How to Stop People Pleasing
People pleasing has its perks. It often means you’re appreciated as the team player at work, considered the friend or family member that is reliable and thoughtful, the one your friends confide in because you’re quick to listen and follow up in meaningful ways. It’s a quality that is rewarded in friendships, families, workplace, and church communities. I get it, I’m a recovering people pleaser myself. The dark side of people pleasing emerges when relationships become more and more one-sided, demanding emotional energy without reciprocity, and unexpressed resentment starts to fester.
People pleasing is often a learned & practiced response to roles you played in your family. Somehow or another you learned to not make a fuss, learned to read others’ emotions & needs better than your own, and take care of others. When this continues for years, people have trouble accessing how they feel, and especially what they need. The idea of prioritizing your own self-care, the right to have boundaries, or express a need feels foreign and even selfish. You’re much more skilled in bending yourself to others’ wishes than identifying your own.
Ready to ditch this people pleasing tendency, but don’t know how to stop?
Identify the emotional costs of pleasing people.
Notice how often you bow to others wishes rather than expressing your own, and how you feel after. Notice where resentment creeps into relationships. Maybe quarantine has narrowed your social connections and you feel burnt out and exhausted in one sided relationships. Maybe you’re navigating COVID social bubbles and compromise your comfortability to keep the peace with others’ choices. Perhaps you learned to keep quiet to keep the peace, but now are convicted about betraying your values or being complicit in upholding racism in families & institutions by staying quiet.
Identify the origin of your people pleasing.
People pleasing can be a learned response to a family member that has much bigger needs in the family, living with addiction, learning to keep the peace, an enmeshed family, living within a family that didn’t allow you to have feelings or needs, etc. It could be a message internalized out of trauma. Before you can rewrite the story, you want to know where you learned it.
Identifying your own thoughts and feelings regularly.
Three times a day, intentionally check in on how you are feeling emotionally. Accept, without judgment, those feelings. Notice if there are things you need, and practice making requests from yourselves and others around those needs.
Start small, don’t climb Everest first.
As you identify your feelings, start expressing your opinions and preferences, regardless of what others are saying. Start with lower risk areas, like deciding where you want to get take out, or which trail you want to hike. Practicing saying no as a complete sentence.
Get help if you need it.
If you feel really entrenched in your people pleasing and need some help finding your authentic voice, give me a call for your free 15 minute consultation. We can reclaim your confidence and joy together.