What would you be doing differently if you did not have to prove yourself to anyone?

I know a man who, at the age of 72, is still trying to please his 95-year-old mother. I have also worked in seminars with many people still trying to earn the approval of parents who are long dead. Authority figures, you see, live not in their bodies; they live in your brain. It is said, "It is impossible to defeat an enemy who has an outpost in your head."

Your enemies are not your dysfunctional parents, childhood sexual abuser, or punitive parochial school teacher; your enemies are the thoughts they instilled in you that you still believe. It doesn't matter if your authority figures are living or dead, right or wrong, nasty or transformed; their influence exerts itself through your agreement with it—right beside your power to remove it.

You Can't Get Everyone's Approval All The Time

Let's get one fact straight right now: You will never, never, never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, never, never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never ever get everyone's approval all the time. Jesus didn't do it, nor did Gandhi or Princess Diana. Even very good people could not get everyone to like them. No one ever has and you won't be the first.

You won't be able to get everyone to like any one thing you do, and you won't get any one person to like everything you do. So give up your quest for universal admiration right now; it is never-ending, infinitely frustrating, and it sucks. If you are ever going to receive the approval you seek, it is going to have to come from you.

Trying to Prove Yourself & Earn Approval

In the film Out of Africa, pioneer Karen Blixen confesses, "My biggest fear was that I would come to the end of my life and realize I had lived someone else's dream."

Is your life an expression of your heart's desire, or someone else's? I know a young man, Robert, who sweated through a year of medical school because his parents always wanted him to be a doctor. Robert's father took a second mortgage on their house to pay the tuition, and Robert felt too guilty to refuse. But he really wanted to be a teacher. This placed him in an awful predicament: While he was being trained to save other people's lives, he was losing his. By the end of his second semester, Robert fell quite ill, which motivated him to speak his truth to his father. His father was disappointed, but realized that his son would never be happy as a doctor, and he gave him his blessing to leave. Robert quit medical school and his health returned in a short time. He went on to become a teacher, which he loves.

Many people have all kinds of ideas about how you should be living, but they are do not matter unless they match your vision for yourself. Well-intentioned as others may be, no one knows your heart and destiny as well as you do.

Seeking Love & Approval: Disease to Please

The disease to please is a prevalent one. It shows up in the son who plays out his parents' hopes for the childhood they never had; the daughter who marries within the faith although she loves another; the wife who dares not defy her husband's wishes; the teenager anxiously striving to fit in with peers; the employee sweating to win the favor of his boss; religious adherents trying to be good so God will not send them to hell. But they are already in hell. If you deny your truth to fit into another's, you will find yourself there too.

If you want to get back in touch with your dreams and live them, these practices will help you:

1. Whenever you are about to respond to a request, ask yourself if your motivation comes from joy or duty. Is this your idea or someone else's? Would you be doing it even if someone else was not asking or urging you to? Is this a "should" or a "would?" Practice saying yes only if it matches your inner choice.

Notice how activities that proceed from fear or obligation deaden you, while activities that proceed from joy or personal intention enliven you. Of course there are times that you choose to do something that would make another person happy, but there is a world of difference between you saying yes because you want to serve and support them and saying yes because you are afraid to say no. The important question to answer is, "Is this really my choice?"

2. Write a letter to each of the people you are still trying to please (even if they are no longer in your life). Tell them all of your feelings and everything you have experienced in your quest to please them.

Hold nothing back. Do not stop until you get all of your thoughts and feelings onto the paper. Finish with a declaration of how you would now like to be living instead. When you feel complete, burn the paper. It is not for them; it is for you.

Measuring Yourself Against Impossible Standards

Some of the ideals you have been told you should attain are downright impossible. You might feel like the Greek mythological character Sisyphus, who spent eternity in Hades rolling a big rock up to the top of a hill, but as soon as he neared the top, the rock would roll back onto him. Talk about diminishing returns!

