How to be a Healthy People-Pleaser | S2E006

Hello and welcome to another episode of

from barriers to breakthroughs. I'm your host, Rebecca mountain,

and today we are going to talk about the importance of people

pleasing. Now, like most people, when they look at people

pleasing, it's a bad thing, right? Because we are making

other people happy, usually at our expense. That's what people

pleasers do, essentially, is they take care of others, and

they put their own desires aside. They put their work

aside. They put their dreams aside because they're trying to

make everyone else happy. Unfortunately, what they usually

discover is that that doesn't actually work. We don't actually

know how to make other people happy. We can't predict how

anyone is going to feel or think or what they're going to do

based on what we feel, think or do. But people pleasers, people

who are really struggling with how people view them, how they

are perceived in the world, by their peers, by their family, by

their co workers, their bosses. It's a real struggle for people

who have that perspective, and unfortunately, it's also driven

by a very low sense of self worth.

Now I have super high performing clients that are people

pleasers, and you can imagine how awesome they feel when I

tell them, you know, you might have a bit of a self worth

issue, because usually when we say things, say things like self

worth issue, it goes with really negative connotations, right

about what this person is like. You know, someone who is really

bad self worth never leaves the house. Is really, nervous. And

there's just, you know, we have these constructs in our minds of

what someone with low self work looks like. And so what I want

to challenge today is the concept that, first of all,

people pleasing is bad. It can be bad, and in many cases, it is

very bad, but it doesn't have to be. There is a way of being a

healthy people pleaser. And I'd also like to dispel the myth

that just because you're successful that does not

necessarily mean that you don't struggle with things like self

worth, people pleasing, in your perception of yourself in the

world. And so let's start first with how we can be a healthy

people pleaser. The idea, again, is the concept that we strive to

make people happy. Now, in the traditional sense of people

pleasing, again, it is to our detriment. We are harmed. We are

held back. We usually feel, eventually, very resentful when

we are always bowing to what other people want. We put

someone comes into our office, we put down what we're doing. We

turn and we're like, How can I help you? So the nice thing

about the healthy way of looking at people pleasing is to turn an

or into an and what that means is you can try and strive and

make it an important part of you to make other people happy, but

you can also, in the and version of this equation, make yourself

happy too.

And so the example I was just giving you, if someone walks

into your office, you know, demanding your attention or

asking, you know, got a minute, you know, you can ruin your day

with got a minute meetings. And there's many of my top level

clients that do in the or version of people pleasing, you

put your stuff down and you give that person your full attention

immediately. In the am version of the equation, the healthy

people pleasing version, you turn to them and say, Hey, Bob,

I really want to help you with this. I'm working on something

right now. Check your watch. Look at your calendar. Can we

pick this up at this time or in this way, or whatever? And you

allow yourself to be helpful and available, but you also protect

what's important to you. You protect the time that you'd set

aside to do this work, or you protect the actual work itself.

You don't want to blow a deadline just because someone

came into your office, not a really good excuse to give as to

why the deadline got blown. Nobody really wants to listen to

that. And so when you look at people pleasing as an and versus

or now you feel very empowered, because my people pleasers in

the world get really, really upset when I say you really

can't make other people's happiness your focus. A lot of

people grew up like this. There could be even some trauma

reasons as to where this come from, and so it's difficult and

sometimes nigh on impossible, for me to tell someone who has

built their life around making other people happy, that they

now have to blow that up and ignore that very integral and

what's important to them, piece of who they are. Instead, it's

acknowledging that you can have that but you. Also need to raise

your level of importance.

If you are putting your work aside to take on somebody else's

task or emergency or agenda, you are declaring yourself to be

less valued and valuable than that person or that person's

task or activity or emergency or whatever has come into your

world. That's what I mean by people pleasers tend to have a

low self worth. If you had a higher self worth even equated

yourself as as valuable and important as anyone else, then

that's how you can step into healthy people pleasing. That's

when it's okay to try to make other people happy. I'm not

saying we should go through the world and just be completely

narcissistic. That's terrible, but the and version of that

allows everyone to win. So let's now move into how do we make

that happen? How do we create that, that habit, that mindset

of being able to tell people that you want to help them, and

it's important to you because that's who you are. But there

are some parameters, and as you can probably imagine, they're

called boundaries. And boundaries are incredibly

important and really hard to protect. They're easy to say.

