Todd Goodwin di Goodwin Hypnosis su come riprendersi dallessere gradito alle persone

For one, break the habit of reactively saying yes by giving yourself time to decide if or how you’ll say no. If someone asks you for a favor, simply say, “I’d like to help, so let me see if I can do it and get back to you tomorrow (or in a few hours).”

In today’s society, the tendency to prioritize others’ needs and expectations over one’s own can lead to significant emotional and psychological challenges. In this series, we would like to explore the complex dynamics of people-pleasing behavior and its impact on individual well-being and relationships. We would like to discuss the root causes of people-pleasing behavior, its effects on personal and professional life, and practical steps for cultivating healthier relationships and self-esteem. We hope that this series can provide insights, strategies, and real-life experiences that can help individuals navigate and overcome the pitfalls of being a people pleaser. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Todd Goodwin.

Since 2007, Todd Goodwin has empowered thousands of clients to overcome their emotional and behavioral challenges. He is one of only a handful of hypnotists to earn the title of Board Certified Fellow from the National Guild of Hypnotists. Todd is also the author of “Break the Chains of Smoking: How to Escape the Mental and Emotional Prison That Keeps You Addicted.” He has a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science and a master’s degree in nutrition and health promotion. Today, Goodwin Hypnosis helps people throughout the world via Zoom to resolve trauma and its negative effects.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

It’s my pleasure. One of my personal missions is to increase others’ self-awareness, so I’m happy to spend the time. People pleasing is a behavioral pattern that I’ve helped many of my clients to change, and I’ve effectively addressed it in my life. Let me share a childhood experience that contributed to my own people pleasing tendencies. I was diagnosed with ADHD in the early 1980s, long before millions of kids were routinely labeled with that condition. The school counselor somehow thought it was a good idea for her to bring me in front of the classroom and tell my classmates that I needed to take medication for this problem. That humiliating experience was traumatic, and it gave my classmates enough ammunition to tease me regularly for years. So from a very young age, it was normal for me to feel ashamed, as well as judged and criticized by others. While my home life was very supportive, my social life was challenging for much of my time in school. Things were better for me late in high school, but the damage to my self-esteem was done. The feeling of insecurity around kids my age led me to be sensitive to possible rejection and to go out of my way to minimize or avoid that. And voila! People pleasing was born. Of course, I didn’t have any of these insights until after I established my current career decades later.

Can you tell us a bit about what you do professionally, and what brought you to this specific career path?

Absolutely. I help people to think better, feel better, and do better in their life. I use methods that are very effective at shifting the subconscious mind, which is the seat of disempowering beliefs, emotional baggage, and unhealthy habits. I just happen to do it as a professional hypnotist, and I’ve been devoted to helping clients improve their lives for 17 years. I focus on resolving the negative effects of trauma, which I loosely define as any emotionally upsetting experience that hasn’t been fully processed, accepted, and integrated. It’s something that adversely affects nearly everyone on some level and most Americans in a meaningful way. I’m grateful that I’m able to help most of my clients realize significant improvements in a matter of weeks and sometimes minutes.

What led me to this career was a personal awakening and transformation. During my third year in college, the cumulative weight of my unresolved emotional baggage from childhood led to a personal crisis. I felt anxious, depressed, insecure, defensive, and overwhelmed. I was eating poorly and had gained maybe 25 pounds over the previous six months. It took some good friends and good books to get the message through my thick head that I was the real cause of my misery, and not everyone I was blaming. I took responsibility for fixing things in my inner world, and I began to radically change my thinking and behavior. Over the next year, I lost the weight, improved my grades dramatically, and I felt happy with myself for probably the first time ever.

I realized that I wanted to help others achieve the same kind of transformation that I had experienced, so I moved to Boston after graduation and earned a master’s degree in nutrition. I later learned that good advice alone is not enough to change someone’s behavior, so I was discouraged with my new career that focused mostly on weight loss. I continued to wonder for several years, “If we know what to do, why don’t we do what we know?” The answer from my research kept pointing to the subconscious mind. If it resists our conscious desire to change our mindset, emotional responses, or habits, then we remain stuck. It’s really that simple, even though none of my grad school professors seemed to know that. Then again, most healthcare practitioners don’t seem to know that either, because they keep expecting rational advice and willpower to make a big difference, which they rarely do.

