#5: Get Rid of People Pleasing (For Good)

We trace how people pleasing forms in childhood and school, how it hides under “leadership,” and why it quietly exhausts high achievers. Then we share a simple process to find the root belief, install a new one, and prove it with small boundary reps.

Some key points: 
• Two households shaping early survival strategies
• School conditioning of compliance over choice
• belief to story to behavior chain explained
• fear as the engine under automatic yeses
• leadership myths that reward self-abandonment
• spotting people pleasing at work, home, self-care
• questions to reveal the limiting belief
• choosing a new belief that serves your goals
• using small actions to retrain your nervous system
• identity shift from “I am” to “I’m unlearning”

Enjoy!

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Transcript

Setting The People Pleasing Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today we're going to dive deep into people pleasing because people pleasing is the number one pattern that I see in both my clients and what I saw in my own life that's holding us back from prioritizing the things in our life that we truly want and getting after those things. And this pattern is significantly apparent in high achievers, people who are very ambitious and people who are great at helping everybody else but themselves. So today we're going to go over what people pleasing is, we're going to go over what creates it, and we're going to go over how we can break free from the pattern. So if you consider yourself a people pleaser, this is definitely the episode for you. So first I want to talk about how people pleasing has shown up in my own life. So I grew up in a separate household when I was growing up. So uh between two different sets of parents. Parent number one over here was the helicopter parents. Uh my stepmom was very much so a, I would say just a domineering parent. She was on my ass, with lack of better words, 24-7. And she was a micromanager parent. She was very much so controlling, and she was also super loving, too, but she was also almost like a uh Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde situation. You didn't really know what version of her you would wake up to. And my dad was more so of the soft-spoken, stable container for her. So that was one household, my stepmom and my dad. The other household was my mom and my stepdad at the time, and they were pretty absent. My mom was had a lot of mental health issues, still does, and she really struggled to be present for me, to just take care of things around the house. She struggled a lot with depression and anxiety, so it got in the way of her being able to really show up for me. And then my stepdad at the time, he had a lot of anger issues, a lot of a lot of bad habits. Um he drank pretty often, ate like crap, didn't take care of himself, and would fly off the handle a lot. And the big difference between the two, I would say, was my stepmom and my dad were very much so breathing down my neck, and then my mom and my stepdad were pretty lackadaisical. Um, I didn't see them that much. So for me, that created a belief that I had to change who I was in order to be loved deep down. Because both my parents got divorced when I was two, and then both my parents remarried when I was four. And from the time we're zero from the time we're seven, we are a sponge for unconscious beliefs and picking up on other people's patterns. And so I learned at a really young age that it wasn't safe to be me. And so that's what created the people pleaser in me. And maybe you're listening to this and you feel similarly. Maybe you grew up with uh broken households, or maybe um you had a stable household as far as your parents were married the whole time, but maybe your mom had super high expectations for you. Maybe she made you feel like your worth was defined by the grades you got in school. Maybe you were pushed pushed really hard by your parents to succeed. Maybe they wanted you to go down a certain path that you know in your heart, you knew in your heart you didn't want to go down. So people pleasing can also be created from that. Essentially, anything that makes us feel like what we want is not valuable and what other people want is more valuable. That's where people pleasing comes from. And it's a form of self-protection. And it's interesting because if we think about the way that we grow up, a lot of times, especially in our school system, we're essentially conditioned to believe that following the rules and accepting things without question and doing what you're told is the way to success. School is literally this like we don't create our own schedules, it's created for us. Um, we don't get to choose what we learn initially in school. We're given the information we need to learn. So there's not a lot of power that we're given early on in our lives as far as the ability to choose what we actually want to do and go pursue those things. So school almost in a way conditions us to accept that things are just the way they are, and anything that we prefer is not important. So people pleasing comes from tolerating life that we don't prefer, essentially, because we're taught that it's it's wrong to want something else than what society says we should want. I remember when I was in school, I really was a terrible student. I would I would say a straight C student at best. And I just hated being in classrooms. I hated sitting still for extended periods of periods of time. I just wasn't the kind of student who could force myself to learn shit that I wasn't actually passionate about. And so naturally I acted out a lot in school because I just didn't care about it. And that whole time when I was acting out in school, you know how this works. My parents would get a call from the principal saying that I was trying to be the class clown in class, or I was being a distraction, or my grades weren't good. And uh my parents would have a conversation with me about it, and the the whole dialogue of the conversation would be hey, there's something wrong with you. You need to stop behaving in these ways. And for me, it it went even further because when when I was a kid, I was