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Speaker 1: What if every single relationship in your life has been

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built on a lie. Not a lie you told to others,

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but a lie you told yourself. The lie that says,

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if you keep making everyone around you comfortable, if you

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keep swallowing your needs, your opinions, your truth, if you

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keep shrinking yourself to fit into whatever space the people

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around you have decided you deserve, then eventually, somehow you

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will be loved, You will be safe, You will finally

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be enough. That lie has cost you everything. It has

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cost you your identity, It has cost you your confidence.

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It has cost you years of your life spent doing

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things you did not want to do for people who

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never truly respected you. It has cost you relationships that

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could have been real because you were never real inside them.

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It has cost you the version of yourself that was

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supposed to show up in this world fully, without apology,

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without shrinking, without performing, some version of yourself designed to

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be acceptable to every one except you, And the most

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painful part of all, you knew it was happening, deep

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down in those quiet moments when you agreed to something

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that made your stomach turn, when you smiled through something

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that was breaking your heart, when you said it is fine,

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while it was very clearly not fine at all. You

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felt it, that hollow, aching feeling that comes from betraying

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yourself over and over and over again. You felt it,

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and you kept going anyway, because stopping felt more dangerous

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than continuing. This is not a book about learning to

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be more assertive. This is not a collection of light

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tips on how to say no without offending anyone. What

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you are about to go through is a complete and

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total dismantling of one of the most deeply ingrained psychological

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patterns a human being can carry through their life. People

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Pleasing is not a personality quirk. It is not a

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sign of exceptional kindness. It is not something to be

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proud of or to wear as a badge of how

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much you care about others. It is a survival mechanism,

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one that made sense once in a different chapter of

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your life, when you were smaller and the world felt

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bigger and more threatening than you could manage alone. But

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survival mechanisms have a way of outliving their usefulness. They

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have a way of becoming the very thing that imprisons you.

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And that is exactly what has happened here. By the

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time you finish this you will understand with absolute clarity

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why you became this way. You will see the hidden

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mechanisms of this pattern operating in corners of your life

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you never thought to examine. You will have everything you

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need to break free from it permanently, to build boundaries

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that actually hold, and to begin living, perhaps for the

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first time, as someone who genuinely values themselves, not someone

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who performs self worth when an audience is watching, someone

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who carries it quietly, powerfully, and unshakably in every room

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they walk into, in every conversation they have, in every

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moment when they are alone with nothing but their own reflection.

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This is the most important work you will ever do.

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Let us begin chapter one what people pleasing really is.

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Let us start with what almost nobody wants to say

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out loud. People pleasing is not about being a good person.

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It has nothing to do with genuine generosity, authentic compassion,

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or real kindness. Those things exist, and they are beautiful,

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and they look absolutely nothing like what you have been doing.

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Real generosity comes from abundance. It comes from a person

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who has so much warmth and energy and love available

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that sharing it feels natural, easy right. What you have

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been doing comes from a completely different place. It comes

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from fear. Fear of rejection, fear of conflict, fear of

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being seen as difficult, selfish, demanding, or simply too much.

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Fear that if you stop performing, if you stop bending

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yourself into whatever shape the people around you need you

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to be in any given moment, they will leave. And

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if they leave, something you have quietly believed about yourself

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for a very long time will be confirmed. That you

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are not worth staying for, that you are only loved

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when you are useful. That the moment you stop giving,

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the moment you stop agreeing, the moment you stop making

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everyone around you comfortable and accommodated and cared for, the

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love disappears. Because the love was never really for you.

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It was for what you provided. That is what people

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pleasing actually is. At its core. It is a constant, exhausting,

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invisible negotiation with the world, a negotiation where you give

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everything and ask for nothing because asking feels dangerous, because

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needing something feels like a weakness that could be used

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against you. Because somewhere along the line, in circumstances you

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may not even fully remember now, you learned that your

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needs were a burden and other people's needs were the

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only ones that mattered. You learned it well. You learned

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it so well that by now it operates completely automatically,

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beneath the level of conscious thought, shaping every interaction before

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you even realize what is happening. And here is the

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thing that makes it so insidious and so difficult to

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see clearly from the outside. People pleasing looks like virtue,

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It looks like selflessness. It looks like the kind of

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goodness the world is supposed to celebrate, and in many

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ways the world does celebrate it. People call you kind,

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they call you easy going, They call you a great friend,

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a reliable colleague, a person who just makes everything easier

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for everyone around them, And you absorb those descriptions like

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water into dry earth, because they feel like proof, proof

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that you belong here, proof that you are valued. But

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here is what those descriptions actually are. They are not compliments.

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They are observations about how convenient you are. There is

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a difference between being a genuinely kind person and being

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someone who has organized their entire existence around the terror

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of disappointing others. A kind person helps because it feels

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good to give. A people pleaser helps because they are

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frightened of what happens if they do not. A kind

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person says no when they have nothing left to give,

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and feels at peace with that decision. A people pleaser

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says yes while running on absolute empty, then lies awake afterward,

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wondering why they feel invisible and resentful and hollow when

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they have done so much for so many people. That

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resentment is crucial. Pay close attention to it whenever it surfaces,

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because resentment is precisely what shows up when you have

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given something you did not actually want to give, every

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time you agreed to something that violated your own needs,

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every time you said yes when your entire body was

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saying no. That resentment accumulated layer upon layer upon layer,

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like sediment settling at the bottom of a river, over

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years and decades. And you carry all of it now.

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You carry it into conversations where you smile more than

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you feel. You carry it into relationships where you work

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twice as hard as the other person and receive half

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as much. You carry it into the privacy of your

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own mind, where you replay interactions late at night, analyzing

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every word you said, worrying that someone somewhere might be

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even slightly disappointed in you. This is the lived reality

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of people pleasing, not a life of kindness, a life

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of quiet, relentless self erasure dressed up as something admirable

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and presented to the world as though it costs nothing.

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The first step to ending it is seeing it honestly

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and clearly for exactly what it is. Not a personality

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trait you were born with, not something that defines the

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core of who you are. A pattern, a learned behavior,

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a strategy you developed at a specific point in your

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history to navigate a world that felt unsafe and a

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version of love that felt conditional, And strategies that no

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longer serve you can be unlearned. That is the entire

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purpose of what lies ahead Chapter two, where it all begins.

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Nobody is born a people pleaser. That is the first

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and most important thing you need to understand, because it

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changes everything about how you see yourself and this pattern.

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When you arrived in this world, you had no concept

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of hiding your needs or managing other people's emotional states.

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You cried when you were hungry, You reached without hesitation

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for whatever you wanted. You expressed discomfort or frustration or

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fear without a single thought about how it might land

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with the people around you. You were completely, unapologetically, fully

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present in your own experience. That version of you had

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never learned that being yourself could be dangerous. Something happened

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to change that, And for the vast majority of people

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who carry people pleasing patterns deep into adulthood, that something

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did not look dramatic or obviously traumatic. It did not

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look like a single catastrophic moment you could point to

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clearly and say, there, that is exactly where it started.

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That is the precise event that changed everything. It looked ordinary,

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It looked like everyday life. It looked like the cumulative

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weight of thousands of small moments, each individually seeming insignificant,

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but collectively rewiring the way you understood yourself and your

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place in the world. Maybe you grew up in a

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home where certain emotions were not welcome, where expressing anger

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resulted in punishment or in a withdrawal of warmth, Where

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sadness made apparent uncomfortable or impatient or dismissive, Where your

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needs were described as selfish, where your feelings were called

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dramatic or oversensitive, Where the unspoken but clearly communicated rule

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was that keeping the peace in the household mattered more

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than whatever you were actually experiencing in that environment. You

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learned quickly. You learned that the version of you who

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felt things loudly and reached for what you needed was

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a version that created problems for the people around you.

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And so you began, quietly, gradually, without anyone explicitly instructing

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you to to become who ever the room needed you

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to be. Maybe you had a parent whose moods were

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volatile and unpredictable, whose reactions were disproportionate, and whose emotional

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state could shift without warning in ways that made ordinary

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life feel inherently unsafe, and as a child navigating that

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landscape daily, you developed a skill that presented itself as survival.

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You learned to read the room before you stepped into it.

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You learned to scan for warning signs in the set

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of someone's jaw or the particular flatness of a voice,

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to adjust your own behavior and energy the moment the

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atmosphere shifted, to make yourself smaller and quieter and more agreeable.

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Because that was the strategy that consistently reduced the risk

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of the storm breaking direct directly over you, you became

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extraordinarily sensitive to the emotional states of the people around you,

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not because you were born with exceptional empathic gifts, but

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because accurately tracking those states was literally how you stayed safe.

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That sensitivity was an adaptation, a tool forged in a

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specific environment, and like all tools, it served you in

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the context it was built for. The problem is that

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you are still using it in contexts that are entirely different,

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and it is costing you far more than it is

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protecting you. Maybe love in your home operated on a

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conditional basis in a slightly different way. Maybe it was

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given in direct proportion to achievement, to compliance, to being

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the good one, the responsible one, the child who did

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not create difficulty or demand attention in uncomfortable ways. Maybe

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that role was rewarded with approval and warmth and a

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kind of pride that felt genuinely good and that you

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understood very early you needed to keep earning. In that dynamic,

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love became a transaction whose terms you had no part

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in setting, something to be earned through sustained performance, rather

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than something that existed as a given simply because you

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were there and you were theirs, And so your nervous

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system absorbed a foundational lesson The way to keep love

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coming is to keep performing, to keep being the version

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of yourself that generates approval, to suppress whatever parts of

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yourself do not. Maybe the wound came from somewhere else,

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entirely from peers who rejected you the moment you showed

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them something real about yourself. From a social environment, and

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where belonging required a degree of self suppression you were

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willing to pay because being included felt worth any price.

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Maybe it came from early relationships where you discovered, through

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painful experience, that expressing your genuine thoughts or needs or

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feelings caused the other person to pull away, or to

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become cold or critical or distant, and so you learned

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to keep those things hidden, to present instead a version

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of yourself shaped for acceptance rather than authenticity, and to

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track very carefully the distance between those two versions of you,

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so that you never inadvertently showed too much of the

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real one to any one who mattered. All of these experiences,

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regardless of how different they look in their specific details,

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teach the same lesson at the level of the nervous system,

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the lesson that who you actually are in your fullness,

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with your opinions and your limits and your needs and

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your inconvenient truths. Is not enough that the authentic version

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of you carries too much risk to show that it

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is safer and more practical and more effective to present

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instead a version designed for approval, a version built to please,

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to pacify, to accommodate endlessly. And you have been living

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as that version for so long and in so many

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dimensions of your life, that you may have genuinely lost

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clear sight of the original. You may have begun somewhere

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along the way to confuse the performance with the person.

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But the person is still there underneath all of this,

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underneath the reflexive agreements and the dissolved opinions and the

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relentless monitoring of everyone else's emotional states. The work ahead

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is not about constructing an entirely new self from the

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ground up. It is about something more honest and more

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profound than that. It is about excavating the one that

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was always there, waiting for exactly this moment. Chapter three.

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The hidden patterns you don't see in yourself. People pleases

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are almost always the last to recognize themselves when someone

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describes people pleasing. That is not coincidental. These patterns are

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so thoroughly interwoven into the texture of daily behavior, so

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comprehensively normalized through years and sometimes decades of unbroken repetition,

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that they stop registering as patterns at all. They feel

246
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like person. They feel like the natural expression of how

247
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your particular mind works and how you prefer to engage

248
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with the world. They feel like just who you are.

249
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And that quality of invisibility, that seamless integration into your

250
00:19:18,200 --> 00:19:22,279
sense of self is precisely what makes them so persistent

251
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and so difficult to interrupt. You cannot challenge what you

252
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cannot see, So the first task is to make the

253
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invisible visible. The first pattern is the automatic yes. Someone

254
00:19:36,440 --> 00:19:40,559
makes a request, any request at all, and before your

255
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conscious mind has had even a fraction of a second

256
00:19:43,839 --> 00:19:47,720
to process whether you actually want to fulfill it, your

257
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mouth has already produced the agreement. The yes arrives before

258
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the reflection. It is not a considered response that emerges

259
00:19:57,519 --> 00:20:02,000
from a genuine assessment of your availability or desire or capacity.

260
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It is a reflex. It is the path of least

261
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social resistance, the response that neutralizes the discomfort of potentially

262
00:20:11,799 --> 00:20:16,240
disappointing someone before that discomfort has even fully formed. You

263
00:20:16,359 --> 00:20:19,839
say yes, and then somewhere just behind your eyes, something

264
00:20:20,000 --> 00:20:25,480
tightens slightly. Some small but persistent part of you registers

265
00:20:25,599 --> 00:20:29,480
that the yes was not accurate, and you file that

266
00:20:29,599 --> 00:20:35,799
away and carry it forward, a small, quiet debt to

267
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yourself that you will not acknowledge and cannot collect. The

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00:20:41,319 --> 00:20:47,160
second pattern is the constant surveillance people. Pleasers are rarely

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00:20:47,200 --> 00:20:51,799
fully present in any given conversation or interaction, and the

270
00:20:51,880 --> 00:20:55,160
reason for that partial absence is that a significant and

271
00:20:55,279 --> 00:20:59,359
non negotiable portion of their attention is permanently allocated to

272
00:20:59,440 --> 00:21:03,559
watching watching the other person's face for the earliest possible

273
00:21:03,640 --> 00:21:08,000
signs of displeasure, Scanning the room for subtle shifts in

274
00:21:08,240 --> 00:21:14,640
energy or emotional temperature, Monitoring tone of voice, body language,

275
00:21:15,119 --> 00:21:19,319
the micro expressions that flicker across some one's face before

276
00:21:19,359 --> 00:21:23,839
their words arrive, the particular weight of a pause in

277
00:21:23,920 --> 00:21:29,319
a conversation, always running the interior calculation Are they okay?

278
00:21:30,279 --> 00:21:34,119
Did I say something wrong? Are they upset with me?

279
00:21:35,079 --> 00:21:38,000
Did that come across the way I intended it to?

280
00:21:38,599 --> 00:21:41,440
Is there something I should be doing differently right now?

281
00:21:42,359 --> 00:21:46,799
This monitoring is relentless, and the cognitive and emotional cost

282
00:21:46,880 --> 00:21:50,960
of it is enormous. It means that you rarely experience

283
00:21:51,119 --> 00:21:54,480
human interaction the way a person with a secure sense

284
00:21:54,519 --> 00:22:00,079
of self does, because half of you is always position

285
00:22:00,359 --> 00:22:06,519
slightly outside the moment, watching it, assessing it, managing it,

286
00:22:07,599 --> 00:22:11,519
bracing for the version of it where something goes wrong.

287
00:22:12,319 --> 00:22:16,960
The third pattern is the apology reflex. You apologize for

288
00:22:17,039 --> 00:22:21,799
things that carry no genuine need for apology. You apologize

289
00:22:21,799 --> 00:22:26,640
for having needs, for asking a question, for taking up

290
00:22:26,680 --> 00:22:30,279
physical space in a room, for existing in a way

291
00:22:30,319 --> 00:22:35,319
that might, in some theoretical scenario that has not even materialized,

292
00:22:36,279 --> 00:22:41,599
inconvenience someone around you. You preface requests or statements with

293
00:22:41,759 --> 00:22:45,519
sorry to bother you, or I am probably wrong about this,

294
00:22:46,400 --> 00:22:49,680
or I don't know this might be a stupid question.

295
00:22:50,599 --> 00:22:55,319
You apologize when someone walks into you. Each of these apologies,

296
00:22:56,319 --> 00:23:03,920
observed individually, appears to be a social grace observed collectively

297
00:23:04,880 --> 00:23:09,480
across the full pattern of how you move through your life,

298
00:23:09,519 --> 00:23:15,160
they constitute a continuous declaration, a declaration that your presence

299
00:23:15,240 --> 00:23:20,200
requires justification, that you are an inconvenience until you have

300
00:23:20,240 --> 00:23:26,079
demonstrated otherwise that you occupy ground you are not entirely

301
00:23:26,160 --> 00:23:29,759
certain you deserve. The fourth pattern is what happens to

302
00:23:29,920 --> 00:23:34,759
your opinions under the slightest pressure In a group, a

303
00:23:34,839 --> 00:23:40,720
person operating primarily from people pleasing patterns will typically hold

304
00:23:40,759 --> 00:23:44,720
off on forming or sharing a perspective until they have

305
00:23:44,799 --> 00:23:48,400
heard what the others present seem to think. And when

306
00:23:48,400 --> 00:23:52,920
they do venture an opinion, it arrives pre qualified, pre

307
00:23:53,039 --> 00:23:58,160
apologized for hedged before it has even fully left their mouth.

308
00:23:58,920 --> 00:24:03,480
I think may, but I could easily be wrong. I

309
00:24:03,519 --> 00:24:07,759
am not sure. What do you all think? And if

310
00:24:07,759 --> 00:24:13,160
someone responds with even mild disagreement, even without particular conviction

311
00:24:13,400 --> 00:24:19,079
or forcefulness, the opinion collapses. Not because the challenge introduced

312
00:24:19,319 --> 00:24:25,519
genuinely new information that warranted a real reconsideration, but because disagreement,

313
00:24:26,559 --> 00:24:33,000
even minor and unthreatening disagreement, triggers in your nervous system

314
00:24:33,359 --> 00:24:39,079
something that feels like danger, And when danger appears, the

315
00:24:39,200 --> 00:24:42,279
fastest way to make it recede is to remove the

316
00:24:42,319 --> 00:24:47,119
source of the friction, which is your own contrary view.

317
00:24:47,920 --> 00:24:51,880
So you dissolve the opinion and restore the apparent harmony

318
00:24:52,119 --> 00:24:56,119
and move forward carrying the particular kind of fatigue that

319
00:24:56,240 --> 00:24:59,880
comes from never being allowed to think a thought through

320
00:25:00,079 --> 00:25:04,599
to its natural and honest conclusion. The fifth pattern is

321
00:25:04,680 --> 00:25:08,359
the resentment you have learned to not allow yourself to name.

322
00:25:09,359 --> 00:25:16,759
You give consistently and generously, often at significant cost to

323
00:25:16,880 --> 00:25:21,200
your own time and energy and peace of mind. You

324
00:25:21,359 --> 00:25:25,160
help when you have nothing available to give, You show

325
00:25:25,240 --> 00:25:29,839
up when you would rather be anywhere else. You accommodate

326
00:25:29,920 --> 00:25:35,839
requests that violate your own needs, and then, beneath all

327
00:25:35,920 --> 00:25:42,680
of that giving, something that feels uncomfortably like anger begins

328
00:25:42,720 --> 00:25:49,920
to quietly build. Not targeted anger at any particular individual necessarily,

329
00:25:50,799 --> 00:25:56,240
but a diffuse and pervasive resentment at the dynamic, at

330
00:25:56,279 --> 00:26:01,000
the structure of your relationships, at the role you always

331
00:26:01,119 --> 00:26:05,200
somehow find yourself occupying. And what do you do with

332
00:26:05,319 --> 00:26:09,559
that resentment? When you notice its stirring? You tell yourself

333
00:26:09,880 --> 00:26:13,720
it is irrational. You tell yourself you are being ungrateful

334
00:26:13,880 --> 00:26:17,480
or unfair toward people who never explicitly ask you to

335
00:26:17,559 --> 00:26:22,799
sacrifice this much. You dismiss it, stuff it somewhere below awareness,

336
00:26:23,720 --> 00:26:28,039
and then give more, as if additional generosity, performed with

337
00:26:28,160 --> 00:26:34,160
sufficient conviction, will somehow cancel out and neutralize the anger

338
00:26:34,279 --> 00:26:40,400
accumulating underneath it. Never does. It simply grows in the

339
00:26:40,480 --> 00:26:45,519
place you have decided not to look. The sixth pattern

340
00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:50,279
is your relationship with conflict itself, not as a natural

341
00:26:50,319 --> 00:26:55,640
dimension of human interaction, not as the sometimes uncomfortable but

342
00:26:55,839 --> 00:27:00,160
often clarifying process through which people come to understand each

343
00:27:00,200 --> 00:27:06,000
other more completely, but as a genuine emergency requiring immediate containment.

344
00:27:06,440 --> 00:27:11,079
When conflict begins to appear anywhere near a relationship you

345
00:27:11,160 --> 00:27:14,559
depend on or a dynamic you have worked to maintain

346
00:27:15,559 --> 00:27:20,279
the full force of your people pleasing machinery activates in

347
00:27:20,440 --> 00:27:24,839
service of de escalation. You absorb blame that does not

348
00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:29,359
belong to you, because accepting it ends the argument faster.

