Are You a Pleaser?

If you consider yourself a pleaser - this episode is for you.
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If this is hard to acknowledge or focus on about yourself - I get it. I am a recovering pleaser myself.
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As a pleaser saying yes to others often means saying no to some deeper part of yourself, such as your core values, legitimate needs, or important goals.
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​In the moment, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but over time can really wear on you.
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While it might be hard to admit and even harder to look at - I want you to know that when you are willing to own this part of yourself is when you have complete freedom to harness the strengths that lie at the foundation.
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In this podcast - I describe the thinking, behaviors and unfulfilling patterns that tend to repeat for a pleaser and show you what you can do DIFFERENLTY that will result in more time and energy and heart to pour into the most important parts of your life!

Episode Mentioned:
#67: Are You a Hyper-Achiever

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Carla Reeves, and this is Differently, a podcast where we explore the ins and outs of what becomes possible when we're willing to think, do, and show up differently to the moments of our everyday lives. For new listeners, and for those of you who may not know, I have been coaching ambitious leaders and hyper-achievers for over a decade. Leaders who've experienced success in some part of their lives, but who feel stuck, have lost their spark, are tired of just going through the motions and ready to take their life to the next level. Our work together is about calming that mental noise, upgrading your internal dialogue, shedding those outdated patterns, and equipping you with tools to be more present and engaged in your work, relationships, and life to create sustainable momentum towards all the important parts of your life. Today I want to speak to the pleasers. In this episode, I will describe the thinking, behaviors, and unfulfilling patterns that tend to repeat for you and show you what you can do differently that will result in more heart and time and energy to put into the most important parts of your life. Hang on, here we go. I want to talk to all the pleasers out there. I know that it might not be something that you want to acknowledge or focus on about yourself. And I get it. I had a coach one time tell me that I graduated nice camp in air quotes. I hated when people would say I was nice. And I often heard that. And on and on. Nice felt boring. And honestly, for me it was. I thought that in order to get the outside approval and validation that I deeply wanted, that it required pleasing others and uh being overly nice. And I created rules for myself that said, you know, don't rock the boat or don't have bold opinions, make sure you blend in, do nice things, do whatever it takes to make sure that people around you uh like you. Before likes, the thumbs up uh icon that we know it as today, I was trying to get likes. It was a game and I figured out how to win. The only problem was that while I got the short-term win, the long-term impact was detrimental to myself and others. Because it didn't matter how many likes I got. The moment that they subsided, I had to work harder, please more, give more to get more. And this vicious cycle never stopped. It was a bottomless pit. I was making the outer world responsible for feeling something inside of me that was truly not their job, not their problem, and was putting way too much on people around me. What I discovered was that this was an inside job and one I could only take responsibility for because regardless of how many likes I got, if I didn't believe it inside, it fell flat and empty. I am so excited to be talking about this topic on the podcast today, because over the years of coaching ambitious leaders, you might be surprising, but this is a topic that comes up over and over again. And so I want to just give you a quick snapshot of how to know. Um, these are just a little snapshot, we'll go deeper into it later. But you might be a pleaser if you find yourself doing these things. One is saying yes to others when you really mean no. And this can look like you're weary and worn out, but you don't want to let others down, and so you say yes, but you later resent it. You do things even though they may not be aligned for you or in your best judgment because you want to make someone else happy. Saying what you think people want to hear instead of saying what's on your heart to say. The next one is taking loads of responsibility for other other people's feelings, emotions, well-being. And while you do this, your own falls to the wayside. Another one that shows up is shrinking or contorting yourself to accommodate others and what you think they want, taking too much responsibility. This can look like overworking, overgiving, overcommitting, overcompensating. The next one is quieting yourself and your own needs because it feels selfish to you. And the last one we're going to talk about here is just caving to social pressure. And it makes it hard to stand in your own values and commitments because you have this have put others on a pedestal and tend to want to accommodate them or please them, and your own uh beliefs and ideals maybe uh get pushed to the wayside. And this can all look like saying, sure, I can do that. Yes, sure, I'm available. Meanwhile, dropping the thing that you told yourself that you would do. And over and over, in a one-time action, it's a small thing, but over time