People Pleasing: It's Worse Than You Realize

People Pleasing is f**king you up way more than you think.

In this episode, John Oakes explores the concept of people pleasing, revealing that it is often not about making others happy but a survival mechanism rooted in childhood. He discusses how this behavior can significantly affect mental health, weight loss goals, and overall wellbeing. Through the example of a character named Cindy, John illustrates the consequences of prioritizing others over oneself and offers steps to reclaim personal freedom and assertiveness. He also shares insights into the deep-rooted fears that drive people pleasing and provides guidance on how to begin breaking free from these patterns.

00:00 Introduction to People Pleasing
00:45 Personal Story and Mission
01:34 Understanding People Pleasing and Weight Struggles
04:22 The Case of Cindy: A People Pleaser's Life
14:43 Childhood Roots of People Pleasing
19:19 The Impact of People Pleasing in Adulthood
23:45 Understanding the Nature of Control and People Pleasing
24:17 Steps to Break Free from People Pleasing
27:06 Facing Your Fears and Setting Boundaries
29:45 The Importance of Self-Care and Personal Wellbeing
33:50 Accepting Your Reality and Needs
38:45 The Journey to Emotional Freedom
40:51 Conclusion and Coaching Information

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Transcript

people pleasing

[00:00:00] Welcome back today. We're going to talk about people pleasing and why people pleasing isn't necessarily about pleasing other people, what it's really about and what this can teach us about our past, our present and our future, how this can impact our mental health, how this is going to impact our goals at losing weight and living a healthier life.

Generally how this topic interferes with our freedom. Our ability to know ourselves, express the truth of who we are, to live from our values and our true desires, rather than living out of avoidance of fear, our survival mechanisms, and these overcompensations that we've been playing out since usually childhood.

If you don't know me, my name is John Oakes. I have a long history with mental illness and weight gain. And when it came time to dig myself out of a very bad place, I couldn't find the answers I was looking for, and my goal is to help you

[00:01:00] Basically to go back in time and explain to myself the things that I desperately needed to hear back when I was in that really dark place, really hopeless place with, yeah, up that Creek, you know, that Creek with no paddle.

So if you deal with depression, anxiety, if you believe you have childhood PTSD or trauma that surfaced later in life, if you're messed up and you really are desperate for help and you haven't been finding the answers you're looking for then I think you're in the right place. And I really hope that you can take a lot from this.

Now, for the most part, I'm going to talk about people pleasing in general sense how it affects us, how it holds us back in a variety of ways. But first off, let's just encounter people pleasing the way a lot of my clients do. And many of the people listening to this do as well especially people who struggle with weight.

People who struggle with their weight. tend to struggle prioritizing their wellbeing by [00:02:00] definition when it comes to taking time to make healthy food or buy healthy food or budgeting for things that they need to take care of themselves or making time in the, in the time budget and the schedule for the gym and all these things.

It's very hard for them to do those things while Because something else has to be downgraded and the people I work with, including myself, our brains tend to keep our wellbeing at the bottom of the list. It doesn't always feel like self hatred. It doesn't always feel like a complete lack of self worth.

Sometimes it just feels like a great deal of importance is,

is riding on. Items number 1 through 118 on the checklist on the to do list. And as soon as we can get through those, then 119, absolutely. Yeah. Self care. That's not, that's our next priority for other people. They can identify that. No. Yeah, I definitely hate myself. I definitely [00:03:00] specifically put any, any active self care way at the bottom of the list.

And I know I do it and I don't really know why, and I don't know how to stop. And I don't even know if I want to, I want to, but I don't. Either way, no matter where you're at, I feel you, you're in the right spot. But practically speaking, anyone who has a considerable amount of weight to lose has gained a considerable amount of weight. And that's hard to do while also putting your wellbeing first and foremost in every aspect of life, right? People who suffer with these issues often have. expressed excellence in many other areas of life.

