How to Stop People Pleasing This Year

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Welcome to today's episode of welcome to the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself. Because if you can improve yourself, you can improve your life. So ultimately that's what we're trying to do. If that's what you're interested in, hit that subscribe button. Today I'm going to be talking to you about how to stop being a people pleaser and how to actually start setting authentic boundaries in your life so that you can regain your own confidence. So let's dive in. Let's talk about people pleasing. First off, let's really start to define what people pleasing is. People pleasing is basically an adaptive behavior where people prioritize the needs of other people, the desires of other people, the approval of others over their own. And so they put everybody else first and they put themselves last. The core of it is is a strong desire more than anything else to just be accepted by other people. And this in turn leads to actions that are more about making other people happy than about fulfilling your own personal needs, your own personal desires, and just throwing yourself at the back. And it's really about making other people happy or what you think will make other people happy and just Ignore your own needs. And so let's immediately go to where does people pleasing start? Well, you guessed it. Just as everything we basically talk about in this podcast almost always starts in the childhood, right? People pleasing often starts in childhood. And kids learn from early ages that certain behaviors get them praise from their parents, certain behaviors get them the exact opposite from their parents. And sometimes they get praise from their teachers, and sometimes they get reprimanded from their teachers. And so, you know, certain behaviors will get us praise when we're younger and certain behaviors will get us reprimanded. And once again, if you have children, if you want children, what it's really important to understand is that all a young child really cares about more than anything else, and this isn't really like a conscious thought, it's just a subconscious, underlying, omnipresent feeling is does my mother love me and does my father love me? And I understand that sometimes children need to be reprimanded. But to a child, what reprimanding really feels like is a retraction of love. And so what happens is, is a lot of times people become people pleasers because it was something that they had to do in childhood to not feel their parents love be retracted from them. So what do they do? Whatever their parent wants them to do to not feel insecure about that parent's love. So for example, a child might notice that if they get good grades or if they're very obedient, it makes their parents happy. And over time, what happens is the child starts doing things to get the parent's approval that not the things that they actually want to do. And so it's not always just, it's not just this one way that it happens. I'm gonna give you quite a few examples today, but it's really important to understand where it comes from. And Dr. Murray Bowen, who's a really well known family therapist, found that kids often try to please their parents to keep peace at home. And this is called the differentiation of self, which is they have their own desires that the self wants. But instead of going for what the self wants, they do what they feel will keep them accepted. And so, you know, with people pleasing, it's a behavioral adaptation to your environment as a child is the easiest way to think about it. For some reason you thought unconsciously, if you are a people pleaser, you thought that it would benefit you and it had benefit to you as a child and as an adult. It can lead to feeling overwhelmed, it can lead to feeling stressed, it can feel burned out. You can feel resentment, resentful of other people. If you feel overwhelmed or stressed or burned out or resentful, or you feel like you have to constantly be someone for someone else so that you're always putting yourself on the back, or maybe that you have to be happy all the time, there's a good chance that you actually might have some form of people pleasing within you. But the core of the feeling of people pleasing is I'm worried at the core that who I am, that I'm not good enough and I need to be somebody else to be accepted or to keep the peace. But if you're an adult listening to me, it's probably time for you to let go of it as an adult. So as adults, people pleasers, we have a really hard time saying no. And so they often feel really guilty and they don't want to, you know, say no to other people or even what they, they don't want to do something that will make other people think differently of them. They want others to be happy even if they're unhappy doing it, even if it stresses them out. They'll put other people in front of them. And they're usually very concerned about the other people's that exists around them, their judgments and their opinions. And so let me give you a couple of quick examples of how people pleasing can