Nick Pollard
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Why is people-pleasing such a trap for so many of us? There's a long answer and a short answer. I think the short answer to that is that we have created an environment through social media really predominantly that everybody's now seeking to measure up to somebody else rather than focused on this internal locus of control where you can... you can really be vibrant on your own.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And it comes from... So often, anyway, I think it shows up in a ton of these guys and girls is like giving to themselves feels inappropriate. It feels so they're kind of racked with shame. It's in the same way that so people pleasing very often can mirror addiction in terms of, you know, I would say it's North Star, which is shame.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I think it's, for me, when it was more of a problem, and I would say that I'm a recovering people pleaser. It's funny, it's one of those things that I don't think ever really goes away. I think you just kind of battle it. But mostly it's an overwhelming sense that you're not enough. And when you're functioning from that place... There's no way you can ever really measure up.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So when you're trying to make everyone around you happy, you're basically kind of always in this modality of trying to appease this inner voice that says, I'm not good enough. I'm not enough, which is toxic change. Like I'm bad. I'm no good. Right. Rather than I did bad, you are bad. And. When you're always trying to prove yourself as better, that means deep at your core, what do you believe?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It means that I'm not enough, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout well ask any addict why that they're you know nobody wakes up in the morning goes fucking great i'm gonna do some heroin today like nobody's excited about that why do they do it it's to bury this feeling of toxicity in themselves and then it just kind of spirals out of control so
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
when you're talking about somebody that is, that experiences almost a total inability to give to themselves before they give to everyone else. Um, yeah, it's really hard to find joy. You know, for me, God, I, I would have a story. It was, I was, I was in roofing sales. This is years ago.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And, um, I've heard a lot of your stuff, by the way, on everybody should have a door knocking job or a club promoter job. I fully agree with that sentiment, um, because I'm not afraid of rejection in any way, shape or form. But, um, that's probably a lie. Anyway, going back to, to the ideas, you know, here I was, I was, I had, I had just gotten out of rehabilitation.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You know, I, I had sobered up and I'd done all the things, you know, my story is a pretty dark one. And, um, I was standing in, in a warehouse store, um, looking at televisions and I was crying like, because I couldn't force myself to to do this thing for myself. And I, and I had the money. This wasn't like something I had to go and, you know, take out a credit card for.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm sitting on plenty of cash and my bills are paid and my rent was paid for the year. And I mean, I was good. And there I stood just, you know, sobbing because I couldn't make myself by myself as present because it didn't serve the purpose of making other people happy. And I did this for weeks, weeks, like weeks on end. I would just go stand there and be like, I can't pull the trigger.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And finally I went to my own therapist and he said to me, you know, you could just stop being a coward and buy the fucking TV. And I was like, okay, I'm going to buy it. And I made him strap it to the car before I swiped my credit card. So I couldn't turn back. And yeah, I think that was really the first time I noticed it in myself, really.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So this is back in 2019 when I really went, wow, I have a real challenge with experiencing joy. I have a bigger problem with experiencing celebration. I have a huge problem with asking for what I need. And then once I do that, I have a bigger problem with receiving it. So all of these components, I started to put it together. I'm like, wow, that sucks.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like, that's a really terrible way to live your life. Mm-hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So it deprioritizes a lot of things. So... I'd say the first is your physical well-being will take a backseat to everybody else's needs. And so the first thing I started to do was get in shape. And I've been listening to your show for years now, and every single person that comes on says, yeah, everything changed for me when I got in shape. So here's one more to the list. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And there's ways that you can tune that to make it better, right? So if you have something like that, so if you have that kind of inferiority complex plus a superior complex plus impulse control is a great example, you can do great things.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'll be the 7,000th person to say that on this show. Yeah. So the first thing I noticed was that I had been deprioritizing really the core of what my body needs. So I was eating poorly because I didn't have enough time to cook for myself. I wasn't going to the gym. I wasn't taking yoga classes. I wasn't stretching. I wasn't meditating. I wasn't doing any of the cool shit I do now.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So that's kind of the first thing is that you notice that your health is suffering. The second and probably more important is that your emotional well-being takes a hit every day. You always kind of feel like you're behind the eight ball in where you're going. It was really weird for me, but I never felt like I could catch up to anybody. So I think you're 35. I'm 44.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
If I was in a room with you, I would feel like I was younger than you. And I have no idea why that was. Everybody was a titan to me. Everybody was better than me. And I was constantly trying to measure up. So when you think of what that does to your mental health, it just puts you in a position that you always feel like you're in the lurch and you can never be what you want to be.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then financially, it'll ruin you. I would give away money to my mom. I'd give away money to my girlfriend. I'd give away money to anybody that needed it. And I'm watching my bank account dwindle and I'm bailing people out of jail and I'm doing everything I can to make everybody else's life easier because I thought that's what it meant to get love.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And so when you consider the implications of how over a long timeline, how it will impact you, it will literally take your life away. The average people pleaser that I work with is either at or about to be burnt out at 38. Like completely burned out.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But if you just have this idea that I'm not enough and that's sort of the main track in the background, then you're always trying to measure up to something that doesn't actually exist. And so often this comes from, you know, it's kind of a pivot point where you have like one parent that was super involved in your life and then one parent that wasn't. Maybe they were abusive.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And it's really kind of now very often they'll burn out and they can continue to keep going because, well, they have responsibility and they have, you know, so entrepreneurs are really great at this. Um, we're awesome people pleasers very often because we get to a place where like the customer is always right.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, and we're trying to make money in that first three years, especially where you really have to have boundaries. You really have to know what you're doing. Um, If you aren't careful, you can go down that road really quickly. But people that have high levels of success as people pleasers generally are burnt out and they're just kind of burying it.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And their misery is growing and their income is rising. And they're like, why aren't I getting happy? Why aren't I getting happy? Why aren't I getting happy? And the paychecks get bigger and it just keeps expanding. So it's like that foam you see that they make. And have you ever seen this stuff where they make this like super foam and they pour it out?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
That's kind of what I feel like people pleasing does is that it starts out as this small problem. but it becomes very explosive toward the end. And then what you see is somebody with no boundaries, a self-image that's generally pretty flawed or wildly inaccurate. You see people that are depressed, and they'll come to me and say, I'm living in my own misery.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And I'm like, well, stop, just don't do that anymore. And they look at me like that's possible. Yeah, you can choose to not do this. And it's I think the biggest challenge is overcoming the idea, too, that the opposite of people pleasing isn't being an asshole. I think there's this, there's, it's this polarized thinking that, you know, you see it in American politics a lot.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You see it in, we see it in America a lot. And, you know, it's like, it's either left or right, right or wrong, black or white. And it's not that, you know, so. People's pleasing our asshole. Right. You know, why would you try and find the tipping point between two wildly toxic extremes? They're on the same through line. They both come from I'm not enough.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So move up to I'm enough and then let's see where you land.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So when I give to somebody from a place of love, and that can be anything, whether I'm buying my girlfriend flowers or whether I'm taking my kid to the park or whatever, there's a sense of peace in that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Very similar to kind of the nice guy narrative where you show up trying to gain acceptance and love because the only way you know how to do that is to either not show up, like to be completely invisible, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I think generosity is probably one of my, if it's not my North Star, it's probably in the top three. So I think there's this beauty in generosity and being authentic about that. When I find myself in the pleasing modality, there usually is something bubbling behind it. Most people know when they're doing something wrong. You can feel it.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
The minute that resentment hits you, you need to correct course. For me, resentment in the body just shows up right here in my solar plexus. I'm like, motherfucker, why am I having to do this? If I start hearing that narrative in my mind, and I've trained my mind to hear it now, it's like maybe I need to not you know, do that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
The other thing that I, I think you can really do to determine this is, is put space between your decision to giving. So if you make a decision, like I'm going to give, you know, 500 bucks to the waitress because that's a cool thing to do at Christmas or whatever. Right. That's fine. Right. That's perfectly normal. You're never going to see a person again.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
