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Being “nice” still isn’t working, is it?

You try to please everyone – partner, boss, friends, kids – and then secretly resent them for holding you back, even though you know it’s really your lack of boundaries and assertiveness. Relationships feel tense or flat. Your job pays the bills but feels like a soul‑draining compromise. 

You censor what you really think and feel, swallow frustration, and end up with resentment, anxiety, and occasional bursts of anger that scare you. You worry that one day you’ll either explode at someone you love or collapse into anxious depression and give up on yourself.

You lie awake wondering if you’re destined to always be the “nice guy” who’s never truly respected.

That’s exactly where many of my clients started. Now they speak their minds calmly on the spot, stand up to high‑status people without blinking, build deep, honest relationships, and live according to their values rather than guilt and fear. 

This coaching offer is designed to help you make that same shift with a clear, concrete roadmap… and without any high-pressure sales calls.

The Outcome

In the next 90 days, you’ll build the foundations of unshakeable integrity and social confidence so you can speak your mind, set firm boundaries, and stop people‑pleasing – without destroying your relationships or reputation.

By the end of this program, you will:

✅Have a clear personal code of values and standards so you know exactly what “living with integrity” means in practical, everyday decisions.

✅Be able to say what you really think and feel – even when it’s uncomfortable – in your relationship, at work, and with friends, without panicking about what others think.

✅Establish and enforce healthy boundaries so people stop walking over you, and you stop over‑delivering, over‑apologising, and over‑explaining.

✅Replace guilt, shame, and anxiety with grounded self‑respect, so you feel worthy of the life you actually want rather than settling.

The Mentorship Roadmap (3 phases)

Here’s exactly how we’ll create those results, step by step.

Phase 1 – Integrity Blueprint: Who you really are

• We map out your current Nice Guy patterns: people‑pleasing, conflict avoidance, dishonesty, over‑giving, sexual shame, and hidden resentment.
• You define your core values and non‑negotiable standards – your Integrity Blueprint – so you finally know what “being a good man” means for you, not for everyone else.
• You get simple, real‑life exercises to start acting in alignment with this blueprint immediately (micro honesty, small confrontations, tiny acts of self‑respect).

✅Result of Phase 1: You stop feeling confused and start feeling clear – you know what the “right thing” is in tough situations, and have a blueprint to guide your behaviour.

Phase 2 – Courage and Communication: Saying what needs to be said

• You learn practical communication tools to speak your mind respectfully: honest disclosures, clean confrontations, boundary statements, and “no” without guilt.
• We prepare and debrief real conversations from your life (partner, boss, family), so you’re not just learning theory – you’re dealing with real situations and upgrading them.
• You gradually face emotionally difficult situations – disagreements, criticism, saying “no” – in a controlled way that builds confidence rather than overwhelming you.

✅Result of Phase 2: You can have uncomfortable conversations without panicking, freezing, or lashing out. People start to see you as calm, honest, and respectable instead of “nice but weak”.

Phase 3 – Lifestyle Integration: Living as a confident, respected man

• We redesign your daily routines, relationship habits, and social life to match your Integrity Blueprint: how you work, rest, connect, and pursue goals.
• You create a realistic, sustainable action plan for the next 6–12 months so that the changes stick instead of fading once coaching ends.
• We address the predictable resistance – from your own fear as well as from other people – and install strategies so you don’t relapse into old Nice Guy habits when things get tough.

✅Result of Phase 3: You’re no longer “doing a program”; you’ve become a different kind of man – one who leads with integrity, stands his ground, and builds relationships based on honesty instead of approval‑seeking.

Logistics & Investment

Here’s exactly what you get.

❇️Weekly 1:1 coaching sessions (online)
60–90 minute private sessions with Dan Munro focused on your specific situations – relationship, work, family, dating, or general confidence.

❇️Session recordings for life
You can revisit any session to reinforce breakthroughs, read transcripts, and stay on track with strategies, instead of relying on memory.

❇️Between‑session support (email / text)
If you want feedback, or you have a big conversation or difficult decision coming up, you can reach out for guidance so you’re not alone between calls.

❇️LIFETIME free access to BROJO community resources
You gain access to courses and group coaching that reinforce what we’re working on and connect you with others on the same journey (normally $100/month – free to you permanently!)

Investment Options

If you’re not yet sure you’re ready to invest, you can apply for a free 1:1 trial coaching session here. Below are the options for men who are ready to get into it and trust I’ll deliver what I promise.

$4,500 US – One‑time payment

Save $300 AND get 1x extra coaching session for FREE to use any time after the program is completed!

$1,600 US – Monthly plan

3x payments of $1,600 split over 3 months

NOTE: This 90‑day intensive is limited to 5 private clients at a time so each person gets full attention and support. The payment links will be disconnected if I’m currently full.

Guarantee

If either of us feels like the coaching should not continue after our first session together, you will get a full no-questions refund and we’ll stop the coaching.

Testimonials

You can read independent reviews from my coaching clients on Google here

Typical experiences for my clients (no promises – this is just what happened for them):

▶️Andy went from catastrophizing all the time about what his workmates and neighbours thought of him, to simply no longer caring about what anyone thought of him. Ever. This allowed him to finally start a side-hustle that he’d wanted to do for decades.

▶️Daniel cheated on his wife. She was about to divorce him. We repaired his marriage by learning to express his emotions clearly, set boundaries, and get over his fear of missing out. Now they’re stronger than ever before. And I helped him start his own business.

▶️Simon was a 30 year old virgin who could only get into the friendzone. He’s now married with two children, and is totally honest in the relationship.

▶️Tony was devastated after his wife of 8 years suddenly left him for another man after getting sick of his people pleasing. Now he’s travelling the world and dating amazing women that he once thought were out of his league. The people pleasing has stopped.

▶️Ian was terrified of commitment of any kind because deep down he thought he wasn’t good enough. He’s now married and expecting his first child, and he found the courage to go all in on his own business.

▶️Vince was constantly getting into pointless conflicts with his wife, and losing her respect. Now they’re a solid team, and she looks up to him as a man who can maintain boundaries without losing control.

▶️Jerry was still living at home in his late 20s, absolutely dominated by his controlling parents. His work colleagues bullied and controlled him too. He’s now living on his own, can approach and connect with beautiful women without fear, and is respected and known as someone you do not mess with at work.

All these stories can be verified here.

FAQ

Who is this coaching really for, and how do I know if I’m a good fit?

The best fit for this program is a man who identifies as being Mr Nice Guy and/or a people pleaser, is dedicated to becoming more confident and authentic, and is willing to get uncomfortable trying some new behaviours.

What specific changes or results can I realistically expect in 90 days?

This obviously depends on your courage and what kind of trauma etc. holds you back, but you can reasonably expect to figure out your Nice Guy sabotaging beliefs and behaviours, fix the worst of them, feel confidence growing, know what your Core Values are and how to live by them, and learn how to create healthy relationships within 90 days. After that it’s just practice and repetition.

How is this different from therapy, books, or free confidence content online?

I will get inside your head for your specific needs, challenges and goals. I’m like a mental mechanic, I will help you pull yourself apart and put it all back together to function much more effectively. You can try doing this on your own too, just expect it to take years instead of months due to being unable to see your own blind spots.

What happens after I sign up – what’s the onboarding and session process like without a sales call?

After you’ve enrolled, you’ll be sent a link to book in your first session and you’ll receive an email with all links, bonuses and other information needed. During our first session the rest will be made clear. I have times available for anywhere in the world, and you can contact me if there’s an issue with finding a good time – we’ll make something work.

How much time per week will this require, and can it work with my job/family schedule?

Apart from the weekly coaching session, our work will be designed to integrate with your life. Your “homework” tasks will involve real-life situations, not extra work on top of your everyday activities. You already have enough time.

What if I do the work but don’t get results – do you have any kind of guarantee or safety net?

I can’t guarantee that you’ll do the work, I can only guarantee that I will deliver expert coaching built on a solid foundation of formal education, practical training, and decades of experience. I can guarantee that I have implemented all of this into my own life for incredible results. I can guarantee that nearly all of my clients who have courageously taken action have achieved results above and beyond their expectations. If you have a history of investing without doing the work, however, this is not for you.

How confidential are our sessions and messages, especially around sensitive topics like sex, shame, or trauma?

Highly confidential. The information won’t be shared with anyone without your permission. Calls are recorded for you, but only you and I will have access to the recordings.

What is your coaching style and philosophy – will I resonate with your direct, integrity‑based approach?

My style is straight to the point. I won’t be hard on you, but I will be honest. I will focus on pointing out the contradictions in your beliefs, and help you to take responsibility for your actions. I won’t allow you to play the victim and blame others for your choices or results. If you don’t want to take full responsibility for your life, I can’t help you.

