Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00] Listeners, I want to tell you a little story as we begin this episode. It’s 2005, and I’m working on a novel, largely alone, because the internet isn’t what it is today. I email a professor to see if he has anything I can do to improve my work. He tells me about a writing group I can become a part of, and it feels like destiny. I have asked for something and received exactly what I asked for, and I’m so excited. I connect with the leader of this group, and he tells me I can join — but I have to be workshopped on the first day. I have a minor misgiving, but I think this is destiny and that my intuition is leading me in the right direction.
Listeners, have you ever had this kind of experience — where it feels like destiny, but something is a little off? I joined this group, and it goes okay for a little while. I share that I’m working on a novel, and the leader says, “I’m working on a novel too. Let’s workshop your novel first.” Again, I had that little twinge, but I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been waiting for feedback on my novel — this is once again my intuition leading me in the right direction.” So, I say yes. It goes incredibly poorly. My book gets completely messed up, and I have to shelve the project.
What is the point of this story? I had fallen into a people-pleasing trap, and that trap had taken me further away from my goal. That is why in today’s episode I’m going to tease out the difference between people-pleasing and actually following your gut, so that you can spend more time being authentically who you are rather than chasing things that do not serve you. I’ll also share the Achilles heel question that writers are often asked — the one that gets them into the most trouble and has them signing up for things that may not be right for them. You’ll want to stay tuned for that. Now let’s get started.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [3:15] I’m so excited to be here with you today as we talk about an issue that is very important to me. I spent so much of my earlier life people-pleasing, and it’s something I can still fall back into — it’s pretty ingrained. But I’ve had to learn how to tell the difference between people-pleasing and following my gut, and how to own my decisions and live from a place of power. That is what I want to do for you.
So, to begin: what is people-pleasing? People-pleasing is when you choose other people’s expectations, desires, or wants over your own desires — and especially over what you know is right for you. It’s a big problem, because when you are people-pleasing, you are abandoning yourself and your needs. That doesn’t mean you never have to do things you don’t want to do, but the difference is this: can you do it in a way that still honors your needs? When you are people-pleasing, you are not honoring your own needs.
Sometimes we people please in a very conscious way. Someone asks or suggests that we do something, and we begin that pro-con list — all this decision-making from the neck up. We think: What are the benefits? What are the cons? What do they expect from me? What has the world told me I should be doing? We might also think, “I’ve always done this; therefore, I should continue.” Here’s a great example: let’s say you’re the person who brings the broccoli rice casserole to every family reunion, and everybody loves it. But you’ve reached a point where you’re sick and tired of making it — maybe you can’t even eat cheese anymore. Yet you think, “Everybody wants it, they’re expecting it, I’ll just take some Lactaid and hope for the best.” You’re doing that for everyone else while negating your own needs. There’s a lot of self-talk involved, and you’re consciously making a decision based on everyone else’s expectations.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:00] Now, sometimes what we think of as people-pleasing — and I’m using air quotes here for those not watching on YouTube — is actually something unconscious: the fawning trauma response. In the fawning trauma response, you’re asked a question or someone wants you to do something, and you immediately say yes or no before you’ve had a chance to think about it. There is no conscious self-talk involved — other than “What in the world did I just agree to?” which happens after the fact. The decision-making is instantaneous.
That’s because the fawning trauma response is a mixture of a freeze and a flight response, where you self-abandon before you’ve even had a chance to consider whether this is something you actually want to do. I have a great episode with Ingrid Clayton on the fawning trauma response, and she also has an incredible book called Fawning — I’ll link to both in the show notes.
If you’ve found yourself fawning and then beaten yourself up about it — asking, “Why do I keep falling into the same pattern?” — remember: it’s unconscious. At one point in your life, it was a powerful mechanism to keep you safe. It was a genius strategy that allowed you to survive in an environment with volatile or inconsistent caregivers, where your survival may have depended on your ability to self-abandon. The difference is that now that same strategy is no longer serving you in the same way.
What you can do with the fawning trauma response is, begin to notice when it’s happening and love yourself radically as you start to unpack it — so that you can make more conscious decisions. And the first conscious decision I want you to know you can make is to change your mind. If you’ve fallen into that pattern and chosen something that truly abandons you, you can say, “I thought this was going to be a good idea, but I’ve realized what I actually need to do is this.” You don’t have to over-explain — though over-explaining is itself often part of the fawning response. You just need to begin understanding why you might be doing this so often.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:00] What causes both the fawning trauma response and conscious people-pleasing is the stories we have been told about how we should behave, how we should operate, and who we should be. In the case of the fawning trauma response, those stories are survival-related: “If I don’t give everyone else what they need, I will be abandoned.” With more conscious people-pleasing, we’re usually falling into stories the world — or our parents, caregivers, or other people — have told us about who we should be.
