For the first time in my life, I realized that it was me who is in charge of my life.
I'd done what everybody else wanted.
Over the course of the next several months, I started to put some boundaries in my life.
Gradually, bit by bit, day by day, I started being more honest about who I am as a person because that was a fundamental problem with me.
I swallowed all my feelings.
I hidden all of my trauma.
I just became whatever anybody wanted me to be, and I couldn't do it anymore.
My life was saying to me, you cannot pretend that you don't have feelings.
You can't pretend to be something that you're not.
The only choice that you have is to be you.
From that moment forward, it felt like everything began to shift.
I mean, life changed so radically for me over less than a year.
It was unbelievable.
So how might your life be different if you had gotten comfortable saying no in your earliest days?
No to other people's opinions about everything from, oh, education, to careers, to relationships.
No to someone else telling you what to prioritize and how to spend your time.
No to people you've never met offering their opinion of what you should or shouldn't do, and then telling you how they think that choice worked out for you.
How would your life be different if you'd gotten okay choosing for you and not just for acceptance or belonging or obligation?
How might you reclaim if you started getting clear on when and what to say yes or no to from this moment on and rid yourself of the need to please?
That is what we are diving into with today's guest, Natalie Lou, a self -proclaimed recovering people pleaser who has spent nearly two decades unwinding the need to please and reclaiming freedom and ease.
So Natalie is a writer, speaker, podcaster, artist, and founder of one of the longest -running personal growth websites in the world, Baggage Reclaim, and the Baggage Reclaim Sessions podcast, British -born and raised in Dublin, Ireland.
Natalie helps people understand how their emotional baggage interferes with their ability to live their lives happily and authentically, and her advice has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, NPR, USA Today, BBC, among so many others, and today she is joining me to share a bit more about her
personal journey to where she is today and her new book, The Joy of Saying No, a simple plan to stop pleasing people, reclaim boundaries, and say yes to the life you want.
And in our conversation, Natalie really opens up about her own personal struggles with this thing called people pleasing, something we all know about and have experienced to some degree, and we talk about the life events that brought her back to herself, back to reclaiming her boundaries in life, and we
get into some of the nitty -gritty of what does it actually look like to understand how and when and why to stop pleasing others and understand when to say yes to you and no to them and reclaim the life that you really want.
So excited to share this best of conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
Something that you shared with us beforehand, I thought really caught me.
It was interesting.
There's something that is profoundly generative about you.
It's been a part of you from the earliest days, not just the creative side or the creation side, but also teaching it.
You know, you spent a number of years as a teen in Ireland teaching young kids.
Art eventually ended up pursuing a degree in design, but they made a really interesting choice, and I'm so curious about it, which is that it sounds like you didn't see at that point what you consider to be a viable career path in it.
Talk to me about this moment, because I've had similar conversations with people about that moment and the choices they've made around it.
I'm so delighted that you want to talk about this.
I grew up constantly hearing that art was for people who basically are either rich or they want to be starving.
Careers were in African Caribbean culture, and actually in Irish culture as well, and probably in a number of cultures, proper careers, accountant, engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of thing.
I wasn't really drawn to any of that, and so when you say, I want to be a writer or I want to be an artist, you got douche in the head and they say, what are you talking about?
Get a proper job. Do something serious.
However, in a very contradictory way, my mom and my stepfather were also very supportive of my creativity in the sense of, you are good at it, so you should make sure you are the best at it.
They sent me off to art school every Friday back home, end up in after school, which is where I taught art during the summers.
But when it came to university, they were not really keen on me going and doing a degree in it.
And I'd gone for a bit of a tough time in that last couple of years of school, so I didn't do as well on my exams as my parents wanted me to.
So even though I was offered a place on a design degree in England, they were like, you have not performed as well as you should have done, so you're going to go off and do an accountancy and human resource management degree.
And I could feel my soul bleeding out of me as I'm heading off to do this.
It just was not for me at all, but there was no way that I was going to be allowed to go to England to do this degree.
And so I go off and I try to do this.
And I have a bit of fun with it, but I fail my economics degree in my second year, much to the horror.
I'd never failed anything before.
I maybe hadn't done as well as my parents would have liked in those big exams, but fail, fail.
It shocked them. It shocked me.
It really knocked me.
So I went off and I worked for a few years and I traveled.
And then I was like, oh, I want to go back to university.
So when I was away in America, I had this very, very fun summer in Fort Lauderdale.
I think it was the summer of 99 or 2000.
And then I was like, do you know what?
I'm going to go to university here, completely clueless about how expensive it is for a university education there.
And I went to the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale.
I was actually there at the same time as Venus and Serena Williams were there as a little side note there.
And so I did a semester there in, I started off thinking I was going to do online marketing and saw people doing graphic design.
I was walking by there and I felt myself light up.
And so I did graphic design for a semester, did really well, but discovered how expensive it was.
So I moved back home to Ireland, then started applying around, got onto a design degree.
So I got onto a product design degree, loved it, but it was very male dominated.
And when it came to, it's time to go and get a job.
The jobs were like 10 grand a year, 10, 11, 12 grand a year.
I was like 25 because I got obviously gone back to university at this point.
So I think I was like 25 approaching 26.
I was like, I can't manage on that.
So I went back into something familiar, which is I went back into advertising and worked in that for a few years.
And so that's how I got diverted from design, but also I think the combination of not being taken seriously about how much I really wanted to pursue that as a career meant that I stopped taking myself seriously about it.
And then I was partying and working.
So then you're not even really looking at it as a hobby really at that point.
And so for a long time, I just ignored this creative instinct in me.