And this can be sort of a by product of that, you know, putting wellbeing on the back burner. Sometimes people are able to have excellence in, , career or relationships or their finances or some aspect of their lives other than their weight. Because they they've so thoroughly perfected this system of, [00:04:00] well, I can take all the energy I would have put into well being and funnel it all into this sort of life or death effort at succeeding at life relationships, finances, career, whatever.

And this is where people who are very successful in many areas of life are often struggling in those very areas of life. And when it comes to relationships and work. One of the ways people struggle, if they're putting their wellbeing on the back burner, let's say, let's say Cindy, she's our, she's our go to gal, right?

She's our, our avatar, our example for just about everything. Cindy has a job. She, she manages people. She manages a lot of money goes through her hands every week, one way or another. She makes big decisions that. are probably more responsibility than what she's being paid to do.

So her performance at work is always under pressure to some extent, whether it's a boss pressuring her [00:05:00] or some sort of issue with people she Overseas, people who report to her, a lot of stressful things can happen at work. Also just the nature of her job. She's got to make the right decision in, in cases where there's not always a clear cut black and white, good and bad decisions.

Sometimes it's always shades of gray and it's like, well, based on my best guess. And given that the, that the future is unpredictable based on the principles I've been taught and that my company values, I'm going to make this decision, right? And there's always that little voice in the back of your head, like, Oh, what if you just screwed up and you're going to cost the company millions, and then you're going to lose your job.

And then you're going to be homeless and live under a bridge and no one's going to love you.

So it would make sense that Cindy, if she, if she's not valuing her well being would come home at the end of the day after she's given, given, given so much to her career.

And if she has a family. Who she feels responsible for, and she feels [00:06:00] a sense of duty toward when she gets home, they're going to have needs and she's going to automatically put those ahead of her own wellbeing. And at the end of the day, she's got an hour and a half to lock herself in her room, watch TV and eat fiddle faddle.

That's her thing. That's the one time of day where she feels like she's doing exactly what she wants to do. Now. The problem with this setup is that at work, she's not really doing the things she wants to do. She likes solving problems. She likes a certain amount of pressure. She likes winning and losing.

She's, she's a little competitive, right? She likes that there are stakes. She likes that it matters to make the right decision. Cause that's, that's why she got hired and someone else didn't, you know, she's good at what she does. She doesn't make good decisions. She is good at. Taking in information, synthesizing it, and saying, Okay, based on this, I think this is the right decision to make.

But not everything [00:07:00] about how she approaches her job is really her doing what she wants. Not everything about how she manages her direct reports is really about her doing the things she wants. She's not managing the way she wants to and she's not reporting to her boss the way she wants to. Her boss asks her to do certain things.

And even though she knows that it's going to be detrimental to her efforts or her job, she still does it. She can't really say no to her boss or bosses. And she has a hard time holding boundaries with her direct reports with her. I don't want to say underlings. They're not her employees. They're her.

I don't want to say underlings cause that's a little bit insulting or What's the word?

Her workers, let's just call them her workers. And then the same is true of, you know, her parents, her sister, her kids, her husband, now her ex husband. And still [00:08:00] somehow, even though he's her ex husband, she's still managing to put his needs before hers. Even though she's tried very hard to stop doing that. And in many ways she has still, sometimes she ends up doing something where she's like, wait a second, why am I picking up the kids from soccer?

When this is his day, wait a second, hold on.

And at the end of the day, Cindy just doesn't feel like she's done anything for herself. And so the voice in her head says, eat, eat, fall down, go into a dark room, watch. Whatever your, you know, TV show escapist thing of choice is, and just disappear for a little while, be somewhere where no one can touch you and where no one can tell you not to do what you want to do, not to eat some junk food.

Now, the trick is there's no balance here because there's no amount of fiddle faddle and TV watching that could really.

Edify [00:09:00] Cindy enough to balance out the things she's giving away everywhere else in life.

