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Hello, welcome to the podcast. Today I'm going to walk you through coaching that I did with a particular client that I'll call Liz on her issue of people pleasing. Have a listen in and see if it might help you with your people pleasing issues.

Liz was feeling really exhausted when she came to me for help because she felt like she was trying to constantly anticipate the emotions of the people around her and that it was her job to keep them happy. She felt like she was always trying to regulate the emotions of the people around her. She felt exhausted because to some extent she felt like her worth and her value was determined by other people's opinions and reactions, and so she felt like she was constantly having to control and cultivate and bolster other people's opinions of her and their feelings around her. She often found that she felt resentful because she was doing things that other people wanted her to do, spending time doing what other people expected her to do. And these things that she was doing often didn't feel very important or valuable to her personally. So she noticed enough that she had a problem with people pleasing that she came to me and we started to work on it. And the very first thing that we started to work on together, which is something that is kind of the first step anytime you want to get a little bit more control over a certain aspect of your behavior or your emotions, is to start to have a little bit of distance from that. I invited her to think of her brain in terms of an internal family. We talked about those movies Inside Out and Inside Out 2. Those of you who've seen those movies, there's a girl and she has all of these emotions inside of her brain, and these emotions are depicted as individual characters. So there's sadness, there's joy, there's anger, there's anxiety, there's jealousy. And each one of these is a particular figure in her brain. So I invited her to think of her brain in the way that Richard Schwartz talks about the internal environment. He's a psychologist that has developed this system called Internal Family Systems, where you think of your different emotions and your different parts of yourself as different members of your internal family. And there is a part of you which is able to observe all of the other parts of yourself, and that part of you is called your Wise Self or your Capital S self. We started to try and work on strengthening her perspective of her wise self, her capital S self, and using her wise self to observe this people pleasing part of herself. So the first step was we tried to give a name to her people pleasing personality, to this part of her internal family. And she chose the name Lavinia. She thought that was fitting for this particular part of herself that always wanted to please other people. And we talked about how it's really important when we're talking about the internal family to never be at war with your parts because all of your parts are trying to help you in some way, and it's nicely illustrated in those movies inside out and Inside out 2, right, because we have all of these different emotions like sadness and anger and joy, and they all have a strength. They all have a time when it really helps to hear their input. And there are other times when it's not helpful to have them driving the control panel. And so the one that needs to decide who's driving when is the wise self. But we need to recognize that Lavinia was wanting to help Liz, my client. And we talked about how people pleasing really stems from something really ancient in hunter gatherer times. We lived in small groups and it was absolutely essential for us to be able to cohere in our groups because people who were cast out of their groups had a much lower chance of survival. The groups helped with resource gathering. It helped people to hunt. It helped people to gather, especially when we're talking about women, were really dependent on their groups, especially when, you know, when they became pregnant, when they had infants, they couldn't be responsible for all of their food needs, all of their gathering. They were really dependent on the group. So we talked about how maybe even females have a little bit more of this tendency toward people pleasing because of, of the dependence in ancient times on the group. But all of us were dependent on our group. And so people pleasing is in, in essence, something that all of us have an instinct to do on some level, and it's not a bad thing. It's something that helped us to survive. If we hadn't been able to be aware of what our group expected of us and how to please our group, then the human race would probably not have survived until this day. It was what helped us be able to cohere as a group and survive. So we talked about how Lavinia has these ancient roots and how she's trying to help Liz survive. How she's trying to help Liz be aware of what her social group expects of her and what her social group will like, and how to please the people around her so that she can stay in her social group and survive. So it was helpful for Liz to start to be able to see her people pleasing instincts from this, from this angle. And when she started to see her people pleasing come up, then she could start to look at it from this ancient priming that she has. We also talked about how pe, although people pleasing, has its dangers which she was experiencing at the moment and which was why she came to me for help, that at the same time, people pleasing reflects a certain talent. So all of those inner characters in the inside out movie that were inside of that little girl girl's brain, they had a specific ability, specific talents and specific weaknesses, right, and specific times when sadness, for example, was really appropriate and helped Riley, the little girl to adapt.