What happens after the 90 days – can I continue, join a community, or move into more advanced coaching?

Some of my clients continue with more advanced coaching because they want to become insanely confident. Many of my clients continue with light-touch maintenance coaching (e.g. one session per month) to make sure they keep their progress going. Others continue with the Brojo community, using the courses and my books to stay on track. And some clients simply don’t need me at all any more and go off on their own.

More questions?

Contact me dan@brojo.org any time

Transcript

Let me start by telling you about a client of mine. We’ll call him Adam to keep him anonymous. Now, on paper, he should have a partner by now. He really wants one. He puts in a lot of effort socially. He loves having a partner and sort of dreams of it. It’s one of his highest goals, it just doesn’t seem to happen for him. There’s nothing obviously repulsive about him. It’s just kind of a regular dude. There’s really no reason why he shouldn’t be with someone. I have another client who actually does have a partner, and it feels completely disconnected to her. Feels like he’s putting on a performance all the time, superficial feels alone even when he’s lying right next to her. Now these two guys have something in common, and that’s what I want to address today. It’s known as avoidant attachment style. So today’s episode is especially for people pleasing type guys who feel like they really do want deep connections and good relationships, and yet there seems to be some invisible force preventing it from happening. It maybe doesn’t make sense that this area of your life doesn’t seem to get over the line. You’re successful in other areas of life. You know, you can take care of your health and go to the gym, like my client or like my other client. You’re doing really well in business, in relationships you feel like an absolute newbie, total beginner, and it’s like there’s something in your blind spot holding you back. Feels like bad luck. Feels like people just don’t connect well with you.

But what if you actually deliberately prevent it from happening without realising you’re doing it? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Going to talk about what it means to be avoidant, and how you can solve it. So, if you’re dating and socialising a lot, but can’t seem to get anything into a committed relationship, or you’re in a committed relationship, or you’re a serial monogamist who goes through relationship after relationship, but never really feels tight, never feels loyal and connected in a way that you can trust, or maybe you get cheated on a lot, or you cheat a lot. These are the kind of people I’m talking to today. I’m not talking about people who don’t even try, but those who put in a great effort socially, and yet there seems to be a wall between them and other people that they can’t quite figure out. So you should feel like you want good connections. You try to take opportunities, but then you sabotage them or you run from them, and you end up sort of telling yourself there’s no point in trying because dot dot dot insert reasons. It’s not the right time. It’s too hard. Nobody likes me. Whatever, and then you regret missed opportunities later. You often pine over people in the past, so obvious to you once the opportunity’s gone. But when it’s there in the moment, you seem to find a way to fuck it up.

So today, let’s talk about the fear that stops you letting people in: the fear of commitment, fear of intimacy, the fear of sharing your life with another person, despite the fact that consciously these seem to be your goals, there’s something in your subconscious that does not want that to happen, and will do everything in its power to stop it from happening. So make sure you stay tuned for the later part of the episode, because this is going to go down a deep dark rabbit hole, a complete mind fuck about how your brain manipulates you into thinking you’re pursuing relationships while it actually prevents them from happening. This particular episode is very relevant for me. For the longest time, I had an avoidant attachment style, and I was putting in a lot of effort to try and find a girlfriend and get into a relationship, and yet I had certain opportunities gifted to me on a silver platter, and somehow managed to ruin them. And then I’d pursue other opportunities that weren’t really opportunities at all. Total waste of time. It seemed like my wiring was all backwards. Like something was off in my brain. I kept short-circuiting on the goal I was trying to accomplish, and this went on for years and years and years. My whole 20s was plagued with this.

I guess I always knew there’s something I’m doing wrong here. There’s there’s something I’m not putting the puzzle pieces together correctly the way I see other people doing it, but because what was happening was in my mental blind spot, it was happening in behind the curtain in my conscious awareness. I could never really grasp what it was I was doing. Once I figured it out, it was quite shocking, quite painful. I wasted 10 years of my life being tricked by myself. So today, I hope to help you guys prevent this from happening to you, or if it already is happening, try to solve it as quickly as possible. Now, I will say this nice and early: this is a difficult one to solve on your own. You have to be able to look into your own subconscious, the space that you are not allowed to. And so I’m quite serious when I say this is the kind of thing you really need to get coaching with, right? Whether it’s with me or somebody similar, you’re going to need somebody else to help you with this because you need someone who can see the thing about you that you’re not allowed to see by your own brain.

So if you want help with this, please get in touch. Dan at brojo. org, we have a free trial session. It might be all you need. So let’s get into it.

Now, the client I mentioned earlier, who tries his best but stays single, he’s got a particular childhood that I think a lot of you will resonate with, and this is a childhood that a lot of avoidant attachment people have in common. This particular case, he was emasculated and smothered by his mother. His father didn’t protect him from this. From this, his father was kind of absent and emotionally distant and physically unavailable. But his mother was this storm, this force that just smothered him with belittling rants and criticism and discouragement, emasculation, withdrawal of love and uncaring whenever she didn’t get her way, lots of arguing, lots of like using love as a weapon, giving it and taking it away to control behaviour, and eventually actually abandoning the family completely, she was very unpredictable. Her mood swings were wild and had no pattern or sense to them. And he felt he was treated as not a valuable person. He was like a burden to her, and yet at the same time felt that he had to help her out all the time, was needed all the time, and he’s just suffocated. Sense of relief he’d get whenever she left the house. You know, told him exactly how he felt about her, and for a lot of avoidance, this is the kind of childhood we had, where somebody getting close to us was painful. Now we didn’t know how to have a suffocating mother, a lot of them did, but we had someone we’re getting close cause so much pain that intimacy just wasn’t worth it, right?

In my own particular case, what I finally realised it was changing schools a lot, and I kept losing my friends, and this meant that I couldn’t let anyone get close because they always got ripped away from me. So it was kind of pointless. Like the the the return on investment wasn’t worth it. I’d get all invested in someone. They’d be my best friend. I’d be really attached to them, and then just rip taken to another school, another city, another part of the town. And this happens only a few times, but a few was enough for me to go like, there’s no point in getting too close to anyone. The pain of them being taken away is too much. It’d be like adopting pets, you know. And every year they just get taken off you again. It would feel like just too painful to become attached to the pet. Well, I was like that with friends growing up. Now, as I got older and things stabilised a bit more at home, and I went to the same schools for a long time, I nearly got over it. Very close. My nice goat syndrome was developing for that and other reasons, but I was almost over my fear of getting attached. I was ready to take a risk, and I did.

I got into a long-term relationship, committed to one girl, and felt risky and scary. But after the first year or two had passed, you know, I finally felt secure. Like, okay, whatever that problem is, is solved now. I saw us getting married and living together forever. That kind of high school romance that goes on and on, and then out of nowhere, she dumped me. I did not see it coming at all. There were actually plenty of warning signs that I overlooked, but I thought we were going to be together forever. And then one day, she’s like, “We need to talk, and I saw that I didn’t see that coming at all. It’s like being hit by a bus. The unexpected, unpredictable nature of it, you know, from my point of view, it just felt like she just woke up in a different mood one day and just changed her mind about me completely. It reinvigorated that avoidant attachment. I suddenly went, “Oh my god, like this is how fragile an attachment is. This is how fragile love is.

So if it can be taken away just because somebody has a mood swing, there’s no point. There’s no point in getting anywhere near it. It’s like the emotional equivalent of investing in crypto. It’s just a massive gamble with no stability. It’s it’s very dangerous. I wasn’t exactly having these thoughts. It wasn’t like a conscious thing where I’m going. I’m going to avoid getting connected to people now. It was just hurt. Just lots of hurt feelings, confusion, lots of confusion, lots of unfairness, injustice type feelings, and eventually, at a subconscious level, this growing fear of somebody getting in and me developing feelings for them-a fear I was not aware was building-in my mind consciously. I’m like, okay, time to go out, move on, find somebody else, you know, carry on, small fish in the sea, blah blah blah. So that’s what I felt like I was doing consciously, but something else was happening in the back of my mind that I was not aware of. Now, long story short, I was able to finally see and then eventually manually override this irrational fear that had built up and prevented me from connecting with people. And today, I’m going to try and share that process of how to manually override this. If you suspect your sabotaging connections, intimacy, loyalty, to avoid getting hurt.