How many times do we come every January, we set our New Year's

resolutions, and we create these boundaries, we create these

goals. This is what I'm going to do. This is the kind of person

I'm going to be, and then they just kind of go by the wayside.

So I'm not going to suggest that setting and protecting

boundaries is easy, but it's essential for you to get what

you want, and that's actually where you start when you want to

set boundaries. The actual question that very few people

answer, they rarely even ask themselves, because they feel

like it's being selfish, is, what do you want? And I come

across people all the time that when I ask them that question,

they actually deflect and they start going about what other

people want and what how they want to serve other people, and

I have to stop them, and I go, I get that, and that's important,

and we'll get there. But what do you want? Then? It's such a big

question that I encourage you to break it down into six different

categories.

The first category of what do you want is, what kind of work

do you want? What kind of work do you want to do? And it could

be what industry you want to be in if you want to keep it at a

high level, or it could it be down to, like, what do you want

to do in your day to day? Like, for instance, I want to do stuff

like this. I want to share my ideas, because if it can help

you even a tiny little bit, then I really feel like I've added

some really good to the world. What I don't want to do is

paperwork. And so when you're looking at your boundaries, you

can go this one of two ways, or you can use both. You can do the

what do I want? And if you're not familiar with asking that

question over yourself, you may find that really tough, because

you're like, oh, I don't really know. I don't really know what I

want. I've never really asked myself that question. But

there's a guaranteed question you've have have asked yourself,

and that is, what do you not want to do? What work drives you

absolutely insane, that makes you just want to stab yourself

in the eyeballs or just run away and hide your head. Never have

to do it again. For me, that's paperwork. Anything related to

paperwork, anything related to tedious work, detailed work, my

brain goes on a vacation as soon as I have to do something that

is kind of minute in nature or finicky or requires me to pay

attention. I'm a creative mind, and that does not lend itself

well to detailed work. I've actually been fired for it when

I worked in corporate Canada. True story. So what work do you

want to do? And again, if you find that too difficult, what

work don't you want to do? And based on those two categories,

you come up with a plan. Okay, if I don't want to do this by

process of elimination, that means I'm left with this work.

If you want to be brave and say, No, this is what I want, and you

want to make that declaration again, now you have much more

clarity on what work makes you happy is totally in line with

how your brain is wired. Is something that you could do all

day and never really get tired of doing. Okay, so that's work.

What work do you want to do?

The second category is schedule. When I went and well, quite

frankly, I got fired enough times that I decided to go out

on my own. I wanted to be sure that I created a schedule that I

could work with. I was a single mom. I had two small kids. They

were three and five at the time, and I needed my schedule to be

flexible in case something happened. And when I was with my

little one, something always happened. When I had the my

phone would ring and it said, school. I'm like, Oh, now you

never knew what it was, box of chocolates and so. My schedule.

I wanted to be flexible. I wanted to make sure that I could

go on vacation and have it such that I had someone else on my

team that could look after my email so I didn't have to look

at it. I wanted my schedule to be only Monday to Friday. I

wanted to start at nine. I wanted it to end at five when I

worked in corporate Canada, and for many years, when I ran my

own agency, I would work 8090, hour weeks, and I did not like

that. So again, sometimes we come into like, what kind of

days drive you, but in is what kind of days drag drain you and

drag on? And is there a way that you could, if you could wave a

magic wand and create the best schedule for yourself. What

would that look like? And I want to challenge you to be creative.

I have a client who gets everything done by two o'clock

and at two o'clock onward, She does whatever she wants. She

makes exactly the money she wants to make based on that

schedule. She attends to all of her client needs. She gets

absolutely every single piece of whatever needs to be done, done

by two o'clock. She is an absolute machine between 830 and

two because that extra time afterwards is so important to

her. Sometimes she'll have meetings in the evening, but

most often she doesn't, and she doesn't like to work weekends.

