Carla Miller [00:00:02]:
Think you might be a people pleaser? Perhaps you've got poor boundaries with others, really want to be liked, or need a lot of external validation to feel that you're good enough to be in your role. I'm going to share some of the signs that you're a people pleaser, what it's costing you, and 4 strategies that you can use to pay more attention to your own needs. Now this is the second in a series of 3 podcasts this summer around mindset and setting boundaries. And if you've not already listened to episode 166 on over committing, head over and listen to that one. When it comes to breaking free from people pleasing patterns, one of the most things you can do is learn how to say no. And luckily, I have a free resource that is going to teach you step by step exactly how to do that. So if you've not already gone and downloaded it, do head over to carlamillertraining.com/sayno to join our free 5 day how to say no challenge. My name's Carla Miller, leadership coach, author, trainer, and founder of Women Leading.

Carla Miller [00:01:09]:
The community that helps women lead without overwhelm. I'm on a mission to empower women leaders in the workplace and make leading less lonely. And this is the Influence and Impact Podcast for women leaders. Helping you confidently navigate the ups and downs of leadership, and feel less alone on your journey as a leader. In fortnightly episodes, I share practical tools and insights from myself and my brilliant guests that will help you to succeed in your career. And today's a solo episode for me talking about people pleasing. And the official definition of a people pleaser personality means a person who feels a strong urge to please others even at their own expense. And here are some of the ways that it shows up.

Carla Miller [00:01:56]:
So it can show up in needing validation from others and struggling a lot with confidence when you don't get that validation. So we've all had those line managers who might be lovely people but are just not very good at providing us with regular, helpful, and positive feedback. And when we find ourselves spiraling as a result, it can be because we really need that external validation in order to feel good enough. And what I discovered for myself in terms of validation is that I used to see covers validation, and I was basically handing my power over to them and hoping that they gave it back to me. So I might ask them how I thought I did on something or I would ask them for some feedback. And I was basically giving them the power that decided how good I was gonna feel about myself. And I just had to hope that they were gonna say the nice things and give my power back to me. I used to do that a lot at work.

Carla Miller [00:02:59]:
I used to do that a lot in relationships as well. Sometimes you would do it by kind of fishing for compliments. So you put something out there that makes you feel quite vulnerable, and then you hope that they're going to say something reassuring in return. And if they don't, then it just the power balance feels a little bit off. So needing validation from others is one of the key signs that you might be a people pleaser. Another is that you struggle to advocate for your own needs. So perhaps you are brilliant and passionate about advocating for other people's needs and you're a great champion of your team and you feel really comfortable doing that, you will go into battle for your team. But advocating for your own needs feels uncomfortable.

Carla Miller [00:03:43]:
That feels selfish or maybe a little bit wrong or just really, really awkward. So if you struggle to advocate for your own needs, but you can advocate for others, that's a bit of a red flag in terms of being a people pleaser as well. And in fact, you may not even know what your needs are because your default is to think about the impact on others first. And your brain actually never gets around to thinking about, well, what about me? How is this gonna impact me? And, actually, that's important. Now another sign of people pleasing is having poor boundaries with others and letting people take advantage. Or doing what I call spoon feeding your team, where your team, instead of learning how to do things for themselves and being empowered, they come to you for the answers all the time, and you give them those answers all the time because you want to make them happy and you want to make it easy for them to do their jobs. But actually, what's not happening is them learning how to work out those answers for themselves. People pleasing can also look like saying yes to the people above you in terms of all the work that's coming your way and perhaps the people sideways as well, but wanting to protect your team from those pressures.

Carla Miller [00:04:58]:
So absorbing all that pressure yourself so they don't really know about how much you personally are doing. And it can look like struggling to own your authority. So if you want to be liked as a priority, if people pleasing is really, really important to you, it's really hard to set boundaries, to set expectations, to hold people accountable, to give people feedback that's more on the constructive side than the positive gushing side. So being able to own your authority means being able to sort of step into the idea that not everything that you do is something people are going to like. Now if I've described you in any of those different scenarios, don't beat yourself up because we have an evolutionary need to belong to a tribe. So we still need that to feel safe. Years ago, you did not want to be isolated from a tribe. That would mean that you were basically out there on your own fighting for your survival.

