Ask Dan Anything:

In this session, we focused on Nice Guy Recovery questions, including:

When to stop identifying as a Nice Guy and realise you’ve moved on from that label.

How to stop ruminating over your ex and move on with your life.

How to get unstuck from always needing others to guide you, and learn to decide for yourself the right way forward.

How to deal with the uncomfortable situation of having to keep seeing someone who hurt you in the past, and how to navigate past the awkwardness and potential manipulation.

Dealing with the difficulty of losing friends while you develop yourself and outgrow them.

Listen here:

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Full transcript (unedited):

So good questions. By the way, there’s a lot of questions today. I’ll try and smash through as many as I can. Yeah, I’ll start with question number one. Have you noticed that people often start personal development when they hit rock bottom, but once they start feeling better, they become stuck in a comfortable state that prevents further progress. How do you help someone push past this plateau to continue growing? You This is very, very normal. Basically, people start personal growth when they hit what’s called a crisis. In psychological terms, this is a period of time of such uncomfortable emotional state that you would rather do something else to get out of it. Okay, so crisis is you’re so uncomfortable emotionally you want to significantly change what’s happening in your life. And I think it’s Tony Robbins, something’s like the pain of change becomes less than the pain of staying the same. That’s a crisis, because most of us want to stay in stasis. So most of us will stay with whatever misery we’ve got if we perceive changing to be more miserable, more painful. So crisis is the opposite. So what people call rock bottom? I mean, it might be their rock bottom, but there’s always worse, but it feels like that to them, and so they go, Fuck this. And that’s, in my opinion, that is the single greatest source of motivation is when you look at your life and you go, Fuck this, and you really like now you’ve got, like this, nothing to lose. Mentality, like something has to move. I’m willing to get very uncomfortable to change this. People often think of motivation as inspiration, and you know this kind of pleasurable sensation, it’s like, no, we’re not motivated by pleasure. Pleasure motivates us to stay. Change is motivated by displeasure, discomfort, and it’s good to keep that in mind if you ever want to change yourself, it’s not about trying to seek pleasure, but trying to turn the screws on. What a what you find painful until you can’t take it anymore and you have to change. And yes, it is very common that people do this, this. They go and they take some actions. They relieve the immediate suffering somewhat, and then plateau, often followed by a relapse. This is really, really normal. I used to see this all the time. When we did live brojo, like meetings, meetups, a guy would come, and this is what would usually happen. A guy would come in his crisis would be that he just really struggles with dating and Romans. So he just nothing’s happening in the woman’s space for him, and he’s in that this place. It’s been too long. He’s too lonely. He’ll do anything now. He’ll show up to a random group of dudes that are part of us for advice. He’s willing to try anything, and it being brojo, what we usually recommend is he tries some version of radical honesty, courageous honesty. What will happen is he’ll do that, and he’s doing it for all the right reasons to begin with, like, Fuck this. I’m going to impress myself. I’m going to build my own self confidence. Stop trying to be attached to outcomes. And because he’s like that, it works. And he starts getting woman attracted to him, and so on. And this pattern, I must have seen this pattern replete maybe two dozen times. God, come in. No successful woman. He’d start being radically honest. He would get a girlfriend, and then he would disappear off the face of the fucking Earth, just ghost us completely. It was the weirdest thing. We’d be like, fuck. He’s doing well, I think things are going well with that girl. And it’s like, hey, where is he? It’s been a couple of weeks, and what happened every single time? Well, they didn’t always come back every time, but the feedback I got every single time was he got the girl, you might say, with honesty, and everything got immediately like, ah, that relief the sufferings over, and then lapsed back into nice guy behaviors to try and keep the girl, which inevitably eroded the relationship which was founded on honesty. And now he switched, and then he might, but half the time come, sort of crawling back to brojo about a year later, going, I don’t know what happened. And this is the pattern we’re talking about here, where you get some immediate relief from a change in behavior, and then your brain kind of uses that, weaponizes it to go like, okay, you’ve done enough relax. What it’s saying is it’s it’s that old thing. Your brain is just constantly trying to get back to stasis, trying to get back to familiarity. Your brain does not like change. It only likes it at crisis points when change is not as bad as Dan saying. But once you pass that, or once you perceive in some way that things are a little bit easier, your brain just immediately tries to, like, lock in another, like it’s trying to park the car all the time. So every time you idle, it just whips into a car park and stops. It just doesn’t like driving. And you will have to battle against this your entire life if you want to continually progress and evolve. It isn’t always as hard. It gets easier to deal with this. It becomes like for me at the moment, I describe it as like having a toddler tugging at your leg now and then. It’s like a minor resistance that you can just sort of Bush away from. But back at the early stages, like right after crisis, those first changes, it feels like being put in a choke hold. It feels invisible. You’re suddenly back to doing nothing again. You don’t know how it happened, but this is, this is very, very, very common. And I think the best frame to look at it is my brain always wants familiarity. It always wants to conserve energy. That’s the whole function of the organ conserve. It’s all the brain is programmed to do. Every fancy thing it does is in service of the goal of conservation. Ironically, yeah, it’s just sort of conserving oxygen more than anything else. And change uses a lot of resources. Right when you’re dragging along the bottom, if it’s a familiar bottom and you’re doing familiar dragging, that doesn’t actually take a lot of brain power, even if you’re anxious all the time, if anxiety is your normal, then it’s easy for you to be anxious the chemicals already dumped into the system. It doesn’t have to do much to maintain constant anxiety or stress or depression. They might feel to us like it’s great suffering and a lot of work, but to the brain that’s actually coasting, having to learn new stuff. You notice how university students always sleeping in the lectures. Is passing out all the time because of the constant learning. The brain just gets exhausted by learning. And change is learning. It’s going from I don’t know anything about this to knowing something about it, and that is about building neural pathways, and it hurts the brain to do this, so it’s constantly looking to stop doing that. Doesn’t want to do any more than what’s needed to survive. And of course, when you elevate off the bottom, I mean, a one out of 10 feels twice as good as a zero out of 10, at least temporarily. And so you just like, oh, relief. It’s like, the kind of relief people get when they promise to do something. They’re like, I’m going to start eating properly on Monday. And it feels so good to say that, that it’s almost like you have started. And it’s like, Well, why would I need to start if I feel this good about myself, it’s actually a little trick to stop you from doing right? So that’s just to give some background on it. What I think the question is really asking is, how do you push past this plateau? And I think there’s lots of technical ways of doing it, or practical ways, but the main one comes from the acceptance, the belief this is always going to be a bit hard. Your brain’s not lying when it says, I’m too tired. It’s embellishing. It’s saying this takes effort. This is a hassle. You know, I obviously I had to work deeply in the field of trying to motivate unmotivated people. When I worked with criminal offenders, I mean, they literally didn’t even want to see me, let alone change their behavior. And what I found is the single most motivating thing for a person is the avoidance of hassle. I thought it’d be something much grander than that, but basically people just don’t want to hassle, which is their way of saying, my brain does not want to expend energy. And so the brain will often message this into your conscious awareness as things like, I’m too tired, or that’s too big a job. I don’t have enough time for that right now, so