Breaking the People Pleasing Habit

Is making others happy making you miserable? We need to realize that sometimes we're draining our very souls because we're chasing this people pleasing or chasing being liked and instead we need to know when to say yes and how to say no and make sure we're doing what God calls us to which does not drain our souls it actually energizes us and it makes us feel that we're doing our part. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller The Five Loved Languages. Today author and speaker Karen Eamon will join us to talk about breaking the pattern of people pleasing so you can live confidently. You'll find her latest book is our featured resource at FiveLovedLanguages.com titled When Making Others Happy is Making You Miserable, How to Break the Pattern of People Pleasing and Confidently Live Your Life.

Just go to FiveLovedLanguages.com. Gary I don't know if I've ever asked you this have you ever struggled with people pleasing? You know Chris I think there's a sense in which most people and especially Christians yeah because we want to serve people you know we have that concept and I think sometimes we can begin to sense like you know if I don't serve everybody that comes along my path I'm not pleasing God so I just you know I think different personalities of course have a greater struggle with that but I think everybody to us in a to a degree especially Christians I think have that sense of I've got to do this I've got to do this for them you know and and consequently sometimes you omit things that are more important in your life so I'm excited about this conversation today. I am too but you didn't answer my question so I'm going to push you on this pastors pastors can get into that unless I'm serving everybody every need that comes to me and if you've got a congregation you know of any size even if you have a small congregation you can't meet everybody's need right? Yeah and it's I think it's more of a struggle with a small congregation because I do remember way back when I pastored a little church about a hundred people you know preaching every Sunday morning every Sunday night every Wednesday night doing all the funerals all the weddings all the hospital visits yeah you could have the sense that the whole thing's dependent on me because I ran the bulletin too for Sunday. You're bringing back memories now I haven't thought about in years Chris. Were they were they using the mimeograph machine at that point?

Yes I think that's what it was. Oh you learn something new with Gary Chapman every time and you know what we say on the program he is a New York Times best-selling author our guest is a New York Times best-selling author too her name is Karen Eman she's a proverbs 31 ministry speaker and a writer for encouragement for today which is an online devotional that reaches more than four million people every day she's written 17 books including keep it shut pressing pause and keep showing up I love those titles Karen's passion is to help women live their priorities as they reflect the gospel to a watching world she's married to her college sweetheart Todd and she's the mother of three mom-in-law of two our featured resource that I mentioned is when making others happy is making you miserable how to break the pattern of people pleasing and confidently live your life you can find out more at fivelovelanguages.com Well Karen welcome to Building Relationships. Well thanks so much for having me it's a delight to be here. Let's begin with a little bit about you and your family and your writing for those who aren't familiar with you who is Karen Eman?

Well I live in Michigan right in the middle of the mitten we Michiganders always have our maps with us we can just hold our hand and point to the middle I like to think of us as America's high five but I've lived in Michigan my whole life and married to my college sweetheart and we have three adult children to buy marriage although sometimes I forget which are which I just like to say I'm a mama five now which is wonderful and fun and I do speak and write for Proverbs 31 Ministries and I just love encouraging people I love antique hunting and I love the Detroit Tigers how's that? All right all right well you are a self-proclaimed people pleaser tell us what you mean by that and why trying to make others happy often backfires? Well I have struggled with people pleasing all my life you know it began when I was young in elementary school I wanted to make sure that my teachers were happy with my grades and my behavior I'm quite the rule follower and I didn't ever want to rock the boat I wanted to make sure my peers liked me and that only got worse the older I got into middle school and high school and college and I kind of fell into this pattern of just feeling like I was responsible for everybody's happiness I stopped or I never learned how to to say no I just started this pattern of always saying yes to people and in some way I feel like it just it it made me feel important it made me feel needed and I just didn't like the feeling of disappointing someone or upsetting them or angering them and so I just never let it happen but it became a struggle that that really was threatening to not only make me miserable but to affect my health as well so I knew I had to do something about it. Yeah I can imagine that a lot of our listeners are identifying with what you have just said and they're thinking about themselves so I know they want to hear the rest of the story so how did you realize that something needed to change in your life? Well about three and a half years ago I was in a season of sorrow my father had just passed away but it was also a season of excitement our first child was getting married we were moving to a new town a town we moved to to be closer to my my father and my stepmom and my mother who all lived in that town and I was still saying yes to everything and keeping everybody happy and it was really a simple request that came my way from my best friend from college she wanted to know if I would help her with something that summer and inside my head everything within me was saying don't do it say no say no but of course I opened my mouth and out tumbled the word I am used to saying so often yes and I hung up the phone I knew I had answered wrongly I went out to the fire pit at the back of our property and I just sat there and bawled and I thought I have got to stop this I've got to stop saying yes to everything and in the next few days knowing that I'd made the wrong decision but too chicken to call her back I started having some physical things happen I couldn't sleep my left eye was twitching and so I knew that these physical manifestations were screaming at me that I needed to stop this pattern of behavior. Yeah so you decided to make a major change of a life reset tell us about the quote summer of necessary and no.

