Better Than Just Being Nice

appearance-and-self-acceptance-large

Are you tired of being nice?

I know I sure am. It still feels a little mean to me when I say it, because I spent so much time trying to micromanage other people’s feelings but the truth of the matter is I got really tired of being nice.

2014 was a really transformational year for me in which I had to stop with all my nice girl stuff and create some real solid boundaries in my life. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t feel good. In fact I think it was one of the hardest things I had to do.

But I knew I was caught in the good girl syndrome of people pleasing, and had been avoiding conversations that were holding me back in all areas of my life.

Sometimes you need a clean sweep of your niceness so you can get clarity on who you really are and what you really want to cultivate in your life.

There were a lot of areas that I didn’t have good boundaries in my life. I was afraid to set these boundaries because I thought somehow I needed my connections the way that they were in order to survive. I didn’t realize I had a choice and what felt good to me and what didn’t. I also lacked the confidence to believe that I could speak my truth and that people would accept it. Most importantly, that if I did speak my truth and they didn’t like it, that I would be okay and they would have to deal with their own stuff around it. It was all about letting go of my responsibility and a feeling that I had to be a certain way for other people in order to retain calmness in my world.

The most important thing I noticed was how much of an energy drain always trying to be nice was, and also how my being nice was directly linked into my fear-based thinking. My default was nice because I feared the result of what would happen if I didn’t just go along with everything.

Perhaps you do the same thing, do you find yourself being nice when you really want to say no or set up a boundary? If so take some notes.

1. When do you feel your nice girl kick in the most? Is it around certain people or situations?

2. What do you tend to do or say in the situations? How does your body feel? Sometimes you might not notice how your body actually feels until later when you replay the conversation and you said yourself holy shit I did it again. But that’s okay because it’s just making you aware of your patterns so you’ll pick up on it more quickly next time.

3. Ask yourself what you would like to say in the situations where you been way too nice. If you could do it over again what would you say? How would that make you feel? Spend some time practicing those responses with yourself. What you’ll find is the more that you come against those kinds of situations the more you’ll start to naturally create boundaries and speak your truth. You’ll feel more confident doing it because you’ve been teaching your brain a different response.

4. Give yourself a break! You can’t change who you really are and personally I don’t want to become a mean person. I just want to be nice when it feels good to me not when I’m doing it just to please others or make a situation go away.

I’d love to hear how your practice goes!

Share this:Share on Facebook0Tweet about this on Twitter0Share on Google+0Share on LinkedIn0Pin on Pinterest0Share on StumbleUpon0Share on TumblrEmail this to someone

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>