Please Yourself: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Transform the Way You Live – About the Book
The Courage to be Disliked meets The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: an essential, inspirational, wise and forgiving book that will liberate the people pleaser inside us all.
This book will teach you how to be you.
We all know how it feels to want people to like us, to approve of us, to accept us. It’s part of what makes us human. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to support other people and help them satisfy their needs.
The problem comes when we give up our own needs along the way.
Because when we give to make others like us or approve of us, to shore up our own sense of self-worth, to feel needed or to avoid painful emotions, then we give to get. And rarely do we get what we really need.
Emma Reed Turrell works with people pleasers every day in her clinical practice as a psychotherapist – clients wrestling with the complicated dilemmas of a life in which you can’t please everyone, but you don’t yet have the permission you need to please yourself.
In this groundbreaking, reassuring and essential book she presents an alternative to people-pleasing. Through the stories of people-pleasers across all walks of life she offers insights and techniques that will help you understand yourself more fully and live more authentically.
It will help you get better at being disliked, instead of staying quiet. It will help you recover instead of fearing failure. It will teach you acceptance instead of avoidance and show you how to grow instead of staying small.
Above all it will help you care better for others, without taking on their problems, through caring better for yourself.
The Review
Please Yourself is series of AHA moments between two covers. This book is so relatable. You will pause every few pages and recognize people and events in your life where you were the people pleaser. It doesn’t feel like you are reading a self-help book – it feels like you are reading a self-worth book. As a psychotherapist, Turrell understands people pleasers, but she expresses herself in an approachable way.
The book begins with a People Pleasing Pop-Quiz. It is worth taking so that you understand what behaviour is indicative of people pleasers and the answer might surprise you. You are then taken through a number of real-life people pleaser scenarios from childhood, to relationships, friendships and beyond. Turrell uses her real-life patients to illustrate her points in each chapter so that the reader can understand the issues by example.
Like every good self-help book, you do not need to read Please Yourself cover to cover. There may be chapters that are not applicable to your life BUT even if you do read them, you will still get nuggets of wisdom.
If you have ever had someone, call you a people pleaser, this is a must-read. The book may be short on pages (229 in total), but it is long on insight.
Favourite Line From the Book
“To help Samara what was going on, I asked her to imagine her life as a movie, to notice the repeating storylines and characters, and spot the outcomes that felt inevitable.”
If you think of all of the relationships in your life like a movie, you will definitely spot patterns. This was one of the major AHA moments in the book.