it’s kind of like that’s too much of a hassle message. And this is what you’ll have to fight that message. You have to see that message for what it really is, which is a lie, because too tired means you can’t do it. Hassle means you would do it. If I put a gun to your head, you could still do it. Too tired is I put a gun to your head. You still can’t do it. Can’t even save your life. So your brain will exaggerate how much energy this is really costing you. And what you’ll often see is when you actually go and do the thing, you’re energized by it, and you go like. Can’t believe I didn’t want to do this. I can’t believe this like prior to walking into this room, it just felt like the biggest hassle and the biggest mistake and a waste of my time. And by the end of it, I’m glad I did it. Why would I feel so differently? It’s like the kind of paradox almost, of you’re too tired to go to the gym, then you go there. Turns out you do have enough energy to work out, and afterwards you feel like you got more energy rather than less. Your brain will constantly try to sabotage change. And every person has a different sort of theme of manipulation of the brain uses to get out of this work. But it sounds like your theme is the hassle one. I don’t have enough time. This is too much work. Look at all the steps. Oh, I’ve got organize this and make that phone call. And just presents this to do list of just unenjoyable tasks. And says, why bother? Why do it today? Put it off. After you do it, you’ll be glad you did it. You get the reward after, not before. Motivation is not pleasure. Pleasure is a reward for doing it. Now I’ll give you a very practical one, and it’s the most practical, or two practical steps. I’ll give you this. But when your brain says something like, I’m too tired. First off is, I would say, reduce the size of the step you need to take until it’s embarrassing not to do it. Because of it, what the brain will do to make to like, sell the I’m too tired story is what I call the Everest effect. It will make the task look too big to do right now, and it’ll do it by often, by stacking, as I call it. So So you gotta make the phone call, and then you gotta check up on the guy, and then you gotta drive there, then you go find parking, and then you go work in bed. And it turns it all into like one big just this conglomerate of tasks as one huge, mega task, like trying to climb Everest in a single step. So you go, No way. What’s one step that? If that’s the only obligation I have to do today, it’s embarrassing not to do it. It takes less than 30 seconds. Maybe it’s opening the email that you want to write, right? Maybe it’s driving to the location with no obligation to actually go in. Maybe it’s just checking the website to see what time the classes, with no obligation to continue. This, the key bit you this is not a trick to make the next task and the next task, next task happen. You really are giving you permission to just shave off this tiny bit of the mountain and call it a day after that. So another trick that your brain is playing on you is it’s saying, do more research, get more information. Show up when you’ve got just enough information to know what you could show up. To show up, no more information required. Okay, so let’s say you’re going, oh, I want to try a range of hobbies. Soon as you get one suggestion, go to a class. Don’t look at other suggestions yet, because how you even supposed to know which of these suggestions is right for you until you’ve tried them, they might appear to be wrong for you when you read them, and then you show up and they’re amazing, and vice versa. You don’t know. So this is a 3x model. You never keep thinking. After you’ve come up with one idea, you now act on that idea, if nothing else, to dismiss it, and then you move on to the next idea. But the brain’s trick to create the Everest effect is compile so much information that you’re overwhelmed by it and won’t act on any of it, but reward you for compiling information, but it’s giving you a pat on the back for overwhelming yourself if you just come down to this thing like I must always show up to something. This must be physical. I must act or speak, in some way, the things have moved. I’ve had a new experience, something I can then reflect on and measure to see if that was the right experience for me. The length of experience, this is the key where you make it small. It’s a guy, okay, I’ve got to show up to a jiu jitsu class. I’m a bit overwhelmed by that, like it’s intimidating. I won’t know anyone there. Blah, blah, blah, blah, so you go, okay, tell you what. I’ll drive to the building, park outside, look through the window. That’s it. If I want to continue, I will. If I don’t, I can go home guilt free. I’ve tried my best really take all that pressure off, because that pressure doesn’t get you to the building taking the pressure off does now, if you look in the window and you’re like, they look like friendly enough dudes, maybe I’ll walk inside. Still haven’t committed to doing the class, even, certainly haven’t committed to signing up to a new hobby for life. We’re just going to go inside the building and then reassess. You. And that turned out to be alright, so I’ll go to the guy with the black belt on and say, How’s this work? And then reassess. At any point I can run away. Any point I can quit. I do not have to get to the top of this mountain. It’s not an obligation here. We’ve been raised our whole lives to think we have to pressure ourselves to complete this whole gigantic task, or otherwise we’re a quitter and a loser. But that’s all delusional. There is no gigantic task, it’s all micro tasks, and you can quit at any point in time, and you should if it’s not right for you. If you pressure yourself to do the whole lot, you end up doing nothing and feeling bad about yourself and thinking that I can’t do things, which makes it even less likely to do the next thing. And that’s the whole point. The Brain wanted you to feel this way so that you stay still, not realizing, of course, that this short term conservation of energy will cost you so much energy in the future, things like chronic anxiety, loneliness, depression, they actually burn a lot of energy. The brain just can’t do forward thinking like that. We’ve still got the same brains that we had 100,000 years ago, when we were middle of the food chain and every day was a gift. We weren’t looking that far ahead. We’re like, how do we get through today without being eaten or killed? And then we’ll worry about tomorrow? That’s what the brain was designed for, and it was and it was the right design for that time. But now we can basically make it hundreds of years, decades, sorry, and the brain just isn’t set up for that kind of plan. We have to override the basic tools that we start with and go look, no, no, I can extrapolate into the future that’s going to cost us if we don’t go to the gym. We don’t go to the gym today. One last practical tip I’ll give you when you have finally decided on the action you know you should take next and you’ve got it down to a size that is manageable, and you still feel reluctant, just ask yourself, How will I feel about this tomorrow? If I don’t, you all set up to go to the jiu jitsu class or whatever. You’re starting to check it out. Totally normal. Just ask yourself, If I don’t go to this class, how will I feel about skipping it tomorrow? When I wake up tomorrow and I remember that I skipped it right? And get into that feeling, because that feeling is motivation. You want to get to the point where you’re just like, Okay, I’m just going to do this at a minimal level, just so I don’t feel that way tomorrow. That’s the reason I’m going to set up tomorrow’s self to be at least satisfied with what he tried to do, rather than having to wake up and deal with them the guilt of having dropped the ball again. So that’s my challenge to you, pick a task, make it so small that it’s embarrassing not to do it and then show up. No further obligation, and you will have to keep doing that, because your brain will keep trying to rebound to stasis, until you hit a kind of tipping point where it actually enjoys change more than staying the same. And then it will support you, then it will urge you to keep changing. Sometimes you even have to rein that back in, but that’s a problem for another day. Thank you for showing an interest in the nice guy brotherhood, a group coaching community program for nice guys and people pleasers who want to become more confident and assertive, to do better in their relationships and their careers. This is also for any man who wants to become more masculine, more bold, more honest and more authentic. So in this program, we focus in on a lot of the people pleaser and approval seeking tendencies that hold men back from achieving full self confidence in healthy relationships, things like avoiding conflict, trying to fix other people’s emotions, molding yourself to other people’s preferences, failing to stand up for yourself, not going for what you really want, and not knowing who you really are. The goal through