Yeah so this time was at the very beginning of summer it was almost memorial day and as I took a few days to stew about it and then make the right decision and pray about it talk to my husband about it I realized that I needed to do something and I really felt like God was calling me to a season for me that was a summer of necessary and no and what I mean by that is that I was to do only what was necessary for my family my home and my ministry my job and I was to say no to everything else for three months even if it was something simple Gary like making cookies for the toddler class at church you know I'd been doing this since I became a Christian at the age of 16 I'd been saying yes to everything especially at church and with friends and neighbors and I knew that I needed to pull back and just clear my my schedule clear my responsibilities just for three months to give myself and my my soul a little time to rest so for three months I backed out of everything and I didn't take on anything new. This is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman author of the New York Times bestseller "The 5 Love Languages" . Karen Eamon is joining us today author of When Making Others Happy is Making You Miserable How to Break the Pattern of People Pleasing and Confidently Live Your Life. Find out more about it at fivelovelanguages.com. Karen in our last summit you mentioned responding to things that people ask you to do at church let's talk about that a little bit people pleasing and the church you know as Christians aren't we supposed to get along with others and be considerate and try to help them and do everything everything we can to help them how did you put those two together yeah you know really when I think about people pleasing especially when it comes to being a Christian it's almost like it's a strength that gets carried to an extreme and now it becomes well we don't say the word weakness in our house we call them non-strengths now it's a non-strength so when you think about us as believers you know we're supposed to love we're supposed to lay down our lives for others we're supposed to serve and help and all of those things are wonderful when it's truly God providing the opportunity for us to love and serve and help and it's not us doing it just because we feel like we're expected to or because we feel like we want everyone to like us or we don't want to get a response from someone that shows that they're upset with us or they're a little you know angry or whatever I feel like we are sometimes doing a lot of the right things but we're doing it for the wrong reason of course we want to love and serve and play our role in the body of Christ but we don't have to do everything every single need is not necessarily our call we need to make sure we're only responding to the ones that are ours to do yeah and that's sometimes hard to to navigate isn't it figuring out what that is as you uh realigned your life and began to say no how difficult was that I mean did you catch yourself saying yes you know even after you those three months that you made that commitment well I'm going to tell you right now the first probably two or three weeks was so strange and so hard because I was used to just being involved in everything and being the center of everything and helping with everything and when I started to back out of some things I started to free up some time and I started to realize that the world can go on without me I don't I have to always be helping with everything but I'm gonna say it honestly it felt very strange but after a while there was this this sense of calm that came over me and and I no longer felt like I had this frenzy in my in my soul of oh I've got help oh so and so I had a baby I gotta take a meal you know I just really would go to the Lord first rather than just do what I thought was expected to me I would go to the Lord and say am I to help or you know am I to just set this one out for the first time in a long time it was strange but the calm that came to my soul was something that had been missing from my life for a really long time hmm yeah I can see that what's the difference between being a people pleaser and being a God pleaser well you know they're not always mutually exclusive there are sometimes yes our pleasing another person is pleasing to God but it all comes down to the motive why are we doing it are we doing it to either elicit a response from someone we want them to like us we want them to think we're capable or we're compassionate or we're competent or are we doing it to prevent a response we don't want them to be upset we don't want them to be disappointed we don't want them to be sad when we are truly doing something because we feel God calling us to and we are doing it for him and as a result the other person is pleased then those line up and those are okay but it's when those two things are in opposition to each other and we know that our saying yes is not what God is calling us to do in fact he's been calling us to slow down but we say yes anyway that's when when those two are in opposition to each other yeah yeah now you had to face some internal fears in the process of relinquishing you know there's people pleasing what fears did you have well with my outgoing personality and people loving ways honestly one of them was I just had that you know they call it FOMO f-o-m-o the fear of missing out when I wasn't involved in everything I thought oh you know I'm not going to be the center of that activity or at that you know function and I didn't like that I thought oh I'm going to really miss this for my life but I found out that wasn't the case necessarily sometimes I actually ended up liking the extra time that it created in my schedule I feared upsetting people I feared disappointing