Being Too Nice Got Me Into A Lot Of Trouble—I’m Done Being A People Pleaser

Life’s too short to be anything but positive so I’ve always gone out of my way to be extra kind to everyone I meet. However, there have been times in my life where I’ve been too nice and I’ve ended up letting people walk all over me. Needless to say, those were NOT positive experiences, but at least I’ve learned from them. Here’s where I went wrong:

1. I LISTENED TO THE HATERS. When people have told me that I was too fat, too ugly, or didn’t have a brain cell, I wasted time and energy believing them instead of telling them to GTFO of my life. I didn’t have the self-confidence to challenge the negativity back then and simply ended up accepting whatever the haters said to be true. It’s not right. You should never allow other people to form incorrect assumptions about who you are without letting them know they’re entirely wrong.
2. I HUNG OUT WITH TOXIC PEOPLE. There have been several occasions in which I’ve spent time with people who weren’t good for me. They wanted to be destructive, do things I didn’t particularly want to do and thought it was funny to be mean to other people instead of anything but kind. Being a nice person, I massively struggled with peer pressure when I was younger. I still do sometimes! Nowadays, it’s less about skipping classes and more about having an extra drink on a night out when I’ve already had too many. I’m getting better at speaking my mind.
3. I ALLOWED MYSELF TO BE INFLUENCED BY OTHERS. Instead of not doing the things I didn’t want to do, I used to go along with what people expected of me. What about my own thoughts, desires, and beliefs? Why did I think they didn’t matter? Just because they were different didn’t mean that they weren’t important. A key lesson I’ve learned in life recently is that it’s alright to disagree with people. It doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person—it just means you have your own judgment and your own way of doing things. People should respect that.
4. I WAS SCARED OF CONFRONTATION. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been terrified of confrontation. It comes with the territory of being a nice person—all you want to do is please people no matter what. Even if I massively disagreed with something my best friend said or did, I never said anything in the past. I became a “yes” person for a large part of my life, but I’m slowly realizing that people aren’t going to think less of me just because I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I can confront people without it turning into an argument, and it certainly clears the air between us.
5. I WAS TERRIFIED OF LETTING ANYBODY DOWN. Even if situations weren’t convenient or didn’t tie in with what I wanted to do, I went along with them anyway. I sacrificed my own needs and wishes for the sake of someone else. Whether this was a boyfriend, a friend or a stranger in the street, I was too nice to cancel that lunch date, or refuse to pick someone up from work when they asked even though they worked all the way across town. I’ve just nodded along because that’s what I thought I had to do, even though I was fully entitled to say no. These days, I do.
6. I LET GUYS TREAT ME LIKE CRAP AND DIDN’T CALL THEM OUT. Because I’ve only just learned to defend myself in the last couple of years, guys used to take advantage of my good nature. They dropped me for other girls, the girls then dropped them, and they picked me back up—and I let them. I didn’t question them when they didn’t text me back for days, I just accepted whatever BS excuse they came up with. There’s being nice and then there’s being a doormat. I now realize that there’s a key difference between the two!
7. I GOT CHEATED ON. The fact that I’ve been so lenient with guys has meant that I’ve been treated poorly at times. I even allowed cheating once—but let me tell you, I won’t allow it again! Sure enough, it happened another time after that even though he promised it wouldn’t. The bottom line is: I was too nice about it the first time so he thought he could get away with it again. It was my fault, really—not my fault that he’d cheated again but my fault that I believed him when he said it was a one-off occurrence.
8. I MADE BAD DECISIONS. One of these bad decisions included cheating on an ex-boyfriend. I didn’t really want to do it because I knew it was wrong, plus I’d been cheated on myself and didn’t want another person to go through the agony I went through. But I did it mainly because I went along with what the guy I cheated with wanted. Don’t get me wrong, I completely own what I did, but maybe if I hadn’t been so nice, I would’ve stood up for myself and my relationship.
9. I JUST WANTED PEOPLE TO LIKE ME. The bottom line as to why I was too nice to people in the past who probably didn’t deserve it was that I just wanted to be liked. I wanted to have friends. I wanted to be that person everybody said was really great, but it came at a price. I wasn’t truly myself and I became someone I didn’t like at all. It’s much better to be yourself—a real person with conflicting thoughts, beliefs, and opinions rather than a robot who goes along with what everybody else thinks and does.