EP 142 From People Pleasing to Principle Centered
Are you exhausted from people pleasing? Do you feel resentful, unappreciated, or emotionally drained from always saying yes?
In this episode, Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom, reveals why people pleasing is not a personality flaw and not a boundary problem. It is a thinking problem.
If you have been told you just need better boundaries, stronger scripts, or the courage to say no more often, this conversation will completely reframe how you see yourself and others.
Through a powerful story from Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend, Audrey explains why tactics alone fail and why true personal power comes from principle based living. You will learn:
- Why people pleasing often leads to depression instead of joy
- The difference between tactics and actionable principles
- Why most boundary advice does not create lasting change
- The foundational principle that transforms relationships
- How treating yourself properly changes how others treat you
- Why character development always outperforms personality techniques
At the heart of healthy boundaries is this truth: you cannot teach others how to treat you properly until you know how to treat yourself properly.
When you shift from scripts and strategies to internal character work, everything changes. You stop negotiating for approval and start living from truth. You stop reacting and start leading.
If you are a mom who feels overwhelmed by demands, decision fatigue, or ungrateful responses, this episode will give you clarity and direction.
Make sure you are on our email list to register for the upcoming free training where Audrey will teach you how to uncover actionable principles for your specific struggles and start living them immediately. www.themissiondrivenmom.com
Subscribe for more principle based leadership, motherhood development, and character driven personal growth.
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AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION
Welcome back to the podcast. I am Audrey Reba, author of the Mission Driven Life and founder of the Mission Driven Mom. Today, I want you to know that people pleasing is not a personality flaw. It is not something that is wrong with you. It is a thinking problem. I am going to show you one principle and it is going to completely reframe how you relate to yourself and others without turning you into someone else.
This is going to be really awesome. So I am going to start by reading you this story about Stan.
THE STORY ABOUT STAN
Stan was confused. He read in the Bible and was taught in church that it was more blessed to give than to receive. But he found that this often was not true. He frequently wished people would have more consideration for his time and energy. Yet whenever someone wanted something from him, he would do it.
He thought this was loving and he wanted to be a loving person. Finally, when the fatigue grew into depression, he came to see me. This is one of the authors telling this story as a therapist. When I asked what was wrong, Stan replied that he was quote loving too much. How can you love too much, I asked. I have never heard of such a thing.
Oh, it is very simple, said Stan. I do far more for people than I should, and that makes me very depressed. Is that sad. But yeah. Ironically true. Do we as moms just want to say this sometimes, that we do more for people than we should and it makes us depressed. It is just so ironic.
The therapist goes on. I am not quite sure what you are doing, I said, but it certainly is not love. The Bible says that true love leads to a blessed state and a state of cheer. Love brings happiness, not depression. If your loving is depressing you, it is probably not love.
I do not see how you can say that, Stan replied. I do so much for everyone. I give and give. How can you say that I am not loving.
I can say that because of the fruit of your actions, you should be feeling happy, not depressed.
So he says he asked him to tell him some of the things that he did for people, and he learned a lot about his doing and sacrificing from Stan.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR WOMEN AND MOMS
Now, what is so interesting about this story is that I work with a lot of women, obviously, and often they will get into the academy, lets say, and just for everyones information, we do talk about boundaries, but not until near the end of level two.
And it is near the end of level two for a very important reason, and that is because of a principle I am going to talk to you about in just a minute.
So these women come in to level one and they do not just immediately learn about boundaries, but they are unhappy, they are unfulfilled, and they think they have a perception that other people in their life are causing the problem, that other people in their life need to be different.
And that if those other people were different, then they would not have these problems.
When they try to be really conscientious and honest, they start looking inside and being like, okay, maybe other people are not the problem. Maybe actually I am the problem and I am the problem because I need to have better boundaries.
And that is what the world and people around me keep telling me. The problem is that you do not have good enough boundaries, and they expect to come into the academy and to increase their personal power immediately by being trained on boundaries, so sometimes they are disappointed.
Then I do not teach them about boundaries right out the gate.