Not only could it not replace what she's giving away elsewhere in life. She's really just giving away more. She's not actually looking after her wellbeing. She's following. A voice in her head telling her, this is the way you have to look after your wellbeing. And it feels like it's right, but mostly because she's never found another way.

She's never found a, another approach, another plan, so to speak a schematic of how could I possibly do life differently? And also had it, you know, mapped out for her, modeled for her and experienced it Outside of all the voices in her head, telling her that, that the only thing that's possible is locking herself in a room and eating fiddle faddle,

which I don't know. I'm sure what fiddle faddle is. It's just like some bullshit, you know, snack, [00:10:00] whatever country you're from. Just insert whatever bullshit snack people eat.

I think it's like popcorn and like nuts and stuff, like all glued together with caramel and whatnot. I could be wrong.

Some delicious blend of sugar, salt, and fat that has some sort of texture that is pleasing to the mouth.

So this is the scenario. A lot of people pleasers find themselves in, they, they don't necessarily think of people pleasing as the biggest. Sin of the day. Oftentimes they're going to look at all the things they failed to do, the things they failed to come through on. Cause those are what they're afraid of

those are the things that are causing anxiety at the end of the day. It's a big part of what she's trying to soothe with that session of escapist TV, watching and snacking or binging even. And then of course she feels shame about the snacking and the binging. She promises tomorrow she'll do better really just creating an expectation, [00:11:00] one more expectation for her to meet the next day.

And then before she can meet the expectations, she has put on herself. Other people put expectations on her. She accepts them. This knocks the expectations for her wellbeing off the plate. And we rinse and we repeat. So the first thing I want to point out is that Cindy's well being cannot be another expectation, which needs to be met.

If it's on the level of expectations, we know that other expectations are going to beat it out, right? As soon as there's another expectation that has to do with anybody else, she's going to prioritize that as well. over her expectations for taking care of herself. So the first thing we have to see that's at work is that Cindy literally values other people's issues more than her own.

Cindy values other people's wellbeing more than her own.

Functionally, she will give [00:12:00] preference to her boss's well being, what they want to feel less stressed, what they want done so that they can have little boxes checked so that their bosses won't get mad at them. And Cindy will take, will give preference to that over the things that really will benefit her well being.

Now. Is that really Cindy giving preference to her boss's wellbeing in a sense? Yes. But is that why she's doing it? Is it out of a sense of,

out of a sense of charity or goodwill toward another human being? Not so much. It's because Cindy thinks that if her boss is mad at her, that this would in some way lead to a catastrophic outcome. Cindy's really afraid of other people being mad at her. She's really afraid of letting other people down. So she's afraid of two things in particular,

not coming through on other people's expectations. She's very [00:13:00] afraid of that

and not keeping other people functional. Well balanced. So Cindy is afraid of course, of what's going to happen to her health. You know, she's already 350 pounds. She's she's miserable. She's unhealthy. Of course she's concerned. She's 51 years old. . She knows that this doesn't end really well. She knows that she's pre diabetic and she's going to be diabetic pretty much any day, and the health complications are only going to.

Ramp up really quickly. Every passing year, she's just going to fall apart that much quicker. And yet, even though these are clear and present threats to her physical wellbeing, she sees the threat of her boss being angry with her. She sees the threat of her workers being angry at her as more threatening than her own physical demise.

So people pleasing, isn't just some cutesy thing where it's like, Oh, I sure want people to like me. [00:14:00] No, you would rather physically die, you know, 15 years sooner than average and have your life be really substandard than potentially create a situation where you might upset someone. So clearly this is not about Cindy in 2024.

Cindy is living in a world that's been created a long time ago in a place, probably far, far away. This doesn't have anything to do with Cindy's job or her boss or her employees, her underlings, her workers, whatever we're calling them. It doesn't have anything to do with her kids or her ex husband. And it doesn't even necessarily have to do with her.

