The Price Of Pleasing Everyone Is High: Not Finding What You Are Looking For
Social desirability, the urge for others to see the best version of ourselves is common and healthy. For this reason we “refine” our behavior in relationships with others, without this having to be pathological. Wanting to show the best of ourselves to please others is not at odds with naturalness.
For all this, if we perceive that our presence has stopped pleasing someone, that any given opinion has been totally unfortunate – deduced from the feedback of the people who listen to them – we can feel tremendously uncomfortable. No one is immune to the emotional damage derived from the implicit or explicit rejection of others.
But if you stop to reflect on it, answer a question: Are you willing that any disapproving look, feeling of feeling out of place or defensive attitude of others transform you into someone in disguise, someone who you are not? Think about whether you prefer to have a lot of friendly relationships or a few that are meaningful .
Pleasant relationships need authenticity
If you are willing to become a hybrid between who you really are and what others expect of you, in all its range and variability, then do not expect too much from social relationships.
The price of being radical in your ways brings bad times. The price of pleasing everyone, of not showing yourself as you are, will make you not find what you are looking for and lose some of the relationships that really make you feel good.
That you choose to wear a mask every time you detect that you are in front of someone who may have different opinions from yours is a double-edged sword. You may avoid a feeling of discomfort, but at the same time you are also avoiding some of the richness that that relationship can bring you.
Many people sin by taking opinions different from their own about an external element to the personal terrain. The truth is that no one should be offended by a value judgment other than their own. If this were indeed the case, many people would not have the need to mask or disguise opinions or to divert conversations to less fertile grounds for debate. In other words, they could be open to candid conversation and not to an artificial exchange of words.
Problems in relationships with others do not arise because we adopt an opinion and a way of life: problems with others basically arise from impostures, falsehoods and from trying to impose our vision on the other. The emotional voids come because from so much generating opinions and artificial images, nobody ends up betting on us as a safe value.
Every time our relationships are faked something real is lost
Except for extreme situations, in which changing our opinion or hiding it can save our lives, pretending to others does not seem like a good investment. For example, if to get a job we have to give up putting our true potentialities into action, at the same time we will ensure the sustenance of today and the dissatisfaction of tomorrow.
If to please the opinion of a group we renounce our minority vision (not for that reason invalid), we will be preventing the members of that “minority” from having an interest in us. If by having a relationship with someone we impose a false identity, we will be giving up the luxury and freedom of being ourselves with another person who values us for who we really are.
We lose values along the way to avoid small disappointments
Imagine that among your plans is to get married and have children and that you are surrounded by people who “apparently” consider those wishes as old-fashioned or “old-fashioned”. Faced with this pressure, you start to soften, to cut off sentences to prevent your life plan from being judged and questioned.
In each resignation of discomfort, you lose authenticity in your emotions and behaviors. Feeling judged can mean that we do not show ourselves as we are, that we do not express what we really think. We give up being authentic about ourselves, being at the same time contradictory and not very credible to others.
It does not matter if your ideas are transgressive, conservative or original in the eyes of others. It may be that at first they cause confusion in the other, but later it is interesting and constructive to exchange impressions with someone who holds some away from yours.
Much more interesting is to be consistent with them and not be ashamed of having them. There are countless people who will find you wonderful and who are waiting to find you, but that cannot happen if you live in hiding to avoid any disdain in the world.
Giving up what you think to walk away from a dispute, pleasing someone or not tarnishing your image can be a smart decision in the short term and in a specific situation. However, if we take this way of acting as usual, we will end up creating around us an artificial world in which we will not feel good.
