Ep #70: Why You Should Ditch People-Pleasing

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who is midlife and plus sized and you want to start running but don’t know how, or if it’s even possible, you’re in the right place. Using proven strategies and real-life experience, certified running and life coach Jill Angie shares how you can learn to run in the body you have right now.

Hey rebels, you are listening to episode number 70 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. And seriously, holy shit, 70 episodes. That just blows my mind. Anyway, I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today we’re going to have some fun.

So right before Thanksgiving, I was in New York City taking a walk in Central Park. It was bitter cold and to kind of keep my mind off the cold, I did a Facebook Live for The Not Your Average Runner Podcast community while I was walking. And we talked about holiday plans and what everybody was going to be doing for the next few days, and more than one person watching was actually going to be going to somebody’s house for the day, not because they wanted to be there, because they were excited to spend the day with that person, but because they felt guilty because they didn’t want to deal with the outcome of not being there.

So we kind of started talking about people-pleasing in general and why it’s so toxic and I thought, you know, I should probably do a podcast about this because I’m pretty sure everyone that’s listening has people-pleased at some point in time. So today we’re going to dive into that whole concept and how it can affect your running and what to do about it.

So let’s get started with what exactly is people-pleasing and why is it a toxic behavior at all? I mean, it kind of sounds nice and pretty on the surface, right? You’re making somebody happy, which means that you’re happy and everyone is dancing around in a field of daisies drinking pumpkin spice lattes in one huge love fest, right?

Yeah, actually, that is not how it works because most of the time, if you do something for the sole reason of making someone else happy, when it is not what you want to do, well really, only one of you ends up happy and the other one has a whole shit ton of drama going on in her head. And that is you, by the way.

So if you find yourself saying things like, “I have to do this,” or, “If I don’t do it, they’ll be mad, I have no choice,” that is usually an indicator that what you’re doing is some sort of people-pleasing. And you always know it when you see it in others, right? We all have that one friend who shows up to every party she’s invited to, whether or not she wants to be there because she doesn’t want the host to be mad at her or she doesn’t want other people to think that she’s not fun or that she doesn’t love her friends.

Even though she’s exhausted and miserable the whole time, she might have a long run scheduled the next morning that’s going to suck because she didn’t get home early enough for a good night’s sleep, or you know that person at work who takes on every single project that comes her way, even though she knows she doesn’t have time because she wants her manager to approve of her.

And never mind that she’s giving up her social life, her self-care and her sleep. It is always way more important to her to impress her boss even though she hasn’t had a promotion in three years and is totally underpaid. Somehow, she thinks, “Oh, maybe it’s just this one next project that will make my boss appreciate me.” And you’re like, “Umm, girlfriend, wake up. It’s not happening.” No amount of people-pleasing is going to fix this situation.

So okay, let’s head a little bit closer to home. This might be you. Think about the last time you ate something because you didn’t want to hurt somebody else’s feelings. You go to a birthday party and you’re thinking, “Okay, I’ve got a half marathon tomorrow, it’s my first one, so I’m going to go to this party but I’m not going to have the cake and wine because I know that sugar and alcohol the night before a big long run doesn’t feel good in my body. It might be fine at other times but the night before a long run, especially my first half marathon, those are things that I don’t eat because I know I’ll run better if I skip them.”

But then the birthday girl says you have to have some or you don’t love her. You know you’ve been there, right? And then the more you protest, you’re like, “No, seriously, I’ve got a race tomorrow,” she’s like, “Oh, you and your running. You were so much more fun before you were a runner.” She gets pissed at you and so you just have some cake and wine just to give in, just to stop all of her drama, which of course immediately starts up drama in your own mind about not sticking to your commitment and about how hard your race is going to be now that you’ve eaten these foods that don’t feel good in your body when you’re running.

