People Pleasers Anonymous

Are you a people pleaser?  

I know I am.  But I’m working on it. 

And you know what?  I think this whole topic of being one gets a bad wrap.  We beat ourselves up for trying to shape-shift and accommodate, yet oftentimes, we never really had the chance to choose something different.  

It’s rewarded culturally, relationally, and emotionally as the pay off is so  BIG.  We get to be liked.  That’s a huge hit of dopamine to the system right there.  

So why wouldn’t you be one? 

Being a people pleaser is a learned skill, really.  It can be baked into our personality type as well, so the skill forms unconsciously by learning what behaviors are praised by others around us growing up.  

Some personality types have more of this tendency than others.  For example, 2’s, 3’s, and 4’s are close to, if not at, the top as the heart types tend to be the most image conscious on the Enneagram.  They depend on the opinion of others to give them information about how to be in the world.  So they have to work a bit harder in order to balance out this tendency.  

I believe any personality type can struggle with pleasing people to some degree, though.  Beyond a type, we are humans and humans are in the big business of survival.  I like how Lynda Roberts explains the ego.  She says, “The ego is our survival strategy for planet earth.”  Simply put, our ego helps us survive in a scary world.  

If something has worked for you for a long time, it’s tough to suddenly shift gears.  That positive feedback becomes so ingrained, it’s almost undetectable.  

So what do we do?

I love what an old therapist of mine used to say,  “People pleasing is really just lying.”

Ouch!

I’d never really thought of it that way before, but it makes sense.   After reading Martha Beck’s latest book, The Way of Integrity, (which I HIGHLY recommend), I became so aware of how unhappy we are in life when we are not in integrity with our truth.  Essentially, when we aren’t telling the truth, we suffer.  

So, as I’ve started to become aware of my own subtle tendency to people-please, I now see it as not telling the truth, and as a result, damaging my life and the person I’m lying to in the name of being sweet.  

I’ve become more comfortable with saying “no” as a complete sentence as well as using responses such as, “I don’t know,” and “Let me think about  that,” or “That doesn’t feel true for me.”  

If you’re a people pleaser, I challenge you to adopt these small movements, because over time, I believe they get us closer to where we ultimately want to be…home to the truth of who we are.