And to give you a quick tip, in case you don’t stick around for the whole big story, the key here is to go towards what you usually run away from. It’s not always the case, but a general rule that you can follow is whatever it is you do in relationships, reverse it. Do the opposite. The people you usually chase after go chase the opposite type of people. People usually say no to, say yes to. None of this is exactly always going to work out, but this is about manually overriding a system that is backfiring on you very badly. If you want to know why that system is doing that and what’s really happening in the background? You’re ready to go deep into your psychology and find some fucked up things in there. Stick with me, and we get into it. So let’s start like usual. Definitions. What does it mean to have an avoidant attachment style?

Now I’m not a kind of expert in attachment styles. There’s a book called Attached, that’s like the Bible of this shit. I recommend you give it a read. It’ll answer 90% of the confusion you’ve had about intimate relationships, both you and how other people behave. If you’ve ever thought other people were bizarre in their behaviour, that book will help you figure out why it was happening, help you understand that not everyone’s a narcissist and all that other bullshit. It’s just people have avoidant and anxious and combined attachment styles, and this causes them to behave in quite bizarre and often quite harmful ways in relationships. But the call it the layman’s my version summary definition: it’s an insecure relationship pattern that’s marked by strong discomfort with intimacy, with commitments, this need for like independence and self-reliance, and the kind of shuddering at the thought of sharing or relying on somebody else, and just this tendency to kind of pull away and keep a distance when things start getting too close.

Now I’ve identified that it’s a mixture of internal identity and then social behavioural patterns. The identity is a bit harder to see, but the behaviour patterns is where you can start. So if you can see what you’re doing, and you can see that it matches being avoidant, then you can understand what kind of identity you might have. But I’ll start with identities just quickly to go over them. If you see yourself as an independent person, that’s a warning sign. Like if you think I’ve, you know, it’s got to be done right. I have to do it myself, and I’ll help others, but I don’t let others help me. That kind of thing. That’s a warning sign that you’re avoidant. You take pride in being a loner or a lone wolf, or maybe you don’t take pride in it, but it’s become a kind of victim excuse story for you. Like I’ve got to do it on my own because nobody likes me, and you don’t really test the idea, and you don’t really fight against it. Or being a promiscuous player, somebody who uses sex like a hobby. This can include people who are really into like sexual cults and communities, polyamory and all that kind of stuff, where you use sexuality to create emotional distance, where you become sort of obsessed with sex in order to prevent actual emotional intimacy from happening. Seeing yourself as really easygoing, no conflicts, roll with the flow, everything’s all good.

That kind of person is actually like protected by a wall of easygoingness that you can’t get through. You can’t find who they really are and see their dark side and their fears and their weaknesses because they just block it all out with this pretence. Being an entertainer, this is a great way of being an avoidant, so maybe you’re in a band, maybe you’re really funny, maybe you perform well on the sports field, where you get a lot of approval and validation from others by performance, which makes it feel like people love you and makes it feel like you’ve got people in your life who might be very popular, or at least really well revered, but nobody actually really gets to know you. You’re all strengths-based. Everything about you is like here’s what’s good about me. Here’s how I exceed. I’m better than others. You know, you kind of play up to your strengths and you hide your weaknesses. It’s like if a job interview was a person, right? You’re like that. The opposite of that is like the wallflower. So this is somebody who cruises under the radar. They’re always at the back of the room. They quiet. They follow the leader. They don’t suggest or make a stand on anything. They’re kind of constantly making sure that there’s really no way to pin them down. They’re just there, but they’re never causing a fuss. They’re never showing any kind of sharp element of their character. That could create a emotional reaction. Having very high standards, I see this one.

People are actually proud of this. You know, I my partner has to be this and this and this and this and this big list. And when you actually look at the list, you realise a couple of things. One is there’s almost no human being on the planet who’s perfect enough to meet the criteria, or the ones who do are all taken, or and or that list does not actually define a person’s character at all. It’s a materialistic, superficial list that any psychopath could tick the boxes. So you’re not actually making a list of the kind of qualities that a great connection would have. You’re making a list of the kind of person that actually probably unlikely to connect with, right. So if it’s all about looks, or it’s about their intelligence, or it’s about their success in career, or it’s about how fit and healthy they are, most of that is stuff that could be easily done by somebody who has no good character whatsoever. You know, the list doesn’t say things like treats me with kindness, really respectful, honest, takes responsibility. It’s not a list like that. You know, it’s not a core values list. So those sort of high standards, which are really just impossible standards, and even if you meet someone who ticks the boxes, you’ll probably just add some more boxes until they fail.

Someone is very busy. Busy is an identity for a lot of people. You know, they say I’m busy, and they mean it like I am busy, not I’m got a lot of stuff to do. It means I am busyness as a person. So this person, no matter what’s going on in their life, their to-do list is endless. They’re stressed. They’re rushing around all the time. Even their socialising is rushed, you know. They go lots of events and they talk to lots of people, but they’re too busy to stop and get to know someone, kind of thing. I remember a girl I went to university with was like this: like she was a social butterfly. We couldn’t walk 10 metres without meeting three people that she knew. It was actually a real pain in the ass, and so she had so many connections. She knew everyone’s name. She got invited to every party, and yet me and her got along well because she was actually quite lonely, which was interesting. And of course, I was avoidant as well, so she probably felt quite safe with me.

But it was interesting to see, like, she looked like she was very busy socially. She probably had the identity of social butterfly or connector, but actually, she was isolated by the busyness, and of course, people who are career focused-you know, people say, “I’m a lawyer, I’m building my business, whatever. None of these things are bad, but some of them are used. Some of them are weaponized to excuse yourself from connecting with people. It’s a great way to say, “I’ll do it later, and “I’ll do it after I become a partner at the law firm, or I do it after I’ve written my book, or I do it after I’ve travelled the world. Then, then I’ll settle down. Of course, that day never comes. So there’s probably plenty of others, but that’s just to give you a sense. If any of those identities sounded like something that you see yourself as, and you’re proud of it, and that coincides with you not connecting well with people, not forming intimate relationships, could be one as the cause of the other. Okay, could be your identity is your fortress to stop intimacy from happening. It’s the thing that you protect yourself with, and it’s easily justified, so it doesn’t look like you’re just hiding in fear. More obvious than the identity is behaviour patterns.

So I made a big list of a lot that I’ve seen in my coaching clients that’ll help you realise, like, hey, if you’re doing this kind of stuff a lot, there’s a really good chance that its sole purpose is to prevent people getting to know you, and to prevent yourself from getting hurt feelings that come with intimate connections. One of my favourites from back in the day was being attracted to and pursuing unavailable women. I had a kind of obsession with following unavailable women, and you know these are girls who were already taken, or were emotionally unstable or unavailable, disinterested in me moving away to another country soon, all that kind of stuff. Another pattern is just anything that creates distance from emotional connection. There’s quite a few different behaviours that do this. I’ll list some of the ones that I’ve used myself, some that I see in my clients, and then some others that I suspect are the case. Humour, humour is a big one.

Now, having a sense of humour is no problem. In fact, it’s kind of necessary to enjoy life. But there’s a difference between having a natural sense of humour and using humour to create positive feelings in a way that also protects you from any dark feelings from happening. Rationality. Some people hide behind logic and reason, whereas connections are created on emotion. So, having really like sensible, rational conversations about technical topics, it might feel like you’re spending a lot of time. You might go to someone say, “Yeah, yeah, that date went really well. We had so much to talk about, but you haven’t shared a thing about your your.” Your feelings, your irrational beliefs, your darkness-you haven’t shared any of the stuff that might connect you. You’ve just enjoyed talking about topics that you’re smart about.

Interviewing-this is a classic technique where you ask a lot of questions, you show a lot of curiosity towards the other person, and this conveniently prevents them learning anything about you, so while they’re enjoying the conversation because they’re centre of attention and they feel like wanted, you are preventing them from ever getting intimate with you, ever knowing anything that might hurt your feelings later on. Being argumentative, obnoxious, contrarian, where you have say yeah but to everything you’re sceptical about everything you love to turn everything into a debate it’s a way of just kind of always grinding against people rubbing them the wrong way you can even be someone who teases too much or banters too much as a way of kind of being contrarian where nobody ever gets to kind of align with you. You always have to fight back on everything.

The obvious one: just being too nice and pleasing, being obsequious, being this person that just allows themselves to be moulded into whatever the other person prefers, where whatever they like is what you become, and you always suppress anything that might upset them. This will get positive feelings and approval from them, tricking you into thinking that you’re building a relationship when actually there’s really nothing that they can connect to, and a lot of what you’re doing is fake. As I mentioned before in the identity section, like being too easygoing, no real strong positions or opinions-the kind of person is like, oh, I can see it from both sides, you know, or you know, I’m good either way. One way to think of character is it’s a set of positions, you know, like dots on a graph. You know, where do you stand on this? Where do you stand on that? Where do you stand on that? And if you plot them all out, you get a kind of a cluster of a person. If you heard everybody’s political positions, you’d know exactly who they’re going to vote for, right? You create character with these points of preference and opinion. So if you’re so easygoing that you don’t have an opinion, that you don’t have anything that you fight for or against, then no one can really plot your position. They can’t know you. You know, if somebody goes, “Well, what do you think Dan will want there? and they’ll be like, “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to want anything, right? So nobody can get to know you if you’re easygoing, and yet everyone will see say that you’re a great guy and enjoy spending time with you. So you’ll be able to trick yourself into thinking you’re creating connections when you’re actually preventing them.