the support of myself and the other members of the community, is to help you build the backbone to stand up for yourself, to stop caring what other people think of you, to stop getting lost in your thoughts and your feelings and learn how to act decisively based on your own set of core values, rather than what everybody else wants you to do. So we’re looking to replace things like conflict avoidance and procrastination and trying to please others with going for what you really want based on who you really are. So we address all these issues through a number of methods. Firstly, we get together each week for a group session. Now part of that is what’s called Hot Seat coaching, which is somebody gets on the mic with me, and we do a coaching session in front of the others, and everybody gives their feedback and support, and we can deal with specific issues that’s coming up for that person in their life. Life in relation to building confidence and overcoming nice guy syndrome. We also have group discussions during these calls, we share links and resources, feedback questions and everything we can do to support each other’s growth. And then also, alongside these group calls, you get access to my full online library of self development courses, which includes things like building rapport, setting boundaries and learning to confront your fears. Now, if you’re interested in the group, we have a deal where you get your first month for just $1 so that you can try it before you buy it and get a sense if it’s really right for you, and if these are the people that are going to help you achieve your goals. Once your first month is up, if you want to continue, then we have a monthly membership subscription. It’s $250 US per month for full access to everything. This includes the entire archive of recordings from all the calls that we’ve had so far. And if you come along with a friend, both of you will get a 50% discount for joining together. It was what we call a zero risk guarantee. If at any time you’re unsatisfied with the program, you can quit and you’ll get your money from the last month give them back to you, no questions asked. So come and check it out. If nothing else, for $1 you get access to everything for an entire month. No risk. I’ll even return that dollar if you’re not satisfied, because that’s how confident I am that this program is going to change your life. All right, let’s have a look. Next question, Has anyone else had a major loss of contact with old friends and networks once the people pleasing behavior is addressed and stopped short answer, yes. There’s a difficult, painful thing that my one to one clients go through. They usually come to me as people pleasers 95% of the time. Then they work on their confidence, and that’s one of the first behaviors to be addressed. They start winding that back, and it starts to reveal the truth about their social circle. I’m going to share an opinion that I think is fact, but I can’t back it up with science, so we’ll call it an opinion. I think you never create connections with people healthier than you. I think you find your match. Now, whatever insecurities and stuff you have, it doesn’t mean that they’ll have exactly those two. They’re not going to be a mirror of you, but they’re going to be doing as well as you’re doing psychologically, and no better, always. And this is why victims always find abusers. They’re both equally fucked up. This is why avoidance find anxious. Why people pleasers find users. We find what matches our current level of psychological health. We’re attracted to what matches our level of psychological health, both romantically and platonically. And as we grow, that changes, we start to see the people in our lives differently if they’re not growing too now, it doesn’t mean that one you have to have some standard where the person in your life, friend or otherwise, is perfect psychologically, because that person doesn’t exist. But if you’re not finding someone who’s, as I say, facing north, they’re not facing in the same direction as you, working on themselves in a similar way to you, or at least supportive of that kind of work and encouraging of it, you are going to grow away from them. And this is going to eventually create a friction I’ve retained like because I’m an extroverted, nice guy, I used to have a lot of people that I’d call friends. I wasn’t actually deeply connected to any of them. None of them would or very few of them would get up at three in the morning to come rescue me from a drama or something like that. They weren’t real friends. But there are people who I thought of as friends as I went through my changes, I’ve you know, if we come to my current self, I’m only in contact with like 5% of them, the rest of a gun. It’s not because they’re bad people or anything like that. It wasn’t like us surrounded by narcissists, as a lot of people seem to think they are and so on. It’s just as I changed they didn’t. And it also revealed that I had found people that matched my lower psychological health level. So when I had low self confidence and low self esteem, I met people that matched that in some way, and as I improved on that, they no longer appealed to me as people to be around. So for example, you know, a lot of them were pretty heavy drug users and drinkers. You know, they they party, they had a good time. They weren’t like the creepy type, just the fun type. I. Yeah, but they really just didn’t want to sit around talking about philosophy or how to improve your life or how to start a business. They wanted to get smashed from Thursday through to Sunday. They got smashed in the other days they were hungover, and I just didn’t want to be around that anymore. That was not it felt like I was trying to get out of a garden where my foot was cemented into the ground like I had to leave. And in my case, it was quite physical. I was living with these people and I had to leave. There’s nothing wrong with those people, but they didn’t want to have the kind of conversations I wanted to have. And when I’ve started brojo, and when social dancing, with Latin dancing and so on, I found people who did want to have those conversations, and who didn’t get smashed five nights a week, and who were like, working on themselves and reading the kind of books I was into and so on. I realized, Oh, I’ve, I’ve found a different type of people that I’m into now, even my physical attraction towards women changed girls I used to find hot suddenly looked less so to me, sort of, I started to see more like desperation or red flags and things like that would I’d be more noticeable. And girls that used to intimidate me now look like my peers. They look like the kind of girls I should, you know, date. They’re girls that I was now attracted I was now attracted to confident girls who stood up for themselves, as opposed to, like, party freak, emotionally unstable that I was previously attracted to, probably for that reason that a subconscious, you know, nice guys love a good fixer upper, right? So it’s a long winded way of saying it is totally natural for you to outgrow the people you’re with, and also to start getting very brutally honest with yourself about how healthy those people really are. Now, I don’t consider my previous friends to be particularly malevolent or anything like that. Like it wasn’t healthy for me to be around them, but they weren’t bad people. They had good hearts, they were generous and stuff with the people they actually felt connected to kind of people. You’d feel safe to have your kids around that kind of thing. But a lot of the clients I work with have much worse than that going on. They have people actively bring them down. People are actually malevolent, who have hostile intent towards them from something as simple as being just controlling through to actually wanting to harm and isolate and destroy person. There’s a book called, I think it’s called Diary of a sociopath, or Confessions of a sociopath. And it’s really interesting, read by a sociopathic woman who’s now done actual interviews you can watch where she’s just very upfront and shameless about being what she calls a sociopath, anti social personality disorder, and she talks about how she likes to ruin people. That’s how she puts it. She says it’s delicious. Her mouth actually salivates at the thought of ruining people. And for her, ruining people just means getting inside their head and completely changing the course of their life. Sometimes they don’t even know it’s happening or whatever, but her actual primary motive is to influence people in any way that makes their life more chaotic, for her own amusement, just to get a sense of power. There are a lot of nice guys out there who have people with this kind of intent in their lives. It could be your parents. It could be the best friend you’ve had since you were a kid. Could be your long term partner. Could be very painful to realize who these people are, and they identify themselves, usually by being the most discouraging about the changes you’re making, to be the most resistant, most unhelpful, and it’s also it