 You don't have to pretend to be someone you're not. But I am one of those people's features. And I know and I'd love to be able to break it. I feel it's so innate in who I am that I don't know how. I know it causes problems in my life. It causes me to be a victim, you know. Because I'd be nice when I really wanted to say, you know, I don't want to be around you anymore. Or something like that. Can you address that, like, and the tips about what happened? You know, how do people break that one? It's really so much for the good they are. Okay, great. As for the people, please. Yeah, it's one of the most insidious defenses against our true self. Because it's like the whole world is projected out there with all of these people. And whether we talk about teenage peer pressure, which is a version of people pleasing, it gets to be very intense when teenagers are kind of working through what is my identity and who loves me and who likes me and peer groups and all that. But we can say that even that same desire to be liked, to be included, to belong to something and someone and feel that sense of belongingness, that does seem to follow us all the way through our adult lifetime as well. And like you were saying, to become such a habit that we realize that there's conflict with that. Where we sometimes will speak something or say something for someone's approval or to be liked. To not hurt the feelings. Yeah, to not hurt the feelings, you know, and to kind of not rock the boat too much. You know, go along with the crowd, go along with something. And then when we're away from that situation, we can have conflicting thoughts and feelings that come in. Why did I say that? Why did I commit to that? To do that this weekend? I would much rather do this, this, this weekend instead of that. And then we have this like a war going on inside. Like if I could commit a meeting, you know, like we got to hear all the different sides and it's like suddenly we're at a meeting of the United Nations in our own mind. And I find that the way through that is basically what I would call integrity of mind, where everything that we perceive and feel and think and believe and desire becomes into alignment. But to me, when Jesus is talking about right-mindedness, he's talking about an integrity of mind where everything is completely in alignment. So there's no aspect of our mind that's out of alignment, that wants to do something else, that where there's conflicting things that are coming in, whether they're conflicting identities or conflicting desires or conflicting outcomes, that all of that is washed away where we come into alignment with God or we come into our sense of right-mindedness. But it takes a lot of practice because we're trained in the other way. We're trained to have our identity and our emotional well-being based on how other people treat us, how other people speak to us, how the world seems to come at us seems to have a lot to do with our state of mind, instead of us being 100% responsible for our state of mind. So I really love that part of the course where Jesus says, I am responsible for what I see. I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve. And everything that seems to happen to me, I ask for and receive as I have asked. Talk about 100% responsibility. That's like a whole po-no-pono statement on the course. Like there's no where you can squeeze that out on. It's 100% responsibility. And really, it's wonderful when we're willing to start to take that much responsibility for our state of mind. I also like the line in the course where Jesus says, you are not responsible for the error. You are responsible for accepting the correction for the error. Because I think a lot of times when we start to take responsibility, we start to take ownership of guilt. We start to take ownership of blame, and we reel it in, and then we feel like, I'm doing this to myself, and it's terrible. It feels awful. And we stop short of forgiveness. We stop short of that release. Like, this is not God's will for me. God wills for me to be innocent, to feel that innocence. And so we can bring it back sometimes all the way back to the thoughts, but we still feel responsible for the thoughts. We still feel responsible for the erroneous thoughts. And we need Jesus to remind us you are not responsible for the error. You are responsible for the correction of the error. That's what the Atonement is about. And I think with people pleasing, we get a lot of opportunities on a daily basis to kind of allow the spirit to help us navigate our mind and the world that's projected from our mind. And the only way that we can really be free of people pleasing is we have to get down to the underlying beliefs and assumptions that are underneath our stream of thoughts that seem to be our everyday life. We have to get underneath that down to the level of belief. One time I was asking the Holy Spirit of Jesus, I said, because I like to do maps. Even when I was in seventh grade, I don't do all maps and color in countries and do all that. I'm very graphic. So I asked the Holy Spirit to give me graphic representation, a map of the mind, so I could know what was going on. And the outer level was the level of perception. And then the emotions were right underneath it. And the thoughts were under the emotions. And then the beliefs were under the thoughts. And in the core, the bullseye was desire. And I remember reading in the course, truth will be returned to your awareness by your desire as it was lost to your awareness by your desire for something else. So desire is at the core of everything. That's