Please Yourself: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Transform the Way You Live

"The Courage to be Disliked" meets "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck": an essential, inspirational, wise and forgiving book that will liberate the people pleaser inside us all. This book will teach you how to be you.

We all know how it feels to want people to like us, to approve of us, to accept us. It’s part of what makes us human. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to support other people and help them satisfy their needs. The problem comes when we give up our own needs along the way. Because when we give to make others like us or approve of us, to shore up our own sense of self-worth, to feel needed or to avoid painful emotions, then we give to get. And rarely do we get what we really need.

Emma Reed Turrell works with people pleasers every day in her clinical practice as a psychotherapist – clients wrestling with the complicated dilemmas of a life in which you can’t please everyone, but you don’t yet have the permission you need to please yourself. In this groundbreaking, reassuring and essential book she presents an alternative to people-pleasing. Through the stories of people-pleasers across all walks of life she offers insights and techniques that will help you understand yourself more fully and live more authentically.

It will help you get better at being disliked, instead of staying quiet. It will help you recover instead of fearing failure. It will teach you acceptance instead of avoidance and show you how to grow instead of staying small. Above all it will help you care better for others, without taking on their problems, through caring better for yourself.