What you should know
"Sometimes... being kind to people is a crime against oneself."
Hussein Barghouti, the blue light
Here is a quick assessment of your personality, try to answer the following seven questions accurately:
Do you find yourself obliged to accept everything that is asked of you, even if it is a burden to you?
Do you find yourself obliged to buy a piece that you are not convinced of, just because the seller insists on you buying it?
Are you afraid to say in your work that you are the one who got the job done so as not to embarrass your colleagues?
Do you find it difficult to return a wrong coffee or meal order that is different from your original order?
Do you find yourself agreeing to a decision/request you hate while rejecting it from within, in order not to expose yourself to problems or embarrassment?
Do you feel intense internal pressure and embarrassment when you want to express your opinion on an issue, so as not to embarrass those with whom you disagree?
If you answered most of the above questions in the affirmative (yes), then you often suffer from what is called
"hyper-consensuality" (
1) and over-kindness, a quality that may be the cause of so much of your daily struggles.
This happens when you decide to meet deadlines beyond your ability, or when you have to go to a store or a place you do not like, these same behaviors may also cause you to fail in your work and job, because you are afraid to say “no” to tasks that are not your responsibility, and because you are afraid To attribute the achievement to yourself.
The scientific term that corresponds to the adjective excessive kindness and excessive politeness with others is called: consociationalism, and it is one of the five features of personality analysis.
Here it must be noted that consociationalism is a positive trait if it is not excessive, as it reflects kindness, kindness and concern for the feelings of others.
In general, consociationalism refers to a "polite" person who does not like to belittle others, as it expresses a very empathetic person, who does not like to hurt the feelings of others and does not like to refuse their requests or oppose their desires.
But the problem
is being overly consensual
, because this will undoubtedly deprive you of the ability to stand up for your desires and for yourself and to claim your rights.
Why am I being taken advantage of because of my kindness?
According to personality psychology, one of the most important traits that constitute the human personality is the trait of agreeableness, as this trait expresses the ease with which a person accepts the demands of others and the extent to which he avoids disagreements, conflicts and problems.
Consensuality also expresses the extent to which a consensual person presents the priorities of others at the expense of his own, and the extent to which he is sympathetic and concerned with what others feel about him. (2)
The opposite of the consociational trait (who scores a low percentage in the consociational trait on the scale of the five personality traits) is disagreeable. Mostly people are hostile and inconsistent. (2)
According to studies of personality psychology and the success of marital and emotional relationships, compatibility is one of the very good features of emotional relationships, which is considered one of the factors of happiness and satisfaction, as individuals who live with couples with compatible traits express greater happiness and satisfaction with their marital and emotional lives.
And quite the opposite, as the trait of hostility in one of the spouses is a dangerous indicator of the approaching end or failure of the relationship and its lack of continuity, because the hostile person does not take into account the desires of his partner, and he tends to insult, abuse, wound and abuse.
Compatibility, on the other hand, is inversely related to the material return that an individual derives from work or a job, as well as in terms of promotion and positions, because the consensual person refuses to be praised for his achievements and refuses to take credit for himself, which makes the evaluation system neglect his role and importance, and the person Consensual avoids negotiating for a material increase, financial reward, or promotion. (3)
Exploitation occurs when the consensual person is subjected to a request from one of them without finding lines of defense to resist their requests. The exclusion of what others desire, as shown in the following figure:
In order to transcend the ills of excessive consociationalism and its negative burdens, this does not mean that we are hostile to others.
If you are a consensual person and are looking for a solution to your excess consensuality, then the word you are looking for here is assertiveness, and firmness is the ability and skill to negotiate and express your true opinion in a way that does not harm others and does not make you succumb to doing what you do not want to do.
Assertiveness is the ability to express what's on your mind in a rational, diplomatic, and non-embarrassing way to the other person.
Note that assertive communication is located in an area between hostile communication and submissive communication to others. It is a solution that satisfies all parties in most cases, and does not injure or harm them, but it shows what is right and wrong, responsibilities and duties, and the limits of each of the parties to the discussion.
What can I do so that others do not take advantage of my kindness and kindness to them?
In general, the therapeutic steps to correct excessive harmonic behavior through behavioral, linguistic and communicative exercises, and these steps can be summarized in five main points:
First: Understand your compatibility traits
Like any other problem, the solution always starts from identifying the causes of the problem and deepening its understanding. Defining the problem is half the solution. But this task will be a little critical, the culprit here is you, your character. The solution requires some boldness in recognizing that many of the problems that happen to us, we ourselves may be the main cause of them, for the qualities of kindness and kindness are considered good virtues for their owners, but the problem lies when we use these virtues as a means of self-justification for ourselves when we are unable to take our rights or claim them We replace it by convincing ourselves that we gave it up of our own free will because we are good people.
The therapeutic step begins by alerting you to your own steps, the way you respond and the way you interact with others, when you can monitor this aspect of your personality, and when you notice how you involve yourself by not revealing your true desires.
This good aspect of your personality (kindness) is good in specific living areas, but it itself brings burdens and damages to you when you apply it in other areas, such as the job or in front of strangers or unrelated friends, so you are unable to refuse their requests or confront them when they perform behaviors that harm you. Personally.
Second: Practice negotiating in your home
The main problem you have, as a consensual person, is that you are afraid of getting involved in disagreements and discussions that may turn into conflicts, because you think that turning a discussion into a problem will make you look embarrassing or ugly.
Therefore, you must learn negotiation skills, specifically learning to continue the discussion to communicate what you want without getting excited or rushing to end the discussion and give up what you want to say.
