Break Free From People Pleasing with Karen Ehman
episode #307
As a lifelong people pleaser who frequently works with many women—many of whom also tend to please others and drink as a way to cope with their feelings—I reached out to Karen after discovering her insightful book, When Making Others Happy Is Making You Miserable: How to Break the Pattern of People Pleasing and Confidently Live Your Life.
Karen Ehman is a New York Times bestselling author, a Proverbs 31 Ministries speaker, a contributing writer for Encouragement for Today online devotions, and a teacher in the First 5 Bible study app which has over 2 million daily users. She has written 19 books and Bible studies, including Keep It Shut: What to Say, How to Say It, and When to Say Nothing at All, and the 2020 ECPA devotional book of the year, Settle My Soul: 100 Quiet Moments to Meet with Jesus.
Karen shares what she realized about certain friendships after she made the decision to spend her “necessary and no” summer and the freedom she felt in having more time for herself. Her reflections highlight a crucial truth: every need is not necessarily your call, and it’s not our responsibility to make others happy. As she aptly states, “You don’t need anyone’s permission to do God’s will.”
Key topics of our discussion included:
The signs and definition of people-pleasing: Recognizing the traits that indicate a tendency to prioritize others' happiness over our own.
Where the need to please others comes from: Karen shares her story of growing up with an alcoholic father not wanting to make him mad, and not wanting to make her mom sad.
The fear of overcoming people-pleasing: How to navigate the anxiety of setting boundaries while seeking balance in relationships and making time for ourselves.
Karen’s journey: Her path to overcoming people-pleasing began with reading Galatians 1:10, which emphasized the importance of aligning her actions with her values rather than the expectations of others.
The summer of “necessary and no”: A season where she learned to establish boundaries that granted her more time and freedom.
The impact of technology: How our phones can perpetuate people-pleasing behaviors by constantly connecting us to others' needs.
The role of prayer: Emphasizing prayer as an essential tool in the journey to overcome the compulsion to please others.
Identifying pushers and pouters: Understanding the dynamics of relationships that foster people-pleasing, including The Pushers, The Pouters, The Guilt-Bombers, and The Me Time Maximizers.
Practical strategies: Simple phrases to effectively say no without feeling the need to over-explain.
It is clear that overcoming people-pleasing is not just about learning to say no; it is about recognizing our worth, setting healthy boundaries, and fostering relationships that uplift rather than diminish us.
The journey may be challenging, but as Karen emphasizes, choosing to prioritize ourselves can lead to profound liberation and a more fulfilling life.
Thank you for listening!
Resources Mentioned:
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[00:00:00] Hey there, welcome to To 50 and Beyond. I am Lori Massicot. I am your host. I'm the midlife sobriety coach and founder of Team Alcohol Free, an online community for women 35 and over who are going and staying alcohol-free together. I am really happy that you are here. If you are new to the podcast, this is where we talk about living alcohol-free later in life. And if you're returning back to the podcast, yay.
Thank you so much. I appreciate you. I'm giving you a big hug. One of our greatest challenges when we go alcohol-free is the things in our lives that motivate us to drink. I like to call it the drinking motivators. You can also call it the triggers that keep that cycle of drinking going. Now you stop drinking, you're out of that cycle, but you're still experiencing the things that motivated you to drink to begin with.
And a lot of women realize after they stopped drinking that, hey, people pleasing and not prioritizing myself is really making it difficult to be alcohol-free. Not just be alcohol-free, not just stop drinking. That's not the [00:01:00] purpose of what we're doing here. We want to have a lifestyle that we enjoy
without drinking alcohol. That's why I reached out to our guest today. Karen Ehman. Karen is a Proverbs 31 ministry speaker and a New York Times bestselling author of 17 books. I reached out to Karen after searching for a book on people pleasing. I wanted something for myself and also to recommend to my clients.
