Claire Fitzsimmons 15/07/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 15/07/2026

Why Is It So Hard to Validate Ourselves?

If other people's approval never feels like enough, you're not alone. Discover why we seek external validation and how emotions coaching can help you trust yourself more.

A few years ago, I was talking to a coaching client about a project she had recently completed at work. It had gone well by every measure available. The feedback was positive, her colleagues were happy, and her manager had praised her contribution. As we talked about it, I asked a simple question: "So how do you feel about it?"

She paused for a moment before replying, "I don't know. No one's told me yet."

It was one of those answers that stayed with me because it captured something many of us experience but rarely say out loud. So often, we are waiting for someone else to tell us how to feel about ourselves. We wait for the compliment, the approval, the performance review, the invitation, the praise, the message that confirms we are doing a good job, making the right choice, or becoming the person we hope to be.

When those moments arrive, they can feel wonderful. There is relief in being recognised and comfort in being seen. Yet for many people, the feeling never lasts for long. The compliment fades. The praise is forgotten. The promotion becomes the new normal. Before long, we find ourselves searching for the next piece of evidence that we are okay.

If this sounds familiar, you are far from alone.

When Other People's Opinions Carry More Weight Than Our Own

Many of the people I work with in coaching are thoughtful, capable and deeply caring individuals. From the outside, they often appear confident and successful. Yet inside, they are carrying a constant question: Am I doing enough? Am I enough? They look to other people for the answer because trusting their own judgement feels surprisingly difficult.

What fascinates me is that this isn't usually a problem of confidence. More often, it is a problem of trust.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that other people's opinions carried more weight than our own. Perhaps praise was linked to achievement. Perhaps approval felt conditional. Perhaps there wasn't much room for our feelings, perspectives or needs growing up. Perhaps we discovered that being liked felt safer than being honest, or that getting things right earned connection and belonging.

Whatever the origin, the result can be the same. We begin to treat other people as the experts on our lives while becoming increasingly disconnected from our own authority.

The difficulty is that no amount of external validation can fully solve that problem. If you don't trust your own perspective, even the most generous praise struggles to land. It might make you feel better for an afternoon or a few days, but eventually the doubt returns and the search begins again.

What Are We Really Looking For?

One of the most helpful shifts I have seen in coaching comes when we stop focusing on validation itself and become curious about what sits underneath it.

Because validation is rarely the thing we are actually seeking.

When we long for reassurance from another person, what we are often looking for is something deeper. Sometimes it is safety. We want to know we haven't made a mistake. Sometimes it is belonging. We want to know we still have a place in the group. Sometimes it is certainty in an uncertain situation. Sometimes it is visibility. We want someone to notice how hard we have been trying. Sometimes it is worth. We want proof that we matter.

When we begin to understand the need beneath the validation, something softens. Instead of criticising ourselves for being needy, insecure or dependent on what other people think, we can approach ourselves with curiosity. We can ask what it is we are really hoping someone else's approval will give us.

That question often opens an entirely different conversation.

From Self-Validation to Self-Trust

I think this is why the language of self-validation can sometimes feel unhelpful. It can sound like another thing we should be doing better. Another wellbeing task to add to the list. Another reason to feel we are falling short.

What if the goal wasn't to become completely self-validating? What if the goal was simply to begin trusting ourselves a little more?

Not more than everyone else. Just enough that our own voice gets a seat at the table.

Letting Your Experience Count

Many people assume that self-trust means being certain all the time. In reality, it often looks much quieter than that. It is being willing to acknowledge your effort before someone else notices it. It is recognising when you have handled something well, even if there is no applause. It is allowing your experience to count as evidence. It is asking yourself what you think before immediately turning to someone else for an answer.

This isn't about becoming immune to feedback or pretending other people's perspectives don't matter. Relationships matter. Community matters. Being seen matters. We are human beings, not islands.

The invitation is simply to stop outsourcing your entire sense of worth and direction to people who can never fully know what it is like to be you.

The people who love you can offer encouragement. They can reflect your strengths back to you. They can remind you of things you have forgotten. What they cannot do is build the relationship you have with yourself.

Building a Different Relationship with Yourself

That work happens slowly, often through hundreds of small moments. Moments when you pause before seeking reassurance. Moments when you acknowledge your own effort. Moments when you choose to believe your experience rather than immediately questioning it. Moments when you allow yourself to be both uncertain and trustworthy at the same time.

If you are someone who constantly seeks validation from others, perhaps the question is not, "How do I stop needing reassurance?" Perhaps the question is, "What need am I hoping reassurance will meet, and how might I begin meeting some of that need myself?"

That feels like a gentler place to begin. It is certainly a more compassionate one.

And from that place, it becomes possible to build something far more sustainable than confidence. It becomes possible to build trust.

Explore Emotions Coaching

If you recognise yourself in this story, emotions coaching can help you understand why external validation feels so important, what needs sit beneath it, and how to build a steadier relationship with your own voice.

Together, we'll explore the emotional patterns that keep you second-guessing yourself, learn what your emotions are trying to tell you, and help you move forward with greater self-trust, clarity and confidence.

Because the goal isn't to stop caring what other people think. It's to make sure your opinion matters too.

Learn more

Claire Fitzsimmons 14/07/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 14/07/2026

How We Learn to Matter Too

Always supporting everyone else can leave you exhausted and disconnected from yourself. Explore how to care for others without losing sight of your own needs.

