October 21, 2010

Savior Complex Anyone?

Here’s a fairytale gone badly, as it sometimes happens in real life: There was once a little girl who believed that all good things will come to her if she is really nice and always helps other people.

She was always there for her aging parents; she even refused a dream job because it was in another town and she didn’t want to move too far from her parents. She would always help her friends, lend them money, give them advice and get them out of trouble.

Her colleagues at work could always rely on her and she would often get behind on her projects to give them a hand with theirs. She also had this affinity towards guys with serious problems (jobless, alcohol abusing, emotionally imbalanced), the kind of guys that desperately needed help.

After about ten years of doing this, she felt miserably. She wasn’t getting the love, appreciation and recognition she wanted, most people had started taking all her help for granted, her life did not look the way she’d hoped it would.

When I discussed with her in our first communication coaching session, focused on identifying the key social skills to improve, after about 15 minutes of conversation, bells started ringing in my head going: “Savior complex full throttle!”

What Is The Savior Complex?

The savior complex is a psychological construct which makes a person feel the need to save other people. This person has a strong tendency to seek people who desperately need help and to assist them, often sacrificing their own needs for these people.

There are many sides to a savior complex and it has many roots. One of its fundamental roots, in my experience, consists in a limiting belief the savior person has that goes something like this:

“If I always help people in need, I will get their love and approval, and have a happy life.”

This is of course, a nice sounding fairytale.

Houston We Have a Problem

Often, in real life, a savior will have such an unassertive way of helping others that instead of becoming grateful, they get used to it and they expect it. They feel entitled to receive help from this person, simply because they need it and they’ve always got it.

On top of this, always putting other people’s needs first makes a savior not take care of their own needs. So while they may feel happy because they are helping others, at some level, they feel bitter and frustrated at the same time.

Reframing Nobility

Here’s where things get worse: many people with a savior complex I’ve met, although they realize at some point that they have a savior complex and it is not worth it for them, they will not try to combat it.

They’re not masochistic; they have another belief that even if being a savior will not get them the recognition they want and will not make them happy, it is the noble thing to do. They believe they are somehow better than others because they help people all the time without getting anything back.

Do you have any idea how dim-witted this is? There is nothing noble in sacrificing yourself for others while you are starving at a psychological level. If our ancestors would have willingly done so 50.000 years ago, our species would be extinct.

If you think you have a savior complex or at least something close to it, I believe the best thing you can do is to face up to the practical consequences in has in your life. Being a savior is neither noble nor practical.

Learn to give and to ask for what you want, to help and to be helped. This is the healthy way to use your people skills and to interact with others.

Image courtesy of Eneas

Filed Under: Attitude, Psychology, Relationships Tagged With: , , , 33 Comments
October 6, 2010

Regrets of the Dying / Living

I’ve recently read this article called ‘Regrets of the Dying’ which I found to be breathtaking. The author worked for many years in palliative care, with patients on the dying bed, and the article synthesizes the most common regrets these people had.

Not only that I enjoyed this article, but it also inspired me to write my own reply article to Regrets of the Dying, with a focus on the regrets of the living.

Regrets as Life Lessons

I’ve never worked with people on their dying bed and I hope I never will. However, as a communication coach and a (sometimes) social animal, I did have my share of interactions with people who:

  • Were getting old and becoming highly aware of the passing time;
  • Were getting sick and becoming highly aware of their fragility;
  • Were seriously contemplating their lives and deaths for some reason;

Being sort of a collector of life lessons and people skills wisdom, I was curious to find out what regrets these people had looking back at their lives, to extract valuable lessons. So I asked many of them about this and consequently, I got my data on regrets of the living who are contemplating dying.

