Deciding You Are Relevant – How To Stop Feeling Invisible In Your Life

What if the reason you feel invisible… isn’t actually about other people?

In this episode, I’m sharing something that came up in a coaching session — and it hit deeper than I expected.

Because while most of us wouldn’t say “I feel irrelevant,” we feel it in subtle ways:

• When someone doesn’t listen to us
• When we don’t feel validated
• When we feel overlooked in conversations
• When our reactions feel bigger than the moment

And what I realized is this:

You only feel irrelevant when you treat yourself like you are.

In this episode, I break down how this shows up, why it triggers such strong emotional reactions, and how to take your power back — without needing anyone else to change.

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In This Episode, I Cover:

• Why “feeling invisible” is more common than you think
• The hidden belief underneath emotional reactions
• How quickly we internalize other people’s behavior
• The difference between external validation and internal relevance
• Why you don’t need permission to matter
• How to stop fighting for relevance — and start owning it
• The pattern that keeps repeating in relationships (and how to break it)
• Why reactivity keeps you stuck — and curiosity moves you forward
• How to get your needs met without escalating conflict

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Key Takeaway

You are not relevant because other people validate you.

You are relevant because you decide you are.

When you stop outsourcing your worth and start leading yourself from that place — everything changes:

Your reactions.
Your relationships.
Your confidence.

Ready to Go Deeper?

If you want support implementing this work in your own life, you can book a discovery call with me.

We’ll talk about what’s going on for you and whether coaching together would be a good fit.

Book here:

amandahess.ca/bookacall

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Connect With Me

If this episode resonated, I’d love to hear from you.

Send me a message on Instagram: @theamandahess

Or visit www.amandahess.ca to learn more about working together.

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Full Episode Transcript:

Hey, gorgeous. Okay. I am back from Hawaii and I am ready to go. Oh my gosh, I feel so inspired. I have so much to share with you. And it all basically came from having a kind of brutal trip as far as weather and emergencies and everything that was going on there. Definitely don’t miss having emergency alerts coming up on my phone all the time.

That’s just jarring. But at the end of the day, it was the trip I needed. And now that I’m back, I just feel fired up. And I have so many things that we’re going to talk about, but today this is something that came up on a coaching session and I thought that it would be really beneficial to talk about it with you here.

And it’s talking about becoming relevant.

I know that a lot of you might not say to me, “Oh Amanda, I feel like I’m irrelevant,” and I don’t think we walk around the earth going, “I’m irrelevant.” But what I will say is that I do notice that when we don’t feel relevant, we have really interesting reactions.

Where I see it coming is when we feel like people aren’t listening to us. When we feel like people aren’t validating us. When we are moving through the world, having conversations with people, and we feel like we’re not being noticed, almost. I almost labeled the episode Feeling Invisible, because I do think that it’s a very common thing that most of my clients do end up struggling with.

And I was just really considering what could be done, what we could do when we feel irrelevant, when somebody doesn’t validate us, when we have something happen where we feel like somehow our self-worth is being challenged.

This can happen in the smallest moment.

I’ll give you an example. I was walking with my husband the other day and I said something to him and he just said something completely off topic. It was so obvious that he wasn’t listening to what I was saying. And that’s a very neutral circumstance, but in that moment it triggered this deep anger and frustration. I got very upset.

And I was thinking about it after and I was like, “I wonder why that was so upsetting,” because it’s not the first time it’s happened, it’s not the last time it’s going to happen. We spent a lot of time together when we were away, so we weren’t always dialed in and listening to each other.

But what I was really noticing was that I had this deeper wound that lived under there where I felt irrelevant, where I felt like nobody cared what I had to say, that nobody was listening to me, that somehow what I thought didn’t matter.

And the only reason why I would believe that is if I said it to myself. You know what I’m saying?

Because I am irrelevant only if I treat myself like I’m irrelevant.

