| People-pleasing has been a commonplace phenomenon for as long as people have existed. It comes up in different ways, across various social settings, and is done for a range of reasons. The practice of people-pleasing refers to our tendency to act in a particular way to evoke pleasant feelings in the people around us. At first glance, it’s easy to understand why we people-please. It pays off. As social creatures, we all have a desire to feel loved, accepted, and important in the eyes of others. We all have a yearning to be looked at, attended to, and well-regarded by others. What happens when we people-please is we simply try to give the people around us a reason to come close to us. It helps us feel connected. There are a myriad of ways in which we people-please. We wear nice clothing, drive nice cars, live in nice homes. We praise, compliment, and flatter with our words. Many times, these actions are ultimately geared towards winning the approval of the people around us. Usually we think that by wearing, driving, living, and speaking in beauty, people will like us more and want to spend more time with us. After all, beauty is always attractive. It grabs people’s attention, and compels them to look. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with people-pleasing, the truth is that it’s based on a risky form of relating. At the core, people-pleasing could involve anxiously overfocusing on other people. It’s about doing whatever we have to do, saying whatever we have to say in order to get other people to like us. As a result, this may lead us to behave in ways that we may not otherwise behave just to get the approval of others. Accordingly, people-pleasing can become problematic. One way people-pleasing can raise issues is that it trains people to anxiously look outside themselves to see how they should feel about themselves. It’s about looking to others to assess one’s own sense of worth on the inside. The more people engage in people-pleasing, the more they are relying on other people for “direction” on how they should think about themselves. This preoccupation with what others think can readily deceive a person into anxiously believing that he or she is only as good, worthy, and lovable as other people say. As a result, another way people-pleasing can be harmful is it limits a person’s range of expression in establishing who they are as an individual. Again, this stems from the obsession to make the people around happy. When a person’s primary focus is to please one’s environment, it becomes really easy to lose oneself. After all, what other people say and do governs his or her self-concept. If others approve, the person feels good about him or herself and seeks to repeat that behavior to gain more positive attention. If others don’t approve, the person feels devastated and tries to change his or her behavior to get a more positive response. That’s why, ironically, chronic people-pleasing often leads people to feel empty, lonely, and lost. People are generally at their best when they have a true, solid understanding of who they are. This is not to say that it’s necessarily easy to get there, but it’s definitely possible. With the proper drive, diligence, persistence, and help, discovering one’s true self is do-able. And as it becomes more uncovered, life becomes different. Because you will start seeing things differently than you used to. You will start seeing who you really are, and making decisions from a more solid, grounded platform. A platform that no person can shake. Being truthful and honest about who you are can be challenging, for it makes you vulnerable to rejection. It can be painful. No question. Yet, the alternative won’t lead a person to a much better place in the long-run. The truth is, the more people try to please the people around them for the sake of feeling good about themselves, the more likely they are attracting people for the wrong reasons. The quintessential irony of people-pleasing is that while it might draw peoples’ attention, and it might seem like people like you, it’s not actually you that they are liking, just the facade you’ve made them believe is you. People-pleasing is a natural tendency we all possess. We all want to be liked by the people around us, and people-pleasing seems to be a great way to accomplish that. However, when taken to the extreme people-pleasing can become problematic. Paradoxically, it often leads people to feel utterly dazed, confused, and disconnected because what they are doing to please others is not always so genuine. When people exercise the courage to own who they are and bring that to their interactions, they are more likely to experience true, loving connection. Because at least now they are giving themselves a chance. If you want to understand and overcome your people-pleasing profile with a premier psychologist in West LA, call or email today for a free phone consultation. |