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How can people pleasing affect confidence in your business? Yes, I'm talking about people pleasing when it comes to your friends, your family, your significant other, your full time job and how this all translates into your business. I’m the best recovering people pleaser that you have ever seen. I would ensure that if somebody had something that was going on that would interfere with something I was doing, I would make a room for it always.
I would stretch myself so thin and I would actually be super resentful about it. Here’s where the people pleasing tendencies came from. I have gone to therapy and done a lot of work around my worthiness, and what I noticed was that I was people pleasing because I didn't want people to reject me or not love me because I wasn't accommodating to them. I grew up in a family where we all are bent over backwards for each other and I believe that that's what love is, which in a lot of cases it is. But I took it too literally in thinking that I wasn't worthy enough of somebody's love unless I was doing everything I could possibly do for them and doing nothing for myself.
This caused me to set basically no boundaries when it came to my energy or my time, because I would constantly be putting everybody else before me, and I thought that was my way of showing love. But when it wasn't reciprocated, or when I didn't feel like it was appreciated by people, I felt very resentful and extremely entitled.
This was a really negative cycle to be in because I was doing things for people, for my own selfish reasons. I was bending over backwards for people because I wanted them to love me and because I wanted them to reciprocate. But you can't control other humans. You can't control their thoughts. You can't control their actions. So really, I was almost manipulating people. I thought that I was able to control people and how they felt about me if I was the "best person", the "most accommodating" person for them. I did everything I could to make them feel good and make them happy.
I think back to the episode ‘why setting boundaries doesn't make you an asshole’, which is somewhere you should go next if this all applies to you. Essentially, you're setting boundaries for your own time and energy and when you're not setting boundaries, you're doing it out of selfishness. When you try and bend over backwards for everybody, what you're really telling yourself is "I am not worthy enough to honor my time, my energy and my boundaries and everybody else is more important than I am". Even though I think it's so important to prioritized relationships and your kids, don’t put yourself on the back burner time and time again.
And that is because you're teaching yourself over and over again that your needs, your wants and your desires aren't enough to warrant any time or energy. It’s so important for you to speak your mind because you'll notice that people are either going to walk all over you, or they're just going to assume that you're okay with everything. Then what happens is when you're having a really bad day, you could offload on that person. You could start to feel resentful. You could start to feel as if you do everything for everybody.
You teach people how to treat you. So if you are constantly putting your own needs on the back burner, then everybody else will too. So when it comes to your business, you are probably going to have a really hard time talking about yourself if you don’t have that sense of worthiness.
You also may not prioritize stuff in your business that you need to. You need to respect your own time and your own energy because you are leading the way for how everyone else is going to treat you. If you're confident in your business, your mission and what you're doing, you're teaching other people to be confident in you as well.
Please put yourself first, put you in your business first. When it comes to people pleasing, everything you do in your personal life will translate into your business and people pleasing is one of them. If you are an over people pleaser when it comes to your clients, you're going to get walked all over, and you really need to set those boundaries. And it starts by doing that in your personal life and with yourself!
Understand that not everybody in your personal life is going to understand what you're doing in this online space. BUT do it anyways... showing up and talking about yourself and your services and really being confident in who you are. Your potential clients are seeing that energy, and they are basically looking at you as somebody who can help them get the transformation you preach. Like I've said before, you only need to be a couple steps ahead of somebody who you're helping. The industry leaders in the coaching world all say this, and it is absolutely true.
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