They're not going to be pleased with you for eternity, but like when you're ready to give to somebody you love, give yourself an hour. Give yourself a day to ask the question, what is the purpose of this? Am I doing this for the reasons that are genuine and generous and kind and loving, or am I doing this because I need validation?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'd say it's similar. I don't know that there's a wild difference. It's one of those really interesting things that it's between the masculine and feminine. I don't know that I could pinpoint a major difference so much as I would say there's different ways of recognizing it. Um, women tend to be, you know, they, they're, so I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't angry.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't a liar and I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't aggressive or passive aggressive. Women tend to be more passive aggressive on this side. So, um, The one thing that I can say about, you know, and I weirdly my my practice will shift. It does this weird thing like I'll have guys and then it will stop and then I'll have girls and then it will stop.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
or to make everyone else happy right or to keep everyone else calm or to constantly be in a peace peacekeeping you know frame of mind and i think that's where people get really hung up that's the one of the typical childhood situations that people pleases would have very typical um you know i've got i've got one-on-one clients all over the world kind of coming from every um every background you know everything from ceo down to you know you know pick a position but um
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I don't know why it doesn't this, but it does. And right now I'm working with mostly women. But what I find mostly in women is they tend to externalize it. as a problem of everyone else where men tend to internalize it as I'm a piece of shit. Yeah. That's interesting. Um, so women will say to me a lot, like if I could only get this person to do this thing, I would be able to set boundaries.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm like, no, like maybe set boundaries. And then if they don't do the thing, let's move on from that. Whereas men are like, I'm such a piece of shit. I can never sit back.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I think it shows, I think it rears its ugly head in a lot of ways. And potentially one of the biggest, most toxic ones is in sexuality. You know, The unfortunate news about being a man in this day and age, especially one that happens to look, talk, and act like me, is that I have no voice. And if I do, then I'm also a piece of shit. But if I don't, I'm also a piece of shit.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
There's no way to win in this present environment. But I think... the manosphere isn't helping, um, by any stretch of the imagination. I think this idea of like everybody has to be stoic and if you're not, you know, self denying yourself and if you're not, you know, again, to your point of like, if I'm not deferring my gratification, then, you know, why even show up?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And it's, you know, if I don't, if I don't make $300 million a year, I may as well just, you know, hang myself. And it's just, it's all of these kind of giant narratives where It's the loudest, craziest people on every spectrum that get the most notoriety.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I don't think that's helping, but I think you're touching on something that's very interesting, is that we've redefined masculine as this toxic trait. And Meanwhile, if we don't function in our masculine, we're considered toxic. Or useless. Right. It's either useless or toxic.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Most of my male people pleasers, when I look into that genre, you're going to find that Dr. Glover and I, you know Robert Glover, function in the same realm. The male version of a people pleaser is a nice guy. And very often nice guys were raised in, you know, predominantly female environments where, you know, mom was in control.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Dad was generally either not around available semical and however, or, you know, in this sphere of abuse or some other awful thing, which is part of my story. And so I think to find those guys and tell them they're okay, like this is okay. Like it's just, You struck on something that's deep in my heart, so I'm trying to get this to articulate. It's not quite working because...
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I spent my entire life being ashamed of who I was as a man. And then when I wasn't, I was pissed. Because now I'm wounded, right? Now I'm like, I spent my whole life not thinking women liked me. I spent my whole life not thinking I was good enough. I spent my whole life climbing a ladder I didn't want to climb. I did all this crap for everyone else.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
The thing that I would say is the most common is generally speaking, one parent made it was an enmeshment issue. So one parent made that child the center of their world and then the other didn't. So and so what that teaches them is that, you know, to make this other person happy means they won't get abandoned. If they don't get abandoned, they'll get their needs met.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And I became a resentful, angry, drunk, addicted piece of shit. I didn't know what to do with it. You've said it before, and I've said it a million times, is that I truly believe that psychology as it exists today is not built for men. It just doesn't, I don't need you to tell me I'm okay. I don't need to cry on your shoulder. That's not what I need.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
For somebody to just say, hey, maybe like, let's look for some purpose. Let's do something else. It's been so helpful, but
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Well, here's a soundbite for you that'll probably get me canceled. Love it. Women are not equipped to handle male emotion. And men are very often not equipped to handle female emotion. And this, of course, is unless you're exceptionally well-trained. But I don't take my big feelings to the women in my life.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then this kind of just plays out in childhood. I forget who said it to me, but it was they called it a transference. So it's like you developed a childhood coping strategy and you kept it all the way through your adulthood and now it's not serving you. And nobody really knows what to do with that. So then you have to figure out, like, what do I do now to make my life better?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So one of the things that you can look for, if you're wondering, like, am I a people pleaser count on one hand, how many guy friends you have, if you're a guy and girlfriends you have, if you're a girl, if that number's less than three, you've got a problem because people pleasers almost universally struggle to connect with the same sex.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
shame um learning to open up to somebody that isn't trying to uh so women tend to feel more safe with men if they're in that people-pleasing mindset men tend to feel more safe with women if they're in that people-pleasing mindset i don't know why that is i would love to you know i should probably ask scott galloway or dr glover why the hell that happens but um i need two men smarter than me to answer that but the but that's just you know the pattern that i see and
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I haven't had a client in the last five years that was like, had a ton of meaningful guy friendships. I haven't had the same as with women.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, so you get to a place where you've kind of advocated for everyone else long enough and you don't know how. So then you, you face this idea of, you know, if I ask, will I even receive, um, where I think you get, as you start to heal from this, you know, profoundly challenging way to live is, um,
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You stop worrying so much about that and say, okay, well, I'm going to ask for what I need, and if I don't get it, I'm going to give it to myself. So there's that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I don't think I realized that till you asked that question. You're good at this, Chris. Um, um, and I'm a little emotional about it because the biggest fear that I see in, in that people pleasing set when I, when I talk about things like setting boundaries is everybody's going to be mad at me. Everybody's going to hate me.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I hear that part of me that was a little kid that just wanted to be loved and accepted and I just wanted to make friends. I struggled with that mightily most of my life. So I think the advocacy of self presents a really big challenge because it's probably the scariest thing you can do is to say, I need something.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And when you're a kid and you don't get it, and then you learn to ask, is dangerous, or could get me abandoned, or to stand up for myself means the bully gets bigger, not goes away, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
That's sounding like a real son of a bitch. Most of the time, people pleasers are liars. And that's probably the most common denominator among all of the people I've ever worked with is this dishonesty in Just in how they show up in general. Right. So lying is one of the bigger things, but you have to then identify what is a lie.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah, it's really hard to come back from in that way. Like if you do it long enough, Um, so, and this is, it's interesting you, you come to that because we talked a little bit about, you know, what is the difference between agreeableness and people pleasing? Um, well, at some point you just become agreeable to everything because you, you, it's not that you don't care. It's that you don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Right. So, um, if you ask me on a Tuesday, do you want to go out and get tacos or do you want to go out and get pizza? I'm not going to give a shit either way. Like I, I like food and both those sound great. Right. So that's what agreeable means to me. It's like, I'm happy to just go along and go with flow from time to time. Cause I don't care. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But when you do that, because you don't like want to be the issue of the moment,
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
um and you do that long enough you're right you you don't have a sense of like what are what do i even like pizza um when was the last time i you know i had an opinion on on god forbid donald trump or or you know joe biden when was the last time i actually spoke up for myself um and this can be hugely powerfully painful at work um you know especially if you're if you've done the corporate environment like i have you know i was a corporate sales monkey for years and um
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I was always number two, never number one. That was always interesting because I didn't want to get... I wanted to be seen, but I didn't want to be that seen, right? And I never stood up for what was right. I never stood up for what I believed. And the eventuality was I burned out in corporate America. And I'm a pretty talented guy. I just couldn't do it anymore. So...
