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Quit People Pleasing and Start Living

The untold consequences of trying to please everyone all the time

Eve Arnold
Practice in Public
4 min readJan 20, 2025

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Photo by Angry._.Kat on Unsplash

All my life, I’ve been an accidental people-pleaser.

I didn’t know it for a long time, it would just show up subtly — so for a long time it went under the radar. For the longest time, I convinced myself that I did things purely for myself. But turns out, on reflection, that’s mostly just something I told myself to help me avoid the inevitable reality of being a people pleaser.

Yikes.

On reflection, my default was also ‘yes’, with thought. Anytime anyone asked me to do a thing, I would say yes (before I even knew what it was). When people at work asked me to do something, I’d say yes and grumble about it later. Most sentences would start with ‘sorry’, mostly when I had nothing to be sorry for.

Honestly? I just agreed with people for an easy life.

Maybe you can relate. And sometimes, you’ve got to pick your battles. Sometimes it’s easiest (for you) to agree and not cause a stir. Sometimes, that’s how life works, it’s a price worth paying.

But in the last few years, I’ve sort of got sick of the people pleasing. Mostly because of the energy it takes out of me. The energy it sucked out of me — I felt exhausted at the end of…

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Practice in Public
Practice in Public

Published in Practice in Public

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Eve Arnold
Eve Arnold

Written by Eve Arnold

100K audience | Work 9-to-5 | Build and scale your career & digital product business: https://evearnoldwrites.substack.com

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