This week I was reflecting back on being nice; what does that mean for me and feel like?
I know from being a child that if I wanted to fit in or be liked, I had to be nice to people. If I was not nice, I would be not liked or be part of a group.
So what do I mean by being nice?
- Agreeing to things that do not feel right to me
- Saying yes when I mean no
- Eating foods that I don’t like, just to please others
- Going to places where I don’t feel comfortable or want to go to
- Talking to people where I don’t really feel comfortable or safe.
I know when I was young, my parents would have lots of visitors come to their house and we were always encouraged to be polite and say hello to everyone, give them a hug or go sit on their laps. I also remember occasions when some visitors would come home and they just did not feel right but I was forced to say hello and go up to them, even when my whole body said No. If I refused I would get told off. There were times when I completely refused and accepted the telling off.
But as I grew older and created my own circle of friends I soon learned you had to be nice to fit into a group otherwise you would be pushed out. In those days, that was worse – not to be part of a group – as I would feel uncomfortable being left out. Friends would gang up and not talk to me; they would ignore me and not let me play with them and they would call me names. I would feel scared walking to school and going home in case someone would physically hurt me.
I know I took this behaviour into my adult life and felt I just had to be this way – this is life and nice became a normal thing. I worked out that if you are nice, you fit in and you are liked by all.
What I have learned through the teachings of Universal Medicine is that being nice is giving our power away, in pleasing other people. Being nice says to the other person, “It’s ok, you don’t need to be responsible for your actions and behaviour.” It says “my needs don’t matter only yours,” but how could this be true?
Nice has been a constant underlying pattern in my life with family, friends and colleagues. When I gained more awareness around being nice, I could feel how harming it is for everyone. By being nice I am not being truly responsible for my own actions and not allowing another to be truly responsible either. This was not easy to identify in my daily life initially, but now I can see clearly how it plays out.
More recently I have noticed that I have avoided how I have tried to please people to avoid any confrontation. This has been across the board, with everyone. I wanted to be liked by everyone but it’s not about others liking me, but about my own self-love, self-respect and being loving to myself.
Now when I sit with this in truth I realise that it is so harming, as I am not being open and honest when things are truly wrong or behaviours are not acceptable, especially when I have felt the truth in my body.
Being nice does not allow us to explore a situation to get to what is really going on, therefore it does not provide the opportunity for true responsibility, nor for any learning or understanding.
As I have been working on deepening my self-love through the connection to the stillness and inner wisdom in my body, I have been able to observe my own behaviour and the behaviour of others towards me, through our communication and movements. When I am racy inside, trying to please and be nice and entertaining, I fail to read what is really happening before me in relationships – or perhaps it is honest to say that I don’t want to feel it. By coming from a place of inner stillness, there is so much to feel and understand but I have to be willing to go there.
Normally I would get caught in other people’s lives, issues and dramas, and with that I would feel sorry for them and then get caught in being nice by wanting to help rather than being open and truthful in my expression of what I feel in that moment.
What I now realise, by not expressing my truth, is how I am allowing another to indulge in their behaviour and saying-without-saying “it’s ok to behave like that” when it’s not. This is harming by not taking self-responsibility and is not supporting them or myself at all.
So coming back to our stillness and inner knowing allows us to be aware, read the situation and express in truth. I now know how important it is to be truthful in relationships and not get caught up in being nice where I do not honour myself or the other person at all. Nice and ‘people pleasing’ is not being loving and does not truly serve.
By Amita Khurana, BSc Honours, Hotel Business Owner, Director, Practitioner/Therapist, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk UK
Further Reading:
True Role Models – From Being ‘A Good Man’ to Taking True Responsibility for My Choices
Giving Your Power Away: Why Being ‘Good’ Doesn’t Work
Learning to Feel my Feelings: Human Beings, not Human Doings
1,139 Comments
There was once a time when I would have been nice to be in comfort however now it feels uncomfortable to behave in that way.
The ‘smiling assassin’ is often used when we know that the face paints a picture but we can read that the energy of movement from another is far from loving.
“So coming back to our stillness and inner knowing allows us to be aware, read the situation and express in truth.” Yes so true and I experienced this lately. It is only when we allow ourselves to drop deeper in our body that we can feel what is going on. I think that we are resisting this at times and that is where the being nice and reaction as well come from. Because as long as we are nice or reacting to situations we don’t have to deepen in ourselves and see what is truly going on.
Niceness often comes with a fakeness and this is not love.
I’m finding being transparent and honest is so much more honouring of all parties and leaves me feeling settled in my body with nothing to hide. Being nice feels like putting sugar in someone’s tea so they don’t notice the poison!
It can be so tempting to be nice and not say what we feel, saying what you know will keep the peace and get you some brownie points. So to turn that on its head and not pander to the need of being liked and appreciate that true friendship is based on Love and expressing what we feel. Lovingly calling your friend to be all of who they are and not settling for less than what this is. I know I want all my relationships to be like this and it is dedication to evolving together.
It can be quite confronting to people when they know and associate you as being ‘nice’, and then you’re just straight with them and true. But nice doesn’t serve anyone: all it does is keep everyone in the same re-circulated soup, going around and around and never getting to feel any different. Nice keeps us all the same, in a lot of uncomfortable ‘comfort’ of familiarity – that eventually feels stifling.
There is no love in nice but you are just left with the poison of unexpressed feelings underneath this surface veneer. You add to the corruption in this world and confuse others and leave them in doubt as to what they feel.
Being nice I can be agreeing with someone when every part of you knows what they are expressing is not true, this can be said in verbal agreement or less subtly with just a nod, either way are we not selling ourselves?
Its a real trap and we need to be open and expressive, as nice is an energy that can trap everyone involved.
Being nice and going into sympathy are two areas of my life that I have chosen time and again. Although I am aware of the insidiousness of them I am only just beginning to clock the harm they actually cause.
There is alot of harm in being nice, its learning to hold everyone in love and be truthful.
Put simply niceness is never the truth of our body. It is only coming from our head whilst our body is saying something completely different.
Agree Joshua, nice comes from head, where truth is felt from the body.
When we have felt truth in our body and over ridden it so that we can avoid confrontation it is like poison in our body. But it is masked by the niceness we go into to pretend everything is fine when in truth we know that we need to speak up.
Sooner or later the truth needs to come out its whether we play the game of delay that harms the most.
Absolutely agree “When we have felt truth in our body and over ridden it so that we can avoid confrontation it is like poison in our body. “
I have played the nice game for most of my life, thinking that nice was good, caring and loving, but what I have realised is that nice is not true, nice stops us from being honest and feeling from the body the truth of the matter and then taking responsibility for what we are saying.
Absolutely nice stops us from being honest, we get trapped in being nice that the truth never comes up.
It can be uncomfortable to drop the nice interactions and feel what is really there in some of our interactions and yet it provides the opportunity to really back ourselves in the sense of bringing the fullness of who we are even more.
It’s horrible when we push our kids onto people that the children would normally avoid just to make it look good in front of the family. Sometimes even the adults don’t want to hug the children because they can sense that the child does not want to.
I agree it is horrible, something I have come to understand and when I am around children I honour their feelings.
The fear of being left out of a friends or social group doesn’t really stop at school. I see it a lot at work, and people aligning to be safe or included who wouldn’t naturally be drawn to each other. I also see ‘nice’ being used quite a lot by adults and as a becoming reformed nice, people pleaser, the manipulation and self-interest of this really stands out.
There is such an underling feeling of discomfort in the body when we are offered the reflection of ‘being nice’ often we override the feeling with the picture that is often fed to mislead us from staying true to what we feel from within.