The True Cost of People Pleasing

In this episode of The Energy Xchange, I’m diving into something almost every highly sensitive person struggles with at some point: people pleasing. If you’ve ever said yes when you wanted to say no, softened your boundaries to keep the peace, or pre-managed someone else’s reactions so you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable, this is for you!

People pleasing isn’t a flaw; it’s actually a survival strategy many of us learned early in life. But in adulthood, and especially in business, it can quietly drain our energy, our confidence, our bank accounts, and our potential.

I’m breaking down what people pleasing really looks like, how it sabotages your growth, where it actually comes from, and how you can interrupt the pattern with small, doable shifts that don’t feel overwhelming or scary.

Main Topics Covered:

• Where people pleasing really comes from
• How people pleasing shows up in everyday life and business
• Personal stories and real-life examples
• The emotional, energetic, and financial costs
• Why we do this — and how to interrupt the pattern
• Reflection questions to help you deepen the work

Who This Episode Is For:

• Sensitive professionals, deep feelers, introverts, empaths, HSPs, INFJs
• Anyone who’s ever been told they’re “too emotional” or “too much”
• People who grew up adapting rather than expressing
• Anyone who wants to feel safer, stronger, more confident, and more self-trusting
• Business owners and employees who want healthier boundaries and relationships

Links & Resources For This Episode

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal lives. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spent years untangling patterns of overthinking, people pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome to this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. Today I'm diving into a topic that affects almost everyone that I coach: people pleasing. If you are a current or recovering people pleaser, what I know for sure is that you are a beautiful, deeply caring, thoughtful human being. Shitty people don't people please, okay? They do not overgive. And we talk about people pleasing as kind of a weak or negative trait, but it's really just a symptom of learning to keep the peace. You know, managing the temperature of a room or earning safety by making things feel easy. It's a survival strategy that stems from early conditioning, and it's a pattern that we absolutely have the power to interrupt. In today's episode, I'm breaking down what people pleasing actually looks like, how it's ruining your business and relationship potential, what it really stems from, and then some low stakes, low pressure ways to interrupt that pattern right now. Okay, so what does people pleasing actually look like? It's it's not about wanting others to be happy. Like it's not an altruistic thing that you're doing to actually physically please other people. It's about avoiding conflict and avoiding your own discomfort. So it's really just conflict avoidance in disguise. And it can show up in a lot of ways. Some are sneakier than others. Um, saying yes when you want to say no, over-explaining your decisions, maybe softening your boundaries or dismissing them to keep the peace. In business, it can show up in discounting or lowering lowering prices, even when no one's even asked you to do that, right? Uh, pre-apologizing for your rates, giving clients a lot more than they paid for. It shows up in all of these ways that are ultimately about trying to pre-manage someone else's reaction. And one thing I catch myself doing that that my brothers called me out on is overexplaining gifts before someone opens them. Like, oh, if you don't like it, I have the receipt, or you know, because I'm just so anxious that they won't love it. And and then so it's not kindness that I'm saying those things, right? I'm just kind of managing my own anxiety or or discomfort. So it can show up in a lot of ways that, you know, aren't they don't seem like a big deal, but when you think about all of those sneaky small ways it shows up, I guarantee you it's showing up in some really big important ways too. And there are a lot of ways that this people pleasing can show up in our business. Maybe we're discounting our prices or we're giving extra hours of work. If you haven't communicated how you work or your typical response times, maybe you feel like you have to respond right away because that's that might be what they're expecting. But one of the most damaging forms of people pleasing, and this is both in business and our personal life, is avoiding crucial conversations because we don't want to make someone else uncomfortable. And what we do instead is we allow ourselves to sit with that discomfort. And when we do this, a lot of things happen, but those unexpressed feelings usually leak out later in a really exaggerated or triggered way. And in those instances, what really sucks about it is that the delivery overshadows the message. So we end up looking like the bad guy, and the original issue never actually gets resolved or even discussed. Another thing that can happen is we we might start to change our behavior towards someone over time, creating a little bit of distance. And they might not even know there's a root issue at