The Hidden Risks of Being Overly Nice

2024-11-27 ~ adminlife

Why Being “Too Nice” Can Backfire

Kindness and decency are universally valued traits, especially in a world that often feels divisive and contentious. In times of conflict, generous and kind individuals help create a much-needed sense of connection and compassion. A truly nice person brings a positive impact on others, providing relief from negativity and fostering goodwill.

Confidence in your abilities to go after your goals can sometimes be difficult to find or keep.

It can sometimes take time to discover the confidence you have inside you. This can be especially true if you are trying something new.

I have a program that can help you to discover what is holding you back from achieving your goals as well as help you set an attainable goal related to where you are in your life and where you are trying to be.

This program also works with you to build up your confidence in being able to reach your goal.

You can find out more about this program at Confidology, a funny name but a serious program.

You can contact me to talk about this or any other aspect of confidence and success at michael@coachmichaelw.com

Visit the site and read through the program description.

If you are not ready to commit to a full program, I have a self-paced course on Udemy that may be of interest. You can find out about the course and register at Confidence and Motivation Development and Maintenance

However, being “too nice” can sometimes come at a personal cost. When kindness becomes excessive, it can make you vulnerable to being taken advantage of or hinder your personal growth. Excessive niceness often has hidden downsides, which generally fall into two categories:

1. The risk of others exploiting your good nature.
2. Niceness as a mask that limits self-growth.

If you find yourself constantly prioritizing others, here are some potential risks of being overly nice.

The Hidden Dangers of Being Excessively Nice

1. Bottling Up Resentment

When you’re always available and overly generous with your time, you can easily forget your own needs. Constantly putting others first can lead to unexpressed resentment. But because overly nice people typically avoid conflict, this resentment often goes unspoken, leading to a cycle of frustration that harms self-esteem.

2. Attracting the Wrong People

Overly nice people sometimes attract individuals who seek to benefit without reciprocation. These relationships can become one-sided, where people only approach you when they want something. Over time, this pattern leads to disappointment as you realize that some of these people don’t have your best interests at heart.

3. Losing Respect and Trust

Respect and trust are often earned, not given automatically. Being overly accommodating can cause people to undervalue you, leading them to take you for granted. If people sense that you won’t confront them over disrespectful behaviour, they may continue to disregard your feelings, leaving you feeling hurt and confused.

4. Developing Unrealistic Expectations

Naturally kind people may expect others to mirror their level of care and understanding. However, assuming everyone has the same intentions can lead to disappointment. Clear communication about your needs and boundaries is essential to avoid frustration and resentment when others fail to meet unspoken expectations.

5. Being Taken Advantage of by Others

People, even without bad intentions, can act opportunistically. If you fail to set boundaries, they may take advantage of your generosity. For someone who sees the good in everyone, it can be painful when others exploit your kindness, leaving you feeling misunderstood or hurt.

Protecting Yourself While Staying Kind

Being kind is a wonderful quality, but it’s essential to balance kindness with self-respect and boundaries. Here are a few tips to help you maintain your kindness while protecting your well-being:

Practice self-love first: Prioritize your own needs and establish your personal boundaries.
Be clear in communication: Let others know what you expect in relationships to avoid misunderstandings.
Respect and love yourself: Self-respect is the foundation for building healthy relationships that benefit everyone involved.

Being genuinely kind can positively impact those around you — but remember to take care of yourself along the way. With boundaries in place, kindness will enrich both your life and the lives of others.

To talk about any aspect of success or working with a Life Coach to help you to achieve success, you can book a 30-minute call by clicking on the blue button below.

Don’t try to do all of this by yourself, ask and receive the guidance that can get you moving towards your own success.

Nothing happens until action is taken.

To your success.

Michael

P.S Don’t forget to visit Confidology to learn more about the program. If you are not ready to commit to a full program, I have a self-paced course on Udemy that may be of interest. You can find out about the course and register at Confidence and Motivation Development and Maintenance

P.P.S if you want to find out more about my programs just check out the site Confidence and Life Coaching

P.P.P.S. If you enjoy reading these articles on my blog, I have more books that have more of this type of information that you can find out more about at Books to Read. You can buy these ebooks at many on-line book stores. The links to the bookstores are at the link above.

