I was labeled as the nice guy in the first semester in the University. Mostly, because I was shy and quiet and no one knew how to handle that so the kids at school just said I was nice, and it stuck. Looking back at this I’ve realized how detrimental it can be to hold yourself to this standard. When you focus on being nice you end up ignoring how you really feel and what you want, and you let people mistreat you because you’re too nice to tell them to stay off. I think many nice people like myself get caught up because we think we’re being good people. We believe we’re doing some kind of service to those around us by holding back our criticisms and saying something purely nice instead.
You can have strong opinions and still be a kind person. You can stand up for yourself and still care about what someone has to say. Human beings are dynamic like that. It’s not in anyone’s best interest if you go out of your way to be nice. In fact, being nice can be detrimental to you and those around you in a number of ways.
1. Nice people are seen as indecisive or non opinionated:
A lot of nice people won’t tell you when they don’t want to do something. Instead, they’ll deflect their opinion by saying things like, “It really doesn’t matter to me”, “I don’t care”, or “I’m open to anything”. The thing is that after consistently deferring the decision-making to the people around you, you can start to lose sight of how you actually feel. Recently, someone very close to me pointed out that I almost never done something I really want to do and that they took this as a sign of mysteriousness. They felt I was still so insecure around them that I couldn’t even answer a simple question, even after years of friendship. What was even more scary was that when I dug deep and tried to give a more direct, opinionated answer, I found I had none
2. Nice people come across as boring:
If you’re constantly trying to only say and do nice things, rather than have opinions of your own, people may start to think of you as being passive and boring. If your friends and coworkers wanted the opinion of someone who agreed with them all the time they could simply ask a mirror. It’s important to realize that people ask for you opinions because they care about what you have to say. Whether it’s your home or professional life, you don’t want those around you to view you as boring, right? Share your true opinions with others, and they’re more likely to view you as a dynamic and unique person.
3. Being nice means you’re more likely to be a follower, not a leader:
A recent article I read, I found that nice people are more likely to follow orders given to them by an authority figure, even if those orders will directly hurt someone else. In the study, researchers found that people who cared more about being agreeable and nice were more likely to follow orders to administer an electric shock that would harm an innocent person (the innocent person being an actor, unknown to the participants). People who were less agreeable and more controversial by nature, however, were more likely to question the ethics of such orders and refuse to shock the innocent person. While we may think that following the whims of others is doing them a favor, you can still be a good person and stand up for what you think is right.
4. Nice people often resent the people they’re nice to:
Strangely enough, being nice to people all the time can actually cause you to dislike and resent the people who benefit from your niceness. Constantly defaulting to what others want to do can cause you to become stressed out, overworked, and bitter towards the people you’re helping—defeating the entire purpose of doing a kind act. Most people dislike both extremes of the spectrum—the overly selfish and the overly generous. Specifically, participants disliked the overly generous participants because they made the rest of the participants ‘look bad’. While my goal in writing this article is not to convince you that nice people are weak and that being a total grump is better for you and everyone around you, I hope it will make you consider how genuinely you express ‘nice’ acts and words. If you really mean the nice things you say and do, that’s great. But if you don’t, just say how you really feel. Everyone will be better off for it.
Source: Tope
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