I'm Mel Robbins. We're talking about people-pleasing. I'm really excited because we have a great question from a listener named Courtney.

Hi, Mel. This is Courtney from Louisiana. I have a question for you.

I have learned through therapy that one of my issues with self-love stemmed from trauma growing up.

And through therapy, I've learned to release a lot of that trauma and discovered more self-love, which in turn has made me a different person. I've learned to create boundaries. My question is that I find family members are close friends that have been with me for most of my life.

A lot of them don't like the new me with self-love.

I think they see the new boundaries sometimes as rejection, as a wall.

I've heard family members members say, when I say that won't work for me or things of that nature, that it's rude, unkind, unflexible, difficult.

But I'm just wondering if other people have discovered that a lot of times, once you enter a world of more self-love and more authenticity, if you feel a sense of rejection from others.

Courtney, I absolutely love this question, and in particular, In particular, I want to focus in on the word rejection. When you start putting yourself first, do you feel rejection from others? The answer is yes. I want to now talk a little bit about why and explain a really interesting connection between your brain and the way that your brain processes stress or discomfort, and this tendency that we have to please other people instead of making the right decision for ourselves. You know how you're in that moment? Let's just use the example of me and this pool table. For years, I knew that I wanted to disassemble the pool table. I would walk past the room, and there it is, like a New York City bus sitting in the middle of a room in a small farmhouse. I would feel this tension in my body because was I knew what I wanted, which was, could I disassemble this and not disappoint my dad? Could I disassemble this and not be the world's worst daughter? How could I do that? And that tension between what I wanted, which was to have that room back, and this pain that I knew it might cause my dad, it created this really awful discomfort inside of me.

Even the idea of making the phone call. I thought about making that phone call to my father for years. And you want to know what kept me from not making that phone call? The discomfort that I felt in my body. People-pleasing is not about other people. People-pleasing is your inability to tolerate that discomfort. So many of us resort to keeping the peace or staying quiet or for not picking up the phone because we're terrified of creating more discomfort in our bodies. And that is what the heart of people-pleasing is, that you just don't like to feel the tension of what if they're upset? What if this? What if that? And this goes all the way back to childhood. And there's a lot of research around this. In fact, based on research, this discomfort that you feel when you know that what you want is at odds with how somebody is going to feel, the discomfort is normal. You're actually wired this way. And this has to do with the fact that we, as human beings, are designed to be in groups. We are designed to bond with other people. And when what you want, putting yourself first, is at odds with how somebody else is going to feel, it's at odds with your own wiring.

This is, according to research from Dr. Juan Dominguez of Montage University in Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Dominguez says, We avoid confrontation because of this uncomfortable sensation, and neurologically, it triggers you to try to just make the uncomfortable situation go away. Brain scans actually show that your prefrontal cortex, which mediates decision making, and the anterior insula, which is involved in the experience of your emotions and body sensations, It shows way more activity than other regions in the brain when you're in a situation where what you want is in confrontation with somebody else. What you're experiencing and what I'm experiencing every single moment. When I walk past that room, I see the pool table, I know I'm like, God, I would love to just disassemble that, but I can't. I can't do that to my dad. He's such an awesome dude. It is such an amazing gift. What a self What piece of shit am I to even think that thought? When you feel that wave of distress, that's cognitive dissidence. That's what's happening with you. That there are two beliefs that are at odds, and that uncomfortable feeling is what makes you cave. It's what turns you into a people-pleaser.

And that's why this is so hard. And ultimately, this is like a huge wake-up call, I hope. People-pleasing is not about other people. It's about you and your inability to tolerate confrontation or discomfort in your own mind and body. I struggle with this. That's why self-awareness is key. I want to come back to the word that you used, rejection. Rejection. That when you start to change, what's going to happen is all that discomfort that you suppressed by keeping the peace or falling in line or saying what you think other people want to hear or just doing what everybody else wants to do. When you start putting yourself first, that discomfort that you were suppressing now appears in the world. See, people-pleasing works. That's why we do it. So I want you to expect it, everybody. And again, I talked about this in the pool table story. Just give people space to be disappointed. Just give people space to feel what they need to feel. Because whenever you change and you start making decisions that either go against somebody's expectations. No, I'm not coming for Thanksgiving. We're going to stay home with the kids. No. My parents just did that to me.

I wanted them to come for the holidays. Really wanted them to spend Christmas with us this year. When I invited them, they're like, Thank you very much. We'd love to be with you. And no, we make it a rule not to travel during the holidays. Have you seen the airports? They're crazy. Then, of course, there were these huge storms and all kinds of cancelations. And they called right before Christmas. Like, We're glad we didn't come. But I was disappointed. It doesn't change the fact that I love them. They're just putting themselves first. That's what that is. And because they're able to do that, that tension that they'd normally be managing their body, now it comes between us because we're at odds. But that's okay. That's what life is about. And you got to be able to work it out. And I want to tell you one other thing. You can Use a little empathy. My parents were great when they called and said, We're not coming, because they knew I was disappointed. And they also said, We'd love to see you, and we just don't want to do it. Having done this so many years, we're over it.

We don't have to be together on Christmas. Why don't you come down? Which I am. I'm going down next week and spending a week with them and be a lot easier to fly. And so they made room for my feelings, and they still did what made them feel good. That's the sign of a loving relationship, loving somebody, how they need and want to be loved. And so when you start to change, it's going to change the dynamic. And the main thing to keep in mind about putting yourself first is that when you start to make decisions that work for you, it makes other people think about the decisions that they're making. So if you start to say, No, I'm not going to meet you at the local diner for pancakes and sausage this morning like we have every year for 10 years because Because I'm actually eating super healthy, and they don't really have anything on the menu, and I'm going to be out going for a training run for this 5:00 AM training I'm training on running. They're going to be like, What? What do you mean? You want to know why? Because if they're used to you doing a certain thing, it is rejection.

I wanted my parents to come for the holidays, and when they said, No, that's not going to work for us. You know what that was? That's rejection because it didn't meet my expectation. But let's go back to the bottom line. I'm allowed to feel that way, and they're allowed to make decisions that they want to make. If we make space for each other, what comes through is the love. That's it. So give them room. Expect them to feel that way. And you now understand the science. One of the things that caught my attention is that you describe this thing that we all do where we become a yes person. What does that mean?

It is when we almost lose an anchor inside of ourselves and we become a yes to the outside world. We become driftwood in the ocean. We're going in whatever direction the wind is blowing us. And really, it's overwhelming because we don't feel grounded, we don't feel centered, we don't know how we're making decisions. We're just going whichever way the world is going. And boy, these days, the The world is going in a lot of directions.

I literally, when you said, You're like a driftwood in the ocean, going in whatever direction, I thought about my poor husband in our marriage. That I am such an overwhelming force. What you're talking about is that you can become a yes to outside forces and not even realize how much you're doing it, and you lose use your ability to make decisions or even to know yourself.

Absolutely. I mean, the goal in the end is to become a sailboat with a rudder that is influenced by the wind but charts its own course. We don't ever want to go so far away from that, that we're anchoring ourselves and unable to move, and we don't care which way the wind is blowing. We We want to care about all of that, and we want to make sure that what we feel is that we have some input into the direction in which we're moving.

I would never have labeled my husband a people pleaser. But when I think about how he goes through life or has until recently, he was very focused on making sure everybody else was okay, and he put himself last. Is that the same thing as people pleasing, or is people pleasing something else?

