Nice Guys appear to be happy and cool and even confident from the outside, but inside they are a psychological disaster just waiting to happen; a ticking time-bomb of boiling rage. People-pleasers build up so much resentment and frustration from a lifetime of trying to make other people like them and create a smooth problem-free life that eventually it turns into rage and hate.

In this video, we face the dark truth about Nice Guy rage and what you need to do about it.

Dan’s Top Resources

Books

Dan has 3 bestselling non-fiction books available in both written and audio form:

• The Naked Truth, his latest release, shows you how radical honesty builds self-confidence and relationships
• Nothing to Lose explores how to build confidence from the inside by correcting the programming in your brain
• The Legendary Life is a very practical, action-focused guide on how to plan and execute a life plan that brings you your ideal lifestyle

Online courses

Dan continues to put out high quality online self-paced courses through the Udemy platform

• Nice Guy Recovery: how to transform from a people pleaser into a confident beast.
• Shamelessness: how to relieve yourself of the “not good enough” story
• Powerful Honesty: takes you through step-by-step development of your communication skills to be more charismatic and powerful in your honesty
• The 3X Confidence and Authenticity Masterclass program: use the famous 3X Model to build confidence in all areas of life
• Financial Freedom for Beginners: includes everything from budgeting, to getting a raise, to investing in the stock market, to starting a side-business and more
• Overcoming Your Fear of Rejection… Permanently!: covers the psychology of “rejection” and what actions to take to make yourself immune to the fear of it

Full transcript (unedited)

