She’d do anything for anyone. She’s so caring, she never puts herself first. She’s amazing – she’s always there to help. Do any of these sound familiar to you?
What about these? Read each one and pay attention to what your gut says to you.
- You’re easy to get along with and you virtually always keep the peace.
- You feel responsible for other people’s emotions, in any situation.
- You anticipate what people need before they even ask.
- You soften what you really want to say, because directness feels threatening and dangerous.
- You can sense someone’s mood shift in a heartbeat, whether they’re angry, upset, stressed or disappointed and you immediately assume you’ve done something wrong.
- You feel an overwhelming urge to fix, calm down or make awkward or uneasy situations feel better for everyone.
If this is you or someone you know, read on, because what looks like kindness from the outside might be something else entirely. What’s more it could be quietly running you into the ground.
Kindness and people pleasing are different
Kindness is freely chosen and a gift freely given, whereas people pleasing is an unconscious drive that stems from your own needs. It commonly comes from a place of fear and is tied to beliefs about your own worth, your need for safety, acceptance, and belonging.
How people pleasing gets wired in
How did you end up with these behaviours? Firstly, it’s important to know that people-pleasing isn’t a character flaw, it’s a survival strategy that was learned for good reason and which, in the past worked for you.
If you grew up around criticism, conflict, or unpredictable moods, even moods that weren’t directed at you, you likely became highly attuned to other people’s emotional states. You learned to read a room as you walked into it, were able to sense any sign of tension and learned how to smooth things over before they escalated. In short, you became the peacekeeper or emotional shock absorber for the people around you. In time, this became a pattern of behaviour.
Back then it wasn’t from kindness either, it was how you stayed safe and accepted. These survival strategies may have been protective as a child, however they often affect your sense of self, your relationships and career in later life. That’s the thing with ingrained patterns, they run and run even when the danger has passed.
These patterns are also more common in women, who continue to be socialised from early, to be amenable, keep the peace, make themselves smaller and easier to be around. Society rewards these behaviours, which make the situation even harder to question. I was criticised for being too loud and bossy, so I shrank myself too. Plus a household of arguments and shouting will teach you to disappear, block your ears and hope it stops. I know, because I lived it.
The mask and what’s under that
On the surface, you look calm, capable and easy-going. People call you reliable, competent and kind. You’re the one who always says yes, who never complains and always steps in.
Yet below the surface there’s a different story. You might feel tense and frustrated. You quietly wonder why no-one ever notices what it actually costs you to show up like this. You’re drained by relationships that are all give and no return. You feel resentful, even though that feels a betrayal of the kind person identity you’ve built. Externally you’re capable and effective, internally you’re feeling conflicted and pulled apart
Where this leads
Senior women leaders and business owners need to hear this part clearly: people pleasing isn’t just an exhausting personality quirk, it’s a direct route to burnout.
Think of your capacity like a reservoir. Every boundary you don’t set, every need you don’t speak about, every difficult conversation you avoid and every “yes” you give when your whole body is screaming NO! is water leaving your reservoir. At the same time it’s not being refilled, because rest feels selfish and other people’s needs always seem to outrank your own.
You keep going, feeling responsible for everyone’s happiness, self-esteem, disappointment and reactions, no matter what. You worry that saying no will make someone feel rejected. You avoid conflict like the plague and would rather tolerate poor behaviour than risk hurting someone’s feelings.
Little by little, you lose yourself more in the role of the heroic leader, the person everyone relies on.
You know, a reservoir that only empties without refilling, runs dry and that’s burnout. It’s not a sudden collapse, it’s the slow, predictable end point of years spent managing everyone’s emotional world except your own.
What you were never taught
You can’t regulate someone else’s feelings, they’re responsible for that, just as you are responsible for your own. Deep down you know this, even though no-one ever told you.
If saying no means someone is upset, it doesn’t automatically mean you did something wrong. Sometimes people get upset simply because they didn’t get their own way. While that might feel tough to sit with if you’ve spent your life believing the opposite, it’s also the start of freedom.
Why can’t you just stop it?
You’ve likely read self help books, done mindset work, journalling, set intentions and boundaries, which you then dismantled the moment stress hit. You’re not a failure, you’re holding a deeply wired pattern that’s doing precisely what it was built to do, especially under pressure.
These patterns are difficult to shift through willpower or logic alone, because they weren’t created by logic in the first place. They were wired in through experience, repetition, and a young nervous system trying to stay safe.
The secret weapon – NLP and hypnotherapy
This is where NLP and hypnotherapy earn their place. Rather than working at the level of ‘just try harder’ to say no, they access the root cause of the pattern and change it there. In NLP terms, it’s about shifting you from Effect (reacting to everyone else’s emotional weather) back to Cause (choosing your response, on purpose, from a grounded place).
Hypnotherapy enables you to access and reframe the pattern, where it’s held unconsciously. This has the change stick even under pressure, rather than dissolving as soon as your calendar fills up.
Don’t worry, you won’t become cold, selfish, or unkind. These methods simply remove the compulsion driving the old response. You keep the kindness you choose, not the kindness you feel you owe.
One important note: when you start to change, you may well get pushback. Remember other people will have benefited from your old pattern and it’ll feel strange and even challenging when you behave a different way. This is to be expected and is a positive sign your new pattern is operating successfully.
Are you ready to stop running on empty?
If any of this struck a nerve, you’re certainly not alone…and you’re not broken either. You’re simply carrying a pattern that made perfect sense at one time. It can also be rewired fully. If you’d like some help with NLP coaching and hypnotherapy, do get in touch.
One other thing, I’m going to run a webinar on burnout, what it really is and how patterns like people pleasing quietly drain your resilience reservoir until there’s nothing left. Interested? Sign up to the waiting list to be the first to know when doors open.
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