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I am currently reading Not Nice by Dr. Aziz Gazipura. It has been an eye-opening journey, and I can relate to many of the passages. I grew up with an alcoholic father, and no one in my family ever talked about his battle with addiction or how it affected our household. Although he was not physically abusive, he was emotionally unavailable and often bothered by the presence of children (me and my siblings). From an early age, I trained myself to walk on eggshells and avoid upsetting him, but I often failed at that. I believed that if I was nice and agreeable, I wouldn't have to deal with his triggers. However, what no one ever tells children is that they are not responsible for others' triggers, and children cannot guess what people's absurd triggers are if they don't communicate them.
My niceness and agreeableness followed me everywhere in life—friendships, work, dating, and conflict resolution. I built the habit of being nice, accommodating, and patting myself on the back for thinking of other people's feelings. But in reality, I was just scared of possible retaliation for saying the wrong thing. My niceness operated from a place of fear.
Over the years, I started shedding these layers of façade niceness, and I'm finally seeing the real "mean girl" that I am—and I love it! What really solidified this transformation was my experience with jury duty. I decided to be the biggest asshole in the room. I told a lawyer that his corporate client need to pay up and stop wasting everyone's time. No one expected that level of bravery, and I thought for sure I'd be eliminated from the jury because of it lol. To my shock, I was selected💀. Apparently, the world likes assholes, and I happened to be one of them now.
Part 1 Brief Summary Ch 1-4 (Direct Quotes From Book)
The Myth of Niceness
At its core, being nice is about being liked by others by making everything smooth and avoiding conflict. It’s based on the flawed theory that if you please others, give them everything they want, and avoid causing any discomfort, they will like you, love you, and shower you with approval and rewards. This theory is incorrect. It is an inaccurate map of human relationships, and following it will not lead you where you want to go. Instead, you will end up feeling lost.
The Opposite of Nice:
The opposite of being nice is being real. It involves being direct, honest, and truthful. It means expressing what you really think and feel, and sharing your true self in the moment. This authenticity allows others to see and know the real you, fostering genuine love and connection.
Being real means speaking up and asserting yourself, your opinions, ideas, and desires. It involves challenging others when you disagree, standing behind your convictions, and being willing to have difficult conversations. By doing this, you experience full contact with life and others, instead of hiding behind a polite wall of fear.
✨Nice Training
Nice training begins innocently enough as part of “socialization.” Your parents have a responsibility to help you function in our world, interact with other children and humans, and set you up to succeed. The only problem is most of our parents didn’t deeply reflect on what traits actually do set their children up for maximum happiness, success, and positive contribution to the world. They often did not have ongoing practices of building their self-awareness, working through their own issues, and actively healing and growing as humans.
Instead, they did the best they could with the resources they had. They wanted you to be a good, kind, strong, healthy, happy child. They didn’t want you to be aggressive, impolite, defiant, selfish, or mean. So, they did their best to guide you, influence you, and condition you to be all of the first list, and none of the second.
✨The Approval Seeker:
Here is the Approval Seeker’s typical list of success criteria for avoiding disapproval:
No one has a negative thought or judgment about me, including my appearance, attire, job, income, speech, movements, actions, choices, or any other qualities.
No one feels any negative or uncomfortable emotions in my presence due to me, such as fear, discomfort, uncertainty, aversion, irritation, upset, confusion, or dislike.
No one shows any non-verbal signs of disapproval, like furrowed brows or curled lips. Only positive or neutral facial expressions are acceptable.
Types of Behaviors:
Avoiding No: You avoid saying no to others, fearing they will become upset or think you’re a bad person, so you usually say yes, even if it adds more stress to your life.
Hesitation: You often wait for the “right thing” to say and thus speak less than you normally would.
Nervous Laughter: You laugh quickly at whatever another person says, even if it’s not funny, often at inappropriate times.
Difficulty with Endings: You struggle to end conversations, friendships, or romantic relationships, dragging them out longer than you want.
Overly Agreeable: You smile, nod, and agree with others regardless of your actual opinions.
Avoiding Disagreement: You avoid disagreeing with others or challenging their perspectives.
Fear of Judgment: You’re afraid of others' judgments, leading to nervousness, hesitation, over-thinking, and social anxiety.
Fear of Upset: You often fear that others are secretly angry or critical of you, even if they seem to like you when you’re together.
Pressure to Entertain: You feel pressured to share engaging stories or adventures to keep others interested.