And I found one of the best titles of a book I've ever seen. "When Making Others Happy Is Making You Miserable: How to Break the Pattern of People Pleasing and Confidently Live Your Life." Inside the book, Karen helps you discover how to live out your priorities despite the expectations of others, create a strategy for knowing when to say yes and how to say no, and implement boundaries with the pushers, pouters, guilt bombers, and others who try to call the shots in your life.
Today, Karen is sharing her story of being a people pleaser from a young age, where people pleasing comes from, and how to spot the signs, and how a verse in the Bible led her to realize that it was [00:02:00] time to start her season of necessary no to overcome her people pleasing ways. She is also sharing some of her strategies in saying no, and the importance of prayer in overcoming people pleasing.
I am so happy to have Karen here. Let's get started.
Hi, Karen, welcome to 250 and beyond. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Oh, I'm so happy that you're here because this is such a topic that we need to discuss people pleasing. I love your book. And when I saw it, the title just grabbed my attention when making others happy is making you miserable. I felt it.
And so I want to ask you to start this conversation off. How do you describe people pleasing? People pleasing is giving an answer, agreeing to a responsibility, or saying yes to a duty. Not because you feel you're called to do it, you want to do it, God wants you to do it, but because you are afraid of the other person's reaction if you don't do it.
Is it more of like what we're avoiding? It can be. Yeah. Yeah. I want to get into more of the science. What is your personal experience? What led you to write this book? I've been a people pleaser my entire life. It goes back to my childhood. I don't want to blame things on my parents, but the reality of my situation was that I lived with a father who was an alcoholic and who was abusive toward my mother and toward us kids.
And I learned very quickly on don't make dad mad. Because if he's drinking, he for sure will yell, but he might hit you. And if he wasn't, well, I didn't want to chance that either, but usually he was a lot nicer when he wasn't drinking. And so I learned very early on, don't make dad mad. But at the same time, I also saw my mom going through the heartbreak of watching her marriage crumble and my father have multiple affairs and then divorce her.
And so. I didn't want to add to her sorrow, so I learned very early on, don't make mom sad while you're also not making dad mad. And it just carried over into the rest of my life. I wanted my teachers to be pleased with me. I didn't want them disappointed. So I got good grades. I wanted to be liked at school.
So I had someplace that was happy because my home wasn't happy. So I learned to be a major people pleaser when it came to my friends. And it. Just kind of caught me in a prison of people pleasing that I walked through and felt trapped by up until probably about five or six years ago in my adult life.
That's where it starts when we're kids. I really do believe that. Thank you for sharing that too. Your story with us. I know that a lot of women are going to relate to that. And then, you know, we just learn it from such a young age and the signs of people pleasing as we get older. I feel like the conversations that I have with women, especially around drinking to please other people or not quitting drinking because it's going to make other people uncomfortable.
It's, it's heartbreaking to watch, but I was there as well. And we worry so much about the other person and we're sacrificing or risking our own happiness. Mm hmm. Exactly right. Mm hmm. Mm. Can you give me some signs of, like, what we can look for as far as, like, if this is the first time somebody is hearing this topic and this conversation, like, what are those signs?
I think for me, it is when someone asks me to help them with something, take on a responsibility, whatever it is, my opinion of their outfit, whatever it is. If my first blink response is, what do they want me to say? Rather than, what do I really think? What do I really feel? That's a telltale sign. Also, I think not thinking, what does God want me to do first, but instead thinking, what does this person want me to do or say, or how do they want me to respond?
And then kind of as a secondary thought, or really my first reaction isn't, well, does God want me to do this? Is it him tapping me on the heart, asking me to take on this responsibility? Or is it? I really care about what that person's response is, and I just hope it kind of somehow aligns up with God.
That's a telltale sign as well. And also just going back in history and thinking in my interactions with this person in the past, have I always said yes to this? Or have I, You know, signed up for that committee, and now I'm on my 12th year, and of course they think I'm going to say yes, and so I feel trapped, like I can't say I feel trapped by my past behavior.