One of the things I see come up most often in my work is what happens when someone has become the strong one.

They are the person everyone calls. The person who knows what needs to happen next. The person who organises the appointments, remembers the details, absorbs the worry, keeps the family going, manages the work, checks in on everyone else and says, when someone finally asks how they are, “I’m fine.”

Often, they are fine. Or fine enough. They are functioning. They are coping. They are doing what needs to be done, and perhaps doing it incredibly well. But somewhere in all that doing, they can begin to disappear.

This is particularly complicated when the people we love are going through something difficult themselves. If your partner is unwell, your parent needs care, your child is struggling, or someone close to you is living through grief, trauma or a major life change, it can feel almost impossible to say: What about me?

Their difficulty might seem bigger. Their needs might feel more urgent. You might look at what they are going through and decide that your exhaustion, sadness, anger, loneliness or uncertainty is somehow less important. You might tell yourself that this is simply what love looks like. You might believe that being strong means being the person who can handle it.

But what happens when you keep telling yourself that it isn’t about you?

When “it’s not about me” becomes a way of life

This is the question at the heart of my conversation with Lois Jackson on A Thought I Kept.

In 2017, Lois’s then-fiancé, former professional rugby player Ed Jackson, suffered a life-changing spinal cord injury. Their lives changed almost overnight, and Lois did what came naturally to her: she went into care mode. She booked appointments. She drove Ed where he needed to go. She spoke to doctors. She supported his recovery. When people asked how she was, her answer was simple: “It’s not about me. Ask Ed. I need to look after Ed.”

What struck me in talking to Lois was how little conscious decision there seemed to be in this. She didn’t sit down and decide to erase her own needs. She simply stepped into the role that needed filling, and perhaps the role she had always been good at filling.

I think many of us will recognise this. Losing ourselves rarely happens in one dramatic moment. It can happen gradually, through a thousand reasonable decisions. Someone else needs us more today. This isn’t the right time to bring that up. I can deal with it later. I don’t want to make things harder. I should be grateful. I should be able to cope. And then, one day, we might look at our lives and wonder where we have gone.

For Lois, that realisation came a couple of years after Ed’s accident. From the outside, life had in some ways returned to “normal”, but of course it wasn’t the old normal. Ed was living with the physical and psychological consequences of his injury. His rugby career had ended. Their relationship had changed. Their future had changed.

Lois realised that Ed had changed, their life had changed, but she was still, as she described it, “stuck in old Lois”. She had kept pushing her feelings to the back of her mind because it still felt as though they weren’t relevant.

Eventually, she knew she had to be honest.

The strong one has feelings too

This is often the difficult part. It can feel selfish to acknowledge that supporting someone has been hard when what they have experienced seems harder. We can turn suffering into a hierarchy in which only the person going through the most visible difficulty is allowed to have needs. But emotions don’t work particularly well in hierarchies.

You can love someone deeply and feel exhausted by caring for them. You can be grateful for your family and need time away from them. You can understand why someone is struggling and still be affected by the way their struggle changes your life. You can want to support someone and feel angry, lonely, scared or resentful. The presence of your feelings does not cancel out your love.

Lois had been afraid that being honest would hurt Ed. She was afraid of losing him. There was perhaps also something else underneath it: a fear that she might no longer be able to be the strong one who could handle everything.

But, as she told me, she came to understand strength differently. Sometimes the strong thing is not continuing to cope quietly. Sometimes strength looks like vulnerability. Sometimes it is saying the difficult thing carefully and honestly. Sometimes it is admitting that you are struggling too.

Lois began having those conversations with Ed. She also spoke to a relationship counsellor and started putting into words what she had been pushing away. Rather than destroying their relationship, that honesty became part of rebuilding it. She described it as though their relationship was “born again”.

There is something important here for those of us who have come to associate love with endurance. We can believe that protecting a relationship means protecting another person from our feelings. But what happens to a relationship when one person can no longer fully exist inside it?

What we suppress doesn’t simply disappear

When we repeatedly decide that our feelings are not relevant, they don’t usually go away. They can become exhaustion, disconnection, irritability or resentment. We might become increasingly frustrated with people we genuinely love, while also feeling guilty for that frustration. We might stop knowing what we want because we have spent so long asking what everyone else needs. Sometimes we end up in lives we never really chose.

This doesn’t necessarily happen because someone else chose them for us. It can happen because we made so many decisions around other people that we stopped including ourselves in the decision-making process.

This is why I think Lois’s thought is so important. After years of saying, “It’s not about me,” she realised something else:

It is about me.

Not only about me. Not me instead of you. Not my needs matter and yours don’t. Me as well as you.

There is a significant difference between putting yourself first all the time and remembering to put yourself somewhere in your own life.

Where are you in your own story?

One of the questions I found myself returning to during my conversation with Lois was: Where am I in my own story?

For those of us who are very good at looking outwards, this can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. We might know what our children need, what our partner is worried about, what is happening at work, what our parents need help with and what is expected of us this week. But ask what we feel, what we need or what we want, and the answers can be much less clear.

Lois now does a lot of work around values, both for herself and with the people she supports. Values can sound like a very abstract idea until we think of them as an anchor: What actually matters to me? What makes me feel alive? What do I want more of? What am I no longer willing to lose?

When we have spent a long time responding to other people’s needs, reconnecting with ourselves may not begin with a dramatic life change. It might begin by noticing.

