Displease with Ease
You have been learning skills to express yourself more fully, stand up for yourself, state more truth, and exercise your influence. From complimenting to sharing what you like, agree with, dislike, and disagree with, you have been practicing potent skills that help you influence others by taking a stand on what you believe, expressing your truth, reinforcing behavior that works for you and redirecting behavior that doesn’t. You’ve been learning to operate more fully from an internal locus of control, guiding your life from your yearnings. You have been learning to be more present and powerful in your interactions. You’ve been discovering the disempowering impact of blame, shame, and justification and how empowering it is to take responsibility for your life.
This time, you expand beyond these skills and take even more powerful stances. You practice asserting your will and expanding your positive influence—not simply caving into rote, socially-programmed responses, or indulging in ineffective, reflexive, and inappropriate people-pleasing. You accept the challenge to express yourself in direct, truthful ways, without apology or equivocation. For example: Will you empower others with purposeful critiques? Will you be on your own side, assert your will, and put all that you have learned together, while fully being the author of your own life? Will you be a person of positive influence in your world?
That is what this is about—expanding the range of your power.
You expand your power to grasp what it means to be the creator of your life in the moment—to live in the moment—to go against the norm and take a stand for yourself and what matters to you.
By practicing displeasing, you are making space to focus on what you yearn for. You are strengthening your power by being able to displease. You are taking steps to be more you. It is powerful to be able to displease in the face of rejection. There is power in beginning to define more clearly who you are, who you want to be, and what you yearn for, rather than conforming to others’ expectations. By learning this skill, you will eventually be able to displease with ease. And, by being able to risk displeasing others, you will find that when you do choose to please others, it will be a genuine, heartfelt action, rather than a conditioned response.
This Week’s Assignment: Displease with Ease
Use your creative, assertive power this week to express what you think, want, or prefer—especially when you know it will not please others. This assignment isn’t license to be passive-aggressive, but to assert yourself with your thoughts, opinions, and actions in a way that will displease others. (NOTE to Passive Aggressives: We didn’t say f*#k with people just to thwart them :-) but to focus on what you truly yearn for, which means that you risk displeasing others.)
Another aspect of this assignment is to learn the power of consciously resisting others in a way that serves you. Discover the power of slowing things down, not agreeing to others’ requests, or putting conditions on doing things, setting limits, or negotiating. Use the Very-Able assignments to help you explore aspects of the assignment this week. Learn how to consciously resist another’s will in a way that lets you be more true to your own will, desires, and yearnings.
You are powerfully determining your sense of self. You are choosing that, no matter what, you will approve of yourself and love yourself even when someone else disapproves of you.
The Power of Yearning and Liking
Kahneman and Tversky’s Nobel Prize-winning research on Loss Aversion states that we are more aware of the pain of loss than the pleasure of potential gain. Applying Loss Aversion to this week’s skill of Personal Power, we often focus more on the upset of displeasing people than the joy of pleasing ourselves and meeting our own yearning!
Many of us are geared to please others at the expense of our own opinions, judgments, and desires. In our attempts to get others to like us, to have them approve of us, and to minimize rejection, we sacrifice our own feelings and preferences. When you focus on what you want, you risk not pleasing another person. They may prefer that you do what they like or approve of, which is often different than what pleases you. By displeasing, you go against your usual intent, which is often to seek approval, fit in, be liked, or not make waves.
Locus of Control
Who do you believe is in charge of your life? You or others? If you believe that what happens to you in life is the result of your own actions and behavior, and you take responsibility for the results you create in your world, then we say that you have an internal locus of control. If, on the other hand, you attribute what happens to you as the workings of fate or as a result of the power of others, then we say that you have an external locus of control. If you have an external locus of control, you are more concerned with pleasing others, not making them uncomfortable, or worrying about their reactions than you are concerned about what you feel and what you yearn for.
The locus of control is really a continuum—none of us operate completely from one or the other extreme all the time. Rather, at times we find that we operate from an internal locus of control—operating with a sense of our personal power, taking responsibility for our actions, acknowledging our mistakes, and seeing ourselves as full authors and creators of our lives. At other times we may operate fully from an external locus of control—acting as if we have no power to regulate our own emotions and behavior, influence others, or matter in the world. From an external locus of control, we blame others, act as victims, view ourselves and our lives as out of our control, or focus on others’ needs and desires rather than our own.
