I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello I'm back. It's been what six, seven weeks since the last episode because I went on my

summer break and it was good timing because I was knackered and also my tinnitus had crept up.

I think my body was saying, girl, you better listen to me and give me some rest.

And so I did and my t just drop back down pretty rapidly and is you

know back to being pretty low and that works for me so I had a good break where, yeah, hung out with my little family.

Both of my girls were home obviously because, you know, summer holidays, but it was also a little bit blurry because my eldest for instance had been at home since

mid-March along with my husband and we weren't going away anywhere.

Everything was booked up in England and obviously we couldn't go to Amsterdam or go anywhere else and you know what

It felt a little bit funny at first because it was like oh I'm not gonna get like a change of scenery and it was like you know know what, it's okay, like surrender. And I read a lot. I had my

challenge on Goodreads this year is for me to read 50 books and I think I'm a number 42 or 43 so I had a really good

read this summer and I will be clearly a good bit over my 50 books for this year. And yeah, I also just needed time to perculate and gather myself for this season ahead, of season of the podcast, season of life, season of being me. So I am back and

raring to go. What am I talking about today? Well, I know that this is going to sound like maybe the

craziest thing possibly to some of you but I just think that sometimes we have to

stop pretending that we are so flipping nice and the reason why this is so important is because what so many of us are unaware of

is that we are mistaking what is actually a desire to control, sometimes anger, which might take

the form of resentment or irritation or resentment or yes sieving, simmering rage underneath.

Yeah, we're mistaking those for being nice.

And we're doing that because of our idea of what we think

it is to be nice. We're doing it because we are so unaware of how our image of ourselves and how we think we want to be perceived by others and our ways of avoiding conflict and criticism and

disappointment and rejection and so forth.

We're unaware of how we have created strategies that we call niceness that help us to manage our fears around these things that help us to manage how we come across.

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