Smart Women Know When to Say No , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Kevin Leman Dr.

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113 pages

English

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Description

Many women try too hard to be nice. It's a way of life for many who live in a culture that expects them to be the ones who "keep everyone happy." But what happens when keeping everyone else happy drains your own happiness?This book by bestselling author Dr. Kevin Leman shows how women who find themselves manipulated by impassivity, guilt, or abusive behavior can learn to assert themselves while maintaining their "pleasing" personalities.

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Assertiveness

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 décembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441213846
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 1987, 2006 by Dr. Kevin Leman
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1384-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Scripture marked NIV is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Scripture marked TLB is taken from The Living Bible , copyright © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
Quotation from Ann Landers appeared in The Tucson Citizen , Tuesday, April 21, 1987, and is used by permission of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
To Hannah Elizabeth Leman
Born June 20, 1987
Hannah Elizabeth
A child’s warm and tender skin
Soft and smooth, without a flaw.
The small body hasn’t experienced life yet
Just being born into it
But this is God’s law.
The innocence of a child,
something we should all have
something we should strive to be.
An innocent child, fresh in God’s sight,
As she ventures out to experience life.
Holly Leman, age 14
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Part 1 Portrait of the Pleaser
1. What Kind of Pleaser Are You?
2. The Little Girl Who Lives in You
3. Why a Pleaser Can Be Born Anytime
Part 2 Why Pleasers Can’t Say No
4. Pleasers Battle a Low Self-Image
5. The Guilt Gatherers of Life
6. Pleasers, Perfectionism, and the Avis Complex
Part 3 How Pleasers Marry for Better and Often Live with Much Worse
7. Pleasers Are the Moths, Controllers Are the Flame
8. Seeing Controllers “Up Close and Personal”
9. Which Way Out of Controller Swamp?
10. Taming the Alligator, Draining the Swamp
Part 4 Portrait of a More Positive Pleaser
11. How to Use “Choice Power” to Become a Positive Pleaser
12. How to Please Yourself without Feeling Guilty
Notes
About Dr. Kevin Leman
Resources by Dr. Kevin Leman
Introduction
Do you know this woman?
Her motto in life is peace at any price. This is a woman who bites off far more than she can chew. She’s responsible for other people’s failures and negligence. She should have been a bail bondswoman because she’s great at bailing people out of their messes.
You’d like her because she’s a very nice person. Everyone else likes her too. But she wants the oceans of life smooth around her. She avoids conflict. She laughs at a joke she doesn’t understand. She appears unaffected when she is offended. She’s responsible for everything. If it rains at the family reunion, it’s her fault because she picked the location.
She’s most likely the firstborn daughter or the middle daughter. People know her soft spots. They know how to push her buttons. Many days she runs on a tankful of guilt that she can live on for a week at a time. Driven by the guilt she carries through life, she doesn’t know how to say no.
Again, I ask you, do you know this person? She’s the Pleaser. And in the pages that follow, Smart Women Know When to Say No will teach this woman how to develop “know” power. What does that mean? Well, there’s something wonderful about having a pleasing personality, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with pleasing other people. Let’s face it the world would be a lot nicer place to live in if we had more people who were bent on pleasing others. But at what expense to the Pleaser and the ones she tries to satisfy?
Maybe you know this woman. Or, maybe you are this woman. Smart Women Know When to Say Know is a book written specifically for you, and for those who want to help you. Just as important, this book will help you become what I call a Positive Pleaser.
Then you can kiss the old days good-bye…the days when you used to say yes but you really meant no.
P ART 1