349
00:27:30,400 --> 00:27:34,039
You make yourself smaller in the presence of someone else's

350
00:27:34,119 --> 00:27:39,519
anger because shrinking reduces the apparent threat surface. You stay

351
00:27:39,599 --> 00:27:43,680
silent about things that matter because raising them might disturb

352
00:27:43,759 --> 00:27:47,039
a piece that already, if you are being completely honest

353
00:27:47,079 --> 00:27:51,799
with yourself, exists mostly in performance. And in doing all

354
00:27:51,839 --> 00:27:54,960
of this, you teach the people around you something that

355
00:27:55,000 --> 00:27:58,079
they did not need to be told explicitly in order

356
00:27:58,119 --> 00:28:02,920
to absorb which them. That your limits are suggestions, that

357
00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:07,400
your feelings are negotiable, that the emotional equilibrium of the

358
00:28:07,480 --> 00:28:12,279
relationship is your responsibility to maintain, regardless of what it

359
00:28:12,400 --> 00:28:15,160
costs you to do so. Look at all of this

360
00:28:15,240 --> 00:28:20,240
with honesty and without the self condemnation that honesty can

361
00:28:20,400 --> 00:28:25,400
sometimes produce, not to shame yourself for the person you

362
00:28:25,480 --> 00:28:32,200
have been, but to finally, clearly completely see the architecture

363
00:28:32,240 --> 00:28:35,319
of what has been running your life. Without your fully

364
00:28:35,480 --> 00:28:41,160
conscious participation, you cannot dismantle a structure you refuse to

365
00:28:41,279 --> 00:28:47,640
examine carefully. These patterns exist, they have been operating for

366
00:28:47,720 --> 00:28:53,720
a long time, and seeing them with precision is not weakness.

367
00:28:54,400 --> 00:28:59,079
It is the single most courageous act. This entire process

368
00:28:59,160 --> 00:29:05,319
will require you. Chapter four, Why being nice is slowly

369
00:29:05,400 --> 00:29:08,799
destroying you. There is a story our culture tells about

370
00:29:08,920 --> 00:29:13,920
nice people. The story says they are good. It says

371
00:29:14,200 --> 00:29:18,759
they are morally elevated, that they hold things together, that

372
00:29:18,880 --> 00:29:23,079
communities and workplaces and families function better because these people

373
00:29:23,119 --> 00:29:27,519
are in them, quietly smoothing the edges of every interaction,

374
00:29:28,319 --> 00:29:33,119
absorbing the friction, making the whole machinery of social life

375
00:29:33,200 --> 00:29:40,640
run with less resistance. Society rewards this quality in observable ways.

376
00:29:41,440 --> 00:29:45,519
It promotes the easy going, and gravitates toward the accommodating,

377
00:29:45,599 --> 00:29:48,359
and smiles most warmly at the person who makes no

378
00:29:48,480 --> 00:29:53,799
difficult demands and produces no uncomfortable friction. You have spent

379
00:29:53,839 --> 00:29:58,000
a long time absorbing this story. You have spent years

380
00:29:58,119 --> 00:30:03,319
believing that your willingness to ben, to accommodate, to prioritize

381
00:30:03,359 --> 00:30:06,720
the needs and comfort of others is one of your

382
00:30:06,759 --> 00:30:11,559
most valuable and admirable qualities, something that makes you not

383
00:30:11,839 --> 00:30:15,599
just pleasant to be around, but genuinely better than people

384
00:30:15,599 --> 00:30:19,400
who hold firm boundaries and say what they actually mean

385
00:30:19,839 --> 00:30:23,640
without first checking whether it will be well received. Here

386
00:30:23,920 --> 00:30:30,519
is what that story systematically leaves out. The cost, the real, specific,

387
00:30:30,920 --> 00:30:36,559
compounding cumulative cost of performing niceness as a substitute for

388
00:30:36,759 --> 00:30:41,359
genuine self respect. When you consistently say yes while your

389
00:30:41,400 --> 00:30:45,799
actual interior experience is registering a clear and unmistakable no,

390
00:30:46,400 --> 00:30:49,720
something happens in your nervous system that you need to understand.

391
00:30:50,440 --> 00:30:55,480
Not a single dramatic alarm, not an acute crisis, but

392
00:30:55,599 --> 00:31:00,799
the activation of a chronic, low grade stress response, the

393
00:31:00,839 --> 00:31:05,480
signal of ongoing self betrayal. And the human body responds

394
00:31:05,599 --> 00:31:08,880
to sustained self betrayal the way it responds to any

395
00:31:08,920 --> 00:31:16,119
prolonged stresser. It adapts, But the adaptation comes at a cost.

396
00:31:16,920 --> 00:31:23,440
Over time, anxiety becomes your baseline state, rather than something

397
00:31:23,480 --> 00:31:30,799
you experience in response to specific genuine threats. Not necessarily

398
00:31:30,880 --> 00:31:38,079
dramatic acute anxiety, but a persistent background tension, a quality

399
00:31:38,119 --> 00:31:42,240
of never being quite settled, never quite fully at rest,

400
00:31:43,039 --> 00:31:47,000
always operating with some portion of your nervous system on alert.

401
00:31:47,480 --> 00:31:51,400
You feel tired in ways that sleeping cannot fix, because

402
00:31:51,440 --> 00:31:55,839
the exhaustion is not primarily physical. It is the exhaustion

403
00:31:56,000 --> 00:31:59,279
of a person who has been performing without interruption for

404
00:31:59,480 --> 00:32:03,039
years and has never once been allowed to fully step

405
00:32:03,039 --> 00:32:06,599
off stage and simply exist without an audience to manage.

406
00:32:07,039 --> 00:32:12,359
You carry a formless, hovering anxiety through your days, even

407
00:32:12,400 --> 00:32:17,039
when nothing in your external life specifically justifies it. Your

408
00:32:17,079 --> 00:32:21,880
body stores tension in ways that seem disconnected from any

409
00:32:21,960 --> 00:32:27,680
particular cause. Your mind runs circular loops of social analysis.

410
00:32:27,720 --> 00:32:30,880
In the hours when you should be resting. You experience

411
00:32:30,920 --> 00:32:35,160
a vague and persistent sense that you are always one

412
00:32:35,319 --> 00:32:40,119
misstep away from something going wrong, even when everything visible

413
00:32:40,160 --> 00:32:43,680
appears to be fine, And through all of it, you

414
00:32:43,839 --> 00:32:48,359
keep performing because stopping the performance feels more threatening than

415
00:32:48,400 --> 00:32:53,119
sustaining it, even as sustaining it quietly drains you of

416
00:32:53,200 --> 00:32:57,119
things you cannot easily name or replace. That is the

417
00:32:57,400 --> 00:33:02,640
internal cost, and it is enormous, but it does not

418
00:33:02,799 --> 00:33:07,880
confine itself to your interior life. Look carefully at what

419
00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:11,839
chronic people pleasing does to the quality and nature of

420
00:33:11,880 --> 00:33:15,519
the relationships in your life. When you operate without any

421
00:33:15,599 --> 00:33:19,759
real or consistent boundaries, you do not draw people who

422
00:33:19,799 --> 00:33:23,640
respect you for who you genuinely are. You draw people

423
00:33:23,720 --> 00:33:27,200
who are comfortable in a dynamic where they receive without

424
00:33:27,319 --> 00:33:32,480
equivalent reciprocity. You draw people who have learned, through the

425
00:33:32,559 --> 00:33:37,119
consistent evidence of your behavior over time, that your yes

426
00:33:37,880 --> 00:33:42,680
is readily available and that your no is unlikely to appear.

427
00:33:43,359 --> 00:33:47,200
You draw people who, whether they are fully conscious of

428
00:33:47,240 --> 00:33:51,920
this or not, have organized their relationship with you around

429
00:33:51,920 --> 00:33:57,640
the assumption of your continued accommodation. And those relationships, however

430
00:33:57,759 --> 00:34:02,079
warm or familiar they may feel in certain moments, are

431
00:34:02,119 --> 00:34:08,719
not built on genuine mutual regard. They are not built

432
00:34:08,760 --> 00:34:12,960
on the kind of honest, reciprocal respect that sustains a

433
00:34:13,000 --> 00:34:18,199
relationship through difficulty. They are built on the continued availability

434
00:34:18,599 --> 00:34:21,840
of what you are willing to provide. The people who

435
00:34:21,920 --> 00:34:25,159
might have offered you something genuinely different the ones who

436
00:34:25,199 --> 00:34:28,280
are self possessed enough to actually respect a boundary when

437
00:34:28,320 --> 00:34:32,000
they encounter one who are emotionally healthy enough to handle

438
00:34:32,000 --> 00:34:35,079
the word no without treating it as a personal attack.

439
00:34:35,480 --> 00:34:39,360
Those people often drift away from people pleasers, not out

440
00:34:39,360 --> 00:34:43,559
of cruelty or judgment, but because something in the dynamic

441
00:34:44,039 --> 00:34:47,199
feels off in a way they may not be able

442
00:34:47,239 --> 00:34:52,119
to immediately articulate, because a person who agrees with everything,

443
00:34:52,440 --> 00:34:56,400
who bends readily to every preference, who has no stable,

444
00:34:56,519 --> 00:35:00,599
visible edges of their own, is someone who is genuinely

445
00:35:00,679 --> 00:35:05,440
difficult to connect with at any real depth. Authentic connection

446
00:35:05,920 --> 00:35:10,880
requires two actual people. It requires both parties to be

447
00:35:11,079 --> 00:35:17,079
actually present, actually themselves, actually willing to occupy the space

448
00:35:17,119 --> 00:35:21,280
of who they are with some degree of firmness. You

449
00:35:21,400 --> 00:35:24,599
cannot form a true and nourishing bond with a mirror.

450
00:35:25,440 --> 00:35:29,360
And that, over time is what a consistent people pleaser

451
00:35:29,440 --> 00:35:32,840
becomes in the eyes of the people around them, a

452
00:35:32,920 --> 00:35:37,039
surface that reflects back whatever they bring with nothing of

453
00:35:37,039 --> 00:35:40,400
its own, held steady. And then there is what it

454
00:35:40,440 --> 00:35:45,400
does to the thing that arguably matters most, your relationship

455
00:35:45,480 --> 00:35:50,400
with yourself. Every single time you override your own needs

456
00:35:50,440 --> 00:35:54,639
in service of someone else's comfort, every time you suppress

457
00:35:54,719 --> 00:35:58,599
your truth to maintain someone else's ease, you transmit a

458
00:35:58,599 --> 00:36:02,280
message to your own noses a system. The message says,

459
00:36:03,360 --> 00:36:13,320
yours matters less, your experience matters less, You matter less.

460
00:36:14,079 --> 00:36:19,039
And the brain, which is a sophisticated and efficient pattern

461
00:36:19,159 --> 00:36:25,000
recognition system, receives this message and files it alongside all

462
00:36:25,079 --> 00:36:29,880
the previous identical messages and continues building the case for

463
00:36:29,960 --> 00:36:33,440
a belief that may have been forming since you were

464
00:36:33,599 --> 00:36:37,679
very young, the belief that you are fundamentally less deserving

465
00:36:37,760 --> 00:36:40,760
of consideration than the people you share your life with,

466
00:36:41,679 --> 00:36:46,559
that your role is to give, to facilitate, to smooth,

467
00:36:47,519 --> 00:36:52,599
to serve, that your value resides in your usefulness rather

468
00:36:52,679 --> 00:36:56,280
than in your existence. That belief is false, but it

469
00:36:56,320 --> 00:37:00,880
has been reinforced with such consistency through such a high

470
00:37:00,960 --> 00:37:05,400
volume of individual acts of self abandonment that by now

471
00:37:05,800 --> 00:37:10,119
it carries the emotional weight and the felt quality of

472
00:37:10,280 --> 00:37:15,639
simple fact, and so the cycle maintains itself without requiring

473
00:37:15,760 --> 00:37:20,039
any external force to sustain it. You believe you matterless,

474
00:37:20,880 --> 00:37:25,719
so you consistently act as though you matterless, which generates

475
00:37:25,800 --> 00:37:31,000
further behavioral evidence that confirms the belief, which deepens your

476
00:37:31,039 --> 00:37:35,840
conviction that it is simply accurate, which produces more of

477
00:37:35,880 --> 00:37:41,760
the same behavior, a loop of extraordinary efficiency, closing around

478
00:37:41,800 --> 00:37:47,800
itself and maintaining its structure without any conscious input from you.

479
00:37:48,239 --> 00:37:52,920
Being nice is not destroying you because kindness is harmful,

480
00:37:53,039 --> 00:37:58,239
or because generosity is misguided. Kindness is among the most

481
00:37:58,280 --> 00:38:03,280
powerful and most necessary things things a human being can

482
00:38:03,360 --> 00:38:07,480
offer the world. It is destroying you because what you

483
00:38:07,559 --> 00:38:12,159
have been practicing is not kindness. It is the performance

484
00:38:12,199 --> 00:38:16,239
of kindness as a strategy for managing your own fear.

485
00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:21,480
It is the consistent, daily sacrifice of your authentic self

486
00:38:21,760 --> 00:38:25,719
on the altar of other people's comfort. And no person

487
00:38:25,920 --> 00:38:29,440
was designed to spend their entire life in that particular

488
00:38:29,519 --> 00:38:34,559
act of disappearance. Chapter five. What you're really searching for

489
00:38:35,280 --> 00:38:40,199
Underneath every single act of people pleasing, beneath every automatic

490
00:38:40,239 --> 00:38:45,880
agreement and every suppressed opinion and every boundary quietly surrendered

491
00:38:45,920 --> 00:38:49,920
without a fight, there is a need. And that need

492
00:38:50,079 --> 00:38:54,320
is never actually about making the other person happy. Making

493
00:38:54,360 --> 00:38:58,480
them happy is the method. The method is not the goal.

494
00:38:59,199 --> 00:39:03,320
The need itself is something far more basic, far more universal,

495
00:39:03,599 --> 00:39:07,079
far more deeply human than any strategy built around it

496
00:39:07,119 --> 00:39:11,400
could ever suggest. The need is to belong, to be

497
00:39:11,559 --> 00:39:15,400
genuinely seen, to be loved, not in the abstract, not

498
00:39:15,559 --> 00:39:19,360
in theory, not on the condition that you successfully maintain

499
00:39:19,480 --> 00:39:25,239
an acceptable performance, but actually fully in the honest and

500
00:39:25,480 --> 00:39:29,760
unedited completeness of who you really are when no one

501
00:39:30,360 --> 00:39:33,760
is evaluating you. That is what has been driving this

502
00:39:34,119 --> 00:39:39,280
entire pattern. That is the hunger underneath the hunger, the

503
00:39:39,400 --> 00:39:44,000
need beneath all the strategies and the accommodations, and the

504
00:39:44,159 --> 00:39:48,960
years of self suppression, and the cruel and almost unbearable

505
00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:52,119
irony that sits at the absolute center of all of it.

506
00:39:52,239 --> 00:39:55,480
Is this The strategy you have been using your entire

507
00:39:55,559 --> 00:39:58,760
life to meet that need is the one strategy that

508
00:39:58,880 --> 00:40:03,639
is structurally incapable of ever satisfying it. Here is the

509
00:40:03,679 --> 00:40:08,320
mechanism that makes this true. When you people please, you

510
00:40:08,400 --> 00:40:11,920
do not allow anyone to actually see you. What you

511
00:40:12,039 --> 00:40:16,119
allow them to see is a version of you, a

512
00:40:16,239 --> 00:40:21,079
version that has been carefully and continuously edited, stripped of

513
00:40:21,119 --> 00:40:26,159
anything that felt too risky to expose, recalibrated for maximum

514
00:40:26,199 --> 00:40:29,960
acceptability in the presence of whoever is standing in front

515
00:40:29,960 --> 00:40:34,199
of you at any given moment, and when someone responds

516
00:40:34,239 --> 00:40:39,800
to that version with warmth, with validation, with approval, with

517
00:40:39,920 --> 00:40:42,519
the sense that they like you and value you and

518
00:40:42,599 --> 00:40:47,440
want you around. Something in you knows, with a certainty

519
00:40:47,519 --> 00:40:51,639
that operates completely below the level of conscious thought, that

520
00:40:51,719 --> 00:40:56,119
it does not actually count, not fully, not the way

521
00:40:56,119 --> 00:40:59,079
it would need to count to fill the space you

522
00:40:59,119 --> 00:41:02,760
are trying to fill, Because they did not love you.

523
00:41:03,719 --> 00:41:10,079
They loved the version of you that never disagrees, never inconveniences,

524
00:41:10,639 --> 00:41:14,960
never asks for more than is conveniently on offer. They

525
00:41:15,079 --> 00:41:19,480
loved the performance, and somewhere beneath all of the performing,

526
00:41:20,440 --> 00:41:24,519
a persistent and quiet voice says, but if they saw

527
00:41:24,639 --> 00:41:29,079
what I actually felt, if they knew what I actually needed,

528
00:41:29,760 --> 00:41:33,079
if they experienced the uncurated truth of who I am

529
00:41:33,199 --> 00:41:36,159
on a difficult day, when I am tired or scared,

530
00:41:36,239 --> 00:41:40,360
or angry or uncertain, they would not stay. That voice

531
00:41:40,719 --> 00:41:44,519
is the wound, and the people pleasing is the elaborate

532
00:41:44,679 --> 00:41:48,800
armor that was constructed around the wound, designed to keep

533
00:41:48,880 --> 00:41:52,000
anyone from getting close enough to confirm what it has

534
00:41:52,159 --> 00:41:57,559
always feared is true. The armor feels like protection, but

535
00:41:57,880 --> 00:42:03,199
armor by definition also prevents contact. It keeps out the

536
00:42:03,400 --> 00:42:08,039
very thing you are most urgently desperate to receive, what

537
00:42:08,079 --> 00:42:11,679
you are really searching for at the most stripped down

538
00:42:11,760 --> 00:42:16,679
and fundamental level, is proof that you are enough, not enough,

539
00:42:16,760 --> 00:42:21,440
contingent on being useful, not enough, provided that you have

540
00:42:21,559 --> 00:42:27,920
successfully managed everyone's emotional state and met every implicit expectation

541
00:42:28,360 --> 00:42:32,239
and created no friction and asked for nothing in return.

542
00:42:33,039 --> 00:42:39,800
Enough as an unconditional baseline, enough simply because you are here, enough,

543
00:42:39,840 --> 00:42:44,639
because you exist, and your existence has inherent value that

544
00:42:44,719 --> 00:42:48,119
does not need to be earned or demonstrated or maintained

545
00:42:48,159 --> 00:42:51,639
through performance. And until you are able to generate that

546
00:42:51,800 --> 00:42:55,559
proof from within yourself, through your own choices and your

547
00:42:55,599 --> 00:42:59,519
own evolving relationship with who you are, no quantity of

548
00:42:59,599 --> 00:43:03,440
external validation will ever be sufficient to provide it. You

549
00:43:03,519 --> 00:43:07,079
will move from one person to the next, from one

550
00:43:07,159 --> 00:43:11,360
relationship to the next, from one moment of approval to

551
00:43:11,440 --> 00:43:15,440
the next, and every time the validation arrives, it will

552
00:43:15,440 --> 00:43:18,280
feel good for exactly as long as it takes for

553
00:43:18,320 --> 00:43:21,800
the fear to stir again and ask, but what if

554
00:43:21,880 --> 00:43:25,719
next time they see something they do not like? What

555
00:43:25,840 --> 00:43:28,679
if next time the performance is not good enough? What

556
00:43:28,800 --> 00:43:32,519
if next time they do not stay? The exhaustion you

557
00:43:32,639 --> 00:43:36,199
carry in this cycle is real, and it is profound,

558
00:43:37,159 --> 00:43:41,119
and it is the exhaustion of a specific kind of futility,

559
00:43:41,920 --> 00:43:46,039
the futility of chasing something that moves every time you

560
00:43:46,159 --> 00:43:49,719
approach it, because what other people think of you was

561
00:43:49,800 --> 00:43:53,199
never genuinely capable of giving you what you are actually

562
00:43:53,239 --> 00:43:59,360
looking for. It was always a proxy, a functional substitute

563
00:43:59,360 --> 00:44:03,119
for the real thing, offering a simulation of the feeling

564
00:44:03,199 --> 00:44:06,800
that was close enough to temporarily satisfy the craving, but

565
00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:11,920
never close enough to actually eliminate it. And like all

566
00:44:12,039 --> 00:44:17,000
substitutes engaged with in quantities large enough to compensate for

567
00:44:17,039 --> 00:44:20,960
the absence of the real thing, it requires more and

568
00:44:21,039 --> 00:44:24,880
more of it over time to produce less and less

569
00:44:24,880 --> 00:44:28,199
of the effect you are seeking. What you are searching

570
00:44:28,280 --> 00:44:31,800
for does not live in another person's approval. It does

571
00:44:31,840 --> 00:44:34,719
not live in the absence of conflict, or in the

572
00:44:34,719 --> 00:44:37,679
relief of being agreed with, or in the warmth that

573
00:44:37,880 --> 00:44:41,800
comes from being told you are wonderful by someone whose

574
00:44:41,800 --> 00:44:47,679
opinion you have organized your behavior around. Securing It lives

575
00:44:47,800 --> 00:44:51,559
somewhere else. It lives in the moments when you say

576
00:44:51,639 --> 00:44:55,840
something true out loud and you are still standing afterward,

577
00:44:56,599 --> 00:45:00,119
when you hold a position under pressure and the relationship

578
00:45:00,199 --> 00:45:04,920
survives it when you choose something for yourself without spiraling

579
00:45:04,960 --> 00:45:09,360
into guilt and discover that the consequences were manageable. When

580
00:45:09,400 --> 00:45:13,800
you sit with your own company with no performance required

581
00:45:14,280 --> 00:45:18,880
and no audience present, and feel something that is genuinely

582
00:45:19,800 --> 00:45:24,159
and simply enough, those are the moments that build the

583
00:45:24,239 --> 00:45:27,119
thing you have been looking for in every other direction.

