Hey girl, I am truly so excited about this topic today because this suggestion came directly from you. I love doing polls on my Instagram stories to figure out what types of topics and things resonate with you the most. And one of the recent questions that I asked was what you would be interested in hearing more about. Honestly, this topic was by far the most requested.
And it’s also something that is so close to my heart because it’s something that I have struggled with so much in the past, and I can relate to so much with you. I think that we all at at least one point in our life can relate to that feeling of being a people pleaser. I know that I’ve shared on this podcast before, about my love for the Enneagram. If you haven’t taken the Enneagram test, I highly recommended it has been such an amazing game changer and insight into just my own personal growth.
And I want to give a quick shout out to all my fellow nines that are listening, because what us nines are known for are being peacemakers. And our key motivators in life are to create harmony in our environment to avoid conflicts intention, and to preserve things as they are, and to resist things that might upset or disturb them. So you guessed it. Ding, ding, ding, I have absolutely done my fair share of people pleasing in order to help bring the peace and help keep people happy.
This journey is truly never ending
And like everything that we chat about on this podcast, this is something that I’m still continuing to work on every single day. And truly, I don’t think we’ll ever be done with this work. I think that the journey of navigating life is truly an ongoing process and we’re constantly taking in new information every single day that helps us grow in the direction that we want to go.
And really that’s so incredibly powerful. So back to people pleasing, I think that there are a few different reasons why people as a people pleaser. So of course at its foundational level, we’re doing these people, pleaser types of things, because we want to make other people happy or, you know, we want to feel liked by others. As humans. We are literally hard wired in our brain to want to create community. So it just makes sense that we’re going to look for opportunities in our life where we can make that happen.
But with people pleasing specifically, if you look at it another way, a lot of the motivators behind these people pleasing tendencies is that there’s usually an underlying fear of what we think will happen. If people don’t like us. You know what I mean? Like we sometimes are so afraid of saying something or doing something that might make someone else unhappy because we are just so afraid that that might say something bad about us as an individual.
Does making someone unhappy mean we’re a bad person?
Like it’s as if we think that if we make other people unhappy or if we say something or do something that upsets them, that it might mean that we’re a bad person, which we know when we think about this, like this is just not true. Right? And at the end of the day, we have one life to live.
Wouldn’t we rather spend our time and our energy thinking about things that bring us joy. I know for me, with people pleasing, there comes this heavy weight that we wear that we think that we have to walk around, making everybody happy. And honestly, that takes so much energy and thought process to just constantly be walking around, thinking about how we’re going to make other people happy every day and grow. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have any extra energy or time to think about those things.
People pleasing tendencies lead to a belief that we aren’t worthy unless we make other people happy
So while the top layer of people pleasing might just seem like we’re trying to be likable, or we just want people to be happy around us, really at our core, what we’re telling ourselves, when we people please is we are reinforcing this belief that we aren’t worthy unless we’re making other people happy. And girl that is heavy. Like I talked about carrying a weight that is a huge weight that we are placing on other people’s opinions about ourselves. But let’s just think about that for a second.
You’re listening to this podcast right now, which means that you’re likely someone who’s focused on personal growth, because I don’t think that you would be listening to a personal growth based podcast. If that’s not something that was important to you. So you are someone that’s committed to learning and growing and figuring out how you can start becoming the best version of yourself every single day.
You are a super complex person who is constantly changing and evolving and learning new things and processing new feelings and pushing past your fears and showing up in your life. And I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a super strong individual. Am I right? Like that’s the person that I want to identify with. I want to show up as a confident growing person.
Let’s start choosing to not tie up our worth into what other people think about us.
Because at the end of the day, I love the saying, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it, but other people’s opinions about you won’t pay your bills. Am I right? Like at the end of the day, what someone thinks about you and what you’re wearing, or how you spend your time, or you know anything about your personal life, they’re opinions, aren’t going to pay your bills, their opinions.
