Somebody asks you for something and you say yes and the interesting part is not that you said it it is the timing the yes was out of your mouth before any deliberation took place before you had checked your diary before you had considered whether you wanted to before any part of you that has opinions about your own life was consulted it arrives first and you followed it out of the room and then sometimes hours later the other thing arrives The sinking,
The realization that you have committed a Saturday you did not want to give away and that you will now spend a portion of this week constructing an elaborate and entirely honest sounding reason why you cannot.
Which you will draw four times and possibly not send.
You know all this about yourself.
This is the strange bit.
You have read about people-pleasing.
You may know which attachment style you are to two decimal places.
You have almost certainly encountered the word fawn.
And something in you went,
That is me.
And knowing it has changed nothing.
Remarkably little.
So you did what everybody is told to do you tried to set boundaries and either you could not the sentence would not form or it formed and came out with so much apology stapled to the front of it.
That nobody noticed a boundary had occurred,
Or you managed it.
You said no.
Cleanly.
And then spent the next day feeling guilty,
Unwell.
And then you quietly concluded that the cure was worse than the disease.
That is the last thing I want to talk about today.
Nor the yes.
But what happens afterwards?
Because I think almost everything being said about this is aimed at the wrong layer.
And I think it is why so many intelligent,
Self-aware people are getting nowhere with it despite all this knowledge.
Now,
Here is what I think is the mistake.
And it is not yours.
People-pleasing is being treated as a behavior.
Something you do.
Which could therefore be replaced with something else that you do.
Say no more.
Use this phrasing.
Practice the script.
And the behavior is very real,
Obviously.
But it is the downstream of something.
And the something is not a behavior at all.
It is a belief about love.
Specifically this whole thing is that love has conditions that regard is something given in exchange for something.
That there is a performance which secures it.
And that the performance cannot safely stop.
Now when I say belief.
I do not mean an opinion that you hold.
If I asked you directly whether you think love should be conditional,
You would say no,
Obviously not,
And you would mean it.
And you might well be the sort of person who believes it most fiercely on behalf of other people.
So that is not where this lives.
It is not a proposition you ascend to It is closer to an expectation the body holds about how things go A prediction,
Laid down by repetition long before you had any language for it.
And running underneath everything since without ever being reviewed.
Which is why arguing with it does nothing.
Because you cannot reason with the prediction your body,
Your nervous system is making.
You can tell yourself you are lovable just as you are,
Every morning.
And the system that generates the panic is not listening.
Because it was never a system that took sentences.
Which is why the boundary fails.
So a boundary is a behavioral change made against a belief that has not moved.
And I think the belief is older,
Faster,
And it's more ingrained.
It's physically enforced.
So you do the new behavior,
And the old belief sends its response.
And its response is often very overwhelming.
Now,
Carl Rogers had a phrase for this.
And I think it is still the best one anybody has produced.
He called them conditions of worth.
And his observation was very straight forward.
A child needs regard from the people around them.
As a requirement of development.
And if the regard arrives conditionally,
The child does something intelligent,
Remarkable.
And quite sad.
They internalize the conditions.
So then it stops being an external arrangement.
Be good.
And you will be approved of.
Then becomes an internal structure.
I am acceptable when I am being this.
I am not acceptable when I am not.
And there is decent research on this now.
Where parental warmth is given and withdrawn,
Depending upon performance of behavior.
What tends to be produced is a not well-behaved adult.
It is an adult whose sense of their own worth fluctuates constantly.
They feel guilt and internal pressure rather than genuine choice.
And then they are doing everything from that position.
And it did not have to be harsh this is what surprises people It rarely looks like cruelty.
More often it looks like a parent whose warmth was simply like weather.
Sunny when things are going well.
Cooler when they were not.
And then a child worked out.
Without anybody saying anything.
What made the weather better?
Or it's a house where somebody was struggling and being easy was a contribution that that child could make.
Or A family where being good was so thoroughly praised.
That being difficult became unthinkable.
And the child concluded.
That the good version was the one that got kept.
And then the conclusion was drawn that love is available in exchange for something.
It was a correct reading of the conditions that child was in.
And that is the part I would not want you to miss.
Nothing was wrong with the child's reasoning.
The reasoning was excellent.
It is just that the conditions have now changed.
And the conclusion is did not and it has been running ever since in rooms it does not apply to So now the thing.
.
.
I most want to give you because I think it reverses how you've been reading your own experience.
When you set the boundary and the guilt arrives,
The unbearable wrongness,
The physical discomfort,
The certainty that you have damaged something You've been treating that as evidence that you did it badly.
You were too blunt.
You should not have.
Or that you are simply not built for this.
Now it is again not evidence of any of that.
It is just the belief surfacing.
Something in you has just watched you stop performing the thing that secures love.
And now it has concluded that love is at risk.
I'll say this part again,
Something in you has just watched you stop performing the thing that secures love.
And it has concluded that love is now at risk.
And it is doing what it has always done when love is at risk.
It will generate an alarm large enough to make you go and fix it.
So maybe that is what the guilt is for.
It is not for moral information.
It is a retrieval signal designed to send you back to restore the arrangement.
And it works.
Because you have obeyed it for 30 years.
Which means something quite important.
The guilt arriving is not a sign of the work failing.
It is actually the first moment the actual material has come into the room.
Everything before that was learned behavior.
And this is the thing itself.
And it is intense in exact proportion to how early it was formed.
Which is why grown,
Competent people are floored by having declined a dinner invitation.
Now if it does not respond to argument What does it respond to?
It responds to being wrong.
Specifically and repeatedly wrong?
In a way that you actually notice.
A prediction updates when it is disconfirmed You expect x to happen.
X does not happen.
And then something in the system quietly revises,
Over time,
With repetition.