becomes your changes and your growth actually becomes a great qualifier, who’s supportive of me, who’s on board with this, who’s keeping up with the new guy, and that’s like the friends I still have now. None of them got in the way. Most of them were supportive. They might have teased me or something. For only you’re going to be a coach. Mr. Hard out over here. But they were on board with it. They supported me. Then there were others who were actively, directly discouraging, and it was interesting to see them come out of the woodwork to be like whoa. And there were others who were passively or indirectly discouraging, like the ones who try encourage me to drink that kind of thing. They weren’t saying I shouldn’t make my changes, but they were encouraging behaviors that would slow me down and so on, trying to keep me the same, not out of malevolence, but just out of their own comfort and self interest. But you know, a lot of my conversations with clients have when we’re into about sort of the third month or something, and the big changes are happening is we usually have to have a pretty hard conversation about they’re in a circle. Often it’s brutal. Like a lot of my clients no longer speak to one of their siblings, for example, or they break up with a partner they’ve been with for 10 years. And it was actually. Been terrible for nine and a half years, and they’re just finally seeing that the person they were when they met them is not the person who would ever choose this. You know, this man or woman now, and that’s another key question you can ask yourself, is, if I just suddenly dropped into this life and had no obligations, if I just met this person and they were like, this, would I keep seeing is it just a sense of obligation, duty and time served, that keeps this person in my life and again? You don’t have to attribute malicious intent. You don’t have to be like, Oh, they’re a bad person trying to hurt me, even though that may be the case. But just more like, you know, the sun set on our time together. I’m a different person now. I wouldn’t choose you now, so I have to let you go. And also, specifically to nice guys, while they often talk about being afraid of rejection and abandonment, they’re even more afraid of doing the rejecting. They’re even more afraid of hurting someone’s feelings, being seen as the bad person, getting a reputation as someone who’s selfish because they cut people out or whatever. And if that’s the only reason you’re keeping someone in your life that you’re worried about being seen that way, then that’s probably not someone you should have in your life. So I recommend that everyone does a fairly ruthless assessment of their social circle. I’ve recommended this one of my courses. You just write a list of everyone who you see at least once a month, and next to them you just put positive, neutral, negative. So positive means they improve your life. Neutral means you’re not sure what impact they have, if anything. And negative is it’s worse to be around them. You’re better off without them. You can see that in terms of how you behave and feel in their presence and afterwards. And then the confident person goes, if it ain’t positive, it ain’t happening, and they cut everyone so that’s my answer to that question. It’s a really brutal experience. I went through a lot of grief as I realized, you know, certain friends weren’t texting me anymore, and that kind of thing that, like I had sort of somehow push them away, and even more so realizing that was right for us, that it’s time. There’s nothing to fix here. I don’t actually want to fix this. I don’t want to be alone, but I want to fix this. And there was a bit of a value, might say, where I was at a very small social circle, one or two friends and noone else. And I was by myself on the weekends because everyone was gone, but I hadn’t replaced anybody. And if you’re willing to go through that valley to create the space for new people, then you can completely change your social circle. But it goes in that order. In order to plant a new garden, first you do weeding, and you’re left with, like, Empty Dirt. Then you build a garden. So if you cling to people because you don’t want to be alone, you’re actually filling up space with someone else to enter, which means you’ll never, you’ll never replace them. But yeah, it’s pretty it’s pretty brutal. And one of the comments here, like, sometimes it’s even good people, and that’s what I found as well. Like a lot of my friends, they were decent enough people, but just not right to be in my life with where I want to go and be and who I want to be. They were kind of unwittingly discouraging in some way or unhelpful in some way. Even if they had good intentions, good hearts, they were decent enough confidence is going like, I don’t want just I’m not going to let a person take up my time energy just because they’re decent. I’m going to bring them in because it enhances my quality of life to have a person like this in it, and I enhance theirs, like I don’t feel any guilt about being in their life, like I feel like I’m contributing that reciprocal value sort of thing. That’s my opinion, anyway. But the other thing I’ll just be real brutal about is you’ll never be you’ll never outgrow your social circle. When I say you’ll never grow outgrow your social circle is whoever you’ve got around will behave as an anchor. You’ll never get much better than that. So if you’re trying to be really healthy physically, for example, and you’re around really unhealthy people, physically, you won’t get very physically healthy. You’re spending a lot of time with those people. They’ll influence you in 1000 invisible ways. That makes it very hard to get physically healthy. Whereas if you replace those people with like fitness fanatics, you’ll get incredibly healthy very quickly. So never see yourself as isolated from your social circle or compartmentalized. Everybody you have any contact with affects your brain, and you can’t prevent that from happening. So assume that whatever is around you is dragging you in that direction. You. So if you’re around someone miserable and pessimistic, you are somehow getting more miserable and pessimistic just being around them. Even if you feel like you’re fighting against it, or you tell yourself you can resist it, you can’t, they’re just poisoning you with it. And the opposite is true. If you’re around someone’s like, Come on, we can do this fucking year. Long enough, you’re going to believe in yourself more. It’ll affect you. So choose your influences very carefully, because you cannot choose whether they influence you. That is happening with or without your permission. Are you a nice guy or people pleaser who wishes they were more assertive, more honest and better respected by others. Since 2013 I’ve been helping people just like you discover their integrity and imply it courageously, to build deeper meaningful connections, get respected by others and become the confident person you’ve always wanted to be, being able to speak your mind without worrying what other people will think or worrying that it’s the right thing to say, and being able to assertively stand up for yourself and your loved ones. Imagine never feeling the need to apologize for who you are or what you want, and being able to live care free, without shame or the I’m not good enough story in your head. Imagine going to bed knowing that you courageously took every opportunity available to you, and you’ve got no regrets, because you always know what you should be doing in every situation. I’m so confident in my ability to help people like you unleash your highest level of self worth that I give people a free coaching session to test what I’m doing. In this one hour session, we will uncover the biggest barrier to your confidence, whether it’s an awareness problem, you don’t know what you should be doing differently, or it’s a courage problem, you know what you should be doing, but you find it too intimidating. I will guide you to make a breakthrough with your behavior, to get through that barrier in a powerful way, without feeling terrified and without destroying everything you love. I’ve had some people find this first session so powerful that I never hear from them again, simply because they didn’t need anything more after that, it launched them into the highest level of confidence that they’ve ever experienced. And if that’s the result you get, I’m good with that. One client put it this session was more valuable to me than three years of therapy combined. So if you’re tired of trying to keep everybody happy, and you’re sick of worrying what other people think of you, and you’re concerned that your people pleasing and conflict avoidance is going to damage your relationships, then come and have a talk with me. Worst case scenario, you get to experience what it’s like to talk with someone who actually understands what it’s like to be you. I’ve lived the nice guy experience for decades. I know it inside and out. I know that pain case scenario, and very likely you will have such a powerful insight into a behavioral