Healing The People-Pleasing Habit

People-pleasing comes from centuries of doing what we had to do to survive. If that meant making other people in positions of authority happy, then we would do it to protect our family and ourselves. The challenge comes that people-pleasing often requires us to step outside of who we truly are and act in ways that are not in alignment with our truth. This causes deep cognitive dissonance that, over the years, causes us to forget who we are. Let's chat about how to reconnect within and let this people-pleasing habit go.

Transcript

So today we are talking about healing the people-pleasing habit and this is a huge topic for me personally because I've been a people pleaser my whole life and it's always been interesting trying to find the balance between the good parts of that and the challenging parts because on the one hand being a people pleaser means that I am connected with the people around me I care what they're thinking I care what they're feeling and I don't want to lose that like I don't want to lose I don't want to become super insular and not care about anyone around me you know I don't want to throw that baby out with the bath water but the problem for me is that people-pleasing has gone so deep inside of me that in many ways I've walked entire journeys that weren't even mine you know that I absorbed the reality of other people and then tried to fit myself inside of their reality and every so often it would still feel like me because I was still sort of doing what I wanted to do but I was doing it in this weird constricted twisted manner and then in the end and then then and I'd be frustrated because I wasn't achieving and I'm going to say the excellence or the potential that deep down I knew was possible and I just didn't know why and then you sort of realize that oh well why am I not doing this and why am I not doing that oh well that would upset this person and that might cause ripples over there but it's so deeply ingrained and truthfully I think I come by it honestly I think my mom certainly was a people-pleaser I imagine the women down her line were all people-pleasers and so it's no small thing to undo because it's almost like it's a course I didn't know I was taking I saw it from the time I was six months old or maybe two years old where I actually started recognizing that there are people who are not me and they may not want what I want and then at that point am I choosing to make them happy or am I forcing them to make me you know the terrible twos like what's that question and honestly it's always interesting when people say oh she was such an easy child she was so happy all the time she didn't have those terrible twos like some children have and it's interesting because a part of me thinks oh see it's just because I'm just by nature such an easygoing person and I'm just you know like naturally the buddha like you know in spiritual land but what if the reality is when I was two maybe I should have kicked up a fuss a bit more maybe I should have been more frustrated with the fact that I didn't like what was going on or I wanted what I wanted you know it's just a it's an interesting question and so this is why I feel this is such an important topic because many of us have just absorbed this external locus of control or this external approval or this external power that then sort of defines our world and then one day you wake up and you're 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 and you're like I don't even know who I am anymore you know I don't even know what I like to do I don't even know what I would do with a quiet Sunday afternoon because I don't you know I'm not thinking about what other people want to do so I have to tell you a story and I wrote a book about this and it's called you don't have to eat the eyeballs and this is my ultimate people pleasing story and it was quite a turning point for me I was traveling in 2018 I gave away all my belongings and I just traveled with a backpack and I stayed in people's homes who wanted to learn English sometimes sometimes I stayed with friends or students or just on my own but there's this great website I don't know if it still exists called Talk Talk B&B where because I'm a native English speaker people will invite you into their homes who want to practice English and so one of the places I I stayed was in Guadeloupe down in the Caribbean and I stayed with this you know lovely family and I was supposed to be there for three months and when I got there they were okay we're gonna take you out for dinner and we go out for dinner and I I couldn't speak the language I Guadeloupe is owned by France and so there is French there so I thought well maybe my limited French that I learned in school because I'm in Canada maybe that would get me by okay but it didn't there was a heavy heavy patois mixed with French and it was just it was I couldn't understand anything and so it was one of those experiences you go out for dinner and you you don't even know what to order like the whole thing isn't ordered organized in a and so I told them that and they said okay well you must have the fish so we sat down and the fish comes and it's cut imagine a whole fish cut in three and there's the head on the bottom and then the tail and then the middle on the top and there's lovely sauce on it and some you know beans and rice and fun things so I'm looking at this fish and to truly understand