No More Christian Nice Girl:
When Just Being Nice-Instead of Good-Hurts You, Your Family, and Your Friends
By Paul Coughlin, Oregon Author
and Jennifer D. Degler, PhD
Minneapolis, MN-Too often people, and women in particular, equate being Christian with being nice. As a result, they bend every which way trying to accommodate everyone, suppressing thoughts, opinions, and emotions. “A lot of what people call nice behavior is really fear, cowardice, and even sin in disguise,” say Paul Coughlin and Jennifer Degler, authors of No More Christian Nice Girl. “Many women are nice, not because they truly care about other people, but because they fear conflict and rejection.”
So these women smile politely-through gritted teeth. And when their passivity and false niceness don’t bring the abundant life Jesus promised, they try even harder to hide behind a fragile facade of pleasant perfection.
“Women believe that timid compliance and bland niceness are always the answer to the question ‘What Would Jesus Do?'” say Coughlin and Degler. “When this passive, superficial sweetness doesn’t help them, women blame themselves and believe following Christ’s example doesn’t work in everyday life.”
Yet nothing could be further from the truth, as Coughlin, author of the groundbreaking bestseller No More Christian Nice Guy, and Degler, a female psychologist and life coach, explain, and they offer an alternative to this “disease to please” cycle of desperation.
They show readers that emulating the real Jesus Christ-not the one-sided “nice” Christ often taught in church-and facing their fears of conflict, rejection, and criticism, opens up options far beyond simply acting nice or being mean.
“If women will risk being frank and firm in addition to being gracious and loving, they will conquer their fear and develop genuine, intimate connections with other people,” they say.
Brimming with enlightening information, thought-provoking questionnaires, insightful stories, and biblically based teaching, this book will motivate women to allow God to transform them into authentic, powerful women of true loving faith. End-of-chapter questions are also included for further reflection or group discussion.
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