4 Reasons Why You Should Quit People-Pleasing Forever
I’m willing to bet serious money that if your life sucks, it’s because you haven’t.
I was a chronic people-pleaser for almost 22 years, and I am now in remission.
What Is People-Pleasing?
My Personal Definition of What People-Pleasing Is
In my own words, people-pleasing is the art of constant self-editing. It’s when you throw out what you actually want to say in the trash.
It’s when you hide or eliminate parts of yourself to try and make people like you. It’s when you can’t think for yourself because you’re always trying to read everyone else’s mind, instead of your own.
It’s when you do things you normally wouldn’t do or don’t care about, because you somehow feel “responsible” for other people’s emotions. It’s when you know people, but no one actually knows you.
It’s when you feel bad for saying “no”. It’s when you don’t tell enough people to kick rocks. It’s when you feel like you have to explain your choices.
It’s when you feel guilty for doing things that you and only you like to do because other people might not approve. It’s when labels mean more than happiness.
It’s when you repeat this phrase in your subconscious mind:
“If I prove that I’m good enough, they’ll eventually give me validation. If I shrink my needs small enough, I’ll finally be seen.”
It’s when you let other people tell you what you think and feel because you don’t believe that your own thoughts and opinions are valid.
It’s when you feel like everyone has a right to be comfortable, except for you. Everyone has a right to say and do whatever they want, except for you.
Everyone else sees love and appreciation as a basic right, but you see it as something to be earned.It’s when you think that being a diehard self-sacrificer will “pay off” at some point.
People-pleasing is when you’d rather be liked than be happy. It’s when you believe that you’ll never be appreciated for your authentic self, so you aim to be tolerated for your usefulness and labor instead.
It’s when a tiny sprinkle of approval once in a blue moon is worth minimizing your self-respect a billion times over.
How Will It Ruin Your Life?
People-Pleasing Makes You Feel At War With Yourself
Perhaps the most insidious thing about people-pleasing is that most people who indulge in it don’t even want to do it. It’s a compulsion, one that forces you to shrink yourself in order to make other people comfortable.
On the rare occasion that you fight the impulse, it feels like you’re choking on yourself. You want to take up space, but then you find yourself inundated with a blizzard of intrusive thoughts:
“What will they think?”
“How will I be perceived?”
“What if they hate the happiest version of myself?”
“What if being me isn’t good enough?”
For those of you who can sympathize with this, you know how frustrating this internal conflict can be.
By the time that you finish this internal interrogation, being yourself feels un-incentivized. You give up, you people-please some more, you try to stop people-pleasing, you stress out, you give up, repeat.
It’s a ruthless cycle. If you choose authenticity, it comes with too much stress, so you opt out in order to feel safe. If you give up on authenticity, you avoid the discomfort of growth — but exchange it for misery. A Catch 22.
When you try to exercise the right to exist as you are, it is one of the most nerve-wracking transitions you could ever experience. It feels like expert-level imposter syndrome.
You swear that you can feel everyone’s eyes searing into your skin, as if being yourself is going to make your entire world explode.
It’s like volunteering for second puberty, only now, you can’t hide with baggy hoodies and loud headphones. There is no protection this time.
Being authentic means being completely exposed, leaving yourself open to criticism and the misplaced projections of others.
Wait, You Just Made Quitting Sound Hard AF. Why Bother?
Quitting People-Pleasing Is Hard, But Before You Give Up, Ask Yourself:
What Are You Willing to Trade For the Approval of Others?
Many of us feel like people-pleasing is a default state. We automatically smile (even when we’re uncomfortable) and find ourselves in situations that we don’t enjoy.
People-pleasing can feel like it has its own center of gravity at times. The approval of others feels like it has maximum value in our lives, and we put it on a pedestal, at all costs.
However, nothing in this world is free. External validation is no exception.
When we seek out the approval of others, there is an implicit trade. You win their approval, but at what cost? We often fail to read the fine print:
Continuing to be a People-Pleaser May Result in the Following Symptoms:
- A loss of authenticity
- Low self-belief
- Low emotional agency
- Lowered self-respect
- Feeling like you have to pretend, indefinitely
- Adhering your sense of self-worth to someone else’s projections
- Giving someone else the ability to define who you are and what you can be
The Four Reasons Why I Quit People-Pleasing, and Why I Think You Should Too:
Now that I’ve explained what people-pleasing is and why it is trash, let’s get into it.
