This means that whatever your style of people pleasing and how frequent it is, your people pleasing is driven by hidden motivations. You’re not doing something because it represents your true values and intentions and how you feel but because of what you’re trying to get or avoid. And even though we’re now grown-up and might be in and around entirely different people and circumstances, in any situation that activates our people pleasing, we still play the role as if nothing’s changed in an attempt to meet old unmet needs and right the wrongs of the past. I worry that my success, happiness, or personal growth will outshine others or cause them to feel unhappy, left out, or abandoned. Natalie Lue is a leading voice on healthy boundaries. This is a beautiful, compassionate resource. Highly recommend it to you.'

The Joy of Saying No: A Simple Plan to Stop [PDF] [EPUB] The Joy of Saying No: A Simple Plan to Stop

Sometimes when we realise that we’re not being treated right despite not having done anything wrong and all our pleasing effort, we hang around waiting for the other party to see the error of their ways. It’s as if we hope we’ll create a tipping point of people pleasing where they spontaneously combust into someone else. But waiting around for someone to do the right thing causes us to do the wrong thing by and to ourselves. Instead of waiting, we can say no to anymore of their shenanigans and choose love, care, trust and respect for ourselves in the process. You might identify with multiple styles, but one or two will dominate. Though I share examples of experiences that can precipitate adopting each style and characteristics of the roles, these can apply in the other styles, so I encourage you to read each one because they’re all people pleasing. You’ll also recognize loved (and not-so-loved) ones and the roles they play.Calling yourself too sensitive, needy, selfish, and difficult, because you feel uncomfortable and increasingly resentful about the friend who repeatedly dumps on you while never taking an interest in what’s going on in your life. Starting to say no set me on a path of healing trauma, including my fear of abandonment and the pain and anger I carried from abuse. My body’s stress responses calmed down, the drama in my life dropped dramatically, and I’ve learned to navigate challenges when they do arise. Committing to someone who’s on the fence about you is betrayal of the self. This isn’t the Hokey Cokey (or Pokey)! They’re either in or they’re out!

The Joy of Saying No by Natalie Lue eBook | Perlego [PDF] The Joy of Saying No by Natalie Lue eBook | Perlego

No matter how discomforting, limiting, or out of alignment with who we really are, we absorb roles into our identities, not least because we’ve taken them on to cope and survive, and so they fit the identities of the key people around us. It’s our way of “helping out” and “being good” for the greater good of the family. In fact, playing roles is codependency; we’re excessively emotionally reliant on others and don’t know where we end and they begin. Instead of being more of who we really are, we do whatever we think fits the people around us and our agendas. Perfectionist is another way that people who consider themselves very hardworking and high achievers apologetically describe themselves while simultaneously humblebragging because they think it’s shorthand for laudable and appreciated qualities. But when it’s not so much about being detail-orientated and working to high standards and more about covering up feelings of low self-worth and trying to control the uncontrollable, they’re also describing people pleasing. Knowing how and when to say no is about understanding your boundaries, the visible and invisible lines between you and others that show your awareness of where you end and they begin.How willing you are to honor your boundaries is an expression of your self-esteem, the sum of the thoughts you feed yourself, and the way you treat yourself. When you treat and regard yourself as a worthwhile and valuable person, you have the confidence to be more you. And even if you don’t feel so good about yourself yet, creating healthier boundaries paves the way to matching how you feel about yourself with your better treatment of yourself. The body doesn’t like conflicts and lies. It needs you to tell the truth so you can be okay and well. Appearing as if what you do doesn’t bother or hurt you, or take as much effort as it does, or that you are without needs, means people have no idea you’re drowning, all while you might feel unseen and unheard. It takes a toll when what you project and portray on the outside is at odds with how you truly feel on the inside.

The Joy of Saying No - HarperCollins Focus

Taking the drama out of your relationships means no longer depending on someone for your needs and self-worth. It means no longer accepting less than love, care, trust and respect from anyone, including yourself. The truth is, we’re often trying to gain self-worth and self-esteem as well as get the benefits of more fulfilling interpersonal relationships and experiences by earning it with our pleasing so that we don’t have to risk vulnerability—and that’s not going to cut it if we genuinely want to experience more intimacy, fulfillment, peace, and joy in our lives. To decide to choose what to let go of means confronting why we accumulated it in the first place and connecting with our true intentions and values, and that’s what I’m here to help you with.Everything you do is about trying to meet needs: the things you need to be, do, and have not merely to survive but thrive. The healthier your boundaries, the more you’ll meet your needs because you’re owning and being yourself, so allowing yourself to say no allows you to fill up the void of the unmet needs that you’ve been (ineffectively) using people pleasing to meet. It’s impossible to avoid saying no or to be fearful of the consequences of boundaries and not be a people pleaser. You’ll keep experiencing variations of the same frustrations, hurts, and problems and mistakenly attribute these to failing to please enough. The Joy of Saying No is about how to reclaim yourself from the cycle of people pleasing and supercharge your relationships and experiences by discovering the healing and transformative power of no. Imagine that, in theory, we’re all born with the same stress threshold. We have the baseline of being unstressed, and then we can tolerate a certain amount of stress because we need it as part of our survival to galvanize us when under threat, to adjust to how we’re using our bodies, and to alert us when we’re overdoing it or when our bodies need something. We need to know when we’re under pressure in some way. There’s good stress from using our bandwidth in the day-to-day of meeting our needs and enjoying our lives, and there’s not-so-good stress that comes from stressors that trigger a sense of threat, whether real or imagined.

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I’m not alone. We live in a world that socializes us from early childhood to be people pleasers and to believe that boundaries are wrong and selfish. Yes, we’re taught about certain dangers and about how no means no, but we then receive such confusing and conflicting messages about compliance and how to be loved and safe that many of us lose the ability to say no with confidence. We learn that no means no as long as it doesn’t involve hurting someone or pissing them off or being a “bad” person. The Joy of Saying No will help you identify your people-pleasing style and habits. A six-step framework then teaches you how to discover the healing and transformative power of no to:We used the positive and negative associations in our “filing” to work out the “rules” and identify our roles in our families as well as around our peers and authorities. It’s like, If I do X (my role and following the rules), people will do Y (play their part), and then Z (my desired outcome) will happen. And then we repeated and refined it as we went along, and this programming became our rules for how to live. Time and again, I’ve found that saying no and figuring out what I need to say no to paves the way to something so much better. All problems we encounter have a boundary issue in there somewhere, so the more we differentiate between our feelings, thoughts, bodies, and stuff, and someone else’s, the better we become at not just solving our problems but also not repeating the same problem.