Ready to Reclaim Your Energy? Embracing Authenticity Over People-Pleasing: My Transformation Journey Unveiled

Have you ever caught yourself agreeing just to avoid conflict, or saying 'yes' when your heart screams 'no'?  I've grappled with the exhausting dance of people-pleasing. This episode offers a raw look into the personal and professional transformation I experienced as I transitioned from the tiresome pursuit of others' approval to embracing my own authenticity. I'll guide you through the early developmental roots of these patterns and how they can infiltrate your work life, sometimes disguised as customer satisfaction principles. But more importantly, I'll show you how breaking free can redefine your business and client relationships, aligning them with your true values.

Imagine the energy you could reclaim by releasing the need to please everyone – that's the journey I embarked on, and it's the one I'm inviting you to join. As I share my own shift from energy drain to personal power in my coaching practice, you'll understand the importance of prioritizing your authenticity. The realization that not every follower is destined for your path can be a blessing in disguise, offering liberation and space for those who resonate with your genuine self. I'll illustrate how true empowerment in business comes from operating with integrity, and how this mindset can inspire clients to step into their own power.

Let's confront the fear that often anchors us in people-pleasing behaviors and discover how authenticity can catalyze both personal and business growth. In this episode, you'll hear how I tackled these deeply ingrained patterns, paving the way for a business operation rooted in fulfillment and impact. We'll discuss the continuous nature of self-improvement and the essential role of self-compassion on this journey. It's time to move beyond survival tactics and thrive with purpose. So, if you're ready for a change that resonates with who you truly are, this is the message you've been waiting for.

Transcript

Michelle Dowker: 1:12

Welcome to Inner Purpose, a podcast for highly ambitious, sensitive entrepreneurs like you who've experienced a spiritual inner awakening and are now navigating the path to pivot their businesses. I'm your guide, michelle Dowker, intuitive Business Pivot Mentor. Here we embark on a transformative journey where your inner expansion meets business evolution. This podcast is a sanctuary for the trailblazers, the cyclebreakers and the conscious leaders seeking to align with their deepest soul calling Together. We explore the fusion of financial success, time freedom, abundant energy and inner fulfillment, all while making a meaningful impact for the greater good. Get ready for profound conversations, deep reflections and a pathway to unlocking your inner purpose. I'm Michelle Dauker and this is the Inner Purpose Podcast. Hello and welcome back. I am so glad you're here.

Michelle Dowker: 2:19

Today's episode we're talking about people pleasing. I'm going to be exploring the tendency to people please and look at some of the deeper layers of why. Most of my clients have already become familiar with people pleasing in their own lives and have done some important work to shift it. However, there's always deeper layers to uncover and, especially for myself, I discovered that the deepest layers of all when it came to people pleasing, showed up in how I was running my business. I'm going to talk about how my business and the impact I was able to provide was diluted when I was operating from this survival behavior and what I did to turn it around for myself and how that improved everything about my work for myself and for the people that I guide. What is people pleasing? This is not a technical definition, but it's this tendency to want to make sure that the people around us are good, to make sure that the people around us are happy, comfortable or, at the very least, not upset with us or won't reject us. It's a safety mechanism. It's a coping and a survival skill that I know for myself and for the people that I've worked with is something that was developed very early on in life. This is something that's usually a behavior pattern that we start, usually by the time we reach eight years of age.

Michelle Dowker: 3:52

The first eight years of life are developmental years and the experiences that we have during those times and the meanings that we put to those experiences set up beliefs about ourselves, about other people, about the world, about how life works. Oftentimes I know this is the case for me, so I'll talk from my own personal experience here. For myself, in those developmental years there was a lot of emotional unpredictability, emotional volatility and that didn't feel safe. In order to try to find some semblance of safety, I felt that I needed to change how I acted and responded to other people in order to try to minimize emotional volatility, in order to regulate the emotions of the adults in my life and also to avoid rejection or abandonment. This was both with the adults in my life as well as my peer group, because I didn't really fit in. I'll talk about that in another episode. Why that was.

