Becoming a people pleaser happens when you give away your personal power. It is a coping mechanism. Giving away your personal power, saying yes when you really mean no, is an outward sign of an inner conflict within yourself.
It may begin simply as a way to keep your job, join a new group of people, or a host of any other valid reasons you wish to promote yourself in other groups. The question is, how much of yourself do you choose to give away?
You might have fostered this self-sabotage trap in your youth depending on the motivational techniques used by your parents, teachers, and others in your world. Or perhaps your parents were absent, worked a lot, or for other reasons were not there to support you. When this happens, you may have had the tendency to look to others for the affirmation, rather than draw from our own self-esteem.
This may be a habit you do not even know you have until you feel used by people. Are you the one everyone else always comes to when extra chores need to be done in the social settings you belong to, at work or with friends?
It is one thing to offer our help from time to time. Doing service for the greater good of humanity is good for the soul. For a short time, if your work needs your extra attention on a project, or your friend needs help, you may choose to volunteer. The key words here are “for a short time.”
But how many friendships have been lost because one person is always the giver, and the other person is always the taker?
Are you always the giver?
Are you always the taker?
This may happen without your being fully conscious of it. Your patterns of thinking, speaking and acting may be on a pre-programmed habitual loop.
When an unfair situation does occur to you, how do you handle it?
It is wonderful the moment when these situations present themselves to your consciousness, because up until that point, you can go years without realizing others are taking unfair advantage of you by your own lack of standing up for yourself.
Once you recognize your patterns of behavior, you have a choice, and your head gets more in the game alerting you to make more conscious, and possibly different decisions.
Depending on your previous conditioning, or your misguided need to be needed, you may choose to continue giving your personal power away and volunteer your life away, in the hopes that your efforts will gain you acceptance, status, recognition, friendship, or to be better liked.
Again, the key phrase is, “for a short time.” For a short time, you can burn the candle at both ends, carry an extra heavy workload, help someone through a health crisis. The trouble begins when you do not stand up for yourself, when the short time turns into what is expected of you over the long haul.
It is interesting to watch yourself when you begin to find your voice. Often what happen is, you may get fed up. You’ve had enough. You get angry with the situation, or the other person because you feel that they are abusing you; when in reality, you have allowed this to happen to you.
Being like an ostrich with its head in the sand does not make the problem go away.
You are not a victim unless you choose to be. No one wants to hear that, especially if you feel you have been wronged or been taken advantage of by others.
Who is really at fault here, you not standing up for yourself, or the other guy who knows your patterns of behavior and goes along with your permissions?
You are not in charge of other people’s actions, but you are in charge of yours.
What tends to happen next, is that you can over-react. You may find yourself angrily lashing out that you need to stop being friends, or you quit the club, or set clear boundaries with others.
However, it is enough to simply stop, to simply say no to extra activities, even with a smile.
When did you have to explain your every thought, word or deed to everyone?
You can say “no” lovingly, state your mind with integrity, drop the fear and the anger.
This is a learning process. You may already have this down pat. Or perhaps, no matter what age you are, you are still learning how to stand up for yourself. This is especially true if you are in the midst of changing addictive patterns in your life. You need to give yourself time to change whatever habits you want to change.
You can do anything you set your mind to think, say and do, holistically for the good of all, of course.