Free Yourself from the Likeability Trap
Your Weekly Newsletter on Designing Healthier Minds, Vol. 6
Photo by Lawrson Pinson on Unsplash
Last week I spent days rewriting an article for a magazine. I wish I could tell you that it was just a part of my process (somewhat right), but in truth, I was suffering from an astronomical case of performance anxiety. I wrote the first draft months ago and felt confident that my final days leading up to the deadline would be spent making slight revisions and edits.
I found myself staring at a door that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to open.
Recently I’ve been acting out my version of Shonda Rhimes’ Year of Yes, and submitting this article to be published in a magazine was like crossing the final frontier. No longer would it be just a handful of people who love practically anything I do and support me by giving of their precious time to read what I write each week. This time it would be “the others”. People who don’t know anything about me. People who don’t have intimate knowledge of how much of a struggle it’s been for me to put myself out there — people who don’t have the backstory. People, mainly women, whose only point of reference would be the short little bio I submitted, and the picture of my smiling face that I hoped didn’t make me seem too pretty, too busted, but just right.
I reached out to these women I love and who love me practically pleading for their advice on what to say in an article that I researched and wrote months ago. I explained that I just wanted to make sure I was providing value, yet when I got alone with my thoughts and decided to get real honest with myself, I realized the real dragon I was facing was this perpetual desire to be liked.
I wanted the other women to read my article and bio and see my face and to like me.
It terrified me to replay the countless deflating IRL examples of encounters with those who are not Team Dawn. And, as if I was wearing a sign on my forehead, the day before the article was due, four complete rewrites and hours of additional research later, I promise you, it seemed like everywhere I went, women were trying to assassinate me with their eyes. I went to a girlfriend’s event and felt that the two women I interacted with there were not only utterly uninterested in being friendly with me but were straight-up dismissive. Next on a shopping trip, I kid you not, every single interaction I had with a woman was laced with hostility. I would see the cashier laughing and being all friendly to the person in front of me. The minute her eyes found my face, her whole countenance changed. And after experiencing an onslaught of this for hours, I came home to sit down at my desk with plans to make some line edits and completely rewrote the entire freaking article…again!
I was so worried about the people reading my article not liking me, worried about getting trolled, that I seriously considered just not turning it in. I felt wholly ready to live with consequences of being on my death bed like "yep, I wish I would've just turned in the stupid article." And this is not the only story in my life like this; this is my story.
I'm overly concerned with people liking me all the time, and it causes me to live in fear and not go after things that I want to do, and it also means that when I perceive that someone does, in fact, not like me, it’s devastating. But the kicker is I’m so concerned with being liked that I think people who actually do like me, don’t, because the minute they take too long to respond to a text or call me out on something or disagree with me, I’m all like "yep they hate me, and I suck." Great thought life I have going on here.
I’m the first to acknowledge that I may be a tad bit more sensitive than most; however, part of the reason I have this need to be liked is that I've been socialized as a woman to be likable, nurturing, selfless, and gentle among other soft skills. Sugar and spice and everything nice, anyone?
In The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed as You Are - her examination of how women are pressured to be likable and what it costs them when they embody those demands - Alicia Menendez writes that “women are expected to be warm and communal. Many people may not consciously hold that belief about women, yet when women violate that expectation of warmth and communality, others instinctively find them less likable.” As progressive as we claim to be as a society, one needs only to look at the polls for the presidential hopefuls to see glaring evidence of how this bias is so prevalent.
The cultural bias that women should care what others think of them comes at a steep emotional cost. You inevitably begin to believe that how someone feels about you means something about you.
So what does she suggest I do? Admitting that I care about what others think of me and examining the conditioning I’ve received from an early age is the beginning.
It took me a long time to admit that I care. It feels so…pathetic. But once I admitted it, and processed it, I turned my attention to this question of likeability. What followed was months of learning how my own obsession with being likable was my kryptonite.
Alicia Menendez
After encouraging me to face up to my reliance on other people’s ideas to inform me of who I should be, she lays out six strategies for shifting away from likeability.
How to Try This On
Strategies you can use to challenge these gender biases include:
1. Self-Awareness – A quote from one of the women in her book said: “Your greatest power is your self-awareness of who you are and your impact on people, it’s nice to be liked, but not everyone is going to like you if you’re real and your intent is true, if you’re doing things for the right reason…people respect and value you.”
2. Clarity – Become clear on your objective, clear on the choices to be made, clear in the belief that the intended outcome of action is in the best interest of others.
3. Relatability and the Power of Connection – So much of the desire to be liked comes from a desire to be understood, to be relatable, she poses the question “if you knew you had to choose between being interesting and being universally likable which would you choose?”
4. Know Whose Opinions Matter – Part of having clarity is knowing for yourself whose opinion matters. “There is value in clarifying how you are weighting the feedback and competing signals you receive, better to collect a small number of champions than try to be liked by everyone.”
5. You Matter – Understand your worth and ask for what you need.
6. No New False Choices – Menendez says, “much of this book is premised on invalidating false choices by presenting self-awareness, relatability, and clarity as alternatives to likeability. I don’t mean to suggest that you actually have to choose between them or pursue them all at once. Instead, we have to start asking what being told to prioritize likeability is costing women and what we all might gain by that shift in perspective.”
She warns against expecting this to be the proverbial silver bullet.
If you are trying not to internalize other’s opinions, and you find yourself doing it anyway, that’s ok, it’s part of the process of disentangling all these expectations and learned behaviors, it takes a long time to actively break up thought patterns that you’ve spent years developing, you have to interrupt those patterns again and again.
Alicia Menendez
In case you’re wondering how the story turned out, I did submit the article and I can expect it to be published next month. I know that I can’t control how the women who read the article will perceive me, if they’ll like me. I can say that I wouldn’t have liked me very much if I hadn’t opened the door to see what was on the other side.
And here’s the final takeaway from Menendez:
The lesson isn’t to forsake likeability, it’s that there are things to be gained from prioritizing other qualities over likeability, focusing on goals that are more attainable than likeability.
Alicia Menendez
Fascinating Tidbit: extremely likable Reese Witherspoon is “allergic” to the word likable.
Read the full interview here.