What am I feeling that I keep dismissing? What do I need that I keep telling myself is unreasonable? Where am I saying yes because I am afraid of what will happen if I say no? What parts of me have become smaller while I have been taking care of everyone else? What would it mean to include myself in the picture?

We may not immediately know the answers. Perhaps the important thing is to begin asking the questions.

You don’t have to wait until everyone else is okay

I think this is one of the hardest beliefs to loosen when you are caring for someone else: the idea that your turn will come later.

I will rest when things calm down. I will think about what I want when they are better. I will ask for help when this difficult period is over. I will return to myself eventually.

But sometimes things don’t calm down for a very long time. One difficult period becomes another. Children need us in different ways. Parents age. Work changes. Someone gets ill. Life continues to be life.

If our wellbeing is always conditional on everyone around us being okay, we may be waiting for a moment that never quite arrives.

Lois has learned to notice her boundaries, to lean on other people and to delegate. She has also learned that putting something back into herself does not have to be enormous. At the beginning of our conversation, after ten emotionally demanding days supporting people on a charity walk, she told me she had just had her hair done. It was a small thing, but it mattered. She had recognised that she needed something put back in.

I loved that because caring for ourselves can become another impossible standard. We imagine it requires a retreat, a perfect morning routine or hours of uninterrupted time we simply do not have. Sometimes it might be a walk. A book. Getting your hair done. Asking someone else to take over. An honest conversation. An hour in which nobody needs anything from you.

Lois also reminded me that rest does not have to look the same for everyone. For her, it might be walking slowly through the woods and paying attention to what she can see, smell and hear. Rest can still involve movement. Support can take different forms. The question is less whether we are doing self-care correctly and more whether there is anywhere in our lives where we are being replenished rather than continually depleted.

Small changes still count

There is another idea woven throughout Lois and Ed’s story: millimetres to mountains.

During Ed’s recovery, progress could be almost imperceptibly small. A finger moving a little more. A toe beginning to wiggle. Changes that were difficult to see from one day to the next, but became visible when they looked back. I think there is something useful in this for anyone trying to find themselves again.

You do not have to completely redesign your life tomorrow. If you have spent years being the person who copes, asking for help once might be a significant step. Saying what you actually feel might be a millimetre. Letting someone be disappointed in your boundary might be another. Doing something because you enjoy it, rather than because it is useful to somebody else, might be another still.

There may be steps backwards too. Lois is clear about that. Progress is not a neat journey in one direction. But once you have evidence that you can do something differently, you have something to return to.

Perhaps the question is not: How do I become someone who always puts myself first?

Perhaps it is: What would help me matter a little more in my own life today?

Maybe being strong was never meant to mean doing it alone

One of the great contradictions of being the strong one is that the more capable you appear, the less likely people may be to realise that you need support. You become the support system rather than someone within it.

But Lois’s work, both through her coaching and through the charity Millimetres 2 Mountains, is deeply rooted in connection. She has seen again and again how much it matters to be around people who understand, to have somewhere you can be honest, and to know that you do not have to carry everything alone.

The same should be true for the supporters. You are allowed to need somewhere to put your feelings. You are allowed to be affected by what is happening to someone you love. You are allowed to want things for your own life even while someone else is struggling. You are allowed to be tired of being strong.

And perhaps strength itself can become something different. Less about holding everything together without complaint, and more about knowing when to let yourself be held too.

Listen to my conversation with Lois Jackson

In this episode of A Thought I Kept, How We Learn to Matter Too with Lois Jackson, we talk about being the strong one, supporting someone through life-changing circumstances, honesty in relationships, identity, rest, hope, nature, joy and what happens when we finally realise that our own feelings and needs matter too.

Listen to the full episode and discover the thought Lois kept: “It is about me.”

Listen here

Who supports the person who supports everyone else?

If you are used to being the capable one, the person who holds everything together, it can be difficult to know where to take your own emotions. You may not want to burden the people you love, particularly when they are struggling too, but that does not mean you have to keep carrying everything alone.

An emotions coaching session is a space for you. A place to talk honestly about what you are feeling, including the feelings that seem complicated, selfish or difficult to admit, and begin to understand what they might be asking for.

If you need somewhere to be supported while you support everyone else, you can book an emotions coaching session with me at If Lost Start Here.

Learn more

Claire Fitzsimmons 21/06/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 21/06/2026

The Difference Between Kindness and People-Pleasing

People-pleasing isn't always a flaw to fix. Explore the difference between kindness and self-abandonment, why people-pleasing develops, and how to reconnect with your own needs.

There is a lot of advice out there about people-pleasing. We're told to stop doing it. To set firmer boundaries. To care less about what other people think. To say no more often. To put ourselves first.

While there is wisdom in some of that, it can also leave us feeling as though people-pleasing is simply another flaw to fix, another habit to break, another reason we're somehow getting life wrong.

Listening to my recent podcast conversation with psychotherapist Alice Bramhill reminded me that there might be a more helpful place to begin. Rather than asking how we stop people-pleasing, what if we got curious about why it exists in the first place? Because for many of us, people-pleasing didn't appear out of nowhere. It developed for reasons that made sense at the time.

Perhaps it helped us feel safe. Perhaps it helped us belong. Perhaps it helped us navigate difficult family dynamics, demanding workplaces, friendships we didn't want to lose, or relationships where conflict felt frightening. Perhaps we learned, consciously or unconsciously, that being easy-going, agreeable, capable, useful, accommodating, or endlessly understanding was the best way to move through the world.

