Bully food behaviors don’t always lead to bullying, but they always limit friendship. Bully food is any behavior, thought, feeling, or belief that feeds into the cycle of bullying on your end.

The list is long, and it includes: worrying, fearing, trying to impress or please, be perfect, obey the bully, avoid them, it’s thinking things like I’m not good enough or I’m so pathetic I deserve this, and feeling anxiety, sadness, bewilderment, hopelessness, self-consciousness, or anger all because of the belief that somehow it’s you who must live up to others’ standards never the other way around.

Bullies sense this belief because it’s what generates all the bully food behaviors.

How do you turn it around? Simple, you break the habit of self-qualifying.

Self-qualifying is trying too hard to feel good enough. We don’t think we’ll measure up, so we over compensate. We over do it to make others think we’re good enough when we ourselves don’t.

It’s common to worry about living up to others’ standards when it seems crucially important to do so.

This is what makes people start self-qualifying. They believe they must win someone over by proving themselves, and whether it’s a potential friend or an intimidating bully, it’s easy to place excessive importance on pleasing them.

The irony is what pleases others the most is our commitment to our own standards, not theirs! Sure, people want us to go along with them, but that’s not what impresses them. And people want to be impressed.

Trying too hard to meet everyone else’s expectations, hoping you’ll measure up, is bully food.

The belief you need to self-qualify produces every kind of bully food.

The importance you place on getting a friendship going, or getting a bully to leave you alone has got to be less than the importance of living by your own standards.

When you live by your standards, you don’t qualify to others, and you make them qualify to you.

Think to yourself I’m good enough as long as I meet my own standards. Look for the ways you may be trying too hard to meet others’ standards, and root them out. Your attempts to make them see you differently are manipulative. You might not be correctly guessing what they really want from you. Even if you are, it’s a losing game. You’ll never root out everything they could potentially criticize, but you can root out your need to measure up to their idea of perfect.

You can only live up to what the world wants if you include yourself, because the world includes you. It’s impossible to please everyone every time, but you can always satisfy yourself, which will please the ones who are important and disappoint the ones who aren’t.

Disappointing the bully is what will send them packing.

Stop qualifying to them and start validating yourself. This will fill you with confidence, and it will turn the tables on your dynamic with others. Instead of them screening you for how well you measure up, they’ll adjust to live up to what you expect.

Not only must you stop qualifying and compensating, but you must also start screening them. Watch them. Decide if they meet your standards, and let them know when they fall short. This is listening, noticing and sharing with friends. It’s observing, assessing and judging a bully. It’s saying, “I see you, and this is how I’m going to handle you.”