Michelle Dowker: 5:05

There's a lot of different layers to that, of course. To feel rejected and to not fit in during those prime developmental years does not feel safe. If you don't fit into your tribe, there's this instinctual need to try to fit in so that you don't get pushed out of the tribe and now you have to survive on your own. For me, I used to prioritize a lot other people's demands, other people's preferences, other people's opinions over and above my own, because I believed, because of the experiences that I had, that my experiences were not valid, my opinions were not worthwhile and that other people were better than me. Throughout my life, I had this coping survival mechanism of people pleasing, prioritizing others before myself. Then, as an adolescent, I stepped into the job world and my first real job was working at McDonald's. There's a mentality there of the customer is always right. When you take that and layer it on top of the already people pleasing tendency that I already had developed, there was this belief that I developed from that that when you run a business, the customer is always right. You have to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. I took these experiences and the beliefs and carried them forward with me in all the different iterations of my career. If you've listened to one of my previous episodes, I've talked about all the different career pivots and changes that I've made, to the point where I ended up going back to school and becoming a naturopathic doctor.

Michelle Dowker: 6:53

Here I was as a clinical naturopathic doctor and I was a people pleaser. I wanted to make sure that my patients were happy with me. I would over give, I would do whatever it took to make sure that I was not rejected, to make sure that they were not upset with me or what I was doing, because there was a belief that if they didn't like what I did, then that meant there was something wrong with me, that meant that I wasn't good enough, that meant that I wasn't valuable. And of course the truth is that that's not true. If I'm operating from a place of authenticity and integrity and somebody is not resonating with that and they don't like what I'm doing, that speaks more to the fact that likely we're not a good match to be working with each other. If I'm not purposefully trying to not do the work, if I'm purposely doing a bad job, that's another story.

Michelle Dowker: 7:50

But at that time, back then, I used to think that that meant something about me. But what I realize now is that if somebody doesn't like what I'm doing, if they don't like the results that they're getting, if they don't like what I'm saying, if they don't like how I'm working, as I mentioned A, we're likely not an aligned fit to work together. And B, what I've come to realize through my own inner work is, more often than not, when somebody is having a reaction, that reaction is based on their own inner perspectives, their own inner world, their own inner emotional terrain and their own projections, and usually have very little to do with me. And the same goes for you. If other people are reacting to you, more often than not those reactions have everything to do with them and their own emotional reactions, their own projections and very little to do with you.

Michelle Dowker: 8:46

This was one piece of the puzzle in terms of a perspective shift that helped me to shift away from this people pleasing, because this survival mechanism of people pleasing, while it helped me get through really challenging situations, especially in my developmental years, was actually holding me back, because what helps you to survive is not going to be the thing that helps you to thrive. And prioritizing others above yourself, twisting yourself around like a pretzel to try to make other people happy or to avoid them having emotional reactions or projections. It leaks your power. It leaves you feeling not satisfied with what you're doing, because you're not actually doing what you want. You're doing what you think that other people want and it's technically manipulation. This was another perspective shift that really helped me to change.

Michelle Dowker: 9:42

This tendency within me is recognizing that when I'm people pleasing, when I'm trying to change myself, to impact other people's emotional responses to me, when I am overgiving, overextending myself, changing what I'm doing in order to try to avoid rejection, in order to try to get people to like me, that's manipulation and if I want to be acting out of integrity and authenticity, I do not want to be manipulating people, and that really opened my eyes and made me recognize okay, I see now what this is about, and I see this truth Now. The key, though, is, once I saw this, is it's not now about berating myself or shaming myself or the fact that I've manipulated people in my past to try to find a sense of safety within myself because it was all out of survival. Moving forward in a state of thriving means giving yourself compassion, recognizing that whatever I did, I did to the best of my knowledge and ability. I did to try to gain some semblance of safety or to meet my developmental needs, even if it doesn't make logical sense. So part of what I did was having some compassionate conversations with myself.

