You Don’t Have to Be Nice All the Time
Do you feel like you have to be nice all the time?
Are you like me and feel like you have to put a smiley face at the end of every sentence sending a message over Slack or WhatsApp so that others won’t feel offended?
I realized that was a habit, and I felt like I wasn’t connecting with the other person. I wondered why.
Forced smiley faces were an attempt to make the message sound more welcoming. I realized that I wasn’t being real when I was doing that all the time.
The reaction wasn’t from my heart but from my head. A part of me knew that it’s the socially accepted way, and the motivation was that I wanted acceptance.
After realizing this, I tried saying things as I felt. I molded the messages to instill my feelings in them. This made my messages richer and real.
This didn’t mean that I was being serious all the time, but it meant that I was grasping the right timing to say certain things to evoke certain emotions.
So I started playing around with my tone, to make my messages sound different. I was reaping the benefits quite quickly.
I spoke in a tone with little emotion to convey seriousness, demanding respect; not to promote myself, but so that I spoke enough assertiveness so people would take it seriously when I’m speaking out of integrity and of goodwill.
Sometimes if we sound too loose, others can feel like they can get away not keeping a promise or a deadline. We don’t want to be too strict, but we do want to keep the right balance between being nice and being assertive.