people I feared sometimes angering them and I don't mean in a way that's unhealthy where you need to get help but just kind of making them ticked off at me and I sometimes I feel like with people pleasing sometimes we're afraid of having to explain ourselves further so sometimes we make it seem like we think a when really we think b and we just kind of let it go because if they really knew we thought b they might ask us to explain ourselves further especially if it's a hot topic or a political issue so I think there's a lot of different fears that are wrapped up in the reasons that we people please now you speak a lot to women you think women have more trouble with this than men or not you know I think sometimes it's because we're women and we're expected to do a lot of things not only outside the home but in the home and so we have a lot of different things we have to juggle and we feel like we have to make sure that you know everybody's happy and everybody's taken care of but I really think it's almost based more in personality because I know some women who do not at all like my daughter 100 she's 30 years old she does not at all struggle with people pleasing but I know that I have a son that does so sometimes I think it's it's based on our roles and what's expected of us as men and women but a lot more I think it's really our personalities yeah you know I tend to lean in that direction as well I think it personality has a tremendous impact on that and of course you know personality is difficult to understand sometimes there's so many segments to that you know but yeah I do agree I think men can do can be people pleasers just as much as women at least that's my perspective my observation yeah and I also think it's not always the same personality type some people are helpers and they people please because they want to help you know some people are peacemakers and they people please because they don't want to rock the boat they want everybody to be happy and some people are perfectionists and to them perfect is when there's no drama in your life and everybody likes you you know so it's not always the same personality type but there are different facets of our personalities that that tempt us to be a people pleaser well you can get in here with birth order too and and the firstborn middle child you know the young child I wonder Gary if if you've ever thought about this with the love languages for example if you have acts of service as your love language and you are at some event and nobody's cleaning up afterwards you know you might jump in because you feel that that's what your love language is do you think that comes in here as well I think it could Chris yeah because if that's your love language then you tend to speak it to other people and consequently there's always things to do I don't care where you are there's always things that need to be done and so yeah I think there could be a parallel there that a person who has quality time necessarily wouldn't be as likely to jump in and overload themselves perhaps because they they they enjoy more you know extended time with one person rather than doing several things for several people so yeah thank you right a lot of layers to this whole thing we're talking with Karen Eamon today on Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman the featured resources her book when making others happy is making you miserable I love that title how to break the pattern of people pleasing and confidently live your life you find out more at five love languages dot com just go to five love languages dot com so Karen when you quit trying to make everyone else happy some people weren't too thrilled about that and you described some of this in a chapter entitled pushers powders guilt bombers and others who try to call the shots tell us more about that yeah just as we were mentioning that sometimes people pleasing is based on our personality sometimes the people who are tempting us to people please they have their own set of personalities too and I kind of categorize them as I looked over my life and the types of people I had the most trouble with and the the first are the pushers they're the ones that are kind of dominant and a little bit bossy and you don't like that feeling of being backed in a corner and being pushed to do something so you just kind of give in and do what they want the pushers get their way by stomping their feet but the second category is the powders they don't stomp their feet they drop their smile and so you don't want to contribute to their sadness especially if there's somebody who truly has been a victim in life and they've got a lot of other things in their life that are disappointing to them or that just didn't turn out the way they'd hoped and there's a lot of sadness in their life well you don't want to contribute it to their sadness and you know if you say no to them they're gonna drop their smile well then you tend to give in there's also guilt bombers you know I'm sure we all can think of that person in our life that makes us feel guilty whether it's overtly or kind of subtly you know just kind of reading between the lines they're they're kind of dropping a guilt bomb on us to get us to do what they want us to do and then the category that I really saw the most in my life it's I just made up a term for him I don't know you probably could help me with it um what's the the right term to use but I call them the me first maximizers and those are the people that on the surface they seem very delightful and helpful they can even be you know really hard working and pleasant but whenever there's a situation where somebody has to do more work or spend more money or you know get the the smaller piece of the pie they make sure that it's never them they can