This article was originally published on my website coachandyou.com

I want to tell you about a yes I said last month that I had absolutely no business saying.

I was at the shop. An acquaintance I see occasionally, someone I like well enough but do not have much in common with, stopped me near the entrance and suggested, for the second time, that we grab a coffee together. I could feel, before she had finished the sentence, that I did not want to go. The feeling was clear. The answer was obvious. Everything in me that has spent years doing this work knew exactly what was happening and what the honest response was.

And yet something older and more automatic than any decision I consciously made took over. I said yes. I walked away slightly annoyed with her for asking and considerably more annoyed with myself for agreeing, because I had watched the whole thing happen in real time and done nothing to stop it.

I share this at the beginning because I think it matters to be honest about the fact that awareness does not make you immune. It makes you a more informed witness to your own pattern, which is genuinely useful, but witnessing and changing are two different things, and the distance between them is longer than most people expect.

The Film You Have Already Seen

A senior finance Director I work with described it precisely and also poetically well.

‘I can narrate the whole thing as it happens,’ she said. ‘It is like watching a film I have already seen. And the ending is always the same.’

I recognised that film immediately, having watched my own version of it more times than I can count, and what I want to tell you in this edition is that the ending is not always the same, because the evidence of the same week tells a different story than it would have a few years ago.

The Cream Sample

The first story happened on a street in the city centre.

A young woman stepped toward me holding a small pot of cream and wearing the particular expression of someone whose job depends on stopping people who do not want to be stopped. She offered me a sample. I took it, because the moment of being handed something is faster than the moment of deciding whether to accept it. She smiled. I smiled. She gestured toward the shop behind her.

Here is something worth knowing about the cream sample, because I only learned it recently: it is a recognised sales technique, the gift that creates obligation, the small yes designed to make the next yes feel like the natural continuation of something already begun, and it works because it exploits the precise discomfort that drives people-pleasing, which is the feeling of having received something, however small and however unrequested, and now owing something in return.

I felt it. The familiar pull. The slight guilt at the thought of walking away. The awareness that she would be watching and that walking away meant being the person who took the sample and did not follow through.

And then I smiled, said something warm and entirely non-committal, and walked on, which sounds like a small thing and in absolute terms was a small thing, and yet there was something in my body afterward that felt lighter rather than heavier, which is exactly the opposite of how the acquaintance conversation had felt, and the difference between those two feelings is something I have been paying close attention to for a long time now.

The Client Who Tested the Container

The second story has more weight to it.

A potential client reached out. The initial conversation was good, the work they described was work I could genuinely help with, and there was real possibility in what was being discussed. We arranged a series of chemistry calls, the exploratory conversations that happen before any agreement is signed, before the work formally begins, before either person has committed to anything beyond finding out whether there is something worth building together.

But somewhere in those early exchanges something began to shift in small ways that were individually easy to explain and collectively impossible to ignore. The communication between calls became more frequent than felt natural, carrying questions that implied actual work rather than genuine curiosity, each one arriving in the gaps as though the boundary around our time together was a suggestion rather than a structure. The chemistry calls were rescheduled. Then postponed. Then rescheduled again, each movement small enough to accommodate without complaint and yet the accumulation of them told me something important about the container that was trying to form before the work had even begun.

I want to be careful here because I have genuine respect for how difficult it is to ask for help, and the person reaching out was not acting from malice. But the work I do is deep and psychological and the conditions it requires are not arbitrary preferences. They are the walls of the house. Without them there is no home inside to build, and a coaching relationship in which the boundaries are being tested before the relationship has started is one in which the real work cannot happen, not because I say so, but because the pattern itself will fill every available space if the space is not clearly held.

So I said no. Not unkindly, not with a list of grievances or a careful explanation of every moment that had given me pause. Just clearly, and with the kind of warmth that I hope communicated that the no was in service of something rather than against them.

In the past, that no would have been impossible. The potential revenue alone would have overridden everything my gut was telling me. The fear of being seen as difficult, of losing an opportunity, of disappointing someone who had come to me for help, would have been more than enough to keep me agreeing long past the point where I knew I should not.

What Is Actually Shifting

And that is what I actually want to tell you in this edition.

Not that I have stopped being a people-pleaser, because the acquaintance and her coffee invitation would suggest otherwise. But something is shifting, and the shift is not coming from reading more about the pattern or understanding it more precisely or deciding more firmly to act differently next time. I know this because I tried all three of those things for longer than I would like to admit, and the film kept playing to the same ending regardless.

What is actually moving something is a process I developed over years, first on myself, because I needed it before I could offer it to anyone else, and then refined through thousands of hours of working with senior leaders who were living the same gap between knowing and changing. It works not at the level of insight or intention but at the level where the pattern actually lives.

It gets lighter. That is what I want you to know, and I want you to know it not as reassurance but as something I have lived from both sides. The knot in the stomach that arrives before the honest answer. The peace of mind that costs you more than you realise over years of overriding it, the career moves that do not happen because somewhere in the room you made yourself smaller than the opportunity required. All of it is addressable, not through more understanding of why it exists, but through the specific kind of work that gives the nervous system something new to believe, something I know how to do and that I have watched change things for people who had spent years certain that for them, unlike everyone else, the ending of the film was simply fixed.

If you are watching the film and recognising the ending before it arrives, that recognition is not the work. It is the beginning of being ready for it. And if you found yourself in this piece, perhaps even already named something that has been costing you more than you have admitted out loud, the pattern mapping call is a good place to start that conversation. Thirty minutes, no pitch, just clarity on whether this is the right work for you at the right time.

P.S. The yes to that acquaintance was a no to myself.

Learning to please yourself, one step at a time.

Danguole Litvinskaite, The Leadership Coach People-Pleasing Directors Eventually Find

P.S.S. Picture credit belongs to amazing Evelina Kvartunaite.

Originally published at coachandyou.com: The Diary of a People-Pleaser series.

Nobody told me the people-pleasing pattern was a problem. Why would they? Everything around me confirmed it was the right way to be. Work hard. Be kind. Help others. Put your head down, and success will follow. These were not just professional values. They were moral ones. The kind of person who operates this way is a good person. A reliable person. Someone others can count on. I believed this completely. And for a long time, the evidence seemed to support it.

What I Noticed But Could Not Explain

Somewhere along the way I started to notice something that did not quite fit the story I had been telling myself. The people getting promoted were not always the hardest workers. Some of them were not particularly kind. A few had what I would generously describe as an attitude. And yet there they were: advancing, being recognised, taking up space without apology.

Honestly, it made me furious. It seemed so unfair. I had been doing everything right. And so my response, almost automatically, was to work harder. To be kinder. To make myself even more indispensable. Because surely, eventually, it would be noticed. Surely being the person who never said no, never dropped the ball, never made anyone uncomfortable would count for something.

It did count for something. Just not what I expected.

The Compounding Nobody Warns You About

Here is what actually happened. Slowly, so slowly I almost missed it. Each small act of people-pleasing compounded. One yes led to another. One absorbed discomfort made the next one easier to absorb. One moment of swallowing what I actually thought in a meeting became a habit so ingrained I stopped noticing I was doing it.

And then came the part that still surprises me when I say it out loud. The more I did for everyone around me, the more guilty I felt. Not less guilty. More. I was giving everything: my time, my energy, my weekends, my opinions carefully softened so nobody would feel challenged. And yet the feeling underneath was not satisfaction or pride or even relief. It was a persistent, low-level sense that I was somehow still letting everyone down. The guilt remained, no matter how hard I worked.

The Prison Nobody Sees From the Outside

From the outside, things looked fine. More than fine, actually. There was progress, achievements, the kind of professional profile that looks, by any reasonable measure, like success. But inside, something had started to shift in a direction I did not have words for yet.

The kindness, the genuine and deeply felt kindness that had always felt like one of my best qualities, had started to feel like a role I could not put down. Like a coat I had worn so long I had forgotten it was not my skin. Being perceived as the kind one, the reliable one, the one who always came through - it had stopped feeling like an expression of who I was. It had started feeling like a condition of my belonging. Like the price of being accepted in the room.

I was not being kind because it felt good anymore. I was being kind because I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped. That is not kindness. That is a cage that looks, from the outside, remarkably like virtue. Research on burnout in high performers consistently shows this pattern. The most conscientious people are often the most at risk.

What I Did Not Know Then

I did not know that the people-pleasing pattern is not a character trait. It is a strategy, one that most of us learned very early, in environments where being agreeable kept us safe, loved, or accepted. I did not know that the guilt I felt was not evidence that I was failing people. It was evidence that the pattern had compounded to the point where no amount of giving would ever feel like enough.

And I did not know that the people advancing around me - the ones with the attitude, the ones who took up space without apology - were not doing something wrong. They were simply operating from a different set of rules. Rules nobody had explicitly taught me. Rules I was only beginning to suspect existed.

Understanding this did not fix anything overnight. But it was the beginning of something. Because once you see it clearly, once you understand that what you mistook for kindness has become a condition rather than a choice - you cannot entirely unsee it. And that is where everything starts.

If you are ready to explore this work, you can find out more about my executive leadership coaching programme at coachandyou.com, or simply reach out directly.

Where This Leaves Me

I still catch myself in it sometimes. The automatic yes. The smoothed-over opinion. The guilt that arrives before I have even done anything wrong. But now I recognise it. And recognition is not the same as freedom. It is, however, the only honest place to start.

Learning to please yourself, one step at a time.

Danguole

The Leadership Coach People-Pleasing Directors Eventually Find

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This is entry #2 in The Diary of a People-Pleaser series, published first at coachandyou.com. Read entry #1: I Caught Myself Doing It Again at coachandyou.com/people-pleasing-director-diary/

If this resonated, you might also enjoy my executive leadership coaching programme at coachandyou.com/service/

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Originally published at coachandyou.com

There is something almost comedic about being a coach who specialises in people-pleasing patterns while still catching yourself people-pleasing on a Tuesday afternoon.

I had a call last week. A potential client, a Director at a large financial institution, sharp, self-aware, clearly exhausted. Forty minutes in she said something like ‘I just do not want to disappoint anyone’ and I felt the sentence land in my chest before I could respond professionally to it.

Because I knew that sentence. Not theoretically. From the inside.

I built my entire banking career on that sentence. Fourteen years of not wanting to disappoint anyone, my managers, my clients, my colleagues, my own internal standards of what a good professional looked like. I was exceptional at it. I was also, by the end, completely hollowed out by it.

And here is the part I do not say enough in my more professional writing:

I still catch it in myself. The impulse to say yes when I mean not right now. The over-explanation when a simple no would do. The checking: did that land well, did I say too much, did I take up too much space in that conversation?

The pattern does not disappear. It becomes conscious. And consciousness, it turns out, is everything, but it is not the same as being free (yet).

What this diary is

I have a newsletter on LinkedIn. It is called Exceptional and Exhausted, and it is for people-pleasing Directors navigating the corporate (and life) gap between where they are and where they want to be. If they are ready to lead on their own terms and want to be recognised and promoted. I write carefully there. Thoughtfully. With the authority of someone who has done this work with thousands of leaders (which I indeed do).

This is not that.

This is the behind the scenes version. The Tuesday afternoon version. The version where I write what I actually noticed, what I actually felt, what I actually got wrong before I got it right.

If you found me through LinkedIn or Medium, welcome to the less polished room.

If you found me here first - hello. I am Danguole. I spent fourteen years in investment banking saying yes to everything, burned out at Director level when that stopped working, and now I spend my days helping other people-pleasing Directors find their way out of the same pattern (and very often into a promotion, be it to Vice President or just generally life promotion).

I am also, for the record, still finding my own way out some days.

That is probably why this work means what it means to me.

This week I have been thinking about

The difference between insight and change.

Every person-pleasing Director I work with arrives already knowing. They know the pattern. They have read the books, done the therapy, taken the assessment that confirmed what they already suspected. They are not lacking awareness.

And yet.

Knowing about the cage and being free of it are two entirely different things. The cage can be completely visible and still completely effective.

I wrote about this more formally in a recent piece you can read it (Here) if you want the fuller argument. But the version I want to be with in this diary is simpler and more personal:

I knew about my own pattern for years before anything actually shifted. I could describe it with clinical precision while living it with complete unconsciousness. The gap between those two things, between knowing and changing, is where I do most of my work now. With clients. And sometimes (well, actually often) with myself.

I do not have a framework for you this week. Just this one fun fact:

The most people-pleasing thing I ever did was to become an expert in people-pleasing admitting it and owning it. I absolutely love love love this work.

Something magical happened when I allowed myself to be put as a priority on my own list, without guilt or second guessing.

In anycase, warm welcome to Danguole Litvinskaite: The Diary of a People-Pleaser

So thrilled you are here. More soon.

Learning to please yourself, one step at a time.

Danguole

The Leadership Coach People-Pleasing Directors Eventually Find