The Pasta Invitation
My mother has a move.
It goes like this: she calls, and somewhere in the first few minutes she mentions what she’s making for dinner.
Not as information.
As an opening.
“Hey, I’m making pasta tonight — was wondering if you wanted to come over.”
She cycles through the options she knows will work.
Pasta.
Steak.
The takeout place I like.
She’s not manipulative in any calculating sense — she’s lonely.
My dad is in a nursing home and the evenings are long and quiet in a way they never used to be.
She misses her people.
I know all of this.
I call her every day.
I see her at least once a week for dinner, outside of the pop-ins she does regularly, often unannounced.
My daughter notices the unannounced visits more than I do — which tells you something about how thoroughly I’ve been conditioned to simply absorb them.
And still, most weeks, there’s the pasta invitation.
The gentle pull.
The ask for just a little more.
I don’t always go.
But I always feel it — that low-level tug between what I want to do and what will make her feel okay.
Between my evening and hers.
Between my voice and the one that’s been in my head the longest.
Because here’s the thing about the disease to please:
It rarely announces itself as a people-pleasing problem.
It usually just feels like love.
Like loyalty.
Like being a good daughter.
The Voice That Isn't Yours
My mother is my greatest cheerleader now.
But the version of her that raised me was a woman shaped by her own era, her own fears, her own unspoken ideas about what women should do and how far they should reach.
She didn’t impose these things directly.
She was never the kind of mother who said don’t do that or you can’t do that.
It was subtler than that.
It was a hesitation in her voice.
A pause before the support came.
A slight shift in tone that I learned, over years, to read like a second language.
And because she never said the quiet part out loud, I could never quite argue with it.
I just absorbed it.
Filed it somewhere.
Let it become part of the background noise of my own decision-making.
Her fears about work — the steady job being safer than the unknown, the you don’t know what’s out there — became a whisper in my own head when I was weighing whether to leave something stable.
Her complicated feelings about men, expressed in tearful moments after fights with my father, became a low-level distrust I still have to consciously work against.
Not because I chose these things.
Because I was there, young and impressionable, when they were downloaded.
This is how the disease to please often begins — not with a boss or a colleague or a demanding client.
With a mother.
With the first person whose approval we ever needed, whose love felt conditional on keeping the peace, whose worry we learned to manage before we were old enough to name it as such.
The most insidious part is that her voice didn’t stay in my childhood home.
It followed me.
Into boardrooms and business decisions and moments of self-doubt.
Long after I’d intellectually outgrown it, it was still there, running quietly in the background like a program I’d forgotten to close.
The Culinary School Moment
There was a moment when I decided to go to culinary school.
It wasn’t a practical decision by most measures.
I had a career.
A life.
Responsibilities.
And when I told my mother, she was supportive — genuinely, I think.
But there was that hesitation.
That almost imperceptible pause before the encouragement came.
The tone that said I’m with you while something underneath it said but are you sure?
She never said don’t go.
She never said I told you so afterward.
She’s not that kind of mother.
But I felt the hesitation, the way you feel weather changing before it actually shifts.
And I went anyway.
That’s the thing about learning to override the disease to please — it doesn’t always look like a dramatic confrontation or a boundary-setting conversation.
Sometimes it’s just a quiet decision to move forward while the hesitation is still in the air.
To let the discomfort exist without letting it decide.
I didn’t go to culinary school to defy my mother.
I went because I wanted to.
And that distinction — doing something because I wanted it, not because it was approved of or recommended or safe — was, for me, a kind of practice.
A small act of listening to my own voice instead of the one I’d inherited.
What This Looks Like at Work
In the women I coach, the disease to please rarely shows up as dramatic self-sacrifice.
It’s quieter than that.
It shows up as volunteering for extra projects — not because the work is interesting or strategic, but because being seen as a team player feels safer than being seen as someone with limits.
As over-explaining decisions.
As softening feedback until the message disappears entirely.
And underneath all of it is the same engine:
The fear that if I stop making myself agreeable, the approval disappears.
Here’s what I’ve learned, both personally and professionally:
People pleasing is not the same as being kind.
Kindness comes from a place of genuine generosity.
People pleasing comes from fear — fear of rejection, of disappointment, of taking up too much space.
One fills you up.
The other slowly empties you out.
Your One Question
Think about a decision you’ve made recently — or are sitting with right now — and ask yourself honestly:
Whose voice am I actually listening to?
Not whose voice you think you should be listening to.
Whose voice is actually driving the bus.
If the answer is yours — good.
Keep going.
If the answer is someone else’s — a mother, a boss, a partner, a version of yourself that learned a long time ago that keeping the peace was safer than telling the truth — then the work isn’t to make the decision differently right away.
It’s just to notice.
To name the voice.
To understand where it came from and what it was trying to protect you from.
Because once you can hear the difference between your voice and the one you inherited, the pasta invitation stops feeling like an obligation.
And you can say yes when you mean it — and no when you don’t.
I found How Women Rise early in my coaching career and recognized myself on too many pages. I’ve pressed it into the hands of more women than I can count since then. Now, with some real miles behind me, I’m revisiting a few of those habits — this time with receipts.