Ep. 20: How to Finally Stop People Pleasing (and a bit about The Valley!)

People pleasing is one of the most common topics people aim to address in coaching. So many of us are in the habit of being a “people pleaser”, and even though it doesn’t get us to where we want to be (because we stay stuck being focused on others rather than moving ourselves forward) we can’t seem to stop. In this episode Stephanie will outline the most important step in breaking the habit of people pleasing, as well as a few other tactics to help along the way - using Bravo’s The Valley as a real (reality) life example. Enjoy!

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the I'm the Problem podcast. I'm Stephanie Finigan, I am the host of the show, I'm also a certified life coach, and I am very excited to bring you today's episode. I know, I feel like I say that every week, because I genuinely am excited every week because I love all of the topics that I get to talk about on this podcast. But this week in particular, I'm excited because this is a topic that has been coming up over and over and over again with my clients lately. Something's going on where a lot of people are asking questions and coming to get coaching around the topic of people pleasing. So I am super excited to bring that topic to you guys today.

So I have actually recently joined TikTok and I've joined under the name @TheBravoLifeCoach. So if you guys like watching Bravo shows and you like life coaching, it's a nice combo of the both. You can find me over on TikTok.

I recently did a TikTok (did a TikTok, made a TikTok? I don't know. I'm 100. Whatever). I have a video up on TikTok now now about people pleasing. And I used Britney from the show The Valley, formerly Vanderpump Rules, as the example. So whether or not you watch, and you should watch The Valley, but whether or not, doesn't matter. I'm going to use her as an example today to explain what I mean when I talk about people pleasing.

Britney is this, you know, sweet Southern gal, been on reality TV for quite a while now, married to one of the largest assholes in the reality TV realm, certainly in the Bravo realm, named Jax. Britney and Jax, sadly, but unsurprisingly, are going through a tough time in their marriage in real, like, in real life, like outside of the show. But we're also seeing it inside the show because cameras picked back up, and we saw a bit of what was going on with them as the season wrapped and as Britney started to make some long overdue decisions about what was best for her and their son when it came to their marriage. And what Brittany said on camera while she was talking to her girlfriends was that part of the reason that she stayed with Jax, who is inarguably a terrible husband, she stayed with him for so long and kept fighting for the marriage, at least partially because she didn't want to disappoint her family. She has this big family back in Kentucky. She said, “I worked so hard to get them to like him. I just didn't want to disappoint anybody. I didn't want to let anybody down”. And she was referring to her family. And that really broke my heart when I heard her say that. And that's why I made a TikTok about it, because that right there is classic people pleasing. people-pleasing.

Also very common that we sort of hang on to something that we know isn't good for us, like a toxic relationship, which is what they're in. We hang on to that thing that we know isn't good for us because we don't want to disappoint or upset or let down other people. It's not healthy behavior. It's also not going to lead you to the life that you want if you're spending your entire life sort of pretzeling your decisions around what other people want.

So we kind of walk around thinking, okay, so I'm a people pleaser. We say that as if we're saying a fact about ourselves, right? So someone will be like, I'm a people pleaser. It's just who I am. The way that we say like, I'm five foot six. You can't change the fact that you're five foot six. That's just a circumstance. It's a fact. It is what it is. “I am a people pleaser” is not a fact. It's an identity that we've adopted. We've learned that terminology from somewhere. We've adopted the behavior of a people pleaser, and we've just done it habitually to the point that we think that's who we are.

So the first thing I want you to walk away from this episode understanding is that being a people pleaser is not who you are. It's not a circumstance of who you are, the way that your height is. It is something that is just an identity that you've put on the way you put on a coat in the winter, and you can take it off.

So with that, let's move forward to unpack people pleasing further. I've given you the Britney example. You might have examples in your own life of when you have people pleased, or you might be somebody who does define yourself as a people pleaser, and you kind of spend a lot of time making decisions based on what you think other people want you to think and say and do and act like rather than what you want and your needs get pushed to the side.

When I coach people on people-pleasing, I used to focus a lot on being aware of the habit of people-pleasing, being aware of when you do it and remembering that you can't make other people feel things and we talk a lot about emotional adulthood, but what I've realized the more that I coach on this is that we actually need to take a step back before we attack those ideas when we're addressing people-pleasing. So here's how I coach on it now, which is first and foremost looking at what exactly we're doing when we people-please. I'm going to keep referring to Brittany as the example here, but certainly apply this to whatever area of your life that you might be people-pleasing in.