Michelle Dowker: 11:08

Once I started to see this truth and go okay, I see now what's actually happening, and I appreciate that I was doing this people pleasing, prioritizing others, trying to manage what I'm doing, to try to control other people's reactions of me, I realized I was doing this to try to keep myself safe, and I thanked myself for doing that. There is no use in shaming myself for what I did in the past, because the past is done and I was just trying to keep myself safe and it does not do anyone any good for me to shame myself, because that doesn't actually help anything. The next part of my conversation with myself was saying okay, now I see this different perspective and while I was trying to keep myself safe in the past, I see now that there's a different way. There's a different way to thrive. I no longer just want to survive, I want to be me, I want to be authentic and I want to be acting out of integrity. And I recognize and realize now that if somebody doesn't like that, then that just means that they're not a fit for me and I'm not going to try to twist myself around like a pretzel to try to get them to like me or accept me or not reject me. They're going to do what they're going to do and that's not my responsibility, and their emotional reactions to me are not my responsibility. The only responsibility I have is my own action, and if I want to act out of authenticity and integrity, then I need to not manipulate people or try to. Instead, what's important is for me to identify what I want, who I am and what works best for me, and to speak my truth with honesty, even if not everybody likes it, because not everybody will.

Michelle Dowker: 13:03

When I ventured online with my online coaching at the beginning of this journey, I was still people pleasing. I was doing whatever I could to make sure that people liked me and I was trying to be everything for everybody, no matter who it was, no matter where they were, no matter if they were a match or a fit to work with me or not. I was doing whatever I could to make sure that they were happy. And that didn't work out so well because I was leaking my power and I wasn't being authentic. And people can feel that and I realize that now and I can see that now and I can see that it was hurting my business. I thought at the time that that's what I needed to do in order to have a successful business was to make sure that the customer is always happy with you, to make sure that they're never gonna be upset with you. And I recognize now that that is operating a business out of survival and that is not the way to enjoy operating your business and that is not the way to be operating your business and doing work from your deeper sense of inner purpose right, which is what this podcast is all about.

Michelle Dowker: 14:12

As I navigated my inner healing journey, as I've talked about in a previous episode and I'll talk about again, and I was starting to see these truths about the fact that A other people's reactions are not my responsibility. My only responsibility is my own actions. B this perspective shift that when I'm not being authentic, when I'm not being myself, when I'm hiding myself or when I'm doing whatever I think the other person needs or wants in order to be happy or to avoid them rejecting me or criticizing me, that's actually technically manipulative. I'm saying it again because the more you hear it, the more you go oh, yeah, okay, this is the thing. The things that I talk about bear repeating, and every time that you hear it, you're going to see it from a different perspective. And every time I repeat it, you're going to get it from a different perspective. So sometimes you're gonna hear me repeat things, and that's why. Okay. So what changed when I decided that I am no longer going to take responsibility for other people's reactions, understanding that their reactions are their own projections from their own inner world, and that the only thing that I can do is take responsibility for my own actions and operate from a place of authenticity, truth and integrity. What happened?

Michelle Dowker: 15:42

It's true that there were some people who were not happy with that. There's some people who don't like what I have to say on social media. When I talk about things in my newsletters, I lost followers a lot of them. I've come to recognize that that's actually a blessing, because if, when I speak my truth, the way that's important to me, the way that resonates with me, and I speak on the topics that feel most fulfilling to me, and somebody leaves because of that, then that opens up the space for somebody else to come in who does resonate with that, who does love that and who will benefit from that. There's no use in trying to hold on to people who are not a fit. It doesn't serve them and it didn't serve me either, because when the people who are not a fit hang around, I would get comments like I don't want you to talk about that, stop talking about this. I want you to talk about this instead. Oh, would you just stop talking about that? That's just annoying, I don't want to hear about that anymore. Can you see that those reactions, those comments, are actually coming from their own projections, their own perspectives, their own preferences. There's nothing wrong with that, but I shouldn't change myself in order to make them happy. If they don't like what I'm talking about, it would serve them to free up their own space in terms of what they're focusing on, to find somebody that does speak on the things that they want to hear more about. No shade on them and no shade on me.

Michelle Dowker: 17:25

This is not about coming from a place of judgment, but understanding that different people will have different perspectives and different preferences and different projections, and learning to not take that personally was another really big piece of the puzzle. Instead of believing that that identifies my worth because it doesn't my worth and value comes from me being me. It does not come from the things that I do or how much I please other people or how many people follow me in my audience. Those things do not define my value or my worth. My worth comes from me being me, and if I want that value of me being me to be the most potent, then it's really important for me to follow my own soul, my own priorities, my own preferences, what is important to me, and speak on those things, not on what other people are telling me that I should talk about, because that's what they want.

