I’m not that nice! (No surprise there.) I just took the “Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It” self- assessment and I am “neither overly confident nor too nice.” And that’s a pretty good thing because according to Carol Frohlinger, author of the new book, “Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It,” nice is highly overrated. We call it the good-girl complex – that ingrained behavior we’ve learned from trying to be first a good daughter, then a good student, a good friend, a good employee, a good wife, and a good mother. And it can hold us back. “Relationships should be reciprocal,” says Frohlinger, who also wrote the book ”Her Place at the Table: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success” and co-founded Negotiating Women, Inc. And that reciprocity won’t happen if you’re more concerned with pleasing others than with addressing your own needs. The challenge is silencing the dialogue in your head telling you to be a good girl that probably started in childhood and has been playing ever since. “Turn it off,” says Frohlinger, “and then end it.” Easier said then done. But if you have a clear picture of what happens when you change your behavior, it gets [...]