And so when you're looking at your schedule, what often

happens is just like, well, I have to work weekends. No, you

don't, because if something is important enough to you, like

not working weekends. And I'm speaking of someone who works in

real estate, so working weekends is kind of part of the draw. But

because she's like, Ah, I really don't want to work weekends.

Then she brought a junior realtor into her team that

wanted to they actually want the they want the experience. They

want the ability to practice what it is that they're

learning. They want that extra time. There are people out there

that want to do what you don't want to do, and so when you have

that mentality of whatever you create, there's a path to make

that happen. It will make your boundary creating much, much

easier, particularly when it comes to work and schedule.

Those are the two that people struggle with the most in terms

of creating boundaries because they think they can't do it, or

they think that it's going to be too hard, or it's going to cost

too much, enter all the excuses for now I want you to just

release yourself from the bondage of your excuses and

things that you think might not work and just suspend it for a

second and believe that it is it is possible to have the work and

the schedule and All the next four things we're going to talk

about. To talk about to create the boundaries for the greatest

life of all time, for you and just for you, everyone's going

to have a different set of boundaries. Boundaries are not

made to make other feel other people feel comfortable. They're

made to feel you feel comfortable. So let's go to the

third one. So we have work, we have schedule, and now we have

environment. Where do you do your best work? So right now I'm

recording this in my office. This is where I do my office

type work. I do my client meetings in here. I do these

kind of recordings in here, and that kind of stuff all happens

here in my office. But when I'm writing my book, I have to go to

Starbucks, I have to go to a cottage, I have to go to a

beach, and I have to be as far away from my office as humanly

possible, because I need to do my super creative work. Now,

some people are like, wow, you know what? I do this kind of

work really well at home, but I do this work really well at an

office. You can have two different locations. You can

have three, you can have five, whatever works for you. But what

environments do you need to create for yourself to be the

most productive? Do you need to be around people? Do you need to

hear some low level noise, like, you know, the like in a cafe, or

something like that? Again, when I do my creative work, I need

that little rumble going on in the background, because it just

feeds my ADD brain, just enough so that I can focus on the big

thing at hand. So what environment, or environments are

ideal for you to be? You're either your most productive or

your most creative or your most insert term here that you need

to be to be at your best.

Okay, so what environment? So we have work, we have schedule,

environment, and we're going to now come to people. What kind of

people do you need to surround yourself with? And this is kind

of a multi parter here, because people can come in different

forms. You have your personal relationships. What do those

people need to be like, and this one can be really tough, because

there could be people in your life, and you really need to

question whether they should be there or not. And it's not like

you have to remove them, because I've, I've done this analysis

for myself, and I'm like, You know what? I'm not gaining

anything from this. They make me mad all the time, but I. Can't

cut them out. And so what I do instead is I create distance,

and I control how much time that I put into that I might even

control my car like I might be okay. I'm only going to meet

this person if I drive there, which means I can peace out

whenever I need to. So people is also on your front, as much on

your personal side as it is on the professional and

professional also goes in a couple different directions. Who

on your team or in your office do you want to surround yourself

with? Do you like being in sort of an open concept, or do you

like it being closed off so that you can engage with people? But

again, you have that door. You're like, peace, I'm out. And

do you need those people to also respect that door? Do you need

them to make sure that when they see that door is closed, that

they don't knock on it, or maybe put a sign, don't knock, you

know, don't disturb if the person because I'm working on

something I'm doing my focus work. What kind of people in the

office or in your work environment do you want to

surround yourself with. And if you run your own business, what

kind of clients do you want to have? And the more you can

really detail out who those people are, like really describe

them in detail. You activate the reticular activation system in

your brain, and you're going to see more of those people, and

you're going to open up more opportunity to engage with them

in a deeper way so the people part of boundary settings is

also incredibly important.