WHAT PEOPLE THINK BOUNDARIES ARE
And then what I watch them do oftentimes is okay, she is not teaching me about boundaries and I am going to keep going with this academy because I think it would be a good thing. But in the meantime I am just going to tell everybody no, because that is what they think boundaries is.
In other words, they think that boundaries is a whole bunch of fences, maybe really tall fences, maybe wrought iron, maybe stone, and you get those fences up as tall and as strong as possible and keep everybody off your property and then you will feel better.
But boundaries are just lines drawn, and they can be subtle and even fences need gates, right. People need to be able to come and go.
TACTICS VERSUS PRINCIPLES
So last week we were talking about tactics versus principles, and we were talking about character versus personality ethic and how the world has moved more and more in the direction, especially in the west, especially in America, more and more toward this personality ethic, tactic based way of being.
And you can tell this in some of the things that go on. You need to do this neurolinguistic training. You need to brainwash yourself. You need to this, that, or the other.
And it is not as if some of those things do not work. If they did not work, people would not use them. And it is not as if the people that promote those are bad or have bad intentions. We talked about this last week.
It is just that those people do not understand that if you do not work on character first, that all the personality ethics in the world will not get you across the finish line.
Eventually you will, in a crisis situation, it will come back to who you really are.
WHAT IS SOLID AND LASTING
In todays world there is a lot of this language about being performative, and everything we do in society is just performative and it is not really who we are. We are just always playing a role. We are just always acting a part in this big play of life.
But there are some things that are solid, that are lasting, that are meaningful, that we can lean on. These principles, these immutable truths, and integrating them into our basic being and developing our character is one of those things that we can depend on.
Because when we become a certain kind of person by integrating those principles, as Covey talked about, that the integration of correct principles into our basic nature is what makes lasting success and happiness possible.
That is what we want to do.
WHY STAN IS CONFUSED AND WHY MOMS GET EXHAUSTED
Now, I want to tell you something even more fascinating.
Stan is super confused. He is super unhappy. He is people pleasing like crazy.
And you and I as mothers probably would not say it quite like Stan, that everybody needs to get off our back. But boy, when you are a mom of young kids, or you are a mom of adult kids, or you are a grandma, people need things from you a lot.
And you are constantly in decision mode and trying to discern who to give what and when to say yes or no.
And that decision exhaustion is real.
And when people do not thank you a lot, in fact, when you, in your best intentions, try to help and then someone is ungrateful or angry or aggressive, it is devastating.
I was teaching a workshop last night, the sneak peek for our Mothers of Creation event that is going to happen in the fall. And one of the women, we were talking about victim types and one of the women talked about a friend of hers who had a child do something that really disappointed her. And so she quote put herself to bed for three months.
And so this is the point at which it could go. This is how far this can go. Like we can really turn our lives upside down because of what other people are doing, and we just do not want to do that.
We just do not want to be at the mercy of other peoples decisions, and we do not want to be these people pleasers all the time.
And it is really important to understand that truth is truth and truth can make you free.
I am going to show you in just a minute how you will be on a completely different trajectory when I teach you this one principle. It will really start to get you on a different path if people pleasing is a problem for you or someone that you love and you are struggling because other people around you are not being grateful and they are asking too much from you.
And your strategy so far has just been to say no a lot.
What are you going to do.
THE BOUNDARIES BOOK AND WHY IT STILL LEAVES PEOPLE STUCK
And remember we talked about how a lot of these current things, people do not have the education to be able to discern principles for themselves.
The story that I told you is drawn from probably the most definitive source on boundaries. It is called Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend. And I think they are incredible. I am very grateful for their work. I think that they do incredible good in the world, and that they are very mission centered individuals that are really out there doing all kinds of good.
But I want to make one point here about even the best source by people who are trying to be God centered and mission centered, who have incredible educations.
Both of the authors have doctorate degrees and they have been doing this work for a very long time.
In this big definitive book on boundaries, there is only one chapter that attempts to teach principles. It is actually only one section, I think maybe it is one chapter in one section of the book, and they call it the 10 Laws of Boundaries.