Carla Miller [00:05:57]:
And we still have that sense now. And in fact, we learn young how to keep our parents happy in order to be cared for and safe. So we learn to smile back at our parents because it gets this wonderful reaction. And then we feel safe and we think, yeah, we are now gonna have our needs met. So it's hardwired into us from a young age. But we can learn to rewire our thinking because the consequences of being a people pleaser can include overworking, often to the point of exhaustion or possibly even burnout. Disconnecting with yourself and your own needs, and that can really impact your self esteem, your mental health, and your physical health. Being a people pleaser can also keep you being undervalued and therefore under promoted because people take for granted that you're going to do all these things for them when, actually, what you could be doing is spending more of your time on one of more promotable tasks, things that will help get you noticed, get the key pieces of work done.

Carla Miller [00:07:01]:
And also when we're a people pleaser, we can find it really hard to let anybody else look after us. And we all need someone to look after us sometimes. So I'm going to share with you 4 strategies that you can use if you think you might be a bit of a people pleaser, or perhaps with certain people or in certain situations you're a bit of a people pleaser. Now the first strategy is to learn why you're saying yes. What is causing you to want to please people over your own needs in certain or all situations. So learning why you're saying yes and learning how to say no is a really, really powerful way of starting to break those people pleasing habits. Because it helps you to understand yourself and to make really deep mindset shifts and create long lasting change. So if you are not comfortable saying no, do go now and download my free 5 day how to say no challenge.

Carla Miller [00:08:08]:
Totally free resource. 5 minutes a day for 5 days, and we will have you confidently say no. Head over to carlamillertraining.comforward/sayno. So that's strategy number 1. Learn why you're saying yes and how to say no. Strategy number 2 is to recognize that actually you only have a limited amount of time every day. Now we know that, but we don't act like that when we're saying yes and doing all these things to please other people. You also only have a limited amount of mental, emotional, and physical energy.

Carla Miller [00:08:49]:
So every yes that you say to somebody else is taking away resources from your own work, whether that's time to work on something, whether that's your mental energy or your emotional energy or just the physical energy it takes to go and show up to a meeting in the way that you want to show up. So that's a really key insight to focus on. I only have a limited amount of time. So it and it's a zero sum game. So if I give some of that time to somebody else, it means I have less to do the things that I need to do, the things I had already prioritized. If I spend, I don't know, a day of my time sitting in on an interview process because everyone knows that I'm good at leading interview processes, even though it's got nothing to do with my role or my team, that is time that you are not spending doing your core work, working on your strategic priorities. Now doing someone a favor every now and then, that's fantastic. But actually being relied upon to do work that's outside the scope of your job, that you're not getting paid for, is not gonna get you promoted in other ways, that's not so fantastic.

Carla Miller [00:10:04]:
It's not so helpful. So start thinking about before you say yes to something else, start thinking about, well, what am I going to not do from my own list in order to say yes to this? It's hard for us to think about our own needs, so don't think about your needs. Just think about your work. Think about your line manager and how they want you to achieve in your role. Strategy number 3 that you can use is to get better at setting boundaries. And Brene Brown has a great quote that says, daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others. And for me, that's really powerful because I hate the idea of disappointing others. I really do.

Carla Miller [00:10:52]:
But I love the idea of loving myself. And so one really useful question that I ask myself on a daily basis when I'm trying to decide what to do is what would be the action that is most caring or kind to myself, or how can I be loving to myself today? So what can I do that is kind for myself today? And getting used to thinking about that as something that's important in your decision making process. And point 4 is to remember that the only person whose job it is to put your needs first is you. So if you're not going to do it, nobody else is going to. So in the workplace, yes, it's your manager's job to create a great working environment, to be a supportive manager, to give you opportunities, etcetera. But, ultimately, they have to think about what's best for the organization, what's best for the team. They also have their own needs. So their job is not to always put your needs first.

Carla Miller [00:12:07]:
The only person who needs to put your needs first is you. Now I'm not saying that you always need to put your needs first. I'm not suggesting that you're going to go from a people pleaser to someone who is entirely selfish. However, it's okay to be selfish sometimes. It's okay to put yourself first sometimes. As they say, you cannot pour from an empty cup. So you have to fill up that cup. And actually, not just so that you can pour it out for others, but because life feels better when your cup is full, when you have that mental and emotional energy, when you rest, when you think about yourself and your needs and what's important to you.

Carla Miller [00:12:52]:
So it's time for you to start thinking about putting your needs first. Then I have a 5th strategy, which I'm reluctant to share, but it's a bit of a workaround. So if you really, really find it hard to put your own needs first, here's a way of thinking about it that's about the impact on others that might help you. Now ideally, we won't need this 5th strategy. Ideally, we'll be able to say, do you know what? I have value. I am important. I deserve to look after myself. I deserve to be able to do my job and not do other people's jobs as well.