So the problem with people-pleasing, the reason it’s so toxic is because we’ve been fed a lie from when we were little kids, we’ve been taught that we can control other people’s emotions with what we say and do, and that is just not true. Oh, and by the way, it does work in the other direction. What other people say and do can’t control your emotions. I’m just saying. Also, true. We’re not going to address that on this podcast but keep that in mind.

So seriously, you’ve been taught to believe this your entire life. It starts very early with something like, “Don’t tell Jimmy he’s a poopie head, you’re going to hurt his feelings.” And I get it, it’s certainly well-meant advice. We want to teach our little ones not to say mean things, but we’re missing the other half of that. We’re setting ourselves up for failure because from that point on, we grow up believing that other people are in charge of our emotional lives and that we need them to behave differently so that we can feel okay.

If I’m told that – if I say x, y, or z, if I tell Jimmy he’s a poopie head, that I’m in control of his feelings, then I learn that what Jimmy does can control my feelings. And that is simply not true, and it’s a very, very powerless place to live because the rest of the world really doesn’t give a shit about how you feel.

This is a fact, my friends. I mean, yes, hopefully your family and friends do give a shit, at least a little bit of a shit, but the other seven billion people on the planet really don’t fucking care. And if nobody cares about your feelings, that means that you’re going to be constantly doing and saying things in an attempt to manipulate them into liking you, into respecting you, and into treating you how you want to be treated.

If they don’t care about your feelings, you have to do the work yourself about getting them to do the things and say the things that work for you. Like, I’m exhausted just saying it. It doesn’t work. Here’s the truth of the matter. People-pleasing is straight up lying and manipulation, and that is – it’s kind of sickening to think about it because I know you don’t identify as a liar or a manipulator, but hear me out because it’s true.

Whenever you change your own behavior to try and influence somebody else, you are lying about who you really are. You’re lying about how you really feel, and you are manipulating somebody else into feeling differently about you. And for sure, if you want to go through life this way, if it’s getting you the result you want then by all means, keep going. But I suspect it doesn’t feel too good to pretend to be somebody you’re not, to do things that you don’t want to do just so you can influence how somebody else feels about you, how they act towards you, what opinion they have about you.

Oh, and by the way, most people can see that kind of stuff a mile away. So if you’re people-pleasing somebody, usually, they’re just like, wow, she’s kind of a – she just sort of rolls over and does whatever I want. You’re trying to get them to like you and respect you by what you’re doing and what happens is they don’t like or respect you because they see that you’re just doing things to make them happy. That does happen. And that’s kind of the opposite of what you want.

And honestly, it’s really tiring and you spend the whole time screaming inside because you’re not being yourself. Does this sound familiar to you? Here is the other thing. When you pretend to be someone you’re not so that your boss or your mom or your friend will approve of you, they aren’t actually approving of you. They are approving of the fictional version of you that you have created.

So even if you do get what you want, you get somebody else’s approval, you get their respect, you don’t really have it. You have their approval and respect of this fictional version, this creation that you’ve made. And if it’s not – if you don’t believe the things that you do, if you don’t believe in the things you’re doing, if you don’t believe in the things you’re saying, they don’t even approve of you. They approve of somebody else.

So then you’re stuck having to keep that secret, keep up the charade that you love working 14-hour days and not sleeping and giving up the dream of running a half marathon or that you believe that you can show love for somebody by eating the food that they’ve made you, right? You have to keep up that charade until your brain explodes or you die or the other person dies or moves away, right? It’s just exhausting.

Here’s some other examples. Staying in a marriage that you don’t want to be in for 10 extra years just because you don’t want to hurt your partner’s feelings and because you don’t want other people to think that you’ve failed. And then you have to numb out with like, alcohol and food the entire time just to get through it, which is in and of itself, a kind of failure.

Or you say, “Of course I’ll bring a homemade pie to Thanksgiving, baking is my favorite,” even though you’re already driving six hours to be there and frankly, you hate baking. You’ll be swearing the entire time you’re making the crust and you probably will end up stopping at the grocery story on the way there to pick up a store-bought pie which is going to taste better than what you’ve got anyway, and then you’re going to try and pass it off as homemade and again, there’s all this drama in your mind.