That is the mechanism.
And it is also the mechanism underneath almost every effective psychological treatment there is.
Not insight,
Not reassurance,
The lived discovery that the feared thing did not occur.
And here is why decades of this have changed nothing for you.
That you have never stayed for the disconfirmation.
This happens for most of us.
You say no.
And the guilt arrives 11 seconds later.
And then you do one of three things.
You won't do it.
You send the follow-up message or you offer an alternative.
Or you end up doing the thing anyway.
With an extra layer of apology on top.
You compensate somewhere else.
You did not do the Saturday.
So you do three other things that week to balance the books.
And nobody asked you to.
Or you avoid the person entirely?
Until enough time has passed that it stopped counting.
And every one of those removes you from the scene before the evidence arrives.
You have said no hundreds of times in your life and you have never once found what happens next because you have always left before the end.
So the belief has never been tested.
It sits there with a perfect record,
Undefeated for 30 years.
Because every time it raised the alarm,
You went and fixed the thing.
Before reality had a chance to disagree with it.
Which means the work is not saying no,
You can already say no.
You've done it and survived it and learned nothing from it.
So the work actually is.
Holding the boundary.
Staying in the room afterwards with hands off and noticing what actually occurs.
So,
Let's rehearse this together.
Not the refusal you can do the refusal we are going to do the 60 seconds after it.
Which is the only place any of this actually changes.
So settle now,
However you are.
And just bring to mind Somebody real?
Who ask things of you.
Not the hardest one.
Maybe a friend,
Maybe a colleague.
And let them be in front of you now,
Asking whatever they usually ask.
And notice the yes.
Already forming.
Notice how fast it is.
It is nearly there before they have finished the sentence.
Now do not say it.
Let the sentence sit unfinished in the room.
This is me.
Thinking about a person,
Place,
Or a situation.
But I struggle to say no.
And I have that person place situation in front of me.
My body wants to say yes.
But I'm holding it and saying nothing.
Now,
Say the other thing instead.
No.
I cannot do that.
Out louder in your mind.
No,
I cannot do that.
No reasons.
No apologies.
No alternatives offered.
And as you say it again internally,
Notice If something in you wants to add something,
Maybe to soften it.
But we stay.
The gate is probably arriving too.
Let it arrive.
Just stay in the room.
With the thing you have done and the discomfort.
If there is any sensation or feeling,
Present in your body.
The alarm,
The prediction.
The younger one in you.
Which is panicking.
I did not do the thing.
And nobody left.
And again,
I did not do the thing.
And nobody left.
Very slowly,
Very gently.
Just bring your attention to your breath now.
You can let the scene go.
And you can just slowly come back to the space.
Wherever you were,
If your eyes were closed,
You can open them.
Breathing and coming back.
Now there is a story that I think is about exactly this.
And maybe it is not read in this way.
Some of you may also know the first half.
A young man takes his inheritance,
Goes off,
Spans all of it.
Ends up in destitute and decides to go home.
And on the road,
He rehearses a speech.
He is going to say that he ruined everything.
That he no longer deserved to be called a son?
And he would be grateful to be taken on as a hired worker.
A transactional switch an offer of labor.
In exchange for a reduced place.
He never gets to deliver it.
The father sees him while he's still a long way off and runs.
Which in that culture an older man simply did not do.
And the speech is interrupted halfway through.
And the celebration starts before any of the terms have been agreed.
The performance was not required.
It was not even heard.
But that is not the part I want to give you.
There is another brother now.
The one who stayed.
And he comes in from the fields.
Here's the party.
And refuses to go in.
And what he says to his father.
Is one of the most recognizable things in the whole of scripture.
If you have ever been the reliable one.
All these years I have served you.
I never once disobeyed you.
And you never gave me so much as a young goat to celebrate with my friends.
That is a person keeping an account.
Years of service meticulously lodged.
Against a ledger that has never once paid out.
He is not angry that his brother came home.
He is devastated that it turns out.
Not to have been about the serving at all.
And then the father says something extraordinary.
Everything I have is yours.
It always was.
Which is to say,
The thing you have been working for was never withheld.
It was actually available the whole time.
You were out in the fields earning something that was already yours.
And nobody asked you to.
And nobody could tell you because you would not have believed it.
For some reason when I read this,
I see it as the people pleaser story.
And that is the people pleaser in the story.
Not the one who went off the rails.
The One Who Stayed and served and was quietly furious for years.
And could not go into the party.
And the text does not condemn him.
It stands beside him in the yard in the dark and tells him the truth.
So whatever you make of theology,
That is a remarkably accurate piece of psychology.
And it is 2000 years old.
So,
Not another script Not a better way of phrasing refusal You have enough of those and they were never the problem.
What there is instead is something slower and duller and considerably more effective.
Say the thing and then say,
Hands off.
No repair No compensating elsewhere And then watch what happens which will almost always be very much less than what the alarm predicted.
And then next week and then the week after.
Collecting one unremarkable non-event at a time the evidence that you have never once allowed to reach you.
Something in you has to find out that it was wrong.
Remember this,
Not to be told,
Not reading these affirmations,
Not reading books on boundaries.
But to find out.
And if that starts to shift.
.
.
What you may notice first is not confidence.
It might be tiredness.
The specific tiredness of somebody who have just realized how long they have been holding something up.
And that is a good sign.
It means the one who was doing the holding has heard you.
And is beginning now very cautiously to put it down.
They were never earning anything,
Remember.
It was in their name the whole time.
Nobody ever told them and they would not have believed it anyway.
And the only thing that will convince them now is a long run.
Of ordinary Tuesdays.
In which you did not perform and nobody left.
Now.
Take what resonates for you.
Go gently and maybe do less this week.
When you think you should.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Namaste.