I think that's another one too. That's a good one for sure. I felt that. You talk about in the book, when you had committed to your friend for having her son come and stay with you. Was this around the time that you started to realize that, Hey, I'm a people pleaser. And could you talk about the realizations around that time?
Cause I really appreciated that story. Sure. So, My husband and I moved to a town, once our kids were all out of school, that was closer to all four of our parents. And three weeks after we moved, my father passed away unexpectedly. And at the same time of dealing with being in a new town, being in a new church, my dad passing away, who I was very close to, because, yes, he was an alcoholic.
And, you know, broke our family apart when I was younger. But the last 20 years of his life, he quit drinking. He reconciled and asked for forgiveness from all the people that he had wronged. And he and my mom actually reconciled just a few weeks before he died. So it ended up good in the end, which is a great end of the story when I talk about him and he, he gave me full permission to talk about him and his drinking, you know, he said, if it can help somebody else, then you, you write about it, you talk about it.
He was fine with it. Bye. It was at that time that my best friend from college wanted her son, who was going to be an intern in our, uh, town right next to us, basically in our town, even though he lived an hour and a half away, he didn't mind the commute, but there were going to be some days during the week where he would be Locking up, it was at a gym, and he'd be locking up late at night, like at 10, 11 o'clock at night, and need to be back at work at 7 in the morning, and he had an hour and a half one way commute.
So she said, on those days, it'll probably be two to three days a week, can he just stay at your house? Well, there was hardwood floors stacked in our guest room, because we were having new hardwood floors put down, but not for like six more weeks, and I was dealing with, you know, selling my dad's estate, and living in a new house, and all of this, but it was my best friend.
I've been friends with her since I was a teenager, so I just said yes, And then I instantly knew, oh, I should not have said yes. And I was having a lot of physical manifestations of stress from people pleasing in my life. Like my left eye constantly twitched. I had a hard time falling asleep at night. I woke up a lot in the night.
I had racing thoughts. I was exhausted all the time. And I knew I needed to go back to her and say, I should have said no. And so I explained to her everything. She was so gracious. She and she said, you know, I care more about your mental health and your physical and spiritual wellbeing. We'll find someplace for him to stay.
It's okay. And I'm going to be checking on you once a week to see how you're doing. She was wonderful to me, but it really led me to what I call a season of necessary and no. And for me, it was a summer of necessary and no. And what I mean by that is I did only was necessary for my family, my home, and my.
ministry, my job. And I said no to everything else for three months. And I dropped out of everything, even if it was something simple, like making treats for the toddler class at church. Cause I realized I'd been doing that since I was in college decades ago. And I really felt God was calling me to completely scrape off my plate.
And at the end of those three months to put only back on what he was calling me to do, not the things I was doing. Cause I'd always done for 12 years. Not the things I was doing because I really want that person to like me who asked me to do it. But you know, I kind of was begrudgingly doing it because I didn't feel called.
I didn't get joy in it. And not that we have to always have joy in serving. I'm not saying that, but there were so many things I was doing. Not because God, I felt, wanted me to, but because of the responses of the other people if I said no. So at the end of that three months, I put back only what I felt really I was called to do, and I didn't join back up for the other things.
And I learned a lot. I learned that some people I thought were my friends really just were being friendly to me because I could do something for them. And I really realized who my true friends were because they were so glad I did that. They knew I was overcommitted. They knew. This was a major stress in my life and they welcomed me taking that, that period of pause.
I've appreciated that response from your friend. And I was thinking about it, you know, the people who really matter in our lives, when we open up and we share how we truly feel, that's typically the response that we're going to get. And the other people, like you said, you know, we were friendly. It's okay.
But I'm sure that there were some fears when you were doing that. Talk about that. Yeah, there's a lot of fear tied up with people pleasing. We fear not being liked. We fear not being viewed as capable or competent or compassionate or caring. And I had a little bit of all of those things in different things that I was saying yes to.