And along that line, another pattern is just following, never leading, never taking the risk, never going first, risking rejection, just going along. You know, you might notice it, especially guys who are already in relationships or even marriages, when they still have an avoiding attachment style, is their wife’s calling all the shots. Yes, dear. You know, just whatever she wants to do is what we do, never kind of putting forward suggestion, never taking a risk to get it wrong, never like just calling your shot and seeing what happens. Just kind of always following, which means again we don’t know what you really want, we don’t know who you really are, and therefore we can’t connect with you, and therefore we can’t hurt your feelings. And in alignment with the high standards type identity is just refusing to compromise on any preference, and you’d probably call it self-respect. But you have this huge list of criteria, and if somebody’s a no on any of those things, you’re like, well, we’re a bad fit for each other. Kind of person that will cut someone off just because they like a different style of music, the kind of person that has so many requirements that they would have to find this like identical twin to have a relationship, and even then they’d be willing to end it on some slight disagreement, but they conflate it in their head with values and principles. You know, they say like I could only ever work in this city in this country for the rest of my life, and whoever I’m with has to accept that. So that’s not a value or a principle.

That’s just a weird rule you made up to stop people getting into a relationship with you. And of course, what I see a lot in my line of work is guys who indulge in the red pill manosphere incel type ideology and content that emphasises that relationships are difficult, or women are impossible, and they pride themselves on their singledom and their incelness and their lone wolfness, and they constantly aggravate women or project negative traits onto women or only pursue women who actually the few that do line up with the red pill ideology to kind of reinforce the idea that it’s not possible, and this can go the other way: the feminism kind of mindset, the woman that think that all men are shit, and they will engage in similar practices. They’ll behave in a way that repulses good men. You know, the kind of woman who just hates on men all the time. Any decent man’s going to run away, and the only. Kind of guy that would be attracted to that would be an absolute emotionally dysregulated psycho, basically. So you’re setting yourself up to fail with that kind of ideology, and that might be happening on purpose.

Now the classic behaviour is you find yourself randomly just losing interest when somebody else actually reciprocates. So you love the chase, you love being interested in someone, but if you find out that they’re really keen on you, suddenly you just back off. You just get this drop in attraction and effort, motivation. You might still like them, but just find yourself not putting any effort in whatsoever, just letting the thing die, not getting back to someone on a text, ignoring an invitation to come to a party. I remember back there was one girl I was pursuing for a long time. I was really interested in her, and I was out driving in town. She’s and she texts me like, “Oh, you’re in town. I’m at this club at this party. I hope you come. And I could actually see the club she was talking about, and I just went, “Oh, there’s no parking, and just went home. I didn’t even really check for parking. I just suddenly, oh, no motivation, and just I just want to be at home. Just minutes before I had thought I was really interested in her. It was only when she became available that I lost interest. Another version of this is just inexplicably ruining opportunities. You know, one of my ones was just getting too drunk, so I’d be at a party or something. Someone’s interested in me. Suddenly I’m doubling up the beers, and now I’m just a mess. And who wants to go home with a mess, right? Or you know I used to use that one a lot to avoid driving somewhere. So a girl might be interested in me, but I’d be like, oh, I’ve had too many. I can’t drive now. You know, oh, you can get a taxi. No, spend all my money on alcohol. Can’t be done, you know. Too bad. Another time. So this thing where it’s like you got this reasonable excuse, like I can’t. Sorry, I’ve done this thing. It might not be drugs or alcohol for you. Maybe it’s just booking in too much stuff into your calendar. Maybe it’s staying late at work. This way of just getting out of opportunities, but with this real reasonable excuse, even though it makes no sense because you got this goal of getting into a relationship, right? Talking yourself out of opportunities that haven’t been tested or easy wins, you might make nice eye contact with the guy at the bar or something, and then you think, “Oh no, he’s got a boyfriend. There’s no point. So there’s the problem of talking yourself out of easy opportunities, avoiding easy wins. So you’re at the bar and you make eye contact with a girl. She kind of smiles and looks away, and you think, “Oh no, she’s probably got a boyfriend, or all her friends are watching. She’d be embarrassed, and you just don’t even take a swing for it.

Now, in your head, you think that that was rational, but you haven’t actually tested it, and so you create a history in your head of like these opportunities weren’t really opportunities that there are no opportunities you have to wait for luck when actually you’re surrounded by opportunities all day long and then talking yourself out of them. Next one was a big one for me. What’s commonly known as oneitis. This is where you get absolutely obsessed with one girl to the point where you’re loyal to her as if you’re in a relationship together, and yet there is no relationship. Certainly not a sexual one. You might be in the friend zone with her; she might not even know you exist. Right? You might have a crush like a seven-year-old boy, but you’re a 27-year-old man. You got this full-blown crush. Think about her all the time, obsess over her, do little nice things for her all the time, but some part of you knows that this is never going to go anywhere because you’re not going to make a move, or she’s unavailable. This is the same as ruminating on exes. So this is how avoidance act inside a relationship. As I constantly think about the girls from the past, so they never really connect with their current girl, and you might ruminate on lost opportunities, even though at the time you sabotaged it and missed it. You’re constantly living away from the real relationship opportunities in front of you, and living in a fantasy world with pseudo relationships because they’re the only ones where you can’t get hurt. So you’re having as much of a relationship as possible without getting feelings hurt, and the only way to do that is to have a relationship with someone where they’re not actually in the relationship with you. But you’ll be able to tell yourself, “Hey, I am trying. Like I’ve been talking to this girl for months, so yeah, you’re trying to keep a fake relationship going so that you don’t have to have a real one. Of course, just being busy as fuck, right? Working long hours, lots of hobbies, constantly moving, travelling, doing too much stuff. There’s no room for anybody else in your life, and you tell yourself you deal with it later, but later never comes, and you manage to excuse yourself from connecting with people. You know, I see this actually with women these days. There’s a kind of trend of women putting their careers first before family and dating and relationships, until they get so old that the dating pool’s basically empty and they’ve got no chance of having a kid anymore. And they kind of go, “Wait, I thought I wanted a family.” So yeah, you did, but you were scared of intimacy, so you managed to like run out the clock with this great excuse of having a career, and now you’ve maybe missed it. I wouldn’t say you’ve missed it. There’s always opportunities, but whether you’re a guy or a girl, if you’re putting a lot of other stuff first and saying I have to wait until then, and yet every night you’re kind of yearning a connection, then your goals don’t match your behaviour, do they? You’re prioritising the thing that’s not the most important. That’s suspicious, or it should be nitpicking connections to death. You know, finding flaws and arguing. You know, like you start dating someone, you just start picking at them, nagging them, finding every little weakness they have and focusing in on that physical, mental, emotional, whatever it is, until either you drive them crazy or you lose interest in them. So you focus much more on the negatives than the positives, so that you just kind of justify losing interest in them before the intimacy happens, of course, and even your body can ruin it. Erectile dysfunction, performance anxiety, all kinds of sexual misfunctions in the bedroom, both genders. You know, your body can actually get involved. It did with me. It’s like I’m not going to let this go any further. I’m going to do things that humiliate you and make this really uncomfortable, so that you don’t want to come back, and so that you’re scared of ever allowing this to happen. And I think it’s because the body is an extension of the mind.

