Let's just start, though, with the term people pleaser so that you and I are on the same page. People pleaser refers to a person who just has a strong desire to please other people, even if pleasing other people comes at their own expense. If you struggle with people pleasing, I certainly used to. I mean, those of us that were parent-pleasers, we grew up to be people-pleasers. If you struggle with this, and you often feel like your own wants or needs don't matter, or you tend to bend yourself into knots around other people, or you find yourself having a really hard time just being yourself or saying what you really want to say, you're not alone. You're going to get all kinds of awesome tools today. The other thing that's interesting about the research that we did to prepare for this episode is that people pleaser, that's not a medical term. That is not some diagnosis that psychologists use. That is simply a way that we describe, casually, this coping mechanism that we all engage in in order to keep the peace, in order to fit in, in order to feel love. There are four takeaways that I want to give you really quickly, and then we're going to go to Janet's question.

Number one, every human being is a people pleaser. Everybody. Unless you're some narcissistic jerk or you've got some other neurological condition that prevents you from truly bonding with other people, in order When you get through life, you have to make other people happy. You have to, for example, put your boss's needs ahead of yours if you expect to remain employed. It is what it is. Your spouse and your kids, they come first at time. Your parents, when you were little, you wanted to please them. There are times where you need other people to be happy with you. Like when you're at the DMV, that clerk that you hope does you that quick favor, you better make sure that they're happy with you. Or the person who's throwing the big party in Cabo over spring break, definitely you're a people pleaser around that person. I don't blame you. You want the invite. That's the big takeaway. You're not the only one that struggles with this. Second takeaway, you're never going to get rid of people pleasing entirely. I wouldn't want you to. You can't. Because some level of people pleasing is necessary in life because relationships are a give and take.

And what we're going to talk about today is the balance. How do you balance other people's needs and your own? Third takeaway, people People pleasing is only a problem if you do it by default. So if you're the person that is so focused on other people, you don't even know who you are anymore. You've been neglecting your own needs or silencing your own voice, or you constantly feel like a doormat that everybody walks on. People pleasing is definitely a problem for you. This is something that I want you to get ahead of because I want more for you. You're going to get more out of your life when you're more self-aware more about when you start putting other people first and abandoning yourself. And so today, I'm going to probably make you pretty shocked at how prevalent this is for you so that you can start making different decisions moving forward. And that leads me to the fourth takeaway. You can take your power back. My mission today is to help you understand the topic, gain more self-awareness so that you can interrupt this pattern, and you can create a different pattern, which is making and conscious decisions in your day-to-day life that truly empower you.

Because you can learn how to consciously choose when you are going to put other people first and when you're not, and you're going to put yourself first. So let's start with a question. This one comes from a listener named Janet.

Hey, Mel. So the way I was raised was that what defines a good woman is what she can do for others, for her children, for her husband, whatever. And you always came second, whether it was you were the last to take a shower before you went out, you were the last to eat at a family event, whatever it was. So my biggest struggle now is creating self-love for myself without feeling guilty, without feeling like I'm not being humble enough or without feeling like I'm less of a mother or less of a wife because I'm taking care of myself. I know it's the other way. I know that I have to take care of me so I can take care of others, but I just have a hard time doing it without feeling that guilt. To me, it literally feels like a child learning to walk. I don't know how to do it without feeling guilt. I want to remove that guilt from inside of me.

Janet, I got some bad news. You can't remove the guilt. I'm going to say that again. When you first start putting yourself first, you will not remove the guilt. I just want to be honest about that. But let me give you the two Two takeaways, okay? That are really important because this really isn't about guilt. This is about you defining for yourself what it means to be a good wife and a good mother and a good person in your eyes. And so I'm going to give you two major wake-up calls that I had around this topic, and then I'm going to tell you this crazy story. So the first wake-up call that I got is this notion that the people who love you, they will be annoyed with you when you put yourself first. It is true. They are not going to like it. They like you being the person that you are right now. It is convenient for them that you put them first. It is wonderful the dynamic that's in place, but it's no longer good for you. So just expect that the people who you love will be annoyed or disappointed or upset when you start putting yourself first.

But they're still going to love you. It's not an either or thing, and I'll explain more about that. And second, this is a huge wake-up call. What if the guilt doesn't go away? What if guilt is actually a good thing? What if guilt is super healthy to feel right now? In fact, that's what I believe. I believe that the guilt is good. I believe that the guilt is healthy, and I believe that you can reframe it. See, guilt shows that you care. That's why you feel that way. If you were a narcissistic douchebag, you wouldn't feel guilty at all for putting yourself first. I want to frame guilt in a different way for you, okay? Let's frame it from a bad sign. I'm doing something bad. I'm putting myself first, into a good one. Stop seeing guilt as a bad thing, because you're not doing anything wrong when you put yourself first. Start seeing guilt as a good thing. Guilt is a sign that you're breaking free of this people-pleasing habit. You feel guilty because putting yourself first is just a new feeling. That's it. I had this insight a few years ago that I think might help you.