But I had to really realize that. I have to please God and serve people and not wrongly think backwards that pleasing people was how you serve God, because that's just what I thought. You just make everybody happy. And I had to realize, yeah, there are times that when I say yes to something God's calling me to do, it will please somebody.
But there are other times that it won't. And what you talked about too, you know, laying awake at night and having the physical reactions from pleasing people, the stress and thinking about it. I mean, that's really where we're sacrificing our own health. and well being. So honestly, when we look at this and we can really get a grip on it and say, okay, well, if this is taking me out of my game, then I really have to make some changes.
But I feel all of those fears. And I know that women listening today, they feel those fears as well. And so you said you came to this like realization about five or six years ago. And okay. Can, can you tell us like what you found out as far as the message and the Bible, the verse in the Bible? Yeah, there's so many scriptures that really helped me.
I think one of them that was the most, like, it really jumped out at me during that, that time when I was taking that season of Necessary Note is Galatians 1 10 and it says this, Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings or of God? Or am I trying to People please, if I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.
And I thought, you know, hold up, wait, people in the Bible, they struggled with people pleasing to and, and this was the apostle Paul, you know, writing to the church at Galatia, that they had been making certain decisions and doing certain things. Not because it was the way of Christ, but it was the way of some very vocal people in their midst.
And I realized, you know, that's me. That's a lot of us today. We make our decisions based on what someone else is going to think or what their opinion of us is going to be, rather than on, is this what God is calling me to do? And not to sound trite about it, my husband and I actually call this giving a Sunday school answer, like, it's the answer you'd give in Sunday school, because it sounds like, you know, the Jesus y thing to do, but really, if there's any advice I can give in this whole thing, it's prayer has got To be a huge part of overcoming people, pleasing, praying to God every morning, you know, just being honest and saying, Lord, you know, today there are going to be some requests that come my way.
People are going to want me to do things for them and, and help them with things and say yes to things and take on responsibilities. Please Lord, help me to discern when it is you. Tapping me on the heart, giving me an opportunity to serve. And when it's someone else trying to pressure me because they know I've set up a pattern of always saying yes, or it's somebody just innocently asking a request, but it's not my need to meet, you know, help me really to discern when it's you giving me an opportunity and when it's not, and then being bold enough, praying for that boldness to not let it rattle you when you do say no to somebody and then they don't like you anymore.
Or, you know, they go and say bad things about you, or they just kind of change how they interact with you, change their opinion of you. Just let it go. You are not on this earth to make everybody happy. You got to quit letting everybody else's feelings be your responsibility. It's hard. And what I want to ask you is during that summer, did you come out?
Did you head into fall with more confidence in saying no? And then also discerning between. Is it coming from people or is it coming from God? Was that, did you feel a little bit more confident or how much time did this take you? At the end of the three months, I felt much more clarity in what things I was doing because I felt God was calling me to do it.
It was a fit with my, my talents and my spiritual gifts and not saying that, but there was a lot more clarity of the things I was doing. Because I felt God really called me to, and the other things I was doing just because it was expected of me, there wasn't any joy in it, there wasn't any fruit. And yet there was a lot of fear and a lot of worry that if I say no to this, I've been doing this, you know, for almost a decade, and they never have to worry because, you know, good old Karen, she'll step up and do it.
But I didn't feel joy in it. I didn't feel called to it. And so at the end of those three months, I really, I had made a list of the things I wanted to put back on my plate. The things that I was going to go and say, you know, I know I've been doing this for a long time, and it's going to put you in a bind because you need to find someone else to do it.
But I'm no longer going to be able to fulfill this role. And at first, it was a little scary because there were some people that were not very happy with me. That started acting differently toward me, didn't call anymore, didn't say, Hey, let's grab coffee like they used to. But then I realized that they were friends with me because of what they could get from me.
