I was always someone who deeply cared about what people thought of me until I realized it was holding me back.
When I think back to when I was younger, I can remember having this strong urge to want to be liked by everyone I interacted with. As young as elementary school, I remember always trying to do anything I could to prevent people from not liking me or from being disappointed in me. As I continued to grow up, this led to me changing who I was just so that I would not upset people or be disliked by them. I was also a very frequent user of the phrase “I’m sorry” whether I even did something wrong or not because I felt it was my job to make that person feel okay.
As I continued to grow up, I continued to live my life as a people pleaser. I would go out of my way to do something for someone even if it meant hurting myself in the end. I failed to take care of myself and my health to live up to the expectations of others. If there was ever a time when I failed at something, it would eat me alive, not just because I disappointed myself but because I thought that others would be disappointed in me.
Being a people pleaser is exhausting. When the thoughts of what others are thinking about you consume your mind it is hard to find the time to think about yourself and your own needs. This is especially hard when you think you are lacking validation that you feel is needed from people in your life. There are multiple times when I have found myself stressed, upset, and worried because someone did not like me or approve of me whether I genuinely liked this person myself. I can think of multiple specific situations where I found myself caring about someone whom I did not necessarily like to be around and what they thought of me. Although on paper it does not make sense as to why I would care about a random person’s perception of me because they were not an important person in my life, unfortunately, it was hard to stop myself from caring.
I found that as I have gone through my years of college, I have slowly stopped thinking about always pleasing everyone even though those thoughts are still sometimes there. Moving away from home and meeting a whole new crowd of people made me realize how insignificant the approval from all those random people I knew growing up was. Why did I even care if that kid who I had a class with in high school gave me a dirty look in the hallway or if that one teacher did not think the paper I wrote was good? All these people I thought I had to spend my energy trying to please ended up being such a minuscule part of my life.
To work towards getting rid of my people-pleasing habits, I began to learn to say “No” to people. I used to be afraid to say “no” to someone and found myself putting aside my mental health just for the sake of others. While I still am a very caring person and like to help the people in my life as much as possible, I learned there comes a point where you need to sit down and think about yourself first.
I also learned how to stand up for myself more with the people in my life. There have been countless times when I have felt people have taken advantage of my people-pleasing tendencies that have prevented me from advocating for myself. I began to realize that it is okay to not agree with someone on something and if advocating for myself is a reason for someone to not want me in their life anymore, then I should not want them in my life either. I regret the times I stayed quiet more than I do the times I advocated for myself, even if it meant I was not pleasing everyone else. I learned that avoiding conflict in certain situations does not give me room to grow. What gives me room to grow is standing up for myself when needed and choosing to do what is best for me first.
A lot of my people’s pleasing issues stemmed from low self-esteem and believing that having everyone like me would help to boost this. What I learned is that this made my self-esteem worse. I based own self-worth on the reactions and comments from people around me. I have done a lot of things to help boost my self-esteem including different journaling prompts as well as eating and exercising in a way that makes me feel good. However, the biggest thing that I did was to start to care for myself how I had been caring for others. Once I started taking care of myself better and feeling overall more self-confident with myself, the desire to try and please everyone around me slowly disappeared because I was already pleased with myself.
There are still times when I struggle with the idea of someone not liking me or being disappointed in me, but now that I am happier overall with myself and feel secure within the current relationships in my life, if someone does not like me, I consider that their loss.