Why can’t I be better? Why can’t I be the person that likes to do these things? And you pretend to be that person and everybody thinks like, “Oh, I love Sally’s homemade pies, they’re so good,” and you’re like, fuck, I hate making that stupid pie and half the time it’s store-bought anyway.

Or maybe you tell someone you’re totally fine with eating cake and wine the night before your first half marathon, that birthday party, even though you know you’ll feel like shit the next morning, and then what happens is you end up blaming your poor performance on yourself and you say, “I don’t understand what went wrong, I had a terrible race, I must not be cut out for half marathons, I should probably just stick to 5Ks.”

Instead of standing up and saying, “I’m not interested in cake and wine, it’s going to hurt my performance the next day,” you create all this additional drama for yourself because you’re not willing to say not to somebody. Basically, here’s what happen; when you people-please, you are trading their drama for yours. Let me repeat that. When you people-please, you are trading their drama for yours.

You are deciding that you would rather create a bunch of drama in your own mind and suffer through that instead of having somebody else think thoughts about you and letting them deal with their own drama and their own problems. I mean, really, people are always going to have opinions and thoughts and beliefs and drama in their heads. We are humans, it’s constantly going on.

Do you really want to be responsible for everyone else’s bullshit in addition to your own? It’s a lot of extra work. It’s like taking on a part-time job when you already have a full-time job. And here is the best piece of advice I can give you for people-pleasing. Manage your own brain. Let other people worry about theirs.

Now, here’s the thing. At first, this doesn’t feel too great and quitting the habit of people-pleasing and sticking with it doesn’t feel great in the beginning, it might not feel great at the end upfront when you’re making that decision not to alter your behavior. Because what happens when you stop being the fictional version of yourself, the people that are used to it will not be happy.

They might say things like, “You were way more fun when you went out drinking with us every night instead of going to bed early so that you can get up and go running,” or, “I loved you more when you did all my laundry and made my lunch every morning instead of going for a run,” or, “If you really loved me, you’d come to Thanksgiving at my house early and help me cook instead of doing a Turkey Trot.”

They might even throw a tantrum or stop speaking to you or say, “You’ve changed, I’m not on board with this new version of you,” and they might be really pissed. And that’s where your work comes in. Like, if you’ve been a people-pleaser your whole life, people are going to – they’re going to think you’ve changed when you start speaking up and saying what you want or saying what you don’t want.

And what’s really happened is you actually haven’t changed. You’ve just stopped pretending to be somebody else, but the person that’s upset doesn’t know that. You’ve been lying to them, you’ve been trying to manipulate them and suddenly they’re like, hey, what gives? So you can understand that.

When something changes and it’s not the way you want it to be, we throw a little temper tantrum. So we’ll have compassion for people who are suddenly like, you’ve known for years that you hate going to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving, you’ve known for years that you hate having those homemade cookies that Lisa brings in every week for work, you don’t even like them but you eat them to be polite. You’ve known that for years.

Your grandmother and Lisa are just getting on board with that right now when you say, “Hey, I’m not doing this anymore.” So that’s where your work comes in. You’re going to have to do lots of thought downloads and lots of self-coaching and what do you make it mean about yourself when somebody doesn’t approve of your choices, when they don’t like you, when they don’t praise you anymore, when you don’t get a gold star for being perfect.

That’s where your work comes in. you need to spend some time deciding if it’s okay if somebody doesn’t like you and praise you, if that means that in exchange, you get to do what you want. You can make it mean a lot of things. When somebody doesn’t approve of you, when they’re like, “Hey, you’ve changed and I don’t like it,” you can make it mean that you’re a failure, you can make it mean that you’ll never find love, that you suck at life, or you can make it mean that you’re kind of a badass for deciding to be your real self, that it takes courage and bravery to express yourself authentically, and that not everybody can do that.