Two things can be true in life at the same time. You can put yourself first and disappoint people, and they can still love you, even though they're disappointed. And here's another example of how two things can be true at the same time. You can feel guilty, and you can still put yourself first. Pretty cool. It's not an either/or. And that's why I say that this topic about people-pleasing is about balancing your needs with the fact that in order to have great relationships, you do have to compromise sometimes. And the balance comes in because in order for you to have the life that you want, you are going to disappoint people that you love sometimes. I experience this all the time. I'm 54 years old. I still want to make my parents happy. Why? Because I love them and because that's what I've always done. When I get into one of those moments where it is a balancing act, it's not easy. I'm going to tell you a story about this. My dad is an enormous billiards fan. And when he was in either Whether it's college or medical school, he used to hustle for money at a pool hall.

He is a great pool player. I grew up in a town called Muskegan, Michigan, which is the world headquarters of a company called Brunswick, which used to make all of the old pool tables. And so my dad became just a huge fan of collecting antique pool and billiard artifacts. In fact, my parents house is full of them. Old pool balls, pool cues, the little counting-like things that hang on the ceiling, artwork, a pool, just all chairs from Bill Yurts. My dad loves this stuff. So when Chris and I got married, he gave us a refurbished Brunswick pool table that dated back to the 1800s, and it had been in a Viking's Lodge in Mesaigan, Michigan, and he ended up buying it at an auction, had it refurbished, and it was the greatest thing ever. But here's the problem. When Chris and I got married, we lived in an apartment. Like, whose apartment has room for a pool table? And so this beautiful pool table sat in my parents' basement in North Muskegan, Michigan for over a decade. And so all this time goes by. Chris and I have now moved to Boston. We've bought our first house.

It is a teeny, tiny antique farm house. There was not a single room that was big enough to clear a pool table. I don't know if you understand how a pool table works. I didn't realize that you need four and a half feet clearance around the pool table in order to play pool. This was not something I was aware of. We couldn't even fit it in our house when we first bought a house. It couldn't fit in the basement because we had a dirt basement. You're not going to put a pool table down there. So more years go by. And then Chris and I We're going to finally have enough money to refinance the house and put on a small addition. We were going to put on a garage with a room above the garage. That's what we were going to do. And to my dad, he was like, Great. That means the pool table finally has a home. Now, given that I did not know that you needed a certain amount of space to put the pool table in, I had envisioned that this room above the garage would be the kids' playroom, right?

And I thought, Oh, okay. Well, it's a two car garage, so clearly we could put a pool table in there and it be the kids' playroom. So get this, my dad is so excited that I fly back to Michigan, and he and I take a road trip in a U-Hall where we drive across country from Michigan all the way to Boston together, and we bring back all kinds of stuff from my parents' basement, and we split a bunch of plants from in their yard, and the pool table was in the back. My dad hires somebody to meet us there, and we assemble the pool table. When they finally finished assembling this pool table, it sat in the middle of this playroom, like a felted aircraft carrier. Our playroom, as it turns out, was only big enough to put a pool table in it. No room for the couch, no room for the kids play table, just a big-ass antique pool table that was a sign of my father's love and devotion to his daughter. Did I want the pool table there? Well, for the first year or two, it was great. But then it literally just collected dust.

And as the kids got older, it became the table that they played Legos on, and then it became the table that I folded laundry on. And then my business started to grow, and I started thinking, boy, it'd be awfully nice to have an office, a place to work. But I didn't dare disassemble that pool table. Why? The thought of disappointing my father? Heartbreaking. Now, keep in mind, he's only at my house once or twice a year. So we're talking maybe four or five days out of 365 days is the man going to see the pool table. But nevertheless, like a dutiful daughter because I love him and I did not know what I know now. I thought that in order to have my dad love me, that meant that I had to just keep this pool table like a mausoleum. Is that the word? That represented my father and my duty and my loyalty. And as my company began to grow, we put plywood on top of the pool table, and we worked on that. And then finally, I thought, What the hell am I doing? I am a grown-ass woman. I need to disassemble the pool table.

My dad will understand. I will assure him that the second that I am successful enough to add on to this house again or do something else, the first thing that I will do is build a room where we can put a pool table. I wish I had more money. I wish I had a bigger house. I wish I had one of those great rooms that people have that you could launch a cannon through. But that is not my life. And it is not what my needs are. And in order to put my needs first and my business first, and for my kids to have a place to be able to be too, I can't have this felted aircraft carrier in the middle of this room. I need to take the room back. And so I'll never forget this day, I picked up the phone to call my dad. And when I heard his voice, I immediately started to chicken out. Hey, Mel, what's up? Hey, dad. And of course, I talk about nothing. And my stomach ache is churning, and I'm starting to feel stress, diarrhea coming on. And finally, I'm like, Okay, God, Mel, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

You're not eight years old anymore. You just feel like you are. And I'm like, Dad, I got to talk to you about something. He's like, Yeah, what's up? Okay, so the pool table you gave us? Yeah, yeah. How's it going? You guys love using it. I'm so happy. Your brother, they just moved into their house in Chicago. And so the table that I gave them, it's in their basement. We played last weekend. My heart is sinking in my chest. This is not going according to plan. So I take a deep breath. I said, Dad, yeah, about the pool table. My business is growing so fast. I really need a place for the people that work for me to come and work. Oh, great. They're going to love playing on the pool table, too. The cool offices all have pool tables and ping-pong. Dad, I don't have enough room in the room that it's in. Oh, well, it could go in the living room. If you got... Dad, it just can't because the living room's not big enough. So what are you saying, though? Well, what I'm saying is I was going to hire the guy that you hired to level it and put the slate in to come back and lovingly take it apart.

