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• How to stop people pleasing

  The person who is always agreeable, always ready to smooth things over, always adjusting themselves to the room. From the outside this can look like warmth. From the inside, it tends to feel like a quiet kind of exhaustion.

  People pleasing is one of those patterns that disguises itself as a virtue. It gets called consideration, flexibility, kindness. What it actually involves is the steady suppression of your own responses, preferences, and needs in order to manage how someone else feels about you. The two things can look identical from the outside. The difference lies in what drives them.

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  What people pleasing actually is

  People pleasing, known in clinical psychology as sociotropy, describes a strong orientation toward seeking others’ approval and avoiding disapproval, often at the expense of your own needs and values. The defining feature is not the behaviour itself but the fear underneath it: fear that expressing a real preference, a disagreement, or a genuine need will damage how someone sees you.

  Being considerate is healthy. Caring whether your actions affect others is part of being human. People pleasing works differently. The core drive is self-protective. Agreeing, deferring, over-giving, staying quiet, these are all ways of managing the perceived threat of rejection or conflict, not expressions of genuine care.

  A 2024 study published in PMC found that higher people-pleasing tendencies were significantly associated with lower mental well-being, including elevated levels of neuroticism, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion. The pattern carries a cost even when it looks adaptive on the surface.

  Where it comes from

  The roots are usually older than people expect. In environments where love or approval felt conditional, where conflict was unsafe, or where keeping the peace was necessary for emotional survival, people pleasing made sense. It was a strategy that worked.

  Psychologists describe the fawn response as a trauma-linked adaptation: when fighting or fleeing a threat feels impossible, particularly in childhood, some people learn to appease. To become agreeable, undemanding, and useful. The strategy that once protected them eventually becomes a default mode, running long after the original threat is gone.

  Attachment research reaches similar conclusions. Individuals who developed anxious attachment styles, often through inconsistent or unpredictable early caregiving, are more likely to engage in approval-seeking behaviours as a way of maintaining closeness and avoiding rejection. The APA has documented the link between chronic anxiety and avoidance, showing that patterns learned in early relationships tend to repeat across contexts.

  If this resonates with something deeper, it may be worth reading about how early abandonment experiences shape emotional patterns.

  How it shows up day to day

  People pleasing rarely announces itself dramatically. It tends to look like ordinary, unremarkable behaviour.

  Saying yes when you mean no. Taking on extra work, agreeing to plans you don’t want, adding yourself to things because refusing feels too uncomfortable.

  Overexplaining decisions. Offering justifications for choices that require no justification, as a preemptive defence against imagined disapproval.

  Apologising for preferences. “Sorry, I just thought maybe we could…” as if having an opinion needs an apology attached.

  Monitoring other people’s moods carefully. Reading the room, adjusting your energy to theirs, feeling a low-grade responsibility for keeping everyone comfortable.

  Losing track of what you want. Over time, this may be the clearest signal. When the default mode is figuring out what others want, your own preferences can become genuinely hard to locate.

  The real cost

  The immediate cost is the exhaustion of constant self-monitoring. The longer-term cost is more corrosive: a gradual erosion of self.

  Resentment builds quietly, even when people pleasers would resist naming it. When you consistently give more than you want to, when generosity comes from fear rather than genuine choice, relationships start to feel unequal in ways that are difficult to articulate. The other person often senses something is off, even if they can’t identify it either.

  There is also an identity question. People who have been pleasing others for a long time often describe a particular disorientation when asked what they want, what they feel, what they think. They have practised reading the room so thoroughly that reading themselves has become much harder.

  Learning to validate your own experience is one of the foundational shifts in breaking this pattern. When self-validation becomes more reliable than external approval, the fear driving people pleasing starts to lose some of its grip.

  

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  Why willpower alone doesn’t work

  The instinct is to approach people pleasing through willpower: to decide to care less about what others think. This approach rarely holds.

  The pattern is rooted in fear, and fear doesn’t respond well to reasoning. The anxiety around disapproval often operates well below conscious thought. You can understand intellectually that a reasonable person won’t reject you for expressing a preference, and still find your body bracing for impact every time you attempt to disagree.

  What shifts the pattern is not deciding to behave differently. It is building the internal capacity to tolerate the discomfort that comes with behaving differently, and accumulating evidence over time that the feared outcome doesn’t materialise.

  Research on cognitive behaviour therapy supports this: lasting behavioural change tends to come through repeated small exposures that update the underlying fear, not through a single act of will.

  Practical steps to start shifting the pattern

  Buy time before responding. “Let me think about that and get back to you” is a complete sentence. A pause between a request and your response gives space for an actual preference to surface, rather than the automatic agreeable answer.

