- Five signs you are too nice and how to stop.
How to stop being so nice, man.
All right, being nice has many meanings.
It could just mean you're polite, could mean you're kind,
could mean you help other people.
Those things are all great, but when you're too nice,
it could lead to you being burned out,
to doing things you don't want to do all the time,
to end up resenting the people, the very people
who you are supposedly being nice to.
After I go into the five signs that you are being too nice,
I'll give you some tips on how to stop being too nice
and set some healthy boundaries and then make sure you watch
to the very end of the video 'cause that's
where I have I think my most important truth bomb.
The first sign that you are too nice is that you take
on responsibility for other people's emotions
and their lives.
Now, we might just think we're being empathetic, right?
I'm an empath, so I have to take on this stuff,
but it might also be we learned as children that in order
to get by, we have to put either our parents or our guardian
or other people in the family's emotions above our own.
We gotta make sure that their emotions are taken care of.
Ours don't matter so much.
From a personality perspective, it might also be
that you're high in openness to experience,
which is a trait that allows you to easily put yourself
into someone else's shoes, to imagine what it's like
to be living their life and feel their emotions
which can then lead us to take responsibility
for their emotions.
The number two sign that you are too nice
is that you say yes to everything.
You don't want to do something?
Oh well, you're gonna say yes anyway.
It's like you say yes automatically without thinking.
Now, it could be you were raised to think that saying no
is bad or on the flip side of that, you might think
that saying yes will get people to like us.
So that's one of the dark sides of being too nice is
that it's actually kind of manipulative
or from my personality perspective, we might be high
in agreeableness which is a trait where we are more likely
to go along with what other people want
to do rather than our own internal decisions.
Now really quick, before we continue,
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Okay, the number three sign that you are too nice
which is a big one, a whammy, if you will,
is that you feel intense guilt and or anxiety
when you just think about saying no, setting a boundary.
The first part of it is you might feel guilty
because you feel like you're being weak.
Especially if you're in a pattern of constantly saying yes
to everything, it's just weak for me
to say no 'cause I could do it.
It might be going back to childhood conditioning as well
where we learned that if we said no, we were being bad.
The stuff we learned in childhood carries
through to adulthood.
It's very strong.
We might also be projecting into the future,
and this is what can cause a lot of the anxiety.
We do like mental rehearsals of what it'll be like
if we say no, if we set a boundary, and a lot of times,
those mental rehearsals are trying to prepare us
for the worst thing that could happen,
and so we just assume the worst thing is going to happen.
The number four sign that you are too nice is
that you are afraid of other people's disapproval
and disappointment, perhaps even them abandoning you
if you say no and set a boundary.
So like I said in the last point, we might catastrophize
what will happen if we set a boundary.
Everything's gonna go wrong, my life will be over,
everyone's gonna abandon me, they'll never talk to me again,
that sort of thing or we might assume this is really
gonna hurt this other person's feelings if I set a boundary.
Especially if we're used to just always dropping everything
to be there for other people, they could actually express
being hurt that you're not there for them
which makes it even tougher when it's like,
I'm a little bit right, their feelings will be hurt.
This could also be affected by high trait neuroticism
where we have a high sensitivity to negative emotion.
We have anticipatory anxiety for future events.
When something could go negatively,
we are much more quick to pick up on that.
All right, and now the number five sign you are too nice,
and after I go through this last point, I'll get into tips
on how to set healthy boundaries and stop being too nice.
Number five is you equate being nice
with being a good person
and this is wrapped up in your identity.
So we might have gotten a message somewhere along the way
in our life that if you set boundaries and say no
and are disagreeable from time to time,
then you are not nice
and being not nice means you are not good.
I mean, think back to childhood.
How often did not nice mean bad?
Remember how I said you might be feeling guilt and anxiety?
Sometimes when that happens, not sometimes,
like almost all the time, when that happens, we assume,
oh, that's a sign that I am doing the wrong thing,
that I am being bad.
Why would I feel guilty unless I was being bad?
And I think a lot of people want to be good people, right?
I mean, most people I would assume want to be good,
but when your definition of good is being nice
and when your idea of being nice is having no boundaries
and all this is wrapped up in who I am, I'm a good person,
at least, that's what I want to be, it just sets you up
to be perpetually in this bad pattern that is leading you
towards burn out and resentment.