appear if you're an adult. So like at work, people pleasers tend to take on too many tasks because they're afraid of saying no. They're afraid of saying no to their boss or afraid of saying no to their coworkers. People not liking them, people judging them. And they feel like if they say no, they're going to get rejected by whoever is asking that something of them. And so they'd rather be stressed with too much to do than feel that rejection. Because that's probably the rejection that they felt from their parents at some point in time. And that's a core wound that they have. And so this can lead to feeling very overwhelmed because they can't say no and they're exhausted and burned out. In a relationship, it can pop up where, you know, they hide their true feelings to avoid arguments and to avoid rejection. And it can make your relationships feel one sided. It can make them feel very unfulfilling with friends. People pleasers often just go along with what other people want, even if it's not what they want. They don't make a decision. They're just like, yeah, whatever you guys want to do, we'll just, I'll just go along and do we just do whatever it is just to fit in. And so I'm going to give you a couple different examples of how this would work. I'm going to give you, you know, fake people and I name them for you, and I give them names. And we're going to take talk about their childhood and into adulthood and we'll see if any of these kind of hit home with you. Okay, so the first one we're going to talk about is Emma. We'll call her the overachiever. Right. In her childhood, Emma grew up with parents who had very, very high expectations. And her parents praised her mainly when she excelled academically or when she performed really well in extracurricular activities, or when she won a trophy in sports. And basically what that taught her was that she needed to achieve in order to earn their love and approval. She felt that she had to earn their love and approval vers just being there, no matter what. Cause sometimes people, and I've heard this many times, is that when they're children, their parents just love them when they achieve, when they do well and then they lose a basketball game and their parents don't talk to them on the ride home and it's like, oh, I have to win in order to be loved. So in adulthood, the way that this pops up for someone like Emma is she constantly takes on extra projects at work and almost always wants to be striving for perfection because that's something that she learned she had to be when she was younger. So often what she does is she works really late at work. She finds it hard to say no to new tasks. She fears that she's going to disappoint her boss and her colleagues. And she's just really worried that she's not going to be able to keep up her high performance. And so she's stressed out all the time. So that could be an example of a people pleaser in childhood and how it can manifest as an adult. I'll give you another example. Right. Very, very common is this fake person I just made up named William. Right. William is the. We're going to call him the peacekeeper. In childhood, William's home was often a little bit chaotic. It was tense. There was arguments between both parents. They were both hot headed, they yelled, they had a lot of anger within them. And so with growing up as a child with that inside of the house, it felt very dangerous. And so to avoid adding to the stress, William became very compliant. And he was always just trying to keep the peace. He was trying to make sure his mom was happy. He was trying to make sure his dad was happy and doing exactly what was expected and not voicing his own needs, but just making sure. Is my mom good? Is my dad good? Do I need to be funny? Do I need to keep them away from each other? And so what he's doing is he's becoming a chameleon for both of them, losing his true self because ultimately he didn't want the blowups to happen anymore. And so that's what happens in a childhood. He then grows up, he becomes an adult. And in his relationships, William wants to avoid conflict at all costs because ultimately your partner becomes a proxy for your parents. And so he agrees with everything his partner wants to do, doesn't really give his own opinion, goes along with his partner's plans, and just doesn't always say what he wants to do and just to kind of keep the harmony, same way that he kept the harmony with his parents. But what it leads to is it's led to him feeling unsatisfied in his relationship and resenting his partner, which is something that's very common with people who are people pleasers because they never really speak up. They resent their partner because they feel like their partner is actually one that's holding them down. And they have to be everything for that partner. And so that one's the example of William, who would be the peacekeeper. And we will be right back. Teachers are deep into new units.

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dial and now back to the show. Let's give you another example. The next person is Sophia.

She's the helper. Okay.

In childhood, Sophia has, you know, she was often praised for being helpful around the house, especially when her parents were so busy and so stressed. And so she learned that she had to be helpful and she had to clean and she had to help with her younger brother and younger sister. And for this she was praised for being a quote unquote good girl. And she always wanted to be a good girl because that's what made her feel like she got her parents love. And so she learned that being helpful was a way to gain their approval and feel valued and feel loved from her parents. How that manifests as an adult is as an adult, Sophia often puts others needs above her own. So she volunteers for tasks at work. She takes care of her friends problems. She volunteers to do everything for her friends, but that's really great. But the problem is because of the fact that she's so busy doing everything for everyone else, she rarely takes any time for herself. And so this constant helping of other people makes her feel drained and also underappreciated and most of the times burned out because she's always doing something for someone else, nothing for herself. And let me just give you the last example. And this might not be you, but I guarantee you probably know a couple people who line up with one of these four examples, right? The last one is Ava. She is the silent contributor. In her childhood, Ava's parents were emotionally distant and they were very critical of her. So to avoid this criticism, because criticism, same as reprimanding, makes it feel like a retraction of love, she just learned to stay quiet. She was told as a child that children are meant to be seen and not heard, which is something that I hear very, very often from people. They learn from their parents. They've been told, hey, children are meant to be seen, not heard. So what did she learn? She learned to shut up. And she believed that her opinions and her needs were less important than other people. And so as an adult at work, Ava rarely speaks up. She never gives her ideas. Even when she knows that she has really valuable ideas, she doesn't share them. And she fears that her input's gonna be criticized, that it's gonna be dismissed, so she just stays silent, which makes her. Makes her really just feel like her self esteem is just dipping every single time. And so that's a few different ways that people pleasing can kind of start in childhood and manifest as an adult. And so when we're looking at people pleasing and we're like, okay, now that we've gone through this and we started to see, yeah, maybe I am a people pleaser in this way. The first step of overcoming people pleasing, just like anything else, is just becoming aware that you are a people pleaser in some way and what that means. If I think of being a people pleaser, it means that I am basically becoming a chameleon so that everybody else feels good and I'm keeping the peace. So I'm this way around my mother, and I'm this for my mother because I want to keep her at peace. And I'm this way at work And I'm this way around my brother and we become a chameleon and we really just lose who we are. And so really what it's about is, first off, noticing that you are people pleaser in some sort of way, if you are, and then starting to realize, who am I actually?

Who do I want to be?

Like, I've kind of lost myself over the years. Maybe it's about me rediscovering who I am. And so there's a couple steps that I want to give you that will really help you out. The first and probably the most important thing that you can do as a people pleaser is to learn to say no. This is the number one tip that I give people that come up to me when I'm giving speeches or when I'm out or, you know, Instagram messages. They're like, I'm a people pleaser. What do I need to get better at? What's the best tip you can give me? Say no more often, learn to say no because you've been saying yes for so long to other people's needs, other people's desires, other people's wants of you that you need to start saying no to other people so that you can say yes to yourself. So that's the first thing that I would say. The second thing is you need to get better at setting boundaries. Okay? You need to get better at setting boundaries. And so there's a three step process that I always give to set boundaries. It's very simple, but it is very challenging to make sure that you actually uphold these boundaries. So the first thing that you need to do in setting boundaries is to get clear on what your boundaries are. It's really hard to set boundaries if you don't know what your boundaries are. So it's like with my, okay, where am I? People please. I'm a people pleaser at work. Okay? I need to set new boundaries at work. What are my boundaries at work? Okay, well, when my boss says, I need you to do this, I will say, hey, okay, no problem. I can definitely do this. But here is what I have on my to do list for the week. I don't know if I'm able to get everything done, so would you rather me get everything on my to do list done, or would you rather me put this thing ahead of everything and take something off my to do list? And if you share it with your boss like that, your boss can be like, oh, yeah, well, take that one thing off your to do list, because this is a higher priority, okay? Cool. And that way you're not taking on too much, but you're able to cancel something off or give, you know, delegate that to somebody else, and then you're able to take on that new task that might be more important. So you're not just taking everything on all the time. You need to get clear on what your boundaries are. Okay, so this is my boundaries at work. Okay? Now my boundaries with my mom. I know some of the people who's with my mom. What are my new boundaries going to be with my mom? And you get very clear on what those are. So you