When you took the quiz, the answers came back to one theme: Always on duty. You’re
always ready to put others first.

I want to stay with that a bit longer, because five minutes and a quiz result doesn’t give it theweight it deserves – or acknowledge the exhaustion of that kind of watchfulness.

That vigilance didn’t appear out of nowhere. As a tiny human, you learned that love came from being useful.

Loving attention may have come when you performed a service, or kept people happy and comfortable. When nothing was allowed to rock the boat. (Including that little girl).

You did not feel loved unless you noticed, fixed, carried, and served, to keep everything calm and smooth.

So, you got brilliant at it:

 Reading a room before you’d even taken your coat off.
 Clocking the tension at the table before anyone said a word.
 Jumping in before the silence got uncomfortable for anyone.

ALWAYS ON DUTY.

And somewhere in all of that, you learned to manage yourself very carefully. Don’t be too much – that’s showing off. Do enough to be loved (but don’t overdo it). 

An impossible calibration. A no-win situation that somehow became just – normal. And you still keep trying

When we’re working to recover from using people-pleasing behaviours I notice it in the small moments you recall:

 Catching up on a report for someone else’s project in the office, when everyone goes to lunch (and you don’t).
 Checking your phone “just in case”,  even on the one evening your teens don’t need you to be ‘Taxi Mum’.
 Remembering everyone’s coffee order, while nobody remembers yours.
 Making sure everyone else has all they want from the table – at YOUR birthday do.

You make yourself smaller, invisible, so you’ll not be too much. And because being noticed might be bad.
But invisible means you’re not seen and you never feel like you belong.

Here’s something to sit with… You are not a supporting role in someone else’s story.

This is your story. And the courage it takes to put yourself on the list – even once, even small – that courage is already in you. It’s the everyday courage that gets you up every morning, that has you standing up and volunteering for that last minute job at work, or helping out when your friend is going through a messy breakup and needs to stay in your spare room for a week… I
call it Tuesday Courage.

The first step isn’t to stop noticing. You’ll always notice – It’s your superpower, not a flaw.

Your first step is just to catch yourself in the act, kindly. “Oh – there I go again”. That
noticing?

That’s not small. That’s your courage, already moving.