Are You a People-Pleaser?
LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | STITCHER
Are you a people pleaser?!
I think most of us are people-pleasers and many of us don’t even realize we are being people-pleasers –we think we are actually being nice. Sister, there is a HUGE difference and that’s why I want to help you determine whether or not you are a people pleaser in this episode, and also what you can do to overcome it!
If you love this episode, I know you will also love…
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey there beautiful human, you're listening to Embrace Your Real with me, Julie Ledbetter, a podcast where I empower you to just be you. With each episode, I dish you a dose of real talk and actionable advice for building your confidence, honoring your body, and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned if you're ready to embrace your real. Let's get in, let's go.
Hello and welcome back to the Embrace Your Real podcast. I am so grateful that you are here spending some time with me today. Wherever you're tuning in, we have listeners all over the world, which is the coolest thing to me, knowing that every single person is choosing to show up, to prioritize themselves, become the best possible version of their self, so that they can go and serve others in their best capacity. Today, we're talking all about people pleasing. Are you a people pleaser? I will be honest, this is something that I personally have struggled with and I still struggle with it, and I know so many of you might struggle with this or have struggled with it or still do, and I think oftentimes we don't even realize certain situations that we are being people pleasers. We actually just think that we're being nice when in reality, the root of it is because we have this mentality that we have to please this person.
And there's a big difference. So I want to help you determine whether or not you are a people pleaser. So in this episode, I'm going to be sharing that with you so that you can overcome it and you can have the tools in your toolbox to ensure that you are really living free from this mentality of constantly trying to please people. Before we dive in, you know I have to share this super sweet review. It comes from Brianna Angeli. It says, "Thank you, Julie. How do I wrap up my appreciation for Julie in a few words? She creates a space of love and absolute realness, reminding other women that we can do the same. She reminds us to nourish our bodies and still enjoy life. Julie, thank you for embracing your real and inviting other women on the same path."
Ooh, I love this so much. Thank you so much for the review. If you haven't already rated and reviewed the podcast, if you've been here for a while I'm just going to ask you to scootch over to Apple Podcasts, click pause, you can scroll all the way down and you can rate and review. It takes less than 30 seconds and it helps us out so incredibly much in the podcast world. If you've already left a review, you can actually leave another review if you've had an episode that you feel like in the last few weeks have really spoken to you. I would just love to know. So in the title, you can put episode 61 or episode 70, and just give me a little blurb on what you got from that episode. I love connecting with you guys, and I love hearing how this podcast is impacting you, how it's changing your mindset, how it is impacting your day to day life.
Thank you again. I love this community so incredibly much. You listening right now, you are the reason why I do what I do. I show up for you because we're in this together, and I just want us to remember that we're not alone in our struggles and knowing that we can get through this. So thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, let's determine if you are a people pleaser or not. I'm going to ask you 11 questions and I want you to get out a pen and paper so you can keep track of how many you say yes to.
Are you ready? I'm going to give you a couple of seconds to make sure you get either your phone or pen and paper out. I love pen and paper because I really feel when we write stuff down, we are telling our brain this is important, because to be honest, we are on our phones all day long, commenting, texting, DM-ing, and I really think that our brain sometimes just goes into autopilot because we're doing it so much. So taking that pen and paper and really being intentional will help you ensure that you are connecting this in your brain as something important.
All right. Question number one, do you say yes when you really want to say no? Question number two, do you avoid speaking your mind or sharing your opinion? Question number three, do you allow people back into your life who continue to wrong you time and time again? Question four, do you go out of your way to help people do things that they can easily do themselves? Number five, do you go out of your way to accommodate other people's schedules without respecting your own schedule? I feel personally victimized right now. I'm being honest. Question number six, do you put others' needs first before your own needs?
Question number seven, are you hesitant to stand up for yourself when people disrespect you? Number eight, do you feel afraid to express your needs to others? Number nine, do you remain silent when you have an issue with what someone is doing or saying? Question number 10, do you regularly do what is best for everyone else except for yourself? And question number 11, do you let go of your values or beliefs for the sake of others, or do you let them go because you're scared of what the other person is going to think or say?