Michelle Dowker: 18:31

That was a really big turning point for me as well, to let go of the conditioning that I need to be talking about what other people want, because that was draining my power and it was leaving my head spinning because I didn't know from one day or to the next how I should be adjusting myself to make sure that the people were still going to follow me, that I was still going to have people signing up to work with me. It left me feeling powerless, it left me feeling confused, it left me feeling frustrated and it left me feeling like I don't enjoy what I'm doing anymore. And so there was this turning point where I just kind of said forget this. I can no longer try to be what other people want me to be. I need to be myself. As I was figuring this out, you know, this is what I was teaching my clients as well To come back home to them and to be themselves, not who they think that other people need them to be. I was finding for me that my power was coming back to me, and I could see it in my clients as well. It was liberating them, it was empowering them, and this is when I recognized like this is an important key that unlocks thriving. It's an important key that unlocks success like nothing else.

Michelle Dowker: 19:53

Trying to prioritize the customer and being who you think other people need you to be, and trying to please the world will give you success to a certain level, but there's a cap. It will only take you so far, and what I've come to discover for myself and as I've guided my clients through this, is that there's this whole other dimension beyond that success, this whole dimension of overflowing, thriving. And that happens when you're connected with yourself, when you prioritize yourself and this doesn't mean that you just like forget about other people, but you make sure that you prioritize yourself first. You take care of yourself, you are connected with what you stand for and what your values are, and you operate from that place where you are doing the things that light you up, that you're passionate about. And when you do that, what happens is that you find your flow and you step into this place of that overflowing, thriving, and when that happens, you want to share that with others. You can't help it. It's just like overflowing from your veins and you want to share that with the world.

Michelle Dowker: 21:15

You want to prioritize yourself, to get yourself in this overflow, so that now you want to help other people, but you're doing it your way, instead of doing it from this place, of trying to get other people to like you. You stand in your power. You stand in your authenticity. You take your truth unapologetically from this place of inner overflow and the people who get it and resonate and love it, they show up and you impact their lives more deeply than you could have ever done so if you were trying to be someone that you're not, in order to just please whoever. This is how you can make a greater impact in your work, when you let go of the people pleasing and you prioritize yourself, so that you can get into this place of overflow and give and share from that place, so that you become this leader and exemplar and this beacon that the people who you are meant to impact will learn from, because you're leading by example, so that you become the change that you wish to see in the world, and the people who get it and love it and resonate and want it will be inspired by what you have to offer and how you offer it.

Michelle Dowker: 22:41

Here's something that I often talk about with my clients you could be doing the very same action but have a completely different intention behind it? Are you doing something with the intention of trying to get somebody to accept you, like you are, not rejecting you or are you doing it because you are an overflowing? You can't help but give because you are overflowing? Can you see the difference in the energy behind each one? You could be doing the exact same thing and from where you're coming from.

Michelle Dowker: 23:16

If you're coming from this place of lack of not good enough, of you need to have other people to accept you so that you feel good about yourself, so that you feel valuable, so that you don't feel bad about yourself, then it's always gonna fall short. You're always gonna be chasing more and more and more to get people to accept you or to get people to not be upset with you, versus when you are so aligned with yourself and centered and grounded and strong and in your power and you recognize that your only responsibility is to be you and that other people's reactions are not your responsibility, and you show up from this place of passion and alignment and fulfillment. How much of a difference that makes, because you're no longer interacting with other people to try to get them to help you feel better in some way. You're doing it because you already feel good, you already feel abundant within yourself and fulfilled within yourself, and you wanna share that with the world. That's how you can make an impact and this is how you can change the world.

Michelle Dowker: 24:28

We can't be everything for everybody, because when we do, we dilute what we can offer. What each and every one of us can offer is to be ourselves and find our own sense of inner empowerment, so that we can find that place of inner overflow and then give from that place and lead from that place. And that's how we can inspire the people who are ready for our magic. That's how we can lead the people who are ready for what we have to offer. Each and every one of us can inspire and lead the way for somebody, and lead the way for a lot of people, but not everybody is going to be ready for what you have to offer. Not everybody is gonna wanna follow your way and not everybody is ready to make the changes that you're here to lead. Whoever you're here to guide people through, and part of that is acceptance. That's another lesson. Not everybody is ready for what you have to offer, and that was a hard lesson for me.

