How Kelsea Ballerini Stopped Being a "Chronic People Pleaser": "I Had to Shift..."
The Voice Coach admitted that "any element of turmoil or people being mad at me feels crippling to me."
As a five-time Grammy Award nominee who signed her first record contract when she was just 19 years old, Kelsea Ballerini has learned a lot about herself. For instance, The Voice Coach knows she’s a “chronic people pleaser,” which can be a tricky quality when you have as wide of reach as the beloved country star.
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How Kelsea Ballerini learned to shift her mindset to stop being a “chronic people pleaser”
In a May 2025 cover interview with ELLE, Ballerini opened up about standing up for her beliefs in the country music scene, specifically her support of drag queens and LGBTQ+ rights as her home state of Tennessee has passed legislation targeting the community. And how she coped with the backlash of doing so.
“I had to shift my mindset from wanting to speak to a wide audience to wanting to speak to my audience,” Ballerini told the magazine. “I had to get out of my head, because I’m such a chronic people pleaser: Any element of turmoil or people being mad at me feels crippling to me.”
In 2023, Ballerini made headlines when she performed her song "If You Go Down (I'm Goin' Down Too)" at the CMT Awards with four drag queens — Kennedy Davenport, Manila Luzon, Jan Sport, and Oliva Lux — who joined her on-stage as her backup dancers. “I love performance and I love self-expression and I love inclusivity,” Ballerini told Entertainment Tonight at the time.
Later that year, the “Miss Me More” singer shared on the Call Her Daddy podcast that she received a lot of “hate” after the CMT performance. “What I’ll say is I can’t imagine what it feels like to be the drag queen on stage because the hate that I got for that was the loudest I’ve ever gotten from the public, but it doesn’t compare to what they’re getting all the time,” Ballerini said during the November 2023 podcast. “It really put me in my place and checked me. I’ve always been an ally, but what does it mean, you know?"
"I just felt like it was a really important time to show up in a way that I could on a stage that felt really important,” she added.
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Speaking to ELLE in May 2025, Ballerini said she realized people who listen to her music and come to her shows know exactly who she is and what her beliefs are. “I never really was loud about anything for a really long time, because I just had to get my footing,” she said. “And then I was like, 'At the end of the day, I want the people who listen to my music to know what I stand for and hopefully align with it.'"
Ballerini also shared that she felt “so deeply grateful” when she saw a drag queen in the audience at one of her shows in Philadelphia.
“I felt so deeply grateful that they felt safe enough to be there in the theater in the wig. And that’s what I care about now,” she told ELLE. “I want my sliver of the world of music — the 15,000 people who are out there — to know we’re aligned and we can be a safe place and keep going out into the world and trying to do the right thing. When I think about it on a wider scale, it’s too much. I don’t know where to start. But I know that I can start with me and how I show up within my community.”