Aren’t going to be the thing that at the end of your life, you look back and you say, you know what? I am so glad that I made that decision and made some other person happy. It’s the reminder that we need that the actual value in our life comes from the beliefs that we hold about ourselves and the things that we choose to spend time doing that ultimately bring us joy.
Everything in life comes with a trade off.
If you’re choosing to focus your time and your energy and your thoughts on trying to make other people happy, that’s time and energy and thoughts that you aren’t able to spend on something else. And it reminds me of my favorite Lizzo song. Any other Liz Obando out there, girl, raise your hand high because when her songs come on, I just like can’t help, but stand up and start dancing, but don’t get me wrong.
I’m obsessed with the song. Good as hell. But there’s a line in there that always catches me off guard, and I’m not going to try and sing it because that’s not what I bought this microphone for. But she has a line in that song that says, boss up and change your life. You can have it all, no sacrifice. And that line always gets me because truly there is a sacrifice, right? There’s always a sacrifice that you have to make in life. And that’s the trade off that we have to make saying yes to something does mean saying no to something else.
And I think oftentimes we feed into our people pleasing tendencies because we kind of devalue our personal time and the things that we do in our life to keep us happy, because we want to say yes to somebody else. But at the end of the day, like we talked about, you know, we’ve got one life and your life and the time that you have, you know, you can think of it like a pie, like a pizza pie, or like a dessert pie.
Our time is like a delicious pie.
Clearly I’m obsessed with food. And that’s all I’m thinking about right now, but you can think of it. Every slice of pie is like a slice of your time. And so before we decide how we know what we’re going to say yes to, if we’re going to say yes to somebody else, we need to look at our whole pie and the big picture of her life and our day and figure out if we even have time and energy to say yes to somebody else. And maybe you can relate to this too.
I think another trade off that we make when we practice these people, pleaser tendencies is not just the trade off of the time and the energy that we have, but it often leads to feeling overwhelmed and stressed because we’re usually kind of loading our schedule with things that we didn’t plan on saying yes to.
And these people pleasing tendencies can show up in all types of relationships in our life. It could be something that’s happening in your work life. This could also be relationship time. You know, maybe you have said yes to, you know, taking care of the kids while your spouse or your partner or someone, you know, takes the night off or spends time doing something for themselves. But you taking on that extra work at night of taking care of the kids or taking care of the talk or whatever it might be like taking on that extra set of responsibility is now limiting your time that you had for yourself.
It’s all about striking a livable balance
I think with anything, I mean, we want to make sure, especially in relationships, if it’s your partner, you want to make sure that there’s a balance of both people getting to spend time just for themselves, but with people pleasing sometimes in relationships, what happens is that, and I think this happens a lot for us.
Women is we don’t want to say no to our partner. We want obviously to make them happy, but we say yes to taking on too much in the relationship. And then all of a sudden, one day it just builds and builds and builds and builds until we’re overwhelmed. All of a sudden we just can’t say yes anymore. And it usually comes out in a very unhealthy way. Like we have a meltdown of like how much we’ve been saying yes to, you know, we just like get really emotional because we just like, don’t have the energy to like control our emotions anymore.
And it’s especially important in your close relationships that you are managing these people pleaser tendencies, because you don’t want it to build up to where you eventually break down. But before we dive into how, you know, we can work on changing our people, pleasing tendencies into more positive behaviors.
What exactly IS people pleasing?
I want to quickly clarify what people pleasing is versus what people pleasing isn’t. So let’s say for example, that your best friend, I don’t know, recently joined a standup comedy school and they’re performing live for the first time on the same night that you had something else planned and it could be any sort of plan that you had. It could be a recurring event that you had. It could be a dinner that you had scheduled. And I know that this example was a little less relevant in the middle of COVID because a lot of these things aren’t happening, but let’s just pretend in a non COVID world that you said yes to your friend to go to their opening show.
You’re now having to say no to something that you already had scheduled choosing to go and support your friend, because you know, it would mean a lot to them is definitely not a negative behavior.
