| Here's what I think my brain does, when it happens: I feel that something is expected of me -> I feel pressured to do it, since failing to do so will surely have bad consequences -> Being pressured, I feel like I have little freedom to do as I think fit -> Feeling like I have no freedom makes me lose motivation, even if the task might have been interesting to me It's not like that all the time, but it has happened fairly often. Sometimes I still fall into that mode of thinking and have a hard time pulling myself out again. What I believe is the problem here: I didn't have the confidence that I can take care of myself and have my needs fulfilled regardless of specific issues at hand at that moment in time. This has caused me to feel overly dependent on others and on meeting their expectations (or the expectations I think they might have of me, that they didn't even express). Since I realized that I have tried the following to improve my situation: I make myself aware of my fears as they come up, and don't try to push them away, but also don't acknowledge that they're justified. I then reassure myself in the feeling that I can look after myself and cause my needs to be fulfilled just fine. In other words, I try to make the cause of my satisfaction intrinsic. |
I’m a people-pleaser so this is great insight into my own behavior. But being a people-pleaser is also why I don’t understand making my satisfaction factors intrinsic. When people push their “successes” — jobs, cars, girls, diamonds, houses and iPhones — onto me, how can I to continue to work on my small WordPress project with the same level of motivation I had before they brought their “successes” to my attention? I do need them for my survival — I get a lot of anxiety just thinking of living without their support — but I don’t want them influencing my motivation, so how do I go about insulating my poor self-esteem from their occasional, and btw completely unintentional, blitzkrieg attacks?