Today, I want to talk to you about one of the biggest diseases in the world today: people-pleasing.
It costs us so much on a daily basis to constantly try to please everybody else at the expense of doing what we think is right.
Imagine for a moment you have something important that you want to do, but a friend or a family member instead asks you to do something else.
Something which is important to them, but maybe doesn’t have any real value to you.
In many cases, you will choose to drop what’s important to you in order to help them.
And in some cases that’s fine.
However, too often, the reason you drop what you want to do to help them is not motivated by their best interests.
It’s actually motivated by what you believe are your best interests.
In other words, it is driven by your desire to be liked, your desire to have people be pleased with you, and to think the best of you.
But when you choose that path, and you choose that motivation, you are doing so at the expense of doing what is right for both parties.
Quite often, when you choose to help others, you’re not choosing based on what you think is right for them; and you’re not even doing what is right for them. You are being “nice.”
Nice is giving people what they want, or what they think they want, or worse still, what you think they want.
But it is not necessarily doing what is best for them.
Now think about that for a moment.
Imagine your friend wants you to help them with something that is, in fact, illegal.
In order to please them, you help them.
But helping them to break the law, in most cases anyway, is not really helping them.
There may be a short-term benefit, but in the long term, you’re helping to lead them down the wrong path, and that does nothing for them.
You’re not being a true friend.
So ditch the people-pleasing. And at any given moment, ask yourself a couple of simple questions:
- 1What is this? Make sure you understand exactly what is going on.
- 2How can I help? But how can I truly help?t
And when you understand what exactly is going on, and you understand what is truly the best way to help, you won’t do anything for the purpose of people-pleasing.
You will simply do it because you truly believe that it is right.
And there is no better reason to do anything.