This week, as you risk displeasing others, you get to observe when you are acting from an internal locus of control and when you are acting from an external locus of control.
Focus on Your Yearning, Rather than the Fear of Displeasing Others
So often we are trying to read what other people want, rather than tapping into our own yearnings to guide our behavior. We are more concerned with what will bother other people than with listening to our own deeper yearnings and pleasing ourselves.
What do you yearn for? What do you truly desire?
Focus on what you yearn for rather than focusing on being worried about displeasing others. What pleases you?
You learn to affirm yourself in the face of rejection as you challenge your “mythconceptions” about power. You will face what it means to risk saying things that people will not necessarily like. You be learn to positively assert your will to make a difference in your world.
In the last several weeks, you have been exploring aspects of personal power and flexing and building your power muscles by doing your assignments. In the last weeks, you have been exploring the masculine and feminine aspects of power, testing the power of agreeing and disagreeing, and expressing and experiencing your power in relationship to others. You have experimented with being more influential and directing and changing the flow of conversations in directions you desire. You have been learning skills to lead and create a life geared toward your own satisfaction.
You practiced expressing what you dislike and disagree with. This was a step in preparing you to express more of what you think, want, and care about. Rather than gearing your words and actions toward pleasing others, you are learning to focus on pleasing, and expressing, yourself. It was a step in learning how to risk rejection and beginning to take a stand for yourself by being willing to displease others—the focus of this week’s assignment. Displeasing can mean even more risk of rejection.
Break the Habit of Being a People Pleaser—and Learn to Please Yourself
By practicing displeasing others, you create space to please yourself. Rather than trying to please others and avoid their displeasure, you can focus on what you want, need, desire, yearn for—and to act on those desires. Rather than putting your attention on others’ reactions, you learn to listen to and tend to yourself. Think about all the times you have said, “Yes”, to things you really haven’t wanted to do for fear of displeasing someone. Or the times you’ve held back your opinion, feelings, or thoughts so that others wouldn’t be upset. Or apologized for things that really weren’t your fault to make someone else not be upset. Think about all the times you were so busy putting all your attention and energy on others’ reactions that you lost track of yourself or sublimated your own needs or desires. By being willing to displease others, you no longer have to lose yourself and your needs. You can please yourself.
Our Matrix and Programming
Family and societal programming often focuses on not making other people upset or conforming to norms and doing things in ways that won’t make others uncomfortable, rather than following our yearnings. Our matrix of beliefs often leads to rules like…Don’t upset others…Obey others…My way or the highway…Be nice…Be good…Don’t rock the boat…Do what I say…
Displeasing others could lead to punishment, withdrawn affection, ridicule, other sanctions, or even upsetting outbursts from people we care about. So we often learned to try not to upset others, to not displease them, or to try to please them. We didn’t want to risk being disliked, not fitting in, or being hurt or rejected.
By displeasing, you express your willingness—or even desire—for the other person to have discontent. You are focusing on what you yearn for, rather than focusing on others’ possible reactions, and are willing to risk others’ displeasure in order to meet your yearnings. You are not conforming and being “nice.” This is an opportunity to challenge the “mythconceptions” you have about power by expressing a desire that is in opposition to someone else’s request. You are creating your own boundaries by letting people know what you are willing to do—whether it fits with their desire or not. You are asserting what you desire, rather than focusing on others’ desires.
Displease with Ease
Main Assignment
In this week’s assignment, you learn more about your beliefs and feelings about displeasing others and note the unexpressed thoughts and feelings that you have withheld because you thought they might displease others. You will also begin to develop a stronger sense of your own self-acceptance, satisfaction, and personal power as you take risks to displease others.
Your main assignment this week is to displease with ease. Rather than focusing on pleasing others, be more conscious of what you want, what you feel, what you desire—and act on that.
Be aware of your preferences, your urges, what feels right to you, and be willing to express them and act accordingly, regardless of what another thinks or feels.
For practice, be willing to displease another, even if you are not clear about your own preferences. You need to find out that you can “break the rules” and create space for yourself to discern what you think, feel, prefer, and want.
