How People Pleasing is Keeping You from Living Your Truth

Are you feeling overwhelmed, burned out, exhausted? And if you had to be honest with yourself, maybe a sense of resentment, frustration or anger under the surface? Have you ever asked yourself or noticed or maybe been curious if some of this shows up from being a people pleaser? 

What are the signs that you might be a people pleaser? Where this might have come from, what limiting beliefs or hidden subconscious belief you might not or maybe you are aware that you fear will happen if you don't show up as a people pleaser? Why you want to take steps to walk on the path of not pleasing people, how you can do that and questions you can ask yourself.

When we think of people pleasers, we think of a person who is always trying to make other people happy or maybe a person who tries to avoid conflict. If we had to make this very black and white, we could say there's basically two types of people in the world. There's the givers and the takers. The people pleasers often show up as the givers taking care of other people. Maybe if you're familiar with the enneagrams, you may be an enneagram too. The helper, you may be a healer or somebody whose job or profession is to help people. Maybe it's one of the ways that you navigate your needs for being a people pleaser.

What we normally see isa person who's trying to make other people happy, maybe complimenting people all of the time. Maybe it's too much. Somebody who really doesn't like difficult conversations, avoids conflict or difficult conversations, maybe has a hard time speaking their truth or creating boundaries. 

A people pleaser might be somebody who apologizes too much. You might find yourself being the person who, if there is conflict, if you're not avoiding it or if you can't avoid it, you're the person who's apologizing just to end the conflict. You may not even know why you're apologizing and honestly, sometimes your apologies may not even be authentic because maybe you're apologizing to avoid conflict. If you find yourself being the person who's always apologizing, take a deep breath and just ask, am I over compromising my beliefs or my values? Am I apologizing just to end conflict? Is this apology sincere? Do I really feel like I did something wrong? Do I always feel like I'm always wrong? 

That's another kind of indicator: maybe your apology is sincere and maybe you're taking responsibility too much for conflict. When things appear to be quite wrong in any way, you might be a fixer, someone who's always trying to help and fix the situation or maybe even other people, maybe your children, maybe your parents. Although our intention is probably always good, this can also create unhealthy relationships. Some people can respond or react to this in a very negative way. They may feel like there's nothing broken, they don't need to be fixed. They may feel like you're creating judgment on them. They may totally resist any of your advice or help or support and you may feel exhausted always trying to help other people fix relationships. Maybe you have two friends who are navigating conflict and you're the peacemaker all the time. Maybe you find yourself trying to prevent your spouse or your partner from getting upset with your children because of something that your children did. There's all kinds of different ways that this can show up.

Maybe there's a financial struggle in your home and you're doing things to try and keep it in balance or hide it. Maybe you're just always that person who's volunteering for things, volunteering for the PTA or anything. Maybe you're over volunteering your time. Maybe you're the fixer. Maybe you're a people pleaser and you aren't totally aware of it.

Another way this can show up is that you're really sensitive, very sensitive to what people think or say about you, or sensitive to what people think or say in general because you can relate. So this is often an empath, and empaths often are people pleasers. This is the shadow of the empath, is the deep need for connection or to be seen. The relationship between an empath and how they attract toxic energy, which is very similar to the people pleaser. But the difference is the people pleaser is a little bit more aware because it's coming out behaviorally, whereas for an empath, it's just the sensation in our body.

If you know that you are sensitive, you are an empath. Ask yourself, do I have the behaviors and reactions of a people pleaser? Am I a person who avoids conflict? That would be another indicator that you might be a people pleaser. You just don't want to have conflict with your spouse, with your kids, with your parents, with parent teacher conferences, sticking up for your kid in some way, maybe even with a friend. It can show up in so many ways. Maybe with so if you're a coach or an entrepreneur, just in the exchange of energy, of payments, like maybe somebody's credit card stopped working and you just don't want to say anything, you want to keep the peace. I don't recommend that because everything's an exchange of energy. It's this sort of struggle with letting people know. You might be a people pleaser. 

If you experience a lot of anxiety, this is where it starts to show up in the body. Anxiety is in the gut and if you have anxiety, you probably know already. You might be in your thoughts a lot about what people think or say or what I did wrong. You might be a person who is reliving experiences over and over again trying to figure out what you did wrong or what you can do to fix something. You might be able to relate with that.

