered, "No one." But the more I've sat with it, the more I've realized the question isn't really about impressing people. It's about how quietly our lives can become shaped by the desire to be understood, accepted, approved of, or simply not to disappoint the people whose opinions matter to us. Those are very different things.

The Invisible Audience

One of the surprising things about growing older is discovering that we can still be living for an audience that isn't even in the room. Sometimes it's our parents, even decades after we've left home. Sometimes it's a former partner whose opinion somehow still echoes in the background. Sometimes it's an old boss, the community we grew up in, or an idea of success we've been trying to live up to for so long that we've forgotten to ask whether it still fits.

Before long, we find ourselves living lives that make perfect sense on paper but leave us quietly wondering why they don't quite feel like our own. We stay in jobs that no longer inspire us because they look successful from the outside. We continue carrying responsibilities that should have been shared years ago because we've convinced ourselves that saying no would make us selfish. We keep explaining away the ache inside us because changing course feels harder than continuing down a familiar road.

Most of this happens so gradually that we hardly notice it.

Sometimes the people we're trying to please aren't even asking us to keep living this way anymore. We've simply never stopped wondering what they would think.

When Approval Becomes Our Compass

I want to be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with caring what other people think. We're human. We were made for connection, so of course the people we love influence us. Their wisdom matters, encouragement and perspective matters. The trouble is that, over time, we can become so skilled at fitting in that we slowly lose touch with the person who was doing the fitting.

I see this often in the people I work with after a cancer diagnosis. A wake-up call of that magnitude has a way of shining a light on the places where we've been living according to everyone else's expectations instead of our own. Suddenly, the questions change. People begin wondering whether the life they've spent years building still reflects the person they've become.

As I've reflected on this question, I've realized there may be an even deeper one hiding underneath it. Whose permission am I still waiting for?

Permission to slow down.

Permission to choose differently.

Permission to disappoint someone.

Permission to outgrow a version of my life that no longer fits.

Permission to become the person I'm still becoming.

Sometimes we spend years waiting for someone else to hand us something that was never theirs to give.

A Question Worth Carrying

I'm not suggesting we stop caring about the people we love. Relationships matter, and wise counsel is one of life's greatest gifts. But there's a difference between inviting people into our decisions and handing them the pen to write our lives. One deepens connection, the other slowly pulls us away from ourselves.

I never told my friend what I thought she should do because it wasn't my decision to make. But as I think back on that conversation, I hope she eventually finds the freedom to choose what feels true for her, even if not everyone understands it. I hope the same for all of us.

So perhaps the question isn't simply, “Who am I trying to impress?” Perhaps it's this:

If I stopped living for everyone else's approval, what kind of life would I finally give myself permission to live?