Does Pleasing Everyone Else Hold You Back From Reaching Your Goals and Dreams?

Your focus is making everyone around you happy. This includes spouses/partners, children, family, colleagues, friends, and bosses. You want everyone to not only be happy, but to be pleased with you. You like doing things for others. You are most content when you are recognized for helping other people achieve their goals and dreams.

What about your goals?

What about your dreams?

If you are a pleaser, then your goals and dreams are just not as important as the people in your world; the people you care about. Less focus, less energy is spent on you. You fall to the bottom of your priority list.

As women, we are programmed to be pleasers. We feel selfish when we do things for ourselves. We are not comfortable asking for anything for us. Am I right?

Well, I hope you can see this is a trap. This attitude and accompanying behavior robs you of the energy to have the life and career that you want. You are expending most of your energy on others and there is very little left for yourself.

In the workplace, you are a team player. You are well liked by your colleagues. You go out of your way to help them out even when time is an issue in your already cramped schedule.  As you begin to build your network and relationships in the organization, you are the first to offer assistance, but often the last to ask for anything in return.

I hope you see this is a trap.

You need a village to help you achieve your career goals. You need to build relationships of trust and confidence and it certainly helps if people like you and want to work with you. They are more likely to help you move your career forward. However, we need to be better at asking for the help we need to improve our performance or gain more visibility in the company. We don’t need to be 100% self serving, but we do need to shift our focus a bit from helping everyone else to helping ourselves achieve our own dreams.

Consider a two step process. You offer to help and then at some point you ask for a favor in return. It’s that simple. That favor might be an introduction to someone in your organization. It might mean making a call to the IT department to help you move a project along. Whatever it is, don’t forget the second step;  the ask.  You can please others by offering to help and they will be more than willing to help you in return.

Everyone wins! Now doesn’t that please you?