Carla Miller [00:13:27]:
But if you need this 5th strategy, it can sometimes be useful to think, well, what am I role modeling to the people around me? So what am I role modeling to the younger women coming up in my organization? What am I role modeling to my daughter or my niece or my goddaughter in terms of whether or not as a woman my needs matter. Because people are looking at us all the time and looking at our behaviors, and they may well look at your behaviors and take lessons from that about how they should show up in the world because they like and respect you. And think about, is this something I'd wish on someone else? Would I wish somebody else that I care for to always be putting other people's needs first, or would I wish for them to be able to have a healthy amount of putting their own needs first? So role modeling can be a way to help us shift our behavior when we struggle to think about putting ourselves first, particularly when we're people pleasers. Okay. So just a recap for you there. We've talked about how to identify whether you might be a people pleaser. We've also talked about some of the reasons why we are sort of hardwired to be people pleasers. And let's just be honest that we do expect this of women in society more than we expect it of men.

Carla Miller [00:14:55]:
Even if you just look at that office housework example, so these are the non promotable tasks that people do in the workplace, things like covering for someone, taking notes, organizing social stuff, organizing birthday cards, etcetera. We know that women volunteer for it more than men. We know that women are also asked more than men, and when we're asked, we say yes a lot more than men do too. And society expects women to do that kind of stuff. And it would be great if we could work on changing that and sharing those tasks out fairly. And for the expectation in the room not to be that everyone looks to the women in the room in order to get things like that done. And I think it's become quite obvious in terms of taking notes and making tea and coffee. I think things have hopefully changed on that front.

Carla Miller [00:15:47]:
I know I always used to be asked to make tea and coffee. However, I think when it comes to the other forms of office housework, it's still really not obvious to everybody that women are doing more than their fair share there. Now we also talked about, the consequences of being a people pleaser if you take it to extremes. We're looking at exhaustion, overwork, burnout, disconnection with yourself, being undervalued and under promoted. And then I shared 4 strategies for breaking those people pleasing patterns. So the first one is learning why you're saying yes and how to say no, and I told you about a resource you can use to do that. The second one is recognizing that your time and your mental, emotional, and physical energy is limited. So every time you say yes to someone else, it's taking resources away from your own work and thinking about that when you make that decision.

Carla Miller [00:16:43]:
Then I talked about boundaries and Brene Brown's quote around boundaries and having the courage to love ourselves and asking what would be how can I be kind to myself today or what would be the loving thing to do here? And then finally, I talked about remembering that the only person whose job it is to put your needs first is you. So you can go around putting everybody else's needs first, but at no point is that really going to be reciprocated. So you need to be able to do it yourself. So hopefully, that has given you a good sense of whether you might be a people pleaser and a couple of things that you can try to help you to break those people pleasing patterns. I hope you found this episode useful. If you did, I have one favor to ask you, which is please, please, please leave a rating or review wherever you listen to this podcast. It really helps us to spread the news about the show. I know lots of people are enjoying the podcast.

Carla Miller [00:17:45]:
I'm accompanying you when you walk your dogs or you commute to work, and I would love more people to find out about it. So please, please, please do leave a review. That would be amazing. Thank you. I also wanted to let you know what I've got coming up in the next couple of months in terms of ways that you can work with me. So the first one is that the next cohort of influence and impact starts in September. That's a 3 month leadership development program for a group of up to 20 women where I will be teaching you how to tackle self doubt, how to increase your impact at work, and how to become brilliant to influencing upwards and sideways. So if that resonates with you, do go to my website, download a PDF so that you can ask your employer to fund you.

Carla Miller [00:18:29]:
The other thing we've got coming up is within women leading, which is my membership to help women lead without overwhelm, as well as the usual peer coaching calls and group coaching calls. We've also got a fantastic session with Rebecca Whittaker, who's a previous guest on the podcast, talking about how and when to coach your team. And I know from the surveys that I've done in the past that knowing how to coach your team to develop your coaching skills as a leader is something that is a high priority for many of you. So head over to my website, carlamillatraining.comforward/womenleading. Sign up. It's £49 a month. You can cancel at any time. That is a bargain, bargain way to develop your leadership skills.

Carla Miller [00:19:15]:
And if you're not already subscribed to our podcast in your podcast player, then do go ahead and make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss any of the fantastic episodes we've got coming up for you. I have, for once, been getting ahead on my recording. So we've got episodes on keeping calm on in a crisis. We've got episodes on what to do when you worry too much about what other people think about you. We've got an episode on your emotional overdraft, this idea that you are supporting your work by investing too much of yourself into it and what you can do about that. And we've got a episode coming up on managing the menopause and your menopause symptoms at work as well. So lots of goodness there. Do subscribe so that you don't miss any of it.