Is People Pleasing Working For You?

This week’s Prescription for Success is about People Pleasing and whether it’s working for you.

I work with a lot of people who feel that they’re pleasing other people and feel like they’re at the bottom of the pile and everyone else is above them.

I just want to ask you, are you or do you know anyone that’s a people pleaser? And whether it’s you or them, does it work?

The reason that people often people please is that they may have had a childhood where they felt that they didn’t matter.  They may have had experiences where they feel as though they’re not good enough – and if they then people please, they become the glue for people and people get attracted to them. Consequently, they  good feel good and the behaviour persists.

If this is you, maybe when you’re lying in bed at night or when you’ve got a bit of time to yourself  then you think

• Well how about me?
• Do I matter?
• What about the things that I want to do?

You get this balance of needing to people please but then feeling like you’d really like to look after yourself  Here’s the thing – if you put yourself  1st,  you can help even more people.

There’s probably an internal strategy that you run, where you either see or hear a situation and you think you want to do something for someone or they ask you to do something and it’s not something you want to do but they expect you to so you just do it.

Or maybe you say to yourself “Well I’ve seen or heard this thing and  I’d love to do that for someone and I’ll just keep them happy and then everyone will be happy and it’ll be fine,” and maybe sometimes it is and maybe sometimes it isn’t.

I think that keeping people happy has come from your experiences or maybe even generations ago because after all, you’ve got yourself, you’ve got your parents, you’ve got their parents, and so on and you can recognise  there’s a pattern that runs through generations.

Maybe, you’ve been brought up where there’s been constant arguments or people haven’t been very happy and when you’ve actually said something or done something for yourself it’s all gone wrong so you end up keeping quiet and keeping the peace and that goes through to your adulthood and doesn’t really keep you happy.

Maybe, you’ve got some beliefs that have come from those memories and experiences such as:

• I’m not good enough,
• People won’t like me,
• No one listens to me,
• I’m not worth anything…

I had that on one of my courses recently where we worked on “I’m not worth anything” with someone and it’s made a huge difference in their behaviour in just a few days.

The consequences of having these beliefs and people pleasing are that sometimes you can’t make decisions for yourself because you’re not sure whether that’s going to “upset the apple cart”. So you’re just keeping other people happy. If you do make decisions then you think that someone’s not going to be happy with that and you’re going to upset someone, which leads to you’re going to feel rubbish, and then you’re going to feel  “What’s the point?”

I’m all about helping people to get their goals and to be happy with themselves and to be in charge of their life so that they can live the best life that they can, which also helps other people. If you feel that either yourself or someone you know is people-pleasing and need some help then get in touch and we can do a free half hour and have a chat about it and find out the cause of it so start to solve it.

Until next time

Dr Bridget, Keeping you all happy.