Very-Able Assignments
Think about Displeasing People—My List
Think of all the things you could say or do to someone that would be displeasing to them. Think of the things you yearn for that might displease other people. Make a list of all the possibilities you can think of—from great to small. Imagine yourself saying and doing the
things that would be displeasing. What does it look like? What do you think would happen if you say it to them? Use the worksheet provided to make a list of possible ways to displease others—and what you imagine would happen if you said or did these displeasing things.
Beliefs about Displeasing or Seeking Disapproval
Think about the beliefs you have about displeasing someone and write them down as they occur to you. How does it fit into the rules and beliefs you have grown up with? Can you imagine speaking your displeasing thoughts? What tends to happen when people don’t approve of what you are doing or saying? Add your discoveries to your matrix map.
Displease Others
Take the actual step and displease people:
Telemarketers
Service providers
Family
Friends
Authority figures
Coworkers, neighbors, colleagues
Strangers
The “opposite sex” (gender expression different from your own)
At work, home and play
Parents
Rate the Level of Risk
Go back to the people you have displeased and rate your level of risk with that person—was it high, medium, or low? What was the difference between high risk and medium or low risk for you? What feelings and thoughts did you have? What was the effect or outcome of each level of risk? Journal on your thoughts and feelings.
Displease by Resisting
Resist others. Experiment by slowing things down; put conditions on your cooperating or agreeing; don’t agree to do what they want.
Resist others’ preferences, entreaties, or requests. Don’t make it easy, or quickly offer to help, or jump in to please. Give yourself some space to find out what you really want, rather than jumping in to please someone else.
Resist and discover the power you have to impact situations.
Set Limits
Displease by setting limits. This is a combination of saying “No” and saying what you will do. I won’t come to dinner, but I’ll join you for dessert…I won’t do the report for you, but I will brainstorm with you on ways you can do it successfully yourself…No, I won’t do that, but I will do… Practice this at work, at home, with friends, and even with yourself. You can do this in different ways:
Limit your time, commitment, or amount of responsibility
Partial acceptance with conditions
Say “No” with Conditions
Similar to setting limits, displease by saying “No” with conditions. Examples: “No, I won’t do it unless you switch meeting times with me; No, I’d only do that if you agreed to babysit; No, I’m not interested without seeing something in writing first.”
You’re Invited—Whether You Like It Or Not!
This week’s assignment is all the more reason to use your growing personal power to hold big visions and invite people to join your life team. Think you’ve over-invited? This is the perfect week to lean into that! Share upcoming growthful events.
Resist others and find the power you have to slow things down, change directions, or refocus encounters. Practice setting limits with others when you think they will be displeased.
Notice your rules, myths, and beliefs that are challenged by this assignment. Notice how others respond—both when their response is what you expect and when it is not what you expect. Notice how you feel about their responses. Make notes around what you notice and discover this week. Use these discoveries to deepen and clarify your vision about who you are becoming and how you are growing your personal power. For instance, are you increasingly able and willing to be on your own side, or growing your internal locus of control, or practicing powerful self-validated intimacy? Track in your Purposeful Leadership Process!
This is the week to give yourself permission to Displease with Ease! When you focus on your yearning rather than pleasing others, you are grow your true personal power.
Displease with Ease
Use the form below to track the areas in your life where you displeased others. In the right column, rate your level of risk for each incident on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest).
Think About Displeasing Others
Think of all the things you could say or do to someone that would be displeasing to others. Imagine yourself saying and doing the things that would be displeasing. What does it look like? What do you think would happen if you said these things? Use the worksheet provided to make a list of possible ways to displease others—and what you imagine would happen if you said or did these displeasing things.
Beliefs About Displeasing or Seeking Disapproval
Think about the beliefs you have about displeasing someone. How does it fit into the rules and beliefs you have grown up with? Can you imagine speaking your displeasing thoughts? What tends to happen when people don’t approve of what you are doing or saying?
Resist, Set Limits, & Say “No” with Conditions
Give yourself some space to find out what you really want, rather than jumping in to please someone else. Displease by setting limits. This is a combination of saying “No” and saying what you will do. I won’t come to dinner, but I’ll join you for dessert…I won’t do the report for you, but I will brainstorm with you on ways you can do it successfully yourself…Similar to setting limits, displease by saying “No” with conditions. Examples: “No, I’d only do that if you agreed to babysit; No, I’m not interested without seeing something in writing first.”
