The Psychology of People Pleasers and How to Stop

Have you ever agreed to do something that you didn't want to do and the word yes just kind of flew out of your mouth before you had a second to even think about it? If that's happened to you, I need you to hear something. You probably have a nervous system that's been trained since childhood to believe that disappointing somebody else is dangerous. And most people think that people pleasing is just a part of who they are. I don't. I think it's one of the most brilliant survival adaptations the human brain has ever created. The problem is what kept you safe and loved as a child is probably what's keeping you stuck as an adult. And so today, I'm going to teach you the psychology of people pleasing, what's really happening below the surface, why it exists, why it's absolutely brilliant that you developed it in childhood, and then I'm going to give you a three-step process to stop people pleasing, because you need to learn how to release it if you're going to create the life that you want. Okay? So, let's dive in. So, here's the thing you first need to understand that might sting a little bit, and that's fine. Just sit with it. If you're a people pleaser, you're not nice. Hold on. Don't just turn me off. Let me explain what I mean by it. Okay. What I'm saying is you're not a bad person. I'm not saying that you're fake. I'm not saying that you're manipulative. I'm saying it is a survival response that you learned in childhood. It is compulsion. Do you get that? Because it's a really important distinction here. Like I think people think that being a people pleaser is being kind and it's really not. Kindness is a choice that you make from a place of having options. People pleasing is what happens when your nervous system thinks that it doesn't have any options. Let that sit in for a second. Let me explain it for you. Okay? [snorts] Everybody listening knows about fight or flight. You've probably heard it a million times. Some of you know about the third thing which is fight, flight or freeze, which is something threatening happens and your body either fights back or it runs away or it locks up and freezes. But there's a fourth one that very few people know about and very rarely do people talk about it and it's the entire key to this episode. It's called Thawn. And the term was coined by a therapist named Pete Walker who did a ton of work around complex trauma. And what he identified is that there's a fourth survival strategy that humans developed. And it basically goes like this. When danger shows up, you try to make the danger like you. Think about that for a second. Like you don't fight it because you can't win. You don't run from it because you can't leave. And you don't freeze because freezing doesn't fix the problem. So instead, you learn to appease it. You become useful to it. You become agreeable or helpful or easy or lowmaintenance, whatever it needs you to be. Because if the threatening thing is happy with you, then you're safe. And guess what? That means that it worked. The thing I need you to understand though is that it works incredibly well and that's why you still do it. And so where did all of this come from? Because nobody comes out of the womb with this. Like I promise you, you were not born this way. You were not born a people pleaser. It almost always starts in your childhood home. Maybe you grew up with a parent whose mood was unpredictable. Like this is very, very common. I hear it all the time. You never knew which version of them was going to walk through the door at 6:00. So, you learned to basically read them at a very high level. And we will be right back. Hey, real quick. If you're someone who's already doing pretty well in life, like you've built a business, you've built a career, you've built everything that looks pretty good on paper, but you know that you're nowhere near your potential and you've been sitting at the same level for a few years now, you need to be at my live event that I'm hosting called Freedom Live. It's 3 days in Austin, Texas. It is not for people that are just starting out. It is for people who are already running, but they know that they're running at like 60% of their capacity. I'm going to teach you how to operate at your peak performance, 95 to 100% of your potential so that you can build a true life of freedom. Go to freedomlive2026.com or scan that QR code right there. There's currently a $50 off coupon if you join right now. So once again, go ahead and go right here or go to that QR code right there. And now back to the show. You got really good at reading them so that you could tell from like the sound of their car door closing what kind of night it was going to be. You could tell from the way that they set their keys down. You could tell from the way that they walked around the house without a word being said. You mastered the art of pattern recognition in them. Or maybe you're a people pleaser, but you didn't have a chaotic parent like that. Maybe nobody was screaming in the house. Maybe it was quieter. Maybe love in your house was just like conditional. When you performed, you got love. When you didn't, you didn't. And that person was cold to you. And so, you learned that love isn't something you receive. It's something that you have to earn every single day over and over again until it was hardwired into you. Or another example is like maybe you were a kid who kept the peace. Maybe your parents were fighting a lot and you learned that if you were funny enough or good enough or quiet enough that you could lower like the the temperature of the room. And so you became the the emotional thermostat for the entire family before you were like 9 years old. And that's very common. All three of those situations are very, very common in people that I've coached over the years, but also very common in people pleasers. And here's what I want you to really sit with. That was genius as a child. Do you understand it? Cuz so many people hate it. So many people think that it's weakness. It's not weakness. It was a brilliant adaptation by a small human who had no power, no money, no car, no ability to just leave the house whenever they wanted to. It was