Tonight we’re going to look at the dark truth about nice guys. And that is their rage, and what you can do about it. So nice guys come in all shapes and sizes, I think of it as a spectrum. With lots of different qualities. If you’re an introvert, it’s different to being an extrovert. You know you if you’re self centered, it’s different to being outwardly focused. There’s lots of different types of nice guys. And what I’m always interested in my work because I really do specify my work to be confidence building for nice guys, is I’m looking for the things they have in common. There are a few, you know, fear of confrontations, for example. But the thing that they most have in common, that’s at the heart of all of it that comes from anyone living a lifetime of being a nice guy is rage. Now, rage is a kind of permanent state of low level anger. Okay, it’s not the emotions we think of in terms of anger, happiness, confusion, sadness, but a deeper level of feeling like confidence as a deeper level of feeling while all the other emotions happen over the top rage as a deeper level of feeling. So a constant bitterness, resentment, frustration, and deep anger about the world about life. And that’s always sitting there. Sometimes it’s quiet, and sometimes it’s loud. But it’s always there. That’s what I’m talking about. When I say rage. Many nice guys will deny the existence of this rage because they are terrified of it. And because it goes so much against their persona, they think of themselves as a nice guy. How can a nice guy be full of rage doesn’t make sense to them. So they deny that part of themselves even though it’s been whispering or shouting at them their entire lives. So if you want to remain in denial, then stop watching this video and go about your life that simply doesn’t work. Or you can face this core fear this core problem that is actually at the heart of all of your suffering, and overcome it. Instead of burying your head in the sand. Nice Guy rage generally comes out in one of two ways, explosions or implosions. Dr. Robert Glover coined the term puke, which is when a nice guy explodes with his rage. This is usually a largely unprovoked unreasonable reaction of anger and rage and resentment towards what looks like a minor piece of behavior and overblown explosion, like the straw that finally broke the camel’s back, you know, so quite often, nearly all nice guys, at some point have a puke, you know, most nice teenagers have holes in their wall that they cover with a poster, you know, or they have these rage attacks by themselves. So I remember driving my car once like screen crying while I was punching the steering wheel for no fucking reason at all. Maybe someone cut me off or something or I was just thinking about how unfair life was. And I just all came out. So there’s an explosion, then there are other people who are far too afraid of confrontation and of hurting others to ever allow an explosion to occur. And they have implosions instead, which is essentially some form of self harm. So yeah, depression and suicidality and actual cutting the extreme forms of self harm. But it can be things more like binge drinking, drink, driving risk, taking behavior, going to dangerous places, hanging out with dangerous people, having unprotected sex, kind of moves that are designed to hurt your life, to kind of lash out in some way at yourself, even though it might look quite indirect. If it was something you did to somebody else, you would consider that to be very harmful behavior. And you do it to yourself, you’ve always got an excuse. But if you understand that all that stuff you’ve ever done to sabotage your life comes from this ball of rage you have about yourself, it’ll make a lot more sense why you do these stupid things. I was a probation officer for many years and I specialized in high risk offenders. And one particular type of offender I worked with were murderous. Now in New Zealand, at least murder has about a 5050 ratio, which is about 50% of murders are things like gang killings and assassinations and strangers beating each other to death, and the other 50% of domestic violence. Okay, men killing their partners, usually out of fucking nowhere, no history of violence, no call outs from the police no record on their rap sheet nothing. Just out of nowhere the guy will strangle his partner to death is actually a very, very common form of murder. And I used to work with a lot of these guys. And they were nice guys. Almost to a tee. None of them were psychopaths or sociopaths. They all seemed pretty normal, pretty decent dudes. And one day they just snapped is actually a documentary on Netflix if it’s still there called American family. American murder movie called me can murder anyway, it’s all about a nice guy killing his whole family. And it makes total sense to me. This is what the rage can do. So this rage is something you got to take seriously, it literally leads to murder, if you don’t do anything about it not in every case. But that’s the potential. All right, especially towards someone you love. The nice guy when his rage flips out, and he explodes as the people he loves who gets the worst of the partner, the kids, the family, the friends, the co workers, people who are usually actually treat him alright, he takes out all the resentment and anger he has about other people mistreating him and takes it out on these people. This rage comes from a lifetime of resentment, frustration, loneliness, seeing yourself miss out on opportunities all the time, feeling like a victim feeling stuck all the time, feeling disadvantaged, like you’ve been born to feet behind everybody else, and you just can’t quite catch up seeing people that you think are worse than you doing better than you and being more loved than than you are. And so on this constant unfairness that you see in the world, and having to face it day after day, after a while you feel like you’re trying your best to do everything you can to deserve the good life, and you’re just not getting those rewards, while other people would barely even try. And terrible people are getting all these rewards reaping all the glory, a lifetime of that makes a man full of rage and hate all these incidents built into a narrative, you know, the brain is always trying to make narratives to explain the world scripts patterns, it’s always looking for these things. And the narrative that the nice guy builds is something along the lines of an unfair universe, right? Other people are jerks, life rewards bad people, I get less than I deserve. This kind of I’m playing on the backfoot I’m playing at a disadvantage. This is very, very unfair, I’m actually putting more in to earn the rewards and other people are and getting less than them. And there’s some sort of wiring in the universe where I’ve been targeted to be treated this way. And there’s certainly a very, very victim irresponsible perspective like this being done to me, even if you think I am the problem, you feel like that is a problem being done to you, like I was born as this person who’s disadvantaged I was born as this person who’s less skilled or less attractive, that’s unfair, you’re still treating as if it’s something external that happened to you, even if you are talking about yourself, sex is a big part of it for nice guys, their rage and their sex go together, the hate and the love go together. You know, if you deprive a man of love and sex for a very long time, his response is going to be hate and rage. Okay, a guy just does not function well, without those key critical elements of life. And it’s all about his perspective, he may, in fact be well loved, he may in fact, be getting six. But it’s not enough, or it’s not good enough, or he feels a lot of pressure and stress. And that situation, he can’t quite receive that he can’t quite enjoy it. So it’s the same as really not getting it at all. You know, the classic media narrative about nice guys, whenever they’re