How do you be yourself, tame friendliness, welcome the wild

[PepperBlossoms]

How do you more skillfully speak your mind, set boundaries, be assertive, be yourself?

How to avoid being too nice?

 

[flowboy]

@PepperBlossoms  I did that by deeply feeling into: what am I afraid of when I'm being too nice / not setting boundaries

Because the being too nice is an automatic response, what helped me is to first "break through it" by going against that impulse.

Especially the boundary setting is easy to mess up, because lack of boundaries is often connected to a very primal instinct to be safe.

So agreeing to something you shouldn't, being too accommodating, often has happened already before you're aware of it.

What I've done is just go back and undo it, whenever I notice it.

I've literally revisited conversations so many times and said something like:

Remember how I agreed to come over to your place and bring this and that? Actually, that doesn't work for me.

I know I said yes to taking a walk, but now that we're here, I realise that I actually didn't want to. So I'm going to head back.

Just correcting it after the fact. Eventually that turns into real-time awareness and behavior change.

It's extremely uncomfortable, but necessary.

 

If you do that, then you will be confronted with strong emotions.

These strong emotions, resulting from going against your ingrained niceness, are clues to the root of your problem.

If you do shadow work or inner child work on those, you can fix it and improve quickly.

 

[Gesundheit2]

@PepperBlossoms I've read many of your posts here on the forum, and honestly you don't seem like a people-pleaser at all. You seem fairly self-expressive and focused on what you want without much care for what people think. Not saying you're lying or anything like that haha, but maybe that can give you some clues on how to behave in the world. Maybe you need to have a clear goal in life, etc.