Make sure you also check out the video below too!
I don’t think I ever considered myself to be a “people pleaser” until I started to take a look into myself. I had always just considered myself to be extremely self-less and just a nice person. I did not realize what my people pleasing stemmed from and why it was not a good thing until I started my personal journey.
I was always that person that thought of someone else’s needs before my own. I would jump at any opportunity to help someone out, even if it was to my expense. I would do something, even if I didn’t want to do it, I would agree with something, even if I didn’t agree with it; most importantly is that I did not express my true feelings about it. In truth, I was afraid I would be abandoned or rejected if I didn’t “just go with it”, but I was not very conscious of this truth.
What is important to realize about people pleasing, is that it actually can be selfish behavior. People pleasers sometimes do not people please out of pure goodness in their hearts. They people please because they are afraid that if they stop doing these behaviors, they will be abandoned or rejected. The root of people pleasing is abandonment and rejection. If you are the type of person that will agree to someone else, like doing something that you REALLY don’t want to do, and you do not voice your true feelings about doing it, listen up!
If you are not taking care of yourself and your needs first, if you are not first being loving towards yourself, you cannot be loving towards others. Think about the energy behind the behavior. We are all in-tuned to everyone’s energy, whether we realize it or not. If you think you may be a people pleaser, the next time you find yourself in such situation stop for a moment. Think about what you want to say to the other person, for example, let’s say they want you to do something with them. Before you respond, ask yourself whether or not you really want to do whatever it is they are doing. If you don’t, then voice it. If there are some other factors, such as you don’t want to but you do want to for other reasons, then voice it! And ask yourself if your choice is serving your best interests or not. This is not a place to be selfish and unemphatic though, it does leave room for and should be composed of compromise if need be. Ask yourself why you are responding in the way that you are wanting to respond. Is it because you are worried about how the other person will feel or how you will be treated by them? If your reasoning pertains mostly to to the other person, are you not taking your own wishes and needs into consideration? Will you feel uneasy or uncomfortable if you chose to express your true feelings about it? Remind yourself that you can freely express yourself and be accepted, that you don’t have to go along with the crowd if you do not want to and you can be accepted for who you are as an individual. Again, compromising is okay, just be sure to do yourself the service of expressing your true feelings about it, don’t hold back on saying “well I really don’t want to [or I really shouldn’t], but…” The more you care about the other persons’ opinion of you etc., the more likely you are to exhibit people pleasing behaviors around them, especially if you have not been your true self with them. Again, this behavior stems from fear of abandonment and rejection.
Affirmations that can help wit this are:
-I choose to believe I am accepted for who I am
-I choose to believe that I am worthy of love as my true self
-I choose to believe that those who choose to abandon or reject me for being myself are not meant to be in my life in this way
-I choose to believe that for as many people that may reject or abandon me, there will also be people who will accept and love me for being myself
If you were trying on clothes and you found a shirt that you REALLY liked, but were unsure of how it looked on you once you put it on, and you asked a friend whether or not they thought it looked good, you would want that friend to be truthful correct? You wouldn’t want your friend just to say they loved it and that it looked good just because you said you really liked the shirt while it was on the rack right? Especially since once you put the shirt on, you weren’t really interested in it anymore. Truthfulness is always the most loving thing you can give to other people and yourself, even if it can sound brutal at times.
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