The Cost of Being Nice

Being nice will always cost you more than you think. On the surface, it might seem like it’s no big deal. You can do it, so why not do it? 

Take these four real situations from clients of mine:

A woman gets stopped by her colleague as she’s about to leave work for home. The colleague says, “hey, I know you’re heading out, but can I just pick your brain about this presentation I have tomorrow?” Fifteen minutes later, the colleague is still talking. 

A mother tells her adult daughter that she’s paying for the daughter’s honeymoon as a wedding gift, and that the “best part” is that the family is also going on the trip. The woman feels guilty that she wants to tell her mother this doesn’t feel like a gift.

A woman shows up to visit her elderly parents for the weekend and discovers that her sibling is leaving their children there to be babysat by her while the sibling attends a wedding over the weekend. The sibling says, “hope it’s OK?” The woman says, “it’s fine.”

A woman drives 1,400 miles to go home for Christmas for four days and when she arrives, mother announces that they’re driving four hours further north to spend the holiday at a cabin. She feels bad about disappointing her mother if she says she doesn’t want to go.

In all of these cases, the women in question really struggled with the situation. They had intense discomfort at the thought of honoring their own needs and speaking how they really felt. And because of a lifetime of being nice and people pleasing, it felt much easier to simply go along - a fawn response many overfunctioning women know well. They calculated (often correctly) that there would be a cost to setting a boundary.

Yes, the cost of the boundary that each of these women could have set would have likely been that the other person would be disappointed at the very least. In some cases, the person in question might have even retaliated with intense passive aggressiveness. So it seems much easier to simply say, “fine” when it’s not really fine at all.

Also, in each of these cases, the women wrongly assess that going along doesn’t really cost them anything. It actually costs them plenty.

What does being nice cost you?

The cost: Losing yourself

Over a lifetime of being nice, you gradually lose touch with what you need and want — a slow, steady self-abandonment. It becomes easy to disappear in the sea of everyone else’s needs and desires. You become used to acquiescing and being “the easy one.” And while many times you are actually ok with going along, there are other times when you know you need or want something different but you don’t even know how to make that known.

The cost: Resentment

Being nice all the time will build up resentment. Guaranteed. You probably know that already. You’ve swallowed so many ‘nos’, and buried so many conversations that you wish you could have had about why something bothered you. All of those unspoken words and feelings you’ve pushed down will build up inside you. 

The cost: Inauthentic relationships

Down the road you may very well become a bit of a two-faced person. You act one way towards people but behind their backs you actually think and feel something different about your interactions with them. Maybe you vent it out with friends or your partner, but you hold off from telling people directly how you really feel and what you really need.

The cost: Your health

If you haven’t paid attention to your body, you may one day be surprised at how much all of that swallowed frustration built up inside you. Two common patterns I see in stored resentments: migraines and jaw problems. But there are certainly many more ways in which swallowed anger affects your health. 

The cost: Your happiness

Being nice means you regularly prioritize other people’s feelings over your own needs. While in the moment, this may seem fine, over time you will grow in dissatisfaction with how unbalanced many of your relationships seem to feel.

The antidote: Kindness all around

Reclaiming your power and sovereignty does not mean you become hard, which is what most  “nice” women think is required. “I don’t want to be a b****.” 

But no, the answer is not becoming tough and heartless. The answer is kindness ALL around, including kindness towards yourself - kindness that can still hold boundaries.

Kindness is able to say, “I’m really sorry that this will be a bummer for you, but I just can’t do that.”

When you are kind and able to care for your needs, you stop treating people like they’re frail little birds that will be crushed if you disappoint them. Perhaps, by taking care of your own needs and feelings, you give them permission to do the same for themselves. 

You act like an adult and you give them ample room and permission to be adults too.

As I like to tell my clients: Your highest good will never contradict anybody else’s highest good. In fact, it will support it.

Are you an overfunctioning, nice person? What is being nice costing you?

If you’d like to dive into this much deeper, join us for the Good Girl Reset: Four weeks, lots of support, community, deep healing and action-taking. It’s for overfunctioning women who have a hard time with anger and difficulty prioritizing their needs and feelings.

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