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People pleasing will never win you respect
Become a confident and respected leader. Leave behind people pleasing. Read this blog by women’s confidence and leadership coach, Harriet Waley-Cohen
People pleasing is generally driven by the desire for one or both of two things.
First up, approval or validation aka please like me, respect me and fill up my low self-worth tank. This looks like not speaking your mind, going along with things to avoid conflict, compromising your own needs to do things for others and so on. Second, control. Needing things to turn out a certain way, especially in a way that feels safe and calm.
However, there is often a deeper reason that people pleasing shows up as a deeply entrenched pattern. And that reason is that it can be a trauma adaptation and learned survival skill.
When faced with danger or threat, the responses we most commonly hear about are flight or fight. Research used to focus on these as human's responses to danger because studies used to only have male participants until more recently (I know, maddening, luckily women are much more frequently included these days).
For women, we may well not win at either fleeing or fighting, and so we are likely to freeze in the face of danger to survive. This is one of the reasons why women’s lack of fighting back nor attempting to escape has be used against us in cases where we have experienced violence.
Alongside freeze, the most common response to danger for women is to try to appease or placate the source of danger in the hope that we will get away later. This is sometimes known as the fawn response.
People pleasing, keeping others happy at our own expense, and abandoning our own needs to win validation, can be a coping strategy carried over from times in our lives when we’ve faced ongoing threat or danger. If we learn that by not rocking the boat, we avoid something horrible or painful, then we might develop people pleasing as a coping mechanism and then carry on doing it as a way of avoiding conflict long after it has served its purpose and the danger has passed.
The problem is that people pleasing causes the opposite result to what we want.
We want to be liked and appreciated, and instead people pleasing causes a lack of respect from others and being walked all over.
We want to be seen as capable and confident, yet we’re seen as doormats who will unquestionably do more than our fair share.
We hope others will see how hard we work and how much take on, and see us as having leadership and promotion potential. But instead, we are seen as bad at delegating or managing our workload, unhinged when we explode at the resentment of being unappreciated, and incapable of leading a team since we cannot balance our lives, nor simultaneously manage self-care and being a high achiever.
When people pleasing is a coping strategy as a result of trauma, you might experience some or all of these:
You feel misunderstood, unseen or like no one knows the real you. That's because you aren't being authentically yourself, because you learnt that it wasn't safe to speak up or be yourself, and that keeping others happy, perhaps morphing into a person they would like or at least not dislike, was vital.
You say yes all the time even when you're already overloaded and exhausted; saying no feels impossible. Why? Because you might upset people, they might get angry you've refuse their request for support, and you feel safe when you avoid that possibility. Trauma can result in being hypervigilant to others needs to avoid them kicking off, and this becomes far more important than self-care, and saying no becomes impossible.
You keep your challenging emotions and needs away from those you are close to. Instead, sometimes you share your troubles or life story in all its gory details with a taxi driver or someone you just met, because they are unlikely to reject you, and you might never see them again anyway so there's not much to lose.
You have resentful meltdowns about how unappreciated you feel by others and how exhausted you are from helping them and never taking care of yourself, but are quickly remorseful, guilt-laden and apologetic, so you shift back in people pleasing to keep the peace asap.
You take too much responsibility for other people's feelings and behaviour, instead of recognising that it's theirs to own and choose.
If you are reading this and recognising yourself in the patterns outlined above, you are probably wondering how you move past all of this. I want to reassure you that it is more than possible to let go of coping patterns that are no longer serving you, and shift to a much better place in how you think, feel and act.
The first step in making change is acknowledging that what you’re doing now is not working, and then becoming fully ready to change and move past it.
If you are genuinely ready, book a discovery call that will help you leave behind sabotaging patterns including people pleasing so that you can create a life and career where you are genuinely respected and successful; a balanced, happy, healthy life full of self-worth.
I want you to reach a place of empowerment, feeling calmly in control and full of inner peace.
Before you lead others, lead yourself: The important of self-leadership
There is plenty of guidance out there about how to be a great leader of others, and not nearly enough on how we lead ourselves first and foremost. Read on…
“Exceptional leaders distinguish themselves because of superior self-leadership.” Daniel Goleman, ‘Emotional Intelligence’
What is self-leadership?
It is far more complex and nuanced than being ‘in control.’ Think of self-leadership more about being in the driving seat of our own lives: owning our own thoughts, feelings and actions, plus being in charge of our own direction of travel.
Self-leadership is about how we observe and manage ourselves; how we compassionately and deliberately reflect and evolve. It is about how we prioritise taking care of ourselves, how self-aware we are, and the extent to which our behaviour is consistently congruent with our values.
Good self-leadership is incompatible with playing the victim or being a people pleaser. It also means rejecting perfectionism and other forms of self-sabotage. How we handle disappointment, failure and challenges with honesty and compassion, and without self-rejection, catastrophising or blame shifting are all part of self-leadership.
It includes taking responsibility for doing the own inner work necessary to move past childhood or other issues, so that the past does not impact how we show up in the present in our relationships and working life. This means investing time, energy and emotional capacity in to therapy and/or coaching.
Another aspect of self-leadership is all thing to do with self-validation and self-worth, inner stability and self-trust. Knowing your value, and fostering the skills to handle your inner world even when thing get sticky and curve balls hit, means feeling calm and confident in your ability to cope no matter what. In this way, self-leadership is a core pillar to our resilience and adaptability.
It also means taking responsibility for how we spend our time and energy, how we balance our lives, who we spend time with, the media we consume and so on.