And in this sense, if you’re actively excited about supporting them and going to this show, we’re choosing to do it because we value it. We know that by doing it, we’re going to strengthen, strengthen the friendship. And it’s just something that we’re excited to do where we’re okay with making that trade off, because we’re willing to give up the thing that we already had planned in order to go and support that friend. So this isn’t the type of people, pleasing activity.
Are you constantly saying yes even though you don’t want to?
Although you will make your friend very happy by attending this. Isn’t the type of thing that we’re calling out today. Now, if the same friend expected you to go to that show or to every single one of their future shows, and you found yourself constantly saying yes, or having to give up things that you don’t really want to give up in order to make your friend happy, then that girlfriend is worth chatting about.
So here are just a few typical people pleasing tendencies that I feel like I hear about. And I’ve experienced in my own life the most often. How many times have you said yes to something? Because you just didn’t feel like you could say no or even worse.
How many times have you said maybe to something because you were too afraid to say no?
Even though you knew when you said maybe you, you literally like said in your head, I’m probably not going to go, but I don’t want to tell them that. So I’m just going to say maybe, and then not really respond for awhile. And then at the last minute, tell them that I can’t go, I am raising my hands so high right now because this used to be a very common thing of mine.
I was so afraid of upsetting people that I didn’t have the courage to say no, and stand up for the time, my own time and things that I had planned in my calendar.
And I was so worried that if I said no, that they would think they would like take it personally, that they would think that I’m like personally attacking them because I’m saying no to something that they want me to do. But what I found over time was that like maybe, and then canceling and saying no at the last minute was actually taken so much worse from their perspective, because then I seemed flaky and completely unreliable.
Often, we’re so afraid of saying no, that we end up seeming flaky or unreliable
So when I made that switch and I realized, Oh, you know what, it’s actually probably better for me to just say no to this now than to drag this out and say maybe, and then not actually go in the end, but we do this in other ways too. You know, how many times have you said yes, because you’re seeking validation and you want to feel liked and included around others.
Maybe there’s an event or a party or a social gathering happening that you don’t actually really want to go to, but you want these people to like you, and you want to feel like you’re included and a part of the group. And how many times have you found yourself saying yes. So quickly after someone asks you something and then realize that you didn’t even give yourself time to think about it in the first place?
I think we get so used to saying yes, that it literally becomes second nature. Someone asks, if you can do something or if you want to attend something or join something. And our immediate response is yes. But then you think about it and you’re like, Oh wait, I should probably even see if I’m available and like check to see what I have going on for that day. And that week. I know for me, these things used to happen to me all the time. I found myself saying yes to things that I wasn’t actually really excited about just because it had become habit. And the crazy and ironic thing about all of this is that time and time again, our initial people pleasing tendencies happen because we want to make people happy, right?
We want to feel liked by other people.
But what it reads to is us feeling anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, and overworked, because we’re constantly saying yes to things that we don’t actually have time and energy for. And not to mention that people pleasers are often identified by others as being insecure. And they actually bring about feelings of irritation and a lack of respect from other people.
So what are some things that we can start doing today to help us gain more confidence and learn that it’s okay to say no first things first is knowing our priorities, because oftentimes we say yes to things without actively thinking about the trade offs that we’ll have to make. And remember our time is like a slice of pie. And every time we take a slice out of that pie, we have to be aware of the trade off.
With every decision comes a tradeoff
So knowing at the beginning of the week, you know what we have scheduled in our time, what, the priorities that we have coming up, the events that we have, the work that we need to take on, knowing those priorities ahead of time are going to make it so much easier to say no when something just doesn’t align with those priorities.
And secondly, we have to commit to either a yes or a no and get rid of the maybe response. And I love the saying, you might have heard it before. If something isn’t a hell. Yes. Then it’s a hell. No. And I know that, that sounds really strong. It’s like, Whoa, I don’t need to say like, hell no, to something like, I’m not that strongly against it. And like, that’s not really the point.