And so you can make it mean a lot of different things. If you’re in a relationship that requires you to ignore your physical and mental health, that is not a relationship that works for you. This is really important for you to take on board. Just like the concept of trading your drama for somebody else’s drama, if you’re in this relationship – and I’m not talking about just a romantic relationship but any relationship, a friendship, a parent child relationship, a relationship with your children, with your siblings, with your coworkers, whatever – if the relationship that you’re in requires you to ignore your physical and mental health, it doesn’t work for you and the only way to change a relationship is for you to change.

You cannot manipulate somebody else into behaving differently forever. You’ll lose your mind. And I know that that’s scary that you are the one who has to take responsibility to change and to express yourself and to be yourself, because sometimes the relationship is your mom or your sister or your spouse, and you think, “I don’t have a choice. I have to keep pleasing that person so they don’t get mad or upset,” because what you’re saying is, I don’t want that person to be mad or upset because I’m uncomfortable with that situation.

So that means they get to be happy because you’re being the person they want and you’re not. You’re trading their drama for yours. I don’t want that for you. So I want you to think about everywhere in your life where you alter who you are to avoid making somebody else unhappy, or everywhere in your life where you do things to make people like you. Like oh, if I do this thing – this happens a lot in dating.

Like, if I just wear the right outfit or if I just say the right thing or if I just pretend to be interested in the same thing as him, he will like me. So think about all of those. Maybe even do a thought download like, all the places in your life where you people-please and spend some time on this, and then pick one that’s not too big.

Maybe it’s not telling your mom you’re not coming for Thanksgiving this year, maybe it’s sending something back at a restaurant because you ordered it without fucking pickles and there’s pickles on your burger. And you think, “Oh no, I’ll just pick them off, it’s okay.” No. Practice where the stakes are low because most of us don’t care too much if the server is unhappy with us and frankly, I don’t think servers take it personally when you say this isn’t what I ordered. They just take the food back and they get you what you ordered.

But it will help you practice speaking up and speaking what you really want rather than what you think somebody else wants to hear. Or you could say no thank you to a get together with coworkers that you really don’t like anyway, that maybe you would go because you’re like, “Oh, it’s the office party, I have to be seen,” bullshit. You don’t have to be seen. Your job, your raise, your paycheck does not depend on you being seen socially with coworkers, for the most part.

So you could say no thank you to those and get used to people being disappointed and saying like, “Oh wow, you used to be such a party girl, what’s changed?” And you’re like, “I don’t know, just not interested.” End of story. Say no. Ask for what you want. Tell people the truth. See what happens.

I promise you that the drama in your head about what might happen or what could happen if you speak the truth, if you ask for what you want, if you say no, if you stop people-pleasing, the drama about the possible occurrences is way bigger than the actual reaction. I mean, sure, that person might be unhappy or annoyed in the moment. They might even blame you, you might feel terrible about that.

But if you’re going to have drama in your head either way, you’re either going to have the drama of like, I don’t want to do this and I have to do this and it’s not fair, or oh, I told this person I don’t want to do this and they’re mad at me, wouldn’t you at least pick the drama where you get to do what you want?

You can either feel bad because someone doesn’t like you or feel bad because you didn’t get what you want and then blame yourself for being a loser. I mean, I would pick the one where I get to do what I want if I have to feel bad either way. But here’s the best part; if you do this a few times, you realize that other people being disappointed in you or not liking you is really not nearly as bad as you think. It’s what you make their disappointment mean about you that hurts.

You’ve got the option to make it mean whatever you want, and then you kind of get better at this and better at this and then people-pleasing becomes something you’re just like, what? Why would I do that? That’s a terrible idea. I promise you, that’s how it works.