584
00:45:27,599 --> 00:45:30,519
Real self worth is not a thought you arrive at

585
00:45:30,559 --> 00:45:34,920
through sufficient contemplation. It is not an affirmation you can

586
00:45:34,960 --> 00:45:39,119
repeat into existence. It is a lived experience that is

587
00:45:39,199 --> 00:45:46,079
constructed slowly through accumulation, through the steady building of evidence

588
00:45:46,280 --> 00:45:50,599
that you can trust yourself to choose yourself, that the

589
00:45:50,639 --> 00:45:53,400
world does not collapse when you take up the space

590
00:45:53,440 --> 00:45:56,199
that is yours, that you are capable of being real

591
00:45:56,280 --> 00:46:00,000
and remaining loved. It is built through thousands of small,

592
00:46:00,000 --> 00:46:05,639
all deliberate, sometimes frightening acts of choosing your own truth

593
00:46:05,760 --> 00:46:10,760
over the easier path of accommodation. Each one is a deposit.

594
00:46:11,639 --> 00:46:16,480
The account does not fill overnight, but it fills in

595
00:46:16,519 --> 00:46:20,199
a way that borrowed validation never could, because it belongs

596
00:46:20,400 --> 00:46:23,679
entirely to you and cannot be taken away by someone

597
00:46:23,679 --> 00:46:27,239
else's change of mood or change of mind. You are

598
00:46:27,280 --> 00:46:30,119
not waiting for the person who will finally love you

599
00:46:30,519 --> 00:46:33,199
in the way you deserve to be loved, and whose

600
00:46:33,239 --> 00:46:36,719
love will make all of this okay. You are becoming

601
00:46:36,760 --> 00:46:40,639
the source of that recognition for yourself. You are learning

602
00:46:40,679 --> 00:46:44,880
to see yourself with honesty and with care. You are

603
00:46:44,960 --> 00:46:49,760
learning to extend to yourself the same consistency of consideration

604
00:46:50,159 --> 00:46:54,320
you have been extending so freely and so automatically to

605
00:46:54,519 --> 00:46:59,000
every person who has crossed your path. And that shift,

606
00:46:59,400 --> 00:47:04,920
quiet as it may appear when described in words, rearranges everything.

607
00:47:05,679 --> 00:47:09,880
It rearranges what you will accept and what you will offer,

608
00:47:10,320 --> 00:47:14,440
and what you will permit to continue. It rearranges who

609
00:47:14,639 --> 00:47:17,719
enters your life and what those relationships are built upon,

610
00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:20,880
and how long they last and what they actually give you.

611
00:47:21,719 --> 00:47:25,280
It rearranges the quality of every single ordinary day from

612
00:47:25,280 --> 00:47:28,559
this point forward. That is what this is really about,

613
00:47:29,800 --> 00:47:35,280
Not the techniques, not the scripts for difficult conversations. The

614
00:47:35,360 --> 00:47:41,559
thing underneath all of that, your relationship with yourself, and

615
00:47:41,639 --> 00:47:47,320
that relationship begins to change right now. Chapter six, Rewiring

616
00:47:47,400 --> 00:47:52,840
yourself worth from the inside out. Here is something nobody

617
00:47:52,880 --> 00:47:56,400
tells you when they talk about building confidence or developing

618
00:47:56,519 --> 00:48:00,519
self worth or learning to value yourself. They make it

619
00:48:00,639 --> 00:48:04,840
sound like a decision, like one day you simply choose

620
00:48:04,920 --> 00:48:08,280
to believe you are enough, and from that point forward

621
00:48:08,559 --> 00:48:12,159
you operate from that belief without difficulty. They make it

622
00:48:12,280 --> 00:48:17,280
sound like an internal switch that, once flipped, stays in

623
00:48:17,320 --> 00:48:21,480
the on position permanently and transforms the way you move

624
00:48:21,639 --> 00:48:25,719
through every situation you encounter. And because that is the

625
00:48:25,840 --> 00:48:30,159
version of the story most commonly told, many people spend

626
00:48:30,280 --> 00:48:34,880
years waiting for that switch to reveal itself, waiting for

627
00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:39,960
the moment of clarity, the realization, the emotional breakthrough that

628
00:48:40,000 --> 00:48:44,000
will finally make them feel worthy from the inside rather

629
00:48:44,079 --> 00:48:48,079
than dependent on the outside for the feeling. That moment

630
00:48:48,159 --> 00:48:52,280
does not come, not in the way it is described,

631
00:48:53,280 --> 00:48:56,960
and the waiting for it is itself a trap because

632
00:48:57,000 --> 00:48:59,719
it keeps you passive in the face of something that

633
00:48:59,760 --> 00:49:05,840
requires active construction. Self worth is not a realization. It

634
00:49:05,920 --> 00:49:10,400
is not a feeling that arrives and then remains. It

635
00:49:10,559 --> 00:49:17,280
is an accumulation. It is built slowly and without fanfare,

636
00:49:18,199 --> 00:49:23,079
through the compounding effect of thousands of small choices made

637
00:49:23,079 --> 00:49:27,599
over time, choices that align with the person you actually are,

638
00:49:28,239 --> 00:49:32,760
rather than the person others find most convenient choices that

639
00:49:32,840 --> 00:49:38,880
prioritize your own honest experience without requiring external permission to

640
00:49:38,960 --> 00:49:46,920
do so. Choices that taken individually may seem almost trivially small,

641
00:49:47,760 --> 00:49:51,440
but that taken together across weeks and months and years

642
00:49:52,320 --> 00:49:57,280
constitute the foundation of a genuinely different relationship with yourself.

643
00:49:58,039 --> 00:50:01,119
The first thing you need to understand about wiring self

644
00:50:01,159 --> 00:50:04,320
worth is that it requires you to stop outsourcing the

645
00:50:04,360 --> 00:50:08,599
evaluation of your own value right now. Whether you are

646
00:50:08,679 --> 00:50:12,079
fully conscious of this or not, you are running a

647
00:50:12,159 --> 00:50:17,519
continuous internal process in which you measure your worth by

648
00:50:17,639 --> 00:50:22,000
checking it against other people's responses to you. When someone

649
00:50:22,079 --> 00:50:26,679
is warm and approving, the needle moves up. When someone

650
00:50:26,800 --> 00:50:32,000
is cold, or critical or disappointed, the needle moves down.

651
00:50:32,840 --> 00:50:36,559
Your sense of yourself on any given day is substantially

652
00:50:36,599 --> 00:50:40,159
determined by the aggregate of other people's reactions to you,

653
00:50:40,840 --> 00:50:45,320
which means your sense of yourself is almost entirely outside

654
00:50:45,360 --> 00:50:50,400
your control. Someone else's bad mood becomes your internal crisis.

655
00:50:51,360 --> 00:50:58,199
Someone else's brief inattention becomes evidence of your inadequacy. Someone

656
00:50:58,239 --> 00:51:05,639
else's enter highly separate and unrelated emotional state becomes data

657
00:51:06,039 --> 00:51:10,000
about your worth and you are exhausted by this process

658
00:51:10,320 --> 00:51:15,079
because you are fundamentally unable to control the inputs. The

659
00:51:15,159 --> 00:51:19,199
work of rewiring begins with a practice that sounds deceptively

660
00:51:19,320 --> 00:51:22,519
simple and is in reality one of the most demanding

661
00:51:22,639 --> 00:51:27,280
things a person can attempt, the practice of pausing before

662
00:51:27,320 --> 00:51:31,280
reacting to someone else's response to you, and asking yourself

663
00:51:31,360 --> 00:51:34,039
what you actually think about what you just did or

664
00:51:34,079 --> 00:51:38,320
said or chose, Not what they seem to think, not

665
00:51:38,480 --> 00:51:42,320
what the room seems to think. What you think, because

666
00:51:42,320 --> 00:51:47,280
somewhere inside you, beneath all the monitoring and managing and outsourcing,

667
00:51:47,719 --> 00:51:51,360
there is a perspective that belongs entirely to you, a

668
00:51:51,400 --> 00:51:57,159
perspective on your own choices and your own behavior and

669
00:51:57,199 --> 00:52:00,480
your own worth that has been chronically surprise rest in

670
00:52:00,559 --> 00:52:04,519
favor of the faster and more available feedback of other

671
00:52:04,599 --> 00:52:09,559
people's reactions. Reclaiming that perspective is the beginning of everything.

672
00:52:10,000 --> 00:52:12,559
This means developing what you might think of as an

673
00:52:12,599 --> 00:52:16,480
internal standard, a set of values and principles that belong

674
00:52:16,559 --> 00:52:20,199
to you and that you use to evaluate your own behavior,

675
00:52:20,760 --> 00:52:24,119
independent of whether the people around you happen to agree

676
00:52:24,119 --> 00:52:29,239
with the evaluation. This is not about becoming arrogant or

677
00:52:29,320 --> 00:52:34,519
indifferent to legitimate feedback. It is about having a home base,

678
00:52:35,440 --> 00:52:39,800
a stable internal reference point that does not disappear the

679
00:52:39,880 --> 00:52:43,760
moment someone expresses displeasure with you. When you have an

680
00:52:43,800 --> 00:52:50,440
internal standard, other people's criticism becomes information to be considered

681
00:52:51,280 --> 00:52:56,320
rather than a verdict to be accepted. You can hear it,

682
00:52:56,800 --> 00:53:02,199
examine it, decide whether it reflects something true about your behavior,

683
00:53:03,039 --> 00:53:08,880
and respond accordingly without the entire foundation of your self

684
00:53:08,960 --> 00:53:14,360
perception collapsing in the process. The second component of rewiring

685
00:53:14,480 --> 00:53:20,000
self worth is learning to tolerate discomfort without immediately treating

686
00:53:20,039 --> 00:53:23,760
it as a sign that something has gone wrong. People

687
00:53:23,840 --> 00:53:30,199
pleases have an extraordinarily low threshold for interpersonal discomfort, and

688
00:53:30,280 --> 00:53:33,719
that low threshold is part of what drives the pattern.

689
00:53:34,079 --> 00:53:38,480
The moment a situation begins to feel uncomfortable, the pleasing

690
00:53:38,559 --> 00:53:44,199
behaviors activate automatically in an attempt to restore ease, but

691
00:53:44,320 --> 00:53:50,159
discomfort is not inherently dangerous. Discomfort is frequently the feeling

692
00:53:50,199 --> 00:53:54,840
that accompanies growth, the sensation of a boundary being held

693
00:53:55,239 --> 00:53:58,719
when it has not been held before, the texture of

694
00:53:58,800 --> 00:54:02,400
staying with your own truth when the easier thing would

695
00:54:02,400 --> 00:54:06,039
be to release it. Learning to sit with that discomfort

696
00:54:06,079 --> 00:54:10,880
without immediately moving to dissolve it. Learning to distinguish between

697
00:54:10,920 --> 00:54:15,159
the discomfort of genuine danger and the discomfort of simply

698
00:54:15,239 --> 00:54:19,599
doing something new and unfamiliar is one of the most

699
00:54:19,639 --> 00:54:23,559
important skills this process will develop in you. The third

700
00:54:23,639 --> 00:54:28,599
component is consistency in self care, and not in the

701
00:54:28,719 --> 00:54:32,840
shallow sense that word has acquired from over use. Not

702
00:54:33,039 --> 00:54:37,159
face masks and long baths, though there is nothing wrong

703
00:54:37,199 --> 00:54:41,480
with those things. Consistency in the care you take of

704
00:54:41,519 --> 00:54:45,639
your own needs on a daily basis the degree to

705
00:54:45,719 --> 00:54:48,599
which you treat your own rest and your own nutrition,

706
00:54:48,800 --> 00:54:51,719
and your own time and your own emotional needs as

707
00:54:51,800 --> 00:54:55,960
things that genuinely matter, not as things to be attended

708
00:54:56,000 --> 00:54:59,920
to only after everyone else's needs have been fully addressed.

709
00:55:00,639 --> 00:55:03,639
Every time you treat your own needs as a genuine

710
00:55:03,679 --> 00:55:08,039
priority rather than an afterthought, you send your nervous system

711
00:55:08,360 --> 00:55:11,320
a different message from the one it has been receiving.

712
00:55:12,119 --> 00:55:15,559
You send it the message that you matter, that your

713
00:55:15,639 --> 00:55:21,480
experience counts, and that message, received consistently over time, begins

714
00:55:21,519 --> 00:55:26,400
to slowly and permanently shift the internal architecture of how

715
00:55:26,440 --> 00:55:31,239
you relate to yourself. The fourth component, and perhaps the

716
00:55:31,280 --> 00:55:36,239
most counterintuitive is allowing yourself to be seen in moments

717
00:55:36,280 --> 00:55:42,519
of imperfection or difficulty without immediately moving to manage other

718
00:55:42,599 --> 00:55:47,880
people's perception of those moments. People pleasers are often perfectionists

719
00:55:47,920 --> 00:55:52,000
in a specific and exhausting way. They work frantically to

720
00:55:52,079 --> 00:55:57,960
appear capable and together and fine, because appearing otherwise might

721
00:55:58,000 --> 00:56:04,119
invite judgment. My disappoint someone might reduce the approval they

722
00:56:04,159 --> 00:56:08,199
depend on. But authentic self worth is not built through

723
00:56:08,239 --> 00:56:12,039
the sustained performance of adequacy. It is built in the

724
00:56:12,119 --> 00:56:15,880
moments when you are honest about struggling and discover that

725
00:56:16,000 --> 00:56:19,239
you are still okay, when you show someone your real

726
00:56:19,320 --> 00:56:23,639
experience and discover they remain. When you make a mistake

727
00:56:23,719 --> 00:56:27,639
and respond to it with honest accountability rather than shame

728
00:56:27,840 --> 00:56:31,880
driven self destruction, and find that the world continues and

729
00:56:31,960 --> 00:56:37,320
you continue in it. Those moments are irreplaceable. They cannot

730
00:56:37,320 --> 00:56:41,920
be simulated or hurried, but you can create the conditions

731
00:56:41,960 --> 00:56:46,920
for them to happen more frequently by choosing consistently the

732
00:56:47,000 --> 00:56:51,519
discomfort of honesty over the temporary comfort of performance. This

733
00:56:52,159 --> 00:56:57,320
is the long work, the real work, and it asks

734
00:56:57,480 --> 00:57:00,239
more of you than any technique or frame work. Or

735
00:57:00,320 --> 00:57:03,800
list of strategies ever could. It asks you to be

736
00:57:03,880 --> 00:57:09,000
willing to feel less certain for a period in exchange

737
00:57:09,039 --> 00:57:15,199
for something eventually and permanently more real. Chapter seven, Learning

738
00:57:15,280 --> 00:57:21,760
to say No without guilt or explanation. The word no

739
00:57:22,599 --> 00:57:27,119
is one of the shortest words in the language, two letters,

740
00:57:27,719 --> 00:57:33,719
one syllable, zero ambiguity, and yet for someone operating from

741
00:57:33,719 --> 00:57:37,760
a lifetime of people pleasing patterns, it might as well

742
00:57:37,800 --> 00:57:41,119
be a sentence in a foreign language that they understand

743
00:57:41,199 --> 00:57:45,280
perfectly in theory but are functionally unable to produce in

744
00:57:45,400 --> 00:57:51,719
real time. The throat titans, the mind races, the elaborate

745
00:57:51,880 --> 00:57:57,920
internal machinery of justification and preemptive damage control activates in

746
00:57:57,960 --> 00:58:02,199
the fraction of a second between the request and the

747
00:58:02,239 --> 00:58:07,960
required response, and what comes out, almost invariably is some

748
00:58:08,280 --> 00:58:13,480
version of yes, or a yes masquerading as a maybe,

749
00:58:13,800 --> 00:58:19,400
or a deflection that postpones the confrontation without actually resolving it,

750
00:58:20,079 --> 00:58:23,480
anything to avoid the clean and honest sound of the

751
00:58:23,559 --> 00:58:26,719
word that would have actually served you. Let us start

752
00:58:26,800 --> 00:58:31,639
with the guilt, because the guilt is real, and dismissing

753
00:58:31,679 --> 00:58:35,280
it by telling you it should not exist will not

754
00:58:35,480 --> 00:58:39,519
make it go away. When you say no to some one,

755
00:58:39,840 --> 00:58:44,480
particularly when you have historically said yes to everything. You

756
00:58:44,519 --> 00:58:48,719
will feel guilty. That is not a sign that you

757
00:58:48,800 --> 00:58:53,719
have done something wrong. That is your nervous system responding

758
00:58:53,800 --> 00:58:58,679
to the violation of a deeply conditioned pattern. Your nervous

759
00:58:58,719 --> 00:59:04,920
system learned a long time ago that saying no led

760
00:59:04,960 --> 00:59:10,119
to consequences that felt threatening, that it produced conflict or

761
00:59:10,159 --> 00:59:15,119
disapproval or rejection or the withdrawal of warmth, and it

762
00:59:15,199 --> 00:59:18,039
stored that learning in the form of a threat response

763
00:59:18,119 --> 00:59:23,599
that activates automatically whenever a noe appears imminent. The guilt

764
00:59:23,800 --> 00:59:28,920
is not a moral signal. It is a conditioned alarm,

765
00:59:29,000 --> 00:59:33,639
and like all conditioned alarms, it gradually loses its intensity

766
00:59:33,920 --> 00:59:39,159
when the expected catastrophe consistently fails to arrive. This is

767
00:59:39,239 --> 00:59:42,840
the first and most important reframe you need to carry

768
00:59:42,880 --> 00:59:47,760
with you. Guilt after saying no is not evidence that

769
00:59:47,880 --> 00:59:51,039
the no was wrong. It is evidence that the no

770
00:59:51,559 --> 00:59:55,480
was new. Those are not the same thing. And the

771
00:59:55,559 --> 00:59:59,239
ability to act in alignment with your own needs and values,

772
00:59:59,559 --> 01:00:03,559
even while feeling guilty, to let the guilt be present

773
01:00:03,920 --> 01:00:08,000
without allowing it to override your decision is a skill

774
01:00:08,119 --> 01:00:12,920
that develops through practice, not through the elimination of the feeling,

775
01:00:13,880 --> 01:00:17,239
but through the development of a relationship with it in

776
01:00:17,320 --> 01:00:21,920
which you are no longer automatically controlled by its presence. Now,

777
01:00:22,000 --> 01:00:25,639
let us talk about the explanations, because one of the

778
01:00:25,639 --> 01:00:29,360
most persistent traps of people pleasing is the belief that

779
01:00:29,440 --> 01:00:34,800
a no requires an elaborate justification in order to be legitimate,

780
01:00:35,440 --> 01:00:37,840
That you need to have a good enough reason, a

781
01:00:37,920 --> 01:00:41,400
reason that the other person will accept and deem sufficient,

782
01:00:42,360 --> 01:00:46,199
before your refusal can be considered valid. And so you

783
01:00:46,280 --> 01:00:52,679
construct explanations, sometimes true and sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes invented outright,

784
01:00:53,400 --> 01:00:58,880
designed not primarily to communicate your genuine situation, but to

785
01:00:58,960 --> 01:01:03,559
make the know palatable enough that the other person will

786
01:01:03,599 --> 01:01:07,800
not press further or withdraw their regard for you. The

787
01:01:07,880 --> 01:01:12,000
problem is that an explanation is an invitation to negotiate.

788
01:01:12,639 --> 01:01:16,159
The moment you offer a reason, you implicitly open the

789
01:01:16,199 --> 01:01:19,639
door to the possibility that the other person might counter

790
01:01:19,760 --> 01:01:23,199
with why that reason is insufficient, or offer to solve

791
01:01:23,239 --> 01:01:28,159
the problem your reason describes, thereby removing your stated grounds

792
01:01:28,159 --> 01:01:32,119
for refusal and putting you back at yes. By default,

793
01:01:32,880 --> 01:01:36,079
a no does not require a reason to be valid.

794
01:01:36,920 --> 01:01:40,039
This is perhaps the single most important concept in this

795
01:01:40,320 --> 01:01:44,320
entire chapter, and it will feel the first several times

796
01:01:44,320 --> 01:01:51,000
you attempt to apply it profoundly wrong, like rudeness, like selfishness,

797
01:01:51,679 --> 01:01:56,559
like a violation of some unspoken social contract. You have

798
01:01:56,679 --> 01:02:02,480
always believed yourself obligated to honor, but examine that belief carefully.

799
01:02:03,079 --> 01:02:07,000
When someone says no to you, do you routinely demand

800
01:02:07,039 --> 01:02:12,039
a detailed justification. Do you hold their refusal in suspense

801
01:02:12,559 --> 01:02:16,400
until they have offered you reasons you personally find satisfying

802
01:02:17,000 --> 01:02:22,800
Almost certainly not, because you understand, at least in that direction,

803
01:02:23,880 --> 01:02:27,760
that people are allowed to have limits, that those limits

804
01:02:27,760 --> 01:02:31,480
do not require your approval to be real, and that

805
01:02:31,599 --> 01:02:35,280
demanding explanations for them would be a form of aggression

806
01:02:35,440 --> 01:02:40,800
dressed up as reasonable conversation. You are allowed the same standard.

807
01:02:41,360 --> 01:02:47,280
Your no is complete without annotation. A simple, honest, warm

808
01:02:47,440 --> 01:02:51,400
no is not a rejection of the person making the request.

809
01:02:52,079 --> 01:02:55,880
It is a communication about your own capacity or willingness

810
01:02:56,159 --> 01:03:00,239
at this particular moment. It is a boundary, and a

811
01:03:00,320 --> 01:03:05,280
boundary held calmly and without excessive justification is one of

812
01:03:05,320 --> 01:03:09,199
the most mature and respectful things you can offer another person,

813
01:03:10,079 --> 01:03:12,920
because it is honest in a way that a resentful

814
01:03:13,079 --> 01:03:17,480
yes never is. There are practical dimensions to this. When

815
01:03:17,519 --> 01:03:20,519
you are first practicing saying no after a long history

816
01:03:20,519 --> 01:03:23,800
of not doing so, it helps to have a small

817
01:03:23,920 --> 01:03:27,280
number of phrases that feel natural enough in your own

818
01:03:27,400 --> 01:03:31,800
voice that you can actually use them without locking up entirely.

819
01:03:32,519 --> 01:03:35,679
Something as simple as that does not work for me,

820
01:03:36,800 --> 01:03:41,039
or I am not able to do that, or I

821
01:03:41,079 --> 01:03:45,039
am going to pass on that. Not a novel, not

822
01:03:45,159 --> 01:03:50,159
an apology tour, a clear, direct, non hostile statement that

823
01:03:50,239 --> 01:03:55,039
communicates the answer without opening a negotiation or performing a penance.

824
01:03:56,000 --> 01:04:00,159
You can be warm and still be clear. Warmth and

825
01:04:00,239 --> 01:04:05,000
clarity are not opposites. A no delivered with genuine kindness

826
01:04:05,000 --> 01:04:07,760
in your tone is not an act of cruelty. It

827
01:04:07,880 --> 01:04:11,800
is an act of honesty, and honesty of that kind,

828
01:04:12,679 --> 01:04:18,159
over time, builds far more genuine trust than any number

829
01:04:18,199 --> 01:04:22,280
of resentful yesses ever could. There will be people who

830
01:04:22,320 --> 01:04:25,880
push back when you say no, people who ask why,

831
01:04:26,480 --> 01:04:30,559
or who express disappointment with a degree of force designed

832
01:04:30,679 --> 01:04:33,840
to make the discomfort of the pushback greater than the

833
01:04:33,880 --> 01:04:38,039
discomfort of simply capitulating. When this happens, you are not

834
01:04:38,159 --> 01:04:43,719
obligated to escalate the explanation, or to produce better reasons,

835
01:04:44,440 --> 01:04:48,280
or to apologize more elaborately. You are allowed to simply

836
01:04:48,360 --> 01:04:54,239
repeat the no, calmly and without additional decoration. I understand

837
01:04:54,280 --> 01:04:58,920
you are disappointed. I am still not able to do that.

838
01:04:58,920 --> 01:05:02,840
That is a complete sentence. It does not require your

839
01:05:02,880 --> 01:05:06,400
distress to be performed in order to prove that you

840
01:05:06,559 --> 01:05:09,800
mean it. And about the people who respond to your

841
01:05:09,880 --> 01:05:13,920
no with anger or withdrawal of affection, or sustained punishment

842
01:05:14,000 --> 01:05:18,840
through their behavior, those responses tell you something important. They

843
01:05:18,880 --> 01:05:23,920
tell you that the relationship in its current configuration is

844
01:05:24,039 --> 01:05:27,880
not one of mutual respect. It is one in which

845
01:05:27,920 --> 01:05:32,679
your yes was expected and your no is treated as

846
01:05:32,679 --> 01:05:37,239
a violation. That is not a friendship or a partnership

847
01:05:37,559 --> 01:05:42,239
or a collegial relationship. That is a dynamic built on

848
01:05:42,360 --> 01:05:47,360
the assumption that you will continuously override your own needs

849
01:05:47,920 --> 01:05:52,280
to maintain the other person's comfort. And while that information

850
01:05:52,400 --> 01:05:58,639
is painful to receive, it is also eventually clarifying in

851
01:05:58,679 --> 01:06:04,119
a way that nothing else is, because relationships that cannot

852
01:06:04,119 --> 01:06:07,760
survive your honest limits were never actually as solid as

853
01:06:07,800 --> 01:06:12,800
they appeared. Say no, feel the guilt, Let the guilt

854
01:06:12,880 --> 01:06:18,719
be there. Stay with your decision anyway. Do this enough times,

855
01:06:19,800 --> 01:06:25,840
across enough situations, and something that currently feels impossible will

856
01:06:25,880 --> 01:06:30,360
gradually become the most ordinary thing in the world. Chapter eight,

857
01:06:31,440 --> 01:06:37,039
Setting strong, unshakable boundaries. Most people think of a boundary

858
01:06:37,039 --> 01:06:40,519
as a rule. They announce to someone else, a declaration

859
01:06:40,639 --> 01:06:45,760
of what is and is not acceptable, stated clearly at

860
01:06:45,800 --> 01:06:50,079
the start of a conversation or a relationship, after which

861
01:06:50,360 --> 01:06:54,039
the other person is expected to observe it, and if

862
01:06:54,079 --> 01:06:57,239
they do not observe it, you remind them of it.

863
01:06:58,079 --> 01:07:02,920
If they still do not observe it, you somehow enforce it.

864
01:07:03,599 --> 01:07:09,320
This understanding of boundaries is extremely common and almost entirely wrong,

865
01:07:09,760 --> 01:07:12,400
and it is the reason so many people try to

866
01:07:12,440 --> 01:07:16,880
set boundaries and find that they do not hold. Because

867
01:07:16,920 --> 01:07:20,840
a boundary is not a rule you state. A boundary

868
01:07:21,159 --> 01:07:23,599
is a decision you make about what you will and

869
01:07:23,719 --> 01:07:28,039
will not participate in, and then follow through on with

870
01:07:28,199 --> 01:07:35,280
your actions, regardless of whether the other person agrees. Let

871
01:07:35,360 --> 01:07:40,559
that distinction land. A boundary lives in your behavior, not

872
01:07:40,760 --> 01:07:44,199
in the other person's agreement to observe it. You do

873
01:07:44,280 --> 01:07:47,679
not need any one's permission to hold a boundary. You

874
01:07:47,760 --> 01:07:50,679
do not need anyone to acknowledge it as fair or

875
01:07:50,719 --> 01:07:54,840
reasonable or justified. You do not need the other person

876
01:07:55,159 --> 01:07:58,360
to change for the boundary to be real and to

877
01:07:58,400 --> 01:08:02,519
have real effects. What you need is the willingness to

878
01:08:02,599 --> 01:08:06,360
act in alignment with your own stated limit when that

879
01:08:06,519 --> 01:08:11,320
limit is crossed, even when acting in alignment is uncomfortable,

880
01:08:12,119 --> 01:08:15,559
even when it costs you something, even when the other

881
01:08:15,639 --> 01:08:19,720
person expresses displeasure with your choice to hold firm. This

882
01:08:19,880 --> 01:08:24,359
distinction matters enormously for people pleasers, because the version of

883
01:08:24,479 --> 01:08:28,079
boundary setting they most commonly attempt is a version that

884
01:08:28,239 --> 01:08:32,640
still places the power in some one else's hands. They

885
01:08:32,680 --> 01:08:35,960
say what they need, they wait to see if the

886
01:08:36,000 --> 01:08:39,239
other person will respect it. If the person does not

887
01:08:39,399 --> 01:08:44,840
respect it, they repeat the statement with slightly more emphasis

888
01:08:45,720 --> 01:08:49,800
or slightly more distress in their voice, and wait again.

889
01:08:50,600 --> 01:08:54,520
And when the person continues not to respect it, they

890
01:08:54,560 --> 01:09:01,239
feel helpless. They feel as though the boundary has failed,

891
01:09:02,000 --> 01:09:05,279
when in fact, the boundary was never fully formed to

892
01:09:05,359 --> 01:09:10,039
begin with, because it was stated but not backed by

893
01:09:10,039 --> 01:09:13,520
a willingness to actually follow through on the consequence when

894
01:09:13,520 --> 01:09:18,680
it mattered. A real boundary comes with a consequence, and

895
01:09:18,720 --> 01:09:24,439
that consequence is something you control entirely, not a threat

896
01:09:24,520 --> 01:09:27,760
directed at the other person, not a punishment you are

897
01:09:27,800 --> 01:09:31,560
warning them of, but a change in your own behavior

898
01:09:32,000 --> 01:09:35,880
that you will implement because the limit has been crossed.

899
01:09:36,640 --> 01:09:39,720
If you continue to speak to me this way, I

900
01:09:39,760 --> 01:09:44,199
will leave the room. If this pattern does not change,

901
01:09:44,439 --> 01:09:47,920
I will not be able to continue this relationship in

902
01:09:48,000 --> 01:09:52,399
its current form. If that happens again, I will not

903
01:09:52,479 --> 01:09:56,840
be available for this These are not threats. These are

904
01:09:57,039 --> 01:10:01,399
honest communications about what you will and will not participate in,

905
01:10:02,439 --> 01:10:06,680
backed by genuine intention to act on them. And the

906
01:10:06,720 --> 01:10:09,680
acting on them is the part that most people pleasing

907
01:10:09,720 --> 01:10:14,800
patterns make nearly impossible, because acting on a consequence almost

908
01:10:14,960 --> 01:10:20,439
always involves some degree of conflict or disappointment or discomfort,

909
01:10:21,079 --> 01:10:25,800
and the people pleasing machinery exists precisely to avoid those things.

910
01:10:26,199 --> 01:10:30,520
This is why boundaries require something that goes deeper than technique.

911
01:10:31,159 --> 01:10:35,479
They require a foundational belief, built through the kind of

912
01:10:35,640 --> 01:10:40,000
slow internal work described in the previous chapter, that your

913
01:10:40,079 --> 01:10:44,479
own well being is worth protecting, even at the cost

914
01:10:44,560 --> 01:10:49,399
of someone else's temporary displeasure. Without that belief operating at

915
01:10:49,439 --> 01:10:54,600
some genuine level, boundaries will remain something you know about intellectually,

916
01:10:54,840 --> 01:10:58,920
but cannot sustain in practice, because every time the consequence

917
01:10:59,000 --> 01:11:02,439
is required, the fear of conflict or rejection will be

918
01:11:02,520 --> 01:11:07,479
louder than the commitment to the limit, and you will fold,

919
01:11:08,119 --> 01:11:12,399
and the other person will learn from your actions that

920
01:11:12,439 --> 01:11:17,520
the boundary was not real. Now, let us talk about

921
01:11:17,560 --> 01:11:21,680
where boundaries actually come from, because this matters more than

922
01:11:21,800 --> 01:11:29,239
most boundary conversations. Acknowledge a boundary is not arbitrary. It

923
01:11:29,279 --> 01:11:32,359
is not a list of preferences you have decided to enforce.

924
01:11:33,079 --> 01:11:36,600
It is a natural extension of your values, of the

925
01:11:36,680 --> 01:11:42,319
things you know with genuine certainty that you cannot continue

926
01:11:42,359 --> 01:11:48,520
experiencing without being diminished in some specific way. The most

927
01:11:48,640 --> 01:11:52,399
durable and most sustainable boundaries are the ones that are

928
01:11:52,479 --> 01:11:57,079
deeply connected to something you actually care about, protecting your

929
01:11:57,119 --> 01:12:03,239
peace of mind, your sense of dignity, your time, your energy,

930
01:12:03,960 --> 01:12:07,800
your physical safety. When a boundary is rooted in something

931
01:12:07,840 --> 01:12:11,239
you genuinely value rather than something you think you are

932
01:12:11,279 --> 01:12:17,600
supposed to want, holding it becomes significantly less difficult, not easy,

933
01:12:18,000 --> 01:12:22,439
particularly at first, but less difficult because the thing you

934
01:12:22,479 --> 01:12:26,479
are protecting feels real, and the cost of not protecting

935
01:12:26,520 --> 01:12:30,960
it also feels real. This means that before you can

936
01:12:31,000 --> 01:12:35,119
set effective boundaries, you need to spend some time getting

937
01:12:35,239 --> 01:12:39,159
clear on what you actually value, not what you are

938
01:12:39,159 --> 01:12:44,159
supposed to value, not what sounds admirable when stated allowed,

939
01:12:44,840 --> 01:12:48,319
but what genuinely matters to you when you are honest

940
01:12:48,359 --> 01:12:53,359
with yourself in private. What situations consistently drain you in

941
01:12:53,439 --> 01:12:58,600
ways that feel like violations of something important. What interactions

942
01:12:58,680 --> 01:13:03,760
leave you feeling diminished or disrespected in ways that accumulate

943
01:13:04,239 --> 01:13:08,439
over time. What patterns in your relationships make you feel

944
01:13:08,600 --> 01:13:13,079
used or invisible, or chronically less than The answers to

945
01:13:13,119 --> 01:13:17,960
these questions are not just complaints, They are navigational data.

946
01:13:18,680 --> 01:13:22,159
They are pointing you toward exactly the places where your

947
01:13:22,159 --> 01:13:25,600
most important and most urgent boundaries need to be built.

948
01:13:25,960 --> 01:13:29,319
It also needs to be said clearly, the people in

949
01:13:29,359 --> 01:13:32,640
your life who have benefited from the absence of your

950
01:13:32,680 --> 01:13:37,039
limits are not going to be uniformly delighted when those

951
01:13:37,159 --> 01:13:41,319
limits begin to appear. Some of them will push back,

952
01:13:42,000 --> 01:13:44,439
Some will test the limits to see if they hold.

953
01:13:45,399 --> 01:13:51,039
Some will express genuine hurt or confusion or anger. Some

954
01:13:51,159 --> 01:13:54,600
will tell you that you have changed, that you are

955
01:13:54,600 --> 01:13:58,880
being selfish, that you are being difficult, that you are

956
01:13:58,920 --> 01:14:03,119
being unreasonable, and here is what you need to understand

957
01:14:03,520 --> 01:14:07,920
about those responses. They are not evidence that the boundary

958
01:14:08,039 --> 01:14:13,439
is wrong. They are evidence that the boundary is real.

959
01:14:14,159 --> 01:14:18,560
The people around you have calibrated their behavior to the

960
01:14:18,680 --> 01:14:22,439
version of you that had no limits. The appearance of

961
01:14:22,479 --> 01:14:28,319
limits requires them to recalibrate. That recalibration is sometimes experienced

962
01:14:28,439 --> 01:14:32,239
as loss, as a renegotiation they did not consent to.

963
01:14:33,079 --> 01:14:38,000
Your job is not to apologize for the renegotiation. Your

964
01:14:38,079 --> 01:14:41,119
job is to hold steady while it happens. Some of

965
01:14:41,159 --> 01:14:44,880
the relationships in your life will not survive the appearance

966
01:14:44,960 --> 01:14:49,359
of genuine limits. That is a hard thing to say

967
01:14:50,359 --> 01:14:54,359
and a harder thing to experience. But the relationships that

968
01:14:54,439 --> 01:14:58,119
dissolve when you begin honoring your own needs were never

969
01:14:58,199 --> 01:15:01,840
built on the foundation you thought they were. They were

970
01:15:01,880 --> 01:15:05,680
built on your accommodation, and that means they were never

971
01:15:05,840 --> 01:15:09,359
actually as close or as real as they appeared. The

972
01:15:09,439 --> 01:15:14,560
relationships that are real, the ones built on genuine mutual

973
01:15:14,680 --> 01:15:19,399
regard rather than on the convenient availability of what you

974
01:15:19,439 --> 01:15:24,640
were willing to give, will survive. They may require renegotiation,

975
01:15:25,279 --> 01:15:28,119
They may go through a period of adjustment. They may

976
01:15:28,159 --> 01:15:32,600
involve some honest and difficult conversations, but they will survive

977
01:15:32,800 --> 01:15:36,279
because they are built on something more durable than your compliance.

978
01:15:37,159 --> 01:15:43,079
Hold the line even when it is uncomfortable, especially when

979
01:15:43,119 --> 01:15:47,319
it is uncomfortable, because a boundary you abandon the moment

980
01:15:47,399 --> 01:15:51,039
it is tested is not a boundary at all. It

981
01:15:51,119 --> 01:15:54,880
is a suggestion. And the difference between those two things

982
01:15:55,359 --> 01:15:57,840
is the difference between the life you have been living

983
01:15:58,279 --> 01:16:02,560
and the life that is possible. Chapter nine, Handling the

984
01:16:02,600 --> 01:16:09,800
backlash when you finally stop pleasing. When you begin to change,

985
01:16:10,840 --> 01:16:15,399
people will react, not all of them, and not always

986
01:16:15,439 --> 01:16:18,880
in the ways you fear, but some of them will

987
01:16:18,920 --> 01:16:22,960
react with a degree of force that surprises you, and

988
01:16:23,000 --> 01:16:27,399
that is designed consciously or not to push you back

989
01:16:27,560 --> 01:16:30,800
into the familiar pattern. This is one of the most

990
01:16:30,840 --> 01:16:34,159
important things to understand before you begin making these changes

991
01:16:34,159 --> 01:16:37,359
in earnest, because if you go in unprepared for it,

992
01:16:37,800 --> 01:16:40,960
the backlash will feel like confirmation that you made a mistake,

993
01:16:41,600 --> 01:16:45,800
that you went too far, that the old way, however

994
01:16:45,880 --> 01:16:51,159
unhappy it made you, was at least stable, at least predictable,

995
01:16:51,560 --> 01:16:54,720
at least safe in a way that whatever you are

996
01:16:54,760 --> 01:16:59,159
becoming does not yet feel. The backlash is not confirmation

997
01:16:59,319 --> 01:17:03,079
that you made a mistake. It is confirmation that the

998
01:17:03,239 --> 01:17:07,239
change is real. Let us be very clear about what

999
01:17:07,359 --> 01:17:11,159
is actually happening when someone reacts with anger or hurt

1000
01:17:11,319 --> 01:17:15,520
or withdrawal to your new behavior. What is happening is

1001
01:17:15,520 --> 01:17:18,720
that a dynamic they had learned to rely on has

1002
01:17:18,760 --> 01:17:22,680
shifted without their permission. They had internalized a set of

1003
01:17:22,720 --> 01:17:26,399
expectations about how you would behave, about what you would

1004
01:17:26,439 --> 01:17:29,479
agree to, about what they could bring to you without

1005
01:17:29,600 --> 01:17:33,680
risk of refusal, and those expectations were meeting some of

1006
01:17:33,720 --> 01:17:38,680
their needs, perhaps very significant needs, in ways they may

1007
01:17:38,680 --> 01:17:43,119
not have been fully conscious of. When you change, those

1008
01:17:43,199 --> 01:17:49,079
expectations are violated, and the reaction to violated expectations is often,

1009
01:17:50,079 --> 01:17:54,920
in human beings, something that looks very much like anger.

1010
01:17:55,560 --> 01:17:59,600
That anger is not primarily about you. It is about

1011
01:17:59,680 --> 01:18:05,520
the change. It is about the discomfort of needing to recalibrate.

