I’ll never forget this one coaching call.
It was five or six years ago. Woman reached out, wanted to work on her business. High performer. Sharp. The kind of person who could walk into a room and within about thirty seconds know exactly what everyone in it needed.
What I figured out later on is that her ability to read a room and deliver on it wasn’t a success tactic. It was a survival instinct.
About halfway through our first real conversation she got to it. She couldn’t stop people-pleasing. She knew she did it, she’d tried to stop, and nothing stuck. She wanted to know how to fix it.
I asked her one question.
“What’s your earliest memory of practicing that behavior?”
She went quiet. And I mean really quiet. Long enough that I genuinely thought the call dropped.
Then she came back.
She told me her dad was an abusive alcoholic. That when she was a little girl, she’d watch for his car in the driveway. She’d go to the door when he pulled up. When he walked in she’d do everything she could to keep him happy, keep him occupied, keep his attention on her. Because if it was on her, it wasn’t on her mom.
That was when it clicked and her people pleasing made total sense.
People-pleasing wasn’t something she was born with. She used it as a response to a threat. Her dad. She was trying to keep herself and her mom safe. But behaviors we repeat become automated. They drop from our conscious awareness into our unconscious and we stop noticing that we’re doing them. They become automatic.
That’s what happened to her. People-pleasing started as a survival instinct. It wasn’t nature. It was nurture. She practiced it hundreds of times, in that house, with that man, until it became second nature. Notice when he pulls up. Meet him at the door. Anticipate what he needs. Manage the temperature of the room. Keep everyone safe.
Then life moved on. Her dad was gone. The threat wasn’t real anymore. But the behavior stayed. The strategy she used to keep herself safe eventually became a self-sabotaging behavior that she shamed herself for.
I knew then that there wasn’t going to be a tactical solution to this. No framework was going to touch it. No accountability system. I was going to have to take a very different approach, and that’s exactly what we did.
The biggest thing I had her do was write a letter to that little girl. I asked her to share exactly what she would say to that little girl if she knew the child would instantly absorb every word as truth. After she wrote it, I asked her to read it every day for 90 days. She didn’t do it perfectly. But eventually it seeped in. People-pleasing became a choice rather than a habit. Life got better for her. Easier on her family too.
Since that conversation I’ve had some version of it thousands of times. We judge ourselves for the behaviors we can’t explain. We call them weaknesses. We call them character flaws. We shame ourselves for things that were never flaws to begin with. They were survival tactics. Automated. Unconscious. Running in the background long after the threat that created them was gone.
If more people could slow down long enough to understand why they do what they do, and give themselves a little grace in the process, I think life would get a lot lighter. And a lot more free.
live freed,
Jordan
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