The way people become people pleasers is that something happens in childhood that makes them viscerally afraid of the emotions of other people. In an ideal situation, a child will be loved and protected unconditionally. This allows the child to be a child. And this [00:15:00] is a, usually the function of a, an adult being an adult.

And if an adult is dependent on a child for their emotional regulation, all of a sudden, we've got everything backwards, right? That's not the way things are supposed to work. A parent. Okay. Every parent has gotten frustrated with their kids. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a parent who at the end of the day comes home with, with their own issues and then leans on the child psychologically, emotionally.

However. For support for their emotional world. I need you to work to keep my emotional equilibrium. This often starts so early with kids that they don't even realize it's happening. And a lot of people don't even look back at their childhood and can see now that that's what was happening, but it was so

people like Cindy develop in a context where. Their authority [00:16:00] figures depend on them for their emotional balance, for their emotional regulation, for their wellbeing. And this is a perversion, right? Obviously we use the word perversion with anything to do with kids. It seems like sexual. We're just talking about a twisting of what ought to be right.

That sense of the word. This is a perversion of the adult child relationship.

Children should not bear responsibility for the emotional regulation of the parents. If that's happening, the child is functionally no longer a child, which means they're no longer on the child pathway of psychological development. Children need to be allowed to go down their pathway of psychological development.

You pretty much just got to stay out of the way of it. You keep the kid fed, you keep them somewhat stimulated, you keep them safe, right? And their little brains will develop on [00:17:00] their own. They need care. They need love. They need the presence of other people. That's all very important, but you don't have to, as a parent, Make your kids brains develop.

That's not really your job that that will happen on its own. And any parent can tell you like, man, just when I thought I understood who my kid was, they, they went from three to four. And all of a sudden I'm dealing with something entirely different. And with some kids it's, it's more stark than others.

Like my younger daughter, she's nothing like she was when she was four or five and she's nine years old, just completely different personality. Well, not completely there, but there were some things that she's done a completely one complete one 80 on why? Because she just developed, she just became more of what she's going to be as an adult and rather than what she was presenting at as, as a precocious headstrong four year old who basically had no interest in.

So adults can do this in a number of [00:18:00] ways. Adults can. demand that children do tasks that the parents don't want to do. They can make demands of children to perform at school or in sports. So they can demand action, they can demand success, they can demand that the child look a certain way. This is another common one where the child has to comport themselves.

In a very specific way. They have to seem like a little angel. They have to dress a certain way. They have to look pretty there, or they have to look clean cut. And, this could be a religious environment. It could be just a social a parent who's just really socially conscious and feels like what everybody else thinks about how she looks and by extension, how her children look is going to, you know, really mean something About her inherent value, just based on the opinions of other people.

It can just be a parent coming [00:19:00] home and dumping on their child. At the end of the day, it can be a parent who's having relationship issues with their spouse and making that the problem of the child. This comes in so many flavors. It's, it's 31 flavors. It's Baskin Robbins, man. This, this comes in so many flavors, but anytime, if you're a people pleaser.

There's something in your childhood where an adult made you feel responsible for their emotions. And so now in adulthood, you have continued to do this through your teens, your twenties, thirties, forties, however old you are. Now you've been doing it that long. You don't feel safe. Letting other people have their emotions.

And what ends up happening is the people who are the least emotionally regulated end up taking all of your attention. Why? Because those are the people who are potentially going to cause you harm. So you end up spending a lot of your time and energy with people who deserve your time and energy the [00:20:00] least.

You end up spending it with people who are takers with people who. Don't think about other people who really think about themselves. And because your brain is wired to stay safe. It's also wired to keep tabs on these nodes of danger in your life. So the more you are a people pleaser, the more you've been taught to avoid this danger,

the more you have learned to identify who is dangerous and to give them a lot of your attention. Why keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. You gotta keep tabs on what's dangerous, right? If, if there's a wolf in the neighborhood, you wanna know where the wolf is, right? You would wanna keep tabs on it.