It turns out that the most effective methods to change the subconscious mind are hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming (NLP). I took some training workshops, found a mentor, studied a lot, earned my hypnosis certification, and opened my practice in Miami Beach. If I had seen a hypnotist back in college, my transformation would have been much faster and easier, but it happened, nonetheless.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about People Pleasing. To make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does “People Pleaser” mean to you?

To me, people pleasing is a behavioral pattern where someone is so agreeable that he or she does something for others at his or her own expense. This is when YES really means NO. It’s related to being a “giver” or a “nice guy.” It’s not the same thing as someone who gives others what they want in order to intentionally manipulate them. I’m referring to the subconscious drive to say yes when it may be better to say no. It’s typically an emotionally compulsive behavior, in that the person’s subconscious urge to give, help, or be agreeable overrides any rational understanding that saying no may be a better option.

On the surface, it seems like being a person who wants to please others is a good thing. Can you help articulate a few of the challenges that come with being a people pleaser?

It can certainly seem like a good thing, but I’ve learned in my work that simplistic, black or white thinking is misleading and isn’t based on reality. People pleasing, like most subconscious behaviors, such as overeating, smoking, procrastinating, and losing your temper, can be very useful in the short run but problematic over time. Putting others’ needs first can harm your self-esteem and self-worth, it can build resentment towards others for “making” you say yes, and it can cause stress from the added workload or self-imposed obligations. Add to that the secondary effects of stress, like poor sleep and unhealthy habits. Crafty employers can even manipulate people pleasers to do more work by tapping into their insecurities. People pleasing can also indirectly harm others by setting false expectations or enabling them to become dependent on the people pleaser.

Does being a people pleaser give you certain advantages? Can you explain?

Absolutely. The benefits of placating or pleasing others include gaining their approval, getting them to like you, avoiding conflict or criticism, and feeling like a nice, helpful, or capable person. In fact, these are the subconscious motivations that drive people pleasing behavior.

Can you describe a moment in your life when you realized that your own people-pleasing behavior was more harmful than helpful?

For me, my people pleasing behavior showed up primarily as my being too generous. The moment in my life that made this really clear to me was when my first wife got upset at my generosity. She said, “You’re so selfish!” I was shocked and asked her to explain. She said, “You always want to be the giver and never let me give to you. You’re depriving me of the pleasure of giving.” Wow. That was brilliant logic that taught me a huge lesson. And for what it’s worth, I realized at the end of our relationship that we had a codependency where I was primarily in the top dog position of enabler. Being a helper and a giver made me feel good, so I had an unconscious motive to keep it that way. But that imbalance disempowered her over time.

The problem is that helping and giving are predominantly seen as good qualities only, which is false. The New Testament contains the saying that it’s more blessed to give than to receive, in terms of helping the weak. While that sounds like a nice idea, this misleading advice is logically flawed and is responsible for a lot of codependency, guilt, shame, entitlement, disempowerment, and a lot of other problems. I’ll prove it. If it’s more blessed to give than to receive, then logically it must be more cursed to receive than to give. So helping the weak is basically cursing them, too, even if the giver thinks it’s a blessing. The unintended consequence is that giving too much to someone can create a dependency that helps the recipient in the short run but curses her in the long run. Anyone with open eyes has seen this in their life. Taken to its absurd extreme, if everyone were to give and not receive, then who are they giving to? That’s why it doesn’t work. The reality is that giving and receiving are equally important and must be balanced.

In your opinion, what are the common root causes of people-pleasing behavior?

There are a few root causes which are learned earlier in life. Fear of conflict or confrontation, fear of being judged or rejected, and low or conditional self-worth. These are all related and are generally driven by fear or anxiety, as well as a strong need to be liked.

Someone who has developed a fear of confrontation, maybe from an upsetting childhood event, is more likely to be agreeable so they don’t rock the boat or create resistance in others. Children who experience conflict after expressing their needs may learn to appease an aggressor to keep the peace. This pattern often continues into adulthood as people pleasing, and the pleaser tends to find herself in similar relationships with others who will take advantage of her.