The Essential Three Regrets

Since I have a passion for people skills, the regrets I focused on finding out were of course in the area of people skills and how these persons interacted with other human beings. Here are the 3 essential regrets I’ve discovered:

1. I wish I did what I wanted instead of what others wanted.

I had many people telling me things such as:

  • “I wish I didn’t study and work in Engineering because my family wanted me to do so. I whish I had chosen Sociology instead, which was my real passion.”
  • “I wish I didn’t get married so fast because all my friends were getting married and expected me to do the same soon. I wished I had stayed single longer.”

In moments of meaningful contemplation, almost all the people I know seem to discover that living the way they want is or would have been much more rewarding than living a life pleasing others, no matter who those others are.

2. I wish I didn’t take what others thought of me so seriously.

When people look back at how they have lived their lives, many tend to discover they’ve spent a lot of time worrying what others thought of them. Of course, they also discover this was a huge waste of time, because most worrying was pointless.

Knowing they are going to die soon gives people a lot of perspective on how important others’ opinions about them are. Almost every time, they discover they’re not important. You could probably piss off half the people you know and that still wouldn’t have any serious negative consequences on your life, so it wouldn’t really matter.

3. I wish I’d spent more with the most valuable people in my life.

A vast number of people discover they misallocated their time resources. They didn’t spend enough time interacting with the most valuable people in their lives and they’ve spent too much time interacting with part of the rest. Why? Because they falsely believed they didn’t have a choice.

If you think about it, your life is a sum of experiences. So the quality of your life is fundamentally the quality of those experiences. If you realize at a deep level that you’ve wasted your most valuable resource on secondhand human interactions, then no excuse for doing this seems sufficient.

There is one key difference between the regrets of the dying and the regrets of the living. The dying don’t really have the time left to correct their mistakes. They can only teach others valuable lessons, about people skills and life.

The living on the other hand do have the time; but they need to stop every once in a while, look back at their lives and ask themselves: Is this how I want to live the rest of my life?

Yes, I’m talking about me and you…

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Lifestyle Tagged With: , , 10 Comments
September 22, 2010

How Badly Do You Really Want It?

Take a moment to ask a person about their dreams and they’ll tell you about a fulfilling career, a great relationship, or their own island in the Pacific Ocean.

Take a couple more moments, as I often do in coaching, to ask them what they’re planning to do in order to make their dreams come true, and you’ll often hear the most unrealistic fairytales.

In my experience, most people are simply not willing to do the things which will realistically make them achieve their big dreams, things which happen to also be pretty hard. Thus, they automatically reject the most effective alternatives, they’re stuck with bad alternatives and they eventually abandon their dreams.

Real Stories

Here are three real examples, of people I’ve interacted with in the past few months:

  1. A person who wants to become a top professional in a Fortune 500 company, but is not willing to leave the small town they live in. Why? Because all their friends and relatives are there.
  2. A person who hates their job and wants to go into a new professional field, but is not willing to take the initial salary cut. Why? Because they would have to sell their fast car and take the subway for a while.
  3. A person who wants to have a successful business, but is not willing to work for 2 or 3 years at developing this business besides their regular job, until it becomes sustainable. Why? Too much work.

In all these examples, the path exists. The only problem is that the person is not willing to take the path. They don’t want to make the necessary compromises.

Quitting In the Face Of a Challenge

Now I’m not saying that all compromises are good. Sometimes, the effort to get to a certain place in your life is just not worth it by comparison with the benefits. However, this is not the case I’m talking about.

The real issue in my view is that many people aren’t willing to make even strategic compromises, which in the end would be worth it: the short-term compromise for the much bigger long-term benefits.

In my area of people skills, I see countless examples of people who aren’t willing to accept a challenge and put in the work to improve key people skills, even though they know how much it would enrich their lives. They stop at the level of: “Yeah, I know: I should probably work on this.” And they pay the price.

Reality Check

Let’s turn the discussion towards you. I invite you to look at your life, your career and your relationships, and ask yourself four magic questions:

  1. What are my biggest, boldest dreams in these areas?
  2. What are realistically, the things I need to do in order to achieve these dreams?
  3. Which of these things have I really accepted and decided to do?
  4. Which of these things am I really doing?

