Unspoken Agreements in Your Relationships That Are Blocking Your Success
27 Jun 2024 · 14 min
Lori Harder’s podcast episode explains the idea of “unspoken agreements”: patterns you implicitly accept by not speaking up (especially in family, friendships, and romantic partnerships). She argues these agreements create resentment and anxiety and recommends practicing hard conversations (write it out, take accountability, set clear desired outcomes or boundaries) to renegotiate or end relationships—framing this work as the path to emotional freedom. The episode also includes multiple ad reads promoting GLOSI (her supplement), blinds.com, and Shopify, and closes with a call-to-action to start having these conversations.
Chapters
I want you to think about an experience where maybe someone in your family does not treat you the way that you want to be treated by you not setting a boundary and by you continuing to go back to the same environment without having a conversation, without setting the boundary or without removing yourself from the situation you have agreed to the way that that person is towards you. That is an unspoken agreement. Foreign. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. It's time for another quickie because there's always time to fit in inspiration. And if you have not gotten to try glossy yet, I'm going to talk about it till I'm blue in the face because it is a life changing daily routine. And I don't say that lightly because I did take a really good portion of my life to to create a product that not only I was obsessed with and couldn't live without, but that I truly felt like my community was asking for as well. And you guys know that I love to support ambitious people, ambitious women. 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All right, on to today's topic, which is unspoken agreements. Maybe you've heard me talk about this, maybe you haven't. But whether you have or you haven't, you have them in your life. Maybe you even hear the term unspoken agreements and you're like, oh, I already know what that means. I know I have a few of those. I know what that is. And if you don't, an unspoken agreement is an agreement that by not speaking how you feel about something that you don't like or that you don't believe in, you're actually agreeing to it. Now let me elaborate. When it comes to just like family beliefs and all of the different dynamics that this show shows up in. So if you can think back to how you were raised or think about the dynamics in your family, I want you to think about an experience where maybe, for example, you go back for the holidays and someone in your family, maybe it's your mom, maybe it's a mother in law, maybe it's an aunt, maybe it's a sibling, someone in your family does not treat you the way that you want to be treated. Maybe they're constantly saying rude things to you or disrespecting you or making fun of your dreams or poking fun at some of your beliefs or the new things that you're doing. Or maybe you've been working really hard on trying to show your family who you really are and show up as that person and be authentically you. And it's completely getting shut down. And by you not setting a boundary and by you continuing to go back to the same environment without having a conversation, without setting the boundary or without removing yourself from the situation or setting an ultimatum that you have agreed to the way that that person is towards you, that is an unspoken agreement. So in my family growing up, there was a lot of unspoken agreements, whether it was around our faith, our religion, the way that we operated. Maybe it was just even the way that we believed that we existed in the world. Maybe it was the way that we all, you know, agreed to kind of keep each other's bad habits in place. The way that maybe we were all codependent upon other, to keep reinforcing our bad eating habits, to keep reinforcing our beliefs, that we didn't think that money was for us, we didn't think that our dreams were possible. These are all unspoken agreements of who you are and how you operate in the world. And we even have a lot of these within our close friendships and within our partners, within our marriages. And so an unspoken agreement, though, is going to be the agreement where you have the most resentment. And the reason that unspoken agreement is really powerful when you can understand that you have agreed to it by not speaking your truth. Having a hard conversation or putting a boundary in place reminds you that you have the power to speak out your truth and create a new agreement. And I think that this is the place where a lot of people are going to bump into some challenges.
Right?
