The Antidote to People-Pleasing Habits
Reclaim your life, live for yourself, and be…hated?
“I’m a people-pleaser” is becoming a popular self-diagnosis — and for good reason.
More and more of us are fighting this internal need to make everyone around us happy.
You’re taught as a child not to disrupt the peace. Don’t piss anyone off.
Just be liked.
But as you know, when you measure success based on how happy you make everyone — you set yourself up for a life of misery.
You’ll make everyone pleased, except yourself.
I want to talk about the paradox of people-pleasing (and the cure that might help you live for yourself a little more).
How to know if you’re people-pleasing
The crux of it is doing things to make someone else feel good, at your expense.
It’s not bad to please people in general, that’s great. It’s bad to do it when it means:
(1) putting yourself down or,
(2) putting yourself in difficult situations so that someone else is better off.
A couple of tells you might relate to:
You think things like “I’ll be fine but they won’t, so I should just do it.”
You show face at events you don’t want to, just to keep the peace
You unconsciously seek out dominant characters to tell you what to do
You feel guilty saying no
You never have time for yourself
You’re always apologising for things you don’t need to
You don’t like conflict — meaning you’ll put yourself in sticky situations to avoid any kind of uncomfortable interaction
Your sense of self-worth comes from external validation — you to seek approval and fear rejection
Why do we people-please?
People pleasing can come from a bunch of different places:
Growing up in a turbulent household.
Dr Gabor Mate explains a concept that says when we’re a child we’re self-centred — we think everything is our fault and needs our attention. So we develop a need to fix the problem at hand, to avoid conflict (ie. you don’t want mummy and daddy to fight again).Low self-esteem and low self-confidence.
These can cause you to start to lose faith in who you are. You don’t think people can like you, for you. Then, you attach to what you think will raise your social status — making others feel good.Lacking self-love.
If you don’t have internal respect, you’ll cling to any outside love that’s given to you, and fear it going away.It’s human nature to want to fit in.
This is a basic human need. If you feel you’re an outsider, you’ll start to do things to appease the group's needs.
As a young kid, I remember my number one goal was to be disliked by no one. I didn’t even care about people liking me, as long as they didn’t dislike me. I’d suppress my opinions, tell girls I liked the same hobbies as them, and go with the mob mentality — all for a boost in likeability.
I didn’t change who I was. But I framed everything differently so I wouldn’t stand out too much.
I thought that if they like soccer, and I tell them I do, we’ll get along.
I said yes to every invite to avoid letting people down.
I hated saying no (and still do).
I was always changing my opinion based on the dominant one in the group.
I didn’t believe that I could be liked for having my own opinions.
And I was right…in a way (more on that later).
It’s normal to do all those things — I think we all do to some extent— but it’s not healthy.
It’s actually something that urgently needs your attention. You might be holding yourself back a lot more than you realise — and here’s why.
If you try to please everyone this is what’s gonna happen
If you keep going at the pace young Eren was going at — doing things for everyone else instead of yourself — you’ll end up losing who you are.
What do I mean by that?
I mean you’ll look back in 5, 10, 50 years and realise that you never did anything that was beneficial to the most important person in your life.
“But my family, my friends, my parents…” — there’s nothing you can do for them that’s better than taking care of yourself.
Because if you take care of yourself, you’ll be a better son, daughter, brother, sister…
If you spread yourself too thin, doing favours left and right, never going to the restaurant you want to go to — you’ll end up unhappy.
Why?
Because you never satisfied your internal desires. External love can only go so far.
My fellow people-pleaser reading this, you can feel it in your soul, I know you can. It’s that icky feeling that you’re not satisfied with your behaviour.
Replying to things you don’t want to reply to.
Sitting at tables you don’t want to sit at.
Going along with something you disagree too
Exhausting, isn’t it?
The people-pleasing paradox (the cure to people-pleasing is this)
You might’ve worked it out by now by reverse engineering…
But to cure your detrimental people-pleasing habits, you’ve got to be authentic to yourself.
You’ve got to:
disagree when you don’t agree
say no when you’re not up for it
go to the restaurant you want to go to sometimes
stand up for what you believe in
Will you turn some people off you? Definitely. But you’ll also garner respect from the people whose opinions are relevant to you — and yourself.
My Dad told me a story:
I was at a table with some new people I hadn’t met before. They were talking absolute nonsense.
They were gossiping about people and having rudimentary chats. It was a conversation that I had no business being a part of. I waited for a while to try and avoid an uncomfortable moment — but in the end, I’d had enough.
So, I stood up, said “This conversation is useless to me” and left.
I couldn’t believe he did that. He got up and left? Amazing.
Do those people like him? Definitely not. There’s probably gossip going around the Turkish community about him.
But, he’s just:
saved himself a conversation he didn’t want to be a part of,
saved the table from having someone who didn’t want to be there,
avoided being an accessory to the gossip, and
created time for something more important
His staying at the table is a losing situation for everyone. He has a bad time, and they have someone at the table who doesn’t want to be there.
What needs to be done is usually obvious, but you and I have this resistance to feeling disliked or hated. It’s natural — for all the reasons we talked about earlier.
But what’s so bad about being hated? Is it the ego hit?
If you think about it, you…
You need to be hated to be loved
It feels amazing to be hated.
But only if you’re hated because you did the right thing.
Feeling like an outsider to a group you don’t identify with is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Telling someone who you don’t want to spend time with, that you don’t want to spend time with them, is a good thing.
You can continue to be a people-pleaser, giving everyone what they want, and you’ll get through life, one way or another. But you’ll never be the one people love and respect. You’ll just be the “nice person”.
You’ll never be the person that inspires others to be their true self.
Which description of yourself would you prefer?
(A) “Got nothing bad to say about them — a nice person.”
(B) “Stands up for what they believe in, respects themself, and isn’t afraid of doing what’s necessary.”
We’re not Christian, but Dad always says:
People threw stones at Jesus…
People crucified the man that stood for what he believed in, someone who did good to everybody.
The truth will make some people mad and uncomfortable, but it’ll make the right people extremely comfortable.
You can’t please everyone — so you might as well help yourself.
Will you be a people-pleaser or a YOU-pleaser?
What’ll it be?
Will you keep going through your day, for others, or will you do it for yourself?
As we discussed before, the most beneficial thing you can do for others is to be the best version of yourself.
You show a good example of how to stand up for yourself
You create more time for the things you love to do
At the end of the day, the fact is, you have to fulfil your needs as a person to be happy.
The outside approval only goes so far.
It’s the inside approval that will take your happiness to the next level.
Thanks for reading my weekly newsletter, Elsewhere by Eren.
If it’s your first time here, Elsewhere is a thought piece based on an idea I’ve had, and implemented, that’s helped with everyday life.
I believe the key to a happy life is mastering the mundane problems we face every day. So, my job here is to crystallise the ideas in an easy-to-understand way so that you can just read this email, instead of making the same mistakes I have.
This newsletter is essentially my life’s work, I’m proud of the ideas that I’m sharing and I truly believe it can help you on your path to engineering a better life - from the inside, out.
I send it out every Friday morning (AEST), a quick read with your coffee - ready for the weekend.