This week I talk about when is the right time to be exclusive and I explain what be yourself

means. I'm Natalie Lou, a writer based in southeast London who is

dedicated to helping people to improve their emotional and relationship literacy.

Let's kick this off.

I know somebody who needed to make an employee redundant.

Because she wanted things to be done nicely, you know, to make

the bad news go down really well, she took the employee to lunch first. And yes, of course, it backfired. Her intentions were in the right place,

but it wasn't the right thing to do for the situation. This got me thinking about how there is another scenario that people sometimes try to do this whole nicely, nicey thing, and it backfires.

And it's around the area of breakups. Why do we try to break up in what we think is a nice way?

I'm not in any way suggesting that we need to be cold and basically un-nice to people that we are breaking up with,

but what we have to recognize is that when we get too focused on trying

to do things in a nice way, we are generally not doing things in an authentic way.

We get too caught up in how we look, so how we are going to be

perceived by the other party and thinking that we can do things in a way that's going to

influence and even control their feelings about it and we don't give too much or enough attention to how that person feels and what the actual situation is.

What this can result in is that and what the actual situation is.

What this can result in is that somebody who is breaking up

can be so caught up in their image and how they look and thinking,

well, I don't want to be an asshole, and I want them to be so pleased with the way that I have broken up with them

that they will want to be my friend afterwards and so they can end up really not being I don't say they have to be brutally honest

I'm not in any way suggesting they have to be cruel but they can end up dropping

hints so then whoever it is that they're trying to break it off with ends up missing the point

...