Pleasing and Thank You

The value that I focused on this week has been ‘pleasing personality’. I think most people are drawn to those who are pleasant. Some though aren’t. Some folks are put off by people who are pleasant. I have a neighbor like that.

I don’t want to play dime store psychologist but I think people like that have some pretty deep seeded issues. Maybe being that way is easier because it certainly creates a barrier that most pleasant people will respect and not even try to put a chink in it.

Anyway; my observation has been that by focusing on being pleasant and observing pleasantness in others makes the contrast pretty glaring. The pleasant people really stand out but then so do the unpleasant ones. The good news is that, at least in my experience, the pleasants way out number the unpleasants.

Like a lot of things; pleasantness can be viewed on a spectrum. There are some who are genuinely happy and seem to have all the right perspectives in order to be that way.

Then there are those like my neighbor who don’t even seem to have an interest in smiling and the only thing that seems to bring them joy is other people’s misfortune. I think of myself as being in the former camp or at least much closer to that end of the spectrum.

Nowhere is this dichotomy displayed more than on social media. I’m not a big consumer of any of the platforms but do look at it occasionally. Another thing that I paid attention to this week was what that looks like in the form of likes, thumbs up, hearts and smiley emojis.

The positive posts get WAAAAYYYY more engagement than the negative ones. The interesting thing is; that doesn’t seem to matter to the negative posters

The reality is; you never know why people are the way they are. Its not up to me to crawl inside anyone’s head to try to find out. Their blueprint is what it is and the best I can do for them is to continue to be pleasant.

Epiphanies happen all the time and when I found myself wondering if negative/unpleasant people get as much out of being how they are as pleasant people do; I thought; this is one of those situations where I don’t want to meet them where they are but just stay where I am and hope that it makes a difference in their life.

See more about what I have learned in my Master Key Experience by clicking here.