The Value of Self-Leadership for Leaders
The most effective leaders walk their talk. They do not ask of others what they are not doing themselves. Self-leadership brings self-respect, and this is an important component of being able to command the respect of others too, as well as role modelling to everyone around you many excellent, desirable personal traits.
One of these is trust, which is such an important trait for effective leaders to foster with everyone around them. Our people need to trust us to work calmly and effectively, to buy into the vision we ask them to contribute towards: with trust comes results, good culture and team spirit. If we cannot trust ourselves, how will others trust us? Self-leadership equals self-trust.
Strong self-leadership inspires, informs and empowers others around us to lead themselves too. If we assume that a good leader is empowering others to succeed rather than instructing and micromanaging, it ties in with wanting their team to be independent, responsible, self-aware and growing too.
A rising tide lifts all boats, and who wouldn’t want their leaders to have excellent self-leadership skills, in order for this to lift everyone around them and below them.
Developing Your Self-Leadership Skills
Balanced self-awareness is the first vital step in developing your self-leadership skills. Compassionate self-appraisal will take you far when you marry it with a growth mindset; be willing and humble enough to take steps to grow in the areas where you notice that you would like to show up differently.
The ability to ask for help and embrace the value of others on our journey can be a vital, courageous step that accelerates your self-leadership too. It could be from colleagues, family and friends for a 360 view. It could be working with a coach, therapist or mentor to support you to move beyond limiting patterns of feelings, thoughts or behaviour.
Great self-leadership happens deliberately when you choose it and move towards it, and I invite you to do that right away!
How can I help you with this?
Are you an ambitious woman who would love to see a radical shift in their confidence and leadership over the next 3 months and are ready to take action? And you are ready to step into a whole new level of self-leadership, respect and success, book a complimentary call consultation on this link: https://harrietwaleycohen.as.me/schedule.php
A celebration of 20 years of sobriety
As part of my celebrations of achieving 20 years sober, here are 10 new ways of doing things that have made a massive difference.
Today marks a very special day.
1st October is my sobriety anniversary, and today marks 20 years clean and sober.
What started as a search for a new way of living from a truly dark, hopeless and baffled place, has blossomed into the most incredible life. Getting and staying clean and sober has provided the ultimate foundation. Everything I do on a day-to-day basis, whether that’s being a good mother, having food in the fridge, running my business and changing lives, having clean hair or taking the dog for a walk, happens because I deal with life without changing the way I feel or numbing out with drugs and alcohol.
How my life looks now is the collective sum of 20 years of sober decisions, behaviour and responses to life.
Here are 10 new ways of doing things that I’ve taken on board that have made a massive difference:
1. Ask for help. You do not, nor should you, have to do life alone. Everything gets figured out and sorted out much more quickly when you have others to help, especially when they have trodden the path already and can share specific experience. Swallow your pride, let go of the idea that asking for help is a weakness or ignorance, and allow others to support you. (Hyper independence is sometimes a trauma response.) Without this concept, I would have stayed stuck in my business and personal life so many times! Invest in help in the form of mentoring, therapy, coaching or support when the best person for your situation is a professional.
2. Feel your feelings, process them and honour them. Every time you sweep something under the carpet, stuff it down or pretend it’s not there, you stop yourself from being free. Unprocessed emotions have the power to impact you long after they need to, causing disproportionate reactions, regrets and disempowerment. Feeling your feelings and honouring the wisdom within them, even when they are painful or unpleasant, is a great gift to yourself.
3. And no matter what you’re feeling, don’t hurt yourself or anyone else off the back of them. This will only result in more unpleasant feelings…
4. Keep evolving. Keep learning. Keep healing. Keep reading. Stay open minded. The older I get the more I become aware of what I don’t know, and rather than finding it disheartening, it has become a way to find magic, excitement and possibility. Part of this is forgiving yourself for not being perfect, and ties in with asking for help.
5. Reality > potential. We do not have the power to change others if they don’t see the need or want to change. It is liberating to let other people be themselves, accept that this is who they are, and then decide whether we want them in our lives or not and in what capacity. Assume someone will never change, and ask yourself on that basis if they are someone you really want in your life. Never is this more pertinent than in the world of dating!
6. Get out of your echo chamber. Spend time with different people from different backgrounds, of different ages and with different interests. Seek to understand, not to be understood.
7. Actions speak louder than words. Whether that’s how I built and now grow my self-worth by showing myself in hundreds of different ways that I love and respect myself (and so can you), or whether that’s figuring out if you can trust someone, this is a show don’t tell situation. When someone shows you who they are, believe them and don’t ignore the signs.
8. Align with the divine. Spirituality brings meaning, connection, purpose and direction. Develop rituals and practises that keep you grounded and aligned. For me spirituality is about seeing the beauty in the world, connecting with a guiding force of universal love, and focusing on being of service to others and the world. ‘What is for the greater good?’ is an excellent guiding principle.
9. Listen to your body. Notice what messages your body is giving you, and honour them. Pay attention to physical signs as well as your intuition. Our bodily wisdom is often woefully underrated or underused.
10. Have fun, and deliberately create joyful moments. Be silly, be playful, be with people who you adore. Let go of worrying what others will think, because this will be a huge barrier to fun and happiness.
That might sound like an impossible to-do-list for just this weekend (!), so how about picking just one for today and seeing how your life and happiness expands when you focus on it.
With immense gratitude to all the people who have helped me get this far, and immense gratitude for this wonderful life I get to live.
Harriet