Terry Prone: People-pleasers are moaners who do you favours you don’t want

My friend searched several databases to identify and ‘reach out’ to the top man capable of reuniting me with my lost iPad.

I was glad I don’t have false teeth when she said it.

A nun, when I was going to school, lost control of her dentures coming down the stairs and nobody who was present to witness their descent in front of her has ever got over it.

(It possibly didn’t improve the nun’s life much, either, but that was a conversation none of us felt like starting.)

If I’d had false teeth, I’d have lost them for sure when the woman told me she had given up being a people-pleaser.

Now, this woman is an acquaintance rather than a friend — but her business reputation lies squarely between Attila the Hun and Lizzie Borden.

I’m not saying she ever actually impaled anyone or smacked anybody with an axe, but the impression I had was that only health and safety regulations had prevented either.

I had dealt with several of her reports when they decided to get out before this woman poured any more misery on them in their workplace. And now she was giving up people-pleasing?

It was such a magnificent contradiction that I almost had to close my mouth with a click and my right hand, like in a cartoon. I could think of no apposite question either.

“Giving up the screaming, are you?” seemed a tad direct, as did any comment about her move being likely to radically reduce staff turnover in the place where she worked as a manager.

As it turned out, she had left that workplace and was now setting herself up as a life coach — which seemed to me a bit like that Englishwoman who trains horses by beating them with crowbars going for a job with the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

As it turned out, my woman had taken a package from the previous employer.

Now, the large and growing business within which she had worked was known to be expanding and recruiting — so it didn’t immediately make sense that they were offering a year-and-a-half’s salary in order to do without the services and talents of one of their more experienced people.

I didn’t say that, either, because she was giving out to me about Fergus Finlay.

I hadn’t been concentrating, so Mr Finlay’s arrival in among the people-pleasers surprised the hell out of me.

He had irritated her on a radio programme, she explained when I sought clarification for his sudden presence in the discussion.

Did I know him? Not only did I know him, I confessed, but her mention of him reminded me that I owed him for two pairs of slippers he had bought for me in his local Lidl. Her expression indicated (a) contempt for slipper-wearing — which, in fairness, I share, but these ones are exceptionally comfy — and (b) a shrugging near suggestion that I shouldn’t bother my arse paying him for them because he had annoyed her so much on the radio.

You can see that shaking off any people-pleasing remnants was not going to be easy for her.

It never is.

In my experience, people who describe themselves as people-pleasers are anything but. They are worthy moaners who do you favours you don’t want in order to complain, after the fact, that you weren’t grateful enough.

They insist on giving you Christmas cakes without ever ascertaining that you hate Christmas cakes. They volunteer to step into breaches that aren’t breaches.

At catered breakfast meetings, they make a big thing of leaving the last chocolate croissant untouched even though they’re self-evidently egging for it.

If you go to a coffee shop with them, their order takes three hours because they want almond milk rather than ordinary, and stevia rather than the sweetener on offer, and also because they insist on spelling their name at a high volume so the barista knows they’re just the latest in a long offensive list of coffee makers who have put the wrong name on the cup.

While so doing, they apologise in eye-rolling side glances at the next people in line to establish that the delay is the fault of the system — not themselves.

Worst of all, in mid-January, they send three or four sweetly reproachful emails to “just check” if you received their Christmas card.

In short, in their efforts to be loved, they end up making themselves markedly less lovable and considerably less effective.

Plus — like the woman mistakenly setting out to be a life coach — they move deep into delusional country. People-pleasing is a myth overdue for scotching.

By way of a corrective, it’s time to introduce — although not by name — one of the most successful women in Irish business, who would look at you blankly if you mentioned people-pleasing.

When I wrote in this column about leaving my iPad with two almost completed books on it on a United Airlines flight going into Newark just after Christmas, this woman made contact to eat the face off me.

One of the best friends I have, let it be clear, more or less asked me what the hell was wrong with me, going in at the lowest level of the lost property system (filling out an online form) and relying on my friend Suzi to do telephone nagging? You go in at the top, she told me, severely. Always.

She didn’t quite say that — as someone with many connections in politics, business, and media — I shouldn’t have to be told this.

But the implication sat there, stinking up the place.

I mildly pointed out that I knew nobody at any level, top or bottom, in United or Newark. Nonsense, I was told. You’re only ever one contact away from the person you need to reach. She had already searched several databases and found the guy I needed on one of them, and reached out to him.

Now, when this friend uses the phrase “reached out”, you must imagine a clenched fist at the end of the extended arm.

It worked, though.

Within hours, the top guy had responded. Within days, I was dealing with his head of lost property. My friend with the clenched fist, meanwhile, contacted the top guy every day to keep him on his toes and bullied me to keep doing the same thing one layer down.

Having never thought of myself as having any people-pleasing instincts (I’ll thank you not to agree so speedily), I found this task difficult and did it with a crawly apologetic self-deprecation that would sicken you and did sicken me.

End result?

My battered little iPad was located in a warehouse in Texas, I sent the shipping money and, tomorrow, have a date with FedEx to have it handed over.

None of which would have happened if my pal hadn’t forced me to abandon any small amount of people-pleasing instinct I possessed.

The bottom line is that people-pleasing is a passive-aggressive myth which wastes a lot of time, and achieves little.