So when we go to people-please, we think, oh we're doing this because we don't want to let other people down, we don't want to upset somebody else, I don't want to make them feel bad, and there might be some thoughts, and I'm guessing this is what's going on with Brittany, but there might be some thoughts like, I'm not a selfish person and I don't want to put my needs first because that's selfish to do that. And I want to make sure everybody's okay. And we've been taught that those are good traits to have, especially as women. When the reality is this, when we're people pleasing, we're not actually doing it because we're trying to put somebody else's needs first. What we're actually doing is trying to avoid feeling bad.

Here's what I mean. When Brittany thinks, oh my God, I want to leave Jax, but I don't want to disappoint my family. What she's actually worried about is not the act of disappointing her family. She's worried that if she says, I'm leaving him and her mother says, you know, I'm really disappointed in you, Brittany, that you didn't stick it out. I'm really disappointed that this is happening. It's not her mother's words that she's trying to avoid, it's her feeling badly about her mother's words. So her mother says those words and then Brittany might have a thought like, oh my God, I'm disappointing my mom. Oh my God, I let her down. Whatever those thoughts are, trigger an emotion for her. And we all feel that when we think we've disappointed somebody. So we feel like, you know, it just feels sort of like icky. You might feel like a gut punch in your stomach or it might feel tense in your shoulders or you might feel kind of like a sting behind your eyes or a sting in your stomach. Like you have a thought, oh my God, I've disappointed this person. It creates an emotion in your body, usually fear, anxiety, sadness, something to that effect that literally creates a feeling in your body. That's what you're trying to avoid when you're people-pleasing. Brittany's not trying to avoid letting her mom down, she's trying to avoid feeling that sting, feeling that gut punch when her mother says something like, I'm disappointed in you.

And that's okay. It's very natural and normal to feel this way. The reason our emotions create these feelings in our body is because it's a signal to us that something is either okay to move forward or it's danger. Our brains are very simple. They like to categorize things simply. So if you feel this bad feeling, if you have a thought and it creates some sort of bad feeling in your body, like a gut punch in your stomach or kind of a sharp pain or something because you're feeling regret or you're feeling sadness or you're feeling disappointment for yourself or you're feeling fear, that's going to create that feeling in your body. And from there, your brain goes, oh my God, this is a bad feeling. This feeling is painful. This feeling is uncomfortable, which means something's wrong. We are not meant to feel pain or discomfort of any kind, physical or emotional. We're not meant to feel that all the time.

When we feel that it sends a signal to our brain that says, oh my God, something's wrong, stop doing this. That makes sense when we're in a situation where those feelings will keep us alive. If you're crossing the street and you see a car coming at you and you get that like that gaspy kind of like immediate panic feeling and you jump out of the way, that immediate panic feeling is a good feeling because it signals to your brain something is wrong, we have to move, we got to get out of here, we got to stop walking forward. That makes sense. Brittany disappointing her mother is not a life or death situation the way that walking into oncoming traffic is.

And we know that logically, but again, we've habitualized the people pleasing so much that we don't even realize we're doing it. We go through the motions. So I just wanted to make sure that's really clear for everybody, because now we're going to get to the part where you can solve for this.

You can feel bad and still do the thing you want to do. You can feel the sting, you can feel the pit in your stomach of disappointment or regret or fear or sadness or whatever emotion comes up when your mother says to you, I'm disappointed in you, or you've let me down. You can feel that emotion and still do the thing that you want to go ahead and do. So Brittany could call her mom, and for the record, I mean, having watched enough of these episodes I don't know that Brittany's family is gonna be disappointed. They never liked Jax in the first place and because of that they might be happy the marriage is ending. That being said if Brittany calls her mom and says mom I'm leaving Jax and her mom says okay I'm really disappointed to hear this Brittany I'm really disappointed in you that you can't just stick it out and make it work. Brittany can think oh I've disappointed my mom, and that feeling that that creates for her, the fear and the sadness and the disconnect that that creates for her, she can feel that emotion. She can even cry about it. She can feel any way she wants and express that emotion any way she wants and then go ahead and leave Jax anyway.

We like to think that if we have that yucky feeling, it means stop, don't move forward with the action. But the reality is you can feel that yucky feeling, for lack of a more scientific term, you can feel that yucky feeling and still move ahead with the thing you want to do. So that's really important to just be aware of because even if you feel a feeling that feels bad in your body, if it creates a vibration that you don't like, you are not bad. It does not mean the action that you're taking is bad. It just means you're having a thought that's creating that feeling.