change that you can make in the next 24 hours to significantly improve your confidence, relationships and career. My ask is that you be honest, open to change and willing to try something new. Why wait another 10 years to discover confidence when you can do it today, fill out the brief form below to apply for a trial coaching session. Do this quickly, because there are limited spots each month, and then I’ll get back to you to book in a time to talk. All right, let’s move on next question. Maybe we won’t get through them all today, but I’ll try next one we have is when dealing with interpersonal hurt, which is somebody close to me said something really nasty, made some vile accusations that were unprovoked, etc. How do I measure my ongoing response as we interact daily? My instinct is to be the opposite of a good guy. Freeze this person out by remaining civil and little else. Where’s the middle ground, if there is such a thing, right? So I’m gonna try and interpret this question so it’s a situation you’ve been around someone who’s hurt you done something very nasty, and for some reason you have to keep being around them. So I’d be interested to know exactly why you have to keep being around them if they really are this awful. But I’m assuming sake of argument is like a work situation or you don’t want to leave your hobby, and neither do they, and they’re still there. So what do we do as someone who’s definitely been disrespectful and harmful towards us, and we have to keep seeing them. He says, My instinct is to be the opposite of a good guy. Freeze this person out with a kind of like cold civility, which may not be a bad idea. Where’s the middle ground, if there is such a thing, I won’t focus too much on like the practical exactly how you should be around this person, but what I will say is manipulation is about how much somebody else is able to adjust your behavior. You. Once you imagine you’re on a track that if nobody interfered with you’d stay on that track. Okay, this is the track that you’re on, so if nobody influenced you or manipulated you, that’s where you would go. An influencer manipulation is anything that shifts you off that track in any direction. We’d say positive information manipulation is something that shifts you onto a better track, or if you’re already on a good track, it pushes you from behind. It makes it easier to walk that track. We’d call that positive manipulation, or helpful influence coaching. But in this case, we’re talking about somebody has a negative impact on you. Okay? They take you off track, they reduce the quality of life, they do things that hurt you without it being beneficial, and you have to keep seeing it. I want to talk here about the concept of manipulation. What I learned working with criminal offenders who were trying to manipulate me every single day was that nobody can actually manipulate me without my permission, because they don’t actually change my behavior. I do what they do, essentially, the manipulation is suggest a change in behavior or provoke a change in behavior, but the final call is mine, and so really what they’re doing sounds weird. They’re manipulating me into manipulating myself, manipulating me into choosing to go off track. This is not the same as somebody manipulating by force. So if I grab you by the hair and drag you and I’m stronger than you, there’s nothing you can do about that. But if I shout at you and tell you to go over there and you walk over there, it’s not my shouting that actually moved you to your own reluctance to feel in more fear, your own reluctance to stand up to the face of something intimidating that was the actual decision maker. Now I didn’t give you that reluctance. I just provoked it. So if you understand like this, can help with avoiding being resentful towards people as well. Nobody’s ever really manipulated you. They’ve just made suggestions that you have agreed with, all right? And if you didn’t agree with those suggestions, they wouldn’t be able to manipulate you, or in other words, if you didn’t agree to step off track, there’s nothing they can do about that. No matter how cunning or intimidating or flattering they are, they feel like nobody takes me off this track, then you are basically unstoppable. You don’t need to be really sophisticated psychologist with years of training and so on and manipulation techniques you almost actually need to be caveman, simple. Nothing takes me off track. Go fuck yourselves and away you go. You gotta know your track before these people intervene, so that you know what staying on track looks like. Otherwise, they will be able to manipulate you into thinking what being on track looks like is something else. Now all of this is a setup to answer this question promise, because the problem you really have now, if you’re constantly having to be in an environment where, say, somebody hurt your feelings and a negative impact on you, we’re now in a battle of wills, will they continue to be able to manipulate you. And what I mean is whether they trying to or not, will they continue to suggest you go off track? And will you keep agreeing with that suggestion? Give you an example that talking about here, let’s say somebody at your workplace, you know, using the question he asked, somebody at your workplace made an accusation about you. Turns out it wasn’t true, but they caused a big fuss, and it was super awkward. And now, when you’re like at the office and you’re walking to the lunchroom and you see them walk in, you decide to have your lunch break a little bit later so you don’t have to face them. That’s manipulation. You have gone off track. Your original intent was to go have lunch at this time, it’s your preferred time. That’s your preferred place to have lunch, but you’ve allowed them to shift that track, which means, even long after the accusations and so on are settled, they are still manipulating you. That is, you are still agreeing to change your track because of them, and regardless of what you know is best in terms of managing how they treat you, staying on track is the most important thing for your own confidence. It would actually be a great way to define there’s lots of different definitions of self confidence, but to define a confident person is you can’t knock them off track, right like whatever they are, the mission they’re on is just this unstoppable force. You can get in the way, but they’ll walk over you. They’ll push through you. They’ll wait until you get out of the way and keep walking. You have to physically rest. In them, they’re so strongly on the track. An example with a client last week was it where he goes to this dance class. He’s been going to dancing very long time, and then one of the girls there basically hit on him, and he’s he’s got a partner, and he has to reject this woman, and he doesn’t know if she’ll take it well or not, but he does know that she’ll keep coming to the class. So in a way, you could say he’s been thrown in it like nothing he can do now is going to lead to a comfortable outcome. He’s not going to cheat on his partner, that would be uncomfortable, and he’s going to reject the skill that’s going to be uncomfortable, and seeing her again that’s going to be awkward every time he goes to the class. This is the big story in his head, right? But the problem is, if he now changes the way he shows up at dancing, she has manipulated him, whether she means to or not, he’s changed his path because he doesn’t want to be awkward. But the confident guy is like, okay, I guess awkwardness is on the path now the obstacle is the way. So the most important thing is not so much how he rejects the skill or whatever the exact words he says. What’s most important is he shows up to this class like nothing’s happened. I don’t mean pretending nothing’s happened, but continuing with the behavior he would have done anyway if this hadn’t happened, because this is not an event that you should adjust your behavior around. Now, sometimes you have to adjust your path because of information that’s come up. Say, for example, I was trying to achieve a bunch of things, and I finally realized that I can’t do them all, and I have to focus on one that’s me changing my path, that’s not being manipulated by somebody. It’s me adjusting to the evidence, making a rational decision, but me not wanting to continue with an activity because someone else there makes me feel awkward. That’s manipulation. That’s not something that’s in my best interest, staying on track with my path. It’s always nuance. It’s always a difficult decision to make. But coming back to the question like, how do I deal with somebody you know, who’s made their workplace different, difficult and so on? Should I be civil? Should I change my behavior? I be like, no, no, make it their problem instead of yours. You don’t change shit. Continue. Make them change. If anyone’s going to be awkward, make it then do not even like hesitate in the way you walk. This is often what it comes down to. One of my client and I were talking about it. We might be walking down the street and you say, like, you see