it builds up. This strategy, and it is a strategy, works well for a while. You appear as a team player, super helpful, someone people like to have around, but over time there's an impact. Some of the familiar feelings that you may experience as a pleaser is there's like an inner turmoil that sets in, feelings of resentment or disappointment, feelings fester because they're not really addressed and they build up over time, and then you may kind of have an outburst of some sort. And then there's regret. Internally, problems tend to arise when saying yes to others because it means saying no to some deeper part of yourself, such as your core values, your legitimate needs or important goals. You may have even lost touch with these deeper parts of yourself. I certainly did, because you're so used to accommodating to other people other people's preferences and responding to their needs. While it might be hard to admit and even harder to look at, I want you to know that when you're willing to own this part of yourself is when you have complete freedom to harness the strengths that lie at the foundation. The perceived solution inside of this is often to get stronger and more confident and learn to say no and be more bold and prioritize better and work harder and be just be more organized, and then you can make your own uh things a priority and a real priority. And this is an illusion. The real solution is to address the part within yourself that drives this need to please. And it's, you know, it's it rooted in a survival mechanism that uh helped you for probably a lot of years of your life and probably even gave you some level of success in your life. And for me, it was a need for approval and acceptance and validation that I was looking for from the external world that I later realized, as I mentioned, could only be filled from the inside out. And this survival way of living likely supported you as it did me for some time, but it's the very thing in the way uh from what you want to create in your life now and shining a light on the roots of this, while it can feel scary, is the very thing that will give you um freedom and have the permission to create a new game in your life now. I've been studying the work of Shurzad Shameen around positive intelligence, and he he talks about the saboteurs, and I covered the hyper-achiever saboteur in episode 67. If you want to go back, today we're talking about the pleaser saboteur. Shurzad describes the saboteurs as those voices in your head that generate negative emotions in the way that you handle life's everyday challenges, and they represent automated patterns in your mind for how you think, feel, and respond. And they are uh really at the root of cause for much of our stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, restlessness, and unhappiness. And they also sabotage our performance, well-being, and relationships. And so while the pleaser is a saboteur to your greatest intentions and goals, at the heart of the pleaser are some really beautiful, important, highly valuable strengths. And I want to make sure that I mention those. The strengths of the pleaser are empathic, um, you know, they feel others deeply and um can almost put themselves in the shoes of others and feel what they're feeling. Uh, pleasers are very loving and giving, they're very tuned into um others' feelings and needs, they're very emotionally self-aware, and they have potential for very high emotional intelligence. And while I work with a lot of hyper-achievers, um the pleasers uh also tends to run high in most of my clients as well. So in Shurzad's work, uh he describes the definition of the pleaser as indirectly someone who's indirectly trying to gain acceptance and affection by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering others. They lose sight of their own needs and become resentful as a as a result. The pleaser tries to earn attention and acceptance through helping others. Uh, it's an indirect attempt to have one's emotional needs met, and it's fed by two original assumptions that are picked up in childhood, which is one, I must put others' needs ahead of my own. And two, I must give love and affection to get any back. And I must earn it, and I'm not simply worthy of it. The patterns of the pleaser, as we've taught gave you a snapshot, this is gonna uh we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into those. But inside of um his work, he talks about when the pleaser strength is overused or untamed, uh, they often describe these type of patterns showing up for people. Uh again, a strong need to be liked by people and attempts to earn it by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering, needs frequent reassurance by others about their acceptance and affection, and can't express their own needs openly and directly. Uh, they do so indirectly by having people feeling obligated to reciprocate. And I know that if you're listening and you're finding that a lot of this resonates for you, it can be hard to kind of accept that about yourself, at least it was for me, and I know it is for some of my clients. But know that knowing this and a greater level of awareness around what this is inside of you, where you're overusing it, and how you can really harness the strength of the pleaser uh can be life-changing. So some of the thoughts of the pleaser um are to be a good person, I should put the needs of others ahead of my own. It bothers me when people don't notice or care about what I've done for them. Uh, they can be um selfish or ungrateful. I haven't really seen that honestly in the work with my clients, but that's what it says here, according to Shirzad Shameen's work. The next one is I give away too much and don't think of myself enough. I can make