So how is it that Lavinia, the people pleaser, has a talent? Well, it's not bad to be aware of how other people feel, and some people are better at reading what's appropriate to the group than others. It can be a real superpower to be able to read people's nonverbal cues and understand what people want a lot of the time. So it's not in essence all bad. We don't need to be totally at war with Lavinia. We just need to learn to understand her, understand what it is that she's trying to do for us, and be able to use that wise self to direct her, to help her to know when what she's trying to do isn't helpful and when her talents actually are useful.
So we actually worked on her learning to, or preparing to talk to Lavinia in those moments when her people pleasing instincts would come up. It's something that you need to practice ahead of time because in the moment it's gonna be maybe kind of tricky to figure out how to talk to this instinct in the third person. And so we talked about, in our, in our coaching sessions, I asked her to try and think of some things that she could say to Lavinia the next time her people pleasing desire came up. And she talked about how she would tell her, " Lavinia, I really appreciate what you're trying to do for me, thank you for trying to protect me. I realize that you think that I'm going to die if I don't please these people around me. But I want you to understand that this is a different kind of situation than the primitive hunter gatherer times. And I'm not actually in mortal danger if these people don't love me, and I don't need your particular talent at this moment." These were some different things that she came up with to try and talk to herself and get that third person perspective, to exercise her wise self, her observing self to be able to observe her people pleasing in an understanding and compassionate way, but also in a wise way.

So, the next step, once we worked on for a while, her being able to observe and step back and see her people pleasing from a little bit of a distance was to understand how to act at that point. We weren't just going to observe, but we were gonna have to act in different situations. In the past, she had always been letting Lavinia determine how she acted. So when people wanted her to do something, she would just felt obligated to do it. But we talked about how it can be a pitfall for people to swing the pendulum to the opposite direction and simply refuse to do everything that people want you to do. So anything that comes up where people want you to do something, to feel like you just push back every time. That that wasn't going to give her freedom from anxiety the way that she wanted. Anxiety comes from not feeling like you have control and auto autonomy over your choices, and so people pleasing causes anxiety because you always feel at the mercy of what other people might want and what they're feeling. You don't get to determine what you do. But reacting to people pleasing and just pushing back at everything that people want you to do is also not gonna help with anxiety. Because when you're reacting, you are also letting other people decide what you, what you want to do. So for, in Liz's case, for example, if somebody wanted her to babysit for her, her reactionary instinct would be to push back and simply say no. But in this scenario, she's still letting other people decide what she's going to do. Whatever people want her to do, she's going to do the opposite. And so she's still determining her behavior by what other people want to do. So we talked about how real freedom from anxiety and feeling confident is going to come from her having more autonomy. And so we talked about how her job was to reconnect with what was actually important to her. And what's hard for people who are people pleasers, and I too have gone through this journey, is that we don't know what it is that we value because we have always determined what we do based on what other people want us to do. We don't actually know consciously what it is that we value. But remember, you do have values. Those values are what are determining your emotions. And so if you're feeling resentful some of the time and you're feeling anxious, it's because your brain is using internal values to assess the situation around you. So it's just a matter of uncovering what it is that is most important to you.

So, of course, Lavinia, her value was to please other people so that she could survive. But there were other parts of Liz and we talked about focusing on the values of her wise self. So let me tell you about a specific issue that Liz was dealing with so that you can see better how to put these next steps into practice. So Liz was part of a church. She was a member of a church, and one of her issues with people pleasing was that she felt like she didn't have autonomy in her church organization. She felt like anything that anybody ever asked her to do or ever expected her to do, she had to do it because they expected it of her. And so what we wanted to do was to figure out what her wise self actually wanted. We already knew that Lavinia wanted her to do everything that her church asked her to do because her church was this particular part of her social group, and Lavinia felt that it was essential for her to be in harmony and in good graces with her social group. But we talked about how it's really important for her to understand that she has other parts with other values and her wise self has other values. And so we, we introduced the questions that we've talked about on this podcast several times that help you to distill what it is that is most important to you long term. I asked Liz, if you only had three years left to live, you knew that you had a diagnosis today, they gave you three years to live, how would you want to behave in relation to what your church is asking of you right now? And I also, I gave her several different questions she could kind of play with. I asked her also to think of herself, imagine herself at 70 years old, looking back on this time right now, and how she would want to have behaved. These questions really helped Liz to ask herself, what will matter to me long term? So she spent a lot of time writing about that and journaling about it, and we discussed it and she realized that she would still want to be part of this church. That it would still be important to her if she were going to die in three years. She knew that she would still want to be part of this church, but that she wanted to feel permission to balance all the different parts of her life, all of her different responsibilities, her responsibilities to her family, her responsibilities to her physical health, her responsibilities to her mental health, and she wanted to be able to weigh both what the, the church was asking of her and what her family needed and what she needed, and be able to use her, what her own wisdom to decide how to distribute all her resources among these different needs and how to use her time and energy most wisely. So when she realized that that was what she wanted, that she wanted to feel permission to go out and go on a run when she needed to exercise instead of doing this particular activity that the church wanted her to be in charge of, or she wanted to feel permission to spend a special time with one of her children on a weekend instead of doing a particular thing that the church was asking her to do, that she wanted to be able to say no when one of these other responsibilities felt like it really needed attention, then she started to all of a sudden feel a confidence to be able to, to, to say deep down, yes, I'm making the right decision. Even though this person wants me to do this from the church, I can say no because my wise self knows that this will be most important to me long term.