If you have an Amazon Kindle account, there are different books at Amazon – Michael W (author)

Photo by Deepak Gupta on Unsplash

Cultivating Self-Love for a Successful Life

2024-11-01 ~ adminlife

Self-love is a powerful foundation for personal and professional success, influencing how you approach challenges, relationships and self-improvement. When you genuinely value yourself, you’re more resilient, motivated and confident in achieving your dreams. Here, we’ll explore practical ways to nurture self-love, from positive self-talk to healthy boundaries, to empower you on the journey toward a fulfilling life.

Confidence in your abilities to go after your goals can sometimes be difficult to find or keep.

It can sometimes take time to discover the confidence you have inside you. This can be especially true if you are trying something new.

This program also works with you to build up your confidence in being able to reach your goal.

You can find out more about this program at Confidology, a funny name but a serious program.

You can contact me to talk about this or any other aspect of confidence and success at michael@coachmichaelw.com

Visit the site and read through the program description.

Appreciating Your Strengths: Building the Foundation for Self-Love

Recognizing your strengths is essential to developing self-love. When you focus on your abilities and achievements, you create a positive self-image that motivates you to aim higher.

1. Acknowledge Your Accomplishments

Take time to reflect on your achievements, no matter how small they may seem. This habit allows you to see tangible evidence of your abilities and progress. Regularly acknowledging these wins builds a positive self-image, fostering a sense of pride in what you’ve accomplished.

2. Practice Positive Self-Talk

Your inner dialogue has a tremendous impact on self-love. Reframe negative thoughts with compassionate and supportive language. For example, instead of criticizing a mistake, remind yourself that everyone makes them and that each one is a learning experience. Positive self-talk helps reinforce your self-worth and resilience, making it easier to tackle challenges.

3. Celebrate Your Uniqueness

Everyone has a unique set of skills, interests and qualities. Embrace what makes you different, as these attributes are what make you valuable. Celebrate your individuality by leaning into your strengths and pursuing goals that align with your true self. Embracing your uniqueness is a powerful way to nurture self-love and confidence.

Prioritizing Self-Care: Physical and Mental Well-being

Self-care is an essential aspect of self-love, reflecting a commitment to your well-being. When you prioritize your physical and mental health, you strengthen the foundation of self-love.

1. Develop a Consistent Self-Care Routine

Self-care doesn’t have to be complex; even small daily habits can make a difference. Whether it’s starting your day with a mindfulness exercise, engaging in a hobby or taking a moment to stretch, prioritize activities that relax and rejuvenate you. A consistent self-care routine reminds you that your well-being matters.

2. Practice Physical Wellness

Physical health is intertwined with mental well-being. Regular exercise, a balanced diet and adequate sleep are critical components of self-care that support both your body and mind. When you take care of your physical health, you’re signalling to yourself that you value and respect your body.

3. Manage Stress Effectively

Managing stress is a key part of self-care, allowing you to maintain mental clarity and resilience. Engage in activities like deep breathing exercises, meditation or journaling to process and relieve stress. Effective stress management helps you maintain a balanced outlook and reinforces a sense of control over your well-being.

Setting Boundaries: Essential for Healthy Relationships and Self-Respect

Setting boundaries is a powerful act of self-love. By defining what’s acceptable for your emotional and mental space, you cultivate respect for yourself and encourage others to respect you as well.

1. Identify Your Needs and Limits

Begin by understanding your personal needs and limits, such as how much time you need for yourself or when you feel emotionally drained. When you know your boundaries, it’s easier to communicate them to others, fostering relationships based on mutual respect.

2. Practice Saying ‘No’ When Necessary

Learning to say ‘no’ is a valuable skill in maintaining your boundaries. While it might feel uncomfortable at first, saying ‘no’ helps you avoid overcommitment and preserves your energy for what truly matters. By valuing your time and well-being, you reinforce your self-worth.

