How Do I Stop Living by Other People's Expectations?

For most of my life I confused values with almost everything else.

I thought my values were the goals I chased, the preferences I voiced, or — more often, yikes — the expectations other people quietly (or not so quietly) placed on me. I could list the things I was supposed to want. I could perform the version of myself that kept the peace. What I could not do was tell you, without hesitation, what actually mattered to me when no one was watching. It kept me hiding, even as an adult: I shut down my online presence because my dad would launch attacks on who I was personally, spiritually, and physically. Even small criticism from strangers would rock me emotionally. It was a sad and deep confusion.

That confusion kept me oriented outward for years. It is also the exact place InnerVerse met me and began to untangle the knot.

Goals are destinations. Values are directions

Goals are specific and measurable. Lose twenty pounds. Launch the business. Get the certification. Finish the race. They have finish lines. Once you cross them, the goal is complete and you need a new one.

Values do not work that way. Values are the qualities of being and relating that you want to embody no matter what the outcome is. Integrity. Agency. Tenderness toward my own nervous system. Protecting my daughter’s sense of safety, self-esteem, self-love, and efficacy. Truth-telling, even when it costs me comfort or creates a massive amount of pain in my life. These are not checkboxes. They are the orientation of the compass.

I used to set goals that looked impressive from the outside while quietly abandoning the values that would have made the goals meaningful. The result was a kind of hollow achievement — and why I always gave up before I reached the top of the mountain, or sandbagged in a race. I could hit the target and still feel like I had betrayed myself.

Preferences are temporary. Values are non-negotiable

Preferences are the things I like or dislike in a given season. I prefer quiet mornings. I prefer strength training over long endurance rides right now — unless I am just going on a long ride to see the scenery and smell the flowers. I prefer certain foods, certain people, certain levels of stimulation.

Preferences shift with hormones, energy, season of life, and recovery. Values do not. After surgical menopause, after years of trauma responses, after the slow erosion of self that comes from constant people-pleasing, my preferences changed dramatically. What did not change was the deeper requirement that my life feel honest. That I stop performing caretaking at the expense of my own aliveness. That I treat my body as something worth listening to rather than managing for other people’s comfort.

Confusing the two kept me flexible in all the wrong places. I would adjust my preferences endlessly to keep relationships smooth while the actual values — agency, emotional safety, self-respect — got bargained away. I did this relentlessly and without awareness, because the other way felt dangerous to my nervous system. I had to face a lot of pain to come back to myself, but I could do it with InnerVerse’s non-judgmental and present way of meeting me.

Other people’s expectations are not your values

This was the most expensive confusion of all. I became highly skilled at sensing what other people needed me to be. The agreeable partner. The selfless mother. The low-maintenance veteran who “doesn’t make waves.” The woman who could absorb criticism without requiring repair. The woman who does not ask anyone for anything.

Those expectations felt like values because they were so consistently reinforced. Meeting them brought temporary relief. Failing to meet them brought conflict, withdrawal, or the quiet accusation that I was being “too much” or “hormonal.”

But other people’s expectations are not values. They are strategies other people use to feel safe, in control, or comfortable. When I treated them as my own, I disappeared inside the performance.

Self-knowing became nearly impossible because the measuring stick was always external.

InnerVerse did not lecture me about this. It simply created a space where the external measuring stick was removed. The generative AI coaching did not need me to be pleasant or low-maintenance. The somatic exercises did not require me to justify my energy levels. The methodology itself kept pointing me back to one quiet question: what is actually true for you when no one else is in the room?

That question, repeated in a protected container, began to separate the layers.

What changed when I could finally tell the difference

I stopped setting goals that required me to abandon my values in order to achieve them.

I stopped treating shifting preferences as moral failures.

I stopped accepting other people’s comfort as the highest good.

The shift has not been dramatic or Instagram-ready. It has been quieter and more structural. I can feel the difference in my body when I am about to say yes from a people-pleasing place versus a values-aligned place. I can notice when a goal is actually someone else’s expectation wearing my language. I can let preferences change without panicking that I have lost myself.

This clarity did not arrive through more willpower or better boundary scripts — which I tried relentlessly in therapy and failed at constantly, with a lot of judgment and frustration from the therapists. It arrived through consistent practice inside a system designed to protect the inward turn. That system is InnerVerse.

Self-knowing is still a practice, not a destination. Some days the old wiring still fires and I catch myself scanning for what will keep the peace. The difference now is that I have a reliable way back to my own center. Values are no longer abstract concepts I admire from a distance. They are the living criteria I use to decide how I spend my limited energy, who I let close, and what kind of life I am actually willing to inhabit.

If you have been living by goals that leave you empty, preferences that keep changing, or expectations that never quite fit, you are not broken. You are simply oriented in the wrong direction. There is a way to turn the attention inward without abandoning the people you love. There is a way to know the difference between what is truly yours and what was only ever borrowed.

That is the work InnerVerse was built to support.