So now we're going to go to the last two often. I started those

four, but I've added two more over the years, because I think

they're important. And the fifth one in our list is things, and

it's not that we want to put our value into things, right? So if

you have a really fancy car, if you if that's part of your

identity, that's a problem, because if that car gets

squished or something happens and again, you don't have it

anymore. You don't want your identity and all the things that

you hold dear about yourself and how you think about yourself to

be driving away on the back of a tow truck, or you having to walk

away from it for whatever reason. But things still can

make us feel joyful. So for instance, I have little things

that I've collected from my children over the years, and

those things are really important to me. I have cards

that someone sent to me. There's my old babysitter, as she died

when she was 100 before, but she took care of us for years, and

she was so lovely that there are things that I hold onto that

have personal meaning, or they may have spiritual meaning or

emotional meaning. And so when it comes to things, things you

want to surround yourself with, things you want to have around

you that can trigger certain memories, certain emotions,

things that make you feel good, you don't have things around you

that make you feel bad. But if you have little things, whether

it's knickknacks or photographs or cars or homes, whatever it

is, as long as the emotion is joy and not something that is

more cloying, more something that you feel like if you didn't

have it, you wouldn't be who you are. That, again, dives right

back into self worth. Self worth is at the bottom of a lot of

what's challenging us these days. And so when you have

things and you understand I have these things because they bring

me joy, then those are what I would encourage you to bring

into your life and have all over the place. And it doesn't matter

what the price tag is. It matters that it means something

to you.

The last thing, which I personally love and have been

very much setting boundaries around this is adventures. So

this could be travel, and most often it's travel, but you can

have local adventures. You can have little mini adventures. I

remember I used to have many adventures with my boys when

they were small. And we go off into the forest and we try to

find stuff and it I hold on to those memories because they're

beautiful. And I also went on adventure, my 10 year

anniversary with my husband to the Maldives. And that was an

adventures, an adventure getting there, and his adventure when we

got there, swimming with manta rays and dolphins and sharks and

turtles and squid and, oh, it was just so beautiful sitting on

the back deck of our over water bungalow, watching the dolphins

go across the horizon and the manta rays. It was ridiculous,

it was incredible, and it was an adventure that I remembered, and

I have so much joy thinking about that particular trip that

I made, but I also have joy with those tiny little adventures I

have with my kids. I'm an empty nester now. They're all off at

school and working, and so I don't have those let's go into

the woods. Moments with the kids doesn't quite happen the same

anymore. Also, that sounds slightly threatening, but you

know what I mean? When they were. Little though those are

the times where I would just look at them and feel so much

joy, like I feel it right now. And you want to surround

yourself as much as possible with those adventures. And when

you finish this work, which is not small work, by the way, so

when you finish the work of setting the boundaries of what

you want, or doing the process of elimination, using what do

you not want, and you come up with a set of parameters, and

those become your boundaries. This is what you want, and I

want you to take a look at that. And if you have any tendency to

be a people pleaser in the negative way, in the unhealthy

way of taking what you want and going it's just not as important

as everybody else. I want you to hold it in front of you like the

most precious thing in the world, and look at it as an

something that you will never, ever compromise away.

There is no amount of compromise or settling that will make you

happy. Eventually it makes you resentful. And I've seen lots of

people pleasers that at the end of many, many, many, many years,

even decades of doing it, have nothing but bitterness because

they gave so much but they never felt they got anything back, and

that's typically because they a, never asked for it, but B, they

never knew what they wanted, and they never communicated it,

which is the next step of boundary making. So you set the

boundaries, and you don't put it down. You set it in front of

you, and that stays there forever. Write it on the wall,

write it on your arm, whatever you got to do, but this is now

what you want, and what is going to make you feel happy and safe

and secure and fulfilled, right? All of these things are so

incredibly important now you need to communicate it.

Communicating boundaries is tricky, especially if you've

never done it before, and especially if people have come

to look at you as someone who will always drop what you're

doing to take care of everybody else. It sounds magnanimous.

It's actually horrible, and we really need to stop idolizing

that as a culture. What we need to do instead is to value the

whole art of everybody gets what they want. We just need to

sometimes be a little bit creative. So when you need to

communicate these wonderful boundaries to other people, it

might take a few ghosts. They may be they might be confused.

They might be wondering, like, this is different. This makes me

feel weird and squidgy, because they're not used to you

communicating it, but it's using kindness. And kindness is not

being nice. Kindness is being firm and clear. Being nice is

taking everything you want and stuffing it under the rug again.

