Common Habits That Make People Like You Less

Sometimes we know for sure that we've done something to make people dislike us.

Will Smith just smacked the sh.

T out of me.

But other times it's less obvious. And the slap isn't the only thing that is causing Will to receive huge backlash. There were several more common mistakes that turned people against him. That's why in this video, we're going to cover three of the more subtle things Will did so that you can avoid these mistakes in your own life. We'll also get into the real reason that Will hit Chris, something I haven't seen anyone else talk about yet. First off, though, when it comes to things that make people dislike you, triangulating yourself into your significant other's relationships. After Jading got upset about Chris's joke, a lot of people suggested that the best course of action for Will would have been to speak to Chris at the end of the event, man to man. But they're actually making this mistake. The best course of action would have been for Jada to speak to Chris because she was the one who took offense. Will laughed. This isn't to say that you can't stick up for your partner, but in situations when you don't share your partner's feelings, it's generally best for you to step back and let them handle their own business. We triangulate ourselves, though, into their conflicts. When we don't trust our partner's emotional maturity, either we believe they'll handle the situation poorly, so we intervene to mellow things out, or we believe they'll misplace their upset feelings on us so we make a strong sign of solidarity to save our own skin. But everyone else knows what's going on and they hate watching you mediate for someone who ought to be mature enough to handle their relationships. So while it is important to listen and empathize with your partner, and of course stepping in in the case of physical violence is warranted, it's important to trust them privately. Handle most interpersonal conflicts. If doing that goes terribly because they explode on the other person or on you, that's a sign you shouldn't be in that relationship in the first place. The second thing that we saw from Will was dodging ownership of his bad behavior. His acceptance speech went on for six minutes and at no point did he apologize to Chris for hitting him. Though somehow the Academy got an apology for watching him do it.

I want to apologize to the Academy. I want to apologize to my all my fellow nominees.

Now, there is a fine line between what deserves an apology and what does not. And I certainly don't advise you to apologize when you're convinced you've done nothing wrong. I do advise you, though, to look for signs that you might be self deceiving to protect your ego. One of those signs is when you feel compelled to speak highly of yourself after a heated interaction, like Will did in his acceptance speech, comparing himself to Richard Williams.

Richard Williams William was a fierce defender of his family. I'm being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.

When you frame your behavior around a conflict, not simply as justified but as virtuous, it might be because you know that you behave poorly and you're trying to counter correct for the guilt you feel. So if you feel a strong urge to defend yourself from people who aren't attacking you, they just watched you do something, you probably need to take some time away. Reflect on how you'd feel if your positions were reversed and someone did to you what you did to them. If that makes you see your behavior in a new perspective, apologize directly. And if you ever find yourself saying.

Love will make you do crazy things.

Take a long pause. You probably aren't acting out of love and you just did something terrible. Which takes us to the third point. People hate feeling like you're carrying emotional baggage from the past to your interactions with them.

To do what we do, you got to be able to take abuse. You got to be able to have people talk crazy about you in this business. You got to be able to have people disrespecting you. And you got to smile. You got to pretend like that's okay.

Now, Will isn't wrong, and I think people probably don't sympathize enough with the stresses of superstardom. Having millions of people speculate about and mock your relationship is brutal. But no matter how hard your plight, letting your upset feelings out on someone unrelated is a sure way to make people desperate despise you. So you must find ways to clear lingering bad feelings before you unleash them on those around you. And it's here. We need to dive deep because not dragging the past around is a lot easier said than done. So we're going to use Will as an example from which you can learn an incredibly valuable framework. For Will, the past that caused this slap is far more than the gossip about his relationship. It goes back to his childhood, where he, like all of us, experienced things he couldn't handle. Here's one major example from his life. Read to him from his own memoir.

I watched my father punch My mother, in the side of her head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood. That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am I've carried.

Most of my life. The sense of failing every woman I interact with.

This is a traumatic experience. It created emotions that a child would have no way of processing. And even if you had a wonderful childhood, you have experiences like this too, that you had no way of handling. Given your maturity, something as normal as a firstborn struggling to share mom and dad's love with a new sibling could qualify. Whatever the source of traumatic overwhelm, our psyches protect us by repressing the memory and the emotions surrounding it.

