Ep. 70 - Be Kind, Not Nice: The Type C Guide to Self-Advocacy with Kathy Washburn

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In this solo episode, Kathy breaks down the hidden cost of “nice” for high achieving women, especially those with Type C patterns. She unpacks why niceness can be a performance that keeps the peace while quietly disconnecting you from your own needs, and how kindness is different because it includes you. You’ll hear a powerful story that clarifies the difference between surface warmth and real care, the science of what chronic emotional suppression does to the body, and a simple practice to help you pivot from freeze to truth in real time.

Topics discussed

• People pleasing and Type C behavior patterns
• Self advocacy skills for high achieving women
• How to say no without guilt
• Nervous system freeze response and conflict avoidance
• Emotional suppression and chronic stress
• Boundaries as self respect and relationship care

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Transcript

 Ep. 70 - Be Kind, Not Nice: The Type C Guide to Self-Advocacy with Kathy Washburn

Ep. 70 - Be Kind, Not Nice: The Type C Guide to Self-Advocacy with Kathy Washburn

[00:00:00] Kathy Washburn: I recently published the companion piece to this episode on Substack, and I received several thoughtful comments from readers. One in particular was left by a mom. She said she had been thinking about this very topic that we're gonna talk about and the difference between being nice and being kind. And after reading, she had a revelation about her daughter.

[00:00:29] Kathy Washburn: Her daughter, she said, is often not nice, direct, unapologetic, doesn't perform pleasantness, she doesn't feel, and this mom had been quietly troubled by it the way mothers are quietly troubled by things they don't quite have language for yet. But after sitting with the Post, she realized something. Her daughter isn't not nice.

[00:00:55] Kathy Washburn: Her daughter is kind to herself. First, [00:01:00] and to a woman who was raised to put niceness toward others first, always first, that kind of self-directed kindness can look well foreign. I read that comment and I felt it somewhere really deep because I had my own version of that story. My son, Kyle, Kyle is one of the most direct, humble.

[00:01:26] Kathy Washburn: Genuinely kind people. I know he says what is true for him. He doesn't apologize for taking up space. He doesn't perform warmth, he doesn't feel, and when he does feel it is, it is completely real. And the people on the other side completely feel it. I've been on the other side of that. He's, he's been this way since he could talk.

[00:01:52] Kathy Washburn: And there were moments when he was growing up where I would think quietly and maybe a little [00:02:00] anxiously like, oh, Kyle, be nice. Okay. Yes. I also said it aloud too. Sometimes. I embarrassed this little boy who was actually standing up for himself and making someone else uncomfortable. It was making me uncomfortable, and that was a me issue, not a Kyle issue, a me issue, and I was completely unaware of it.

[00:02:27] Kathy Washburn: I had been raised with a very specific instruction running in the background. Swallow your words, swallow your needs and your desires. Do what others expect of you be what would be nice to other people. And when I encountered someone who hadn't received that instruction, who moved through the world with their own center instead of everyone else's part of me, didn't know what to do with it, it [00:03:00] read as wrong as missing something, and it was certainly foreign to me.

[00:03:05] Kathy Washburn: I often thought like, how could this child be mine? He wasn't missing anything. It turns out he was actually what whole looks like, I just didn't realize it. Then.

[00:03:18]

[00:04:07] 

[00:04:07]

[00:04:07] Episode Theme Be Kind

[00:04:07] Kathy Washburn: Welcome back to The Self Investment Project. I am Kathy Washburn, your host, and today is a solo episode. And we are closing out our, the first quarter's theme together.

[00:04:21] Kathy Washburn: Maybe you realized it, maybe you didn't, but we've been focusing on self-awareness and moving towards self-advocacy. And today the topic is be kind. Not nice.

[00:04:35] Kathy Washburn: I wanna start with something that Dr. Lydia Tamock said when I interviewed her for this podcast. The researcher who named and defined type C behavior patterns, who has spent 30 years studying what chronic emotional suppression does to the human body. At the very end of our conversation, I asked her. If you could [00:05:00] leave the listeners with one piece of wisdom, what would it be?

[00:05:04] Kathy Washburn: She didn't even hesitate. Be kind, not nice. Four words and everything in this episode lives inside them. Because there is a world of difference between being kind and being nice. And most of us, especially those of us carrying type C patterns, have spent our entire lives per perfecting nice while starving ourselves of kind.

[00:05:35] Kathy Washburn: I just wanna note here, 'cause I hear this a lot from my listeners and, and friends and family and they say, you know, I love your podcast and I always get something of it, but I'm not a type C person. I don't relate to those type C behavioral patterns. And I, I'm gonna say to them what I'm gonna say to you right now, please stay.

