How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser - Nick Pollard - #884

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Why is people-pleasing such a trap for so many of us?

**Nick Pollard** (0:07)
There's a long answer and a short answer. I think the short answer to that is that we have created an environment through social media really predominantly that everybody's now seeking to measure up to somebody else, rather than focused on this internal locus of control where you can really be vibrant on your own.
But the way that we function now as a society has changed that. And everybody's comparing themselves to people that are insurmountable. And I find myself doing this too. So I worship at the altars of Alex Hormozi and James Smith and all these guys that I see have millions of followers and make millions of dollars. They're exciting and they're fun. And I'm like, how do I get to that, right? Rather than recognizing in myself, I can just be happy with where I am. I have a really great friend who said this to me that really resonated with People Pleasing, which you don't have to hate where you are to want to be better. And when I heard that, I was like, that makes so much sense. And I think we've kind of taught people that you have to like almost hate the way that you show up in the world in order to want to better that. And I think that causes this idea of how do I measure up and then how do I make everyone else around me happy because that's really what the world is kind of built on these days.

**Chris Williamson** (1:27)
Yeah, draw the line for me between that sense that we measure up. But people pleasing isn't about us. It's about optic management. It's about how other people see us. It's about prioritizing their needs over ours. Why is that important?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:44)
What's that got to do with it?

**Nick Pollard** (1:46)
So I think it's, for me, when it was more of a problem. And I would say that I'm a recovering people pleaser. It's funny those things. It's one of those things that I don't think ever really goes away. I think you just kind of battle it.
But mostly it's an overwhelming sense that you're not enough. And when you're functioning from that place, there's no way you can ever really measure up. And there's ways that you can tune that to make it better, right? So if you have something like that, so if you have that kind of inferiority complex plus a superior complex plus impulse control is a great example, you can do great things. But if you just have this idea that I'm not enough and that's sort of the main track in the background, then you're always trying to measure up to something that doesn't actually exist. So and so often this comes from, it's kind of a pivot point where you have one parent that was super involved in your life and the one parent that wasn't, maybe they were abusive, very similar to kind of the nice guy narrative where you show up trying to gain acceptance and love because the only way you know how to do that is to either not show up, like to be completely invisible or to make everyone else happy, right? Or to keep everyone else calm or to constantly be in a peace keeping frame of mind. And I think that's where people get really hung up.

**Chris Williamson** (3:11)
That's one of the typical childhood situations that People Pleasers would have?

**Nick Pollard** (3:18)
Very typical. You know, I've got one-on-one clients all over the world kind of coming from every background, you know, everything from CEO down to pick a position. But the thing that I would say is the most common is generally speaking, one parent made, it was an enmeshment issue. So one parent made that child the center of their world. And then the other didn't.
So what that teaches them is that, you know, to make this other person happy means they won't get abandoned. If they don't get abandoned, they'll get their needs met. And then this kind of just plays out in childhood. I forget who said it to me, but it was, they called it a transference. So it's like you developed a childhood coping strategy and you kept it all the way through your adulthood and now it's not serving you. And nobody really knows what to do with that. So then you have to figure out like, what do I do now to make my life better?

**Chris Williamson** (4:11)
What behaviors should we look out for that suggest you might be a people pleaser? How would you get us to self-diagnose?