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People pleasing is a behavior that prevents women from experiencing work-life balance. It causes them to say yes to too many things, to not delegate, to work late and always be available. People pleasers don’t want anyone else to feel disappointed and so they avoid conflict at all costs. But people pleasing isn’t really what you think. In today’s podcast, I’m sharing the truth about people pleasing, what you’re actually trying to avoid by people pleasing and 2 things you need to do to stop the people pleasing behaviors.
Topics in this episode:
What you likely misunderstand about people pleasing
Why people pleasers are amazing people and what makes it good
What you make it mean when someone else is disappointed in something you do
How inadequacy and feeling incapable are at the heart of people pleasing
Why it’s important for you to know what makes you invaluable at your company
The 2 step path toward ending people pleasing
Show Notes & References:
In 6 months you can stop people pleasing and start controlling your schedule, presence and energy. Click here to schedule a free call and learn more about coaching: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
Let's talk about people pleasing. People pleasing is a behavior that most women see as something that's really getting in the way of them having work-life balance. It causes them to say yes to too many things, to not delegate, to work late, to always be available. Pleasers don't want anyone else to feel disappointed, and so they avoid doing anything that might make somebody unhappy. But people pleasing isn't really what you think it is. In today's podcast, I'm sharing the truth about people pleasing - what you're actually trying to avoid by people pleasing and at the end, share two things you need to do to stop it. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Okay moms…hello, happy monday. If you're listening to this on the day it comes out, I want to give a little shout out to one of my clients because I haven't done a shout out in a while. One of my clients is just so deserving of it. Amanda, she got this new job. Congratulations, Amanda. But what makes this story so remarkable is that she hadn't really been applying for jobs for very long and she was able to get this job within three weeks. And it's the perfect job. It's going to help her reach her bigger goals that we have named for her in coaching. She was able to negotiate for a higher salary for more benefits. She was really able to show up powerfully and negotiate with a lot of confidence in that. And all of this really because of all of the work that we've done around her self worth and her value, she really believes, and the value that she brings to any company and into the role that she has and into her leadership, she believes it so much so that she has been able to articulate that in such a way that other people just can't wait to hire her because they believe it too. And that's the way it's really supposed to work. When your belief in yourself and the value that you have in yourself feels so palpable that other people experience it and latch on to it, and then in the hiring process, of course they're going to hire you. It's just amazing. Congratulations again, Amanda. I can't wait to see what amazing things happen for you in this next job and in this next company as you work your way up.
What is people pleasing?
So today we're going to talk about people pleasing. And there's just no real way to sugarcoat this topic. So we're just going to dive straight in. 56% of women self identify as people pleasers. A people pleaser by definition, is someone that has a strong urge to please others. Now, that doesn't sound so bad. I want to start out this podcast by talking for a moment about how this term people pleasing kind of gets a bad rap. Because the desire for someone else to be happy, the desire for other humans to be pleased and feel cared for and loved, that isn't a bad thing. The women I know and the clients that I work with that describe themselves as being people pleasers, they are some of the most relatable kind - Like if you need something, they're going to be there for you. Dependable, empathetic people that I know, they tend to be great managers because they're people people. They tend to be amazing friends. And this is why - because they care so deeply about other people's happiness. This isn't a bad thing. And the reason I want to put this out there is because people pleasers have such a negative view of their people pleasing. And yet it's the foundation of what oftentimes makes you such an amazing human being and probably makes you really good at your job too. To change the fact that a people pleaser cares so deeply for other human beings and wants them to be happy would be like changing the very DNA of who they are. So being a people pleaser - meaning to be someone that likes and cares about pleasing others, that is not inherently negative. However, that is not, generally speaking, where the definition ends.
When we're talking about people pleasing, a people pleaser in the way that we most often think about it, is defined as someone who has a strong urge to please others at the sacrifice of themselves. Now, oftentimes when I talk to my clients about the various parts of their personalities about people pleasing or perfectionism or things like that, we talk about the healthy versus unhealthy side. So for people pleasers, the healthy side is that they have this desire and urge for others to be happy and they're willing to do a lot for other people. That's a great thing. That's a healthy thing. That's something really positive about them. They love people and care for people. Unhealthy side of it is when it comes at the sacrifice of themselves, it's like two sides of the same coin.
Behind self-sacrificing is a belief that you are not as important as other people.