somehow finagle things so that they always come out on top and you always get the short end of the stick and those were the people that I had the hardest time with I call them the me first maximizers I wonder if uh our listeners as they hear that uh see themselves falling in some of those one of those categories because let's face it though I mean those are pretty common things right people that push you the kind of bossy and and those that will just kind of pout you know kind of withdraw and pout uh yeah and then make you feel guilty I have a sense some of us are identifying with this now smartphones smartphones allow us to demand attention every minute of the day that is if you will allow them to so how do you stick to your priorities when people can have access to you all day long every day yeah having this age of digital in our lives has really only complicated things because you know just think about it back in the day when you and I were both younger we probably had a land line in our home right so if I wanted to get if I wanted to get a hold of you I had to call your land line and it wasn't even outfitted with the answering machine that let's go back that far so if I didn't get you you didn't pick up the responsibility was on me to continue to contact you until I got you to pick up well things are so different now now people have a myriad of ways that they can contact us they can shoot us a text leave us a direct message on social media leave us a voicemail send us an email and I almost feel like people are putting things on my to-do list that I never asked for nor gave permission especially like in the mornings I keep my phone plugged in in the kitchen but when I walk out there in the morning and I take it out of airplane mode dozens of things do their daily dance down from the top of my screen and it's like somebody has taken the pencil out of my hand when I'm writing my to-do list on my old-fashioned legal pad like I like to do and they've written things on my list you know send me this link hey give me that recipe hey I need you to do this and the burden is now on us to get back and either say okay or to say no way and so because they can contact us and they feel like they have instant access to us everyone thinks boy if I text them they're going to text me right back it's really kind of made this whole temptation to people please even harder than it used to be in the past yeah so how have you figured out to handle that because I'm identified with what you're saying right now okay how do you how do you select who to respond to or how do you handle that well it's hard because again I think people feel like you have instant access to the phone and especially if they're somebody who's never without their phone and they respond immediately to people they find it very strange when you don't so I've learned even though I might have time to respond to somebody's text message I won't I'll wait I try to return text messages in the evening and so people are kind of getting the the hint that yeah I might text her at 11 a.m but I might not hear back from her until after the work day is done so I think we need to just start setting up some patterns so people know what to expect yeah otherwise really I mean it can be just moment by moment you're getting text or some kind of messages that if you just respond to them that'd be all you do all right well yeah this is this is uh I think touching a lot of us now you came to recognize that you are a what you call a fabulous fibber tell us about that and how you overcame it yeah I was sitting in church one Sunday morning and I usually love sitting at my church but the pastor kind of wandered off on a tangent and was talking about people pleasing and he made the statement just kind of off the cuff he said you know people pleasers they often lie and I'm telling you I felt like those spotlights that were normally shining on the stage where the worship band was or the pastor was suddenly had drops swiveled and they were shining at me and everybody knew he was talking about me because I thought of how many times I shade the truth I dress it up a little bit I you know fudge or fib just a little because I feel like it's for a good reason like I don't want to hurt someone's feelings or I don't want to upset them but I had to come to the reality in this whole journey of learning to break free from the prison of people pleasing that a lot of the time there was some dishonesty to my people pleasing I was saying what someone else wanted to hear rather than what I truly felt and that's being deceptive yeah yeah now how did this affect your family you know in your home you began pulling back on people pleasing and uh how'd your husband respond to this how'd your children react to this well my husband very sweetly kind of said it's about time you know because he had known for years you know he would see me hang up the phone sometimes you know even years ago when my children were little and I'd said yes to something else and he'd go how in the world are you gonna find time to do that and I'm like well but they need help and I really like them they're a new friend at church and it'll be okay and I just kept feeling like I could keep piling things on my plate I never thought to remove anything from my plate before I took something new on or to say no I don't want that new thing on my plate because I was so sure that I was so clever and capable that if I just rearranged everything on the plate somehow it would all fit so my husband he was kind of like you know I'm glad you're finally seeing this because this has been an issue for a long time he's he's pretty laid back and not a pusher in my face so he kind of lets me learn my own lessons like he does with our kids our kids were over the moon happy