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah, I think that line gets really blurry. And that's probably one of the first things to go in terms of your self-image is your ability to formulate opinion. I mean, I can't put it on a... I couldn't delineate a timeline. If you started at 16, by the time you're 24, you won't have an opinion anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But I would say that the first thing you probably start to feel is, I don't know what my interests are and I don't know what my opinions are. And there's really only way to find that out is to... you know, do some journaling and go try some fit.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You know, so saying yes, when you mean to say no, well, that's dishonest. Right. Committing to things you don't want to go to. Well, that is also dishonest. And so when I work with people and they and they kind of realize, oh, my God, I lie all the time. And it's not that you're lying to the person on purpose. It's not in this kind of malicious way.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But the way that we function now as a society is, has changed that. And everybody's comparing themselves to people that, you know, are insurmountable. And I find myself doing this too.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
That is a question I'm going to steal from you. I'm taking that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Where I can see... I'm working with a really great CEO now, a fascinating dude. And something that's really interesting in that vein that I want to come back to is how interesting people pleasers actually are. But he says to me all the time, well, you know, I just got lucky, right? I just got lucky. It couldn't have been the 25 years of toil, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
it couldn't possibly have been that you have the mind for the work. It couldn't possibly have been that you're talented. Right. And I, I fall into that trap a lot myself still. So, and I've mentioned to you, like, this is not something that you, it's not like, I say in my videos very often that I'm a recovered alcoholic. I don't know that I'll ever actually recover from this.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I think this is just a thing that I do. It's like everybody has their thing that they have to deal with in life. And if you listen to whatever personal growth literature that you may tend to absorb, but my very favorite one is Scott Peck. He started with the line, life is difficult.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And it remains difficult until you realize it's difficult, and then you don't care that it's difficult, so it's no longer difficult. Yeah. So, but this is the difficulty of my life. This is the thing that I'm going to, I'm going to overcome for, you know, years to come. And I hope that I can teach my children to overcome and, and all those.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's just you don't even recognize the damage you're doing to your own well-being. And then all of a sudden you have no free time. That's one of the things that you can look for is like, are you lacking free time? Like, is your calendar always full? If you're constantly doing that, are you low on money because other people have needs, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It goes back to that thing we were talking about. And I've played with an idea that's also interesting that I wonder if people pleasing and narcissism aren't on the same through line. But the beautiful parts of you don't have to die for the toxic parts to go away. So it's like when people see, you know, they say, so I've heard you say, you know, I'm, I'm a people pleaser.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm struggling people pleasing, you know, like, okay, well, I don't experience you that way. Now I've heard some of the backstory. I might've been incorrect, but the, the generosity, the kindness, the, the loving way you show up, the, the joyful part of you that actually gets the,
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
to look at yourself not as a problem, but as having a set of problems and then solving each one through a long enough timeline, you get to keep all those things you love about yourself. You don't have to turn into an asshole. You just get off that line. It's like, If you're driving head-on at a bus, just steer. Just turn. You'll be fine.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And I think that's – Maxwell Maltz probably was one of the first real books that I ever – Engagements called psycho cybernetics. I don't know if you ever read that one.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's been a while. So, you know, this is going to be clunky and probably wrong. But his equation of humans is that we're all kind of servo mechanisms like guided missiles and missiles don't actually guided missiles don't actually aim at a target. They aim away from not the target. So when you just start to realize that, okay, well, I'm not on target. So just, okay, aim away from not on target.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then you're going to course correct your way to, you know, a pretty happy life, just taking good care of yourself and getting in shape and, um, you know, starting to eat well. It's always the first thing I work with my clients on is like, all right, let's go to the gym. Um, let's get some of the anger out of your body. Like, Pleasers are pissed historically over every person.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Are you prioritizing the wants and needs of other people above your own? Well, that's virtuous in many ways, right? But again, it's like balance. If you constantly do that and never prioritize yourself, then what ends up happening to you is you're broke, you're alone, you feel miserable. One of the things that I used to say is that I never got invited to barbecues when I was a people pleaser.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
They're just mad because their life hasn't gone the way they wanted it to go. Well, it's not going to unless you do something about it. So get some of the anger out, get them in shape. We start to build up on this idea of like, how do I make more money? And you start to see life improve. Yeah, I don't know how to answer your question there. I got lost in my own brain.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
probably better as a, as a, as a relatively small demonstration. But if I say to you, like I say, Chris, you're not enough. What do you feel physically when I say that to you? Uh, like, uh, closing over shoulders come forward.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So you kind of feels right. So you kind of feel it in your chest. You feel it in your shoulders, right? Well, the first thing you need to do is, is learn to sit with that. Learn to just sit in that feeling. And ask it questions. Your emotions are not fact. They're just in there. And they come from, you know, experiences. They come from your past.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And, you know, I could probably iterate a million different personal growth books on that. But once you just feel it and you say, okay, so now I know what that feels like. The next question is, what does it mean? What am I actually saying to myself in this moment? So if anybody's listening, whatever that thing is that you hear in your head, there's always a bullshit story that plays around here.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like, I'm not smart enough. I didn't get enough schooling. There's a million ways you can tell yourself you're a piece of shit. Pick the one that's most meaningful. And then just say it to yourself in the mirror and let yourself feel it. And then wherever that shows up, just ask it the question. What are you? Are you real? Where did you come from? And get curious about these things.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
We tend to judge our negative emotions by calling them negative emotions. I don't think there's a positive or negative emotion. I can tell you for sure that I can remember the first time I ever was going to kiss a girl. I know exactly what that felt like. I also remember the first time I thought I was going to die.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So, you know, kind of butterflies in the stomach. That's where I get anxiety. That's where I feel it. So now I feel that, like, okay, what are you? Are you excitement? Are you fear? Are you anxiety? And generally I'll get an answer. Okay, where did you come from? And it'll say, well, you know, You're going on Chris's show. It's the biggest show you've ever been on, Nick. You sure?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
This isn't what we're supposed to be doing yet. You should have 4 million followers before you go on that damn thing. By the way, this is a real iteration from this morning. And so as I kind of dealt with that today, that's how I take other people through it too, is just kind of learning to sit in the darkness.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
The other thing that I really would stress is that there has never been a people pleaser I've ever met that was created in a vacuum. So getting around other people that are kind of dealing with this is vital. It's, and it's so much more fun because I, you know, I said it earlier, people pleasers are super interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like they forget that they have all these weird hobbies and they're quirky and, you know, you get them laughing and talking about who they are and you find these vibrant, exciting humans that are just waiting to be unleashed. And, you know, here they are in a cage that's unlocked, just open the door and fly the fuck away. Um,
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like my friends would have parties and I'd never get invited to those things. They'd want to hang out with me for lunch at the office. Or they'd want me to help them do something, but they never really engaged with me. And so I think one of the core components that I see with people is that if they're truly in that people-pleasing mind frame, they have a lack of connected relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I think to answer your question in a long form is the first thing is learning to sit in the emotion and recognize it. Because it really is emotion based. It's that feeling you get when you feel like you're not enough is the thing you have to look out for. And it's the thing that will sabotage you the fastest.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