If your digestion is off, if you have a hard time sleeping, if you're really suffering from severe anxiety, it's going to affect your digestion. It's going to affect your whole solar plexus area. You might have knots in your stomach. You might feel nauseous. You may self sabotage by overeating or undereating, and you might just be really low in energy. If you're a people pleaser, you probably care too much about what other people think in this day and age with social media. Maybe you've even spoken your truth a time or two on social media, and there was some backlash, and that made you super uncomfortable. Maybe you don't openly share things or maybe you don't openly share things with anybody in your life because you're afraid of conflict and you fear too much what people think. If you find yourself being the giver and not the taker, like always, over giving.

Here's the key here, not receiving, because there are givers and takers. As people pleasers, sometimes we don't even let ourselves receive because we don't want to take. When you have the right to receive and be in healthy relationships, in both give and take, that's where we really want to be is in that balance of giving and receiving. That's what we're seeking in relationships. If it's hard for you to say no, if it's hard for you to speak your truth, if it's hard for you to be seen in your truth because of fear of judgment, fear of not being good enough, fear of rejection and abandonment, those are really the top four fears that really come up for people pleasers.

This usually has something to do with your childhood, a lot of things do. Some of you are probably parents right now and just thinking, oh, my gosh, I See that my children are people pleasers. How did I contribute to that? It happens. This is where we just have compassion for ourselves, and we get to choose differently. We get to walk this journey with them, and we get to navigate this with them or through ourselves and teach them as we're going through it.

A fear of being selfish, a fear of appearing to be self centered selfish. And a lot of that is maybe because you're a people pleaser, because you've been doing everything your whole life to seek approval from other people and you're realizing that that is not your truth. That's not actually how you want to show up anymore. Maybe your high achievements in achieving all of that was even to gain recognition from one of your parents. Maybe you subconsciously believe that that's how you received love. There's so many things under the surface but when we can finally kind of understand it and without blaming anybody because we're all here in co-creation, we're all learning, we're all making mistakes. When we can really uncover where that might have come from, we can just have compassion for ourselves.

The reason that we really want to break this cycle, that's really what this is about, is first identifying if you're a people pleaser and then saying, okay, so I know that I have people pleasing tendencies and you may only have one of these and you're going to start attracting the takers. You're going to start attracting toxic relationships. It might happen over and over and over again until it really feels like a kick in the stomach and it feels like betrayal, because it's actually self betrayal, because you were giving your power away to somebody else in order to be liked by them or to feel special by them. We attract these people who are the takers.

An extreme end of a taker would be a narcissist. Navigating the relationship between the empath and the narcissist, the giver and the taker and the people pleaser, we'll just say kind of an energy vampire. This is why you really want to break this cycle because you've probably already noticed that you may even have somebody in your life right now, that it feels really good right now. But maybe there's some red flags, maybe it's a little off. Maybe you're super exhausted when you're around this person.

Subconsciously can be people pleasing for a subconscious need to control a situation. This isn't most of us, but it can be some of us if we're feeling really tired, these would be the people that are kind of keeping tabs. A person like that might say something like, after all I've done for you. We might even say this to our children, like, after all I've done for you or well, I did this for you. If you notice yourself saying that, then be very curious about your level of people pleasing because that's a deeper level of people pleasing. Get super curious about what is the need underneath that, maybe we have a need to be loved and appreciated. That's pretty normal. Under that is there a need to control something? Are you giving because you expect something in return?

Why is it important to stop people pleasing? Because you're going to attract these toxic relationships. You're a person who seeks validation. You're a person who needs healthy boundaries. You want to feel loved, you want to feel special, you want to feel appreciated. You become a very easy target for somebody who isa taker, an energy vampire who lacks compassion and empathy, even if they appear to have it on the outside. It's an energy exchange, it's kind of the way it's the give and the take. It's an energy exchange. You start to project that energy outward. That is because your energy field isn't tight. In truth, because you're not self sufficient. There's a part of your wounded self out of your fear of rejection or abandonment that might be seeking some validation. You might attract somebody who's going to give you validation. They might even love bomb you in a really kind of extreme case. You might attract a narcissist and this can be in a romantic relationship or a friendship or a business partnership, but you might attract a person who they may not even know because oftentimes they have their own unhealthy self that's coming out but they are going to give you the validation that you're seeking in order to serve them and at the same time it's feeling good to you because subconsciously you're seeking that validation and you're somebody who probably wants to be seen or heard or feel special. So you over give or you overdo to be that person. Someone gives you the opportunity to do that. Somebody who has another agenda, who's looking for a person to support them in some way is going to come and maybe take advantage of that situation.