because honestly you know and I don't want to cry about it but it makes me want to cry there were so many times I was saying yes to things outside my four walls just so someone would like me just so you know they would think I was all that and a bag of chips and I was saying no to my children and I was putting them on the back burner to run off and save the world and it was very eye-opening to me that I had been doing that I didn't realize it I thought oh they'll understand hey I'm modeling a life of ministry before them right but they all were like mom we're so glad that you're not overextending yourself anymore and you have more time to be present here with us our program is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman you can find us online at fivelovelanguages.com you'll see our featured resource there the book by Karen Ehman when making others happy is making you miserable how to break the pattern of people pleasing and confidently live your life find it at fivelovelanguages.com Karen as I'm listening to you tell your story and I love what you said your your family to how they responded to you they were seeing this I think the the phrase you used a minute ago the prison of people pleasing the hard part of this whole thing is that the prison is not made by somebody else it's our own choices the the bars are up there but the the good part of that is that we have the power to simply by saying no to pull those bars down right yeah I like to think of the image of you know we're in this prison of people pleasing we're trapped inside we're like how can I get out how can I get out if we just look down in our hand we hold the key we've got the key but we're just not using it we're not using it we just keep saying yes we keep pleasing everybody we keep thinking you know everyone's happiness is our job and we don't realize that we hold the key and we can bust out of that prison of people pleasing with God's help of course but it starts with us yeah Chris you mentioned earlier pastors you know and I talked about my early days in the pastorate I cannot tell you how many times in my counseling office wives of pastors have said to me things like my husband has a mistress and I come shocked and she says it's the church you know she feels that he gives more importance to the church and pleasing the people in the church than he does her and Karen you were just talking about how that works in the family you know with your children but I think pastors can identify with this there's a huge temptation to come across that way that we respond yes to everybody in the church and and ignore our spouse and sometimes we say well you know it's my job I'm gonna have to do this you know well listen the pastor chooses what he does what he does you know as you said the keys in our hands right we we choose what we what we do what we don't do and the corollary that adds to that Gary is all of this is theological and it's in its construct and we I think everything's theological in some way or another but Karen answer that question if if I believe it's all on me and I act as if I it's all on me then I don't allow God to be the person that can come alongside somebody else who's struggling I don't allow God's sovereign hand to to reach out because I feel like it's all I'm sovereign that's hard to see isn't it yeah but if you're exactly right we kind of take the place of God we think we can be everywhere and know everything do everything and that's that's really his job not ours yeah well you're right and I'm quoting here we teach others how to treat us expand on that that's actually something a friend of mine said to me probably 10 years ago when she realized that I was quite the people pleaser and she was trying to help me out and she made a statement to me one day I know it's not original to her somebody famous once upon a time probably said it but she said a statement she said you know Karen you teach people how to treat you and I said you and I said what and she said I'm just making an observation you teach them how to treat you by what you allow what you don't allow by how quickly you respond by how often you say yes and it's true I mean I bet all of us on this call are listening to us talk here can think of somebody in our life that if I said to you I'm going to give you a hundred dollars if you text somebody in your contact list and they text you immediately back we all know who we would text right that person that always responds right away and on the other hand if I were to say okay I'm going to give you a hundred dollars if you text somebody that doesn't respond for a day or two I can think in my mind who in my family rarely responds for a couple days and guess what both of those people have done they've taught me how to treat them if I need something right away I'm going to go to person a the first person because they're going to right away respond but I'm not going to go to that second person because if I need something right now and I'm not talking about a dire need like I was just in a car accident but yeah if I need say all my family was talking about uh some movie this weekend and they all remember the name of it and I can't remember the name of it and I want to know I know I'm not going to text one son because he rarely responds to his text messages he's taught me he's not going to get back to me I know I'm going to go to the other son who has a lifestyle where he can have his phone with him more often and he tends to text right back so we do by our behavior we teach people how to treat us and they push the envelope with us because guess what we let them do that in the past and so that's why they're going to be shocked when we change our behavior right and they're going to say wait a minute she always responds what's wrong