JANUARY 5-WEEK || Boundaries + Consent for People Pleasers

with Mia (they/them)

VIRTUAL: Mondays, January 27–February 24, 5–7pm PT / 8–10pm ET.

This is the ONLY time this class will run in 2025!

Class recordings will be available only to students who registered for the full program in advance.

This is a great class for organizers, activists, artists, and people in helping professions. You’ll learn practical tools and skills to identify and express your boundaries, needs, and desires.

This program is founded on principles of autonomy and agency. 

I believe that consent is a shared responsibility, not that of one person or one demographic. I believe we have to take responsibility for risks we take knowingly and choices we make, and move through regret when it comes. I don’t believe in blame and punishment when we miseducate people through media and poor consent education. I believe in rehabilitation and repair. I believe we have an obligation to each other to learn our own boundaries and communicate them, as much as we have an obligation to ask and check in. I think if we redirect resources towards healing, support, and education and away from trying to identify who’s at fault so we can punish them (often with incarceration), we would all be better off. 

Part of me respecting your autonomy is that I trust you to know yourself and to know what you need to take care of yourself. I will support you in building a care plan at the beginning of class so you have it as tough things come up.

This class is taught from an anti-carceral and anti-cancelation standpoint.

What is people pleasing?

People pleasing (often called fawning or the appeasement response in Polyvagal theory) is characterized by difficulty saying no, putting others' needs before yours, and people-pleasing to avoid conflict.

Often what looks like enthusiasm is a form of people pleasing. It’s very hard to trust chronic people pleasers because their truth changes constantly. This can make consent really fraught. You may do things you didn’t want to do, and then blame yourself because you didn’t speak up. But maybe you didn’t speak up because you didn’t know your boundaries or know how to advocate in the moment. Perhaps you were in a stress response.

People pleasing is a survival mechanism, but it’s harmful to all parties involved, as are many vestigial survival mechanisms that worked at one point but are no longer fulfilling the intended function.

Is this class for you?

This is a great class for organizers, activists, artists, and people in helping professions. You’ll learn practical tools and skills to identify and express your boundaries, needs, and desires.

Now is the time to hone our communication skills so we can work together to create the world we want to live in. Let’s not let poor communication clog up the gears. Learn to identify what you want and need, believe you deserve it, and ask for it.

Are you giving past your capacity and then resenting other people for it? Are you struggling to feel your boundaries? Do you freeze when it’s time to say ‘no’?

If you find yourself frequently in this space of people-pleasing, you’re likely concerning yourself more with how you’re being perceived than how you feel. You may be estranged from your desires, not feel safe in your own mind or body, and therefore be disconnected from your agency and creativity.

This is a trauma-informed, neuro-diversity-aware approach to consent that takes the gut-brain axis into account. Consent is more than “no means no” or getting permission. Consent is a language and an embodied practice.

This class is likely not a good fit for those who have only just dipped their toe into consent, or are at the beginning of their journey saying no. If you’ve just discovered that you haven’t been saying no, I’d recommend waiting until you’ve found your footing a little bit before signing up. This class contains some tough love and you may want to start with a gentler approach <3

What will we be doing?

This course will give you practice tools to access your confidence, ask for what you want, say no, take rejection with gratitude, advocate for yourself, harness stress so you can propel yourself to act, and apply these skills outward through examples from TV and film.

This is a hybrid live & recorded class. You’ll receive recordings of my Practice Saying No class and my Nonverbals class (a $150 value) before we begin that will inform Class 3’s practice exercises.

• Class 1: What is Consent + the Consent Iceberg

• Class 2: Confidence - Finding your voice

• Class 3: Self-Advocacy - Harnessing stress

• Class 4: Practice Exercises - Bringing it into the body

• Class 5: Media - Examples from film and TV

You’ll take away a deep and intuitive understanding of power dynamics. You’ll begin to access the embodied sense of your boundaries. Consent and boundary knowledge can help you find evermore nuance and subtlety in your communication. It gives more options, expands structure, and can even open up space for creativity.

This is a skill-building and embodiment practice course.

• You'll learn to confidently and easefully advocate for yourself and others.

• You'll learn vocab that will help you express yourself more clearly.

• You'll learn to feel your boundaries and communicate them.

• You'll practice saying 'no.'

• You'll get more in touch with your needs and desires.

• You'll learn to feel your capacity and not go beyond it.

• You'll learn breathing techniques and practice exercises that you can share with others.

Read what people are saying about these classes.