People pleasing is the moment that you give up what matters to you in order to appease or please somebody else so that you can belong, so that you don't have to confront conflict, so that you can keep that relationship intact. I think all of these have spectrums. What I'd say is, at the end of the day, what you really want is that you're able to take input from the outside world. But when it's time to make a decision, you turn up the voice, the sound of your own heart slightly louder than you can hear the voices of others. I love you. And so that's the end. That's really the end way because it's a It's nuance. We live in a world with other people. We care about each other. It matters to us that we belong. And so to be able to say, Oh, someone's a people pleaser, or they're not, Listen, at the beginning of my life, 100%. First three and a half decades of my life, 110%, the scale was tipped so far on one side. I'm a healer, right? I'm a doctor, I'm a coach. All of these come from that place.

It's such a good intention to serve. Yes. But when it goes that far, at least what I learned about myself was that it came from a trauma early on in my life where I didn't feel like I belonged. And so if I didn't feel like I belonged or I didn't understand what I did wrong, then later on, I will almost overcorrect in my life to make sure no one sends me... It was me being sent away with my grandparents when I was really young. And I didn't understand why am I being sent away. For my parents, it's an act of love. But to a child, it felt like, Wait, why am I the one being separated? How we interpret what happens early on helps us figure out coping mechanisms and strategies that we use to manage that pain or that stress that occurs later on. I went too far on one in one direction. What I hope I never lose, Mel, is caring about what the people around me think, what they want, who I'm in partnership with, and what he wants. So I really resonate with your husband because I think that's a lot of me.

And I needed to come more into balance to become who I truly am. And I needed to learn how to sit in the discomfort of another in order to be true to myself.

There are There's so many things that you have already said that I don't want to go forward yet without stopping and taking some time and unpacking it. I want to make sure you heard Dr. Neha say this image of a sailboat with a rudder and a sail that can use the outside forces to go in a direction that you want, but that you stay centered to yourself. The second thing that I wanted to put a highlighter on is when you describe story of being a little girl, and your parents sent you to live with your grandparents, and you didn't understand why. Can you unpack that for us? Because I had a very similar visceral experience. When you heard that, when I heard you say that story, I had this visceral image of myself as a little, little kid going, Why are you mad at me?

I'm going to tell you a little bit about it, and we'll just see how I do. When I was three months old, my parents are immigrants from India. And in 1965, they came here to build a life. I grew up in Michigan, in Grand Blank, Michigan, and I'm the middle daughter of three. My grandmother, because we're Indian, came over to take care of the children while my parents were both working full-time to make ends meet. And so My grandmother was cooking, cleaning. I have an older sister, 18 months older than me. So now there's a newborn, and you can imagine those two little ones in this whole thing. So my grandmother's there. My grandfather gets stationed by the UN in Africa to help them with their agriculture. He calls my grandmother and says, I know Neha's three months and Ritu's 18 months, but I need you here. I'll do the work of the United Nations project, but I need you to do the social world, which you do so well. My grandmother scooped me up, had a talk with my parents, scooped me up and said, I'm going to take Neha with me. You take care of Ritu.

She's potty trained. I'm going to take Neha with me. We'll have plenty of resources there and me, and everything's going to be great. And my parents thought, Oh, my gosh, how amazing. She'll get the love her grandmother who was going to be here taking care of her. So they sent me. Fast forward two years, and my sister and my mother came to pick me up. Except a three-month-old didn't know what was happening, but a two-year-old sure does. So when they came to pick me up and brought me back, I didn't stop crying for more than a month. I would just wake up, I'd be crying. Where is my Nani and Nana? Where are they? My parents, who were in their 20s, doing the best they knew how, moving to a new country, all of these things, were beside themselves with this two-year-old who wouldn't stop crying. It took about a month, and I realized how stubborn I was because when I was little, I would only call my dad. In that time, I'd only call him, Hey, you. I wouldn't call him dad. I was like, Hey, you, potty. Hey, you, hungry. Hey, you. But it took about a month of his persistence.

I have to give him credit. I upgraded him to uncle.

Wow.

I realized after about a month or two that no matter how much I cried, I wasn't going back. And so I better adjust to the environment I'm in. I began to scan the environment. I mean, I knew what everybody wanted, my mom, my dad, my sister, the Indian community around me, my neighbors. I became such a good child that when I overheard my dad later on wanting to He just made a comment like, Yeah, the second one was a girl, too. I wanted a son who was an engineer. Then I heard my mom saying, Wow, I missed my calling to become a doctor. I wish, I hope one of my girls becomes a doctor. Boy, Mel, my radar was so in tune to everybody else's needs. And the Indian community, in general, it's like, Hey, so you're good at math and science? Are you going to be an engineer or a doctor? So this little girl grew up like a sponge, absorbing the external environment because inside me was too painful. So I checked out and disconnected from myself and tuned into the accolades and love that I could get from going outward.

However you could get them. So can you describe for us just what happened to you and/or what you see in your practice so that anybody listening might be able to locate them in this moment where they felt separate and people-pleasing, became a coping mechanism.

I remember being really young, about seven years old. My dad's parents really never taught him about emotions. He has a temper that I write about in my book. My dad's temper, I wanted to figure out why I was getting bullied when I was older, but it was people who were getting really angry and blowing up and telling me to do things.

I think it's those moments that really create this experience where we are uncomfortable with other people's discomfort, or we feel as though we've done something wrong, and we knee-jerk, move into a mode of, How do I make this okay?

How you show up as a leader today is as much determined by your childhood blueprint as your wardrobe at home influenced what you're wearing today. I want to help deconstruct the invisible connections between their past and their present moment experience. I traced it back to being about seven years old in a yellow kitchen, standing behind a plant while my parents were arguing about something. And my dad got really mad. He picked up a plate. It was empty, but a plate, and he smashed it down on the table and it broke. And little seven-year-old, my mom said, Neha, can you please go upstairs, honey? Can you please? I'd like to talk to your father. And so that was my cue to exit left. But I remember, it wasn't until 20, 30 years later that I remember saying, Oh, wow. I, in that moment, came up with, Don't make dad mad, because if you do, this time it was the plate. And if mom wasn't here, next time it would be you. I didn't do this consciously, but my little brain went scurrying up the stairs and noted to itself danger. Anytime someone starts raising their voice, thumping, breaking, slamming cupboards, doors, whatever it is, don't make any more trouble.

Get out of there.

Right. I think we all have an experience like that growing up, because the hardest thing in the world when it comes to yourself is managing your own emotions, both what you're feeling and your ability to tolerate it. When we went to our massive audience online and started asking people about people-pleasing, the vast majority, 70% of people said, I often say yes when I mean no, and the majority of the time it's at work and with friends. 82% of people responded that they feel constantly stressed, irritated, tired, and impatient, and they attributed it as being related to some conflict that they were avoiding. You, as a medical doctor, have seen the impact not only in your own life, but with your patients, both when you were practicing as a resident and also in your current practice practice, the impact of all of this pent-up inability to tolerate emotion and then twisting yourself in knots to make everything on the outside okay When you are simultaneously killing yourself on the inside, can you talk to us about the physical impact that people-pleasing and being somebody who's so concerned about the outside that you're not thinking about you and inside of you?

