Stop people pleasing and start living for you

A guide to setting limits, focusing your time and saying no.

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to please. I also wanted to achieve. The two definitely went together. If I worked hard and achieved something, I was praised and rewarded. It felt good, I guess, and so I carried on doing it.

I carried on doing that for around 36 years.

Six months ago I realised that just because I was technically capable of doing or achieving something did not mean I had to do it.

Any fellow teachers out there will know that teaching is an endless cycle of planning; and for the perfectionist it can be hellish. I have been teaching for 16 years and I am a very good teacher. I know this to be true, yet I was still feeling that I should stay a little bit later at school to plan a bit more, or arrive half an hour earlier (at something silly like 7am) to rearrange a classroom or plan a lesson in even more detail.

I could technically do these things. I was capable of doing these things, yet in reality they didn’t make a big difference to the outcome, and I certainly wasn’t being paid more if I did go the extra mile. What actually happened is that I burned myself out because I was trying to fill up all of the possible time by doing things that I felt I should do. I was people pleasing.