I was going to store it in a really loving way until I have a place for it. Silence. You want to know how I felt in that moment? I felt like the world's worst daughter. I felt like an ungrateful piece of shit. Because through the silence, I could feel my dad's heart sink. It was a really hard thing to do. That's How do I say this is a balance. It's so easy to say on a TikTok video, Just say no. When it's somebody that you love and you know that you're going to disappoint them, that's not easy, and you can still do it. And what's interesting about that moment is it didn't feel like this victory. It didn't feel like, Yeah, there was this residue there because I knew knew that he was disappointed. And I was disappointed, too. I wish I had a bigger house. I wish I could accommodate this beautiful gift. I wish that I had a basement that it could go in. I wish I lived closer to them. And so all of that emotion came crashing in in that moment. And that's why I'm going to keep on saying, learning how to balance those moments when you know that your decision that is truly best for you and what you need is going to disappoint someone.

Remember that two things can be true. You can do what's right for you, and you can have somebody be disappointed in you, and you can know that deep down, they still love you. People that you love, disappoint you all the time. All the time. And you still love them. And it's a real art to learn how to be in those moments with grace and advocate for yourself and still hold space for somebody to be upset with you or disappointed in you or sad about it. That's what that moment was. It was just both of us feeling disappointed that it wasn't different. Do they tease me when they come over? Of course they did. For years, they did. This was It was pretty recently, by the way, everybody. I'm just remembering back to the fact that when I released the five-second rule book, it was 2017, and I self-published that, and we did all of the internal layouts. Do you know what I used that pool table for? It was our creative desk where I laid out the entire design of the five-second rule book. I'm talking less than five years ago, everybody. I had this conversation with my father.

And whenever they would come visit, they would walk in and they'd look in the direction of where my office was, and nice pool table. Or every time I would say, Yeah, I'd love grandma's table from the kitchen. And then my mom would say something snarky like, Oh, is it going to end up in the basement with the pool table? You sure you want it? And you know what? They're allowed to say that. They're allowed to be disappointed. They're allowed to call me out on that. I have to create space for them to have their feelings. I also believe that that's one of the things we don't talk about a lot in relationships and people-pleasing. You think when you're people-pleasing, it's all one way. It's not. It's a give and a take. If you want other people to make room for the very real emotions that you feel and the reason why you need to put yourself first in certain circumstances, then you got to show up and hold up your end of the bargain and make room for their feelings of disappointment and confusion, and sadness. Just know that when somebody is given the space to process it or to make a joke or say something snarky, because let's face it, do you know what's underneath that snarky comment?

Or is it going to end up in the basement like the pool table? It's hurt. It's sadness that's not processed in a healthy way. Just keep in mind that, yes, when you start putting yourself first and when you start making decisions, you will disappoint other people. Give them space to feel that and know that they will still love you. They do, even if they don't express it in a constructive way. And also know that you can feel guilty. I sure as hell felt guilty. And you want to know what? I still feel guilty, even though it's not my fault. And I feel so guilty that you know what? Now that we're here in Southern Vermont and I've built this dream house of mine, I made damn fucking sure that in the barn, you better believe there's not only space for that pool table. I built a barn so that we could put the pool table in there. So, dad, I know you're listening. You get your ass up here because I'm going to beat you in a game of pool when you do come, okay? And I can't wait. And yeah, I still feel a little guilty.

Why? Guilt is good. It means I care. And it means I am expanding my capacity to live in that to do things that really work for me and know that that is not going to work for some other people. And that's okay. That's what it's all about. 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 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. And 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 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. And so 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 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 has been 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, right? 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 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, laser 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, I'm a doctor, I'm a coach. All of these come from that place. It's such a good intention to serve.

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? So 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 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. I really resonate with your husband because I think that's a lot of me. I needed to come more into balance to become who I truly am.

I needed to learn how to sit in the discomfort of another in order to be true to myself.

There are 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 that 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 eat. 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 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 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 of 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 I didn't know what was happening, but a two-year-old sure does. And 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 Where is my Nani and Nana? Where are they? And 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. And I upgraded him to uncle.

Wow.

And 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. And I began to scan the environment. I mean, I knew what everybody I wanted my mom, my dad, my sister, the Indian community around me, my neighbors. And I became such a good child that when I overheard my dad later on wanting to to... He just made a comment like, Yeah, the second one was a girl, too. I wanted a son who was an engineer. And 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 Can you describe for us just what happened to you 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. So 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 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. And 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, the impact of all of this pent-up inability to tolerate emotion and then twisting yourself in knots to make everything Are you seeing 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. 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 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 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 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 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 would, 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, and 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.