CB, Yeah. I mean, it's amazing how often, especially I think when we're a bit younger in life, we take the assumptions of those who we look to for support or for guidance as, well, that just must be the way it is and often don't test those assumptions.
But you in fact did, you know, you said, okay, so let me sort of like follow the prescribed path, went and tried it and did it.
It wasn't for you. And then it sort of like found your way back to this thing that was speaking to you, dove into it and then came back out into the world and said, okay, so let me actually see what's available to me.
It sounds like it was fairly hospitable to your desire to actually like keep continuing down this path.
I'm always fascinated by how we grapple with experiences like that.
And also, if we end up like testing the waters, testing water, then maybe walking away for a window of time and then maybe down the road coming back to it, which you have in different ways, like through writing, through art making, what brings us back to it?
Like what eventually makes us come full circle and say, you know, this actually is a really important part of me.
I don't know if it's going to be the central thing that earns a living for me, but I can't not do this in some way, shape, or form.
Yeah. And I've definitely had that because my children are 15 and 13 now.
And I went through a spell sort of in the first two or three years when they were born and I was working for myself like writing at this point, where I found myself because of them, I was making a lot of stuff like I started sewing again, like I had as a kid.
And I started buying a lot of craft books.
I dove into that and didn't really, I guess, think too much about it.
I kind of saw writing as my sort of creative outlet.
And then, I don't know, life sort of came along and a few years went by again, and I started drawing.
This is back in the early days of the iPad.
There was this paper app.
And so I started sketching on there.
I did some sketches for a friend who was designing handbags and she used them to pitch successfully for a grant.
And I was like, and I started drawing.
This was, I think, 2014 or 2015.
I started just doing sort of basic drawings and including them on my blog.
And then somebody said something, as is the internet.
So somebody made this throwaway comment, like, oh, those don't look like professional drawings.
And it just brought back that feeling of being at university when one of my professors who I used to do a drawing class with was like, oh, that style of sketching, it's too scratchy.
Oh, I don't like this or I don't like that.
So I was like, oh, there's a particular way to draw.
So I pulled back from it again, the sort of outside noise, outside influence, because it's like, oh, the internet is commenting on how I draw.
And then it got to 2017 when my dad died.
And I took, I guess what you might probably call, because I was listening to your episode about when you took a creative sabbatical recently, and it reminded me of when I took the best part of a year out.
And what had happened is my father had died in March, 2017.
I had taken some time out as you do.
And then it was like a sort of six, seven weeks vampire.
And it was like, oh, I need to get back to things.
And when I try to go back, I did not fit into my life as I had before.
So I found myself struggling.
And so then a few minutes went by and I was like, right, hit pause on podcast, hit pause on blog.
I shall just potter, take it easy.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
I didn't even know if I was going to come back to the podcast.
And in that time I found myself just doodling and pottering about and just sort of igniting other creative aspects of me.
And so this went on for about a year or so where I was quite slow and then I gradually eased back into the podcast.
And then I stumbled across a class one day about drawing and something just went off in me.
So I started doing daily drawing.
And then I was at a festival giving a talk and it was like a makers festival and I handled these workshops.
I finished the talk and I was walking around and it was like, oh, you can come along to this workshop.
It was my soul completely lit up there.
I was so happy. I was so energized.
I was to a degree wrestling with, I think somewhat since then.
So that's like 2019 is this feeling, this very strong urge to be making, like physically making things, painting, drawing, embroidering all sorts.
And also I'm a writer and also I've got all the things that life is asking of you, either work or parenting or partner.
And it's this trying to fully bring it into my life because each time it slips away from me, it just feels so wrong.
So I have to fully embrace this now.
Yeah, that so resonates with me on so many levels.
We share a lot of similarities and that's sort of like we've been steeped in the creative impulse from the earliest days, sort of like woven in and out of it.
And a lot of my work as well has been channeling that into digital form or into writing, but always through a screen and through a keyboard.
And I have so missed the physical act of creation using physical materials, like actually working with my hands and something that is raw and something that you can play with that doesn't involve a plug.
And it's different and it sounds like it affects you differently too.
But for me, I've realized down to my bones, I'm a maker.
I've been channeling so much of that through digital media over the last really decade and a half.
And I think there was something in me that was sort of like speaking to me and saying something's not there.
Like there's an impulse that you're not feeling.
There's a satisfaction you're not feeling, but I was never entirely sure what it was.
And as you'd reference, you know, like I just recently took a month on creative sabbatical and I spent the first two weeks of that part of my day.
I was literally, I took a giant old piece of wood and turned it into a table.
And every time I go back to a physical process of making, I'm reminded of the fact that this matters to me.
And for some reason, the physical act, it affects me very differently than a digital process of creation.
And it sounds like you have a similar experience.
Very much so. I mean, it's funny when I was listening to you talk about going on that creative sabbatical and you talked about how I think you said your sparketype is maker.
And then you said shadow one is scientist.
And I remember that I'd actually done your quiz ages ago and I went looking for my email.
I couldn't find it.
So I went and did it again.
And I was like, is this going to come out as maker?
And mine is the sage and the shadow is maker, which actually is pretty spot on.
It's almost a part of me that almost wanted it to be the other way around.
But it actually really defines that thing that I guess that I wrestle with where I never run out of ideas.
I can pick up something and it will set off an idea in me about something that I want to share as a concept or something that I want to go and create.
I have oodles of sketchbooks, notebooks.
If they did a digital version of hoarders, they'd be the equivalent of somebody with two houses full of stuff.
And like you, you can get sucked into all the things that life has.
And at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, you get into that physical act of making, of creating the physicality of it away from a screen.
That's when I feel most me and also my happiest lit up self.
Yeah, that resonates deeply.
And clearly the sage part of you has been there from the earliest days also.
