Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast where each week we talk to you about a topic to help you with the ups and downs and ins and outs of your career to give you some ideas for action and also just a little bit of support along the way to help you with some of the challenges that we all face in our squiggly careers.

And this week we're talking about a topic we know resonates because we asked our community about it.

And that is the idea of people pleasing and how we can stop it from getting in our way at work.

So let's just start off with what it is, why we do it, because let's face it, most of us do it at some point.

And then we will, as always with the podcast, spend the majority of our time thinking about

how do we stop doing it or maybe just do it a bit less, might be a more realistic ambition.

So people pleasing is when you put other people's needs ahead of your own and we do it often to seek

approval from other people and it is really worth watching a school of life video that we'll link to in

the resources which does go a bit deeper into the psychology behind people pleasing because often

it's a behavior that we learn when we're a kid but then we

unconsciously bring it into our kind of grown-up life almost without realizing that's what's

happening and it is possible to be pleasant and helpful and kind and caring without being a people

pleaser. I think maybe those are the two almost contradictions that

perhaps we have in our minds when we're thinking about these things is we want to still be all

of those really good qualities, but without feeling like we're always putting other people's

needs ahead of our own. Because if we do that, that's when you feel emotionally drained.

It's when you get really stressed.

You feel really burnt out.

And we ask people on Instagram, how many of you recognize this as a behaviour in yourself?

And it was like over 80%.

So pretty much everyone said, I would describe myself as a people pleaser at least some of the time.

And people are giving lots of examples of how that

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