When People-Pleasing Becomes a Survival Mechanism (And steps to help ourselves)

There’s a moment in a subjective sport right before the judges’ marks come up that is so intimate and honest.

No matter how hard an athlete tries to seem neutral in that moment—a calm smile on their face, a distracted conversation with their coaches—their eyes tend to reveal the weight of the next few minutes.

Sometimes they’ll appear to quietly pray, their hands clasped together, as the fate of a possible Olympic team, a medal—their professional future—sits completely out of their control.

Other times, their neck may be lowered, their gaze on their lap, a grimace on their face after a tough performance. Yet there’s often a bit of hope that appears when the announcer prepares the arena for the marks to be read. Their eyes may dart up pleadingly, wondering if their own disapproval of their performance was harsher than the judges’.

As an athlete, this is one of your most vulnerable moments.

You’ve trained. You’ve performed. You’ve done your job.

And now it all comes down to: Did they like me?

When you grow up competing in a subjective sport, gaining the acceptance of a panel of strangers has been the goal since your first competition. To be liked by the judges means you’ll be granted the medals and the success you’re seeking. Through the years, you learn no matter how hard you train or how well you perform, ultimately your results depend on the approval of others.

Often, when an athlete retires, they aren’t yet aware of how deeply this mindset has permeated other areas of their life. When you’ve spent most of your life up until that point focused on appealing to and meeting the expectations of others—whether through media training, your choice of costumes, hair, makeup, music or choreography—it can be really hard to suddenly shut off this people-pleasing mindset.

But why is it so hard? Once we logically know that we no longer need to please a panel of strangers, why can we often see the same pattern playing out in new areas of our lives? And, perhaps more important, what are some ways we help ourselves start to change this pattern?

When we’ve spent most of our lives competing in a subjective sport, we may start to believe pleasing others is how we gain emotional security and self-worth. The belief that our happiness is dependent on others liking us may slowly develop, and because we ultimately can’t control everyone’s—or anyone’s—perception of us, an undercurrent of anxiety and powerlessness may present.

The people-pleasing lens is distorted because it minimizes our power and magnifies the power of others. Once we realize this, the goal is to replace this lens with one that allows us to see our current reality clearly: we are not dependent on the approval of others to feel emotionally secure and to achieve what we desire in our lives; emotional security and self-worth are found within ourselves.

Because people-pleasing wasn’t born overnight—it was trained and ingrained over years of repetition—we want to be patient with ourselves as we deliberately view the world through this new lens. This requires practice. We want to practice intentionally choosing new beliefs that affirm power and internal security as qualities we provide ourselves rather than qualities to be earned through external validation. To do this, it can be helpful to increase awareness of our thoughts and to slowly start to challenge beliefs that no longer serve us.

For example, if someone doesn’t like how we dress, how we act or our opinions—if someone doesn’t like us in general—it doesn’t mean we are experiencing the same threat that came from low marks at a competition or missing out on a competitive achievement (even if it initially feels that way). Instead, we want to affirm the belief that someone’s disapproval can be taken as feedback, and our power isn’t dependent on their approval; it’s in our ability to choose how we want to respond to the situation.

At first, these new beliefs won’t feel right. This doesn’t mean they aren’t accurate, though. Changing limiting beliefs can be unsettling, so it's important to be patient and compassionate with ourselves.  This starts with small but consistent actions to strengthen self-trust and deliberately begin listening to what we want and need. If someone doesn’t like our opinions, our choices or our feelings, we maintain the boundary that we won’t abandon ourselves to try to please them. Instead, we will validate how we feel and treat ourselves with kindness. By doing this, we are teaching our nervous systems that others can disagree with us, and we are safe.

Because perhaps the most dominant area of your life growing up was curated to please someone outside of yourself, it would be unreasonable to expect to completely shut off this mindset once you are no longer competing or performing. It takes time to shift old patterns of thinking, to know on a gut level you don’t need external approval to achieve a life that feels successful and emotionally satisfying. It takes time to teach yourself that the things you want come from within, and that you can trust yourself to take care of yourself in the face of others’ disappointment or disapproval. While listening to feedback from those closest to us is valuable, learning to emotionally validate ourselves and claim our personal power is essential—and it never has to be earned through external approval.

The content on this blog is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy. The content does not replace a therapeutic relationship with a licensed mental health professional.