They weren't friends with me just to be friends with me. So as much as it was a little disappointing because I don't like rejection, I've never liked, you know, like who in their life thinks I feel like getting rejected today. So it was hard to deal with that rejection. But then after a while, honestly, I was like, This is great.
I have more time in my day. I'm not running around trying to make everybody happy and trying to do all these things for all these people. And now I actually have time to pour into something I want to do or to maybe pursue that friendship at church where I feel God has been nudging me to get to know that person and, you know, either, you know, develop a friendship or a mentoring relationship or whatever.
I had more time because I wasn't filling all my spare time with helping everybody else. Wow, that's fantastic. That word rejection. I feel like that's so much of it. Like for me, like I, I want to please people. I don't want to be rejected. I don't want to be looked at like somebody who is unkind, you know?
And it's, that's what it is. And you say, you know, we teach others how to treat us and, and really vice versa, right? . Yes. Yeah. Someone said that to me years ago. I don't remember the originator of that phrase. It's not me, and it's not my friend that said it to me, but it's somebody famous. I can't remember. I don't wanna misquote.
But that's so true that you teach people how to treat you. And I think that could be evidenced by, if you know, I were to say right now, Lori, to all your listeners, I will give them $100 if they can text someone in their contact list. that they know will text them back within two minutes. Everybody knows who that person is.
It's always got their phone and always texts right back. Or if I said, I'll give you a hundred bucks if you can text someone in your contact list that you know won't probably text back for at least three or four days. We all know who that person is too, because guess what? Those people have taught us.
How to treat them. We've either, they've either taught us, I'll respond instantly. I'm at your back and call every minute. I've always got my phone with me. Or they've taught us, I'll get back to you when I have time to get back with you. And it's so true that people pleasing often as a result of us over the years, teaching other people how to treat us.
They know. You got a problem, you get yourself in a pickle, call Karen, she'll get you out of the pickle. We've taught people how to treat us and it's got a lot of us pretty miserable. So as much as people pleasing is the fault of those people in our life that kind of, you know, use us or, or push us a little, maybe bully us a little, a lot of the times it's also our own fault because we've set up a pattern that we're, you know, We're available.
We'll do it. We won't even think about it. Won't even blink. We'll just say yes. And it's making a lot of us miserable. Yeah. And it's that expectation that other people have when they reach out to us and they know that's where it's holding us back. It's like, they're going to expect me to do this because that's what I've always done.
I immediately thought of those people in my contact list that I could reach out that would respond right away. And then another. Person that I could reach out to, and it would be, you know, maybe a day, maybe a little bit more. Does that have to do with this person has some really solid boundaries? Are we talking?
Exactly. We have to have those boundaries, even with our phones. I mean, the digital age is really contributed to people pleasing because people feel like they have instant access to you. And they, you know, it's almost like. I feel like I'm writing my to do list the old fashioned way, because I'm a legal pad and Ticonderoga number two pencil kind of girl.
So I'm writing my list of to do and it's almost like through the phone, somebody reaches over my shoulder and takes the pencil and adds some more things to my to do list. Because this is how they do it. They send you a text that says, Hey, I need the link for that recipe you were talking about last night, or they send you a direct message on social media saying, Hey, we need extra workers in the nursery on Sunday.
You know, I know you guys aren't going to be out of town this weekend. So can you help a girl out? Right? Or they send you an email telling you what they need. And now the burden is on you to get back with them and to answer and they wait. Assume the answer is going to be yes. And, and I just think that technology has just given people so many ways to have access to you.
And it's shifted the burden of, well, how can I say this? So in the past, the burden was on you, Lori, if you wanted to call me and ask me to do something, and it was in the time of landline phones and no answering machines, the burden was on you to keep calling until I picked up the phone. Well, now with the dawn of not just answering machines, but.
