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July 30, 2008
Death of a People-Pleaser
I am a people-pleaser. There. I've said it. It's out.
In an age of political correctness where wife-beating can be called a disease and total jerks can blame their rage on their mothers for not breast-feeding them enough, I have finally figured out what's wrong with me. In what I've always thought was an effort to be the nice guy, I have often kept my mouth shut when I probably should have voiced my opinions, thoughts, and concerns. I have often let people get away with walking all over me because "surely, they didn't mean that the way it came out." And I have typically felt knots of guilt and regret curl in my stomach at the mere thought of having to say "No" to somebody or to let someone down due to my own inconvenience.
These, I have always thought, were random acts of kindness. I was brought up with this seemingly noble idea that to deny anyone a favor for the mere reason of meeting my own goals instead was selfish. This may have simply been the way I perceived it, though somehow, I did perceive it as the "Christian thing to do." If you were brought up in a church or religious group like me, you probably heard sermon after sermon about "turning the other cheek" or "blessed are the peacemakers." Scriptural phrases like these are often taken out of the cultural context for which they were intended and thrown about, giving parishioners the misguided and, frankly, unbiblical idea that to not stand up for yourself is somehow noble and spiritual.
And so, for almost all of my life, I have been the nice guy. In high school, jocks would treat their girlfriends like dirt under their toes and then trust me to "talk them up" when the ladies dumped them. And rather than confess my own feelings for those ladies (with what I thought was my own heart of gold and perfect intentions), I would lie and try to help them see the jerky-jocks' point of view.
Are you wincing yet?
Again, these were what I considered to be selfless motivations. Random acts of kindness.
So why, then, have I spent much of my life living out other people's desires for me when they seem to just go on living their own lives the way they want to? Why, then, have I so often held my tongue when someone took advantage of me and, rather than feel noble and inner-peaceful, wanted to push them into the street and run over them with my car?
(Don't you just love honesty?)
I have finally discovered the name for people like me. People-pleasers. We are the ones who are passed over for promotions day after day, are horrified by anyone who might confront us about anything, and will let others cut in line or push us out of the way because "they probably had a bad day."
While you might expect people-pleasers to be these peaceful saints of the universe, these seemingly selfless Zen monks are not actually living for the satisfaction of giving it all away. No, the two things that usually motivate people-pleasers into their sad forms of action are a fear of rejection, and a desperate need for acceptance. Man alive, am I being honest today!
When kids grow up, they learn, among other things, that they have certain weaknesses as well as strengths. From my own experience, it often seems as though most of my peers, while never achieving anything particularly great or useful, grew out of the insecurities of adolescence and grew up to not really care if their road to survival offended someone else. This is probably a gross generalization and is very likely a dramatic conclusion. After all, most of the people I went to high school with are doing the same things their parents did (or something very similar), or aren't doing anything at all.
Yet, still, it seems that I missed something significant, because these are the same people who continually cut me off in traffic, ask me to work their shifts because they're going to the midnight screening of "Cannonball Run 2" or some other stupid reason. And I forever seem destined to accept their selfish requests. And they forever seem destined to know it.
The world has no respect for people-pleasers, and people-pleasers have no respect for themselves. This is, of course, unless they begin to wake up and realize that their need for approval is really pointless. After all, giving a jerk what he/she wants won't make him/her like you any better. You won't make a vegetarian out of a lion by throwing tofu at him.
I have recently decided to kill off the people-pleaser inside of me. This post will probably have a slight Stuart Smalley feel to it, but that's okay.
I don't yet know if this experience of a newly realized self-awareness without the need for affirmations of others will be like heroin withdrawal or whether it will play out like a baptismal conversion, instantly life-changing. What I do know is that everyone starts from somewhere, and this is my new beginning.
So, if you are a people-pleaser like me, stop. Stop worrying about the morons around you who are only asking you to do something because they know exactly how you'll respond. Take your life back and begin to set up life on your own terms. Use the God-given gifts inside of you and don't let any opposing word stop you or set you back. Just keep moving forward.
And for the love of God, don't tell anyone, unless it's in a blog like this one.
19:23 Posted in Life Strategies | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this