I shared this recently on Instagram and it provoked such a positive response that I decided to dive into it a little more deeply on the blog.

The scenario was this; I had a woman jump into my DMs recently and expressed an opinion that I disagreed with.

I politely expressed an alternate perspective. (When I say ‘politely’ what I mean is that I was not rude and I certainly didn’t personally attack her. I spoke from my own perspective and clarified my own values vis-a-vis the topic.)

She was not pleased.

Her response alternated between excessive defensiveness and trying to attack me personally.

It was fascinating to watch because it was so clear to me that her response had nothing to do with me.

I didn’t know this person. We had no history with one another. She had shown up unbidden in my DMs and the thing that provoked her outrage was my decision to express an opinion different to her own.

This happens often when you’re interacting with people who expect you to behave according to social conditioning, like when you decide not to do the good girl thing. And at one point, this would have encouraged me to placate, to assuage, to agree. But this is where visibility block clearing work really comes into its own.

Because I have spent many years clearing out my fear of not being liked, my concerns about being judged for not being nice or kind, my anxiety about not meeting someone else’s expectations about how I should show up in the world, I express myself differently than I might have in the past.

I’m clearer in my communication. I’m more direct. But I’m also more compassionate. Because I’m less triggered by other people, I’m able to hear what they have to say, consider their perspective, and still present an alternative point of view.

NB: just because you have compassion for someone or empathise with their plight doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. You can see their perspective and still not adopt it as your own. That is absolutely ok. Disagreeing with someone says nothing about what you think of them as a person. It speaks to how you perceive and interpret an idea they’re presenting. (We need more people in the world to understand and appreciate this nuance.)

More than once on socials, when I’ve disagreed with another woman’s perspective, I’ve been accused of shutting them down. Of not supporting them to be visible. As though the only way to support another person’s visibility is to agree with everything they say.

I can’t say this loudly enough; you don’t need to be surrounded by ‘yes people’ in order to be visible in the world. You need to rid yourself of the idea that people agreeing with you is the only kind of visibility you’re looking for.

When someone is in an active conversation with you, when they’re listening to you and responding to your comments, they’re not shutting down your visibility efforts. You are in fact, very visible to them.

If, when you says you want people to support you to be visible, what you actually mean is you want people to agree with you all the time, that actually has very little to do with visibility and a lot to do with narcissism. 

The whole point of visibility block clearing is to feel comfortable being visible even when people disagree with you. Especially when people disagree with you.

Because I’ve let go of my need to pander, in conversations such as the one I’ve relayed here, I can see the other person struggling to have an emotionally mature conversation where we don’t have to agree with each other AND I can see that it’s not my job to save them if they can’t yet handle that.

Rather than assuming that I ought to make them feel good about our conversation, I can choose instead to model what it looks like to express an opinion with clarity, without pandering and with ease as to whether others agree or disagree.

And this, my friends, is the great gift that visibility block clearing work has to offer us all.