anyone like me. And if I don't rescue people who will, expressing own needs directly feels selfish. Um, they're worried that insisting on their own needs may push others away. Um, and they often feel resentful for being taken for granted, but they have difficulty expressing this. And the last one is the world would be a better place if everyone did the same. So sometimes, as the pleaser, you're such a helper, such a giver, and you often expect other people to operate in life the same way and can feel frustrated about that. So, some of the patterns, I want to dive a little bit deeper into the places that I've really seen show up for my clients and the places I help my clients really break free of. One is being the peacemaker. And when you're a peacemaker trying to make everybody happy, you really feel like it's your job and responsibility to make sure everyone's happy and you sacrifice yourself in order to do that. And often this can show up in staying in relationships for too long, um, even though relationships might feel lopsided to you because you've taught other people in your life that you are that person, that you give more, you extend more, you're always available for other people. And so you've taught people that this is how you are, and maybe that you don't need as much. And then later you can feel sad that other people don't give that back to you. People get stuck here because this behavior is not sustainable. Um, but making any kind of change can feel really, really scary because you're afraid other people won't still like you and they might go away. The beautiful thing here is that it is possible to teach people how to be in a relationship with you now in a really loving, uh gentle, generous kind of way. Often it also shows up as putting others before myself. So with this job of having to make others happy, pleasers often, you know, keep that peace and harmony, even if it means sacrificing their own. And they become very, very good at it and they get a lot of worthiness and validation and acknowledgement from doing this. People really like to be around you because you can adapt and adjust to anyone and fit in or feel liked. The problem is you're like a chameleon and may struggle to feel deeply seen in your relationships, which kind of leads to the next one, which is contorting yourself to be liked. Because I contorted myself to what I thought others liked or wanted of me, and because that is not sustainable, when you do start behaving like yourself, others may have fallen in love with a different version of you and a version that wasn't so authentic. And so sometimes I've seen with clients as they start to show up as their true selves, their relationships might start to shift and change. That's okay. The next pattern that I see show up again and again again and again and again is that it can be hard to ask for what you want. Um, you may have trouble, a pleaser has trouble asking for what they want because they've become so accustomed to always taking care of the needs of other people that it actually feels selfish and they've made it their job to be the givers. Their own needs go unmet and it feels lopsided. They end up disappointed. The next one is holding back. A pleaser might keep their own problems to themselves to avoid being too much for others, or out of a fear of being unliked or pushed away. And we've talked about this, ends up feeling frustrated and resentful because they wait for others to behave the way that they do and thinking others should behave this way, and then they feel frustrated. And resentment builds, and eventually it may kind of blow up, or they end up leaving a relationship that may have been a really great relationship, but they just never learned to make sure that their needs were getting met inside of the relationship, too. The cost or impact of this, you can feel it, right? Um, I know it firsthand. The the real cost is that your life doesn't feel like your own. And you have desires deep down that you can't ever find the time or energy to nurture because you're afraid to do that because you might lose connection, relationship, or approval. And that feels detrimental. And the ultimate cost is sort of a not sort of, but it is a betrayal of self. That's not sustainable. So if this is you, I want to help, um, there's a huge opportunity to take the strength of the pleaser and leverage it uh in your life. I had a friend once say that actually it was on a podcast episode on communicating your strengths with Jennifer Vansel. And she talked about really when you're leveraging, learning to leverage a strength, you because you can overuse a strength and it becomes a weakness. You need to learn to, uh, similar to a pot on the stove, sometimes we, you know, we turn it on high and it boils over and creates all that white, frothy stuff and kind of boils over. That's sort of a metaphor for when you're overusing a strength. And when you're when you've got it too low and the water isn't even getting hot, um, you're underusing a strength. But the idea is to find that really nice simmer where it's not too cold and it's not boiling over. And that's the idea for any of these saboteurs and the strengths is we want to find that nice temperature where um it really propels our life and our relationships forward. So here are some things you can do right at right away that will make a difference is one, like everything else, start to pay attention, start to raise your awareness and notice all the mental noise and the rules and the ideas that you've sort of sentenced yourself to living by really shining a light and looking at that. Does it make sense anymore? Is it helping your life move forward? Is it strengthening your relationships and on and on? Start to ask those really powerful