It is not about what is for dinner.
For thirty years she had been having the same argument. Every evening, the same game. The same turmoil. The same result.
"They can never just tell me," she said. "My kids, my partners, everyone always wants something else. Or worse, they do not want what I want. It is a never-ending battle of wills."
Dinner. The nightly battleground of the busy parent, the spouse, the pleaser. Every evening the anxiety wells up in us like the tears of a toddler who has lost his red balloon. "It is never a negotiation. I always end up choosing something, and then I feel like nobody wants to eat it. Am I a bad mom?"
One month later, a different client, the same problem. He was making lunch, and he asked his wife a simple question. What would you like?
"She never knows," he told me. "So I run through fifty ideas before we finally land on something, and it is exhausting. I want to do it. I love her. But christ, just decide. So I give up, tell her to make whatever she wants, and walk off frustrated."
Same story. Same problem and it is not the meal...
And before you decide this is a lesson for other people, understand that it is not. I have been guilty of this from both sides. I have stood in a kitchen worrying about what everyone else wanted instead of simply stating what I wanted and executing unless someone offered an alternative. And I have been the one who turned a simple "where do you want to eat" into a standoff that swallowed the whole evening.
So one day I added it up. The arguing, the deferring, the running through options. Roughly twenty-five minutes a day, every day, on the single question of what to eat. That is 9,120 minutes a year. 19 full eight-hour workdays, gone. Enough time to get a real running start on a new language.
So stop asking.
The person you are serving has one task. To eat. You have one task. To prepare something to eat. That is it. The moment you open the door to infinite possibility, the two tasks blur together and paralysis sets in.
Asking someone what they want is not to be demonized. But in the face of time, the constraints of human nature, and life in general, the meal itself is usually enough. Frankly, half the time they cannot decide because they do not particularly care. Most of us will eat what we see. When you hand a person fifty options, you are setting them up to fail, and there is a reason for that.
People pleasers are not really asking. We are avoiding being wrong. We are avoiding being disliked. Yes, even over lunch. The payoff you think you are getting is their happiness. What you are actually buying is the safety of never making the choice, so that the choice, and by proxy you, can never be rejected.
And that is the real fear. You fear the rejection. You fear that you, not just the sandwich, will not be sufficient. So you supplicate, and you end up with lost time and frustration.
Here is what to do instead. Make what you want. It sounds like this. "I am going to make lunch. Unless you have something specific in mind, this is what you are getting." Full stop.
"But what if they say that is not what they want?" You are screaming at the screen, hating every word of this, are you not? Simple. You stay open. "If you have something else in mind, I will make it. If not, it is sandwiches."
There is a line between making what you want, in the kitchen and in your life, and steamrolling everyone in it. It comes down to one question. Are you open to a better alternative if one is presented? Make that known, and you get both. You get to state what you want, and the people you love still get their say.
This is task separation.
Alfred Adler, yes, him again, said we suffer when we take up tasks that are not our own. At dinner, you have taken on the task of making everyone happy, when the only task in front of you was making them fed.
P.S. In both cases everyone was still happy. The meal was had, the smiles granted, and all without the dramatics.
People pleasing is a list of habits, and it may surprise you that you can break them in a couple of weeks. The real work is in the execution, and in being around other people doing the same. That is the I Hope You Hate This community, where we break the habits and replace them, step by step. Learn how you can too, click here to get started now.