And 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 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 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 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 30 6 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 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 and 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 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. But 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 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. And I never thought about my husband on the spectrum of people-pleasing. And 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 He's too busy to come to his games. 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 attic in a crib, and that was his in the 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 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 place. 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 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? Yeah.

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. And so 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 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, like, Oh, my God, you're overextended, is that it is also a sign of a 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. That's the me-we world because you may have been carrying a boulder uphill. I mean, I am guilty of single-handed Really 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 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 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. Let's talk about how you do this in real life. I've got a ton of questions from our global audience. When they heard that you were coming on Dr. David, we've got a ton of questions about how you manage your own emotions situations, particularly in situations where other people are triggering you. This particular question comes from Tina. Tina writes that her son is struggling with anxiety and depression, and she wants to know, Dr. David, how do I separate my emotions from my son's when he's so low. I try so hard not to, but I find things such a struggle when he feels low, and when he's okay, I'm okay. I just don't even know where to start.

It's not just kids. This is for your partners or if your parents are struggling. I think we all want to know how to support somebody but not get sucked into their emotions. How do you do that, Dr. David?

Well, I mean, anyone who's parented, anyone who's looked after elderly parents, anyone who's been in relationship with anyone, recognizes some of the truth that is said, which is, as a parent, for example, you only tend to be as happy as your most unhappy child. Because of course, when we see people in pain, it evokes pain in us. We are social creatures. We, of course, are going to experience pain, grief, agony when we see someone else in pain. At the same time, what happens when we get stuck in my experience of what that other person is experiencing. We become both unable to manage our own health and well-being, but also we can't really be functional, effective parents because we are now reactive within the pain that is created in that world. There are a couple of things that I would say. Firstly, if we think about how to think about children's emotions, because that's probably a really good place to start, we can then start thinking about our own. Children's emotions. Often as a parent, it becomes really tempting when we see our children in pain to rush in and fix. I remember Mel years ago, me taking my son to the pediatrician He had just been born.

And I remember going and my son was gogo and gaga and smiling and happy. And I handed him over to the pediatrician for his shots, and he started to scream. He started to be outraged, and he was crying. And I jumped in and I said to him, It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. And the nurse, so kindly, so empathetically, said to me, Susie, it's not okay. Your child is in pain. Okay, it's not okay. Your child is in pain. It will be okay, but your child is in pain. I was like, I've got a flipping PhD in this stuff, and I did the one thing that you're not allowed to do, which is invalid. The point that I make here is, one of the first things we often try to do with others is we try to control what emotion we think they should or shouldn't be allowed to feel. Often we do it. I can see it's resonating. I can see it's connecting. Often we do it with good intention. We do it with good intention. Now, what does that teach our child? What it teaches our child is what we call display rules.

Display rules are the implicit rules that we often have of what emotion is it okay for me to feel in in my family? Or what am I allowed to experience? So how does this impact on the child? What it basically does is a display rule. If every time a child comes home and is upset, you said to the child, Oh, you're not allowed to be upset. And you might not be saying that overtly, but you might be signaling that. What that's saying to the child is, Sadness has no place here. I need to turn away from myself because sadness is not allowed in this family, or anger isn't allowed, or emotions aren't allowed. So now, what is the longer term impact of that? Well, how do we become good at regulating our emotions? We become good at regulating our emotions when we say, Hey, This is what sadness feels like. And you practice feeling sad, and you practice the sadness that I felt 24 hours ago. I did A, I did B, I did C. Now I no longer feel sad. By allowing our children to feel all of their emotions, we're not just allowing them to feel all of their emotions.

We are actually doing the core work of parenting, which is helping our children to be with discomfort, helping our children to recognize and be with uncomfortable emotions. And so I think one of the most powerful ways for Tina and for every single person listening, is any emotion we experience, rather than judging that emotion as that's positive, that's negative, that's wrong, that's right, it's hard to human. And so for Tina, creating a little bit of space where she sees that experience in herself with compassion is very powerful because now it's already moving you into the space of the self where you're not in this vortex of both of you struggling, you're now in with yourself. So that is, firstly, a very important skill. Secondly, is often when people experience tough emotions, we start getting hooked by the emotion, and there's no space for anything else. So I'm angry, and I'm feeling overwhelmed, and there's all this stuff going on for me, and there's no space in that. For the wisdom that I believe Every single one of us has. We all have wisdom. We all, in the peace of night, when we are lying in bed and it's just us, there's this part of ourselves that is just us, and it's wise, and it's capable, beautiful, centered.