If you’re like 98% of people, you’ll find out that your deeds aren’t exactly aligned with your dreams. There is a gap between them which if you don’t face, can become as big as the Grand Canyon.

You may try to find shortcuts and creative solutions to achieve your goals with little effort or struggle. If your goals are high, chances are that you will not find them or they won’t work.

The roads to great places tend to have quite the bumps at some points. The best thing you can do is to accept the bumps in the road and go through them.

In a way, you could say that making those hard, initial compromises to get what will truly enrich your life is the easy way. I say this because if you look at things in perspective, you end up living a much more meaningful and joyful life.

However, the meaningful joyful life does imply an initial level of work, perseverance and sacrifice which only few people are willing to go through. But if you want something big and you want it badly enough, it makes sense to go beyond what most people are willing to do.

If you decide that you simply don’t want if badly enough, no problem. Just make sure that when you’re an old person and you tell stories to your grandchildren about your life, you don’t say that you could have been a great person but you didn’t have the opportunity. It was right there in your face!

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Success Tagged With: , , , 23 Comments
September 13, 2010

Dealing with Envious People

Reach a high enough level of success, skill or happiness, and you find out there are a lot of little green monsters around you, many of which you used to call friends, colleagues, partners or collaborators.

Since envy is a common and tricky interpersonal occurrence, I believe that dealing with envious people effectively is one of the important people skills to master. The primary thing to be acquainted with is not technique, but the fundamental philosophy of handling envious people. This is what I’ll focus this article on.

Reality Check

Before you think about dealing with envious people, answer this question: Are they really envious of you? You see, one thing I’ve noticed coaching people to improve their people skills is that in a many cases, envy is a false diagnostic.

What’s really going on is that a person has a better image of their skills or success than it’s warranted, so they act all arrogant and they expect special treatment. When this special treatment does not happen, the person wrongfully concludes that people are envious of them.

Here’s an example: a recruiter who believes they are the best recruiter in the company and should get the most important recruitment projects. However, their manager accurately believes that this person is not the best recruiter and gives them regular recruitment projects. So, the recruiter decides that their manager is just envious.

This is why it’s good to open your eyes really wide, notice what’s really going on and then decide if it’s a case of people green with envy or rather you being a self-righteous pain in the ass.

Putting Envious People in One of Two Boxes

If you decide that you’re dealing with real envy, the next thing I recommend is to think about those people who are envious of you and their real power to have a practical negative impact over you. Based on this, put them into one of two boxes:

  1. The Harmless Box. These are the people who besides making some bad jokes and not liking you very much don’t have the power or the guts to actually do something which can harm you.
  2. The Potential Threat Box. These are the people who do have enough power and nerve to potentially harm an aspect of your life, such as a work colleague who is very well trusted by all the top management in the company.

Ignore, Ignore, Ignore

The people in the first box are the people you just want to ignore. Let their jokes and passive-aggressive comments be like spears passing through water. There is no real harm they can do and often, if they see their comments have no effect on you, they eventually back off and continue hating you in silence.

By defending yourself in front of them or becoming passive-aggressive yourself, you are giving these people more importance than they deserve. Many of them are hopping this will happen, because they derive power not from real results, but from manipulative, power games.

Address Them Head On

The people in the second box, they are a different scenario. Since they can actually sabotage your career, relationships or life, you want to deal with them as soon as you notice comments or behaviors that suggest envy.

The first approach I recommend is talking to them. Point their conduct, express your honest opinions in a tactful way and seek to get their perspective on things. Yes, if your communication style is good enough, this does work and you can get the other person to back down.

If this approach fails, it’s time to put into play one of my favorite people skills: cutting this person’s power over you. This means you change your environment and your social dynamics so the envious person no longer has power to affect you.

