Stop being treated like a doormat
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“No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness. If you behave like a doormat, expect to be stepped on and don’t complain about it. If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.”
As a people pleasing introvert, being treated like a doormat is one of the easiest traps to fall into. Since we don’t speak our minds and we are very polite, people take our silence to mean acceptance of the way they treat us. However, on the inside, we feel this massive volcano ready to burst but 99% of the time, it never bursts. We suck it up, smile, and politely move on. This kind of behaviour damages our self confidence and our self esteem. After a while, it becomes second nature and instead of calling out other people for bad behaviour, we blame ourselves and our introversion and accept that this is just the way it is.
What’s worse is that the volcanic eruption never full subsides. On the worst end of the scale, one day someone does something small and it’s enough to push us over the edge and the volcano finally erupts. However, while our eruption is internally perceived to be caused by a constant barrage of being treated like a doormat, other people will perceive it as us severely overreacting to what is a single, isolate, and insignificant event.
Instead of being seen like a doormat, you’re now seen as someone who overreacts to tiny matters, and all your people pleasing efforts have amounted to nothing. Yeah, being a doormat sucks. What’s worse is tolerating it when you’re treated like a doormat.
So take this simple step to stop being agreeable, stop being treated like a doormat, and minimise the risk of a massive volcanic eruption. You can watch the full video from Jocko Willink at the end of the blog.
SET YOUR BOUNDARIES EARLY
Draw your boundaries early. It sounds simple but difficult to do. It’s take practice and it takes a small change in mindset. The easiest way to achieve this is to start being conscious of each time what you are saying and what you are feeling are not congruent with each other. Start with the simple things. If your partner wants to have Mexican for dinner and you feel like Chinese, and yet you just quietly nod your head, recognise that this is you not setting your boundaries.
Setting your boundaries doesn’t mean you always enforce what you want. But it does mean you need to firstly recognising when you are going against what you want before you can start setting up boundaries, and then moving onto calling out what is unacceptable.
Once you’ve gotten familiar with recognising that you being agreeable, you can then start articulating your preference. Again, it doesn’t have to be a massive blow-up but it could be as simple as saying “I actually feel like having Chinese for dinner. Let’s have Mexican tonight but tomorrow we’ll have Chinese.”
Once you’ve gotten into the habit of the above two steps, you can trialling with the spectrum of intensity of the boundaries you are setting. It can range from a low intensity boundary (like the sentence above) through to level 10 intensity where you stand your ground. In fact, kids at school are being taught this at a young age. My son’s teacher always teaches her class that if ever anyone does something they don’t like, they need to say “Stop it. I don’t like it.” If that line doesn’t work, then they can escalate to the teacher.
If kids are being taught this at school, as adults, we should adopt the same approach at work. Let’s face it, in the workplace, some people are just adults on the outside but childish on the inside.
Photo by bruce mars from Pexels
Commanding genuine respect, one that doesn’t rely on your position power is one of the hardest things to do for an introvert. There are five simple actions we can adopt straight away that can help us to establish our presence in the room and command the attention and focus on what we have to say.