Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘People-pleasing tendencies develop for different specific reasons, but right at the core of all of them lies a fundamental denial of what it means to be a limited human being. When it comes to the challenge of building a meaningful life, it’s easy enough to see that our limited quantity of time is a major stumbling block. (A vast proportion of conventional productivity advice consists of techniques for maintaining the illusion that you might, one day, find a way to fit everything in.) But we’re saddled with many other limitations, too, including the one that makes people-pleasing such an absurd and fruitless endeavour – which is that we don’t have nearly as much control over other people or their emotions as we might wish. Essentially, it’s a form of perfectionism, a felt need to perfectly curate what’s going on inside other people’s heads, if you’re ever to let yourself relax or feel secure…

What I eventually figured out – not that it ever seems to get particularly easy – is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems.

It bears emphasising that the people you’re worried might be angry with you, disappointed in you or bored by you almost never actually are. They’ve got their own troubles to worry about. According to stereotype, people-pleasers are self-effacing sorts, constantly putting others ahead of themselves – and yet there’s something strikingly grandiose and self-absorbed in the notion that your boss, client or colleague has nothing better to do than pace up and down all day, thinking bad thoughts about you. Or, by the same token, that your presence at a social gathering is so utterly consequential that it has the power to ruin it for anyone else. As the novelist Leila Sales observes, poking fun at this tendency in herself: “It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.” (I think it’s also worth noting that on the mercifully few occasions in adulthood that another adult actually has exploded in rage at me, it had never occurred to me for a moment that they might be angry at all. Clearly, I’d been worrying about the wrong people.)

But what if someone genuinely is furious, disappointed or otherwise upset with you? Still – at the most fundamental level – not your problem. This isn’t to endorse the “ignore the haters!” mentality one sometimes encounters from self-help gurus, according to which you should disregard other people’s emotions as a matter of principle. Nor is it carte blanche to be a jerk to others, treating them like dirt before sauntering away, complacently reassuring yourself that you needn’t take responsibility for the feelings you just triggered. The point, instead, is simply that it’s a fool’s errand – and a flagrant denial of your finite power over reality – to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on the knowledge that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.’ (from The Guardian)