Fear of judgment or rejection is related, so if an insecure person can garner someone else’s approval, then the result is a temporary sense of security and calm.

Someone with a self-worth that’s low or dependent on others’ opinion (a very common condition with a lot of undesirable effects) may also develop people pleasing behavior. The reason is that such a person needs others to like him so he can feel good about himself. Doing something perceived as “good” can make the people pleaser feel like a worthy person, which is helpful to someone who doesn’t feel good enough. That was part of what drove the dynamic in my first marriage.

A person with any of these underlying issues is likely to feel uncomfortable saying no, even if it’s in his or her long-term best interest to do so. But saying yes does satisfy short-term emotional needs, so it’s a temporary solution to an underlying problem, just like engaging in addictive behaviors. Helpful in the short run, harmful in the long run.

How does people-pleasing behavior impact personal relationships?

In a big way. First, let’s look at how people tend to respond to potential conflict. When fear and low self-worth are factors, people tend to react either passively or aggressively, depending upon the situation. Virginia Satir, a renowned family therapist in the 1960s and 1970s, introduced an important concept that she called the four coping stances. These are ways that people deal with interpersonal pressure when they’re unwilling to be candid and honest, which one needs in order to be assertive. Two of the coping stances — blaming and placating — are relevant to people pleasers. While this is a generalization, aggressive people tend to blame others, while passive people tend to placate or appease others. People pleasers tend to be passive, in that they allow others to manipulate and coerce them into doing something against their long-term interest. They placate partly to avoid possible aggression. Constantly doing this causes internal pressure to build in the form of anger. The result is either an explosive, aggressive response to outside demands, or it leaks out as passive-aggressive behavior, which is a safer way to push back. To put it simply, if you’re aggressive, you tend to subordinate others’ needs to your own. If you’re passive, you tend to subordinate your own needs. If you’re assertive, you prioritize your own needs while respecting others’ needs. People pleasers have a lot of trouble asserting themselves due to their fears and low self-worth.

Mothers, because of their nurturing role, tend to fall into the people pleasing trap. Meeting the needs of children is great, unless it comes at the mother’s expense or provides too much support without enough challenge. In such a case, children may disrespect their enabling mother, and they may not develop the emotional maturity that comes from a more balanced upbringing.

I’ll give a quick example of a mother I know who tends to placate and spoil her child. While there is some discipline, the boy gets away with a lot of aggressive behavior and has learned how to control his mother. Her primary motivation to have a child stemmed from her need to feel loved. Her inability to be consistently firm with her son comes from her low self-worth and fear of being rejected by him. By letting him run around the house yelling or eat whatever he wants, the mother pleases him and ensures his loyalty to her, at least in the short run. But he may eventually resent and reject her, so she may lose the very love she desperately needs. At the same time, rewarding him for poor behavior will weaken him, and he will someday find the real world to be too challenging, unless he can find other people pleasers to dominate.

How does people-pleasing behavior impact professional relationships?

When done excessively, lopsided giving, selfless service to others, repressing one’s own needs, and being too nice or agreeable can be disastrous professionally, just as in personal relationships. I know a doctor, also a very nurturing mother, who cares so much about her patients that she allows them to call her cell phone at any hour, including on the weekend, for any non-urgent issue. She has very low boundaries, and so she’s constantly overwhelmed by her professional life. She also breastfed her daughter until four years old, which nearly everyone would agree is too long. In her case, it was another example of placating someone else to maintain closeness. By placating her child and patients, she feels like a loving person, a helpful healer, and a selfless person. God forbid someone should think of her as selfish for saying no and taking care of her own needs. But at what cost?

Commonly, employees with low self-worth or fear of confrontation will people please their bosses or coworkers by volunteering to do extra work or agreeing to do favors when asked. Their unconscious drive to be seen as valuable or to avoid judgment by subordinating their needs contributes to constant overwhelm. Despite the people pleasers’ overly nice and agreeable public demeanor, the pendulum can swing only so far in one direction before reversing. This can lead to explosions at work, meltdowns at home, unwanted consequences in one’s health or personal life, or more commonly feeling burned out and exhausted. In fact, I recently read that since COVID, more than 100,000 nurses have quit due to burnout, and a sizeable segment will never return to healthcare.