Michelle Dowker: 25:37

This was something that I had to start learning as a naturopathic doctor, that people would come to me with their health concerns and their symptoms and they wanted me to fix them. They wanted those symptoms to go away. My particular style of naturopathy is guiding people to make change, and at that point in my career it was about guiding people to make change in their diet, in their lifestyle, as well as in their mindset and how they managed stress. And I found that it was the mindset and stress that really helped the most. But not everybody was ready for that. Not everybody wanted to do that work that was involved to really transform how they saw the world and how they managed stress and how they looked at things and how they thought about things and reacted to things. There were a subset of the population who just wanted me to give them a herb that was a natural equivalent to a medication, so that they would no longer feel their symptoms. That was a long journey for me to accept that. That's where some people are at.

Michelle Dowker: 26:53

I can't force anyone who's not ready to do the type of work that I truly enjoy guiding people through and I recognize now I go deep. That's my preference. That's who I am. I'm highly intuitive, I'm really deep. I pick up on patterns. I can see the root under the root, under the root of things, and for the person who's ready for that and the person who wants it, it changes their lives. They want to see how everything fits together and they want to get to the depth of it all so that they can finally transform what they've been trying to figure out likely for years, but it takes a certain level of readiness and willingness in order to go there, and not everybody's ready for that.

Michelle Dowker: 27:43

There was a point in my life where I wasn't ready for that either, and part of this transformation of the people pleasing is being honest about that. That that's what I, this is who I am and this is what I do. And it isn't for everybody. And I'm not gonna try to change who I am and how I work because not everybody's ready for it, because that delutes the power that I have to deliver the level of transformation that I do for the people who are ready for it. And so part of this journey to move away from people pleasing was to own that I'm not for everybody and to create a set of standards for who I am, for that benefits both myself and the people that I work with, because when I create a set of standards of who my work is for, at what level they are, for me personally the person that I work with it's optimal if they have already developed a certain level of self-awareness through some sort of personal development work or inner healing work, whether they've seen a coach or gone to therapy or done red self-help books, if they've developed some level of self-awareness already, because then they're ready to see those deeper pieces of the puzzle put together. They want that, they wanna go a level deeper than they've already gone. I recognize now that I'm not for the person who's just looking for a topical band-aid solution to help them get by If that's where they're at, that's where they're at and there are practitioners that are there to help them with that. But that's not who I am.

Michelle Dowker: 29:28

And in order to deepen my own purpose and who I'm here for and what I'm here to be doing, and really just connecting with myself and my own truth, was to own that this is me and that's okay, and no longer trying to change myself just because somebody doesn't like it, because this is the thing as well. It's human nature to just want to feel comfortable, right, not challenge the status quo. Looking at ourselves and looking at the truth of ourselves can sometimes feel uncomfortable and not everybody wants that. And typically the person who's ready to look at those deeper levels of themself are the people who have gone through enough significant challenge in their life, or they've been stuck for long enough, or they've gone through enough darkness that they are ready to have something different. They are ready to make a change, and to make a change means to look at things in a different way. When the discomfort of looking more deeply at yourself outweighs the discomfort of where you are now, that's when you're ready and those are the people who are ready for my work.

Michelle Dowker: 30:43

People-pleasing was actually preventing me from owning that. People-pleasing was preventing me from actually stepping into working at that level with my clients, because I was afraid of telling them things that might upset them Right. Looking at yourself and being honest with yourself. Some people don't like that and I had to be okay with. Sometimes I'm going to say something in terms of seeing a pattern or getting an intuitive hit, and and I'll say it with care and compassion and love and sometimes it can strike a nerve, and this has happened more than once in a client session where I will put my finger on exactly what the root of the issue is. And it triggers emotions and this is the thing about triggers and I'll talk about this in another podcast.

Michelle Dowker: 31:35

When you feel triggered about something, it is a really valuable message letting you know that there's something about that thing that triggered you that you have not healed, come to terms with or integrated within yourself. If you can disengage with feeling, identified with the triggered feeling, and instead become curious about what actually is more deeply going on here, then you have an opportunity to heal and integrate another level about something about yourself or the world or other people or your projections or your wounds millions of different scenarios and possibilities here. I used to be afraid of having someone getting triggered on a call because I don't want to upset them, but instead, since I've done my own inner work and come to these truths and shifted these perspectives, when a client gets triggered because it does happen it's an opportunity and I sit with them and hold safe, supportive space for them to work through the emotions and then to work through, okay, what's really actually at the root of this the person who is aligned with my style and who feels aligned to work with me. They are ready and willing to do that with me, and I will guide them in a way where they do feel safe and supported and we will explore what's actually going on underneath the surface with that trigger. And once they do, and once they see the puzzle pieces and how that all fit together, then they can integrate what hadn't been integrated before and then they're no longer triggered by that thing anymore. That's the magic.

