Are you easily influenced by others? We tell you how to recognize and overcome this drawback.
Are you easily influenced by others? We tell you how to recognize and overcome this drawback.
To be successful, it is important to be able to behave well towards others. Kindness helps maintain relationships and attracts other people to you.
However, the line between a gentleman and a simpleton is very thin. If you are too kind-hearted, you will end up just fixing other people's problems, and no one will take your interests into account. If you are afraid to speak your mind and pursue your own goals for fear of appearing too opinionated, selfish, or impolite, you are putting yourself down and limiting your potential.
Here are some common habits of people who try to be too nice to others to their own detriment.
Compliance
You regularly soften or even change your position because you are afraid that others do not share your true thoughts. To be successful, you must be firm in your beliefs and not afraid to express them directly and clearly.
Don't try to earn approval by giving in to others. Believe that you are worthy of respect.
Learn new things and improve in your field to feel more confident when communicating with other people.
Influence a person by satisfying his needs
It is often possible to observe situations in which the dominant person exerts his influence on the victim only because he, to some extent, provides the victim with what he wants or satisfies a need. Human dependence gives rise to a feeling of inferiority and painful expectation in the victim of such relationships.
You can influence a person in different ways, influence knowing that the person is lower than you in status, weaker in character or financially dependent, and also knowing that the victim will still obey, because she needs something from you.
Experts in the field of adult psychology argue that the social environment is divided into two parts: those who influence and those who are influenced . Recently, using modern technologies, scientists have developed schemes by which one can easily determine which person can be manipulated more and which less.
But let's start with the fact that the influence can be positive and negative. Anything that does not lead a person to a positive result is a negative influence. Thus, the management system has developed some processes that allow you to manage people at a professional level, helping them achieve the best results, and therefore extract maximum profit .
A psychology professor at the University of London found that having power does not mean influencing . A person has his own energy, thinking and vision. A person with power can only demand, but this does not mean that he has influence. To influence means to instill one’s opinion , which means, in a certain way, to impose one’s own conclusions and priorities, to guide a person, to show him the path.
Seeking approval from others
Your need to constantly seek approval can tire others. Don't expect others to give you the self-esteem you need. You won't achieve much by staying on the sidelines all the time. The real path to success lies through believing in yourself and the willingness to devote your life to your chosen goal.
If you feel the need to gain someone else's approval, ask yourself: “What do I really want?” Your goals and desires matter, and if it causes inconvenience to someone, what can you do, that’s life.
The only way to get what you want is to directly state what you want and go towards your goal.
Start small.
Taking and turning everything over at once is useless. Try to take the first hesitant steps carefully. It's like you're learning to walk again. Don't be in a hurry to burn bridges.
First, buy yourself a new thing. Let it be brighter than you are used to. Get a new hairstyle or change your perfume scent. Go somewhere new. Join a dance group.
Start enjoying the decisions you make. The results will please you. Every day, discovering new thoughts for yourself, allowing yourself joy, you will gradually free yourself from the reproaches of your inner critic and stop depending on the opinions of others.
3. Insincerity
If you constantly try to say nice things to others, it may be a sign of lack of self-confidence. Starting and ending conversations with compliments can make other people feel manipulated. Such compliments are often insincere. In fact, you are trying to “appease” your interlocutor in order to cope with your own feelings of insecurity. This is the wrong way.
Success can only be achieved by those who take risks, not by those who try to please others.
How to understand that I am dependent on other people's opinions
An “adult child,” when he goes out into the world, continues to wait for decisions from other people, because he is not used to acting in his own way. Often, when growing up, children break off relations with their parents because they cannot withstand the pressure, but because of their constraint, they find friends and colleagues who continue to prevent the person from expressing their opinion.
Dependence on other people's opinions, fear of evaluation is a manifestation of infantility, psychological immaturity, which boils down to the inability to take responsibility and make choices. Since childhood, internal dialogue was replaced by external instructions, and a person ceased to understand himself - his feelings, needs. He already knows what he should feel, how he should respond and react in order to please others. But all this is a mask, which is formed by the desires of society and the internal limitations of parents, which they “inherit” to their child.
There are people who depend on the assessment of not only close people, but also those they don’t even know. In this case, a person “suffocates” due to his own thoughts and limitations, because he is haunted by a constant fear of evaluation, critical comments, and condemnation.
If you feel that the above statements are your position, then you should work on yourself.