With cell phones and social media and email and all these ways, we, the burden is not on the person trying to contact someone now they just dump it in their lap and the burden is on the person receiving the message to answer them and it just is really given a lot more opportunities for. People to, to kind of push and for others to cave in and people please, because they have that instant access to us, or at least they feel like they do 24 seven, unless you put some boundaries in place, unless you are saying, you know what, I shut my phone off at six o'clock at night because I want to be present with my family.
So don't text me at seven o'clock meeting something because I'm not going to see it. Or you put on the features on your phone, like do not disturb, or I use the one that says personal. So it still allows texts and calls from my family members. But not from anybody else. And I put that on it at six o'clock at night, unless we are careful to enact some boundaries, people are just going to walk all over us.
And that's tough to do. For those of us who are in sobriety, we've got to change how we respond to things because that will perpetuate the cycle of drinking. If we don't, we've got to really make some, some changes. And a lot of us look at that as that's a sacrifice. That's like, I'm risking this relationship or I'm risking something else.
You know, we've got to protect ourselves. Yeah. Talk about in the book where you talk about the pushers, the powders, the guilt bombers. Share this with us. So there are multiple ways a person appears in your life that tempts you to people please. It's not always that they're just a pushy bully kind of personality.
That is one category, the pushers. They kind of stomp their feet if they don't get their way and if you don't say yes to them. Doing what it is that they want you to do, but not all people are pushers. Some people are powders, so they don't stop their feet if they don't get their way. They drop their smile and you just don't want to make them sad.
You don't want to disappoint them. Other people are guilt bombers. You know, they make you feel guilty even by how they, you know, ask a question when you're asked to take on a responsibility, you know, and say, oh, you know, since I see that you haven't. brought snacks yet this year. Would you bring the snack this?
Well, of course you're going to feel guilty because everybody else has taken two turns and you haven't, you know, so they kind of guilt bomb you. But the one that is the, that is the hardest for me to deal with is the category of people that I just kind of labeled them myself. I call them the me first maximizers.
And these are the people that in whatever situation is happening, they somehow. Look at it in a way that they come out first and it can change the scenario can be the same, but if they're in a different position, then they change what they think about the scenario. Let me give an example. I had somebody that was a big me first maximizer in my life, and I remember one time being on the phone with them.
When somebody else, my dad, called in and wanted to talk to me, and so I said, Oh, hang on a second. This is an old landline phone. I said, hang on a second. I'm getting another call. I'll be right back with you. And so I told my dad, hey, I'm on the phone with this person. I'll call you back in like 10 minutes.
And then I got back on the phone. Well, that person chewed me out and said, how rude. To put me on hold, basically, like I'm, you know, calling the doctor's office and you put me on hold to take another call. That is the rudest thing I've ever heard of in my life. And I thought, Oh, wow, I won't do that to her anymore.
Well, then fast forward, not less than two weeks later, I was on the phone with someone else and that person called me and I, I just ignored it. I just ignored it until I finished this phone call, cleaned up the dishes from dinner, and then I called that person that had been trying to call me back about 45 minutes later.
And I said, Oh, hey, sorry, I didn't pick up. I was on the line with somebody else. And you know what they said? How rude when someone's trying to call you that you didn't click over and at least tell me you were on the other line. And I thought, Wait a minute. Just two weeks ago, you thought completely differently about this.
Why? Well, it's because they were in a different position, you know, and, and I see that a lot with people in my life. They will ask me to do things that they never would say yes to if I were asking them to do things because they are me first maximizer and they just know how to put themselves first in every situation and then explain how things should go down based on them coming out on top.
Yeah, I read that in the book and I giggled. I just thought, Oh, brother, you can't make people like that happy no matter what you do. You can't. No, you do talk about you can still say yes to a friendship while also saying no to their request because this again goes back to that fear. I don't want to hurt their feelings.
In your personal experience, you, you've already shared that this is true. You, you've gotten great responses from your friends and family. I know that there is somebody out there who is worried about this, especially with their families. You know, we have grandmothers taking care of grandkids now and, you know, helping their kids.