3. Maintain Relationships That Uplift You

Surrounding yourself with supportive and positive people is essential for self-love. Cultivate relationships that encourage growth, respect and positivity. Healthy relationships reinforce your self-belief, while toxic or negative ones can erode your confidence.

Embracing Growth: Continuous Improvement as Self-Love

Self-love doesn’t mean settling for where you are; it also involves a commitment to growth. Pursuing personal development allows you to reach new heights, reinforcing your belief in your abilities.

1. Seek Continuous Learning

Commit to lifelong learning by reading books, taking courses or engaging in new hobbies. Each skill you acquire enhances your self-belief and sense of accomplishment, showing you that you have the capacity to grow and adapt.

2. Accept Constructive Feedback with Positivity

Constructive feedback provides valuable insights for growth. Instead of viewing feedback as criticism, approach it with an open mind and a willingness to improve. This mindset enhances your confidence and helps you view self-improvement as a positive journey.

3. Set Personal Goals That Reflect Your Values

Goal-setting is an essential part of self-love, particularly when the goals align with your values and passions. Setting meaningful goals and working toward them reinforces your commitment to a life that fulfills you. As you make progress, you’ll experience a boost in self-confidence and satisfaction.

Cultivating a Hopeful and Resilient Mindset

A hopeful outlook empowers you to stay positive and resilient in the face of adversity. Self-love means believing in your potential, even when times are tough.

1. Focus on Gratitude

Gratitude shifts your perspective to the positive aspects of your life. Begin each day by acknowledging something you’re grateful for, whether it’s supportive friends, a safe home or simply a sunny day. Gratitude keeps you grounded in the present and reinforces a mindset of appreciation.

2. Embrace Setbacks as Learning Opportunities

Challenges are inevitable, but how you respond to them shapes your resilience. Embrace setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow rather than as failures. This shift in perspective helps you maintain a positive outlook, reinforcing your ability to overcome obstacles.

3. Cultivate Hope and Optimism

Hope and optimism are essential for resilience, helping you maintain motivation in the face of challenges. By focusing on what you can achieve rather than dwelling on limitations, you strengthen your ability to persevere. A hopeful mindset is a powerful form of self-love, reminding you that brighter days lie ahead.

Self-Love: A Lifelong Journey Toward Fulfillment

Self-love is an ongoing journey, requiring intentionality, patience and practice. By appreciating your strengths, practising self-care, setting boundaries and embracing growth, you lay the groundwork for a life filled with purpose and achievement. Each step in cultivating self-love empowers you to live authentically, approach challenges with resilience and pursue goals with confidence.

Start Prioritizing Self-Love Today

Building a life you love starts with valuing yourself deeply. Self-love enables you to take on the world with confidence and resilience, knowing that you deserve happiness and success. Embrace this journey of self-discovery and growth, practicing self-love each day. As you do, you’ll find that the possibilities for fulfillment and accomplishment are endless. Begin today — take the first step toward a life where you thrive, grow and achieve with a strong foundation of self-love.

To talk about any aspect of success or working with a Life Coach to help you to achieve success, you can book a 30-minute call by clicking on the blue button below.

Don’t try to do all of this by yourself, ask and receive the guidance that can get you moving towards your own success.

Nothing happens until action is taken.

To your success.

Michael

P.P.S if you want to find out more about my programs just check out the site Confidence and Life Coaching

If you have an Amazon Kindle account, there are different books at Amazon – Michael W (author)

Photo by Microsoft Edge on Unsplash

Why you should consider using a life coach

2020-11-06 ~ adminlife

While many people may be hesitant to go to a life coach because of a misconception that it is the same as getting therapy, which has a negative stigma in many societies, a life coach guides you to achieving your goals.

Using a life coach can be very effective. The International Coaching Federation has conducted a study which found that 99% of the people that were interviewed, reported that they had a rewarding experience by working with a life coach, and 96% said they would do it again. Another 65% said that their performance at work improved and 80% said that their self-confidence had improved.

