For many of us, people-pleasing is a default way of being. Thanks to a mixture of gendered stereotypes and societal pressures, making others happy and putting someone else’s needs before our own comes as naturally as breathing deeply or taking a sip from a cup of tea.

But all this people-pleasing doesn’t lead to much. Whether you’re chasing a promotion at work, trying to be a ‘good person’ or attempting to make someone like you more, people-pleasing rarely achieves the outcome we desire, and more often leaves us burnt out and full of resentment instead.

The good news is that being aware of your people-pleasing tendencies is the first step in getting them under control. Natalie Lue, a boundaries and relationship coach, calls this the first step towards becoming a “recovering people-pleaser”. While the tendency to be a people-pleaser will always be there, being aware of your people-pleasing means you can use techniques to unpick your bad habits.

During her talk on the Work Life with Google stage at Stylist Live last weekend, Lue – the author of The Joy Of Saying No and host of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions podcast – shared three helpful tips for anyone who wants to nip their people-pleasing in the bud. Here’s what she had to say.  

1. Take care of yourself

Unpicking your people-pleasing tendencies can take a lot of time and effort, so it’s a good idea to start with the basics. You may not realise it, but as a people-pleaser, you’re probably engaging in a bit of self-neglect – and taking steps to rectify this will empower you to make bigger changes down the line.

“Hands up if you’ve recently got up from a particularly busy stint at your desk and realised you’re absolutely busting for a wee or found yourself skipping lunch without realising it,” Lue asked the audience. “We might think those are just examples of us being a good worker, mother or friend, but they’re actually signs of self-neglect. So if you can even start allowing yourself to go to the toilet when you need to go and eat your lunch at the right time without making yourself feel like a terrible person for taking a break, that’s a simple way to start getting into the habit of meeting your own needs.” 

2. Start tracking your ‘yeses’

As a people-pleaser, it’s likely you say ‘yes’ an awful lot. But while saying yes is easy, doing all the extra work those yeses bring can quickly become exhausting – so you want to keep your yeses under control where possible. To do this, Lue recommends keeping track of your yeses.

“A lot of people think they are a people-pleaser but aren’t sure how their people-pleasing shows up,” Lue explained. “The problem is, you can’t change what you don’t know, and we all have our specific brand of people-pleaser, so I always recommend spending a week observing how you spend your yeses, nos and maybes. The typical people-pleaser has a lot of yeses and not a lot of nos.” 

She continued: “You don’t have to be intense about it but just notice where you are spending those yeses and what triggers feelings of guilt, anxiety and overwhelm. And you should start to notice there are specific scenarios or people who make you feel that way. People who, as soon as you see their name pop up on your phone, make you start thinking, ‘What do they want from me?’ From there, you can start to cut back on some of those yeses and observe how that makes you feel. Play around with it, and you’ll find examples where you don’t feel as bad, and others where your people-pleasing really plays up.”     

3. Identify your people-pleasing thoughts

People-pleasing isn’t just identifiable by how you behave on the outside but also by the thoughts and feelings that come up inside when people ask things of you. When you start to notice these thoughts, you can start to recognise when your people-pleasing is present – and tackle that impulse.

“An example would be someone asking you to do something, and while outwardly you might say ‘yes’, inwardly you might find yourself thinking, ‘The audacity of this person!’, ‘I don’t really want to do this’ or huffing and puffing. You might also think something like, ‘I need to do this because people aren’t going to like me.’ But these are all people-pleasing thoughts, and they’re clues about the fact that your people-pleasing is showing up. If you can start to notice these things, they’re easy entry points into making change.” 

Image: @shotby_farheenxo