Like, you're like, okay, yes, I've got a lot of these, but now. Oh, God. God, now you want me to. You want me to have a hard conversation. Like, you want me to speak this out? Like, do you know what kind of shitstorm this is gonna cause in my life and my family? Well, yes, absolutely. It will create some fallout. But I'm telling you that you're already living the worst case scenario, if you're already living in an unspoken agreement that you feel trapped in and you feel like does not align with you, you actually are having more of a struggle living in a lie all of the time than you would be to go and have this conversation a few times. Have the initial conversation, the initial pain. Yes, it doesn't feel fun. It feels like a tidal wave of hell. But a tidal wave is simply that. It's just a tidal wave. Like, it's going to wash over you. It's going to be over real quick. And I guarantee even within the first five minutes of having that hard conversation, majority of the emotional charge is going to start coming out of it. Because hard conversations, the hardest part is starting it out in the first one to three minutes. And after that first initial one to three minutes, and when you're in it for five minutes, you'll start to notice that the emotional charge is coming out. You're starting to be able to, like, sort through some of the thoughts, some of the feelings. And whenever we have a hard conversation like this around an unspoken agreement that you want to start putting words to and start changing the agreement, you actually want to practice it. You want to write it out and you want to take full accountability for the role that you have played in this agreement throughout your life. And you also have to have the awareness that to this person, they may not even be aware that this is something that you don't want to be a part of because you have agreed to it for so long. So it may come as a complete shock. So when you're creating this conversation and writing this out on paper, you need to come at it from a loving place of I want to preserve this relationship. And if you don't want to preserve the relationship, then you need to be really clear on how you're going to go at that conversation to end it and let them know that it's over. With the holidays and the new year.
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What you want that conclusion to be. Never go into a conversation without knowing what you want the new agreement to be and without sharing with them why you care about them and why you want to continue on that with that relationship. Why this conversation is really for the preservation of the future relationship. That intention, that love, and those words are gonna be so much more well received than coming at it and saying, you did this to me. This is how it's always been. I can't believe I've let you do this for so long. That will just shut the other person down and that will not allow this conversation to be had and that will be a very bad fallout. So looking at the unspoken agreements in your life that you have left, some of you don't have a lot. Some of you may not have any. Some of you have like 20. And I can tell you that the level in which you have stress and anxiety has to do with how many unspoken agreements you have left that you need to change the agreement. Everything is negotiable in life, you guys. Literally everything. How you relate to your mother, how you relate to your father, your brother, your sister, your religion, everything is up for negotiation. It is not solid. And I can tell you this because I didn't believe that it was up for negotiation around my relationship with my parents and my mom and my religion. And it Was. And I can tell you that the religion that I was raised in, truly, if you did not agree to the terms of the religion, it was like the original cancel culture. And truly, if you didn't agree, you're out, like, you're done. And for mental health and wellness and all of the things like growing up, up in that state of if you do one thing wrong, that's under these particular things, like, you're out, you don't get to be with the people that you grew up with. You don't get to be around even your family members. So for me to be able to tell you that coming from that way of growing up, that everything is negotiable, everything, if you're willing to come with the right intention, if you're willing to put the work into the conversation, and if you truly become a fierce warrior of having these tough conversations, that you can clear your life of this, you can clear it of the anxiety, you can clear it of the resentment, you can clear it of all these things. And don't get me wrong, I still have so many conversations I have to have.
Frequently I have things that come up.
And I'm like, oh shit, there it is again. Or oh God, here we are again. I didn't think I'd be here. How many hard conversations do I have to have? You'll have to have so many throughout the course of your life, you guys. But I'm telling you, it's the path to freedom. So I hope that this helped you kind of like look at exactly what conversations you need to have and know that you don't have to carry that.
Like you to don't have.
Have to carry all of these emotions every single day. You know, if you have a lot of conversation in one to two years time, you could be free of all of it. That could all be changed. Every agreement could be changed. You could figure something out. You can find new people to fill the gaps of maybe some people that you've lost. I promise you, I promise you that you can figure it out if you're willing. If you're just willing to sort through the emotions and have a very responsible conversation where you take a lot of ownership and come from a place of like, love, pray about it, write it out, and then move through it. And I'm telling you, once you've had one or two of these, you literally won't be able to live any longer with carrying these conversations because you know how truly free you are on the other side. You'll be like, how did I ever allow myself to go through life holding all of this shit and energy that isn't mine or that I could have solved. So I'm sending you guys so much love. Let me know if this helped. Let me know if this resonated. Send it to somebody who has to have a hard conversation or, you know, needs to switch up some agreements in their life. And I'm so grateful for you guys. And until next time, earn your happy.
Bye, everyone.
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