What is people-pleasing and why is it so damn hard to stop?

What Is a People-Pleaser?

In short, a people-pleaser is a person who puts others’ needs ahead of their own, and they do this not wholly from an altruistic place. Rather, people-pleasers are often driven by their own insecurities, and their actions rarely align with their true desires. While people-pleasers may be viewed by others as agreeable, helpful, and kind, people-pleasers often resent their overextended commitments and often feel taken advantage of.

Signs You Might Be a People-Pleaser

There are a number of characteristics that people-pleasers tend to share. Some common people-pleasing behaviors include:

You have a difficult time saying “No“

You are preoccupied with what other people might think.

You feel guilty when you do tell people “No”

You fear that turning people down will make them think you are lazy or selfish.

You agree to things you don’t like or do things you don’t want to do.

You want people to like you and feel that doing things for them will earn their approval.

You’re always telling people you’re sorry.

You take the blame even when something isn’t your fault.

You never have any free time because you are always doing things for other people.

You neglect your own needs in order to do things for others.

You pretend to agree with people even though you feel differently.

Did you know that people-pleasers are also highly intuitive? They tend to be good at tuning in to what others are feeling and are generally empathetic, thoughtful, and caring. In part, this is what makes them so good at people-pleasing. But these positive qualities may also come with a poor self-image, a need to take control, or a tendency to overachieve.

Why is it hard to stop?

Our natural survival tendencies are part of the reasons people-pleasing is hard to stop. The primary purpose of your brain is to keep you alive. Both humans and animals have brains that focus on three simple motivations to increase the odds of survival:

Focus #1: Avoid pain

Focus #2: Seek pleasure

Focus #3: Be efficient and conserve your energy

These three tendencies comprise our brain’s motivational triad. The net result is that we are always driving to do things that won’t hurt us, feel good, and require the least amount of effort. These primary motivations are how we have, historically, survived.

We were motivated to hunt, have sex, and seek warm shelter by our desire for pleasure. We stayed vigilant to avoid any potential danger/pain. We didn’t waste energy lifting weights or running just for the fun of it because we were motivated to conserve our energy. (This is why exercise can feel so daunting until you can start being motivated to pursue the resulting endorphins — it’s your brain’s fault, not yours!)

Now that we have evolved into modern society, the motivations of this primitive brain don’t necessarily “fit” into our society. In fact, those parts of our brains can stunt our development —

The desire to avoid pain will result in you avoiding new experiences or potential risks. This is what drives many of us to avoid conflict by people-pleasing. Furthermore, we often people-please because it’s easier and feels better (in the moment) than saying “No” and potentially damaging the relationship. People-pleasing also gives us that temporary endorphin rush that often arises when we feel needed. But as many of us know, those positive effects are short-lived and quickly spiral into overwhelm, frustration, and resentment.

While we are well aware of the negative effects of people-pleasing, why is it so hard to stop? That one is also attributable to your primitive brain and the drive to be efficient.

Given the chance, your brain will stay on autopilot rethinking the same old thoughts and beliefs you have relied on since childhood. All of those beliefs that formed the basis of people-pleasing — “I can’t say no, people will get mad at me, they will stop giving me work, they will think I’m not a team player, I might get fired, they will judge me, they won’t like me…” — will continue to run on autopilot in the background, driving you to continue to show up and act in the same way, continually recreating the same result. In other words, our brain’s desire to remain efficient will continually remind us why we can’t stop people-pleasing. Our brain’s efficient patterns will keep us sticking to those same old beliefs that created this problem from the outset.

Other Reasons We People-Please

In order to stop being a people-pleaser, it’s important to understand some of the reasons why you might be engaging in this kind of behavior. So what else is driving this tendency? There are a number of factors that might play a role, including:

• Low self-esteem: Sometimes people engage in people-pleasing behavior because they don’t value their own desires and needs. This may be due to a lack of self-confidence which drives a need for external validation where we feel that doing things for others will lead to approval and acceptance.

• Insecurity: In other cases, people might try to please others because they worry that other people won’t like them if they don’t go above and beyond to make them happy.

• Perfectionism: People-pleasers often want others to think and feel about them in a certain way — someone who can do it all seamlessly. That drive for perfection is at odds with setting healthy boundaries and saying “No,” so we fall into a people-pleasing pattern.