They really want to help their kids. They want to help their family. And then they're getting to the point where they're feeling burnt out and exhausted and they don't have a lot of time for themselves. So, if you can share maybe some tips here and the stop it statements, a few of the stop it statements that you have in your book to maybe help the woman who feels this way.
I want to help others, I want to say yes to my friends, but I also need to find time for myself. I need to find some more balance. I think what's really important when being asked to take on a responsibility is to just be brave enough to say out loud some of the things you're thinking, because I think often we feel pressure to say yes.
And if we don't Don't say yes, and we say no, we have to have some really dire reason why we're saying no, otherwise, they're not gonna, you know, accept our no, but just say out loud things like, you know, I'm really struggling here because I love you and our friendship, and I care so much about it, and I don't want there to be any awkwardness between us.
And I know you want me to say yes, cause you have this need, but I have to tell you, when I look at what I have going on in my life right now, I just simply don't have the bandwidth to take on another responsibility, but I hesitate saying no, because I don't want it to affect our friendship. So I know that if the tables were turned, I would want you to be honest with me.
So I'm going to be honest with you and just say, as much as my heart wants to say, yes, I'm going to have to say no to this request, I just won't be able. To do a good job, and I don't have the bandwidth to take it on without it detracting from other things in my life. Just be honest, and, and say those things, and, and tell them your hesitation.
Prioritize the friendship, you know, I really don't want this to affect us, but I've, I've gotta say no. Just say those things out loud and as far as the simple stop it statements, I did want to kind of empower people to kind of preach these little one sentence sermons to themselves when it comes to people pleasing that might help them from once again saying yes to something that they shouldn't.
And so one of them is this. I had a friend say this to me years ago when I was running around like crazy saying yes to every need I heard about when my children were all small. She said, you know what, every need is not necessarily your call. Yes, there's a need, but it isn't always your job to meet those needs.
Sometimes it's somebody else's call. And if you say yes to something you're not called to, then you're taking the blessing away from the person God meant to do that. You know, to meet that need in the first place. Another thing that I've told myself over and over is that I need to stop making other people's happiness, my responsibility.
It's not my responsibility to make everybody happy, so I need to stop making their, their feelings my responsibility. Um, another thing is kind of the flip side of people pleasing. One side of people pleasing is feeling pressure to say yes to someone to make them happy, but the other side of it is the fear to say yes to God because you fear the response from someone else.
So at that point, you need to remind yourself that you don't need somebody else's permission to do God's will. If God's really calling you to do something, It doesn't matter what that other person thinks. And then I think probably one last one, and this was, again, something somebody said to me years ago when I was a young mom.
She said, don't take on more than you can pray for. And by that, what I mean is whenever you take on a new responsibility, you're going to have new people that are part of that endeavor. You're going to have tasks to do. It's going to be a lot more. responsibility in your life and you're going to need to be praying about those responsibilities, those tasks, those things that are expected of you, those people that you meet in there are going to have prayer requests.
It's going to be a new added thing to your life. And if you don't have the bandwidth to take on praying for all of those people and those things,
So if you don't take on more than you can pray for, I think that would be probably my favorite. And like I said, there's seven of them in there, but that's just a little sampling. Thank you so much for, for sharing that, Karen, and you tell him my voice, I'm just going to say it. I just started, had a coughing attack, so we're back.
I'm not going to be editing this. I wanted to mention too, because this is something that. I think that you touched on and I heard, but it's this idea that, well, I have time, I'm available. So I might as, you know, I don't have to, like, we don't want to make something up. Like we have anything going on, but we really don't want to do something, you know, just because we're available doesn't mean we're available.
Right. And I forget exactly what you said, but it was like, we don't have to have this big thing going on in our lives to say no. Right. And you don't owe them an explanation. You don't. And that's one of my big problems is I overexplain rather than just saying, you know, I prayed about it. I looked at my schedule.