And so we need to create the space for that. And when we're being clouded by being hooked by a difficulty motion, there's not the space. So some practical strategies is, when we are hooked by a difficulty motion, is to recognize that often we use very big labels to describe what we're feeling. If you just think about something as simple as saying, I'm stressed, A lot of people come home and someone says, How was your day? Stressful. Now, let's deconstruct that a little bit. Your body, your psychology, doesn't know what to do with the word stress. There is a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Stress and I feel unsupported. Stress and I feel unseen. Stress and I'm bored. There's a world of difference. What we know is that when we label our emotions with greater levels of accuracy, with with high levels of granularity, that what it starts to enable us to do is to understand the cause of the emotion. Gee, it's not just stress, it's I'm feeling unsupported. And it also allows us to develop what psychologists call our readiness potential. The readiness potential, when you move away from, I'm not stressed, actually, I'm bored, what that boredom does is when you start starting to label it in that way, you're also starting to say, Gee, what do I need to do to now not be bored?

So it starts to move you towards goals. We know that children as young as two and three years old who have greater levels of emotion granularity. In other words, they're not just saying, I'm mad or I'm sad, but they're able to say, I feel a bit upset, I feel a bit disappointed, I feel even children as young as two and three years old, obviously within their language capacity. Those children who have greater levels of emotional granularity, 10, 20, 30 years later, those children do better. So again, coming back to Tina, we've got this gentle acceptance of emotion that is crucial. In my work, I call it gentle acceptance. It's about showing up to all of our emotions with acceptance and curiosity. Not the same as passive resignation, but it's this gentle acceptance. We also I want to start creating space because we can't be wise, we can't be intentional when we're just on autopilot or in react.

I want to lean into the word, how do I separate my emotions? Whenever I use that in my own life, I want to separate my emotions from a child that feels anxious or a husband that is struggling with depression or going through something really difficult. When you feel that sense to separate, is that a signal that you're getting sucked into and triggered by someone else's emotions, and you need to now take a breath and come back into your own body? Because if I listen closely to what you're saying, you're basically saying that, of course, if there's somebody in your life that is struggling, it's going to make you sad and make you feel grief and make you feel all these complicated things, which is absolutely normal.

Yeah.

And that hustling with our emotions and being in conflict with what is coming up for you is part of the problem, like resisting the actual feelings that you have. Yes. How do you separate, though, what your son or daughter or significant other is dealing with and needs to deal with and feel for themselves and what you need to deal with for yourself. Because for me, I'll just explain in case it's helpful to you listening, when one of our kids is struggling with anxiety, which all three of them have in various levels throughout their life, or my husband struggling with depression, the emotions that come up for me are so uncomfortable that the way that I would normally deal with them, Susan, is first try to swoop in and remove all the discomfort from my kids. I'll take care of it. I'll get you the therapist. We're going to talk about this. You're going to be... Because I can't deal with my own emotions. Then as soon as I have just barfed all that out at somebody, because I'm going to fix it, fix it, fix it, because I don't want to feel what I'm feeling, because it scares me to death that you're anxious because I love you and I don't want you to be in pain and now I'm upset about it, then I go pour a drink because I don't want to feel those things.

Yes, I love that question. By separation, we don't What we mean, disengagement. By separation, we don't mean, I don't care about you. By separation, what we mean is healthy levels of boundaries. Boundaries don't mean that I remove my compassion, boundaries with my child that basically say, I am safe as a person, and you, my beautiful child, are as a person because I'm not going to let your anxiety derail me and make us both unsafe. In other words, because it's a really important thing. So what are we doing when When you're setting a boundary? You are wanting to see your child's need, to recognize that need, and to state that need. I can see that you need me right now while I'm cooking dinner. So we We want to state the need. We want to, number two, empathize. I love you. I care about you. I empathize with you, and I can see that what you're going through is really tough right now. We're doing all of this, need, empathy. And third is we are stating what we can and cannot do. I can't Can't deal with this now. I'm cooking dinner. Can we have this conversation in an hour?

Now, in that way, you're not being inhuman. You're not walking When you're looking away from your compassion. What you're doing is you're coupling your compassion with a strong sense of groundedness in yourself and your ability to set boundaries. So separation is not about distance or I don't care, but it is the most important skillset. What we found, what I found in my work, is that usually when people have these difficult emotions, and you captured this so beautifully in the example that you gave, is Often what we have is one of two reactions, and people sometimes jump from one to the next. The first is what I call bottling difficulty emotions. Bottling difficulty emotions is when we experience these emotions, but we start engaging in emotional suppression. We can do it with ourselves, we can do it with others. Ignoring and going and watching Netflix, so I don't need to deal with it, is an example of bottling. Doing that once is fine, but when it becomes a default coping strategy, you aren't going to be effective in the world at all. Bottling is this idea of suppressing difficult emotions, pushing it aside in myself, pushing it aside in others, forced positivity trying to fix, trying to say to someone, Don't worry, it'll be okay.

Sometimes leaders will say, when people are going through difficult situations at work, leaders will say something like, It doesn't matter. Everything will be okay. Everything will be fine. I'm like, That is not leadership. That is what we call denial. Forced positivity is not leadership. Forced positivity is denial. It's denial that's wrapped up in rainbows and sparkles. So what do you do if you're worried, though?

You've got somebody that's really struggling.