I mean, you were turning around and teaching young kids and whether it's through the act of actually playing the role of a teacher or through your writing or through like, if you look at what you're doing and what you've built over the last decade and a half or so, it's like so much of it is forward
facing. It's almost like I love making and the minute I figure something out, I want to turn around and share what I figured out with anyone else who it might help.
So that impulse is like so front and center with you as well.
Yeah. I mean, you just described me to a T and I was laughing to myself and you said, oh, you know, that sage impulse had been there from the get -go because I can remember, I used to get into trouble a lot as a kid for being, I don't know if you have the same saying in America being called a nosy Parker.
So they'd say, you know, it's taking in everything as listening in on conversations.
I always knew what the adults were up to.
I was always very good at figuring out the relationship dynamics.
I always knew who was cheating on who.
I knew whose relationships were having problems.
I don't know how I knew this stuff as a kid, but I was also treated like I was older than I was.
And so I think that adults seem to talk to me about things that they really probably shouldn't have, but also in my peer group, I was always the person that people looked to for advice from my perspective.
And I remember being a kid and I was teaching my little brother and then I was teaching the dolls and then I was teaching the kids on the street.
And then it became, Oh, well, I'm at art school.
And that was an amazing experience that I had of going to this art school every Friday.
And she was wonderful and really sort of nurtured that aspect of me.
And when she said, Hey, do you want to help out in the summer with these?
They were like three to 12 year olds.
I think it was, you know, this is Ireland back in sort of, this would be the nineties.
So some of these kids had never been around a black person before as well.
So I'd be like teaching art and they were like, where are you from?
Why are you this color?
And it was, I absolutely love that experience.
And I completely forgot about teaching art probably for about 20 years of my life.
I forgot that I had spent my summers teaching children art, which now I look back as like, how could you forget something like that?
Yeah. I mean, to such a part of you.
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
It seems like there've been interesting moments of inflection for you where you've sort of like, there are these inciting incidents or wake up calls.
You've shared a couple of them around art and teaching, but for you, another one that you've described in your writing the year of 2005 was sort of a pivotal year for you.
Like this was a year that seems like it really, it was in no small part, it shook you to your core and it really made you reevaluate a lot of things in your life and really set you on a course to so much of the work that you're doing today.
Take me back to 2005.
In 2005, I think it was 27, yeah, 27, 28.
And I had terrible taste in men and relationships.
I was a overachiever, perfectionist, over performer at work.
I struggled with having boundaries with my family.
I was also grappling with an immune system disease called sarcoidosis.
2005, I'd been ill with it for at least a good sort of 18 months or so, but I'd only really been fully aware of it for maybe about a year of that time.
And life just felt like it was imploding around me.
It felt like everything was going wrong because I'd done a year -long course of steroids and they hadn't worked as steroids invariably tend not to.
So one month out from finishing the course of steroids, all the symptoms that had been suppressed by it came flooding back.
And sarcoidosis, it creates all these hard lumps around your body.
It affects your breathing.
It affects your organs.
It's like your immune system is attacking your body.
At one point, I was actually losing my sight in one of my eyes.
That's how I found out in the first place that I had this illness.
And I went to the doctor for my usual consultant appointments at the hospital and they said, well, because the symptoms are back, you have no choice but to go on steroids for life.
And if you don't, then you'll die of pulmonary heart failure by the time you're 40.
I was sitting there in this appointment and it felt like, I know it sounds cliche, but it really was one of those feeling everything shift a little, hearing, suddenly seeing your life sort of flashing before you and going, what the hell have I been doing with my life?
Because it suddenly occurred to me, wow, I might barely have another decade left here and I won't be able to dance.
I won't be able to have fun.
I won't be able to pursue my dreams.
And then I thought, well, actually, even before you knew this, you weren't doing some of these things.
You've been living your life really for everybody else because I was a quintessential people pleaser.
That's how I was raised.
And so even though he was telling me, I had no choice, I turned around and I said no.
And he was pretty shocked when I said no.
But I told me I didn't have any, but I said, I still will explore the options.
And I walked out of there.
And for the first time in my life, I realized that it was me who is in charge of my life.
I'd done what everybody else wanted.
Like what I said to you, I'd go off and do the degree my parents told me that I have to do and pursue the jobs and the careers and all the things.
And so over the course of the next several months, I started to put some boundaries in my life.
I'd heard the word boundaries before that, but I realized there was no point in me trying to eat healthily, cut out certain foods, follow the protocols that alternative specialists were suggesting to me.
If I still went and lived my life the way that I had been up until that point, saying yes, it says yes to all the wrong things, not expressing my discomfort with things.
I was no. And so gradually, bit by bit, day by day, I started being more honest about who I am as a person because that was a fundamental problem with me.
I swallowed all my feelings.
I hidden all of my trauma.
I just became whatever anybody wanted me to be.
And I couldn't do it anymore.
My life was saying to me, you cannot pretend that you don't have feelings.
You can't pretend to be something that you're not.
The only choice that you have is to be you.
And from that moment forward, it felt like everything began to shift.
I mean, life changed so radically for me over less than a year from when I walked out of that consultant's office.
It was unbelievable.
It's amazing also that it started out by you effectively looking to somebody who presents as an authority figure, somebody who knows all the answers, somebody who returned to tell us what to do because we don't have the education.
We don't have the licensing.
We don't have the knowledge base.
This person told you, this is what you need to do.
And you looked at that person and said, no, something inside of you said, no, maybe this person is right.
And if I live the way I want to live, I only have a small amount of time.
But something inside of you still said, just no, I'm done.
And you use the phrase people pleasing, which we'll dive into a whole bunch more.
