People Pleasing + Your Creativity

I’ve been contemplating the nature of “people pleasing” for years, but this summer brought up some interesting conversations that have allowed me to dive a bit deeper. So many of us get stuck in this tendency of putting others before ourselves, even after years of awareness and doing our own personal work.

But here is the thing- it is an absolute flipping delight to please folks. I LOVE making people feel good about themselves and their ideas. To reflect joy and pleasure back to others is a core tenet of the work I do. I am known for my gift giving, on a few levels. We are wired (socialized?) to want to meet others’ needs, assuming that there will be reciprocal action.

Clearly, things go awry. So many of us have found ourselves burned out and under-appreciated. We have not been given tools to find the balance of including ourselves in the equation, and don’t understand why certain people aren’t respecting our shaky boundaries or are not meeting us where we are at and doing their “fair share”. Whew!

Something we have been working with in Dark Moon Sparks, the monthly accountability group for a new era of motivation, is our tendencies. The Four Tendencies are are concept developed by Gretchen Rubin that defines four different ways of responding to internal and external expectations. Turns out 41% of folks are Obligers, which means they have no problem doing things for others, but struggle follow up with things for themselves. Considering the fact that we can not change our tendency, that is a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to “fix” the part of themselves, when they are actually supposed to engage external systems of accountability in order to make things happen for themselves. This is where accountability groups are PERFECT. (psst- you are welcome to pop in to an online or in-person session next week if you would like! just be sure to register in advance.)

In a couple of weeks, Group Study returns for the autumn series, and our initial focus is People Pleasing. We will work with the energetics of it all, navigate Values, Boundaries, and our Human Design over the first few sessions, which will be both in-person and online, starting Wednesday, September 13th.

Let’s turn People Pleasing on it’s head and evolve it in to something that we can own on our own terms and find balance in our connections with others and our own creativity.

Group Study is a twice-monthly workshop series (six sessions total) for artists and creative entrepreneurs. Each session is rooted in the work done in Creative Guidance Sessions: Human Design, the chakras and nature systems, with intuitive guidance provided. There is always a general structure to the classes, but it will evolve to be responsive to the participants.

If the current schedule doesn’t work for you but you’re super interested in getting in on these workshops, please drop a line and we can see about adding another session depending on what works.

xoxoMsAnnaLee