How can long-term people-pleasing behavior impact an individual’s mental health?

Besides burnout, long-term people pleasing further damages self-respect and self-worth, and it can lead to resentment and bitterness towards others, as well as depression. In extreme cases, people pleasing can manifest as what I call a messiah-martyr pattern, which is where someone devotes themselves to helping and saving others so much that they sacrifice themselves in the process. In my experience, it’s much more common among women than men, and especially in nurturing roles like mothers, healthcare practitioners, and schoolteachers. They put the needs of their family, children, patients, and everyone else first, with little left over for self-care. It may cost them their physical and mental health, but with their final breath, at least they can say, “I was a kind and generous person.” I’m being melodramatic here, but it’s a real problem that underscores the need to recognize and overcome interpersonal fears and self-worth deficits.

You can find a pop culture example of the messiah-martyr pattern in Shel Silverstein’s book, “The Giving Tree.” The tree develops a relationship with a boy, who, throughout his life, continuously takes advantage of the tree’s generous offers. He uses the tree for shade, carves his name in its bark, eats its apples, chops it up for wood, and more, until nothing remains of the tree but a stump. At the end, the tree is sad that it has nothing left to give. The boy, now an old man, simply wants a place to sit, and the tree is happy to offer its stump. I’d say that the tree, despite its good intentions, taught the boy how to be a parasitic consumer without regard for the long-term consequences. In the short run, the tree’s compensation for its generosity was feeling happy that it could help the boy or man. But at what cost? In the end, it will die as a stump, because it didn’t balance its people pleasing tendencies with concern over its own long-term wellbeing. Giving or helping or being kind is great within reason, but we absolutely must value ourselves enough to say no at times. Otherwise, there will always be people who will take advantage of us until we have nothing more to give, even to ourselves.

Also, we must get past the black or white thinking that says it’s only good to be supportive and generous, and it’s only bad to be challenging and selfish. If the tree had challenged the boy to find other ways to meet his needs, it might have taught the boy to be more resourceful or self-sufficient, and it would have survived. It’s possible that the boy might have rejected the tree for being selfish, which is ironic, but how healthy is a relationship that rejects someone for looking out for herself? Reality and psychology exist in shades of gray, not black and white stripes. Unfortunately, cultural and religious rules have programmed people to accept unnatural laws of behavior with undesirable consequences. You see, the nature of reality is complex, but the human mind wants simple answers, and that causes a lot of humanity’s problems. I’m presently writing a book that addresses this very issue, so stay tuned.

In your experience, what is the role of self-awareness in overcoming people-pleasing tendencies, and how can individuals cultivate it?

Understanding why you think, feel, and act the way you do is a critical first step to overcoming any unwanted issue, including people pleasing. Also, having self-awareness makes it easier to treat yourself and others with more respect and compassion. In fact, it can help you realize how underlying thought patterns lead to emotional, behavioral, relationship, financial, and even health problems. Our intention with every educational video on the Goodwin Hypnosis YouTube channel is to raise self-awareness, since that’s really important to us. While having self-awareness is a great first step, it’s rarely enough to change subconscious patterns. Otherwise, hypnotists like my wife, Gina Goodwin, and I wouldn’t be in demand. So while most of our change work relies on subconscious methods like hypnosis and NLP, self-awareness is an important piece of the puzzle. Once you discover how and why your mind creates your problems, you can finally understand why certain methods work very well, while others do not.

Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience or research, what are the “Five Strategies Or Techniques That Can Help Individuals Break Free From The Cycle Of People-Pleasing”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1. For one, break the habit of reactively saying yes by giving yourself time to decide if or how you’ll say no. If http://www.polsoorologi.org asks you for a favor, simply say, “I’d like to help, so let me see if I can do it and get back to you tomorrow (or in a few hours).”