[00:05:59] Kathy Washburn: Please keep [00:06:00] listening. We humans are of multitudes. We are never just one thing. Type A, type B, type C. We all vacillate between them depending on the circumstance. In fact, that was the topic of the Substack piece. It was how being kind versus being nice shows up in the different areas of our life, like work friendships and relationships.

[00:06:25] Kathy Washburn: Some of us have stronger A or C tendencies in these different situations, and we're all looking for that balance of a type B to be able to emotionally handle situations in a healthy way. It is my hope that you'll leave with more awareness about something that might help you in this area or in an area of your life.

[00:06:50] Kathy Washburn: Don't turn it off because you might be turned off by type C behavioral patterns. This is a place that I live in because I know it [00:07:00] really well. I've lived it. I've transitioned or transformed from it, and it's something I wanna share. So with all that today we are going to talk about what nice really costs you, not just emotionally, but physically.

[00:07:15] Kathy Washburn: We explore what kindness actually looks like when it is directed at yourself, and we close with one practice. I want you to carry into your day, into your week, maybe even into the next quarter.

[00:07:32] Why Nice Costs You

[00:07:32] Kathy Washburn: What nice really is. I'm curious, have you ever caught yourself saying, I'm fine when you actually weren't? How many times have you smiled through something that made you wanna scream or said yes when your body was literally and doing everything it could to say no. Have you ever absorbed someone else's bad [00:08:00] mood and called it compassion?

[00:08:03] Kathy Washburn: That's nice. Nice. In the Type C world is a performance. It is the carefully curated presentation of yourself as agreeable, accommodating, endlessly available.

[00:08:19] Kathy Washburn: It's the person who never rocks the boat, never asks for too much and never takes up too much space. Dr. Tamock described type C individuals as unfailingly, pleasant, even under painful or aggravating circumstances, even when the body is in distress, even when the inside is screaming. And here's what makes nice so insidious.

[00:08:50] Kathy Washburn: It looks virtuous from the outside. Our culture celebrates the giver. The helper, the one who never complains. [00:09:00] Busyness is a badge of honor. Dang, and I've worn that thing proudly. Self self-sacrifice gets mistaken for strength. But nice isn't strength nice is actually a survival strategy, and many of us learned it really early because Nice kept us safe.

[00:09:23] Kathy Washburn: It kept the peace. It made us lovable nice was how we earned our place in the room. Somewhere along the way we stopped asking whether it was working for us and we just kept performing. So if NICE is a performance, what is kind. 

[00:09:46] Minnesota Nice Lesson

[00:09:46] Kathy Washburn: I wanna answer that with a story because I think I understand the difference now in a way I never could have defined my way into when my ex-husband took a job in Minnesota.

[00:09:57] Kathy Washburn: This was back in [00:10:00] 2002 or 2001, I packed up my life and moved. And before I even got there, a friend said to me, with a knowing smile, oh, you're gonna love it. It's the land of Minnesota. Nice. And I said, rather naively, don't you mean Minnesota ice? I meant that because of the weather, because all to see, I had no idea what she was talking about, and she wasn't wrong. When I moved there, people were genuinely warm. They would tell me where to sign my kids up for soccer. They would recommend the best grocery stores wave hello from their driveways. There was a real sweetness to it, but the circles were already formed.

[00:10:49] Kathy Washburn: Deep and wide and years in the making. You could press your nose against the glass and feel the warmth radiating out, but you [00:11:00] weren't quite inside it yet. That I realized later was the nice my friend was referring to. Friendly help, helpful on the surface. Performed with complete sincerity. But then something happened.

[00:11:17] Kathy Washburn: I got sick and the circles suddenly opened. People I barely knew drove me to radiation. They brought food to my family. They took care of my children. When I couldn't, they snowed my driveway without even being asked, without making it a big deal, without needing anything from me in return. That that was kind the difference between those two things.

[00:11:51] Kathy Washburn: The soccer signup, tips and driving me to radiation is the difference This entire episode is about. Kindness [00:12:00] isn't a performance of warmth. It is warmth showing up in your actual life when it actually cost you something. And here's the thing, the goal is not to stop giving. Please give generously, intentionally, and include yourself in that giving care for yourself.

[00:12:25] Kathy Washburn: The goal isn't to stop helping others. It is to include yourself in the healing and helping of those that you love. That is kindness. It's not loudness. It's not selfishness, it's not burning everything down and starting over. It's just including yourself. Kindness asks, what do I actually need right now?

