The Need to Please: Mindfulness Skills to Gain Freedom from People Pleasing and Approval Seeking

Do you have a hard time saying no to others, no matter how outrageous their requests? If so, you might be a chronic people-pleaser. Unfortunately, because we live in a society that praises putting the needs of others before ourselves, it can be difficult to break this bad habit. And while thinking of others is always commendable, there is a fine line between sacrifice and senseless approval seeking.

In The Need to Please, a leading mindfulness expert and psychotherapist provides compassionate, mindfulness-based techniques that will help chronic people-pleasers like you address and overcome your fears of failure, inappropriate self-sacrificing, loss of personal identity, and voracious need of approval. In addition, you will learn to put an end to the codependent behaviors that lie at the heart of being a people-pleaser.

Change is hard--especially when it means going against years of social conditioning. But if you're ready to "Just Say No," to others' demands and start saying, "Yes" to your own needs, this book can help.

You can find out more about these mindfulness techniques at www.livingmindfully.org.

Micki Fine, MEd, LPC, is the founder of Mindful Living in Houston, TX and a certified mindfulness teacher. She was awarded this credential from the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, where Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the renowned Center for Mindfulness. She holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology and is licensed as a professional counselor. She has been in private psychotherapy practice since 1990, and currently teaches mindfulness in her private practice, The Jung Center, and Rice University. To find out more about Fine, visit livingmindfully.org.

Foreword writer Diana Winston is coauthor of Fully Present. Heralded by the Los Angeles Times as one of the nation’s best-known mindfulness teachers, she has been teaching since 1993 in a variety of settings, including hospitals, universities, corporations, non-profits, and schools.