Defensive position
Defensive behavior is usually considered a sign of weakness. In life you will have to face the fact that people will disagree with you. If any obstacle causes you to feel anxious or upset, you will not be able to achieve success. You need to learn to accept criticism without getting upset. No one will contribute to your success out of pity.
Criticism is a reason for development, not for frustration.
Reduce communication
Moving to the stage of reduced communication, and possibly its complete absence, is true in the case when the person himself does not want to leave the flow of negativity. She likes it there, she has mastered it well. The person will leave on his own if you stop answering his messages, saying hello when you meet him, or unfollowing him on social networks. Leave quietly, avoiding explanations. Otherwise, everything will result in showdowns and scandals in which you will be to blame.
It is impossible to avoid communicating with relatives, but it is quite possible to reduce their influence on you. If necessary, limit yourself to one call per week, where you can check if everything is okay, and end the phone conversation as soon as you feel an emotional attack in your direction.
Don't feel guilty about leaving someone behind. You are the only person who can take care of yourself. The negative state of other people can ruin your plans. Don’t ruin your life by “keeping” people in it whom you would be sorry to leave in the past.
Lie
By trying to please people, you create dishonesty. For example, you agree when deep down you think differently. If you only follow someone else's point of view, no one knows the real you, cannot appreciate your ideas and your inner world. This type of lie is caused by fear and the desire to be like everyone else.
But only an ordinary person can “be like everyone else.”
If you want to achieve something, you sometimes need to be able to go into conflict or tell the unpleasant truth straight to your face.
Influencing a person for your own benefit
It turns out that positive and negative influence on people occurs for the sake of profit, but how then can these two influences be distinguished? If we take ordinary office work and, accordingly, subordinates as an example, we can see the following picture. The fact is that the positive influence of a manager on an employee increases good results, which the employee himself can feel (monetary rewards, time off, bonuses for good work).
Negative influence is beneficial only to the dominant party, and the victim at this moment is only a means to achieve the goals of the manipulator through deception.
For example, an employer, leaving an employee to work overtime, may not pay him the corresponding amount, but pay him much less, but at the same time, the employer is able to influence, claiming that this is the highest payment possible at the moment, and in the future the conditions may change.
Just expectations of improvement can be the “carrot” that a naive employee will chase for quite a long time.
The psychology of influence is a very broad topic that you can talk about for hours, but the important component remains that the person who has the skills and methods of manipulation is able to influence . Basically, as mentioned earlier, you can manipulate or control a person by providing him with a reward for this, instilling certain information, and also instilling fear, which psychologists generally do not welcome.
Read on the topic: Robert Cialdini “Psychology of influence”
The book by an American professor of psychology and sociology may not be new, but it is one of the fundamental books on this topic; it will be especially useful for those who are actively influenced or those who influence, so to speak, in an official manner - teachers, politicians, media persons .
Continuing the topic of psychology of influence, you can watch a video about the manipulation of consciousness:
Workaholism
Sometimes it is rooted in a desperate desire to prove one's worth. As a result, you will begin to do some things that you absolutely do not want to do, because you will be afraid that you will be judged for not being diligent enough.
When people feel like you're desperate to please them, they lose respect for you. Relax and do your job - and let others do their part too. It’s still not possible to move a mountain alone.
Learn to say “no” and not feel guilty. There is no need to take on a business that you do not want to do or the success of which you do not believe. What you are willing to give up is very important - it sets you apart from others. This is how, by building boundaries, you let others understand where their world ends and yours begins, and if they don’t see these boundaries, they will violate them.