So if your mind is set on keeping you away from connections, your body will comply with that. You know, and I found that quite interesting. I never got performance anxiety with a girl that I didn’t care about. If it was just some girl I met at a bar, and I wasn’t really interested in her. Could perform just fine. When I actually hoped the girl would be a girlfriend, suddenly my body locked up, which is very telling about what my body secretly wanted. All of this, all of these behaviours on their own, they look justifiable. They look like rational behaviour. You could excuse it and say, “Hey, I’m just doing normal stuff, but all of it is a strategy designed to keep people at arm’s length. I literally call it the arm’s length strategy. So it looks like people are allowed to come in. It looks like you have friendships. It looks like you have connections. It looks like you’re trying your best, but there is this moat around your castle that people can’t get over, and it’s made of your behaviour. But it’s so easy to excuse it that you can call it bad luck and all sorts of other things, and not have to take responsibility for the fact that you prevent connection from happening on purpose. So I’ve got to say again here, if all of this is resonating with you and you want help, please get in touch. Dan at brojo. org. We can either jump on a call and have a session to break through it, or I’ve got some fantastic courses designed to help you overcome this. Especially my powerful honesty course, which will help you speak in a way that destroys, you know, insecure attachment styles and forces a secure attachment to happen. Just get in touch. I’ll give you whatever resource you need at this time. So let’s have a look at why this happens. Let’s have a look at causes and patterns and help you identify how you’ve come to this place, and then we’ll get into the real dark shit around how your mind is manipulating you, or your brain is manipulating your mind, and how you can get on top of this manipulation because it’s getting in the way of a good life. So past causes. I’m not a therapist, and I don’t actually believe going back into the past and rehashing everything is all that helpful. But in this case, it can at least it can at least help you understand that it is irrational. That it’s time to put this aside to stop behaving from this place, from this strategy, because this was the strategy of a scared little kid, and it doesn’t apply to an adult who wants to connect well with people. So if you can understand that everything you’re doing comes from this childish place, then maybe you won’t be so sold on continuing to do it. Okay. So some of the experiences that I’ve seen that contribute mostly to an avoidant attachment style, pretty much any childhood experience that told you letting people in was a bad idea. All right, so you can think back to your past, what taught you that letting people get close ends in pain for you. Pretty much anything like that is going to line up with this. So there’s outright abuse and bullying. So if people at school or home hurt you badly, siblings, parents, people are supposed to be your friends. You know, especially getting betrayed by a friend group at school. You thought they were your friends, and then they ditched you one day. It teaches you that like letting the walls down and letting people in is an incredibly dangerous thing to do because once they get in there, they just wreck everything, right? And especially if that came from a parent or a sibling, these are the people you’re supposed to trust the most. Everybody else is less trustworthy than this. So if they are like this, man, other people are going to be so dangerous. That’s a childish thinking, right? And of course, it can just be like I just don’t want to get hurt. I’m not willing to risk that someone won’t hurt me because once I let the gate down, I can’t tell if they’re going to hurt me until they’re already in. So I’m just going to keep the gate up.

Very simple strategy for a simple person. Helicopter parenting-that kind of suffocating presence of parents that just like on you all the time, telling you what to do all the time, coddling you, making it so you can’t fucking breathe. This idea that love suffocates. So even if that’s coming from like positive, loving place, like they’re not trying to hurt you, they’re trying to help you. Help can be very suffocated. We’re we’re quite independent beings. We like to learn stuff on our own. We like to figure shit out for ourselves. And if someone’s just doing everything for us all the time, we just feel like we can’t breathe, and this can lead us to get kind of rebellious and independent. Like I’m going to do it all myself. Again, if you’re let down, if you tried working with others and that led to really bad outcomes for you, you might start to think like I’m on my own here. Everybody else is too stupid. You know, one thing for someone like myself, I have quite a high IQ. I’m not bragging; it’s just a fact. And so I’m constantly outthinking people around me a lot, and this makes me feel separate from them. You know, when I get to the point 10 times quicker than the other people do, I feel like I’m a different species, and I start to think, you know, it’s better if I just do things on my own because people can’t catch up. Now it’s not actually true, right? Because IQ is just one kind of intelligence. You put me in front of a car engine, I’m absolutely lost, right? So this idea that I’m better than other people is not actually true, but it was reinforced in high school, particularly because of my performance academically, and it just made me feel like I’m not really one of the crowd. So there’s no point in trying to get to know them because they won’t get it, right? So if you were particularly successful at something, you might have felt elite, arrogant even, and that’s caused you to see other people as sort of less than you. This is one of the main problems that like psychopathic and narcissistic personalities have. They see themselves as gods. They couldn’t possibly connect with people. It’d be like us thinking that we can connect with chickens. It just doesn’t feel right. Of course, abandonment and loss is a huge one. So if you were left, if you were betrayed and cheated on, dumped unexpectedly. A parent left the house one day for cigarettes and never came back. You get that insecurity about people connecting with you. Now some people get anxious with this and they constantly try to cling to people. Others go, “Fuck that! I’m never letting someone hurt me like that again. So walk away if you want. Doesn’t matter to me, and they develop that sort of attitude. Can go either way. Rejection and humiliation, either a big one or it happening often. So like I got a couple of really big rejections in high school that just flattened me. They were quite like rare, exceptional humiliation cases, which told me like is risky to show your feelings to someone like that is that is a dangerous game, or you know, and this didn’t happen to me, but it happened to others that I’ve worked with. It can be lots of things. Often, you know, there’s one client I have at the moment who moves schools a lot, like almost every year, maybe more. He was always a new kid, and he always got bullied. Now he didn’t get particularly tortured. It was just kind of emotional abuse, mild to moderate probably, but it happened all the time with nearly every kid. So he developed a very strong belief, like no one likes me. Yeah, there’s no point in getting close to someone because they all secretly hate me. Once they get to know me, it’s over. So he developed that from lots of frequent smaller abuses. Of course, if you just got not good enough conditioning, if you were raised with a lot of discouragement, insults, you’re never good enough for your parents, or you struggled in school or whatever.

You just get the sense that you’re not worthy, then your avoidant attachment can be this almost noble thing where you’re protecting other people from the suffering they’d go through to be with you. Like you’re this lesser person, you don’t want to burden them. You think that it would be sort of disrespectful of you to trick them into liking you because they’re going to be disappointed because you’re just such a worthless piece of shit. You know that kind of thinking can lead you to keep people’s arms length like for their benefit, right? I’ve already talked about moving a lot, but that’s a big one that I didn’t realise would be a big deal until I started coaching and started hearing this happen over and over again. If you have to change schools a lot, you have to change friend circles a lot. You start to develop a bit of a shell to protect you from those changes, those losses all the time, and you know I became really funny kid who was good at sports and so on, and this allowed me to like have friends, but if they suddenly left, I could move on quickly. Besides being betrayed and cheated on, there’s getting scammed, manipulated, conned, and. Really stupid about that, so you let someone in, and they just take you for a ride, and they take you for everything you’ve got, and you distrust your own judgement. You get to a point where you’re like, I can’t trust myself to judge who should be let in and who shouldn’t. Like this is the most devastating effect I think of, really, from cheating on people or scamming them in some way is they lose a sense of faith in their own judgement, and so they think it’s better to just keep people out because I can’t trust myself to let in any good ones. So they might still believe that there are good ones out there, but they just think I’m I’m a bad judge of character, or I only attract bad ones because of that letdown. And this can also be vicarious; it can be from watching others. If your parents were fighting all the time, for example, or if your friends are getting cheated on, or getting divorced, or you know your uncle loses everything in the divorce, and everyone’s shocked by how your aunt treated him, or just the online content or the red pill bullshit. Like if you see it looks to you that love hurts and goes badly for people, and you watch a lot of those crappy like reality shows and stuff, you get a swing thinking like this isn’t fucking worth it, right? Like, why, why bother? Look how badly it goes for everybody. I’m not gonna make that mistake. It’s just a matter of not seeing when it actually goes well, and also at a deeper level, just not being willing to make the trade-off, like not being willing to take the risk that those kind of things could happen, in order to find love and connection. Thinking, you know, as far as a trade goes, that’s just not worth it. So those kind of things set the past scene; they set you up for having an avoidant attachment style, and then we got to look at how it manifests in the present day, because the past is not an excuse. It’s a reason, but it’s not an excuse. So you don’t have to keep doing this just because these things happen to you. Like yes, maybe you had bad luck in childhood. Maybe you had it worse than others. I mean, I think attachment style is largely down to the luck of your childhood. That securely attached people had great parents and a good circle of friends and the right sort of genetic makeup to handle loss, and that’s why they’re secure and that’s why they’re so fucking rare because almost nobody has that childhood, right? And the rest of us had some sort of fucked up shit happen to us, and we didn’t have the education and support needed to get through that properly, and so we carried it through into adulthood. So let’s talk about how it manifests in adulthood, how it’s affecting you today, this week, last year, so that you can see the kind of up-to-date version of it and maybe do something about it.