that I am not an adventurous eater like at all I am a very very very boring simple eater so but I want to be polite you know they've they've they've opened their home to me they're strangers for all intents and purposes so I look at the top fish and the top half third and I start to piece out the meat of course it's all the bones and everything and I'm piecing out the meat and I'm literally terrified just to get a bone and I eat that and then I get to the tail and I kind of dig the meat out of the tail and then there's this huge head sitting there looking at me and I'm like so I start eating the beans and the rice and the one woman says to me she says why are you not eating the head and I'm like and and to also understand I'm tired you know traveling the world with a backpack with no home base and all that sounds really romantic on Instagram but the reality is it's exhausting and it's exhausting emotionally there's something really curious about living in different cultures and always having people speaking languages you don't understand and it's almost like you're always reaching for connection to people but you can't connect to them in the ways that you normally would connect in them to them and so I'd already been traveling for over a year by this point and I was a little tired you know and so I look at her and I'm like I said to her I said but it's just brains like and I don't understand what I would be eating and she looked at me she was all like annoyed with me and she says well you have to at least eat the eyeballs and I'm serious about me not being an adventurous eater like when I go to a restaurant I get the same thing every time for 30 years like that's me I'll be creative in other aspects of my life food's not one of them and I looked at her and I looked at these big eyeballs and inside I started dying like just dying I was like I don't know what to do and so I finally I had all these in my mind I'm like you can do it you know come on you can do it you've done harder things you've you've had children you've done this you you know you you know you were married you know a million things like come on you can do it and then finally I thought to myself you know what you eat wieners Katrina eat the darn eyeball so I took my fork I stabbed it which was disgusting I pick it up I'm dying I put it in my mouth and it's so big I had to chew it I am dying and there was something hard inside of it which is I don't know it's like part of the eyeball or and I spit it out and they're all laughing they thought and I'm like traumatized by this horrible experience anyway I get home and I call a friend of mine who's not a people pleaser I said you wouldn't believe what happened oh my god and then they gave me this and I had to eat this eyeball and I and she just and she was so funny and she just said to me why didn't you just say no and it had never dawned on me that I could say no it isn't like I thought about it and weighed the pros and cons I never considered saying no and this is the weird thing about people pleasers we actually aren't often thinking how do I say no sometimes we are but when we're not we're actually just thinking all right this situation is in front of us how do I get through it we never even think of saying no and then I started thinking to myself how many metaphorical eyeballs am I eating all the time whether they're conversations whether they're time spent whether they're jobs whether it doesn't matter how often am I doing this and this is where I really had to dig deep inside of me and say where are you even like are were you even sitting at that table like actually Katrina or do I have some kind of persona that I'm walking around that I'm just this free and easy traveler and everybody just loves having me come stay in their house because and I take part in all the local customs and rituals and I'm just so what you know exotic and interesting or something like what story am I telling myself and then what's what persona did that story create in that person sitting at the table that didn't allow real Katrina to say yeah I'm sorry I really can't I'm kind of I'm just not that adventurous and if they were upset or insulted you know there's nothing I can do about that but at least I'm actually being me at least in that moment they met the real Katrina if I had have said yeah I'm sorry that part was great but now I really would love to enjoy the and and rice that crazy woman who was losing her mind having a hundred nervous breakdowns inside and spitting the eyeballs out who was that and sometimes I think about that when I have done something that I didn't want to do or I've gone somewhere where I didn't want to go and then afterwards I'm actually so angry and I'm critical and judgmental and I'm driving home you know maybe I've gone there with my partner and then suddenly because I'm so resentful because I didn't actually want to be there suddenly I'm being hyper and can you believe they said that and you know and I mean oh can you you don't and I'm watching myself then going what's wrong with you Katrina like where is all this judgment coming from where is all this anger coming from whereas if I had just been me to begin with we wouldn't have ever had to gone down that road so one of the reasons that I've been uncomfortable and why I've been a people pleaser is because I've often and still to this day struggle with being uncomfortable with other people's discomfort.