Psychological help online
You probably know people who always apologize for everything, and when you point it out to them, they apologize for apologizing. Yes, it's about me. I've been such a "wag" more or less all my life, but the older I got, the harder it was for me to bear it. Finally, I decided to do something about it. I'm not sure when it started, but I remember when I realized I couldn't stand it anymore. My fiance and I finally chose a house. I saved for years for a down payment, he also invested some savings, and we were happy that things worked out. But I noticed something during the process: everything revolved around my fiancé. When I made the first payment, the real estate company thanked him. The mortgage company only called him. He answered all calls. It was as if I had nothing to do with this. At first we were just joking about it, but then the climax came. I submitted documents for a loan, they were approved, and we officially became owners of the property. I sent a thank you letter to the mortgage company and the response was, “Congratulations, Brian!” It was stupid and funny. But I didn't want to laugh. I got angry. As petty as it may sound, I wanted to be relevant to the goal I had worked so hard for. Instead, I felt helpless and invisible. I started swearing, and my friend, who was sitting next to me, said that she had never seen me angry before. I apologized. I felt guilty for not feeling grateful. In the end, I bought a house and I should be happy. “You don’t need to apologize,” my friend said. “You can be grateful and still want recognition.” Now I know that I am a soft person. I'm quiet. I can be a wuss. So I know how it happened. But it was not only this incident that overflowed my patience. For years, friends manipulated me, bosses overwhelmed me with work, colleagues asked me for favors. I felt helpless. I realized that I could continue to complain about it, or I could try to understand why this was happening. So I sat down, thought about it, and formulated a few rules that help me not give in to others and become stronger. I didn't want to change my character, but I wanted to change some social habits that were bothering me.
Be direct
Like many people, I hate confrontation. Some of us hate it so much that we avoid everything that reminds us of it. Is the salesperson doing a bad job? It's okay, I'll take it. Did the restaurant mix up my order? It's OK. I am sure that the situation with the house could have been resolved from the very beginning if it were not for my constant fear of confrontation. No one had any idea how annoyed I was at being thrown out of the process, and how would they know? I never said anything because I didn’t want to conflict with anyone. However, there is another solution to this problem. It is quite possible to convey your point of view to others without being confrontational - this is called straightforwardness. Being direct means talking about your thoughts and feelings, being objective and rational. Confrontation, on the contrary, is a manifestation of aggression and frustration. When I thought about it, I realized how many situations in which I felt like a wuss could have been avoided if I had been straightforward. So that became Rule No. 1. I'm not the only one who has a fear of being too aggressive. In a Columbia University study on assertiveness and shyness, participants negotiated and then rated themselves on an assertiveness scale. It turned out that people with normal levels of assertiveness overestimated themselves: “People who were given an average score by their opponents believed that they were too assertive, an effect we called the “line-crossing illusion” ... For example, people who lacked assertiveness believed that their opponents assess their level as normal or high.” In other words, no one thinks I'm aggressive when I speak up. This gave me confidence and helped me follow the rule. I ended up calling the mortgage company, I was direct but polite and told them that I would love to be included in the home buying process. Of course they apologized, and even though the deal was already over, I felt more confident and strong.
Don't be afraid to say no
A few months ago, a friend asked me to help her with a project. At first it was easy, but over time it became more and more difficult. The more serious the tasks became, the more letters my friend wrote to me, and the more work I had to do. Because of this project and other commitments, I began to feel like I had no control over my free time. When I thought about how tired and powerless I felt, I realized that this could have been avoided if I had said no to the person who was taking away my time and productivity. “I’m really sorry,” I told my friend, “but I’m very tired and can’t devote as much time to this project as you need.” It's that simple. Since my friend is a reasonable person, she understood everything and thanked me for my help. Around this time, a client asked me if I could change my already busy schedule and finish the job ahead of schedule. This meant working 12-hour days, and I knew this would lead to my burnout and poor quality of work. My first reaction was to do what I had done for years - agree without talking. But I remembered rule No. 2 and told the client that I was very sorry, I couldn’t do this, but I would try to finish the job as soon as possible. I was terrified. I didn't want to get fired. However, I knew what would happen if I agreed: I would get bogged down in work, get angry at the client, hate my job, and feel helpless. But if I say no, I will do the job on time and well. Even better, I will have control over my time and work output. It was worth the risk, and fortunately the client agreed. Of course, this doesn't always happen easily. There are obligations that we cannot neglect. However, I believe that we often convince ourselves that some tasks are mandatory, which in fact are not the case. This was the easiest rule because the result is visible immediately. You say no and the load is reduced.
Be proud of your achievements
When someone gives me a compliment, I return it or start putting myself down. Either way, I reject it. People reject compliments for many reasons. Perhaps they are embarrassed and do not like to draw attention to themselves. Perhaps they have low self-esteem. Maybe they don't want to appear complacent. Whatever the reason, recognizing your own accomplishments can boost your self-confidence. When you are in control of your actions and achievements, you feel stronger. A list of weekly achievements can be a serious motivator. Recording your achievements does not mean patting yourself on the head. This means that you remind yourself that you control the results of your work, that you receive a reward for it. Learning to accept compliments and recognize your accomplishments will help you understand what your strengths are that we often take for granted and don't notice. Accepting my strengths became my rule. A weekly list of achievements helps with this. As for accepting compliments, I analyzed my usual response to them and replaced it with a more confident one. Even a simple “thank you” sounds quite confident. It seems simple, but when this behavior is not habitual, you have to completely rebuild your way of thinking.
