THE DISEASE TO PLEASE

In our everyday jobs, and our personal lives, the desire to be liked by others is a natural inclination. After all, as human beings that’s all we are: love. We want our parents to love us, our friends to appreciate us, our children to respect and admire us. Love, that’s the main thing we want to experience, the rest are just details.

Is it wise to behave this way as adult professionals? Or even on the dating scene? Is this really the way the real world operates? The wealthy often feel guilty for their wealth, so they may give more than they should so others may not judge them. Successful individuals sometimes apologize for their success by keeping a low profile. How does it feel when we climb the corporate ladder and the time comes to acquire power, fame, or money, and we have to trample over the colleague we befriended? He or she may even have brought us into the company in the first place.

As a writer I give my opinion, it may be in a subtle way such as fiction writing, or it might be in a blog, but automatically this means that there will be people who won’t agree with my point of view. Some may even be offended. With Twitter, the world has unlimited access to our private lives. If we’re public figures, we may receive a thousand positive comments, but if one, two, or three people express negative words to us, we'll remember them. Why is our brain wired that way? Why do negative comments, or feelings, are more likely to stick?

In my previous career, and I’m sure in many of your jobs, the system was such that you had to become selfish, step over people to show the ones ‘above’ that you meant business. In a corporate environment, when we value happiness over money we’re often misjudged for not being ambitious enough. In other words, greed is the way to go. How many of us feel good about this? I get the idea that as a boss you need your employees to ‘get off their butt’ so to speak, and if they don’t bring in money, well, you’ll be out of work. The boss included. For many of us, however, the idea to ruffle feathers with others, or walk into a room and feel the evil stares, is just unbearable. Our behavior shows we’d rather have less professional success than to risk being disliked. Is this weak? Deep down, are we not inclined to maintain peace and harmony with our peers? Or are some of us simply better at hiding it?

Guilt is often the main driver of our self-destructive behavior. Experts say we have a conscious and subconscious mind. When it comes to money, sex, politics, and religion, the subconscious takes over, and that's when we're inclined to make fatal mistakes. Others notice our body language and hear our unconscious words, we don't.

Speaking from my experience, it often requires being hurt, cheated, or abused, for us to finally ‘get off our butts’ and not care what others think. Why does it take pain to change? To me, it’s like the dating life: when we’re young we believe in prince charming, or the ‘perfect girl,’ we have an idea of how things should be. But when someone plays with our emotions and ideals, it pushes us to put our boundaries. The more mature we get, the more we know what we want and know what we are willing to deal with or not.

The disease to please is a curable ‘disease’ that I think maturity, putting our boundaries, and knowing what we want, may heal.

With Purpose, Passion, and Love,

Frédéric Byé