What is the physical impact of doing this over time to yourself? Always putting everybody else first. Here's some of the things that people said. I avoid conflict because I'm afraid of criticism, because I hate confrontation. That was a huge one. I hate confrontation. I just want to keep the peace. It makes me uncomfortable. It's just easier.

Well, let me tell you, it's only easier short term. It's easier in the moment. So when you come to a decision point, am I going to address this or am I going to not say anything about someone wearing shoes in the house, someone leaving dirty dishes in the sink? Every day. This is an everyday experience. What happens is in the short term, you have a choice. If you choose to ignore it, you take the short term high of not having to deal with it.

It's just easier to do the dishes. It's easier not to say something. It's easier to go to their house for the holidays. It's just easier to say, I'll take the pager or I'll do the summary of the report or I'll handle the thing or I'll pick it up or I'll just say yes because I don't want to deal with the drama. So in the moment, you're like, Okay, I know that this is not the right decision because I can feel my resistance to it, and I can feel my... But then I just take it on myself because I think it's easier. But you as a medical doctor, Dr. Neha, are here to say, No, something else is going on. What's going on?

Well, you're taking the short-term high, and you're going to end up with the long-term yuck. You're going to end up with looking yourself in the mirror saying, Does Does everyone think I'm a magic fairy around this house? Nobody else does anything. So what happens is, Mel, if there's a conflict between you and I, and it's between us, and we ignore it, it grows bigger. It doesn't go away. We think we've just avoided it. It actually grows bigger and it changes location. And so it took me a good 10 years of me wanting to be curious about why I got bullied in my life, why I felt so tearful when I would leave people. All these curiosities led me down the path of exploring my childhood, which gave me the answers of what the unhealed experiences were for me that I needed to heal in order to, in the present day, feel more connected, be able to talk about these stories without crying. Sometimes I do get tearful. Okay, so there's something here, Mel, that I want to say is underpinning a lot of people-pleasing. It's that we don't really teach our children. We weren't taught, and oftentimes because our parents didn't know themselves, how to handle disappointment, how to handle discomfort, an underlying sense of unease in our bodies.

Whenever we get physiologically or biologically, we feel uncomfortable, our body starts talking to us, we do anything we need to to make that go away.

Every single human being has that experience at some point in their childhood where you're like, Scan the environment. And now, based on what's happening outside, I got to become or behave or do something in order to remain safe or to be seen or to get the love or to I just get them off my back. Is that the heart of people pleasing? Maybe I should ask you this, what is people pleasing? What is it? Is it a personality? Is it a coping mechanism? What is people pleasing?

The way I think of people pleasing is it's a behavior that we use in order to feel safe and belong. I became an engineer and a doctor, and I blamed my parents like, Oh, my My parents made me do this until a very smart coach once said to me, Really, Neha? Who applied to engineering school? Who did all the problem sets? Who took the exams? Who did the 36 hours shifts in residency? I'm pretty sure it was you. So you want to tell me what you wanted more than they wanted? You're the one who did it. And in that moment, I was like, Oh, I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be valued. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be recognized in the Indian community and in the world. I wanted to be of value, and I didn't want anybody to send me away again. So it's a safety thing. It's subconscious. Of course, I didn't know it at the time. But boy, this is the value of going back and understanding the blueprint of your childhood, of understanding the decisions you made to survive to adapt and to adjust to a world you didn't yet understand.

Is everybody on the planet a people pleaser?

What I would say is I think everybody has had the experience of giving up themselves in order to belong to another. I'm thinking it's Gabor Mathe who speaks about authenticity over attachment, that sometimes we choose attachment over authenticity and that we give up who we really are, if we know that, consciously. If we know who we are, we give it up in order to stay, keep the relationship, stay attached, be part of a group. I went to med school. Engineering and med school, absolutely, I did it. Now, I can see that I did it with those underlying subconscious intentions. I went to engineering school because I was good at math and science and because I heard my dad say that one day in the office. I was walking by. He had no idea I heard him. Then the second piece is the Indian community and my mom revered doctors. My mom missed her calling. I think that's a bigger piece underneath here, which is when you don't know, when you're not anchored to what you value and who you are, you are that driftwood in the ocean.

I want to go back to what I said at the very beginning, which is that I had never thought about my husband, Chris, as a people pleaser, because I consider myself a people pleaser, not anymore, but that in the past, for probably almost 50 years, I was actively trying to make sure nobody was mad with me and actively trying to avoid conflict and actively scanning the environment and saying yes when I meant no and not really good with boundaries and feeling a lot of anxiety and a lot of resentment and all of that stuff. And so my experience of people-pleasing was on the type A end and on the, you are actively engaging in something to manipulate the way other people respond to you. That's what you're doing. And I got it. I never thought about my husband on the spectrum of people-pleasing. I have learned about my husband that he was like so many people, and perhaps you listening, he felt like the forgotten one in the family. Nobody was there to pick him up. Everybody was too busy to come to his He's got story after story after story. Just a couple of weeks ago, his mother was reflecting with tears in her eyes about how poor Christopher, we put him up in an unfinished addict in a crib, and that was his room because we didn't want to hear him.

When you said driftwood floating in an ocean, I had this visceral experience that that's what my husband must have felt like for years. And so disconnected from himself because his experience was, it didn't matter what he said. It didn't matter what he did. Nobody was coming.

It didn't even matter if he was crying.

Correct.

Because he was up in the crib in the attic.

Correct.

The function of your brain is to help you seek pleasure and avoid pain. Very basically. It's like this amazing, incredible incredible tool that helps keep us safe in the world. Seek pleasure, avoid pain. Since we were little, if we were told things like, go in your room and don't come out until you have a smile on your face. We're told things that when we're feeling unhappy, disappointed, when we express it, when we say it, it's wrong, it's bad, don't go there, and it's not welcome in this household. We grow up believing that we need We need to fix it. We need to fix it in ourselves and fix it in the environment, because who knows what's going to happen if we don't?

One of the things that you said that really made me go, Holy cow, this is me, is that one of the biggest red flags that you can have when you're reaching that critical stress, you're overextended, you're saying yes to too many things, is when you start to resent the outreach from friends or from your job. Can you unpack that in the context of people-pleasing and what that means when you are resenting things you normally wouldn't have?

Well, listen, resentment is such a big clue. It's a big clue that your boundaries have been trampled all over, and you probably never even drew them. You may never have even told people that boundaries were there.

Most people don't.

No. And yet you find yourself resentful. I've heard basically a saying, and I'm not pinning where I've heard it from, but It's basically that resentment is like me drinking poison hoping that you die. That's how effective that is. The resentment is one of those big clues that you have over extended yourself, that you've said yes when you meant no. You've given people parts of you that you wanted to keep for yourself, whether it was your time, your energy, your expertise, your care, whatever it is. So you want to really ask yourself in those moments, wow, first of all, how does resentment show up in my body? What's the way that I am aware right now? Is my stomach sinking? Do I feel weak in my knees? What is happening? So the first thing you want to do is decipher how you know.

I can tell you how it is for me. It's a gigantic... It's a full body like, Fuck. There's shit again. It's like a full thing that I feel. And the other thing that I've come to learn, this is why it was a huge thing, oh, my God, you're overextended, is that it is also a sign of a broken broken process or a broken system that you're in, something that needs updating, leveling up, some communication pattern that's broken. It's something outdated that needs leveling up. When I think about it that way, Dr. Neha, I don't make it personal like an attack. I'm able to go, Oh, I'm really resentful right now over this, and I'm stupid to be, so something must be broken that needs attention. Is that a good way to think about it?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the me-we world because you may have been carrying a Boulder uphill. I mean, I am guilty of single-handedly trying to change the healthcare system, trying to make it be different than it is. And so once again, I'd ask you, what is your role in this? You really want to do something amazing to help people. What's your role in it? What's the environment environment that you're in? But the question becomes, have I voiced this? Have I told anyone? Or do I just vent at home?

