Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
I've just walked up this hill on Dartmoor.
I live right on the edge of Dartmoor so when I go for a walk on Dartmoor it invariably means walking up a hill.
The moorlands are high above my house and I've just paused in a field which in the spring time is absolutely full of ewes and lambs but most of them now have been released onto the moorland and this field which at one time is green with grass is now thick and green with bracken.
There's just a few footpaths running through it and the bracken,
Which is like a fern,
Is tall and thick and almost impenetrable.
At some points it's a good four foot high and it's going to keep growing.
It can grow much taller than I am and it grows so quickly.
And I've just come off a call with a client and one of the things we were talking about is something I want to share with you today because she told me that she was a people pleaser and she was a bit concerned about this trait in herself.
So this is all about people pleasing and the question to ask yourself is am I a people pleaser?
Now the first thing that we talked about was this sense that her being a people pleaser was almost like a genetic defect.
She thought it was just who she was.
She couldn't shift it.
So the first thing we began to explore and question is was it a thing?
Like is being a people pleaser a thing that just happens to be part of your psychology and you just can't get rid of?
And it soon became clear that it wasn't a thing.
It wasn't like an illness she had caught.
It wasn't in her genetics.
Being a people pleaser was just a story she told herself and it was a story that she believed about herself.
She believed that it was important for her to please others and the story that she had is if I don't say yes to do things and I don't please others then I am being unsupportive and not very helpful and in work situations I'm being unprofessional.
So no wonder she said yes to pretty much everything because if she thought she was being unprofessional and unsupportive then it made complete sense to say yes.
But then she began to realize that those feelings that she felt,
Those feelings of concern that she was not being a good colleague,
That she needed to say yes to this in order for people to like her and for people to see that she was doing a good job,
That those uncomfortable feelings weren't actually telling her anything about whether or not she should do something.
They weren't telling her that she was an unhelpful or unsupportive person.
Those feelings were just like a warning sign.
They were alerting her that she was about to fall into some habitual thinking and to fall into a habitual story and that story was that she was a people pleaser and that meant she needed to say yes.
If somebody asked her to do something,
Regardless of whether it was her job,
Regardless of whether it was something she was meant to do,
She needed to say yes in order for that person to like her.
Today is a real good reflection on what we say yes to and what we say no to.
I often say to people that I work with,
When you say yes to something,
Make sure your yes is more important than what you're saying no to.
Because if you say yes to something,
You will be saying no to something else.
So for example,
In her example,
When she says yes to taking a work meeting phone call when it's actually dinner time for her family,
Then she's saying no to her family.
It's an equation.
If you say yes to something,
You're saying no to something else.
When she said yes to helping people out at work,
And she said yes to something that wasn't her job,
It wasn't what she was meant to be doing,
Then she was saying no to her job.
She was saying no to her job as a leader.
She was doing something that she wasn't paid to do,
That it was for somebody else to do.
And so when she said yes to it,
She was saying no to being a leader and to supporting people from her position as a leader and through leadership.
So today is all about just reflecting on whether you are somebody that says yes to things,
You are a people pleaser,
Whether you say yes to things that really aren't yours to do.
And the question to ask yourself is,
If I say yes to something,
Then you're saying no to something else.
So just make sure when you say yes,
That your yes is more important than what you are saying no to.