But you also brought up something which I think is so important that I don't want to gloss over, which is this notion when you start to see alternative or complementary medicine practitioners and start to look at other ways to deal with this.
So often it's focused on nutrition and supplementation and lifestyle and movement and all these things.
And we say yes to those, but what you just centered, which I think is so important and we so often ignore is if there are other relational environmental things that are causing us persistent stress and anxiety, and we don't deal with those, those are major if not even bigger contributors to everything
that ails us physically and psychologically.
Yet those are the things that we say, let me focus on the other things because I can get a very clear menu of what to put into my body or not or how to move my body or not.
Yet rarely, if you don't deal with the other stuff, the relational side, it rarely gives you the outcome that you want.
I mean, honestly, I mean, you could see me nodding my head like crazy there.
I almost want to say testify when you said that because first of all, the whole authority thing, I grew up in as so many of us did in this culture where it was like, authorities are everything.
And when somebody is deemed an authority like in the medical profession, if they tell you, this is how you've got to do it, then that's the way it has to go.
And it occurred to me.
It's like, well, hold on a second.
You're telling me that I don't have any options.
I'm saying I want to explore other options.
If I want to give myself a chance here, I have to listen to myself.
And the other thing that about the relational part around it, yes, totally, because I walked out of there going, okay, I'm going to explore the options.
And a friend of mine from back home in Ireland had mentioned that her cousin, one of her 50 cousins, had gone to a kinesiologist, which is like they do muscle testing.
It's almost like acupuncture without needles, but it's like rebalancing your energies.
And she suggested, she mentioned that and I said, Oh, I'm going to check her out.
But I went there with that mentality that so many of us have.
She'll recommend nutritional, you know, she'd tell me what allergies I have, intolerances, she'll recommend this and that.
And I'll just stroll on out of there.
That is not what I mean, did do that.
But she went into the emotional stuff.
And by gosh, I had a lot of it in the moment that she started talking about that I wanted to run for the hills.
And at the same time, I was like, Yeah, but you also want to be alive.
So you're going to have to sit this one through.
And what I learned again and again, through any practitioner that I have gone to see, when I go to see the medical doctor research, is that you have to have to have a holistic approach to yourself, you can't turn up to somewhere and be like, Oh, just give me the fix.
So I can fix this one thing.
And then I'd be done.
You bring in your whole self into this.
So you have to be willing to look at, well, what aspects of my life are potentially contributing to why I might be going through this particular thing right now.
For me, it makes total sense that I had one of these mystery immune system disorders, because I had shut down emotionally a long time ago.
And if you shut down emotionally, that is going to play out with physical symptoms.
And if I wanted to be better, I had to confront the emotional stuff.
And that is the name of life that a lot of the time, most the time we have to confront the emotional stuff that we so often go out of our way to avoid.
If we want to have a true connection to ourselves and be able to move forward in a way that feels very true for us as well.
And a lot of that often means really asking what do we need as human beings, as an individual rather than what does everybody else expect from us?
Yeah. And as a society, we have not been taught about needs and feelings and values and boundaries and self -care, unless my kids know about that stuff, because they're growing up in an age when they hear about these subjects.
Anybody else who's an adult right now did not hear that stuff consistently growing up.
And we learn to be disassociated from our feelings.
And our feelings give us a sense of what it is that we need.
And we have a lot of shame around our needs because we think, oh my gosh, me having this need makes me selfish or needy or too sensitive or difficult or rude or whatever it is.
But we all have needs.
We, from our first breath to our last breath, everything that we do in life is about our needs.
And if we're not meeting our needs, then we cannot experience that sense of fulfillment in a piece.
And we also just can't deal with any difficult stuff that we've been through.
It is a subjugation of who we are and what we need to be okay in the world.
But we don't look at it that way because some, and this is something you speak about and you write about.
You use this phrase, we were all raised in the age of obedience, where it's sort of like, okay, so there are rules, there are norms, there are expectations.
This is the way that a healthy society, a healthy workplace, a healthy school room works.
And you have to conform to these things because that's just what a good person in society does.
And yes, it probably does help create order and obedience.
But at the end of the day, if you are not a person, where any of those norms or rules or expectations or behaviors work for you, it's massively destructive to your wellbeing.
And it leads us to this condition, which it's funny, when I use this phrase, people pleasing a lot, and it's sort of centered in your most recent work.
And the way you describe it to me almost sounds like you're describing a disease.
Well, I remember many years ago, I can't remember who it was.
I said it might have been Oprah that said it had the disease to please, but it is so rampant in society.
We are socialized and conditioned into it that we don't even realize that a lot of what we are grappling with, what we are struggling with is about people pleasing.
We don't even know that our anxiety is stemming from the people pleasing.
It's so ingrained into us and it's like society is in this big wrestle with itself.
And actually, I think that something that's come out of the last, how many years have we been in this pandemic for?
I'm losing track now at this point, we're probably close to three years, but something that's come out of that is I think that it has really, really pushed buttons around our people pleasing and made a lot of us really reconsider who we are, what we need, what we want, and whether we want to blindly
follow everything that we are told to do.
Yeah, I think it's really led a lot of people to question, yeah, what voice they want to follow and where the balance is between accepting what's given to us or demanded of us and what we feel like we need on the inside.
And I think a lot of people are grappling with how do we redraw our own lines, our own boundaries in a way where I feel like I can be healthy, I can be true to me.
And at the same time, most of us still do want to be accepting contributors to society.
We want to be considered good people, but there's a really delicate dance.
And I agree, I think the last two or three years have really have pushed people to just re -examine all of the assumptions that they've been making for a long time.
Your brain clearly works in ways where you categorize things.
And you described these five different types of people pleasing that I found fascinating.
Can you walk me through those?