struggling a lot with depression just because I felt like I couldn't get anything right. I remember just never thinking that I was doing the right thing. I was always walking on eggshells in both households that I was in because my stepdad, he had anger issues, and then my stepmom, she had anger issues in both households. So I just remember always feeling like I was walking on eggshells and had to tiptoe my way around my house because I didn't want to piss anybody off. So as a way to keep myself safe, I stopped expressing myself and I stopped honoring my own needs and desires. I learned it wasn't safe, and that translated in school as well. So I got super depressed. I believe that depression is in a way a suffocation of the soul. It's when we repress our desires. It's and when we are essentially not honoring what we truly want to do. And so I had a lot of depression issues. And of course, I went to a doctor because my parents thought there was something wrong with me, and they said, Hey, you're depressed and you're anxious. You have an anxiety disorder and you have a depression disorder. This was when I was like nine years old. And I lived with that label for a long time. I really believed that I was just a depressed person and an anxious person, and that that was deeply ingrained in my subconscious mind. And the thing about our subconscious, unconscious, I don't know the technical term for it, but the unconscious mind, let's call it, is that whatever we believe to be true deep down is going to be how we perceive the world, how we perceive ourselves, and then it's also going to translate into the behaviors that we take. So I learned, let's kind of go through this. So when it comes to people pleasing, for me in my life, what I learned was it's not safe for me to be myself or what I want is not important. That's the unconscious, limiting belief that I learned at a really young age. That turned into a story in my head of I just have to listen to people. It's pointless. Um, a lot of negative self-talk, I would say, that's how it would manifest itself for me. And then that would lead into behaviors like saying yes to everybody when I wanted to say no, ignoring my intuition and my discernment, feeling like I had to put other people's needs before my own. Really specific example of this is whenever I was a district manager of the old company I used to work for. Whenever anybody wanted anything from me, I would drop everything to take care of it. It didn't matter if I needed more rest, it didn't matter if I didn't eat that day, it didn't matter if I was working 12 plus hours already. If one of my guys called me and they needed me, I dropped everything to answer for them. And on the outside looking in, that seems really honorable. And that's actually reinforced because of course, if you're working for an organization, they want you to drop everything for the organization. At least that was my experience. I pray that a lot of companies are starting to shift this mentality, and that's part of what I help companies with. But yeah, of course they want you to drop everything, and they actually reward that behavior. So, hey, the more that you sacrifice yourself and serve others, that's leadership. So, again, another limiting belief that I learned as a leader was hey, you got to sacrifice yourself to lead properly. And I learned that in the Marine Corps too. And excuse my French, that's bullshit. Because the reason why I couldn't sustain myself as a leader was because I was abandoning myself. And what people pleasing causes us to do is it causes us to abandon ourselves for the sake of other people. And again, with people pleasing, we think that it comes a lot from insecurity. Um, but it doesn't, or sorry, it does come from insecurity. We think people pleasing comes from generosity, meaning that we think we do it from a place of love, and we really don't. That's the story we tell ourselves that I'm doing this because I want to be there for other people. But deep down, it's because I'm scared of what's gonna happen if I don't do this thing. I'm scared of what's gonna happen if I say no. I'm scared people are gonna leave me, I'm scared I'm gonna get yelled at, I'm scared that uh I'm gonna get fired from my job. So, people pleasing is a pattern of behavior that is rooted in fear. And so, by default, any pattern of behavior that's rooted in fear eventually becomes toxic and destructive. It may not be that bad at first, but then over time it gets more and more moldy. It gets more and more destructive. So if you are listening to this right now and you consider yourself a people pleaser, then I want you to really think about one, how does that show up in your life? Does it show up in the form of you're at work and you're a leader in an organization and it's time for you to go home, you've had a long day, and then your boss asks you to say later and you say yes out of impulse? Does it show up in your relationship where you feel the need to constantly say yes to doing things with your partner because you're scared that if you if you say no, your partner's gonna not gonna like you or they're gonna leave you? Does it show up within yourself of uh let's say that you have an impulse to drink more than you know you probably should, but because you're so used to abandoning yourself, you just say, fuck it, I'm gonna drink anyway. All of that is people pleasing. So ask yourself the question where does people pleasing show up in my life? And then ask yourself, what is the story that I tell myself that causes me to engage in those behaviors? Because our brain is really good at justifying whatever we believe to be true. So if there is a deep-seated belief in you that says that my needs aren't more important than other people's, or my needs aren't aren't important, other people's are, or um, it's not safe for me to be myself, then that's gonna show up as a story. So for me, a lot of times the story was oh, this is it's okay, like I'm helping this person, or when it comes to the context of my relationship, it was um it's whatever she wants. Whatever she wants is fine. I'm I'm fine, I'm content with whatever she wants to do. Even though my body was telling me something different, even