is she sick yeah uh-huh yeah okay how does enforcing boundaries and this is somewhat of what we're talking about how does enforcing boundaries work in this whole process yeah I feel like with boundaries I like to think of it as uh sending out a syllabus you know how it was when you were in high school or college and the teacher or professor gave you a syllabus this is what you can expect this semester in this course by our behavior we are sending out a syllabus to the people in our lives what we will allow and tolerate and what we won't allow and won't tolerate and when we learn and I'm preaching to myself on this one because I'm terrible at boundaries I'm much better than I was five years ago but when we learn to have healthy boundaries in place they're not only going to help us but they're going to help other people because they will know how they can treat us and how they can behave around us and what we will and won't allow it works for everybody and it betters our relationships when we have clear healthy you know not totally out of the the world boundaries where we won't help anyone like I don't want to ever make it sound like we shouldn't love and help and serve and please other people at times we should but it's knowing when we're doing it for God and when we're doing it just to be liked and so having those boundaries in place kind of helps us ourselves to not cross them and to to not kind of veer off into the people-pleasing lifestyle again because we've we've put some different parameters in place.

Give us an example of of what a boundary would be like here in this context. Well let's go back to our cell phones you know I taught people how to treat me with my cell phone the first time I had one you know I was just tethered to the thing it was like a fourth your fifth appendage right and so I had to learn to set some boundaries and so people in my life now know unless it's an emergency I'm not going to text you back until after 5 p.m when work's done and it might not be after until after 6 p.m when dinner is also done so that's just a boundary I'm not going to pick up I'm not going to put out your fire that you started yourself your emergency you know because of a lack of planning on your part doesn't now mean an emergency on my part that I've got to run and rescue you I'll be polite and I will be helpful as I can when I'm done with my work day so don't expect me to text back at 11 o'clock and it's hard sometimes because we all have different lifestyles and there are some people they have a lot more free time than you do and so they just think it's strange when you aren't you know playing around on YouTube and watching videos and texting them right back they don't realize what's really going on on the other end of that phone that you have a job or that you're caring for young children or whatever it is that has you tied up and so just putting some kind of boundary I actually have a friend who she only answers emails on Monday Wednesday Friday she only responds to social media messages on Tuesday or Thursday she has a lot of boundaries in place mine just basically is you're not going to hear from me till after the work day is done yeah I'm thinking again of pastors you know we can set a boundary that on Tuesday nights we're going to have a date night with our wives and if the whole church knows that they're less likely to call us on Tuesday night unless it's an emergency you know and then just to even say that to our congregation just just so you all know you know unless it's a dire emergency you know I'm not going to be responding on Tuesday night and I think people accept those things when we share them in the right context and with the right spirit when it comes to saying no to others you claim that and I'm quoting here you can still say yes to a friendship while also saying no to their request what does that look like well you know for so many years I bought the lie that if I didn't say yes to my friends all the time that my friendship with them was in jeopardy like maybe not that they were going to totally dump me and not want to be my friend anymore but that there might be some awkwardness going forward in our friendship but one of the biggest lessons I learned from that summer of necessary and no was that my true friends were still going to be my true friends there were some people that didn't understand when I told them that summer I can't help you this summer I can't volunteer at this or I can't do that some of them split the scene because you know what they weren't really my true friend they were just hanging around me because I said yes all the time and I helped them you know lighten their load but those friends who were my true friends they cared about my mental health and my emotional well-being and they wanted me to build some margin in my day and I've learned with those friends that if they ask me something and I really feel like it's not my call it's not what I'm supposed to do I don't feel the Lord leading me this way I can honestly say no to their request but still say yes to the friendship by saying but I'll help brainstorm who you might who else you might ask or I will certainly be praying that you find the right person you know for that job I can still you know love them and care about them and ask how that situation is going that project they're working on whatever I can still say yes to the friendship but say no to that request I don't have to always say yes. This is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman author of the New York Times bestseller "The 5 Love Languages" . Our guest is another New York Times best-selling author Karen Eamon author of When Making Others Happy Is Making You Miserable How to Break the Pattern of People Pleasing and Confidently Live Your Life.

