If you’re serious about success, there’s one thing to know: You’ll get nowhere as a doormat.
In business you can have the best intentions, ideas, your product and service and customer care can be unparalleled, and you can work to the bone and have everyone around you believe in you. In your private life you can be the best partner or friend, have all the love in your heart anyone could want, and be with the best mate and posse ever.
But if the disease to please festers within you, success wherever you want it in your life will always be out of reach.
A people-pleaser just is not a match for the highest levels of success; those who have what you want will have – I guarantee – pissed off a lot of people en route. Not because they are asses, not because they are blindly ambitious or mean or greedy or unscrupulous – most successful people love the idea of everyone being pleased with one another.
However, high level success stories know and respect a simple truth:
It is impossible to please everyone – everyone wants different things from you. >Tweet this!
And so truly successful people don’t even try. You cannot match up your ideas and agenda and feelings and needs with everyone around you.
To some degree, we all suffer from the disease to please. I for sure have, and it stalled my life in myriad ways for years until I realized that no quick fixes from a magazine (set boundaries! learn to say no!) would change anything.
Do you have the disease to please? Common symptoms (he wrote, from experience) include:
* You don’t give a straight yes or no answer and often sidestep answering all together.
* You would rather pretend you have the answer than state you don’t know.
* You feel very real fear from the thought of upsetting others.
* It feels awful to think someone does not like you.
* You return every email, phone call, social media message you are sent.
* Others are slow to return your calls and emails.
* You speak in your upper register to people.
* You think people are doing you a favour by doing business with you.
* You think you are ‘lucky’ to have the friends or partner you do (this is not the same as appreciation or gratitude).
* You don’t set boundaries (“but she’s a client; he’s my boyfriend”).
The solution isn’t to just do the opposite of what you were doing before. The reason disease to please feels dreadful isn’t because you’re doing things you don’t want to do (though that never helps), but because you are doing things you don’t want to do because you think success depends on pleasing people and it is your buy-in of such an immense false premise that is what stings.
Pleasing Others = Success is actually so bogus you feel the awful ache in your solar plexus; it gnaws down into the deepest part within you every time. (The good news now is, next time you feel that certain awful, you’ll know you are people pleasing again.)
You are born to be successful. You are here to create your version of joy. You are meant to make manifest glory as you see it. There isn’t a limited success pie. It is your birthright. It is all of ours. That’s the point of being here.
I overcame my disease to please by letting go of old habits of thought; I had a #ThoughtRevolution about how success happens, why it happens, how I deserve it and that it is my destiny. I chucked any idea I had that felt shitty thinking it and replaced it with an idea about success that felt amazing. (That’s the only way to know if an idea is right for you: it feels crappy or feels like joy. And for those of you like me who work for themselves – or want to – a #ThoughtRevolution that success is your natural state of being is worth having, stat.)
Some new ideas on success for me – including ones I have shared – included:
– My success is governed only by me. (Feels like joy.)
– I am the only person I need to please. (Reads harsh but feels real nice.)
– The best way to please others is to give them a happy and successful version of myself. (Feels euphoric.)
Try this #ThoughtRevolution on for size; create a few affirmative ideas that fit you where you are now. And a great time to re-think any old idea is the morning before any distractions begin – lying in bed upon waking, journalling over a coffee, or as you walk your dog.
However you make it happen, if you only repeated one of new ideas over and over, your life would change in a week. When you honour yourself with a simple #ThoughtRevolution – telling your story the way you want it to be using thoughts that please you – the world around you shifts.
I guarantee that, too.
It’s not behaviour changes that cure the disease to please, it’s the thoughts you think about who you are and where your success stems from.
Please share this with any people pleasers you know who could use some help. And I would love to know about your experiences with the disease to please. (I enjoy getting so much feedback via email, but sharing below lets us all reap the wealth of experience we all have to share with each other.) Please leave your thoughts in a comment!
When you try and please everyone the opposite ends up happening where you don’t really please anyone at all. You become mediocre instead of remarkable. Great article and congratulations on your launch on Sirius Radio.
Thanks guys. “You become mediocre instead of remarkable” – that’s where I was (“my life had stalled in myriad ways”). It was a life, it just wasn’t a remarkable one by my standards. Thanks for the kind words.