tl;dr AFCs tend to put a big premium on pleasing and impressing people. This results not only in a lot of misdirected efforts and unneeded stress, but in being held in less regard by the very same people you try to please. Here I discuss the most common behaviours of this type and how to avoid them.

The People Pleaser

As illustrated in "How to Stop Being an AFC", Average Frustrated Chumps engage in cycles of failure due to their reliance on external motivation (the opinion of other people, and comparisons with other people) rather than internal motivation.

A widespread and particularly harmful incarnation of this phenomenon is People Pleasing. AFCs engage in People Pleasing by trying to please or impress the people they interact with for no better reason than they've graced the AFC with an interaction. While pleasing people has its tactical uses, AFCs engage in this behaviour by default and thus, in the vast majority of cases, when it's not simply unneeded but actively harmful.

Being Nice is Not Nice

Have you ever been around that guy who is massively socially awkward and is evidently trying to be nice and make conservation, but is only coming across as nervous and desperate? do you remember feeling uncomfortable around him, because at once you were bothered that you were sort of responsible for showing him he was doing ok and unsure what he might do next?

That's an extreme case of what happens with AFCs who engage in People Pleasing. When your objective going into an interaction is obtaining a positive reaction from your counterpart, that counterpart is going to feel put on the spot and will think less of you. They will definitely not like interacting with you, and will try to avoid it in the future.

Projectile Vomiting

Women especially can smell this behaviour from a mile away. When you interact with a woman and for no particular reason you are trying to please and impress her, you come across as needy, desperate and she might well feel creeped out by you.

Women are programmed to sniff out beta behaviour. Trying to please a stranger woman for no better reason than she has a pussy is being the ultimate beta: you are not even trying to exchange favours for pussy, you are giving yourself away for free. You are orbiter material, at best.

Clinical Signs

People Pleasing manifests in several typical behaviours:

  • Closed, soft posture: People Pleasers naturally adopt a submissive posture, taking up less space and making themselves appear non-threatening thinking that this will make the counterpart feel more at ease. On the contrary, this activates ancient brain circuitry that says "why is this person behaving as if they need to submit when nothing indicates it?"; suspicion, nervousness and embarassment follow.

  • Lack of eye contact: People Pleasers will maintain weak eye contact, thinking that looking people in the eye is aggressive and puts them on the spot. What happens instead is that they appear shifty and indecisive, as if they had something to hide.

  • Low-volume, pitch-shifting speech: People Pleasers speak in a low volume, often shifting to a higher pitch as they end each sentence. In their mind this is non-aggressive and polite. In reality, it imitates the way children speak when they are pleading with adults, and when adults do it it creates cognitive dissonance and thus annoyance in the counterpart.

  • Automatic Agreement: People Pleasers tend to immediately and systematically agree with the opinions presented to them, without even allowing themselves time for reflection. Thinking they are being polite and open-minded, they instead come across as insincere suck-ups.

Treatment

There are two main ways, and several minor strategies, by which you can stop being a people pleaser:

  • Adopt a IDGAF attitude. This is a general life philosophy change that will positively affect this specific problem as well.

  • Consciously work on spotting and countering PP behaviours. When you notice you are doing something just to please your counterpart stop, eliminate that thought and carry on. Consciously tell yourself, using your inner monologue "I'm doing this just to please them. No, I won't keep doing this". This will appear cumbersome at first but it will very, very quickly become second nature, until it slides into your subconscious and you only occasionally need to think it out loud.

Minor strategies involve:

  • Purposefully adopt an upright, relaxed, space-taking posture when interacting with people. Go a little overboard at first just to get through the initial embarassment if you've never done this.

  • Work on finding and using your natural, diagraphm-driven voice and use it systematically, even and especially if it feels weird and 'theatrical' at first. Word of warning: your natural voice is not just 'speak lower', people who do this end up straining their throat and not actually speaking with their natural voice.

  • Maintain laser eye contact. Yeah you'll overdo it at first. This is about becoming comfortable in doing your own shit without worrying that you are imposing on others, going overboard is once again part of the process. Remember that eye contact is about your natural, hardwired desire to read the other person's facial expressions, not about just staring them in the eye and you'll be golden.

Conclusion

A big part of adopting a IDGAF attitude is learning to stop being a People Pleaser. In many men this behaviour is so ingrained that even when they work on NGAF they still slide into People Pleasing without even realizing it. Adopt the above strategies to catch yourself when you do it and correct it.