Michelle Dowker: 33:32

And can you see that if I had still been stuck in my people-pleasing ways, I would have never been honest enough to actually say the things that might potentially trigger my clients? Of course, I always operate from this place of authenticity and integrity. I'm not trying to hurt them, but sometimes there are going to be things that bring out emotional reactions in them and I see now that those emotional reactions are projections of their own wounds and those are opportunities for healing, those are opportunities for integration and those are opportunities for them to empower themselves and once they move through that, they come out the other side feeling more liberated and empowered and strong and clear than ever before. Can you see how, if I was stuck on people-pleasing, that transformative opportunity would have been diluted. And this is how a piece of how people-pleasing was impacting my business in the past and the importance of shifting away from these people-pleasing tendencies and a lot of my clients. Now they've already shifted away from those people-pleasing tendencies. However, when they started their business, they were still in people-pleasing tendencies, so there's still some residual all holding on to those old patterns and how they're operating in their business and maybe in the standards that they have or haven't created in their business or the boundaries that they haven't set up in their business because of this fear, because of these old ways of operating.

Michelle Dowker: 35:10

The more awareness that you have and the more you can see these pieces of the puzzle, the more you can change them, because you can't change what you can't see and then, once you see it, you can't unsee it, and I say this over and over again because it's just that important. This was a micro topic and I have a lot more to say about people-pleasing, but I think that's enough for today. I hope this gave you a sense of, maybe how people-pleasing impacted my business and the level of enjoyment and impact that I was able to provide in my business, compared to shifting away from this survival behavior, how that opened me up to more satisfaction, fulfillment and impact in my work and the success for the clients that I guide, and how important it is to actually maybe do a little bit of an inventory within your business operations of where you might still be operating from old survival patterns, of things like people-pleasing, because they're so ingrained into us and they're almost conditioned into us to be like the right thing to do, especially for women. Right, being the good girl, making sure that everyone is taking care of first and this leaks into every area of our lives and especially our work. To be an agent of change and a cycle breaker and a trailblazer and being a leader involves really getting honest with where these coping behaviors and patterns might still be lying in your business, in your personal life, with your relationships, all the things. It's always a work in progress, right? There's always going to be new levels and layers that we're going to see about ourselves as we continue to grow, evolve and progress. I still do these little inventories and take a look at myself and continue this work and look at these layers, because there's still layers of people placing that I see that come up from time to time. That's okay. Remember to go back to having those compassionate conversations with yourself. It's not about shaming yourself for any of it, but understanding that you're just trying to keep yourself safe. What helps us to survive is not the thing that helps us to thrive. And now let's look at some different ways that we can look at this. Let's look at some different ways we can operate. These different ways that we operate will give us so much more fulfillment and joy than operating from those survival patterns and behaviors. So I hope this was helpful.

Michelle Dowker: 38:01

Please leave a review, because that helps this podcast to get out to more people. If this is of interest to you, please check out the show notes. There's some links there where you can access some free resources as well as learn more about how you can work with me one-on-one If you're resonating with what I'm talking about and you're ready for a guide to help you to really step into this next level of thriving in your business, by really connecting with yourself and connecting with your truth unapologetically, and letting go of worrying about what other people are saying or doing. While you're checking out the show notes, remember to hit follow or subscribe so that you don't miss out on an episode. I have a lot of fun talking about this and I look forward to talking to you on the next episode.

Michelle Dowker: 38:53

As we close this episode of the Inner Purpose Podcast, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to you, our incredible listeners. Remember, your journey doesn't end here. It's a continuous unfolding. If today's episode stirred something within you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with someone who needs that extra dose of inspiration. Your journey is our collective journey. Let's continue to create ripples of positive change. Until next time, continue leading with purpose and embracing the extraordinary within.