Up until about the age of twenty-five or so, I was unconsciously suffering from Nice Guy Syndrome.

That is, I didn’t know I had something wrong.

I was the nicest guy.

I was funny.

I was entertaining.

I was super helpful.

I was always compassionate and supportive.

I never had a bad word to say to you, I never confronted or asserted myself.

I was really easygoing, really pleasant to be around, really agreeable.

It was just nice to be around me.

At some point, I finally looked at all this—first myself, and then other people—and said: if being nice is really so good, why are the people doing it suffering so much?

If it’s really such a healthy, good thing to be, why does it cost the person so much to do it?

Well, after a while, I finally looked at myself more honestly, and over the course of a few years started to realize what I was doing wrong.

I started to realize why being nice wasn’t really working out for me—internally or externally. And I had to face some really dark truths about who I was and my behaviour.

See, people pleasers aren’t just good people.

Good people are something else. If you’re a good person, it doesn’t matter how others react—you will still have confrontations and be setting boundaries.

You will do what’s right rather than what’s easy. You don’t live in your comfort zone all the time. So good people and people pleasers are actually rather different from each other when you get down to the details.

To dive deeper into this topic, check out the original video here: