00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 230, "People Pleasing." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. Glad to have you. For those of you who have left me a review lately, which is a lot of you, thank you so much. That helps other people find this content. It helps to bump it up on their list of suggested podcasts to listen to and makes it easier for people to find it. So thank you. You're doing your part to make the world a better place. 

00:44 

Okay, today we are talking about people pleasing. When I was younger and heard the term "people pleaser," I kind of thought it sounded like a good thing and I just didn't see what was so wrong with it. Because in my mind, people pleasing was fulfilling all of the social ideas that I had been taught were important for me in order to be a good woman, and even what I thought was a woman of God. As a people pleaser, I would be concerned with everybody else's experience, doing everything I could to make sure that they were having a good time and that they were comfortable. I would also be the epitome of a good Christian sacrificer, not thinking of myself but seeking only to make everyone else's lives and experiences easier, often at the expense of my own wants and needs. As a people pleaser, I would always, well not always, you know me at this point, but I would try and hold my tongue if I felt that my ideas and opinions would create even the slightest ripple of discomfort for someone else and especially if what I had to say was in direct opposition to what someone else was saying. After all, it was my job to make sure that there was never any discomfort, any undue frustration, any sort of...contention at all. As a people pleaser, everyone would like me and no one would hate me because I would be someone who fit in easily with all the people. At some level, I would morph into the person people needed me to be in order to make their lives easier. 

02:17 

So a large part of my life was spent living this way, meaning a lot of years. So for me, it wasn't entirely founded on a lack of self-worth, on a desperation to be liked, although that played into it some. I do recognize though that for a lot of women and also men, their people pleasing tendencies are triggered by a lack of self-love and self-worth and a need for outside validation. My own people pleasing tendencies came more from a place of societal expectations, a place where I felt that it was my role and my responsibility to be in charge of how everyone else thought and felt. And I think it was about the time I started thinking seriously about divorce, about 20 years into my marriage that I started to look at some of these beliefs. Now, not at the level that I do now and absolutely not with the same awareness and vocabulary, but I really started to question why I felt I didn't have a voice in my marriage. I started to question the idea that I should not speak up and ask for what I wanted and what I needed. I started to believe that my needs were important and I began to realize how long I had quieted the voice inside of me that said that I had valuable things to say and do. I began to realize that it wasn't my responsibility to be in charge of other people's thoughts and feelings, most especially my husband's, and began to step back from trying to control his life experience. Strangely enough, I started to see that my people pleasing tendencies in my marriage were about trying to create this idyllic home life that I thought was what being a Christian woman was all about. But in doing so, I tried to control things that were not mine to control. I realized that I had become pretty heavy handed in trying to make people believe how I thought they should and thinking and feeling the way that seemed most appropriate and that validated my work as a mom and a wife. 

04:21 

So as my own self-awareness has increased over the last 11 years since I first considered divorce as a viable option, until now, I can see so much of my behavior as really inappropriate and even hurtful to those in my life. And it all started with the innocuous belief that I should create this loving, perfect Christ-centered home and that I could control all the things to create said home. I would imagine that some of you have caught yourselves in a similar pattern, although it probably has shown up differently. And your people pleasing tendencies may be centered more in a lack of feeling your self worth and a lack of self love. But let's talk about people pleasing, what it is really, a little more and why it's often there and then we can look at how to move out of it. 

05:18 

So I was looking for the definition of people pleasing and Medical News Today says that people pleasing refers to a person who has a strong urge to please others even at their own expense. They may feel that their own wants and needs do not matter or alter their personality around others. So another definition I found states "someone who cares a lot about whether other people like them and always wants others to approve of their actions." Okay. So we get that. I'm gonna be a little bit more blunt because it's just my personality. Right? Some people love that and those are the people who hire me to be a coach. Some people don't love that and they don't listen to this podcast and they don't hire me. But here we go. I describe a people pleaser as a lying manipulator. Okay, now I know that some of you just went, "ouch," but sometimes we gotta see things for what they are, and it's my personality to just put it out there. So let's dissect that definition a bit. And I want you to start off by asking yourself, how is people pleasing lying? I'm gonna give you just a second. 

06:34 

Okay, I know that when I talk to this with my clients, they often have that first knee-jerk reaction like "a lying manipulator?" And then I say, "yeah, tell me how it's lying?" and it usually doesn't take them very long before they're like, "oh, I see it." So a people pleaser is known for telling people what they want to hear rather than what they really want to say and what they 

really believe. Now this is different than monitoring what comes out of our mouths to ensure we're not being hurtful or unkind. This is going against ourselves in an effort to go along. So we're going against, right? Because we want to go along. This is not being true to what we really think or feel or want or need in an effort to make someone else have an easier experience or to like us. In essence, we lie to ourselves and often to others in an effort not to rock the boat. So when your adult child asks if you'll watch the grandkids this Saturday before Christmas so they can do their shopping and you have a full day scheduled and don't have time, you lie and say you'd love to because you don't want them to feel uncomfortable or waver in their liking of you and wanting you to watch their children. Because darn it, you love your grandkids, right? You don't want them to have thoughts about how selfish you are and how you've never been there to help them out when they need it. So we lie and we say, I'd love to. Heaven forbid that any of our children should have to work through uncomfortable emotions while we are around to feel all of those emotions for them by people pleasing. 

08:15 

Okay, and this leads us to the manipulator part. How is a people pleaser a manipulator? Again, I'm going to give you another second. Okay, because they are trying to manipulate how other people think and feel, particularly about them. I don't want them to think I'm selfish. I don't want them to think I don't love my grandkids enough to sacrifice. I don't want them to feel like the other grandma is a better option. I don't want them to be angry with me. I don't want them to think poorly of me. See how easy it is to try and think that we can control how other people think and feel. And it's super, super tricky because it all seems so sweet and lovely. It's tied up with a really pretty bow, right? We want them to like us, to trust us, to think that we're a great grandma. We want them to have happy and positive thoughts when they think of us. And yet we actually have zero control over how they think and feel about us. We can do all the things we think a good parent should and they still may not have happy and positive thoughts about us. I have coached many a client and myself about this exact same thing. But we somehow think that by showing up a certain way, that we can control their experience. See, this is lying manipulators. Okay, we just need to see it for what it is. 

09:45 

So let's dig in a little bit deeper to show you some other ways that people pleasing shows up. Oftentimes our people pleasing behaviors stem from the thoughts that people won't like us if we show up as ourselves or if we show up as too anything. Like too needy, too annoying, too opinionated, too loud, too quiet, too selfish, too selfless. You name it and we can be accused of being it, right? We worry that we'll be rejected. So we lie about who we are, about our needs, our personality or our opinions. When we're not being ourselves so other people will like us, again, we are lying about who we are. We are pretending we are someone we aren't in an attempt to manipulate other people's opinions about who we are. We are trying to get them to like us by lying about who we are. And there's a very good reason we do this. It's because we're scared. You see, when we don't have a deep love for ourselves and when we don't love and accept who we are, flaws and all, we don't validate ourselves. And so we're always looking for other people to validate us. We look outside of ourselves for confirmation that we are of worth, rather than being able to look inside of ourselves for that confirmation. 

11:09 

When I'm insecure about who I am, it makes vulnerability in showing up as myself doubly scary. Because if they don't like me, now there are two people who don't like and accept me, them and me. If I'm secure in who I am, it's not as painful if someone doesn't like me because I know that I always have my own back and that I always like me. And guess what? I hang out with me a lot more than I hang out with anybody else. So it's much easier when we really like to hang out with ourselves. So think about how you talk to yourself in your head. If you wouldn't be happy with anyone else talking to you that way, it is not okay to talk to yourself that way either. Showing up as us requires vulnerability and being vulnerable is scary, especially 

when we don't have our own back if the other person doesn't accept us. When someone rejects me and I am dependent on their opinion to tell me whether I am worthy of love, then it really hurts because I already reject myself and then they reject me. But along similar lines, when someone rejects me and I know I'm not showing up as the real me, it can make the rejection a little bit easier because I know they're not rejecting the real me; they're just rejecting the pretend version that I let them see. Okay? But then we're still stuck in this people pleasing trap of not showing up as us. But here's the thing, it takes a whole lot more work and effort to try and be someone else than it takes to love and accept ourselves the way we are so we can feel comfortable showing up as us. 

13:00 

At the core, people pleasing is about being insecure with who we are and not embracing who we are, which is painful in its own right. So to add our rejection to the rejection of someone else can just feel like too much pain sometimes. And this can sometimes get even trickier because we will even people please ourselves. We will lie to us about what we want, about what we need. We don't tell ourselves the truth about who we really are. It can be very subtle and we can often let years can go by with this pattern of behavior and we won't see it. But learning to look for and see the inconsistencies in what our spirit wants to show us in how we actually show up and what we actually say is a valuable tool to start creating the life that we were created for. This is a lot of the work that I do with clients, helping them to see areas in their lives where they aren't showing up honestly for themselves or for others and learning how to have their own backs, learning how to accept and embrace who they are. And when we really start to see ourselves clearly, when we start being really honest with ourselves, it can be painful. I promise you, this can be really hard work. But I also promise that it's some of the most fulfilling and satisfying work you will do in your life. To begin aligning your life with who you are really opens up your capacity to give and love and serve in the way that God created you to. It allows you to connect with yourself, with others, and with God in ways that were inaccessible to you before. It allows you to tap into the real you, the person you are underneath all of the social conditioning and the insecure thoughts. And when we tap into this person, into our real selves, then we can begin to contribute to the world in ways that feel incredibly authentic, so in alignment with our eternal selves and with who God created us to be. 

15:12 

I get a lot of middle-aged clients as well who are like, "yeah, I don't know who I am at this stage. I don't know what I like. I don't know anything." Well, one of the first places we get to start is with our people pleasing tendencies and really learn to let go of those. And this is the space of really growing up, of stepping into emotional maturity. This is a space where we truly learn to accept and embrace us, caring more about what's on the inside of us than on what we are projecting to other people. This is the space where we start serving because we love others, rather than because we fear the condemnation and the judgment of other people. This is the space where we say kind things to others because we genuinely are kind in our hearts, rather than because we're trying to flatter them and get them to like us. This is a space where we volunteer to watch our grandkids because we genuinely love spending time with them and we enjoy giving our children a break, rather than because we want to outdo the other grandma or because we want our children to like us more or because we're afraid they'll stop liking us if we don't. This is the space where we don't pretend to agree with everyone, where we share our thoughts and our ideas, even if they're different, and we can do it with love and kindness, rather than with contention. This is the space where we take responsibility for our thoughts and our feelings and our actions and back off to let others take responsibility for theirs. And this is the place where we stop apologizing for being a human, for things that really, we don't need to apologize for. 

16:57 

Okay, side note, if you have not listened to podcast 195 called "What Are You Sorry For?" Oh, get over there and listen to that one. That one's a really, really great one, okay? This place is also where we only agree to do things that we really want to do, for reasons we love, and we stop feeling overwhelmed and burdened down and guilty about things that we don't want to do. This is where we start showing up as us, no longer adapting our behavior based on what we think other people want to see in order to approve of us. And this is the amazing place where we have our own back, where we no longer yearn for external praise and validation because guess what, we're getting it from ourselves. When we do get it from others, it's nice, it's lovely, and we can appreciate it, but we don't need it to be content and happy and secure with who we are. It's like you're the cupcake and the frosting. All that substance is you. Other people liking you, it's kind of like the sprinkles on the cupcake. Like they're nice, they're cute, they're lovely, but they don't add any substance to the cupcake. They don't add flavor, right? They just are cute, they're lovely, they're nice. When you are the whole cupcake and frosting, that feels amazing. This is also the place where we learn to say "no" when we really want to say "no," and we learn to say "yes" when we really want to say "yes." This is also the place where we are aware of our feelings, the easier ones as well as the more difficult ones, and we allow them to all have a place in our lives. We don't feel the need to always be happy so that people around us can admire our optimistic positive attitude. We get to show up however we are. I love this place because it is here that we set appropriate boundaries, where we no longer fear rejection or being abandoned and where we feel like we are enough. This is a place of living in integrity with ourselves, of loving who we are and why we are. 

19:03 

If you find that you are in the people pleasing camp a little more often than you like to be, it can be really helpful to explore these three questions. Why do you feel the need for people to like and accept you? That one could go on for quite a bit and get pretty deep. Here's another one. What don't you accept about yourself that you're afraid other people also won't accept? And then identify what ways does people pleasing show up for you? So these are just three questions to get you started, but a really great way to start seeing some of your work. So when I talk about this work, this is what I'm referring to: recognizing in yourself ways that you aren't showing up as a person you really want to be and learning how to step into integrity with yourself. Creating awareness is the first and biggest step I believe because sometimes we can go our whole lives and not see some of our biggest flaws. I know I spent a lot of years being very self-righteous and judgmental of people who didn't do things the way I thought they should and I had no idea it was going on because in my head it just all seemed so normal. When I had my first ahas with regards to my self-righteousness, I really was so shocked. I had never seen it before even though other people in my life were completely aware and probably had even made comments here and there. And yet it just wasn't on my radar. I didn't see it. It just all seems so normal and logical to me. But once these things start to hit your radar and you choose to see it and accept it, and then the work has begun. And though it can be painful work to see your stuff, to see how you've hurt people and challenged relationships, it's also some of the most fulfilling and amazing work around to begin adjusting those behaviors. I really believe this is work that brings us closer to God that addresses and cleans up the patterns that are holding us back from becoming more Christlike. 

21:13 

This is the work of growing up into emotional adulthood. And growing up is amazing, don't you think? Thank you for growing up with me on this podcast. My growth game continues, and this podcast is a big part of this as I continually do my own coaching and receive coaching and strive to become aware of ways that I'm not showing up the way that I want to. And moving into that space. I just had a coaching session for me this morning that was mind-blowing in what I was able to discover about myself and some ways that I'm showing up that I really don't want to. And I'm so grateful for that insight. And though I'm a little bit like, "oh, okay, I've got some work to do," it also just feels amazing to know that I am stepping into my life and my relationships more the way that I want to. So grateful for that. Okay, that's gonna do it for me, my friends. 

22:24 

If you feel like you would like some personal help from me to clean up a lot of this stuff, I do a lot of divorce coaching. So people who are working on considering divorce, whether they're in the middle of the divorce or at the after the aftermath of the divorce, like trying to learn how to let go of the blame and forgive and that kind of stuff. I do a lot of that coaching because I have been divorced and I've worked through a lot of that myself. But I also do a lot of just midlife coaching. So people who are at this stage of life trying to figure out how to clean up a bunch of the stuff that we've created over the years and how to show up more the way we want to, I do that as well. So if you are interested in working with me, you can go to tanyahale.com. You can go to the top where there is a "contact me" button, I think, or work with me or free consult. I think it says "free consultation." You can click there and set up an appointment at your convenience for a free consultation. We can chat and work through some stuff together. Okay, that's going to do it. Have an awesome, awesome week, my friends, and I will see you next week. Bye. 

23:32 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tonyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!