For me, yes. You know, for most of the people I work with, yes. Um, because you're trying to, you're trying to squelch that, like that feeling when you felt like your shoulders were hunched forward and you kind of like, I could see it on you that you were like, I don't like that. That doesn't feel good. It feels, it, it almost reverts you to being a child. right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You looked as though I had scolded you and it probably felt as though I had scolded you. And what are you going to do with that feeling except for go, well, fuck, how do I make that go away? Right. How do I make you like me again? Right. So when you can sit in that and get used to it and then start to get curious about when it shows up, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
that's been the gift for me and this is not that i cured it it's that i'm curious about it so it shows up and i'm like what's that like this morning when i'm i i had to take a five mile walk just to get out of my head um you know and i'm almost fanboyed when you got oh my god it's you and so i take this walk and i'm like what am what am i what am i worrying about
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like this is either going to go greater. It's not like there's nothing I can do. You know, I'm not a moron. I'm going to be fine. Um, what am I really worried about? And, and here I was, you know, back in that, in that mindset, like, well, what if he doesn't like me? Well, what if it'll be what it's going to be?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, and it was me sitting, I was sitting on the Capitol steps at, um, here in Denver, um, On the mile-high step, there's a step right there that's a mile high, exactly. I like to go sit on that when I'm kind of thinking and It was there where I was like, okay, what am I believing about this? I'm believing if I don't show up, then I'm a piece of shit.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like if I don't do this right, then it's going to be the last podcast I'm ever on. And then like, okay, how am I reinforcing that belief, Nick? Well, I'm sitting here pondering this over and over and over again and ruminating in my brain like a psychopath and having conversations with myself on the street like the other people that are around here. And it's not looking good for me.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Like they're probably going to lock me away. And then it was like, okay, well, you know, and these four questions have saved my life a million times. You know, what do I want to believe about this? Well, no matter what happens, I'll be okay. And I'm okay. Like, I don't have to be enough. I don't have to be good enough. I don't have to be bad enough. I just have to be okay.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then what do I want to do? And it was, okay, well, I really want a piece of taffy and I want to have a Pellegrino and then I want to get on the show. and that's what I did. I just got myself in because my brain is going to tell me what I want. Your brain's actually really smart. You listen to it.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, and it was like, you know, let's have a piece of candy and, and relax and, you know, be a kid for 10 seconds and let's get on the show and have some fun with Chris and we'll see what happens. Um, Dr. Glover was funny about this. I told him I was coming on the show and I was afraid of it. Like, you know, and he says, um, what are you afraid of? I said, well, what have I screwed up?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And he goes, well, you're gonna, I'm like, oh, okay, great. So now what? He goes, listen, learn to laugh, have more fun, make mistakes and enjoy yourself. And that's what I'm doing. And I was able to do that by reaching out to, you know, my team, my men that I work with and to, you know, kind of talk myself through this danger zone. What are the other two questions?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Because it's just a masking. In many ways, it's similar to narcissism in that way, is that you can't really get to know that person. Which is why, so the way I found you was you had kept identifying yourself as a people pleaser. And I'm like, ah, you don't come off that way to me.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You said that there was four questions that have got you through a lot of things. So the four questions are, so when you get that feeling where you're hunching forward, right? The first question is, what am I believing? So our beliefs drive our behavior, our behavior creates our environments. We need to be very careful about what we're believing, especially in a moment like that, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So the first question is, what am I believing? Very often it's come back in some iteration of I'm not enough, right? I mean, whatever iteration that could be, you know, maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe I didn't go to Harvard. Maybe, you know, it doesn't matter. It's the whole thing. It'll come back in some way or another.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
core to the kind of the really interesting thing about beliefs is that they have to be reinforced somehow. So you have, you know, an experience, which is the feeling you're having, and then you have to reinforce it. So you're the only one that can reinforce it, it has to be reinforced by somebody in a position of authority. So if you're biased by yourself, and you're, you are that authority.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So you have to ask yourself the next question, question number two, which is, how am I reinforcing this belief system? Like, what am I doing or not doing?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
that's making me feel that i am not enough and you'll get an answer to that right what am i doing or not doing um question number three is um what would i prefer to believe like what would i what is that preference you know rather than what should i believe what would i prefer to believe and um in my, in my vocabulary at that point was I would prefer to believe that I got this, like, it's good.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's going to be fine. He's probably not going to murder me. I don't think he has a, you know, missile that will hit my house. So I think we're going to be okay. And then what do I need to do to reinforce this new idea, this new belief system? So when you go back to question number two, we ask like, what am I doing or not doing?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Very often the answer to question number four, which is, you know, what do I need to do to reinforce this new belief system? It's usually the opposite of whatever it was in question two. So it's like, I'm, I'm a, I'm timid about the show. It's just to admit that I'm timid about the show. Um, and yeah, it's a powerful exercise.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I mean, I get to connect with you over it, which, and to tell you like, this is, this has been like my, I've been excited all week. And, but when you have this idea in your head that you're not enough, that excitement very quickly can turn on you into anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Okay, so the first misconception about boundaries is that they're about other people. So boundaries are about how you show up in the world. They have nothing to do with anyone else. They are delineators for what you accept and not accept what you'll tolerate and not tolerate.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
and so a boundary doesn't sound like hey don't say that to me it makes me mad a boundary sounds like i have a value system that is around this then how you communicate that is different so for instance i tend to spend my time only with people that i that value kindness if you are an unkind person you have no space in my life so when someone is being unkind i will generally say hey
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I don't appreciate the way that this is happening right now. I'm going to leave the situation. That's how you enforce a boundary, right? So your boundaries are actually based on your value systems. That's kind of the most important misconceptions that like it's a rule book. Boundaries are not a rule book. The other one I hear a lot of is boundaries are about putting yourself first.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So, you know, I worship at the altars of, you know, Alex Hermosi and, you know, James Smith and all these guys that I see have, you know, millions of followers and make millions of dollars and they're exciting and they're fun. And I'm like, how do I get to that? Right. Rather than recognizing in myself, like I can, Just be happy with where I am.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And that's horseshit. Boundaries are about making your needs equal to everyone around you. So rather than saying, I'm putting myself first, I have to be selfish. Well, no, you don't have to do any of that. You have to define yourself in equality, which is, okay, my needs are as important as everyone else's. And then you can make decisions based on that data. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So if, for instance, you want to go out for tacos and somebody else wants to go out for pizza, this is not a boundary. Right. But if, you know, one of the things I see a lot with people who've gotten sober is, you know, you'll get a phone call and it's my least favorite question of all time. Well, there's going to be drinking at the party. Is it OK if I drink? I don't. Why am I in charge of that?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So my boundary around this is I am not in charge of other of adults, other, you know, other adults decisions. That's a boundary. I am not in charge of other adults' decisions. That doesn't sound like anybody's got a rule to bend, does it? That's me. I am not in charge of that. So when they call me and say, is it okay if I drink? I say, I am not in charge of other adults' decisions.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
What you choose to do, you choose to do. If what you are choosing to do makes you feel uncomfortable, I would suggest you not do that.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Boundaries at work are very, very often something, you know, I get this brought up a lot. It's like, well, how do I tell my boss I'm not going to do that? Well, you just say no, and then that's it. Like, unfortunately, my workload is such, and I have a boundary around personal time with my family, so I won't be able to come in this week or this weekend, whatever the thing is, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So those are the two most common misconceptions. When you start to understand that, you start to develop what looks more like a Bill of Rights than a list of boundaries.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So a Bill of Rights is a list. How do I explain this? I actually do this in Boundary Bootcamp, which is funny because I explain it like shit every single time. But a Bill of Rights is a list of values and priorities that you hold yourself to. So, for instance, I'm allowed to ask for what I want is within my Bill of Rights. I'm allowed to have conversations during sex is in my Bill of Rights.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'm allowed to laugh at inappropriate jokes. I'm allowed to make inappropriate jokes.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's a weird one, but it's in there for me because at some point in my life, I was married to a woman who was gluten free. And for some reason or not, or I was not allowed to like the things that I like, I'm allowed to. Um, so when you think of the bill of rights, it's, um, you can also put in there things you don't have to do. I do not have to tolerate unkindness. Right. Um,