I love that we have started with this huge spectrum of people-pleasing because not knowing what you want or believing it doesn't matter what you want, or feeling like the only way that you're going to get the love and the safety and being seen and the validation that you deserve is by overachieving. Those are all forms of people-pleasing because to your point, you are so focused on what's outside that you're not anchored to what's on the inside. Dr. Neha, how did you come to realize that all of this was going down? You have a story at the age of 31 and practicing as a physician. Can you share that with us and how you connected the dots between illness, stress, overwhelm, anxiety, depression, and people-pleasing?

Yes. My regular life at work was busy, 18 patients in the hospital, five days on, five days off. Takes me three of the five days to recover. I'm in this whole cycle. I still remember it. It was June 17, 2004, I walked into the hospital. I'm seeing my 18 patients, last day on service, I get to sign everybody off. Somebody calls in sick. What do I say? They say, Can you take the Alpha Pager? Somebody's sick today. The Alpha Pager means you also take all incoming traffic, air traffic control from all neighboring hospitals.

Oh, my gosh.

What did I say? Last day on service, I'm exhausted. I say, Sure, I'll do it. I take it. Five hours later, so I started What is 6:00 AM, it's 11:00 AM. I've seen two of my 18 patients, and I turn to the nurse and I say, Hey, Nina, could you please get 40 mill equivalents of IV potassium for the gentleman in room 636? She turns to me and says, Dr. Sangwa, are you okay? I say, Yeah. Why? And let me just tell you, truth be told, that was my first indication I might not be. I said, Yeah, sure. Why? And she said, Because you've asked me that same question four times in less than five minutes, and I've answered you every time.

Wow.

And it was one of those moments where I went into a little bit of shock. I don't know what's going on here, but I better pay attention. So I walked to the bathroom and I contacted a psychiatric colleague, and I just said, Hey, Roger, when can I do it? I just want to consult you. Something weird just happened. And he said, Sure, stop by today at five o'clock. It was 11:00 in the morning. I looked at my pale, weary face in the mirror and I said, How about now? And boy, that is code in doctor world for I am in trouble. He took me in, and one hour later, he diagnosed me as a severe people pleaser. He told me that single-handedly, I was trying to take care of the fact that the hospital environment was under staff to make budget, that I was in an environment of bullying in the hospital, and that I was a real people pleaser that had started to manifest here in my work that every time someone needed something, I was the one to volunteer. What he told me that was really lovely is he said, I really want to acknowledge how much you give.

He wasn't making me wrong or bad. He was trying to help me understand that there's what I now refer to as me, we, world.

What is that?

I'm an engineer, so I like to get to the root cause of problems, not just bandaid them. In our world, I think a lot of times people get overwhelmed because they think about me now, or they zoom way out and they think about world and I can't do anything. When I think about problems and how I solve them or how do I to the root of them, I realized that oftentimes it has something to do with me, it has something to do with we, it has something to do with the world. The environment of the hospital in general, being understaffed contributed to my needing to take the pager, needing to do more with less all the time, even if there's no resources. What I do, even in conflict, if I'm in any conflict, you can do it anywhere in your life. You want to think about it as, what's my part in this? What's someone else's part in this? What's the environment? What's the role of the environment and the situation that we were in? I call it wee-wee world because it reminds me that I need to expand my perspective to understand what's happening.

That is incredibly helpful. I also love that another medical doctor diagnosed you with people-pleasing.

He did.

I love this framework. I also love the fact that once he connected the dots, medically speaking, between this coping mechanism of people-pleasing and taking on everything around you as a way to feel loved and needed and all this stuff. I know tons of our listeners will resonate with this, regardless of whether you work or not. They just take it all on. You're the one in the family taking care of mom and dad. You're the one that's always doing this. You're the one that's a volunteer at the school. You're the one that's always saying yes. You're the one that's organizing everything. This stopping and going, Okay, what's my I've heard in this? What is my role to play in this? What is the role of the environment in this? Can you explain this in the context of you've got aging parents and siblings, and one person feels like it's all on them?

You bet. So if I am, let's say, a child, my parents are aging, and I'm the one being like, Why do I have to do Everything. Well, I need to take a moment to say, When mom and dad aren't doing well, what's my first reaction? Is it, I'll pay for it, I'll be there, I'll go over? And let's say a sibling says, Well, I can go over in an hour, and I say, Well, that is not good enough. I need to go over this minute. Sometimes it's true that things are urgent and I need to go over this minute. But if my answer every time is, No, I need to take care of it right now because I need to be the good girl, because I need to be the good daughter, because I want to get an A, whatever it is, I need to pay attention to my part in it. Now, And so if your adrenaline starts running every single time, you want to just say, Oh, what's my part? What's my sense of urgency here? Then why does my sister or brother always think it can be done tomorrow or next week?

Pay attention to what's going on for them. Pay attention to the larger dynamics of your family. What role have you been playing for a very long time in your family? Who played what role? And how How does it show up with your parents? There's a bigger ecosystem, so it goes me, we, world.

Got you. But the first part, which I'm really starting to get, is that when you ask yourself, What's my role in this, you will inevitably find yourself having to look in the mirror and see those moments where you can't deal with discomfort in your body. You can't deal with the disappointment that it's not going a certain way, or that there's some uneasiness that you feel. But what if nobody goes? What if this happens? What if that happens? And so the people-pleasing is triggered by something happening in our bodies.

Yeah. And what I would say to you as a doctor is I learned from my patients that their inability to communicate with themselves and each other makes them physically ill.

Wow. Can you talk a little more about that? Because that really, really piqued my interest on resolved conflict, on met expectations, misunderstandings, broken promises, heartbreak, fractured relationships, loss, separation, unhappiness. All of this stuff, all of this discomfort that we process by saying, It's It's just easier not to say no. It's just easier to give in. It's just easier to make the world around me okay and work another weekend and take on that thing that isn't my responsibility to take in. That it actually bubbles to the surface as physical illness, stress, burnout, anxiety, depression, all that stuff. Is that what you're saying?

100%. I found that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80% of all illness.

Wow.

When I realized that, I came back in the hospital and I was like, Hey, guys, I figured out that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80% of all illness. Why are we not asking our patients once we've physically stabilized them, Let's ask them what's at the root of their stress. My colleagues, one at a time, gave me some version of this, Neha, just like you wouldn't order a test or a diagnostic that you didn't know what to do with the result, nor should you ask a question that you don't know what to do with the answer. I'm telling you, Mel, I got angry, I got sad, and I almost got emboldened. Then we give them some cocktail of medications, antidepressant, anti-anxiety, or sleep medication, to help their physiology get back in sync. Now, these things are good to do when somebody is about to fall over the edge of burnout or stress or overwhelm or whatever it is. They're helpful. But as a long-term strategy, one month later, we send them back in the ring for round two with no new awarenesses of how they got there or tools to fix it.