Over time, those behaviours can become so familiar that we stop noticing them altogether. We become highly attuned to the needs, moods, preferences, and expectations of everyone around us, often without realising how little attention we're paying to our own.

This is where many people find themselves feeling lost. Not because they don't care enough about other people, but because somewhere along the way they stopped knowing what they themselves wanted.

When Kindness Becomes Self-Abandonment

One of the things I appreciated most about Alice's perspective is that she doesn't demonise people-pleasing.

There is a tendency in wellbeing spaces to treat it as something entirely negative, as though caring deeply about other people is automatically a problem. Yet most of us can think of countless examples where being thoughtful, considerate, generous, or compassionate enriches our relationships and our lives.

Many people-pleasers are genuinely kind people.

The challenge comes when kindness stops being a choice and starts feeling like an obligation.

When we say yes because the thought of disappointing someone feels unbearable.

When we agree because we don't know how to express what we really want.

When we take responsibility for everyone else's emotions while quietly carrying our own.

When we become so focused on keeping the peace that we lose touch with ourselves altogether.

The difference can be subtle, which is why so many of us miss it.

Making your grandmother happy because you love her and want to spend time with her is very different from feeling unable to say no to anyone, ever. Supporting a friend through a difficult time is different from believing you are responsible for fixing their life. Being considerate is different from constantly abandoning your own needs.

The question is rarely whether we're being kind. The question is whether we're choosing that kindness freely.

The Hidden Cost of Always Being Good

For many women especially, people-pleasing is tangled up with a much older story about being good.

A good daughter. A good mother. A good friend. A good employee. A good partner. A good person.

These ideas often arrive long before we have a chance to question them. They are handed to us through family, school, work, culture, religion, advertising, and countless everyday interactions. Some serve us well. Some help us become thoughtful, responsible, caring human beings.

Others can become surprisingly heavy. Because when being good becomes the primary goal, we sometimes start rejecting parts of ourselves that don't fit the picture.

Our anger. Our ambition. Our uncertainty. Our need for rest. Our desire for more space. Our wish to change our minds. Our longing for a different life.

The more energy we spend trying to maintain the image of being good, the harder it can become to hear what is actually true.

The Fawn Response and the Need to Feel Safe

In recent years, more people have become familiar with the idea of the fawn response, a survival strategy where we seek safety through pleasing, accommodating, or appeasing others.

For some people, this language offers an enormous sense of relief. What looked like weakness may have been adaptation. What felt like a personal failing may have been an intelligent response to circumstances. Seen through this lens, people-pleasing becomes less of a character flaw and more of a conversation.

What was this behaviour trying to protect?

What did it help me avoid?

What need was it meeting?

Those questions don't excuse every pattern or remove the challenges people-pleasing can create. They simply invite us to respond with curiosity rather than criticism. And curiosity tends to open doors that self-judgement keeps firmly closed.

Becoming Curious About Yourself Again

One of the hidden consequences of people-pleasing is that we often become experts in everybody else's needs.

We know who likes what.

We know who is upset.

We know who needs support.

We know who is disappointed.

We know who might be annoyed.

We know who requires reassurance.

What we often don't know is how we feel. Or what we need. Or what we want.

Many people arrive at coaching, therapy, or periods of personal reflection not because they are selfish, but because they realise they have spent years looking outward and very little time looking inward.

This is where the work begins. Not with becoming harder. Not with becoming less caring. Not with learning to stop being ourselves.

But with gradually extending some of the same curiosity, compassion, and attentiveness that we offer other people towards ourselves.

A Different Question

Perhaps the goal isn't to stop people-pleasing altogether. Perhaps the goal is to understand it well enough that we have a choice.

To recognise when kindness feels nourishing and aligned. To notice when accommodation becomes exhaustion. To understand when caring for others is an expression of who we are and when it has become a way of disappearing from our own lives.

Because there is a difference between kindness and self-abandonment. And sometimes finding our way back to ourselves begins with asking a gentler question than "How do I stop people-pleasing?"

Perhaps it begins with asking:

What has people-pleasing been trying to do for me all these years?

The answer might tell us far more than any boundary script ever could.

If you’re curious about where people-pleasing and ideas of being “good” show up in your own life, listen to my conversation with psychotherapist, writer, and podcast host Alice Bramhill on A Thought I Kept.

Together, we explore self-trust, boundaries, sensitivity, late-diagnosed neurodivergence, and the thought Alice has carried with her for decades: "I'd rather be whole than good."

If you've ever felt exhausted by trying to be good, struggled to know what you want, or wondered where people-pleasing ends and genuine kindness begins, I think you'll find this conversation really helpful.

Listen to When Being Good Is Exhausting with Alice Bramhill on A Thought I Kept.

Listen here

If this piece resonated with you, it may be because you've spent a long time paying attention to everyone else.

Many of the people I work with arrive feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, resentful, or disconnected from themselves. They often know exactly what everybody around them needs but struggle to answer a much simpler question: "What do I need?"

Emotions coaching offers a space to slow down and get curious about those patterns with someone alongside you. Together, we can explore the habits, beliefs, emotions, and expectations that may have helped you navigate life so far, while gently uncovering what you need now.

You don't have to stop being kind. You don't have to become a different person. Sometimes the work is simply learning how to include yourself in the care and attention you've spent years offering everybody else.