Yeah, so they are gooding, efforting, saving, avoiding, and suffering.
And each in the way by its name implies what the people pleasing is about.
So people who identify with the gooding style of people pleasing, their primary driver is people thinking that they are good, thinking well of them, or being perceived by others to be likables.
They hate the idea of not being liked.
And they have often quite strong ideas about what it is to be a good person.
Efforting, which is my style of people pleasing, people pleasers, their way of pleasing is through their efforts.
They are always about giving 100%, trying to be the best.
They're often perfectionists and they are the most likely really to burn out because it's not enough for them just to look good, to give the impression of being good.
They throw everything into efforts.
And for them, their idea is if you are putting a lot of effort into something, then you should get what you want.
People who have the saving style of people pleasing, as the name would imply, they're about helping, giving, and support, but without boundaries.
And so the way that they try to please others is by being of service to others.
And you know, we live in a world where that is very commended and understandably so.
But when we do those things without boundaries, so we don't take care of ourselves in the process, but we also cross other people's boundaries as well because we are helping and supporting them to get rewarded in some way for it.
We run into a lot of problems.
And people who have the saving style of people pleasing, of course, are also likely to experience burnout as well because they experience it from being there for others.
And I think often as well people who people please via the giving and helping and supporting have had messages growing up that a good person always helps.
A good person always volunteers first.
Avoiding. There are some of us who we have learned that the way to be pleasing is to never make others feel uncomfortable.
And that was almost like our job at home.
And so we never put a foot out of term.
We never raise the awkward, difficult subject.
If there's anything that we think is going to create any discomfort in somebody else, we'll avoid that to be pleasing for others even though it will put us in immense pain.
And so there are some people who make it practically a vocation to avoid conflict, criticism, anything that they think, oh, that's going to be a problem.
And then there is suffering.
And there are some people who they might have been doing that from the get -go, but it's often they've kind of fallen on their sword in one of the other styles of people pleasing.
But it's this idea that to suffer is to be a good person.
Or the more that you suffer, the better that you are.
But also, surely if I'm suffering so much as a result of the things that I am doing for you, then you will want to meet my needs eventually because can't you see how much I'm in need by how much I'm suffering?
And I felt that it was important to break down people pleasing in this way because there's a lot of misunderstanding around people pleasing.
There's a portion of us who believe that being a people pleaser is like a badge of honor.
I'm such a people pleaser.
Oh, I'm just a people pleaser.
And we see it almost like it's a really virtuous quality.
And then there are some of us who are like, oh, people pleaser means doormat, which to be clear, it does not.
And what I also find is a lot of people have a suspicion that they have an issue with people pleasing because they recognize that they struggle with boundaries, that they feel uncomfortable about saying no, that they are afraid of not being liked or afraid of conflict or criticism, but they can't quite
put their finger on what people pleasing is in their lives.
And so understanding people pleasing through these lens of these five categories, I understand what is it?
What's your primary driver?
I know that I have some avoiding tendencies in me, but efforting, that is me front and center.
My whole life has been based around effort because that's what I internalized growing up.
Effort is what matters.
You must be seen to be making an effort.
And if we can understand what our primary driver is, where we tend to fall on our sword, where we tend to exhaust ourselves, where we try to prove ourselves, then we can understand where our people pleasing is showing up.
Yeah. I thought it was so interesting to walk through those five categories.
Even as you're sharing them here, I'm going to hear myself like, okay, is this me?
Is this me? Is this me?
Because my sense is that, and tell me if I have this right or not.
My sense is that we probably all have some of this in us.
We probably got a little bit of this and a little bit of that because I think if we're concerned, empathetic, compassionate human beings on any level, we're not going to walk through life completely ignorant of other people's needs around us.
And we want to be seen in a certain way and want to help.
But we also probably have one or two that tend to be more present.
I'm curious also with some of these, when you shared the description around gooding, what immediately popped into my mind was, I wonder if there is a relationship, is the prevalence of social media really feeding?
If this is your orientation and you get on social media, I can't even imagine what that ends up doing to you.
Yeah, absolutely. Because what you tend to find with people who they have a strong inclination towards gooding is they focus very much on how they want to come across and their intentions, not necessarily on impact.
So they will want to see themselves in a particular way, but it will also be very important for them to feel that others are receiving that about them.
And of course, social media can really push on these buttons because it's fine when everybody seems to be getting the message that we're trying to put across, but the moments that maybe we receive criticism, or we don't get the thing that we were hoping to get out of it, it can certainly be like, oh
my gosh, social media, what is it doing to me?
But also I think that there can be this, and I'm sure you've encountered this, there are people who end up crafting a persona on social media that doesn't really match who they are in the main and in real life, but they feel it's important to say that they are certain things because they think that that's
what makes a quote unquote good person.
And of course, that can put you at odds with yourself.
There were some people who would argue, oh, but it's totally normal to lie about yourself on social media or to hype yourself or to exaggerate yourself.
It might be normal in the sense that we have normalized that type of behavior online, but actually, as humans, we do struggle with pretending to be something that we're not, we can't play one thing and play another and expect to be happy with that.
Yeah, I mean, it's like you're carrying the weight of another identity all the time.
And maybe you feel like it's got certain benefits.
Maybe it's getting you some indicia of acceptance by people who you likely don't know and will never know for the entire rest of your life in any sort of actual personal or intimate way.
And you feel like, well, that's making me okay.
That's giving the acceptance that I want.
But if it's not you, I agree.
It's also piling on.
You've got to carry the load of another identity as you walk through every moment of every day, whether it's a digital identity or like you're living as two people in person in one life.
There's a burden. It takes a toll on you.
And I wonder about that on a regular basis in the context of social media.