- Overgiving is a form of control.
You might think that being an overly-giving person is a good thing, but there’s a darker undertone to your behavior. You fear being disliked and being in situations where how you’re perceived is out of your control.
To make up for this, you try to adorn people with excess availability, zero boundaries, and a complete erasure of your needs.
Deep down, you’re “selfless” because you think it will get you something in return — control over people’s perception of you. But no matter how “selfless” you are, you can’t control how people view you.
How people view you comes down to a bunch of previous factors that existed way before they met you, which brings me to point two:
2. People’s Projections Make Them Messy Sources of Validation
People’s feelings towards you are unreliable gauges of your self-worth. Everyone has different ambitions, limiting beliefs, traumas, insecurities, and opinions on how life should be lived.
These entities are reflected every time they express an opinion to someone else. Every opinion is a glimpse of the speaker’s most personal lived experiences.
However, these beliefs often manifest as projections. It can be dangerous to try to win the approval of people who are projecting because when people project, they’re not talking about you, they’re talking about themselves.
People-pleasing ignores this distinction.
When you try to please people who are projecting their negative opinions onto you, you might accidentally internalize their self-hate.
By internalizing their emotional vomit, you could then make the mistake of thinking that something is wrong with you, that their problems are your problems.
Your failure to separate their issues from your self-worth could ruin how you view and value yourself. In reality, their negative beliefs are 100% independent of you.
Don’t let your self-perception become an echo chamber of other people’s insecurities.
3. It Destroys Critical Thinking Skills
When you’re busy trying to make yourself likable to everyone, you abandon how you actually feel about things. When trying to be agreeable, you tend to avoid disagreement. Makes sense.
However, dissent is the core of innovation. People need to be able to think freely in order to come up with new perspectives, ideas, and art. By trying to water themselves down, they rob the world of their unique viewpoints.
People-pleasing takes up too much mental bandwidth.
When you’re trying to mind-read others, you don’t dedicate as much thought to reading your own thoughts.
People-pleasers often claim that they are “neutral”, have “no opinion/no preference”, and “don’t know what they like”.
I call BS.
They know exactly what they want, but they’re too afraid to say it because they’re worried that other people won’t like it.
By stressing yourself out with the thoughts of others, you limit the space for your own genius.
4. It Recreates Cycles of Unworthiness
If there was ever a time when you weren’t treated fairly, you might have walked away from the event(s) feeling like you somehow deserved it, even though you didn’t.
You felt that the real you was unworthy of good treatment and validation. You were taught that being yourself correlated to undesirable treatment, so you learned to abandon all of the things that make you, you.
When you people-please, you recreate these old relationship dynamics, long after the initial event.
People-pleasing is a way to give yourself a “do-over” for poor dynamics you might have experienced early in life.
Subconsciously, you think that by changing yourself enough for new people, you will finally be able to “earn back” the validation you deserved long ago.
Without even realizing it, you’re trying to “win” past dynamics through your present-day people-pleasing. People-pleasing is your way of “proving” your worth to yourself.
It’s a desperate attempt to heal that core belief of unworthiness — but all it really does is reaffirm it. You never needed to “earn” validation. That idea in and of itself is incorrect.
By people-pleasing, you’re buying into the initial idea that existing as you isn’t good enough.
You’re reliving the core belief that the initial event taught you — that your opinions, thoughts, and desires are secondary to everyone else’s, simply because they belong to you.
By quitting people-pleasing, you learn a key idea:
You have always been good enough, just the way you are.
There is no one who you need to “earn” that from. There is no one who “gives” that to you.
It’s already yours, you were just taught otherwise. You never needed to change in order to receive validation.
You are automatically deserving of that. You have always deserved that. You just need to realize it for yourself.
In Conclusion:
People-pleasing is one of the most toxic things you could ever do to yourself. It will affect your self-perception, the choices you make, the people you choose to associate with, and your entire outlook on life.
Stop trying to use other people’s eyes to finally feel seen.
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