• Past experiences: Setting boundaries and using our voices isn’t always well received. If we have painful, difficult, or traumatic experiences around times when we tried to stand up for ourselves, it may also play a role. People who have experienced painful feedback in the past may try to please others and be as agreeable as possible in order to avoid triggering that same behavior in others.

How You Know It’s A Problem

Being kind and altruistic is not necessarily a problem. However, if you are trying to win the approval of others in order to shore up weak self-esteem or if you are pursuing the happiness of others at the expense of your own emotional well-being, you are creating a pattern that will only result in self-destruction.

Side effects of people-pleasing include:

• Anger and frustration. Excessive people-pleasing can often leave us feeling taken advantage of and unimportant. We feel like no one seems to care about our wants and needs, which breeds frustration and resentment.

• Depleted willpower. Devoting all of your energy and mental resources toward making sure that others are happy means you are less likely to have the resolve and willpower to tackle your own goals. This tendency can also create a harmful pattern of self-sacrifice or self-neglect where the people-pleaser resists advocating for themselves.

• Lack of authenticity. People-pleasers often hide their own needs and preferences in order to accommodate other people. This makes us feel like we are living a lie — we become disconnected with our own true wants and needs and sometimes forget them entirely. This inauthenticity also breeds its own form of frustration.

• Relationships suffer. When we don’t share our true feelings and needs, it’s difficult for other people to get to know the real you. Vulnerable honesty is important in any close relationship, but it can feel impossible if the relationship is founded upon people-pleasing.

If you find yourself caught up in people-pleasing tendencies, check out the Lawyer Life Podcast episode on People Pleasing to learn how to deconstruct that pattern. If you are ready to dig in and do the work to stop people-pleasing for good, sign up for a free coaching consult to see what we can do together!

When I was in my early 20s, I moved to Washington, DC to work for a boutique law firm. While there, my direct supervisors were from New York City. A farm girl from Iowa was quite the novelty in my little office and I was often chided for my “Mid-west Nice” attitude. After that excursion, my next legal job took me to national law firm in the Midwest. There my supervisor was another New Yorker and once again my Midwest Nice was met with ire. At first their criticism of my midwestern attitude bothered me–after all, I was just being polite and what was wrong with that?! Over time, I realized that what they were criticizing wasn’t midwestern civility. What they saw instead was an insecure young attorney who was afraid to make waves: who was afraid to be honest for fear of upsetting others. What they saw was people-pleasing disguised as good manners.

People pleasing tendencies. We’ve all got them. It may seem like simple Midwest Nice but at it’s core, people-pleasing is rooted in deception. When we put the needs and feelings of others before our own, we relegate our truth. We relegate our voices and we implicitly acknowledge that we are less important that those we are desperately trying to please.

My own lady lawyer coach recently blew my mind.

She said, “Frustration is often a sign of an unfulfilled intention.”

Whenever we are feeling frustrated it’s usually because we have stifled our truths and we aren’t showing up authentically or in the ways that we truly want to show up. We are frustrated because, for whatever reason, we feel like we are being inhibited in our ability to be honest.

For instance, when we are frustrated that we have more work than we want, at it’s core is frustration with ourselves for not protecting our capacity and being honest — because we really wanted to say, Absolutely not, I cannot do that project, I have more work than I need right now. We ignore our genuine intention of standing up for ourselves and being honest and that drives our frustration.

When we are frustrated with the people in our lives, the reason that frustration flourishes is because we aren’t taking authentic action to overcome it — instead of having a real conversation with the source of our frustration, we just rant and rave. We ignore our intention to have open, honest relationships with the people in our lives. When we stifle that true intention, if fuels the fires of frustration.

When we are frustrated after conversations with our supervisors, it’s often because there are things we wanted to say but didn’t. Truths we left hidden because we were afraid to bare them.

When we get frustrated with our parents, it’s easy to spin in anger over years of unspoken exasperations from the past. All the things we have wanted to say, all the hurts we wanted to address but never did. All those intentions left unanswered.

Frustration is often a sign that we are people pleasing: that we are not living in alignment with our intentions. It’s uncomfortable to be open and honest and give air to our true intentions.

But it’s also uncomfortable to live inauthentically — to live in frustration. It’s exhausting!

Besides, the truth always makes itself known.

When we people please, we trade our truths for immediate but temporary gratification. That frustrated, unlived intention will fester below the surface and eventually make itself known–except usually by that point the frustration has evolved from a rumble to a cataclysmic event. Enter the rage quit/breakup/meltdown/epic battle where all those past hurts and unspoken intentions come tumbling out.