A people pleaser has an unhealthy subconscious need for validation and approval. Let's just have compassion for all of this, maybe it came through in a relationship with some type of authority in your childhood. It could have been your parents, it could've been a teacher, a coach, anybody. At some point in time, somebody in a position of authority. If you are a people pleaser, likely this isn't everybody. This is just my opinion and from all of the research that I have done on this and the coaches that I have worked with, that this comes through from some experience in childhood where we're seeking validation, love and approval, from a position of authority when we're very, very young.

We can attract people who love authority, who love to control things, who make promises to you and then all of a sudden you feel special and you give and they take. Then maybe they even drop you like it was nothing.

Reasons you want to stop? Because there's probably five or six reasons you want to stop. The biggest one is because it's not good for your well being. What happens is a lot of people pleasers suppress their emotions. When you suppress your emotions, they can show up in your body and create energetic stagnation. The place that it most often shows up is your solar plexus. Anxiety in the gut, resentment in the gallbladder, anger and frustration in the liver. You may even have digestive issues. You may not have healthy bowel movements. You may have a lot of food sensitivities. You might have a gut that doesn't absorb. You might not be able to gain weight, or you might be gaining too much weight because of the stress, because of the cortisol. It could all be related just to this, or this could be part of it, not just the food you eat. That's why nutrition alone can't heal or cure anything. It's your emotional relationship to food and then energetically. How well you absorb the nutrients and utilize them has a lot to do with the state of your nervous system. You want to do this because being a people pleaser is not good for your well being. 

Number two, you're going to feel unfulfilled in your life, in your relationships, in your marriage and your friendships, with your kids, with your work, with money. Nothing's ever going to be enough because you're over giving and you're not receiving. Even if you have wonderful people in your life, you're still going to feel unfulfilled. This is why you want to navigate your relationship with people pleasing and be in healthy, balanced relationships.

Number three, you're going to burn out. You're going to burn out. You're going to be exhausted, you're going to feel overwhelmed. Are you really showing up in your life if you're exhausted, burned out and overwhelmed all the time? Are you being present? Are you being present in those relationships? Are you enjoying the moment? Are you just waking up every day in survival mode and asking yourself, how do you really want this next chapter of your life to be? Do you want to continue in the cycle of overwhelm, self sabotage, exhaustion? Or do you want to start enjoying the time that you have left with your parents, your children? Do you want to step into a career in a job that you love? Do you even know what your dreams and goals are for your life? So many times when I meet with women in an initial connection call, they don't even know what they want their life to look like. That's a sign that you are exhausted and overwhelmed.

Number four, you don't know your dreams and goals because you're stuck in that cycle. You're in survivor survivor strategy, survivor cycle. You can't even see beyond the confusion. You're in a spinning cycle of day to day, overwhelm and burnout and exhaustion. You're just trying to get through breakfast and the workday and dinner and you crash out at night. Is that really how you want to live your life? It's time to get clear on the areas that are not fulfilled in your life because you're out of alignment and the areas of your life that you're not fulfilled because you're in a cycle of overwhelm. So there are areas of your life where you're not happy because it's out of alignment with you. You don't know this because you haven't taken the time to navigate what is in alignment for you because you're too overwhelmed.

Another reason that you want to stop being a people pleaser is because you're emotionally disconnected from yourself and your truth. You don't even know your needs and your feelings. So needs and feelings, goals,and dreams are all different. You've likely created a pattern of kind of shutting down and suppressing your emotions. This means that you probably are missing out on having deep, loving relationships with the people that you love. Because if you're not allowing yourself to experience the whole range of emotions, you're probably not allowing yourself to experience the depth of true love, intimacy, and relationships. This is heartbreaking. We don't give ourselves permission to say the things we want to say to show up in the way that we want to every single day with our parents, our spouse, our children, our loved ones because you're emotionally disconnected. You don't even give yourself time to feel the feelings. Sometimes we get to feel the heal. I'm sure you've all heard that. 