somebody who was completely dependent on the adults in that household for survival. And so that kid did the smartest thing possible. It's [ __ ] brilliant if I'm being honest with you. That kid learned how to keep everybody okay because if everyone else was okay, that kid was okay, right? You were not being a doormat. You were being a survivor. It's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant protection mechanism. The problem though is that you're not 9 years old anymore. You might be 45 years old and you've built your own life. But you have to ask yourself like why if it was happening then and I'm 40 years old now, why is it still happening in my body? Because that wiring didn't come out when you turned 18 or when you moved out of the house or when you got married or when you had children of your own. Nobody uninstalled the wiring. It's still there. And that's why you're, you know, 34 or 47 or 78 and you have a life and you have a job and you have your own family and nobody in your house is dangerous and you still do it. You scan the room every time you walk into it and you know within 4 seconds whether a person you're talking to is annoyed. You still apologize when somebody bumps into you. My gosh, how many of you guys do that? or you still say like, "Sorry to bother you." When you send an email to a person that's one of your employees. And here's the thing that everybody listening is going to recognize. Somebody sends you a text message and it says, "Hey, can we talk later?" And your entire body drops. Your stomach goes hollow. Your chest gets really tight. Your heart rate goes up. Your breath gets really shallow. And so you spend the next like two hours building fake scenarios in your head about what you did wrong and how to fix it. And what you have to realize is that nothing has actually happened. Nothing is wrong in that moment. It was just four words on a screen. So what's actually going on in your body in these types of moments? Your amygdala, which is a threat detection part of your brain, has flagged the possibility of somebody being upset with you as danger, actual physical danger. same system that would fire if you saw a snake. And this is not me being dramatic at all. There's a neuroscientist named Naomi Eisenberger who did some really fascinating research on this. And what she found was that social rejection lights up the same parts of the regions of your brain that processes physical pain, the same circuitry. Which means your brain says they might be mad at me, but your body is not filing it under like inconvenience. It's filing it under injury. Because for most of human history, it was true. For a couple hundred thousand years, if the tribe rejected you, you didn't go find a new tribe, you died alone in the dark, in the cold. So, your brains built this incredibly sensitive alarm system around social disapproval. And if you grew up in a house where love was conditional or where your parents mood was unpredictable, that alarm got tuned way, way up. And it's like a smoke detector that goes off every single time you make toast. There's no fire, right? Like it's not something to worry about. There never has been a fire, but that thing is just like screaming inside of you. And so that's the thing that makes it stop. And so what do you do that makes all of it stop? You say yes. You overexlain. You apologize when you don't need to. You take on the project because you can't say no. You go to the dinner when you wanted to be by yourself. you take all of the blame when it wasn't even your blame in the first place, right? And you know, here's the part where it becomes really, really hard to break. And I want you to pay close attention to this. So, here is the part that becomes really hard for you to break, okay? And I want you to really pay attention to this part. When you fawn, you actually get relief immediately. That anxiety in your chest goes away. They smile. They say thank you. The tension drops out of the room. Your body floods with relief. [sighs] I can breathe again. Your brain goes, "Okay, that worked. Do it again." And so you do it again and again and again and again thousands of times a year. And after enough repetitions, it stops becoming a behavior that you do. And it becomes so automatic that you think that it's the person that you are. It becomes an identity. Oh, I I'm just the reliable one. I'm the one that everybody else comes to. I'm the strong one. I'm the one who holds it all together. And that identity feels good. People praise you for it. They call you selfless. They call you their rock. So now, not only is your nervous system addicted to that relief, but your ego is getting fed by that reputation as well. You are being rewarded constantly for, get this, abandoning yourself. Do you get that? Do you see it? People pleasing is selfabandonment. Okay. So, what do we do to change all of it? This whole situation is not your fault. You did not sit down at 8 years old and choose to be this way. It was installed into you by an environment that you didn't pick, that you wanted to feel safe in. But it is your responsibility to change it because no one's coming to undo this for you. And if you don't do it, you'll just keep repeating the same pattern and you'll pass it down to your kids the exact same way it got passed down to you. And so, let me give you the the step- by-step process, the three-step process to stop people pleasing. Okay? Number one is to catch it in your body before you catch it in your head. Let me explain what I mean. You are probably never going to outthink this in the moment. Because at this point, it fires faster than thought. It's in the subconscious under the conscious processing. You don't notice these thoughts that are so fast and under your conscious processing. And so by the time your conscious mind shows up, you already said yes. So what you want to do is stop trying to catch the thought cuz [snorts] you're probably not going to catch it and try to catch the sensation. Learn what fawn actually feels like to you physically in your body. For most people, it's like a tightening of the chest. It's a drop in the stomach or butterflies or like a a heat in the face or your shoulders coming up