like our point of prayer, our point of power. But those beliefs that we hold on to are right outside that ring of desire. And until we get down to the underlying beliefs, it just seems as if the world is outside of us that our identity is shaky at best and that we need a lot of approval and being liked in order to feel good about ourselves. When actually we have to learn to have integrity, really deep integrity before we can actually reach that point of peace. So for me, I had to start to see how far am I willing to go with this integrity. How far am I willing to go where I actually start to experience that there's nothing outside of me. I had to start questioning everything about the world. For example, when I would get disturbed about politicians and various political stances or whatever, I had Jesus inside saying, you're not really involved in politics. Politics are in you. When I got upset about society, I said I just am never going to be able to be peaceful as long as I'm living in this society, in this culture and I will never be peaceful. Jesus would say, you are not in the society. The society is in you. It was always pointing me back to everything that I perceive is based on belief. All the way to the point that he's saying that there is no world apart from what you think. That everything we think is out there in the world is actually in consciousness and we're still holding it in consciousness. We're still holding onto the beliefs and the concepts and then tricking ourselves to think that the world is doing it to us instead of us having the power. Us having... We can control the direction of our thinking. We don't have to succumb to ego thinking. We can actually align with God and think with God and we're still trying to think against God. Another area for me was around competition. This is such a competitive society. Jesus is like, oh no, no, no. This society is not competitive. You have to be visual. He said never underestimate the need to be visual against the idea of competition. And so when you start to really take it to heart, you start to take a look at where am I competitive? Where do I still value the competition? Where is it that I still believe the competition will bring me something that will give me peace of mind? Then you start to really have a healing that occurs because in one sense you're stepping back in your mind from these thoughts, from these beliefs and feeling an empowerment that comes from the miracle. When he calls out a Course in Miracles, he means it. He actually is calling us to be miracle workers. And that took a while for me to take in because I got the wrong person. I had ambitions and goals for my life, but miracle worker was not... I don't think that's on the SAT test or any of our aptitude tests in high school. The miracle worker. Oh, hey, little David will be a miracle worker. It's just not even in the discussion. But at some point I began to really work with this and going, I guess I'm supposed to be a miracle worker. I think that's where this is all heading. And he also said, seek not to change the world. Seek rather to change your mind about the world. So it's not like we're going out to try to bestow miracles on people or convert people or save people or any of that stuff. It's all for our own mind training, our own mind healing. And it's not about trying to change anybody at all or fix anybody at all. And that runs right in opposition to the people pleasing which is kind of like, oh, I'm going to act the way you want me to act and say the things that you want me to say because otherwise you may leave. And there's still this deep sense of fear of abandonment and fear of loss. Why would we people please unless we were afraid of losing our jobs or afraid of losing our relationships or afraid of losing our parents and children? Why would we people please at all? We would just tell it like it is. We would say it. We would speak from our heart. And the more we work with the Course in Miracles and authentic spirituality, we actually see that it is valuable for us to extend the truth inside of us that really nothing's going to come down on us. And I isn't going to cave and fall in on us if we start really extending and sharing this love that wants to pour through us. It's quite the opposite. And then when I got into a Course in Miracles it was like all this love and joy I just wanted to just come pouring through me at my course group. You start off from your course group and then all of a sudden I was going to like five course groups a week. And I was like, this is really good stuff. But the ego was really terrifying. Like, oh, this is not good. You're shy. You should be doing all this joining and hugging and talking about your emotions and all that stuff. But I could feel like that was the beginning of the end for the ego. And then the more I just let it grow stronger and stronger in my awareness, the more I realized that I didn't have anything to lose by being authentic and really sharing what was on my heart. But actually people appreciated that and felt more and more like we had these deep heart-to-heart connections. So I started out like most of us with a circle of friends practicing with them. And then I started to just say, ah, I'm going to be willing and open to go wherever I'm invited. And then I started to get more and more, when you get happy you seem to get a lot of invitations. People like to be around happy people. It's like we don't have to have a lot of money or a lot of status or don't have to drive a certain type of car and if you're happy, people like to be around you.