It's our featured resource at fivelovelanguages.com. Karen just before the break you said that if it's really your friend you can say no and maybe you can help them you know problem solve or whatever but what you just described there was that's really hard to have the the wherewithal to say I can't do what you're asking me to and I'm still your friend I hope you'll like me I hope you'll still like me that's kind of a vulnerable place to be isn't it? It is and what I found helps the most is to just be very very honest and say everything within me right now wants to say yes like my heart totally wants to just jump right in and help you and say yes to your request but I know my limitations I know you know how much white space I have in my schedule and I know that this request it deserves the attention and the focus from somebody that really can do it and that's just not me so it's not going to be good for me if I say yes and it's really not going to be good for you because I can't give this project the focus and attention it deserves so even though my heart wants to say yes because I love you so much and you're such a great friend I know I have to say no. Yeah and if they're a true friend they will understand that.

Yes. Now there are some women maybe men as well who feel that being nice to people requires that you have to be available 24 7 especially if it's friends and family in a crisis you know so how can that constant availability actually hinder the other person's growth? You know I've actually had this happen two or three times in the last 15 to 20 years in my life and it was always when I had a friend who was going through a very rough and unwanted divorce everything within them wanted to stay married but in all three situations there was infidelity on their partner's part and they came to me for comfort and for advice and for prayer and for a listening ear and with all of them there they wanted to kind of give the blow by blow play-by-play of what was happening and so they call me and say oh then this happened and then they did this and they said that and they were calling me I had one friend that was calling me multiple times a day and I felt like it was the right thing to pick up the phone because you know they were in a crisis they needed help they needed a listening ear but I finally realized that I was preventing them from running to God the place they should have been headed in the first place because I was picking up the phone and they were running to me and I was just giving them a little temporary band-aid that fell off they needed to learn to run to God and so I had to put some boundaries in place and I had to have a tough conversation with one of them and say I love you so much but this isn't healthy for you it's not healthy for me I really think you need some professional counseling and so they started going to a counselor and it got so much better for them because I know licensed trained counselor but I think sometimes we step in and we prevent people from running to the Lord because we're right there to rescue them. Yeah and sometimes God uses that counselor because that counselor is trained to do what they need at the moment.

Exactly. Now you have a grid or a system that you use to determine who and what to say yes to. How do you discern when to say no? I kind of ask myself some questions whenever I'm asked to take on a responsibility or to help with a project or take on a role and the first one you know kind of is going to sound like a Sunday school answer but it's have I been deliberate to pray about not just this decision but about daily decisions in my life? Have I been deliberate to you know get up in the morning and say Lord today a lot of requests are going to come my way perhaps please let me know tap me on the heart when they're coming from you and I should say yes and help me to know when they're not mine to do and I need to just boldly and politely say no. I of course you know ask myself is this violate anything laid out in scripture we don't want to do that so we need to you know make sure we're thinking that through and have we taken time to ponder and pray about this specific request almost laying out a pro and con list you know like we learned when we were younger you know on the left hand side of the page the all the pros of saying yes to this and on the right hand side all the cons sometimes just having it there and writing helps us. I also ask myself you know if I've really factored in what saying yes to this commitment is going to do to my other roles and commitments especially to my family so whenever we say yes to something we're saying no to something else because if we're going to spend two hours a week on this new project well that's two hours we have to say no to something else so factor that in also you know ask yourself might you be able to grant the request if you did delegate something else that's already on your plate sometimes we are being called to take on a new task but we first need to take something else off of our plate and then also I like to just remind myself you know ask myself have I solicited input from others who I know have my best interests at heart and they will be very prayerful with me to pray about this request because sometimes they can see angles of it that I can't see myself.

