At a recent leadership summit, thoughtful actor Kristen Bell was interviewed by psychologist Adam Grant. The topic was people-pleasing.

Bell describes herself as a people pleaser, hypervigilant about how other people are feeling and wanting to contribute to their feeling better.

It can feel pretty terrible to be a people pleaser. Bell offers an example by acting out a scenario where she cannot get herself to explain that she wants a second coffee but without two creams. She cannot get the words out because she feels so bad about how it will come across. Because Bell is so charming, her experience is especially revealing. A people-pleasing attitude can interfere with even the most socially skilled person’s ability to voice a simple preference.

What is behind this? Grant and Bell analyze the phenomenon together.

What is people-pleasing really about?

Bell explains how much she has thought about people-pleasing. She has begun to notice the energy wasted by it and how it only leads to pointless non-interactions with others. She has been considering whether she knows what the server actually wanted, which may simply be honest feedback so that she can make the coffee the way that Bell likes. And she suggests that her fear of upsetting others might be, instead, a desire to try to control the situation, avoiding the risk that the server might become displeased or feel hassled. The idea is that people-pleasing might seem to us to be about others, but it’s actually motivated by a fear of discomfort. Adam Grant even suggests that people-pleasing is selfish.

They agree on guidance for people pleasers to put into practice:

• Lead with inquiry rather than advocacy.
• Show care and concern. (Bell’s take on this is to “act like a team member.”)
• Reduce the threat level.

Is there anything controversial about this advice? Likely not! At this level of generality, all sorts of approaches to life fit with this guidance.

Yet, in just a few minutes, Bell and Grant invoke many highly philosophical concepts: emotional energy, authenticity, fear, emotional boundaries, control, niceness, selfishness. And each of these, of course, has to be assigned a value and placed in the context of our overall goals in life. When it comes to the good of each of these, no matter what surveys of others tell us, we rely on deeper accounts of life’s meaning.

Stoicism

Stoicism is one such account. Stoicism, a very complex philosophical account, has very particular, and to most of us, probably odd and counterintuitive elements. It takes pains to explain morality down to the nature of belief acquisition and up to the nature of the universe. It has been gaining appeal as writers have been distilling its lessons for use today. Sometimes, necessarily, those lessons get reduced to a warning like don’t allow other people’s opinions or reactions to determine your peace of mind.

But Stoicism puts this advice in a very particular context. The context in which Stoicism places all life advice is this: Its recommendations are for a person whose goal is actually so narrow as to be to (just) become virtuous. For this goal, other goals have to go by the wayside.

This can be easy to say but difficult to envision. So the coffee example helps.

What if the coffee is not good?

Rather than focusing on why we fear other people, the Stoics offer us something else. It will sound strange: They would say that it is the preference for a type of coffee that is the problem.

Whether it contains cream is a matter of preference, what the Stoics call a preferred indifferent. The emotional difficulty surrounding the interaction therefore reveals, the Stoics would argue, an attachment to externals. This is the mistaken evaluation of what deserves concern. The preference is not wrong, but treating its fulfillment as emotionally significant is.

Epictetus

Epictetus, the ancient Stoic, worked through practical scenarios just like Bell and Grant. One is the case of a father who is too rattled to stay with his sick child. Could his absence from her bedside be justified?

Here is the method Epictetus used to reason through the question:

• Is your love for your child an actual good?
• Is this good what is actually involved in justifying the decision? Does love apply in what the father is considering? Are others who love the child acting the same?
• Would you want to be loved this way?
• Finally, check to see if your motivations differ from the way you are representing them.

In some ways, this seems so similar to the Bell and Grant advice. But the contrast is evident when we go back and apply Stoicism to the case of too much cream in a coffee.

You would begin with: Is your preference for coffee an actual good?

The Stoic answer: No, the coffee is not an actual good.

This demonstrates the broad divergence between Stoicism and most contemporary approaches to self-help. Yes, both ask us to change if upset over a trivial social interaction. The Stoics, too, analyze interpersonal issues that do not feel good to us. But modern self-help often looks to how we can feel (and perform) better while remaining true to ourselves. Stoicism tries to help us figure out what is ethical to do in any situation.

The Stoic proposal is that proper authenticity, emotional energy, lack of fear, boundaries, helpfulness, and wanting the right amount of control result from judging correctly what is genuinely good. Once that question is answered, many familiar problems, including people pleasing (and fear, and imposter syndrome, and timidity, and selfishness) dissipate.

As strict as Stoicism (and probably most ethical theories) seems—who wants to be thinking about ethics all of the time?—it can be more permissive than self-help. Staying quiet about unwanted coffee might be the right thing to do in a situation; you would not have to feel bad about it at all. And even if thinking about ethics all the time seems onerous, we are making ethical claims all of the time—for instance, that it is actually selfish to be nice. The Stoics would say: So do that with care.

I certainly do not know if Stoic methods work to reduce anxiety and discomfort, but their idea is that having one goal rather than very many is what we should try.

Bell’s line about being a team member was particularly resonant, as Marcus Aurelius recorded something similar: “We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”