How creativity helped me stop people pleasing
People pleasing can cause a lot of harm. Ready to try something different?
This is a bonus post related to the recent series on debunking success.
The second post in the series looked at the myth that you shouldn’t care what others think.
In today’s post, we’re looking at one of the four quadrants represented in a graphic I made for that second post.
If you missed the original post, you can read it here for more context.
When is it appropriate to care what others think?
Here’s a quick summary.
The key difference between a helpful and unhelpful approach to other people’s opinions about you is whether you’re worried about what others think or whether you’re appropriately interested in what they think.
The following graphic (pulled from a previous post) shows four potential outcomes of various relationships with what others think.
Today, we’re looking at the bottom right quadrant: people pleasing.
People pleasing: it’s not your fault
When I say people pleasing I’m referring to the urge to make people comfortable or appease them while disregarding the costs of doing so.
You might go above and beyond to be sure a coworker likes you, taking on tasks that cut into your personal life and well-being in the process.
Or you might take a job because your parents think you should and you want to make them happy… even though the job makes you very unhappy.
If you’re a people-pleaser, at some point in your life this pattern kept you safe either physically or emotionally.
Growing up, managing other people’s emotions can be a survival skill.
If people around you were pleased with you, they were less likely to lash out or act unpredictably.
So you learned to manage people’s opinion of you to avoid their dangerous, scary, or out-of-control responses.
Our bodies and psyches remember times when we didn’t feel safe to be a burden, to have an opinion, or to do something controversial.
If that was the case for you, it makes sense that you’ve continued those patterns.
For example, you might go along with what someone else wants for dinner even though you don’t really want to eat that type of food.
In this scenario you’re protecting yourself from their reaction to not getting what they want.
In a hostile environment, people pleasing makes a lot of sense.
You’re not broken or weak if you’re a people pleaser. Your brain came up with a brilliant strategy to manage unsafe or uncertain situations.
And yet, people pleasing can have incredibly harmful impacts.
The dark side of pleasing people
As a kid, I once let a dentist give me a filling with no Novocaine because he had waited too long, it had worn off, and I felt bad making him do it again.
My personal examples of people pleasing unfortunately get worse from there.
People pleasing left me unable to access a “no” in countless situations throughout my life, exacerbating my accumulation of trauma and contributing to the complex PTSD I’m still sorting through today.
I’ve also seen how ineffective people pleasing can be.
In some cases I’ve made more trouble for others by trying to tiptoe around my needs.
For example, imagine you have a house guest who arrives after dinner and doesn’t tell you they’re hungry because they don’t want to bother you.
They end up hangry and are less fun to be around than usual. At 10pm they hit a wall and finally admit they didn’t have dinner.
If they’d told you earlier, you could have ordered takeout, but now everything in the neighborhood is closed and you have to whip up a meal for them with whatever you’ve got in the pantry.
As a host, would it really please you that your guest tried not to be a burden, or would you prefer for them to be upfront about their needs so you could plan appropriately?
In addition not getting your needs met, sometimes people pleasing can lead to being more burdensome than if you had just spoken up for your needs in the first place.
I’ve been inconvenienced by people pleasers not speaking up for themselves directly and I’ve inconvenienced others in the same way.
At times I’ve also taken on all the discomfort myself, erasing other people’s discomfort at my own expense.
In the previous example, that would look like not telling the host I was hungry at all, even when I hit my 10pm wall, and just suffering in silence.
At its height, my people pleasing and social anxiety fed each other.
The more I tried to please others, the more anxious I was about whether or not it was working. The more anxious I was about whether people were happy with me, the more I tried to please them.
This led to a spiral of unhealthy detachment.
During my most intense people pleasing phase, I was completely disconnected from what I wanted and needed, with all kinds of negative outcomes.
I didn’t even think I had an opinion a lot of the time. I had learned to bury my own desires and needs so fully that I often couldn’t even figure out what I wanted for dinner.
A creative practice can help
Getting into graphic design and eventually directing animated videos was an incredibly healing process, helping me reconnect with my own desires and opinions.
Creativity involves making decisions based on what you think, like, and want… which means learning to get in touch with those preferences.
Over time, my people pleasing induced self-silencing loosened and I began connecting to my inner authority.
I developed answers to questions like… What looks good? What will communicate this message most effectively? What do I like?
It turns out I have a lot of opinions, and they’re valuable when it comes to design.
I learned to trust my instinct as it picked up on subtleties like noticing a few pixels of misalignment.
And today, I’m learning to trust the creative process of writing and pouring myself into Woven Deep.
I feel that I’m starting to contribute from the core of who I am.
People pleasing involves shutting off who you are and shapeshifting into a person others want you to be.
A deep creative practice can unleash the part of you that doesn’t care about being palatable.
This part of you knows exactly how to tap into the deepest essence of life and create from that boundless place.
It’s possible to create with reckless abandon… Ask your inner critic to step aside and create selfishly, without a single thought towards what people will think.
You don’t have to show anyone what you make.
When you dissolve self criticism and enter a moment of uninhibited creative flow, freedom from people-pleasing is effortless.
Maybe for you the medium is ecstatic dance, abstract painting, free-flowing drawing, or pottery.
Maybe you make fairy circles in the backyard or make your own clothes.
Maybe you don’t think of yourself as creative and can’t imagine doing any of these things.
I didn’t think I was particularly creative until after college, when I stumbled into design and eventually became a professional designer.
Today I’m of the opinion that everyone is inherently creative.
We block our creativity for various reasons and forget how to connect to that place of boundless and joyful creation.
Your creations don’t have to be considered good by others for a creative practice to be fruitful. That’s the whole point… learning to connect deeply with the core of who you are and letting go of what you think others will like.
I still get caught in people pleasing patterns sometimes, but they have less and less power over me.
I can appreciate my people pleasing tendencies for getting me safely where I am today.
And I can thank the current version of myself that has come to see how much more deeply I can contribute to the world when I’m not tangled in people pleasing habits.
Shifting away from people pleasing means you can contribute to the world more fully.
Managing other people’s emotional states is exhausting.
How amazing would it be to reclaim that energy, connect with yourself on a deeper level, and bring that fullness out to the world?
To offer your fullness to the world instead of slowly depleting yourself?
To be able to navigate the world actually knowing what you want?
To find a healthy balance between compassion for others and compassion for yourself?
I’m working on these things a little each day.
If this article hits close to home, I hope you feel inspired to pick up or deepen a creative practice and see where it leads you.
Interested in a playful workshop on building deeper self trust through creativity?
Let me know with this anonymous poll. Thanks for your feedback!