mentioned, is this very small percentage of the spectrum, which are the guys who are entitled to six, the kind of narcissistic types who take a woman out and expect that because they pay for dinner Dinner there, she should have sex with them. When she says no, the guy gets in a van and drives into a group of people. Now those guys do exist within the nice guy spectrum, but they’re actually a very small part of them. The vast majority of nice guys. It’s not really entitlement, they feel it’s a business towards their own lack of success. They do feel that they’re being very good. And then they’re meeting all the standards that everyone has told them to meet throughout their lives, either directly or indirectly. They do feel like they’re being good people. That’s why they call themselves nice, guys. I’m doing everything. You told me to be nice. But when they don’t get the reward, it’s not so much that they feel entitled to it. It’s that they feel like God, I just can’t quite do this good enough. Or the resentment they feel as like, I’ve been steered down the wrong track. I’m doing everything people told me to do. And yet it doesn’t work. It doesn’t get rewards. This is very, very unfair. Why’d you tell me to be this way? If it doesn’t work, you know, the classic lament of the nice guy is he’ll grow up with women in his life that he’s attracted to. And they’ll say things to him like, Oh, God, I wish other guys will like you. I wish I could find a boyfriend like you. And he’s suddenly like, I’m really fucking here. What do you mean, you don’t need to look any further. I exist currently. But of course, the insinuation is like, it’s you but not you. Right? And he gets us feeling like there’s a percentage on missing here. There’s a part of the puzzle that I want wasn’t given us very unfair, I’m doing everything right. But it’s still not enough. You also get this kind of meta rage building your inability to resolve your rage in rages you, you know, because nice guys, despite the fact that they can see, they’re being nice clearly doesn’t work and doesn’t create a life that they enjoy and pleases other people doesn’t actually make people love them or anything like that. Yet they don’t do anything about it, they keep doing that, like their only solution is to do more of it be even funnier, be even more helpful, give more compliments, being more available and reliable. Whatever it is, they think being nice is they just double down and triple down whenever it’s not working. And that’s enraging. Because you’re like, I don’t care. Doesn’t matter how much gas I pour into this car just won’t get off the line. Right? And it’s amazing how much they don’t click LIKE A maybe I’m doing it wrong. Maybe I’ve been given bullshit advice or maybe been conditioned to behave in a way that doesn’t work. They just think, Oh, I’m just not quite doing it enough. So how do we deal with this rage? Let’s get to the heart of this. Well, first off, you have to face it and acknowledge it. There is a fucking monster in you. And until you look that monster in the face, it is going to dictate your life. It’s going to control you, it’s going to ruin everything. You need to get your hands on this back and Beast, right. I remember in my early 20s, one of the reasons I became so obsessed with psychopathy, the study of psychopathy, and personality disorders in that spectrum, it’s because I thought I had it. I thought I must be a psycho. For two reasons. One is I was very numb emotionally. And because of that struggle to connect with people, and to us because of this rage, this latent violence I had in me now I barely ever hurt another person in my life. But there were times where I wanted to kill. There were times I was scared that I would, as I go, please, nobody provoked me today, I don’t think I’ll be able to control myself any further. You know, there was a time where a friend of mine was like, just annoying me and I turned and punched him in the chest as hard as I could as if he was my enemy. It was another time when as a kid, somebody laughed at me when I fell over and I ran the length of a tennis court to jump kick them in the face. There was these moments of violence that burst out of me very rare. But when they happen, they scared me. You know, what am I capable of? You know, when I watch that American murder, Doc, I’m like, yeah, if I keep going, I could have been that guy. I could have moved in my whole family, I could have snapped, it’s a me, you need to face it’s a new to stop pretending that it’s not there, stop treating it like it’s minor. Stop dismissing it as if it’s doing no damage, it is controlling your whole fucking life. And if you don’t want to face it, then fine, have a life of misery end up being a murderer or harming yourself or drinking yourself into an early grave or whatever it is, this rage is gonna cause you to do. Secondly, you have to see the monster for what it is. It’s not an unfair world. It’s resentment yourself, for not being the person you should be. Right. And that is not about results. And it’s not about advantages. It’s not about resources. It’s about the way you behave. Everything that’s happening in your life, all the unfairness and misery and suffering that you’re experiencing is a direct result of your decisions and your behavior and nothing else. You’ve created this life. You didn’t mean to you thought you’re doing it right. Newsflash, you weren’t you were doing it very fucking wrong. And that’s why you’ve got wrong results. You have to take responsibility, your rage, at the very least you got to see that you’re angry at yourself. Right? Not for being disadvantaged or disabled, or whatever it is, you think that is the reason for your poor results. But because you haven’t been courageous because you haven’t been responsible because you haven’t been honest. Okay? Because you haven’t taken risks. Because you’ve disrespected yourself. These are choices you made that you have full control over. And they are the reason that your life sucks, and they are the reason for your rage. Nobody else has hurt you. You’ve hurt yourself. If anyone else hurt you. It’s because you let them this is nobody else’s problem. There is not an unfair universe, or I should say there is but it’s unfair on everybody. It doesn’t give a fuck about any of us. You can’t sit around waiting for it to reward you for superficially nice behavior for you to pretend that you’re a good person. Even if there was a God even if the universe worked their way it would see through your act and notice you’re just doing it to get rewards knows you’re not altruistic. So cut the fucking crap already. Third power when you finally acknowledged and accepted that this thing is caused by you. You ask yourself this question. Who do I need to become so that I no longer feel resentment or frustration or bitterness? So height. How do I need to change? I don’t mean what stuff? Do I need to get more results? Should I have to feel better? But how do I need to be? Right? Do you need to be more honest? Do you need to be brave? Do you need to be humble? Do you need to mix things up a bit and take some risks and try some new shit and experience a whole range of emotions and get rejected and all the things you’ve been avoiding? Is that the guy you need to be so that you can rest in peace at night, and go for it doesn’t matter what my results are, because I fucking crushed it today. I was a good man today. I wasn’t just playing an act of being nice. I mean, I was solid. I was respectable. I would admire me if I watched me. You ask yourself question, Who is that guy? How do I be him? That is the solution to your rage. Your rage goes away when you start paying him. If you want to help to become that guy, get in touch dan@brojo.org have transformed 1000s of nice guys into men of integrity. It’s actually not that hard. It’s just uncomfortable. You can do it. Anybody can get in touch if you want to help doing it. I’ll see you next time.