You would always be looking over your shoulder just to make sure you know where the wolf is compared to where you are.

And this can get us into codependent relationships, where we identify someone who is emotionally dysregulated, unregulated, not regulated, however you want to say it, [00:21:00] and we know how to regulate them. Because of experiences in the past, we learned techniques of like, Oh, I know, I know this kind of dependency.

I can meet these needs. And so we will move toward that sort of person who is very needy. And is going to siphon our energy and our priority list is going to put them higher than us. And sometimes the person never asked us to. Sometimes the person never said, Hey, if you don't put my needs before yours, I'm out of here.

Some oftentimes you're projecting that onto them. And yeah, these people never asked you to. Emotionally regulate them yet. That's the only way you know how to relate to people, especially people you're really close to. After you, after you get to a certain level of closeness to someone, you don't feel quite comfortable unless they need you for their emotional regulation at some level, in some way.

Otherwise you feel like you have no purpose. [00:22:00] You feel it. And that makes you feel like you have no worth.

So. This is the result of something very unfair and perverse that happened in childhood from a parent, a caretaker, an adult, a teacher, a coach who treated you in ways that was really immature on their part and just not good, messed up. And in that case, you were a victim. Because this should not have happened to a child.

It cannot happen to children. Otherwise they don't grow up as healthy, well adjusted adults. And if that happens, we're going to have problems in society. We don't get to be completely closed off from the bad parenting of other people. This is going to affect everything about our, you know, our community, the, the, the places where we interact, the places where we all live.

And sadly in adulthood, it, it makes you, because in your efforts to try to avoid the dangers of childhood, it keeps you [00:23:00] repeating this cycle of, I need to keep the world turning. I need to make sure everybody's emotions are at a certain place. I need to make sure everybody's happy. I, no, one's allowed to be mad at me because if that would be catastrophic, I can't do anything, go anywhere, say anything, think anything.

That could leave me in a position where everybody hates me because then I'll have nothing. And so you're taking this perspective that your value and your safety lies in the hands of other people, people who by definition need your help to stay regulated. So it's a very twisted thing. It gets to be very, very complex.

And that's why it's really hard to see at all, let alone deconstruct, get yourself out of. Because there is a weirdly egotistical nature, right? And a lot of people who seem very controlling are often people pleasers, right? [00:24:00] They're trying to control circumstances and manage people's emotions. And they're doing it in a not so graceful way.

And people call that controlling other people. They're obsequious. They're too nice. And, but it's the same thing.

So here's one way of many to begin to look at extricating yourself from the situation. You need to find someone who you're afraid of certain emotions. You're afraid of reactions that they could have start small, start with the employee that you care least about, who's at the bottom of the totem pole.

And if they didn't like you, it really wouldn't matter and piss them off. Yeah. Don't go out of your way. Don't be mean. Don't do anything wrong. Don't, don't go out of your way to hurt them or create friction where there doesn't need to be. But do the thing [00:25:00] that you need to do. Do the thing that you haven't been doing.

Carl, I've asked you three times to get X, Y, and Z done. You're not getting it done. If you don't do it by this time next week, you are gone. Understand me. Okay. I've tried to be cool to you. You're playing me like a fool, get it done, or we're going to have a problem. And then Carl walks out and you know, Carl's going to get the first person he talks to.

He's going to be like, Oh, so and so is such a, you know, what? Good, good. This is A leap and a bound toward your personal freedom, toward your extricating yourself from this prison of people pleasing, and then you basically just work your way up from there. You start to notice all the places where like, hold on, I'm just doing this reflexively.

I'm not actually afraid of what so and so thinks of me. And in Cindy's case, she's, she's already divorced her ex. You know, she's got issues with them [00:26:00] and she's like, listen, what's the worst thing that's going to happen? He's going to leave me. I mean, I already divorced him. So the next time the ex asks for a little too much or just kind of expects her to pick up the slack

without really making it a two way street, she just says, Nope, not doing that. That's I have plans. You're going to have to figure out something else. And done. End of story. And so she, she knows the people in her life who tend to take, right? The friend who is always like, Oh, I forgot to do such and such.

