Welcome to Mindset, mood and Movement, a systemic approach to human behavior, performance, and wellbeing. How psychological, emotional, and physical health are all connected. In this episode, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience to help you overcome a challenge that you might be facing in life health. All work.

Do you find yourself saying yes to things when you'd rather say no? Do you find yourself doing things to make people happy, to please them, when actually you don't really want to do it, but you feel compelled to? Okay, well, people pleasing is a modern phenomenon and it's widespread and it can be a serious problem and it can really degrade your life and your work. So in today's episode, I'm going to talk about this, about the kind of the how, the what and the why, and how do we deal with this stuff? But first we need to understand it as with any problem. It's so tempting in our culture to get rid of the problem, solve it, band aid it. That is not helpful. We want to understand why. Why do we have this pattern? Why do we do this behavior? What does it serve? Where does it come from? Because if we don't understand its origin and its usefulness, then generally we're gonna probably cycle back to that pattern. So people pleasing. On the surface it can sound lovely. You know, you're making people happy, um, not rocking the boat, keeping things all smooth, those kind of statements. They are all Let's just say they're all things we can say to ourselves that basically confirm why we do it. The real reason we do it is for, let's say, some more heavyweight reasons. It's low self worth, kind of fear, fear of rejection, lack of assertiveness, perhaps not wanting to fit in. All these kind of things. So, let me, let me take you through this a little more. I worked with a guy, uh, a little while back, uh, Stephen, so we'll alias him, but Stephen, Stephen was a super guy, really nice, just had a huge network of people, really successful, hard worker. But Stephen was a people pleaser, and we were doing some work on, uh, his performance, uh, both, you know, as a person and in his work. And the, the pattern was coming up, it was clear to me, and my job was to help it become clear to him. So we got into it, and, uh, what? Got into the point of why do you say yes when really you want to say no to to events to things going on? He on the surface gave me an answer, which was like, oh, I just you know, I Yeah, I'd like to keep people happy, you know I'm a people person all this stuff, but actually when we drilled down and got underneath him whilst that was true to some degree What he really was doing was avoiding confrontation What he didn't want to say to someone is like, no, I don't want to do that. Or I can't make that or that's not going to happen because that would be alias to I am confronting this person. Now while that's not actually true, saying no to somebody is simply saying no. The belief of this is a confrontation about to happen is often what goes on in the people pleasing mindset. So, if this is going on for you, then it might be a fear of confrontation. What does it mean to stand up

for

yourself? And we've got to cycle this back. Early experience normally is where these, these formations lie in our experience of, in our brain, literally, in our body, in our psyche, about what it means to be in confrontation. And the problem we have is that if we think of... Every time we say no to someone, that equals confrontation. The people pleasing pattern will slip in, and there you'll be, saying yes to everything, even though you don't want to. But nothing is all, so it may not be confrontation. It might simply be, Oh, no thanks, that's a great invitation, but I can't make that. Or, No, my workload's too busy, I can't take that on. And that actually becomes about discussion. So we have to be very careful of not understanding these sub patterns. So that's number one. So Stephen's work was really to understand people pleasing was a strategy to avoid confrontation. When we realised that most no's don't equal confrontation, then things could change. But there was one more layer to this and it was also about he didn't like people getting upset with him He didn't want to see someone hurt or upset and again, there's there's there's a there's a very human loveliness to that But who says you're going to upset someone by being truthful or saying what you need to say? There's a way to do it, but if you start to believe that I'll upset them, there's another layer to this. It's because it's my fault was Stephen's problem. He has on this negative belief that if someone was upset, he would be the cause of the upset. And hence, don't want to upset anybody, get people pleasing. So keeping an eye on this. Avoiding confrontation, finger of a blame pointing at you to being upsetting people. This is normally built on our early childhood experience. So we need to get up to date. How you communicate with people. How you understand that you can say yes and no. But separating out the fact that if someone gets upset, they get upset perhaps. But be careful of not assuming that's always going to happen. Because it probably isn't. And then there's some space. So rather than people pleasing, you can be really kind and generous and yet really clear with people. And that's a beautiful way to be.

So

that's one level. Now you might have heard of fawning. Fawning, uh, fawn like a baby deer is, um, a term that's used now, as with a lot of terms, to describe complex behaviours, but fawning is another one where it's really another term of people pleasing. What I think is interesting when we, when we look at this angle, is really what we're saying is, I'm getting triggered into a threat response so I'd rather say yes and I'd rather people please and I'd rather do what other people want because they're more important but that's because you feel a threat so we're getting triggered so we have a neurological response fight or flight if it's fawning you're going into flight you are wanting to get away from the problem and most of this is happening below consciousness so we're not overtly thinking about this it's all very subtle in our mind body system but you're being triggered You feel there's a threat.

