How to Stop People-Pleasing: There's No "No" in You Yet to Say

Have you noticed everyone keeps telling you to learn to say no, as if the no is already sitting inside you, formed and ready, and only your fear is keeping it down? Both sides of the argument agree on this, the boundaries and techniques people and the trauma and fawning people, they disagree about why you can't get the word out, but they share one assumption underneath, that you already know your know and something is merely blocking it.

Now I want to take that assumption apart as I do with assumptions because it's wrong and believing it is part of what keeps you stuck and unable to say no. Start with the phrase you reach for instead of refusing, I'll try. We treat it as a dodge, a cowardly almost know, but consider that I'll try might be the single most truthful thing you say all day, because to say a real know you have to know what you actually want instead and you may genuinely not know.

You've never consulted that instrument, the thing everyone's calling avoidance might be honesty, the honest report of a person who has no position to defend, standing in front of a question they have no inner answer to. I'll try, may not be you hiding your know, maybe it's telling the truth that there isn't one yet. Look very hard at that word no because it asks more than people admit, a real know requires a self with a stake in something, a preference strong enough to be worth protecting, a yes underneath it that the know is guarding.

When you say I can't say no, you probably hear it as I'm too weak to defend my preferences, but there's usually a more unsettling reading. Maybe there's no preference there to defend. Maybe the know won't come because there's nothing behind it pushing. No position formed, no want articulated, no self standing in the doorway saying this far and no further. Reading the room before yourself wasn't always a wound. For most of human history we lived our whole lives inside a tight band of people and our survival ran straight through their goodwill.

If you fell out of favor with the group and you didn't just feel bad, you died. So the childhood learned to sense the mood to soften to become whatever the room needed was the child who lived. Dissolving into the group was the most adaptive thing a person could do, but we don't live in that group anymore. We live among strangers in a world that asks each of us to author a life from the inside out of our own wanting and the old genius for vanishing into a room has become in these conditions a disability.

You were given a brilliant survival skill for a world that no longer exists and it's disabling you in this one. So the picture most people carry of the people pleaser is wrong in a very, very important way. They imagined someone full of opinions gagged by fear, a real self trapped behind a wall of niceness waiting to be freed. But that's not the inner experience and you know it if you live there. The truer picture is emptier and stranger, someone standing at the spot where a position should be finding open space.

The pleaser isn't suppressing itself, the pleaser is missing the practice of ever having made one and you can't liberate a no that was never formed. What the pleasing is actually for then is not mainly what we're told. We say people pleasing protects you from other people's displeasure and there's a grain of truth in that. But the deeper function is that it spares you the terrifying labor of having a position at all. Forming a real preference and saying it out loud means standing somewhere specific where you can be wrong, you can be judged, disappointed, told no.

Every time you hand someone a yes you don't mean you buy your way out of that exposure. You don't have to risk a self because you never put one on the table. The yes is very cheap. What it's really buying is the right to stay unformed. Now when you realize how much work having a position actually is because we talk about wanting as if it's automatic as if someone simply knows what they prefer and the only question is whether they'll admit it.

But forming a real position is difficult. You have to turn toward the question, sit with it, pass the first easy answer, feel what you'd actually choose if no one were watching. And then hold that against the friction of other people who'd rather you chose differently. It's tiring and it's exposing and most people would do almost anything to avoid it. But the pleas are found a way out. Read the room, give it what it wants and you never have to do the work of generating an inside at all.

You outsource the whole question to whoever's in front of you. They decide you comply. Nobody least of all you ever finds out what you'd have wanted. Now it's not laziness, not really. It is the most efficient avoidance system a person can build and it costs you everything. Look at what a life of pleasing leaves behind and you'll see the real cost. Please everyone accommodate everything smooth over every encounter and you reach the end of the day or a year a decade having authored nothing.

The pleaser leaves no fingerprints move through the world giving everyone everything they want and you can pass through it without a single mark that says you were here. That you wanted this and not that that a particular person with particular edges came through and chose. That's the horror under the exhaustion. It isn't that you're tired of saying yes. It's that you're living unauthored present at every moment of your life and the author of none of those moments.

And that word unauthored is everything. It's the tiredness you can't explain, the resentment you can't justify, the sense of attending your own life from somewhere behind glass. None of it comes from saying yes too much. It comes from never having written a line of the thing yourself. And this is why just learn to say no can't touch any of this. It's aimed at a self that hasn't fully formed. You can drill the technique of refusal all you like with no position underneath it.

The no has nothing to stand on and nothing to defend and it collapses. The moment a real person looks disappointed in you. So he's the work and it's slower and lonelier than the advice you're being given. It was never learning to say no. It's the harder task of generating a yes that's actually yours. Sitting with the question what do I want here? Not what does the room need? And staying in that question long enough for an answer to form.

Even a small one, even an uncertain one. Build a real yes somewhere anywhere and watch what happens. The no you've been chasing for years arrives then on its own. And it's not a technique you finally mastered. It's a simple shadow cast by a yes that finally exists. The no appears the instant there's finally a someone in you to be disappointed. That's the distinction. There's no no in you yet to say and chasing it is chasing the wrong end of the problem.

I'll try no matter how avoidant that might be was actually honest all along. It was the native language of a self that hadn't yet formed a position. The way back into your own life was never refusal. It is always authorship. The patient making of a person specific enough to want things certain enough to be disappointed and exact enough to leave a mark. Do that and the no stops being a skill you have to force. It becomes the natural edge of someone who's finally there.

So the next time I'll try risers in you don't reach for a better no go looking for the yes that isn't built yet. That's where you've been missing this whole time. If anything in this episode made you want to explore what you just heard I made it very easy for you to do so. In the show notes there's a link to access a book called before approaching the threshold which is the gateway into this work. Alongside that you'll also receive free 14 day access to the atlas and intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work.

It's there to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with both are free to start and the link to access them is in the show notes. This was Michael Luria and you're listening to the architect's speaks.