hand. And in those cases, the relationship never reaches its potential. So, an example from my own life, back when I, you know, was early on in my corporate career doing marketing, I started freelancing and I charged about$25 an hour for marketing strategy because that's what my old salary worked out to be. So I was just massively undercharging for freelance work out of a fear of rejection and just kind of that scarcity mindset. And I constantly overgave. Like I had clients that thought that rate was too high, right? So if a project took three hours, maybe I only charged for two. And I was just terrified that someone would think that I was too expensive. And what happened over time was I got really burnt out, I got resentful, I wasn't excited to take on new work, and then I just had this like pit in my stomach, chronic anxiety about disappointing people. I was ultimately creating situations that supported resentment instead of sustainability. So there is a real cost associated with people pleasing in business. So let's talk about it. What are those costs? First, we've got the emotional and the energetic cost. So again, it's that chronic resentment, that burnout. Another thing that I think a lot of people pleasers do is we water down our ideas to make them more generally accepted. And I think to, you know, consider when you first started out in your career and maybe you had those big team meetings, that's kind of where I remember that happening for me the most. But you know, we didn't want to be too out there, so you lose a little bit of innovation. And there's that idea that if everyone loves your ideas, they're not strong enough, right? So if we're really just giving those safe ideas, it's not enough for for you to shine. You should be annoying a handful of people with your thoughts or creating a little bit of debate. And if you're staying quiet in meetings because you're afraid to speak up, eventually you'll feel overlooked or invisible and potentially lose confidence in your expertise. And all of those things can lead to that undercurrent again of anxiety. And then we get into imposter syndrome and all of these things that are really just the effect of not being comfortable speaking up. And there's a real financial cost, and these apply whether you have your own business or you're working for someone else. Again, undercharging, not asking for raises, over-delivering without appropriate compensation. Another thing that can happen is when we bend to others' expectations or our perceived idea of their expectations is that we can start attracting really misaligned clients or career opportunities. You know, when I was severely undercharging, I somehow I was attracting clients who also had that scarcity mindset. So even my super low rates were too high, or work wasn't getting done fast enough. Like we were together, both kind of projecting the same level of anxiety about the work and the situation. Or I would take on work that wasn't even what I wanted to be doing. I just didn't want to turn down work. So those scarcity-driven decisions can really take their toll on our financial picture. And all of these things can be remedied by having those crucial conversations with people. When we avoid those little moments of discomfort, we create really big long-term problems. So why do we do this? Where does it come from? Well, all of this comes back to our early conditioning, childhood. You know, who were those adults around you? How did you adapt to live in the spaces that you were in? And this isn't everyone wants to blame our parents, right? This isn't that. I mean, it can be, but there are a lot of other adults in our world very early on that kind of teach us how to show up in the world. And then that gets magnified when we're surrounded by other people our age and we we start talking and start interacting, and we're in school, we're in after-school programs, hobbies, all the things. Now we're really kind of exacerbating that. Like we're taking that teaching out into the world, and it's basically becomes part of our makeup. For many empaths or sensitive people, you learned really early on how to read the room to decide if you felt safe or comfortable. Peace, instead of rocking the boat, felt like safety. So other people's reactions were likely dictating your behavior and how you felt in those spaces. And over time, you might have developed a real sensitivity to conflict, which makes you want to dissolve tension immediately. That becomes your survival strategy, and it's really just a protective pattern, and it is one that we can interrupt. So great segue here. How do we break this pattern? You know, when I was really starting to go down this path in my work, really addressing some of these patterns that I was seeing, I was dealing with some pretty big situations, and what helped me get more comfortable addressing those was choosing low-stakes scenarios to retrain my nervous system. And that could be as little as saying no to an invitation to something that you don't want to attend. Maybe telling a client, hey, we need to increase this scope instead of just automatically doing extra work. You know, what are those little things that maybe don't feel so high stakes? Um, you could also change a standing habit that no longer works for you. If you've been like meeting a friend to