If you'd like some support finding your way back to yourself, I'd love to help. Explore emotions coaching and book a free discovery call.

Work with me

Claire Fitzsimmons 14/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 14/05/2026

A Thought I Kept… About Connection

Feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, or emotionally exhausted? Explore why human connection matters most in difficult times. Inspired by conversations from our podcast, A Thought I Kept.

There are moments when the world can feel too loud to properly hear yourself think. You wake up already behind. The news is unbearable again. Somebody somewhere is shouting online. The food shop costs more than you thought it would. Your phone keeps filling with reminders, requests, headlines, notifications. Work spills into evenings. Even rest starts to feel strangely performative. We scroll instead of pausing. We cancel plans because we’re tired. We tell ourselves we’ll reply properly tomorrow.

And slowly, often without noticing, many of us begin retreating from one another. Not dramatically. Quietly.

We stop reaching out first. We stay home more. We become suspicious of people who think differently to us. We compare ourselves. We convince ourselves everyone else is coping better. We move through life slightly armoured — overstimulated, emotionally exhausted, and unsure how to find our way back to each other again.

But one of the thoughts I’ve kept from making A Thought I Kept is this: human connection matters most precisely in the moments when we’re tempted to withdraw from it.

Not because connection fixes everything. Not because friendship erases grief or anxiety or burnout or uncertainty. But because being with other people — really being with them — can remind us that we are still here. Still human. Still part of something larger than our own spiralling thoughts.

As I pulled together conversations with Cathy Rentzenbrink, Tanya Lynch, Hiroko Yoda, Laurence McCahill, Suzy Reading, Liana Fricker and Lauren Barber, I realised that although these episodes explored very different corners of life — grief, spirituality, creativity, burnout, friendship, books, business, midlife, rest — they kept circling back to the same idea. Connection is not an optional extra to wellbeing. It might be the thing holding so much of it together.

1. We Retreat When Overwhelmed But Isolation Deepens the Feeling

One of the strange things about difficult periods is how quickly they can make us disappear from our own lives. You stop texting back properly. You feel too tired to explain how you are. Going out starts to feel like effort. You tell yourself you’ll reconnect when you feel calmer, less overwhelmed, more yourself again.

But listening back to these conversations, I kept noticing how often people found their way back through other people. Not through becoming shinier or more productive or more emotionally “together,” but through being alongside somebody else long enough to soften a little.

In my conversation with Laurence McCahill, we talked about how growth and change so rarely happen in isolation. We can read the books and underline the quotes and listen to the podcasts and still feel strangely stuck. Sometimes what’s missing isn’t another idea. It’s other people. Someone sitting opposite you saying, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.” A room where you don’t have to explain yourself quite so much. A gathering that reminds you life can feel different to this.

I think modern wellbeing culture sometimes forgets this. So much advice is aimed at the individual: your morning routine, your mindset, your habits, your healing, your optimisation. And while solitude can absolutely be restorative, there is also something profoundly regulating about being witnessed by another human being. The friend you voice note while unloading the dishwasher. The person who notices you’ve gone quiet. The neighbour you always end up chatting to longer than intended. The group chat that suddenly becomes honest at 11pm. These moments can seem tiny from the outside, but emotionally they can be enormous.

2. Connection Doesn’t Have to Look Big or Impressive

What struck me listening back to these episodes was how often connection appeared in ordinary forms. Not grand gestures or perfectly curated social lives, but cups of tea, shared books, walks, retreats, conversations that drift unexpectedly from logistics into longing.

In my conversation with Tanya Lynch, we spoke about the feeling of being gathered — of spaces where people are allowed to arrive exactly as they are, whether that’s hopeful or grieving or emotionally threadbare. There was something in that conversation that stayed with me because I think so many of us are craving precisely that kind of space right now. Not networking. Not performance. Just moments where we can stop pretending to be fine for a minute.

I think many of us accidentally make connection feel harder than it needs to be. We imagine thriving social lives and elaborate dinner parties and huge friendship circles maintained through impeccable emotional availability and perfectly colour-coded calendars. But often connection is much quieter than that. It’s somebody saving you a seat. Somebody remembering what you said last week. Somebody sending you a photo because it made them think of you.

These tiny gestures matter because they remind us we exist in other people’s minds and lives. That we are held somewhere beyond our own stress and self-criticism.

3. Being Witnessed Changes Us

There’s a moment in my conversation with Cathy Rentzenbrink where we talk about books and grief and the relief of feeling recognised by somebody else’s words. I think that’s one of the deepest forms of connection there is: the feeling that someone else has inhabited something adjacent to your own experience and survived long enough to describe it.

Loneliness is not only physical isolation. It’s also the feeling that your inner world is somehow unshareable, too strange or messy or contradictory to be understood by anyone else. Which is why it can feel so unexpectedly emotional when somebody articulates the thing you haven’t been able to say yourself.

This is part of why art matters so much to me. Why conversations matter. Why podcasts matter. Why books matter. Not because they solve life, but because they make our inner worlds feel more shareable. Somebody else has also sat in the car park crying. Somebody else has also felt lost at a dinner party or uncertain in midlife or disconnected from themselves after years of coping. Somebody else has also stared at the ceiling at 3am wondering what on earth they’re doing with their life.

Being witnessed doesn’t remove pain, but it can make pain feel survivable. Sometimes another person’s honesty becomes a bridge back to our own.