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I will, I have a, I have a boundary around yelling. I don't believe that that's a proper way to communicate. Um, so in my bill of rights is I do not tolerate yelling in conversation. And how does that show up if I enforce it, which is, I would just simply say, Hey, uh, raising your voice with me is not an, is not an option. So we're going to take a break from this.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I'll come back to it in 15 minutes. We both of us have calmed down and that's it. Like, it's not like, it's just, this is what's going to happen.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
so that bill of rights really shows up and it's, it's unfortunate because it's, it sounds a lot like affirmations, like, and one of your, one of your, um, one of your good friends, um, who is a coach to me that doesn't know he's a coach to me is Alex Ramosi. Um, he's the, the sphere of, of, uh, personal growth has been so awesome because I, I have coaches that don't know they're my coaches.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, and he mentioned at one point, I think it was on your show. He said, you know, Confidence is not about shouting affirmations at yourself in the mirror. So this is sort of in that vein. So it's going against one of my own heroes. It feels much more operational, though.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I explain that really in detail to a lot of people, which is those four levels of learning, which is you start out as unconsciously incompetent. You don't know what you don't know. You move into the conscious competence realm where you do know now what you don't know. And at that point, you have to make a choice. Do I give a shit to learn how to do what I don't know how to do?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And you then become consciously competent where you go, okay, I have to practice this until it's a thing. And at one point you become unconsciously competent where it's, we call those people naturals. Like for instance, you are a natural podcaster. I watched your very first stuff. It was good. It's not this good, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
If you go back to my original videos, I looked like a monkey fucking a football. It was- I was terrified. I was shirtless in Panama. I thought I was going to be in men's work. The captions were all wrong. It was filmed sideways. It was a disaster.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I think so. The other thing I tend to say is that when somebody shows you who they are, just believe them. Oh, that's great. It's really simple. If somebody shows you who they are, believe them. It's the easiest way to negate narcissism. If somebody shows up and we talk a lot in the personal growth world, or not even personal growth, but just TikTok and Instagram and all the places that I've
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
you know, Meyer, myself, um, tend to get all the red flag commentary, right? Well, this is a red flag and that's a red flag. I'll tell you what a real red flag is. The fact that you ignore red flags.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And if you are boundaried enough, if you understand your bill of rights, if you understand who you are, then when somebody shows up in the world that violates that, despite how manipulative they can be, or whether they have narcissistic person, personality disorder, or whether, you know, they're, they have sociopathy or whatever, it's, um, You won't tolerate it.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And so, yeah, I do agree with that statement. I agree with that a lot. I just think there's – go ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
but I've got an alarm for everything.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I do that in a, in a variety of ways. Um, I hesitate to answer it because there's so many prescriptive ways of living these days that everybody's telling me I have to be up at four in the morning and I've got to bathe my nuts in olive oil and then I've got to sun my asshole and then I've got to get into an ice bath. And then after that, I have to get into a sauna.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I've got to go to a sauna after this. And then once I do that, then I can start my day. But I think put it somewhere you see it. Um, one of the things I do with people is just say, take your top three that you want to make sure you focus on, put them on a business card, like go get a blank business card, put it on that business card, handwrite it, then take it and laminate it.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then you have it right. And it's just kind of a reminder. It's in your wallet. It's in your pocket. Um, It's about, you know, another hermosism is, you know, most people don't need to be taught. They need to be reminded. So once I've taught you, I've taught you. The other way you can do this is getting involved with other people that are doing this.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So, you know, my community is a great example of this. I have an incredible group of humans that are all in there and, you know, they get a text message from me like every other day. Stop that. Whatever you're doing that you know you shouldn't be doing, stop doing that or do that, right? Um, but the most important thing I think Chris is just, is just read it.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You know, if you read every day or you get up and you have kind of a morning routine, it doesn't have to be, you know, you don't need to spend 25 minutes meditating on it. You don't need to, you know, have a long conversation with yourself in the mirror. You don't need to write, I love you in lipstick and then a heart around your head and you know, all that nonsense.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You just read it once a day, um, as you go. And I learned that actually, um, One of my favorite stories about myself, speaking of collating myself, is I was fortunate enough to be coached one-on-one by Zig Ziglar at one point in my life, which if you don't know who he is, you seemingly do. He's probably the first most important sales trainer ever.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And I had called him in a sales slump when I was 19 years old. I just called him on the phone and never thought I'd hear from him. But six weeks later, he called me back. And he sent me this little thing on his website. And it was this, it's like this long paragraph. And it was like, here's what I'm going to do today. And, you know, and it wasn't like affirming.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It wasn't like I'm good enough and I'm smart enough. And gosh, darn it. People like it was, you know, here's how I intend to show up. And I, and he said at the bottom, never forget the quote, the eyes are the windows to the soul. So be careful what you look at. And this was the first thing I read every day or like, four years.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And, you know, my sales kept climbing, and he checked in on me about every six months. And, you know, really kind dude, I'd love to tell you that story some other time. But that's really where I figured that out is that I just read it, I read mine every day. And, and I revamp mind about every six months.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I go back and revisit it, make sure that the, you know, the things I'm working on are, you know, that I haven't mastered them. You know, it's kind of, it's this mindfulness moment that why would I need to continue to be mindful about something that I've already mastered that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So I just, I'll take things off that list. That's another concept.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Boundaries aren't static. They're evolving, just like you. Who you are is not a fixed concept. It's ever-evolving. It's always changing. That means your needs will change. It means your boundaries will change. What you'll tolerate, what you're willing to tolerate will change. I think if you give yourself time enough to grow into that, then you can really experience a very cool life.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
That's how I would say to do that in terms of
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
There's two things on that. I was actually going to bring this up way early in the call and I forgot about it. So I'm really glad you came back to this.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
There seems to be this concept that you have to immediately defend yourself, but acids and bases mix about as well as emotions and logic. So if you are in a potentially emotional situation, it's best to buy time.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Now that's not to say to be conflict avoidant because that is kind of a core competency of the people pleasers to just avoid conflict until it goes away, but it's about conflict deferment. So, and maybe that's an hour, maybe that's a day, maybe it's after Thanksgiving dinner, you know, maybe drunk uncle Eddie needs to go home, like whatever. But so that's the first thing.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's like, if you are somebody that's highly sensitive and, Don't hold yourself to the standard that you're going to be Johnny on the spot with your boundaries, especially in the beginning. You have to give yourself time to adjust to this new way of being. And the way you do that is you just say, okay, hey, I'm getting uncomfortable. I'm going to take a break from this conversation.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's a great way to do that. Or, hey, I've asked that we don't talk about that, so I'm just going to step away or whatever. Usually, especially in family situations, it's generally around conversation. The second thing you can do is when you notice you're feeling that hunched feeling is just to breathe. So when you get that sense that you're being overcome...
