3 ways to combat chronic people pleasing

As women, we are socialized from birth to be pleasant. Our role has always been one of supporter, helper, nurturer. So it's not surprising how many of the women that I have been working with (including myself) are chronic pleasers. 

People pleasing is not biological, we aren't hard wired for this. It's a learned behavior that unsurprisingly impacts women much more than men because we are taught that other people's needs are more important or valuable than our own. The good news is that since it's learned, it can be unlearned. 

Here are 3 ways to combat your people pleasing nature and free yourself from this limiting behavior.

Practice being OK with other people's discomfort
As Glennon Doyle says, we are constantly abandoning ourselves in situations where we don't want to disappoint others, so we disappoint ourselves instead. We are too quick to put our own discomfort ahead of someone else's so we give in to pleasing so that they don't have a negative experience of us or the situation.

Validate yourself instead of finding your value in the opinions of other people
We please to get the praise, the gold star. If we can work on our own thoughts about ourselves, we can learn that as nice as approval from others is, it shouldn't define us. We should define ourselves and stand strong in our own opinion. 

Get comfortable with the big, negative emotions like anger and frustration
These are the feelings that we are avoiding through people pleasing. We are uncomfortable with how we *might* be perceived if we show up with big feelings (angry/mad/frustrated). Life is 50/50 and there is no way around negative/hard emotions. The opportunity is to learn to allow and process them instead of avoiding them. The more we do this, the less we will be uncomfortable.

Discomfort is the price of growth

To do anything that we want to do, we need to be OK with it feeling awkward or difficult for a while. Becoming aware of when you are people pleasing is the first step. Then you can use the tools above to arrest that behavior and build the new behavior of not jumping in to relieve the discomfort of others at the expense of yourself.