How to discover your powerful true self and stop pleasing others? This unraveling usually entails shadow work, recognizing where pleasing started, but it can be erased over time. You still slip back into pleasing, but you recognize it faster and recover more quickly, and that alone is evidence of growth.
Following our inner guidance may feel risky and frightening at first because we are no longer playing it safe, doing what we should do, pleasing others, following rules, or deferring to outside authority. Shakti Gawain, author and cofounder of New World Library
Are You Living as a Pleaser?
For years, “yes” may have been your automatic response. You say yes to fit in, to please, to keep the peace, to be loved, to be accepted. You go along without voicing your opinion and slowly begin to identify more with others’ needs than with your own, casting aside your true self almost without noticing.
Little by little, those yeses pull you farther from your soul center—the powerful, essential you—and plant the seeds of struggle, hurt, and quiet resentment. I know this pain and loss of power; it is not theoretical for me. My tsunami showed me how to recognize it, and helped me walk a new path to unlearn, this habit that had become an uncaring friend.
I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. Carl Jung
Why Choice Shapes Who You Become
Carl Jung wrote, “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” That truth still gives me goosebumps. What you choose—moment to moment—is vital to what you become, because your thoughts, values, and beliefs all crystallize into choices. This creates your sacred, self-identity.
When you choose through the lens of someone else’s expectations, or bow to another person’s preferences because it feels safer, you slowly hand over your power in the name of pleasing. Pleasing enters quietly: “It’s just this one time,” “I’ll keep the peace,” “If I say no, they’ll think less of me.” These tiny compromises are easy to repeat, until the habit of not being true to yourself becomes your new “truth.”
Choices, ahh, the spiritual roads of life. Nina Zapala, author of Unpack Your Personality: Let Your Inner Guide Be Your Travel Guide – A New Age Travel Guide!
How My Need to Please Was Born
My own drive to please began in childhood. I wanted my mother’s love, attention, and approval. Pleasing became the way I tried to be seen and heard. Later, as a devoted spiritual seeker, I assumed I had healed this pattern. I had been studying spirituality since my teens; I considered myself “awakend.”
Yet my life told a different story. I kept making choices that took me away from the path of my truth and left me questioning how I had ended up so far from myself. When I turned to my spiritual tools for answers, the guidance that came during meditation was simple: Use what you’ve learned. At first it made no sense, and then it became the key.
When Personality and Soul Finally Meet
During a year-long spiritual retreat, I began rethinking everything I knew about personality typing. I realized my ENTP personality was very out of balance. My personality traits, were working hard to keep some inner stability, while my introverted sensing (Is), my inferior trait, the most unconscious of all had taken over.
My Is said yes to convention, history, following the experiences of the past. Raised in a patriarch society, I succumbed and said yes. Completely unaware that relying on this trait as my North Star left me unbalanced, in disharmony–living by a false sense of identity.
Discover Your Powerful True Self
Once I identified the root of my unwise choices, I began using stillness to bring awareness into daily life. I saw that my unconscious introverted sensing trait was actually my soul’s way of whispering: It’s time to release the idea that you need to abide by convention. You here to break conventional and teach a new way of being.
As I began to fully embrace my personality type; clarity, confidence, and courage to make decisions based on who I really am, began to better align with my true self. I felt myself stepping onto a new path—one that led back to my truth, my own self-authority. It was exhilarating and essential to my healing and awakening.
This possibilities are available for you, too. Your personality traits are not random; they are interconnected and they are exactly what the soul relies on to express itself into your personal reality. Spiritual personality typing is one way to discover your powerful TrueSelf by viewing your traits through the lens of soul, not just psychology.
Think of it like this you are a soul with a personality, not just a personality with a soul!
Embrace this thought and watch your life transform.
Reclaiming the Present Moment ⏤ and Your Life –Jon Kabat-Zinn, author Mindfulness for Beginners
Stillness Practices To Help You Discover Your Powerful True Self
Stillness practices pair beautifully with Spiritual Personality Typing℠; together they create alignment. A stillness practice slows the busyness, creates a pause between stimulus and response, and gives you room to notice:
Am I acting from truth or from pleasing?
Does the soul have a voice or is it just the ego responding?
These questions help you see repetitive patterns—mindless beliefs, behaviors, and negative self-talk—as they arise instead of after you’ve already abandoned yourself. When you bring intentionality, present-moment focus, and non-judgment into these practices, you begin to unwind automatic pleasing and rebuild your life around your real values.
Practical Stillness Practices to Get You Started
Here I offer a few easy and practical stillness practices you can use to help you discover your powerful true self. If you decide to incorporate a mindfulness practice, please know these three areas are key; intentionality, a present-moment focus, and non-judgment; of yourself or others.