4. Rituals and Shared Experiences Help Us Feel Human Again

I kept thinking about this during my conversation with Hiroko Yoda, where we explored Japanese spirituality and the way it can live quietly inside ordinary rituals and everyday life. Shared meals. Seasonal practices. Returning to certain places. Moments of pause and reverence that tether people back to each other and to the world around them.

It made me realise how many of us are quietly searching not only for connection with other people, but connection with meaning itself. Something beyond productivity and algorithms and constant consumption. Something that helps us feel part of a wider human experience again.

Maybe this is why small rituals can feel so unexpectedly important during difficult seasons. Cooking for somebody. Reading in bed beside another person. Returning to the same café every Saturday morning. Listening to a familiar voice on a podcast while commuting home in the dark. These things can seem insignificant until you realise they are helping hold you together.

There’s comfort in repetition. In familiarity. In tiny practices that remind us we belong somewhere — to a person, a community, a season, a place, a version of ourselves we’re trying not to lose.

5. Other People Help Us Remember Who We Are

Perhaps this is the thought I’ve kept most strongly from these conversations: we do not become ourselves entirely alone.

Other people reflect us back to ourselves all the time. A friend remembers the version of you that existed before burnout. Someone notices your excitement returning before you do. A conversation unlocks a part of yourself you thought had disappeared. A community helps you imagine a different future.

We are constantly shaped by what we share, what we witness, and what we allow ourselves to receive from one another. Which feels particularly important in a culture that simultaneously encourages hyper-independence while exhausting us emotionally.

Maybe wellbeing was never supposed to be something we carry entirely alone. Maybe part of feeling better is allowing ourselves to be held — by conversations, friendships, rituals, stories, books, communities, shared meals, and moments of recognition that arrive unexpectedly in ordinary life.

Putting together this playlist reminded me that connection rarely arrives looking cinematic. More often it appears quietly. A message sent at the right moment. A conversation that stays with you for weeks afterwards. Somebody making you laugh when everything has felt unbearably heavy. A voice in your headphones helping you feel a little less alone as you move through another complicated Tuesday.

And maybe, for now at least, that’s enough.

If you’d like to listen to the full A Thought I Kept… About Connection playlist, you can find it here:

Claire Fitzsimmons 13/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 13/05/2026

How Human Connection Helps Us Through Hard Times

Feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or disconnected? Explore how human connection can support us through difficult times, ease loneliness, and help us feel less alone in modern life.

I think one of the hardest things about modern life is that so many of us are living right at the edge of ourselves.

You can feel it in the way people answer “How are you?” with a sigh before they even begin. In the low-level exhaustion that seems to sit underneath everyday life now. In how quickly conversations move from grocery prices to burnout to the latest terrible thing in the news.

There is so much happening at once.

There’s the pressure of work and bills and trying to hold together ordinary life during a cost of living crisis. There’s the endless churn of headlines arriving directly into our palms before we’ve even had breakfast. There are wars unfolding in real time, including the ongoing devastation in the Middle East, which many people are carrying emotionally while still trying to navigate school runs, meetings, laundry, dinner, emails, ageing parents, and the strange expectation that we should somehow continue functioning normally through all of it.

And underneath all of that, many of us are simply tired. Not dramatic collapse tired. More the kind where joy starts slipping out of reach. The kind where you become permanently a little irritated, a little resentful, a little emotionally threadbare. The kind where you keep going because you have to, but feel increasingly disconnected from yourself while you do.

What interests me about difficult seasons like these is that we often respond to them in ways that make us feel even more alone.

We retreat.

We stop replying to messages.

We cancel plans.

We convince ourselves we’re too exhausted to socialise.

We scroll instead of speaking.

We mistrust people more easily.

We compare our messy lives to everyone else’s carefully edited competence.

We assume we’re behind.

We become less generous with one another because we’re barely holding ourselves together.

And the wider culture often deepens that separation. Politics becomes polarised. Algorithms reward outrage. Conversations flatten into sides to pick rather than people to understand. We become wary of saying the wrong thing, believing the wrong thing, being judged, misunderstood, excluded, criticised, corrected.

It can start to feel safer to withdraw.

But I keep coming back to the possibility that it’s exactly in moments like these that human connection matters most.

Not in a glossy “community fixes everything” sort of way. Not because a coffee with a friend magically resolves grief or burnout or fear about the state of the world. But because connection helps us carry reality differently.

There’s something regulating about being with people who allow you to exhale a little.

Someone making you laugh when you hadn’t realised how long it’s been since you properly laughed.

Someone texting to ask if you got home alright.

Someone saying, “Honestly? I’m struggling too.”

Someone sitting at your kitchen table while life remains unresolved, but somehow more bearable because another person is witnessing it with you.

Connection reminds us that we are not machines built only for productivity and endurance.

We are relational creatures. We make meaning together. We soothe each other’s nervous systems. We borrow hope from one another. We remember ourselves through other people sometimes.

And importantly, connection does not have to look impressive to matter.

I think we can sometimes make ourselves feel worse by imagining “good connection” as being endlessly social, extroverted, emotionally articulate, always surrounded by friends or part of some perfect community.

But connection can be tiny and ordinary too.