It bothers me that you're not okay and whether it's an empathic thing that sort of that human connection to other humans and maybe I'm picking up on their emotions or whatever but all of a sudden if anyone else isn't happy I can't be happy and I remember when my son was first born so my son's 30 now and I remember when he was first born if he was upset I would drop everything to make sure he was okay like it didn't matter and I did the same with his dad I did the same with my dad I did the same with everybody I did the same with my in-laws if they weren't okay I had to stop everything and make sure they were okay you know this was a pattern but I really noticed it in my son because I just had a different a different love and a different connection to him and I couldn't blame him you know what I mean I couldn't hold him accountable as a fully functioning adult you know he's eight months old but then and then I had a daughter two years later and now I'm running like crazy around these two children two infants and we bought our farm I had married a dairy farmer we lived on his parents farm and the day my daughter was born we bought the farm and it was now just my husband and I and our two children babies on the back doing the chores all by ourselves it was a big dairy farm and now not only am I farming milking cows doing all the things I'm also running myself ragged you know with my babies but then when they were two and four I got sick I had breast lumps whole great big story of healing and learning and meeting my first spiritual teacher but one of the number one things that Jim my teacher tried to pry out of me was what we would call negative emotion because I had this belief that I always had to be level right I always had to be okay I always had to be happy and deep down I actually think it was a I believed it was a sign of enlightenment or something like a sign of intelligence and a sign of maturity in all ways emotional maturity mental maturity spiritual maturity that I could be this you know constant all the time but that wasn't reality that isn't how I actually felt the truth is sometimes things happened and it really hurt my feelings sometimes things happened and I was really mad and I remember Jim he would poke me he would say things just to make me angry and poke me and poke me and poke me until finally I would lose my mind and I'd be like Jim and I would yell at him just like in all my fury and he'd look at me with that twinkle that only a has and he looks at me and he starts to smile and he's like hmm there you are and this is what he would do and I'd be so angry and he'd say why didn't you just get angry the first time what is so wrong with anger what is so wrong with sadness why do you judge these feelings so much and this began my journey of deeply feeling my emotions all of them not just the happy calm ones but the anger the sadness the joy the hope the disappointment the grieving everything and I started to realize that all of these emotions made me a complete person that just calm buddha-like Katrina isn't actually who I am now maybe that's a resting point for my nervous system like maybe we all want to have a calm nervous system inside but that has nothing to do with my emotional response to the world I'm allowed to be happy and I'm allowed to be sad and I'm allowed to be disappointed and I'm angry I'm allowed to grieve for as long as I want has nothing to do with my inner nervous system right it has nothing to do with my state of being it's just being alive so what happened was after so I had a healing a miraculous healing the lumps came out the side of my breast it was this whole amazing thing that was 26 years ago you know all is well but after that whenever my son was sad I was okay with it sometimes he just woke up on the wrong side of the bed and I would just be you know is there anything I can do mom and because I had worked so hard to feel my own feelings and to not judge them I actually allowed him to have his feelings I allowed him to be angry I allowed him to be sad I allowed him to be frustrated I just allowed it now but the funny thing is what I find in in my experience is I can totally sort it with my children and then still be afraid of my husband's or my partner's emotions it's almost like they lie in different groups like during that time because the breast lumps were in my left breast according to Jim's wisdom that signified that I struggled to tell the truth to people who were I was connected to by blood so that would have been my dad my sisters my children whereas the issues in the right side are about non-blood relatives so that would be partners friends people at work neighbors in-laws that kind of thing and I'm not saying this is across the board teaching I'm just saying this is what Jim's theory in this case was and so part of my journey was also healing my ability to allow my family to feel what they felt and not have to fix them but then there's the whole right side of things there's the husband the in-laws the whoever everybody else and it's an interesting thing why are we afraid of the emotions of our romantic partners are we afraid of being left are we afraid of being seen as difficult that was a big one for me when I was growing up there was all these I don't know what it was whether they were tropes whether they were stories whether they were mythologies I don't know about why some women didn't marry and it was always like the ugly older sister or the spinster or the you know and people love to gossip like obviously it's not so much today but it's like oh well they never did marry well they are awfully difficult I mean like everybody had