I’ve just finished reading “You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again” about prostitution in Hollywood, and what comes across, again and again, is to protect your daughters or anyone vulnerable DON’T bring them up to be ‘Nice’ ‘A people pleaser’ yes employers like ‘keen’ however anyone who is exploitative will spot a people pleaser a mile off, and if it suits their purposes, they will exploit them.
That exploitation could be a line manager, looking for an inexperienced employee to blame if any of that line manager’s targets are missed. Grooming for this one could be the line manager ‘joking’ about the ‘gaps’ in their target’s experience to see if they” accept the line manager’s ‘assessment’ of them. Or it could be another employee seeing how willing their target would be to do things that are actually part of that colleague’s job.
From “You’ll Never Make Love,” Linda, “Girls are often raised to be polite, but nice girls are easy marks for anyone who wants to use and manipulate them. I wish I had learned it’s OK to disappoint your boss. … I remember once seeing the mother of a teenage girl who had been murdered, ‘If I had one thing to do over again, I would have taught my daughter not to be so nice.’ … It took me far too long to get suspicious of things that were too good to be true. There will always be a price to pay.”
It’s far safer to be ‘reasonable’. And young people need to know what their reasonable is in any situation. And what they are going to say if someone tests it.
I now have over 1000 Linked In connections, so I hope that lots of you will come to my next launch; it’s FREE, takes under 1 hour, and if it doesn’t change the way you think about bullying and harassment, you’re welcome to disconnect from me.
My website is playing up a bit – booking for the launch is currently via the orange banner above.
I am also holding the first workshop – so if you know young people, new to the workplace or anyone who has been bullied or harassed, please send them the link via orange banner. I can’t change what has happened to them, but I can prevent it happening again, Also, there is no shame if you are a manager who has been bullied or harassed, as “The Shield of Silence” points out, senior women make prestigious targets and shame and silence is what bullies and harassers rely to facilitate their behaviour. Come to the workshop if you want to know how to spot that someone is assessing you as a target and how to respond appropriately but effectively. #workplacebullying #harassment #bullyingawareness #bullyingprevention #anewnormal
