People pleasing is one of the greatest epidemics known to mankind. It seems that we will do whatever it takes to please others and make them like us. Another motive for people pleasing is to avoid conflict, confrontation or our own truth.
We have been taught from an early age that we should be nice and in order to be nice, we attempt to please as many people as possible an any given moment. And if you are saying to yourself at this moment, that you never try to please people, I am going to assert that you are , in fact, a people-pleaser and are unaware of it.
When we are caught in the people pleasing mode, we completely abandon ourselves and our own needs. This leads to a loss of personal power and ultimately to resentment and anger. When we say yes when we really mean no, we build up a residual resentment against the very people we are trying to please.
A typical example of this is the husband or wife who martyrs him or herself for the good of the other. This results in a set of unspoken expectations. When the other person fails to meet these expectations, resentment accumulates. Eventually, the resentment is so huge it can be difficult, if not impossible for an individual to see beyond.
When the wife of 40 years looks at her husband and sees only the ways he has disappointed her over the years, she is caught in the trap of people pleasing. She becomes blinded to the reality that this is the person with whom she has spent her life, her partner and friend. She has covered up his vulnerabilities as a fellow human being. Both her eyes and her heart have been covered over by the imagined wrongdoings of her husband.
What began, as people pleasing results in a separation from those we love the most. We have to be true to ourselves within our acts of kindness. We have to understand that saying yes when we mean no is not the road to happiness and well-being. It is the road to loneliness and isolation.
Standing in one’s own power means to be confident and courageous enough to be honest and say what we mean. We all want to be liked by others, but the truth is that regardless of what we do, half of the people will like us and the other half probably won’t.
What is really important is that we love our self enough to risk the opinions of others. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true,” for when we cannot be true even to ourselves, we cannot be true to another.