an opinion about why someone didn't marry weirdly it didn't go the same towards men they were just a confirmed bachelor and it was all very romantic or something but women something very weird about that at least in the world I grew up in and that I really internalized that I never wanted to be that that woman like even Shakespeare you know taming that his his play Taming of the Shrew well the premise is that there's two sisters the young one who is beautiful and fine and lovely and sweet and then her older sister who is difficult and temperamental ironically named Katrina and and or they and Kate they would call her I think there was another version of it a version of the show called Kiss Me Kate or something like that and this and the the hero wants to marry the young woman the younger sister and the father says oh well if you marry her I'm never going to get rid of her sister so you've got to find someone to marry off the old shrew taming of the shrew and then you can have my daughter and this is this is the whole premise of that whole play I obviously internalize this a little bit so now all of a sudden I'm in any kind of romantic relationship especially if it's a long-term marriage you know long-term partnership this teaching is so deep in me that what if they think I'm difficult what if am I being too much am I being oh you know and maybe I'm being too argumentative maybe I'm being too judgmental and no matter what's going on I will go into the corner and go way past just owning my part of it obviously we should always be aware of what part of it is us but I would always go way past that and also own all of their part of it too and then somehow create some story in my mind that I really created this whole thing just because I didn't want to just be honest and the crazy thing is is when I do this I create all kinds of resentment towards the other person and this this resentment is is like slipped under the rug of my consciousness probably right into my subconscious or unconscious you know and it sits there and I'm sure it fuels nothing healthy when instead I could just be honest and if I'm seen as being difficult well then I guess I'm difficult is this a an ocean you want to surf I guess that's becomes the choice you know another thing that struck me one day was how I thought it was okay that I was upset but I didn't want them to be upset even if they had done something that hurt my feelings somewhere inside of me it was better for me to carry all the pain and let them live on in ignorance that anything bad had even happened isn't that weird like the idea that like it reminds me years ago a man came to me for counseling and he was really struggling with his partner and having a horrible time and she was always yelling at him and screaming at him and and all that and and I said to him I said well what does she say when you bring this up to her and she said he said oh I I don't bring it up to her he says I don't want to cause trouble I don't want to cause trouble and I remember saying to him but you aren't causing trouble you're just talking about the trouble that is there is trouble there is something amok and you'd like to talk about it oh no no no but I have that training right I don't want to cause trouble it's easier for me to just swallow it which of course it isn't because it actually creates distance between us and it maybe even sets up some kind of in thing inside of me that now he owes me because he doesn't even know that I swallowed all this pain on his behalf just to keep him comfortable it's funny the other thing I realized at one point is that if I was to say to you you know why I didn't say that thing I would say I'm afraid of how he would respond afraid and that was really interesting to me especially when I was married on the farm I would think that a lot that I was afraid and my husband would never have harmed me not even in any way didn't yell didn't nothing nothing like that and so it is possible that I have epigenetic history ancestral trauma past life memories of being harmed and so maybe maybe I do hide a little because I'm afraid of rocking the boat you know gotta keep whoever happy so that's possible in which case I need to come into the present moment in this version of me in 2025 and make a different choice right if it's karmic if it's ancestral at some point the pattern has to end the cycle has to be stopped and so it's good to have the awareness but it's not an excuse to keep doing it because then it just means that I'm going to perpetuate this not only in my own life but in the lives of everyone around me so it's interesting to kind of stop and say well then the then the buck stops here another big reason that I am a people pleaser this is like this is like confessions with Katrina hi my name is Katrina Boss but I have always had a very strong need for the approval of others like this is and and maybe it started as a child maybe it was put into me in the school system you know education can be hard for everybody and and this may sound like a weird thing to say but the school system fit the kind of ways that I learn and so therefore I was an A student you know I just I always figured that the people who created the education system were just like me and that's why you know I got an A but then what that did from a very young age is it meant that I always had to get the A no matter what I did and that that A came from other people it came from other people's judgment of me not mine it wasn't my own inner excellence perfection I was seeking I had to do something perfect that everyone else approved of and whether you were an A student or not I think we all have