questions and call out the lies of the uh pleaser saboteur that tell you that in order to have great relationships, you need to do this. Because my belief is that in order to have great, strong, healthy, thriving relationships, you really want to learn how to step out of the saboteur of the pleaser and step into the strength of it. And it will uh, contrary to what our mind wants to tell us, it's not going to weaken relationships in your life or push them away. It's really going to strengthen them. Um, the second one is resist the urge to think for others. I did this for years, um, trying to think or anticipate what others want of me or think I should do, and then try to fit into that mold. It's a never-ending bottomless pit. You're never going to please everyone. And so why not bring it back to yourself and really start to just think for yourself? Ask questions where needed instead of assuming what others think. And what if you started to just take actions that you could stand tall in? That will make a difference. The next one is do differently. Instead of just doing what you've always done, start to take an inventory of the way you behave and move and work when it comes into your relationships. Notice it, collect data, start to be curious about it, because that data then is access for you to start to make some simple, small changes. Give yourself permission to take up space and share yourself. Uh, this is something that I continuously work on in my own life because it's so easy to sit back and give space to others. And so I encourage you to practice with that. Another one is notice when you're saying yes, when you actually mean no, and start practicing being authentic and truthful in little small, easy places. Practice asking for what you want again in simple, small ways to start. Know that being a giver is. And allowing space for others and being generous, which is all part of the pleaser strength, it can all feel so much better. And when you take responsibility for the overgiving and overextending of yourself and start to also give that space and energy to take care of your own well-being and your own goals and things that are most important, that you will actually have more to give. And it will come from an entirely different place and feel so good. So when I work with clients in this area, I really walk them through the very steps to changing the pattern in their life, where it can feel while it can feel like others need to change, the real work and the true lasting change change comes when you start to change from the inside out. This is my life's work and passion to help people do this. And some of the steps that we go through is really setting the past in the past so that those survival patterns don't continue to replay in your life today. Equip you with new approaches and simple ways to create new patterns and outcomes in your life. We really set you up to create healthy boundaries when it comes to your yeses and your no's and your energy and your time and really teach you to do that with love so that it feels authentic. We really help you to start to teach other people how to be in relationship now so that it is healthy and thriving. And we work on small steps in the moment that equip you to have simple, truthful conversations that move your relationships forward in a really amazing way. And over time you build this muscle until it becomes your new norm. When this gets more healthy for you, you get to give all that energy and love back to everyone around you. And for those of you who are parents, it can feel selfish sometimes to do this work in your own life, but know that when you model this for your children, it downloads to them. They're watching what you do far more than they're listening to what you say. And when you do this work in your own life, I've watched it uh download to the children. So that's a beautiful side effect. In closing, I love pleasers. Pleasers, you are big-hearted, you are generous, you're giving people who want to be of service. And the goal is not to get rid of this strength. The goal is to lead from this strength. And when you do, you will be able to serve and give and share your big heart from a full tank and without the need for anything in return. And it will feel amazing. As you can see, the pleaser has a great strength, and when overused, can have a huge impact. And it's really about having awareness and choice that you can make in the little moments to ensure that you're showing up in a way that moves you closer to the life you want to create, who you want to be, and all the amazing things you want to do while you are here on this planet. If you're listening and know this is you and you realize that you want to shift the way you leverage this saboteur and strength in your everyday life, I would love to help connect with me on Instagram. If we're not connected there, you can also connect with me on LinkedIn, reach out to me through uh direct message, or schedule a time to just talk a little bit more and understand uh what's possible for you. And there's always a link in the show notes to do that. Thank you so much for being a listener of this podcast. And if you know of a pleaser in your life who could benefit from this message, please pass it along to someone that you love. I look forward to seeing you next week. Have a beautiful rest of your day. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Differently. I hope it stirred your thinking, and I invite you to take one inspired action from something that stood out to you. If you want to hear more conversations like this, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. And if this episode could impact someone you know, please pass it along. Remember, new episodes drop weekly. See you next week.