My mother and I never talked about it until I read her the chapter. My mother and I, for my entire life, we never brought it up.

This pattern of compartmentalizing and then not discussing trauma is classic. In fact, the things that have traumatized you may honestly seem like no big deal when you think about them. They don't even really bother you. So talking about them seems like a waste of time. But even if you don't think about the past, the underlying emotions are still there in the subconscious. And they create an indelible influence that drives more of our lives than we can imagine.

For the most part of my adult life, from that moment in that bedroom, I carry a sense of not being good enough, not being able to protect the women I love.

Will is describing coping mechanisms, patterns that do not directly process trauma, but allow us to manage it. Sometimes these coping mechanisms are obviously destructive, like cutting or developing an eating disorder. But sometimes these coping mechanisms have positive benefits in our lives. For instance, a child raised with fears of not having enough money might work really hard to earn as a grown up. In Will's case, he felt he let his mother down. So he became a charmer and built his self esteem around this.

The entire basis for my self esteem was foundationally dependent upon whether or not my woman was happy. My self image was inexorably bound up in my woman's opinion and approval of me.

Similarly, to avoid his dad's wrath, he became the funny guy. That coping mechanism catapulted his career, but it also caused him to laugh off things that upset him for years. For instance, there was a lot of deflecting with humor in his conversations with Jada about her relationship with August. Alsina.

I got into an entanglement with August. That's what I said.

An entanglement?

Yes.

Yes, a relationship.

Yes, it was a relationship. Absolutely.

And this is the issue with even the helpful coping mechanisms. They come with a price. In exchange for avoiding direct confrontation with difficult emotions, we make our whole lives of reaction to trauma. For instance, the child raised in poverty might never confront the terror of not having enough and instead work non stop to make money far beyond what they need to be happy. A child who becomes the funny guy might bottle up their negative emotions until they erupt explosively. And a child who couldn't protect his mother from abuse may never confront the helplessness that he felt and instead believe he's constantly being called on to protect women like he couldn't in the past.

I got to protect ingenue Ellis. I got to protect Saniya. I'm being called on in my life to protect people.

But as a 53 year old man, what is Will protecting these women from? Is it really necessary? Trauma will say yes, because the traumatized parts of your psyche are stuck. They never grew up, so they want to recreate the past and somehow fix it. That's why Will sees women who need protection everywhere. That way he avoids the helplessness that he felt from not being able to protect the one woman he wanted to save most. But recreating the past and making amends doesn't actually heal trauma. It is the trauma response. Trauma is healed by embracing the truth. My guess is that Will needs to embrace the limits of his responsibility. It wasn't his responsibility as a young boy to protect his mother from his father, and it's not his responsibility as a husband to protect Jada from a joke. He needs to learn to let adults, women in particular, work out their issues without feeling called to intervene. Of course, there are totally legitimate moments where physical protection and even some offense would be necessary. But the trauma makes it difficult for Will to tell the difference. Will also needs to learn to find the middle ground between laughing off pain and exploding. Directly expressing how he's been hurt without joking or snapping or would be a great growth for him. And maybe you too. If you're also prone to comedic deflection, and if you want to begin the process of relaxing your coping mechanisms and confronting uncomfortable truths, there's one that we almost all could benefit from. And that's the mass coping mechanism of worrying about other people's character, particularly celebrities. Judgment of anyone often serves to bolster our own egos. I'd never do that. We say we, which makes us feel morally superior and distracts us from our own issues. This doesn't imply that you have to approve of everything that other people do, though. For instance, Will hitting Chris was wrong. He should apologize. But spending energy on what Will or anyone else ought to do differently protects you from the more uncomfortable task of identifying what you need to do differently in your life. So if you want to make sure you're not dragging your past around, focus on your own self. Identify your coping mechanisms, the truths you've been hiding. Hopefully Will's example has sparked a recognition of something that maybe you hadn't looked at before. And if not, a few of the best ways I know to begin purposely addressing trauma are meditation therapy, holotropic breathwork, and the conscious use of psychedelics. These are much larger topics for another video, but they are by far the most powerful ways I know of to unwind trauma. And granted they aren't all as easy or self satisfying as celebrity gossip, at least in the moment. 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