The truth about people pleasing.
When I coach, teach, and speak, “people pleasing” is a topic that clients and audiences bring up again and again. Many of us received social conditioning that directly taught us to try to please others. Even as we learned lessons like “don’t lie,” we also learned lessons like “don’t hurt anyone’s feelings” and “always tell your grandmother that you like what she cooks, even if you actually hate it.”
It’s no wonder we’re confused, right?!
We’re trying to simultaneously follow two distinct social conditioning ideals that are in direct conflict with one another. And if we don’t realize that’s what’s happening, it can be confusing to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing when it comes to people pleasing.
Let’s take a look at what people pleasing actually is. People pleasing is trying to make other people like you or be happy with you. Sometimes it means doing something you don’t want to do or wouldn’t otherwise do. Other times it means doing something you might normally do, but rather than doing it out of genuine desire, you’re doing it to try to create a specific outcome, namely that the other person is “pleased” and/or that they like you. If you’re anything like I used to be, you might even do this without realizing you’re doing it, maybe under the guise of “just being nice” or “just being a cheerful person.”
Let’s look at an example. It’s 5:30pm and you’ve been working since 8am. You’re about to log off for the night. But then your boss slacks you with “just one more thing.” You groan. You totally do not want to do this last minute request. It could totally wait til tomorrow. But instead of telling your boss you’re logging off and that you’ll handle it in the morning, you shoot back with “sure thing!” and “I’ll get that right over to you!” You’re not as excited as your exclamation marks are pretending you are, but you feel like that’s how you need to act, so it’s how you act.
Why are you showing up the way you’re showing up in this interaction? Because you want your boss to like you, and because you’re trying to ensure that outcome via your behavior.
But let’s be honest. Most of the time, including in the example above, what we call “people pleasing” is actually lying. And it’s not just lying outwards, to others, it’s also lying inwards, to ourselves.
Allow me to explain. When we people please, most of us don’t tell the truth to the other person. We don’t say, hey, I’m actually logging off now, can this wait til the morning? Instead we pretend not just that we don’t mind but often that we’re overjoyed to do this thing that we actually do not want to do at all, because we think behaving this way will get us more of what we want (being liked, getting promoted, etc).
That’s lie number one. Even if you haven’t been calling your people pleasing lying, you probably also knew that you weren’t exactly telling the truth to the other person. But did you know that there’s another lie at play in people pleasing? Yep, there’s also lie number two: the lie we tell ourselves about why we told lie number one.
Like I said earlier, we tell ourselves that we’re people pleasing because we want the other person to like us and think we’re awesome or because it’s important to demonstrate that we’re invested in our work. Those might be true, but they’re not the full truth. The other reason that we aren’t honest with people is because (drum roll please): we don’t want to feel the discomfort we would feel if we told the truth.
And there’s multiple layers here. We don’t want to feel our own discomfort internally or externally. So just like we tell two lies - to ourselves and to the other person, we avoid that discomfort twice as well. We avoid the discomfort of telling the person the truth because of how we think we’d feel if we did. And we also avoid the discomfort of telling ourselves the truth and having to come to terms with what we’re really doing here.
Instead of telling ourselves, hey I don’t want to feel uncomfortable, we gloss it over and pretend that being a people pleaser is a nice thing we do, something that results in joy for others, rather than seeing it for what it is - an avoidant behavior that is inherently dishonest.
Here’s the other problem to add to the already cringey reality of “people pleasing” - it doesn’t work. We can't control other people's thoughts and feelings, no matter how hard we try, no matter what we do. We can't make people like us. Not by lying or by telling the truth. Weirdly, we don’t create their opinions of us with our behavior. Most of us have been raised to believe that we do, but of course, we don’t.
You can behave exactly the same way and one person will love you to bits while another person will find you utterly insufferable. For instance, if you say, hey I’m logging off for the night, one person might think you’re a slacker and another person might admire how well you can hold a boundary about the end of your workday. You saying you’re logging off doesn’t create their opinion about that.
When we try to people please, we are literally trying to control what we cannot control, and it’s driven by our inability to be honest, not by our desire for others to feel genuine pleasure.
We’re also taking the authentic us offline, where no one can like or even get to know us. When we people please (ahem, when we LIE), then the self we present to the world is not our actual self. It’s fake us. It’s what and who we think we need to be.
But this backfires, because of course it does. When we aren’t willing to be real us and navigate the world as our actual selves, we also rob ourselves of the chance to connect authentically with others. People at the office may love us. But we don’t feel that love, because on the inside, we don’t believe that they actually know us. We don’t believe that they would like us quite so much if we actually, you know, told them the truth.
At this point, are you wondering if now you have to take an oath to always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? The answer to that is only if you want to.
From a coaching point of view, what I’d invite you to do is to start telling the truth to yourself, no matter what you say or do on the outside. If you want to people please someone, be clear about what you’re doing and why. Decide if you like those reasons. If you’re holding your opinion back because you’re not ready to share it with the world, be clear about why you’re doing that, and again, check in to see if you know and like your reasons.
It’s not for me to say whether it’s important if you tell the truth out loud. You get to decide. And I believe that it’s important to have space inside your head to have realizations without forcing yourself to share them before you’re ready.
You may find that you simply didn’t know you were avoiding discomfort and once you see that you are, that’s enough to change your habits. You may decide that you don’t want to change how you show up at work but you do want to change how you show up in your marriage or with your family. One of the things I love most about coaching is that it’s not one size fits all. We each find our own best solutions. What I want you to see is what people pleasing truly is beneath its cheerful name. Whether you want to keep doing it or not is up to you.
Ready to kiss people pleasing goodbye forever and learn to own your truth like a boss? I can help you with that. I’m currently accepting 1:1 clients for my coaching practice, which by the way is virtual and serves clients all over the world (so if you’re not in the US, don’t worry, I can accommodate you). I’ve also got a few spots open for corporate speaking engagements. Learn more here.