Could you go pick up so and so? No, I can't. I need to go to the grocery store to do my shopping for my meal prep. And I'm not going to drop everything for you. I'm not going to drop anything. Because you didn't think through your day. Like I have things that I'm doing because they're important to me.

If you were true, if you're, you know, on fire, yeah, I'll come save you, but I'm not going to let minor inconveniences on your part become emergencies on my [00:27:00] part, because I know I wouldn't call you and expect you to drop everything because I screwed up.

And then eventually we work up to The people that were really triggered by the people that were really afraid of. And we start to say, Hey, listen, this is what I need. This is what I want. And here's why. And we learned to be assertive with them and we learn to let them react however they want, because the truth is there's nothing your boss can do to you that can really hurt you, right?

There's nothing your boss can do to you within the rules of the corporation that can really hurt you. They can call you names. They can fire you. Okay. But is that really what you're afraid of? Or are you afraid of what those things mean? Usually, Hey, getting fired and being called names. Yeah. That's going to be, that's going to be a bad day for most people, but really what's, what's, what's going to happen?

What's so traumatic about that. It's what that means about us [00:28:00] based on what, based on the stories we've been carrying around since childhood, you know, some, some passerby on the street, you know, somebody wearing a trash bag and, you know a hat made out of pantyhose and they. Walk by you and said, you're fired. You're a piece of crap. And then they walk by you. You'd probably be like okay. And then you continue on your day. I'd be like, I don't care what that person thinks of me. They're obviously something they got to screw loose.

Right. So

generally the people who you're afraid of, the emotions you're afraid of. Their ability to impact your life is if it, if it exists at all is 1 percent of what your brain is afraid it could be. It's a little grain of sand compared to the beach that your brain is inventing and it's in itself and it's mind.

Your brain doesn't have a mind or it is a mind. Does your brain have a mind in your brain's mind?

It's making mountains of possibility out of mole hills in reality.

And then there are the people who we genuinely care about. And [00:29:00] oftentimes it's the same people, the people who work for us, the people. Yeah, we got a soft spot for Carl. We see ourselves in Carl. Carl's, you know, a good kid. He's funny. We want, we love Carl genuinely, but he's screwing up and come on, man.

Like you got to do your job. We like our boss. Maybe, maybe you're like, I really like my boss. I want them to like me just genuinely. And maybe they're a father figure, a mother figure. They remind you of a teacher you once had and just genuinely want them to be pleased with you and to give you those pats on the head and you know say good job because probably you're starved for that sort of thing you don't get a lot of positive reinforcement and if anybody in your life is a source of that well then you're gonna be that much more dependent on them for that positive reinforcement.

At the end of the day, it all comes back to the same fundamental issue,

which is that you yourself are not an adequate source of wellbeing. You yourself are not a priority. What you think about [00:30:00] you has no bearing compared to what other people think about you.

So much so that you may have not ever developed a real sense of what you think about you. You may have only been thinking about yourself in terms of what keeps me safe. What keeps me what gets me the atta boys, atta girls from other people.

What things about me get me love, get my needs met and get me the attention that I need. I desire that's basically what your personality is. It's the parts of you that you've developed and brought to the four. In order to , get your needs met in the best way you've found.

Now, invariably, this is going to be scary. It's going to be difficult. That's why I say start small. Start with whatever is the next step, right? Your mind can say like, okay, here's the person I'm really terrified of ever having boundaries with. Okay. Well, we're not going to start there. Let's work backward.

Let's work backward until we find a boundary that we're like, Hey, wait a second. This is that thing. Hold on. [00:31:00] John did the podcast. John did the YouTube video about X, Y, and Z and hold on. This person's doing the thing to me right now. And I'm just reflexively saying yes. And when it's like, no, do your job.

