How To Deal With Other People When
You Are An Agreeable Person?
Is it hard for you to say “NO” when someone asks you to do something for them? Do you feel worried most of the time that people would get upset with you?
There are people who care about others a lot. Such people are extremely kind and they always try to provide comfort to others even if it costs them their own. In the psychology literature, they are known by the term “agreeable”.
Agreeable people live a life infused with strong feelings. They are polite people and as such, always show tolerance in conflicts. In spite of all these great qualities they still face trouble while interacting with others. This might sound surprising, especially to people who are not agreeable by nature, but it is actually true.
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In this piece of text, we will try to understand what kind of problems they face and how they can possibly solve the issues without changing their kind nature. To understand this clearly let’s discuss the interaction of an agreeable person with nice people and opportunistic people separately.
Interaction With Nice people
Let’s suppose a nice person asks you for a favor. You may not be ready to help but since you are agreeable by nature you may accept the job.
When you accept the unwanted job it would be a burden on your shoulder. You would have to do it just because you couldn’t say no due to your nature. Practically, you made that person happy by helping him but you may feel annoyed.
Interaction With Oppertunistic people
There are all kinds of people in every society. As we all know, one of these types is self-centered people. They mostly don’t believe in the give-and-take formula. Their mind mostly thinks about how to take advantage of others around them. You could say that they are mostly concerned with the “take” part.
If you are an agreeable person and do favors for an opportunistic person, you may feel used or betrayed because you may not get what you were expecting back. In fact, it is highly likely that you’ll get the opposite of what you had expected.
So, being agreeable, you may face these two main issues. Sometimes you may feel annoyed by helping others and sometimes you may feel betrayed. Both of these are feelings you don’t really want to experience.
Understanding Give And Take
Mostly, we only count physical and financial help as a give-and-take activity. However, there can be many different reasons for connecting two people in any relationship. For instance, we understand the concept of working the whole month for our boss and we do not mind working hard because we are getting a salary, even if we don’t like the job.
Sometimes, we connect with some people because of their funny and easy nature. Such people always bring a smile to our faces. In this case, too, there is a give and take happening but we don’t often realize it.
Some people are very good at taking care of a gathering; they are the charm of our parties and we love them just because we know their presence means a good time.
Some people are very smart and we often connect with them whenever we need any consultation. Their advice and tips always help us a lot.
You may be providing physical help and in return, you may be getting a good company. You may be helping emotionally or perhaps acting as a good guide in a tough time and in return, he/she may help you in some other matters. Therefore it’s everyone’s individual wisdom how to judge gives and takes.
Understanding Reasons of Favor
We, humans, are different from one another. The way we understand and accept human nature in other matters can be replicated to accept human behavior in relationships.
Let’s try to see the most common reasons for being nice to others.
- A mother is kind to her kid because of her love. It’s unconditional love and she is not expecting or demanding anything from her child. All she needs is the happiness of her baby.
- People working at the reception show nice gestures to clients because they are getting paid for it. It’s part of their job.
- Other than these two reasons, you may be nice because you believe that if you are nice to others, you may get a reward in one way or another from the same person or from someone else. Or you might believe in God and think that he will give you a reward for your good karma.
- There are also people who love appreciation and they like to help others to feel a sense of pride.
- Some people help others to get help in return.
- You may help others or be kind to other people just because of yourself. Doing so might genuinely make you feel good. You may like to see smiles on other people’s faces.
Everyone is free to behave the way they want and we are not here to judge anyone. As long as you are nice and trying to take care of others, you are great.
How To Stay Kind Without Being Agreeable?
If you are an agreeable person, you are most probably nice to others just to see a smile on their faces. It’s a very exceptional reason and you may not feel any disappointment while helping anyone because they would be smiling because of you. You don’t even need to choose the people that you want to help. You can probably be nice to anyone all the time because you get positive energy while helping others. If you are this kind of person, you might feel very good all the time because people love you and you love others.
However, you may probably need to be very careful with opportunistic people because betrayal is very hurtful. No matter how positive you are and how forgiving, betrayal is an emotion that will weigh on you. In fact, it can be argued that betrayal can be especially hurtful for kind people as they are the least likely to do the same with others. So, to avoid being hurt, you may need to take care of yourself and your kind nature. You may perhaps consider how much you can afford to help others. Sometimes it’s okay to be nice to a selfish person to test the generosity of your kindness. But at other times, you may need to avoid helping that person who seems to be very dependent on you so that he/she adopts responsibility. If you can be more conscious of who you help, you may share your kind nature by choice and not by habit.
Secondly, everyone loves a polite person. That’s why people come close to you. If you have a higher level of tolerance, this is a great quality to have. It means that you can avoid unnecessary conflicts. In a way, this is your superpower. So many people have trouble with their anger and they get into unnecessary conflicts all the time. So, it’s better to have better tolerance and be a more polite person. However, these qualities can be your weakness if you don’t do the right thing where it is necessary. What happens when you avoid five or six conflicts with the same person? Surely he may push you more because he knows you will not react anyway. Sure, you might not want to react aggressively but perhaps, it’s also important to show tolerance to a certain level only, so that the other person knows your limit and won’t mess with you indefinitely.
Human interaction is a vast topic and almost everyone faces a lot of difficulties while dealing with others. This is especially the case for agreeable people. However, you need to remember that in every interaction or relationship, there are only two people – you and the other person. Probably, dealing with people becomes easy when you treat yourself as someone who deserves the same and equal care and respect as others. Be kind to yourself the way you are kind to others. Take care of yourself and sometimes give chance to others to take care of you too!