Okay rebels, I do have a couple quick updates for you this week. I personally have been obsessed with finding that keychain that Carrie and Jimmy mentioned on the self-defense podcast. The one that looks like a little bulldog, and they didn’t have it for sale. But somebody, some smart little cookie in the Run Your Best Life group tracked down almost identical keychain and sent me the link and we’ve got it in the show notes for this episode.

So if you have been wanting to get one of these, I just ordered one in pink and purple and then one in black too, just in case I want to feel badass. I like to match my self-defense tools to my outfits. But anyway, you can grab one for yourself. They’re like – I think they’re like, $4.99. They’re super inexpensive. But before you buy one, I want you to do a little Googling and make sure it’s legal to carry one where you live. Not just in your state but in your city because some cities, like I know New York City has all kinds of – has slightly different laws than New York state and so forth.

So do some Googling. Maybe even take a picture, send it to your local police station and say hey, am I allowed to carry this? Then make the decision on whether you’re going to carry it or not based on that. But if you do live in a place where it is not legal to carry one of those things, then Carrie also shared with me a link to a personal alarm/GPS tracker and she gave me a 20% discount code, which also includes free shipping.

So it’s called Run Angel and in her description – I have not tried this out myself but I will be ordering one so that I can report back, but it’s called Run Angel and it has sort of an easily accessible alarm. Something that is really loud when you need help. So you can press the alarm. And then when the alarm is triggered, it sends your exact location to the group of people that you select.

So if you trigger that alarm, somebody immediately knows hey, she’s in trouble, this is where she is and they can call the police or go there or do whatever needs to be done. So we’re going to have all of those links in the show notes as well as the code for the discount on the Run Angel, and yeah, so that’s my obsession.

And I also – so you guys know I just moved to Princeton and I was super inspired by Carrie and Jimmy’s talk as well, so I’m going to be looking for some local martial arts places that do self-defense and yeah, so I’m going to take some self-defense courses. I will probably report back and let you know how that went because I’m sure it’ll be hilarious to watch because I’m not the most coordinated person. But I’m totally going to do that and I’ll let you know how it goes.

And finally, last update. As we slide into the end of 2018, I’m recording this, we’ve got like, three weeks left in the year and I am laser focused on planning the New Orleans race-cation for my Rebel Runner clients. And by the way, there’s a couple spots left of that so if you are interested, I’ll let you know in a minute how to talk to me about that, but the next one – February is the New Orleans race-cation. Super fun.

But the next one is in June. It’s right around the corner. So we’re right now in the process of booking hotels and activities for this race, which is the Seattle Rock ‘n’ Roll half marathon. It’s got a four-hour time limit, which is an 18-minute mile. So it’s super friendly for beginners and back of the packers. The race starts and ends at the Space Needle with a view of Puget Sound.

It’s so – if you’ve ever been to Seattle, you know what I’m talking about. It’s just gorgeous there. It’s a super fun city, obviously they have the best coffee in the world, except maybe Costa Rican coffee, which I can attest is pretty awesome.

But the whole race-cation is going to be amazing. It’s four days which ends with a race and a big party. We’re actually booking the hotel for everyone right at the race start. So it’s going to be steps out of the hotel to go down and line up for this race. Gorgeous views of the city. We are planning some really, really fun activities and chef Jen Lamplough from the morning routine episode and also from episode eight all about her marathon, chef Jen is going to be there cooking for everyone.

So seriously guys, it’s going to be amazing. If you want to be there with us, I want you to sign up for a free consultation at talktojill.com and find out how. And you can talk to us about the New Orleans race, you can talk to us about the Seattle race, you can talk to us about the Savannah race. So go to talktojill.com, sign up for your free call, find out about all of the race-cations we’re offering this year.

Make suggestions about where we should be going in 2019. I’m personally thinking Hawaii, but I’m open to suggestions and that’s it for this week, my rebellious friends. Everything I mentioned in the episode can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/70 and I’ll talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to www.notyouraveragerunner.com to download your free one-week jumpstart plan and get started running today.