237. How Relationships Keep You From Your Best Life

Episode Summary:

In this episode, Sade Curry kicks off a new series on what it means to live a relationship-centered life—and why that might be the thing keeping you stuck. You’ll hear Sade unpack the social conditioning that trains women to prioritize everyone else first: partners, kids, bosses, siblings, even exes.

Sade breaks down why simply saying “decenter men” isn’t enough—because the issue runs deeper. Women are conditioned to center relationships, period. That’s why even after divorce, you might still feel pulled in every direction and unable to start the business, write the book, or just book your doctor’s appointment.

This episode gives language to what you may have been feeling: that you’ve been pouring out for others while putting yourself last. Sade shares stories from her own life and coaching practice to show how shifting your focus—centering yourself—is the first step to real freedom and clarity.

You don’t have to blow up your life to change it. You can make grounded, intentional shifts toward the life you want.

Ready to stop putting yourself last?
Let’s talk. Book a free consultation call with Sade Curry and explore how private coaching can help you reclaim your time, focus on your goals, and create the life you want—without losing the people you love.

👉 Book your call here

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Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Dating After Divorce podcast. I am your host, Sade Curry, and it is a pleasure to be back with you today. I have a new series of podcasts, so you might see several dropping in the month of November. Today is October 27th, so over the next several weeks, I really want to deep dive into the concept of being relationship-centered.

If you are on social media or if you read news outlets, you may have seen a lot of talk around being men-centered, decentering men, centering yourself in your life, and it is a very important concept in dating. I don't use the same language that they use on social media, just because I find that a lot of the decenter men conversations, while the concept is incredible and I endorse it, the language of the conversation is often shaming to women. Almost as though you are bad for being someone who centered men. It doesn't take into consideration the fact that when you are socialized as a woman, when you are raised as a woman, when you are conditioned as a woman, you are basically brainwashed from the time you are a child to center men.

Not only are you conditioned as a child in most families of origin and in most cultures, today's culture, today's narrative, today's television, movies, magazines, books, the language of music, the language of our society continues to center men. So of course, women center men, because everybody centers men. Even men center men. They center themselves when they are with women. They center other men when they are with them. Most men are seeking the approval of the men in their lives, not the approval of the women in their lives. So everybody centers men.

When there is specific language directed at women saying, "Well, can't believe you centered a man. You're looking to a man," it's kind of like, that's what everybody's doing. So I don't enjoy that language, although I enjoy the concept. The second reason I don't necessarily toe the line of, "Okay, decenter men," is that women are not just conditioned to center men. We are conditioned to center relationships as a whole. Even women who are not dating or who are not in a relationship, I have found that many of them are centering other people in their lives.

If you were to ask me what I think women should be doing, I would say women need to center themselves in their own lives. That is the only language that I would enjoy using if I were to talk about the concept, because it is the only answer that is always correct. Your person should be—you should be—the most important person in your life. From the overflow of caring for yourself, you have your own mask on, and then you are able to care for others. You are able to care for your child. You are able to care appropriately for your siblings, parents, spouse if you have one, or a partner if you have one. You are able to appropriately evaluate the people that you date, and figure out if they're right for you or not. You are able to appropriately invest or not invest in a relationship, because you are at the center. Your needs are at the center. You are allowing other adults to be themselves and to do their own thing.

You are acting appropriately with other adults. You are doing things with consent. You are like, "Hey, I'd love to help you with this." You are asking if they want you to help with it. You're asking yourself if you're the appropriate person to help with it. That is my thought about it, but I do think it's a very important thing to consider.

The series I'm going to do is coming from the work that I have done behind the scenes this year with my one-on-one clients. Times when I'm not promoting the Dating After Divorce Collective, I am actually working behind the scenes with my one-on-one clients who are often thinking about divorce, divorcing, rebuilding post-divorce, or making career pivots. Some of them are building businesses, and I've always had— that's actually where I started with my coaching business was with private one-on-one coaching. Then I started the Dating After Divorce Collective, and the private one-on-one coaching has just kind of always been there, and women come to me for all kinds of different things.

I grew up in Nigeria, so a lot of women from the Global South, from Nigeria, will reach out to me because they don't know other coaches who are from Nigeria, and there's a cultural context there that is helpful for them. This year, I really sat with it. I didn't do a lot of other marketing of the dating part of the business, and I was able to really look at the patterns with my one-on-one clients who were working on big goals. Every single one of them has challenges with achieving their goals because they are centering other relationships, prioritizing other people over their own goals.

That's what I want to talk about. Over the next, I guess you could say three to four weeks, you will find all the podcast episodes will be about that. It will also be about dating because this applies to dating too. A lot of my dating clients are not able to feel centered, and they're constantly heartbroken in the dating process because they are not centering what they want in the dating process. You've heard me talk about this before, but this is just another slant towards that.