And I think there are a lot of really powerful and valid uses of social media.
And at the same time, I'm always an interesting opportunity for me to think about it in the context of people pleasing styles and how it would interact with how people present themselves and relate to others in a social context.
One of them was avoiding also one of the five.
And as interesting as you're describing that, I had this momentary flashback to a conversation that I was fortunate to have with a number of years back with Eve Branson, Richard Branson's mom who's no longer with us.
And she was describing when Richard was a small child and how there was sort of like a social expectation that if you enter a room with other people, it's your job to make them feel good.
And I think a lot of people are just brought up with that familial or cultural or community expectation.
That's your role. That's what we do.
We learn to be polite.
We learn manners. We learn to overgive in the name of making other people feel comfortable.
And at some point, what about us?
Yeah, because at some point, it gets away from you.
No one, least of all me, least of all yous, is knocking anyone for wanting to please, to want to support, to love, to give, to care.
But there are people who do things for others, who work hard, who put efforts into various things, and they don't do them for the same reasons as an active people pleaser.
And what I, for instance, have had to confront in myself is what you were saying about how you're going into a room and it's like, make people feel good.
And we've all picked up those kind of messages about what we're supposed to do when we walk into a room or when we're in a certain context.
And something that I've had to confront in myself is recognizing that really up until the last few years of my life, I have had it ingrained in me that I don't have any limits.
So you go in and you show what you can do and you do more until it is considered to be top -notch the best.
So you were considered to have performed.
And if you grow up with this message that you have to be seen as putting in an effort that's actually in some respects, that you are going to have to work that much harder and prove yourself to get the same, for instance, as your peers, you don't have an off switch.
You don't have limits, but also your currency, the way that you value yourself in the world becomes, well, my efforts.
If I'm not doing things all the time, if I'm not pleasing others, then I'm not purposeful or I'm not valued or I'm not needed.
And so this is the thing that most of us, I would say, have some level of people pleasing and it's quite simply because it's the society that we were raised in.
As I said, that age of obedience.
But what we have to look at is the why behind what we do.
And I know this is something that's important in your own life, something that, again, you were talking about when you were talking about going on that creative sabbatical, is really looking at the why.
But actually, that is front and center of everything in our life.
Because when you start being honest about why you're doing certain things, okay, go back to the social media thing.
When you go on social media and you say certain things, you do certain things, you think it's important to convey something, why?
Because that why is either going to be an authentic why, or it's going to be an inauthentic people pleasing why.
There'll be some level of trying to control how others perceive you, or you're trying to leverage it to get some sort of reward, something, but there's a hidden agenda in there.
And that's always a problematic why.
And I think that when we can be more honest about our why as well, we can differentiate between the past and the present.
Because when I examined a lot of the things that I had done in my working life, and bear in mind, I've done a lot of things that I'm proud of, and that have given me the chance to explore my creativity.
But I also had to recognize that sometimes I have done things because I feel like I have to prove myself in some way, or I have to be seen to be credible, or I have to be seen to put in the most amount of effort.
And that why taints what could be a very, very genuine why.
You can start off, and I always say, and I think I even say this in the book, I can take something and put my people pleasing and perfectionist myths all over it and suck the joy out of it.
So I have to be very mindful and very aware of my why, because it's easy for that conditioning to suddenly show up and put you under a lot of pressure.
I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me.
As you're describing that also, I'm getting curious about does the why sometimes change based on culture of origin?
Whether it's does it change based on gender?
Does it change based on race?
Does it change based on country of origin or local community expectations?
Because things like safety changes depending on all these different things, and you might end up conforming to a norm for very different reasons, depending on your own history, your community's history, like your culture's history.
So people pleasing, I think it serves a lot of different imperatives.
Yeah, I mean, we use people pleasing as a, we started out using it as a survival and coping strategy.
And it's also our way of massive survival and coping strategy is our way of fitting in.
So we fit in amongst our family or the environment in which we grew up in, it helped us fit in at school, it helped us fit in with our peers or around authorities or church or community.
In the process of that, we get to adulthood and we don't stop doing that.
We actually continue on with it.
These strategies that we learn in childhood are maladaptive, that kind of coping and survival strategy, because now what happens is we go into work.
And instead of it being like, oh, I'm my 45 year old self at work, I'm now treating, for instance, my boss, like they're my mom or my dad, because they're my boss, it's triggered this compliance in me.
So now I'm sort of playing the role of, oh, I've got to be the good girl and please my boss.
When you mentioned about the safety, I mean, when I think about my relationship history prior to the one I'm in with my now husband, who I met after 2005, in my dating history, I most of the time didn't really feel any great way about the people that I was involved with.
But let's say they persisted, then I would feel obliged to reciprocate that interest because I didn't want to offend them.
Or if it was a date situation, I didn't want to put myself in danger.
So that people pleasing thing can kick in there where it's like, well, I don't really want to be here.
I don't really and as somebody who grew up in a level of feeling, sort of a level of chaos and feeling unsafe, that was something I was actively trying to avoid.
But then I think about, I think I mentioned, it's African, Caribbean, Irish, and actually, on my father's side of the family, there's also Chinese as well.
So we've got African, Caribbean, Irish, Chinese, and of course, English culture in there as well.
And there's a few things kicking in there because there's this whole thing of, it's important to never let people outside know what's really going on inside.
And when my family moved to England, which was during what we call the Windrush area here in England, Blacks and Irish were very unwelcome here in England.
So people pleasing was part of the survival of, you do all the things that we tell you to do within the family and people will steer clear because they will see you as being good and pleasing, and that will be safe for the whole family.
So it's like, you will club together, you remain tight knit, you clothes rank, you make sure your hair is never out of place, you're wearing perfectly clean and ironed clothes, you have a good job.