2. Second, identify a few dozen ways that your behavior actually harms others, in addition to helping them. And how does it hurt you, in addition to helping you? This can be quite enlightening, as it challenges the common belief that giving someone what they ask for produces only beneficial results. Remember that it’s a myth that it’s better to give than to receive. The reality is that there are both advantages and disadvantages to both parties involved in a people pleasing dynamic. An example might be a healer who feels bad about charging for her services. If she doesn’t make any money, she goes out of business, and then she can’t heal anyone else.

3. Similarly, identify a few dozen ways that being self-serving and taking care of your own needs indirectly serves others’ best interests, because it probably does. If the healer charges a fee that’s proportional to the value she provides, then her clients will value her work, and she’ll be able to remain in the business of healing others. In the case of the Giving Tree, it could have chosen not to invite the boy to cut off its branches. If the tree had prioritized its own health and wellbeing, it could have provided many more years of shade and apples, so everyone would have benefited.

4. Here’s an eye-opening exercise for those who feel obligated to people please voluntarily, as opposed to responding to requests. I’ve shared it with many of my clients with great results. First, list the people pleasing behaviors that you feel you “must” or “have to” or “need to” do for others, whether at work or personally. Then realize that every one of those obligations is really a choice in disguise. There may be consequences to not doing them, but it’s still your choice to say yes or no. Second, rephrase each obligation as a sentence starting with, “I choose to do (whatever the behavior is), because…” and include the reason why you choose to do it. For instance, is it to avoid getting fired or to help your spouse feel loved? Finally, commit to removing some of those former obligations from your list, so that you can ease your burden. For example, do you really need to send out one hundred Christmas cards or invite your in-laws to stay with you for a week? No, you don’t. It may feel a bit uncomfortable at first, but there are alternatives, and you’ll benefit from having less hassle and greater self-respect.

5. The recommendations I’ve just shared will certainly help, but there’s a limit to how much you can do at a conscious level, since people pleasing is a subconsciously driven pattern. As you’d expect, I find that it’s much more effective and efficient to rely on techniques that directly shift the subconscious, such as hypnosis and NLP. With my clients, this can involve reframing distressing childhood memories and clearing fears, instilling a strong sense of self-worth and self-acceptance, and mentally rehearsing assertive behaviors with feelings of confidence. Since COVID, Gina and I have seen nearly all clients via Zoom, which is just as effective as the office-based practice I had for the previous 13 years. I realize that some of your readers may prefer to meet with a professional in person. If so, they should look for a board certified hypnotist, skilled in NLP, who has experience helping people change the way they think about themselves in relation to others. That’s my fifth strategy or recommendation.

What steps should people pleasers take to establish healthier boundaries?

The suggestions I just shared will definitely help establish healthier boundaries with others. Another way is to enhance your self-respect, so I recommend engaging in more self-care, whether it’s related to personal wellness or hobbies. Focus on activities that improve your self-worth. Ask yourself what you really love to do, for you and not for anyone else. What inspires or fulfills you, as opposed to obligating you? What gives you energy, as opposed to draining it? Often these are creative pursuits or things that are just plain fun. People pleasers typically lack the time, energy, or interest in hobbies, so making a practice of self-care will get easier over time. It’s like watering and fertilizing your flower garden, so that it can grow to be healthy and beautiful.

How can someone who is naturally empathetic maintain their compassion while becoming more assertive?

There’s a difference between empathy and compassion. Empathy can be very unhealthy, because having low emotional boundaries leads to enmeshment, where an empath feels responsible for another’s happiness or suffering. Compassion, on the other hand, is acknowledging and caring about the other person’s situation while remaining separate and detached. It can be hard to say no when someone needs your help, but it’s critical to remember the example of the oxygen mask. When you’re on an airplane, they tell you that if the oxygen masks should drop, make sure to put one on yourself before trying to help others with theirs. After all, if you pass out, you can’t help them, and you may sacrifice yourself in the process. Here’s another metaphor…In our initial consultation, many of my clients feel like they’re lost in the woods. If I were to run headlong into the forest to try to rescue them, I might get lost in their story, feeling their pain, and then neither of us will find our way out. That’s an example of empathy, and it’s not helpful. But if I take a few steps in, just long enough to take their hand, I can lead them with clarity and strength, out of the wilderness into freedom. That’s compassion, and it’s a balanced way to care for others. In addition to following my previous suggestions, remember to value your own needs while still caring about others, so you can learn to assert yourself.