In order to have real, lasting relationships we must invest in authenticity and allow those around us to know the real us.

If you are frustrated with your job, your career, or your relationships, or if you are challenged to overcome your own people-pleasing tendencies, you are not alone! I would love the opportunity to support you in the same way I support my clients. Schedule a free consultation today.

When you feel yourself being tempted to please others in a manner that is not consistent with your truth, choose instead to have your own back. To honor your deepest intentions.

Choose instead to have real, authentic relationships with everyone in your life. Like everything else, relationships are yin and yang — the other person can’t always have all the power, it will shift. Relationships can’t always be calm waters. When we people please to try and avoid the 50/50 of life, we only delay the inevitable. In doing so we diminish our own value and degrade our own truths.

Real relationships will require you to use your voice and have your own back when it comes to your own wants and needs. Anything else is a just a pretty dictatorship and you are playing the court jester.

Photo by Brett Jordan

When we operate from our prefrontal cortex (the grown-up part of our brain that’s good at planning, strategizing, and anticipating challenges) it’s easy for us to see where change needs to happen. It’s easy for us to identify areas of our life where a new boundary would be helpful. We can look at our To Do List and the tasks that we take on and easily come up with things that we could take off our plates. Logically, this all makes sense but executing is where the battleground begins.

Once we’ve started something we have a hard time backing out. Once we’ve developed a pattern of saying “yes” we struggle to develop a new pattern. Even if we know intellectually that a new pattern will benefit everyone in the long run.

When we know that we need more “no” in our life, the only way we are going to get there is if we can deconstruct the rationale that got us to the place of overloaded to begin with. The next time someone asks you to take on an additional project or to sit on an extra board or help them through a problem, whatever it may be, we must pause in those moments and ask ourselves what rationale is driving us to accept these requests. It likely sounds something like this:

I should help

It’s the right thing to do (meaning, if I say “no” I’m not being a good person)

I don’t want to disappoint anyone

If I don’t say “yes” there will be a negative consequence (I won’t get anymore clients, I will lose out on work, people won’t trust me, people won’t like me, etc.)

All of these thoughts are incredibly persuasive in the moment. All of these thoughts are also rooted in fear. We worry that if we don’t help, others will judge us. We worry that others will think we’re not a good person or we’re not a team player. We worry that something bad will happen if we don’t follow through on all of these requests.

Sound familiar? Setting boundaries and time management is a huge part of my work with my clients. If you want to change the way you respond to requests and manage your time, grab a free consult and let’s get to work. You deserve better!

Those fear-based thoughts spring from our fight or flight brain that wants us to continue our usual routine of saying “yes” and chasing the endorphins of people pleasing. When we consider saying “no” and deviating from this pattern, our survival brain goes on the defensive. It starts offering to us all the reasons why this new approach will be catastrophic for our lives and our reputations. Knowing this, we must look at all of those fear-based thoughts and challenge them (using our prefrontal cortex).

I should help.

What does that even mean?! How do you know when you should help?! Who decides? Would everyone agree with that?

When we tell ourselves that we “should” help we often get ourselves into scenarios where we’re overloaded and we do a poor job in the end. In fact, it would be more of a service to the person making the request if we actually didn’t help because it’s possible they would find someone with more capacity who could do a better job. In other words, when you find your brain telling you that you should help the exact opposite is typically true: you should not help. Back away! Let them find someone else who will be more engaged and more available for the task.

It’s the right thing to do.

Again, says who?! What does that even? Is it right to help people when you don’t really want to? Isn’t that just dishonesty in a prettier outfit? Besides, when it comes to the “right thing” to do, shouldn’t your wants, needs, and sanity be the primary driver of those decisions?!

I don’t want to disappoint anyone.

The only way we disappoint people is when we overcommit ourselves, overextend ourselves, and do not show up in the manner that the requestor knows we can provide. When we say “yes” even though we mean “no,” we set ourselves on a clear path to likely disappoint not only the requester but other people who have similar requests already sitting on our plates.

Similarly, when we tell ourselves something bad will happen if we don’t say “yes,” it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are likely to take on something that we don’t have capacity for and we do a bad job and create a negative consequence simply by doing a bad job and not being able to show up as our best selves. It’s a lose-lose scenario.