All right. So I'm going to give you a second. I hope as I was listing those off, you just did a Y or an N, and I would love to know how many of those you said yes to. If you had more yeses than nos and you were being completely honest with yourself, it's clear that you are a definite people pleaser. I know, it's kind of a hard pill to swallow sometimes because everything in me does not want to be a people pleaser. But when I'm brutally honest with myself and I go through those questions, I am. Even if you have two to three yeses, this is still something I would recommend working on, because as long as we are people pleasers, we're never truly going to be able to live authentically, embracing our real and reaching our goals. We'll constantly be morphing ourselves to match others just so that they will like us or just so we don't upset them.
And we'll constantly be putting everyone else's needs and wants ahead of ourselves. And too much of this for too long is not healthy. Not everyone in your life is worried about pleasing you, so you need to stop being so worried about pleasing them. So you might be sitting here and you're like, "All right, number one, Julie, I am personally victimized because I feel like I said yes to just about every one of those things, if I'm brutally honest. And two, now that I feel personally victimized, and I feel like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm a people pleaser,'" This might be the first realization in your entire life, or it might be a reminder of like, "Oh yeah, I am a people pleaser, and maybe that is something I need to work on."
You might be asking yourself, "How do I stop? How do I stop pleasing people?" So number one, you need to make sure that what you are doing feels authentic and true to you. And this is not something that I feel like we have to learn. We are smart enough as humans to know when something does not align with our true self or when it doesn't feel right to us. So you need to remember that and you need to stand your ground. Don't let go of your values and beliefs just to please others.
And I know that's easier said than done, but you truly have to maybe ask yourself a deeper question. The beliefs and values that you have, why are they so important to you? Why do they make up a huge part of your life? And reminding yourself why they're so important so that when you're faced with this situation that you feel like you could easily go the other route, and even if it doesn't align with you, you can remind yourself of your values and beliefs so that in that moment you can do what feels most authentic and true to you, to your core, and to your beliefs.
Number two, you need to make sure that you are speaking your truth, and always, of course, in a compassionate way. Now don't tell somebody something just to make them happy if you don't truly mean it, and don't stay quiet because you're afraid of upsetting someone. You have to speak your truth, so the next time you have an opinion or feedback or a concern or a question or issue, you have to speak up. And I think that this is really important because I think oftentimes, maybe in situations growing up, we were told, "Shut up and sit down." whether it was through words or it was through actions, you were told that your opinions didn't matter, or that your feedback was stupid, or maybe you were criticized one too many times and that really stuck with you. So that's an insecurity that you struggle with.
I want to encourage you to be brave, to stand up for what you believe in, to speak your truth. And the more that you practice that, and the more that you're able to remind yourself that your voice does matter, the more you'll be able to feel the feeling of freedom that you get when you do speak up and you'll be able to do it more often, because it becomes more of muscle memory. I want to encourage you to speak up. I want to encourage you to be brave and remember that your opinion, your feedback, your experience, your truth, it matters. It really does matter, and you never know where that will take you. So speak your truth.
Number three, make sure you're putting your needs above the needs of others. And I think a lot of times people, especially moms, me, obviously I'm not a mom yet, but I can only imagine when you hear this, you are thinking, "You don't understand." And while I don't understand on that level, I do understand with working with thousands of women who are moms and who have struggled with this to the point where they have no longer been able to help themselves at all because they only know how to help others, but they've gotten so burnt out because they're not prioritizing themselves. Remember that putting yourself first is not selfish. Everyone is doing it. No one is putting your needs before theirs, so stop putting your needs behind everybody else's.
Ask yourself if it's actually within your bandwidth. Can you still take care of your needs while taking care of theirs? And if the answer is no, then you need to ask yourself, "Am I doing this because I'm a people pleaser, because I want other people to look at me, I want other moms to look at me and think of a supermom, thinking that I have it all together, think that I can do X, Y, and Z." And the matter of the fact is you have to ask yourself if this is sustainable, if this is something that you can truly take on in your life and still prioritize yourself.
