An Interview With Brooke Young & Yitzi Weiner
It starts in the reflection. — Making change first and foremost requires self-awareness, along with a desire to make a change, which often starts by looking back on situations and circumstances where people-pleasing occurred. It’s hard to catch unconscious actions in the moment, so take some time to step back and reflect on what happened to broaden your perspective and understanding of what occurred. I’ve learned that a lot of what we do comes back to fear and shame, so I often ask myself, “What were you trying to avoid?”, “What were you scared of?”, or “What are you ashamed of?”
In today’s society, the tendency to prioritize others’ needs and expectations over one’s own can lead to significant emotional and psychological challenges. In this series, we would like to explore the complex dynamics of people-pleasing behavior and its impact on individual well-being and relationships. We would like to discuss the root causes of people-pleasing behavior, its effects on personal and professional life, and practical steps for cultivating healthier relationships and self-esteem. We hope that this series can provide insights, strategies, and real-life experiences that can help individuals navigate and overcome the pitfalls of being a people pleaser. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Karen Richard, CEO and co-founder of Made Live.
Karen Richard is the CEO and co-founder of Made Live, an AI-assisted end-to-end children’s book publishing platform dedicated to simplifying the publishing process for aspiring authors. She is a recovering pediatric Speech-Language Pathologist, kidlit lover with a nerdy heart, and a proud member of the late-diagnosis ADHD club. Driven by her firsthand experience navigating the challenges of self-publishing visual books, her mission with Made Live is to empower authors to tell stories that inspire, educate, and connect young audiences around the world.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I was born and raised in a small city in the Canadian prairies where I lived with my mom, dad, and older sister. I had a pretty quintessential 80s childhood — running amok around the neighborhood and coming home before the streetlights came on. My mom, a trained nurse, stepped away from her career to raise us and work alongside my dad in our family business. Both of my parents worked a lot, but were still there to get us to and from school and activities, and we managed to eat dinner together almost every night. School was always very important and I remember my parents encouraging my sister and I to establish ourselves with our own careers. We were never asked if we were going to attend university, but where we would go, and what we would take. So it’s no surprise that I jumped right from high school into my first year of university, despite having no idea what I wanted to take. I had a whole year to decide, and after shifting from English professor to lawyer to dietician I somehow landed on Speech-Language Pathologist.
Suffice it to say, being an SLP wasn’t my lifelong dream and was something I fell into. I joked for years that even though I had a career, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I loved working with the children and families on my caseload, but as my career progressed, budgets dropped, caseloads soared, and my job satisfaction plummeted. It broke my heart to see children waiting, sometimes for years, to start services. I got sick of feeling like I wasn’t making enough of a difference and I found myself dreading the drive to work every day.
Can you tell us a bit about what you do professionally, and what brought you to this specific career path?
I’m the co-founder and CEO of Made Live, an AI-supported book publishing platform tailored to the needs of authors writing visual books, like children’s picture books, comic books, graphic novels, even cookbooks. The path from SLP to tech co-founder might not seem that logical, but it was pretty straightforward. I’d used children’s books as a key therapy tool for years as an SLP, and when thinking of the all the families waiting on caseloads for services, started to think about writing a series of children’s books embedded with language development strategies and extra information for parents, as a way to provide them with a tool. I looked into traditional publishing, but that process and business model isn’t known for being particularly accessible, especially to new authors, and it was certainly not fast enough for me and my dreams of publishing about 20 books in quick succession.
I looked into self-publishing but found most innovation in the space catered to text-only books with disjointed piecemeal solutions available for children’s book authors. Not only was self-publishing overwhelming, it was confusing, filled with cautionary tales, and far more expensive than I’d expected. Still, it was my only viable option. Lucky for me, though, I had married a software engineer with years working in the world of technology startups. He was pretty confident he could build out the technology to do what we needed, and the idea for Made Live was born.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about People Pleasing. To make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does “People Pleaser” mean to you?
For me, being a people pleaser means doing things to make others happy, usually at the expense of your own happiness and desires. It extends into everything from how you behave in public, how you fit in, how you dress, how you present yourself, and doing what is expected of you. As children we learn that when we do what is expected, we’re praised, so the behavior is reinforced and we then learn and adapt to do more of the same. It’s extremely common in neurodivergent circles, like ADHD, as a way of masking and fitting in.
On the surface, it seems like being a person who wants to please others is a good thing. Can you help articulate a few of the challenges that come with being a people pleaser?