And then the opposite is brooding. And brooding is where we like, This feels terrible. This feels so difficult. We get stuck in our difficulty motion. So what we want to do with our difficulty emotions to create that distance is, firstly, this gentle acceptance that I spoke about. Secondly, is when we start getting granular with our emotions, we are now not in the space of like, Oh, everything's stressful and my whole family life is up the creek. Instead, what we're doing is we're saying, I'm feeling disappointed because this is hard. Just that starts to create a sense of liberation in ourselves and a sense of separation. Another thing, and this, I think, is one of the most powerful things that we need to recognize, I own my emotions. My emotions don't own me.

I mean, that sounds great. I don't know that I feel that way some days.

Let's just think about our language. All right? I am sad. What are we saying when we say I'm When we say, I feel sad, we're saying, All of me, 100% of me.

Oh, versus I feel sad.

Versus I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. When we say I feel sad, when we say I feel angry, what we are literally doing is saying I am all of me is defined by the sadness. And Mel, the metaphor that I use sometimes is, imagine there's a cloud in the sky. When you say, I am sad, I am angry, I'm a bad parent. What we are doing is we are almost being the cloud. I am all of me is that cloud. But when we instead start noticing Our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories for what they are. I'm noticing that I'm feeling grieving about what I'm seeing in my child. I'm noticing my sense of disappointment that I need to go it alone here, that I'm the person that's holding the family together. I'm noticing a story which is that I need to be a perfect parent here. So when we move away from I'm a bad parent into I'm noticing my thoughts, emotions, and stories for what they are, which is their thoughts, their emotions, their stories, they're parts of us. They're not all of us. We've also got our wisdom. We've got our values, we've got our intentions.

We've got our wants, our dreams. So we need to create that separation. And a really powerful way of doing that is using this linguistic Linguistic separation. Linguistic separation, instead of I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. What you're doing here is you are not the cloud. You are the whole damn sky. You are powerful enough to experience all of your emotions and then to choose who you want to be in that situation.

I want to really drill down into this example a little bit further because I think what you've just shared is super helpful when you're the one who is getting brought down and overwhelmed by somebody else who's really struggling. It's super helpful to see the need to, literally, separate a little bit, have some compassion for yourself, use the linguistic separation of, I'm noticing this in myself, which even just acknowledging it, does that readiness in terms of pointing you in the right direction to know what support you need.

Firstly, we're not trying to sense make with anyone while they're lying on a supermarket floor having a tantrum. Okay. What we know from our work is that the simple presence, the simple willingness of one individual to be human with another individual, to not try jostle and fix and distract, but simple presence, automatically de-escalates those difficult emotions. So we know that. You can't react with intentionality when you are reacting. In other words, when you're being reactive rather than responsive, when we're grounded in ourselves, we can respond. We've got our feet on the ground and we are Now, there are a couple of mistakes that people make with us. The first is, I spoke about brooding earlier, where we get stuck in our difficulty emotions. There is something called co-brooding. Co-brooding is when someone's had a really bad day and you come home from work and they come home from work and you have a big fat moan about what's been going on in the day. That's co-brooding. What we're doing here is we are both now stuck in these difficulty emotions. There's fascinating research on co-brooding. The idea that you go out with your best girlfriend, you have a big fat moan about your father-in-law.

And what do you do when you leave that restaurant conversation? You love your best friend. You feel better about your best friend. But what is the longer term impact of your behavior on your father-in-law? It actually is worse. So co-brooding is where you both now get stuck in a little vent. And we know that co-brooding and brooding is actually predictive of longer term depression, of longer term anxiety, and it is unhelpful. This is where this labeling comes in that's very, very important.

I would love to hear you help us understand what some emotional laced behavior in other people is signaling to us, because I don't think most adults go up to other adults and are like, I'm really lonely. Here's an example. If this happened to a friend of mine where she just wanted to have a couple people go out for her birthday, just three or four friends. Some other friends found out about it, and she gets a passive-aggressive text, Thanks a lot for inviting me. That is clearly behavior by another adult that is driven by emotions that are uncomfortable for them. When somebody is emotionally volatile or passive-aggressive in the way they communicate with you, what is the deeper thing that you could probably assume somebody's feeling or dealing with so that you can tap into that compassion instead of like, She's a jerk.

I think this is really important. People aren't going to say I'm lonely. But if we think about, for example, the loneless, and then move it into that example, what is loneless signposting? Loneless is signposting a greater need for intimacy and connection. That's what it's signposting. Boredom is often signposting a greater need for growth. Anger. This idea of we've got to not have anger. Anger is often signposting a need for equity or fairness or that some values are being traversed. If we move away from this idea that emotions are good or or that I'm only allowed some of them. Actually, what we do is we move into the space where we start saying, for me as well as for the friend in the restaurant, is like these emotions are signposting our needs and our values. I think this is very, very powerful. Now, the person might not say, I am lonely, or, Gee, I feel excluded. Instead, they're doing it in this passive-aggressive way. But you are able to, as a human to another human, start I'm saying, Instead of what I'm seeing about the emotion, what is the function of the emotion? What is the emotion trying to tell us about our needs and our values?