One person I know who had an envious manager did so by becoming a good friend with and earning the trust of their manager’s manager. Another person with an envious manager did so by quitting their job and finding another one. Alternatives do exist; the essence is to act on them.

Envious people can be a bother, but they don’t have to. Know how to deal with them wisely, have the confidence and the people skills to do so, and they become insignificant; which is how I think envious people deserve to be.

Image courtesy of Darwin Bell

Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills, Relationships Tagged With: , , 42 Comments
September 5, 2010

When It Comes To Life Success, It’s All About Crafty Confidence – 5 Unorthodox Tips to Improve Yours

This is a guest post by Jonny Gibaud, co-founder of Emergency Food Storage. Jonny writes for the love of helping people, inspiring people and Katie Holmes. For articles on Life Design, Business and Sexy Money head over to his blog or check out his personal BrandBase.

Confidence Is The Winner

Confidence, more than ability, is usually what separates the winners from the losers and so what better trait to focus on for improving your confidence.

Some people are innately very confident and I am sure we all secretly harbor some resentment towards them because of it but even if confidence does not come easily to you, it can be improved. The 5 Unorthodox confidence boosting techniques we are going to focus on today are:

1. Wear Outrageous Underwear
2. Make Statements – Limit Explanation
3. Learn To Love Silence
4. Dress Dapper
5. Finish Well

1. Wear Outrageous Underwear

Sometimes the only thing you need to do to put your fears to rest is to have a secret that you know and no one else does. Imagining people in their underwear is yesterday’s news, wearing your own outrageous pair of skinnies under your clothes in the new future.

Having this little secret that you and only you in the room know will help you feel more relaxed and settled.

Personally, whenever giving a presentation or networking I like to wear a pair of silk black boxer shorts with bright red hearts on. (Yeah, too much information I know) but it is this little outrageous act that relaxes me and allows me to be at my most confident. Try it and see for yourself.

2. Make Statements – Limit Explanation

Confidence is all about perception and the quickest way to destroy that perception is to overly explain your job, idea, background, latest travels etc. Try to limit the amount of explaining you do unless specifically asked to.

Simply making a one sentence statement is incredibly powerful because it comes across that what you just said does not need explanation or proof.

“I’m a Personal Branding consultant who works with my clients to define and project a powerful Personal Brand both online and offline” is far more powerful then “I’m a Personal Branding consultant who works with my clients to define and project a powerful Personal Brand both online and offline. You need a personal brand because…..and I do this…and this for you…with this on the side”

3. Learn To Love Silence

Silence is your friend, my friend.

Most people hate silences and will do anything to avoid them, and it is for this reason that learning to love them can be so powerful.

Whether the silence falls within a natural lull in conversation or when contemplating an idea, people will normally try to jump in and fill it with repeated words, fill words or just plain nonsense. Anything but the silence.

If you can learn to enjoy the silences, not try to fill them and use the time to actually think (as opposed to having shifty, uncomfortable eyes) then the world is yours. People admire this trait and subconsciously attach a huge amount of self confidence to your character.

4. Dress Dapper

We all make snap decisions, we shouldn’t but we do. If you’re not looking your best, you will never feel and act your best.

Remember how confident you felt in a Tux or a beautiful dress. (Tux for boys, dress for girls. Behave people.) Clothes make a difference and nothing saps your confidence like turning up underdressed and not looking your best.

Take the time to make sure you look dapper and let your confidence expand from there. Your look is the foundation of your confidence.

5. Finish Well

It’s all in the finish people. Fortunately you can make a hash of almost everything but if you finish well, that has the major impact on what the audience takes away.

Focus on always finishing speeches, conversations and network events with a powerful and confident close. Practice and perfect it.

With a powerful close that will leave a great impression you can be safe in the knowledge than no matter how badly things go, people will tend to remember at least a confident close. This knowledge will also help you relax and in turn act more confident. It’s a great fulfilling circle of awesomeness.