Portrait of the Pleaser
What is she like, this woman who wants to please? Is she motivated by fear or does she have a Florence Nightingale complex? Is it bad to be a pleaser? Does pleasing inevitably lead to being a doormat and thus a slave to a controller? Are there different kinds of pleasers? How did you get to be a pleaser? Is it inherited, like blue eyes, or did you learn it? In the first three chapters you will learn the answers to these questions, as well as the life-style of the typical pleaser where you fit on the Pyramid of Pleasers why no is the hardest word a pleaser ever has to say the key characteristics of all pleasers how pleasers are trained from childhood to be “good little girls” how the “love bank” affects your relationships what kind of pleaser you are why the little girl you once were is still with you why your relationship to Daddy was absolutely crucial why you can’t change “your grain” but you can change which birth order has the most pleasers why the youngest members of the family are the least likely to be pleasers
1
What Kind of Pleaser Are You?
“She always tries to make everyone happy.”
She seems quite confident on the surface, but behind the “I’m working at it” smile is a woman who is a bit down. She doesn’t feel as if she measures up to what life is throwing at her, and she’s in my office to figure out why.
Her story pours out. She’s “successful” as wife, mother, and working woman. She is busy, oh, so busy. Her schedule rivals the man who rides around in Air Force One . It seems her kids are involved in every activity and sport, and therefore so is she.
Her husband? Well, he’s busy too, even busier than she is. He works long hours, staggers in anywhere from 7:30 to 9:45 p.m., sometimes too tired to eat, always ready to collapse on the couch and watch TV. She doesn’t say anything, of course, because when she does he can get quite angry. He’s doing it all for me and the girls , she tells herself.
This woman seems to have it all, so “Why,” she asks, “am I so depressed? Why don’t my kids listen to me? Why can’t I say no? I even buy things from machines that call with a recorded sales pitch. Why does everyone take advantage of me? I try so hard to please. Why is everybody on my back?”
“Tell me more,” I reply, usually knowing what she will say.
And the story continues to come out. She isn’t as confident as her perfectly tailored suit and perfectly done face, nails, and hair suggest. She is achieving at work but doesn’t feel that good about it.
“I second-guess myself,” she says ruefully. “I doubt my ability even when I succeed and my boss praises me for it. I feel I should have done it better. I rethink things until I find fault with myself.”
After work her balancing act continues. She rushes over to her mother’s house, where her two daughters always go after school. And she gets it there with both barrels.
Her mother always worries about her health. She’s working too hard. She needs more rest. How can she care for a family and work, too?
Her two daughters aren’t as concerned about her rest. In fact, they want her to run a little faster. Why is she late again? What’s for dinner? Can they watch TV until nine o’clock? Are they going to the zoo Saturday? Did she get the material to make the costumes for their party?
“Sometimes I just feel overwhelmed,” she admits. “I don’t think I can do it. Maybe my mother is right. I guess I just don’t have what it takes to make a good marriage today. My friends aren’t doing much better. It seems as if everybody is getting divorced.”
“When you were a little girl, what was it like growing up?” I ask, and she remembers having to stand on her own two feet after her dad left when she was ten.
“Mom drove him out,” she recalls. “He loved me, I know he did, but he couldn’t take the hassle. And when he started drinking, that was it. Mom said he had to get out and he did. I saw him only a few times after that. He was going to come to my high school graduation but something happened.…”
As she talks, the pattern continues. She always got good grades, always came home before curfew. She tried to be a help to her mother, who never remarried, but whatever she did, it wasn’t quite good enough.
“Mom was always second-guessing me on what I wore and how I looked. She let me know in one way or another that I really wasn’t adequate. All I could hope for was to snag a man, and then I could never be sure he’d hang around.”
Dutifully she tried to learn all the tricks of the trade how to be attractive, sexy, available. That was the only way she could hope to be loved. And now she had come to see me because the balancing act was getting more and more difficult. She was feeling less secure and less confident all the time. And she was beginning to suspect that her husband’s frequent need to work overtime didn’t always involve his accounts.
Pleasers Fall into Many Categories
The woman I have described is a composite of clients I see weekly. She represents a wide variety of the species I call “the pleasers.”
They can be single, married, divorced, thinking of remarriage, or recently remarried and in “the same bad scene again.” Some have sworn off men for good and are marinating in their own bitterness, wondering if they can ever be happy.
Whatever their situation at the moment, all these women want to know why their sincere attempts to please haven’t really pleased anyone, particularly themselves. Their complaints are familiar:
“ Why is everyone always on my case? I try so hard to please and all I get is guff from the kids, from the dog, from the checker at the supermarket. And oh, yes, from Ol’ Harry, when he remembers to come home from work.”
“ Why can’t I say no? I give in to my ki