Here are some of those stories: “I’ve always done this thing that people like, so I have to keep doing it.” “Hard workers are seen as good, so I have to keep working, even when I’m exhausted.” Or, as I was just discussing earlier today, the algorithm tells us we have to be online all the time — and if we’re not, our content gets suppressed and we’ll disappoint the people waiting for it.
Listeners, if you have another story the world has been telling you about how to operate, please add it in the YouTube comments, because I’d love to have a conversation about it. These stories are a huge part of the problem — they convince us that if we do what other people want, we will be safe, loved, and accepted. And sometimes, like in the case of that writing group, it can feel so enticing, so much like what we think we want or need, that it genuinely feels like our intuition is leading us in the right direction — when that may not be the case.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [11:30] This can show up directly in your writing — specifically on the page — when you try to please the people who have given you feedback, whether that’s members of your writing group or an editor. Here’s what that looks like: you’ve been writing, you have a piece that’s a bit messy or not quite there, so you give it to your writing group or editor for feedback. You get feedback, and some of it goes against your gut. But you start to think, “Well, that person knows more than I do,” or “If they said it, it’s probably a problem.” So, you change your work based on what they’ve said, without considering how that may affect the vision you have for your project.
That’s essentially what happened with my novel. It was the first novel I’d ever written — I didn’t really know what I was doing, and it was a practice book that didn’t need to be published, so my heart isn’t broken about it now. But the lesson I learned was this: we were workshopping the novel one chapter at a time, so people would have questions and want me to change things. I’d change everything to please what they said — but if they’d known what happened forty pages later, it would have answered their questions, and I wouldn’t have needed to make those changes. It completely discombobulated the project.
What discombobulated it? My desire to please the people giving me feedback, because I wanted to be seen as good. I wanted to be seen as someone with a thick skin, someone who could take in feedback and do something with it. Does that sound familiar, listeners? It’s a common thing.
That’s why I always say: you are the god of your story, and it’s vital that you own that. When you don’t, your projects can get derailed. In relationships, constantly people-pleasing can breed resentment, which can fracture the relationship. Even when it doesn’t, it can lead to a shame spiral — you know you’re self-abandoning, you know you’re not doing what you want, but you can’t stop, and you get caught in a really negative storm that makes you feel terrible about who you are. If you’re constantly in those states of frustration, resentment, or shame, it can have a real impact on your health. You are in a chronic state of stress. You are not in your power.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:00] So let’s talk about what you can do to stop people-pleasing. One of the most important things is to get clear about what you want. I know that for those who’ve experienced the fawning trauma response, that can be genuinely challenging. You may have been asked, “What do you want for dinner?” and your mind goes completely blank. So, start with what you are passionate about, because those passions are usually deeply ingrained — even if you haven’t been allowing yourself to connect with them, you know what they are.
A question I frequently ask people is: What would you do if no one paid you and no one recognized you for it? That can help you get to what your true vocation and passions are. For instance, I am a person who loves to write. That situation with the writing group a long time ago really hurt, and it did make me not want to write for a period of time. But because writing is my passion — so deeply ingrained — I came back to it. Teaching is another passion of mine. I was once an elementary school teacher, and even now, doing something entirely different professionally, I still teach whenever I can, because I love it.
What are the things you would do no matter what? Those are your passions. And the first step to getting out of people-pleasing is to ask yourself: How can I make room for my passions, even just a little? Can I say no to something for five minutes? Can I not self-abandon for five minutes, so I can do the one thing that matters to me? That small exercise can create just enough space to start making room for what you actually want.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [18:30] And that leads me to the Achilles’ heel question I promised to share — and this may feel like tough medicine for some of you, because you may think you’re the only one who’s ever fallen for it.
I cannot tell you how many times someone has told me they were at a dinner party, shared some harrowing or powerful part of their life, and someone said, “You should write a book about that.” And they came to me wanting to write that book — without fully knowing what writing a book actually takes: the time, the effort, everything they’d need to learn. And often with the expectation of not just writing a book but writing a bestseller.
What this is equivalent to is a couch potato who has never run a day in their life saying, “I’m going to run a marathon — help me do it in two weeks.” That’s often what’s being suggested, and people don’t realize it. I’m not saying you don’t have an interesting life, or that you shouldn’t write a book — you very well might need to. But here’s what I really want you to think about: Is that your passion? Is that the thing you would do even if it’s never published and no one reads it? If that’s not the case, I want you to question not whether you should write, but whether a book is the right form. Could you write an essay? A short story? Something else before committing to a full book?