a group of dudes on the corner, and they look a bit intimidating, and you start to slowly, like 10 meters, where you start deviating so that you won’t walk too close to them. You start telling yourself a story like, ah, it doesn’t matter. I just, I want to walk on that side anyway, so on. And you also want them to think like, Hey, I didn’t move for you. I moved like, 10 meters back. It’s got nothing to do with you, right? You’re just getting this big drama about how you’re going off path, quite literally off path to avoid these guys. Whereas if they weren’t there and he didn’t feel intimidated by them, you wouldn’t have moved. And confidence is going back on track. Keep walking like you would have walked. Walk where you want to go. And I don’t mean smashing through people, and I mean making, not making, adjustments for other people’s existence, but not letting your own emotions be a reason to go off track when there’s no good, rational evidence to support that? Well, this is not the best way forward, but this is not what grows you and brings you the life you want, right? So what I’d suggest is that the answer to this question is, ask yourself, if this person wasn’t at the workplace or everything was fine between us, then how would I act and try to maintain that? And I don’t mean pretend to like them or anything like there’s no pretense going on here, but it’s sort of more like you refuse to let them change you. You refuse for them to be a factor in considering your life plan, and you behave accordingly. So you translate that however you see fit in terms of your situation. I need more details to know, and like I said, I’m wondering why this person’s still in your life if they’re this vial, because for me, being on track would be cutting out somebody out, like, like this. That would be part of my track. I weed the garden as I keep going, um, but if, for some reason, that’s literally impossible, then I’d kind of like, mow through them. I’d make it they’re the one who has to be awkward around me. I’m going to keep going like, that’s the stoic thing. Marcus, Aurelius, the best revenge is to be unlike him who caused the injury. So I’ll let them be the dickhead, the vile person. I’m not going to go down to that level and match them, because then they’ve manipulated me. They’ve allowed me to make them like themselves. That’s not a win for me. The best revenge is to not be like that. It’s to hold the high integrity ground and show that they can’t take me off it. They’ll get theirs. I don’t need to take revenge on them. Vile people get theirs, right? You can’t behave like that without stacking up a debt. And I don’t mean some mystical karma, I just mean like, I spent so much time working with people. I’ve done lots of bad things to people. It always comes around, because it’s just like an equation. You can’t cause that much damage and not have a repercussion. It’s very simple. Might take a while, but it’ll happen. So you don’t need to take revenge. You don’t need to punish them. Let the universe take care of that, because even if you did it yourself, it’s not going to make you feel better. And now you’ve lowered yourself to their level, they win. That’s why I love this saying just best revenge not to be like that. Don’t let other people move you, and that’s how you win. Sometimes it takes a lot of thought, like, what the fuck would I have actually done if this hadn’t happened and you’re going to fight against all the suggestions your fear makes to try and change your behavior. Because, ironically, if you are dealing with, say, a bully or somebody who’s whatever nasty, vile, malevolent towards you, backing down excites them. Changing who you are is a win for them, even if it means you fight back against them, so on, so forth. That’s what I learned working with criminal psychopaths, is they manipulated me, just to manipulate me. There was no end game in it. They just wanted to move me. They like to ruin people. They love the the taste of somebody’s path being altered because of them. They don’t care how it’s altered. There are times I’m like, there is really no reason for them to be doing this. This doesn’t even work out in their favor. But the fact that I’ve changed is enough for them. This is the game they’re playing. This is the level they play it at, and I’ve noticed that they started to get very agitated. The more solid I became, more I was just like, it’s almost like they weren’t even talking. I just ignored anything they see and just measured their behavior. And when they started to see that their words didn’t change my decision making. I started to get agitated, and was like, Okay, I think it might be working, not that you’re ever immune. I promise you that. Thank you for showing an interest in the nice guy brotherhood, a group coaching community program for nice guys and people pleasers who want to become more confident and assertive, to do better in their relationships and their careers, this is also for any man who wants to become more masculine, more bold, more honest and more authentic. So in this program, we focus in on a lot of the people pleaser and approval seeking tendencies that hold men back from achieving full self confidence in healthy relationships, things like avoiding conflict, trying to fix other people’s emotions, molding yourself to other people’s preferences, failing to stand up for yourself, not going for what you really want, and not knowing who you really are the goal through the support of myself and the other members of the community is to help you build the backbone to stand up for yourself, to stop caring what other people think of you, to stop getting lost in your thoughts and your feelings and learn how to act decisively based on your own set of core values, rather than what everybody else wants you to Do. So we’re looking to replace things like conflict avoidance and procrastination and trying to please others with going for what you really want based on who you really are. So we address all these issues through a number of methods. Firstly, we get together each week for a group session. Now, part of that is what’s called Hot Seat coaching, which is somebody gets on the mic with me, and we do a coaching session in front of the others, and everybody gives their feedback and support, and we can deal with specific issues that’s coming up for that person in their life, in relation to building confidence and overcoming nice guy syndrome. We also have group discussions during these calls. We share links and resources, feedback, questions and everything we can do to support each other’s growth. And then also, alongside these group calls, you get access to my full online library of self development courses, which includes things like building rapport, setting boundaries and learning to confront your fears. Now, if you’re interested in the group, we have a deal where you get your first month for just $1 so that you can try it before you buy it and get a sense if it’s really right for you. And if these are the people that are going to help you achieve your goals, once your first month is up, if you want to continue, then we have a monthly membership subscription. It’s $250 US per month for full access to everything. This includes the entire archive of recordings from all the calls that we’ve had so far. And if you come along with a friend, both of you will get a 50% discount for joining together. It is what we call a zero risk guarantee if at any time you’re unsatis. Fired with the program, you can quit, and you’ll get your money from the last month. Give them back to you, no questions asked, So come and check it out. If nothing else, for $1 you get access to everything for an entire month. No risk. I’ll even return that dollar if you’re not satisfied, because that’s how confident I am that this program is going to change your life. Here we got a relatively quick one here. My question is, What, in your opinion, are the three to four things that could get me unstuck and move towards what I really want from life? I think what I really want is full of self expression and all the childhood development goals that I missed out on, basically give the most, frankest, bluntest advice without pulling any punches. Do I usually pull punches? I don’t know. I’m going to interpret this question, especially that last line, give me the frankest, most blunted advice. What are the three or four things that would give me unstuck this very sort of practical sounding question? It’s the subliminal I’m hearing in it, which is, tell me what to do. And that’s actually what I want to address here, because if I do tell you what to do, and I know this might sound like I’m contradicting everything else I do, but I do tell you what to do, then I’m actually enabling the process that you’re trying to get out of. The stuckness is you looking for the answers outside of yourself. You know you want to move towards what you really want from life. If you want fuller self expression, you said you want the Childhood Development Goals. Well, childhood development is movement towards independence and autonomous