Why Your Boldest Ideas Get The Flattest Responses

On social comparison, tall poppies, and the people closest to you who really wish you'd calm down

Mar 30, 2026

If you’ve ever announced something exciting and watched someone’s face do absolutely nothing, this one’s for you.

It’s a little cringe, a little frightening, and a little envious all at the same time.

There’s a thing that keeps happening with people who know me well. Not the audience, not the students, not the people who see me perform. The closer ones.

It’s hard to explain but it’s a feeling. An eyebrow lift when I announce a new idea. A small smile rather than a full throated yes, that sounds cool. And sometimes a flat out “why would you do that?”

That’s sounds a bit over-the-top, but it’s not.

There’s not much more deflating than the exuberance of telling someone about your awesome idea, or maybe it’s not awesome but it’s still fresh and you’re excited, and watching them react like a wilting flower.

Waa waa waa.

I asked my husband recently what he thought that behavior was actually about. This was about a specific person in my life. He thought about it and said if he had to guess he’d say it’s a reaction to decisiveness. To me making a decision about something.

Huh.

I don’t love that answer but something about this rings true.

I looked it up. It’s called Social Comparison Theory.

The basic idea: we evaluate ourselves by watching the people around us.

When someone close to you makes a move, announces a project, takes a swing at something, it functions as a mirror.

I know you are but what am I?

Your decisiveness doesn’t make them feel bad about you. It makes them feel bad about themselves. The reaction is self-protection dressed up as skepticism.

I realize that could easily be read as me saying “she’s like totally jealous”, with full vocal fry. That’s not what I mean. I mean something is happening in that person that makes your cool idea land as a threat rather than a delight. I think it’s worth understanding why.

The People Closest To You Have The Most To Lose

I looked this up too. 😋

Researchers who study what they call Ambivalent Relationships:

Relationships in which love and subtle undermining coexist, have found that close friends and family have the most at stake in us staying exactly as we are.

A stranger cheering you on loses nothing if you succeed.

Someone who has known you for twenty years has a whole story about who you both are to each other.

Your change can destabilize all of it.

I've been sitting with this particular kind of friendship loss for a while.

It’s not always conscious. It’s just human behavior. Pre-wired into our DNA to keep us alive.

There’s also a concept you have probably heard of, called Tall Poppy Syndrome:

This describes the social impulse to cut down anyone who rises above the group.

It’s not purely jealousy.

There’s a group cohesion mechanism underneath it. The discouragement is almost reflexive, like a system maintaining its own equilibrium. Nobody has to mean it. It just happens.

Some researchers go further and argue that when someone in your life takes a bold public risk it doesn’t just trigger envy. It threatens the whole internal story they’ve built about why playing it safe was the right call.

The “why would you do that?” isn’t really a question. It’s a defense.

My excitement, my ANNOUNCING! of things, my very public trying, functions as an implicit critique of everyone watching who isn’t doing that.

Which is why learning to let people actually see you in the first place takes its own kind of nerve.

That’s heavy. And it definitely slows me down as a creator.

I’ve walked through life trying not to be too excited about things.

I’ve learned that certain people, men especially but honestly some women too, don’t love when I speak too fast, too emphatically, too opinionated, too too too.

I’ve done enough work on myself to recognize that sometimes I genuinely am the problem. I’m working on it.

I have extended family members with more extreme versions of this tendency so I can see it clearly in its full expression, which makes it easier to spot in myself. It’s always helpful to have a strong genetic component within you that you can see outside of yourself in order to grow as a person.

The gender piece of all this is its own article entirely, so I’ll save that for another day.

Here’s where I land: if I don’t feed my soul this way, the public trying, the announcing, the decisive moving forward, I start to drown. In illness, in stagnation, in the particular misery of a person who stopped attempting things.

So I keep going. I try to meet myself in the middle.

And I’ve mostly stopped explaining myself to the wilting flowers.

📖 Reading: I’m currently in the middle of Wise Effort by Diana Hill, PhD. It’s all about how to focus your genius energy on what matters most.

🎧 Listening: Here’s a companion episode to the above book. Diana Hill and Dan Harris and his episode of 10% Happier.

📝 Substack Inspiration: My favorite writing inspiration is Writing In The Dark. Just look at how she writes and be inspired. One of my favorite subscriptions here on Substack. I’ve been very busy lately, but once I open my next upcoming show, I’m hoping to do some quiet writing like hers while I am performing and need ways to keep my body calm.

Language taught me to hold the shimmers and shards of my life gemstones. To let grief and wonder live in the same sentence. To let texture and shadow and silence mean something, too.
From language I learned that time isn’t a line. It’s a tangle of dog fur, a dropped spoon, a broken screen door, a winding path, a trap door, a secret passageway behind the lilacs. I write to braid it all. To make a form from the mess.

More later, and thanks for reading/listening,

🙋‍♀️Molly

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