Biologically and evolutionarily, people pleasing serves a very important purpose, or our brains wouldn’t have adapted to it. Generally, people want to be accepted — to be part of a community or larger group. Historically, it increased our chances of survival. But the dark side of it is we often lose parts of ourselves in the process. Some adaptation and adjustment can be good for us and society at large, but when we focus too heavily on pleasing others, we face a whole new set of challenges.
When we constantly prioritize the needs of others over our own, our self-esteem is fed by our ability to please others rather than meeting our own needs, muddying our sense of self and personal identity. By focusing on making others happy we often neglect our own needs, dreams, even self-care. Making decisions on our own, based on our own wants and needs, can feel like a daunting task. This can lead to chronic stress, tension, and burnout, which has a clear and well-established negative impact on our mental, emotional, and physical health.
Saying “no” becomes a struggle, as does setting healthy boundaries, so we tend to overcommit, even when we know we shouldn’t. Ironically, people-pleasing behavior is often motivated by a desire to maintain or achieve harmony, but it often leads to feelings of resentment and causes strain on relationships over time. We get angry with ourselves for caving yet again, or with others for what we perceive as their request for self-sacrifice. Over time, we can develop a deep fear of conflict, believing that asserting our own needs or disagreeing with others will lead to rejection. In ADHD circles, you’ll hear people talk about RSD, or rejection sensitive dysphoria.
Does being a people pleaser give you certain advantages? Can you explain?
Of course it does! If there weren’t advantages to being a people pleaser, we wouldn’t have adapted to it. By nature, people pleasers are well liked and easy to get along with. We’re empathic and observant, and can easily understand what others want or what drives them, so we often work well in groups, as mediators, and in helping professions. I think it’s important to remember that people-pleasing isn’t an inherently negative trait, especially if you’re able to find balance and maintain your own sense of self.
Can you describe a moment in your life when you realized that your own people-pleasing behavior was more harmful than helpful?
I’m pretty sure the first time I realized I was a people pleaser was in therapy, so I was already in pretty deep. I’d prided myself on being easy to get along with. I liked making my parents proud. And for most of my life that had actually served me fairly well as I’d found a lucrative career that made me happy. Somewhere along the way, though, I began to lose myself in the process. I was so focused on pleasing others that it was hard to figure out what made ME happy.
The real turning point was when I realized I was in a codependent relationship and sought professional help. I now understand my issue was a deeper, extremely unhealthy version of pleasing people. My self-worth was tied to my ability to “fix” someone else, which was well out of my reach and abilities. As it progressed, I’d lost my sense of self. Almost every thought of my day focused on the other person. I was stressed, burned out and miserable. And I couldn’t figure out how to change it.
In your opinion, what are the common root causes of people-pleasing behavior?
Ultimately, I think people-pleasing behavior all comes back to cause and effect. When a behavior is reinforced or punished, that behavior is either encouraged or discouraged. A basic antecedent-behavior-consequence feedback loop. But the root of it starts with family dynamics shaping how we behave, alongside societal and cultural expectations.
Women, on average, are more likely to show people-pleasing behavior than men. From a young age, girls are socialized to be nurturing, accommodating and sensitive to the needs of others, with cultural expectations placing a higher value on politeness, being agreeable, and not too assertive, all which encourage people-pleasing behavior. As these girls grow up and enter educational institutions and the workplace, compliance is highly rewarded, as was my experience. Those who get and stay in line are praised as “team players” while those who challenge the status quo are seen as troublemakers. Unfortunately, this also pigeonholes them into roles that are less about innovation and leadership and more about support, limiting career opportunities and growth.
How does people-pleasing behavior impact personal relationships?
Because people-pleasers suppress their true feelings and preferences, relationships lack a sense of authenticity. This leaves family, friends, and others feeling like they don’t truly know the person, and the people-pleaser feeling misunderstood or isolated, even if they’ve developed what they think are relationships.
In my own life, I developed a lot of resentment towards others, especially those I felt should understand me. I was frustrated that people kept asking me to take on tasks that I didn’t want to do, and felt I couldn’t say “no”. I felt like my opinions weren’t valued or that my wants and needs were outright ignored. Not to mention the codependency! It led to a lot of misunderstandings and arguments that could have been avoided.
How does people-pleasing behavior impact professional relationships?
I think in the early days of my career, it made me an ideal employee in a lot of ways! I was easy to work with, got along with everyone, and jumped at the opportunity to be helpful any way I could. I didn’t want to let anyone down, so I never said “no”. But the flipside to that was that I learned to fall in line, not to develop my own thoughts and opinions, or to be innovative in my work.
