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One of the common misconceptions I get is that emotional intelligence is about how to be nice to people.
It’s actually the opposite of that. Not in a mean or destructive way, but in a more assertive way that doesn’t allow others (or your own emotions) to take advantage of you.
It’s the ability to not let your emotions distract you from what you want to communicate. It’s the skill to manage conflicts both within yourself and with others to have a productive influence. It’s about aligning your words and actions with your feelings so they are congruent.
What it’s NOT is being nice just to please others and forgetting about yourself. It’s NOT just doing things for people only to get what you want. And it’s definitely NOT just saying things without also feeling them.
It’s Nice. Until It’s Not
Being nice is nice and all, until it gets to the point where you’re sacrificing too much of yourself and not getting your own needs met.
It’s nice until you get too far into people-pleasing where it comes off manipulative or egotistical.
It’s nice until you burnout from all the projects you said ‘yes’ to.
It’s nice until you don’t have the emotional capacity to spend with your loved ones because other people consume so much of you.
It’s nice until you end up leaving your own long-term goals on the shelf and you look back, proud of what you’ve accomplished for others, but wondering what you’ve accomplished for yourself.
I’ve learned the hard way that people don’t actually want ‘nice’ people who’re eager to do things for others. To your face, they’ll be all gung-ho about it, saying it’s what they want, but they’re not truly attracted to it. What they really want are kind people who are compassionate but don’t give in to other’s needs or wants. This is true professionally, romantically, and socially.
Think about someone in your life you consider to be the nicest person but seems to get pushed around. Would you trust them to lead a big work project? Could you see them being happy in a reciprocating relationship? Would you see them taking any financial, physical, or emotional risk in their life?
Now, where do you see that, or lack thereof, within yourself?
It’s About Assertiveness
Emotional intelligence is the ability to be assertive with your vulnerabilities. That means owning up to your deeper, more uncomfortable emotions and to express that both for yourself and for others.
You can’t be ‘nice’ about it. You can’t hold back your honest feelings in order to avoid conflict. You can’t be timid about what you truly want to express.
You’re going to have to mean it, without being mean. It may feel rude at first but people will get over that. And they’ll come back around to appreciate the courage it took for you to be honest.
If they don’t take it well, or distance themselves from you, you’ve now identified where the boundaries are in the relationship and you can decide how much you’re willing to continue investing into it. But those who receive it will stick around longer because they see themselves being challenged with you. We all want to surround ourselves with people we can grow with.
It’s About Kindness
You might have noticed the distinction I made between being nice and kind earlier. Being nice is doing things for someone with an expectation of a return. Being kind is doing things for someone with their wellbeing in mind.
It’s nice to buy a girl a drink at the bar. It’s kind to get curious about her or her friends and how they’re enjoying their time at the bar.
It’s nice to take on your manager’s tasks. It’s kind to figure out how to free up more time for them to do what they truly want to do.
It’s nice to ask new people about what they do at work. It’s kind to ask deeper about what excites them about their life and how it’s going.
Emotional intelligence is being mindful about how you make others feel without getting attached to a specific outcome or result that you want out of it.
It’s About Integrity
Emotional intelligence is having alignment with not only what you say and do, but with how you feel. Without it, you’ll do nice things, you’ll say nice things, but you won’t feel nice things.
Being a recovering people-pleaser, it felt good for me to say nice things do something nice for others. But over time, compromising my truth accumulated into feeling undervalued, invisible, and taken advantage of.
I was saying things without backing them with action. I was doing things without communicating them to others. The lack of integrity within me started feeling like a massive hole filled with only shame and bitterness. Sounds dramatic, but that hole tainted my view of people.
During my corporate burnout, I became overly-skeptical of others and kept them at a distance. And because of that, not only were my working relationships shallow, my personal and romantic were as well.
Building integrity is a lifelong journey. And as I continue working on it, I’ve realized that being ‘nice’ hasn’t been helping me do so. Counterintuitively, challenging people with my values is what had them respect me more.
This will be easier to do when you’ve developed the emotional intelligence to identify what you truly feel, regulate your emotions so they don’t get in the way, and then express them authentically and assertively.
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Previously published here and reprinted with the author’s permission.
Photo: iStock
