Tell me if you can relate to this:
You worry a lot about what other people think of you.
You monitor yourself to make sure you don’t make any kind of mistake.
You pre-plan your social game or rehearse interactions to make sure you don’t “screw up.”
You say yes, then regret it.
You stay longer at events than you’d like to.
You agree to help when you don’t want to help.
You overextend yourself or overbook yourself.
You feel stressed about maintaining your image.

You may be a people pleaser!

People pleasing is the tendency to put other people’s needs ahead of your own. It’s a sneaky tendency, because on the one hand we’re taught to be generous and nice to others, but deep down our “niceness” might not feel right to us. We may spend a lot of time and energy focused on other people and end up feeling overextended, exhausted, fearful, and resentful (“I do so much for others; why doesn’t anyone support me?”).

When I work with people who want to do less people pleasing, I like to address the issue via a couple of different routes. Both are important. One route is to address the behavior itself; to learn new tools for replacing people pleasing behavior with new actions and new communication that better support your own true feelings and needs. Below, I’ve included a link to Vanessa Van Edwards’ awesome list of potential new behaviors for people pleasers.

The other area I think is so important to address in people pleasing is noticing the feelings (emotions) and body sensations that underlie our people pleasing behaviors. I might start by asking, What do you fear would happen if you didn’t ____ (say yes to the party, give away your aisle seat, arrive exactly on time, pretend to be interested when you’re actually bored)? What do you fear would happen if you did ____ (say no, leave early, arrive late, voice a different opinion than others)?

And as we’re exploring those fears, I then might ask, What do you notice is happening inside your body when you are people pleasing or as you consider not people pleasing? What sensations do you notice? It might be something like, “Ooh, my chest feels tight,” “I feel a little nauseated,” “My shoulders are tense,” or “My throat feels constricted.” These sensations are so valuable to identify because our body sensations are amazing sign posts for us. They can point us to our feelings or to relevant earlier experiences. (You can also check out my article “Mind-Body Connection is a Superpower That We Humans Have”)

For example, that feeling of nausea may prompt you to recall an earlier time you felt a similar thing. Often people pleasers have had some childhood experiences where they got “called out” or punished. When that happens, we learn, “Uh-oh, I better pay real close attention to what (my mom, my teacher, my friends) want, because if I don’t, I’m gonna get called out and humiliated again. You may have even been explicitly taught that other people’s feelings are more important than your own.

Identifying these early experiences allows us to understand why you might feel nausea nowadays, and how that nausea might keep you from making your desired behavior changes (“I want to tell my mom No, but I feel sick to my stomach and overcome with anxiety if I so much as think about it!”). It’s hard to make behavior changes when our bodies are telling us – DANGER DANGER DANGER! DON’T DO IT!

Identifying and unpacking these early experiences allows us to start to help soothe young-us who was so hurt back then. We can combine this with mindfulness and relaxation tools to help our bodies relax. In these ways we strengthen ourselves in the present so that we’re able to make our desired behavior changes with our bodies on board.

So yeah, I love to address people pleasing with not just proposed behavior changes, but with an understanding of and a compassion for the childhood experiences that led to people pleasing and the body sensations and emotions that accompany our journeys to let go of pleasing others and ignoring ourselves.

Here’s Vanessa Van Edwards’ great list of behavior changes to explore:
https://www.scienceofpeople.com/people-pleaser/