77. What Happens When You Finally Stop Pleasing Everyone

Okay, so what does it actually mean to disappoint someone? What does that actually mean? I want to start by separating the fear that we hold inside of ourselves of disappointing someone from the reality that of actually disappointing someone.

Okay, and I'm gonna do that using real data.

So there's this kind of feeling that we get when we're about to say no to something, when we know we need to maybe back down on something, we know we can't say yes to something, we have to say no to a request or tell someone a truth that they don't wanna hear.

that feeling is not information about how bad the outcome is going to be.

What it is, is a prediction.

And that prediction can be wrong, especially for many of us high achievers.

So many of us high functioning, high achievers, we live in this world of what I call black or white thinking, all or nothing thinking, or also known as catastrophic thinking.

And what that does is it creates this prediction where if I do this, it's going to be the absolute worst thing in the world.

And the world is going to come crumbling down on me.

But that is That is not exactly what they're going to be feeling.

That's just our own fear.

So that fear of disappointment that we feel that feels so heavy in our bodies that keeps us stuck is actually our own fear that we have in ourselves because we have no idea what the other person is going to experience yet.

There's a Cornell social psychologist that has done really interesting research.

Her name is Vanessa Bones, and she spent years studying what she calls the underestimation of compliance effect.

So she studied over 14,000 people.

And what she has found is that people consistently underestimate how things will actually go with others.

They misjudge reactions to requests.

They misjudge what's going to happen if they refuse to do something.

And they usually misjudge it by about half, by about 50%.

So what's interesting about this is that her work shows that this isn't about being naive or overly optimistic about people.

It's that we're so consumed by our own discomfort in the moment.

We're so concerned about how uncomfortable it feels to even perceive that we might be disappointing someone.

that we completely lose the ability to accurately predict what's going to happen on the other side.

So we tend to imagine a much bigger, longer lasting reaction in the other person than what is actually going to happen.

So what I think is really interesting is what we are actually feeling is the fear of disappointing someone else, which lives in our body.