They are good, solid truths in a sense, but they are actually just concepts, not principles. They are not actionable principles.
For example, the story I just gave you was law number five, the Law of Motivation. But then they told the story of Stans people pleasing, and then they talked about how Stan was afraid, and he was motivated by his fear.
We might be motivated by lots of other things.
And so then they go on to share, they say some things that we could be afraid of and some things that could be motivating us, and then talk about how we need to have the right motivations.
I am still at a bit of a loss. I still do not have an actionable principle. I still do not actually know what to do.
This is why we have fine tuned this process and we not only teach the law of nature and that ancient framework and principles and how they are immutable truths, we learn how to write actionable principles because that is the only way you know what to do.
Here is another one, the Law of Evaluation. There is a page or two description, still do not really know what to do, and I had to go back and read and reread these and then try to write my own principles around them and still struggled to do that.
So even in the best source, with a million or more copies sold, being the definitive source, going around teaching all these workshops, they do a lot of good and they help a lot of people, but they are also really caught up in a lot of applications and tactics.
And if they knew better how to write actionable principles for us and delineate those more clearly, we could think about our own applications.
THE MOST IMPORTANT PRINCIPLE ABOUT BOUNDARIES
So the most important principle about boundaries that I have ever learned did not actually come directly from them, and when I share this principle with you, it will reframe, I hope, the way that you see yourself and the way that you see others and the way that you manage your people pleasing.
Because at the very heart of boundaries, and there are a few other actionable principles we can flesh out around boundaries, and we do get to that eventually, and I am going to explain to you in a minute why we get to that only eventually in the academy, because boundaries are very simple.
Boundaries are simply teaching other people how to treat you properly.
WHY BOUNDARIES REQUIRE TEACHING
As human beings, we tend to test limits. We tend to push boundaries. We tend to want to get away with what we want to get away with, partly just because we are lazy and it is hard work to live with intention all the time.
And it is hard work to treat people the way that we ought to treat them.
And we do not want to have to do a job or a task or whatever the case might be.
And so we do not treat others the way that they should be treated all the time, or even most of the time.
And in order for us to have proper working relationships, we must teach each other how they need to treat us.
And when we have done a good, thorough job of teaching other people how to treat us properly, then other people can choose whether or not they want to honor what we have taught them.
And that teaching can happen bit by bit. It can happen informally. It happens in a million ways. It happens with looks and body language and words and actions.
But when we understand that is what we are doing, that in order to have proper boundaries we have to teach other people, it is a teaching, it is an active role, it is a choice we are making, it is an ongoing process, and the onus is on us.
To do it right. To do it kindly.
THE FOUNDATION FOR BOUNDARIES
But here is where it really gets better.
You and I cannot actually teach other people how to treat us properly unless we first know how to treat ourselves properly.
Unless and until we treat ourselves properly, we will not have the clarity or the confidence or the language or the ability or the inner strength or the courage to teach others how to do it.
If we cannot or will not treat ourselves properly, it becomes more and more difficult to expect others to.
Because why would they treat us better than we treat ourselves.
Now, sometimes people do. Sometimes there are really Christ like people in the world and they treat others properly because of who they are. And we love those people and we are grateful for those people.
But normally, on the day to day, it is up to us to teach others, and that means that we start by treating ourselves properly.
TREATING YOURSELF PROPERLY IS NOT INDULGENCE
And that does not mean indulgence.
One of my favorite things that C S Lewis ever said is that most people do not want a father in heaven. They want a grandfather in heaven.
And he just meant that we want all of our wounds bandaged up. We want to be sent on the playground to have a good time. We want to have the lollipops and the candies and desserts. We do not want to eat our vegetables because that is what a father makes us do.
A father disciplines us. A father teaches us what is right and wrong. A father expects us to do what is right or to take the consequences.
And so even though treating ourselves properly sometimes means recreation and leisure and having fun, it also means disciplining ourselves.