These are pleasing things for the culture, but it also makes us safe.
And something I talk about in the book is actually about how people pleasing can be a form of good citizenship.
So if, for instance, you come from what we call an immigrant upbringing, your parents might be like, right, you have to have a really good standard of education and you have to make sure that you are always within the law and that you get a really good job, because this shows that we are a good immigrant
and we have made good on our opportunity and we are pleasing and we're not like the negative version of whatever is conveyed of us.
So we don't want to be seen as lazy, we don't want to be seen as this.
It's easy to see how this can creep into, this is my identity and this is what I have to do because even if you're not thinking about pleasing the culture, you don't want to displease your family.
And next thing you know, you're in a career that you don't want to be in because you think, well, this is what will please my family.
You're doing your 10th masters or whatever it is because it's like, oh, I have to do this because this is what somebody like me has to do or should do to be pleasing for the family.
It's complicated, you know, is what it comes down to.
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
It's interesting, you offer a set of questions that I thought were really useful around when you're trying to unpack like, what's really going on here with me?
Like, am I offering myself in a way because it's actually like a healthy expression of an impulse that I have that's nourishing to me or is this something that is unhealthy that is built around emotional baggage, which is a phrase that you, like baggage is something that you talk about a lot and really
trying to tease out the distinction.
You offer a set of, I think it was three questions that I thought were really useful.
Can you walk me through those three questions?
Because I think if for anyone who's listening to this saying like, I'm trying to figure out like, is this just like because it's genuine to me and and I love doing it and I feel really good doing it and it's not depleting or is there something else going on?
And these three questions I felt, I feel like they help you figure that out.
My big question that I get people to ask themselves in situations where, you know, what's going on here?
Why is this happening?
Or you're mad at somebody else?
Ask what's the baggage behind this?
So even though the person might be annoying, they may well be in the wrong, what's the baggage behind the way that you are responding in that moment?
So in terms of what you're thinking and feeling and doing, where else have I felt, fought and acted similarly?
You know, who does this situation remind me of?
Even if it seems like, oh, that seems really irrelevant that that person's name popped up.
Who else have you felt, fought and acted this way around?
Because I know we'd like to think that we are just having a totally new reaction in every situation that the only reason why we are responding in the way that we are is because it's totally about the present.
But each of us is bringing our emotional baggage into every situation.
And we are humans, so we react based on habits.
So when we have all this chatter in our head about something, or we feel angry about that person, it doesn't invalidate that.
But if we want to understand why we're responding in that way, or why we even want a particular thing, asking what's the baggage behind this can help us to understand what we're bringing into that situation.
It can also help us to choose more mindfully.
Because when we keep pretending that we're just having a special reaction, totally brand new for this particular incident, we are not recognizing how because we're bringing things in from the past that we may be overstepping our own boundaries in that instance.
Or we may be ignoring a need or an important want in that instance.
If we can keep it honest and keep it mindful, then we can make very bad choices there and going forward.
Yeah, no, I think that's really helpful.
And the notion that once you're far enough into life, I would say there are very few new reactions or new circumstances that don't in some way mimic or trigger something that has happened in the past that brings up some train pattern or behavior.
It's the way we are as human beings.
We have to pattern recognize, we have to file certain types of experiences into containers that say, this is a circumstance, this is a pattern, this is the way that this is how we behave.
And I think it's so powerful that you're prompted because they help you recognize or distinguish at least for me between what's really happening in front of you right now and what happened in the past so that you can actually say like, what's really happening here?
What is the healthy and constructive way for me to think about this in this moment, regardless of how I behaved in the past?
One of the other things that you explore in this or like in the realm of, well, what can I do about this?
Is this distinction between making something, you use the word desire, a desire or just flat out saying, no, talk to me about this.
And in particular, like what you mean when you use the word desire.
So I think when we think about why we're doing a lot of the things that we do, even if there's some desire in there, we're often doing things because it's expected of us, not necessarily because we want to.
We're doing some of them because it's what we feel we are under obligation to do.
And that's not the same as wanting to do it.
Now, when I talk about a desire, it really is about operating from this place of genuinely feeling connected to wanting to do it.
You are present, you are mindful, you're honoring yourself and your needs in that process, and you're really operating from a place of intimacy, intimacy with yourself and wanting to have that intimacy and connectedness with others.
The thing about when we do things from this place of it's expected of me, I have to, I have no choice, I am obliged to do it, is it cuts us off from ourselves.
And it also cuts us off really from the truth of that relationship or that situation.
That's not to say that we don't have certain obligations in life, but I would also argue that we have a lot less obligations than we tell ourselves that we do.
And so when I say to people, what do you want to do versus what do you feel obliged to do, that teases out the difference between the want and the obligation.
The common example that I use with this is around family.
And it could be about how often you want to speak to a parent or you want to visit a parent.
And I'll say to people, okay, how often do you feel obliged to call or to visit?
And that person will real laugh, oh, my parents expect me to call them every day, or they want to see me X times a week or a month or whatever.
And I say, okay, and what do you want to do?
When you really check them with yourself, what do you instinctively want to do?
Nine out of 10 times, there's a difference between the two.
And sometimes the difference is so wide, you're surprised that they have any relationship at all with their family.
Because the breeding ground for resentment and tension and friction is that gap between want and obligation.
If you're doing things because you feel like you have to, like you don't have a choice about it, you end up feeling, remember when you're like a teenager and your parents would get you to do something and you really didn't want to do it.
So then you start dragging your feet and you're passive aggressive and you're looking, that's what a lot of us are like in life, at work, with family.
So I have to do it, huffing and puffing.
