People Pleasing stops you from being your True Self E86
March 21, 2023
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Do you like to make it right for everyone else but yourself? do you put everyone else’s needs before yours? And you already know that it does not make you happy but what can you do? Then I am begging you to stay with me here and keep reading. You need to know the true impact that people-pleasing has on your life.
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I don’t know about you, but I am a recovering people pleaser. And with that comes that some days are better than others. My focus is now to put myself first instead of putting others first. And as it is with anything that you are trying to change, sometimes is easier than other times. And that’s ok!
Soooo, if you are a people pleaser or if you are already like me in the recovery stage, this blog is specifically for you. Not only do I want you to understand the steps that I suggest you take to move away from people pleasing – but more impactful will be what I am going to share with you why most of us are people pleasers, to a certain degree, and what the consequences are. Those are the most shocking and it might trigger you, so it should. People pleasing has huge impacts on your life that you are probably not even aware of.
Why do we people-please?
So why do we actually please other people in our lives? Overall we do it because we shy away from conflict. We do all this people-pleasing to keep the peace and keep everyone around us happy. Well, so we think. But we will get to that later.
In moments when we put other people’s needs first and do everything to please them, we do that to avoid conflict, either by trying not to create a conflict situation or not being part of a conflict conversation. We are in fear of what might happen. We just don’t want to take that risk of someone being upset, with us, with other people or just in general. So we run around, putting our needs on the back burner and trying to make it as comfortable and easy for everyone else but ourselves.
We abandon ourselves
But here is our first consequence of people pleasing. When we are putting other people’s needs first, even if it’s for our partner or children, what we truly are doing is we abandon ourselves. We are making sure that everyone else is ok by fully ignoring if we are actually ok.
I want to make clear that there is nothing wrong with avoiding conflict situations for reasons where you don’t abandon yourself. I am not asking you to jump into every conflict that you can see from now forwards. Not at all. It’s more about standing up for yourself and being more in alignment with who you are and what your needs are. Quite often you speaking your mind and standing up for your needs, might not even create a conflict. It’s just the fear of a potential conflict that makes us do this.
You create inner misalignment
The thing is if there is misalignment to your true self by you avoiding conflict and therefore people-pleasing, this misalignment is not going away. It just has an impact on you in a different way or the seemingly lovely bubble that you have been creating is going to burst at a later point – but with a much bigger bang than if you would be facing it now.
And let’s be honest. It does not really feel that good to people please in the first place, otherwise, you would not have even clicked on this episode. I know what it feels like when I put other people’s needs first and ignored my own. The biggest feeling I had to face was resentment. Resenting the people that I just bend myself backwards for, as if they forced me to go with what they wanted to do instead of just saying what I wanted to do.
And after a while, it’s not just resentment. For some people, this turns into anger and frustration. For others, it goes towards guilt and shame. Others might be struggling with disappointment or even self-hatred because they see what they are doing but just cannot stop themselves.
And I ask you: Is it really worth it? Is it worth it to keep the peace for years and years on the outside just to feel like shit on the inside? Obviously not!
My example of bursting the people-pleasing bubble
As we are talking about this bubble that we are creating and that bursts anyway at some point, I have my own example that I want to share with you. Quite a few years ago I was in a role where I covered for someone else’s shortcomings in their role. I just took on some of their responsibilities otherwise they would just not get done. And I wanted to make sure to keep the peace and that everyone is happy.
This went on for over a year until the bubble burst. It was my annual performance review and my boss gave me a worse rating than I expected. She told me that she realized what I was doing and that I made the situation worse by covering for someone else. If it would have become clear that the other person was not up for the responsibility earlier, it would have been easier to do something about it. So she gave me this pretty harsh feedback and a rating that I was clearly upset with at first. But after a while, I started to understand what happened and that it was my own fault because I seemingly wanted to keep the peace. Well, you can imagine that this did not happen to me ever again. It cured me from covering anyone else’s shortcomings at work ever again.
We learn and grow out of straight and honest feedback
And looking back at that example and a couple of others, every time a boss or a loved one gave me straight feedback I learned so much from it. Did it suck? Yes, it did at that moment but then I learned so much from it. Do you see what happened here? They did not people please me and therefore gave me straight feedback or told me when I did something wrong or hurt them. And for each and every instance I am grateful.