Get Confident

So there you have it. Five very simple and effective techniques for improving your confidence. Go out and give them a try, I am sure you won’t be disappointed. Also, as a shameless plug for my new upcoming book keep and eye out for the launch of CHOOSE: Master of Money Or Slave To It.

Rock on all.

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Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills Tagged With: , , , , , , , 18 Comments
August 31, 2010

The Corporate Person’s Guide to Loosening Up

In my experience, there are a lot of stiff people in the corporate world. Their manner is so formal, their words are so contrived that they often give the impression of robots made on the same production line, having no people skills.

Whenever I find myself interacting with such a person, I have a somewhat hard time feeling relaxed and trusting them. And I find that most people feel the same way. Their conduct seems so fake and insecure that it’s hard to feel otherwise.

A Good Idea Gone Insane

Ask a corporate person about their manner which appears stiff to you and they will often tell you it is a business and professional manner: “This is how corporate people behave”. While there is some truth in this, I believe the formal corporate conduct has gone way beyond reflecting professionalism.

Dig a little dipper and you will discover a conduct which prevents people from enjoying their interactions and working well together. It is a conduct rooted in:

  • A false image of professionalism and the professional image;
  • A tendency to blindly follow traditions and conventions;
  • A fear of being authentic in business interactions;
  • Giving too much significance to clients, colleagues, bosses and their opinions.

My Top Ideas for Loosening Up

I think that loosening up as a corporate person is something anyone can benefit from and an excellent way to improve your business people skills. Here are my top ideas on how to loosen up:

1. Don’t wear a formal suit all the time. Nobody likes to wear a formal suit all the time. Not even James Bond. And the fact that official company policy may demand you wear a full-piece suit all the time is not a good excuse in my view. This is one policy you can bend. Try dressing in a way which still reflects professionalism, but is less formal.

2. Relax your body. Many corporate people I know have this really stiff posture and body language, which they force on themselves. A corporation is not the same as the army. It’s OK to relax your body and even slouch a bit, and you can do this while still marinating dignity in your posture.

3. Do joke once in a while. Some corporate people hardly make a joke in a business meeting or in a discussion with a client. They take their work and their professional image that seriously. Learn to have fun while interacting with others in the business environment and joke about things once in a while.

4. Do talk about other things besides business. It’s OK to be focused on results; it’s not OK to do so without adding a human side to your interactions. Make personal conversation with your clients and your colleagues; get to know each other as human beings. It is this human component which often strengthens the business side.

5. Avoid using clichés. The signature trait of a stiff corporate person is the fact they talk in clichés. They are so afraid to say the wrong thing and be improper that they end up only saying the old, over-repeated and predictable things which add no real value. Avoid this and speak your unique truth.

6. Do work you love. The more work you do which you are passionate about, the more you become passionate in your general conduct. The fact you enjoy what you do gives you more positive energy and more confidence to express yourself as you are. The most relaxed people I know are those who don’t care and those who are very fulfilled.

If you happen to be a somewhat tense and stiff person in your manner at work, I can tell you now that changing your ways and improving your people skills in this area will take a degree of persistence. However, you will see it happen.

As a final thought, consider this: you will be spending about 1/3 of your life working. Don’t you wanna express yourself and have some fun with it in all this time?

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Filed Under: Attitude, Career, Communication Skills Tagged With: , , , 8 Comments
August 15, 2010

Beyond People Skills: My 3 Life Lessons

This article is written at the invitation of fellow blogger Abubakar Jamil, as part of the Life Lessons Series. You can find out more about this project and the people involved on his blog.

It’s a very enjoyable activity for me to look back at my life so far, at the experiences I had, to reflect on them and to draw lessons. It’s something I do periodically, in a systematic, pen & paper way, and something I encourage everyone to do.

As I’m doing this process now, there are 3 very valuable life lessons which stand out. They go beyond improving people skills and they’re the lessons I want to share with you.

Life Lesson 1: Your weaknesses are your strengths.