Second Guessing & Conversational Replays: During interactions, you experience self-doubt and replay conversations in your mind, finding faults and things you should have said.
Habitual Apologies: You apologize quickly out of habit, even for minor transgressions.
Submissive Body Language: You frequently look away or keep your eyes down.
Putting Others First: You habitually put others’ needs ahead of your own, thinking it is selfish to do otherwise.
Not Stating Desires: You rarely state what you want directly, hoping others will detect your needs.
Attempting to Fit In & Impress: You try to fit into groups by pretending to be interested in things you are not or exaggerating your experiences and achievements.
Area of need:Approval Seeker Versus The Powerful You
The Powerful You doesn’t need to control anyone’s perception. You focus on showing up as 100% yourself, knowing that you only need to find your people, not everyone.
The Cost of Approval Seeking
The more you try to avoid disapproval and earn approval, the more you suffer. These behaviors pull you away from yourself and drain your social power. Small things like submissive body language, habitual apologies, and nervous laughter can significantly impact your life, reducing romantic options, making people less interested in talking with you, and affecting job opportunities. Larger patterns like being overly agreeable, feeling anxious about entertaining others, and avoiding conflict can create limited and tense experiences, confining you to a box of your own making. When combined with a deep fear of upsetting others and a belief that they’re harshly judging your character and worth, it can lead to significant trouble.
✨The Guilt Bubble
Lots of Guilt: You frequently feel guilty about letting people down, hurting their feelings, and putting yourself first.
Tons of Resentment: You may feel anger towards others, including partners, parents, friends, bosses, neighbors, and colleagues, often without realizing it because expressing anger and resentment doesn’t fit the “nice” persona.
Physical Pain: Recurring pain such as headaches, migraines, neck pain, back pain, knee pain, ankle pain, foot pain, or stomach pain may be present. Despite various treatments, you rarely remain pain-free for long.
Types of Behaviors:
Avoid doing anything to lose others’ approval.
Avoid hurting others’ feelings.
Avoid displaying anger or irritation or doing anything that might upset others.
Area of need:Healthy Guilt vs. Destructive Guilt
✨Over-responsibility
Over-Responsibility is another pattern we learned in childhood. As young children, we would see Mom or Dad get angry, anxious, or sad, and instantly assume it was our fault. When we are very young, we are unable to understand that others are separate people, with their own experiences, feelings, and desires.
It makes us feel completely responsible for everyone else’s feelings, with a strong compulsion to make sure everyone feels happy, relaxed, content, and generally good in all scenarios. This might sound impossible and problematic. It is. It becomes even more so as you interact with more and more people, whether it be in business, your love life, or socially.
Area of need: Taking Care vs. Care-Taking
However, when we’re living in a world where we’re entirely responsible for the feelings of everyone around us, we become constant care-takers. We are subconsciously assuming and treating others as if they are young children who cannot manage their own feelings. This misconception creates stress, burnout and an endless supply of bad guilt. It sets up unrealistic demands of how responsive you should be, and causes you to give more than you want to, and say “no” much less than you need to.
✨Don't be mad at me!
If you learned that anger is bad, hurts others, and shows weakness or unlovability, you may naturally avoid it. If something is scary, uncomfortable, threatening, and only leads to pain and problems in relationships, it makes sense to avoid it.
Fears:
Fear of Hurting Others
Fear of Retaliation
Fear of Loss
Behaviors:
Conflict Avoidance
Submissive Stance
Over Accommodating
Work on: Feeling vs. Doing (Ex:I don't want them to think I'm mean. Being mad does not equal being mean)
There is a big difference between feeling and doing. We can feel whatever we want. In fact, I believe it’s optimal and extremely healthy to feel everything inside ourselves. This includes all emotions, especially the ones that are uncomfortable that we call “negative,” including anger, sadness, fear, hurt, loneliness,emptiness, rage, and many others. The more we can give ourselves complete permission to feel anything, and know that it doesn’t mean anything about us, the freer we become. In addition, it doesn’t mean we necessarily have to do anything either. We’re just feeling.
I always say would you put a piece of trash or useless object next to your trophy on your trophy shelf?
No. So why allow that in your life?
Your life is the trophy shelf, you are the first prize, and people should be other prize standing next to you.
A man who is not a prize had no business being part of your shelf.
Brilliant post that so many of us, including myself, can relate to.
☺️✨✨