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Sometimes I'm so sweet
even I can't stand it.
Julie Andrews
 Niceness can be a means of hiding our actual emotions, feelings, thoughts,
and desired actions. Niceness can cover states such as fear, anger, hostility,
or boredom. Niceness is a quality of the persona, our social mask.
The productive aspects of niceness.
We can suppress a negative trait, deciding not to express it, but
acknowledging it, and planning to do design-work at a later time to resolve the
suppressed elements.
 | Niceness is essential for social protocol, when our situation does not
permit us to express our impatience or other antagonistic attitudes. |
| Niceness is essential as a default, when we cannot deal directly with a
difficult situation. We may not have the necessary social skills, knowledge,
experience, power, or awareness of intuition. |
| Niceness is essential when we meet new people. We do not know these
people so our superficial, nice chit chat can be an appropriate way to
approach these people with respect for their as yet unknown personality. |
The destructive aspects of niceness.
Niceness is superficial, and so it is destructive in situations that require
emotional intimacy.
| Niceness can be narcissistic. We are concerned with our image and our
supposed virtue, instead of the other person and the circumstance. Niceness
is not a virtue, on the contrary, it can become a stifling substitute for a
genuine response. |
| Niceness can be based on repression. We may believe that our nice
qualities are our true identity, and so we deny that the opposite of those
qualities are equally true in our potential. We develop an inaccurate self
concept, and we cannot use the beneficial qualities of the traits that we
have repressed into our potential. |
| Niceness is not an accurate response to a person's words and actions.
If someone is aggressive, and we respond with niceness, the person may
respond in these ways:
 | The person can believe that aggression is acceptable because we are
responding to it with niceness. |
| The person can feel unwarranted guilt or shame because our niceness is an
exaggerated positive contrast to the person's aggression. |
| The person can hurt us. Even though we may believe that we like people who
are excessively nice, we are compulsively cruel to them. We are punishing them
because they are not fulfilling their duty to participate honestly in this
design situation. Reasons for this reaction:
 | We want them to provide honest feedback to us. We want the other person
to give true reflections of our actions as we learn about this design
situation. We want to be corrected when we are wrong. |
| We want them to confront their life honestly. Our harshness is not a
personal attack. It comes from the dynamic of spirit that is telling them to
satisfy their responsibility to explore the design situation with their true
thoughts, energy tones, images, and actions. |
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Niceness can be a means of controlling people.
When we believe that "I am being nice, and so you must be nice," we
create the following conditions:
| We are prohibiting people from expressing their actual thoughts and energy
tones as emotions and feelings by trying to prevent them from asserting their
rights, or from provoking our charged design elements regarding an issue. We
are therefore, squelching an opportunity to confront and discharge those
elements. Likewise, our niceness prevents us from triggering someone's charged
elements in situations where a confrontation is appropriate. |
| We are trying to compel people to like us. We are manipulating them by
presenting an unrealistically pleasant image of us.
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Techniques for dealing with niceness.
| Design-work.
| Affirmation. "I can be nice when that quality is
required." "Niceness is only a temporary state while I learn to deal
with situations". |
| Directed imagination. We can visualize ourselves in situations where we
are skillfully responding to a situation with the expression of our thoughts,
energy tones, and actions instead of responding with phony niceness. |
| Modeling. |
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| Intuition. Intuition can tell us when to use the superficial
pleasantries of niceness, and when to confront the not nice aspects of a
situation. |
| We understand the difference between suppression and repression.
| In healthy suppression, we can act nice while acknowledging our contrary
thoughts, energy tones, and desired actions. |
| In repression, we deny that those contrary things exist. |
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| We can work on our potential. Our potential contains our repressed and
suppressed thoughts, images, energy tones, and physical habits. We resolve the
charge of those elements, and we reclaim their useful qualities by working on
our potential. |
Next topic: Kindness |
