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Book Review: The Myth of the Nice Girl by Fran Hauser

Ahh, the problems that come with being the nice girl in the office. It can feel like a double-edged sword, especially when higher-ups chastise you for being too nice. But if you’ve spent your life as the agreeable one, or a natural people-pleaser, such criticism can feel especially harsh.

That’s why the book “The Myth of the Nice Girl” is such an important read - it really breaks down the idea of how to maintain your niceness and succeed in doing so, while addressing what to do when others fail to reciprocate your cheery attitude.

Transcript

Kasey Jones: Hi everyone. I'm Kasey Jones of A Better Jones.

And today I'm going to be reviewing a recent book that I read, The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Becoming a Person you Hate by Fran Hauser.

I've listened to the audiobook version of this and Fran had fantastic delivery, which I cannot always say for nonfiction writers, but I really love this book and I don't think that this is just for women.

I think, yes, women may have more of a tendency to be a little too nice and sometimes feel like they've got to over compensate to not be nice at at all.

But I think anybody could really get a lot of value out of this, and in the book there’s Fran, who has a really impressive career. She started on the finance side, worked at Ernst & Young, and then made the move to the marketing and kind of digital side of media, so working at some big companies Yahoo, Time, etc.

And now she is an investor and a really, really impressive woman and she really explains how being nice, being kind being giving and open, empathetic - how that has played a really positive role in her business and she gives some really practical tips for how you think about these things and how you can walk this line between being nice and not being what she refers to as a people pleaser. And she talks a lot about how with people pleasing you're just making it easy for others no matter what the costs are.

And so she talks a lot about you know, how you give nice feedback, how you be a nice mentor or how you look for a mentor as a nice person. How you deal with people that are not nice. How do you deal with bullies in the workplace and all kinds of other topics in between, and what I really loved about it is, you know, she told a lot of stories from kind of women that she knows but she also conducted a pretty intensive research survey to women in business before writing this book.

So she's constantly telling stories that people reveal during the survey and really looking at the insight that she's gained from talking to other people and that's something that you don't always get with some of these non-fiction books. It's often just one person's perspective and not a lot of kind of meat to back it up and she really weaves in a ton of these different stories from her past, but also from her friends and her colleagues and then from this this research survey, so it feels very comprehensive and it feels very impolite.

The other thing I really liked about it is that even though she's talking about kind of an emotional topic she really digs into very practical steps of how you manage this and how you could strike this balance and ways to look at it and things to try so she even gets down to you know, how to word conversations where you're needing to set boundaries with a boss or with a colleague, really specific things. And so you walk away from this book with I think very actionable advice on how you can be the kind of person that you want to be, how you can be kind but still be a strong leader and still be respected and taken seriously in the workplace.

So I highly recommend taking a look at this book, give the audiobook version a try, Fran does a fantastic job. So click the link, I've got links to go buy the book and would love to hear your feedback.

So if you read or listen to the book share in the comments, let me know. What did you think? What did you learn? Did you like it? Did you hate it? What's another book that you would recommend either instead of or in addition to this one?

Always love to get your feedback on what's working for you so that we can all get better together.

Thanks.

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