Cure for People Pleasing!

Hi, I'm Jess Hendrick, conscious relationship coach, and we're going to talk about the concept of people pleasing. So it's really interesting when you kind of dissect it and take it apart a little bit, because when we feel the need to make other people happy or please others, a lot of times our own intuition and our own needs are are put on the back burner in order to try to make someone else happy. Why doesn't this work? Well, for one, when you are constantly focusing on someone else other than yourself, you can actually start building up resentment towards that person because you're not honoring yourself and you're not filling your own cup first. So what that might look like is being a little irritable with them or maybe being a little passive-aggressive or coming out in a way other than healthy conscious communication. So that's one thing is that trying to make other people happy and putting their needs before our own can create resentment with us which then impacts the relationship as a whole, right? Secondly, what people-pleasing can do is cause us to go crazy because we can never make everyone happy. No matter what we do, we're never going to be able to make everyone happy. And so we might as well just stop trying. And this is what brings me to the most important thing we can do for all of our relationships is if we can focus on filling our own cup first, giving ourselves what we need, not looking outside of ourselves to people, to different external situations or circumstances to help us to feel happy, but to really take responsibility for our own happiness and tune in with ourselves every day and see, OK, what can I do today that would support my happiness or that would fill my cup? And the reason this is so, so important is because when we fill ourselves up first, we fill our own cup first, we then show up as a higher, more loving version of ourselves to everyone that we come into contact with. So really the whole idea behind people pleasing, it's well-meaning, but it's backwards because if we continue to give, give, give, give without filling ourselves up, we're going to be depleted and we're going to get resentful and that is not going to help our relationships. And if you want to go even a level deeper, I was working with a client and we had this, we had this revelation together that actually at the deepest core of it, people pleasing is a little selfish on our part because if we're acting in a certain way to avoid creating discord or discomfort for ourselves, like if speaking our truth would maybe create some conflict or just some discomfort, we would have to then sit with our discomfort and have another opportunity to meet our own needs in that area. So if we think, okay, I'm just going to say what they want or do what they want to make them happy, we're actually trying to avoid our own discomfort. So I hope this is helpful and I hope this gives you an excuse to really go and fill up your own cup. Cup first, knowing that doing that is the best thing you can do for yourself and all the people that you love in your life.