How to Stop Being Too Nice to People

Welcome along to the show. You're listening to High Performance with myself, Jake Humphrey, and Damian Hughes. And this is one of the episodes where Damon and I share some of the sort of the clips really from the back catalogue of high performance that resonate with us, things that we believe can hold some real lessons for your life. Instead of expecting you to listen to hundreds and hundreds of hours of conversations, we've distilled down Some of the greatest moments of the last five years. And today we're actually going to tackle a subject that we know a lot of you struggle about. We see it on our DMs, we get emails about it. We've actually got a question that came in from one of our listeners on Spotify. Um and the topic is all about being nice. Now obviously you can immediately think, well surely being nice is the most important thing in life, but actually Joseph got in touch on Spotify and said

How do I stop being too nice? to people. I suppose before we get going, Damien, I'd like to get your sort of instant reaction, if you like, as someone who was studied so much, lectured so many people about high performance, worked with so many high performing teams. When someone asks you, How do I stop being too nice to people, how does that make you feel instantly? Oh, I think it's a brilliant question because I think Like you say, you've instincts is you hear the word nice and saying, Well, how can that be a bad thing? But

My immediate reaction though, because The interview we did with Shane Parrish, the The author of the Farnham Street blog, who gave us a great definition that I found really helpful, where he said, Make the distinction between being nice and being kind. And the example he offered, if you remember Jake, was when he said, If somebody's got spinach on the teeth If you're being nice, you don't say anything'cause you don't want to embarrass them.

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