Oh, it's okay, you know, I know it makes you feel uncomfortable,

so like we'll, we'll do it later. Nope, you're kind to

yourself and to others by saying, Well, you know what?

This is really what I would I would love, but I love it when

people give me my personal space.

So one of the things I like to do in communicating boundaries

is not to say to people, don't do that, don't do this, don't do

that. Is to say, You know what makes me really happy. You know,

what makes me feel really awesome is when people do this

and you use the positive behavior that you're looking

for. First of all, that's what people's brains hear anyway, and

that's what you want to push so that's how you be kind in the

communication, right? You may go to your boss, you may go to your

team, and you talk about the work that you're doing. You

know, it'd be really great. You know, open up so much for me and

make me feel so much joy. Is if we can figure out how to Redis,

redistribute the work, give this work to someone else, whatever

the case may be, and you just go through each one of those six

layers of boundaries, and you communicate each one when it is

necessary. If you're the kind of person who kind of has done this

a little bit, you're not a super people pleaser that hasn't been

your personality. You may find this easier than someone who has

had years and years of just bowing to other people's

emergencies and agendas, be it as it may, communicating what

you want is going to be important. And the final step,

and this is the hardest step, which you thought maybe like, oh

yeah, setting the boundaries was hard. Ooh, communicating sounds

hard. Nope. The hardest part is actually protecting them. And

what's going to happen, especially if you haven't set

boundaries before, is people are going to try to mow them down.

Take a deep breath. You put the barricades back up, and you're

like, Nope, this is actually how things are going to go. And be

adamant and firm and kind. You don't have to have a freak out,

and you don't have to wonder. Why are people violating your

boundaries? Well, maybe you never set them, maybe never

communicated them. Maybe they're, you know, a little bit

of an asshole kind of going on in there. Who knows? Doesn't

matter. What matters is you re communicate that boundary you

like, Hey, did saw that. You know, I asked for this. You did

the absolute opposite, or you keep coming into my office, even

though my door is closed, there's a sign that says doing

my focus work, and you might need to kind of work out what's

causing them to do that. And most often, it's because your

boundaries make them realize they don't have boundaries, and

it makes them feel weird. So if they can make you, you know,

throw your boundaries out the window, then they don't have to

go through what feels like the hard process of creating and

communicating and protecting their own so that's why I always

encourage kindness in these kind of situations. Because most

often, especially when people are really giving you the gears,

it's driven by a fear of some kind that either you're

progressing without them, or you're growing they're not, and

that reflects badly on them, and they're just maybe not

emotionally capable of processing that themselves. And

when people aren't emotionally capable of processing their

emotions, which is most of humanity, they're going to take

it out on you, because it's easier to spew the poison than

to process it. It takes a lot more work, and so just continue

that kindness, continue that direction of saying, Okay, what

do I want? How do I communicate it? How do I protect it? And you

might have to take a lot of deep breaths, and you might need to

adjust things over time.

Boundaries are meant to adjust over time. But when you can say,

Okay, this is clearly what I want, and you adopt the healthy

people pleasing attitude of an and versus an or everybody can

get what they want, and you spread more of that message into

your sphere of influence, so more people set their boundaries

and create that wonderful expectation that everyone has

boundaries and all are to be respected, communicated and

protected. Everyone around you and everything around you

becomes so much easier any kind of game playing and mind reading

goes away, because clarity is now in the room, and clarity

above anything else is kindness. And so if you have been a

healthy people pleaser or an unhealthy people pleaser, maybe

you've done a little bit of boundary work. Maybe you've

never even tried. I want you to be able to take some time right

now, set those boundaries, understand how you're going to

communicate and protect it. Really look at those as the most

important and meaningful thing that you can have in your life,

and then adopt the overarching attitude of and I can be this

happy, fulfilled, successful, respected person, because these

are the parameters that will allow me to feel that way and

continue to do whatever and however much help you want to

provide to other people, because it's important and meaningful to

you.

So go out there be the healthy people pleasers you know you can

be and enjoy setting, communicating and protecting the

boundaries that are going to give you the life, work and love

that you really want you.