And you can catch it and go, okay, this is that opportunity. Okay. This is easy. This is easy. I can do this. Hey, actually, I'm not going to do that. I don't have time to do it. You're going to have to ask someone else. Oh my God. I did it. I did it right. It wasn't that hard. I didn't die. Cool. And you just take baby steps forward like that.

And eventually what you're going to find is, is that you allow people to, Come up with creative solutions for their problems, which they need to do. They need that as part of their life. They need that as part of their journey. Your kids need to figure out how to solve their own problems, especially the problems they created, right?

Why? Because that's life. That's an essential skill. And you're actively preventing them from developing that skill if you're swooping in and saving them every time [00:32:00] they're in danger of experiencing a consequence for the things they've done.

You have to let other people interact with the universe, with the world. You have to let them take actions and see what results from it. You have to let them go through things to realize they're not going to die because they ran into a problem, right? Every time that you take a problem away from somebody else, it's really not yours to take.

You're taking growth away from them. You're taking their confidence away from them. You're taking their development away from them. And that's the weirdly egotistical nature of people pleasing is that by preventing other people from having certain emotions, you are in a sense, repressing their emotions.

And that is not a good thing for you to be doing. And ultimately when other people's emotions no longer scare you, guess what's going to happen with your emotions. This is not about the people around you. This is [00:33:00] ultimately about you, your emotions, your thoughts about yourself or your lack thereof, your relationship with yourself or your lack thereof.

Most of what you're trying to keep spinning in your exterior is a projection of how unsafe and unstructured you feel on the interior. If you allow people in your exterior to just have their emotions, have good days, have bad days, be angry with you, not be angry with you, love you, hate you, whatever, if you allow them to just be them and do them and you put all your effort into being you and doing you, you would eventually learn.

This is what I care about. This is the line in the sand for me. This is where I say no and and do not care what happens. These are my values. This is where I come first. Nobody comes in front of X, Y, and Z. And over time, when you start to identify those truths, these aren't like beliefs or anything that like you [00:34:00] saw on Tik TOK and you're like, Ooh, that's a nice mantra.

I'm going to try that. No, we're talking about things that you discover to be true about yourself because you are a human being. And guess what? You are real. You have real desires. You have real values. You have experiences, you have perspectives. These things are real. You can no longer float through life like a ghost, pretending that you're not real,

pretending like your needs aren't real, because the more you pretend that your needs aren't real, the less you're going to fill it, fill your needs, and the less you're going to be a fully realized adult, and that's going to impact your ability to care, truly care for the people you love, to truly be The best ex wife for, for the ex husband that you're still going to be in your life to truly be the best mom for the kids that you're raising to true to truly be the best employee for the higher ups that are depending on you to truly be the best manager.

You can be for the people underneath you and the chain of command to truly be the best friend, to truly be the best community [00:35:00] member.

And when you can say, no, I have a boundary, Nothing comes before my self care, my care for myself. Guess what? At the end of the day, Cindy's not going to be so frigging exhausted and she's not going to need to lock herself in a room with a TV show and a bag of fiddle faddle, basically just kicking the ball down the road and hurting herself in a way that doesn't cause immediate harm, but does cause harm and is causing harm and has caused harm for decades.

She's not going to have to do that anymore. Right. This is all part of the same issue. The emotional eating is not separate from the lack of motivation. The lack of motivation is not separate from the people pleasing the people. Pleasing is not separate from any of these other things, and none of it separate from the shame that drives so much of it.

It's hard to be told that you are real. I know that may sound strange, but you are real. You are as just as much of a real [00:36:00] part of this universe of this world as anyone else, which means it's not that you're entitled to have wellbeing. It's that you do have wellbeing, either you are well, or you are unwell.