1012
01:18:06,159 --> 01:18:08,720
And while it will be directed at you, and while

1013
01:18:08,720 --> 01:18:12,079
it will feel very personal, and while it will be

1014
01:18:12,119 --> 01:18:15,720
delivered in language specifically designed to make you feel that

1015
01:18:15,760 --> 01:18:19,239
you have done something wrong, it is important that you

1016
01:18:19,319 --> 01:18:22,000
do not allow it to be the primary input into

1017
01:18:22,039 --> 01:18:25,720
your decision about whether to continue, because if the backlash

1018
01:18:25,800 --> 01:18:28,520
is enough to make you retreat. Then the only lesson

1019
01:18:28,600 --> 01:18:32,199
learned by everyone in the situation is that sufficient pressure

1020
01:18:32,239 --> 01:18:36,119
will always restore the old arrangement, which means the next

1021
01:18:36,159 --> 01:18:40,479
boundary will require even more courage to attempt, because the

1022
01:18:40,600 --> 01:18:47,199
precedent established is that boundaries under sufficient pressure collapse. There

1023
01:18:47,239 --> 01:18:51,079
are specific things people say to people pleasers who are

1024
01:18:51,079 --> 01:18:54,600
in the process of changing, and it helps to hear

1025
01:18:54,640 --> 01:18:57,840
them in advance so they do not catch you completely

1026
01:18:57,880 --> 01:19:01,600
off guard. Someone will tell you that you have changed,

1027
01:19:02,600 --> 01:19:06,560
delivered in a tone that makes clear they do not

1028
01:19:06,800 --> 01:19:10,000
mean it as a compliment, and you need to hear

1029
01:19:10,039 --> 01:19:13,000
that and be able to say inside your own mind,

1030
01:19:13,159 --> 01:19:20,119
if not out loud, yes, I have that is accurate.

1031
01:19:20,880 --> 01:19:24,600
Someone will tell you that you are being selfish, usually

1032
01:19:24,680 --> 01:19:27,600
in a context where what they mean is that you

1033
01:19:27,680 --> 01:19:31,760
are no longer prioritizing their needs above your own in

1034
01:19:31,840 --> 01:19:34,720
the specific way they prefer, and you need to be

1035
01:19:34,720 --> 01:19:39,479
able to hold the clear distinction between genuine selfishness, which

1036
01:19:39,520 --> 01:19:43,680
is a real thing that exists and matters, and the

1037
01:19:43,760 --> 01:19:47,760
act of simply taking your own needs seriously, which is

1038
01:19:47,800 --> 01:19:52,319
not selfishness at all, but basic self respect. Someone will

1039
01:19:52,319 --> 01:19:57,119
tell you that you have become cold or difficult or

1040
01:19:57,239 --> 01:20:02,760
hard to be around. These cacharacterizations almost always appear when

1041
01:20:02,840 --> 01:20:05,960
someone has discovered that the version of you they preferred

1042
01:20:06,479 --> 01:20:10,039
was the version that asked for nothing and agreed with everything,

1043
01:20:10,640 --> 01:20:14,119
and the discomfort of encountering a version with limits is

1044
01:20:14,199 --> 01:20:17,680
being expressed as a critique of your character. None of

1045
01:20:17,720 --> 01:20:22,600
these statements are verdicts, they are reactions, and there is

1046
01:20:22,640 --> 01:20:26,560
a crucial difference. There is also the more subtle form

1047
01:20:26,600 --> 01:20:30,439
of backlash that is harder to identify because it does

1048
01:20:30,479 --> 01:20:35,439
not look like anger. It looks like sadness or confusion

1049
01:20:35,840 --> 01:20:39,640
or hurt. It looks like someone who was genuinely attached

1050
01:20:39,640 --> 01:20:44,119
to the old dynamic, who derived real comfort or security

1051
01:20:44,199 --> 01:20:51,000
from your consistent availability and accommodation, experiencing genuine loss as

1052
01:20:51,039 --> 01:20:55,840
that dynamic changes. This form of backlash is harder to

1053
01:20:55,920 --> 01:21:00,880
navigate because it activates your empathy rather than your defensiveness.

1054
01:21:01,720 --> 01:21:04,960
It makes you want to fix it, to restore the comfort,

1055
01:21:05,279 --> 01:21:08,880
to absorb the pain you have caused, and you need

1056
01:21:08,960 --> 01:21:12,479
to be able to feel genuine compassion for that person's

1057
01:21:12,520 --> 01:21:18,560
adjustment while simultaneously not using their discomfort as a reason

1058
01:21:18,640 --> 01:21:22,239
to undo the changes. You are making. Both of those

1059
01:21:22,319 --> 01:21:27,920
things are possible at the same time. Compassion and firmness

1060
01:21:28,319 --> 01:21:33,439
are not mutually exclusive. You can care deeply about someone's

1061
01:21:33,520 --> 01:21:38,439
experience without allowing that experience to override your commitment to

1062
01:21:38,520 --> 01:21:42,880
your own well being. Throughout all of this, the most

1063
01:21:43,119 --> 01:21:48,800
important thing you can do is stay connected to your reasons,

1064
01:21:49,760 --> 01:21:54,159
the reasons you started this process, the cost you were

1065
01:21:54,239 --> 01:21:59,920
paying before, the person you were becoming, or perhaps more accurately,

1066
01:22:00,800 --> 01:22:04,439
the person you are failing to be under the weight

1067
01:22:04,960 --> 01:22:08,680
of the old pattern. When the backlash is loud and

1068
01:22:08,720 --> 01:22:11,439
the guilty is real and the pull toward the old

1069
01:22:11,479 --> 01:22:15,239
way is strong, those reasons are what you return to,

1070
01:22:16,000 --> 01:22:19,880
not as a weapon, not as a justification you brandish

1071
01:22:19,920 --> 01:22:23,560
in some one else's face, but as a private anchor,

1072
01:22:24,399 --> 01:22:28,520
something you hold in yourself that reminds you why this

1073
01:22:28,720 --> 01:22:34,520
discomfort is worth sustaining, why the temporary difficulty of navigating

1074
01:22:34,600 --> 01:22:38,199
other people's reactions to your growth is a price worth

1075
01:22:38,239 --> 01:22:40,680
paying for the life on the other side of it.

1076
01:22:41,319 --> 01:22:43,680
Because there is a life on the other side of it,

1077
01:22:44,560 --> 01:22:47,840
and it is not a life without difficulty or conflict

1078
01:22:48,000 --> 01:22:52,560
or challenging moments, but it is a life in which

1079
01:22:52,680 --> 01:22:59,439
those things are encountered as a person who trusts themselves,

1080
01:23:00,239 --> 01:23:03,439
a person who knows what they value and acts in

1081
01:23:03,520 --> 01:23:06,840
alignment with it. A person who does not spend every

1082
01:23:06,880 --> 01:23:12,039
interaction monitoring for signs of disapproval, managing other people's emotions,

1083
01:23:12,439 --> 01:23:16,439
running calculations about how much of themselves they can safely show.

1084
01:23:17,239 --> 01:23:24,479
A person who is simply, straightforwardly, genuinely present in their

1085
01:23:24,520 --> 01:23:29,880
own life. That person is who you are becoming, and

1086
01:23:29,920 --> 01:23:32,720
the backlash is simply the last defense of the old

1087
01:23:32,800 --> 01:23:36,720
arrangement trying to keep you from arriving there. Stay the course.

1088
01:23:37,760 --> 01:23:44,720
The noise is temporary, the change is permanent. Chapter ten,

1089
01:23:45,800 --> 01:23:54,119
Building a life driven by self respect, not approval. At

1090
01:23:54,119 --> 01:23:58,119
some point in this process, something subtle but profound begins

1091
01:23:58,119 --> 01:24:02,079
to shift. It does not arrive as a dramatic moment.

1092
01:24:02,800 --> 01:24:06,720
It is not a single conversation or a single decision,

1093
01:24:07,159 --> 01:24:10,199
or a single day when you wake up and feel

1094
01:24:10,319 --> 01:24:14,760
categorically different from the person you were before. It arrives

1095
01:24:14,800 --> 01:24:20,960
the way most real change arrives, incrementally and without announcement,

1096
01:24:21,920 --> 01:24:25,960
in the texture of ordinary moments, in the way a

1097
01:24:26,000 --> 01:24:29,560
conversation feels when you are actually present in it, rather

1098
01:24:29,640 --> 01:24:33,000
than monitoring it from a slight remove in the quality

1099
01:24:33,039 --> 01:24:35,800
of your own company when you are no longer performing

1100
01:24:36,000 --> 01:24:40,159
even for an audience of one, in the specific unfamiliar

1101
01:24:40,239 --> 01:24:43,880
lightness that comes from realizing you have moved through an

1102
01:24:44,039 --> 01:24:48,399
entire interaction without checking anyone else's face for evidence of

1103
01:24:48,439 --> 01:24:51,479
your own acceptability. This is the beginning of a life

1104
01:24:51,560 --> 01:24:55,520
driven by self respect rather than by approval, and it

1105
01:24:55,600 --> 01:25:00,560
is worth spending time understanding what that actually means in practice,

1106
01:25:00,920 --> 01:25:04,840
because it is easy to misunderstand it as something colder

1107
01:25:05,000 --> 01:25:09,279
or more isolated than it actually is. A life driven

1108
01:25:09,359 --> 01:25:14,119
by self respect is not a life in which you

1109
01:25:14,239 --> 01:25:18,880
stop caring about other people. That is a common misreading

1110
01:25:18,920 --> 01:25:21,960
of what the recovery from people pleasing looks like, and

1111
01:25:22,039 --> 01:25:25,760
it causes unnecessary fear about what is being given up.

1112
01:25:26,319 --> 01:25:29,560
You do not become indifferent to the people around you.

1113
01:25:29,560 --> 01:25:32,920
You do not become hard or unavailable or selfish in

1114
01:25:33,000 --> 01:25:38,119
the genuine sense of that word. What you become is honest,

1115
01:25:38,880 --> 01:25:42,880
and honesty in a relationship as uncomfortable as it can

1116
01:25:42,920 --> 01:25:47,880
sometimes be to produce, is the foundation of something far

1117
01:25:47,960 --> 01:25:52,520
more durable and far more nourishing than the comfortable fiction

1118
01:25:53,039 --> 01:25:58,000
of unlimited agreement and accommodation. When you stop organizing your

1119
01:25:58,119 --> 01:26:02,399
choices around the management of other people's approval, you discover

1120
01:26:02,600 --> 01:26:07,239
something surprising. The relationships that remain and the ones you

1121
01:26:07,319 --> 01:26:11,600
begin to form from this new foundation are qualitatively different

1122
01:26:11,680 --> 01:26:16,680
from anything you experienced before. They are built on something real.

1123
01:26:17,319 --> 01:26:20,800
They are built on the knowledge held by both parties

1124
01:26:21,640 --> 01:26:25,800
that what you offer is genuine, That when you say yes,

1125
01:26:26,119 --> 01:26:29,960
it is because you actually want to, not because you

1126
01:26:30,000 --> 01:26:33,399
are afraid of what happens if you say no. That

1127
01:26:33,439 --> 01:26:36,960
when you show warmth and care and generosity, it comes

1128
01:26:36,960 --> 01:26:40,439
from a full place, rather than from the anxious calculation

1129
01:26:40,560 --> 01:26:43,680
of someone who has learned that giving is the only

1130
01:26:43,920 --> 01:26:48,159
safe currency. The people who receive that kind of honesty

1131
01:26:48,239 --> 01:26:52,399
from you receive something far more valuable than the performance

1132
01:26:52,479 --> 01:26:57,840
of limitless accommodation. They receive the truth of who you are,

1133
01:26:58,560 --> 01:27:02,399
and that for anyone worth having in your life is

1134
01:27:02,520 --> 01:27:08,159
incomparably more meaningful. Self respect also changes the relationship you

1135
01:27:08,239 --> 01:27:13,039
have with your own work, your own time, and your

1136
01:27:13,119 --> 01:27:17,840
own daily experience in ways that are difficult to fully

1137
01:27:17,880 --> 01:27:21,920
anticipate until you are living them. When you are not

1138
01:27:22,079 --> 01:27:26,920
spending enormous quantities of cognitive and emotional energy, monitoring and

1139
01:27:27,000 --> 01:27:32,880
managing and pleasing. That energy does not simply disappear. It

1140
01:27:32,960 --> 01:27:37,199
becomes available, available for things that actually matter to you,

1141
01:27:37,840 --> 01:27:41,199
for the projects and the ideas and the relationships and

1142
01:27:41,239 --> 01:27:44,960
the experiences that your authentic self is actually drawn to,

1143
01:27:45,560 --> 01:27:48,800
rather than the ones you have been performing enthusiasm about

1144
01:27:48,840 --> 01:27:53,479
in order to appear acceptable. Many people discover, as they

1145
01:27:53,520 --> 01:27:58,279
recover from people pleasing, that they have interests and opinions

1146
01:27:58,680 --> 01:28:03,399
and esthetic preferences and creative instincts they barely knew existed

1147
01:28:04,000 --> 01:28:07,279
because those things had no room to surface in a

1148
01:28:07,319 --> 01:28:12,159
life organized entirely around other people's needs. The practice of

1149
01:28:12,199 --> 01:28:16,640
building this life is the practice of asking yourself, with

1150
01:28:16,800 --> 01:28:23,039
genuine curiosity and genuine patience, what you actually want, not

1151
01:28:23,239 --> 01:28:26,439
what is expected of you, not what would be most

1152
01:28:26,560 --> 01:28:30,399
convenient for the people around you, Not what the version

1153
01:28:30,439 --> 01:28:33,520
of you who was trying to be loved would choose.

1154
01:28:34,279 --> 01:28:40,359
What you, the real and increasingly visible and increasingly inhabitable

1155
01:28:40,399 --> 01:28:47,920
you actually want from this day, this conversation, this relationship,

1156
01:28:48,640 --> 01:28:53,920
this season of your life. That question, asked consistently and

1157
01:28:54,119 --> 01:28:59,880
answered honestly, becomes the compass that replaces approval as the

1158
01:29:00,079 --> 01:29:04,000
primary navigation tool and it turns out to be a

1159
01:29:04,119 --> 01:29:08,680
far more reliable one, because approval is contingent on too

1160
01:29:08,840 --> 01:29:13,520
many external variables to ever serve as stable guidance. But

1161
01:29:13,680 --> 01:29:17,439
your own honest wants and values, though they require attention

1162
01:29:17,640 --> 01:29:21,920
and practice to hear, clearly, are always pointing towards something real.

1163
01:29:22,359 --> 01:29:28,000
Living from self respect also means changing your relationship to

1164
01:29:28,199 --> 01:29:33,640
failure and to judgment in ways that have cascading effects

1165
01:29:33,920 --> 01:29:39,560
on everything else. When your primary fear is disapproval, every

1166
01:29:39,640 --> 01:29:45,600
mistake becomes a potential catastrophe because mistakes invite exactly the

1167
01:29:45,720 --> 01:29:50,399
judgment you most dread. This means you take fewer risks,

1168
01:29:51,399 --> 01:29:56,399
stay closer to the proven and the safe, prioritize the

1169
01:29:56,479 --> 01:29:59,680
outcome that is most likely to be approved over the

1170
01:29:59,720 --> 01:30:04,159
wh that is most aligned with your own values and desires,

1171
01:30:04,920 --> 01:30:08,680
and that chronic risk aversion keeps your life smaller than

1172
01:30:08,680 --> 01:30:12,960
it has any business being. When self respect becomes the

1173
01:30:13,039 --> 01:30:20,520
foundation instead, failure is recontextualized, not into something comfortable or irrelevant,

1174
01:30:20,920 --> 01:30:27,319
but into something survivable, into information, into the inevitable texture

1175
01:30:27,439 --> 01:30:31,239
of a life being lived actively rather than cautiously performed

1176
01:30:31,520 --> 01:30:34,880
for an audience that has opinions about everything. There is

1177
01:30:34,960 --> 01:30:39,720
also the matter of solitude and how your relationship to

1178
01:30:39,800 --> 01:30:45,119
it changes people. Pleasers often have an uncomfortable relationship with

1179
01:30:45,279 --> 01:30:49,920
genuine quiet, because quiet is where they are alone with

1180
01:30:50,039 --> 01:30:53,439
the version of themselves they have been running from, the

1181
01:30:53,560 --> 01:30:57,720
version that has unmet needs and honest opinions and genuine

1182
01:30:57,760 --> 01:31:01,600
feelings that were never given space to be expressed. As

1183
01:31:01,680 --> 01:31:08,359
those things are gradually given room as the internal relationship improves,

1184
01:31:08,520 --> 01:31:14,600
solitude changes character entirely. It stops being the place where

1185
01:31:14,640 --> 01:31:20,640
anxiety lives and becomes instead the place where clarity arrives,

1186
01:31:21,359 --> 01:31:25,439
where you can hear yourself think without the constant interference

1187
01:31:25,479 --> 01:31:28,920
of monitoring and managing, where you can simply rest in

1188
01:31:28,960 --> 01:31:32,840
your own company, without performing even the smallest version of

1189
01:31:32,880 --> 01:31:38,279
self management for an invisible audience. This is ultimately what

1190
01:31:38,520 --> 01:31:42,039
all of this work has been building toward. Not a

1191
01:31:42,079 --> 01:31:49,079
perfectly boundary, maintained life in which nothing uncomfortable ever reaches you,

1192
01:31:50,039 --> 01:31:53,399
not a version of yourself that never feels the pull

1193
01:31:53,439 --> 01:31:57,079
of old patterns or the temptation to smooth things over

1194
01:31:57,159 --> 01:32:00,199
with a dishonest yes, but a life in which you

1195
01:32:00,239 --> 01:32:05,319
are recognizably yourself in every situation you navigate, in which

1196
01:32:05,359 --> 01:32:08,359
the person you present to the world is continuous with

1197
01:32:08,399 --> 01:32:12,720
the person who exists in private, in which your relationships

1198
01:32:12,760 --> 01:32:16,720
are real because you are real within them, in which

1199
01:32:16,800 --> 01:32:20,800
your choices reflect what you genuinely value rather than what

1200
01:32:20,880 --> 01:32:24,119
you are afraid of losing. In which you wake up

1201
01:32:24,279 --> 01:32:29,920
with some reasonable regularity and feel without having to construct

1202
01:32:29,960 --> 01:32:35,319
the feeling from external materials, that your life belongs to you.

1203
01:32:36,359 --> 01:32:39,000
That is not a small thing. That is not a

1204
01:32:39,039 --> 01:32:42,199
minor upgrade from one way of being to a slightly

1205
01:32:42,319 --> 01:32:46,560
better one. That is the difference between a life spent

1206
01:32:46,640 --> 01:32:52,079
auditioning and a life spent living, between moving through the

1207
01:32:52,119 --> 01:32:55,800
world as a version of yourself calibrated for maximum acceptability,

1208
01:32:56,119 --> 01:32:58,920
and moving through it as the actual person you are,

1209
01:32:59,319 --> 01:33:02,239
with all the common perplexity and the specificity and the

1210
01:33:02,279 --> 01:33:07,640
occasional inconvenience that entails. You spent a very long time

1211
01:33:07,800 --> 01:33:12,359
learning to disappear in service of being accepted. The work

1212
01:33:12,359 --> 01:33:16,359
from here is simpler in its direction, though not always

1213
01:33:16,399 --> 01:33:20,399
easy in its practice. The work from here is to

1214
01:33:20,520 --> 01:33:28,640
reappear steadily, honestly, without apology, and to discover as you

1215
01:33:28,760 --> 01:33:32,720
do that the version of yourself you spent so long

1216
01:33:32,840 --> 01:33:38,720
hiding was never the problem. It was always the Answer,

1217
01:33:39,479 --> 01:33:44,880
Chapter eleven, The Relationships Worth Keeping. As you move through

1218
01:33:44,880 --> 01:33:48,399
this process of changing, as you begin to hold limits

1219
01:33:48,560 --> 01:33:51,520
and speak honestly, and show up as a more complete

1220
01:33:51,640 --> 01:33:55,880
version of yourself, the landscape of your relationships will shift

1221
01:33:56,199 --> 01:34:01,000
in ways that are sometimes disorienting and sometimes quietly clarifying,

1222
01:34:01,359 --> 01:34:05,119
and occasionally painful, in ways you were not fully prepared for.

1223
01:34:05,720 --> 01:34:11,119
Some connections will strengthen, some will weaken, some will end.

1224
01:34:12,000 --> 01:34:15,920
And the end of a relationship that you valued, even

1225
01:34:16,000 --> 01:34:19,000
one that was built on dynamics that were not healthy

1226
01:34:19,039 --> 01:34:22,560
for you, carries a real grief that deserves to be

1227
01:34:22,640 --> 01:34:27,279
acknowledged rather than bypassed with reassurances that it was for

1228
01:34:27,319 --> 01:34:31,199
the best. It may well be for the best. It

1229
01:34:31,279 --> 01:34:35,079
can still hurt. Both of those things can be true

1230
01:34:35,359 --> 01:34:39,199
at the same time. But before we talk about what ends,

1231
01:34:39,800 --> 01:34:45,039
it is worth spending serious time on what becomes possible,

1232
01:34:45,720 --> 01:34:49,119
because one of the most significant and least discussed gifts

1233
01:34:49,119 --> 01:34:53,079
of recovering from people pleasing is the quality of relationship

1234
01:34:53,119 --> 01:34:55,600
that opens up once you are no longer bringing a

1235
01:34:55,640 --> 01:34:59,520
performance to every connection you have, once you are no

1236
01:34:59,600 --> 01:35:04,159
longer playing a role designed for maximum acceptability rather than

1237
01:35:04,279 --> 01:35:08,119
maximum authenticity, Once the other person in the room is

1238
01:35:08,239 --> 01:35:11,840
encountering you, rather than the carefully managed version of you

1239
01:35:12,119 --> 01:35:16,800
that was constructed to avoid their disapproval. Real relationships, the

1240
01:35:16,800 --> 01:35:20,079
ones worth keeping and building and investing in, are built

1241
01:35:20,119 --> 01:35:26,000
on a specific and irreplaceable ingredient. The ingredient is mutual reality.

