Magic Happens When You Let Go of People Pleasing!

When you stay true to yourself the Universe unfolds unexpected blessings.

The end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 was quite a challenging time for me.  Even though within that time frame I had many beautiful blessings it didn’t play out how I had envisaged.

However, with my knowledge of how life works I know challenges don’t happen to us but for us.

My son, daughter-in-law and two beautiful grandsons were due to arrive from London to spend Christmas with us.  I was so excited to see them and to meet the newest addition to our family, Alex.  Unfortunately we had missed his birth when we were in London in September because he decided to arrive 10 days late.

Our plans took an unexpected turn when both my husband and I contracted COVID just before the arrival of our family. The excitement of waiting eagerly at the airport, envisioning my 3-year-old grandson running into my arms, and embracing my 3-month-old grandson in a warm hug faded away. I am sure any grandmother could relate to the disappointment I was experiencing. Adding to the challenges, I remained COVID-positive for an additional week after their arrival, prolonging the time before I could finally relish those precious cuddles.

Fortunately, our COVID symptoms weren’t severe, but the lingering fatigue, coupled with exhaustion from a busy end to the year, meant it took quite some time for me to regain my energy.

On top of all that my husband snapped his achilles tendon 10 days before Christmas and was in a cast and on crutches and has only know progressed into a moon boot.  So all day to day responsibilites were down to me.

It sure did happen knowing that these challenges were happening for me and I asked the question “What was I needing to learn from this?’.

Being a recovering People Pleaser who finds it very hard to ask for help this was quite a test for me.

It came time for my family to fly back to London and we had planned to drive them back to Auckland so that they could catch their flight home.  It was now ME that had to undertake that 6 hour return drive (as my husband was unable to drive due to his injury) and I was stressing about doing it as my energy was still quite low.  I kept talking myself into it and saying I would find the energy, if worse came to worse I could stop the night somewhere.  I kept all these thoughts to myself and and just stewed and worried how I would do this. To book flights at this stage from Tauranga to Auckland for them all would be expensive.

Finally, I mentioned it to my husband.  And, bless him, he got staight on to it.  He spoke with my son who said it wasn’t a problem and maybe it would be better for the children if they did fly.  Now, me being me,  I felt guilty about this and said we would pay for their fares, which my son promptly resfused.

What a relief I felt!

Now the story starts to spin its magic.

When we got to our local airport which is a 5 minute drive away my family discovered that because they were transiting through Canada they needed visas which they had not applied for.  Now if we had driven straight to Auckland they would not have had the time to apply and receive the visas before the flight but because they had a bit more time up their sleeves and with a lot of wonderful help from the airline staff their visas came through just in time.

They would have had to miss their flights which would have cost them an awful lot of money.

This was such a valuable lesson to me.  Being true to ourselves always has a flow on effect to others.  It may not have an outcome like this one but it gives others permission to be true to themselves.  If someone doesn’t have good boundaries and respect then they may not like our decisions but that is their issue not ours.

It is an ongoing lesson for me to let go of people pleasing and it is scary for those of us with this trait when we start changing this habit.  However, we never know what the Universe has planned.  Everything changed the moment I voiced how I was feeling to my husband.  This was a step in the right direction but next time this lesson arrives (and there will be a next time because I haven’t quite got it yet) I will speak up for myself.