And if you're not prioritizing that. That's not how life works. There's not, there's not a single organism in life that prioritizes someone else's wellbeing at their expense. Otherwise that organism would cease to exist. That organism has to protect itself first. And then if it has a symbiotic relationship with someone else, then it does that.

It's not selfishness to care for your wellbeing. It's absolutely essential. It's not even an option. You come first, logically, whether or not you accept that it's just a fact of life. It's just a part of reality. It's part of being a real entity who's here on this planet right now.

[00:37:00] And it's not a question of whether you put yourself first or not. It's whether or not you accept that you're real or not, whether or not you accept that you have real needs because Cindy. It doesn't need to go to the gym. She needs to accept that she has a need for physical exercise. And when she accepts that she's going to have an intuitive connection to what she's doing.

She doesn't need to jog. She needs physical activity. She can do whatever she wants. She can play pickleball. She can go for a hike. She can go for a walk in the mall with her friends. It doesn't matter. Right. And this is why we get so hung up on the exact house. How do I lose weight? How do I work out? How do I eat right?

Who cares? Like for the most part, just once you connect to the need that you have to do all those things, pretty much color in the color in the blanks, however you want. That's the beauty in all this is that once you do the hardest thing of all, which is accept [00:38:00] that you're real and that your wellbeing is a factor, whether you act like it is or not, everything else is up to your preference.

And this is when people start to actually connect with who they really are. Oh, I need to move my body. Okay. How, how would I like to do that? And as you experiment with that and find out what you like and don't like and why, and why you connect with it or not, you're going to deepen your understanding of who you are, what makes you tick and what you value.

And that's just going to sharpen your ability to make decisions that keep you healthy. Allow other people to be their best selves and really create harmony and balance in your relationships, in your community and within your own mind.

So people pleasing is not really about the people you are pleasing. It's mainly about the people who

in childhood made you feel like either your well being or theirs. And that was wrong. And today in [00:39:00] this moment, it's not so much about that either, because that's not really what we're dealing with. They're not here doing that to you. You're really just interacting with the world, projecting that onto everything you do.

And that's not a character flaw. That's something we can understand as a logical outcome of what happened to you. However, at this point, your healing is not so much about what that person did. In childhood, what, someone did to you in childhood, your healing is going to be about what you do now

 You know, so much of your trauma is not what happened to you, but the things you've built to keep you safe from what happened to you, the personality you've, you've built to keep yourself safe from the things that were a danger to you in childhood, the things that made you feel powerless, the things that made it so hard to get your needs met the ways you've learned to scramble to get your needs met.

The more you're willing to let those things go. and create space to watch better things show up. That's,

that's how fast and how [00:40:00] completely you're going to be able to get free from these things. It takes courage because it's ultimately about surrender, which means this is not a job. This is really a letting go. This is not a creating. It's just a receiving, right? You're just receiving reality as it is because you don't have to make it.

You don't have to make the reality where other people are allowed to feel whatever they feel because that's already the reality. They're already allowed to do that. You've never successfully controlled anyone from feeling what they're going to feel. It's just a story you're telling yourself and it's costing you an immense amount of energy to uphold that delusion.

And there's so much freedom on the other side of letting it all go easier said than done. But

that's the human condition. That's the journey. And that's why I do coaching. So I can help people work through this stuff and pick through 

The details and the particular circumstances that they're faced with. [00:41:00] And I do this in my coaching programs, one to one coaching, the weight loss freedom Academy. So definitely if you're interested in any kind of coaching, you can email me at john J O H N at Oaks, weight loss. com. Oh, a K E S. Oh, a K E S weightloss.

com. If you're not in the free community, I highly advise you to get in there, lose weight with John. You can find the link below it's school. com slash L W W J school spelled with a K, but you should be able to find the link below

with that. I wish you will hit me with your questions, hit me with your comments. I appreciate a like a subscribe, whatever you can do to help this grow and to share it with other people who need to hear it. I'd really appreciate that. And I'm sure they would too. All right. Talk to you later.