People pleasing is neither a value nor a virtue. It’s just futile. You can’t control how other people feel about you or anyone else. You can care, but you can’t make people feel anything. All this devotion to making other people happy is a great exercise in futility. The worst part is, the people you spend the most time trying to please rarely notice it.
I remember bending over backwards to keep the peace in my family. I grew so much personally for that effort. No one appreciated it but me. I thought when I responded less defensively or more amicably they would notice, and they would love me. They didn’t. Tyrants rarely notice those who are obedient to them. It just gives them more of an opportunity to ignore you. I can imagine at some level wanting to be ignored by tyrants. It sort of beats the alternative. But wouldn’t it be better to be respected by your heroes?
I talk to people struggling in relationships or possibly worse, struggling without relationships, and I just want to widen their vision of what they desire. It’s usually so, so small. “I just want someone to talk with me and listen to me.” Don’t “just” want anything! You might just get that and just that.
If you want to strengthen relationships in your life, you are going to have to release this notion of asking for little or trying to make other people happy. You have to start building a better relationship with yourself. To do that, you have to come to terms with your core values. Once you take your values seriously, others will come to respect you. People respect values. Until you start to figure out what you value and cultivate it in your own life, you will be essentially valueless, useless to others no matter how much time, effort and money you spend. I can tell you from experience I have expended a lot of resources being useless to others or at least being treated as much.
I don’t want to work hard at selling you on the notion of being useful and furthermore respected. You already want the things in your life that the cultivation of personal values can bring you. When you see people who model health, abundance, beauty, harmony, grace, ease, joy, peace, kindness, love, romance and other such values and you feel longing, then what you are truly longing for is a certain level of commitment to your values. If you are chasing the outcome, though, trying to cajole others into loving you or respecting you, without developing and honoring those values already within you, fostering them, nurturing them and defending them, you are going in the opposite direction of your dreams and desires.
You can spend the rest of your life trying to please people so they will like you. OR you can spend a month or two, devoted to something like beauty. When focused on cultivating it, defending it like it were a newborn infant child and making every decision based on the outcome of hope for beauty’s future growth in your life, people are going to want to be near you. You are going to be a beautiful person. Your beauty alone will be a force to be reckoned with. Relationships are going to present themselves to you that you never imagined while thinking small. Those people whose attention you grovel for, like a pauper in the streets, their heads may start turning. At that point, you may not so much even care for their attention. They also may not come around. You can’t control other people or what role they choose to play in your life. However, you can create 100% harmonious relationships with the people who want to be there and eventually, you can effortlessly eliminate those who can’t or won’t respect your values.
Until you have values, you have nothing. Those people can not see your effort or care about it, because there’s nothing behind it but longing and discontent. You can’t be selfless if you don’t have a self to begin with. You’re just a void. The good news is, you can start filling up that void without any outside validation. Stand for something. Stand for your values.
I am offering an exclusive opportunity for 10 people who want to build better boundaries and stand up for those values to join me on this journey. If this idea of standing for something resonates with you, email me at TheSovereignMom@gmail.com with the subject line “STAND UP” and you will be added to a list of people I will notify first about this one time special offer to build better boundaries with me.
I look forward to working with you. The time has come to stand for something. The world is waiting!