I talked to my husband and I'm sorry. I'm just not gonna be able to say yes, but I'll be praying for you that you find the perfect person to meet that need. I start overexplaining. And then what happens is it's like my mouth is falling down the stairs. I just get in a worse like I just had. Okay, so I'll give you an example.
I just had somebody that I don't know. Email me, because they're self publishing a book, and they felt that God had told them that I'm supposed to write the forward to their book and endorse their book, and that they needed it back, the, all of that back within two weeks. Well, I should have just politely said, Hey, you know, thank you so much for trusting me with this, you know, great honor of reading and endorsing and writing a forward to your book, but I'm sorry.
I just, my schedule for endorsements is all full for the year. I only take on a certain amount. End of story. Oh no, I said that and then I said, besides two weeks is just way too fast of a turnaround and I don't read things digitally because they sent me their manuscript digitally. I always insist on a hard copy and so I'm just going to have to say no.
Well, what did they do? They came back and said, Oh, give me your address. I'm going to send you a hard copy and I asked my editor and you can have six weeks. And so they just came back like, you know, we throw up these red flags and they just take them all down because they, they solve them all. And, and that happened because I over explained.
I over explained. I should have just said, thank you so much for asking. I'm so sorry, but my answer is no. And Lamont says no is a complete sentence. Yes. Yes. Yeah. No. Yeah. I, I get that. Like if you over explain that a certain person is going to find a loophole, they're going to find a way to make that work for themselves.
And so no is a complete sentence. We have to remember this. Yes. Yeah. And then don't get me started on the over apologizing when you do say now. So no, we don't need to over apologize or over explain. Is there any other words that you would like to share with our listener before we leave today? Anybody who is out there who is having a difficult time with this?
What can you share with them? Well, I think they just need to learn to be patient with themselves because they have set up a pattern probably over the years of saying yes. And Being liked and being viewed as capable and competent and all of those things. And they need to realize that it's going to feel awkward at first to prioritize, you know, putting God first and, and carving out some time for the things they want to do or carving out some time to just, you know, Do nothing.
I actually have a little notepad that says at the top, it says, schedule some time to have nothing scheduled. And we need to do that. You know, we need to do that and not feel guilty. And if we're truly connecting with God each day and asking him to help us to discern the opportunities that come our way and help us to have a servant heart, because yes, we want to serve.
We want to help others. Of course we want to do that. But making prayer priority and asking God to help us. To manage our time in a way that pleases him and to serve in a way that he's called us to without kind of crossing that line to know it's morphed into people pleasing, it's hard, it feels awkward at first, but there's so much freedom that comes knowing that you're exactly where God wants you to, you're doing the things that he's called you to do, and you're not allowing other people to push you around, whether they're you know, stopping their foot or dropping their smile or how it is that they're kind of manipulating you.
It's, it's not unhealthy to have boundaries in place. It's, it's a good and healthy thing, and it helps your relationship with God be stronger. Yeah. And the relationship with ourselves as well. Definitely, because we learn so much when we're able to say the things that we really want to say. And we're not walking around with the resentment and the dread and waking up in the middle of the night.
I should have said this. I shouldn't have said this. Right. Uh, yeah, it's, it, this was a great conversation, Karen, I appreciate you so much for saying yes to my request to come on the podcast and I'm going to have all of your information linked down below. And of course I'm going to be sharing this book with every gal I know because we need it.
We need to have these conversations. So I thank you for being here. Well, thank you so much for having me, Lori. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Thank you again for listening today. If you are a fellow people pleaser and you are ready to break free from pleasing others to Prioritize yourself more go and check out when making others happy is making you miserable I will have the book linked down below in the show notes and all of Karen's information take care of yourself this week I will see you next week.
Peace
Hey, there! I’m Lori, the host of the To 50 and Beyond podcast.
Where aging and living alcohol-free are celebrated.
To 50 and Beyond is about self-discovery, living for today, and designing an alcohol-free life that alcohol can’t compete with.
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