And

of course, if you have a high bias to flight response, you want to get away from the problem. And then if we think of our beautiful form being chased through the woods by a predator, you know, that's scary. We don't want to spend our life being chased. So if we're always in a flight response, there's also the beautiful. Seemingly the beginning pattern of people pleasing to avoid him. That works occasionally, but most of the time it's maladaptive. Because what people pleasing does is you're just avoiding the issue. Which is another flight response. So to solve that way of dealing with potential challenges... It's about moving towards the problem, A, a fight response. So not actually fighting, but moving towards the problem. And this is a very different thing. So if you're asked to do something and you don't want to do it, and you're getting triggered and you think you're gonna form the whole thing out, oh, you're making excuses. Notice you're being in, pushing into a flight response. Pause, breathe, feel your body. Notice that you probably are more capable than you believe, and you can move toward that problem. which means you can find ways and strategies to solve it. That immediately starts to dissolve this fawning pattern. People pleasing as the strategy will probably drop away because instead of people pleasing, you'll be problem solving. So it becomes quite an elegant shift. And I know many people listen to my podcast and many people that I coach are highly intelligent and very skillful. So if you can adopt the problem solving behavioural stance, then you, by default, already transition, shift out of people pleasing. So this is a really, really, really big one. I've pushed this a lot because when we don't understand our neurological state, we do patterns. Know your neurological state. Fight, Flight, or Flow or Freeze, whichever one you're in, then you can work differently. So there's a really important one. And, and finally, it's, there are other layers to this. So there's cultural layers, there's family layers, depending on how you've been brought up in the world and what kind of families you've been brought in. There are all sorts of learnings that we've learned that mean it's not okay to speak up, or you have to be subservient to another. And these are, these are, these can be difficult, but recognize that perhaps they may also be past biased, which means if you were brought up in a particular culture or family which said you couldn't speak up and you had to always do what everyone else said, then if you're an adult and if you're in the perhaps hopefully the free world where you can be who you are, notice that that shadow doesn't want to be chasing you down the road and all shadows. are just an absence of light. So bring light to your awareness that you can make choices now. And catch operating from the version of you are today. Notice that fight response and flight response. But then come into the present. You know, be a, be a present person. And if those old past patterns are still there, notice them gently. But realize that past lives in the past. It can only become present when you bring it forward. So simple, not easy. As all this work I do is, is it's often simplicity, which is elegance, but it doesn't mean it's easy. So with that conscious shift, you can also let go of perhaps those cultural family biases. And last thing I want to say is You know, low self worth is cited in people pleasing a lot. We don't feel good about ourselves. Um, I'm not good enough. Any of these kind of statements, if you say them, it's kind of in there, it's the self, it's the low self worth trigger point, you want to look at that, but is it true? You know, I find it fascinating that we, including myself, have all these beliefs, which run our life, and we sometimes don't stop and go, hang on a minute, is that actually true? And then you can start to almost like I do, I kind of laugh at that belief. It's simply not true. I've done loads of great things. I've got a friendship group. I've got successful business. I'm a great parent. Whatever it is you are skillful and good at, then we can start to challenge the I'm not good enough narrative, which is also low self worth and start to find worth, find value. Look for where you have value. Guarantee you have plenty, but where you put your attention is where it will show. So look at where you have value, wherever you're doing well in your life. And it could be small stuff. You might think, Oh, you know, I'm, I'm only a parent, which I would say is a huge job to bring up a child. It's an incredible job to do that. Well, Oh, I run a small business, but you run a business. Look at where you have value and own it because low self worth again can be a trick of the mind. It can be. Archaeology from the past. It could be someone else's stuff. Build the bank of you by knowing your value, by looking at where you're doing well and even the small pieces, you know, collect them up and aggregate them. Hey, that's what saving is about, right? So I hope these, uh, some, some of the overarching points for people pleasing have been able to be insightful, get you thinking. Get you freed up from it and maybe if you're, if there's some area that I haven't touched on that you think, Oh, you know, people pleasing and really think sounds kind of got my point, reach out, you know, drop me a question because there are so many nuances in, but the themes of this, looking at, um, Not wanting to upset people, looking at the subtle belief of you think it's your fault, looking at that flight response and trying to get away from the problem and looking at low self worth. These cover almost all of the expressions of people pleasing. So then you can go around being authentic and you can be lovely as a person and you can still say no. You can be a really effective human being and you can turn down things without upsetting anyone. So people pleasing is then starts to drop away. So let me know how you get on. As always, you can reach out to me via my website. Drop me a message via email on the, on the, on the contact page. You can contact me on the socials, which if you're seeing this on, drop me a comment. Um, it's a big one. And I really hope that this is helpful for you. So, um, please, uh, be pleased, but not please others. Okay. I'll talk to you on the next one. Take care. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe. And if a friend would benefit from hearing this, do send it on to them as well. If you would like to get in touch yourself, then you can go to my website. Which is Sal Jeffries dot com, spelt S A L J E F F E R I E S. Sal Jeffries dot com. Hit the get in touch link and there you can send me a direct message. If you'd like to go one step further and learn whether coaching can help you overcome a challenge or a block in your life, then do reach out and I offer a call where we can discuss how this may be able to help you. Until the next time, take care.