[00:12:51] Kathy Washburn: Nice asks, what does everyone else need me to do? To be To say, to not say. [00:13:00]

[00:13:01] The Body Keeps Score

[00:13:07] Kathy Washburn: I wanna pause and share something I think is essential. And I'm not saying this to scare you. I just feel like sometimes we need science to validate what our bodies already know. In Dr. Tam shock's research, she showed participants hooked up in biofeedback equipment. A patient would say calmly, I am fine. Yeah, everything's fine. But the monitor would show elevated heart rate stress markers going through the roof. This disconnect between what they said and what their body was doing was measurable, visible in real time, and she asked them to imagine what if you're doing this all day long, what is that doing to your body?

[00:13:55] Kathy Washburn: Chronic emotional suppression, the niceness pattern, the [00:14:00] freeze, the constant accommodation. It creates chronic stress, and we are beginning to understand in very concrete physiological terms, what long-term chronic stress does to the immune system, to inflammation, to our body's capacity to protect itself.

[00:14:22] Kathy Washburn: Your body is not neutral in this conversation. Every time you say yes, when you mean no, your nervous system registers it. Every time you perform pleasant. When you're feeling overwhelmed, your body is keeping the score. I truly believe that this had some impact on my own diagnosis. It was kind of a puzzle piece that fit in and that I was now aware of that I could never be unaware of again.

[00:14:56] Kathy Washburn: And believe me, you deserve to be in your [00:15:00] life fully and maybe this episode is your invitation to start. 

[00:15:07] From Freeze To Truth

[00:15:07] Kathy Washburn: For most of my life, when conflict arose, when something felt threatening or a situation required me to take up space, I didn't fight. I didn't flee. I froze. Not in a dramatic, visible way on the outside.

[00:15:24] Kathy Washburn: I was perfectly pleasant, accommodating, managing everyone else's experience of the moment. But on the inside. I had vacated myself entirely. My survival response was to get small, adjust, accommodate, freeze, get small, adjust for years. I didn't recognize it as a survival response. It was just. It felt like me.

[00:15:54] Kathy Washburn: It felt like who I was. It wasn't until I started doing this [00:16:00] work that I began to notice the moment that specific nanosecond when I felt the pull away from my own center toward someone else's. I see it so clearly now, and I can almost imagine it like an armoring up. And I feel the heaviness of that armor the magic.

[00:16:25] Kathy Washburn: I learned to use that freeze as a pivot point instead of letting the old wiring take over. Instead of immediately accommodating, adjusting, making myself smaller, I started to pause. When I felt the heavy armor erecting itself, I would take a deep, intentional breath, and I asked myself quietly, internally, in my own head, what is true for me right now?

[00:16:58] Kathy Washburn: Not, what should I do? [00:17:00] Not what does this person need, not what will keep the peace, but what is true for me right now. The answer that came back often surprised me. Sometimes it was, I need to just go for a walk and get away from this conversation for a moment. That was a new flight pattern. I got to remove myself.

[00:17:24] Kathy Washburn: That was totally new. Sometimes I am actually okay and I can choose to show up. I speak my truth even if it makes someone uncomfortable. Again, this is a new fight pattern and I've now come to realize that conflict should not be looked at as a bad word. It actually is an opportunity to deepen relationships.

[00:17:51] Kathy Washburn: And then sometimes I just need five minutes before I can even open my mouth to respond because I want to [00:18:00] respond, not to react to whatever's happening, but in all three of those options, the answer was mine. It came from inside of me. It was not a performance. And that question is the bridge between self-awareness and self-advocacy.

[00:18:20] Kathy Washburn: And you have access to it every single moment. 

[00:18:23] Boundaries As Kindness

[00:18:23] Kathy Washburn: So let's pull all this together because this is what the entire last six weeks have been building toward self-awareness is knowing what you need, hearing yourself in the moment, and self-advocacy is doing something with what you discover and the bridge between them.

[00:18:44] Kathy Washburn: Is kind kindness in how you advocate for yourself without betraying who you are. So many high achieving women in my world have been told explicitly or implicitly, [00:19:00] that setting limits is mean. That saying no is selfish. That asking for what you need is making yourself a burden. And they believed it.

[00:19:09] Kathy Washburn: I used to believe it because NICE told them it was true. But a boundary isn't a a wall. It's not barbed wire. A boundary is a declaration of what you can actually sustain. It is the honest answer to what is true for me right now. Spoken outward when you set a boundary from kindness, not from anger. Not from resentment, not from exhaustion.