It’s not about whether you should do it — it’s about whether you’re doing it to please a group of people who told you it was a good idea. That word “should” is right there: “You should write a book.” Or is it something that is truly, authentically what you want to do? Dig deep and decide for yourself. Dr. Rosenthal, author of The Gifts of Adversity, told me back in 2015 at the Virginia Festival of the Book that if you want to write a book, you have to have something you really, really, really want to say. Because of the tenacity it takes — the time, the energy, the setbacks and failures you’ll face along the way. Ask yourself: Do you have something you really, really, really want to say? And what will you call upon to persevere? Because once you know those things, you can stand in your power and make decisions that allow you to do that.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [22:00] Another powerful exercise that can help you get in touch with what you truly want is one I do at least once a year — I actually did it with my husband just a couple of weeks ago. Imagine that today is the end of your life. You’re dying today — it’s a painless death, so we don’t need to worry about that part — but time is up. Write your obituary based on what you have done up to right now.
As you write, pay attention to where the grief and regret appear. What do you regret not doing? What do you grieve — the opportunity missed, the thing you wish you had done more of? Once you’re clear about those things, go do them.
Another version of this exercise is to write the obituary you would love to have — the one where you’ve done all the things — and then compare it to the one you’d write today. See the gap. If you’re not doing those things yet, find a way to plan them into your day or your week so that you are making progress. When you get to your actual deathbed, it may not matter whether you finished the goal. What matters is that you showed up and worked on it — that you did the thing that really mattered to you.
Here’s an example of what that might look like. Writing a book requires spending a lot of time alone — writing and rewriting — which may mean skipping social events, saying no to calendar commitments, spending a little less time with family. If this is truly your vocation, your passion, you will be excited about that. You won’t feel regret when you look at your obituary. However, if you write that you regret not spending enough time with family and friends, or not relaxing, or not having fun — make sure you’re doing those things. Those are often what people actually regret at the end of their lives: not enough time with the people they love, not enough fun, not enough rest.
You can even fall into people-pleasing within the writing process itself — “I need to get this out there quickly so everyone can read it” — and lose sight of the other things in life that matter. Make sure you’re attending to all of it, so that you’re living as authentically as you can and moving toward that deep sense of overall satisfaction.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [26:30] So we’ve talked about a few different ways to get in touch with what you truly want. We’ve also talked about the stories — the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones the world tells us — that cause us to self-abandon, whether because we think it will keep us safe, help us belong, or help people like us more. Pay attention to what those stories are and how they conflict with your own desires. And as you work on getting clearer about what you want and understanding the stories keeping you in a people-pleasing space, I want you to have radical compassion for yourself, so that you can work through this gently and allow yourself to stand in your power over time.
To wrap up with an update on that original story: all these years later, I have taught other people how to have healthy writing groups — ones where everyone’s ideas are acknowledged, where everyone has a chance to say no, where people can try something and see if it’s the right fit. I’ve practiced being in other writing groups, which has led me to an incredible writing group I’m in right now that has allowed me to do the very best writing of my life. I am so in love with what I’m doing. And I’m also open to revising, because revision is necessary — but because I know what I want and I know what my vision is, I can take in other people’s feedback and filter it through my own internal knowing. I can ask: Can I use this to enact the vision I have for my book? Or is this very good feedback from someone who loves me that just isn’t right for what I’m doing? I know when to say no and when to say yes. I feel good about my decisions. I am living in my power. And that, my friends, is what I hope for you.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [29:45] That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening and for being part of this conversation. If you want to take this content further, get out your journal and write your obituary as if you died today. As you’re writing it, note where you feel regret — what do you regret not having done, or who do you regret not having spent more time with? Write those things down and then make a plan to do them. You will feel so good having given yourself that chance. I would love it if you’d share some of your answers in the YouTube comments — it is one of the ways you can make my day.
Speaking of insights, thoughts, and feedback: I want to thank @JuliePiggott, @jjscribe2020, @dorettesnover, and @NancyKeelermusicarts for your comments on my recent episode with Patricia Knight Meyer. It was so wonderful to hear from all of you, and I loved everything you had to say about my conversation with Patricia around her author platform. I also want to thank Doreen Francis for sharing your insights and for letting me know who else is talking about the same content when it comes to debunking author platforms and the need to protect our hearts as we do this work. Doreen, it was so great to hear from you — thank you for furthering that conversation. And listeners, if you haven’t reached out to the show yet, I would love to hear from you too.
