Hello my friends and welcome back to the show! Today’s topic is a very relevant topic because so many women I know struggle with people pleasing.
I want to educate you on what people pleasing actually is, how it affects your relationship or marriage, and the long-term effects of it on you. Then, I want to tell you what to do about it!
Ok so let’s get started. I am just going to give it to you straight. People pleasing is lying. I know it doesn’t feel like it because your intentions aren’t bad. But it is straight up lying. It is dishonesty. Plain and simple.
When you tell your partner what they want to hear, despite it not aligning with what’s really going on with you, you are not being honest. You are not being honest with your partner, and you are not being honest with yourself.
And I get it, it is so much easier to say what your partner wants to hear and have a nice, peaceful day together then to be honest and have to navigate possible conflict or tension. But I ask you, at what cost?
Well let’s talk about the costs! Let’s talk about the results you get when you habitually people please your partner.
- Resentment. When you are continuously doing things you don’t want to do, you start to feel resentful towards the person you are doing those things for. Let’s take an example; let’s say you are on your way home from work and your husband calls and asks you to stop by the store to pick something up for him.
But you have been sitting in traffic and the last thing you want to do is make a stop. Plus you have a lot to do when you get home and you’re kind of in a time crunch to get your kid to swim practice.
To put it simply, you don’t want to, and it would be highly inconvenient. But instead of saying that, you say “sure no problem, babe.” Because you want to please him. You want to tell him what he wants to hear because you like that dopamine hit you get when he says, “thanks you’re the best!”
But now, you’re doing it resentfully. Even though you are the one who said yes, you feel resentful towards him for the fact that you are now running even more late and feeling more stressed out. So now you’ve said yes when you meant no. Which leads me to the second consequence of people pleasing your partner
2. Your partner will, by no fault of their own, begin to have expectations that align with your people pleasing and not with your truth.
So, if you cook dinner every single night when you would really rather cook a couple times a week, your partner is now going to expect that you cook dinner every night. And not only do they expect it, they think you enjoy it!
Because to someone who is not a people pleaser, they can’t fathom why you would cook dinner unless you really wanted to! Do you see how you’re setting yourself up for more people pleasing followed by more resentment? It’s a vicious cycle.
And no, I am not saying don’t run errands for your husband or cook dinner! It feels great to do things for the people you love…. When you want to! And if you choose to do something for them when you don’t want to, which is also fine… it’s called sacrifice… just be honest about that.
3. The most important and harmful consequence is that you abandon yourself. You don’t match your insides with your outsides. This leads to low self-esteem and problems with self-trust. Think about it, if I can’t trust myself to honor what’s true for me, I will feel unsafe with myself! I will have anxiety and I will feel lost.
In a previous relationship, I was always saying yes to things that I wanted to say no to. I didn’t know how to just say no. I would agree with him when he complained about someone.. even when I thought he was in the wrong!
I would say yes to things in the bedroom that I didn’t feel like doing, I would hang with him on the couch when I really wanted to go read my book, and I would nod quietly as he ranted on about things, I just didn’t believe in. I wanted to be the cool girl, pleasant and laid back.
I remember actually feeling the word no get stuck in my throat… I mean physically stuck there… and I would choose to just be agreeable because I was afraid of what being myself would lead to.
Would he be mad? Would he judge? Essentially, the real burning question was… would I be accepted exactly as I am?
Looking back, and I’ve said this on other episodes, I see so clearly now that I abandoned myself in that relationship. And if you are a people pleaser, then you have abandoned yourself as well.
And I want you to know that you are worthy and lovable just as you are, even when you’re not saying yes or telling your partner what they want to hear.
In her book Untamed, Glennon Doyle says “Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”
Ugh so good. And why is that true? Because when you choose you, you are on the self-love journey. And at the end of the day, you have to love yourself in order to really love your partner in a healthy way.
So, if you completely resonate with what I’m teaching here and you just don’t know how to break the vicious cycle of people pleasing, I’m going to tell you where to start.
Start small. Start with something that doesn’t really matter. In the next episode, my good friend and colleague, Jenna Huss, talks about how she began breaking her people pleasing tendencies towards her partner by simply ordering the coffee she really wanted to have and not saying I’ll just have what he’s having.
And it really can be that simple. You see, all roads lead to Rome. If people pleasing is prevalent in your relationship, then it shows up with the big things and with the small things. So the next time your partner asks you what you want to eat for dinner, instead of saying “whatever you want”, tell your partner what it is you want to eat for dinner.
I promise you, these little changes are what builds the confidence to being more authentic with the bigger things. And nothing feels more amazing then being your total self within your relationship.
To show up as the real you without the fear that you will be rejected, that’s when you can open up to really loving your partner exactly as they are letting them love the real you in return. and the two of you can grow together in truth, rather than the dishonesty that is people pleasing.