What are the most common misconceptions about people pleasers, and how do these misconceptions affect their journey toward recovery?

Maybe that they’re so selfless and generous. In reality, the obvious generosity is balanced by a hidden selfishness. After all, people pleasers are engaging in their behavior because they unconsciously benefit from it. It could be a feeling of safety, a self-congratulatory sense of being a good person, or an unintentional manipulation of the person they’re interacting with. The Giving Tree was a people pleaser to an extreme, and it felt pleasure from being acting selflessly. But ultimately, there’s really no such thing as altruism when you consider the intrinsic benefits that one receives from giving or helping others. Even a philanthropist who donates anonymously feels pleasure or self-satisfaction in proportion to the size of his donation. That doesn’t take away from the generosity or impact of the gift, but it’s not without an intangible reward. So people pleasers may think of themselves as givers, but they’re also receiving. While we may feel bad that they’re being taken advantage of, people pleasers are unconsciously trying to control the relationship dynamic. There are no victims in people pleasing. As I said before, simplistic, black and white judgments like selfless and selfish, good or bad, just get in the way of understanding reality. Like in a codependent relationship, there are advantages and disadvantages to both sides. People pleasers who look at their behavior and interpersonal dynamics honestly can take responsibility for playing their part, and if they so desire, they can choose differently.

What role can therapy or counseling play in helping individuals overcome people-pleasing behavior?

I have my opinions about the limits of conventional talk therapy, because conscious-level advice, self-awareness, and willpower rarely change subconscious patterns. But to some degree, it can provide a safe venue for practicing assertiveness and healthier personal interactions. As I’ve mentioned, I prefer to directly influence the subconscious mind through methods like hypnosis, NLP, and other modalities for rapid transformation, simply because it’s faster, easier, and more effective for many people. Here’s my approach. If conflict avoidance is the root cause, then using NLP to clear the negative emotional charge from any distressing memories usually helps a lot. If self-worth is the issue, then using hypnosis to update the self-image with more balanced and reality-based beliefs is the solution. Similarly, I use other techniques to dissolve the fear of rejection and to attach confidence to new behaviors like communicating assertively. In most cases, some combination produces the best results in the shortest amount of time.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Ideally, more people would learn about the basics of human behavior, since it affects nearly everyone’s health, career, finances, relationships, and happiness. For instance, what really causes issues like anxiety, grief, resentment, regret, fears, and trauma? What really causes people to develop and get stuck in compulsive or addictive patterns? Why does simply applying willpower, rationally discussing a problem, or emotionally venting rarely change anything? The answers to these questions are not rocket science. They’re quite straightforward in many cases. Our free YouTube channel offers more than 100 videos on these topics. If more people understood these concepts, they would be more likely to overcome their personal struggles. They would understand how easily they can be manipulated by the media and unscrupulous, self-serving political and religious leaders. They would be able to recognize toxic personality types in society at large and in their relationships, so they could protect themselves from harm. Let’s put it this way. If everything I just said had happened decades ago, many of the geopolitical, socioeconomic, healthcare, and environmental problems our world is facing today would have been solved already. Global problems begin with personal problems, and global solutions begin with personal solutions.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can visit our website at www.GoodwinHypnosis.com to learn about our different services and how we can help them. Also, our YouTube channel at http://YouTube.GoodwinHypnosis.com has a growing library of free educational videos, including some on this very topic.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

You’re very welcome, and thank you for the opportunity to share some of my knowledge with your readers.

About the Interviewers:

Brooke Young is a multipassionate publicist, public speaking mentor, and communication consulting. She works with a wide range of clients across the globe, and across a diverse range of industries, to help them create, develop, and promote powerful messages through heart-centered storytelling. She has formerly worked On-Air with FOX Sports, competed in the Miss Ame