Jerks can really ruin your day or worse, turn you into one of them. The world could stand to be a little more kind, but being too friendly has its drawbacks, too.
If you’ve ever been told you’re “too nice”, you’ll probably be able to relate to this School of Life video so much it hurts. Overly agreeable people dislike confrontation, but more than that, we just want to be liked. And when you mould your perspective just to be liked, agreeability turns into a bad habit.
Not only does it keep you from being yourself and truly exploring other points of view, it actually backfires. The School of Life puts it like this:
In order to succeed at pleasing anyone we must first accept the risk that we might well displease them through a candid expression of our being. Successful charm relies on an initial secure sense that we could survive social failure… we must reconcile ourselves to the risk of not making friends to stand any chance of actually making any.
This isn’t permission to go out and be a disagreeable jerk just for the sake of being a disagreeable jerk. It’s simply saying that part of being likeable is being confident enough to share your point of view. For more detail, check out the complete video above.
The Problem with Over-Friendly People [The School of Life (YouTube)]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.