So how can working with a life coach help you?

Many people report that coaching had a positive impact on their career as well as their lives. They saw improvement in:

establishing their goal and taking action
becoming more self-reliant
they saw their job satisfaction grow
they took on more responsibility for their actions
the worked easily with others.

You can figure out what you want to do with your life by yourself, but working with a life coach gives you the support that can aid you to get where you want to go without wasting time and money.

Here are some signs that you should consider working with a life coach.

You feel lost – if you are feeling lost and confused, a life coach can help you to find your way to your new life.

You are doubting yourself – a life coach can help you find clarity in this confusing world. You may know deep inside of you what you want but you are confused in how to make those goals happen. A life coach can help you to realize your goals.

Your path to your vision is not clear – you may have a goal or vision but you do not know how to achieve it. A life coach will guide you through the steps to create your plan of action to get you where you want to be. Sometimes all you need is organization and clarity.

You don’t always follow through with your requirements to achieve your goals – a life coach keeps you accountable with your obligations and keeps you motivated to reach your goals.

You tend to procrastinate – this can tie into the above reason on following through. If you want to achieve your goals you need discipline and you need to take action. A life coach can help you to make the changes to your behaviour and break the procrastination habit.

You get stressed easily – without any support you become frustrated and you waste a lot of energy when trying to reach your goals. A life coach can help you to relax and also give you a clear path to your goals.

You lack self-confidence – a life coach can help you to develop and maintain your self-confidence. A life coach can make your life better and your dreams and goals to come true.

It may be time to hire a life coach if any of the above reasons apply to you and your life. Successful people have used and continue to use life coaches. When you have a life coach to lean on and support you, you will get to where you want to be more quickly and efficiently.

To your success

Michael

P.S. if after reading this article, you want to investigate using a Life Coach yourself, contact me at michael@youaresuccesslifecoach.com for a 30-minute strategy session where you can learn more about how we can work together to help you achieve your life’s goals and start living the best year of your life.

P.P.S. Sometimes it seems impossible to get yourself going towards your goals. If you believe in yourself, this can be a lot easier. This book may help you to get that understanding that you need to start believing in yourself more.

You Have To Believe In Yourself To Be Happy

Feature Photo by Bich Tran from Pexels

Your Life Coach – Your Ally

2014-01-052014-01-05 ~ adminlife

“A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.” – John Wooden

In life we sometimes get stuck or feel that our progress has been sidetracked. In order to get motivated and move forward again, we may need an ally. Someone to help us to see what we can do to get unstuck. A life coach.

The article below gives a lot of information about the personal life coach.

Michael Wilkovesky

The Personal Life Coach as Modern-Day Ally – by Cameron Powell

A personal life coach is part of a profession whose name is new but whose role is as old as recorded history. Throughout history, successful people have had the self-awareness and emotional intelligence to ally themselves with friends and confidants, advisors and partners, mentors and guides, peers and supporters of their enterprises, consultants, and, in athletic endeavors, even coaches. The synonyms for those who care for us and are committed to our growth and success are as plentiful as mythology’s hero of a thousand faces.

A COACH IS THE MODERN-DAY ALLY

Since we began to call it “coaching” in the mid-1980s, we now have “coaches,” who differ from the previous archetypal helpers in various ways. Yet those differences are precisely the source of the power and effectiveness that is causing more and more people to hire their own chief of staff.

Clients hire coaches for support and comradeship in reaching goals in areas as diverse as business, executive, leadership, career, financial, health and relationships. Many coaches offer specialties such as spiritual coaching, parenting coaching, and individual speech coaching. The coached client sets better goals, takes more action, makes better decisions, and more fully uses his or her natural strengths.

Coaches enhance the traditional functions of friends, mentors, or advisors by adding several effective features:

A structured relationship with clear goals
Advanced techniques and procedures designed to effect change
Motivated clients who know they want something, even if they’re not yet sure what it is
A coach skilled in ferreting out a client’s true goals and identifying how the client can most effectively use his or her natural talents to reach them

Sometimes coaches will just help you over that cliff. But only after you’ve told them you’re ready, looked back, and given them the thumbs-up sign.

