You are HARD WIRED to be a people pleasing CEO/CXO

You are HARD WIRED to be a people pleaser

We all are, to differing degrees of course but unless you are mentally ill you are wired to try and make other people in your tribe like you.

It is a built in survival mechanism so that you can maintain or improve your position in the tribe and perhaps avoid getting your extremities ripped off by a tribe of chimpanzees as you wander alone in the wilderness.

What that means is that your brain is driving you towards saying yes to peoples requests.

McDonald’s make billions with one question, “would you like to go large?”

Starbucks do the same, “would you like a cake with that?”

We’d have said it at the start if we really wanted it no?

And that’s to relative strangers.

When it’s a friend, colleague, business associate the trust is higher, the interconnectedness higher and so the drive to say yes is higher too.

The fact is that we don’t operate with full consciousness for much of the day, particularly when we have a lot on.

We are in the future focusing on what we are trying to achieve and for everything else, physical survival and relationship survive we default to the habitual patterns that allowed us to survive in the past.

That is what a habit is.

Relying on willpower to help us say no is not smart given that the brain wants to say yes.

Even kids know this, that’s why they always ask for things we’d usually say no to when we’re cooking, on the phone, and trying to help their sibling with homework all at the same time.

So what’s the answer?

1. We have to know what we value, what we don’t and what exact obstacles stand in the way of having that in advance at a habitual level.

2. We need a strong idea of what we are saying NO to every time we say yes. When we know the genuine impact of the yes then NO gets WAY easier.

3. We need to look at the most challenging NO’s that re-occur in our lives and design a clear NO that appeases both parties. There are fewer than most people think.

How about you, are you working against your brain and making the no seem impossible?