1242
01:35:26,479 --> 01:35:30,319
Both people in the relationship need to be actually present,

1243
01:35:31,239 --> 01:35:35,720
actually themselves, actually willing to show the parts of themselves

1244
01:35:35,760 --> 01:35:40,840
that are uncertain or complicated or inconvenient, alongside the parts

1245
01:35:40,880 --> 01:35:45,199
that are easy and appealing. Relationships built on one person

1246
01:35:45,279 --> 01:35:49,239
performing and the other person receiving the performance are not deep,

1247
01:35:49,640 --> 01:35:52,800
however long they last, and however warm they feel in

1248
01:35:52,840 --> 01:35:56,840
their better moments. They are relationships between a person and

1249
01:35:56,960 --> 01:35:59,800
a role, and you have been playing that role for

1250
01:35:59,800 --> 01:36:03,560
san so long in so many of your closest connections

1251
01:36:04,439 --> 01:36:06,600
that you may not know yet what it would feel

1252
01:36:06,720 --> 01:36:10,279
like to be in a relationship where the role is

1253
01:36:10,319 --> 01:36:15,319
not required. It would feel like rest, That is the

1254
01:36:15,439 --> 01:36:20,800
closest approximation, like setting down something very heavy that you

1255
01:36:20,880 --> 01:36:25,039
had been carrying for so long you stopped registering the

1256
01:36:25,079 --> 01:36:27,880
weight of it. And the people who can offer you

1257
01:36:28,039 --> 01:36:31,319
that rest, who are secure enough in themselves to be

1258
01:36:31,399 --> 01:36:35,399
in relationship with someone who has genuine edges who do

1259
01:36:35,479 --> 01:36:39,119
not require your continuous accommodation in order to feel okay

1260
01:36:39,199 --> 01:36:43,840
about themselves and about you. Those people are the ones

1261
01:36:43,920 --> 01:36:49,079
worth every ounce of the effort this process demands. They exist,

1262
01:36:49,800 --> 01:36:52,640
and one of the effects of you becoming more genuinely

1263
01:36:52,680 --> 01:36:57,479
yourself is that you become far more visible to them.

1264
01:36:57,960 --> 01:37:02,600
Because they were never particular kularly attracted to the performance version.

1265
01:37:03,479 --> 01:37:07,279
They are attracted to the real one. How do you

1266
01:37:07,359 --> 01:37:12,159
identify a relationship worth keeping through this transition? Not through

1267
01:37:12,199 --> 01:37:15,840
what the other person says in the easy moments, but

1268
01:37:15,920 --> 01:37:20,279
through how they respond in the harder ones. A person

1269
01:37:20,319 --> 01:37:24,159
who genuinely cares about you, and not just about the

1270
01:37:24,279 --> 01:37:28,279
dynamic you represented for them will be able to tolerate

1271
01:37:28,359 --> 01:37:32,560
the discomfort of your growth. They may need time to adjust,

1272
01:37:33,159 --> 01:37:36,680
They may have questions or even moments of hurt as

1273
01:37:36,720 --> 01:37:40,880
the dynamic shifts, but they will ultimately be able to

1274
01:37:40,960 --> 01:37:44,600
hold those things without punishing you for them. They will

1275
01:37:44,600 --> 01:37:48,159
be able to have honest conversations about what is changing,

1276
01:37:48,560 --> 01:37:52,359
without making the conversation an exercise in pressuring you to

1277
01:37:52,520 --> 01:37:56,920
change back. They will demonstrate through their behavior rather than

1278
01:37:57,039 --> 01:38:01,680
just their words. That their investment in you rather than

1279
01:38:01,720 --> 01:38:04,239
in the specific role you used to play for them.

1280
01:38:04,840 --> 01:38:08,000
A relationship worth keeping is also one where repair is

1281
01:38:08,079 --> 01:38:13,239
possible after conflict. People pleasers often avoid all conflicts so

1282
01:38:13,399 --> 01:38:18,079
assiduously that they never discover whether their relationships can survive it.

1283
01:38:18,840 --> 01:38:23,119
They smooth things over, absorb the discomfort, pretend the friction

1284
01:38:23,279 --> 01:38:26,680
did not happen, and maintain a surface of apparent harmony

1285
01:38:26,920 --> 01:38:29,880
that sits on top of an entirely unexamined set of

1286
01:38:30,039 --> 01:38:34,359
unresolved tensions. Part of what changes when you stop pleasing

1287
01:38:34,880 --> 01:38:38,640
is that some of those tensions surface. And discovering which

1288
01:38:38,680 --> 01:38:42,039
of your relationships can move through that process and come

1289
01:38:42,079 --> 01:38:46,720
out the other side with more honesty and more depth

1290
01:38:46,800 --> 01:38:50,600
and more genuine closeness is one of the most important

1291
01:38:50,880 --> 01:38:54,800
and most rewarding discoveries this period of your life will

1292
01:38:54,800 --> 01:39:00,920
make available to you. Conflict does not destroy real relationships.

1293
01:39:01,039 --> 01:39:06,600
Sustained dishonesty does. The absence of conflict in your history

1294
01:39:06,640 --> 01:39:12,039
with someone is not evidence that the relationship is healthy.

1295
01:39:12,840 --> 01:39:16,079
It may simply be evidence that you have been working

1296
01:39:16,319 --> 01:39:20,399
very hard to prevent any situation that might require the

1297
01:39:20,479 --> 01:39:25,760
relationship to demonstrate its actual resilience. Real resilience in a

1298
01:39:25,840 --> 01:39:28,800
relationship shows up when there is a rupture and both

1299
01:39:28,840 --> 01:39:33,600
people choose repair over retreat, When something difficult gets said,

1300
01:39:34,520 --> 01:39:37,600
and both people stay in the room, when a limit

1301
01:39:37,680 --> 01:39:40,600
is set and the other person is able to hear it,

1302
01:39:41,119 --> 01:39:47,720
and after whatever adjustment is required, respect it. Those moments

1303
01:39:47,720 --> 01:39:52,600
of repair are what create genuine closeness, the kind that

1304
01:39:52,680 --> 01:39:56,680
does not depend on everything going smoothly and both parties

1305
01:39:56,720 --> 01:40:01,319
staying comfortable, the kind that knows it has been tested

1306
01:40:01,680 --> 01:40:08,079
and held. There are also, in most people's lives relationships

1307
01:40:08,119 --> 01:40:11,079
that are worth investing in that may have been somewhat

1308
01:40:11,239 --> 01:40:15,720
neglected during years of people pleasing. Connections with people who

1309
01:40:15,800 --> 01:40:21,000
were perhaps less demanding, less in need of management, less

1310
01:40:21,159 --> 01:40:25,479
likely to create the kind of interpersonal crisis that tends

1311
01:40:25,520 --> 01:40:31,439
to pull people pleasers attention and energy disproportionately. The people

1312
01:40:31,439 --> 01:40:34,680
who never needed you to perform for them are sometimes

1313
01:40:34,760 --> 01:40:38,680
the ones who got the least of you, precisely because

1314
01:40:39,039 --> 01:40:41,520
they never required you to show up with the full

1315
01:40:41,680 --> 01:40:47,079
force of your accommodating machinery activated. As you recover, as

1316
01:40:47,119 --> 01:40:50,840
you have more genuine energy available because you are spending

1317
01:40:50,960 --> 01:40:56,279
less of it on monitoring and managing look toward those connections,

1318
01:40:57,159 --> 01:41:02,119
the ones that were quieter but perhaps more real. They

1319
01:41:02,119 --> 01:41:04,640
may have more to offer than you realized when your

1320
01:41:04,680 --> 01:41:09,439
attention was being consumed elsewhere. Ultimately, the question of which

1321
01:41:09,479 --> 01:41:12,960
relationships are worth keeping is not answered by an audit

1322
01:41:13,119 --> 01:41:16,840
performed at the beginning of this process. It is answered

1323
01:41:16,920 --> 01:41:21,760
gradually through the evidence that accumulates as you show up

1324
01:41:21,800 --> 01:41:27,600
differently and watch what happens. Some relationships will surprise you

1325
01:41:27,960 --> 01:41:32,439
with their durability, some will surprise you with their fragility,

1326
01:41:33,399 --> 01:41:37,239
and some that you thought might not survive will become

1327
01:41:37,640 --> 01:41:42,520
on the far side of an honest and sometimes difficult renegotiation.

1328
01:41:43,199 --> 01:41:47,399
The most important connections you have. Give them the chance

1329
01:41:47,479 --> 01:41:51,479
to demonstrate which they are, give yourself the chance to

1330
01:41:51,560 --> 01:41:55,399
find out, and through all of it, extend to yourself

1331
01:41:55,439 --> 01:41:58,680
the same patience and compassion you would extend to someone

1332
01:41:58,760 --> 01:42:03,279
you love going through a difficult transition. Changing the relational

1333
01:42:03,319 --> 01:42:07,119
patterns of a lifetime is not a linear process. There

1334
01:42:07,159 --> 01:42:11,600
will be moments when the old reflexes win, when the

1335
01:42:11,760 --> 01:42:17,000
yes escapes before the honest answer can form, when the

1336
01:42:17,039 --> 01:42:21,920
limit dissolves under pressure that felt too significant to hold against.

1337
01:42:22,640 --> 01:42:28,479
Those moments are not failures. They are information. They show

1338
01:42:28,520 --> 01:42:32,479
you where the work still has depth to go, where

1339
01:42:32,520 --> 01:42:39,760
the pattern is most entrenched, which relationships, and which emotional

1340
01:42:39,800 --> 01:42:46,039
triggers require the most sustained attention. What matters is not

1341
01:42:46,199 --> 01:42:50,199
that you never revert. What matters is that you notice

1342
01:42:50,520 --> 01:42:55,880
when you do, understand why and return to your own center.

1343
01:42:56,680 --> 01:43:01,239
Rather than treating the reversion as proof that change is impossible,

1344
01:43:01,840 --> 01:43:06,079
it is not impossible. You are already proving that by

1345
01:43:06,119 --> 01:43:11,600
being here reading this, choosing to take seriously something that

1346
01:43:11,680 --> 01:43:15,199
the old version of you would have set aside as

1347
01:43:15,279 --> 01:43:21,880
too uncomfortable to examine. Chapter twelve, Rediscovering who you actually

1348
01:43:21,920 --> 01:43:25,840
are here is a question that most people assume has

1349
01:43:25,880 --> 01:43:30,159
an obvious answer until they are asked to sit with

1350
01:43:30,239 --> 01:43:34,920
it seriously. Who are you when no one is watching?

1351
01:43:35,760 --> 01:43:38,560
Not who you present yourself as in the presence of

1352
01:43:38,600 --> 01:43:41,560
a boss or a partner, or a group of friends

1353
01:43:41,600 --> 01:43:44,960
whose approval matters to you, Not the version of you

1354
01:43:45,239 --> 01:43:48,199
that shows up in any of the social contexts that

1355
01:43:48,279 --> 01:43:52,399
have been for most of your life the primary arena

1356
01:43:52,800 --> 01:43:56,880
in which your sense of self was constructed and maintained.

1357
01:43:57,560 --> 01:44:01,279
Who are you when the audience is gone, when the

1358
01:44:01,319 --> 01:44:05,279
performance is not required, when there is no one present

1359
01:44:05,600 --> 01:44:09,600
whose reaction you need to monitor and manage. What do

1360
01:44:09,680 --> 01:44:13,520
you think about? What do you feel? What do you

1361
01:44:13,600 --> 01:44:17,159
actually want to do with this particular hour or evening

1362
01:44:17,279 --> 01:44:22,039
or Saturday morning, when no external structure is imposing itself.

1363
01:44:22,359 --> 01:44:24,920
If you sat with that question and felt something that

1364
01:44:25,079 --> 01:44:28,239
was less like clarity and more like a blankness, a

1365
01:44:28,279 --> 01:44:33,279
certain emptiness or uncertainty that was vaguely uncomfortable, you are

1366
01:44:33,319 --> 01:44:38,119
not alone. People who have spent years operating primarily in

1367
01:44:38,159 --> 01:44:43,640
relation to other people's needs and preferences often discover when

1368
01:44:43,720 --> 01:44:48,279
they turn the focus inward that the inward landscape is

1369
01:44:48,399 --> 01:44:52,920
less familiar than they expected, not because there is nothing there,

1370
01:44:53,800 --> 01:44:57,920
but because so little attention has been directed there for

1371
01:44:58,000 --> 01:45:02,199
so long. The self that exists independent of the social

1372
01:45:02,239 --> 01:45:06,159
performance has been present all along. It has simply been

1373
01:45:06,239 --> 01:45:10,840
starved of the attention required to become visible to itself

1374
01:45:11,399 --> 01:45:16,399
and to anyone else. Rediscovering who you actually are is

1375
01:45:16,479 --> 01:45:20,479
not a dramatic or instant process. It does not happen

1376
01:45:20,560 --> 01:45:23,960
through a single moment of revelation or a weekend retreat,

1377
01:45:24,439 --> 01:45:28,800
or a conversation that suddenly makes everything clear. It happens

1378
01:45:28,840 --> 01:45:32,600
through a sustained and deliberate practice of paying attention to

1379
01:45:32,680 --> 01:45:35,479
yourself in the way you have been paying attention to

1380
01:45:35,560 --> 01:45:40,159
everyone else for years. Noticing what you actually like, not

1381
01:45:40,479 --> 01:45:43,079
just what you like to say you like in company

1382
01:45:43,119 --> 01:45:47,159
that you want to impress, Noticing what genuinely interests you,

1383
01:45:48,079 --> 01:45:52,840
what kinds of experiences leave you feeling more like yourself

1384
01:45:53,439 --> 01:45:58,760
rather than less, Noticing what your actual emotional responses are

1385
01:45:59,119 --> 01:46:02,600
before you try late them into whatever version feels safer

1386
01:46:02,640 --> 01:46:06,840
to express. Noticing your own preferences in the smallest and

1387
01:46:06,920 --> 01:46:11,720
most ordinary things, because those small things add up to

1388
01:46:11,800 --> 01:46:15,560
a person, and the person they add up to is

1389
01:46:15,720 --> 01:46:20,560
you start with the physical and the immediate. What do

1390
01:46:20,680 --> 01:46:24,159
you actually want to eat when no one else's preferences

1391
01:46:24,239 --> 01:46:27,640
are part of the equation? What music do you put

1392
01:46:27,680 --> 01:46:31,479
on when you are alone? What kind of environments make

1393
01:46:31,560 --> 01:46:36,039
you feel more alive, and which ones deplete you? These

1394
01:46:36,239 --> 01:46:40,479
are not trivial questions. They are the vocabulary of a

1395
01:46:40,560 --> 01:46:43,600
self that you are in the process of learning to

1396
01:46:43,680 --> 01:46:48,079
hear again. And the practice of honoring those small preferences,

1397
01:46:48,600 --> 01:46:52,399
of making choices based on what you genuinely want rather

1398
01:46:52,439 --> 01:46:55,840
than what seems most acceptable or least likely to attract

1399
01:46:56,039 --> 01:47:00,439
comment is where the larger work of self rediscovery begins

1400
01:47:01,439 --> 01:47:05,880
in the accumulation of very small, very honest choices made

1401
01:47:05,880 --> 01:47:10,800
in private, then moved to the deeper material. What did

1402
01:47:10,840 --> 01:47:14,840
you care about before other people's needs became the primary

1403
01:47:15,159 --> 01:47:19,000
organizing principle of your attention? What were you interested in

1404
01:47:19,079 --> 01:47:21,720
before you learned to be interested in whatever the people

1405
01:47:21,760 --> 01:47:25,640
around you found interesting. What kind of person did you

1406
01:47:25,720 --> 01:47:28,720
imagine becoming when you were young enough that the shape

1407
01:47:28,760 --> 01:47:32,159
of the future felt open. What would you be doing

1408
01:47:32,199 --> 01:47:36,119
with your time if approval were completely off the table,

1409
01:47:36,520 --> 01:47:39,520
if no one's opinion of your choices had any weight

1410
01:47:39,600 --> 01:47:43,359
at all. The answers to those questions are not necessarily

1411
01:47:43,399 --> 01:47:47,920
prescriptions for life changes, not necessarily directions to quit your

1412
01:47:48,039 --> 01:47:52,680
job or move cities or fundamentally restructure your existence, though

1413
01:47:52,720 --> 01:47:58,399
sometimes they are. They are more fundamentally just data information

1414
01:47:58,880 --> 01:48:03,119
about a self that was submerged, a beginning of an

1415
01:48:03,119 --> 01:48:06,119
honest account of who you are when who you are

1416
01:48:06,239 --> 01:48:09,520
is not being negotiated in relation to what others prefer.

1417
01:48:10,279 --> 01:48:14,039
One of the consistent experiences of people recovering from people

1418
01:48:14,079 --> 01:48:20,640
pleasing is the rediscovery of opinions, actual, strong, personally held

1419
01:48:20,680 --> 01:48:24,880
opinions about things that genuinely matter to them, opinions that

1420
01:48:24,920 --> 01:48:29,199
were suppressed for so long that they almost stopped being

1421
01:48:29,239 --> 01:48:33,840
aware they had them, And then, gradually, in the context

1422
01:48:33,880 --> 01:48:38,239
of safer relationships or in the privacy of their own thinking,

1423
01:48:39,039 --> 01:48:44,279
those opinions begin to surface again, and they discover that

1424
01:48:44,439 --> 01:48:49,479
they have views, that they have esthetic preferences and intellectual positions,

1425
01:48:49,520 --> 01:48:53,439
and moral commitments and tastes that are specifically their own

1426
01:48:53,760 --> 01:48:57,600
and not derived from the preferences of the people around them.

1427
01:48:57,960 --> 01:49:02,880
This rediscovery can feel strange and vulnerable at first, like

1428
01:49:03,000 --> 01:49:07,039
exposing something that spent a long time protected, but it

1429
01:49:07,079 --> 01:49:12,920
is also almost invariably accompanied by a quality of a

1430
01:49:13,000 --> 01:49:18,359
liveness that the performance state never produced. There is also

1431
01:49:18,479 --> 01:49:20,479
the matter of the things you were told you were

1432
01:49:20,520 --> 01:49:23,960
not good at or not suited for, the interests you

1433
01:49:24,039 --> 01:49:30,359
abandoned because they attracted insufficient approval or active discouragement, The

1434
01:49:30,399 --> 01:49:34,039
parts of yourself that were too unusual or too inconvenient,

1435
01:49:34,199 --> 01:49:37,199
or too different from what your environment valued to be

1436
01:49:37,239 --> 01:49:41,439
safely maintained. Not all of those things will turn out

1437
01:49:41,479 --> 01:49:45,079
to be important. Some of them were simply phases or

1438
01:49:45,119 --> 01:49:51,159
experiments legitimately outgrown rather than suppressed, but some of them

1439
01:49:51,479 --> 01:49:54,520
will turn out to matter. Some of them will turn

1440
01:49:54,520 --> 01:49:57,560
out to be connected to something real about who you are,

1441
01:49:58,520 --> 01:50:02,199
and their rediscovery will feel less like learning something new

1442
01:50:02,760 --> 01:50:07,600
and more like remembering something you always knew. Be patient

1443
01:50:07,720 --> 01:50:12,000
with this process. Selves that have been suppressed for many

1444
01:50:12,119 --> 01:50:17,479
years do not resurface all at once. They come back

1445
01:50:17,520 --> 01:50:22,880
in pieces, in glimpses, in moments of unexpected pleasure or

1446
01:50:23,000 --> 01:50:28,359
unexpected preference or unexpected reaction. Your job is not to

1447
01:50:28,439 --> 01:50:32,279
hurry the process, or to construct a new identity on

1448
01:50:32,359 --> 01:50:34,720
top of the old one with the same urgency you

1449
01:50:34,800 --> 01:50:38,800
once brought to constructing yourself for other people's approval. Your

1450
01:50:38,880 --> 01:50:43,680
job is to stay curious, to pay attention, to give

1451
01:50:43,720 --> 01:50:48,079
the emerging version of you the same quality of attentive

1452
01:50:48,159 --> 01:50:53,399
interest you have spent years giving to everyone else. That investment,

1453
01:50:53,920 --> 01:50:58,359
made consistently over time will return something that nothing else

1454
01:50:58,439 --> 01:51:03,359
in this process can provide, a self that feels genuinely

1455
01:51:03,800 --> 01:51:07,840
and continuously yours. There is one more thing worth saying

1456
01:51:07,920 --> 01:51:13,479
about this rediscovery. It will not always be comfortable. Some

1457
01:51:13,640 --> 01:51:17,479
of what you find when you turn genuinely inward, some

1458
01:51:17,600 --> 01:51:21,640
of the honest preferences and real opinions and unfiltered feelings

1459
01:51:21,640 --> 01:51:25,239
that surface when the performance is no longer running will

1460
01:51:25,279 --> 01:51:28,600
be things you have to reckon with, feelings of anger

1461
01:51:29,039 --> 01:51:33,960
about things that were never adequately addressed, grief about time

1462
01:51:34,159 --> 01:51:37,800
spent in patterns that cost you more than you fully

1463
01:51:37,880 --> 01:51:42,039
acknowledged while you were in them, desires and directions, and

1464
01:51:42,119 --> 01:51:46,279
authentic inclinations that complicate the life you have already built.