It might be the person at the local café who remembers your order. The neighbour you chat to while bringing the bins in. Sending a voice note instead of a text because you want someone to hear your actual voice. Watching a film with your teenager and briefly entering their world. Going for a walk with someone who doesn’t require you to be cheerful. Sitting in a room with other people at yoga, church, choir, book club, a protest, a workshop, or a community garden and remembering, even fleetingly, that we are living alongside one another rather than entirely alone.

Sometimes connection is simply the experience of being real with another person for five minutes instead of pretending you’re coping perfectly.

And perhaps that’s why it can feel both comforting and uncomfortable at the same time.

Because real connection asks us to emerge slightly from hiding.

To let ourselves be seen before everything is neatly resolved.

To admit we’re struggling before we’ve found the lesson in it.

To risk not being entirely self-sufficient.

Which can feel deeply vulnerable in a culture that rewards performance, certainty, independence, and appearing fine.

But when life gets hard — and for many people, it really is hard right now — isolation rarely softens the experience. Usually it sharpens it.

Connection, meanwhile, often gives us just enough steadiness to keep going.

Not because other people save us.

But because being human was probably never meant to be done entirely alone.

Explore the Connection Pathway

Our wellbeing journal, If Lost Start Here, includes a full pathway exploring connection — the people, places, conversations, communities, and everyday moments that help us feel more supported, understood, and alive.

Inside you’ll find reflections, prompts, and playful experiments to help you reconnect not just with others, but with yourself too.

You can explore the journal here

Get your copy

Claire Fitzsimmons 04/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 04/05/2026

Connecting While Human

When something shifts in your relationships, it can feel confusing and lonely. This piece explores how to stay connected while being yourself, even when it’s messy.

You’re halfway through a conversation and realise you’re not really in it. You’re nodding, saying the right things, keeping the tone light enough, agreeable enough. You hear yourself laugh at something that isn’t quite funny. You offer an explanation you’ve offered before, one that lands just well enough to move things on. And at the same time, there’s something else happening underneath — a more insistent feeling that says: this isn’t quite it.

You might notice it later, when you’re walking home or making dinner, replaying the conversation in your head. The bit you didn’t say. The way you softened something. The way you tried, once again, to explain yourself into being understood. And then, almost reluctantly, the thought arrives: I don’t think this is about explaining anymore.

It’s a subtle shift, but once it’s there, it tends to stay.

This is the place Jacky Power and I found ourselves in during our conversation — not just the moment of clarity that so many wellbeing conversations promise, but in what comes just after it. The part where you realise something about yourself or your relationships, and then very messily try to do something about it.

Jacky described believing, for a long time, that if she could just say things the right way, people would meet her there. That the gap between her and others was something she could bridge with better words, more careful explanations, a little more effort. It’s such a human instinct — to assume that understanding is something we can earn if we try hard enough.

And sometimes that’s true. But not always.

Sometimes what we’re up against isn’t a lack of clarity, but a difference in direction. A difference in how we see things, what we value, what we’re willing to hold or not hold anymore. And that’s much harder to resolve, because it doesn’t bend as easily.

What follows that realisation isn’t a clean decision. It’s more like learning to walk again on uneven ground.

You say something you’ve been meaning to say, and it comes out slightly wrong. Or it lands in a way you didn’t expect. You question yourself almost immediately. Was that too much? Too blunt? Not quite right? You tell yourself you’ll try again next time, maybe in a softer way, a clearer way. You adjust, you retreat, you step forward again.

Jacky described it as “stumble, trip, stumble, trip.” And it’s exactly that. Not a confident stride into a new way of being, but a series of attempts, some of which don’t go to plan.

There’s a kind of vulnerability in this stage that doesn’t get talked about much. Because from the outside, it might look like growth — becoming more self-aware, more aligned, more boundaried. But from the inside, it can feel uncertain and exposing. You’re no longer fully comfortable in the old way of relating, but you’re not yet steady in the new one either.

And that can feel lonely.

Not necessarily in the obvious sense of being alone, but in the quieter sense of not quite being met. Of noticing that the ways you’re beginning to show up don’t always fit neatly into the relationships you’ve had before. Of realising that not everyone will come with you, or understand you in the way you hoped.

Jacky spoke about this without dressing it up. That there can be grief in it. That choosing your own direction — even gently, even kindly — can create a kind of separation. Not because you want it to, but because something has shifted, and you can’t quite go back to not knowing that.

And still, there was something else in what she said that felt just as important.

That the alternative — ignoring what you’ve noticed, continuing to override yourself for the sake of keeping things smooth — comes at a cost too. A quieter one, perhaps, but one that builds over time. A sense of being slightly out of step with yourself. Of saying yes when you mean maybe, or maybe when you mean no. Of slowly losing touch with what feels true.

This is where connection becomes more complicated than we often allow it to be.

Because it isn’t just about being close to other people. It’s also about how close you are to yourself within those relationships. Whether there is space, even in small ways, to be honest about what you feel, what you need, what you see differently now.

And that honesty doesn’t have to arrive all at once.

One of the things I took from this conversation is that connection doesn’t depend on getting it perfectly right. It might be something much smaller than that. A moment where you say a little more than you usually would. A conversation where you don’t immediately tidy up your feelings. A pause where you notice the urge to explain, and choose, just for a second, not to.

It might be noticing where you feel able to do that, and where you don’t.

Because not every space will hold it. And that, too, is information.

Jacky talks about “human tricky things” — the parts of being alive that don’t resolve easily. The feelings we don’t always have words for. The experiences that sit somewhere between connection and disconnection, between being seen and staying hidden. And what struck me is that learning to connect while human isn’t about smoothing those things out. It’s about finding ways to stay with them.

