I’m a people pleaser, but I don’t seem to be able to “learn from my mistakes”

I’ve always been the kind of person who tries really hard to make other people comfortable. I’m not trying to impress anyone or agree with everything they say. I just tend to be overly considerate, to the point where I sometimes put other people’s comfort before my own without even thinking about it.

For example, I always put other people first. If I’m walking down a narrow sidewalk and notice someone next to me, I’ll automatically move out of the way and let them go first. But a lot of the time, they’ll end up walking incredibly slowly, and I could’ve just walked past them ages ago without it making any difference to them.

Or I almost always have a forced smile on my face because I’ve been told so many times that I look “too serious” and that it can be intimidating. I’ve also been told that if I want to make connections with people, I need to be more friendly and approachable.

The thing is, I don’t seem to learn from my mistakes the way other people describe. You know those stories where someone goes through a bad experience and realizes, “I don’t need to please everyone,” and then they actually change their behavior afterward?

That doesn’t happen to me.

Recently, I lost a few online friendships because of misunderstandings. These were people I had put up with despite there being a lot of things about them that I didn’t like or found annoying.

One of them stopped talking to me because she had an argument with another friend of ours. I had already given her so much advice about the situation, and when she brought it up again, I gave her a short response because I genuinely didn’t know what else to say. I just told her, “Don’t worry about it. If you love someone, you have to let them go.”

And honestly, that situation did teach me something. I realized that there’s no point in going out of my way to be nice to someone who makes me uncomfortable, because at the end of the day, they’re going to make their own assumptions about me anyway.

But even after realizing that, I STILL keep doing the exact same thing with other people???

And it drives me insane. I just wish I didn’t feel like I was performing all the time.