There’s a line in the excellent 2024 David Nicholls book You are Here when the main character, Michael – who is reflective and tender and dorky (all of my favourite qualities in men) – describes himself as a people-pleaser. But, he notes, nobody seems to be very pleased with him. It’s one of those great sentences that presents like a funny throwaway line but cuts like a knife if you linger on it. To me, it hits hard because it exposes a big problem with the term ‘people-pleasing’ – a label I personally want to throw in the bin.
In case you’re one of the 10 people in the Western world who has never hear the term, a people-pleaser is defined by Psychology Today as someone who has an emotional need to please others, often at the expense of their own needs or desires. They often feel overburdened, go out of their way to avoid conflict, can’t say ‘no’ and are constantly apologising. When you read it like that, it’s clear that people-pleasing actually has very little to do with other people.
Think about it this way. ‘People-pleasing’ implies a slavish devotion to making other people happy (at your own expense), which sounds a lot like a virtue. But it isn’t love that drives people-pleasing behaviours, it’s fear and anxiety, and a chronic dearth of self-worth. As such, people-pleasing is really just a well-intentioned PR strategy – a desire to present yourself as a good person, in order to earn and keep love and high regard. It’s manipulation, but the entirely forgivable type. Of course, as the You Are Here quote points out, this rarely results in the adoration ostensibly being sought. (Name five doormats you’ve worked with who got promoted… I’ll wait.)
Given the not-insignificant impacts of people-pleasing on wellbeing (exhaustion, unhealthy relationships, and so on), I wonder if bestowing a new name might help us recognise these behaviours for what they are instead of seeing them as merely an unfortunate byproduct of wanting to be loved and caring about other people’s happiness.
Good idea, except… I tried to come up with a more accurate name, and failed so hard. So here’s what I’m going to do instead. When I’m working with a client who describes the following, I’m going to call it what it is, without reaching for the overused people-pleaser mantle. Someone packs their schedule full of caretaking for extended family members and regularly drops everything to rescue friends and acquaintances going through a tough time? That’s codependency with a side of self-abandonment. Someone works ridiculously long hours and takes on more work than they can handle? That’s work addiction, masking a deep sense of inadequacy (and possibly a deliberate avoidance of relational intimacy). Someone lets their ‘friends’ make jokes at their expense without speaking up, because they want to ‘keep the peace’? That’s an ongoing degradation of your own soul. And the common through line in all of these examples: cripplingly low self-worth.
A person who understands their own value and operates from the core knowledge that they deserve respectful treatment is far less likely to be described as a people-pleaser. Not because they’re invested in pleasing themselves, as such, but because they’re not looking to other people to derive a sense of meaning, purpose and value.
Building up your own self-worth – or at least, no longer chronically devaluing yourself – is one of the hardest ways to get away from people-pleasing, but since it sits at the heart of the problem, it may be one of the most sustainable. Maybe the best word we can use is just that: low self-worth.
I really like your thoughts and words on this topic. Thank you! 🙏 There is a great book called Too Much, which describes something called High Functioning Codependency, which is basically people pleasing on steroids.