Why Playing the "Good Girl" is a Bad Thing (Read Time: 4 min.)

How often have you found yourself playing the role of the "good girl/good guy"?  

You know the one... The reliable, responsible, trusting, caring, nurturing, say "Yes" to everything person who's always there and ready to help...

Playing the role is a double-edged sword.  There's a difference between giving because you choose to and saying "Yes" because you have to.  The "good girl" persona is one that requires too much time, too much energy and results in very little value... for you and the other person.

Here are 5 reasons that playing the "good girl" is a bad thing: 
1) Pretending to be someone you're not indicates insecurity... and emotional vampires can smell insecurity a million miles away.  Why do you think people use "good girls" so much?  Whenever you create a super-good persona, you implicate yourself in the belief that who you REALLY are simply isn't good enough... and crazymakers eat that kind of insecurity for breakfast.

2) "Good girls" really do finish last.  When you play the "good" role, you can't put on the hat five hours out of the day.  We teach people how to treat us so the more you play "good", the longer people expect you to play the role.  Before you know it, you're in a marriage, raising a family, and working at a job where people demand all of your time without one concern about meeting any of your needs.  It's a vicious cycle where you take on the role of serving and people stop seeing you as anything other than a servant.  Don't do it!

3) Eventually, you will get tired of being someone you're not and then watch out!  The volcano erupts, you have some explosive conversations, and now you've lost your cool, family and friends, and you're not quite sure who you are anymore.  Whatever you suppress has to come out... AT SOME POINT.  When you cover up who you really are, you set the stage for an eventual emotional showdown.  First you have a showdown; then you meltdown... and then you have to do the work of picking up all the pieces.  All in all, it's way too much work pretending to be someone that you're not only to explode into someone you never wanted to be only to come back to picking up the pieces of who you really were to begin with.  The Incredible Hulk is overrated but when good girls go wild, that's exactly who comes out.

4) Perfect sucks.  Here's the thing: nobody's perfect and striving for it is a total and complete waste of time.  Some people spend their whole lives trying to live up to other people's fantasies about who they "should" be.  It's called a fantasy for a reason.  Don't get sucked into the trap of having to be MORE so other people will like you.  Those who don't like or love you as you are never will like or love you as you will be.  Once you get to their definition of perfect, they'll create a new one... and there you'll be, on the hamster wheel, trying to keep up.  Remember: the only perfection is imperfection and we're perfectly capable of doing that by being ourselves.

5) When you shine a light on the "pretend" version of you, you dim the brilliance of who you really are.  Nobody wants the fake version of a brilliant, real thing and, yet, somehow, we think that being NOT ourselves is exactly what people are looking for.  If you're in a relationship with someone who can't handle how brave, brilliant, and daring you are, rethink the relationship, not YOU... The test of any boundary is not whether or not the other person will honor it but to what extent you will uphold it... Play the "good girl/good guy" won't get you more respect or love; it will get you more conditions upon which respect and love are divvied out.  That's not the kind of relationship you want.

So how do get over the whole "good girl/good guy" syndrome?

Check out tomorrow's blog post where I talk about  

Five Ways to Cure the Disease to Please!  

I'll break it down then...