People-Pleasing Isn’t About Other People — It’s About Self-Abandonment

If you’ve ever wondered why every boundary-setting tip in the world hasn’t actually changed your people-pleasing habits, Kori Strobl has an answer: you’ve been looking in the wrong direction.

In a recent conversation on See Her Now, Kori, a coach who spent 15 years as a yoga teacher and holds a master’s in spiritual psychology, shared the insight that reframed her own decades-long struggle with people-pleasing. “People-pleasing” is the wrong name for what’s actually happening, she says. The real term is self-abandonment.

I circle back to that distinction often in my own work. Clients are trying to read the room, the person, the environment.

But it’s not about them. It’s about you not being in the room.

Most advice on people-pleasing focuses outward: set the boundary, say no, speak your truth. Kori tried all of it. And it never landed.  This is because the behavior isn’t really about managing other people. It’s about what happens inside you.

“My attention is outward and over there all of the time,” she explains. Underneath the constant reading of rooms and moods is usually anxiety — and the people-pleasing behavior is an attempt to manage that anxiety by controlling the environment. Bingo!

As Kori puts it, people-pleasers are often “some of the most quietly controlling people in a room.” And it’s not because they want power, but because keeping everything calm outside feels like the only way to feel calm inside.

**This is a version of something I see often with the women I work with: we assume the problem is out there, in the relationship or the room or the other person’s reaction, when really it’s a matter of what we’ve been trained to see, and not see, in ourselves first.

Where it comes from

Kori traces a lot of this back to childhood. Her parents did all the right things on a practical level, she says, but were emotionally unavailable. Because she was a highly attuned, empathetic kid, she learned to read a room and meet other people’s needs to manufacture a feeling of connection, without ever having to reveal herself. It worked. It also meant she got very good at seeing everyone but herself.

Can you relate to this? I know I can. The way we interact with the world around us ties so deeply to childhood. We learn what connection feels like based on the relationships that teach us everything we know. While recording this podcast, this was my biggest breakthrough moment.

Setting a boundary vs. holding one

One of the most useful distinctions Kori makes is between setting a boundary and holding one. Setting a boundary is often other-referencing. We learn that it’s about telling people what you need and expecting them to comply. Holding a boundary is internal. It has three parts:

1. Know who you are: what do you actually want, feel, need?
2. Believe yourself: without softening, minimizing, or talking yourself out of it.
3. Take responsibility for you: not for managing anyone else’s reaction.

“If I don’t want to engage in conversations where people are being disrespectful to me, then I am responsible for stepping away from those conversations,” she says. Not the other person’s job to change. Hers to leave.

There’s something here that echoes the earliest step of any real transformation work: before you can act differently, you have to be willing to see yourself, and your own responsibility in a situation, differently first.

And you acknowledge that you need to take action. This isn’t a passive process. You need to embody the boundary, so to speak.

Chemistry vs. capacity in dating – an interesting take

For anyone coming out of a people-pleasing pattern and stepping back into dating, Kori offers a distinction worth sitting with: chemistry versus capacity. Chemistry feels good and tends to avoid tension. Capacity — how someone actually handles conflict, disagreement, or an inconvenient truth — only shows up in moments of tension. Her advice: slow down enough to let capacity reveal itself before you’re already attached to the chemistry.

She uses the image of a fence: let someone in, watch how they treat the space, and let them leave again — rather than throwing the gate open before you know anything about them. “Let’s just never demolish the fence,” she says.

The daily practice

Healing this isn’t a one-time realization; it’s a practice. Kori starts her days by sitting with whatever she’s feeling before the day’s stories take over, and she’s built in a pause before responding to anything that used to trigger an instant, reflexive “yes.” “Pause, myself, then respond,” as she puts it.

The work isn’t becoming less generous or less empathetic. Those are real gifts people-pleasers bring into a room. The work is including yourself in the room too. Which, at the end of the day, is the whole project: learning to see yourself as clearly as you’ve always seen everyone else.

**Listen to this episode here.

Kori Strobl works one-on-one and with couples, and offers a six-module online course, “Recovering Guide for People Pleasers to Return to Themselves.” Find her on Instagram and on her website.