Don't give in to other people's stress
When I started this experiment, I had a phone call with potential clients. They wanted me to run their blog, this is my usual job, and I told them about my schedule. I could write them a text in a week. “But we need him by Monday,” they told me, “We have a tight deadline.” Given the fact that it was the end of the week, customer demands meant that I would have to work over the weekend. Plus they asked for a discount. I should have refused, but I agreed and spent Saturday working. I didn't do it because I needed the money or liked the job. I agreed because the stress of the clients affected me. During our conversation, I also began to feel stressed that the work had to be done quickly and they could not find another author. It seemed that I was their only hope. Helping people feels good, don't get me wrong. But taking on other people's stress is a bad habit. My clients were not my friends or family. This was a company that wanted to delegate its urgent task and for some reason I agreed to it. I could have helped them by recommending another writer, or ending the conversation quickly, saving them time. But I didn’t help them, I just took their problem upon myself. As a result, I felt tired, angry and offended. And I myself was to blame for this - I agreed to it! This rule is similar to the ability to say “no”. But stress can be contagious, whether someone asks you for help or not. If you are a person who likes to solve problems, you know what I mean. We can't ask people not to burden us with their stress, but we don't have to accept it. It’s another matter when you have already agreed to a job associated with stress and are ready for it. There is a big difference between being asked to do your job and someone simply passing their problems onto you. When you give in to other people's stress, you have less time for your tasks and you lose control. At least that's how it happens for me. Ultimately, strength and confidence come from within, but let's be honest: other people's reactions and actions affect us. Whether we agree to obligations that we cannot handle, whether we solve other people's problems, or simply remain silent about our feelings, this has a bad effect on us. Understanding this helped me formulate the rules described above. By focusing on each rule in turn, over time I began to feel more in control of my life. Author: Kristin Wong Translation - Psychological Studio of Polina Gaverdovskaya Source: https://lifehacker.com/four-rules-i-followed-to-stop-being-a-pushover-and-make-1782042324
Silence
Whenever you don't express your thoughts or opinions, don't respond to an insult, you cease to matter to people, they begin to look past you. Don't hesitate to speak the truth.
To achieve anything, you need to realize that sometimes conflict is inevitable. Learn to be brave and stand up for your own opinion, it is your right. If you constantly hide your views for fear of rejection, no one will ever know your true preferences. Don't compromise. Just indicate what you think is true.
Influence a person by instilling fear
Often people submit to influence in a state of fear. If we take as an example an ordinary group of young people relaxing in their usual circle, you will notice that there is a certain hierarchy . Someone is higher and has authority, and someone is lower, simply by being in this company.
Those who are lower are subject to the influence of others. They, as a rule, are afraid of falling flat in front of their “friends” and are ready to fulfill their requests because they sympathize with them, or try to imitate their manners and lifestyle. Fear awakens an inferiority complex in a person, as a result of which a person begins to realize that he is worse than others.
Psychological impact on human consciousness
People want to be psychologically higher, stronger than others, sometimes they study how to influence people, or are even interested in how to psychologically break a person.
People often try to influence each other by instilling fear or using “innocent” blackmail from their point of view, because in this way you can not only manipulate a person, but also use him for your own purposes at any convenient moment. Finding themselves in such a trap, many people withdraw into themselves, continuing to doubt their own abilities. This can be seen not only in the example of a youth company, but also in society in general, at work enterprises, etc.
Even elementary criticism can already be considered an element of the psychology of influence; having felt guilty, a person is more likely to make concessions and undergo some coercion. Spreading gossip, rumors, intimidation in any form is also part of the same opera of negative influences on a person.
Read about manipulating human consciousness using NLP in this article.
8. Uncertainty
Stop the habit of asking for permission in cases where it is not required. This often happens when we try to appear polite and respectful to others. Unfortunately, when we cannot act on our own, we look stupid and pathetic .
Learn to be courageous and make decisions even when you are not sure. If people see a bold solution, they follow it.