work out at 7 a.m., but you actually prefer to work out at night, make that change. You know, these little tiny reps can help build your confidence and make it easier to address the bigger things. Another thing that's really helpful is grounding yourself in your why. Boundaries are really hard to set and to maintain if we haven't connected them to our values or what we want our life to look like. Right now, so I'm 47 years old, I'm super focused on hormone health. It's like I want my eight hours of sleep every night so I can show up my best. And that value makes it easier for me to say no to late night plans. It's not about the other person that's inviting me, right? It's now about me and my value set. And a lot of times we start with the boundary, right? But it doesn't have the backup to support it. So if you can take some time to get to the bottom of what you want your life to look like and then create your boundaries from that, it's it's a little easier to stick to those. It's also helpful, in my opinion, to not attach boundaries to specific people. Like create a general boundary and apply it everywhere it needs to be applied. So this will help to reinforce that your boundaries are about you, no one else. It's not something anyone should be taking personally. Boundaries aren't meant to push people away, guys. They're they're designed to show people how they can be in our life and get the best of us. It's a service to not only ourselves, but everyone in our world. And if you believe that and live that, it's so easy to maintain your boundaries. So another thing that's really helpful is using neutral language when issues come up. So, example, this is outside of scope. Would you like to add it on? Or that timeline doesn't work. How does Tuesday look? Or I'm unavailable for that. Here's what I can do. So it opens up a mutual dialogue, it doesn't point fingers at anyone, it simply states what is, and then opens up that conversation about where to mutually go from there. And one of the biggest ones, at least for me, is to stop pre-managing other people's reactions. Like let people feel what they feel. Your job is not to soften every emotion for them. And a lot of times that little moment of discomfort can kind of lead to some clarity for both people. So I know this is a really hard one, but don't be afraid of letting people feel what they feel. And then finally, set clear expectations up front. For business owners, that could look like having a really clear, detailed proposal, outlining the project scope, timelines, how to communicate with you, you know, what that process looks like. When you have those expectations up front, you don't have to have these nerve-wracking critical conversations. Like it's all laid out. You can simply direct them back to what they've already agreed to. And it just gives you that comfort too, that you know that they know what those expectations are. So you don't have to get into those anxiety moments or panic that you're not responding quickly enough. Like you've already set that standard with them. Now, if you're in a traditional workplace, the way that looks is clarifying responsibilities. You know, what is your actual scope of work? Another thing you can do is ask, ask up front about timelines for raises, advancement opportunities. So if they say one year, then you know in one year it's safe to approach them to discuss. So we're removing that fear or hesitation from the equation. We've set that expectation. Other things, you know, when you're interviewing, ask about the company culture. What are those expectations around time, availability? Um, and then document all of these things so that you can more easily advocate for your needs. So whether you own your own business or you're in a traditional workplace, having that proactive clarity will eliminate so many of those people-pleasing triggers. So I want to close this out with some things to think about and some potential steps forward. I love giving a little bit of homework. So maybe ask yourself where in your business or personal life do you say yes when you want to say no? And then what conversations have you been avoiding? And a really easy clue for that is asking yourself who or what lives rent-free in your head every day. And if you've got a couple answers, there's something there that probably needs to be addressed. And then finally, what's one little micro moment of bravery you could have this week to interrupt this pattern of people pleasing? So to wrap this up, I just want to remind you that people pleasing is not a weakness. It comes from a very deeply caring, thoughtful, intuitive part of you. If you've been stuck in these patterns, guys, it's because you care, which is absolutely beautiful. But, but, but, but if we want to live a life of authenticity, abundance, ease, avoiding these things will never get us there. Okay? Every time you choose a tiny moment of honesty over avoidance, you are a step closer to building a life that supports you instead of one that drains you. We all deserve relationships, clients, and environments where our truth doesn't cost us our peace. All right, I'm gonna end it there. If this episode spoke to you, a quick review would mean the world to me. It helps more like minded people find this space. Thank you for being here, guys. I'll see you next week.