Let’s talk about the fact that humans are social creatures. Nothing I'm going to say is to say, "Don't have relationships." I am very pro-relationship myself. The people who are in my life know that I am all for them. They are a priority. There are people in my life who know they can call me at 2 AM and I will answer. The people who are in the inner circle of my life know it. It's always very clear when you are in the inner circle of my life. I have multiple people. I have three best friends, and they know that they're my best friend. They know that they can call me at any time. They know that I'm basically or constantly chasing them down for us to do friend things. I have my spouse, I have my kids. The people in my life that are close to me know that they are close to me, and I am always trying to expand that circle of people who are close to me. I do it very slowly, but I do it because I know that we are social creatures, and we need community.

You cannot survive without other people mirroring back to you that you are loved, that you are appreciated, that you are valuable, that they care for you and that they have your back. If you do not have that in your life, that will shrivel your soul. So I’m very pro-relationship.

I worked with a client whose family was already very small. The members of her family had passed away. Other members had other challenges, so she really was not close. She did not have close family ties. Her job made her travel a lot, so she never really put down roots in her 20s and 30s. When she finally retired early, she found herself without very deep relationships. She only had one or two. We spent a year working on building community for her. When we were done, she had a whole church base, close friends, people she could call if she had a medical emergency. She had people that she was contributing to their lives as well.

So it’s really important. It takes time and energy and focus to build a healthy community around yourself. When I got divorced, what I thought was my healthy community disappeared. If it was healthy, it wouldn't have disappeared. But I wasn't a healthy person at the time, so I wasn't building healthy things. I had to build my own relationships from scratch as well, and that is why I know that having relationships in your life is very important.

Don’t misconstrue anything I say about centering yourself or putting yourself first or focusing yourself to mean that you shouldn’t have relationships. In fact, centering yourself and understanding your needs will let you know that you do need relationships. It will help you find the relationships that are right for you. We are social creatures. Biologically, emotionally, mentally, we thrive in healthy social environments, and we wither in unhealthy ones.

One of the things that's super important is to know, for you as an individual, what kind of social environment is right for you. You can't even figure that out if you don't center yourself, because you'll just look around and say, "Well, this person is thriving in this environment. There must be something wrong with me." No, that environment might not be right for you. You are a unique human being. You have your own thoughts, feelings, personality, conditioning, desires, hopes. Not every environment where one person thrives is one where another person thrives.

I know this because when it comes to my business—which is such an important part of my life—I love it. It is one of the best things that’s happened to me. I love building my business. I love working on it. But I know that there are certain environments where I can't talk about my business because the people there kind of don't get what I do. They think it's weird. They say, "Why are you doing this? Why aren't you just doing a regular profession like being a lawyer or something?"

I do have some of those environments, and I just know that that environment is not a place where my business can thrive. So I might have other conversations in that environment. I might not spend a lot of time there. But I know people who thrive in those social environments.

In the Nigerian community, we have something called "owambes," which literally translates to "I was there." When we were teenagers in boarding school, we would sign our name on desks or in bathrooms saying, "This person was here." So that’s the name of these social events. I know people who adore these events. They're fun—you dress up, there's food, dancing, it's amazing. I could probably enjoy one of those a year, or maybe one every 18 months, and be good. I went, I danced, I sang, I ate. It was amazing. But I couldn't love it more than once a year, maybe twice if I tried really hard.

So for me, a social environment where owambes are the big thing people are doing for community would not be an environment where I thrive. I thrive more in situations where people are sitting around, having conversations, tearing things apart and figuring things out, even if we don’t do anything about the ideas. Sitting down and enjoying talking about ideas, good food—I’m definitely a fan of food—people sharing ideas, that’s where I thrive.

So you find me here on the podcast, coaching, speaking, delivering workshops—that's who I am. There's nothing wrong with other social environments. They're amazing. I admire them from afar. But you have to know yourself, and you can't know yourself if you don't center yourself.

Women are raised and conditioned—our society, this is not your parents’ fault or your grandparents’ fault or your great-grandparents’ fault. This has been happening long before any of the people whose names you know were alive. Women were the first owned proper humans that were owned as property—before even other enslaved people. So this situation where women are overly relationship-centered has been going on for a very long time.

This system exists. We can't say, "Oh, it’s this person’s fault." That doesn't mean people should be misogynistic—it doesn’t mean that's okay. It just means that how we handle the problem is twofold. One is speaking out against misogyny, or the ways women are treated badly, or conditioned to continue taking on too much emotional labor. That’s one way to make change, and there are people doing that.

I follow a lot of them. I feel like my unique thing with this is helping individual women turn it around for themselves. So it’s sort of like, there’s the macro issue—systemic issues around how women are treated, like in court, which is huge. Those of you on this podcast know—when you're getting divorced, the court is very unfair to most women. There are a lot of problems with how society runs. Some things we can do about that, but it’s a slow, grinding, step-by-step change to change the system.