[00:19:40] Kathy Washburn: You're actually saying, I care about this relationship enough to be honest about what I need, because I care about the relationship with myself. It does not mean it's one of the most generous things that you can offer yourself and another person. [00:20:00] The research here that anchors. This is Dr. Tamock. When she found in her work with people living with aids that the ones who could say no to unwanted favors were the ones who survived longer in the most literal biological sense, saying No was life giving.

[00:20:23] Kathy Washburn: Saying no from kindness is not selfish. It is in the most literal sense, life-giving.

[00:20:32] Kathy Washburn: So self-awareness is the ability to stop, look inward and tell yourself the truth. Not who you've been performing, not what you've been offering as evidence of your worth, but the real quiet, complicated, beautiful truth. And then we get to ask, how can I speak on my own behalf? Self-advocacy, the courage to take what you've seen and act on it [00:21:00] in your own voice in your life with kindness.

[00:21:05] Kathy Washburn: The poet Andrea Gibson wrote, it takes guts to tremble because I think we have this idea that courage means not being afraid. The self-advocacy means striding forward without a wobble, but the tremble is the courage, feeling the fear, and saying the true thing. Anyway. Noticing the freeze and asking the honest question.

[00:21:31] Kathy Washburn: Anyway, reaching out to receive when every piece of old wiring is in your body is telling you, I'm fine. It takes guts to tremble. It takes so much tremble to love, including loving ourselves. 

[00:21:51] 20 Seconds Of Courage

[00:21:51] Kathy Washburn: here is your 20 seconds of insane courage for this week. And by the way, 20 seconds of Insane Courage [00:22:00] was inspired by the movie we bought a zoo with Matt Damon.

[00:22:05] Kathy Washburn: It's a very sweet movie, and there's a, there's a scene when his character Benjamin advises his son sometimes. All you need is 20 seconds of insane courage. Just literally 20 seconds of just embarrassing bravery, and I promise you something great will come of it. I actually wrote that quote on a post-it note and it lived on the side of my computer screen for almo almost, or maybe more than a year.

[00:22:38] Kathy Washburn: So. Every one of you listening right now is standing at a different threshold just by way of what you've gathered from this episode where it resonated with you. Here's your invitation. 20 seconds of insane courage. Here's some options I want you [00:23:00] to notice, which. One your body responds to because that's probably the door for you.

[00:23:06] Kathy Washburn: Option one, grab your phone, hit voice memo and record yourself saying out loud. To the room, to whatever you believe is listening. The thing you haven't said yet, the true thing, don't send it to anyone.

[00:23:23] Kathy Washburn: There's no need to. You're not speaking to get a reaction. You're speaking to claim your own voice to get the reps in, to let your nervous system hear it in your own words, your own voice, because sometimes we need to say it to ourselves before we can say it to anyone else. Option two, maybe your 20 seconds looks like making the appointment you've been putting off.

[00:23:48] Kathy Washburn: Calling the doctor, looking into functional medicine, booking a session with a therapist or a coach who can help you move from insight to embody [00:24:00] change. Or option three, maybe your 20 seconds is deciding where your self investment dollars are gonna go this year because something in you has woken up and you know that you are worth investing in one door, 20 seconds, no attachment to outcome.

[00:24:22] Kathy Washburn: Which one is yours?

[00:24:25] Wrap Up And Next Steps

[00:24:25] Kathy Washburn: And before I let you go, if this episode has been stirring something in you, if the phrase be kind, not nice, has you wanting to go deeper on where this wisdom actually came from? I wanna send you directly to the source. The first episode of the Self Investment Project is my conversation with Dr. Lydia Teak, the researcher who identified type C behavior patterns and has spent her career understanding.

[00:24:53] Kathy Washburn: What chronic emotional suppression does to the human body and to the human spirit. [00:25:00] It was the first guest interview I ever recorded, and it remains one of the most important conversations I've ever had. When you hear be kind not nice in her voice, after everything she's seen in 30 years of research, it just hits differently.

[00:25:16] Kathy Washburn: I promise you that the link is in the show notes. Go binge it. Thank you for your gift of time and thank you for doing this work. The quiet, hard, beautiful work of learning to include yourself in the circle of care you so generously give to others. From here, we're gonna be moving into the body, what it means to live in em embodied life, to be fully present in the skin you are in, to stop outsourcing your wisdom to everyone else in the room.

[00:25:47] Kathy Washburn: But that's is for next time. For now, be kind. Not nice. Until next time, I wish you well. 

[00:25:55] ​