But the point that it’s making is that if you’re not super excited or have the energy to take on something saying no from the beginning is going to just be the better option, because if you’re only going into it and I apologize, I know I’m like cursing a little bit more, but like, if you’re going to go in and like gonna half ass the work, because you just don’t have the energy or the time to do it, then that’s not helpful for anybody because kind of sorta committing to something isn’t beneficial for you.
Kinda sorta committing isn’t helping anyone.
And it’s not beneficial for the person that you’re saying yes to. And remember, it’s okay to say, no thank you or no, not right now or no, but you know, maybe next time for a lot of us, we don’t like conflict.
I think many of us don’t enjoy getting into conflict. And I think that it is also okay to just say, no, I don’t think that we have to, you know, this brings me into my third point. I don’t think we need to list out the reasons of why we’re not able to do something, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t say it in like a really nice and friendly way.
And my third point is not feeling the need to list out all of our reasons why we can’t do something or take something on. Because I think for so many of us people pleasers, we feel like we need to explain in like great length, why we’re saying no to something when in reality, a simple, no, thank you.
A simple “no, thank you” can go a long way
More than suffices in almost every situation. Just think about it, you know, imagine that today, you know, someone said no to you, you know, maybe you ask them to take something on or to attend something. And they said, no, but then they started listing out a bunch of excuses or reasons why they couldn’t say yes, you know, like, Oh, well I would love to help out with that, but I just can’t do that today or this week because I have to go pick up the kids and the house is a mess and I have so much laundry to do. And like, I have to take the dog to the vet and I’ve just not been getting enough sleep.
All of a sudden, they’re just like listing out all of the reasons why we can’t do something. Doesn’t that actually make you feel like more awkward in the situation.
All you can think is: oh, okay. Like it’s okay. You don’t have to, you know, take this on or do this extra stuff. So kind of think about it. Like on the flip side, like, would you want someone to feel like they have to list out all of the reasons why they can’t do something or would you appreciate just kind of like, Oh, that sounds so great. But unfortunately that’s not something that I can do right now. Maybe ask them again in the future and then we can all just move on.
Always remember, it’s absolutely impossible to keep everybody happy all of the time
And lastly, we need to just remember to give ourselves a little gentle reminder that we cannot be everything to everyone as people pleasers. I do. I think some of us find joy in, in being a people pleaser. We like making people happy and it’s something that we enjoy doing and we want to spend time doing it, but we have to remember the negative effects that it will have if it’s something that we continue to put first
So spending time identifying the people and the causes and the activities in your life that you want to prioritize first will be so beneficial because then you can figure out if you have time leftover to be able to take on more things. And don’t forget about yourself when you’re thinking about your priorities for a lot of us and especially for women, I know you can probably relate to this too.
We sometimes forget that we need our time for self care. And this is something that I’m even still continuing to try and implement more in my life because we start taking on the more self care that we need to make sure we’re adding into our schedule. So don’t forget when you’re making that picture of your week ahead and the things you want to prioritize, don’t forget to schedule in some self care in order to help you recharge better.
Prioritize your self care before you plan anything else for the week ahead
I think that there is so much value in knowing where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. And like, you know, putting yourself and your opinions first. But like, I’m never going to be someone that’s like don’t ever listen to anyone else’s opinions. I think that they have a place in life, but I think that they shouldn’t be put before our own. And they should definitely not be tied to how we think of ourselves.
Because honestly you are worth so much more than anyone could ever give you credit for and not to mention then that when you stop saying yes to things that you don’t want to do, and you start saying yes to only the things that light you up, your energy will change. And the people around you will actually start to respect you more because they can sense that energy shift. They can sense you being in your element and just being so fulfilled and recharged and happy in your life.
Live your life for YOU, FIRST
So if nothing else sticks from any of this, just remember that by trying to make other people happy, you will literally be spending every single minute of every single day for the rest of your life, working to make other people happy. And is that really how you want to spend your one time and your one chance that you have on this life, chances are, if you’re listening to this podcast, the answer is no, I am so grateful for you. I can’t wait to watch as you grow your life from saying yes to everything, to saying yes to only the things that are truly important to you. And until next time, I’ll talk to you soon.
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