For this to happen, there are three key skills that you can train yourself in at home in order to develop your debating abilities:
Define your order accurately
You must know exactly what you want.
When you are confident of your conviction, desire, or need, you will stand up for it, and you will not find an escape or a way out to justify for yourself to abandon the discussion about it.
From here learn to say what you want to discuss with three or five clear and specific words (I want to replace this piece, please) without saying broad, general, random and redundant words, as hesitation and lack of clarity reduce the chances of others responding to your requests or desires It also makes you vulnerable to accusation and exploitation under the pretext that you don't even know what you want.
Create a virtual situation and practice with your brother
This step is done by asking your best friend or brother to have a virtual discussion with you about a business issue.
In this case, you have to challenge yourself, ask your friend or brother with whom you are training to put counter-arguments for you, in order to learn the quick wit to evoke immediate responses when your points are met with criticism and rejection.
It is not enough to practice negotiating in your mind, but you must learn it by confronting someone other than yourself (such as saying to your brother I want to ask you to return a pen that you just took from me, and resisting the arguments I put for you in a blunt way, so that I learn to debate for a long time).
Equipped with multiple arguments and different possibilities (what do I do when my first argument fails?)
This step depends on learning to go beyond one-step thinking, as the first argument of a consensual person often fails, he thinks only one step, such as: I should ask him to close the window because I'm cold. And when he does this and fails to fulfill his request, he does not find other options for confrontation because he is a consensual person and fears excessive urgency and fears getting involved in a dispute. So one must have more than one justification and way to enforce his request (eg: I will ask him to close the window, or I will ask the office manager to close the window rather than the person sitting next to it).
Third: Learn to say “no” when you feel that you have to.
Consensualists are overburdened because they are afraid to answer “no” so as not to hurt the feelings of others and not get involved with them in a dispute or argument in front of the rest of the people around them. (4) He must be understood. Consensualists say that they cannot please everyone all the time, and that to be likable does not mean that they destroy their own health and personal interests to gain the admiration of others.
The important thing here is to balance the demands made from them and their current capabilities in terms of time, skill, money, psychological and physical readiness, and so on.
Fourth: Learn the techniques of assertive communication.
It may seem like a simple idea, but it is effective. Believe it or not, a large part of the problems of compatibility may be linguistic or communicative.
More precisely, consociationalists may overcome their kindness problems by replacing their daily answers with other answers. (5) They are communicative and language exercises that teach you how to replace answers that subject you to submissiveness with assertive, (say and don't say) answers.
At the end of this article, you will find in the "Tools that will help you" section, two tables that explain some of these exercises to you.
Fifth: Draw healthy boundaries
In his book "All the waters are the color of drowning", Emil Cioran says: No one can protect his solitude if he does not know how to be hateful with people6.
This may sound a bit harsh, but it's the start of an important rule of thumb about setting healthy boundaries.
Healthy boundaries are those where you keep your distance from others in a way that ensures you are safe to say what you really want without suffering serious consequences.
The problem lies when professional or occupational relationships are mixed with family relationships, and family relationships with job relationships, as well as when we make the boss at work a father.
Yes, this may be useful for some time, but it will return to infiltrate your privacy and waste your time and desires in many times, so drawing boundaries always preserves relationships more than they ruin them, contrary to what is expected.
Tools that will help you
Table (1): Practice assertive response techniques
A table showing you how to answer questions that try to take advantage of your politeness and kindness
Practice the schedule well, and entrust yourself every week with one of the points (such as intrusion), and try to notice every question that tries to exploit you, and use the optimal answer as suggested by the psychologist (6), and then watch how much you improve in communication, and how far you get rid From the burdens of questions that try to embarrass or exploit you.
Table (2): Practice assertive communication techniques
As mentioned above, the exploitation of your kindness by others depends primarily on the way you communicate, as it happens through our loose answers that we create open windows for others to break in, because in the end others interact with the answers you give them.
The following is a table that shows you the most important pleasant communication mistakes, which, by changing them to assertive communication methods, will draw healthy boundaries with others in a way that achieves what you want and achieves for others what they want in a mutually satisfactory manner.
Memorize the table below (7), and try each week to practice replacing one box of wrong communication with assertive communication, and so on until you have done the rest of the table.
Book: The Power of Positive Rejection - William Urey
It often happens that our answer is “no” to many of the tasks that are asked of us, but we are afraid to answer “no” for fear of the feelings of others, or for fear of their power and oppression, or for fear of losing their satisfaction with us or losing the gains that our good relationship with them gives us. .
But how can you say “no” in a lively and positive way, without the other feeling attacked or rejected, and without the situation or the request becoming a point of conflict and disagreement?
The anthropologist and researcher in the field of negotiation and understanding presents his book "The Power of Positive Rejection", where he explains in detail how answering "no" by refusal can be a way to develop our relationships with others, and a way to preserve our own health and personal will.
Sources
(1) Psychology Applied to Modern Life Adjustment in the 21st Century. Wayne Weiten, Dana S. Dunn, Elizabeth Yost Hammer.
(2) Personality psychology : domains of knowledge about human nature. Randy J. Larsen.
(3) Do Nice Guys—and Gals—Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on Income. Judge, TA, Livingston, BA, & Hurst, C.
(4) The power of positive rejection. William Urey. Jarir Bookstore (2009)
(5) Develop Your Assertiveness. Sue Bishop.
(6) The waters are all the color of drowning, Emil Cioran. Camel Publications (2013)
(7) Asserting yourself: A practical guide for positive change. Bower, SA, & Bower, G. H