So she learned to be able to step back and observe, to be able to be conscious of various different parts of herself and various different simultaneous emotions in herself, and also to be able to be more aware of what was most important to her long term. She got to the point where when she was asked to do something by her church that Lavinia would've automatically said yes to, she went through a process where she determined if it was actually in concert with her values, if this was really going to be the way that she would want to use her time, if she only had a year left, if she only had three years left, or if she's looking back on it from age 70. And when she determined that this particular thing that was being asked of her was according to her values, then any sacrifice that was involved in doing it did not create resentment on her part because she felt autonomous. She felt that this was something that she wanted to do for intrinsic reasons, not for extrinsic reasons, right? Extrinsic reasons are those external things that we don't control. The outcomes, the way that people feel about us. When we're always trying to control those extrinsic things, that's when we feel anxiety because we can't control them. But she focused on what she wanted to do for intrinsic reasons. And so when she was acting according to her values then it didn't matter if it ended up being something really difficult or involved a lot of sacrifice because it was something that was satisfying to her. When she was asked to do something that was not according to her values, she felt that she was able to say no because she knew that something else was more important to her. That it was, so, it was important for her to use that same time that she would have to use for that particular activity, it was important for her to use that time doing something more important to her, . So basically the overview is that she was able to take back autonomy in her choices and in her values, and do things that were important to her. And so she didn't feel controlled or determined by other people's feelings. She was able to tolerate a little bit of discomfort when other people weren't pleased with her. And she noticed that people that were close to her in her church started to really appreciate more who she was because she was being more authentic about herself and she was still able to give in the ways that she wanted to give and connect with people in that way. But she was also able to say no when there was a priority that was even more important to her. So I just wanted to give you this overview. It's a really broad overview. This was, this was work that we did over months and months, but just so that you can get an idea, a little bit of an idea of how to go about working on people pleasing if this is your issue.

But I will say that it can be really helpful to sign up for some sessions of coaching because when I can individualize it with you, ask you questions and help you to figure out, to draw out from your wise self and your interior, it's a lot more powerful when you, when you can in individualize that . And of course my goal is always to help people get to the point where they can do this work on themselves. But when, when we're just starting out, a lot of times it can be really important to have a third party who can observe and can ask you questions and help you to recognize patterns in the things that you're, say you're saying and ask you questions that you have to search and probe for, and the act of actually speaking and verbalizing what you're feeling and what you're thinking is what brings it into your conscious brain and helps your wise self to know what it is that you actually value and act what you actually think and what you actually feel. So it can be really helpful to begin with some coaching sessions. So if you wanna do that look at my website and look me up and sign up for a couple coaching sessions. So that's what I have for you today. Thanks for tuning in, but don't go away yet. We have our kindness narrative now. This is not just a feel good moment. This is actually a practice that if you can engage in every week, it can help to change your default anxiety settings. And it helps us to listen to these stories that other people share, but it can help you even more if you'll share your own story, and you can do that either with audio or a written form, and the information comes on after this kindness narrative. So stay tuned.

When I was in graduate school , I was studying choral conducting, and this is a culmination of many experiences with my professor. He was always very stern with people, you didn't get a lot of accolades or any accolades from him, and I sometimes thought this person needs to be kinder to people. He needs to be nicer to people. As we went along and as I learned more about him, I realized that he didn't feel like it was his job to tell you how good you were. It was his job to help you be better. I got to know him, I realized what a fabulous Mentor he was. In the beginning, we were always kind of a little bit at odds. I get along with people, and yet I was always at odds with this person. We never seemed to get along. But the more I got to know him and the more I realized that his whole focus was on helping you be better, and perhaps he could have done it in more diplomatic ways, but I think his straightforwardness and his courage in seeing what you needed to change was the important thing . And we live in an environment where people often think you have to speak kindly to people or you don't point out their problems or you don't criticize them in any way. We live so much in that environment. This man wasn't afraid to bring up your inadequacies, and it was exactly that, that made him such an incredible professor because he really had your wellbeing at heart, even when you didn't feel like it. And I remember once I said, I finally get it. The problem is you think I can do this and I don't. And he looked at me and said, yes. Anyway, we are the greatest of friends now. he has blessed many, many lives, but it didn't come in the way you would've expected by somebody just being nice. And I, and I've thought a lot about that and thought, you know, really the greatest gift, the greatest kindness we can give someone is by giving them what they need, not what they want.