And I was really hearing certain messages, certain things that I was consuming while I was away. I’m reading this book by Rick Rubin and I’m really loving the book.

If you don’t know who Rick Rubin is, he’s a very talented, very well-known music producer. He got his start in college, and his first big break, he’s kind of attributed with really helping begin rap music in the mainstream. And who he produced to begin with was Run-DMC.

I mean, I wasn’t a huge Run-DMC fan. My husband loves rap. I do not love rap. That being said, I loved listening to his story about how he created and how this all came to be.

But I guess the reason why this comes up for me in talking about him and this book is that he didn’t worry about whether or not other people thought it was relevant for him to do rap music.

In fact, Run-DMC did a cover of Walk This Way. So Walk This Way is an Aerosmith song, right? We all know the song. Or at least I think we do. Very popular, very mainstream song.

And so what he decided was that he was going to do a rap album with Run-DMC, but he wanted them to do Walk This Way because he had a theory that if people heard lyrics they already knew, but in a new format, it could become something they really liked. And he wanted to test that theory out. And so that’s how it all sort of began.

He really just led with his creativity and was like, “I think this music is really cool and I want to show other people how cool it is. How can I get them to listen to it?”

And I just think that what we do in our lives is the opposite. We think something’s really interesting or important or something that we want to talk about. And then when we talk to somebody, if they’re not interested, we internalize that to mean we are not good enough. And then we have to be fighting for our relevancy.

Versus just deciding that it’s relevant because we find it interesting.

I really loved how he approached his life and how he approached this art that he did. And he considers it to be art. And this book is really great. I can get you the title of it if you’re interested. Just message me and I’ll send it to you. I just can’t think of it off the top of my head. It’s on my Kobo. And for those of you that are American, a Kobo is like a Kindle, but it’s the Canadian version.

That being said, I want to leave you with the idea, with the understanding even, that in order for anybody else to consider you to be relevant, you must believe it 100%.

That is on you.

To believe in your relevancy.

And it’s the work that we do. We’re not always going to feel it. Sometimes self-doubt is going to be really running rampant. But I believe that it is a huge aha moment for anyone to realize, “I can give that back to myself. I don’t need to wait. I don’t need to ask permission. It will just be given to me because I already own it, because I’m already relevant.”

And so if I think something’s interesting enough to be considered or important enough to be talked about, then I’m the one that gets curious about how do I ensure that other people hear this and understand this and can come at it from a different place.

It just gives you more room to grow.

When I was speaking with this client, we were talking about a disagreement that she had had with her partner. And what can be really interesting to notice is how we have the same fight over and over and over again with our partners.

So we get upset. We say we’re upset. The partner hears the upset tone in our voice, sees that we’re upset, immediately gets defensive, then we get more upset, then they become more defensive, and the pattern begins.

Where we have some agency is how we approach this.

Because if we can approach it and not be reactive, but instead be curious about, “How can I get my partner to understand why this is so upsetting for me?” then we have somewhere to go. We have a place to grow because our relevancy is not in question.

So we have to tell ourselves that: this is relevant. My needs are relevant. What I believe is relevant. Who I am is relevant. I don’t need anybody else to give that to me.

So I’m going to give that to me right now, and I’m going to get curious about how do I get my needs met inside of my relationship.

And if I approach the problem super upset and they get defensive and then it escalates and we keep having that experience again and again and again and again, that is the definition of insanity, right? Approaching the same problem the same way and expecting a different result.

You are not going to get a different result.

That’s why it’s a pattern. That’s why it keeps happening.

So instead, what we can do is get better at confirming our own relevance, and we can get better at propping up our own self-worth and taking care of our own self-doubt.

And then once we have done that, then we can come as this whole version of ourselves who is confident, who understands what she wants, who understands what she needs, and she can be curious and therefore not repeat the pattern.

Okay?

This is what I’ve got. I hope you have a beautiful day. I hope you have a beautiful day. Can’t talk today at all. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye.