An Interview With Brooke Young & Yitzi Weiner
Integrate Self-Trust into Strategic Planning: Apply your action and alignment framework to blend intuition with strategic business planning effectively. Encourage decisions that are both intuitively aligned and strategically sound, moving away from reactive choices aimed at pleasing others to proactive steps towards your vision.
In today’s society, the tendency to prioritize others’ needs and expectations over one’s own can lead to significant emotional and psychological challenges. In this series, we would like to explore the complex dynamics of people-pleasing behavior and its impact on individual well-being and relationships. We would like to discuss the root causes of people-pleasing behavior, its effects on personal and professional life, and practical steps for cultivating healthier relationships and self-esteem. We hope that this series can provide insights, strategies, and real-life experiences that can help individuals navigate and overcome the pitfalls of being a people pleaser. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Anna Wojtowicz.
Anna Wojtowicz is a first-generation immigrant, Speaker, Host of The Limitless Podcast and Founder of The AW Creative, a business and mindset advisory. She’s on a mission to help ambitious high-performing women redefine success by stepping into their purpose and peace without sacrificing profits, ultimately finding a balance between ambition and inner peace. Anna has spent a decade in NYC working in the Marketing and Ad Sales department of brands such as Teen Vogue, Vogue, Martha Stewart and The Smithsonian Magazine. She has supported over 100+ female entrepreneurs to start and scale to multi 6 figure brands within her business consulting services. While the success speaks for itself, she’s now helping them with the other 50% of entrepreneurship and that’s living sustainable lives outside of business. After burning out in corporate and then burning out again scaling her business to multi-six figures and accomplishing every milestone by 30 she hit a wall and realized that no amount of success will ever fill the “it’s enough” void because ambition without inner peace feels empty.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
My parents and I immigrated from Poland to The States when I was 5 and I grew up in a very small town in Florida. I was the oldest daughter, ambitious, didn’t need to be told to do anything, always prepared. Growing up in an immigrant household is an interesting experience because you’re always managing two separate identities which as a child you don’t even realize until you become an adult and realize oh I’ve developed hyper independence.
Can you tell us a bit about what you do professionally, and what brought you to this specific career path?
I never really knew what I wanted to do but I always knew I wanted to have some sort of impact on the world and honestly I didn’t figure out what that was till I was 30. So now it’s funny looking back to when I was 23 thinking I was behind not having life figured out. I’ve spent over a decade in NYC working in ad sales and digital marketing departments of publications like Martha Stewart, The Smithosnian and Teen Vogue.
When 2020 happened I got laid off and started to look for another job but every time I had a phone interview my heart sank. It was like my intuition was screaming “don’t do it”. I was physically, mentally, and spiritually drained from burnout in corporate. So I started thinking with all of my knowledge why couldn’t I try going out on my own and consulting? So that’s what I did. I moved home to FL for 1 year because I couldn’t afford NYC rent with no income, with the goal of starting my own consulting agency targeted at helping female entrepreneurs start and scale their brands. Within 11 months I had doubled my yearly corporate salary and was back in NYC in my dream apartment.
However in 2023 I hit burnout again which is so common for high achievers and entrepreneurs. Not only did business burn me out but I suffered a loss and grief completely took over my life. I had always prided myself on being able to bulldoze through any problem but in grief I realized that I accomplished every milestone by 30 and yet no amount of success ever filled the “it’s enough” void because ambition without inner peace feels empty. There was nothing driving the success other than wanting to feel success and self worth.
I made the hard choice to go on sabbatical from my business for 1 year. After a year of a deep healing journey to heal my addiction to success and the need to achieve, I realized that adding in inner work didn’t take away my ambitious identity or strategy, it simply removes the pressure and expectations that are sabotaging my authentic core beliefs and desires from amplifying my success & lifestyle.
The experience has had such a profound impact on me that’s become my mission in life. I now work to help ambitious women redefine success by stepping into their purpose and peace without sacrificing profits by infusing strategy with practical mindset and spirituality tools for holistic success.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about People Pleasing. To make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does “People Pleaser” mean to you?
To me as an entrepreneur it means serving without being served in return.
On the surface, it seems like being a person who wants to please others is a good thing. Can you help articulate a few of the challenges that come with being a people pleaser?
As an entrepreneur, pleasing people is such a delicate balance because as business owners, especially service providers, we’re selling not only our services but ourselves through our brand. So not only do we want to fill a gap in the marketplace based on what consumers want and give them a fantastic result but we also want to do it in a way that serves our purpose and mission as well. What I see all the time though is we create a people pleasing business through offers, marketing, sales and then we wonder why we feel burnt out and unfulfilled.
Does being a people pleaser give you certain advantages? Can you explain?
Being a people pleaser can offer certain advantages in business, particularly in building relationships but at what cost to yourself. The natural inclination to meet others’ needs and expectations can lead to high customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as strong team cohesion when employees feel valued and heard. However, these benefits can sometimes come at the cost of personal well-being and business efficiency if not balanced with clear boundaries and intuitive decision-making vs “I should” decision making.
Can you describe a moment in your life when you realized that your own people-pleasing behavior was more harmful than helpful?
I burned out to the point I have to take a 1 year sabbatical. I no longer felt connected to myself and didn’t understand my WHY behind my business anymore. After a year of a deep healing journey to heal my addiction to success and the need to achieve, I realized that adding in inner work didn’t take away my ambitious identity or strategy, it simply removes the pressure and expectations that are sabotaging my authentic core beliefs and desires from amplifying my success & lifestyle.
The experience has had such a profound impact on me that’s become my mission in life. I now work to help ambitious women redefine success by stepping into their purpose and peace without sacrificing profits by infusing strategy with practical mindset and spirituality tools for holistic success.
In your opinion, what are the common root causes of people-pleasing behavior?
In business it comes down to two things…
- Self worth Tied To Revenue: When you experience an income dip you instantly start panicking because your self worth is tied to your income which leaves you feeling guilt, shame, and failure like it’s all about to crash. Your belief is that you are only valuable as a person when your bank account has a current number in it and if you’re not making more money than your value decreases. So you people please by selling offers that you don’t really want to sell, or price it lower than you would like, or give a client 5 revisions when they only paid for 3. There’s a core belief that a consumer holds 100% of the power and you’re at the mercy of it.
- Needing external validation that you’re good enough to “feel successful”: When you’re a people pleaser and a business owner you care so deeply about wanting to make everyone happy and make sure their experience with you is 120%. But there’s a difference between having a successful business with happy consumers and only doing it to chase approval and the feeling that you’re “successful”. In this case we’re also giving away 100% of our power letting other people determine whether we’re allowed to be successful and good enough.
How does people-pleasing behavior impact professional relationships?
I coach ambitious high performing female founders who want to do it all. But the reality is traditional balance doesn’t exist, instead we focus on internal balance which is how can we regulate your nervous system to be fluid so you can find calm in the chaos and make decisions that are not rooted in pressure and urgency but rather purpose. Without these tools I see a lot of people trying to give 100% to everyone and the result is always no one gets a quality 100% from you and you yourself don’t feel fulfilled which long term starts straining relationships.
How can long-term people-pleasing behavior impact an individual’s mental health?
It can lead to burnout, physical exhaustion, and a low sense of self worth when you’re an entrepreneur this not only impacts the sustainability of your business but of you as the human running the business.
In your experience, what is the role of self-awareness in overcoming people-pleasing tendencies, and how can individuals cultivate it?
Ambitious high performing entrepreneurs already are hyper self aware, for example they know that they’re a perfectionist. But what I find a lot of self aware people lack is internal awareness, how attuned are they to themselves. It’s the reason why you know you’re a perfectionist or people pleaser but have no idea what to do about it or even lack the awareness of how it’s affecting your day to day life and business.
So when I’m working with new clients this is the first area we focus on, bringing awareness and acknowledgment to what we are thinking and doing and why. Ultimately trying to shed the story we tell ourselves around it.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience or research, what are the “Five Strategies Or Techniques That Can Help Individuals Break Free From The Cycle Of People-Pleasing”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
- Align Actions with Purpose, Not Approval: Regularly revisit your core mission and ensure every business decision supports this purpose, rather than seeking external validation. Use your purpose as a compass for decision-making, helping to navigate away from people-pleasing tendencies.
- Regulate Your Nervous System for Clear Decision-Making: Implement practices that help regulate your nervous system, such as mindfulness or breathing exercises, to maintain clarity and reduce the impulse to please others under stress. Recognize when the desire to please is a stress response and use your techniques to return to a state of balance.
- Cultivate Inner Baseline for Confidence: Develop an awareness of your internal baseline — your fluid, ever-changing state of balance — and use this as a foundation for self-trust. Make decisions from a place of self-assurance, knowing they’re aligned with your evolving needs and goals, rather than static expectations.
- Embrace Duality in Leadership: Recognize that being a strong leader involves both assertiveness and empathy, ambition and inner peace. Show that success and personal fulfillment are not mutually exclusive but can be pursued simultaneously through balanced leadership.
- Integrate Self-Trust into Strategic Planning: Apply your action and alignment framework to blend intuition with strategic business planning effectively. Encourage decisions that are both intuitively aligned and strategically sound, moving away from reactive choices aimed at pleasing others to proactive steps towards your vision.
What steps should people pleasers take to establish healthier boundaries?
You can only establish a boundary once you change a core belief. I can tell you how to set boundaries around clients but if you have a core belief that if you aren’t on call 24/7 then the client will get mad and never work with you again then you’ll never enforce the boundary. This is why we first need to work on identifying and changing the root core beliefs before we work on setting boundaries.
How can someone who is naturally empathetic maintain their compassion while becoming more assertive?
The motto I live by is that there’s power in softness and strategy. I truly believe that knowing how to leverage your emotions and intuition is a secret super power to not only success but fulfillment in life. Therefore you can be empathetic and compassionate while still maintaining assertiveness but it starts at understanding your purpose, values, and priorities.
What are the most common misconceptions about people pleasers, and how do these misconceptions affect their journey toward recovery?
That people pleasers are weak when in reality, their behavior often stems from a deep-seated desire to maintain harmony and make others happy, which requires its own form of strength and resilience. SO then the journey to recovery becomes changing their core belief of I’m weak, people don’t take me seriously, I’m powerful and people listen to me.
What role can therapy or counseling play in helping individuals overcome people-pleasing behavior?
Therapy certainly helped me get down to the root cause of people pleasing and see things from a different perspective. When you’re already hyper self aware, therapy can always be tricky. However when you’re an entrepreneur I find that therapy isn’t enough, at least it wasn’t enough for me and all the ambitious high performing female founders I work with.
What I needed was community alongside therapy. I needed to see someone like me with my characteristics help me see and walk through the micro symptoms of people pleasing in business and what it looks like on the other side. That’s exactly why I created The Balanced Entrepreneur Membership, because I couldn’t find it.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Impacting as many ambitious female founders as possible and normalizing the concept that you can have purpose & profit. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Most people see inner work or mindset as something that helps you prevent burnout or that will help you heal from it. But I see my mission as a complete revolution in not only redefining success but what growth strategies in business actually look like.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://theawcreative.com/the-limitless-podcast/
https://www.tiktok.com/@theawcreative
https://www.instagram.com/theawcreative/
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewers:
Brooke Young is a multipassionate publicist, public speaking mentor, and communication consulting. She works with a wide range of clients across the globe, and across a diverse range of industries, to help them create, develop, and promote powerful messages through heart-centered storytelling. She has formerly worked On-Air with FOX Sports, competed in the Miss America Organization, and is the Author of a Children’s Book. She frequently works with children as a professional speaker where she educates on Volunteering and Therapy Dogs. She has over a decade of professional performing background and finds joy in sparking creative passions for her clients.
Yitzi Weiner is a journalist, author, and the founder of Authority Magazine, one of Medium’s largest publications. Authority Magazine is devoted to sharing in depth “thought leadership interview series” featuring people who are authorities in Business, Tech, Entertainment, Wellness, and Social Impact.
At Authority Magazine, Yitzi has conducted or coordinated thousands of empowering interviews with prominent Authorities like Shaquille O’Neal, Peyton Manning, Floyd Mayweather, Paris Hilton, Baron Davis, Jewel, Flo Rida, Kelly Rowland, Kerry Washington, Bobbi Brown, Daymond John, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Alicia Silverstone, Lindsay Lohan, Cal Ripkin Jr., David Wells, Jillian Michaels, Jenny Craig, John Sculley, Matt Sorum, Derek Hough, Mika Brzezinski, Blac Chyna, Perez Hilton, Joseph Abboud, Rachel Hollis, Daniel Pink, and Kevin Harrington
Yitzi is also the CEO of Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator which helps business leaders to become known as an authority in their field, by interviewing prominent CEOs, writing a daily syndicated column, writing a book, booking high level leaders on their podcast, and attending exclusive events.
Anna Wojtowicz of The AW Creative On How to Recover From Being a People Pleaser was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.