that in us to some degree but that's certainly been my experience so I have this default that you must approve of me long before I have to approve of me so bringing that that awareness or that sense of who I really to the inside is a journey for me continually to this day it's still a journey for me because I default to what do you think of me because your opinion matters more right your opinion makes it official and that's interesting which can certainly cause us to be people pleasers another big one is the desire to be loved I wanted to be loved so much I was so awkward growing up and in high school and I was sort of that nerdy kid covered in acne it's flat chested just wanting to fit in didn't fit in in the 80s during all of the Revenge of the Nerds movies and I was that nerd of course ironically now as being 56 I'm reclaiming the joy of being a nerd I kind of wish I'd never lost it and and the the social messages whether it was just from Hollywood or from advertising was unless you look like Raquel Welsh or Brad Pitt no one's gonna love you oh I wanted to be loved so badly and I would have given up anything for that and that includes me that includes who I really was if I loved you and you loved me back okay I I can put everything aside and I remember I read a book once written by one of the guys who founded Access Consciousness I think it was called Divorceless Marriage or something like that and they tell this great story about there's a guy in a car and I'm saying it this gender way just because I'm a woman and you know but you can obviously flip this around to be all the genders all the time but so let's imagine you know I'm standing on the side of the road and the love of my life drives up in his car and he says to me come come and get in my car and let's go on a loving adventure so I go to get in the car but I don't quite fit and I try to squeeze myself into the car and I can't get in I can't get in but then I realize oh you know what if I cut my right arm off I'd fit in the car so I cut my right arm off and I get in the car woohoo this is awesome and we go on this loving adventure and it's so amazing then I realize I'm still a little squished you know what I'll just cut my leg off it's okay I don't need that leg and I'd rather just be with this person in the car on the adventure right so of course as it goes you know you cut your other leg off you cut your other arm off and then eventually you're sitting there going who am I can't do this can't do that can't do much and very often this is where we find ourselves that we've removed so much of us just to be loved that we're barely even there and I you know for me I was married for 20 years and afterwards it became this journey of finding my arms and legs again you know actually discovering who I ever was before I was married and this has nothing to do with my ex-husband this was me he didn't cut my arms off I did because I wanted his love no matter what so it's interesting right to just kind of look inside and say hmm what's that all about another thing I've always been afraid of is being different you don't want to be different you don't want to be you don't want to stand out you want to don't want to be open for criticism and this also is something that we have deeply inherited like externally the systems that we've been raised in really were hard on anyone who is different you know the early Christian church if you did not ascribe to the orthodoxy if you did not take you know what they said to be true you were a heretic and you could be killed for that that's pretty deep in our history if you know when they first sort of started molding the medical system in North America and they sort of they went full out you know medicine only pharma only if you practiced homeopathy or herbalism or hydrotherapy or anything you were this was quackery quackery you know and you know the whole idea of anarchism you know people who said you know I don't think uh the monarchy should be able to control us and now you're an anarchist this is deep inside of us you can't go against the grain don't go against the grain and so it's an interesting thing to kind of like did you know that the word heresy is actually the greek word for choice it just means that they chose something else isn't that crazy this is what I this is me researching my new book right like all about the sacred cows of our lives and so it's interesting to be compassionate with us with ourselves to say it makes sense that you're afraid to stand out it makes sense that you're afraid to go against the grain of the relationship or the family or society or anything because our our ancestors our heretical ancestors weren't treated all that well you know but in the end the journey becomes one of self-love Jim my teacher he used to define love as connection so instead of thinking about self-love like looking at yourself in the mirror and saying you're amazing there was this Saturday Night Live skit with Stuart Smiley and he used to have this whole spiel that he'd say you're good enough and you're awesome and everybody likes you or something like that i'm good enough i'm strong enough and gosh darn it people like you something like that there was this one time that they had Michael Jordan on there or something so Stuart has terrible self-worth and so Michael and Stuart's like you know you know what it's like when you know everybody else is better than you and Michael Jordan at this this was in his high point he's like well actually I I am the best basketball player alive right now and Stuart Smiley's like oh Michael denial is not just a river in Egypt so anyway and Stuart Smiley like basically