How To Stop People-Pleasing

I remember talking about how guilty I felt when someone asked me to do something I wanted to say no to. My friend felt the same. We laughed at ourselves and decided we were just too kind, and that people would take advantage of our kind nature. We needed to toughen up.

That conversation happened when I had no clue what was driving me, or that the guilt was only the tip of the iceberg. I thought I simply needed firmer boundaries. I didn’t realise I was a people-pleaser.

Most of us want to be liked. We want to be helpful and considerate, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The trouble starts when wanting to please someone matters more than what we think, feel or want. We agree to things we don’t want to do. We go along with decisions we disagree with. We avoid difficult conversations because we don’t want to upset anyone.

Part of what makes people-pleasing hard to change is that it becomes a habit. We say yes so often and so automatically that we stop noticing we are doing it. It starts to feel like part of who we are. Habits like this are wired over years, and they take time and patience to change, as I’ve written about in Can You Rewire Your Brain at Any Age?

Why We Say Yes When We Mean No

There are many reasons we say yes out of habit. Some of these may sound familiar:

• We don’t want to disappoint someone we love.
• We’re afraid they’ll be angry, reject us, or think badly of us.
• We’ve always been the dependable one, and that’s what people expect.
• We feel responsible for other people’s happiness.
• We want to avoid an argument or an awkward conversation.
• We think putting ourselves first is selfish.
• We want to feel needed, valued, or appreciated.
• We’ve spent so long fitting in with others that we’re no longer sure what we want.

These responses often originate in childhood or in an earlier relationship, or they have simply built up over decades. They aren’t a sign of weakness, either. Someone can be confident and capable at work and still find it very hard to disagree with a partner or let a parent down.

People-Pleasing Isn’t Always About Doing Too Much

We tend to picture the people-pleaser as someone who is always busy, running around after everyone else. Sometimes, it’s not being too busy that’s the problem; it can simply mean being afraid to be ourselves.

I once knew someone who agreed to move house with her partner, even though she had real doubts. She stayed silent to keep the peace. She didn’t want to put the relationship at risk. Her reluctance never went away, and over time it wore the relationship down until it ended.

Most of the time, we give pieces of ourselves away in much smaller ways. We agree with a friend’s opinion to avoid debate. I still do this sometimes when I know we have very different views. I weigh up whether discussing them is worth risking a rift in the relationship. But there’s a difference between choosing not to argue and being afraid to say what you think.

We pretend to enjoy a partner’s hobby. We keep our ambitions to ourselves because our family wouldn’t approve. We laugh at a joke we find offensive. None of these seems to matter much on its own, but they add up.

The Cost of People-Pleasing

A client came to me some years ago because she was completely worn out. Her mother needed her, her workplace kept asking more of her, and she had taken on a role with a charity that was eating into every spare hour she had.

She felt trapped between two feelings. If she thought about saying no, she felt guilty. When she said yes, she felt resentful. Neither option felt good, so she kept saying yes and kept feeling worse.

This is what people-pleasing so often leads to. We hold back what we really want because we think it protects the relationship, but it does the opposite. When we hide what we think and feel, the other person never gets to know us properly. They are in a relationship with the version of us that agrees with them.

It isn’t fair on them either. They make decisions, sometimes big ones, based on an agreement that was never real. Like the woman who moved house, we can let someone build their plans around a yes we didn’t mean. When we people-please, we unwittingly leave ourselves out of the relationship.

If you recognise a cycle of going along with things and then feeling resentment build up, you might find my article, Overcoming a Negative Pattern, helpful.

What Your Higher Self Knows About Pleasing Others

Your Higher Self doesn’t judge you for people-pleasing. It helps you see the situation more clearly and find a way through that respects everyone involved, including you.

Stopping people-pleasing means noticing the fear behind our choices so we can choose differently. You don’t have to become cold, uncaring or selfish to do it.

The ego tells us many things when someone asks something of us. Our Higher Self sees the same situation more calmly:

Choosing to sacrifice versus feeling you have to

Living from your Higher Self doesn’t mean always putting yourself first. Love sometimes asks us to make sacrifices or to keep a commitment when it isn’t convenient. The difference is whether we choose it with our eyes open and give it willingly, or whether we’re driven by fear and obligation without realising it.

Remorse or guilt?

I make a distinction between remorse and guilt. If we’ve let someone down or caused harm, feeling bad about it is the right response. That’s remorse, and it can run deep. It tells us that what we did didn’t work, and it helps us put things right. Maybe we said no when it would have been the right thing to say yes. Guilt goes further. It tells us we are wrong, and to me it’s just another layer of shame. With people-pleasing, there’s usually nothing to feel remorse for. We feel guilty simply because we’re doing something unfamiliar. We’ve said yes for so long that saying no feels wrong, even when it isn’t.

How to Choose Differently

With my client, the turning point came when she gave herself permission to say no. Not to say it immediately, just to imagine she could. That gave her room to work out what she wanted. She decided to set boundaries around what she could offer at work, to the charity and to her mother, rather than taking responsibility for everything herself.

You can try this yourself. Next time someone asks something of you, give yourself permission to say no, just long enough to find out what you really want. Then ask yourself:

1. If I wasn’t worried about disappointing anyone, would I still want to do this? Notice your first gut response before you start thinking it through.
2. Am I saying yes because I want to, or because I’m afraid of what will happen if I don’t?
3. If I do say yes, can I do it without resentment? If the answer is no, the request probably needs renegotiating.

When saying no isn’t simple

Not every situation allows a clean no. If you have young children, an older parent who depends on you, or a job with real obligations, you can’t simply walk away from them, and I’m not suggesting you should. What you can do is make conscious choices within those responsibilities. You might change how you help, when you help, or how much. Even when there is little room to move, choosing rather than complying changes how it feels.

Going too far the other way

When you first start saying no, you may overdo it. You might swing the other way for a while, and people around you may notice a harder edge than they’re used to. If that happens, you can notice it and adjust. What you are reclaiming is your right to choose, and that includes choosing to help.

Saying No with Kindness

When someone is disappointed by our choice, it doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong. Our decisions will sometimes inconvenience others, and we can acknowledge that honestly. Their feelings matter, but they don’t make us responsible for changing our minds.

It may help to know that the reaction we dread is usually milder than we imagine. In a 2023 study, researchers Julian Givi and Colleen Kirk found that people who turned down an invitation expected the other person to be far more upset than they were. This held true for couples too, regardless of how long they had been together. Most of us overestimate the cost of saying no.

Boundaries are how we communicate what we’ve chosen without blaming anyone. A boundary is a clear statement of what we will and won’t do, and we can express it kindly and with respect. My article, Why Boundaries Get Easier When You Stop Blaming, explains how to have that conversation.

As for my client, she still gives a great deal of her time, but now she chooses where it goes and no longer resents it.

When you no longer need someone else’s approval to feel good about yourself, you can give freely, without resentment.

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