1465
01:51:47,159 --> 01:51:50,840
This discomfort is not a sign that the self discovery

1466
01:51:50,920 --> 01:51:54,319
is going wrong. It is a sign that it is

1467
01:51:54,399 --> 01:51:59,800
going deep, and depth in this process is always preferable

1468
01:51:59,840 --> 01:52:04,039
to the comfortable surface of a rediscovery that only recovers

1469
01:52:04,119 --> 01:52:08,920
the easy and appealing parts while leaving the harder ones untouched.

1470
01:52:09,640 --> 01:52:14,720
The full self is the only self worth recovering, and

1471
01:52:15,800 --> 01:52:22,000
the full self includes everything. Chapter thirteen, When the people

1472
01:52:22,079 --> 01:52:28,399
you love are the hardest to say no to. Everything

1473
01:52:28,479 --> 01:52:32,600
described in the earlier chapters of this book sounds manageable

1474
01:52:32,720 --> 01:52:37,640
enough when you apply it to co workers, acquaintances, people

1475
01:52:37,720 --> 01:52:43,399
in your life whose approval matters but whose relationships with

1476
01:52:43,600 --> 01:52:49,119
you are not central to your sense of who you are.

1477
01:52:50,000 --> 01:52:53,520
Saying no to a colleague asking for a favor, holding

1478
01:52:53,560 --> 01:52:57,720
a limit with someone in your social circle, being honest

1479
01:52:57,760 --> 01:53:01,640
about your preferences with a friend of several years rather

1480
01:53:01,720 --> 01:53:06,399
than the decade's deep kind. These things are difficult, but

1481
01:53:06,439 --> 01:53:10,159
they are a difficulty you can intellectually prepare for and

1482
01:53:10,399 --> 01:53:15,720
practically navigate. Then there are the other people, the ones

1483
01:53:15,760 --> 01:53:19,560
whose approval you have been seeking the longest, the ones

1484
01:53:19,600 --> 01:53:23,600
whose love or disappointment carries a weight that makes every

1485
01:53:23,720 --> 01:53:29,880
other social pressure seem mild by comparison. The parents, the partners,

1486
01:53:30,640 --> 01:53:35,720
the siblings, the oldest and most foundational relationships in your life,

1487
01:53:36,640 --> 01:53:40,520
and with those people everything is harder. This is not

1488
01:53:40,600 --> 01:53:44,760
a weakness. It is the accurate recognition that some relationships

1489
01:53:44,760 --> 01:53:48,239
are more load bearing than others, that some people's responses

1490
01:53:48,279 --> 01:53:50,880
to you are more deeply entangled with your sense of

1491
01:53:50,920 --> 01:53:53,760
who you are and what you deserve, and that the

1492
01:53:53,960 --> 01:53:58,399
history in those relationships carries a gravity that relatively newer

1493
01:53:58,439 --> 01:54:03,439
connections simply do not. The people pleasing patterns you formed

1494
01:54:03,479 --> 01:54:08,560
in your earliest family relationships were the original ones, the template.

1495
01:54:09,479 --> 01:54:13,720
Every subsequent pattern of accommodation and self suppression was built

1496
01:54:13,800 --> 01:54:17,199
on the foundation of what you learned to do in

1497
01:54:17,319 --> 01:54:21,760
that first environment, which means that changing those patterns in

1498
01:54:21,800 --> 01:54:25,199
the context of those relationships or in the context of

1499
01:54:25,239 --> 01:54:29,039
the relationships that have acquired similar depth and significance over

1500
01:54:29,159 --> 01:54:32,800
years of closeness is the deepest and most demanding work

1501
01:54:32,840 --> 01:54:36,199
this process will ask of you. Let us begin with family,

1502
01:54:37,159 --> 01:54:41,359
because for most people it is where the blueprint was drawn.

1503
01:54:42,079 --> 01:54:45,840
The family system is a particular kind of environment for

1504
01:54:45,920 --> 01:54:51,039
personal change because every family system develops its own equilibrium,

1505
01:54:51,439 --> 01:54:55,319
its own set of unspoken rules about how each member

1506
01:54:55,359 --> 01:54:59,760
is expected to behave, what roles they are expected to occupy,

1507
01:55:00,359 --> 01:55:04,199
what kinds of interactions are permitted, and what kinds are not.

1508
01:55:05,199 --> 01:55:08,399
In a family where one person occupies the role of

1509
01:55:08,439 --> 01:55:13,399
the accommodating one, the peacekeeper, the one who manages every

1510
01:55:13,399 --> 01:55:18,600
one else's feelings and makes themselves smaller so that the

1511
01:55:18,720 --> 01:55:24,840
overall family atmosphere can remain stable, that role becomes structural

1512
01:55:25,039 --> 01:55:29,439
over time. It becomes part of how the family functions,

1513
01:55:30,119 --> 01:55:33,520
and when the person in that role begins to change,

1514
01:55:34,239 --> 01:55:38,399
it is not just their individual behavior that is affected.

1515
01:55:39,199 --> 01:55:43,479
It is the entire equilibrium of the system. This is

1516
01:55:43,479 --> 01:55:46,960
why family members sometimes react to personal growth with a

1517
01:55:47,000 --> 01:55:50,520
degree of force that is entirely disproportionate to the apparent

1518
01:55:50,760 --> 01:55:54,840
size of the change. A boundary that would be unremarkable

1519
01:55:54,920 --> 01:55:57,800
coming from someone with a different history in the family,

1520
01:55:58,720 --> 01:56:03,760
stated quietly and without drama, can produce a reaction that

1521
01:56:03,920 --> 01:56:08,720
feels enormous because what is actually happening is not just

1522
01:56:08,840 --> 01:56:13,319
one person responding to one request. It is a system

1523
01:56:13,800 --> 01:56:18,439
responding to the disturbance of its established order, and systems,

1524
01:56:19,520 --> 01:56:24,800
like people, have a strong instinct toward maintaining whatever equilibrium

1525
01:56:24,840 --> 01:56:29,159
they have developed, even when that equilibrium is built on

1526
01:56:29,279 --> 01:56:33,600
the suppression of one of its members. Understanding this does

1527
01:56:33,640 --> 01:56:37,279
not make navigating it easy, but it makes it less

1528
01:56:37,279 --> 01:56:43,560
confusing and less likely to be misread as evidence that

1529
01:56:43,640 --> 01:56:48,800
you have done something uniquely and specifically wrong. When a

1530
01:56:48,880 --> 01:56:52,920
parent responds to your new limit with expressions of profound hurt,

1531
01:56:53,960 --> 01:56:58,039
or a sibling reacts to your honest communication with accusations

1532
01:56:58,079 --> 01:57:02,920
of selfishness, or a family gathering shifts in atmosphere the

1533
01:57:03,039 --> 01:57:06,520
moment you begin acting in alignment with your own needs

1534
01:57:06,840 --> 01:57:09,520
rather than with the role the family has assigned you.

1535
01:57:09,960 --> 01:57:13,640
These are not primarily judgments of your character. They are

1536
01:57:13,680 --> 01:57:18,119
the system's attempt to restore a familiar pattern, and you

1537
01:57:18,279 --> 01:57:22,880
have the option, possibly for the first time in your life,

1538
01:57:23,199 --> 01:57:28,920
of declining to be restored partners present a particular complexity

1539
01:57:28,960 --> 01:57:32,279
that deserves its own attention. If you entered a significant

1540
01:57:32,279 --> 01:57:36,319
relationship while deep in people pleasing patterns, which many people do,

1541
01:57:37,279 --> 01:57:41,119
then that relationship was established with a specific version of

1542
01:57:41,159 --> 01:57:47,159
you at its center, a version that accommodated more, agreed more,

1543
01:57:48,079 --> 01:57:52,079
and asked for less than the version of you that

1544
01:57:52,239 --> 01:57:58,079
is now emerging. Your partner organized their understanding of the

1545
01:57:58,159 --> 01:58:03,359
relationship and to in some degree, their understanding of themselves

1546
01:58:03,399 --> 01:58:07,920
within it, around that version. When you begin to change,

1547
01:58:08,319 --> 01:58:11,920
you are not just changing as an individual. You are

1548
01:58:12,000 --> 01:58:15,680
changing the terms of the relationship, and depending on how

1549
01:58:15,720 --> 01:58:19,520
your partner is constituted and what they genuinely need and

1550
01:58:19,640 --> 01:58:22,960
genuinely value, this can either be the beginning of a

1551
01:58:23,000 --> 01:58:26,039
deeper and more honest relationship than you have ever had

1552
01:58:26,079 --> 01:58:30,359
with them, or the revelation of a fundamental incompatibility that

1553
01:58:30,399 --> 01:58:34,560
the people pleasing was papering over all along. This is

1554
01:58:34,680 --> 01:58:38,560
one of the most difficult truths in this entire book.

1555
01:58:39,159 --> 01:58:43,880
Some relationships that have been sustained by one person's continuous

1556
01:58:43,920 --> 01:58:48,439
accommodation will not be able to survive the cessation of

1557
01:58:48,479 --> 01:58:52,239
that accommodation, not because the people in them are bad

1558
01:58:52,720 --> 01:58:57,520
but because the accommodation was doing structural work, was filling

1559
01:58:57,560 --> 01:59:00,920
a gap that exists at the foundation of the connection,

1560
01:59:01,840 --> 01:59:07,600
was compensating for a fundamental mismatch that genuine honesty reveals

1561
01:59:08,039 --> 01:59:12,920
rather than creates. And facing that possibility with honesty is

1562
01:59:12,960 --> 01:59:16,760
among the most painful things the recovery from people pleasing

1563
01:59:16,840 --> 01:59:21,399
can require. It is also, in the long run, among

1564
01:59:21,479 --> 01:59:26,000
the most necessary for the relationships that can survive and grow.

1565
01:59:26,640 --> 01:59:33,520
The path forward runs through honest conversation, not confrontational, not accusatory,

1566
01:59:33,960 --> 01:59:37,359
not the performance of new found assertiveness for its own sake,

1567
01:59:38,239 --> 01:59:42,399
but genuine communication about what you have been doing, what

1568
01:59:42,520 --> 01:59:46,560
it has cost you, what is changing, and what you

1569
01:59:46,720 --> 01:59:52,479
need from this relationship going forward. Those conversations are difficult,

1570
01:59:53,199 --> 01:59:56,279
they are the kind of difficult that produces something real

1571
01:59:56,359 --> 02:00:00,239
on the other side, the kind of honest reckoning betweeneen

1572
02:00:00,239 --> 02:00:03,159
two people who are committed to actually knowing each other

1573
02:00:03,600 --> 02:00:06,880
rather than performing for each other, And for the partner

1574
02:00:06,920 --> 02:00:10,520
who genuinely loves you and is secure enough to hear you.

1575
02:00:11,600 --> 02:00:16,880
Those conversations are not a threat. They are an invitation,

1576
02:00:18,119 --> 02:00:21,960
an invitation to a more honest and more nourishing version

1577
02:00:22,000 --> 02:00:25,319
of the connection You already have. The hardest moment in

1578
02:00:25,359 --> 02:00:28,119
all of this is the moment when someone you love

1579
02:00:28,279 --> 02:00:31,840
deeply and genuinely reacts to your honesty, or your limits,

1580
02:00:31,960 --> 02:00:34,960
or your changed behavior with something that feels like the

1581
02:00:35,000 --> 02:00:38,840
withdrawal of their love. When a parent goes cold, when

1582
02:00:38,880 --> 02:00:43,880
a partner becomes distant, when a sibling stops calling. That

1583
02:00:44,119 --> 02:00:49,520
experience activates the most ancient and most primal fear that

1584
02:00:49,640 --> 02:00:53,760
people pleasing exists to prevent the fear that you are

1585
02:00:53,840 --> 02:00:58,600
unlovable without the performance that the love was always contingent,

1586
02:00:59,319 --> 02:01:03,399
that the moment you stopped being convenient, you stopped being loved.

1587
02:01:03,800 --> 02:01:07,960
Sitting with that fear, allowing it to be present without

1588
02:01:08,039 --> 02:01:11,920
immediately acting to dissolve it by reverting to the old

1589
02:01:12,039 --> 02:01:18,399
behavior is among the hardest things this process will ever

1590
02:01:18,640 --> 02:01:21,760
ask of you, and it is also, if you can

1591
02:01:21,800 --> 02:01:25,800
sustain it, the thing that will show you with definitive

1592
02:01:25,920 --> 02:01:31,680
clarity what was actually there. Because love that disappears the

1593
02:01:31,760 --> 02:01:35,960
moment you become genuinely yourself was not love of you.

1594
02:01:36,960 --> 02:01:43,920
And love that remains adjusted and perhaps initially uncomfortable, but

1595
02:01:44,159 --> 02:01:49,680
genuinely present is the only kind that ever actually counted.

1596
02:01:50,399 --> 02:01:56,880
Chapter fourteen, The Daily practice of valuing yourself. There is

1597
02:01:56,920 --> 02:02:01,039
a version of this process that people sometimes imagine when

1598
02:02:01,119 --> 02:02:05,520
they first begin to understand what people pleasing is and

1599
02:02:05,600 --> 02:02:09,079
why it needs to change. The version where you arrive,

1600
02:02:09,479 --> 02:02:13,960
after sufficient work at a permanent state of self possession

1601
02:02:14,279 --> 02:02:18,920
that does not require ongoing maintenance, where the patterns are

1602
02:02:18,920 --> 02:02:22,800
dissolved and the wounds are healed, and the new way

1603
02:02:22,840 --> 02:02:26,720
of being is so thoroughly established that it simply runs

1604
02:02:26,760 --> 02:02:31,920
without effort, the way a healthy habit eventually does. That

1605
02:02:32,079 --> 02:02:36,720
version is a comfort to imagine. It is also not

1606
02:02:36,840 --> 02:02:40,640
quite accurate, not because the growth is not real, not

1607
02:02:40,760 --> 02:02:44,239
because the patterns do not genuinely weaken and recede, but

1608
02:02:44,359 --> 02:02:47,920
because valuing yourself is not a state you arrive at

1609
02:02:48,159 --> 02:02:53,039
and then inhabit passively. It is something you practice every

1610
02:02:53,159 --> 02:02:57,800
day in the specific and unglamorous texture of ordinary life,

1611
02:02:58,159 --> 02:03:02,720
through small choices that accumulate over time into a fundamentally

1612
02:03:02,760 --> 02:03:07,560
different relationship with who you are. This chapter is about

1613
02:03:07,560 --> 02:03:11,880
what that practice actually looks like, not in the abstract,

1614
02:03:11,920 --> 02:03:15,079
but in the daily and the particular. It begins in

1615
02:03:15,119 --> 02:03:18,159
the morning, in the very first set of choices you

1616
02:03:18,239 --> 02:03:20,880
make before the day has imposed its full weight of

1617
02:03:20,920 --> 02:03:24,520
demand and expectation. What you choose to do with the

1618
02:03:24,560 --> 02:03:28,039
first portion of your day before other people's needs enter

1619
02:03:28,119 --> 02:03:32,079
the picture tells you something significant about how much you

1620
02:03:32,119 --> 02:03:37,600
are genuinely prioritizing your own experience. Not that mornings need

1621
02:03:37,640 --> 02:03:41,720
to be sacred or ritualized in any particular way, but

1622
02:03:41,840 --> 02:03:44,199
the question of whether you are beginning the day from

1623
02:03:44,239 --> 02:03:47,840
a place of genuine connection with your own needs and intentions,

1624
02:03:48,800 --> 02:03:52,560
or whether the first act of every day is already

1625
02:03:52,600 --> 02:03:56,560
the management of someone else's requirements, is a meaningful one.

1626
02:03:57,239 --> 02:04:01,319
People who have recovered from severe people pleasing often describe

1627
02:04:01,359 --> 02:04:04,680
the reclamation of some portion of the mourning for their

1628
02:04:04,720 --> 02:04:08,039
own mental and emotional calibration as one of the most

1629
02:04:08,079 --> 02:04:12,960
practically significant changes they made. Not because mornings are magical,

1630
02:04:13,000 --> 02:04:18,680
but because beginning from your own center, however briefly, creates

1631
02:04:18,840 --> 02:04:24,520
a different foundation for everything that follows. It continues through

1632
02:04:24,520 --> 02:04:27,960
the day in the quality of attention you bring to

1633
02:04:28,039 --> 02:04:33,520
your own internal experience. People pleasers have an extraordinarily well

1634
02:04:33,560 --> 02:04:38,239
developed capacity to monitor other people's states and a correspondingly

1635
02:04:38,520 --> 02:04:43,079
underdeveloped capacity to monitor their own. They know almost immediately

1636
02:04:43,119 --> 02:04:46,319
when someone around them is uncomfortable or displeased, or in

1637
02:04:46,399 --> 02:04:49,640
need of something. They often have no clear idea what

1638
02:04:49,760 --> 02:04:53,279
they themselves are feeling until the feeling has become so

1639
02:04:53,479 --> 02:04:57,399
strong it can no longer be ignored. The daily practice

1640
02:04:57,399 --> 02:05:03,239
of valuing yourself include developing a practice of regular, honest

1641
02:05:03,439 --> 02:05:09,319
self check ins, not elaborate or time consuming ones, simple

1642
02:05:09,720 --> 02:05:13,760
and direct ones. What am I feeling right now? What

1643
02:05:13,880 --> 02:05:17,359
do I need right now? Am I honoring those things

1644
02:05:17,399 --> 02:05:20,399
in how I am moving through this moment? Or am

1645
02:05:20,439 --> 02:05:25,399
I overriding them for reasons that no longer actually serve me?

1646
02:05:26,079 --> 02:05:32,159
These questions, asked with genuine curiosity several times across the day,

1647
02:05:33,119 --> 02:05:37,359
begin to rebuild the connection to your own interior experience

1648
02:05:37,880 --> 02:05:42,680
that years of externalizing your attention has eroded. The practice

1649
02:05:42,800 --> 02:05:47,479
includes the daily management of your commitments. People pleasers tend

1650
02:05:47,479 --> 02:05:51,319
to operate with calendars and schedules that are organized around

1651
02:05:51,359 --> 02:05:56,159
other people's needs and requests, with their own priorities consistently

1652
02:05:56,239 --> 02:06:00,439
placed in whatever space remains after every external demand has

1653
02:06:00,479 --> 02:06:07,279
been accommodated, which is often very little space. Indeed, changing

1654
02:06:07,359 --> 02:06:11,720
this requires the deliberate and ongoing practice of treating your

1655
02:06:11,760 --> 02:06:15,680
own commitments to yourself with the same seriousness you bring

1656
02:06:15,720 --> 02:06:18,640
to your commitments to others. If you have decided that

1657
02:06:18,760 --> 02:06:23,600
something matters to you, whether it is time for creative work,

1658
02:06:23,720 --> 02:06:29,960
or physical movement or simple unstructured rest, that commitment deserves

1659
02:06:30,000 --> 02:06:33,079
to be protected with the same degree of firmness you

1660
02:06:33,119 --> 02:06:36,880
would bring to a professional appointment or a promise made

1661
02:06:36,920 --> 02:06:40,840
to someone else. The idea that your commitments to yourself

1662
02:06:40,880 --> 02:06:44,760
are negotiable while your commitments to others are fixed is

1663
02:06:44,800 --> 02:06:48,279
one of the most practically damaging aspects of people pleasing

1664
02:06:48,640 --> 02:06:53,439
and reversing it requires consistent, deliberate practice rather than a

1665
02:06:53,479 --> 02:06:58,079
single decision. It includes the way you speak about yourself,

1666
02:06:59,079 --> 02:07:02,239
not in the perform coming humility way that people pleases

1667
02:07:02,319 --> 02:07:07,520
have often mastered. The way of preemptively diminishing yourself before

1668
02:07:07,600 --> 02:07:12,680
anyone else can, of prefacing your contributions with statements about

1669
02:07:12,720 --> 02:07:17,399
your own inadequacy, of framing your needs or perspectives as

1670
02:07:17,479 --> 02:07:22,680
probably wrong or potentially unreasonable before they have even been received.

