The People Pleaser Trap

I got to start over- thank you, divorce- and my first real step in starting over was figuring out who I actually was and what I valued. I know by now that if I’m not living according to my own values, I end up unhappy, unmotivated, and generally unsuccessful at whatever I’m trying to do.

I keep seeing this exact lesson play out in conversations with other people too, over and over.

Today it happened again.

I volunteer in a few different capacities, and this particular morning I woke up to an email from one volunteer coordinator telling me I wasn’t needed that week, after I’d already set the time aside. I also had an email waiting from a fellow volunteer, unhappy about how the whole thing was being coordinated.

Perfect, I thought. I could help sort this out.

I carefully wrote an email to the coordinator, thanking her for everything she’d been doing, and gently asking if she could clarify how she decided who volunteered each week, since it wasn’t clear to me, and probably wasn’t clear to others either. Maybe a quick note to everyone would help, I suggested, just to head off any resentment building quietly under the surface.

I must not have been the only one sending emails like that, because what came back was long and defensive. At the very end, she asked if I wanted the job.

Not exactly what I was expecting. I drafted an even more careful reply, apologizing that my note had apparently landed as an attack.

She wrote back with an even longer email and asked again if I wanted the job. She hadn’t wanted this role to begin with. She’d been strong-armed into it. Everyone was complaining. And so on.

I genuinely felt for her. She’d taken on something she didn’t want, and I understood exactly why, because at one point in her email she said it herself: “I’m a people pleaser.”

Oh, I know that one well. If there’s one thing guaranteed to pull you away from your own values, it’s being a people pleaser. You end up living according to someone else’s idea of what you should be doing, instead of your own.

She’d taken the job to please someone, clearly not herself, since she was practically being dragged to her computer to wrangle a schedule nobody was happy with. And instead of thanks for the effort, she was getting nothing but complaints, desperate to hand the whole thing off to literally anyone. If nobody stepped up, she’d probably just keep doing it anyway, since quitting would mean disappointing people.

I hoped, for her sake, that she’d quit regardless of whether a replacement ever turned up. I hoped she’d see it as taking a stand for herself, a real learning moment, rather than as letting people down. It would’ve given her the opening to start fresh, and to fill that space with something she actually wanted to be doing, something she’d have a real shot at being happy and good at.

A first step out of the people-pleasing pattern, and a step toward finally hearing her own actual values underneath it.