The Product of What Others Want

It’s 4:00 am again. I rarely need an alarm to wake me at that hour anymore.

4 or 5 hours of sleep is never enough, but I’m awake.

With my headlamp fully charged and snug around my skull, I enjoy a run at that unholy hour a few times a week.

I’m generally home, prepped for the day, and on my way to the office before much of the area where I live has woken up.

I work hard at my day job, falling a little bit further behind in my workload each day.

Someday, maybe, we’ll hire some extra help, if there’s help to be hired.

Until then, I do the work of three people.

I rarely say no, and that’s my biggest problem.

Being a people pleaser is a fool’s errand. It’s taken me a lot of years to learn that lesson. Even knowing the lesson, however, I continue trying to please as many people as I can.

In the short term, being a people pleaser makes people like you, but in the long run it’s damaging to relationships, mental health, and the ability to get stuff done.

So much stuff.

Work is important as a means to provide for the basic necessities of life, but it can also be a leach: something that will suck every ounce of energy you’re willing to give it.

Employment doesn’t stand alone in that category. You ever spend time with friends when all you really needed was to go to bed an hour early? The list of social engagements and family pressures will grow unbounded if you let it.

Darius Foroux said it best:

In our endless quest to please the people in our lives, we become the product of what others want.

It’s a punchy one-liner but it doesn’t stand alone on its own merits. Society exists because of people who are willing to sacrifice something of themselves for the greater good of humanity. If everyone spent all their time in selfish pursuits, societies could not function.

It should be apparent. Balance is required, but balance isn’t easy.

Several years ago, I attended a presentation where the presenter entered the stage with a series of handsprings, backflips, and an assortment of other acrobatic maneuvers that I can’t name. Later in his presentation, he rode a unicycle while juggling machetes.

His skills were quite impressive. Developing those skills, as he pointed out, required him to live life off balance on purpose for a long time. He talked about the amount of time he spent just trying to learn how to ride a unicycle. Once he had mastered that, he introduced juggling which required him to learn how to ride the unicycle all over again. The acrobatics came with years of falling, painful injuries, and time away from his wife and children.

Living life off balance on purpose.

Ironically, striking an off balance balance is, in itself, a balancing act. Emotional intelligence might dictate that it’s wrong to expect others to show up in a particular way in our lives. However, it’s important in our most intimate relationships to anticipate and meet the needs of those around us, likely showing up in the ways they want (and need) us to because we want to.

I show up as provider for my family, first because I made that commitment to my wife more than 22 years ago. Second, however, is because I know she needs me to show up that way. If I weren’t here, she would figure things out because she’s a very capable and resourceful person, but our marital agreement is that as long as I am able, I will provide for her and our children.

Even in such an arrangement as this, there are still times when I may not show up in ways outside the agreement that my wife expects me to. We make agreements with employers to show up in a certain way in exchange for money. There may be (and often are) instances where employers expect employees to show up in certain ways that’s not part of the “contract” either.

Where significant practice is required, then, is in learning how to be what someone else wants or needs you to be because it aligns with who you already want to be. It’s also learning how to say no to being something someone else wants you to be when that something doesn’t align with your own goals. These are goals that exist outside the bounds of mutually agreed upon terms of our relationships.

The key is to avoid creating a situation so beautifully encapsulated by the actor Anne Hathaway:

There’s something very addictive about people pleasing. It’s a thought pattern and a habit that feels really, really good until it becomes desperate.

It’s more art than science, requiring daily practice to gain some level of mastery. While you learn, you might continue to be a people pleaser. Remember to go easy on yourself. Those machetes are sharp.