I’M NOT NICE

I am not nice. 

There. I said it.

 I am kind, almost always.  And compassionate above all.  But I’m not nice. 

Not anymore.

Like you, perhaps, I was raised being told to be nice, over and over.  Most little girls are and often boys, too. When I moved to Atlanta in my late teens, I noticed that little girls were consistently told to “be sweet” and how little boys were “just being boys”. Hmmm.

As I’ve traveled through life, I have come to see it’s more than just a gender thing, though. It’s a human thing and this distinction between “nice” and “kind” has really intrigued me.

So I made a video about it this morning, as one does, and a Tiktok friend (@takaAza (Stoic) ) commented, summing it up really well.  “…nice is indoctrination and kind by definition comes from self awareness.” 

Another way of thinking about it is that “nice” comes from your brain and “kind” comes from your heart. “Nice” means rule following, trying to do it right or well, in order to be accepted.  To belong – which honestly is all I think human beings are wired to want at a base level.  And “kind”? Well, kind comes more from being true to ourselves, to having given ourselves what we need so that we can serve from a place of overflow.  Kind comes from having enough capacity to be generous in myriad ways.

Nice, I find, tends to lead to frustration, to unexpressed emotion and to a lot of unhappy people projecting all that’s pushed down inside themselves on everyone else.  It may be nice but it’s just not pretty.  Or sustainable. 

The journey from nice to kind has been a long one for me, and so very worth the trip.  Kind allows me to be my wild and wonderful self while still holding light and space for others as they travel their own paths.  It feels oh so much better – and who doesn’t want to live in a kind world?

I’d love to hear from you about how this lands and about where you fall on the spectrum, either in the comments or an email HERE. You can find the video on Tiktok and YouTube, too, if you’d like to hear more.