As I became more aware of my people-pleasing and worked to change it, my change in behavior, of rejecting tasks that weren’t part of my role for instance, was not well received. Management didn’t appreciate the push back. I grew resentful and felt far less satisfied in my position.
How can long-term people-pleasing behavior impact an individual’s mental health?
People pleasing slowly chips away at your sense of self and ultimately your self-esteem. My sense of worth was so tied to what others thought about me that I didn’t feel pride in myself or my accomplishments unless someone else praised me for it. Ultimately I found that I sought out things I thought I should want or do…not the things that I truly wanted at my core. Ticking off the next ‘to-do’ item on the becoming an adult checklist. My self-care took a hit and I even felt guilty if I prioritized my physical well-being, believing it “took away from” something else that others needed from me. I felt on edge all of the time and was hurtling towards burnout pretty quickly. It’s scary to look back at where I was, not knowing how bad it was at the time. I’m still a major work in progress, but knowing what the issue is can sometimes be half the battle.
In your experience, what is the role of self-awareness in overcoming people-pleasing tendencies, and how can individuals cultivate it?
Ha! I swear I didn’t know this was the next question! Self-awareness is EVERYTHING if you want to make any kind of change, including overcoming people-pleasing tendencies. I used to say something similar to the families I worked with if I was trying to get them to change the way they communicated with their children. I’d tell them that the first step is catching yourself using the “old way” of doing things, but that their job was not to judge themselves for it. Instead, their job was to catch themselves just a little bit sooner next time, and that eventually, they’d catch it before it happened and THERE would be where the major changes and magic would happen.
I think the same is true for people-pleasing. If you’re not aware of it, there’s very little chance you’ll be able to change it. You might not be able to catch it as it happens, but reflecting on your day, or even on a single interaction, can help you identify it. And once you catch it, you can change it.
Based on your experience or research, what are the “Five Strategies Or Techniques That Can Help Individuals Break Free From The Cycle Of People-Pleasing”?
1 . It starts in the reflection.
Making change first and foremost requires self-awareness, along with a desire to make a change, which often starts by looking back on situations and circumstances where people-pleasing occurred. It’s hard to catch unconscious actions in the moment, so take some time to step back and reflect on what happened to broaden your perspective and understanding of what occurred. I’ve learned that a lot of what we do comes back to fear and shame, so I often ask myself, “What were you trying to avoid?”, “What were you scared of?”, or “What are you ashamed of?”
2 . Read. Talk. Get help if you can.
Breaking patterns like people-pleasing can take a lot of work, and might be a bit too hard to do all on your own. My own journey started with reflections that happened during 1-on-1 therapy, but many of the monumental changes came from talking with other people going through the same thing and self-healing through reading as much as I could about setting boundaries (and keeping them). No step is too small if you have the desire to change.
3 . Listen to your inner voice.
For so long many of us have been conditioned to put our needs on the back burner. As this happens, time after time and year after year, that inner voice that tries standing up for you, telling you to stand up for yourself, gets quieter and quieter. But it’s not silent. Before you act, give yourself a beat. A pause. To give that voice the space to stand back up and be heard. It’s there if you give space for it to show up again.
4 . Set and work hard to keep your boundaries.
This one is hard — until it’s not. I shocked myself with it just last week when someone asked me if I was going to my daughter’s school PAC meeting. I didn’t even think before I blurted, “No. I don’t do that”. I know my limits (and my triggers) and know that if I went I’d feel the need to overcommit to everything that needs doing. I can (and do) support my child and her school in a multitude of other ways, and it felt incredible to not feel guilty for saying no. I didn’t even feel the need to explain my “why”. It took a while to get to this point though. I used to have quotes about boundaries tucked in places I’d see them, like sticky notes around home or on my computer. Some of my favorites were:
- Boundaries are like fences; they keep out what you don’t want and protect what you value.
- No is a complete sentence.
- A lack of boundaries invites a lack of respect.
- We cannot simultaneously set a boundary and take care of another person’s feelings.
- When you’re saying “yes” to others, make sure you’re not saying “no” to yourself.
- If it’s not a “hell yes” it’s a “hell no”.
5 . Practice radical self-compassion.
I’m a big fan of Kristin Neff and her work on self-compassion. Your people pleasing likely comes from a place of kindness and empathy. Acknowledge this and forgive yourself for any consequences that may have come up from the situation. Talk to yourself as you would your best friend. Remind yourself that your needs are just as important as others’. Give yourself permission to prioritize your own well-being.