To overcome uncertainty, you need to express your opinion and not give up on it.
Why are they susceptible to bad influence?
No friends in the family.
Unfortunately, again we need to start with the family. If a teenage child does not have friendly relations with family members, then he will look for this communication on the street. A teenager needs to feel that his family needs him. If he has household responsibilities and is praised for his obedience, spends time with him regularly and organizes interesting weekends and holidays for him, if possible, then the child will not be drawn anywhere from the family. However, if the teenager is left to his own devices and the parents are busy with their own affairs, then quickly there will be someone who will be closer to your child than you. This happens both in not prosperous (as they say) and in prosperous families.
The reason is not the amount of money and family capabilities, but the emotional atmosphere at home.
Strong influence.
Indeed, your child may be subjected to pressure to become like everyone else. Bad guys (if you call them that) can also be annoyed that someone is different from them and acts more correctly than them. Teenagers don’t like it when someone already has an inner core and strives to bend this person under them. They can use threats, emotional bullying after lessons and even during lessons and breaks, organize boycotts, etc. In general, they will do everything possible to get their way, unlike parents who cannot influence the child in the same way in a positive way, as sometimes happens. Of course, many parents also begin to fight for their child, but then do it with more persistence and consistency than teenagers at school. Do you understand?
Habit of constantly apologizing
If you start every sentence with “I'm sorry,” people will think you don't respect yourself. There is no need to apologize for your existence. Starting with “sorry, but” prefaces the message with the expectation of disapproval. Learn to start a sentence like this: “Listen!”
Be brave enough to make mistakes. What joy is there in hiding your personality and just trying to please others? When we do this, we become fake. Living people make mistakes, no one is perfect, so there is no point in apologizing in advance. They learn from mistakes, but for one beaten they give two unbeaten ones.
Show kindness
When faced with someone's dissatisfaction, listen to him and try to understand without making value judgments. Everyone has bad days, and this one will end soon too. If the situation happens day after day, appease the negative person, show him signs of attention, tell him that you will help deal with the situation, invite him to the cinema or go shopping, take a walk in the park or ride bicycles. Keep the person busy so that he doesn’t have to think about anything bad towards you.
A negative person sees only evil and danger. Show him that everything is not as bad as he made it out to be. Kindly point out that you can learn a useful lesson from the situation that will teach you not to make mistakes in the future.
For example, your friend is angry about his job as a manager, although he so wanted to become an artist. Engage in joint drawing, during which you hint to your friend that he will not need to work as a manager all his life, he can develop in the field of art, sell his paintings, start making money on it, subsequently leaving his unloved job and devoting time to himself and his creativity.
Fightback techniques
"That's who I am"
When trying to shift the blame onto you, blaming you for your insensitivity and your mistakes, use the technique of rebuffing the manipulator “That’s who I am. I like everything about myself and I won’t change.”
An answer in this style is categorical and is not suitable for a conversation with your boss at work. But you can easily blow off friends you don’t know well.
"Answer without an answer"
To the manipulator’s requests, you always have options for non-conflicting answers:
- This is interesting.
- Thank you, your opinion is very interesting.
- Maybe I'll think about it.
Examples of Gaslighting
Gaslighters are not always easy to identify: they leave no bruises and often disguise their manipulations as harmless humor, constructive criticism, or concern. The easiest way to understand this phenomenon is to use specific examples.
Gaslighting in a couple
Example: a woman is sure that her husband is cheating on her. She notices a long hair on his shirt and lipstick marks on his neck. The man is increasingly late at work and does not answer the phone. At the same time, in response to her suspicions, he says: “You are paranoid! Instead of feeding me dinner, you ask stupid questions. Contact a psychologist and don’t distract me from work!”
The result: after some time, a woman loses the ability to accurately assess what is happening. She begins to doubt her conclusions, blames herself for being too suspicious, and eventually apologizes to her husband for the baseless accusations.
Gaslighting of children
Example: a boy gets an A in chemistry, a subject that is difficult for him. After school he rushes home to please his parents. He proudly shows the diary to his father, and in response he hears: “So what? Why are you so happy? A great achievement for me too! When I was your age, I generally had only straight A's. And you’re not trying hard enough.”
Bottom line: according to the father, this way he stimulates his son’s interest in learning and motivates him to strive for high results. In fact, the child stops trusting his own emotions, becomes convinced of his inadequacy and grows up unsure of himself.