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I've been a martial artist most of my life. You're probably familiar with the term kiai, which means spirit. I can't just scream haya in the middle of a family dinner. But what I can do is take a very, very deep breath in and hard out. And that generally will help me reset my nervous system. So it's like in all the way.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then really hard through so I get all that carbon out of my body and just... Let that out. And then that will actually cause my skin to heat up. And you can see it. I actually got flushed when I did it. So that will cause my skin to heat up, cause the emotion in my body to kind of dissipate, go other places and to balance out. And then I can say, okay, that's not okay.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, I'm an extremely sensitive person. It may not show up that way online. Um, because, you know, I'm sort of a fire branded preacher of everything that says, you know, you can do it. You just don't believe you can. And, but in, you know, genuinely speaking, I, I'm pretty impacted by, um, other people or I wouldn't do this.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, so that's how I do it is one good solid breath that nobody even has to know I had. will help me reset and I can then decide, kind of make the idea of, okay, do I want to even address this now?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, there are, but, uh, you know, I, I will not allow Andrew Huberman to take over the key. I, okay. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Right. Sure. Um, so, um, If you're truly in a moment, so number one, speaking of another person that's a coach that doesn't know they're my coach, Tim Ferriss, says that there's no such thing as an emergency. And I fully agree with that sentiment. There's almost no reason we need a decision right now unless it's life or death.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So if somebody's pushing on something and you're uncomfortable, the answer is it needs to be a default of no. Now that's really hard. Um, so that there's, there's two things that you have to remember in those moments. The first thing is no feeling is no feeling is permanent and they're almost never fatal.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Okay. So maybe I was wrong. Perhaps. Yeah, I mean, perhaps I was. That's a whole thing. So you spoke two things that are really interesting is the value of your no. I want to just touch on that. Something I've said a lot of is that most people who have this kind of tendency aren't afraid to say no, they're afraid to not say yes.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's okay that your shoulders hunch forward. It's okay that your eyes well up and you don't know what to do. It's okay that you're overwhelmed. It's okay you have butterflies in your stomach. It's okay that your jaw is clenched up and you just want to fight. That's all okay.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
and if you can just remember that it's okay and without it you cannot be courageous you can never call yourself brave if you're not afraid then you can immediately start to rewire the thought in your head it's like first when i feel afraid what does it mean i'm afraid that's all it means it doesn't mean anything it just means i'm afraid right am i gonna die probably not um
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
the two seconds between a decision and the words make a big difference so um in the in the game of no that we talked about earlier so you have 90 seconds like you give them 90 seconds you only really need two really you only need two
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, so if somebody is really pressuring you or somebody is really pushing on a boundary, give yourself two seconds, two seconds, one, two, and then speak whatever comes out, whatever comes out.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It can be vitriol. It can be sunshine and rainbows. It can be an, I love you. It's a great way to diffuse a boundary conversation, by the way, just, I love you.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So that's what I would say is give yourself two seconds and then speak whatever comes to your mouth. And it's going to be scary and you're going to feel it, right? And so I think what I heard you ask me and tell me if it's true is like, how do I get over the feeling?
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yeah. It's, I mentioned it earlier. Like if you think of the first time you were going to kiss your wife, you're married, right? You're married. No, I thought you were married for some reason. Um, if you think of the first time you're going to kiss your, your girlfriend or anybody, and then you think of the first time you thought you were going to die, the feelings are identical, right?
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So the question is, are you guilty? Are you excited? Are you feeling guilty because you're, you're not choosing them? Are you feeling excited because you finally chose you?
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You're going to get over it. Yeah. You're going to feel guilty, man. It's like you weren't good at tying your shoes in the beginning either. You know, for the first three years of your life, you shit your pants, but you're able to get over the discomfort of learning how to not shit your pants and how to tie your shoes.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And so, because that yes is what gives them that dopamine rush, that, that feeling of like, I did it. Like everybody loves me. Everybody wants me. And then, so it's that not saying yes. Like you could, you could just say the word Lima beans and it's going to make you feel like shit. Um, so it's, it's not even the no.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So if you can get over the discomfort of not shitting your pants and learning how to tie your shoes, and there's a good, a fair chance you can get over the discomfort of saying no. And so it's this immersion in the idea that you are not for everyone. And I lived my life the opposite forever. So I think it's something I'm really passionate about is, yeah, you're going to feel guilty.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You're going to feel uncomfortable, right? Is it guilt or is it just discomfort? That's the next question. It's like, are you guilty? Like, are you sitting there going, I'm really, this person's really going to be sad? Probably not. So if they are, if you're truly believing that, are you engaged in a form of hubris? That would be my next question is like, how important do you think your no is?
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I have a really great friend who said this to me that really resonated with people-pleasing, which you don't have to hate where you are to want to be better. And when I heard that, I was like, that makes so much sense. And I think we've kind of taught people that you have to like almost hate the way that you show up in the world in order to want to better that.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And I ask people that all the time and in exactly the same way. It's like, how important really are you? Are you really that important that if you say no, I don't want to go to lunch with you, they're going to go outside and stick a fire hose from the tailpipe into the window? Probably not. I think they're going to be okay. They'll have a margarita by themselves, right?
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And so I think there's a self-importance. This is where people pleasing and narcissism tend to bump up against each other a lot. It's like your no is about as meaningless as your yes because you never say no. So when you say no, nobody believes you. And when you say yes, less and less people are believing you because you're so overcommitted you can't show up.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So when you start saying no to things, you're going to be uncomfortable. Everyone else is probably just going to be surprised.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Yes. Initially, it gets – and it's not –
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's a very lonely way to live. Because you constantly feel like you're in a transaction with everybody around you. And you never really know what your value is to other people. And you start to think, okay, I really don't have any friends. So you kind of feel lonely. But then when you start to prioritize yourself as equal to other people, those people start to leave your life.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then you're like, well, now I'm so lonely. Well, you were lonely anyway. I don't even have my fake friends anymore. Right. No, I don't even have the bartender that said that they liked me, right? It's the same thing as when I quit drinking. I had all these friends. But when you drank the way that I did, you start to realize that those friends were, you were just a joke.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And one of the ways I show people how to do that is, um, we'll give you a little secret from one of my boundary bootcamps, but, um, spend seven days saying no to everything, everything.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
You were a paycheck and a joke. And very often, the people that will exit your life when you start to do this work are Two things will happen. Either they'll, they'll go and they'll stay gone. Um, but more often they circle back. Um, you know, I had a friend, we were watching football the other day and he said, I really liked this version of you better.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And he was the first one that ever said that to me. And I hadn't seen him in years. And it was just so, it was just a really cool moment for me where I really felt something like he likes this version of me better. And it was when I told him, no, I don't want a shot. They don't want to do that. I'm a recovered alcoholic.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I can have a beer from here time to time, but I don't want to sit and do shots with you. That's a dangerous road for me. And I said, no, I'm good. I don't do that anymore. He goes, man, I really like this version of you better. What a cool thing. But that's been a five-year timeline. So it's not unlike starting a business. You go through this. From the moment you change...