But changing your own internalized behaviors, patterns, conditioning, and brainwashing—you can do that in an instant. You can change beliefs that were ingrained in you—things your parents, society, religion told you. You can change that immediately. That’s literally the work we do in coaching.

You can start to change that relationship-centeredness anytime you want. If you are a person who finds yourself always dropping what you're working on for others, because your relationships are overly prioritized—there’s nothing wrong with being relationship-oriented, but being overly relationship-oriented—you can change that.

The way to know if you need to change something is to find out if you're wasting a lot of time, attention, and energy trying to fit into what others want you to be. You're doing things the way others want. You're cleaning up other people's messes. You're constantly setting boundaries or pushing people away, trying to get them not to control you. You can't say no—your sister calls, your mother calls, your ex texts you, your boss wants stuff after hours—and you find yourself on a hamster wheel making sure everyone gets what they want.

But you also want to start a business. You want to travel. You want to spend more time with your kids. You want to lose weight, get healthy, book your medical appointments—but you haven’t been able to, because there are always fires. Your family has a fire, your boss, your coworker—there's always something. Maybe you’ve got a micromanaging coworker—that was a recent coaching situation. You just can't get these things off your plate to have time and space to think about you and what you really want.

Then you really might be overly relationship-oriented, and it's showing up in all these little ways. That is something you're going to want to work on. It's really hard to direct yourself or think about what you want, or pursue your own direction in life, if you're investing all your energy and time thinking about what this person is doing and what that person is doing and what they want. This is why we are overwhelmed. This is why we’re tired. This is why you crash at the end of the day.

When people say, "Live your best life," it’s like, "How can I do that? I have all these things going on!" It’s not because there’s not enough time, or space, or because you’re not smart or brilliant. It’s not because you’re lazy or a procrastinator. You procrastinate because you're tired. You can’t make decisions. You’re overwhelmed because you used all your energy trying to figure other people out.

That’s what I want to talk about in the subsequent episodes. We’re going to dive into more specific situations. We’ll talk about where the pattern came from. We’ll talk about how it creates a fear of conflict—so you give up on your own stuff, avoid your own stuff, rather than tell people no so that you can work on your own stuff.

If you recognize yourself in anything I’ve talked about today—if you already know you’ve been putting off your goals because there’s too much drama going on in your life, or you haven’t been able to get started, or you got started and couldn’t dive deeper, or you needed to fix some things and couldn’t get back to them because of what other people said—if any of that resonates with you, I want to invite you to work with me in private one-on-one coaching.

We can fix this. You can get it done. I had to fix this. I was so codependent in my first marriage, it was insane. The fact that I am somewhat independent, kind of know what I want in life, and am going for it is really a miracle. I spent 20 years knowing what I wanted but not being able to lift a finger to go beyond the very first steps to getting something done.

I have wanted to run an online business since I was 19. The minute I saw the internet and people started posting on forums—I’m talking 1998 or 1999—I wanted to have an online business. I didn’t start until closer to 2016. So almost 20 years. More than 20 years. I can’t do the math right now.

It’s because I was so relationship-oriented that I stayed in a marriage that was sabotaging what I was doing. I was spending so much time doing things for my ex-husband. I applied for his green card in the U.S. I did all of the paperwork. He wouldn’t even go and submit the paperwork at the INS office, because you had to submit it in person at the time. I did that. He wanted to apply to grad school—I did all of it. I wasn’t even a math person. I applied to his math program and got him in. It was insane how much energy I invested in other people through the years. Not just my ex—other people, family members, friends, and church. It was insane.

I’ve turned all of that around. My projects come first now. My purpose—what I feel like I’m here to do—comes first. And you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. At least, you can get closer. You can get to your version of being independent and healthily interdependent with other people.

If this is something you would like, I want to invite you to book a sales call with me so we can talk about coaching together. In the first 30 days of coaching with me, you will know exactly the specific needs that are keeping you stuck—it’s different for each person—and you’ll have scripts and a plan for starting to move things off your plate in a safe way.

If you have to push back at work, we do it in a safe way—we’re not trying to get you fired. With your family, if you need to push back, we do it in a way that doesn’t break the connection or blow up your life. I’m not a fan of blowing up your life. My life had to blow up before I could make changes. I don’t recommend it. It’s not fun.

I recommend we try to do it in safe ways so you can keep the people you love in your life, but also center yourself in your life. Then we work together for six months, and I keep you accountable. I give you the support you need so that you are getting your own goals done. You’re starting your business, you’re writing your book, you’re switching jobs if that’s what you want, you’re getting a promotion, you’re getting divorced if that is what you want, or you’re dating—you are taking those steps to start dating, no matter what the people in your life have to say about it.

All right. That is our episode for today. Look for a couple more episodes this week on this topic. Thank you for your time and attention, and I will see you next time.