Underestimated: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls by Chelsey Goodan, EXCERPT

Underestimated: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls by Chelsey Goodan

*National Bestseller*

“If you have a teenage girl in your life, you need to read this.” —Oprah Daily

In the vein of Reviving Ophelia and Untangled comes a fresh, unexpected, and empowering guide to better understand teenage girls, revealing how their insights can create heartfelt connections and impactful change.

Written with warmth and humor, Underestimated is the first book to invite us into a teenage girl’s brain and heart, as told from the point of view of a beloved and trusted mentor. Chelsey Goodan is a highly sought-after academic tutor who has worked with hundreds of girls from all different backgrounds, earning their trust, confidence, and friendship. They in turn have shared with her their innermost concerns, doubts, and what they wish they could communicate to their parents and the world at large.

With topics and language directly chosen by the girls, Goodan reveals how the solutions to a girl’s well-being lie within her. She offers parents the exact words they can use to help her discover these solutions and demonstrates how adults can better support a teenage girl’s voice to create positive change.

Rather than dismissing teenage girls based on our own fears or treating them as problems that need to be solved, Goodan encourages us as parents, and as a society, to help girls unleash their power and celebrate their intrinsic wisdom, creating more healing and connection for everyone. With inspiring ease, Underestimated shows us how to do this with accessible advice, entertaining narratives, and profound wisdom.

“People Pleasing,” excerpted from UNDERESTIMATED: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls 

by Chelsey Goodan

“Really?”
“Yeah . . . yeah, it’s fine.” 

Fifteen-year-old Lucia stared at me with her large brown eyes. Normally full of ideas and excitement, these eyes look empty and defeated. She’s telling me everything is “fine” in order to make me feel comfortable. 

School was not going well for Lucia. Additionally, her family’s health and childcare needs were falling on her shoulders. It was clearly a burden that, in an ideal world, would not be her responsibility, but life is rarely ideal. What killed me in this moment was that she was prioritizing my comfort, my needs, above her own, making sure that I felt “fine,” even while she was clearly in pain. 

People-pleasing is ferociously sneaky in how it bares its teeth. For teenage girls, it can look like a smile, but in reality, so many of her facial muscles are tensely clenching, trying to hold it together. A study from Girls Inc. found that 74 percent of girls say “they are under a lot of pressure to please everyone.” I see girls from all different back- grounds shouldering an emotional burden within a family dynamic. 

It slithers its way into so many facets of a girl’s life until it’s absolutely normalized. “It’s fine” might not be as blatant as the people-pleasing classics like forced laughter, endless giving of one’s time and attention, overcompensating, manufactured enthusiasm, and overdone politeness that we all know so well, but it’s just as insidious. 

I relate so deeply, because every day I still agonize over how much or how little I should care about making other people happy. Teenage girls have brought it to my awareness and now I must reckon with it— the root cause, the why, and where do we go from here? 

In order to avoid even the potential of tension and conflict, girls have been taught to people-please. As much as a girl will unleash her fury at her parents in the privacy of her home, out in the world, she can slap on a smile with the grace of a champion ready to win gold at the Niceness Olympics. 

If a little girl, ages three to eleven, is found to be annoying, aggressive, bossy, loud, or demanding, she is thoroughly and often severely “corrected” with a tone that penetrates her psyche for a lifetime. Little girls learn very quickly that they need to be sweet, charming, humble, polite, and thoughtful in order to get positive attention and succeed in this world. And as they grow into women, they learn each subsequent lesson along this people-pleasing path. In many workplaces, a show of assertiveness from a woman can quickly get her thrown into the “bitch” category, so she needs to make moves very cautiously and amiably, in order to not threaten the professional patriarchy. Quite simply, we’re taught that our best bet to succeed in life is to not only be “perfect,” as already noted, but also to be . . . likable. 

Women and girls learn how to perform our gender within the frame- work of perfection by making sure that everyone around us is happy and comfortable, even if we ourselves are not. I see this show up in the most common word that I hear from a teenage girl’s mouth: Sorry. 

Teenage girls say “sorry” about everything. It’s the word that covers all unforeseen potentials, so she won’t offend or say something wrong, guaranteeing that she will be viewed as pleasing. This type of “sorry” is very different from a heartfelt apology, which will be expanded upon later. This “sorry” sounds like an empty flurry of words, and after spending so much time with teenage girls, I realized that I say it a lot too! I ended up telling girls that I wanted to stop saying it so much, and I asked them if they would point it out when I do it. Most of them responded with: 

“Oh my gosh I do it too! Let’s do it together!” And to my delight, we all started catching ourselves saying the most unnecessary “sorrys,” and we began changing the habit. However, if a girl is having a hard time stopping the stream of “sorrys,” I recommend asking her in a nonjudgmental tone, 

“Why do you think you’re saying sorry?” Some of the answers I’ve heard from girls include: 

“I feel like I’m never doing anything right,” “I don’t want to dis- appoint people,” and “I just want everyone to be happy.” With those harder-to-hear answers, I’ll usually pause and uncomfortably sit with where these messages could be coming from. Then I’ll lovingly ask, 

“Have I done anything to make you feel like that?” 

A question like this can open up the possibility for a much deeper level of connection. It’s where honesty develops and trust blossoms. 

The enemy of this space is defensiveness. 

Receiving and holding space for these types of feelings, ones where I might be personally involved in the hurt, is a space where I can give her the gift of feeling heard and understood. It’s a space for healing. 

If the conversation is on the simpler side and a girl is shutting down a lot of the questions, I often go back to the basics of asking what she wants: 

“Do you want to stop saying these types of sorrys?” Near the end of these kinds of conversations, I always like to finish on a note of agreeing with her and empowering her sense of agency: 

“Okay, sounds good. I’ll let you handle it in the way that feels good for you.” 

No matter what, I’m always trying to create a safe environment where we both can be more intentional and authentic with our language.

BUY HERE 

—

BIO: 

Chelsey Goodan is the author of the bestselling book, UNDERESTIMATED: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls, which has been recommended by Oprah Daily, saying: “If you have a teenage girl in your life, you need to read this.” Amazon’s Editorial Director chose UNDERESTIMATED as 1 of her top 5 “Editor Picks for Best Nonfiction” for the month of March. And when Chelsey was recently on TODAY With Hoda and Jenna, they exclaimed: “We couldn’t stop talking about your book.” Chelsey has been a mentor and empowerment coach to teenage girls for 16 years. She speaks regularly to audiences about gender justice and serves as the mentorship director of DemocraShe, which supports and guides girls from underserved communities into leadership positions. As a keynote speaker, Chelsey teaches communication strategies that make everyone feel seen, heard, understood, valued, and celebrated, creating psychological safety for everyone from teenage girls to CEOs. She’s also a board member for A Call to Men, a national gender-based violence prevention nonprofit that educates men and boys about healthy masculinity. Chelsey’s passion to explore humanity’s potential for authenticity, liberation, and empowerment permeates all of her work.

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing