Anna Campbell
The opposite of the Good Girl isn’t the Bad Girl.
It’s the woman who chooses.
I’ve become obsessed with what I call Invisible Rules: the expectations and assumptions women learn about how to be good, successful, liked and safe.
The thing is, once we see the rules we’ve been living by, we can’t unsee them.
And that means we get to ask a much more interesting question:
Do I want to live by this rule anymore?
Book Anna to Speak
Explore Invisible Rules
INVISIBLE RULES ARE SNEAKY. THEY DON’T LOOK LIKE RULES. THEY LOOK LIKE...
Being the one who notices what needs doing before anyone else does.
Saying yes because disappointing someone feels hard.
Keeping going because you can cope, even when you probably shouldn’t have to.
Waiting until you feel completely ready before putting yourself forward.
Thinking one more qualification, one more piece of proof or a little more confidence will make the next step feel easier, so you delay moving forward.
Being useful, reliable and the person people can count on.
The irony is that these patterns may have worked really well for you.
They may have helped you succeed at school, build a career, grow a business, keep a family running, earn trust and become the person everyone knows they can rely on.
So this isn’t about blaming yourself for having them. They were often intelligent responses to what was expected, rewarded or needed from you.
But a way of living that got you here might not be what you need to get where you want to go next.
The question is whether you are still choosing these behaviours, or whether they’ve become so familiar that you no longer notice you have a choice.
Maybe the old rules did their job but maybe now you need a new plan.
WHEN DOES A RULE STOP FEELING LIKE A RULE?
Psychologically, we learn a lot about how to behave through observation, reinforcement and repetition.
We notice what gets approval and what gets disapproval. We watch the women around us. We learn which behaviours are rewarded, which ones create friction and which ones seem to help us feel safe, liked or accepted.
Do that for long enough and the rule starts to disappear.
Nobody needs to keep telling us to be helpful, agreeable, prepared or easy to deal with. We just do it.
Eventually, it can become difficult to tell where the rule ends and our personality begins.
And that’s the bit I find fascinating.
How much of what feels like our personality is actually an old rule that no longer serves us?
WHO TOLD YOU CONFIDENCE HAD TO COME FIRST?
We keep telling women they need more confidence.
But I think that can become another rule.
We tell ourselves we’ll put ourselves forward when we feel more ready. We gather more proof. We do another qualification. We prepare a bit more.
We wait for a level of certainty that life can never really give us.
And while we’re waiting to feel confident, we’re delaying doing the thing that would actually help us build it.
Bravery isn’t acting without fear. It’s doing the thing while the fear is still there.
Confidence is great, but it usually comes from doing the work, not waiting until we feel confident enough to begin.
We don’t need more confidence. We need to spot the Invisible Rule that says we need to feel confident before we do the thing.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THE OPPOSITE
Spotting an Invisible Rule doesn’t mean you suddenly have to start doing the opposite of everything you’ve ever done.
You can still say yes. You can still help. You can still be ambitious, reliable, generous or the person who gets things done.
The difference is that you get to decide.
For me, that starts with three things:
Notice. Pause. Choose.
Notice the rule that has kicked in.
Pause long enough to ask yourself whether it is still what you want.
Then choose what you want to do now.
Sometimes you’ll make exactly the same choice you would have made before.
Sometimes you won’t.
That is the rebellion.
Not burning your life down. Not becoming a completely different person.
Just getting better at noticing when an old rule is making the decision for you, and choosing for yourself instead.
YOU KNOW THAT MOMENT WHEN AN IDEA CHANGES EVERYTHING?
I’ve been teaching, training and speaking since 1999, and that moment is still the bit I love most.
When someone suddenly sees something differently. When a thought clicks into place and they realise, “Oh. I hadn’t seen it like that before.”
That is what I want to create in a room.
I’m not interested in giving women another five things they should be doing better. Yawn.
I want to get underneath the surface conversation and ask the questions that make people see what has been there all along.
My talks bring together psychology, research, lived experience and Invisible Rules to explore the things shaping women’s choices, often without us even realising it.
I want people to leave with more questions than they came in with, but better ones.
Especially this one:
What are the rules I’ve been living by without even knowing they were there?
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