Do you always want to be seen as nice and agreeable, happy and friendly and kind?

Do you do favours for people when they ask, even when your time and energy is limited? Do you give your time and energy away even if someone doesn’t even ask? Do you go out of your way to avoid conflict; even sacrificing your own peace of mind, opinion and happiness? Do you put other people’s well being before your own, all of the time? Do you take on more than you can handle and have to let people down? Do you have any free time? Any hobbies? Do you struggle to articulate your emotions and needs? Do you know what you want? If most of these are a ‘yes’, then you could well be a people-pleaser.

I, personally, hate the term, but it sums it up well. It’s putting other people’s needs and happiness above your own. Sometimes you’ll find that this only happens in certain areas; with work, family, friends or intimate relationships. Sometimes it’s across the board.

As a former people-pleaser, I can now see why I was doing a lot of these things, but at the time the habit was so ingrained, so close, that I had no idea how detrimental it was to me or that I could be any other way. 

So, if you recognise yourself here, CONGRATULATIONS!

It’s your first step to freedom. What happens when you start to recognise your people-pleasing habits is this;

• You gain more time, space and energy.
• You start to figure out what’s right for you and what isn’t.
• You start to learn all of the things that you didn’t know before, such as; how to say no, boundaries, what you like and don’t like, how to express yourself, put things off, different ways of communication, that conflict isn’t the end of the world, that people will still like you even when you’re being awful, and to feel.
• Life gets a whole load easier, doable, interesting. Life opens up to you.

Learning how to feel is really important because this is part of what you’ve been avoiding for so long. So recognising, naming, feeling, accepting, understanding our emotions such as guilt, feeling responsible, overwhelm, stress, blame, shame; is all part of it. 

The good bit is that once you start feeling these emotions, you’ll realise that you didn’t need to hide from them. Sure, it can be uncomfortable, but once you’re out on the other side the sun is shining beautifully, just for you. It really is. And, those emotions won’t have meant what you thought they did. 

You’re learning what you didn’t learn when you were younger. For whatever reason, some of us miss out on these essential life skills. Or, we were denied expressing ourselves, so we covered up our emotions, we hid ourselves and tried to form a more ‘acceptable’ self. 

We’re not able to feel comfortable with ourselves, our opinions, we don’t have that sense of trust in ourselves that other people seem to have. It can be a bit disorientating, confusing. I often wondered why I found it so hard to figure out what I wanted to do, why I couldn’t do what other people could do very easily. 

That’s because we’re so busy looking outwards, to other people for our cues and it’s the wrong direction. It’s one of those awful things that we have to do, our worst fear if you like; we have to stop looking to other people and we have to look to ourselves. That’s the one place we don’t want to look to start with. This does change, it gets easier and even fun.

But, to begin with it’s might not feel like that, fantastic if it does though! I think, for most of us even thinking about putting ourselves first feels selfish, but it really isn’t, you don’t have a balanced perspective on it right now, that will come in time.

It might also seem daunting, changing all of this, where do you start? That bit is easy, if you’re reading this and have recognised yourself, then you’ve already started. Now what will happen is that you’ll start to notice things. The times when you say yes, but mean no, the times where your boundaries are violated – even if you’re not quite sure what’s going on, you just might feel uncomfortable. You notice.

Once you start to notice it, you can do something about it;

• You can let it go – you’ll only be able to do this so many times though.
• You can put off the decision.
• You can say you want time to decide.
• You can say no and laugh (you’ll love it when this happens to you, it is very surprising and funny).
• You can say yes and then change your mind.
• You can explode and say ‘why the hell do you keep asking me when you know I don’t want to!’ (this is when you learn that you can handle conflict, learn to mess up and apologise and how to set boundaries all in one go). 

Your growing awareness of what’s going on is the thing that’s going to guide you through this. This is not something that needs to be resolved in one day, you don’t need to undo it all in one go, it’s one step at a time. It’s a process, and for a lot of us, myself included, it’s ongoing and fascinating and life changing and at some point, it ceases to be a problem, not because you’ve solved it all, but because you notice and deal with it at the time. 
 

I’ll write more about this, and in the meantime, if you’d like a helping hand guiding you through, take a look at working with me here and if you’d like to, feel free to book a 30 minute discovery call (complementary and no-obligation) and we’ll see how we can start unravelling it. 

Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash