That “not good enough” story in your head is common – we all experience it, yet we almost never talk about it. In this webinar, we challenge that inner critic, discuss how to live with it, and how to actually use it to make yourself more confident. If you’re a Nice Guy people pleaser who’s sick of that discouraging voice in your head ruining your achievements and making you hesitate or procrastinate, you need to listen to this.

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

get excellent with people see faces. So it’s good sign. Can you guys just give me a little wave? If you can hear me and see me. Alright. That looks good. There we go. Darren, welcome along. Cool. There’s only three of you straight on the call. And yeah, there’s all join us as we go on. And welcome along, everybody. It’s Saturday night for me. So if I come off a little bit tired, it’s just because I’ve been staying up too late. But thank you guys so much for coming on. And yeah, thanks for muting yourselves there. If you want to come on and have a chat, we can do that, but helps with the background noise if you guys hit the mute button there. Welcome, guys, this is the seventh one now on our nice guy recovery series. And it’s a weird that this one’s the seventh one because it’s really the most important one. So when we’re talking about nice guy syndrome, people pleasing, talking about the different aspects of it. And, you know, the kind of the more harmful aspects of the mindset that get in our way, in terms of confidence in terms of connecting with other people in terms of enjoying life. And today, we’re getting really to the core of it, which is the inner critic, that voice in your head, that tells you you’re not good enough, the voice in your head that criticizes you and you have you tried to do something, their voice in your head that takes anything good you’ve done and undermines it and picks it apart, worries about the future and regrets your past that voice as what we’re going to be talking about today. It’s the voice I call the best kept secret because everybody’s got it. But nobody talks about it. Everybody pretends that everything’s all good. And yet all of us have this inner critic going at us a lot of the time. And today, I want to talk about a healthy, helpful way to deal with that voice that we all have to deal with. So for those of you who are new to me, or I’m new to you, whichever way around it is, my name is Dan Munro, I call myself a confidence coach. And I run or help run the brojo community, which is now going international. And for the last five plus years, I’ve been coaching guys on building confidence, specifically nice guys and people pleasers I’ve been focusing on the most, because that’s who I am a nice guy, people pleaser in recovery. I spent most of my life trying to make people like me. And that was the kind of top priority, avoiding confrontation, trying to come off as helpful and fun and friendly and interesting. And everything that makes people happy. I was really focused on that my entire life. And all they did was burned me out and exhaust me. And it led me to have no really deep connections, and quite a lot of anxiety. And took me a long time to realize that, hey, that shits not working for me. And I had to look at another way to live. So I’ve been working with guys on that. And today we’re going to be looking at a specific aspect of that. The inner critic as I call it, or other people call it that as well. And we’re going to see what we can do about it, and see if we can give you guys a little relief from that voice and find some more helpful ways to deal with it. So before we dive into that, I want to give you guys a little bit of housekeeping. If you haven’t used zoom before, if you’re on a beyond desktop computer and you move the mouse around, you’ll see some options come up, you can mute yourself, turn your video on and off, down the bottom left, usually, there’s little chat box. And I see one of these already jumped on their little speech bubble with three dots in it. If you guys have any questions, or you just want to share out a comment at some suggestions, type it in there. And I’ll respond personally, I may even bring people onto the call if they want to have a chat about something. And that’s about all you need to know. And we’ll get going with that. So let’s just bring up my little slideshow, you guys should be able to see that. Excellent. So we are dealing with the inner critic today. And we’re going to be looking at it through three main points. Okay, three main values that make up what I call the 3x model. It’s a model I’ve developed with the help of the broader community to help people build confidence and it’s made up of these three values going in a suit circle, round and round. And we’re going to look at how to use these three values to deal with the inner critic and the not good enough story. So we’re going to start today by talking about curiosity. So questioning the not good enough story, questioning that voice in your head and exploring it, rather than just believing it. As soon as it speaks, we’re going to look at honesty, which is about taking action, primarily, we’re gonna look at the kind of actions you can take to help reduce the impact that that voice in your head has on you. And then we’re gonna look at respect, we’ll look at how you measure yourself, and how you treat yourself and what you can do differently around that. And how that not good enough story in your head actually relates to how you treat yourself and how you measure what you’re doing. I’ll make sure I’m really open with my expectations for you guys. Because this is partly a webinar, just me trying to help you guys and free value, as people like to say, but it’s also here to promote brojo and promote the work that I do. And I’m not going to do any sort of tricks or sales techniques or any bullshit like that. But at the end of this, if you liked what we do here today, and you want to know more about working with me or with brojo, I’m going to talk a bit about that. But otherwise, I’m just going to try and make this as valuable as I can for you. And you guys can comment and give me questions at any time to try and make it more valuable for you. But I don’t want to hide the fact that this is partly promotional. And as part of their promotion, whoever emails me saying that they want to try out brojo membership. Within a week of me doing this webinar, I’ll give you a free trial month, just so you can test it out for yourself. And the first 10 People who email me will also get a one to one coaching session completely complimentary, if you’ve never had one with me before. So that’s about as much as the promoting stuff goes. I want to start before I get into this, I’ll start a little bit about my personal story, to share what I’ve learned about the inner critic from my own life. So I’ve got a, I got a background of being an overthinker, primarily, and constantly analyzing, re analyzing everything I do everything I think everything I think other people are thinking everything they did and what that means for me. And this kind of never ending noise in my head just plagued me, for for most of my life. That’s no longer the case. But for decades of my early life, it was just this constant voice in my head, looking for faults, looking for failure, looking for flaws, and kind of hounding me about it. And what I found a lot of people call this is perfectionism. There’s a voice in your head, that’s always telling you what could be done better. It wasn’t quite enough, you’re not quite enough, you could be better. And it’s always looking for that like no matter how well you do, it looks the little thing you did wrong. And the little thing that needs to be even better, and how you are worse than that other guy, even though you’re better than those other guys, and so on. And so I, I would be unable to stop things sometimes, because I couldn’t imagine myself completing it perfectly, I wouldn’t be able to talk to someone I’m interested in. Because I couldn’t imagine myself being charming enough, I wouldn’t be able to take on a particularly challenging task, because I couldn’t imagine myself getting 100% on it. I could do a lot of stuff. I was a very high achiever, but I couldn’t even enjoy my wins. I could achieve something very highly against a 97% on a test at school. And then I think well, what about that other 3%? How come I couldn’t get there. So there was kind of no achievement that was good enough for this voice in my head. No matter how much someone liked me, I always doubted it and always thought that eventually leave. And essentially, this voice just always said could be better, could be better. Not good enough. And there was this thing called fundamental attribution bias, which we’ll talk a bit about today, which was, if I did something, well, I’d consider myself to be lucky. However, if I did something wrong, it was my fault. So anything good happening in my life was kind of luck. I’d write it off as sort of a gift and an exceptional thing that I was lucky to actually didn’t deserve. But if I failed, I definitely caused that failure. It wasn’t luck at all. And I had that kind of that kind of bias in my head. So that’s where I was for a lot of my life. And it was exhausting to say the least. had to achieve very highly to keep their voice quiet. And I’d always just, I’d never quite keep it quiet and then I’d have to drown it and alcohol or drugs or porn or movies or any kind of binging, they’re just shut the voice up temporarily. And it wasn’t the healthiest way to live. Put it that way. So get some water going. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about what I’ve done about that voice and what I’ve seen other people do, because now I’m at a point where that voice in my head is almost entirely encouraging. And notes what I do well and gives me credit for it. And Pat’s, me on the back when I tried my best, but failed and encourages me to give it another go, their voice has totally changed for me. And today, we’re going to be talking about what I believe change that voice. So we’re gonna start with curiosity here. And keep in mind, guys with the little chat box, if you ever have questions, or you just want to share, jump in at any time, I have a great tendency to rant on and on. And I’ll do that. If you don’t interrupt me, which is fine, too. So let’s get into it. Let’s have a look at curiosity, questioning the not good enough story. What is the I’m not good enough story. Okay. Essentially, it’s any form of thinking, any thoughts or patterns or feelings, even it can become emotional, that hold you back from doing what you know you’re supposed to do. It might allow you to do a bit of what you’re supposed to do, and then start to like, make you procrastinate and kind of lose track and give up. Or might just stop you completely. In the form of both thoughts and emotions. It’s a kind of negative feedback, a discouragement, a doubt or fear, often in the form of a delay. So sometimes it’s really, you guys will know what it is, as actual thoughts might think, Oh, I’m too short, or I’m not smart enough, or I’m just generally not good enough, or I’m a fucking loser leads kind of thoughts that pop into your head. And they feel very true. They feel like they’re an accurate assessment of who you are somehow. And other times, it’s just a feeling, it could be a very confused, doubtful feeling, like something you were sure you could do suddenly seems very difficult and impossible. They may be one day, you’re thinking tomorrow, I’m going to ask out that girl I like. And then the next day, when you actually see her all of a sudden, you’re filled with doubt. Like, it seems like the most impossible thing? How could I have ever thought of doing it? It can be anxiety, just the heart pounding, sweating, this kind of fight or flight response, like you’re suddenly in a lot of danger. You know? So it can it can be very specific in terms of thoughts. Or it can be just more a feeling that you’re not good enough. You’re not strong enough. not smart enough? Shouldn’t do it’s too dangerous. especially noticeable when at one point you thought it would be all good. And now you suddenly doubt yourself. Cool. Oh, we got a couple of people chatting here. Okay, so you guys are relating to this fantastic, are not the only one. You know, that’s actually I’ve got to say this. One of the reasons I wanted to do this topic, is because the most punishing part of this not good enough story is thinking that you’re the only one who thinks like this. Well, that you’re one of only a few. I’ve been coaching people for five years, I was a probation officer and a manager for about seven years before that. I swear to you, I’m yet to meet someone who doesn’t have this voice in their head once they actually dig in and question them about it. And yet, nobody fucking talks about it. We all act like we fucking got our shit sorted. So one of the reasons I wanted to do this talk is just to share by the way, this is common. This is actually a very natural human, neuro logical trait to have this doubtful voice in your head. And just knowing that can go a long way. At least it did for me. So they’re not good enough story. Yeah, they’re not good enough stories. Basically, there’s doubt. It takes the form of thoughts takes the form. Sometimes you are imagining yourself failing, even though you’ve never tried the thing before or imagining a negative consequence happening. That’s just too risky to try. Or it can just be a feeling that holds you back and makes you hesitate and makes you panic. Sometimes, it can take all sorts of different forms, but the message is, you’re not good enough to do this task. So don’t do it. Whatever the task is. The Curiosity is about cool Assuming the story, when those thoughts, those projections, those fantasies, and those feelings come up. One of the reasons they’re not good enough story holds us back is because we just, we believe them straightaway. As soon as the thought comes up, we go, oh, that must be true. In fact, we’re so sure it’s true. We don’t even say to ourselves, Is that true or not? We just go with it. You know, you’re looking at asking the boss for that promotion, your brain goes, No, you’re not smart enough. And that’s it. That’s argument over you go get I’m not smart enough moving on. And you don’t even question it. And the first part of dealing with this not good enough story is not fighting it, I really want to emphasize you’re not going to fight against this story. But questioning it is critical. So the one seed I really want to plan in your minds is that for a lot of your life, you’ve probably been really trusting your thoughts and feelings as somehow being truthful. Today, I want you to really open your mind to the possibility that they’re not. Okay. Not that they’re complete lies. Not that every thought and every feeling is a lie, but that some of them aren’t quite accurate. Critical thinking. When I went to university, to my psych degree, we did a paper on critical thinking, which was all about the different biases and problems with the way the brain thinks and processes information, all the things we do where we understand reality incorrectly. And I remember doing that paper thinking, why the fuck am I only learning about this now, this is something I needed when I was like seven years old. And here I am learning it at the age of like, 23, or something. I had always up until the point where I took this paper, I had believed that my thoughts were somehow accurate, that my brain was assessing reality and coming to a kind of rational conclusion. It felt really rational. So for example, if I thought, you know, I see some pretty girl at a cafe and I think I want to go talk to her, my brain would say, No, that’s too dangerous. And I just believe that the idea that my brain could be wrong in that assessment never even occurred to me, it seems such a rational assessment, it seems so logical, critical thinking, the biggest issue you have the not good enough story is believing it and not knowing that you have what are called cognitive biases. Now there are millions of these are not millions, but there’s dozens. And I really recommend if you want to go further into this, that you jump on Google and you look up cognitive biases, and you teach yourself some shit about them. Okay, because they are huge, and they completely control the way you see reality. And they’re very, very important to the concept of the not good enough story. But there’s a few I want to talk about today that are very relevant to their inner critic, their voice in your head that tells you you’re not good enough, I want to talk about few of the biases that make that voice happen. So the first one, and probably the biggest bias that everyone is ever subjected to is called confirmation bias. Now, what happens here is essentially the brain is lazy, in a way, or should I say it wants to make things easy. And the easiest thing the brain can do is confirm what it already believes it’s very difficult to change a belief, you have to reassess everything, you have to let go of all these assumptions and, and all these conclusions you’ve come to, it’s really hard to learn something new like that, when you believed it for a long time. It’s a lot easier for the brain to just confirm what it already thinks it knows. And so when it comes to the not good enough story, let’s say you were bullied. And I don’t want to trigger anyone here, but I have to be frank. So you had shitty parenting with someone who was really critical and made you feel bad about yourself, or you were treated badly. You know, you were bullied at school or anything like that. What will happen is your brain will believe from that very early age that there’s something wrong with you. You’re getting a lot of negative feedback from the people around you and your brain will come to the conclusion. There’s something wrong with me. And that’s a belief. Now, it doesn’t matter if the belief is good or bad. The brain doesn’t care if the belief helps you or harms you. It just wants to keep beliefs the same because that’s easy. So let’s say you’re young, and you’ve got this belief, there’s something wrong with me. What your brain has been doing ever since then, is trying to prove that belief correct. So if you’ve got this loser belief about yourself, your brain is constantly looking for proof that you’re a loser. And it’s constantly dismissing evidence that goes against that. It’s one of the hardest things to understand about this not good story is that you would actually try to think of yourself as bad or wrong. But people do not because it feels good. But because it’s easy for the brain. Your whole life, if you’ve got the Naga enough story in your head, it’s because at some point you came to believe you weren’t not, you weren’t good enough. And you’ve been proving it ever since then. So when you get 80%, on a test, your brain doesn’t go, Yeah, you got 80% That goes, well, what about the other 20%? Or if you make a certain amount of money, it doesn’t look at all the people, you’re making more money, then it looks at the role of people who are richer than you and goes, How come you’re not as rich as them? When somebody frowns at us, is they frowning at you, because they don’t like you. It keeps making things into evidence that there’s something wrong with you, because it just wants to prove itself true all the time. So I want to open your mind. And this, I know this is a big one and takes years to figure out. But I want you to open your mind to the possibility that you’ve been spending years, constantly making up evidence or looking for little pieces of evidence that there’s something wrong with you. And you’ve been enduring proof that you’re actually good enough. One of the key things to notice is that you’re alive and listening to me right now. So you’re at least good enough for survival. But notice how you don’t give yourself credit for that. In fact, right now, you’re probably thinking like, it’s not a big deal to survive, why would I give myself a pat on the back for that, and you’re billions and billions of people have died, and the world’s trying to kill you all the time, and you made it. So notice how your brain dismisses evidence that you are good enough to survive. It says that’s not worthwhile. That’s not good enough. Survival. Anybody can survive, you need to be rich and famous, and all this other ship before you can be a good person knows how it dismisses that. Notice, when you think back critically, you’ll realize that you’ve done a lot of things quite well. You know, they you probably in most of the tasks you do, you come out at least more than 50% You do the task good enough. But your brain doesn’t seem to care about that does it dismisses it undermines it. But every time you fail, every time you don’t do what you hoped for expected, your brain makes a big deal about it. Right? If you ask someone out, and they say, yes, your brain is or you’re just lucky, forget about it. Yeah, someone and they say no. And you go see, your brain goes, you fucking loser. Everybody hates you. I told you that you. So notice the difference when it tries to prove itself, right? I know I made a big deal about that particular bias. But that’s the biggest one. If you can start to see that you do not measure yourself properly, you do not look at evidence properly, you’ll start to understand why they’re not good enough story is so strong. And yet it’s actually built on a very weak case of evidence. The next bias in the water tonight. Next bias is called the availability heuristic. Now, essentially, what happens is, you’ve got a part of the brain called the amygdala. And it attaches emotion to events, in particular attaches emotion to memory. The more emotional something is, the easier it is to remember. And you’ll be able to know that if you think back to your childhood, you don’t remember all these boring days, like sitting around doing nothing. You remember the big events, remember the really painful ones and the really happy ones. Those are easier to remember then the kind of ticking along having a bit of toast for breakfast, or walking to school and being a bit bored. You don’t really remember that very well. Well, there’s a thing called the availability heuristic, which is the easiest something is to remember, the more weight your brain gives it. I’ll give you an example of this. You know, when I was about 14, I won’t tell the big story, but I asked a girl out, and she reacted very negatively. Really, really angry at me. So when I think about asking a girl out, that memory pops into my head very quickly. I don’t get lots of memories of all the millions of times that girls were nice to me and treated me well. I just remember this one girl being really nasty. And my brain remembers that. And because I remember it’s so easily. My brain says that must be important. And this is what happens to you if you’ve been bullied or treated badly when you’re younger. Your brain will think that that’s very important feedback more important than all the feedback of people being nice to you and everything like that because you don’t remember that so easily. So your painful experiences are clearer, which are your failures, aren’t they? I mean, embarrassment, disappointment. You know, frustration that’s easier to remember than happiness or calmness or relaxation. So all the failures stand out in your mind as these big events. And all the successes just kind of disappeared into your memory swamp, you notice that I’ve got another column in there. As my brain hurts, it will have to come out. Yeah, look, I probably should have give you guys some warning, if you’re not familiar with critical thinking, and cognitive biases, it can actually be quite painful to have to learn about this stuff. I remember when I first learned about it just made me go Holy shit, like I couldn’t trust my brain anymore. It was really quite painful experience. And I’m okay with hurting you guys, if that’s what the case is. Because what’s really been hurting you as you believe in your brain, your brain is a very helpful tool, and we’ll look at how to use it better. But believing everything that thinks it’s I believe in eyewitness testimony, you know, somebody sees a robbery, and they’re all excited and full of adrenaline and scared, they’re not going to remember who did it properly. And that’s what we’re talking about here, cognitive biases. So a couple of the ones that we’re talking about as how they’re not good enough story is built on a lot of really bad evidence. You believe that person in your head saying you’re a loser, but he doesn’t actually have a strong case to prove that. But you never question it. So you never find out. Yep, Darren says my critique turns winds to failures within 24 hours. This is what we’re talking about. How can a win become a failure? Well, only if the brain starts playing with the evidence. Okay. And that’s what we’re looking at here. There’s another, there’s another bias that’s very important. It’s called anchoring. And that is the first time you experience something, it becomes a big deal in your head. So if I go through something 10 times, it will never be as big as the first time. You think back to say, losing your virginity. You know, the sex that happened after that isn’t as memorable. Everybody remembers their first time very well, but they don’t remember their 50th time very well. You know, it’s the same with like, the first time you failed at something, it’s a lot more memorable than actually the first time you succeeded. So if you the trouble is, like, whenever you do something for the first time you suck at it, that’s just normal. I mean, think about like learning to drive a car, nobody gets into like a stick shift car and just takes off, right? They stall they fuck around, they get the corners wrong, they panic and brake too hard. That’s all part of the learning process. And when you’re doing it in the car, it’s fine. Because everyone’s doing it, you can see everyone else failing as they learn how to drive so it doesn’t feel like you’re a loser. But other things like the first time you ask someone out on a date, or the first time you tried a new sport. If you fail it, then it looks like everyone else’s good, it becomes a big deal to you, you start to think that there’s somehow a significant failure in your brain starts to tell you, Hey, you probably should have done that better. Yet, that’s not true. Your first time should suck. So it doesn’t make sense. I’ll give you a couple more. I don’t want to spend the whole time talking about cognitive biases, but I just wanted to shake up your grip on you’re not good enough story belief. I want you to start questioning how accurate it is not fighting against it, just questioning it. Like a lawyer in court. Somebody said, Hey, he committed the murder. You’ve got some questions before you send him to jail, right? Don’t be like, did he really Where’s the proof for there? So when your brain starts saying, Hey, you’re a fucking loser, go MI, Where’s the proof for that? And is that proof balanced and fair and accurate? This is then called self fulfilling prophecy. This is the very first thing that got me excited about psychology. When I went to university and started learning about psychology. I wasn’t even going to be interested in it because I didn’t even know what psychology was until I went to a lecture about self fulfilling prophecy. And essentially what self fulfilling prophecy is, is that if you believe something, you’ll behave in a way that lines up with that belief. And in doing so you make it true. So for example, if I believe I’m a loser, then I won’t try very hard when I do stuff. I’ll be hesitant and insecure. And that will make me fail a lot. And they will seem to confirm that I was indeed a loser. I won’t see that I’ve actually sabotage myself because the belief at the start actually influenced my behavior. If I think if I ever believe for example, that I’m unattractive. Then when I talked to When I’m attracted to I’ll be very nervous and shy and feel very guilty and apologetic because I already believe I’m unattractive. And that behavior actually makes me unattractive, which seems to confirm that I was right. But the behavior was the problem. If I hadn’t had the belief and behaved according to it wouldn’t have created the evidence. So the point I’m trying to make as a lot of the not good enough evidence that you think you’ve seen of failure, and procrastination, and hesitation and cowardice was actually caused by the not good enough story in the first place. You’ve actually created a belief by believing in something before there was evidence. It’s a hard concept to wrap your mind around. But basically, let’s say I believe that I can’t throw a ball. And this makes me very nervous about throwing a ball. And I think God, if I throw a ball wrong, I’m a fucking loser. And I started having like fight or flight response, having a panic attack thinking about this, and then I go to throw a ball, it’s probably going to be a poor throw. But my brain would go, Oh, my God, See, I told you, you can’t throw a ball. When the truth was actually I’d having a panic attack and nobody throws a ball very well when they’re doing that. So the same thing applies to you, if you’ve been, you know, had social awkwardness, or you’ve been unassertive at work, or whatever, none of this is actually proof that you are awkward or unassertive. It’s just you’re following the belief rather than creating evidence to see what’s true. comments coming through thick and fast here, which is excellent. It’s gonna see is, we should also we also should prophesy our future. One of the things I’m going to be talking about a yesterday is about creating evidence with behavior, rather than trying to control your thinking. One of the difficulties when you’re not good enough story suffer as we all are, is when you try to control your thinking, it will eventually turn negative on you, because it’s stronger than you are. All these biases in your brain are very powerful, and they happen a lot in the subconscious parts of the brain. So trying to get a control of them will just end up with you being manipulated by them. And so what we’ll talk about in the second section of this of this webinar, is how to focus on behavior rather than thoughts how to be able to do the right thing, even though your thoughts are telling you you shouldn’t, where you can’t, or you’re useless or whatever. There’s a few others, I don’t want to spend too much longer on these. But a couple I want to mention, one is loss aversion. We are twice as motivated to avoid pain as we are to seek pleasure. And all the stuff I’m saying you can look up the research, it’s very solid science behind what I’m saying here, I don’t have the citations here. But a quick Google search will show you that I’m not making the shit up. So if you’ve been rejected by someone, and that was embarrassing and painful, you’ll be far more motivated to avoid that happening again, then you will be to actually like get a girlfriend. And so this will motivate your thinking. So when you start thinking, now I can ask her out because she’s probably got a boyfriend. And you know what if she says now in front of everyone, it’s really embarrassing. It’s not that you don’t actually want to, it’s that you really want to avoid pain. So quite often, you think that you don’t want something simply because your brain doesn’t want the painful alternative, more than you want the thing. So you’ll notice that why don’t you I noticed that your social, you want something until it comes to actually taking action. And all of a sudden, you seem to lose interest in it. That’s not good enough story is saying, like, think about how many times you’re like, you know what, tomorrow, I’m going to ask for that promotion in the shower tomorrow. And you’re like, I’m not really sure if I even want their job. I mean, looks pretty hard. And I’m pretty happy with where a man my boss was good. And your brain to start talking all this shit. You were so sure yesterday that you wanted it. And now it seems like it’s not that big a deal to you. A lot of us have that starting a business starting a relationship moving traveling, we seem to want something and then we suddenly lose interest in it. Why? Because your brain is motivated to avoid pain. It’s not that you lost interest in it. So as part of your brain is really interested in you not going through pain. I think I’ll cut off the because you guys can look up more of these as you want. But the point here is, don’t trust your thoughts. They’re not good enough story is primarily made up of thoughts and reactive emotions. And your biggest problem is not trying to stop these from happening because they will happen. You will always have doubt and uncertainty and fear and all these things come up. It’s believing it That’s your problem. It’s like believing a car salesman as a talks about how awesome this particular car is, you’d be ridiculous to believe that he’s unbiased, that he doesn’t have a hidden agenda, where your thoughts are the same. They’re not telling you the truth. They’re telling you a story that manipulates you. And you’ve got to understand that believing the story is your only real barrier. And we’ll talk more about that soon. But you can do all those things you want to be doing. As long as you don’t believe the story. Let’s move on here. Let’s talk about fear. Got to sign here, fear is a liar. Fear is a lie. Fear is there to keep you safe, but not in the way you think. Fear is not there to keep you alive, like you think it is to protect you from danger. It’s more there to keep things the same. So fear is primarily motivated by the avoidance of unknown because unknown as the most threatening thing. So the more you do things that are similar and the same, the more happy your fear is, so to speak. So you might hate your shirt job, but your fear doesn’t. Your fear likes it, because it’s predictable. It knows what’s going on. Your fear might hate being single, sorry, you might hate being single, but your fear doesn’t. Because it knows singer would understand signal and understands a lot better than trying to talk to that girl you’re interested in. And there’s essentially I, I worked a lot with criminal offenders for many years. And I learned a lot about manipulation. And then I came to realize that fear uses the same manipulation tactics, as like psychopathic murderers have used on me, in the US for I’m not going to go into these too deeply. I’ve got a whole podcast on these. And if anybody wants that, you can just email me dan@brodo.co.nz ed. But there’s essentially four things fear does to to trick you into thinking you’re not good enough. The first thing it does is it intimidates you. It’s something I call the Everest effect, as a Mount Everest. And what it does is it takes a task that you want to do, and it blows it up into something that’s too big for you to handle. Let’s say for example, there’s a classic one, I am able to take guys out and show them how to meet people, like in public, I’d say, you know, go talk to that girl, and so on. And there’ll be sometimes I go, I’d be really nervous, and so on. And I’d say, Well, why don’t you go talk to that girl? He goes, Ah, I don’t know. She’s not my type. I don’t think she would make a good girlfriend. As I did, I didn’t say asked her to be your girlfriend to go talk to her. How’d you get there so quickly. And what happened is, as fear had turned, talking into her, talking to her into being in a relationship with her made it this huge thing that he couldn’t handle. I mean, he can handle going up and saying hi. But he didn’t feel he could handle being in a relationship with the skill he didn’t know, somehow was fear made saying hi to Gil into this huge Everest of a task. And you’ll notice fear does that you say you know, I’d love to start my own business. Now starting our own business is as simple as like doing a bit of research right now online. But your brain goes well, what about taxes? And what about, like, if you run out of money, and then you’ll have to like five years from now you might have to go through bankruptcy, you’re like, oh my god, there’s too much I can’t handle all that. Your fear turns it into this imaginary Mount Everest, when actually the task ahead of you is totally doable, and you could quit at any time. So that’s one of the main tricks that fear plays on you and makes you feel that you’re not good enough to do the task by making the task too big for you. The fact is, that makes it so big that nobody could do it. But it tricks you again, with the next thing, which is the invalidation. So not only does fear, make the task too big for you, and then find somebody else who is doing that massive task, and shows you how weak you are. So you think, oh my god, I couldn’t start a business because five years from now go through bankruptcy. And then your brain goes, see, look at that guy with three businesses, he’s better than you. It’s now you don’t even trust yourself even more, right? Because you’ve seen that not only is the task of starting a business too big for you, but everybody else is doing it so easily. Which means you must be a fucking loser. Notice that effect that fear plays on you, just to keep you the same. So the invalidation is a you know, the guilt tripping is probably something you picked up early on in your life, other people guilt trip to you. Maybe your mother said, I wish you could be more like your brother. Something like that. We just, I’m just I’m never quite good enough. I remember I had this one client The kind of the poor, you know, that stereotypical, like underpressure Asian guy. And he was saying he would come home from school and tell his Dad, look, I got 97% on this test. And his dad would say, Where’s the other 3%? You know that that kind of story getting planted in your head young, you’ve been carrying that story on fear is keeping that story going, keeping things the same. And I think it’s like Darren mentioned before, you’ll, you’ll do well at something, and your brain immediately goes to work to invalidate that, because it scared of you doing well. It’s stuff that scared of you going further down that path. You might go to a new dance class, for example. And you’ll I actually picked it up pretty quickly. I didn’t think I’d be any good at that. And on the first day, you’re feeling good. But the second day your fear goes Yeah, but that other guy, he was actually even better so the girls laughing with him. They seem to enjoy dancing with him even more. And then the day after their says, are you so sure you are they’re good? Maybe you’re just bullshitting yourself, you always bullshit yourself. Five days later, you’re too scared to go back to the class. How did that happen? Because you believed what your brain was saying. Fear also uses distraction. Perfectionism is a good one for this. So fear will try and get you to do a lot of stuff, get really busy, really distracted, have a lot of thoughts, spread yourself really thin. And in doing so you’re too tired and too busy to actually do the important things. And then I’ll tell you that you’re useless. Right. So feel will make you so busy or prioritize every task on your task list too urgent. And then when you don’t get more done, it goes See, you’re useless. When actually, you didn’t need to do half that shit in the first place. So fear kind of sets you up to fail with this distraction. And then the worst one that I’ve seen lately, is flattery. Fear will actually make it feel kind of good to be the victim. This is a hard one to swallow for some people. So I want to just take through Hold on just going to Darren says, I know my brain does it. But it’s still true believable evidence bad outweighs the good. Even when I acknowledged the good. It’s the waiting. That’s not true. Your brain will use real evidence that something happened. But it will give the weight unfairly. So let’s say you got through a whole day and you didn’t die, you ate all your meals, you showered effectively, you got to and from work effectively you did your job as good as you could. And then somebody was mad at you. Your brain will make it out like that person being mad at you is more important than all the other stuff you succeeded in that day. And that’s where the lie happens. The inaccuracy of the waiting. And this is the thing. It’s not that you can stop that inaccuracy from happening. You can just notice that it’s not accurate. That’s all we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about fighting against the not good enough story. We’re talking about not believing it. It’s like if you talk to no one a trigger any conspiracy theory guys here but I’ve got a few friends who are under the conspiracy theories, and there’s just no talking them out of it. And I realized, well, I can listen to them without having to fight against them. But also without believing them. In I got one friend who’s like, you know, there’s the chemtrails, the planes, they’re dumping like mind control agents on us. Now I’ve tried to talk him out of this. And it’s been completely ineffective. He’s not listening. I realized, well, I can hear him saying that without going Oh, no chemtrails. You can do the same thing with your brain. When your brain says, you know, are you failed, you can go alright brain, whatever you say, without going oh, no, I did fail and really latching on to it. Which is what we’re going to be talking a bit more about today. But coming back to the flattery idea what your brain will do. There’s a thing I call reverse entitlement. I got it from Mark Manson’s book, The Subtle Art of not giving a fuck. And what he talks about is this thing where we actually kind of want to be the loser. It’s something we don’t admit to ourselves. And yet the evidence for it’s quite clear. It’s partly about being significant. We want to believe that we’re somehow special in our disability. We don’t want to believe that we could actually do something and we just holding ourselves back. We want to believe that it’s somehow impossible for us that we are especially disadvantaged. And we look for that, don’t we? We look for how much easier it is for everybody else. And we really convince ourselves that everybody else has an E easier, and we have to work really hard to do it. And if we’re your fear kind of flat as you guys look at us suffering more than everyone else, you poor Marta, you know, everybody else has an easier they got this advantage and that advantage. They’re smarter than you and more charming, the new and more charismatic and they started off uneasy your background and they didn’t have what you had to put up with. It’s telling you the story that yeah, it’s justified that things are too hard for you. Unfortunately, that story is also a lie. Like I said, the you know, they’re not good enough stories, the best kept secret. And if we were all honest about it, you would see that all those people that you’re envious of or that you admire, suffer as much as you do from the not good enough story. But because you can’t see that, because you’re not having those conversations with people because you believe it is easier for them. You’re able to convince yourself that you have it harder. And the funny thing is, even if it’s true, why does it stop you doing stuff? Why does having a harder life, a justification for not doing something you’re clearly capable of doing? So the point of this curiosity was just to open your mind, put it this way. 1% Doubt, whenever you have a thought that you are a failure, that you weren’t good enough that what you did wasn’t enough that you could be better. Give yourself the openness to Delta just by 1%. To not fully buy into it, just because it’s a thought to open your mind to the possibility that your mind through fear can lie to you because it wants you to stay the same. Once I realized this, the noise in my head started to change shape, I stopped being like my voice and started to be more the voice of my brain. And what I mean by that is it wasn’t me talking to myself anymore. Like this truthful conversation of complete accuracy. Now it was parts of my brain trying to convince me of something. And I realized, well, if it’s trying to convince me it’s can possibly lie to me, or at least been the truth. Yes, I might have been rejected by that girl, but it wasn’t really that bad. Did I die? Is my life able to continue after that? Could I do it again? Rather than just like, oh, yeah, that was so bad. I can never do this again. Yes, it would be uncomfortable to confront my boss. But could I handle that discomfort? Is it really so bad that it’s impossible for me to talk? Just because other people find it easy to do? Does that mean I can’t do it at all? These are the kinds of curious questions you can bring to the knock goodness story when it comes up in your head. You don’t have to convince yourself that it’s a lie. You know, because that’s not going to work. We’re not fighting against the not good enough story. We’re just doubting it a little bit, to open up possibilities. Okay. And this is just to get you started, because now we’re going to start talking about behavior. Before I do is anybody wants to ask any questions or share any comments before we move on to the next section? Use the chat box, if you do. See on the pictures there. Good to see a whole bunch of here. That’s fantastic. All righty. Close that. Now, just a reminder, for those of you who just joined us. If you enjoy this talk and you want to try out brojo is a little promotional stuff I warned you about. Just email me dan@brojo.co.nz. I’ll give you a free trial month of brojo entirely tested out no obligation just to see if you like it. We’ll talk more about what that comes with at the end of this session. And for the first 10 people who do that. If you’ve never had a coaching session with me before, I will give you a free one to one confidence coaching session to help you break through whatever your current barriers again with no obligation or sales pitch or pressure or any of that shows just a free gift so you can get a taste of working with Dan. All righty. Let’s move on. Honesty. Not good enough story is essentially a form of dishonesty. And there’s only one cure for dishonesty is honesty. And in particular, honesty through action through doing something not just thinking about through saying something, not just believing your thoughts, but actually testing them. You know, sort of dare mention that it’s really hard to disbelieve your thoughts because they seem to be based on true evidence. And it is hard to do there. But it’s easier to test the information. So for example, if your brain says, or you can ask for a promotion that will go badly, and go, Okay, well, let’s go make sure that then let’s go ask for the promotion. So we’re going to be talking a bit about shamelessness about using behavior to react to the not good enough story rather than trying to think your way out of it. Stephen says, We could totally disregard the not good enough story, then replace that thought with another reality check. It’s an excellent technique. And I really want to emphasize something here. Not fighting the thoughts, but replacing them with behavior. Because one thing, you know, I used to do positive affirmations, and I now believe them to be completely unhelpful practice. Because they stir up, they’re not good enough story. I used to look in the mirror and go, you’re a good person. And straightaway some part of my brain would go, No, you’re not. It would like provoke an argument in my brain. I tell myself, you know, I’m a good guy. And I’m attractive. And I’m smart. My brain will gate Yeah, but what about that time that girl dumped you, or that time that you failed that test, it would provoke an argument trying to like put thoughts into my head that like counted the not good enough story. But behavior is different, because behavior is evidence. And we’re going to talk about behavior. Behavior is the key to all of this. Rather than trying to think yourself out of the knock goodness story, you’re going to try and prove it wrong. I don’t mean proving it wrong by getting results, and impressing other people and winning. But by impressing yourself. You know, just the other day, someone challenged me to describe confidence building as simply as possible. And I managed to get it down to two words, impress yourself. What I’ve come to realize is that the reason that not good enough story leaves me alone most of the time now, is because I’m impressed with my own behavior. And I don’t mean my results. I don’t mean the effect that I’ve had on the world, or how other people view me. But the courage, the honesty, the self acceptance, the self respect that I’ve demonstrated to myself, I’ve found that what the not good enough story was really challenging me to do was to act right. You know, they’re not good enough. stories seem to be telling me that I need to win more and be loved more and, and be more successful. And yet, when I impressed myself, just with behavior, they’re not good enough story, shut the fuck up for a bit. It was interesting, not good enough story, I’ll say, Oh, you’re such a pussy. You know, you never stand up for yourself. And then I’ll go stand up for myself. And they’re not good enough story and sort of go, well done. I’ll give you that one. Because it can’t argue against real evidence. It can argue against success in say, Hey, I got the job interview. And your brain will go well, you’re just lucky or, you know, maybe they didn’t know who you really were, or whatever. But if you can say, Hey, I was scared of doing the job interview, and I did it anyway. So that’s courage. Your brain will be like, Yeah, well, you were scared, and you did it anyway. I can’t argue against that. So that’s the key here is if you’re if your brain is saying you can’t do something, then at least go prove it right. Go try it. Don’t try it to be able to do it, though. Try it just to show that you have the fucking balls to try it. Because that’s what’s going to impress you not winning, but trying where you are too scared to try. You can’t think yourself out of the not good enough story because the only thing you’ve got to work against thoughts where there’s other thoughts. And we know from the not good enough story that your brain is pretty unreliable with thinking. The thoughts aren’t going to help you hear. Your inner critic is based on overthinking it’s based on over analyzing second guessing mind reading, lots of thinking with no real evidence. The only cure for overthinking is action. You overthinking leads to a lack of action, which leads to a lack of evidence, which seems to be evidence of you being unable to do something so your brain distracts you with thinking and then blames you for being distracted and not doing anything. It creates a like a feedback loop from hell. He gets stuck in this loop of not doing anything because you’re too busy thinking about how to do something. The only way you can prove it wrong is by doing some thing. Couple of thoughts coming through. Great one here. Sir, I don’t know what your name is there from yellow in this body. Say that, right? So you’ve said here, there’s some evidence, we all took the initiative to join the seminar and improve ourselves. Perfect fucking example. Okay, of course, I’m gonna say joining my webinar was awesome. But you could have not come on this webinar, you could have tried to stay in your old belief and not challenge yourself, you could have done some sort of distracting thing instead, you took time aside for yourself to improve your life. Your brain cannot say that didn’t happen. It definitely did. You’re on the call that evidence is clear. It’s very hard, you’re not good enough story to say that didn’t happen. It can say you didn’t do it well enough, or you should have done it better. But I can’t say you didn’t do it. And that’s the key here, you want to give yourself evidence that your brain cannot argue against because the evidence is compelling. Alone want to share with you now one of the most powerful concepts in confidence building self development, particularly courage. small but significant. See you in you, we talked about how your fear plays a trick on you have overwhelming it with the size of a task, that Everest effect, it makes something too big. And the trick there is it stops you from doing anything. So you don’t build up any evidence. What I suggest you refocus on is taking tiny actions regularly, that are meaningful, like coming on a webinar like this. Or like saying no to someone at work when you usually say yes. Or like driving a different way to the class just to challenge yourself to deal with an unknown road, or taking 30 minutes to have a nap and take care of yourself when you would usually overwork or eating a salad instead of a pie. These little things that aren’t hard to do. They almost seem so small, they’re not worth doing. But they build up evidence. When your brain goes, you don’t take good care of yourself. You can say well, I ate the salad. So what the fuck you talking about? Telling me I didn’t eat that salad? The brain goes, Okay, fair enough, you ate that. But what about the other stuff, you only start to build up this evidence, particularly. And this is a really important part. Evidence that you can handle the unknown. You know, I gave the example for of like driving a different way than you usually drive. It seems like nothing but what you’re doing there is you’re showing your brain that you can deliberately choose something that’s hard and unknown, and survive it. mean what we said Fear is about the unknown, it doesn’t want you to do things that are unknown. So the more unknown things you can expose yourself to and survive, the more evidence your brain has to counter the not good enough lie. What I found as the most powerful out of everything, when it comes to small but significant actions, is honesty. And I want to talk now a little bit about something that I call shamelessness, you’ll see we’ve got a couple of comments coming through there. And says, I agree action is the key. That’s where I usually fail. Where can I buy some of these balls you reference. You create them, you grow your own balls. Very, very small. So what Often people talk about when it comes to courage is they ask for too much of themselves. We want to look for very slight pieces of discomfort to start very small. Think of it like desensitization, let’s say you’re afraid of spiders, you don’t jump straight into a bath full of tarantulas, it’s too much. But maybe you just look at a picture of a spider for as long as you can handle. You just start small like that. Okay. So, we’re gonna talk a bit more about that. When you say it’s like say I’m going to start a gym to benchpress 300 pounds. Now that’s actually a really good example. Some people do this. They’re like, right, I’m gonna go to the gym, and I’m gonna fucking bench 300 pounds, the brains actually sit them up so they don’t even go to the gym at all. Or if they do go to the gym, they’ll definitely fail. And they can say it’s negative. It sounds weird, but I found one of the key things to building confidence is to really lower the expectation bar means really low. So at least I’m just doing something, even if it’s barely something small, that’s significant. Rather than tie, okay, go and talk to that beautiful girl and ask her out, I’ll say, just go make eye contact with her. It’s more than nothing. But it is significant. It’s not huge. But it’s really significant to me to do that. And next time, maybe I can hold the iContact. Maybe the time after that, I can say hi, I keep adding these tiny little bits to it. Courage risk isn’t really about strength, a lot of people think it’s about the sort of power to do something. But it’s more about wisdom. It’s about making something small enough, so you can handle it. That’s all courage really is to inch away at something to take it one bite at a time, rather than trying to stuff the whole fucking thing down your throat. You know? Aaron says might not good enough stories are usually around taking the evidence such as going on this webinar and attaching a meaning to it. That’s negative. The evidence is real. So that’s the point here. The story your your mind adds to the evidence. That’s the part you challenge. So you might come on this webinar, and your brain will say, Oh, you didn’t participate enough? So Well, that wasn’t the measurement. Did I go to the webinar? Yes. Okay. There’s the measurement. We’re gonna talk a lot more about measurement soon. But what you do is you make sure that anything your brain adds to it essentially doesn’t get to count. You go to the gym, and your brain is like, Yeah, but you didn’t lift 300 pounds. Yeah, but I wasn’t trying to lift 300 pounds, I was just trying to go to the gym that I go to the gym. Yes, shut the fuck up, then. I’m not saying actually have that argument with your brain. But focusing on real evidence rather than the story. Your brain attaches to evidence. You can’t stop that story from happening, but you can question it. Rather than going oh my god, there’s definitely real. Just going on. There’s my brain trying to keep me the same again. You know, it’s like when you know, when a child like, Have you ever seen a child pretend cry, to like, get your attention. You know what’s up, you know, he’s not really crying. It’s just trying to make you feel bad for him. Or when your brain starts coming up with these stories, think of it like that. There’s my brain trying to keep me the same again, playing that little trick it does was very convincing this time. Still a trick though. Just because a magician looks really convincing. It doesn’t mean it was really magic. It’s an illusion, a sleight of hand, your brains doing the same thing with you. And that’s what I’m saying here is just open up that doubt. And particularly with your behavior. shamelessness is the cure to the inner critic. Put it this way. If every secret about yourself was fully known, and you are fully okay with it, there would be no more not good enough story. shamelessness is by far the most powerful thing you can you can use to deal with an awkward enough story. And what is shamelessness? It’s about revealing the honesty you don’t usually reveal. Okay? It’s about getting all those things about yourself out there. One small but significant piece at a time. It’d be an example of this, I was a manager at my work. And I was really suffering from imposter syndrome, which is a form of the not good enough story. already thought, you know, I’m not qualified to lead. I’m younger than everybody. This is all gonna come falling down on my head. I had a lot of that going on in my head. That’s a lot of not good enough story stuff there. Now, there’s no evidence for this. You know, everything was ticking along. Okay, at least it wasn’t falling down. And I might have been younger than everyone, but it didn’t stop me being the manager. So while the evidence was yes, I’m younger. The idea that that somehow bad wasn’t proven, but my mind was making a big deal about it. And what this leads me to do is pretend that I was okay. I pretended I wasn’t stressed. I pretended I wasn’t worried. I pretend that I have all my shit sorted. Now apparently, it’s very obvious that I didn’t because it was big bags under my eyes, and I’m really snappy and when I kind of agitated all the time, but I thought I was hiding it well. And then one day, I just couldn’t take it anymore. And at a team meeting, I just told my team look, I’ve got to be honest, I’m a little bit stressed. And it was amazing to feel that weight come off. where not only could I tell them are stressed, but I was lucky I guess their reaction showed me that me being stressed wasn’t the end of the world. Actually, what they did is offered me support which blew my mind I fully thought they’d be like Oh no, he’s not a good leader. Let’s go find a new team to work for some bullshit like that. Some unrealistic his fucking mind. But I finally told them that that all stressed and in doing so I made being stressed okay. So they went from being a not good enough factor to just being a thing. And that’s what shameless honesty is about. It’s about talking about who you are all those things you hide as often as possible, until they’re not something you hide anymore, until they don’t seem like a big deal. You might think that being anxious is a big deal and you hide there. A lot of people, a lot of nice guys think they’re being anxious as somehow a failure, even though it’s just an emotional state that everybody goes through. If you started joking about it, and being honest about it, saying, Oh, shit, I’m having a bit of anxiety right now. Like, Damn, that makes me nervous. And you keep doing that until it feels normal to do it, you’ve eliminated it as not good enough factor, it will no longer be something your brain goes, You’re not good enough because you’re anxious. They’ll just be like you having anxiety, that’s a thing we do normal. So I really got to emphasize small but significant pieces of honesty, your greatest weapon for the not good enough story. Essentially, sharing the not good enough story is the way to eliminate it to make it okay to have it takes all the power out of it. You know, I remember getting to the point where I’d be actually in a conversation with someone and tell them that my not good enough story was giving me shit. And as soon as I did that, they’re not good enough story was kind of left stumbling. It’s like, oh, no, you’ve, you’ve told them. I’m out of the bag. Like I can’t do anything now. You know, I remember going up to a girl I was attracted to once and telling her that I like to. And she said how confident I was. I said actually, I’m not confident right now my heart pounding like I’m so nervous right now. And she didn’t believe me and I put her hand on my chest so that she could feel my heart pounding. She was like, Whoa, and she was so blown away that I was that open whether that suddenly me being nervous was like an interesting thing to talk about. So my not good enough story about me being nervous just shut up. Because now me being nervous is okay. It’s not something I can be punished for anymore. These little acts a huge, but they’re hard to do. So you got to make them as small as possible. You might be scared of confrontation. That doesn’t mean tomorrow, you got to go on and tell everyone to go fuck themselves. You’re not ready for that yet. That’s just the Everest effect. But you can maybe just tell one person, hey, I can take on more work right now. Or I’m a little bit stressed right now. Or I don’t think I can handle this new project. Just be honest, a little bit more honest than you usually are. particularly about the not good enough story content. And just watch yourself neutralize it one small piece at a time here we got to somebody says I completely agree. I’ve been really angry last few weeks, and I told all my friends how angry I was. And it made it okay to be angry. Exactly. And another great, dude, you’re kellyo with examples tonight. I’ve got to say, this is a great example because anger is such a huge one for nice guys. We think it’s a failure to be angry. We think it’s somehow a loss. We always hide our anger. Don’t we all we explode with a tantrum. Just tell people you’re angry. You love to be angry. It’s a human emotion is actually the very emotion you need to be to get those balls that Glen’s asking about right? And like you say, we associate anger with aggression but aggression is behavior Anger is an emotion you can be angry without punching someone in the face without shouting. without risking your life you can just say I’m angry and this is a huge factor rather than holding it in until you fucking go read and punch a hole in the wall just every time that tiny bit of annoyance frustration anything comes up and you go I shouldn’t be feeling this I’m a failure for feeling this. Just tell people about it to say ah that bothered me I wish it didn’t bother me but a fucking did. You can even tell them about the NOC good enough story like, I’ve been so angry this week. But I didn’t want to tell anyone because, you know, I’m kind of like ashamed of anger. They’re not good enough stories left going, Oh, you fucking told them now? What the hell am I going to talk about? It’s like if someone’s blackmailing you, and then you tell everyone the secret that they were holding. Now they can’t blackmail you. Not good enough story is blackmailing you. It’s holding you back with secrets. If you reveal those secrets, it can’t do anything to you anymore. You know, if you tell the person that you’re scared to confront that you’re scared to confront them. Suddenly being scared to confront them has just been okay now. Still unpleasant to feel. This isn’t about removing the feeling. And still the thoughts will come up. But it’s okay now. That’s the key. See that the real trick of the not good enough story is to convince you not to talk about sci fi club. First rule is not good enough stories you don’t talk about not good enough story. But that’s the trick that keeps it going. If you don’t like, Okay, I was nervous at the start of this webinar. For some reason, I’m not normally nervous at the start of webinars. But it wasn’t the start of this one. There’s because there’s a slightly bigger turnout. It’s late at night. And I’ve been blowing this up one up in my head a bit, because it’s like, my favorite topic, and I was hoping it would go well, you know, now I’m okay with it. And I probably should have said that at the start. But seeing it now, just eliminates all problems with me being nervous. I don’t care that you guys know that I’m nervous now. I used to care about that kind of stuff a lot. But I’ve talked about a lot since then. And now it’s not important. I’ve got this kind of rule. If you talk about something 100 times with a wide range of people, you will no longer have anything attached to it. So I remember the first time I told guys that when I was nervous with girls, I’d get erectile dysfunction. I was my heart was pounding. I was deeply read and embarrassed. The 100th time I talked about it, it’s I talking about what I had for breakfast, there’s just a normal conversation. There’s no longer anything that had not good enough attached to it, because I talked about it so much that it was now okay. I hate to break it to you. Like I’d love to be able to give you a quick fix for the knock goodness story. But frankly, I’ve never found one. I have found the long, slow, effective approach though. And it’s what we’re talking about right now. So small, but significant, hopefully, absolutely thrashed out one to death. So rather than trying to react to negative thoughts with positive thoughts, react to negative thoughts with positive action. Think about it this way, the not good enough story is merely a prompt for you to try and do something that impresses yourself. So every time the voice in your head says you’re a loser, go do something that proves to you that you’re courageous that you’re honest, that you’re curious, that you’re responsible, that you’re respectful. Try to do something nice for somebody not as a nice guy, people pleaser. But to be truly giving us the not good enough story is like a platform for behavior that you’ll be proud of. And that way they’re not good enough story becomes more like a reminder, and alarm reminding you to live by your core values, I won’t go too much into value living especially if you’re not familiar with that term tonight, but if any of you are interested in it, like I said, we’ve got a free month abroad where you can learn all about your core values, and how to live by them within that free month and get started with that. And I’ll give you all the practical kind of application of what behavior you can do to make you proud of yourself. And like Darren mentioned the risk there is is to make sure that the only measure is the behavior itself it’s not the extra story you add to it whether it went well or successful or whether you didn’t good enough, but just that you did it that’s all you know, something that can’t be argued against. So that brings the honesty section to a close I mean I could go on about honesty my whole fucking life and I probably will but you will was not good enough story is revealing it right? It’s like a vampire can’t survive coming out in the sunlight. Not for long, it hurts at first. It will do everything it can stop you. You guys are already doing it on this call. Those of you have commented and shared bits and pieces about it. That’s a start. Okay, more of that little bits that you can handle until everything that you think is not good enough by yourself just becomes normal information. Okay. Alrighty, let’s move on to our speak may have seen through your questions and thoughts in the chat and I really appreciate you guys putting on the bet that we can respond to negative thoughts with action. Little picture there. Okay, respect. One of the things are not good enough story does. The inner critic is it tricks you into treating yourself badly. Treating yourself badly in two critical ways. One is not giving yourself time and space in sympathy about being a normal human. And the other is not setting boundaries, allowing other people especially if you’re a nice guy, people pleaser, allowing other people to wear you down and use you and then feel bad about letting them do that. Respect as a value is about measuring yourself accurately. And about treating yourself as if you are your own best friend. Okay, the voice in your head might not be very nice to you. But your behavior can be nice to you, no matter what their voice in your head says. And I want you guys before I go on to So I want you to notice a couple of things. One, notice how you disrespect yourself a lack of boundaries. Okay? And to notice how you different disrespect yourself with self care. Notice how you’re mean to yourself how you treat other people nicer than you treat yourself how you express expect less from other people than you expect from yourself. Notice that disrespect and notice that you’re in control of their, you might not be able to force yourself to have respectful thoughts. But there really is nothing stopping you behaving in a respectful way. Okay, how on earth are you supposed to see yourself as good enough? If you’re constantly disrespectful to yourself? I mean, the not good enough story is simply a measurement of that isn’t that. I mean, you’re essentially what I see a nice guys, the biggest tragedy, I mean, this way, like coaching nights, guys, you know, to try and help them stop hurting themselves, is that they just, they just treat themselves so fucking poorly. And there’s really no good reason for it. Because even if you are a fucking loser, treating yourself poorly isn’t going to help someone effective strategy. So we have talked about respect now, respect in terms of measurement. So actually measuring what you do accurately rather than just letting your brain and its cognitive biases, tell you what happened. And treating yourself well. So when it comes to measurement, one of the keys here is to switch out of autopilot. All those cognitive biases we talked about before, they are what happens if you do not consciously intervene with your measurement system. If you don’t step in, and sort out the way you measure yourself, your brain is going to do it in its own way automatically. And that way sucks, doesn’t it? They’re not goodness story version of measuring yourself as inaccurate, unhelpful, and fucking miserable. So you have to override that. And you have to understand that if you do not journal and measure yourself properly and track your behavior, and consciously and accurately measure it, your brain will autopilot, it will do it its own way. And you get to choose which way happens. So your auto pilot is essentially you looking for something to criticize, right? Darren kind of mentioned that before quite accurately. So when you don’t try and measure yourself accurately, what your brain does is just search and search and search until you find something that I can criticize something and say that could have been done better. Well, that was wrong. Or that wasn’t good enough. That’s all it does. Just keeps looking for something. And if that’s confirmation bias, if you look for something, you’ll find it, you know, if you’re racist, you’ll find evidence that that race you hate does bad things. Right? It won’t be the full evidence and won’t be accurate of the entire race. But you’ll find that evidence, you know, if you’re sexist, you’ll find evidence of woman behaving badly not because all women behave badly, but because some do and you can find that evidence, right? If you’re overweight, and you want to believe that you should remain overweight, you’ll find reasons why you need to eat more, and why you shouldn’t bother trying to exercise and why you’re a failure and taking care of yourself. That’s the autopilot measurement, you need to be able to learn how to snap out of that and measure yourself more accurately. Quite often, I think, the most the biggest mistake that most guys do when they measure themselves is they measure themselves on emotion. They say something like I failed because I was nervous. Right? I failed because I was scared or I failed because I got too stressed. They’re not looking at what they did. They’re looking at how they felt doing it. Right. But action is all that matters, how you felt or what thoughts you had during that action are irrelevant. There’s no evidence of those. Right? They came and they went they like clouds in the sky. When you look up at the sky, you can’t see where the clouds were once you can only see where they are. So the clouds, you know, they’re not evidence and the thoughts you had once you can’t show me them anymore. They’re gone. The emotions you had once they’re gone too. But your behavior can be recorded and tracked. Your behavior makes the difference. Your behavior shifts and influences things. You know, if you go to the gym and run for 20 minutes, there has an effect on your exercise on your fitness. Right? If you go talk to 10 people at the party, you will have now new connections with 10 people even if they’re only brief. There will be evidence that you did Something, how you felt during it, that’s long gone, there’s no evidence for that doesn’t matter. So when it comes to measuring yourself, you must focus on what you did, and only what you did not the story attached to it in your head, and not how you felt doing it. But what you did, and whether or not that’s something to be proud of. So coming on this webinar, if that meets your standard is doing the right thing, then that’s all that matters, how much you participated on the webinar, how you felt during it, what your thoughts told you while you’re on the webinar, none of that matters. All that matters, as you showed up, and you’re here, your brain cannot deny that. And that’s the only thing worth measuring. When we look at this, is you can have a thought right now that you are a pink elephant, you can imagine it in Think of yourself as as big pink elephant, like a big pink elephant with your face on it. Is that true? No. So thoughts are unreliable, we know at the very least you can come up with completely bullshit thoughts if someone or thoughts are unreliable, and that casts doubt over all thoughts, which means they’re not a reliable form of evidence. You know, sometimes you can feel anxious, even though there’s nothing to be scared of. Sometimes you can feel sad, even though there’s nothing bad happening. So emotions are unreliable, too. They’re not a source of evidence of what’s true, but your behavior is what really happened. So that’s the thing to measure. So your autopilot will measure all those things that don’t matter, like your thoughts and your feelings. And I don’t say they don’t matter. But they’re not evidence of who you are as a person. Your new system must measure behavior, journaling. Journaling, something I got, I go on and on about it, I try to get people to do it as much as possible. And I can almost never convince them to do it. People just don’t see the value in it. And I have come to realize that that’s for a couple of reasons. One is, if you do start journaling properly, you’re not good enough story is going to get really loud, because it doesn’t like you doing this. Because this is the argument against not good enough story, you’re not good enough story doesn’t want to see that you’re actually doing all right, and that you’re living by your values. And that you most of the time we’re doing stuff, that’s good things to do. Because they’re not good enough story is really invested on you being not good enough. It doesn’t like this counter evidence. So it makes journaling, this boring, hard thing to do to distract you from the fact that this is actually going to help. And journaling doesn’t mean like, do diaries. You know, somebody was mean to me today and I got a crush on this girl. That’s not journaling. That’s a 14 year old girl after school. Journaling has about going here’s the things I did today. Do they line up with my values? Were they good things to do? Not how well did it go? Not? How did I feel doing it, though? You can record that just out of your own interest? Certainly not. What thoughts do I have about it? Just did it happen? And does that line up was what I believe a good thing to do is write. And it’s a very clear measurement. And that’s all journaling is really about. What did I mean to do? Did I do it? What did I learn from doing it? When that critic comes in measuring you negatively, you know, when he jumps in and starts saying, Oh, you’re a fucking loser, and you’re not good enough, and blah, blah, blah, he just say what did I last do to live by my core values and measure that instead? Again, use the nocturna story as a prompt, to just visit the evidence of who you are. Okay. I’ve really got to emphasize I see it again, there is a part of you that really wants to believe they’re not good enough story. And you have to make your piece you have to accept that part of you exists their victim inside you, that wants to remain a victim. That that part of you is going to fight against all of this, it’s going to try and keep the not good enough story true. It’s essentially a kind of an adolescent brain. The teenage victim who wants to believe that things are too hard for him, so he doesn’t have to try. You know, you have to make your peace that he exists and he might never go away. But he’s also kind of foolish yet kind of lazy, kind of avoidant of fear and pain, kind of cowardly. And that’s okay. He’s got reason to be but you don’t. He exists from your past, he’s not your present. So when it kicks in, you’ve got to ask yourself, Am I living with integrity right now? And if the answer is no, then change your behavior. And then measure that. If you look back over your day, and you’re like, I’ve done nothing I’m proud of then go do something you’ll be proud of. And then get your fucking journal out and write it down. Monday for 14, I went to the gym and went as hard as I could. Case fucking clothes. That’s the important action that happened. That’s a small but significant thing that took place today can’t argue against it definitely happened. Instead of tried to ask that girl out, but I got too nervous and didn’t say anything. And now she probably hates me. You’re right. I walked up to her. And I opened my mouth and said, Hi. And that was as far as I got. Okay, good. That’s as far as she got. That was courageous, it was hard to do. If you’re gonna record your emotions, record the emotions that got in the way. And he did it anyway. I was scared to do it. But I still did it. That’s courage. Right? I wanted to lie. But I told the truth. That’s honesty. You know, I was really like stuck and stubborn on my beliefs at the team meeting, but I let someone change my mind. It’s curiosity. Record yourself living by your values and see how valuable you actually are. While the story just plays in your head, they’re not good enough story is just a guy trying to sell you a car, you know, he talks while you live. Just keep proving to yourself, that that story in your head is not an accurate reflection of your behavior. Which brings us to the sort of final part here, treating yourself well. It’s very hard for you to get rid of the not good enough story. If you’re always being hard to yourself. And actually being hard on yourself as part of the pattern. You make it hard for you to do things by being exhausted that people pleaser, always being down on yourself not taking good care of your body and your mind. And makes you more likely to create evidence that you’re not good enough. Why don’t you just think how many of you treat other people better than you treat yourself and think that that’s somehow a noble good thing to do? Self sacrifice, where you put down your own needs to meet somebody else’s? Where did you learn that from? Why do you think that’s a good idea? Notice how if somebody else did that you tell them to stop. You say no, you got to take good care of yourself first. But when you do it, it’s a good idea. I was really big with self sacrifice. You know, I whatever energy I had, for me was whatever was left over after I took care of everybody else. So I fixed all of their problems and made everybody else happy and listened to everybody else and whinging and complaining and all the stuff I used to do to try and be a good person. And it left me just like wrung out and fucked at the end of it all. How am I supposed to think I’m good enough if I treat myself as the bottom of the pile, as the last person on the list who deserves you know, respect. What was ironic is when I started putting myself first, at first I thought, Man, that’s gonna be really selfish. But I came to realize that actually, everybody got the best from me when I did that. If I got up and did my morning routine, and took care of myself and did the tasks that are important to me, and then helped other people, I had high energy, I was focused, they got the best health possible. When I put all of my ship behind, I’d lose sleep, I get exhausted, stressed, anxious, and then I’m an exhausted, stressed, anxious person helping people. How’s that helpful? Becoming your own best friend is the best thing you can do for everyone else. And that does not mean controlling your thoughts. But it doesn’t mean challenging them. I want you to think for a second you know that not good enough storing your hair the way it talks to you. Imagine if you talk to your best friend like that. Imagine how horrific that would sound. If your best friend like went and asked someone out and got rejected and you’re like yeah, well that’s because you’re a fat fucking loser. And that’s the kind of thing you might say to yourself. But imagine saying it to another person held just how horrendous that would be. Notice how it’s become okay for you to talk to yourself like that. You tolerate that from yourself. But you would think it was just terrible if somebody to to somebody else, you know, people talk to each other they’re way you’d call it abuse. You’d call it bullying it when you do it to yourself, you think of it as just as truth. Right? So when the credit kicks in and gives you shit, you know, ask yourself if someone spoke to your best friend like that, how would you react? Well, one of the things that I’ve learned to do is to listen to myself. And again, journaling comes in here a different type of journaling. Which is when things go hard for me, I just hear myself out. I let myself tell myself that it was hard that I struggled and that I wish I had done better. And that’s just not good enough story talking. You actually see if you read through my journal and Who knows, I might send you guys a snippet of it. I’ll do something. I’ll be upset with the way I did it. And then I’ll kind of comfort myself through that upsetness I’ll be like, you know, I overreacted got too angry. Shouldn’t have fucking done that. Then I punish myself for getting too angry got myself in this right big mess, but it’s okay, I just do that sometimes I’ll try and do better next time. It’s, it’s all good. I’m just human. I say stuff like this to myself a lot because I try to talk to myself through my journaling. Like I would talk to a best friend. You know, supportive, encouraging. I don’t fight against the NOC good enough story, I just, I have a conversation with it. When it says you’re a fucking loser. I say, Look, I know, we feel like that sometimes, you know, life can be tough. And sometimes you get a bit down on that’s just normal. Constantly normalizing the not good enough story instead of making it a big deal. And you know, when your friend comes and says something like, Oh, nobody fucking likes me, you know, they’re too extreme. You know, they’re exaggerating. But you don’t need to argue against that. They just need to get it off their chest and then move on with their life. Where you can do the same with you’re not good enough story. When you go for the big job promotion, and you get rejected and your brains like, oh, nobody’s ever gonna hire me. Initially, okay, get it off your system, you know, get out of the system, no one’s gonna hire you. Sucky job, all that stuff. Get it out, get it out. Okay, well, let’s go have a nice coffee and just recover from it, we’ll go for a walk. And you can have a treat yourself. Well, like that. You know, have a nice bath, go hang out with someone you like. You know, go have a pint with a friend bitch about what happened. Go for a walk, relax, read your favorite book, do something nice for yourself. Treat yourself as if you are your own best friend. And do this every time and not good enough throw it gets really painful. Respect yourself. And I really got to set the tone here respecting yourself as often about boundaries. If you’re not a full 100% start saying no to people. If people are getting a down, start telling them to back off, this can actually be part of this shameless honesty. Ignore phone calls, if you need to tell your boss that you’ve got enough work, you can’t take on anymore. Stop pushing back and resisting the people who want to invade your space, they only invade your space because you let them. You know, confrontation will save you so much from the not good enough story most of the time, and not good enough story just wants you to have a stronger backbone, that’s all. So let’s sort of recap everything here. I’ll do this promotion should at the end. I just want to recap a couple of things. The key points here. One is, don’t trust your thoughts and feelings. Understand that you have biases that you’ve been conditioned to think in certain inaccurate and unhelpful ways. And that you’re just continuing that legacy from your childhood or whatever happened to you when you’re younger. And it’s not all 100% True. That’s all your behavior is what really happens. The thoughts and feelings are just clouds in the sky, they come and go. They’re no more true than anything else. So when they come up, just challenge the truthfulness of them. The accuracy was really as bad as telling you it was a you did as the world stopped moving. If not, maybe it wasn’t quite so bad. And understanding understand action is everything. Do something to prove to yourself that you’re a valuable person. And I don’t mean having a successful outcome. But I mean, action itself is