  Notice what you feel before you perform a reaction. People pleasers often move to automatic responses so quickly that their genuine reaction is never accessed. Slowing down that gap, even briefly, is the first practical skill.

  Start small. The first “no” doesn’t need to be in a high-stakes situation. A low-risk disagreement, a small honest preference expressed to someone safe, begins to build evidence that it’s survivable.

  Separate disappointing someone from harming them. Saying no to a social plan doesn’t damage the other person. Expressing a different opinion is not an attack. Practising this distinction in small moments builds it into something more available under pressure.

  Understanding what a life coach can do to help you build healthier boundaries may also be useful if the pattern is showing up in your relationships.

  When working with someone helps

  Some of this shifts through awareness and deliberate practice. For patterns rooted in early experience, ones that have been running for a long time and feel deeper than a habit, the shift tends to be more durable with support.

  A coach can help you see where the pattern shows up most clearly, understand what function it’s serving, and build practical approaches to responding differently in the situations that matter most. The goal isn’t to become indifferent to other people. It’s to develop a relationship with your own needs that is at least as reliable as your attention to everyone else’s.

  If this is something you’re working through, get in touch.

  Quiz: what’s blocking your success?

  This quick quiz will help you uncover which mental or behavioural pattern might be holding you back from reaching your full potential. Identifying your specific blocker is the first step to overcoming it.

  Read each question and choose the answer that best fits your situation.

  No email or payment required to complete the quiz and receive your personalised results.

  Paloma Chiara

  Once you know your main blocker, you’ll have clarity on what’s been holding you back. These patterns are not permanent traits, they are habitual ways of thinking and acting that can be changed with the right guidance and practice.

  If you’re ready to overcome your specific blocker, email me to try a coaching session.

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• How to overcome your fear of failure

  There’s a version of your life you want. And there’s a part of you that keeps pulling back just before you reach for it. The hesitation has nothing to do with laziness, or a shortage of ambition. It comes from something more specific: a quiet fear that if you try and it doesn’t work, the failure will confirm something you’ve been dreading about yourself.

  Fear of failure is one of the most common blockers in personal growth. It rarely announces itself. It shows up instead as delay, perfectionism, or the persistent sense that you’ll start properly when you’re more ready. But that readiness rarely comes. And the gap between where you are and where you want to be stays exactly where it is.

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  What fear of failure actually is

  Fear of failure, known clinically as atychiphobia, describes a persistent anxiety around not succeeding. In severe cases, it qualifies as a diagnosable condition. Most people who carry this fear don’t meet the clinical threshold. They carry something more common: a deep, learned association between failing and what that failure means about them as a person.

  That’s the core of it. Healthy concern about failure is functional. It keeps you from taking reckless risks. Unhealthy fear of failure works differently. The fear isn’t really about the outcome. It’s about what the outcome would prove. If this doesn’t work, it means I’m not capable enough. If I try and fail, something unflattering about me gets confirmed.

  A 2024 review in BMC Psychology found that fear of failure is among the strongest predictors of avoidance behavior. The avoidance happens not because you can’t do the thing, but to protect yourself from the meaning you’ve attached to doing it badly.

  Where it comes from

  The roots usually go back further than most people expect. Environments that rewarded outcomes over effort, or where mistakes were met with criticism rather than curiosity, plant the seeds early. When approval felt contingent on getting things right, failure started to carry a social cost.

  Academic systems reinforce this. Most schools grade outputs. Mistakes are marked wrong. Many people leave formal education with finely tuned sensitivity to getting things right and very little practice with failing productively.

  Then come adult experiences: a rejection, a public stumble, a project that didn’t land. Each one adds to a collection of evidence. Over time, these solidify into limiting beliefs about your own capacity. “I always mess up the important things.” “I’m not talented enough for this.” These beliefs filter how you interpret new situations, making failure feel more certain, and more costly, than it is.

  How fear of failure shows up

  This is where it gets practical, because fear of failure is skilled at not looking like fear.

  Procrastination is one of its most common forms. When you avoid starting something, you can’t fail at it yet. Research consistently links the root of procrastination to fear of failure and emotional avoidance, not to poor discipline or time management. Avoiding the task is a way of managing anxiety.

  Perfectionism is another. If the work is never finished, it can never be judged. Setting impossibly high standards creates a permanent buffer against exposure. From the outside, perfectionism looks like diligence. From the inside, it often functions as protection.

  Staying small is subtler still. Choosing goals, roles, or situations that feel safely within reach. Taking longer to decide because deciding means committing, and committing opens the door to being wrong.

