You’ve read the advice. Advocate for yourself. Speak your truth. Set boundaries. Prioritize you. Maybe you’ve even tried it — booked the self-care, rehearsed the confident line, walked into the room determined to be a woman who asks for what she needs.
And maybe you noticed something strange while you did it: you felt like a fraud the whole time.
That feeling isn’t a sign you did it wrong. It’s a sign you understood something the advice didn’t.
A new performance is still a performance¶
Here’s the thing nobody names. If your core pattern is performing — constantly scanning for what the room needs and adjusting yourself to deliver it — then “be more assertive” doesn’t free you from that pattern. It just hands you a new script.
You’d perform confident woman who advocates for herself. You’d perform boundary-setter. You’d perform truth-speaker, in scheduled ways, with the right verbiage. The audience changes. The script changes. But the performer — the part of you that’s always managing how you come across — doesn’t change at all. You’re still running the same machine, just optimizing it for a different output.
That’s why the assertiveness advice tends to feel hollow even when it “works.” A performance of having needs is not the same as having access to your needs. It looks similar from the outside. From the inside, it’s exhausting in the exact same way the old performance was.
The shift: stop performing differently, start performing less¶
There’s a different move, and it’s almost the opposite of “do more, speak up, push harder.” It’s subtraction.
Picture a dinner party. The host asks if anyone wants more wine. The performance — the one you’ve run for years — says yes, please, that’s so kind, with an extra wattage of warmth that quietly signals I’m easy, I’m a delight, you don’t have to worry about me. Un-performing is just saying no thanks, I’m good in your normal voice, without the warmth-management wrapped around it.
The action is tiny. Three words. Nobody watching can even tell anything happened. But internally, something shifted. You didn’t perform. You just answered.
That’s what “un-perform” means. Not doing nothing. Not being cold. Just doing the thing that actually corresponds to what’s happening — without the performance layer on top. And unlike “be more assertive,” it doesn’t ask you to become a new person. It asks you to stop adding a layer you’ve been adding so long you forgot it was optional.
Why this matters more than it sounds¶
Notice what’s not on this list: no boundary to set, no speech to give, no advocacy to muster. That’s deliberate.
Boundaries and self-advocacy require a self that’s connected enough to itself to know what it wants. And if you’ve spent decades performing, that’s precisely the contact you’ve lost. You can’t advocate from a center you abandoned. That’s the real reason “just set boundaries” has never quite worked for you — it skipped the step where you get back in touch with the self the boundary is supposed to be coming from.
Un-performing is that step. It comes before the boundaries, not instead of them. Do it long enough, in small enough increments, and the boundaries start to arrive on their own — not as a performance you push out, but as the natural expression of a self that’s finally there to have them.
This is the heart of a framework called the Unperformance Method, and it’s a genuinely different approach to a problem the usual advice has been getting wrong for years. If “be more assertive” has always felt like one more costume, The High-Functioning People-Pleaser walks through the whole method — and why subtraction, not effort, is what finally works.