It's going to look different in different seasons of your life. Obviously, if you have a newborn baby, it's going to be really, really difficult to try to have any sort of schedule. I've heard that from my sister, from my best friends, from so many other women that I've just seen go through motherhood. So I want you to practice grace with yourself, but I also want you to constantly check in with yourself and ask yourself, "In this season of my life, are there certain things that maybe I'm putting other people before me that is not allowing me to show up as my best self when I'm with them?"
So that could be prioritizing your morning routine, prioritizing your movement, really getting your nutrition in check and making sure that you're honoring your body with that nutrition so that you can feel good and have the energy to keep up with your kids, to keep up with your husband, or to keep up with your business or your friends or whatever roles that you play in your life. Just remember that putting yourself first is not selfish. Always ask yourself, always check in with yourself on that.
When you start standing your ground and standing up for what is true to you, the people who actually matter in your life will respect what you're doing. The people who are upset when you stop pleasing them are the people that are likely benefiting from it. And I just talked about this on my Instagram, I just talked about how important it is to keep your standards high, to ensure that you don't dip down to other people's mediocre standard just because you feel bad for having high standards. Instead, you need to set those standards for yourself and you need to let those high standards be an inspiration to other people. And the people in your life who truly respect your high standards, those are the people that you want in your life. And it's the same thing for standing your ground and asking yourself and editing parts of your life that you realize, "Oh my gosh, I've allowed myself to people please so much."
So I want to challenge you to start today. I want to challenge you to start becoming more aware of how and who and what you are doing in those people pleasing situations. So always going back to those 11 questions that I asked, and if you can write these down, this can even be a monthly check-in. So at the beginning of the month, asking yourself these 11 questions and saying, "Okay, what areas can I work on this month to progress in this?" And remember, it's just like anything. It's not going to be like you're going to wake up tomorrow and instantly not be a people pleaser any longer.
But the beautiful thing about digging deeper into something that you may be struggling with or growing and developing the skills and the tools to have in your toolbox is that you will start to identify triggers, you'll start to identify patterns, and in that that is when you can ask yourself, "Okay, I'm identifying this because I've learned about it. I'm identifying it, and now I have the tool to combat it." So just remember, it's going to be a process. It's not going to happen overnight. And it's something that you're going to have to check in with whether it's month to month for the rest of your life, or maybe you get to a point where you feel you've really been intentional about growing in your capabilities to not be a people pleaser so you check in with yourself twice a year, and then you go down to once a year.
However you feel, just remember that these tools are in this toolbox for you, and I want you to live free from constantly being weighed down with people pleasing. Because I know firsthand that it's exhausting. It is so exhausting living in the state of mind where you are constantly trying to please other people, and by the end of the day, you look at yourself in the mirror and you don't even recognize yourself because you've just been pouring so much of your time, so much of your energy into these things, because you're trying to please these people. I say this in love, and I say this in truth, because I want you to live free from this. I want to live free from this. And just remember anytime that I'm talking about something, I'm speaking to myself first.
All right, so if you have somebody in your life, maybe one or two girlfriends in your life that you feel would really benefit from this episode, I just ask that you share this out. You can send this in a text message. You can copy this link and send it to them in a text, or you can post it up on your story. You can always tag me, Julia Ledbetter and our podcast account Embrace Your Real. I would love to know your aha moments from it. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I will talk to you guys in the next episode.
All right, sister, that's all I got for you today, but I have two things that I need you to do. First thing, if you're not already following me on the gram, be sure to do so, JulieALedbetter. Yes, it's with an A in the middle, for that daily, post-workout real talk, healthy tips and tricks, and honest accountability to keep your mind and heart in check. The second thing, be sure to subscribe to Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode. Thank you so much for joining me. It means the absolute world, and I'm going to leave you with one last thought. The most beautiful women that I have met in my life are the ones who are completely confident and secure in being authentically themselves. Remember that beauty goes so much deeper than the surface, so go out there and embrace your real because you're worth it.