Payment + Pricing

This class is $199 with early bird pricing through the end of 2024. Regular pricing at $299 starts on January 1. A payment plan is available, which allows you to pay for the class in two installments, three weeks apart.

You can read about why our prices are what they are on our Business + Financial Transparency page.

If this is cost-prohibitive, you are always welcome to make us an offer, especially if you are in a country where the exchange rate makes this class financially inaccessible.

Please note: The deadline for refunds is 24 hours before the first class.

Some things you should know about this course and about me…

• A lot of grief comes up in this work. Relationships fall away as you begin to stand up for yourself and voice your boundaries. You will likely experience grief (or anticipatory grief) for those relationships, as well as grief for your past self and how different things could have been.

• Your standards will go up. This will contribute to relationships ending, but it will also help you gravitate towards and pull in more aligned, fulfilling, easeful relationships.

• The consent concepts we’ll go over in class are things you cannot unsee. I mean this in the best way. The world around you will become clearer, more specific, and you’ll see communication in granular detail. You’ll be able to not monitor or constrain yourself because you will become fluent with the concepts. It will becomes easy and intuitive. However—and this isn’t intended to scare you, nor is it an exaggeration—your life will change and there’s no going back.

• Tough shit comes up in here. Old stuff gets the dust kicked off of it. Trauma can come up. I (or the guest teacher) am the only facilitator in the room so we cannot come support on an individual basis. You will have time in Class 1 to develop your care plan.

• I am invested in restorative justice practices which means that I am deeply opposed to cancellation. This includes how cancellation happens online as well as how we participate in such things internally. We don’t police people in these classes. We meet people where they’re at and we assume good intentions. When (not if) harm is caused, we tend to it with care for all parties, typically outside of class time. I believe that people learn through osmosis and exposure and this requires patience from me and you.

• I prioritize connection which requires me to expand my tolerance for activation. I run classes with this at the forefront of my mind.

• I prioritize vulnerable sharing over the need to give a content warning. You will have time to develop your own care plan on day 1, and I trust you to use it, to manage your own feelings and needs as they come up, and to take care of yourself as needed.

• I am a white, queer, neurodivergent, trans nonbinary, chronically ill anti-Zionist practicing Jew with a college degree. I speak from my own experience and no one else’s.

Before this class, I noticed myself saying I didn't want to do a specific thing, but then somehow I ended up doing it anyways. Thanks to the class, I got better at noticing when I really don't want to do the thing, and get more comfortable at saying No before I get into a situation where I might end up doing it anyways. I'm noticing and celebrating the small steps that lead me towards more noticing, more embodiment, and feeling more comfortable saying No. I also used to think I'm bad at noticing things in my body, and Mia was the first person to actually give me helpful instructions and pointers towards working through that. And now, lots of things are falling into place, and I feel like I'm on a great trajectory towards getting what I want and spending less time feeling bad about myself or forcing myself into things I don't want to do.

— Reese

I signed up for the class as I have a lot of anxiety around setting boundaries and advocating for myself (thinking people will push me away), and honestly, I have trouble knowing what I actually want in certain situations too. I normally defer to other people's needs, believing that will make them happy. Because of this, I’ve found myself becoming passive in some of my relationships. I didn’t know how effective the class would be, as I’ve always struggled with this and have found it scary to overcome.

Through clear information, exercises, and discussions, I was able to understand why I act the way I do, and practice actions that are scary to me (just saying no to something without any follow up explanation or apology). The class has been a real breakthrough for me — I’m finding myself changing my actions, and being able to show up for myself and others. Not only do I have the tools now to slow down and work out what I want from certain situations, I'm less anxious, and feel more comfortable opening up and being vulnerable and sharing more of who I am.

I’m excited to take the tools and ideas I’ve learnt and continue to grow.

Thank you Mia, and everyone else that was part of the class.

— Rob

I signed up for this course because I've been following Mia's offerings for over a year (since I first found out about their practice through Meenadchi).  When Consent for People Pleasers appeared, I literally paused and kept re-opening the email.  Something spoke deeply to my core about how I wanted to engage and this was what I needed in this particular time.  When encountering requests, I sometimes struggle to discern where I'm at on the yes-no spectrum (and what I want or even am willing to do or what I might offer or need so that I can provide a response).  I have been actively working on staying present and curious with where I'm at and wanted a space to continue this journey.  I anticipated that the course would be scary awesome.  I did not anticipate how grateful I would be or how much I would look forward to the classes each week.  Thank you.  Thank you for helping me to learn how better to trust myself and heighten trust with my relations where they can better trust my word, by receiving my no's, yes's and pauses.

— Diana

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