Girl, Stop Apologizing
Rachel Hollis
31 min
7 Key Points
4.5 RateWhat's inside?
Discover your inner strength and stop saying sorry for being ambitious. Learn how to set and achieve your goals without guilt or fear.
You'll learn
1. Ditching excuses that hold you back2. Embracing failure with a growth mindset3. Setting and smashing your goals4. The need for self-care and boundaries5. Stop seeking approval, believe in yourself6. Balancing work and personal life.Key points
01Stop Living for Other People
Have you ever caught yourself blurting out an apology when someone else bumped into you at the grocery store? We do this all the time, instinctively taking the blame and trying to smooth things over just to avoid making anyone else feel uncomfortable. This seemingly harmless habit of constantly apologizing spills over into how we handle our biggest dreams and deepest ambitions. We have been conditioned from a very young age to be accommodating, polite, and agreeable, often at the massive expense of our own personal growth. The "good girl" syndrome is incredibly pervasive, teaching us that our primary role in life is to be liked by everyone around us. But living your life solely to meet the expectations of others is a guaranteed way to suffocate your true potential and end up harboring deep-seated resentment. Rachel Hollis points out a hard truth that we all need to hear: other people's opinions of you are absolutely none of your business. When you decide to start a new business, go back to school, or dedicate your weekends to writing a novel, people are going to have opinions. Your friends might think you are working too hard, your family might not understand why you are spending money on a new venture, and acquaintances on social media might silently judge your journey. But why do we give these people a front-row seat to our lives and a steering wheel to direct our choices? The fear of judgment paralyzes us before we even take the first step. We convince ourselves that if we just stay quiet, keep our heads down, and do what is expected, we will be safe. But safety does not lead to fulfillment. To truly stop apologizing for your goals, you have to drastically shift your mindset regarding external validation. We often seek applause from people who have never even stepped foot in the arena we are trying to conquer. Think about a woman who wants to start a fitness coaching business. She hesitates because she is worried her coworkers will think she is being overly self-promotional on the internet. She is essentially letting the hypothetical opinions of people she barely sees outside of the office dictate her financial and personal future. That is a terrible trade-off! We must recognize that the people who actively judge you are usually projecting their own insecurities and unfulfilled dreams onto your courage. Here are a few common traps we fall into when we let other people's opinions dictate our lives: The Fear of Outgrowing Your Circle: We worry that if we become too successful, too driven, or too focused, our current friends will feel alienated and leave us behind. The Need for Universal Approval: We falsely believe that every single person in our lives must understand and support our vision before we are allowed to pursue it. The Guilt of Being "Selfish": We label the pursuit of our own happiness as a selfish act, completely ignoring the fact that a fulfilled, passionate person brings infinitely more light into the world than an exhausted, resentful one. You have to get incredibly comfortable with being misunderstood. Your dream was planted in your heart, not theirs. It is not their job to understand it, and it is certainly not their job to approve of it. When Rachel Hollis started her early lifestyle blog, she faced a barrage of judgment from other mothers who thought she should be focusing entirely on her children rather than building a brand online. If she had listened to those murmurs of disapproval, she never would have built a media empire. You have to draw a hard line in the sand. Decide today that you would rather be judged for living authentically and chasing your wildest ambitions than be universally liked for hiding your true self. The discomfort of someone else's judgment is temporary, but the regret of letting your dreams die inside of you will last a lifetime.
02You Have More Time Than You Think
The most common lie we tell ourselves every single morning, usually before we have even had our first cup of coffee, is that there simply are not enough hours in the day. We look at our overflowing calendars, the piles of laundry, the endless emails, and we declare that our dreams will just have to wait until life "calms down." But let us be completely honest with ourselves: life is never going to miraculously calm down and hand you a perfectly wrapped box of free time. Time is not something you find; it is something you actively and intentionally make. We all have the exact same 168 hours in a week, yet somehow, certain people manage to build businesses, write books, and run marathons while the rest of us are still trying to catch up on our favorite television shows. The excuse of not having enough time is usually a mask for not having enough focus or prioritization. When we say we do not have time to work on our goals, what we are really saying is that our goals are not a high enough priority to displace our current habits. Consider conducting a ruthless audit of your daily schedule. How many hours a week do you spend aimlessly scrolling through social media, watching reality television, or hitting the snooze button? If you track your time honestly for just three days, you will likely find massive pockets of wasted hours that could be redirected toward your ambitions. Rachel Hollis introduces the concept of the "season of hustle." We are often sold this beautiful, shiny lie called "balance." We think we should be able to simultaneously cook organic meals from scratch, have a spotless house, excel at our careers, nurture a flawless marriage, and build an empire on the side. Balance is a total myth. When you are fiercely pursuing a massive goal, your life is going to be out of balance, and that is perfectly okay. During a season of hustle, something has to give. Maybe your house is going to be a little dustier than usual. Maybe you will have to order takeout twice a week instead of cooking. Maybe you have to say no to social invitations for a few months. You have to be willing to let go of perfection in the areas of your life that do not align with your current primary goal. Let us look at a practical scenario. Suppose you want to write a novel, but you work a full-time job and have two young children. The idea of finding three uninterrupted hours to write seems laughable. But what if you stopped looking for massive blocks of time and started utilizing the margins of your day? What if you woke up just one hour earlier than the rest of your household? That is five extra hours a week, twenty extra hours a month. Over the course of a year, that single hour a morning translates into two hundred and forty hours of dedicated writing time. You can write an entire book in that amount of time! To reclaim your time, you have to become fiercely protective of it. This means learning the power of a polite but firm "no." Stop overcommitting: You do not have to volunteer for every committee, attend every neighborhood gathering, or bake three dozen cupcakes for the school bake sale. Store-bought cookies are perfectly fine. Limit your distractions: Put your phone in another room when you are doing deep work. The constant pinging of notifications shatters your focus and steals your precious minutes. Delegate and ask for help: If you have a partner or older children, they need to share the load of household management. You are not the sole manager of your home's ecosystem. When you stop viewing your time as something that happens to you and start viewing it as a resource you control, everything shifts. You stop playing the victim to your busy schedule and start acting like the CEO of your own life. Yes, it requires discipline. Yes, waking up at 5:00 AM when the bed is warm and cozy is incredibly difficult. But the satisfaction of knowing you are carving out time to invest in your own future is worth infinitely more than an extra hour of mediocre sleep. Stop waiting for the perfect time to start, because the perfect time does not exist. The only time you have is right now.
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03Ditch the Fear of Falling Short
04Stop Asking for Permission
05Build Habits That Actually Work
06Master the Art of Goal Setting
07Conclusion
About Rachel Hollis
Rachel Hollis is a best-selling author, motivational speaker, and blogger. She gained prominence for her self-help books, including "Girl, Stop Apologizing". Hollis is also the founder of the lifestyle website The Chic Site and the CEO of her own media company, Chic Media.