though internally I was starting to build resentments. And so, so ask yourself the question, what's the story? And then in order for you to uncover what the belief that's limiting you is, to really see if this is a people-pleasing belief, then I want you to ask yourself the question, what am I scared's gonna happen if I say no? What am I scared's gonna happen if I stop people pleasing? What am I scared's gonna happen if I actually speak up for what I want? And uh whatever comes up when you ask that question is what the limiting belief is. So for me, when I asked myself the question, what am I scared's gonna happen if I say no? Well, I was scared that somebody was gonna leave me in my prior relationships. I was scared that if I said no and I didn't do everything that my partner wanted to do, that they were gonna get tired of me and leave. And where did that stem from for me? Who taught me that? Well, I learned it from my parents. So, another question you can ask yourself once you discover the limiting belief, it's okay, who taught me that? Because that's not inherently my nature. People pleasing is not anybody's inherent nature. Nobody just pops out of the womb being a people pleaser. It's a top behavior, it's a pattern. And that pattern creates a lot of problems in our life. And so instead of looking at the problems and more so looking at the pattern, we can actually address it. So, who taught you the people pleasing pattern? What circumstances did you grow up in? What what situations did you deal with that made it so that people pleasing was the way that you kept yourself safe? So that's really important. And then from there you can ask yourself the question, okay, well, what's a new belief that's gonna better serve me? So instead of the belief that I used to have that says who I am is not good enough, maybe that belief can change into that belief can change to I'm more than enough. Being me is more than enough. The right people will love me for who I am. Awesome. That feels good to my body. That's giving me a little electrical zing, right? So there it's what patterns are gonna reinforce that belief because the thing about belief is itself is not enough. Your belief has to be reinforced by a behavior. So, in order for us to stop self-abandoning, we have to start doing things that actually reinforce the positive belief. So instead of not speaking up when you want something from your partner, maybe the new belief is now asking for what I want. So I gotta prove to myself in my reality that asking for what I want is safe. And I can't do that if I'm not asking for what I want. So I'm gonna lean into the discomfort, I'm gonna change the pattern of suppressing what I want to asking for what I want. And then I'm going to do that in small ways so that I can slowly prove to myself in my nervous system in my mind that it's actually safe for me to ask for what I want. And then I do that enough times, and all of a sudden, that old belief is out the window, that new belief is now installed into my operating system. And what's going to happen is now my perspective of myself and my perspective of the world is going to change because whatever we believe to be true is what shapes our reality. It's what shapes how we view the world and how we view ourselves. So that's a practical step-by-step process you can use to break your people-pleasing pattern or any belief. Um, so let's just re-go through the steps. If you feel like you struggle with people pleasing, one, I want you to understand you are not a people pleaser. So stop saying that. Say, I have a people pleasing pattern that I'm working on. You're not a people pleaser. Anytime you say I am, your brain is gonna lock that in for your identity. It's gonna wire into your nervous system. So quit saying you're a people pleaser, quit identifying with it. Okay, so now I want you to ask yourself the question: how does people pleasing show up in my life? In what ways does people pleasing show up in my life? That's one. So you gotta identify the patterns so you can start separating yourself from them. You are not your patterns, really important. Your value is not your patterns. There are just patterns that help you, and there's patterns that hurt you. People pleasing is a pattern that hurts you. It protected you at one point, but now it's hurting you. Two is what's the story I'm telling myself that gets me to engage in these patterns? So, what's the brain telling you? You gotta figure out the difference between the stories that are true and the stories that aren't. And then three is what am I scared is gonna happen if I stop people pleasing? That's what's gonna reveal the unconscious belief that has been driving this people-pleasing pattern. And then you want to ask yourself the question, who taught me that? Or what taught me that? So you want to trace it back to the root, and this part isn't as important. So if you can't remember that's okay, the most important part is that you actively choose something different. So then you want to ask yourself, what is a belief that would better serve me? So instead of the belief that I have to change who I am to be loved, who I am is more than enough, and the right people will love me for that, as an example. So, whatever the opposite of the limiting belief is, is typically the belief that's gonna empower you. And then it's like, okay, what's the pattern of behavior I need to start embodying to reinforce this new belief? How can I prove to myself that this old belief is bullshit and this new belief is true because we are so powerful, whatever we believe to be true is the reality that we're gonna we're gonna create. We are so powerful that what we believe to be true is the reality that we're gonna create. And then you do it, you commit to it. Easier said than done, but it is very simple. Most things in life are. So, if people pleasing has been holding you back, that's the step by step process that you can take to break free from the cycle of behavior. And I hope this helps you. So, thank you guys so much for listening. Subscribe if you liked it, if you're watching on YouTube, follow along if you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and I'll talk to y'all next time.