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
to what one might consider to be the end result, you're going to experience a pretty high level of loneliness in between those two points because you're not healthy enough for the new folks and you're way too healthy. So even having one boundary can make you too healthy for everyone around you.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
That profound when you're deep in that people-pleasing well is one boundary will make people start to turn on you. Like, hey, I don't want to go to your birthday party. Why? Because I don't want to. That's it. I don't want to. Because I value my time and I spend it with my family on Sundays. It could be any number of damn things, right? But that one boundary can really set the tone.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
just do you want to go out to lunch no do you want to hang out on saturday no do you want to help me with my work project no right the answer is just no um and there's rules to the game the rules are you know you have to do it for seven days you can tell everybody you're playing so you literally you can illuminate it to everyone doesn't have to be a secret um and then you can change your mind after 90 seconds oh but you have to sit with the discomfort of the no for a minute and a half
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's like in the parlance of fighting, if I jab you in the face, I've now set the tone. We know who's in control, right? And when you take control, other people aren't going to like it. So you immediately start to see people exit stage left, and you're looking ahead, and you don't see a lot. You see an empty wilderness.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Because loneliness presents with it a massive amount of freedom. Like, I could do what I wanted when I wanted, had to answer to nobody, had nowhere to be, nothing to do. My options were limitless. I ate when I wanted, I shit when I wanted, I went to movies by myself. And so, initially it will get worse. Worse is a weird way of saying it.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Right? I get a lot of people that, you know, whether it's on my channel or in my groups or whatever, they'll say, well, you know, if I do this, then, you know, let's pretend you have a narcissistic person. By the way, I hate that term. I also hate the term manifestation. We can do that on another time. But let's pretend, well, my narcissistic whatever is not going to like that.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Okay, well, they're mad at you anyway, so who gives a shit? Like, if they're going to be mad, whether you do or whether you don't, you may as well do. So, if your life is going to suck, whether you do or whether you don't, you may as well do. And if it has to be done sooner or later, it may as well be done sooner. So let's just do the thing and feel better about ourselves.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And will it initially suck?
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It didn't matter how much money I made. It didn't matter who my friends were. I thought it did. It didn't matter what car I drove. And it didn't matter on what floor of the high rise I lived on. What mattered was the minute I started saying, I'm going to show up for me. And I would delineate exactly how I was going to do that.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Maybe I can start a business. Maybe I can travel the world for two and a half years. I did that like a crazy person. And, you know, at 40, by the way, don't ever do that at 40. It's really, it's fun, but it's, I aged myself a lot and maybe I can ask that girl out. Maybe I can ask that guy out.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Maybe I, maybe, maybe I can, you know, and I think that's what shows up when you, when, you know, kind of in the, in the medium term is like, maybe I can. And then, so it goes from like, Oh fuck, I'm lonely to like, maybe I can. And then it's like, Oh shit, I really can. And then, And then your life just starts to skyrocket and you start to feel good about yourself and you start to wonder.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then you hit a wall and that'll happen because you'll make a new friend or you'll make a new ally and they'll turn out to be a piece of shit that's common along this journey because you start to get a little full of yourself. And then you get knocked back down a little bit and you make a course correction.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Well, yeah, and it also does two things. So it changes the value system in your brain, at least it did for me, where I was like, okay, well, no doesn't really actually hurt that much. So I stopped being afraid of the word no. But it also gave me the idea that I could, well, then I can think about what I'm trying to do. Like, do I want to actually do that?
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then slowly but surely you start to find out that people love you for you, not because of what you do.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I know it's a safe space. I want to answer that, but I want to also say your business partner is also one of those coaches that doesn't know he's my coach. In fact, you can thank him. You can thank him for my sound quality today because I went and bought this just for you.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I struggle with this because I think I'm not, I tend to not be great in psychological terminology and I'm going to get shit on for it, but whatever. So in my experience, I come from a lot of childhood trauma and when I was triggered, I would have a visceral emotional reaction within my body.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And it could be auditory. It could be hallucinogenic. It can really be an experience where somebody will say something. You'll have a smell. You'll feel a feeling. Something will occur. Somebody will yell at me, and it could fire my mind off. I've done a ton of work on post-traumatic stress disorder within myself. I'm not an expert in the field.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Because when you're a people-pleasing kind of person, and I do want to draw the line at some point that being agreeable and being a people-pleaser are not the same. Um, you know, I generally don't care about much stuff. So there's that. But when you start saying no, you go, okay, well now my calendar is free and I can actually do stuff that I want to do.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But I think where we've gotten is the conflation between triggers and negative emotion. And that's what I mean by that. Somebody who's legitimately triggered, if that's a thing for you, you need to speak to somebody in the psychological field. If you are having a visceral, overwhelming reaction, to external stimuli, then that's a bigger problem that I'm prepared to address.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's the conflation between... There's two things. There's a conflation between triggers and negative emotion, and the other conflation is between trauma and adversity. When I say your triggers are your responsibility, I mean just somebody making you feel uncomfortable is not you being triggered, and if it is, that is your responsibility.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Even in the sense that I was talking about with my own post-traumatic stress disorder, that was still my responsibility. So dealing with that level of trigger is different. Dealing with the I'm uncomfortable trigger or I don't like it when you do that thing trigger.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
and and i think we've i think we've you know i think we've beaten that horse to death and manifested our way into this idea of um that everybody is supposed to be everything to us all the time and it's just it's not sustainable and it's not realistic
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I'm not sure I answered your question there so much as I gave you a soundbite that's probably going to get me punched in the face on the streets of Denver. But, you know, whatever.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I think there's almost an epidemic of no contact in the world right now. So I think giving up on people is happening a little too quickly. So I'm really glad you asked that.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And I can say, you know, I really don't want to go to that party. And then you don't change your mind. Right. But you change your default answer from a yes to a no. And then that default becomes something that you can do, which is why the fourth rule is you can only play the game for seven days. Because if I learned anything from James Clear, it's not about how long you practice something.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
um not everybody who doesn't understand this new way of you showing up is toxic um so i want to just start by saying that but when somebody it's really i mean it's so nuanced and i hate that word too um because it's just it's the new excuse for you know i don't want to hear what you have to say um You said it on another one of these nuances, the new N word. I almost passed out. I laughed so hard.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I was driving. I almost locked up the brakes in my car. But I've only gone no contact or cut three people out of my life. and they weren't small people. So one of which was my father. I talked to him once in nine years and then once on his deathbed. That was it. Um, I've not talked to my, um, sister since 2015 or no, I'm sorry, 20, 2009. I have not spoken to her and I probably will never again.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I don't know if it's more or less. I think it's, um,
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's the repetitions by which you do that. And you're going to repeat that action hundreds of times a week.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, the challenges it presents when you've become a highly successful people pleaser are probably more challenging to overcome because there's, there's more at stake. Um, and your belief system, but I mentioned this earlier is, you know, Beliefs drive behavior. Behavior creates environment. But beliefs are built through reinforcement.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So you've spent 20 years reinforcing this people-pleasing as a way of living, and you then have convinced yourself that if I don't make everyone happy, I'm going to go broke. So in the highly successful people-pleasers, that's where we start to see that burnout component. well, fuck, I'm just an ATM machine.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And I think it's more challenging in the way that you have to literally redefine your relationship with probably the two highest value things in your life, which are your family and money.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And that's really hard. Um, you know, I really like money. I like making lots of money. I like spending money. I like going out to nice dinners. Like I'm a dude who likes stuff and I don't like stuff, but I like experiences and they're usually not cheap.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And, you know, so that's the benefit in it, of course, is that you can then prioritize things that you actually like, but your relationship with money has to change. And, uh, I think it was on your show that Jordan Peterson said about getting sober that you have to change everything. You have to change who you hang out with. You have to change your entire social strata. All of it has to change.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