Like in the words of Laura Ingalls, I must make myself mind myself.
AN ACTIONABLE PRINCIPLE FOR PEOPLE PLEASING
That is where we get at an actionable principle.
I must treat myself the way I expect others to treat me.
And that is a jumping off place for a myriad of actionable things.
Okay, what would that mean.
That means I need to listen to my conscience better.
That means I need to take care of my body, my mind, my soul, and my emotions.
It leads to all sorts of better behaviors that then build the reserves and the confidence.
By taking loving actions towards ourselves, we like ourselves more. We learn to love ourselves. The feelings of love and liking follow. They come after the loving proper actions, the making ourselves mind ourselves, the putting proper boundaries in place by treating ourselves properly.
And this is why when you begin to think in principles, stuff that was so ethereal and confusing to you before just snaps right into focus.
WHY THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
When we began this podcast and I talked to you about getting over your people pleasing, you might have had a myriad of solutions you thought I was going to give you about how you were going to sit down and have conversations or tell people this or that other thing, or tell people no, or set a better schedule, or a million tactics that you might be hearing out there in the world.
But actually it all comes back to you.
In a future podcast, I am going to talk more about this and why that matters so much, and this is exactly why our academy is built the way that it is built, because the foundation of all your other relationships is your relationship with yourself.
And that core truth puts everything into clearer perspective.
Now you know that if you struggle with people pleasing, you have an actionable principle you can take right now, and you can begin to work on your relationship with yourself.
You can treat yourself better knowing that as you do, you will have the strength and the confidence and the clarity to expect others and to teach them with kindness because they do not always know.
And as you change and you want them to change toward you, you will have to kindly teach them that kind of thing is not allowed.
For example, how you talk to yourself.
If you do not want others to talk badly to you, you should probably start talking better to yourself.
Because you need to treat yourself the way that you would treat someone that you love.
And when you do that, you can tell others not to talk to you that way because that is not how people talk to you, including you.
So this shift increases your personal power when you lean into truth and not tactics.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN REAL LIFE
You are liberated to know what to do, to know how to practice.
There is a myriad of actions that you can take from this podcast, from this one principle that you can begin to put into action.
And as you work on loving yourself properly, as you treat yourself the way that you deserve to be treated, you simply communicate that to other people.
Oh, we do not talk that way to me.
Oh, we do not demand things of me.
Oh, we honor my schedule.
Oh, that is something that you need to do.
And of course there are other principles of boundaries and there are, in a collaborative relationship, and you need to learn those and you can learn those.
But unless the foundation is in place, the others will fall apart.
Because when you get in a pinch and when things get rough, just like I said before, it will all fall back on the person you have become.
The principles that you have integrated into your basic character will be who you are, and that is what you will fall back on in a crisis or in a hard situation, or when you are being called upon by someone to do something that makes you feel uncomfortable.
You will not cut corners anymore.
You will not let people take advantage of you.
You will not do things that go against your conscience when you are around other people.
Because you will treat yourself the way that you need to be treated, and this is why tactics fail with boundaries scripts.
You say this and then they say this.
Or just say these affirmations to yourself.
Or just do these simple things.
It is truth versus approval.
It is that personal empowerment, becoming the authority in your own life, becoming the expert in your own life, and living the principles that cause you to work on you first and healing yourself internally, not just behaviorally.
The answers are not out there. They are not in the words that you say in the way that you navigate these relationships. They are about what happens to you internally.
And when you shift the focus from people pleasing and trying to negotiate those relationships out there to how you treat yourself better, parenting yourself, guiding yourself with good principles and practices, everything begins to shift.
FREE TRAINING INVITATION AND CLOSING
And in this free training that I am going to be teaching you soon, I am going to walk you through how to uncover principles like this for your specific struggles.
And I am going to teach you how to start living them immediately.
Make sure you are on our email list and you get registered for that free training.
Because I really want to have you there so that I can give you these tools and skills.
I can help you shift your thinking forever so that you can have truth make you free.
Thanks for joining me. I will see you next time.