And the space of compassion is the space of saying, Gee, it is actually hard to human. And gee, it actually… When you feel like you're part of our group of friends and you came out to dinner and you happen to see me with a smaller circle of this group having a birthday party and you realized you weren't invited, that hurts. A lot. A lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. What is the function of the emotion? Or what is the function of the text? The function of the text is saying, Do I matter? Or Or am I still part of us? Often what we're doing in reactive mode is what do we do? We get the text, we say, Oh, my God, can you believe she didn't understand that I just wanted to be by myself? We maybe text our other friends. We start labeling them as toxic. There's a very powerful way that we often, we call it the fundamental attribution bias, where we start saying what that person is experiencing is now her personality. She's needy. She's all of these things. What we often doing when we're in reactive mode is that person is defensive, now I'm defensive, and now we're in this weird escalation of something that doesn't need to be.

A different way of being in that space.

Talk to us because I want to know how you would handle that because I love the word escalation because you're right. I think we all have someone in our life where you've been on the receiving end of, Oh, I see you're in Boston, Mel. Thanks for calling me. I get one of those from her. I'm like, Now, I'm never calling you, by the way. Well, exactly. Now, all of a sudden- You just got guaranteed. Your immature emotion, my immature emotion escalates. It's all the time. How do you... I think this is like... I think this moment right here, whether it happens at work, or it happens with a friend group, or it happens with a significant, this is everything. You see the dishes in the sink with your roommate, and your emotions fly up because they didn't do it again. I think if we can give the person and me de-escalation, how do you, as a psychologist, when this happens to you and you feel someone else's emotional reactivity? How do you deal with it?

Well, just to be clear, I've got an effing PhD in this stuff, but it doesn't mean that I get it right all the time.

But the approach- Do you explain yourself or do you just validate the emotion?

I think it depends on the situation. I think sometimes it's completely okay to say Georgia was in town and the three of us decided to go out. I don't think you have to explain, but the The crux here is understanding the emotion behind the surface-level passive aggressiveness is what engages you in a clean relationship. And so much of my work is about moving into cleanness with ourselves and with others. Accepting my emotions, all of my emotions okay, I don't need to hustle. Separation between me and my difficulty emotions because I own them, they don't own me. What does that look like? It's the granularity. It's the instead of I am, I'm noticing what I'm feeling. Then, understanding the why behind difficulty emotions. What the funk? What is the emotion signaling to you about your needs and your values? And then lastly, how can I move forward with those difficult emotions, even if it's uncomfortable, even if it requires huge amounts of courage because it's walking towards my values. And these skills are skills that enable us to be clean with ourselves, but also to be clean with others. You are allowed to feel what you feel.

I'm helping you in this text message or in whatever example, I'm helping us to understand what's going on for you, that you're not just being a silly little bitch. Actually, you hurt because you care about me. I'm helping you to notice that you are feeling that, but I love you. I'm helping us to also think about, how do we want to be as friends? Like, what does friendship look like? Friendship often means that we go towards the values of having a difficult conversation.

I want to just highlight this part of the conversation because this is an example of what you are dealing with in life every single day. It's an example of these moments that I deal with every day in my life, where something happens, someone has an emotional response, and now you're either going to react or you're going to take all this and put it in pause. I want to just share what I just got from you, Dr. David. It's so easy to roll your eyes and why is this person text me This person's so dramatic. This person's always the victim, and start to label them and push them away. And what I just got listening to you is if you practice these skills and you come back to this Emotional core, think about the gymnast, center yourself, pause. Then you can ask yourself, What might this person be feeling? The passive-aggressive, the immature behavior, there is There's something deeper underneath that. If I had to guess, what's underneath somebody who's even texting me, Hey, I see you're in Boston, things like that, is they're trying to connect, even though the way they're doing it blows. That deeper and more profound Underneath either the silence, the passive-aggressive, all this stuff that irritates us is just another human being who can't process their emotions and who wants to somehow connect with you.

I think having that reframing helps It helps me be a better human. It helps me bring more compassion. And it also helps me diffuse the emotion in the moment and be able to reach out to this friend of mine and say something like, I can see that you're upset. Let's have a conversation about it tomorrow, because I certainly don't want you to feel that way. Thanks for reaching out. What a wonderful way to handle it. Certainly beats turning to your friends at the table and being like, What a jerk. That is more emotional immaturity. If you've always lived your life for other people's expectations, how at the age of 54 do you step out and live your life for you? Great question. So are you a people pleaser? Are you always worried about what people are going to say or think? Are you constantly concerned that you're disappointing somebody? Do you have trouble putting yourself first? Well, listen up, okay? It doesn't matter if you're 54 or older. It doesn't matter if you're young. You're never too early, never too late to learn how to live for yourself, okay? This was super hard for me.

I was basically like a human chameleon. I was such a people pleaser that I would morph into whatever person I needed to be in my friendships and particularly my romantic relationships. When I was in college, I remember my freshman year, I actually sewed a Grateful Dead patch on the center of my ski jacket in the back because my boyfriend liked the Grateful Dead. I didn't even like the Grateful Dead. That's how much of a people pleaser I That's how much I put everybody else before me. I not only said yes to things I didn't want to do, I actually pretended I liked stuff that I didn't like just so I would fit in. And this is where we all go wrong. We have life backwards. We think that the point is to fit into somebody else's world. That's not the point of your life. Your life is to figure out. The point of your life is to figure out who you are, what you like, and to be that person no matter where you are. The point of your life is to figure out who you are and to be who you are no matter where you are.

