14 May What Flow Has to Do With People-Pleasing (More Than You Might Expect)
Flow state and people-pleasing Directors are connected in a way that most leadership conversations never name. A client sparked this reflection last week when he mentioned Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his work on flow, and somewhere in the middle of him explaining it I found myself thinking about people-pleasing in a way I had not quite framed before.
The book makes a distinction between pleasure and joy that I want to start with, because it sets up everything else.
Pleasure is the satisfaction of a need. The relief of tension. It feels good in the moment but returns you to baseline without leaving you fundamentally changed by the experience. Joy, by contrast, arises from growth, from being fully stretched by something that requires more of you than you currently have, and while it is not comfortable in the way pleasure is comfortable, it leaves you different in a way that pleasure never does. More capable, more present, more yourself than you were before you encountered it.
I found myself returning to that distinction for the rest of the day. Not just as a concept but as a way of looking at something I see in almost every people-pleasing Director I work with.
The Pattern That Works, Until It Doesn’t
The people-pleasing pattern, at its best, produces something genuinely remarkable. The Director who has built a career on reading rooms, anticipating needs, absorbing difficulty before it reaches the team, and delivering beyond what was asked is not failing. They are, by almost every measurable standard, succeeding. Their KPIs are met and frequently exceeded, their teams feel genuinely supported, their stakeholders trust them with the things that matter, and their track record is, on paper, extraordinary. Exceptional on the outside, in every way the organisation measures it. Exhausted underneath in a way the organisation never sees.
The pattern works. For a long time, it works beautifully, which is precisely what makes it so hard to question and so persistent in the face of the cost it accumulates.
Because the cost is real, even when it does not show on the outside.
Pleasure Versus Joy in the People-Pleasing Pattern
When a people-pleasing Director says yes to something they should have declined, there is a moment of relief in which the other person is not disappointed, the tension dissolves, and that relief feels good enough to pass for something more meaningful than it actually is. It feels, in the moment, like kindness and generosity and being the kind of person others can rely on. But in Csikszentmihalyi’s terms it is pleasure rather than joy — the relief of tension rather than the expansion of self — and while it feels good it does not build anything that was not already there, and it costs something each time that accumulates over years in ways that only become visible long after the pattern has taken hold.
The authentic interaction, by contrast — the honest no, the opinion expressed without first softening it until it disappears, the boundary held when everything in the nervous system is urging accommodation — feels profoundly uncomfortable in the moment and requires tolerating something the pattern has spent years learning to avoid. And yet it is precisely this discomfort, this stretching beyond what feels safe, that produces the growth Csikszentmihalyi describes, and the person who tolerates it comes out the other side with something the person who avoided it does not have.
Flow State and People-Pleasing Directors
Which brought me to the part of the book that felt most precise for the leaders I work with.
Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as the state of complete absorption in a challenge that sits exactly at the edge of current capability — not so easy that it requires nothing and not so overwhelming that it becomes paralysing, but the precise point where the person is being stretched without being broken, fully present and fully engaged in something that demands everything available to them.
People-pleasing Directors almost never experience flow state at work, and the reason is not that the work is insufficiently challenging or that they are incapable of that quality of presence.
The reason is that a people-pleasing Director is never fully in the room.
Part of their attention is always elsewhere — monitoring the faces around the table for early signs of disapproval, calculating the safest version of what they actually think before committing to saying it, managing how they are being perceived rather than fully engaging with what is actually happening in front of them. There is a portion of their attention permanently allocated to keeping everyone comfortable, and that portion is therefore never available for the depth of engagement that produces flow. They are present enough to perform at a high level, which is why the pattern stays unexamined for so long, but they are rarely present enough to experience the full weight of their own leadership.
The Cost Nobody Names
And this, I think, is one of the costs of the people-pleasing pattern that almost never gets named in the conversations about burnout or promotion ceilings or strategic presence. Not the exhaustion, which is visible to anyone paying attention. Not the ceiling, which eventually becomes impossible to ignore. But the gradual erosion of the experience of work itself — the slow distance between a person and the thing that once made the work feel worth doing.
The Director who is always managing rather than leading has traded flow for safety. And they often do not realise it until they notice that work stopped feeling meaningful a long time ago and they cannot quite remember when that happened. This erosion is part of the same pattern that closes the space for recovery and rest — the monitoring that prevents flow at work is the same mechanism that prevents genuine rest outside of it.
The Question Is
The question my client’s book left me with is this.
When was the last time you were completely in the room at work — not monitoring reactions or calculating the safest response, but fully present in something that required everything you had and left no attention spare for anything else?
Most people-pleasing Directors I ask this question find the answer arrives more slowly than they expected. And that slowness is itself worth paying attention to, because what becomes possible when that part of you that is always monitoring the room becomes available for something else entirely is not a small adjustment to how work feels. It is, I suspect, a great deal of what you came into leadership to find in the first place.
If you recognise yourself in this and want to understand what it would actually take to address the pattern at the root, you can find out more about my leadership coaching programme. Or the pattern mapping call is a good place to start. Thirty minutes. No pitch. Just clarity on whether this is the right work for you at the right time.
Becoming the leader your next level is already waiting for.
Danguole Litvinskaite, The Leadership Coach Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders Eventually Find
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do people-pleasing Directors rarely experience flow at work?
Because flow requires complete presence, and a people-pleasing Director is never fully in the room. A portion of their attention is always elsewhere: monitoring reactions, calculating the safest version of what they think, managing how they are being perceived. That portion is unavailable for the depth of engagement flow requires. The work gets done at a high level. The experience of doing it quietly empties out.
What is the difference between pleasure and joy in the context of people-pleasing?
Pleasure relieves tension. The yes that keeps someone comfortable, the boundary not held, the opinion softened until it disappears: each of these produces relief in the moment. Joy comes from growth, from tolerating the discomfort of something that stretches beyond what feels safe. People-pleasing Directors become expert at pleasure and progressively more distant from joy, which is part of why the pattern is so hard to examine even when its cost is already visible.
Why does work stop feeling meaningful for people-pleasing Directors?
Because managing rather than leading trades flow for safety. The Director who is always calculating the safest response is not fully engaging with what is actually happening. Over time the gap between performance and presence widens, and what erodes is not the quality of the output but the experience of producing it. The work continues to look extraordinary from the outside long after it has stopped feeling that way from the inside.
Can a people-pleasing Director learn to be fully present in the room?
Yes. But it is not primarily a mindfulness question or an attention management question. The part of a people-pleasing Director that is always monitoring the room is doing so for a reason that goes deeper than habit. Until that reason is addressed at the root, the monitoring continues regardless of intention. What becomes available when it does shift is not just a different quality of presence at work. It tends to change the experience of leadership entirely.
About the Author
Danguole Litvinskaite is an executive leadership coach based in Switzerland, specialising in helping exceptional and exhausted senior leaders advance without losing themselves in the process. With 14 years in investment banking across 4 countries, an ICF PCC credential, and 3,000+ executive coaching sessions, she works with senior leaders in tech, finance, consulting, and global financial institutions. Her 3-month intensive, The Integration Method, addresses the overdelivering pattern at the level where it actually lives, combining corporate strategy, leadership psychology, nervous system regulation, and career navigation. Clients include senior leaders at the largest tech companies, Big 4 firms, and global financial institutions.
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