Pause and Prayer
When I feel triggered by someone or something, I pause and take three long, conscious breaths. Then I ask, “Is this my lesson, or am I meant to smile and release it?” If it is my lesson, I do my best not to react, even though that can feel hard. I ask for guidance and wait; the answer usually arrives, if not immediately then in the days that follow. When it comes, I do the inner work. If it’s something to release, I feel the tension leave my body and send the person or situation love and light.
Walking Meditations
I’ve never been someone who easily sits still, so walking ’n wondering has became a peaceful way for me to unwind. As I walk, I reflect on triggering situations, ask for guidance, and then intentionally let them go, trusting that clarity will come when it’s meant to. Very often I end up more focused on the beauty around me than on the original trigger. Your version of a walk will be different as your personality has different needs—whatever lets your mind soften and your soul speak.
Check out my new book: Walk N’ Wonder due out April 2026. I go deep on the idea of a daily walking practice to keep you on your path, in peace and truth on the daily!
Mindful Breathing
For mindful breathing, I use an antique rosary my mother gave me, which once belonged to her mother. It is precious to me. You might use a crystal, a beaded necklace, or nothing at all; I simply like having something to help me focus. Each bead becomes a breath: I inhale love and light, and exhale toxins, negative energy, and old stories that no longer serve.
Key Steps to Stop Pleasing and Return to Your True Self
Over time, these practices and insights taught me a new way of being with myself. Here are the essential movements in this journey:
- Recognize when you are saying yes while your inner truth is saying no.
- Explore what your “please” is serving—often an unmet childhood need.
- Become aware of personality traits that feed your pleasing patterns.
- Use mindfulness to bring awareness into the exact moment you’re tempted to abandon yourself.
- Employ practices like pause-and-prayer, walking meditations, and mindful breathing to calm triggers and make new choices.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about progressively choosing your TrueSelf more often than you choose your pleasing self.
Awakening the Soul’s Role in Your Personality
How to discover your powerful true self and stop pleasing” is more than an embodiement phrase. It is a spiritual invitation.
Traditional personality models are useful. Yet as we awaken to our spiritual needs, we are called to add another layer: the soul’s role. This is where wholeness and joy live, where you tap into your sacred self-identity.
When you align a healthy personality with your soul self, your traits become vehicles for your soul’s intentions. They carry your self-expression and Divinely inspired actions into the world. You begin to embody the Divine spark within you—soul, God fractal, Holy Spirit. For me, this is the path to enlightened living.
Journal Prompt: What Is Your “Please” About?
If you prefer to journal here’s a great prompt to get you in touch with your pleasing ways. This week, notice when you please another instead of honoring yourself. Ask: What is my please really about? Is it belonging, love, fitting in, being seen or accepted? Write it down. Dig deep. This is sacred work.
Are You Ready to Stop Pleasing and Start Living as Your True Self?
If questions like “Who am I?”, “How did I get here?”, “What’s next?”, and “Is it too late for my dreams?” echo inside you, you are not alone. Many of us long to know ourselves more deeply, yet don’t know how to unravel the conditioning and false beliefs that hide our essence.
My work is a roadmap back to your true self. It helps you unlearn who you are not—the self shaped by external expectations—so who you truly are can step into full self-authority. It embraces the soul’s role in personality typing: a spiritually grounded approach to Myers-Briggs® that reveals a healthy, soul-inspired expression of your true nature—the essence of you.
What I know is this: everything you seek already lives within you. Seen through a spiritual lens, your personality traits become resources that clarify your truth instead of obstacles that block it.
I invite you to join a small but powerful group of people who are clear about who they are and willing to live from that clarity. I’m here to share what I learned walking through my own life tsunami. The question is no longer if you are called to this journey, but when you will answer.
If you are spiritually open, ready to discover who you really are, and know you are more than your struggles and fears, I welcome you. I’m here to walk with you through change and challenge, and to help you create a life that reflects your soul, not your people-pleasing.
P.S. A Note on Support
This work is offered freely and without ads so it can remain clear, spacious, and undiluted.
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Your support allows me to continue creating soul-led resources like this.
Who Is Nina Zapala?
I’ve navigated my own midlife tsunami — that overwhelming season when everything you thought defined you starts to wash away. When the world seems to look right past you. But I’ve learned that midlife doesn’t have to mean invisibility, fighting to stay relevant, or feeling marginalized. I created a new way through this powerful chapter with a sacred self-identity paradigm called Spiritual Personality Typing℠ — a framework I developed to make sense of my own tsunami that has brought me more joy, soulful self-discovery, and intentional living. Now, I help women design lives that are entirely their own — untethered from society’s expectations and rich with new beginnings, confidence, and freedom.
It’s Time to Unpack Your Personality Type ©️ – Nina Zapala, a Curious Type, ENTP.
Photo by Alfred Schrock on Unsplash