But I want to make sure the person listening really gets the takeaway, which is the root cause of 80% of the diseases and the health issues that people people have can be traced back to the stress in their life. You are also saying that the majority of the stress that you have control over and that this all stems even deeper to an inability individually for you to tolerate unease in your body, discomfort, or disappointment, and that That is what is triggering people's inability to effectively communicate with themselves or other people. That is what turns us into people-pleasers. That is what turns us into YES people. That is what is contributing to you getting sick and unhealthy and feeling anxious and stressed, and that there is a solution. Tell us these five questions that you ask the people that you work with, Dr. Neha.

I call it the awareness prescription.

Okay.

The night before their discharge, I would say to them, I'm getting ready to discharge you tomorrow, and I'd like to give you the opportunity to answer five questions. Question number one, why this? Why a heart attack? Why not your liver or your left leg? Why has your body, why has this part of your body broken down? And whatever comes to you is the right answer.

Okay.

Question number two, why now? Why not three years ago? Why not two weeks from now? What is the message that you needed to get in this moment that you were not getting? Question number 3, since hindsight's 2020, what clues, symptoms, patterns that didn't make sense now make perfect sense? Question number Four, what else in your life needs to be healed?

Oh, that's the dozy.

And question number five, if you spoke from the heart, what would you say to me? And so every patient knew why they were, what was at the root of their stress. They knew why they were sick. They knew what they needed to do. I wonder if there's not a single patient, thousands and thousands of them have done it. I speak about it actually in Talk or Act, how I use this and help them get to the root of what was going on. Here's the best part, Mel. My patients, families weren't the ones that started writing me after this. The patients themselves would show up in the hospital cafeteria, would write me letters themselves and say things like, Hey, Doc, you remember that lifelong migraine medication I was on? I only need half the dose. Hey, Doc, it's the first time in five years I've slept through the night without back pain. Hey, Doc, I only need a third of my anxiety medication now. I think I'm making progress. And they had started to do their own work. What they wanted was that sacred exchange that we have an opportunity to have with one another, where I was willing to slow down and ask them the real questions, and they were willing and open to answer.

You know what this reminds me of is this year, I read about it in the Harvard Medical School Journal, I don't know what the thing is called, where there was a meta-analysis done of—I've got it right here— that encompassed 97 meta-reviews of more than a thousand randomized, controlled trials involving over 125,000 participants, where they concluded that exercise is one and a half times more effective for most people in treating depression and anxiety than medication and therapy. In listening to you, you not only have managed to expand this people-pleasing or abandoning of self or being a yes person to include all of us on some level, you have also made a very compelling case that the root cause of the things that are causing you to feel anxious or feel overwhelmed or feel disconnected or feel burnt out or sad is your inability to effectively communicate with yourself and with somebody else. And by effectively communicating with yourself, I'm assuming what you mean is coming back into your own body and finding that anchor inside yourself. Yourself so that if you've been adrift and life just pushes you around and you go with the flow and you find yourself just trying to take care of everything, that you now have an anchor to come back to.

How do we do that? Can you teach us when you are somebody, and this happens for women in particular, that constantly are saying, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that. How do you manage your own people-pleasing at work?

In a work setting, know that if there's some gray zone that's happening, now it's about drawing healthy boundaries. You're my boss. You've asked me to work the weekend or do something. I would say to you, Hey, Mel. It sounds like you want me to work the weekend. I'm going to need to figure out if I can get childcare and see if this can work for me. Is this something that might be ongoing that we need to talk about and arrange so that we need to have a discussion on this? I wasn't aware of this as part of what we were going to be doing. Then when I got into that discussion, I would be saying, How long is this for? I would be... Now, the thing that people worry about is, maybe I'm not a.

Am I going to get fired? No, what I'm worried about is I'm going to get fired.

And so you just get to say, Listen, I'd like to talk about this because I want to do a really good job for you. Help me understand what's changing about the role, about the company. Because listen, it's not about me being a victim and being fired. The deal is, if the company is changing, I need to figure out whether I'm still a good fit for this role, this company, this new chapter, this new phase. We're in a world moving faster than many of us, definitely me, can keep up with. The name of the game now here is going to be, can we navigate the unknown together? Can we ask these questions? Can we draw healthy boundaries? Do we know what levels of agreement we've made? Do we have the courage to speak up when something feels hard, different, not what we want to do?

What I want to thank you for is that I think that when the world talks about people-pleasing, we immediately go to boundaries. What you're talking about is the medical and physiological fact that people Ego pleasing is triggered, the root cause, by an inability to tolerate discomfort and unease in your body. If you can start with that, you will start to build a muscle of tolerating that wave that normally triggers you to say yes when you really wanted to say no. It's in that ability to tolerate and be aware of the discomfort that you gain choice and you gain that anchor and you get reconnected to yourself, and now you have a chance to start doing the things on the surface, no, or a boundary, or renegotiating agreements, all of which you have so beautifully empowered us to do. Hi, Mel. My name's Anna. I just saw your stories and thought I'd send over a question that I've been having. My question is more about... Well, I consider myself a very independent person and I am definitely very disciplined in what I do, but that leads me to live a life that is very different from most of the people I surround myself with, I guess.

So my question is more of how to really hone in on that discipline and keep living the life that you know you should be living, even when others don't understand it or just don't get why you're doing it. Thanks. Anna, I love this question because you are making a mistake that every single one of us makes when we start to live a life that is truly aligned with what we want to be doing. Everybody that you're surrounded with right now has been on the road with you up until this point. But they have no idea what your day-to-day life is like moving forward, because they're not living the same some life. Here's what I want you to understand. When this happens and you start to make very deliberate changes, whether it's in your health, or maybe you've launched a business, or you are just tired of a gossipy social climbing circle of friends, and now you're seeking deeper meaning in your life, you don't have to ditch those people. They can continue to be in your life, and they will be part of the rest of your life. But they're never going to understand what you're going through because they don't live the day-to-day life that you're living.

A major mistake that I see people making is, as we're making major changes, we turn to our existing friends and our family for counsel, and they have absolutely no idea what we're going through. For example, there are very few people on the planet who actually understand what I do for a living. I can count them on one hand. When it comes to speaking on corporate stages, hosting a podcast, creating content for people like Starbucks and LinkedIn and Audible, to being an entrepreneur, to having the social media following, to having a marriage and a family. Very few people that understand the pressure I'm under, the impact that I'm making, the goals, the hopes, the dreams, the frustrations. My husband doesn't understand it. He's not in that world. My kids don't understand it. My friends don't understand it. If I want somebody to truly understand what my life looks like, I got to pick up the phone and call Jay Shetty or Jenna Kutcher or Trent Shelton, like somebody who is doing what I'm doing. And it goes for everything. I'm in the middle of menopause. I talked on a couple of episodes ago about this bread basket that I'm feeling on my waist and hormone stuff.

I'm not going to go to a 28-year-old a fitness freak in my family and ask them for advice about my stomach. They don't understand what I'm going through. And so I'm making this point because when it comes to people-pleasing and when it comes to putting yourself first, the way that you continue to create discipline is twofold. You have to get super intentional about seeking out more people in your life, either through mastermind groups or following people on social media or attending online classes or going to different events. You've got to find people who are up to what you're up to because they'll understand. They'll support you. You have to stop seeking validation from the people that are already around you, because that's not why you're doing this thing. Here's one more thing I want to tell you. Why do you care what they think? You already said you're independent. You already You said you're putting yourself first. Why on earth would you seek validation or advice from somebody who you wouldn't trade lives with? Just stop asking people who are miserable or unqualified to validate your happiness, your life, your choices. You got to validate yourself by making decisions that work for you.