If you, let's say you say, oh, I have to call my parents like five times a week and you only actually want to speak to them once a week, doing five times more than you want to.
So of course you're going to start to feel resentful and frustrated.
Now, it doesn't make you a bad person that you don't want to speak to your parents every day.
It's being honest with yourself about where you are at in terms of your needs and how you want to, for instance, interact with your family.
To be honest with you, I don't want to speak to anybody every day.
I mean, obviously aside from my husband and kids, but I don't want to feel an obligation to call anybody every day.
You want to feel like I can call if I want to, but I can also not call if I want to.
And I think if we can all start being more honest about what we want to do, we can look at where we're forcing ourselves into things far beyond the level that we are comfortable with.
And it's not that we go, oh, well, I feel obliged to call like five times and I only really want to do it once.
So I'm just going to immediately drop to one, but it's like, how can I get to more of a middle and authentic ground there?
What's my sweet spot here with this?
And something I stress actually in the book is we are not necessarily always going to be crazy about doing everything in life.
I just don't think that that's realistic.
There are certain things.
It's not the thing that's at the top of our list, but it facilitates our life.
It allows us to enjoy time with our family or to get on with other things in our work.
And so we will want to do that.
So even though we feel like, oh, that's something that's important and I have to do it, we want to do it because it facilitates it.
And something else I stress is that we also know the difference between wanting and not wanting to do something.
So think about those times in your life when you haven't wanted to do something like where are you feeling that in your body?
Like what's happening in your head?
How are you behaving?
That's information from yourself that you don't want to do something.
And then think about when you actually want to do something.
Now, a chronic people pleaser might actually not know what that feels like because they oblige themselves to do everything, even when they actually would do it because they want to.
But if we can start to be more honest about how we feel, we can choose to do things for a place of desire, which allows us to do things for a place of connectedness and intimacy.
But it also allows us to operate with self -care because when we want to do something, we have a sense of who we are and what our boundaries are in that process.
Yeah, I love that. And it allows us also the emotional and energetic bandwidth to then when we do say yes to something, invest in an entirely different level.
It's like if you actually, that example that you just gave, if you kind of negotiate with a parent who wants to hear from you every day, well, what about twice a week?
That gives you back time into your life if you choose to invest intelligently to probably do more things that are nourishing for you for no other reason than the fact that it's actually deeply nourishing to you.
So then when you do return to that conversation, which is now less frequent with your parent, but you return to it more nourished, more whole, so the quality of that conversation, even though it's less frequent, will likely be a lot better.
So like on the parent side, you're probably going to talk to your kid less frequently, but when you do talk to them, it's not going to feel like you're bothering them.
Every conversation is a heavy lift.
And isn't that what, we're both parents here, isn't that what we want when we talk to our kids and we can expand this out.
Any relationship, any sort of like expectation like that, whether it's a parent child or extended family or chosen family.
So as we have this conversation, you've written a book, you have shared with me off air before this that as soon as you turned in the manuscript, you felt exhausted, but also an internal pressure to figure out what's next.
I have felt that. And I'm so curious what this is, whether you've thought about what this is about for you, because I have felt that same thing so many times.
And I've often wondered, is this a healthy natural impulse to make to just the creative impulses alive and well in me?
And I'm off to my next thing, or is something bigger going on there.
What I realized sort of a few weeks into this, Oh, what's next?
What's next? What's next was that I think there's a level of programming kicking in for me there in that where it was like, Oh, you finished this book.
So now you need to have another thing to be getting your teeth into.
You need to be able to say, this is my golden plan for the next six months or a year or whatever it is.
And the reality was that I was exhausted.
And that even if I had come up with something to do at that point, I didn't have it in me.
And so I found myself in this uncomfortable place of sitting with this anxiety about not doing something, because I realized it was an anxiety.
It wasn't coming from this creative impulse, this creative itch like, Oh yeah, I'm energized.
And I feel let up and I want to go and do something.
I was drained and taking my own advice, feeling drained and exhausted was that sign that actually I needed to slow down quite a bit.
And so what's been interesting is sitting with myself over the year and keeping on coming back to what's next, what's next.
And what was hilarious in all of this is at the start of the year when I was exhausted, my book was due to come out in October.
And then as is the way that things can be in publishing, the date changed.
And so it moved to January and I was like, Oh my gosh, because now I was in for a longer haul.
And also it meant that even if I had had a what's next, that things were sort of shifting around with that.
And then what I settled on was, what if you don't have to have a big grant plan?
What if you let yourself be curious and you explore and allow yourself to stumble into it?
Because the truth is I'm not really a big plan kind of person.
That doesn't mean I'm running around flying by the seat of my pants.
And you know this, the book process, don't get me wrong.
I love the book and I loved writing it.
It feels like I poured everything into that.
However, by the time the book comes out, it will be almost two years since I got the deal on that book.
That is a long, long time to be emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually tied up in something.
So I was like, what about you just give yourself grace to see what comes out of the year?
And the funny thing is that over the months, I still didn't kind of stumble into a big what's next.
I think the biggest thing that came out of it is you really, really need to embrace being in a really a daily art practice.
That was really the big thing that came out of it for me.
And that can be a big thing.
You sort of frame it differently.
Saying yes to a daily practice that's nourishing is powerful.
It's sort of like we're just breaking into smaller daily chunks that we're saying yes to.
It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well.
So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
Is to be the truest, most authentic version of yourself at any given moment.
That's where any joy, peace, contentment, fulfillment is going to come from is the expression of yourself as being true.
Thank you. Thank you.
Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode safe, but you will also love the conversation we had with Susan Piver about the Enneagram and how it really helps us relate to others and also set boundaries.
You'll find a link to Susan's episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on this episode.
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