1671
02:07:23,359 --> 02:07:26,640
That particular habit is a form of self abandonment performed

1672
02:07:26,680 --> 02:07:31,920
in language, and it perpetuates internally the same dynamic you

1673
02:07:32,000 --> 02:07:36,399
are trying to dismantle externally. The practice of speaking about

1674
02:07:36,399 --> 02:07:41,119
yourself with neutral honesty, not with inflated pride but without

1675
02:07:41,239 --> 02:07:46,520
reflexive diminishment is more demanding than it sounds, and more

1676
02:07:46,600 --> 02:07:51,279
consequential than it appears. The practice includes how you respond

1677
02:07:51,359 --> 02:07:57,399
to compliments. People. Pleasers are often extraordinarily uncomfortable receiving positive

1678
02:07:57,399 --> 02:08:02,479
acknowledgment from others, because receiving it requires a moment of

1679
02:08:02,520 --> 02:08:05,920
allowing something good to be true about you, a moment

1680
02:08:05,960 --> 02:08:10,520
of not deflecting or minimizing or immediately redirecting attention toward

1681
02:08:10,600 --> 02:08:15,119
the person offering the compliment. Learning to receive a compliment

1682
02:08:15,199 --> 02:08:20,000
with a simple, honest thank you is not a trivial thing.

1683
02:08:20,800 --> 02:08:23,279
It is a small act of allowing yourself to be

1684
02:08:23,359 --> 02:08:27,640
seen in something favorable and staying with that rather than

1685
02:08:27,680 --> 02:08:32,199
immediately collapsing it. It is a micropractice of tolerating your

1686
02:08:32,239 --> 02:08:35,960
own worth being reflected back at you without needing to

1687
02:08:36,039 --> 02:08:39,720
disprove it. The practice includes the choices you make when

1688
02:08:39,760 --> 02:08:43,880
you are tired, when your resources are depleted, and the

1689
02:08:43,960 --> 02:08:48,319
request arrives anyway, when someone needs something and the automatic

1690
02:08:48,359 --> 02:08:51,560
system says yes before the conscious one has a chance

1691
02:08:51,600 --> 02:08:56,840
to weigh in. Learning to pause in those moments, even fractionally,

1692
02:08:57,560 --> 02:09:02,159
and ask yourself whether you are agreeing because you want

1693
02:09:02,199 --> 02:09:06,239
to or because you are afraid not to, and then

1694
02:09:06,640 --> 02:09:10,880
acting on the honest answer, regardless of the discomfort it produces,

1695
02:09:11,439 --> 02:09:16,079
is perhaps the most important daily practice in this entire process,

1696
02:09:16,840 --> 02:09:20,000
because the moment of fatigue is the moment when the

1697
02:09:20,039 --> 02:09:24,279
old patterns have the least resistance to overcome, and it

1698
02:09:24,359 --> 02:09:27,119
is therefore the moment where the new ones are most

1699
02:09:27,239 --> 02:09:31,720
powerfully reinforced when they manage to show up. The practice

1700
02:09:31,920 --> 02:09:36,680
also includes the nightly reckoning. Not a harsh self audit,

1701
02:09:37,479 --> 02:09:40,479
not a catalog of every moment you failed to be

1702
02:09:40,560 --> 02:09:45,680
perfectly boundaried or perfectly self respecting, a gentle and honest

1703
02:09:45,760 --> 02:09:49,399
review of the day that simply asks, where did I

1704
02:09:49,439 --> 02:09:53,279
show up for myself to day? And where did I not?

1705
02:09:54,279 --> 02:09:59,199
What contributed to that? What might I do differently tomorrow?

1706
02:10:00,000 --> 02:10:04,199
Not to accumulate shame, but to accumulate data, to learn

1707
02:10:04,239 --> 02:10:08,199
the specific patterns of your own particular version of this struggle,

1708
02:10:08,479 --> 02:10:11,920
so that you can address them with increasing precision over time.

1709
02:10:12,640 --> 02:10:15,119
The person who goes to bed each night with a

1710
02:10:15,159 --> 02:10:19,199
slightly clearer understanding of their own patterns and a slightly

1711
02:10:19,359 --> 02:10:23,000
firmer intention to honor themselves in the next day's particular

1712
02:10:23,079 --> 02:10:28,600
challenges is a person who is building something real, slowly,

1713
02:10:29,479 --> 02:10:35,960
without drama, in the unglamorous consistency of the ordinary. That

1714
02:10:36,720 --> 02:10:42,039
is where the actual work happens, and that is where

1715
02:10:42,079 --> 02:10:46,640
the actual change is made. One final element of the

1716
02:10:46,720 --> 02:10:50,680
daily practice deserves mention, and it is the one most

1717
02:10:50,960 --> 02:10:54,520
likely to be underestimated. It is the practice of celebrating

1718
02:10:54,560 --> 02:10:58,680
your own progress, not loudly and not for anyone else's benefit,

1719
02:10:59,079 --> 02:11:05,399
but privately and honestly. People pleasers are often extraordinarily generous

1720
02:11:05,439 --> 02:11:10,840
in acknowledging other people's growth, and extraordinarily reluctant to acknowledge

1721
02:11:10,880 --> 02:11:16,319
their own. They minimize what they have accomplished, immediately move

1722
02:11:16,399 --> 02:11:20,359
the goal posts to the next challenge before giving any

1723
02:11:20,479 --> 02:11:25,119
real recognition to the one just cleared, and treat their

1724
02:11:25,119 --> 02:11:29,560
own development with a persistent stinginess of acknowledgment that they

1725
02:11:29,600 --> 02:11:33,479
would never apply to someone they cared about. The deliberate,

1726
02:11:33,840 --> 02:11:38,199
intentional practice of noticing when you have done something difficult

1727
02:11:38,520 --> 02:11:43,079
and honoring that fact, of saying to yourself, without irony

1728
02:11:43,199 --> 02:11:46,680
or qualification, that was hard, and I did it anyway,

1729
02:11:47,479 --> 02:11:52,319
is not self indulgence. It is the maintenance of the

1730
02:11:52,439 --> 02:11:58,720
internal conditions that make continued growth possible. You cannot sustain

1731
02:11:58,960 --> 02:12:03,079
effort in a direct action that you never acknowledge. Moving in.

1732
02:12:03,920 --> 02:12:08,800
Notice the movement, let it matter. It is evidence that

1733
02:12:08,840 --> 02:12:14,279
the person you are becoming is real Chapter fifteen, The

1734
02:12:14,359 --> 02:12:19,319
person you were always meant to be. There is a

1735
02:12:19,399 --> 02:12:22,800
version of you that has been waiting, not in some

1736
02:12:23,159 --> 02:12:29,039
mystical sense, not in some predetermined destiny that was always

1737
02:12:29,079 --> 02:12:33,319
fixed and has simply been delayed, but in the practical

1738
02:12:33,640 --> 02:12:36,720
and very real sense that there are dimensions of who

1739
02:12:36,800 --> 02:12:40,479
you are, capacities and qualities and ways of being in

1740
02:12:40,520 --> 02:12:43,840
the world that have been held in suspension by the

1741
02:12:43,880 --> 02:12:49,239
people pleasing pattern, waiting for enough safety to emerge, waiting

1742
02:12:49,239 --> 02:12:52,840
for the moment when the cost of continuing to suppress

1743
02:12:52,920 --> 02:12:56,840
them finally exceeded the cost of allowing them to surface.

1744
02:12:57,720 --> 02:13:02,479
That moment is now, and what surfaces when the performance

1745
02:13:02,560 --> 02:13:07,880
is finally released, when the role is finally relinquished, when

1746
02:13:07,920 --> 02:13:12,680
the continuous management of other people's comfort is no longer.

1747
02:13:12,760 --> 02:13:17,600
The primary organizing activity of your life is not a stranger.

1748
02:13:18,560 --> 02:13:23,119
It is someone you recognize. It is in some essential

1749
02:13:23,159 --> 02:13:27,520
way that you may not have expected to feel so clearly.

1750
02:13:28,439 --> 02:13:31,840
You but let us talk about what it actually means

1751
02:13:31,880 --> 02:13:36,840
to be that person, because this is a chapter about arrival,

1752
02:13:37,520 --> 02:13:40,680
about what you are arriving at and what life looks

1753
02:13:40,800 --> 02:13:43,960
like and feels like on the far side of this work,

1754
02:13:44,680 --> 02:13:48,760
not to romanticize it, not to make it seem simpler

1755
02:13:48,880 --> 02:13:52,039
or more peaceful than it is, but to give you

1756
02:13:52,159 --> 02:13:56,439
the clearest possible picture of what this whole process has

1757
02:13:56,520 --> 02:14:00,840
been building toward. The first thing that characterized the person

1758
02:14:00,920 --> 02:14:03,520
on the other side of this work is a quality

1759
02:14:03,560 --> 02:14:07,600
of presence, a way of being in a room, in

1760
02:14:07,640 --> 02:14:13,560
a conversation, in any given moment that is qualitatively different

1761
02:14:14,000 --> 02:14:17,880
from what people pleasing allows. When you are not dividing

1762
02:14:17,920 --> 02:14:21,000
your attention between your own experience and the surveillance of

1763
02:14:21,039 --> 02:14:27,439
everyone else's, you are simply here in the interaction, in

1764
02:14:27,479 --> 02:14:32,199
the relationship, in the experience itself, rather than in the

1765
02:14:32,239 --> 02:14:36,960
monitoring of it. This quality of genuine presence is not

1766
02:14:37,199 --> 02:14:41,880
just pleasant for you. It is something other people feel.

1767
02:14:42,000 --> 02:14:44,920
It is what makes some people magnetic in ways that

1768
02:14:44,960 --> 02:14:48,439
have nothing to do with performance or charm or strategic

1769
02:14:48,479 --> 02:14:53,159
impression management. It is the unmistakable quality of a person

1770
02:14:53,399 --> 02:15:00,840
who is actually there, actually themselves, actually available in the

1771
02:15:01,039 --> 02:15:05,520
deepest sense of that word, and it is only available

1772
02:15:05,560 --> 02:15:08,119
to you when you are no longer spending most of

1773
02:15:08,119 --> 02:15:11,359
your resources on the management of an image. The second

1774
02:15:11,399 --> 02:15:15,840
thing is a different relationship to your own emotions. People

1775
02:15:15,880 --> 02:15:20,840
pleasers have typically been suppressing significant portions of their emotional

1776
02:15:20,920 --> 02:15:25,239
experience for a very long time, most notably the ones

1777
02:15:25,319 --> 02:15:33,159
that feel socially risky to display anger, disappointment, grief, genuine fear,

1778
02:15:34,079 --> 02:15:38,359
the specific kind of vulnerability that comes with expressing a

1779
02:15:38,479 --> 02:15:44,680
need directly. As the pleasing pattern loosens, those emotions become

1780
02:15:44,800 --> 02:15:50,520
more available, more accessible, And while this can initially feel destabilizing,

1781
02:15:51,000 --> 02:15:53,920
like a damn releasing pressure that had been building for years,

1782
02:15:55,000 --> 02:15:59,399
it moves over time towards something far more valuable, toward

1783
02:15:59,479 --> 02:16:03,399
a relationhiphip with your own emotional life that is integrated

1784
02:16:03,479 --> 02:16:07,760
rather than managed, where you feel what you actually feel

1785
02:16:08,159 --> 02:16:11,079
and can name it and can respond to it in

1786
02:16:11,159 --> 02:16:15,840
ways that are appropriate to its actual scale, without either

1787
02:16:15,920 --> 02:16:21,359
suppressing it entirely or being overwhelmed by the accumulated backlog

1788
02:16:21,479 --> 02:16:25,279
of everything you never allowed yourself to express. The third

1789
02:16:25,359 --> 02:16:30,680
thing is confidence, not the performance of confidence, which is

1790
02:16:30,680 --> 02:16:35,520
a very common substitute and looks in many ways like

1791
02:16:35,600 --> 02:16:39,399
the real thing from the outside, but the specific and

1792
02:16:39,559 --> 02:16:45,440
quiet and actually quite different internal experience of genuinely trusting yourself,

1793
02:16:45,719 --> 02:16:49,120
Trusting that you can handle the situations that arise, that

1794
02:16:49,239 --> 02:16:52,920
you can navigate conflict without it destroying you, that you

1795
02:16:52,959 --> 02:16:56,280
can be wrong and recover from it, that you can

1796
02:16:56,319 --> 02:17:02,639
disappoint someone and remain standing. You can encounter disapproval and

1797
02:17:02,799 --> 02:17:07,879
continue acting in alignment with your own values regardless. This

1798
02:17:08,040 --> 02:17:11,639
kind of trust is not built through positive thinking or

1799
02:17:11,719 --> 02:17:16,120
through the repetition of affirmations. It is built through repeated

1800
02:17:16,200 --> 02:17:20,920
experience of being tested and surviving, through the accumulation of

1801
02:17:20,959 --> 02:17:24,159
evidence that you are more resilient and more capable than

1802
02:17:24,200 --> 02:17:27,520
the people pleasing pattern allowed you to discover, And that

1803
02:17:27,600 --> 02:17:30,760
evidence is built through exactly the kind of choices this

1804
02:17:31,079 --> 02:17:34,799
entire process has been preparing you to make. The fourth

1805
02:17:34,840 --> 02:17:38,040
thing is a change in what you find yourself attracting.

1806
02:17:38,879 --> 02:17:42,879
This is not magic, and it is not a metaphysical claim.

1807
02:17:43,120 --> 02:17:47,319
It is a straightforward consequence of becoming genuinely more yourself.

1808
02:17:48,000 --> 02:17:50,840
When you are no longer performing a version of yourself

1809
02:17:51,000 --> 02:17:56,040
optimized for maximum acceptability, you become visible to a different

1810
02:17:56,120 --> 02:17:59,840
set of people. The people who found the performance useful

1811
02:18:00,040 --> 02:18:02,879
but felt nothing real for the person underneath it begin

1812
02:18:03,000 --> 02:18:06,639
to drift away or to lose interest, and the people

1813
02:18:06,639 --> 02:18:10,680
who are always looking for something genuine, who are themselves

1814
02:18:10,840 --> 02:18:14,159
genuine enough to recognize and value it when they encounter it,

1815
02:18:14,959 --> 02:18:19,319
begin to move closer. The relationships you form from your

1816
02:18:19,319 --> 02:18:24,200
authentic self are built on entirely different foundations from the

1817
02:18:24,200 --> 02:18:29,879
ones built on your accommodation. They are chosen rather than

1818
02:18:29,920 --> 02:18:35,440
defaulted into. They are reciprocal rather than extractive. They are

1819
02:18:35,600 --> 02:18:40,120
honest in ways that produce real closeness rather than comfortable

1820
02:18:40,239 --> 02:18:46,520
but ultimately hollow familiarity. The fifth thing, and perhaps the

1821
02:18:46,559 --> 02:18:50,959
hardest to fully describe, because it is more felt than conceptual,

1822
02:18:51,879 --> 02:18:55,600
is a sense of being on your own side. People

1823
02:18:55,639 --> 02:18:59,520
pleasers are, in a very practical and very significant sense,

1824
02:18:59,799 --> 02:19:04,959
not on their own side. Their internal monologue is not supportive.

1825
02:19:05,639 --> 02:19:10,120
It is critical, vigilant, perpetually scanning for signs that they

1826
02:19:10,159 --> 02:19:16,799
have failed to be sufficiently accommodating, sufficiently, acceptable, sufficiently whatever

1827
02:19:16,879 --> 02:19:21,280
the current situation seems to require. The voice inside the

1828
02:19:21,319 --> 02:19:24,639
head of a person deep in people pleasing is not

1829
02:19:24,760 --> 02:19:29,159
a kind one. It is a demanding one, always asking

1830
02:19:29,239 --> 02:19:32,639
whether you did enough, whether you said the right thing,

1831
02:19:33,479 --> 02:19:39,079
whether you managed the situation adequately, whether someone somewhere has

1832
02:19:39,120 --> 02:19:42,559
been given grounds to be disappointed in you. On the

1833
02:19:42,600 --> 02:19:47,479
other side of this work, that voice changes, not immediately,

1834
02:19:47,920 --> 02:19:53,280
and not completely, and not without effort and attention, but gradually,

1835
02:19:53,639 --> 02:19:57,239
with the same consistency of practice applied to everything else.

1836
02:19:58,159 --> 02:20:03,280
It becomes something closer to an ally than an auditor,

1837
02:20:03,280 --> 02:20:07,280
something that notices when you are struggling and responds with

1838
02:20:07,360 --> 02:20:12,680
something closer to kindness than accusation. Something that is, for

1839
02:20:12,719 --> 02:20:17,159
the first time, genuinely on your side. This is what

1840
02:20:17,239 --> 02:20:21,159
you have been working toward, through every difficult conversation and

1841
02:20:21,360 --> 02:20:25,159
every held limit, and every moment of sitting with discomfort

1842
02:20:25,520 --> 02:20:29,040
rather than rushing to dissolve it. Not a perfect life,

1843
02:20:29,440 --> 02:20:32,520
or a life without complexity, or a life in which

1844
02:20:32,600 --> 02:20:38,639
the old patterns never surface again. They will surface, particularly

1845
02:20:38,719 --> 02:20:42,559
under stress, particularly in the contexts where they were most

1846
02:20:42,639 --> 02:20:47,559
deeply formed. The pull back toward the familiar will be felt,

1847
02:20:48,200 --> 02:20:52,319
but the experience of that pull will be different. You

1848
02:20:52,399 --> 02:20:55,200
will feel it and be able to recognize it for

1849
02:20:55,280 --> 02:21:00,079
what it is, a reflex rather than a truth, an

1850
02:21:00,120 --> 02:21:02,959
old signal from a system that was built for a

1851
02:21:03,000 --> 02:21:06,559
different version of your life, and you will have something

1852
02:21:06,639 --> 02:21:09,600
you did not have before. You will have a choice.

1853
02:21:10,000 --> 02:21:12,920
The person you were always meant to be is not

1854
02:21:13,079 --> 02:21:17,200
some idealized and frictionless version of a human being. It

1855
02:21:17,280 --> 02:21:21,200
is not someone who has transcended difficulty, or who never doubts,

1856
02:21:21,520 --> 02:21:26,200
or who moves through every situation with unshakable certainty. It

1857
02:21:26,280 --> 02:21:31,040
is someone who is honest, honest with other people, and

1858
02:21:31,200 --> 02:21:35,360
honest with themselves. Someone who knows what they value and

1859
02:21:35,520 --> 02:21:39,159
lives in alignment with it as consistently as they are able.

1860
02:21:39,760 --> 02:21:42,760
Someone who takes up the space in this world that

1861
02:21:42,879 --> 02:21:47,959
belongs to them, not aggressively or at anyone else's expense,

1862
02:21:48,840 --> 02:21:54,239
but fully and without apology. Someone whose relationships are real

1863
02:21:54,680 --> 02:21:58,639
because their presence in them is real. Someone who wakes

1864
02:21:58,719 --> 02:22:01,399
up and moves through their death with the specific and

1865
02:22:01,600 --> 02:22:06,479
irreplaceable satisfaction of living as themselves, rather than as a

1866
02:22:06,600 --> 02:22:09,760
version of themselves constructed for an audience that was never

1867
02:22:09,879 --> 02:22:12,959
going to love the performance the way they deserved to

1868
02:22:13,000 --> 02:22:16,840
be loved. You spent a very long time believing that

1869
02:22:16,879 --> 02:22:21,040
the path to being loved ran through making yourself acceptable

1870
02:22:21,079 --> 02:22:27,879
to everyone around you, through shrinking, accommodating, suppressing and performing

1871
02:22:28,559 --> 02:22:33,600
that belief was understandable. It was formed in circumstances where

1872
02:22:33,639 --> 02:22:37,680
it felt true and necessary, but it was always, at

1873
02:22:37,840 --> 02:22:41,399
every point in your life, a substitute for the thing

1874
02:22:41,479 --> 02:22:44,680
you were actually looking for, And the thing you were

1875
02:22:44,799 --> 02:22:50,079
actually looking for was never available through that route. It

1876
02:22:50,200 --> 02:22:54,280
was only ever available through this one, through the slow,

1877
02:22:54,719 --> 02:23:01,200
sometimes painful, ultimately irreplaceable process of becoming real, of learning

1878
02:23:01,239 --> 02:23:06,280
to value yourself honestly and consistently and without requiring any

1879
02:23:06,280 --> 02:23:09,719
one else's permission to do so, of showing up in

1880
02:23:09,799 --> 02:23:13,360
your own life as the person who was there all along,

1881
02:23:14,479 --> 02:23:18,719
waiting to be allowed out. That person is here now,

1882
02:23:18,840 --> 02:23:21,040
and this is where their story begins,