Stop looking for validation from other people, particularly other people who don't even understand themselves or what you're doing. Because if they can't understand themselves, if they don't understand what you're even trying to do, there's no way in hell they're ever going to understand or endorse what you're doing. Instead, start looking to people who have made the changes that you want to make, who have the values that you want to make. Not only do they understand what it takes to make this change, but they also have the confidence in the track record and the experience to cheer you on. Well, we've covered a lot of ground, and I think you're starting to realize, wow, this people-pleasing thing isn't really about saying no, it's about self-awareness. It's It's about my ability to catch those moments where those uncomfortable feelings rise up and to tolerate them. It's about my ability to know that there are going to be times in my life where I'm going to be making decisions that people that I deeply love are going to be disappointed by, and I can make space for both. There are going to be times in my life where I'm pursuing a change in my lifestyle that nobody around me understands, nobody else is pursuing, and I got to stop this default of seeking validation and advice from I'm the people who don't understand what I'm doing.

When you learn how to do that and start making decisions that really empower you in the long run, your life is going to change. It's going to be more meaningful. It's going to be richer, deeper. You're going to feel more agency and control in your life. I know what you're thinking right now. I know here's what you're thinking, Mel, dear God, do I want this? But if I'm the person that has never, ever, I've ever put myself first, how the heck do I even know when to do it? And let me tell you something. First, you have to go back to the beginning and become self-aware, and you have to get deliberate about defining the person you are becoming. Let's hear this final question from a listener to this podcast named Nella.

Hi, Mel. I am a big fan from Ireland. My name is Nella.

I'm a singer-songwriter.

Something that I definitely struggle with is with masking and being afraid to show up as my true, authentic self to all people at all times. Yeah, just any advice would be amazing on how to just get better at doing that and have the confidence to just be my authentic, true self all the time. That would be great. Thank you.

Nella, thank you first and foremost for your honesty. But I'm going to say something a little provocative. You kept saying the words true authentic self, authentic self, authentic self. And I want you to stop and ask yourself, do you even know who you are? Do you know what it means when you say, I am my true authentic self? And the reason why I'm asking you this question is because I don't think most people do. I think we want to be We want to be our authentic selves. Of course. But what does that even mean? Listening to your question, it reminds me when I was writing The High Five Habit, there was a woman who wrote to me from Ireland, and I ended up getting on the phone and then on a Zoom call, and I spent a lot of time talking to her, and she is in the book. I want to bring this up because I want to make a point about the pressure that we feel to conform. In this example of the woman from Ireland, she writing about the fact that she wanted to get a divorce. That is her true authentic self.

Yet, she had been delaying doing this for seven years because of the pressure of the Catholic Church, because of the disappointment of her mother, because of what the priest might think, because of what the whole freaking country of Ireland might think. I'm highlighting this because for some of us, people pleasing is even deeper than this discomfort. It's the social norm. You wouldn't be caught dead in some cultures, or in some religions, or in some households veering from the norm. The pressure is so intense, it's just the air that you breathe. For many people, that is the case. If that's you, you might not even know what the authentic you is, because you have been told for so long by your country, by your religion, by your family, by the community, community you live in, by whatever, who you're supposed to be. I'm going to give you a really important exercise. I want you to just imagine that you are a screenwriter, that you are about to write a movie about the real you. Write a character description and describe a day in the life of the real you. Remove the country you live in, remove the religion you grew up with or you didn't, remove the stories that you've been telling yourself or the pressure you feel or the disappointment or what other people think you should or shouldn't do, and write the story, a day in the life, of who you are at your core.

When you would wake up, where you would live, where you would go, what work you do, what friends that you have, what are your habits, what do you love doing, who are you laughing with? This is such an important exercise because, again, remember, I told you that people pleasing, it's a balance. And it begins with you truly knowing yourself. And if you don't really know who you are because you've always been told who to be and you've spent your life feeling like you do nothing but conforming, this is a really important step for you to take. Because people pleasing at its core is you believing the person that you are deep inside that it's not good enough. You're not good enough. Based on what we've talked about, you can start to change that. But you really have to go through the steps of getting curious about who you are for real. And if the idea of you having a conversation like I did with my dad, or you telling somebody that you're not coming over for dinner because you're tired, and that's the truth, or saying that, No, you can't borrow my pickup truck again.

I don't lend it out anymore. If that makes you really uncomfortable, here's a tool that you can use to start to experiment with that moment of discomfort. The tool is called Switch, and this comes from research. You don't have to say yes. You're going to go from saying, Sure, I'll let you borrow my car, or Sure, we'll come to things, or, Sure, I'll do that, or, Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Instead of saying no, switch it to a pause. I'll think about it. Let me check my calendar. I'll get back to you on that. When you Switch your yes to a pause and you buy yourself some time, you're going to feel a little less pressure. For example, when you say, Let me get back to you. 20 minutes later, you can email back and say, Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm booked. Or send no over text if it's too hard to say it in person, or say no over the phone if you don't want to say it to their face. But switching from feeling the pressure to say yes to putting yourself in a pause, that's what I want you to practice.

Because if you can say, I'll get back to you. Let me think about it. You got time to settle those uncomfortable feelings. Because remember, it's not about the other person. It's about you not being able to tolerate that discomfort that rises up, and then you immediately make the discomfort going away by going, Okay, fine. I'll do it. No. Switch into pause. Switch into pause, because in that pause, you're going to find some peace. In that pause is where you're going to find that balance. I'm going to give you one more quick little example about how this works. Last week, I was in Las Vegas, and we were on day 15 of a 16-day business trip. We landed late, and we did a tech check because I was delivering a speech in the morning, and we were about to head up to the hotel. It was eight o'clock at night, and I turned to my friends, and I'm like, We should probably get something to eat because we haven't eaten since lunch. I know it's late, and we're going to get up early, and then I'm going to have to race into this speech, and we're going to We're not going to have any food in our stomach.

So we went straight to the steakhouse that was in the casino. We walk in there wearing sweats off an airplane. It is 8:30 at night. This place has a freaking DJ in the bar. People are thumping and bumping and glitters and sparkles everywhere. They seat us right away in the bar at a high top. The three of us order immediately because we are going to shovel down that food. I got the filet mignon and some mashed potatoes, and we got mock tales. Right above our was this speaker that was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We were, I mean, it was like zero to a thousand inside this place. I was not ready for this. I just wanted to get some protein in my stomach and get to bed because I had a speech to give, and I was exhausted. So we're eating and we're bopping and talking. Right when the steak comes, I hand her my credit card signaling, Bring me the check right away. I'm part of the Clean & Play Club. I am done. I have finished in probably 11 seconds flat. Melinda, who is at the table with us, she is done, too.

I look over at Amy. She is eating in slow motion. She is enjoying every bite. I think she She's engaged in a mindfulness meditation with this steak and salad at this point. And as I assess what is left on her plate, I think, this is going to fucking take her 20 minutes to eat. It is 9:30 at night. I am exhausted. This is the This is the moment I'm talking about, everybody. This is the balance. Because the wave of discomfort comes up in my body. I want to leave. I want to go to bed. I don't want to be a douche. Here, one of my closest friends is sitting here enjoying a salad. We've been on the road together. I'm like a ride or die person. What a jerk leaves their female friend alone at a high top in a bar with a salad that has 85% to go in terms of completion just because they're tired. I do.