A COACH IS NOT AN EXPERT IN ALL AREAS

Coaches presume you are the expert on you. Unlike other practices (consulting, some fields of therapy), a coach does not need to be an expert in the field of your goals in order to coach you on the process of achieving those goals – in fact, a generalist can sometimes help you more than any specialist. That’s because coaches are experts in process — in the methodology of asking powerful questions that help you to clarify your values, goals, and what blocks you. And coaches are experts in defining, leading you to, and declaring the attainment (or lack thereof) of outcomes. They don’t need to be experts in subjects like your psychology or even human psychology, though many are. If expertise matters at all in a given situation, the expertise is yours, the client’s.

COACHES TEND TO BE EMOTIONALLY INTELLIGENT AND GOOD WITH PEOPLE

Beyond commitment, coaches bring critical attitudes and traits: emotional intelligence, ferocious listening skills, proven psychological techniques, people smarts, and, if you hire right, a sense of humor. Coaches perform assessments of skills and aptitudes, of course, but they also draw out what would give you fulfillment. Most importantly for life and career coaching clients, coaches dig into what clients have always (often since childhood) enjoyed, but too often overlooked. This is just one of the ways we whittle away at who you might reflexively think you are in order to expose the real you.

We know how to help you model the attributes of people you consider successful until that modeling manifest as your new reality. We can show you techniques of mental imagery and construction of effective, positive affirmations. We’re alert to linguistic patterns indicating commitment – or the lack of it. We can spot speech patterns that signal avoidance, resignation, defeatism, and unexamined assumptions and obstructions that impede success.

We also work at converting clients’ unconscious negativity and subtle patterns of defeatist thinking into conscious empowerment. We do this using various methods, including some drawn from consulting and psychology. One is Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), a series of techniques and procedures for coding human behavior in order to assist clients in understanding what they do and how they do it when they do it excellently. Another is cognitive-behavioral therapy. We use framing and metaphors to set up worldviews in speaking to you, and we employ reframing when we see that a worldview (or set of assumptions) expressed by you is restrictive and self-limiting.

We try to apply the best of science and people skills to real caring about how you fare.

• Social Contract. Coaching relies on one of the most powerful forces in the world: the power of the social contract and commitment. For the same reason that public marriage vows tend to keep people together longer than they would in its absence, for the same reason we try harder to keep New Year’s resolutions we have shared with others, coaching is effective because you have made a promise to someone other than yourself – a public or social contract.

• A coach has you as his full-time job. Unlike even a friend, a coach is wholly and formally committed and dedicated to your success, uses rigorous and proven training and techniques to assist you in getting there, and will always (not just most of the time) speak the truth to and challenge you when you could most benefit from it.

• Sometimes we want help but don’t need a therapist: a coach drives a future of high functioning. Unlike a therapist in a strictly counseling format, a coach focuses not on the past but on the future, and supports you not in analyzing dysfunction but in functioning at an even higher level than you already are. For more on this important topic, see our article on “The Difference Coaching and Counseling” at http://www.ferocecoaching.com/coaching-and-counseling.html.

• A coach leads you to answers that are often inside you. Unlike a consultant, who purports to be a subject-matter expert and creates most of any plan of action, a coach is an expert on, if anything, process and motivation, and simply guides you in the creation of most of your own plan of action. We believe and have seen that people are fundamentally creative and resourceful; our job is to show you how to tap into that creativity and those resources.

We bring to the task the following guiding principles:

A posture of non-judgmental awareness, or unconditional positive regard, or, more simply, acceptance of you
Authenticity, and honesty coupled with sensitivity
Compassion-in-action, and empathy

Source:

Cameron Powell, a writer and coach, is also a professional ally and strategic partner who, as a life coach, when his clients most need it, will kick their butts into action now and then. To learn more about how he gets people unstuck and moving forward in their lives and careers as a Personal Life Coach , visit his site.