Why It Doesn't Pay to Be a People Pleaser

Infomercials are kind of the penultimate version of this. The product is almost meaningless compared to the ability to sell it. It's not a towel it's a Shamwow!

Generally, most people don't have a clear understanding of what they want vs. what they need, and have even more confusions about what other people need.

"So envelop what they need with what they want."

Sure, that works fairly well. It's not the only approach. There are a whole set of teachings that go straight to the point. It is funny, because every time I bring it up to people, people have a lot of problems with that. Heheheh.

The thing is, I know that there comes a time when what is needed is not anything at all like what is wanted, and it is impossible to envelop it with what is wanted. This is usually touching the deep truths, and the want results from attachment, from wanting to deny reality.

Though now that I wrote that down, I'm rethinking about that too. Hmmm.

I think we have just faced a simple labeling problem, with people-pleasing as the ultimate vague word.

I'm curious how you actually follow through on that with children. It's hard to move on from them (without inflicting lifetime psychological trauma, anyway).

Also known as "tit for tat" in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, a very successful strategy.

Understanding naysayers' concerns, and learning a ready answer if they ultimately don't seem valid can be a good use of time. Giving a whole lot of air time to someone who has a foregone conclusion that they think merits some transparent rhetorical game is not.

Someone that always offers a harsh unvarnished and negative opinion on things usually gets a reputation as a jerk. Someone who is always trying to please everyone gets a reputation as a spineless brown-noser. In the real world, how you say something is often even more important than exactly what you say. If you are charming you can convince more people of more things, and political capital is a real thing that matters all the way down to individual relationships—you have to pick your battles. Throw in culture, sexism, racism, moods, and innumerable other contexts and things become very subtle.

That's what bothers me about these pop science articles: nothing is that simple. Maybe an article like this triggers you to evaluate yourself and say "hey, I do try to please others too much", but then again maybe you need the opposite advice. The bottom line is you have to gauge for yourself how your behavior is affecting relationships and whether you are getting what you want out of life.

That is not being authentic, and that's the problem. In our heads we know what we want, but we ask for something else.

Why do you want your friend to get off the computer. To be off the computer? No. You miss your friend and you want him to hang out with you. You are worried that he is missing out on life by living in the game and you're both going to pay for it later.

Just ask, man.

There is saying, "you can shear a sheep over and over, but you can only skin it once." Learn to shear.

I think there's a line between being tactful and being manipulative and it may be different for everyone. For example you seem to think that Steve is telling a "white lie by omission" but I don't. Unless Steve was dishonest if questioned about his motivation or Steve was trying to pretend to be into the game rather being interested in Jack and his interests I wouldn't consider that being dishonest.

> "Jack, you shouldn't play Overwatch..."

This is judgement, which implies ego. The indicator here is "shouldn't". Ego isn't an authentic representation of self, it is fiction. If we can become aware of ego and avoid following it's incessant needs, we are closer to ego-lessness which can contribute significantly to happiness.

So in the end, being authentic and transparent without ego, the original statement may be something like:

> "Jack, I don't like to play overwatch, I would rather (do x,y,z)"

Great book for anyone seeking - Eckhardt Tolle - "A new earth" - be warned, skip chapter 1!

A good book on this subject is "Difficult Conversations", a favorite of my wife's, which describes strategies for doing exactly this: being honest about your feelings without ruining someone else's day as a result.

Being honest does not mean you cannot exercise tact and discretion in the way you talk to people.

That is exactly what some people do in real life professionally in phycology, without the strong words(that denote lack of control). It works really well.

In order to illustrate this think on "Kitcken nightmares" tv program, or something like "Hermano mayor" on Spanish TV.

I use to do the same thing with friends and people that demand my help. Loner? Quite the contrary, help someone get out of a hole and he-she will be your friend forever.

I have taken people out of drugs, or gangs,prostitution this people will give their life for me. There are few things as rewarding in life(it is also a pain in the ass while you do follow the process but it is worth it).

Of course you need education in order to do that. You don't need to say you are "fucking frustrated", in fact if you are frustrated you can't help anyone.

There are masters at this, like in anything,and if you do that you will learn with every person you help. After some people you see patterns and being effective becomes easier.

For John to be authentic, then he would need to first suss out why he feels so bothered by seeing John being addicted to playing Overwatch.

Meaning, there is something that John is unaware of his own psyche that lead to feeling irritated by Jack's addiction. Being unaware of that means he might be _seen_ as transparent or authentic or honest -- you certainly did -- but he's not actually in integrity.

Also, what you described with Steve is called rapport in NLP, or ethos in rhetorics. It's not people-pleasing, so much as matching impedance and getting inside someone else's space. People-pleasers tend to be too self-absorbed to be able to fully enter someone else's mindspace and establish rapport. Unless that person is on the psychopathy spectrum.

That's some pretty impressive hand-waving. The more likely outcome is that Jack keeps playing his game and Steve just wasted a bunch of time trying and failing to manipulate his "friend".

I don't think the author want people to be totally honest always, like, "Hi dear colleague. I think your dog is stupid. And, by the way, you are, too."

Instead, I imagine that fairly many people tend to, when their friends say "Do you want to hang out with us doing this?", they answer "yes" just to please their friends. Although in fact they might have wanted to suggest something else instead. And in these cases, the advice in the article can sometimes? often? be useful. I.e. to be more transparent and honest with your friends about what makes you happy.

If you interpret a piece of advice with the mindset that "perhaps this is good advice in some situations, when might that be?", then it can be helpful and useful to you (or to other people — to me, when I was younger, for example).

But if you interpret it like "always do this", then a piece of advice that is actually good in some situations, has been lost.

(I suppose the article can be rewritten / reworded, to make it easier to interpret it in a "good and useful" way.)

I disagree with your causation. By people pleasing you develop relationships that are inauthentic, which creates a fiction of good within your relationships. People pleasing and expecting those "better relationships" to be real is just perpetuating your own fiction.

I was reading up on some things about that, and the ideas of infinite ethics. Combined with your comments here, seems like the philosophy of Effective Altruism still has a long way to go.

If you are practicing what you believe in, though, I salute you.

"p.s. pleasing people also makes you happy, because you develop better relationships."

I'm not so sure about that. Having worked with people who have deep-seated emotional issues, people-pleasing like that creates a fragile edifice. The greater the effort in fulfilling the want without addressing the need, the more fragile the whole situation becomes.

One of the weird practices I have done is something called Demon Feeding. It descended from the Tibetan traditions, so it still carries it's shamanic/magical/tantric roots, but in this form, it was rebased in Western roots.

Each section is an amazing practice on it's own, and the first three sections sharpen discriminating awareness and empathy. Over time, practitioners not only learn to distinguish wants from needs, they also learn to dig for the need under the want. The practice does not stop there. After ascertaining the need, the practitioner than finds out what would be felt after fulfilling that need. That resulting feeling is what someone is searching for.

The practice is usually done with the self first, and over mant iterations, you start getting towards the ground. Dig deep enough and across enough iteration, the answer to "how will you feel if you get what you need" will tend to converge on one answer.

We all have our subjective distances. But if you are a human being, some combinations of the following will be that distance:

1. Sustenance (food, water, housing, money)

2. Community (belonging, love)

3, Self-expression

4. Self-transcendence (altruism)

This is a gross simplification of Maslow, but give me some slack. If you question every person saying "you won't get very far in life" with "how do you measure getting very far", you are not only annoying the other person, but also yourself. Spend that time trying to measure how far you have come.

If you find yourself smiling and nodding at the above, however, bear this in mind also: we geeks often err in the direction of undervaluing social status. If you haven't acquired basic skills in areas like networking and office politics, X effort invested there might do more for you than 10X effort invested in further honing your technical skills.

This is one of the better discussions about this: https://antiblog.quora.com/The-One-Piece-Puzzle-Chapter-2

Some excerpts:

"When people talk about true self in Western culture, the discussion normally tends toward "the Snowflake Model" of identity. That's my phrase for the notion that your true self is discovered by polishing up your understanding of the way in which you are utterly unique, special, and valuable - a "wonderful little snowflake unlike any other.""

... and ...

"Am I like a box, or am I like light? Consider the difference: a box has a boundary, it has fixed characteristics, it has contents. A box wants to survive, it wants its contents kept safe, it wants to be properly labeled, it wants to be approved of when it passes through customs, it does not want to be crushed at the bottom of a huge pyramid of boxes.

A box, ideally, wants to be at the top of the pyramid. Or maybe off by itself, so that it doesn't have to feel anxious about being judged relative to other boxes. A box is an ego.

Light isn't like that: light wants to go everywhere, and it weighs very little."

Wild guess, you entered the world of online interactions after mailing lists. These buttons address the need of people to be "contributing". Before "+1"/"like", we had "me too". People want to feel like they're supporting views they like, and that button gives them that way, leaving space for more meaningful contributions in the actual text.

It's the same thing as a nod in a 1:1 conversation. "I'm paying attention, I'm here, I agree, continue".

That's where they help, allowing a flow of communication that suits people. Looking at the cumulative number of those... "Narcissism" comes to mind.

At least that's the vague impression I have gleaned.

kross comment stated that the negative effect is the exact same for a woman or a man, thus disagreeing with your statement. It also states that the amount of women being "pleasers" are higher for cultural reasons.

You could claim that the culture that causes more women to be "pleasers" is an gender issue, in which you two might be in an agreement on that point if you two are also in an agreement on the definition of gender issues.