Let's talk for a moment about why it is not healthy to sacrifice yourself consistently for the sake of others. Because inherently behind self sacrificing is a belief that you are not as important as other people. Or to say it the other way, it's to say that other people are more important than you, that your needs are not as important as other people's needs. That your desires and wants are not as important as other people's desires and wants. That your value as a human being and what you offer to this world is not as valuable as somebody else's. Now, likely if you're a people pleaser and you hear me say that your brain is probably putting up a little bit of a fight because you know that that's not true, cognitively in your brain, none of that is true. You know that you are just as valuable and that your needs are just as important and your wants and desires are just as important. However, your actions do not reflect that. And you will not be able to create for yourself a sustainable, balanced life if your actions are consistently to put other people's needs above your own.
If you are putting other people's needs before your own, likely what you're doing is saying yes to too many things. Everything someone asks you to do, you say yes to it. Your boss, your team, your friend, you say yes. You say yes to every meeting request without questioning it. You say yes to every deadline without really considering it. If you can make it happen in the 40 hours a week that you have to work, you also probably avoid a lot of conflict. So when you said, I can get that to you later today, but it turns out that you really can't until tomorrow, you work late to get it done to avoid the conflict of telling that person that they're going to have to wait. And if you're a manager and you want everybody else to be pleased and happy, you probably don't delegate as much as you should out of fear of burdening them or making their workload more than they could handle. If you schedule in time for your workout during a lunch break and someone says that they really need you during that time, you just schedule over it. It feels justifiable because their needs are more important than yours. These are all of the people pleasing behaviors that come from the belief that other people's needs and wants and emotions are more important than yours.
This is the game changer to understand…
Now, this last thought, the thought about their emotions being more important than yours, that's actually the most important thing to recognize. And it's really the truth that I want to share with you today on this podcast. When I talk to my clients about why they don't push back on meeting deadlines, and why they say yes to too many things, and why they stay later than 5pm even when they don't want to, or haven't planned on it, or why they always are available to their team after hours, their typical response to me is I don't want them to be disappointed. But the reality is it's actually not about their emotions at all. It's not about their disappointment. It's about how you will feel when they're disappointed. It's about what you will make their disappointment mean about yourself. You're not actually trying to avoid them feeling an emotion of disappointment. You're avoiding the icky emotion that you're going to feel when and if they're disappointed. This is a game changer to understand. And I'm going to give you several examples so you could really see the impact of this, that it's really not about helping somebody else to avoid an emotion. It's about you actually trying to avoid one.
So here we go. I have a client that I'm working with right now that has a really hard time taking control of her calendar. She's an executive leader in her company. She has a lot of people that work under her. She runs departments, and she feels like her schedule is just a total mess. And it's not really reflective of the work that she really needs to be doing in her job. It's more reactive and it's about putting out fires rather than being proactive about not making them start in the first place when we're talking about her schedule. Recently, she came to a call wanting to talk about why she couldn't do the hard thing of moving a meeting. Something had come up that she had to make time for in her calendar, but she was essentially just booked with back to back meetings all week long, which meant that there really wasn't room in her calendar. She was going to have to cancel something in order to make space for the new meeting. But in canceling the old meeting, what that meant was that her whole team was going to have to adjust around her and that they would have to find a new time that would work for everyone, which always seemed to be difficult because everybody's calendar was always very overbooked. I'm sure you can relate to this.
Feeling like a failure.
So when I asked her why she didn't do the uncomfortable task of canceling the meeting and making the whole team reschedule, she said it was because she knew that people would be frustrated. And then I asked her if people were frustrated with her because they had to move the meeting, what would she make that mean about herself? And, without missing a beat, she said it would mean that I'm not a very good manager, that I'm not a great leader. Bingo. This was the reason why my client was avoiding, canceling and moving this meeting around. It wasn't that people would be frustrated with her. It was that she would feel like she wasn't good at her job, that she was terrible at managing, and that she probably shouldn't even be in this position that she was in. She would feel inadequate and incapable and like a failure as a manager. And those were the emotions that she was actually avoiding. And it was why she was having such a hard time moving this meeting around.
Of course, none of that is actually true. Having to move a meeting around and making your whole team have to reschedule and find time in their schedule because another priority surfaced has nothing to do with how good of a leader you are. It doesn't mean that you're a failure or incapable of your job or inadequate or anything. In fact, there's a lot of opportunity to demonstrate your leadership and your management skills by the way you communicate about this meeting move. So it's not actually true, but her brain made it feel so true, so possible, that that's what it would mean, that she did everything she could to avoid it.
Feeling like you have no choice.
