Let Your Geek Flag Fly

What you need to know about bullies is that it doesn’t matter what you do, they will still attack you. So you might as well let your geek flag fly.

Happy Boy who is free of bullying

What adults know and most kids take a while to learn is that bullies are

 

bullying to gain power and status. They do that by putting down others. You literally cannot make a bully happy because their attacks aren’t really about you. They are about the bully socially excluding someone to gain power.

If you went to a school where everyone was an athlete and beautiful and rich, you would still have bullying. Bullies will use whatever means they can find to socially ostracize someone, even if it means making something up.

And here is the secret, they don’t really care who the victim is, only that they are able to socially exclude them. It’s the act of socially excluding someone that gives a bully their power. They are creating and defining their own in group and that’s a powerful thing. It plays on our instinctual need to belong.

My point is that whatever it is you are being hassled about, whether it is your shoes, your hair, your weight, your eyes, your skin color, your gender or whatever, understand that that even if you could change to whatever it is the bully things you should ideally be- they would still bully you because it isn’t about you!

Don’t change yourself to fit in. Don’t let a bully convince you that you should change. Let your geek flag fly. You will be happier and you will act as a beacon to others who are being pressured. You being an open happy geek will give others permission and courage to be so as well. And if enough of us are openly geeky, it will make it hard for bullies to succeed. They can only succeed if they can convince people that being a geek is a bad thing. It isn’t.

Let your geek flag fly.

If you are dealing with a chronic bullying situation and want to get it to stop, get the book and sign up for the bully vaccine toolkit for more detailed information on how exactly to get a bully to stop using behavioral science based techniques. There is nothing geekier than science that works.