thinking that’s essentially all child development is to go from completely dependent to interdependent, to be able to do things on your own as well as work with others. And you’re asking me to tell you what to do. I would actually not be serving you if I told you what to do. In fact, the only thing I tell you what to do is to decide for yourself, right? You already know what you really want from life. I want you to guess what you should do, if nothing else. Childhood Development Goals is about doing things without permission from other people. It’s about taking risks emotionally. It’s about putting the burden of responsibility on yourself like it’s my job to get this done. If I was to tell you what to do in this particular situation, then I’d just be enabling a parent asking a child kind of dynamic, sorry, a child asking a parent, don’t I’ll be saying here, just follow my advice. Now, there are times and places for advice. I certainly take advice when it’s needed at certain times where it’s actually really harmful to give someone advice, and that is when they really need to do it themselves, and that is what I read in this situation. I think the best thing you could do would be to come up with the idea the answer to your question yourself, and even if you’re not sure on it, if you’re filled with self doubt you don’t trust yourself, do it anyway. Get it wrong, right? Go fuck it up. Make a huge mess, it would be your development. Go make a mess and clean it up yourself. That’s development. I could give you formulas for what I believe is objectively a good life, but we would never know if it’s actually right for you, because you didn’t decide it. You didn’t come up with it on your own. So the only thing my Frank is blunt. This advice is you decide, come up with one action that you think would move you out of unstuck all by yourself, and do it no matter how stupid you think it is, no matter how much you doubt yourself and your abilities, no matter how worried you are that it would be the wrong move whatever. Do it anyway. That’s my bluntest device or not. Don’t know if that’s what you wanted to hear, but that’s what I gotta say. Alright, one more last question, how do I finally let go on any ongoing rumination that I’ve already worked to let go. Alright, I’ll try and interpret this on I don’t quite understand the question, but focus on the sort of gist of ongoing rumination. What I might be hearing in this question is it’s like the downside of talk therapy, the more you fixate on a problem to actually, the bigger you make it. And so if you’re trying to let go of rumination, if you’re trying to work on being someone who gets out of their head more and, you know, spends less time focused on things they can’t control or things that never happen, imagination, then that in itself becomes a fixation. And you start to ruminate about rumination itself. It’s like somebody starts to worry about getting anxious. You’re now getting anxiety about anxiety. And obviously that’s not going to reduce the amount of overall anxiety. Ruminating about ruminating doesn’t reduce ruminating, right? I’ll start with the concepts that I’ve talked about before that I find really helpful, which is, when you’re learning how to drive, and particularly when you’re learning how to drive at night, you get what feels like counterintuitive advice, which is, don’t look at the cars coming towards you. Don’t look at the headlights, because you unconsciously steer the vehicle towards what you’re looking at. And so if you want to stay safe and not cross the same line and hit people at night, you look away from their lights, at your side of the road, at the curb on on your side of the road, that’ll keep you away from their car, and your periphery will take care of anything dangerous they might do. But looking directly at them actually takes you. Here we go again. All right, something going on. Hang on. A second. Couples freaking out. Don’t know what happened there. Shane, you might most just want to stop and start your camera anyway. Here we go. Got some clarification on question, how do I let go of something I’ve stuck in my head even though I have dealt with it. Okay. Now I understand. Okay, so the situation is resolved, but you’re still ruminating on that’s what you’re saying. All right. Well, I’m still, I think, on track to dealing with that with what I was saying a little bit, which is, you know, you get a song stuck in your head. We’ve talked about this before. Psychologist was talking about this in a video, so they said, the reason you get songs stuck in your head is because a certain part of your brain sees a song as a problem to be solved. And you always get songs stuck in your head when you don’t remember all the parts of the song, usually it’s like the end, or maybe you only have a little bit of the song, like a single riff. You don’t know all the words to the chorus. And so as soon as you start singing in your head, your brain goes, Oh, what’s that other line? Or how’s this end, or what comes next? And starts trying to solve it, and does it by short circuiting. It keeps going back over the thing and hoping that that will somehow lead to the solution. And that’s really the principle of rumination, as we keep re reviewing over and over again, hoping that with enough revisions, we’ll break through and find the piece of information that’s missing and feel concluded. The problem is, when you got a song stuck in your head, is that you never knew the words, ruminating going over and over, the song is not going to produce any more information. Your brain thinks the information is in there, but it’s not it. Can’t recall it. And I do this like I always get songs I don’t like stuck in my head because there’s songs I don’t know, there’s songs I heard on the radio, some pop song or something I don’t know. I didn’t quite hear what the words were. I only hear a snatch of chorus, or it’s a jingle from an ad or something. I wasn’t paying attention and so it just loops in my head because I never knew it. My brain’s just like, we’re going to figure this song out. And I’m like, please don’t I don’t care about this song. Brain’s like, don’t worry. I got this. I got this. You just carry on. We’ll just play this in the background till we’ve solved it. It’s very hard to tell my brain like, No, this is not a good use of time. Please stop doing this. But with a song, we’re not too bothered by it, because when I asked just a song, who gives a but if it’s doing the same thing with, say, the girl who rejected you when you asked her out, or the conflict you had with your boss 10 years ago, or that time you crashed the car and you didn’t have insurance, and this thing is well in the past and dealt with, or there’s nothing more you can do about it, or whatever. Now we get really a lot of suffering from this rumination when all that’s happening is again, your brain is repeatedly going over it, trying to look for a better conclusion. The problem is there isn’t one like not knowing the words to the song. The while not knowing the words to the song, the brain doesn’t have a better conclusion than what already happened on an event quite often. You know, we talked about this a while ago. We talked about how nice guy always want to know. A nice guy always wants to know why something happened, obsessed with why. Soon something bad happens. The first question is like, right? And how did this happen? What the fuck is going on? Who do I blame here? We’re just obsessed. With understanding things. We really hate not knowing. We hate confusion. We hate missing pieces, and if we can’t find them, we’ll make something up. We don’t know why the girl rejected us. We’ll decide it’s because of our height, or because she’s a bitch or whatever. We’ll have to come up with something that closes the loop, because we can’t sleep without it. The problem is, most of the time when you’re ruminating or something, the reason you’re ruminating is because that information you’re looking for does not exist. It’s not available, and even if you got it, it will just ask more questions, right? Let’s say I’ve ever once having this I was ruminating about a girl who had rejected me, and then I found out she was a lesbian. I was like, ah, and then I was like, Well, why am I going up to lesbians? What’s wrong with me? Now I’ve got another question. If I can answer, I’m like, Hold on, I don’t think I’m ever going to run out of questions here, if any event doesn’t go exactly the way I want it to, if it’s not the exact emotional pleasure I’m looking for, I’m going to start questioning things, and I’m not going to stop, because there’s some hope in me that if I keep questioning it, I will arrive at some sort of conclusive, finished feeling. The reason this is all set up because the problem with rumination is not the thought repeating. It’s just like a song stuck in your head. It’s not actually that painful, unless you believe it, unless you think a serious thinking processes happening that needs to be concluded, unless you fuse to it, as I’d say, an acceptance of Commitment Therapy. You zoom in on it, you