But you can feel that feeling and do the thing anyway. And here's the trick, right? The more you do it, the more you're going to learn to tolerate it. So I go to Solidcore all the time. I mean, the first time I went to Solidcore, for people that don't know, it's like a Reformer, Pilates, masochist type of workout. So the first time I went there, I mean, I couldn't walk for like a week afterwards. And now I go all the time and I still get sore when I work out, but it doesn't hurt nearly as much as it used to when I first got started like two years ago.

And it's the same here. You can disappoint people, let them down, but if you know you're doing the right thing for yourself, then you can still move forward with what you're doing because that sting is gonna sting less and less the more that you start practicing the habit of doing things that you know are right for you, even if you're letting people down. That's how you start to break the habit of people pleasing. When you stop people pleasing, you start creating the life you want and you stop creating the life other people want for you. And you can say, thank you very much. I appreciate your love. I appreciate the fact that you want good things for me. But at the end of the day, this is what I want to do. And you move forward with doing it.

Now, after you get comfortable doing that, you can start to think about some of the other ways that we move forward breaking the habit of people-pleasing. So just a few nuggets here. And again, this is where I used to kind of jump in and coach people. But now I really focus on that feeling piece first and then move forward with this.

So key things to remember:

Adults get to feel whatever they want to feel and think and act however they want to think and act. Children do too, frankly, but with children, you know, we can't control their thoughts, we can't control their feelings, we can help them to understand them and then we can help them figure out what an appropriate action is. With adults, what we're looking at here are people that are going to think whatever they want to think, feel whatever they want to feel, and act however they want to act, no matter what. So it's great if Brittany's mom is supportive of her choice, because if it's Brittany's choice and it's best for her, of course, go ahead. But no matter what, Brittany's mom gets to think whatever she wants to think. Sherry is her name. Sherry gets to think whatever she wants to think and say and feel and act however she wants about Jax and Brittany splitting up and Brittany can't do anything about it. You cannot control another person's thoughts. You can't crack open their brain and rewire their thinking. Okay, that's their job. So that's very important to remember. So you might as well stop with the people pleasing because people are going to think and feel whatever they want anyway, no matter what you do.

The second thought here is about emotional adulthood. I mentioned this concept earlier in the episode, I've talked about it on social media and some other podcasts, but essentially this concept means that you are responsible completely for all of the results you're getting in your life. So if you can own the concept of emotional adulthood, if you can seriously stop and just embrace everything that's happening with you, then what happens is you start to realize, oh, other people's opinions and pleasing other people is a lot less important because I own everything I'm doing and I'm creating my results.

And third, I love this thought, and this is a thought, if and when you're ready, you start practicing this thought which is, I'm just not taking that on. So I have a client, she's a business owner, she recently raised her prices and a few of her clients were not, one in particular was not happy with her about that and didn't continue working with her. And she had all kinds of feelings about it because she would classify herself as a people pleaser. One of the thoughts I could offer to her is, hey, I'm just not taking that on. That person gets to have their thoughts and feelings about the fact that I raised my prices, but I know I'm doing this for the right reasons and I feel good about this choice and so this is what I'm doing and I'm just not taking on his opinions. I'm just not taking on his thoughts. The expression came from the actress, June Diane Rayfield, and I heard it on my favorite podcast, Bitch Sesh, for Real Housewives fans. But yeah, I love this one. I'm just not taking that on.

So again, adults get to feel what they want. Emotional adulthood means you are responsible for everything in your life, and when you embrace that, you stop focusing on other people, which helps you to stop people pleasing, and finally, start practicing the thought, I'm just not taking that on, when other people's opinions start to come back and interfere with the decisions you wanna make.

But again, those ideas, which I love, and they're very useful, don't help you unless you've done the first part of this, which is what we talked about at the beginning of the episode, which is learning to live with the feeling of yuck, the feeling of ick, the feeling of bad, the feeling of disappointment, regret, sadness, anxiety. We're learning to feel that physically in your body and then do the thing you want to do anyway and practicing that. Once you practice those skills and get good at that, then you can move forward with these other concepts I just touched on.

All right, that's what I have for you guys today. I hope this was helpful. I love the topic of people pleasing. So if you want more on this, just go over to makeyourpivot.co. There's a ton of ways for us to work together. Also find me, as I said, over on TikTok at the Bravo Life Coach, as well as on Instagram, pivot underscore coaching. So lots and lots of ways to get in touch. If you want to sign up for a consult, all consults are free. 60 minutes of coaching to see what it's like to work with me. So bring your people-pleasing topics to, and questions to that consult, and we can get started on breaking you of the habit of people-pleasing. All right, have a great week. I will talk to you guys soon.