  Imposter syndrome often has fear of failure running through it. The sense that people will eventually discover you’re not as capable as they think is, at its core, a fear about what being found out would mean.

  None of this announces itself as fear. It shows up as feeling tired, not quite ready, or just preferring to wait a little longer.

  

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  What the research tells us about failure and growth

  Carol Dweck’s work at Stanford has produced something genuinely practical here. Across decades of research on motivation and achievement, she found that people with a fixed mindset interpret failure as evidence of fixed, limited ability. People with a growth mindset interpret the same failure as information about what to do differently.

  The difference isn’t intelligence or raw capability. It’s whether you see yourself as a fixed entity or a developing one. And Dweck’s research showed that this orientation can shift with deliberate practice, which means your relationship with failure is changeable.

  The APA’s research on resilience reaches similar conclusions. Resilience, the capacity to keep moving through adversity, is built through experience. Working through failures, rather than avoiding them, is exactly how you develop the resources to handle them better next time.

  People who seem unfazed by failure are usually not fearless. They’ve accumulated enough evidence that failure doesn’t destroy them.

  Practical steps to start moving through it

  Begin where the stakes are genuinely low. Fear of failure thrives when every attempt feels high-stakes. Starting in situations where the cost of failure is small builds evidence that you can survive things going wrong.

  Follow the worst-case scenario to its end. When you imagine failing, take the thought further than you usually would. If this doesn’t work, then what? And then what after that? Most fears of failure, traced to their actual conclusion, rest on assumptions that are far less certain than the feeling suggests.

  Separate the outcome from your identity. A failed project is not a failed person. A rejection is not a verdict on your worth. Practicing this distinction in small, everyday moments, each time you catch yourself turning a result into a statement about who you are, builds real capacity over time.

  Work on developing grit: the ability to persist through difficulty rather than avoid it. Grit isn’t stoic endurance. It’s having a reason that matters more than the discomfort of the attempt.

  Bring self-compassion into the mix. One of the reasons fear of failure persists is the harshness of the internal response that follows any setback. When failing feels like self-attack, avoiding it becomes genuinely rational. A kinder internal climate after failure reduces the stakes of trying, which makes you more willing to do it.

  When it’s worth getting support

  Some fear of failure softens with the practices above. Awareness, deliberate exposure, and attention to the stories you tell yourself about failure can shift the pattern significantly.

  When it’s severe enough to affect your major life decisions repeatedly, when avoidance has been running for years, or when it’s intertwined with deeper anxieties and entrenched beliefs, working with someone else makes a real difference.

  A therapist can address the clinical dimensions of anxiety. A coach works differently: helping you look clearly at what you want, understand what’s been getting in the way, and build a practical path forward from where you actually are.

  If fear of failure has been keeping you from something that matters to you, get in touch to explore what coaching might look like.

  Quiz: what’s blocking your success?

  This quick quiz will help you uncover which mental or behavioural pattern might be holding you back from reaching your full potential. Identifying your specific blocker is the first step to overcoming it.

  Read each question and choose the answer that best fits your situation.

  No email or payment required to complete the quiz and receive your personalised results.

  Paloma Chiara

  Once you know your main blocker, you’ll have clarity on what’s been holding you back. These patterns are not permanent traits, they are habitual ways of thinking and acting that can be changed with the right guidance and practice.

  If you’re ready to overcome your specific blocker, email me to try a coaching session.

  Read blog

• Exercises for stress relief that actually work

  “Exercise more” is the advice everyone gives for stress and almost nobody follows when they’re actually stressed. Because when your nervous system is in overdrive, the last thing that feels possible is lacing up and going for a run.

  The good news is that the most effective stress relief exercises are mostly not what you picture. Some of them take 5 minutes. Some of them you can do at your desk.

  Follow on Instagram · @paloma_chiara.coach

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  Why physical movement helps at all

  Stress evolved as a preparation for action. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system to get you ready to run or fight. The problem is that most modern stress has no physical outlet: the difficult email, the financial worry, the relationship tension. The hormones arrive and then have nowhere to go.

  Movement burns through them. Even a 10-minute walk measurably lowers cortisol. You don’t need intensity. You need to give the stress response somewhere to land.

  Walking

  The most underrated one. A 2015 study from Stanford found that walking in nature for 90 minutes reduced activity in the part of the brain associated with rumination. But you don’t need nature or 90 minutes. Even a 10-minute walk around the block changes your physiological state.

  The key is to leave your phone in your pocket. Walking while scrolling is not the same thing. The point is to give your attention somewhere other than the thought loop.

  Box breathing

  Used by Navy SEALs specifically for high-stress situations, which is a decent endorsement. The pattern: inhale for 4 counts, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4. Repeat for 4 rounds.

