Pleasing Everyone…

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Early in my work life, I received this piece of advice:

Give up on trying to please everyone; that is not your job. Besides, nothing you do will please everyone.

Like most advice, it is easy to say and challenging to implement! My life has been a tangled web of people-pleasing. I think if we are honest, most of us have been trying to please somebody much of our lives. AND, it is okay to begin there. It turns out that part of our instinct to survive is belonging to a group. Groups/tribes mean sharing labor and sustenance, warmth and companionship; at its simplest, a tribe means someone will be there to help me get up when I fall. I need others and I want them to stay; consequently I behave in a way I believe will keep them in my life.

The instinct to survive translates into a list of people we try to please. We adapt our behaviors to survive. Clearly in a healthy environment, our lives are “better” when we please primary and secondary caregivers. With age, we “advance” from pleasing only our caregivers which adds to an expansive list: our teachers and mentors: our peers and significant others; perhaps an ever-changing array of work supervisors. Later we may start over again, trying to please our children!

If one is religious, they also wrap all this pleasing into appeasing your chosen deity/Deity. Likely that deity/Deity has rules about how we treat caregivers, elders, supervisors, like-minded and unlike-minded peers. This merely adds to the complexity of figuring out how to behave. We begin to see the intricate tapestry of people and Others that we hope to please. Rather than making life simple, all this pleasing makes life difficult. It seems like dances within dances within dances we perform to keep everyone pleased. After all, you cannot please everyone. Can you even please anyone?

Learning to live this way creates a persona, a mask we maintain After a while, it may no longer be clear where the mask stops and “I” begin. Additionally it is tiring maintaining this mask; it also requires energy to maintain the public (false) face and this energy is a from a finite pool.

How will I break this cycle? What can I do to manage this desire to please others/Other? This is where the work begins:

• I recognize the patterns of pleasing others in my life.
• I give attention to notice the timing in which these patterns arise and from what underlying thoughts/feelings.
• I see that I am not the thoughts, feelings, or protective patterns I have created in my life.
• I choose to live from a place other than the mask.
• I watch for arising patterns.
• When I notice the pattern, I thank the pattern for keeping me alive.
• I smile and let go.

Pleasing others in order to receive approval, affection, and “to survive” becomes a habitual and unobserved adaptation. Observing and naming this flow within begins the work of being yourself. Eventually, it can lead to letting go and healing.

Breaking patterns of people-pleasing will not happen overnight. I have spent years journaling, meditating, praying, entered therapy and spiritual direction, and now wisdom mentoring. I have studied a variety of “techniques” and have read about archetypal, enneagram, developmental, and integral theories. All of these offered hints and language for the journey. Each of us is charged with “making the road by walking.”