The Truth About the Disease to Please
Why do so many women still subconsciously sabotage their own success by not speaking up? For one thing, women who do speak assertively are (unfortunately) often perceived as being overly aggressive or pushy — a double standard that makes it difficult for women to know how to voice their opinions without polarizing themselves from their peers. This goes back to a tendency to want to please others. Taking a stand will inevitably alienate someone — or so we assume — so instead we play it safe, act as people pleasers, and keep quiet.
This “people pleasing” habit often begins in childhood. According to research by Jo Ann Deak, Ph.D., when girls are between the ages of eight and twelve, they first become aware of how others perceive them and start “camouflaging” what they really think and feel in order to blend in better with their peers. These girls don’t want to stand out, so they stop speaking up and voicing their opinions and start acting like everyone else in order to please others and fit in.
Before this kicks in, most girls have no problem expressing their own unique perspectives, which, if you’ve spent any time with a girl under the age of eight, you undoubtedly already know! But many of the tween and teenage girls Deak spoke to admitted to remaining quiet even when they had an opinion or important knowledge on a subject to avoid being seen as “too eager,” “annoying,” or, “overbearing.”
This may seem like a normal part of being a teenager, but its long-range impact can actually be very damaging. When girls begin camouflaging their true selves as their identities are just developing, they lose out on an important chance to discover what they really think and feel and how to best express that. As a result, despite decades of women’s empowerment messaging, many women in the workplace still struggle with this tendency to camouflage, hide, or dilute their thoughts and ideas rather than communicate them directly. It’s one of the key issues that my mentees ask me about—how to speak both kindly and assertively—and was the number one question from the women around the country I surveyed. Here are some of the things they had to say:
“If I keep quiet, my boss thinks I have nothing to add, but if I speak up too often, my coworkers think I’m a bitch. I just can’t win.”
“I naturally communicate in a straightforward style, but this is often taken the wrong way, and people think I’m being rude. I resent feeling like I have to act like somebody else at work just to get along.”
“I have a really hard time speaking up in meetings. I usually think that other people’s opinions are more valuable than mine, and I don’t want to waste people’s time by talking just to hear my own voice.”
Does any of this sound familiar? It sure did to me. It’s incredibly difficult to feel like you’re constantly bumping up against an implicit bias that as an assertive woman you’re being perceived as rude, pushy, and even angry.
Unfortunately, additional biases can make this even more complex. I recently spoke about this with Anna Chavez, the author, speaker, attorney, and former CEO of The Girl Scouts of the USA. As a strong, successful woman of color, Anna felt throughout her career that she was unfairly labeled as angry or aggressive when she simply voiced her opinion at work. Yet she also had to fight to be taken seriously — an almost impossible balancing act to pull off.
Anna told me about one situation early in her career. It was the first time she was sent out to represent a federal agency in an enforcement hearing. She was barely two years out of law school and looked young for her age. She walked into the hearing room in Aurora, Colorado, and found several men already seated at the conference table. One of the officials looked at Anna and asked her if she knew when the hearing officer would be arriving because he and his corporate colleagues were very busy and needed to get back to their office. He assumed that she was a secretary or paralegal. Anna paused and said, “Well, you're lucky. The hearing officer is here and I am ready to start the proceedings.”
All of the men were shocked that Anna would be determining the outcome of this federal hearing, and throughout the proceedings Anna found herself trying to prove her gravitas to these men while still coming across as likeable. In the years since then, Anna has learned to stay true to herself by focusing on the good she was trying to do through her job and always trying to act as a model to others by treating them in the way she wanted to be treated. It may sound like a cliché, but this focusing inward helped her display a quiet confidence that strikes that difficult balance between strong and kind, assertive and empathetic.
To me, Anna is living proof that we don’t have to give up our niceness in order to be powerful. We can make room for others and take up an appropriate amount of space for ourselves. It doesn’t diminish anyone else for you to stand up straight and speak with authority. In fact, it’s a gift to other women to take the space and air time that you need because the more women stop camouflaging themselves, the more we lead the way for every woman and girl to be as powerful as they can be.
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