While I was on parental leave, I discovered a label for how I moved about the world. I was a people pleaser.
If you haven't encountered the term before, it might sound nice. Who doesn't want to be known for pleasing people? Based only on those two words, we might assume that a people pleaser is kind and easy to get along with. They might be the type of person who is told at their annual performance review, "Everyone enjoys working with you."
While those descriptions might be true, the intuitive definition of "people pleaser" leaves out an important part of the tendencies it describes. A people pleaser repeatedly goes against their own wishes to please the people around them. And they often do this without even trying to represent or meet their own wishes and needs.
I came to identify as a people pleaser in part because of my struggle communicating with loved ones at the beginning of the pandemic. Many of us experienced the same challenge—suddenly, we either had to blindly accept the risk introduced by another person's approach to the pandemic or we had to communicate more clearly with them than we ever had before. It was a difficult change to make, and doing it while learning how to care for a newborn made it that much more difficult and important.
Each week, my therapist and I talked about the most pressing challenges I had encountered. With her help, I realized that my temptation to prioritize another person's temporarily hurt feelings over my family’s safety from an unknown, potentially permanent threat to our health—that was people pleasing.
Over time and with persistent reflection, I eventually discovered that people pleasing governed not only those conversations, but most of my choices.
I found myself remembering a user interview study from early in my career. My mentor lead the sessions with the executives who were participating; I took notes; and then he and I would debrief after each session. After one where he had improvised some questions that happened to be leading, he told me that he didn't mind asking leading questions of these participants, because these folks were confident enough to set him straight if he made an incorrect assumption.
When he said that, I felt uncomfortable. I knew that although I, too, often portrayed confidence, I constantly compared what I chose to say or do against what I thought the people around me wanted. I instinctively knew that if I did that, there must be other people who did it, too, and that the two behaviors might be difficult to discern. By conducting research, we aim to understand the people's behaviors, and we can't do that if their people pleasing is getting in the way. Of course, being a people pleaser, I presented none of these thoughts to my mentor.
That moment and its discomfort stuck with me, and ultimately motivated me to practice improvising non-leading questions. Now, when I'm in the right frame of mind, I am good at it, and I believe it to be a key skill for UX researchers.
In light of my recent discovery of people pleasing, however, the memory has taken on another meaning for me. That I had that insight and that it motivated me to dive deeper into UX research—I now wonder whether I was drawn to UX research because of being a people pleaser.
Another attribute of people pleasing is that we often long for others to do for us what we try to do for them. We long for them to see what we need and yet won't ask to have, and we long for them to give it to us. When I decided it pursue UX a decade ago, it felt like a way I could make the world more like the world I wished to have for myself. I used to think that was a generous thing, and now I am not so sure.
Ultimately, this hypothesis is one of the reasons I left my job earlier this year. I decided that I would heal better if I stepped away from professional people pleasing, and I realized that I was in a place were we could afford to do it.
It is strange writing weekly to support a profession whose core I now question. But I'm excited to have finally introduced this reflection to you, my dear readers, so that we might continue to explore it together.
I still believe in the mission of UX. I still believe that people deserve high quality products that serve them well. What I question, however, is what kind of mental load UX researchers and designers are bearing, whether it is fair for them to do so, and how that might change.
Mentioned in this issue: People pleasing, as described by an article (recommended by my therapist) in Psychology Today.