  It works because the slow, controlled exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the branch responsible for calming the stress response. You’re essentially using your breath to manually switch lanes.

  This one is useful mid-meeting, before a difficult conversation, or when you feel the physical signs of anxiety arriving before you’ve had time to think.

  Progressive muscle relaxation

  Developed by physician Edmund Jacobson in the 1920s, and still one of the most research-supported techniques for stress and anxiety. The method: systematically tense each muscle group for about 5 seconds, then release. Start at your feet and work up to your face.

  The logic is that physical tension and psychological tension are connected, so deliberately releasing one helps release the other. Most people discover they’ve been holding tension in their shoulders, jaw, or hands without realizing it.

  It takes about 15 minutes for the full version. There’s also a compressed version (just hands, shoulders, and face) that you can do in 3 minutes.

  Coloring

  The adult coloring book trend that exploded around 2015 had more going for it than it seemed. Studies published in the journal Art Therapy found that coloring geometric patterns, specifically the kind found in mandalas, reduced anxiety symptoms in a way that free-form drawing didn’t.

  The reason seems to be the combination of repetition, focus, and low stakes. Your prefrontal cortex gets something specific to do (stay in the lines, choose a color) without any pressure or consequence. The task is contained, and that containment is calming. It’s close in effect to meditation, but it doesn’t require you to quiet your mind, just redirect it.

  You don’t need a special book. A printed mandala from the internet and a set of colored pencils is enough.

  

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  Yoga

  Specifically the kind that prioritizes slow movement and breath over intensity. Yin yoga, restorative yoga, or a gentle flow rather than a heated vinyasa class if your nervous system is already maxed out.

  The combination of movement, controlled breathing, and sustained held poses activates the relaxation response more reliably than most other forms of exercise. The physical poses also tend to surface where you’re holding tension in ways that are harder to access just sitting still.

  If you’ve never tried it, a 20-minute YouTube session at home is a lower-barrier start than signing up for a class.

  Shaking

  Less familiar but backed by somatic research. Animals naturally shake after a threat response to discharge the stress hormones from their system. Humans have largely lost this, which may partly explain why we hold stress so persistently in our bodies.

  Intentional shaking (starting with your legs, letting it move up through your torso and arms, for 5 to 10 minutes) activates the same discharge mechanism. It feels bizarre the first time. It also works noticeably quickly, which is why it’s sometimes used in trauma-sensitive somatic therapy.

  Journaling with a specific method

  Unstructured journaling can sometimes increase rumination rather than reduce it. You write about what’s stressing you, and you end up just cycling through it more articulately.

  2 methods that research supports specifically for stress reduction:

  Expressive writing: Write for 15 to 20 minutes about something stressful, going into the emotions and the meaning you’re making of it, not just the facts. Psychologist James Pennebaker has studied this for decades: people who do this consistently show measurable improvements in immune function, mood, and cognitive clarity over time.

  Worry time journaling: Write out everything you’re anxious about, then close the notebook. The point is to give the worry a container with a clear end point so it’s not leaking into the rest of your day.

  Cold water

  Brief cold exposure, a 30-second cold shower or holding your wrists under cold water, triggers a noradrenaline release that produces a calm, focused state. It’s uncomfortable for the first few seconds and then most people find it clears their head quickly.

  It’s not a long-term stress management strategy on its own. But as an immediate intervention when you’re spinning, it’s fast and it works.

  The one that actually compounds

  Any of the above, done consistently, does more than any of them done occasionally. The benefit of stress relief practices isn’t just what happens in the moment: it’s that repeated activation of the relaxation response gradually lowers your stress baseline.

  The goal isn’t to manage stress better when it arrives. It’s to arrive at stressful situations with a more regulated nervous system to begin with.

  If stress is a chronic pattern in your life rather than a situational one, that’s worth looking at properly, what’s feeding it, what in your structure or your thinking is keeping it high. Coaching can help with that part. Reach out if you want to work on it.

  Quiz: What is blocking your success?

  This quick quiz will help you figure out which mental or behavioral pattern might be holding you back from achieving your full potential. Identifying your specific success blocker is the first step toward breaking through to new levels of achievement and fulfillment.

  Read each question and choose the answer that feels most true to your situation.

  No email or payment is required to complete the quiz and receive your personalized insights.

  Paloma Chiara

  Once you have your primary success blocker, you have clarity about what’s been holding you back. These patterns aren’t permanent character traits, they’re habitual ways of thinking and behaving that can be changed with the right guidance and practice.

  If you’re ready to break through your specific blocker, send me an email to try out a coaching session.

  Read blog