Let's talk about another example. I had a client that had a boss that requested from her first thing Monday morning, an assignment or a task of some kind. But he had assigned it to her on Friday afternoon, which meant the only possible way that she was going to be able to accomplish what he was requesting was to work over the weekend, which is not something she really wanted to do. And in a balanced life, it's not something you should be doing all that frequently, at least not in this kind of reactive way. But she felt like she had no choice, so she took up half a day on either a Saturday or Sunday, and she got it done. But she felt resentful while doing it, and she felt guilty for not spending the time with her family, but she did it anyway and it was ready for Monday. A couple of days later, we had our next coaching session, and we spoke about it. And I asked her why she did that. Why didn't you just tell her boss that she wasn't planning to work over the weekend and that she could have it to him by the end of Monday or Tuesday morning? And she said she felt like she just couldn't. And I said, Why? And she said, well, he's the CEO and I'm still pretty new at my job. And I asked her what she thought would happen if she had done it, and in the practical sense, she said, probably nothing. But he probably would have been a bit frustrated and disappointed in her. And I said, what would you have made that mean? And she said that he probably made the wrong choice in hiring me. Her interpretation of his disappointment and frustration was that she is not as valuable to her company like they thought, and that maybe they even made a wrong choice in hiring her. And if that was really true, what she would feel is probably not good enough undesired invaluable.
So in reality, it had nothing to do with the boss's disappointment and frustration and had everything to do with the possibility that she would feel invaluable and undesired. It was not that she was avoiding her boss's reaction or trying to save him from feeling anything. It was what she was trying to save herself from feeling that.
Struggling to delegate to your team.
I have a client right now that's struggling with delegation, even though she knows that it's a really important part of managing her time and achieving more in less time. And it's a really important part about being a manager and she's struggling with it because everybody on her team has a really full workload, including herself, and everybody is feeling this general sense of overwhelm and she doesn't want to add to it. It sounds really nice of her, doesn't it? Not to overburden her team and her staff by giving them more to do and instead taking it on herself. But what's the problem with that? If you're constantly taking on more of the workload in order to avoid other people feeling overburdened and overwhelmed, are you truly able to create balance for yourself? Probably not. Hence why she hired me as a coach, because this continues to be a cycle for her.
Her brain thinks that she is doing them a favor by not overburdening them. She doesn't want them to feel overwhelmed because what happens when they feel overwhelmed? It's possible that they won't be able to get all of their work done. And if they can't get all of their work done, what would that mean about her as a manager? That she wasn't very good, that she really shouldn't be in this job, that she's inadequate, incapable? It's not them feeling overwhelmed that she's avoiding. It's the emotions that would come with it when they feel overwhelmed. It's the emotions that would come over her when they feel overwhelmed and all of the implications because of that.
Feeling guilty.
Let me give you one more example. I have a lot of clients that work in the tech industry that are overworking, particularly in the startup industry, which tends to be sort of like a badge of honor and just an expectation. I had a client that just worked in this type of industry. She loved her company and they love to hold late night work parties where everybody just stays up late to get the job done. But as a working mom, my client doesn't really want to do that anymore. She probably never really wanted to do it to begin with, but it didn't bother her as much before she had kids, and she really struggled to say no most days of the week. She was the first one of her team to leave the office. She felt really bad about that. She felt guilty. She worried that other people would think that she was not dedicated to her job and she worried that she'd be passed up for promotions because she wasn't, quote, willing to put in the overtime. She was worried that they thought that maybe she wasn't a team player, that she wasn't as good. She felt like she was letting down her team.
So what would she do to make up for that? She would stay available to her team, she would answer their phone calls or their texts whenever they were, even if it was in the middle of dinner, in the middle of family time. If she was trying to be present with her kids, she would answer it anyway. Sometimes she'd even log back on to do work or sometimes she would tell them, hey, I'll hop on at 9pm and put in a couple of hours with you, or something like that. This wasn't what she wanted though anymore. She didn't know what to do about it because it just felt like it was the culture of the company. She and I spent a few sessions really talking about the value that she brought to her team and her job and her company, despite the fact that she doesn't work late. Not through the lens of how much time she worked, but what she actually did. We talked about how she could increase value, how much she could give to her company by resting more, by sharing her great ideas more readily, by advocating for certain projects for her team.
