On Personal Power and People Pleasing

Hi y’all,

How are you doing?

I’m exhausted personally. Finishing the semester in a few weeks and just trying to make it through the next month. I haven’t had a ton of extra mental space to write as much as I would like to but one thing I’ve been thinking about as we continue to witness the genocides in Congo, Sudan, and Palestine is the importance of personal power and how easily we give our power away.

Some of the common responses that come up when people bring up the concurrent genocides are that “bad things happen all the time” and “that’s just how the world is.” With the amount of propaganda being leveraged in the media to manufacture our consent to people being harmed, I think it’s really important to interrogate some of the common phrases that we hear and challenge their validity. Yes, to an extent there may be a natural amount of tragedy in life but a lot of the terrible things that happen are a product of the society that’s been created. They are not naturally occurring. They are the result of human beings making a choice to oppress others, exploit the environment, weaponize fear, and more. That is how we’ve found ourselves with the world we’ve inherited. Saying that “bad things just happen” without contextualizing the human choices that manifested them is one of the many ways that we give our power away. Rather than keeping our personal power to hold other people accountable for their actions, phrases like this give our power away to some vague force to work things out somehow.

Yes, human beings have the capacity to create immense harm and that may always be the case. It’s a free will planet so we can’t control other people’s actions but we can control our response. That’s what is so powerful about the historic amount of protests taking place all around the world. There are hundreds of thousands of people taking their power back from governments and institutions to set a boundary and use their voices and bodies to say “no, we’re not allowing this to happen.” That’s what “power to the people” truly means. When we are able to recognize that we do have the ability to collectively assert boundaries and demand better for ourselves and each other, deep transformation is possible. We’ve seen it time and time again throughout history. I honestly don’t think there are many examples of civil rights or human rights changes that were not a direct response to the actions of the people whether it’s the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, anti-discrimination laws, labor laws, and more.

So my question is, why haven’t we been doing this more consistently? Why does it always take some immense amount of tragedy to wake us up? Well I think, in part, that’s how the system is designed. It overwhelms us in the minutia of trying to survive our own individual lives and convinces us that there is only one path to success. The system is so successful at this that we quickly become blind to the interconnectedness of all of our struggles. I think on the other hand, many of us are conditioned to find safety in defaulting to the expectations of those in a position of power which is a kind of people pleasing.

At its root, people pleasing is a form of protection that comes from diminishing our own needs to appease the needs of others in order to feel safe. This dynamic is most tangible on an interpersonal level but I think it applies on a collective level as well. Western society tells us that we need to attain higher education, get a job, get married, buy a house with a white picket fence, and then we’ll be free. And we do it because we believe that we’ll be safer this way even when there’s a little whisper telling us that things could be different. Not only do we receive confirmation that this is the safest path to freedom, we see how poorly people are treated who don’t follow this path. It’s very similar to growing up in a household where you’re punished for not doing exactly what you’re told and you’re praised for being quiet and obedient.

Healing our relationship with people pleasing is an important way to take our power back because it enables us to build a deeper connection with ourselves and our own ways of knowing. It allows us to determine how to show up authentically in this moment of collective change rather than continuing to follow the path that led us here in the first place. Questioning the status quo is not easy. There are many systems in place to ensure that we don’t do it. But the cost of maintaining this artificial sense of harmony by not asking questions or daring to believe in the possibility of a better world is too high.

With all that being said, it’s important for me to mention that I’m not saying any of this from a place of judgement. I’ve struggled deeply with people pleasing and cultivating a sense of self trust for most of my life. Because of that I’m deeply aware of the results that giving my power away produce. It produces an experience of being deeply disconnected from myself and others, shame from not living in alignment with values, hopelessness from feeling a complete lack of agency in my life, and more. It is because of this experience that I’m constantly questioning what we’ve been told to accept and I’ve started asking news questions about what is possible.

What world is possible when we take our power back and stop relying on people and institutions outside of us to tell us who we are? From what I’m seeing so far, it looks like we’re anchoring in heaven on Earth and I can’t wait.

Thanks for reading as always ❤️ 

With love,

Paula

Current Offerings

Support My Work

If you’d like to support my work feel free to forward this email to a friend or buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/paula__ami