puts all of this self-doubt into Michael Jordan and by the end of it the two of them are sitting there looking in the mirror going I'm good enough I'm strong enough and gosh darn it people like me anyway a little bit of a digression but the point is that that's not the self-love I mean imagine that self-love is simply the connection to your soul that you're that we're actually listening to our soul all the time and isn't it strange that we don't isn't it strange that we aren't connected to our soul like when you really think about all of us billions of people around the world all given these unique bodies circumstances families gifts challenges names our soul is here to guide us right that's that's why we're here it's the only thing that can guide us to live disconnected from our soul it's actually a very strange thing so now imagine you know here I am in Guadalupe and I'm deeply connected to my soul and it's kind of like I'm Katrina and I recognize that my soul is having an experience here on earth so suddenly my life isn't dictated by the circumstances around me it's not dictated by what you think what that person thinks or anything else my life is dictated by my experience of everything that's going on so suddenly I'm sitting at that table with the fish eyeballs staring at me and my soul is saying wow hmm and they're like you should eat them it's like yeah I'm really not feeling called to eat those right now but thank you so much would you like them I hear they're a delicacy you know or you're in some wonderful romantic relationship and your soul is bursting with gratitude that you found this amazing human to play with and explore all these wonderful loving things and then something happens it doesn't feel right and you in full connection to your soul says hey this isn't feeling great can we have a conversation about this or even you know you're you're with your family because sometimes family is very challenging and they are all the personalities that they've always been easy hard angry happy optimistic pessimistic who knows mean kind and your soul is wandering through these very curious personalities and you're like wow you know the pessimistic guy whoever that person is is like wow he's he's really angry today wow you know it's not it's not up to you to make him happy it's not up to you to change anything but your soul is having an experience of them and maybe they even say something mean to you something cutting or sarcastic and your soul's like whoa wow that really smarted and maybe you choose to say something or you choose not to say something you just avoid them you know what i mean it's all about simply your experience of it it's not going to suddenly change your behavior or do anything it's just like wow they're feeling pretty ripe today you know like they're in quite a mood and if you're in any kind of relationship that is deeply important to you suddenly conflict becomes a very interesting exploration when you're really in that self-love soul connected place because you're sitting there and there's this conflict and you sit and you i often think this if my partner and i are having an issue and we seem to be at a standstill when i check in with myself myself says i really love this guy and he has a really beautiful heart i wonder what's going on here really you know there's something that happens when i can tap in with that soul-centered part and i remember love like i remember connection even though right now there could be darts flying you know energetically or whatever i don't know life completely changes and then the idea of people pleasing becomes a strange thing and so how we cultivate that connection to self i truly believe this is the whole point of the yoga the meditation mindfulness contemplation doing whatever it is that makes you feel whole anything that we can do that makes us feel like ourselves even silly things like my daughter and i have started going to the gym monday wednesday friday mornings at six to go swimming well i love swimming i am born swimming i swam on a swim team when i was a kid i grew up near the water i i am a fish in the water on earth i'm pretty slow but in water i i love it and i hadn't swum in a long time and i got in that pool we just started swimming about three weeks ago again and i'm swimming along doing the front crawl and i kept feeling like this is what it feels like to do something you're good at this is what it feels like to do something that's natural for you because so often we strive and we reached trying to do something that we're not good at and sometimes it's good to learn right it's good to expand but sometimes it's good to just let us be us and expand on the things we're already gifted in and so connecting to ourself and self-love and our soul doesn't all have to be meditation it can just be doing what you love that just sets your soul on fire that you're just like i love doing this you know there's just like a magical thing so perhaps in the end healing the people-pleasing habit yeah we have to look at all those little pieces you know all the little things that might be little programs that are embedded in our minds that cause us to have that external locus of control they call it but in the end it's all about actually having this lovely connection within and then we can just go out and enjoy everybody no matter how they are no matter what they think of us it's awesome well thank you so much for being here i hope you have a wonderful day

Reviews

This talk really resonated with me. I’ve been a people pleaser since childhood. Easier for me to relax and have fun if everyone else was content. Still work to do… ✌🏻❤️🙏🏻