and getting tightened. There's a specific feeling and you know the one I'm talking about. You need to find out which one it is for you. You need to identify yours. And your only job first more than anything else, I don't want you to change it yet. Is to just start to notice it. That's it. Don't try to fix it. Don't try to do anything differently. Just go, "Oh, there it is. There's the alarm. That's the alarm that I'm looking for." That is awareness. And you cannot change a single thing that you're not aware of. So the single most important thing that you must first build is this awareness and the way it feels inside of your body. Okay, that's number one. Number two, I just want you to simply build a gap between the ask and the answer. Let me tell you what I mean. This whole thing lives in speed. The yes is automatic because there's zero space between the request and your response. So you need to start actually trying to build the space. What do I mean by that? You don't ever say yes immediately. If you're about to say yes, learn to take a quick breath, whether it's something you actually want to say yes to or something you might be people pleasing, and just learn to pause for a second before you ever say yes, and you build it. If you feel like, "Oh my gosh, this is something that I don't really want to be saying yes to," then what you do is you build the gap with one sentence that I want you to practice out loud until it's boring. And the sentence is this. Let me check on a couple things and I'll get back to you. Simple. Oh my god, it's so simple, right? Not easy, simple. So, when you notice you're about to say yes to something, even if it's something you want to say yes to, just pause for a second. Build a self-awareness. How am I feeling inside of my body? Is this something that's a full hell yes to me or is this something feel like I might be abandoning my true self? And if it feels like in this little bit of a gap that we have started that I might be abandoning myself, I'm just going to say, "Let me check on a couple things and I'll get back to you." That's it. That's the whole move. You don't have to say no. Saying no be it feels scary to you. It should be feeling no like should feel scary to you because you've never really had a whole lot of proof that saying no is not dangerous. So don't say no. I don't want you to say no. You just don't have to say yes yet. Because the second that you have 20 minutes to think about it because you said that sentence, you get to not react out of compulsion. And your actual true self gets to have an opinion. You today at the age you are right now gets to have an opinion. not the 8-year-old version of you that built a pattern from trauma. And you will be shocked how often, given 20 minutes of just thinking, the answer is actually no, when you would have just said yes. And if it's not easy for you, practice in the mirror, practice in the car when you're driving. It's going to feel really difficult saying this, and it sounds crazy. It's going to feel difficult. It will feel difficult the first like 10 times you do it. Just do it anyways, right? You're learning how to finally speak for yourself. Let me check on a couple things and I'll get back to you. Okay, that's number two. And number three, you have to build a tolerance for somebody being disappointed in you. [sighs] Oh [ __ ] What? Yes, that's like the real work. Everything else, number one and two, that's all warm-up. Because here's the thing. Every single time you fawn, you learn to teach your nervous system that disapproval is genuinely dangerous. You never let yourself find out that disapproval is not going to kill you. And so you've been running from that snake for 40 years and you've never turned around once and actually even looked at it. And the way that you change that feeling to disapproval is exposure to it. It's exposure therapy. So you start small, like really, really small. You let somebody be mildly annoyed with you and you don't fix it, right? You don't answer a text within 4 seconds. You let it sit for two hours. You say something like, "That doesn't work for me." when you would have normally said yes. And then you just shut up and you stop talking and you don't feel the silence and you don't overexlain and you don't give them a whole five sentence justification. You just say that doesn't work for me or you say like, "I'd rather not to somebody this week to anybody about anything. I don't really care." it. It's really just comes with the actual exercise to sit in the discomfort and watch what happens. Feel the alarm go off inside of you. Everything's going to go crazy. Let it feel terrible and then notice 20 minutes later, you're still here. You're not dead. Nobody left. The world didn't end. That other person's completely fine. You didn't die. That's how you retrain your nervous system to actually understand that it's not dangerous. And so you're collecting evidence that it's not dangerous to not fawn and to speak up for yourself. And so I want to leave you with this. Somewhere in you, there's a child who figured out the fastest way to be safe was to be whatever somebody else or everybody else needed. And that kid was smart. That kid did their job. That kid got you here. But that kid is still running the system. And you're an adult now. You have your own house. You have your own money. You have your own car keys. You can leave any room that you want to. You're not stuck in the house anymore. Nobody in your life today has the power over you that the people in your house did when you were a child. You are safe now. Your nervous system just has not gotten the memo. So your work is not to become mean, not to become cold, not to stop caring about people because caring that's real. That's beautiful. I don't want you to lose that. Your work is to become somebody who is kind by choice instead of by fear because that's when it actually becomes true kindness. Hey, thanks so much for watching today's video. If you love this video, click this one right here. This is the one that you need to watch next. And if you want to make sure you don't miss any more of these episodes, click that button right there. Make sure you subscribe and check out the next