So another consequence of people pleasing is that you don’t give the other person the possibility to evolve, to change or to see a new perspective. I am not saying that the other person will always do that when you do stand up for yourself, but there is a possibility that they do and you stop that from happening. With your people-pleasing, you might even underestimate the other person because you think that they will never let you do your thing or will even understand you. Well, you don’t even give them a chance. Do you see that?
So let’s talk about the last consequence that I want to cover for today – there are for sure more but I want to get off of my soap box soon and rather focus on what we can do about this.
People-pleasing lets you come across as inauthentic
When you are ignoring your needs, your dreams or your preferences, you are not true to yourself and that does not help you or the other people in your life and let me tell you why: you come across as inauthentic. I know that because I got that feedback before. I was told before that I was inauthentic and that I should stop it if I wanted to be promoted at my previous employer. Especially people who are more sensitive or can read people quite well will see that you are wearing a mask and that puts people off from really connecting with you.
If you are not your true self, people don’t really know you and you don’t even give them the opportunity to get to know you, the real you – and the sad thing is that quite often you don’t even get to know your true self. Some people are pleasing others so much that it has become their new normal way of living. They have completely lost themselves and how sad is that?
And if you take this thought further, what that means is, that they deny people to fully love them for who they truly are. And lastly, they are not able to fully love themselves ever as they don’t even know who they should be loving.
Be true to yourself instead of trying to fit in
On that note, I will finish talking about all of the impacts that people pleasing has. I think we heard enough and have felt the full force of all of this. So let’s move on to talk about what we can do to change that habit.
In my opinion, the best action to take is simply to be true to yourself instead of trying to fit in. Listen to your inner voice and if you have never done that before then start now so your inner voice finally has a chance to speak up. Spend more time alone and do something that just you want to do. I have talked previously about how much I fan I am from travelling by myself – this is a time when I get closer to my true self. But you can do this as well at home by meditating or just sitting in silence and asking yourself some powerful questions.
One immensely powerful question for yourself
Let me give you one that might be difficult to ask yourself but if you are willing to do it, it will be crazily insightful. Ask yourself this question: Who in my life is here because I always please them and who is in my life because they love me? Let me say this again: Who in my life is here because I always please them and who is in my life because they love me? If you can be honest with yourself and listen to your inner voice you will have some huge light bulb moments. I promise you that!
If you are completely new to stopping the people-pleasing then start with setting some healthy boundaries for yourself. Ask yourself, maybe for the first time in your life: What will you and what won’t you tolerate going forward? And when you have your answers, communicate them. Face your fear of conflict and do it anyway. The first and the second time will be the biggest hurdle and the third time you begin to see that nothing bad will happen to you and will start to like it.
How to give feedback to others: SBI Method
If you ask yourself now how you can give the people in your life feedback and where to even start, I share with you a feedback model I learned in my previous HR role. It’s called the SBI method. S stands for Situation, B stands for Behaviour and I stands for Impact.
First of all, describe the situation you are giving your feedback on so the person knows exactly what you are talking about. So very objectively describe the facts of the situation. Then you move on to share the behaviour of the other person from your perspective. You can even say the words: In this situation I observed you behaving in this way …
And lastly, you share with them the impact that this behaviour had on you. Not on someone else, but the impact it had on you. Don’t speak for other people. The point of this feedback model is that the other person cannot deny how you observed their behaviour or how it made you feel. You make it very personal to you and you keep it as objective as you can. It also invites the other person to comment on their behaviour and clarify that they did not intend to make you feel that way – unless they did, but that is another conversation then.
So, try it out. You could even write it down beforehand to practice it. And if you want just google it SBI feedback method and you ding tons of information on it.
Stop people-pleasing and start to love your true self
Well, we are coming to the end now. We covered a lot about the consequences of people pleasing and there might have been a lot of hard truth in that. It was important to me for you to see the true and deep impact that this has on your life. I will leave you with this: If you ever want to become your true self and love yourself more, stop trying to please everyone else – start pleasing yourself.
I will provide you as well with a link to my “I am enough” meditation that helps you to strengthen your self-worth and self-love which is very much aligned with what we covered today.
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Free Meditation: I Am Enough
This meditation is for you if you have feelings of unworthiness and feelings that you are not enough.
I am guiding you to transform these feelings so you can begin to move into a state of worthiness and receive everything you wish for in your life.
I’ve created two versions for you to choose from based on how you are feeling and how much time you have: 25-Minute OR 15-Minute.
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