Comment by acrynx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acrynx | Hacker News Reader

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Here's what I think my brain does, when it happens:

I feel that something is expected of me

-> I feel pressured to do it, since failing to do so will surely have bad consequences

-> Being pressured, I feel like I have little freedom to do as I think fit

-> Feeling like I have no freedom makes me lose motivation, even if the task might have been interesting to me

It's not like that all the time, but it has happened fairly often. Sometimes I still fall into that mode of thinking and have a hard time pulling myself out again.

What I believe is the problem here:

I didn't have the confidence that I can take care of myself and have my needs fulfilled regardless of specific issues at hand at that moment in time. This has caused me to feel overly dependent on others and on meeting their expectations (or the expectations I think they might have of me, that they didn't even express).

Since I realized that I have tried the following to improve my situation:

I make myself aware of my fears as they come up, and don't try to push them away, but also don't acknowledge that they're justified. I then reassure myself in the feeling that I can look after myself and cause my needs to be fulfilled just fine. In other words, I try to make the cause of my satisfaction intrinsic.

I didn't have the confidence that I can take care of myself and have my needs fulfilled regardless of specific issues at hand at that moment in time. This has caused me to feel overly dependent on others and on meeting their expectations (or the expectations I think they might have of me, that they didn't even express).

I’m a people-pleaser so this is great insight into my own behavior. But being a people-pleaser is also why I don’t understand making my satisfaction factors intrinsic. When people push their “successes” — jobs, cars, girls, diamonds, houses and iPhones — onto me, how can I to continue to work on my small WordPress project with the same level of motivation I had before they brought their “successes” to my attention? I do need them for my survival — I get a lot of anxiety just thinking of living without their support — but I don’t want them influencing my motivation, so how do I go about insulating my poor self-esteem from their occasional, and btw completely unintentional, blitzkrieg attacks?

I know about that anxiety, what other people might think about you.

The problem with anxiety is, that you just want to get rid of it, the anxiety hinders you in a way to look at it, to reflect about it.

Instead of trying to get rid of it, it might be better to reflect about it. So in the case of the anxiety about the thoughts of others: what kind of effect these thoughts really have, even if they think the worst about you?

The anxiety of the bad things that might happen in most cases have no foundation in your current life, but have bean created somewhere in your childhood.

Honestly that question is quite hard for me to answer, since I have rarely felt pressured to acquire or achieve something because of the successes of others.

Generally I'd say if you find that some things you do or think are not the way you want them to be and you feel the cause is other people influencing you, then you have to take a step back and try to assess what your motivations and priorities are.

The hard part is to stop your fears from messing up your reasoning. Try to think about what you value first and worry about how that is attainable later. I think you will find that there are always more ways to reach a goal if you just take a chance, than you thought there were when you worried about it beforehand. So try not to worry too much.

Self self-esteem can be irrational, but I feel like it is very valueable to me nonetheless. I think I have come to accept that being confident involves being somewhat crazy and actively taking risks.

After all, most things we worry about never happen, so you might be able to afford being a bit more light-hearted :)

I don't think being a people-pleaser inherently works against making satisfaction factors completely your own. For me my motivation and desires are completely unrelated to the standard 'pop' model of success you allude to. But I sill feel like I am a people-pleaser myself, you just have to learn to make others understand you and how you are different, striving for a mutual understanding that allows relationships to flourish. Hope I am making sense, I have quite strong feelings about this and a lot to say but want to stay concise.

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