She thought the reason she was having such a hard time saying no to working late was because she didn't want people to be disappointed in her, to not see her as a part of the team or to think that she didn't care. But in reality, the reason why she was having such a hard time not working late and always being available to them was because she feared she would not be as valuable otherwise. It wasn't that she feared what other people were thinking about her, although that's what her brain wanted her to think. In reality, she was already thinking those things about herself. And when she was thinking that she wasn't as valuable because she wasn't putting in as much time, it became almost a self fulfilling prophecy to her. And she was avoiding all of the feelings of being invaluable and like she wasn't a team player.
In all of these examples, I'm giving you people pleasing behavior:
Not being able to say no.
Not pushing back on meetings.
Saying yes to every project even though you don't have time.
Working on the weekends.
Always being available.
Not delegating enough.
Not pushing back deadlines.
Always being on.
It's what you are going to feel and think about yourself.
These are the things that you're going to have to do if you're wanting to create a life that feels balanced. But the truth is, it's not really about what somebody else might think or feel when you do these things. It's what you are going to feel and think about yourself. The path forward to ending people pleasing in yourself, the unhealthy side of it - is being willing to feel any emotion. It's being willing to feel inadequate when people are disappointed. It's being willing to feel like you're not a team player when you say no and you don't work late. It's being willing to feel incapable when you delegate and your team members maybe don't follow through or possibly even fail. I'm not saying you're actually going to experience these emotions. Because generally speaking, our brains tend to make them much more worse than it actually is. But you have to be willing to feel them.
Be willing to FEEL.
I want you to just take a moment and consider, what would you do? How braver you would be, how much more efficient you would be, how much more balanced you would be if you were willing to feel anything? I want you to take a moment and consider what would you do? What would be different in your life if you were willing to feel any emotion, if you're willing to feel inadequate, if it should come up, if you are willing to feel failure should have happened, if you were willing to feel incapable because maybe you got something wrong.
How I have overcome the fear of failure.
For me, the one that I've really had to work too is a willingness to feel stupid. Stupid is a really strong emotion for me that I have noted that I tend to avoid in my life. But if I'm going to have the successful business that I want. If I'm going to put my ideas out into the world through this podcast. Through social media. Through all my emails. Through everything I do. My programs. I have to be willing to have people totally disagree with me and think that my ideas for creating work life balance and having the life that you want to have as a working mom are stupid and that they don't agree with me. I have to be willing to feel that and for people to oppose it and be willing to feel all of the emotions that I need to feel in order to do it. That is how I'm able to overcome all of that fear of failure and put out all of my ideas into the world so confidently because I'm willing to feel that should it come up.
Question your thoughts.
Now, the second part of moving past the people pleasing behaviors and ending your people pleasing - because remember, this is not a bad thing to be a people pleaser. It's okay that you really love people and you want people to be happy. We just want to end the behaviors that are self sacrificing and self deprecating. And the second part of really moving past this is needing to question all of your thoughts. Because when your brain makes it mean that you're not a team player, when you're not available tonight, right when they're all going to log on and you're not and your brain wants you to think that you're not a team player because of that, you have to question that. Is it really true that you're not a team player if you don't work tonight? How do you know it's not true? How is it actually true that you're amazing and you are a very dedicated team player that loves their company and is totally all in? Or when your brain suggests to you that you're not a really good manager when you have to reschedule meetings or push back deadlines, you need to argue with your brain about that. Is it really true? What actually makes you a good manager? What makes anyone a good manager? Is it the fact that they never reschedule meetings? Would that be on the list? Probably not. How are you the perfect person for the job, for your team?
The heart of ending people pleasing behaviors is believing in yourself.
At the heart of ending people pleasing behaviors is believing in yourself, no matter what anyone else may think. When you believe that you are adequate and capable and loved and so good at your job and not lacking anything, and a good leader and caring, kind individual. And when you believe these things, no matter what, that is when you are going to be freed from the people pleasing behaviors and work life balance will literally be unlocked for you. I can help you. This is the exact work I do in coaching with all of my clients. Our work could start now, and by the beginning of next year, you could feel in complete control of your time, your calendar, your presence, your energy. Schedule a call to connect with me about coaching. I'll put a link to that in the show notes, and let's get started today. All right working moms. Hope you have a great week, and let's get to it.
Outro
Hey, before you go, I want to take a moment and tell you about an opportunity to speak with me directly. If you've been listening to this podcast and still feel like you need help balancing a fulfilling career with motherhood, then I encourage you to schedule a free breakthrough call. On this call, we will get crystal clear on exactly what it is you want out of your career and how you want to balance that with motherhood. And then we'll craft next steps for you to start moving toward a more calm and fulfilling working mom life. Head over to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to apply for this free call till next week. And working moms, let's get to it.