What steps should people pleasers take to establish healthier boundaries?
Start small. For me that was starting with and establishing what I actually wanted. The “yeses” in my life. I needed to know how much space my “yeses” needed before I could determine how much extra capacity I had to work with. I broke it into priorities for different aspects of my life — work and career, relationships, self-care, etc. From there, it was easier for me to identify what didn’t fit into my current set of priorities, which in turn made it that much easier to say no.
How can someone who is naturally empathetic maintain their compassion while becoming more assertive?
I’m glad you asked this question. I think many people believe that empathy and compassion cannot coexist with being more assertive. It’s about finding a balance or a way of integrating both sides — a dance of sorts. Part of maintaining your compassion is in how you assert yourself. There’s a difference between a cold, hard, unfeeling and aggressive “no” and an empathetic statement that says “no” with your rationale. It’s not just about what you say, but how you say it, so this leaves room for naturally empathetic people to stay compassionate while respecting their own boundaries.
What are the most common misconceptions about people pleasers, and how do these misconceptions affect their journey toward recovery?
I think there are so many misconceptions about people pleasers. Externally, people might think they’re always happy to help, that they have no opinions or preferences of their own, or that they are weak or lack confidence. Internally, people pleasers have misconceptions that if they say “no” that people won’t like them, that it’s harmless (or even helpful), or that it only impacts the people pleaser in a negative way.
But every single one of these beliefs is false and impacts the recovery process. For instance, believing that it’s a kind and considerate behavior will undoubtedly delay a person in acknowledging that the behavior should be addressed. Fearing that saying no will make them unlikable just creates a sense of fear and anxiety about changing the behavior, leading to further avoidance of change. And believing that people-pleasing is a sign of weakness just exacerbates the lack of confidence, shame, and guilt that the person is already feeling. That’s part of why recovery can be so challenging — if you want to change you have to unlearn all of the misconceptions you’re been told and may firmly still believe.
What role can therapy or counseling play in helping individuals overcome people-pleasing behavior?
I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would have been for me to overcome people-pleasing without some type of therapy or counseling. I was stressed, overwhelmed, and miserable but couldn’t pinpoint why. It’s incredibly difficult to see the bigger picture when you’re so close to the problem, yet often so easy for others to see. Since identifying the issue and becoming aware of it in yourself are so integral to making change, therapy can serve as a starting point and guide throughout the unlearning process.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
With Made Live, our whole mission is to give people the platform to tell their stories that inspire, educate, and connect young people around the world. So my movement would be to empower children to learn to set boundaries, build self-respect, self-esteem and develop self-compassion when they’re young. It’s far easier to learn something than it is to re-learn and undo what we’ve learned.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Please visit us online at https://made.live, on Facebook, and Instagram. Or follow me on Threads and LinkedIn.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewers:
Brooke Young is a multipassionate publicist, public speaking mentor, and communication consulting. She works with a wide range of clients across the globe, and across a diverse range of industries, to help them create, develop, and promote powerful messages through heart-centered storytelling. She has formerly worked On-Air with FOX Sports, competed in the Miss America Organization, and is the Author of a Children’s Book. She frequently works with children as a professional speaker where she educates on Volunteering and Therapy Dogs. She has over a decade of professional performing background and finds joy in sparking creative passions for her clients.
Yitzi Weiner is a journalist, author, and the founder of Authority Magazine, one of Medium’s largest publications. Authority Magazine is devoted to sharing in depth “thought leadership interview series” featuring people who are authorities in Business, Tech, Entertainment, Wellness, and Social Impact.
At Authority Magazine, Yitzi has conducted or coordinated thousands of empowering interviews with prominent Authorities like Shaquille O’Neal, Peyton Manning, Floyd Mayweather, Paris Hilton, Baron Davis, Jewel, Flo Rida, Kelly Rowland, Kerry Washington, Bobbi Brown, Daymond John, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Alicia Silverstone, Lindsay Lohan, Cal Ripkin Jr., David Wells, Jillian Michaels, Jenny Craig, John Sculley, Matt Sorum, Derek Hough, Mika Brzezinski, Blac Chyna, Perez Hilton, Joseph Abboud, Rachel Hollis, Daniel Pink, and Kevin Harrington
Yitzi is also the CEO of Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator which helps business leaders to become known as an authority in their field, by interviewing prominent CEOs, writing a daily syndicated column, writing a book, booking high level leaders on their podcast, and attending exclusive events.
Karen Richard of Made Live On How to Recover From Being a People Pleaser was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.