So this is where we get nice and fucked up. Here’s my theory: your brain is tricking your mind. This is how it’s happening in the present moment. You think you have a goal of connecting with people. That’s your conscious self. Your conscious self says, “I want a relationship. I want to be real with my friends. You know, I I believe in being honest. It says all these things. You have all these things that you think are your goals and your principles, but your behaviour seems to be acting according to a different set of rules. And when you see that contradiction, you say like, “I want a relationship, but I behave in a way that prevents one. You have to understand there’s more than one entity in here, and one of them has different goals to you. I like to use the words the brain and the mind. The words don’t matter that much, you know. The Jung would call it the shadow self. There’s lots of different words, names, subconscious. The that thing behind your conscious awareness that still has a lot of control over your life, but when I say the brain, I’m talking about the thing you’re not aware of, and when I say the mind, I’m talking about your conscious awareness, who you think you are. All right, the mind is the victim in this manipulation, and the brain is the perpetrator. So my clients often talk about feeling torn. They think they want it. They’re sure that they want it. They behave like they don’t, and when I point that out to them, that all their excuses are bullshit, that they are deliberately preventing anything from happening, they’re very confused by this. But I want it. I’m sure I do. Why would I? Why would I stop it? These must be rational things that I’m doing. Because why would I destroy this thing that I clearly want and know is a good idea. You got to stop saying “I” as if there’s a single unit in there. You’re torn because two units are fighting against each other. There’s a war going on in here, and if you’re still single, even though you want a relationship, you’re losing that war. So let me put it very simply: your brain has a different goal than your mind, so you, who you think you are, thinks you want a relationship. You think that’s your goal. You want to connect with people, have deep friendships, whatever. However you word it, your brain’s like sounds good, but I’m going to go in another direction. Now, how’s this possible? How can we have. These two things, not be aware of it, and yet the evidence is clear because of our behaviour. But you gotta understand, your brain just can’t be honest with your mind. Can’t just say, “I’m scared of love, because that’s not compelling enough. It’d be like think of a parent and a child. Let’s say the child like wants to climb a tree. The parent just can’t say, “Oh, I’m scared of you climbing the tree, because that won’t stop the kid from climbing the tree, right? So what does the parent do? Manipulates. Oh, that tree, the leaves are poisonous, and you know those branches are really weak. You’ll fall down and break your arm. It has to make something up, the parent, because if the parent just expresses the true feelings, that’s not compelling enough to control the child. Your brain thinks of you as a child that needs to be controlled. Your brain sees the mind and goes, “That’s stupid. But if I just say, “I’m scared of him doing that, that’s not going to be enough. I’m going to have to come up with something more compelling, and I’m going to have to make him think that it’s his idea, so your brain has to convince your mind that you are indeed trying your best to get a relationship, and has to let you believe that, just like a parent letting their child think that the child has a choice when they really don’t.

And while it lets you think that, it secretly perpetrates a different strategy to achieve the very opposite, and then when you fail at your goal, you’re going to blame yourself and think you did something wrong, when actually you were following orders from the secret parent living in the back of your brain, controlling the whole show. So it’s quite a difficult thing if you have some sympathy for your brain. It has to try and find the perfect commands to make you think that you’re pursuing what you want while you sabotage it. That’s no easy feat. But eventually, it starts to notice. It watches, sees behaviours from you and others, and observes and watches and sees what looks like moving forward when it’s actually moving backwards, and it starts to double down on those behaviours, like pursuing someone who’s not available. Perfect, isn’t it? You are actively pursuing, but it’s never going to work out. And when it doesn’t work out, I was trying my best, and your brain will be like, “Yeah, you know what? That’s just unfair. That’s a bit of bad luck, mate. When really your brain was like, “Hey, be attracted to her. So your brain controls your attraction. Attraction is totally subjective. You know, you think about it like you’re attracted to different people as you get older, and so on. Like that’s totally subjective. Your brain controls all of that, so your brain can figure out who to be attracted to, so that you pursue the wrong people. You know, it’s one of the hints here as to the manual override. One of the things I had to do was start pursuing people I was not originally attracted to because I couldn’t trust my attraction. My attraction was wired towards fixer-uppers. I used to be so attracted to girls who were so fucking crazy and unstable, and that’s not saying anything against them. It’s just the time of life they were going through, but they were not ready for a good relationship, right? They were not ready for what I wanted, and yet I found them hot, and they might look exactly the same, pretty much as another girl who’s really healthy and ready for a relationship. And I’m like, I don’t like the colour of her hair, so my brain was actually steering me in that direction. This is an example how your brain can trick your mind into thinking you’re pursuing your goal while you’re actually achieving his. So one way to think of it is your goal. I want a partner, or you know, I want real friends. It’s like a screensaver on a computer. It looks like this. What’s happening on the screen while behind the scenes a different programme is running, and that programme is I don’t want to get my feelings hurt, and because it believes that intimate relationships is where feelings get hurt, it must prevent intimate relationships. So the goal is essentially keep you single. But I have to keep you single while thinking that you’re pursuing it. Like you have to feel like you’re running towards the try line when you’re actually standing on a treadmill until enough time passes where all the opportunities are gone. So let’s have a look at some of the ways that it tricks you. This can be a bit of a mindfuck. Like I said, if you’re not open to the idea that there’s more than one entity in there and that they’re at war with each other, you’re going to struggle with this, and you might not be ready for it yet. Because once you open that door, you’ll start to realise that none of your thoughts can be trusted, and it gets pretty dark for a while. This is why I coach people to help them through this difficult phase. But let’s get into it. If you’re ready for it, let’s go forward. So we’ve already talked about pursuing unavailable woman by convincing yourself that there’s a chance, even though everyone around you is like, “What are you doing? She’s not keen, or she’s got a boyfriend, or she’s moving away, but you convince, “Oh no, this could work out. Even though there’s much more available women within easy reaching distance, right? Same with being attracted to women, where there’s just no future. Getting a what about other girls? Kind of. Urg, a dopamine rush when something’s actually going well with somebody.

Now I talked earlier about learning losing interest all of a sudden for a girl reciprocates. This can manifest as a kind of like, oh, that’s going well. Maybe there’s other opportunities. A kind of player urge, the grass is greener on the other side, that kind of thing. So even if you are just miserably lonely for months, one girl gets interested in you, and you’re like, “Oh, what about other girls? Rather than sort of taking, you know, what’s in front of you, turning neutral events into rejections. So you’re talking to a girl, and she turns away briefly, and you say, “Oh, she’s not interested in me, you know, or like a girl doesn’t text you back right away. Oh, she’s me. Or, you know, girl’s a bit moody on her period. Oh, she’s a narcissist. I give up. So again, it feels like you’re trying your best, and these people are just losing interest in you, and they’re not available. When actually, they haven’t rejected you at all. They’re just having normal human emotions, normal experiences. You just have to keep going. But it’s a great way to excuse yourself without acknowledging that you’re the one ending it. Your brain convincing you that the way to connect with people is to be really positive, really entertaining, really interesting. In this way, you put on a show, you put on a huge effort to make people like you, while you actually prevent intimacy from happening. So your brain can be like, “Well, you tried your best, mate. Maybe they just don’t like you enough, when actually you’re being too positive, too interesting, too entertaining, not real enough. So your brain doesn’t mind you putting a huge effort in as long as it’s fake, or if not fake, at least forced and hiding the negatives. If you believe connections are built on a shallow range of good experiences, good feelings, and you think a date should go well, and so on, then you probably have this thing happening to you, right? This is a trick. That is not what connections are built on. You’ve got to share your sorrows, share your suffering, go through hard times together, have real emotions, anger, confusion, stress, depression. These things bind us. If you’re not letting any of that shit show, then you’re not allowing connections to happen. Believing old school bullshit techniques, you know, seduction stuff. Just ask questions, you know, always talk about them. Anything that avoids them getting to know you, you know, the kind of people like, oh, you can’t talk about politics on their first date. You know, all of this old school stuff is just all avoidance. It’s all just preventing anything real happening in a conversation, and it’s not designed to create connection. It’s designed to make people like you, which is not the same thing. Kicking the can down the road, we’ve already kind of talked about this, but having conditions where you’re not allowing connections to happen, like I’ve got to wait for my business first, or I might be moving house in three months. No point in getting into anything. Any of these excuses that just keep allowing time to pass when they don’t actually make any sense. Because if you found the love of your life tomorrow, you’d probably change your plans to suit them anyway. So it’s all bullshit. There’s the kind of anxious attachment switch. So somebody’s avoidant, and then they get something going with someone. They switch to anxious, and now they’re like suffocating and needy and double texting and off-putting. So they actually smother the connection to death. So what looks like anxious attachment is actually more avoidance. And this is a little theory I’ve been working with because some people talk about being both. I don’t think we’re really both. I think if an avoidant person gets anxious, it’s to kill the connection, not to create it. Right. So anxiety is just another tactic. But your mind, it feels like you’re trying your best to keep this thing going, like you’re clinging to it, when actually your brain’s like, yeah, this will make them fucking run away. Do that. So more of that trickery happening, where it feels like you’re putting in the right effort, being afraid of confrontations, boundary setting, feeling really scared that this will like kill connections. What this does is stop you establishing formal relationships.