When I was a teenager, I was frequently described as ‘annoying’ because I asked a lot of questions and always wanted details about things I didn’t quite understand. The result of this was that I started asking questions about why it’s bad to ask a lot of questions. I never got a satisfying answer, but I also didn’t want to annoy people so I ended up shutting up a lot more.

As time passed and I got seriously into psychology, I began to see all the potential benefits of my tendencies to ask a lot of questions. I was basically an analytical person, which enjoyed decoding various phenomena. So instead of repressing this side of my personality, I decided to express it and find the best ways to do so.

Now, the fact I ask a lot of questions is what makes me have a good understanding of how people skills work; get a good grasp of my clients’ needs and provide real results through my coaching services. I still annoy some people, but I don’t mind that anymore. I know that if I look in perspective, my weakness is my strength.

Life Lesson 2: Perfectionism kills productivity.

I started writing at the same time I started coaching. I remember that it took me then almost 4 hours to write a one page article related to people skills which I now write in less than 2 hours. Part of this visible increase in my writing speed is due to the fact my writing skills have improved a lot in the passing years, and part is due to the fact I stopped being a perfectionist about my writing.

When I was writing articles for the first time, I felt this need to make them look perfect. I wanted the perfect structure, style, words and ideas every time. Later, I realized that perfection was not necessary. My readers wanted very good writing and high quality ideas (this made them read my stuff and buy my other services) but they did not require perfection.

By being a perfectionist about my writing, I was using a lot of time for each article, without a significant increase in the benefits to justify it. So, I gradually started to tolerate imperfection and give less time to each article. I continued to have a high standard in my writing, but I no longer sought perfection. Because perfectionism was killing my productivity.

Life Lesson 3: Hope is not enough, you need a good strategy.

This is a lesson which fortunately for me, I’ve learned mostly from the experiences of other persons around me. I say fortunately because it was a lesson learned mostly through big failures and loses.

I have seen people in my professional network lose a lot of money and fail miserably with all sorts of business ideas. And most of the time, these people had one thing in common: they weren’t applying realistic business strategies. They had a lot of hope and optimism, but no real understanding what it takes to make their business ideas work. They were very slow to learn from their mistakes, to develop their strategies, and so they’ve made businesses plummet.

I have seen this happen beyond managing a business, in managing a career or a life. And it’s the same pattern: hope is good but it is not enough. At the end of the day, you need to know what the heck you’re doing and have a solid strategy to reflect it. Hope is a good companion, but not a replacement for competence.

These are my 3 life lessons. What are your most important life lessons?

Image courtesy of Paco Alcantara

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Lifestyle Tagged With: , , , 21 Comments
August 10, 2010

Rich Online Social Life and No Offline Social Life?

Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter tend to have curious effects on people and their social lives. One thing I notice is how many of those who use them tend to fall into one of two opposite categories:

  1. The people who have a rich, active offline social life and use socialization through social networking sites as an extension of this one. Social media is for them an opportunity to communicate more, with more people, from more locations.
  2. The people who basically have no offline social life and use socialization through social networking sites as a replacement for it. Social media is for them a way to compensate a lack of face to face interactions, by spending a lot of time communicating online.

Now, can you guess the people from which category I believe have a problem? That’s right, the people in the second group. Those who don’t balance their online social life with their offline one. And I believe their problem is two-folded: it has a component related to impact and one to relationships.

Weakening your impact

The first side of the problem is that by interacting almost exclusively online with the people you could also be interacting with offline, you considerably diminish your impact. Offline communication may require more time and effort, but it definitely has its rewards in terms or the influence you can achieve.

This is why I’m a big supporter of things like public speaking, networking face to face and having good people skills for face to face interactions. Usually, you will get the best results by mixing and balancing online with offline communication.

Having superficial relationships

The second side of the problem is that by interacting almost exclusively online with people, your relationships often end up being very shallow. Face to face interactions can have a lot more depth and a bigger emotional charge than the ones on the Internet. They can make relationships develop easier and become much stronger.

