02 Jan Dont try to please everyone ?
None of us get through life problem free. We all have both our range of problems and opportunities. In order to improve your chances of tacking either, it can be useful to seek outside help. This outside supposed pragmatic facilitation is to help you to clarify the issue(s) and surface some possibilities at developing and implementing appropriate solutions.
As an outside facilitator one has to be very careful that you are not seeing your client’s issues through your own lifes influenced experiences, rather than through their lens. As an old beggar woman outside Moscow once said to me,
“You people see me from your perspective and based on that picture my current situation probably looks very bad to you. I see myself from where I am sitting on this street and the picture as I see it is not that bad”
(More detail contained in my books www.mriwex.ie
If your own relationship is in shreds you might want to pay particular attention to how you listen to someone with relationship problems. If your own work life is stressed, you need to be sure it’s your client’s stress you are dealing with rather than your own. You have to be an appropriate solution provider, rather than seeking to please everyone. If you try to please everyone at the expense of your professionalism, then you will finish up being nothing. Is this your mission?
People pleasers can compromise so much that they cease to exist as themselves. Eventually they do not feel respected. The reality is that it’s they who have ceased to give themselves respect in the first place.
How much of your behaviour is determined by seeking approval of others, or anticipating how they will react?.
Is your behaviour driven by fear?
- Fear that you will be thought mean, so you pick up the bill.
- Fear that you will be thought lazy, so you load yourself with work.
- Fear of asking for help, because you will be perceived to be limited in some way.
The next time you find yourself doing something, when in your heart you know that you shouldn’t, look at your reasons why you are doing it. It may be a once-off, which is ok, but it may also be part of a pattern, where you are just a “puppet on a string”. Eventually this leads to bitterness and all its follow on implications.
You are now the victim, rather than the facilitator for the good of “others”.
Blaise Brosnan.