Right, for a relationship to continue, for love to get really deep, you need boundaries. Need to protect that. Need to have rules of engagement and behaviour. And so, if you’re not allowed to talk about stuff like that, if you’re not allowed to have uncomfortable conversations, then you can only ever have superficial connections. So your brain will tell you, you know, don’t ruin things, while actually you’re doing the thing that ruins things. Feeling like you get to reward your efforts by taking time off, like you go on a few dates and you’re like, oh, I’ve put a lot of effort and I made some progress. I won’t date for a little while. I used to get this with approaching people, so I’d go and approach lots of people. I’d get good results near the end, and they’d be like, I’ve earned a break, and for three weeks I’d just go cold and not approach anyone, get all rusty, lose all my momentum. It’s a great way of like preventing anything actually escalating. You’re supposed to double down when things are going good. That’s not when you take a break, right? Ruminating on unpleasant signals and unpleasant experiences to overlook all the promising and positive stuff that’s happening. You know, you have one argument with your girlfriend, and that’s just on your mind all week, even though she’s been really kind and wonderful to you. Rest of the time, it’s like your brain’s trying to paint a picture of her as a demon. You know, there’s a common thing that happens with people who cheat. In order to justify the cheating, they first have to paint their picture as like they have to paint their partner as the demon, right? As the villain. So they spend often months, sometimes years, building up to cheating by constantly picking and resenting all the negative things about their partner until it’s basically justified, you know, you pushed me into the arms of another person, catastrophizing, forecasting disasters, and then calling it rational. You know, you start to see some wobbling wheels on the relationship, and you’re like, “This is going nowhere. This is absolute nightmare. I give up. So you kind of like overemphasise potential warning signs. You might call them red flags when they’re really just someone having an emotion, like your girlfriend’s a bit grumpy when she gets her period, and you’re like, “Oh, she’s a narcissist, right? She’s going to abuse me, right? Or like somebody refuses to pay on a first date. Oh, it’s a gold digger. Like so, you just blow things up, and so in your mind you’re justifying ending things early, when actually what you saw was just neutral. There’s no real evidence of anything in there. As we’ve already said, like listing criteria and calling it self-respect when actually it just prevents a connection. So your brain’s kind of tricking you by saying, “Oh yeah, you can have a relationship, but I only want the best for you. Right? We’re going to make sure you have a great relationship. So here’s a list of criteria that guarantees you’re going to find an awesome partner. I’m on your team totally. And then if I was to look at your list, I’m like, “This is not the list of a great partner. This is no human being ever. Good luck finding this fucking freak. Right. So that way you get to feel like you’re pursuing it, but you’re actually preventing it. One of my favourites: waiting for a green light, making them lead, making them initiate, making them make all the moves, never taking the risk and calling yourself a gentleman when actually you’re just a coward. I used to do this all the time, and I imagine it’s been exacerbated by the #MeToo movement and stuff, guys are very scared of harassing. We always have been quite scared of that. Now even more so, and we can use this as an excuse to never lead, to never take a risk. And so, if someone was to challenge us, like, “Oh, the only reason you’re not getting into relationships is because you’re not taking any risks, you can say, “Well, you know, I don’t want to cross the line. I’m just being a gentleman. I’m being a nice guy. I just want to respect their boundaries. So we got to find out what the boundary is before you can respect it.

You’re not even finding out. You’re waiting until they come to you, which narrows down the people who come to you in a way that probably guarantees you’re not going to have a good relationship. Now here’s a weird thing, and I think it goes both ways. If you refuse to be with anyone where you have to initiate, if you wait for them to come to you, you’re not giving yourself the best possible chances. If you’re a girl, this means that most of the guys who come to you are going to be players, because most guys are too scared to initiate. So if you’re waiting for only guys who will initiate with you, like you won’t put any effort in, you want the guys to come and hit on you and fight for you, you’re going to get the guys who are used to seducing women a lot of the time, not guys who are interested in a relationship. And it goes the other way. You’re a guy and you wait for the girls to hit on you. You’re kind of going to get the most desperate ones. That’s not always going to go well for you. I know it sounds almost contradictory, but if we all start initiating more, the people we don’t usually initiate, we start initiating more, then more healthy connections can happen. So there’s lots of other ways that this trickery happens, but it all creates this kind of donkey and cart idea that I’ve been thinking of, where you think you’re pursuing that carrot, that goal that you want, but there’s a secret driver in the cart steering you around, whipping you in the back, and you’re taking credit for this. You’re thinking it’s your idea. You’re thinking that you’re doing your goals when actually you’re doing his, and he’s got no interest in you being in a relationship. He wants to run out the clock. He wants you to get to old age alone, because he thinks that that’s the safest approach. Because it was when you were a kid, and this guy he hasn’t grown up. So let’s finish up now by having a look at the strategy to overcome it. Okay, and again, last time I’ll say this: if you want help doing this, so it takes a few months instead of a few years, get in touch, Dan at brojo. org, and I’ll help you overcome this as quickly as possible. So, long story short, you need to see that in the manipulation, and you need to override it. You need to realise that if your goal is to be with someone, then anything that does not serve that goal directly and get good results is highly suspicious, and needs to be overridden and challenged. What you’re attracted to, what you think you want in a partner, what you think are good opportunities and good strategies and good methods-all of this cannot be trusted, because if it was true, you wouldn’t be here watching. You’ve been your well secure relationship by now. So whatever you’ve been following, from your traction through to your methods, your habits, your patterns, your behaviours, none of that shit works, and it must be treated with suspicion. Even if you’re so sure it’s the truth. Well, if it’s the truth, why are you single? Okay, you think your great list of criteria is good list of criteria for a partner? How come you don’t have a partner then? If there’s a good list, you’d have a fucking amazing partner, right? If you think waiting for them to come to you is a great strategy, how come you’re still single, right? If you think, oh, I’m only going to go to the people that I feel physically lusting towards, you know, like that kind of attraction, maybe that lust is a trick. None of it can be trusted if it isn’t working for you. This is the big mindfucker. It was very hard for me to deal with this, to realise all the things I thought were true and all the things I thought were right weren’t working, which means they can’t be true and they can’t be right. Otherwise, they’d fucking work. Results don’t lie. If you’re not with a great partner right now, then your approach doesn’t work. Simple as that. There’s no other explanation for it.

Once you accept that, then you can open your mind to trying something else, something that maybe feels wrong, or feels weird, or you’ve never even thought of doing before. That needs to now come onto the table of possibility. I’m not guaranteeing that any of the stuff will be any better, but you’ve already tried what doesn’t work, so we can safely chuck that in the bin now and try something else. If you’re not willing to try something else, well, then you have to accept you’re an avoidant. You don’t actually want a relationship. Stop trying to get one. Move on with your life. Be single forever. Embrace it. Make your peace with it. Stop pretending you want a relationship. So I’ll rehash what my brain tricked me into doing, and then we can talk about how to do the opposite. So here’s some of the things that tricked me into doing. Got a list right here: oneitis and crush on girls that I was never going to make a move on. So become obsessed and loyal to girls where there was no chance of a relationship. Pine over girls that were in relationships or who lived overseas or who weren’t really interested in me. So basically, just a pattern of being very focused on girls where the least likely chance of a relationship would happen. Getting distracted and losing interest in girls that actually had some likelihood of something happening, focusing on their flaws until I was put off, or just moving on with other areas of my life, losing interest and effort, sleeping with girls I had zero interest in, and then running away the next day, while there were girls that I was interested in and not making a move on. So it was like I was two different people. One part of my life I was like a player. The other part I was a total coward in cell, and these guys were happening in the same week. It was really bizarre. Getting too drunk or fucked up for anything to happen, otherwise, you know, sort of making it very hard for something to happen rather than very easy. Performance anxiety, troubles in the bedroom, and then like avoiding getting into that situation because of the embarrassment of it. So I’d actually prevent opportunities from happening in case that happened. Being kind of too extreme in my personality, you know, being super funny or playing in a metal band. I went through a phase of doing all the jackass stunts for a while. It creates emotional distance while entertaining. So I was this kind of like party guy with this extreme personality, but not a real person you could connect with. I used to often wonder like, how come all these boring guys got a girl? You know, me being judgmental. I’m like, here I am, this interesting thing who does all this great crazy stuff, and he’s old regular Joe with a regular job and nine to five life, and he’s got a girlfriend. So, well, because he’s being real with people and they can connect with that. I’m just putting on a show. I’m like, it’s like you’re watching me on TV, but you’re not going to talk to the guy on the TV, right? Nobody goes home with the comedian at the end of the night. They’re going with their partners. He was just the entertainment, and then of course dismissing girls on superficial floors. You know this was particularly bad in my younger years, so I’d be desperately lonely in my early 20s, and yeah, I’d be like, oh, that girl’s slightly overweight, or you know, that girl’s makeup’s a bit crooked, or you know, oh that girl, I don’t really like her laugh, and I just like pick at any excuse to be like no, it’s the best or nothing at all, and yet all of this stuff was superficial shit that I didn’t even believe in. So that’s how my brain tricked me into thinking I’m desperately trying to go for girls while actually making sure nothing happened, and it went beyond romantic and dating as well. It was also on friendships. You know, I was the comedian and the entertainer with guys, but I wasn’t having like real conversations with them. It was always just banter and taking the piss and so on.

