Terry Prone: People-pleasers are moaners who do you favours you don’t want
In their efforts to be loved, they end up making themselves markedly less lovable
Originally published in the Irish Examiner.
I was glad I don’t have false teeth when she said it.
A nun, when I was going to school, lost control of her dentures coming down the stairs and nobody who was present to witness their descent in front of her has ever got over it.
(It possibly didn’t improve the nun’s life much, either, but that was a conversation none of us felt like starting.)
If I’d had false teeth, I’d have lost them for sure when the woman told me she had given up being a people-pleaser.
Now, this woman is an acquaintance rather than a friend — but her business reputation lies squarely between Attila the Hun and Lizzie Borden.
I’m not saying she ever actually impaled anyone or smacked anybody with an axe, but the impression I had was that only health and safety regulations had prevented either.
I had dealt with several of her reports when they decided to get out before this woman poured any more misery on them in their workplace. And now she was giving up people-pleasing?
It was such a magnificent contradiction that I almost had to close my mouth with a click and my right hand, like in a cartoon. I could think of no apposite question either.
“Giving up the screaming, are you?” seemed a tad direct, as did any comment about her move being likely to radically reduce staff turnover in the place where she worked as a manager.
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