To stay with yourself when you’re unsure. To stay in relationship where you can, without forcing it where you can’t. To allow for the possibility that connection might look different now — less about being perfectly understood, and more about being real in the places that can hold it.

If you’re in that space at the moment — noticing something has shifted, but not yet sure how to live it — it might help to know that this part doesn’t need to be rushed.

You’re not behind. You’re not getting it wrong. You’re in the middle of learning something about yourself that takes time to settle.

And there is a kind of steadiness that can grow here, even if it doesn’t feel like it yet. Not from having all the answers, but from beginning to trust what you notice. From allowing that to matter, even when it complicates things.

If you’d like to hear more of this conversation, you can listen to my episode with Jacky Power on A Thought I Kept, where we explore emotions, loneliness, and what it means to stay connected — to ourselves and to each other.

Listen to our conversation here

And if you’re looking for somewhere to think about your own relationships or feelings a little more gently, explore our coaching and resources here If Lost Start Here.

Explore more support

Claire Fitzsimmons 17/04/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 17/04/2026

Grief Disco

Discover Grief Disco, a welcoming and uplifting space for anyone living with loss. A place to heal, connect and feel grief through music, movement and community.

Perfect For

Grief Disco is for anyone living with loss and looking for a different kind of space to hold it. It’s for people who don’t always have the words, who feel isolated in their grief, or who want to be around others who understand without needing everything explained. It’s for the heartbroken and the hopeful, for people who want somewhere gentle, human and a little unexpected to go with what they’re carrying.

You do not need to be good at dancing. You do not need to be ready to talk. You do not need to arrive in any particular state. You just need permission to come as you are.

Why You’ll Love It

Grief Disco offers something many grieving people are missing: a place to feel less alone without being forced into conversation or expected to “do grief” the right way. Through music, movement and a sense of shared understanding, it creates room for sadness, joy, memory, release and connection to exist together.

This isn’t about dancing to forget. It’s about dancing to remember, to honour and to reconnect. For some people that might look like tears on a dance floor. For others, it might be a small exhale, a moment of laughter, or the relief of being in a room where no one needs grief explained to them.

What Makes It Special

So much of grief can feel isolating. People don’t know what to say, or they say nothing. We can start to feel cut off from ourselves, from our bodies and from other people. What Grief Disco understands is that grief does not only live in words. It lives in the body too.

That’s what makes this space so powerful. It offers people a way to process loss through movement, music and presence, rather than through talking alone. There is no pressure to perform, no expectation to be upbeat and no fixed script for how you should feel. Everything is an invitation.

Grief Disco also holds something many of us forget is possible: that joy and grief can coexist. That a person can cry and dance at the same time. That love, memory, heartbreak and laughter can all be in the room together. In that sense, it doesn’t just offer support for grief. It offers a more human way of being with it.

The If Lost Take

There is something quietly radical about creating a place where grief is allowed to move.

So many of us are more familiar with the language of coping than the experience of actually feeling. We know how to keep going, keep functioning, keep answering “fine” when we are anything but. Grief Disco interrupts that. It offers something softer and, for many people, more freeing: a chance to let grief be alive in the body, not just managed in the mind.

What we love most is that this doesn’t turn grief into a problem to solve. It doesn’t rush people towards silver linings or ask them to package their pain into something neat and shareable. Instead, it makes room for what is true. Sometimes that truth is sorrow. Sometimes it is love. Sometimes it is a song that opens something you didn’t realise you were still carrying.

And sometimes healing looks less like fixing and more like finding a room where you can be fully human again.

Founders Story | Co-founded by Georgina Jones and Leah Davies

Grief Disco was born from lived experience of loss and a belief that grieving people deserve spaces that feel connecting, warm and real. Co-founders Georgina and Leah created it as a response to the loneliness that grief can bring and to the sense that many of the places available to grieving people do not always make room for the body, for joy or for community. Their approach is shaped by the understanding that no one should have to grieve alone, and that music and movement can help us find our way back to ourselves and each other.

Founder’s Go-To Wellbeing Advice

“Look for the love.

Look for the tiny moments of joy that are still here, even in the hardest seasons. Keep a playlist that helps shift your energy. Let music help you move what words can’t always reach.

And remember that grief is not something to fix or get over. It is something to feel, and you don’t have to feel it alone.”

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Some Practical Details

Grief Disco is a space where people can come together around grief through music, movement and optional sharing. Some events happen in person and there are also online grief discos for people who would rather join from home. The atmosphere is invitational rather than intense: you can dance, sit, cry, talk, stay quiet, turn your camera off or simply witness. There are also small ritual elements, such as dedications and moments to remember the person or people you are dancing for.

If you are grieving and looking for support, this may be one of those rare places that helps not by asking you to explain your loss, but by giving you somewhere to bring it.

Take me there

Grief Disco

Various locations. Follow on social media and sign up for their newsletter for future dates.

Website | Instagram | YouTube

More places to connect

Claire Fitzsimmons 16/04/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 16/04/2026

Zenaa Retreats

Discover Zenaa Retreats, a welcoming, fad-free approach to yoga and wellness retreats in the UK and abroad. Designed for real life, these nourishing escapes blend movement, rest, great food and genuine connection. Perfect for beginners, solo travellers and the yoga curious.