The Life You Want Requires Breaking a Few Rules

Are rules you never agreed to follow keeping you from living it?

The Takeaways

1. Some of the most restrictive rules are the ones we've unconsciously internalized. They shape our choices without us consciously agreeing to follow them.

2. What feels like personality may partly be protection. Familiar patterns often developed around experiences we learned to avoid repeating.

3. Rebellion requires more than rejecting expectations. It takes courage to turn toward the pain that made conforming feel necessary.

4. Choosing differently creates room for relationships to evolve. As our participation changes, longstanding dynamics can begin to shift into alignment.

5. Sovereignty is the real prize. We reclaim the freedom to discover who we want to be and experience more of the lives we're longing to live.

The Rules You Never Agreed to Follow

Most likely, nobody told you explicitly it was your responsibility to keep others happy, anticipate needs, or avoid disappointing people. More likely, you absorbed those expectations from experiences you had so long ago that following them became second nature. Whether you remember it or not, you learned from experience what might happen if you don’t, so you continue playing by the rules even now as an adult…and you're increasingly frustrated by what it costs you.

And here's what's fascinating: those rules might have little authority over your current life except for that which you learned was necessary to give them long ago. But you feel stuck changing them now because it’s how you’ve always operated.

That's where my idea of being a renegade comes in.

I've long appreciated the rebellious spirit of those willing to challenge conventions and refuse to conform simply because something is expected of them. If I’m being honest, I find the freedom they embody to be magnetic in a way. But the rebellion that interests me most isn't necessarily loud or outwardly defiant; it's the deeply personal decision to discern what's authentically aligned with who we are and how we want to live. 

Not rebellion for rebellion's sake, but the conscious choice to go against the grain when conformity compromises our freedom to be ourselves.

For me, being a renegade begins with questioning the conditioning that's shaped our choices, identities, and relationships, and reclaiming the freedom to live beyond its limitations.

Were some of the rules you're living by established without your conscious consent?

Who Wrote Your Rulebook?

In The Good Girl Bargain, I explored how we learn to associate qualities like agreeableness, helpfulness, independence, and exceptional achievement with being valued, accepted, and loved. In The Capable Woman Trap, I examined how those genuine strengths can eventually become expectations that leave us carrying more than our fair share.

What's especially interesting is that the patterns themselves can become so familiar that we rarely question their origins. We come to think of ourselves as naturally accommodating, exceptionally responsible, fiercely independent, or simply the person who makes things happen. And perhaps those qualities genuinely reflect parts of who we are or desire to be, but what if they also reflect adaptations we made to experiences that taught us certain feelings were dangerous, intolerable, or best avoided, adaptations that no longer serve us here as adults?

Maybe being agreeable protected you from conflict. Exceptional performance helped secure approval. Taking care of things yourself protected you from the disappointment of depending on someone who didn't come through. These strategies may have served you remarkably well and may even have helped you build much of this life you currently treasure! But when protecting ourselves becomes automatic, we can lose sight of the choices available beyond those protections, even as we feel an increasingly urgent desire to live as more fully ourselves.

The Rebellion Beneath the Rebellion

Here's where my definition of renegade departs from the usual image of someone boldly breaking rules. It's relatively easy to declare that you no longer care what other people think. It's considerably harder to tolerate the discomfort when someone whose opinion matters to you disapproves of a choice you're making in order to experience your life more fully.

You can decide that another person's disappointment is theirs to manage, yet still allow it to influence your actions. You can know you deserve reciprocity and still feel stuck when someone doesn't hold you with the same care and consideration you offer them.

Our old rules aren't necessarily upheld by conscious agreement. They're often reinforced by discomfort we've learned to fear. I've written about this as The Emotional Energy Tax: the energy quietly consumed by managing, anticipating, pleasing, perfecting, and protecting ourselves from old emotional pain.

To me, the most courageous act of rebellion is deliberately choosing to feel what we've spent years unconsciously organizing our lives around avoiding, so those old protections no longer dictate what's possible for us.

That means getting curious about what we're afraid might happen if we stop complying with an old expectation, and meeting the feelings that arise with steadiness rather than automatically retreating into familiar behaviors, all the while continuing to miss out on the lives we want to live.

As we become more willing to experience what once felt intolerable, those old rules begin losing their authority. We reclaim greater freedom to choose how we respond, and consequently, how we live.

When We Break the Rules, Relationships Can Evolve

Of course, our patterns don't operate independently of the people around us. They've shaped our current dynamics and how others expect us to continue participating in our relationships, families, workplaces, and communities. Over time, others have understandably become accustomed to what we provide, tolerate, anticipate, or take responsibility for.

So when we begin choosing differently, those arrangements inherently need to evolve.

Perhaps we allow ourselves to express a preference that previously went unspoken, or let someone else take ownership of a responsibility without managing how they handle it. We begin showing up with greater honesty about what we need, want, and are willing to contribute.

That vulnerability can feel unsettling. People may welcome the changes, resist them, or need time to adjust. We cannot control their responses, and not every arrangement will become more equitable simply because we change our participation. But we can stop automatically reinforcing dynamics that no longer reflect how we want to live and choose accordingly going forward.

In When “Burn It All Down” Starts Sounding Like Relief, I explored the possibility that what we sometimes long to escape isn't the life we've built, but the ways we've learned to exist within it.

What becomes possible when we're willing to question those ways of being?

The Freedom to Become More Fully Ourselves

This is where rebellion becomes something much more expansive than putting up a middle finger to expectations. It becomes an opportunity to reclaim our sovereignty: the authority to decide how we use our time, energy, attention, and capabilities, guided by our own unique values and desires.

And perhaps even more excitingly, it gives us the freedom to discover and embody aspects of ourselves that otherwise have had little room to emerge.

Who might you have become before you learned which parts of yourself were most acceptable? What desires, interests, perspectives, and possibilities might be waiting for your attention now? How might your relationships, work, creativity, and everyday experiences evolve as you bring more of yourself into them?

We don't necessarily know the answers. That's part of what makes the exploration so compelling.

For me, being a renegade means having the audacity to question the rules we've been conditioned to follow, the courage to turn toward the pain that once made those rules necessary, and the willingness to stand in the vulnerability of becoming more fully ourselves.

It's how we reclaim the freedom to participate differently in the lives we value, moment to moment, and discover just how much more meaning those lives actually hold.

That, to me, is the rebellion we owe it to ourselves and the world to pursue, because we all have something uniquely ours to contribute when we're free to be fully ourselves.