That's very true with the people. Now that I think about it, it's probably more challenging. It requires a lot more resources and a lot more time because you have a lot more invested in it. The cool thing, though, With the highly successful variety. So my, my clients between, you know, like 35 and 55, you know, making a quarter million plus a year.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And it's, it's like a moment, it's a moment of clarity. So like with people that are not quite at that level that are kind of moving up, you know, my 28 year olds that are doing okay, but not, they're not where they need, where they want to be yet. Right.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
they tend to take a little longer for some reason or another, but like with a 35 to 55, you know, 65, whatever year old, when they recognize the pattern and it's like, it's always one little thing. It'll be a technique that I show them or, you know, learning how to say no. And it's just over.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I never really thought about that, Chris, but it's really not. It's usually just, okay, well, I'm going to do this now. And everybody around him goes, okay, that makes sense.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I think that's a great way of saying is you got more ballast on the ship, you know, which is a short way of saying that you've got more support.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And so when you change, especially if you're in that kind of higher status, um, or if I'm going to be your James status, um, position, um, look at me, I'm learning.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I think there's a component to that of selfishness within your social strata as well.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Right. If you're miserable and I had a really great CEO that was in London. We never did end up working together, but I really love him and I hope we get a chance to someday. But he has that kind of really big persona, that really big social strata. I don't think he knows how easy this is going to be.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
everybody loves him right and he's you know he's everything to everybody most people in your life that love you don't want you to live like this they really don't they benefit from it you know everybody in your life if you're really in that people pleaser mindset if you really do live that way everybody in your life either benefits directly or indirectly from the behavior i promise right but
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
That the only reason Velcro works is because it's imperfect. And because that's what catches the Velcro. That's what catches the loops is the imperfections.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And be grateful for who they are.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And it's not because of status, and it's not because of wealth, and it's not because of any of the extrinsic motivators that people might have.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And because I get to do that, I get to do that. I get to have things like boundaries, but I also get to have great sex. I also get to have amazing dinners. I also get to laugh at people like you. I get to meet friends that I never thought I'd meet. So one of my coaches, his name is Stone. I told him I'd mentioned his name on this podcast. He was 17 when I hired him to teach me how to do TikTok.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
He was 32 bucks. Um, and about a year ago I had posted on my wall that I wanted to come on your show. And I told all my, I told all my following to tag you. And I don't know if they did or not, but I was like, I really want to go on the show. I really want to meet this guy. And he texts me. He goes, if you get on that fucking show, I swear to God, I won't make another piece of content.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So, but why do I get to do this? It's because I, I show up as me online. I'm not a persona. I'm not, I'm not blowing smoke up anyone's ass. I just, I get out there and I do it. And then I saw you say it. And I said, what I say, it wasn't like, so I didn't sit and obsess about it. I was like, all right, I'm just going to say this. And you know, he's probably never gonna see it, whatever.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And next thing I know, here I am. Right. And, um, is it harder, um, when you're affluent? Maybe.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, first one is, um, not nice by Aziz Gaspari. Um, that was really the, I think that was the first book I ever read that really addressed this kind of people pleasing behavior and really put, helped me put a tag on it. Oh, I see that. Right. So, um, that book is called not nice. Um, you know, the cornerstone text of course is going to be Dr. Robert Glover, you know, no more Mr. Nice guy. Like,
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Doc, you're the king. You know you're the king.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
I would say that probably Scott Peck is... I mean, it was one of the number one selling personal growth books of all time, which is The Road Less Traveled.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
and you know, some of the other greats, of course, Mark Manson did a marvelous job with, you know, subtle art and, um, you know, atomic habits and, you know, obviously James Clear and Tim Ferriss and all those guys, but, um, probably those are my top threes. Um, not nice by, um, Gaspari, um, Glover's no more, Mr. Nice guy.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And, um, Scott Peck, I believe, uh, is no longer on the planet, but, uh, the road less traveled is, and it's probably the book that will change your life the fastest. If you really sit to and just absorb it, um, it'll break you. Um, and it's, it's one of my favorites. It's one of my favorites.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, I think where I learned to speak though, if I can, if I can give you one more, my favorite fictional author is Kurt Vonnegut. Which book? Um, uh, Slaughterhouse five is probably the one that everybody says, but sirens of Titans is my favorite. Um, I just love, I love him as an author. I've read it. I've read his entire library. Like,
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Whenever I'm in a mood that I don't want to read personal growth, which is starting to happen more and more as I write a book around this, I'm just kind of burned out on it. I don't want to read anymore about how I have to have habits. I don't care. I know. I'm going to think positive. It's fine. I'm going to be fine. I think I've probably absorbed 10,000 hours of this shit.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
If I don't know by now, I'm not going to know.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Easiest place to find me is the people displeaser.com. Um, and on Instagram is, you know, the people displeaser, uh, a moniker that I love and would hope to get rid of someday.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
It's good for now. I'll take it for now. But the people displeaser.com is the easiest way to find my stuff. And, um, Follow me on Instagram. And if you really want to do me the favor, follow me on YouTube because that channel needs some love. That's saying the people displeaser. So I love it. I loved being here. Thank you so much for this.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Well, and it might hurt their feelings if you don't eat the peanuts. Are you going to eat the peanuts? Probably not, right? Because it'll kill you. But so if that's the case, when you think of anything that you dislike or genuinely don't want to do, it's almost in the same vein because on a long enough timeline, it kills your ability to experience joy and happiness and authenticity.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
Um, it's been a dream of mine for a couple of years now and you made it come true. So I appreciate you.
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#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And I just and I think that causes this idea of how do I measure up and then how do I make everyone else around me happy? Because that's that's really what the world is kind of built on these days.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then, you know, and so often I hear it like, how do I find myself? Well, So one of the core concepts, and you'd mentioned psychology before, and I'm not a psychologist. I'm just a person who's been through this.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And something I'd see in a lot of my clients is that they either didn't have a ton of play in childhood, so they were kind of caretakers or meeting the needs of their parents, et cetera, or they've forgotten how to play in adulthood. And because what we find is that, you know, if you don't play and you don't learn, then you can't self-define.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
If you can't self-define, then you lose kind of a scope of who you are. So I actually believe, you know, people pleasers struggle with the idea of self-identity very often. And they're always asking me, like, how do I find myself? My advice is never do that. Never, ever find yourself. Constantly invent the new version of you. And through self-invention, you find more joy.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
But you have to do that through play.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
So I think I figured it out. This is a relatively new development for me. I have made an effort in the last 12 months to be more playful. And because I'd kind of lost all my whimsy. You've started a business. You know what I'm going through. I'm in year three of this thing. It's a fucking disaster. Eating glass. Right. I'm constantly lighting myself on fire.
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And then trying to put myself out with kerosene. It's really great. But so I really made a commitment to myself. I was going to do more playful stuff. And. I was watching kids in the park the other day, and I'm watching them play, and it occurred to me that they're not just playing. To the adult, like to you and I, when we see kids play, what do we see?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
We see just fun, and they're on the jungle gym, and they're doing the thing, whatever they happen to be doing. And they're going to get hurt, and they're going to do whatever. But they're not playing. They're learning. they're discovering through play, like what are their boundaries? What can they physically tolerate? What do they like? What don't they like?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And they do that by playing with each other. And then very often they're putting on personas of who they want to be. So, you know, one kid wants to be Iron Man. One guy wants to be a fireman. One little girl wants to be a princess. Somebody else wants to be something else, right?
Modern Wisdom
#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser
And through that idea of like self-invention, that's how they start to form the idea of like, what is their definition of self? And I think adults don't play enough to continue that self-invention process. So they lose contact with that core kid where they're like, okay, well now who am I? Well, I don't know. You haven't spent any time inventing that.