find all of the different places in your life. I really just need to set boundaries in my relationship with my partner. Okay, how do you need to set boundaries? And so you've got to get very clear, crystal clear on what your boundaries are in each of these individual places in your life. The second thing that you need to do is you need to communicate your boundaries in each of these areas. So if you have new boundaries with your mother, you need to communicate clearly, because the more clear that you are with them, the more that they can understand it and give them the Y. I need to set this boundary because of X, Y, Z. So you communicate that boundary with them, and then you say, okay to my boss, I need to do this. To my partner, I need to do this. And you. First, you get very clear on them. Then you communicate them very clearly as well. And then the third part about boundaries is you need to stay firm on your boundaries. The worst thing you could do is get clear on your boundaries, communicate your boundaries, and then just let people step all over you, because then your confidence is going to go down even more, right? So it's like, you've got to stay firm. You've got to say, hey, mom, remember when I. We had this conversation around xyz? Well, I'm really starting to hold my boundaries around this thing. I'd appreciate if you can. If you can understand these boundaries that I'm now setting with myself. Because really, I'm just trying to gain more confidence in my own whatever it is that you're trying to gain confidence in. Right? And so you've got it. Number one is you have to make sure that you get very clear on your boundaries. Number two, you have to communicate them clearly. And number three, you have to stay firm to those boundaries. And so that is. Number two is to get clear and set boundaries. And then the third thing is to start finding ways to build more confidence in yourself. If you want to build more confidence, you can go back. I have episodes on how to actually build confidence from yourself. But I want you to understand this. If you're a people pleaser, the reason why you're a people pleaser ultimately is because you're seeking validation from other people. And I've been saying this a lot recently. I hope that you really understand this. Deep in your bones is what you're seeking from other people, what you're seeking from the outside world, you're actually seeking from yourself. And so if you're seeking validation and acceptance from other people, what you're really searching for is validation and acceptance from yourself. Because when you accept yourself fully, you don't need anybody else to accept you. You can still want them to, and they can still accept you, but you don't need them to validate you. You don't need them to accept you. You don't need them to love you, because you ultimately already feel whole without anything else being necessary. And so you've got to start to build confidence within yourself and start to give yourself whatever it is that you feel like you're seeking from other people. And the way another way that you build confidence within yourself is to start doing what you say you're going to do. So set small goals, show up for yourself, and actually start doing the things that you say you're going to do. Because ultimately you're always watching yourself. You're the only one that's with yourself all the time. And so when you say, oh, I'm going to work out tomorrow and you don't work out well, you're lowering your self confidence. When you say, oh, I'm going to wake up early and then you sleep in, you're lowering your self confidence. But when you show up and you do the things that you say you're going to do, you build confidence within yourself, which is ultimately when you have more confidence within yourself. You don't need people to validate you and to accept you because you have your own self confidence. And so that's what it's like to be a people pleaser. That's where it comes from. That's how it manifests as an adult. And that is how you actually start to overcome and work through your people pleasing. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, the best way that you can say thanks is to share this somewhere in the world. The only way this podcast grows is from you guys sharing it. So if you would put it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it. Rob, dial junior R O B D I A L J R I would appreciate it. That way people can find it, they can learn about it, and ultimately we can help people who follow you that might not even know right now listening to this podcast. This podcast exists, so if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it. And also if you're the type of person out there that's really trying to exponentially grow, you're going to love something that I have that's called Mindset Mentor plus. And here's how it works. For every single episode of the Mindset Mentor that comes out, Mindset Mentor plus listeners get a whole lot more to really integrate each episode into their life. So with every episode that comes out, you'll get detailed worksheets that you can print out that you can underline that go even deeper into every single episode that I put out. It's got journaling questions, it's got assignments, got all of that. It's got an entire community of over 1300 people that you can connect with that are all interested in the Mindset Mentor, that are interested in growing themselves and improving themselves. You might make a couple extra friends that are into growing themselves as well. And the last thing it comes with, as well as last main thing that it comes with, as well as a few other smaller bonuses, is we do monthly Q and A sessions every single month where you can actually ask me questions live and get your questions answered by me. 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