Those who have few face to face interactions often feel lonely and a lack of real connection with other people. From an emotional perspective, they essentially have second rate, noticeably less fulfilling social lives.

In general, my experience as a communication coach is that too much of an online social life by comparison with the offline one is a sign of a shy, insecure person with not so good people skills. Not chronically shy, those people don’t even chat online, but still. Many of the geeks who a decade ago played Nintendo all day long are now represented by geeks with fake social lives.

Getting out of the shell

Do you have 2000 Facebook friends and only 2 live friends? Do you spend a lot more time interacting with people online than offline? Do you often feel lonely and disconnected? These are all different pieces of the same puzzle.

The first step to improvement as a person in this group is recognizing the costs of not having much of an offline social life. The second one is to fight your natural tendencies to compensate a lack of face to face interactions through stuff like chatting on MySpace, and instead going out there to socialize.

As you gradually push yourself to interact more with people, your people skills improve and your social confidence with it. You experience more social freedom and more fulfilling relationships. It is only when you have the option and skills to interact with people using a wide range of channels that you can make the best social choices.

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Filed Under: Attitude, Lifestyle, People Skills Tagged With: , , , , 11 Comments
July 26, 2010

Why Family Pressure Is Heavy Pressure and How to Lighten the Load

Even the people I know with really good people skills are often little babies when it comes to handling family pressure on them to think, feel or act in certain ways. They may be able to easily refuse a colleague’s invitation to go bowling, but when mom asks them to visit for dinner, they just can’t say no.

The fact that our families have more influence on us than most other people is not all bad of course, considering they do play a big role in our lives. But this is the first layer. Beyond it, there is a huge ability of many close family members to pressure us into doing things we don’t really want to do and we don’t regard as good for us.

I have seen people get in and out of jobs, colleges, marriages and cities in order to please their families. Close family members often have this way of pushing our emotional buttons and making us comply with them even when it would be saner to nail our heads to the wall.

First of all, it’s important for us to understand why. Looking at this phenomenon in terms of people skills and attitudes, I conclude that there are 2 major factors at play.

  1. Family members know what buttons to push. Having usually spent a lot of time interacting with us, they understand our needs, our vulnerabilities and our emotional buttons. And consciously or not, they use this knowledge to pick the right channels in order to make us conform to their desires, even if those channels involve emotional manipulation and putting pressure on us.
  2. We give family members a lot of meaning. We generally perceive disappointing a family member as something very bad, which will affect us greatly. And because of this, so it does: at an emotional level. We add so much meaning to what our parents, brothers, wives or husbands think and feel about us, that we can’t tolerate emotionally not to please them. 

You can’t really influence the first factor. It’s natural for close family members to know which buttons to push, and it’s pretty much impossible to get them to not use this knowledge in a manipulative way if they do. What you can control is the second factor.

Putting things back into proportions. Talking in practical consequences, it is relevant for us to please our family. It’s not very fun to live with a parent or a wife who thinks you’re an idiot because you got on the wrong career path and who treats you like one.

But at the same time, we blow things out of proportions in this area. A lot of the practical negative consequences of not pleasing our families our simply dramatized in our heads. We delude ourselves into believing it’s intolerable to not make your parent proud, your family happy, when it’s mostly water under the bridge.

We set ourselves up to fail by thinking that the approval family members can give us is a must now, just as it seemed when we were 6. However, we are not 6 anymore, and our options have improved significantly. We have options to distance ourselves from family members who don’t appreciate us and to not tolerate rude treatment from anyone. This is a big part of what having good people skills is all about.

Once you realize the kind of power you really have and the kind of obligations you don’t, things naturally get put into their real proportions. Families become relevant but not essential, family pressure is something you no longer feel, and you are emotionally free to follow your own way in life.

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Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , 8 Comments