The only way out of Sisyphus's predicament is to give up the boulder rolling and celebrate your perfect imperfection. Let your process be as rewarding as your goal. If it's not fun now, it's not gonna be fun when you get there. And if you never get there, you will resent all the angst you suffered in trying. So whatever you are doing, enjoy it or quit it.

Gotta Get It Right Syndrome: Fear of Being Wrong

Men suffer under the Gotta Get It Right syndrome more than women. (That's why NASA began to send women up in space capsules—in case the crew got lost, someone had to be willing to ask for directions.) We men have been taught that we are supposed to know it all, and it's embarrassing to admit when we don't. Men also feel a lot of internal pressure to keep things working efficiently. This is why when a woman comes to a man when she is upset, the man thinks he has to solve the problem. But the woman doesn't regard her upset as a problem; she just needs to express her feelings. Finally the man throws his hands up in frustration and stomps out of the room, shouting, "I just don't understand you." If, in such a situation, the man can let go of his need to be a fixer and just allow the woman to vent, she will likely come out on the other side feeling better and he will save himself a bunch of stress. Women live longer than men because they don't carry the world on their shoulder and they express their feelings more freely. So men, let's take a clue, buy a few more years, and enjoy ourselves along the way.

Women have a different challenge: they have been taught they need to live up to an impossible societal standard for beauty. If you don't weigh 98 pounds, have a porcelain complexion, and your lips are not as puffy as a calzone, you aren't good enough. Meanwhile, the Vogue cover girls live on one lettuce leaf a day and go into cardiac arrest when they find a wrinkle. What a price to pay for glamour! Even the cover girls need help; Playboy magazine does a lot of airbrushing. Beauty is delightful to behold, but it's a vicious taskmaster.

Religious Standards and Moral Expectations

Others are sweating to live up to religious standards with overbearing moral expectations. You would have to be a saint to live up to them, and probably a saint could not handle them either. (I think saints were a lot more human than we make them out to be; once they are dead we can idolize them and not have to deal with the human traits we would notice if they were present. One true mark of a good saint is their embracing of their humanity.)

Morals are important, but if they wield tyranny, they suck. Robert Louis Stevenson suggested, "If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have. But conceal them like a vice, lest they spoil the lives of better and simpler people."

Personal Integrity: Being True to Yourself

The highest morality is personal integrity—living in harmony with your own value system. Religious ideals rarely encourage individual choice because they do not recognize that God guides people uniquely from within. Nor do they regard people as worthy enough to connect directly with God. So religions make up a long list of rules about how you should live, some of which apply to you and many of which don't.

Religion helps lots of people, but others do better to develop a conversation with their own soul and forge a personal destiny. They find deeper meaning to discover their inner Bible rather than rely on one written by another. You cannot photocopy God; the more you do, the more blury the image becomes until it bears little resemblance to the original, and it becomes unreadable. Dogma insists that you adopt someone else's relationship with God, which is never as powerful as developing your own. We're back to the frog on the log. Sooner or later your karma will run over your dogma.

The only thing more important than being good is being real. More good comes from living your truth, than truth comes from living someone else's idea of your good. It has been said, "It's not how good you are—it's how bad you want it." Sincerity of intention attracts more success than seeking to satisfy externally imposed injunctions.

To Get What You Want, Be What You Are

Imitation sucks; authenticity rocks. Perfection is not a degree you attain; it is a truth you recognize. Find perfection where you are in who you are, and you will escape the ravages of the disease to please.

©2002, 2005 by Alan Cohen. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Jodere Group, Inc. www.joderegroup.com

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Why Your Life Sucks, And What You Can Do About It
by Alan H. Cohen.

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About The Author

Alan Cohen is the author of the bestselling A Course in Miracles Made Easy and the inspirational book, Soul and Destiny. The Coaching Room offers Live Coaching online with Alan, Thursdays, 11 am Pacific time, 

For information on this program and Alan’s other books, recordings, and trainings, visit AlanCohen.com

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