That's a joke.

It's a balancing act. I said to myself, Well, what's really going to serve me? And what's really going to serve me, because my number one job is to kill it in that speech tomorrow, is to ask Amy if it would be okay for me to go upstairs and just go to bed. And I felt that discomfort because the old Mel People would have been like, I would have just sat there because it would be rude to leave somebody. And oftentimes, we don't even ask. We don't even ask. And Amy's sitting right over there. So, Amy, I want you to get on the mic because I rode the Balancing Act. I used the tools, and I turned to her because a lot of this is also about the context, and it's about how you say it. It's not what you're saying, it's how you say it. And so you don't be like, I'm leaving. Out of here, bitches. That's not what I said. I just said, Aym, would it be okay If I head upstairs and go to sleep, I'm exhausted. Amy, what was your experience at this moment as I'm clean plating it and you've got probably 20 minutes left?

Yeah, I mean, you're a fast eater, so that was number one. I felt like when you asked me and you said, You mind if I go upstairs? I felt like, Thank God, because I would not want her to sit and watch me and my llama eating habits super slow and just savoring every bite. I wouldn't want that to be the case. I want you to do you, and I want me to enjoy my salad and my steak.

When you noticed that my plate was clean, and so was Melinda's, and you still had 20 minutes to go, what were you feeling?

Well, I'm often in this situation. I felt like, I know what's going to happen next. They're going to want to leave, and I'm happy to do that. I felt really happy for you to get what you needed, and I needed to get what I needed.

I wanted you to hear that, and this is why. You often don't even ask. And Amy was relieved that I asked because you know what? She doesn't want to sit there and feel pressure. She wanted to enjoy her salad, and that's exactly what she did. Melinda and I went upstairs. She sat there for another 25 minutes bopping and weaving, alone, having the best salad of her life without her annoying friend sitting there staring at her like she was some a zoo animal. So we all won. Bottom line, people-pleasing. It's It's not about the other people. It's about you. So notice when it comes up. Notice that discomfort. Find the strength to say, No, I'm not going to sit here with this discomfort and do something that doesn't serve me. When you have the ability You have the ability to recognize this, and you have the ability to say, No, I'm not going to just fall into line. No means that you're in charge of your life. No strengthens your self-discipline. No keeps your goals and your happiness front and center. It can make you stronger so that you change patterns and habits that don't serve you.

Because when you don't say no, you're saying yes to something else. It is powerful. When you say no, I am not going to do that. I'm going to ride this uncomfortable wave, and I'm going to do what works for me, and I'm going to know at the end that you can be disappointed, and you're still going to love me. But I'm going to love myself a little bit more. Because every time you say yes to you, you are proving to yourself that you deserve to be happy. You deserve to have support. You deserve to to go to bed in Vegas because it's late. And you deserve to have that room back because you need it. And you deserve to do things that really work for you. So starting today, start saying no. Start tolerating the discomfort Switch your yes to a pause and put yourself back in charge. Your happiness, your life, it starts with you. Always, always, always, always. And I know you can do it. And I want you to do it. And you don't have to prove anything to me. You got to prove it to yourself. When I think about the topic of both authenticity and how to be your truest, most powerful self, this is so difficult for people, and I see it everywhere, this inability to stand in your power.

I know so many people, and you listening to us may be one of them, that if you order coffee at a coffee shop and they get your order wrong, you don't say something. Because you don't want to make waves, you don't want people to not like you, you don't want the person behind the counter to feel bad, you don't want to hold up the line. And there's an element of being able to stand in your power and ask for what you need that is part of being your truest, authentic self, correct?

Thousand %. And in fact, one of the things I can tell you based on my own journey, which is one that before those of you joining us today think that, Oh, Ritu, you've always been this way. You always have known how to embrace your authenticity and claim your belonging. The answer to that is absolutely not. In fact, I have struggled. I struggled for decades to embrace who I am and be who I am. But as I learned to do my healing and stand more in my power, what I realized is that every action, every micro behavior that I engage in is one step forward to me fully embracing who I am and claiming belonging for myself. And whether that is the barista at the coffee shop or the customer service person at the airport or the person on the phone for my Internet problems, or family members or my lead leader or my team members or my clients or my customers. Like big stakes. There's a low stake, big stakes. Every single act, every behavior I engage in is a chain reaction for me claiming my authenticity and belonging. But it took me, like Mel, it took me years to finally make this happen for myself.

How did you know that you weren't your authentic self? Because I asked that question, it may seem dumb. But when we use the words authenticity and belonging, I think those are the words that are intellectual. Without a real-life, tangible example, it floats over all of our heads. I want to start with the piece of authenticity and really help the person listening understand what you're talking about and how you even know if your authentic self or not.

Yeah, it's such an important question. I'm going to tell you a really quick story. I mentioned it in my new book, We've Got This, because it's a powerful example of how these moments can happen for us, where when we're tuned in, we can clock the behavior. And I think being intentional and mindful and tuned in is critical, like self-reflection, self-awareness, huge. So just in a nutshell, so I'm the child of immigrants from a very young age. I experienced relentless bullying, childhood bullying, and it was racist in particular. Plus, I had cultural confusion based on how my parents were like, How white should we make her? How Indian should we push them to be? And so between the cultural confusion and the shielding myself from the hate and hurt coming my way as a kid because of being bullied, I learned to put on multiple masks, and I learned to push down my identities, and I learned to curate what I call a performing self. And when I say performing self. I don't mean high performance. I mean, life is a stage. We're actors on the stage performing who we are as opposed to being who we are.

I did this as a child to shield from hurt harm. I became a lawyer. I entered the legal profession. And as a young woman of color navigating the corporate world, I noticed that the messages around conformity were never direct like being bullied as a kid, but they were always there subtly. And so I became a master at shifting curating what I'll talk about at work and what I'll mask on and taking on the hobbies of the corporate world that were really popular, but I hated. I did all of this to fit in, and I'm using air quotes for those listening and not watching, fit in because I can tell you now that changing who we are, masking aspects of our identity, will never yield, never be the same as actual belonging. Yes, some doors to acceptance will open, but it's not the same as actually belonging.

I want to stop right there because I think that's part of the confusion for most of us.

Yes.

Where innately, Whether it's because you want to have friends or you don't want to get picked on or you don't want to feel lonely or you want to climb the corporate ladder or you want to get a job, innately, we seek to fit in. There are varying degrees to which we compromise our true selves. You're talking about something I've never had to personally deal with as a white woman. I've never had to do that code switching because of environments where it was all white because I blend it into that area. I understand what you're talking about when it comes to the subconscious cues, because as dumb as it sounds, I do remember being a corporate lawyer at a time where women didn't wear skirts. Excuse me, where women didn't wear pants. That is a very benign and superficial example of fitting in somewhere, because I think I have to fit in in order to succeed. Everybody, regardless of your background, you have some example, whether it is deep around your identity, your race, your religion, your sexuality, your gender, or you have examples that are very superficial.

Right.

But what I really want you to explain for everybody right now is what's the difference between fitting into a group or a culture at work versus belonging to that group of friends or belonging to that team and that culture at work?

It is entirely rooted in how you feel, Mel. Oftentimes, Sometimes we think that the mind goes first, but it's actually the body. Our body will signal to us how we're doing, how we're experiencing a situation or a person before our mind even catches up. And so we want to, after today, start using our body as a guidepost for an anchor for how we're feeling. And so I define belonging really quickly as the profound feeling. So again, it's something in our body that says to us, I'm being honored and accepted for who I am. When we are experiencing belonging, we feel in flow. We feel at ease. We feel safe. It feels good. It feels nice. Even when it feels vulnerable. Even when we're feeling a bit nervous and activated because it's like, Oh, my gosh, I'm worried. What are you going to think and say? But I'm still going to share me and do me. It feels good. Whereas fitting in is activating. I often talk about when we feel the pressure to put on our performing self mask and change the way we speak or hide aspects of our identity. For example, I experienced a lot of inequities and hate and hurt coming my way, tied back to my race and intersectionality with being a girl, a smart girl or a woman, and coming from an immigrant child family upbringing.

But people experience all kinds of judgment and bias tied back to, for example, mental health. Look at people's experiences with anxiety, depression, or you grew up poor, or you're the first person in your family to go to college or university, or some people feel like they're so short, tall, They're bigger. We are being judged. The fear of judgment and bias, people actually judging us based on who we are, that's what strikes at our ability to belong. When we worry, based on my work and research, I can tell you, when we worry that you're going to judge me, you're going to take your love away from me, you're going to take opportunities away from me, that's what causes us to suppress our authenticity, and it strikes at our belonging. And so that's what It changes us to feel like I got to put this performing self-mask on, curate who I am, change the way I speak, change what I talk about, change the way I dress, not tell you about my anxiety, depression, or who I really we want to love, or how I view my gender, or how unwell my parents were, or the really crappy neighborhood I grew up in.

Whatever the fear is, it's what causes us to curate and sanitize. And so we hide our emotions, we hide our behaviors. And we do this not because we're evil human beings trying to deceive others. We do this to shield and protect ourselves from judgment, which is one of the reasons, Mel, why I don't use the word inauthentic ever. I feel like the term inauthentic. My first book, The Authenticity Principle, I wrote in it. The term inauthentic or inauthenticity, in my view, has a lot of negative connotations to it. It's like you're deliberately trying to mislead people about who you are. My work in research has shown me, and I can tell you my own personal experience, is that when we put on our performing self masks, we don't do it because we're trying to mislead people. We do it because of hurt and woundedness. We do it because of pain. We do it because we're afraid others will take their love away. And you know what? It's not a figment of our imagination. It's because people in the past have taken their love away from us. And we worry it'll happen again. But as we do our healing work and we stand in our power, we start to realize a life that is created and rooted in belonging, where I feel in flow because I to be who I am around you, even if you'll judge me, I'm going to do it anyways, is so much more rich and beautiful than a life of literally walking around with that mask on all the time.

I can tell you, I'm not even up and joking because I did it for decades. This life that I'm leading, it's harder to live because it's more intentional and mindful, but it is so much more beautiful and worth it.

Yeah. Why not just like yourself? Well, that brings me to something. I want to read to you a question from somebody that listens to the podcast. Corinne Schillinger. She says, It's great advice, but here's the deal. Everyone says, Love yourself, accept yourself, validate yourself. These are general terms. No one actually knows what that means. What does loving yourself actually look like? What does that mean in our everyday lives? Please do an episode about what loving, accepting, and validating yourself looks like, feels like. Specific examples. So many people are frustrated and find themselves confused by the advice love yourself. What does that mean and give specific examples of what you do? It is an incredibly broad term. Just love yourself. So easy to say. But I personally think that loving yourself is different for everybody. Everybody's going to love themselves in a different way. The way I like myself is... I feel like there's always little things. There's always little things about yourself that you can find that you like. So number one, find something little. It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be big. It could be like- Okay. So give us three examples of Little things you like or love about yourself.

Right now? Yes. I haven't looked at a mirror recently, but I think I like my hair right now. Pretty sure I like my hair right now. We'll check the foot in later. Let's see here. I'm liking my smile right I really like my smile. I'm also liking who I am in my friend group right now. What does that mean? What do you like about who you are? Give me a specific example. It's how I'm acting with my friends and how I'm treating them and how I'm respecting them and being there for them. I'm enjoying that. I'm liking that about myself. You're proud of yourself? I am proud of myself. Can you give another example that is not about something physical? About something physical. I'm proud of how I'm doing in school. I'm doing pretty well in school. Do you know why you're doing well? Because I'm trying. Yes. You're proud of your sofa trying? Yeah, I am. See, it's like those little things. When people are negative, it's also so more broad when they're negative about themselves. It's like a bigger thing. Like, Oh, I don't like the way my stomach looks, or I don't like the way I look.

Or I don't like my grades, or I don't like this. Then you don't feel motivated because you're beating yourself down. Exactly. You find, number one, little, teeny things. They can literally be like, I like the color of my eye right now. It doesn't have to be the world ending like, I look like a God. No, it just has to be like, very little. Yeah. Start with I love the shape or the color of my eyes. I love the sound of my laugh. Find something small. I'm focusing on simple and small habits because this is not something that happens overnight. Self-acceptance, self-kindness, self-love is a habit you practice. And for it to become second nature, you have to practice it every single day. And so we've already talked about two things that you can do. One is find one small thing that you like about yourself. It could be that you're a great friend, that you have an amazing laugh, that you're a wonderful cook, that you're a terrific son, that you try really hard at work, that you are proud of the way you're working on your boundaries. There is one thing that you need to compliment yourself on every single day.

And if you can't think of something, look in that mirror and look at your iris and just compliment the incredible miracle that is that unique pattern and color that is unique to you. Of eight billion people on this planet, you are the only one with an eyeball that is designed and looks like that. And that is freaking cool. So start with that. The second thing you're going to do is before you go to bed, scan your day and think of one win. Just a small win. And the reason why I want you to think of a small win is because you don't realize how much your brain is currently scanning for what's wrong. And I want you to start to create a habit where we're going to retrain and reprogram your mind to look for what's going right. Because there's a whole lot going right in your day that you're not giving yourself credit for. And whether you got out of bed, that's a win. You got dressed, there's a win. You got to work, there's a win. You smiled at a stranger, there's a win. You treated yourself to a coffee today, there's a win.

You got outside and looked at the sun, there's a win. I mean, there are so many things you do right, and you don't even realize it. And so I want you to start to just interrupt the campaign of negative thoughts with one win before you go to bed. And in just a second, I'm going to share my absolute favorite tool. But I just wanted to take a minute and say, It's hard. You know, Oak sounds really upbeat, and so do I, and we're joking around because we're really good. We have a great relationship, and Oakley doesn't hate himself anymore. And I'm actively working on self-kindness and self-love. But it's hard, right, Oak? It's definitely hard. It's not going to be easy to love yourself, and it takes time. It's like a muscle. I'd say it's definitely like a muscle. When you work at it and you start off small, start off with small weight, and then you get bigger, it becomes easier. If you think you're a very negative person right now, it's probably because it's a very unconscious decision that you're making. But when you start to try and work at it and you work more, it's going to become more unconscious that you are nice about yourself.

Hey, it's Mel. Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed that video, by God, please subscribe because I don't want you to miss a thing. Thank you so much for being here. We've got so much amazing stuff coming. Thank you so much for sending this stuff to your friends and your family. I love you. We create these videos for you, so make sure you subscribe.