All of these thoughts are red flags that we are setting ourselves up to create the exact opposite result than what we’re wanting. More failure, disappointment, and chaos await us when we allow those thoughts to drive our actions.

Rather than allowing ourselves to be persuaded by these thoughts, we must remain rooted and grounded in our commitment to ourselves, our balance, and our happiness. We must reconnect with our prefrontal cortex that knows we already have enough on our plate, we’re already overextended, and some things just have to start coming off the list. Allow our prefrontal cortex to make those decisions ahead of time and go into the day knowing that any new request will be met with a simple “no”.

That is power.

That is having your own back.

That is putting yourself in a position to show up as your best self every time and ensuring that when people rely on you, you will have the time and energy to rise up and meet those expectations because you’re caring for yourself first.

Photo by Isaiah Rustad on Unsplash

Should is such a worthless word. The word “should” only matters when we are talking about something factual, provable, demonstrable. My coffee pot should turn on when I plug it in. My email should transmit when I click send. The light should turn on when I flip the switch.

“Should” makes sense in this scenario because these things are designed to operate in a certain way. There’s a manual that supports your conclusion that these machines are supposed to act in a certain way. You bought them for a very specific purpose, to perform a very clear task. We know what this thing is supposed to do: it is widely understood and accepted.

That usage has no translation to human beings. There is no manual, there is no widely understood and accepted understanding of how we are supposed to act.

You can argue religious mores and social norms all you like; they are not universally held or agreed upon.

But yet here we are, constantly telling ourselves what we “should” be doing. How we are supposed to act.

As a practicing lawyer, I often find myself in situations where people that I love want me to help them sort out their legal struggles. (For background, my specialty is in ERISA, taxes, DOL/IRS funsies.) In all honesty, my utility in helping family and friends with their legal issues is fairly limited. File a lawsuit? No thanks, my secretary knows more about that than I do (she also supports a busy litigator).  It’s difficult for non-lawyers to appreciate that lawyers, like doctors, have their own unique specialties. Just as you would not ask a gynecologist to opine on your ear ache, asking an ERISA attorney to advise you on your divorce is ill-advised (for all parties).

But yet, so many of my clients struggle with saying no.

They have a hard time admitting that they don’t know all aspects of the law. They have a hard time saying “no” to their loved ones who want support for their legal challenges. They know enough to be dangerous and can probably “figure it out.”

So many of my clients back themselves into a corner, agreeing to do things that they don’t REALLY want to do, things that they shouldn’t do, things that ask them to color outside the lines. They agree to do it because they feel like they “should” help as much as they can. But then as they settle into the work, they are fuming. How could they have asked me to do this? How rude of them to expect that I have time for this? They should be paying someone to do this (not me!).

Instead of being honest with the people in our lives, we mislead them and mischaracterize our interest in helping. In other words, we lie to them and then we get angry for having to do the work. We pretend like these other people forced us into this predicament. Why? Because we SHOULD help.

What would it be like to have an honest and authentic conversation with these people instead of lying to them? What would it be like to believe

I can help them to the best of my ability without taking on this project for them. I can support from the sidelines.

This goes for all areas of our lives where we struggle to say NO to those we love.

We want them to love us, admire us, believe in us.

We are so willing to trade our own truth for the possibility of them thinking about us in a certain way. This is really very simple manipulation! But here’s the truth, you can’t control what they think of you. So it’s a totally FUTILE manipulation attempt.

What’s more, you can decide what you want to make it mean when you say “no.” You can choose to believe that you are letting them down and that you SHOULD help them. Or you can choose to believe that loving them and  being honest with them is your greatest contribution.

You can support your loved ones and not agree to do things you don’t want to do.

Seek authenticity and honesty in all your relationships. It is okay to say “No” when you want to say no.

You don’t need a good reason for it and you don’t need to explain yourself. There is no manual you must follow, you get to do whatever you want because you are a human. Period.

What is the upside of doing that thing you didn’t want to do? How much fun is it to fume about the project every step of the way and beat yourself up for saying yes? How is that serving the relationship?

As lawyers, we have a lot of experience and knowledge that we can offer those around us. With that ability comes the need to set clear boundaries and honor yourself by learning when to say no.

Invest in your relationships and invest in your own integrity. Your relationships will thrive because of it.

Having a challenging relationship? Need help saying no? I’m free if you are.

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