So what we have to do, obviously,
is set boundaries and be firm about it.
First up, stop automatically saying yes.
Practice saying no, and this might be something
you actually have to set aside some time and be like,
all right, for this day or for this week,
I'm just gonna say no, and it's gonna feel
like you're being a bad person, right?
Those feelings of guilt are gonna start coming up,
but having boundaries, saying no,
not jumping whenever anyone needs anything
or when at least you interpret that they need it,
that doesn't make you a bad person, right?
Think about when you're on an airplane
and they're doing the pre-take off emergency speech
that no one really listens to and they're saying,
in the event that this mass comes down
and everyone's freaking out, make sure that you put
your mask on yourself first before you put it on the child
that you're traveling with because if you put it
on them first and you don't have enough oxygen,
you're gonna pass out,
and then what's gonna happen to the kid?
Not gonna have his parent there, right?
So you need to put it on yourself first.
Make sure you're taken care of,
and then slap that mask on that other person.
In the same way, setting boundaries is just
about making sure that I am good, I am functioning fully
as a human being so that then I can go
and help other people and I can be nice.
It's 'cause the key to setting boundaries
isn't just saying no to everything.
The key is recognizing responsibilities.
What are other people's responsibilities?
What are my responsibilities?
What are not my responsibilities?
And I gotta take care of my responsibilities first,
prioritize that, and then maybe I can go
and help other people with what they're dealing with,
but if I'm neglecting what I am responsible for
and I'm constantly interpreting that I am responsible
for other people's stuff, it's just like in the plane,
you without your oxygen mask but you're trying
to put the mask on everyone else, you're gonna pass out.
You're gonna get hypoxia up there, man,
and it's not about just setting boundaries,
but it's about communicating it to other people
because if you don't do that, then they're just gonna assume
that they can just keep going in that old pattern
of you always dropping everything to do everything for them.
They might give you some push back at first, right?
They might say, dude, why are you being a jerk?
I thought I could depend on you to do everything for me.
I need you to pick up my lunch at Chipotle.
Why didn't you do that for me this time, right?
But that's okay.
Like just because they're making an adjustment,
and just because they might bristle a little bit at first
at you suddenly setting a boundary
doesn't mean you're doing the wrong thing.
I mean, it just, if anything,
it just means that you took too long.
You know, it's been so long of you being totally agreeable
and just doing whatever for anyone that they don't know
how to make sense of your place
in their life right now, and that's okay.
They just need to adapt to, oh, you have boundaries,
and eventually they'll be like, okay, I get it.
If you stick to them, if you don't give into those feelings
of guilt and I'm a bad person and all that,
eventually people get used to it and they're okay with it,
and in fact, they'll learn to respect you more
because when you are too nice and you don't have boundaries,
people lose respect for you.
So ultimately, there's no drawback to these boundaries,
and maybe you will have some friends who aren't real friends
who drop off, who drop by the wayside when you start
to draw boundaries because they were only there
because you didn't have boundaries, right?
And even that, even if you lose those friends,
who needs friends like that?
It can only be a positive for you that you take care
of yourself first, and it can only be a positive
for the people around you
because you can help them much better.
You can be a much more positive force in their life
if you are operating fully on all cylinders.
You've taken care of yourself, you're ready to go,
and I mean, if people get upset
because you're setting boundaries, remember,
their emotions are not your responsibility.
Now, here's a big thing.
If you start to feel guilt and anxiety
when you're setting boundaries, that is a sign
that you need to set the boundary because if you stop
and you're like, oh, I feel guilty, I feel anxious,
I'm just gonna violate my boundaries, I'm just gonna
go ahead and say yes even though I don't want to,
you are just reinforcing that feeling
so that it's gonna come back next time.
It might even be stronger next time.
It's gonna be harder to break that cycle.
So you need to just face it, feel those feelings,
and realize that doesn't mean anything.
Your feelings are not facts.
Just because you feel guilty
doesn't mean you're doing something wrong.
Just because you feel anxious doesn't mean there's anything
that you need to be afraid of.
Thanks for watching.
Until next time, stay cool and attractive.