Sometimes they also know things about the situation the other person's situation that you may you may not know too yeah. So your book offers seven quote stop it statements for recovering people pleasers would you share your favorite one or maybe a two or three of those? Sure well one part of people pleasing is what we've been talking about a lot it's saying yes to someone because we want to please them but the other side of it sometimes is that we should be we should be saying yes to something God's calling us to do but we're so worried about the reaction of someone else and whether or not they approve of it that we sort of say no to God. So one of these stop it statements I like to think of them is one little one sentence sermons I preached myself is this that you don't need that person's permission to do God's will. If God is really calling you to do something I have a friend that's walking through this with being called to foster care but she knows her family does you know her extended family thinks she's not so she doesn't need their permission to do God's will if that's what God is really calling her to do. So that's one of them you don't need their permission to do God's will and then another one that I preached to myself often is this my my friend Becky said this to me years and years ago don't take on more than you can pray for and what I mean by that is with every new responsibility that comes your way you're going to have the task you're going to have the people involved with the task those people are going to have things going on in your life that you might want to be attentive to and praying for so if you can't take on the time it's going to take to pray about your roles and tasks and responsibilities and the people you're involved with then maybe you shouldn't take on the task so don't take on more than you can pray for.

Well Karen I think those are extremely helpful and I hope that our listeners are going to want to get your book because those are the kind of things that are very very practical. You invite women to take time to stop the siphoning of their souls. What does that mean to you? I feel that it's when we are constantly trying to make everyone happy we're caring so much about other people's emotions and and their responsibilities and their tasks and making sure that that we rush in there and help them that we don't realize that in doing that we are neglecting our own souls our own emotions our own you know capacity that we have and so we need to not put ourselves first but we need to realize that sometimes we're draining our very souls because we're chasing this people pleasing or chasing being liked and instead we need to know when to say yes and how to say no and make sure we're doing what God calls us to which does not drain our souls it actually energizes us and it makes us feel that we're doing our part. Karen our time is almost gone but can you say just a word about the role model of Jesus as it pertains to this topic?

Yeah you know when you think about Jesus he had lots of people in his life and he had a packed agenda while he was on earth but he didn't seem to get tripped up you know he knew when it was time to pour into his 12 disciples or when it was time to speak to the crowds or when he needed to pull alone you know back and be alone with God or maybe just spend time with his three closest disciples Peter, James, and John he seemed to be able to do this without getting exhausted and without you know over serving if that can be said and I think it's because he had such a close relationship with the father he knew when to pour in and when to draw back and we need to do the same thing you know he never diverted from his mission but he knew how to interact with people and when it was okay to just be alone and be with the Lord. Yeah it's a good observation well Karen thanks for being with us today I think that this book and the message is going to touch a lot of people's lives because I think a lot of people wrestle with this and all of us to some degree wrestle with it when to say yes and when to say no so thank you for what you have done in terms of your own life and sharing this concept with us today. Well thank you so much for having me. Once again the title of Karen Ehman's latest is when making others happy is making you miserable how to break the pattern of people pleasing and confidently live your life we have it linked at the website fivelovelanguages.com again go to fivelovelanguages.com and next week why you need to stop striving and surrender. Don't miss the conversation with Erica Wigenhorn in one week. Our thanks to Janice Todd and Steve Wick for their work behind the scenes Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.