So one day, I just sort of finally realised, like, I’m doing all the stuff to prevent someone getting close. You know, had some tough experiences when I was a child. Had a bad breakup at the end of my teens when I was particularly vulnerable, and I just got scared. I got scared of people being close to me. I got scared of being ditched and abandoned and dumped and betrayed, and so I started living in a way where that couldn’t happen again. I sort of threw out the baby with the bathwater. I couldn’t take the risk of connecting with someone because of the risk of rejection, and so I threw away all connections just to eliminate that risk completely. Rather than accepting the trade-off that if I want love and connection in my life, I’m going to get my feelings hurt. That’s the cost. I mean, I look at it now. You know, I’m married to like my ideal partner. I got this wonderful little girl. The worst thing that could happen to me is one of them dying, right? Both of them dying would devastate me completely. That’s the trade-off, you know. We just had a nice little morning actually, and I was playing with my daughter for like three hours, and then we all went to lunch together, and it was just all sort of cute family sort of moment, just really nice, like just one of those things that make life worth living. Doesn’t look like a big deal to anybody watching, but to me it was like just so nice and warm, and oh, I just love my girls, you know. And so the cost of having good feelings like that is I am gonna be fucking ruined if I lose it, which I’ve got to in some way someday. My problem as an adult was that I was still like a little kid who wasn’t willing to make that trade-off, whereas I had to grow up. I had to realise like that’s the cost. If I want the good shit, I got to take the bad shit. If I want to play in this life, I have to take risks. If you want to go fast on a bike, you have to take the risk of falling off and smashing your need a bit, right? Like that’s how life works. There is no safe, easy option for playing. There’s either suffering all on your own, or getting your heart broken occasionally while you have lots of love as well. Those are the two only available options. There is no safe option. You suffer either way, but at least one way you get some rewards as well. So once I realised that, I was like, “Fuck this! I’m rewriting the system. I don’t know what I need to do, but I know it needs to be different. So I started doing everything differently. I’m going to give you a list of some of the things I tried to prompt you, and then you can go and try some of the stuff on your own. So one thing I did was I said yes to any girl that was even remotely interested, even if I wasn’t attracted to her at all, I said I’ll go at least a full date with her, right? Like I don’t trust my attraction at all. I’m going to get to know someone before I say no to them, you know. And so I, I just took any girl said yes, any girl showed interest, I pursued it until she said no. Like I made it go all the way. And the opposite. If there was a girl stringing me along, I was really keen on, but she was not reciprocating. I cut them off. And for girls not available, I said goodbye, even though I felt like there was a chance. Told myself, if this girl really wants me, I’ll see very obvious signs very early on. And if I’m not seeing those signs, I need to just let her go and move on to someone who actually likes me. I made expressing attraction the first thing I talked about, rather than the thing I never talked about. So I put it out on the table. I’d meet a girl, and within 30 seconds, I’m telling her I’m attracted to her, so that that way I can’t get in the friend zone anymore.

I can’t pretend that this is platonic. I can’t get into one-eyed situations. This is either going to escalate or not. I’d make that sort of polarising happen. I’d keep escalating as well in this place, platonic and romantic. Like I’d invite people to come over and spend time with me, and I’d go in for the kiss, even if I didn’t see particular signs of attraction from them. I’d sort of make them say no. I’d always respect to no. I’d never go beyond consent, but I’d actually go to the point where the consent was taken away rather than guessing, because my guessing was very bad. It was very inaccurate. There were people who were very keen, and I had no idea, so I started just going. Okay, they will say no. Once they say no, then I can back off, but I have to keep escalating until they say no. Having very honest conversations is probably the heart of it, really, especially with friends, family. Start opening up more, talking about real topics. Stop pretending that I had everything all together. Stop trying to make people laugh all the time. Just talked about real shit and just risk losing friends, which I did. I lost quite a few friends doing this, but the ones I kept and the ones I gained were much more enhanced relationships than I’d ever had before. I publish books. You guys don’t have to do this, but this is in the later sort of stages of my development. I was like, okay, no more secrets with anyone for any reason. So I put my deepest secrets in my books and published them to the world. It’s not like I sold a million copies, barely sold 1000. But I didn’t care who read them. I was like, okay, I’m gonna warts and all. This is who I really am. Judge me, hate me, whatever. Let’s get this done instead of trying to like control my reputation. I’m gonna let go of it completely. I started sharing unresolved inner conflicts. I’d gotten good at like say. You know, I used to struggle with something, but now I’m fine because I was always trying to present like this person who’s okay now started showing like I’m struggling with this thing right now. You know, like right now I’m really struggling to get over my addiction to sugar. I can see I’ve put on a bit of fucking weight again. I just love eating sugar, and I know it’s really bad for me. And I haven’t solved that. I don’t know what the fuck to do with it? Nothing I do works. Like so, being able to share the stuff that I’m currently struggling with because nothing connects people more than that. So long as you’re not like whinging and treating them like a therapist, letting people see that I wasn’t perfect because people can’t connect with perfect. Like I said, I stopped trying to be funny and entertaining. Let people see that I’m boring. There are a lot of people now who think of me as antisocial or quiet, and I just let them think that because I just don’t try now. I don’t try to make people feel good about me. I don’t try to entertain them. I don’t try to be part of things and fit in. I don’t run away and hide either. But I just turned off the show, and I’m just like, this is what I’ll be like if you knew me for 10 years. This is me with no effort. If you don’t like this, then that’s fine. If you do, I will allow it to continue, but I’m not going to try and make something happen. I tried connecting with new types of people, broke away from my old patterns, my old circles, went and did salsa dancing, and started hanging out with different types of people and just developed a new style of friends with types of people I’d never really hung out with before. Now I look at my friend circle, which is spread all over the world, and there’s very few of the original members from like high school left, and a lot of new people who are all from all walks of life, all age groups, ethnicities, genders, fucking types of jobs and interests and so on, and quite different.

You know, I used to be just working with tradies who were into sports and like drinking and taking drugs. Now there’s almost no one like that in my life, and the people I’m into now are quite different. So I let that change happen, and mostly I employed my favourite technique, which I’ve saved till last, to reward those of you who’ve waited this long. When you’re overcoming the fear of commitment, which is a huge one for me, to continue seeing someone I was interested in to take that risk, there’s a question I developed which saved me, which is, do I want to see them one more time? That’s the only question I ever had to answer about anybody. Took all the pressure off around like commitment and long-term intimacy and so on, without me kind of having to figure anything out in particular. It’s just I either want to see this person again or I don’t. And if I do, then I will. And at the end of that time, I’ll ask myself again, and this way I’m never really getting myself in too deep with a commitment. I’m always free to leave, and because I’m always free to leave, I’m not actually scared to stay. And that’s how I tricked my trick. That’s how I got my brain to relax. I’m in agreement with my brain, like I will never ask you to be with someone more than once. All right, so if we can make the agreement, we can only we’re only going to see them one more time. Can you please stop sabotaging shit and just trust that we will end this if it gets bad? And that’s the kind of cooperation I’ve got. I mean, I don’t think that much anymore. I don’t really need to, but especially like when I first started seeing my wife and the commitment was coming up. I was so in love with it. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to get my heart broken. It was all coming up again. I was just like, “Just relax. I don’t have to marry her. Just, do you want to see her again? Yes. Okay, we’ll see her one more time, and then we’ll reconsider. And that got me through the tough transition where I was getting really like panicky about the commitment and so on. Actually, went too far from. Ended up proposing to her really early because I got too obsessed with her. But because I gave myself permission to run away, I didn’t have to run away. It was counterintuitive, and it was very, very effective for me. So, like I said, I recommend the book attached to go deeper into this. I recommend you get in touch with me if you want more support. Dan amprojo.org. Thank you so much for listening. Hope that it helped. Comment below with your thoughts. I’ll see you next time.