become the thought, because it fills your entire awareness space. Now let’s say I have a question in my mind that says, like, why did that girl reject you? Was it something you said? Was it the way you dressed, or whatever? Starts asking these questions, and I start going over that rejection over and over my head, investigating it like CSI, trying to find the answer. Instead of just going, Oh, it’s just a song stuck in my head. Moving on, it’ll be stuck in my head. There’s nothing I need to do about it, but I’ve got to stop believing that this is a conversation I need to have with myself. I can’t stop the rumination by will, but I can refuse to take it seriously. Now, this is an art that takes a long time to master, because every voice in your head sounds legit, sounds like you know, every thought you have, there’s an underlying belief that, yeah, man, what is up with Zoom today? Hang on a second. Um, there’s an underlying belief with negative thinking. We’ll say the kind of the root cause of negative thinking or rumination is that thoughts are to be taken seriously, that thoughts are truth, that all of them are legitimate, all of them are worth considering. All of them are valuable. And if you can disabuse yourself of that notion, if you can realize that that’s not true, then you’ll start to see ruminative thoughts a little differently. One way to always look at it is whatever you’re thinking about, ask yourself to point to the problem. Okay, so if my brain is going if only this had happened, only then blah, blah, blah, okay, point to the thing that I can do about it. Point to this. The the next step I can take here, if I can’t point to, if there’s nothing I can actually do about it, right here, right now, then I know the thought is bullshit. It might sound very legitimate. It might come with a sense that I’ve gotta do something about it. You know, you better figure out why that girl rejected you, or otherwise, no other girl will love you. You know, whatever it will come with that sense to it. But if there’s really nothing I’m going to do about it right here now, other than keep thinking, then it’s not real. And the trick is actually, give yourself a problem to solve. Find something to actually you can do something about, probably something you’ve been procrastinating on while you’re busy ruminating, you know, send that email you’ve been dragging your ass on. You know, get your taxes filled out. Go for a walk. Do something instead of think, I don’t mean you try to suppress the thought or ignore it. You just treat it like a song stuck in your head, you just go, Oh, my brain’s short circuiting because it didn’t conclude a way that feels pleasurable. That’s all. There’s no information to be had here. My brain can’t dig through itself 10 times and suddenly find something that it didn’t find before. There’s nothing that’s going to be found. As I ruminate on the scene, I’m not going to remember the lyrics to the song that I’ve. Even knowing. So I’ll just let it play while I carry on with my day. So you don’t fight against the thought, but you also don’t engage with it. You don’t take it seriously. Just catch it like I’m ruminating. Sometimes I give myself a slap. I’m like, fuck. Stop it. Just stop it. Right as I’ve gone down a big resentment track explaining to myself while my wife is unjust in whatever decisions you make, I just go, stop, stop. Go, fucking write an article or something. Go for a walk. Do some push ups, prepare your lunch. Go find a problem you can solve. Yeah, that’s not going to completely solve the problem of rumination kind of thing. But as I mentioned at the start, is even rumination itself. It is a meta concept. If you take that too seriously, you only enable it right? If I start going like, I gotta really work on my rumination. Now I’m ruminating about ruminating. That’s not a step forward, it’s a step backwards. You catch that and go, Oh, here I am ruminating about ruminating again. I’m short circuiting. Alright, go find something to do, cuz the solution to overthinking is action. Any connection I mentioned, there is a little trick that I’ll throw into this that I mentioned in the school group, which is my my mom’s a psychologist. She works with severely disordered teens, and a lot of them have disassociative disorder, so they just fucking zone out. And she found a really, just a neat practical trick, which is, it’s really pretty much impossible to dissociate if you’re trying to balance. So literally, physically balanced, like, take one leg off the ground and get onto an angle when it’s hard to maintain. You know, get up on your toes, lift a leg out sideways until it starts getting wobbly. It’s really hard for your brain to think about shit. While that’s happening, your brain power goes all into trying to stay balanced, and so it’s a great way to sort of snap out of it a little bit. You know, splashing your face with ice cold water is another way of doing it, kind of physical action that takes you out of your head and very much into your body, because you have to be there. So, yeah, cold balance, physical exercise, trying to engage in a conversation where you really listen to what the other person sees like anything you don’t deal with thinking by doing more thinking, you deal with thinking by doing physical action, right? And you just do that as often as you need to. You’re not running away from the thought. You’re not fighting against it. You’re just carrying on with your life instead of engaging in it and treating it like it’s legitimate. Because if it is legitimate, you will have practical actions that you can take right now. There’s nothing practical you can do about it right now. It’s not legitimate. It’s not a helpful thought. The last little note I’ll make on that is something I realized, both in playing guitar and dancing, there’s a certain level we’ll take guitar, for example, the first six months, you’re very carefully thinking about where to put your fingers. All the time, you’re very aware of where each one goes, and you’re thinking quicker than your fingers can move right but if you stick with and you get past this kind of like plateau, difficult part of learning guitar, and you get into the bit where you’re actually good at it, there’s a transition where your fingers can now move faster than you can Think. And the musicians and and athletes often call this muscle memory. It’s as if your muscles have the memory of where to go, but your brain can’t keep up. The truth is, it’s still your brain doing it, but your conscious mind can’t keep up. You can’t think quick enough to do this, and it shows you a kind of terrifying truth, which is your knowledge and the instructions and decisions about where to put your fingers is not conscious. There’s some part of your brain deciding where all the fingers should go and everything, but your thoughts are actually off track. They’re behind. If you ever been a guitarist doing a guitar solo, you can’t think like that one, that one, that one. You can’t do it that quickly. You’re just watching your hands, like look at it doing that thing. And you can have this almost out of body experience where you’re watching yourself play guitar like, I hope he doesn’t fuck this up, because he’s beyond me. And I noticed that with dancing as well. If I try, once you get to sort of like intermediate, advanced level of dancing, if you think about what you’re doing when you dance, it actually throws you off. You get a little bit off time. You overthink your moves, kind of thing, you start to worry. But if you just listen to the music, you’ll just dance, and it’s like all the moves are there. It’s like you get out of your own way, and you’re better at dancing than you thought you were. If you try to think about dancing, you actually end up worse. So there’s a deeper truth here, which is that thoughts have very little to do with decision making. It’s a very horrible concept to explore. We often attribute all our decision making to a thinking, conscious thinking process. But the truth is, if I put you in a high stress situation or something where you’re really good, you won’t think at all about what to do. You’ll just do it. Now, some part of your brand’s still making decisions. It’s just doing so without. Insulting your conscious awareness without even sort of sending a memo through as to what’s happening. So you’ve got to stop taking your thoughts so seriously. Stop treating them like they are the decision making process, or that they are some accurate, truthful source of information. It’s much closer to just a pointless song that you don’t like being stuck in your head. All the stuff you need to do can be done. In spite of this, you can still decide the right thing to do without paying attention or engaging in the ruminative thoughts that you’re having. But it is an art. It takes a long time, because when it’s in your head, it feels very real, like I said, point to it. If it’s real, you can point to it and solve it. If you can’t point to it and solve it, it’s not real. It does not exist.

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