Got it? Good. That's the point of your life. So how do you do it? How do you start practicing it? I'm going to give you two tips today. Number one, once a day, Say no to something. People-pleasers always say yes to shit they don't want to do because they're afraid of somebody's reactions because they think they need to put somebody else first. Every single day, say no to one thing you just don't want to do. And it's going to It'll be hard in the beginning. But when you start saying no to the stuff you don't want to do, you start becoming the person that you want to be. And you got to say no to a lot of people if you expect to continue to put yourself first. So that's rule number one. Rule number two, we're going to leverage something called behavior activation therapy. It's called BAT, for short. Tremendous amount of research behind it. Super simple principle. If you're trying to change, one of the most effective ways to change anything is to simply Act like the person you want to become. Behave like the person you want to become. So if you're a people pleaser who puts themselves last, you need to wake up every day, and after you've said no to something, I want you to go through your day and act like a person who's not a people pleaser.

Act like the person you want to become. And here's one final little trick. If you don't know how to do that, just pick somebody who you think is like that. And who could you pick? Oh, I don't know. What about your friend Mel Robbins? Here's how you use this trick. Tomorrow, when you wake up as you're practicing, behaving like the person you want to become, as you're learning how to put yourself first, if you get yourself in a sticky situation and you don't know what to do, just ask yourself this, what would Mel Robbins do? And act like me because I do put my self first. Act like me because I have been working hard to break the people-pleasing habit for decades. Act like me because that'll get you out of the thinking emotional mind, and it will push you to do something different than what you normally do. Let me know how that goes. You're never too old, never too young to put yourself first. And remember, the whole purpose of your life is to figure out who you are and to be who you are no matter where you are. I'm a people pleaser.

This is a question from Sylvie Five. I'm a people pleaser. How to set my boundaries and say no. How do you set boundaries? So do you have anybody in your life that's- Who is the most important in your own life Who? Who? Me. Exactly. If you're a people pleaser and you want to make sure everyone's happy, you need to realize that you are more important than anybody else to yourself. So you step Step one is to make sure you are people-pleasing yourself. Okay. And normally, people-pleasing just gets... It's only ever bad when you're jeopardizing how you feel. So if you can prioritize how you feel, then I feel like you can people please as much as you want. As long as it's aligned with what you believe. You believe. Okay. So hold on. It actually sounds like you skipped a step. Probably. So step one is understanding- What you What you want. Exactly. And step two is making decisions that align with what works for you. I think being a people pleaser is a great thing.

Making sure other people are happy is a great quality.

But you need to make sure that you are the happiest because you also can't help people if you're not happy. So if you want to be a people pleaser, you got to make sure that you are following what you believe and you're doing what makes you feel comfortable, but you're You're still doing things that make people happy. You know, I got a story about this. Can I tell you a quick story? Tell them. I'm telling you. Oh, good one. Oh, my God. So this just happened to me this weekend. Yes. A friend of ours' father- Oh, yes. Who was very sick and has been for a long time, died. And they were holding a memorial service two and a half hours from here on Saturday. And normally, I am the person that always shows up because I think it is important to show up in life. Definitely. And dad was all set to go, and I was planning on going. But then I had a mammogram, which is a scan of my breast. I don't know if you know this. And they saw something. You just had one? Yes. And that's why I was in Boston for an extra two days.

Did they get it out?

Well, they wanted to do extra tests to see what exactly it was that they saw and to make sure it wasn't something, you know. Scary. Is it? Thankfully, no. I've got to go back for more tests in six months, but they think it's just scar tissue. Lovely. So when I got up here on Friday night, finally, After two extra days of getting the exam and moving, I was tired. And here's a question that I asked myself because I started to beat myself up for not wanting to go. And dad looked at me and said, well, I really don't want to go either, but I think it's super important that you show up for friends. And I think you should show up for friends. Of course. But here's what's important if you tend to be a people-pleaser, instead of asking yourself, Should I show up? Should I do that thing? Ask yourself, What would support me? What decision would support me right now? So instead of the should, which is guilt, obligation, what decision really is going to support me? And had I not had to be in Boston two extra days to get all these medical tests.

You would have gotten. Oh. A hundred %. It would have supported me to be there for my friends. Of course. And so that's one trick that you can use as a people pleaser to stop yourself yourself from pressuring yourself with guilt and a sense of obligation and just say, well, what would support me in this instance? And there are going to be times that what supports your friend aligns with the answer to that question for yourself. And there are times when it's not going to just as it did on Saturday. And so I didn't go. I stayed here. I got a bunch of stuff done that I needed to get done. I got to spend time with you and Kendall, who was visiting from LA. And dad went down to the service and was there on behalf of both of us. And I sent the couple a beautiful note, and that's it. I'm happy I did it. 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.

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