People pleasers don't know what their needs are. People pleaser is going to ask for help. Asking somebody, would you be willing to do this? Because the golden bow on all of this is the whole reason you want to stop people please is because you matter. Your needs matter, your feelings matter. Your requests, your dreams, your goals, all of those things matter. When you are super clear in that, when you stand in that truth and you're protected, you no longer attract those toxic relationships. Or if you do, they kind of roll off you. They kind of bounce off you. You no longer choose to self sabotage through unhealthy eating habits or overly excessively drinking or avoidance or over shopping or any of those unhealthy addictive patterns that can show up because you know who you are. You have found how to be a peopleplease, how to not be a people pleaser, how to live in alignment with what's true for you, what matters for you. When you do this, relationships, they feel healthier, they are more imbalanced of giving and receiving and you're speaking up in your truth, in relationships, you're able to communicate with how you're feeling, what doesn't feel good and what you need. You can do this in a way that's well received by other people, even the most offensive people. It's such a wonderful tool. Be curious about your self worth, make time for your self care because that's the golden nugget. 

There are people that can help you to identify what is the subconscious belief that is creating this pattern of people pleasing. What is the need underneath? A counselor, a coach, a therapist can help you to identify this, help you get clear on your dreams and your goals that maybe you've never even made the time to do. You get to discover all of those, what matters most to you, what are your values? You get to live your life from a place of, is this in alignment with me and my values or not? Because if it's not, then it's a No. You start to learn how to create healthy boundaries and the first time you do, it's going to feel really good. It's not from a place of fear or hate. This is the difference. This isn't creating a boundary out of rejection. This is creating a boundary out of love. Love for that person and for yourself because it creates a healthy relationship.

If you find yourself being a person who has to over explain why you're saying no, you're a people pleaser. You don't have to have a reason. You can just say no. You do not have to explain yourself. You can create healthy boundaries in a loving way.

Seek a counselor, coach, therapist. Discover your needs, feelings, goals and dreams and take action on them. One small step. Just one small step. Create healthy boundaries and relationships. No explanation needed. Ask for help. Because then it really gives people the opportunity to choose, would you be willing to? Not can you. Because we can, but maybe we don't want to, but would you be willing to? You're inviting the person to co-create the experience with you.

Lastly, create mutually supportive relationships.If you're feeling exhausted in a particular relationship, it's not just that other person. It's also asking yourself, how am I showing up in this relationship that's contributing to that. Sometimes it's easy to be, oh, I'm so exhausted around that person because all they do is talk and dump their stuff on me. Well, are you speaking up about that? Are you creating a boundary? Like just letting them know that it doesn't feel good to hear some of those things? Or that maybe you've got a lot going on and you just don't have the capacity or the space at this time, but you're their friend and you're sending them love. This is hard to do. This is really hard to do with friendships with spouses or with your children. 

Every relationship, every conversation is an opportunity for us to practice. We get to practice those boundaries. There's internal boundaries where we just don't allow ourselves to be consumed by other people's needs. Then there's the external boundary where we actually step out and just say something. This is kind of a little bit up and down, like all of the journeys that we're working through. We're going to notice different layers, we're going to notice different things. We're going to think, oh yeah, finally I broke that cycle. And then it might come up in a different relationship in a different way. You just seek support and you just move through it. And every time you do, it gets easier. But I'm going to invite and encourage you not to avoid it, because if you go through it, you can break it and diffuse the energy and actually start showing up the way you want to. Start showing up for yourself in your relationships, in your life with money and work and food and nutrition and love and marriage and kids and all the things.

P.S.

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Jen Mons is an author, speaker, mentor and coach for high achieving purpose driven ready to shift the paradigm of feminine leadership and redefine excellence and wealth through 5 Element Wellth, Prosperity, Daily Devotion Journaling and Soul Wisdom Imprinting.