valuable. You tried to be giving you tried to be honest. He tried to be respectful. He tried to be kind. Do it for the sake of doing it not to get a good reaction. But prove to yourself yeah, you are good enough. You’re capable of good enough behavior anytime you choose. small but significant. And then when you do this behavior, measure it, write it down recorded evidence, your brain does not store evidence properly. All those biases we talked about before skew your memories. So don’t trust your brain to store this evidence. It won’t. It will just look for things to critique. He’ll even make shit up because they Hey, that person thought bad things about you. There’s no proof for that. And I’ll give them more evidence and the fact that you actually did get your ass to the gym this morning. Record the things you actually did. Okay, not the things you didn’t do, because they aren’t real questions. You guys have any more questions or thoughts? Please send them through. Come to the end now. I’m keen to answering your questions or clarify any points that were a bit difficult. We’ve kind of touched on some some concepts are really high level here. And I’m gonna skip passing questions over here. And if you guys want further information on any of these points we’re going to do is email me and send them through. And like I said, if you join us for the first month of brojo, get access to all sorts of stuff. Let’s see, that’s all comments, questions coming through here. Dan says, if you’re people pleasing, as in doing nice things, when the story of you’re doing it to please people and be liked just be a story. How do you know which stories are useful or true? Okay. What I would say is that almost none of the stories are useful, necessarily true, perhaps, but we don’t ever really know why we do something. Because the reasoning happens in the subconscious part of the brain, we get told a story about why we do something, but we don’t know if that story is true or not. When it comes to people pleasing, the real question I would ask myself, was, what value was I trying to live by? So people pleasing really struggles to be justified by values. Like if I put down the important project I was working on to do a favor for someone for someone who didn’t even need my help. It’s very hard for me to say how I was living by one of my values there. Right. So rather than like trying to reverse engineer people pleasing, say was that the right thing to do? Set yourself up with a behavior that lines up with the values today, I will be more honest today or will confront that person. So they all treat myself nicely by doing this thing. Design The reason before the behavior, rather than trying to work backwards from a behavior and make it okay. So wanting to make people’s life easier, isn’t backed by a value it may be. But people pleasing isn’t about trying to make people’s lives easier. It’s about trying to make people like you. It’s about trying to make them pleased. Give me an example of this. I went on coaching, I will try to make people’s life easier, but I might not please them to do it. I might upset them. I might challenge them, and might really piss them off, you know, bring us this sharing screen. Yeah. People pleasing could be both Exactly. But rather than sort of leaving it to chance, design behavior that you know, is living by your values. What I’d say for the most of you, because what I think you bring up as the ask, the question is, what’s wrong with being nice? You know, is nice, really a bad behavior? And the answer is, it depends on why you did it. Okay? The behavior itself was fine. It’s amazing. When I’m coaching nice guys, they often do what I call a 360, which is, by the end of the coaching, they’re behaving exactly the same as they did at the start, except now they’re doing it for a lot of different reasons. And they’re being more confrontational as well. So somebody’s still very nice once they’re finished with, with the sort of nice guy coaching, but they’re not doing it to be seen as nice. And they’re not doing it to get approval. And they’re not doing it to be liked. Instead, they’re doing it because it was honest to do it. Or they’re doing it because it was respectful or because it was compassionate, or because they wanted to try something courageous. Set up the reason before you take the behavior, because they’re not good enough story. If you’re trying to please someone, it can always tell you that you didn’t please them enough, right, or can find someone that you didn’t, please can always find a problem with it, they’re not good enough story is fucking expert of finding what you did wrong. So you’re going to make it so the behavior itself cannot be questioned. So for example, let me give an example of like, helping someone that isn’t people pleasing. I have a great example, I had a coaching call last night, I really want to help the guy I want to live by the value of giving. Okay, it’s one of my strong values. And to do that I live by the value of honesty. So I gave him my honest opinions on what he was doing. He got very upset during the call. For most of it, it came right at the end. But at no point did I try to stop him from being upset. Because I’m okay with them being upset as long as it helps them. Now, people pleaser would not let someone get upset because they want a person to be pleased. That’s an outcome. That’s not a value. This is a very tricky topic. And I might do a whole webinar on this, this idea of the difference between like being nice as a nice guy, people pleasing versus being genuinely generous or compassionate or helpful, right. But what you want to do is you want to make sure that you’re you want to make sure you’re sure well You did it. Okay. So if you’re like was that people pleasing or me living by my values? Choose a new behavior and go do that. If you’re not sure, go do one that’s definitely living by your values. Okay? Darren says, I think I see kindness as neediness and everyone now and I don’t appreciate kind gestures and acts of giving be nice to have a webinar differentiating your look unfortunately, you might be seeing the truth there because I, I’ve come to believe after doing this work for so many years that a lot of people’s nice behavior comes with a hidden agenda that very few people are genuinely nice. They’re actually manipulative through being nice. You know, it’s actually kind of depressing what I’ve seen, because I’m, there are some people who are genuinely giving any know the difference because they’re okay with upsetting you. They don’t stick around to see if you’re gonna give them recognition. They don’t expect you to say thanks. They don’t want anything in return. Those people actually pretty rare. The other people, I always think about it like giving presents, do you put your name on the card? Because if you’re really just giving, you don’t need the recognition from someone else, you don’t need them say thanks for giving me the prison, you’re so good at buying presents. Oh my god, you’re an awesome person. That’s not really giving if that’s a requirement. It’s more like taking or like I said, putting someone in debt. Nice Guys, this this concept is really difficult. With people pleasing, it’s really hard for us to know when we’re genuinely being kind. And when we’re trying to like win favor and people pleasing seek approval. I’ll give you a couple of quick tips on this right now is you can actually train yourself out of this, if you want to be kind and nice. I get there. I do too. I don’t like people are fucking mean and make the world a worse place. Fuck those people, right? We can do less of them. But I want to make sure that when I am being nice, it’s genuine. It’s coming from a place of value. It’s not manipulation or just trying to get something from them and this kind of neediness. So there’s a few ways to do that one. And most importantly, one is make it impossible for them to reciprocate. For example, you can give anonymously, like one of my favorite things to do is to talk behind someone’s back, but talk positively to tell someone good things about someone and not let them know that I was the one who said it. So they like for example, I might go into my boss’s office and say, hey, you know, Roger has been working so hard lately. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but he’s killing it. Don’t tell him I told you, I just want you to know. Now Roger is doing better with the boss. He doesn’t know that I did that for him. So I’ve managed this just a training tool. I don’t usually condone secrecy. But I do this so that I know that all I can do is give Roger doesn’t know he can’t reciprocate. So this is just giving now. You know, I a great example, the other day, I was walking to the supermarket. And there was a mother with a trolley and a toddler. So she had like a kid in the pram and another kid toys were being thrown everywhere as a fucking massive bag slipped off her shoulder, she’s added this little mini family meltdown on the sidewalk. And I just stopped and I picked up the toy gave it to the kid picked up the bag gave it to her. Before she could even say thanks, I walked away. I just did the deed and moved on. I didn’t need a recognition that needed a smile at me and say, Oh, you’re a good person. I just did the right thing and moved on with my life sees little xy just make sure if I can’t trust myself to not be needy for approval, I’ll cut off the ability to get approval. And that way the behaviors definitely genuine behavior. Right. So it’s difficult, but when you can’t trust yourself, then design the behavior in such a way that there’s no doubt about it. Okay. And yeah, it’s it’s tricky. None of this is going to be like black and white, simple. But it’s about the attempt that matters. Because they’re not good enough story. You think that getting approval helps with the not good enough story. Thanks. Someone says, Yeah, you’re good enough that they will help. But it doesn’t, it just feeds it. Because now you’re relying on other people’s feedback. And as soon as you don’t get it, you’re gonna start worrying. You know, it’s like a drug approval. Somebody says, Yeah, you’re a good boy. Thanks. The next day like, oh, no, nobody said Good boy, yet. He started withdraw. He like, gets to go and press somebody a bit to go do something. So somebody says I’m a good boy. It’s like taking a drug every time you take it. It doesn’t have quite as much impact as the last time. You know, go when I was a teenager like if a girl smiled at me it made my whole week Right. But by the time I was in my 20s, the girl slept with me it would only last about a few hours before I started getting anxious again, I was so attached to approval and it just the hits weren’t big enough until I started doing things for different reasons. Another one here. So people who smile by default, when they see someone, it’s not that they’re happy to see you, it’s an ingrained habit of smile when you see someone. Yeah, you know, it’s, um, we won’t go too much deeper into that particular topic. I’ve done a few things in the series that you’ll see in the brojo library. But you’ll notice yourself doing a lot of autopilot behaviors throughout the day that are designed to get approval from others. And this relates to not good enough story. They’re not good enough stories giving you shit all day long. So you constantly do little things to try and like counter it. smile at someone pretend to be interested in the weekend, do a helpful task, even though nobody asked you all these little things to try and like counter, they’re not good enough story. One of the things that I did as a practice is I just stopped doing all that shit for a few weeks. I stopped smiling unless I was happy. You know, I didn’t ask people questions that I didn’t actually want the answer to. You know, it’s amazing how often you like, oh, how was your weekend, like you give a fuck how the weekend was you don’t, you don’t really, you tell yourself you do. But really, you’re just trying to show interest and be that guy who can talk and stuff. And I started just taking the pressure off myself to be that guy, you know. So I just, I just stopped doing stuff. Like when someone needed help, I waited for them to ask. So just diving in and fixing things. And I noticed that this was an act of respect to myself. And I was kind of weaning myself off off my drug of approval. And I could feel the withdrawal. I remember specifically I was in the office. And this girl came out of the elevator and she was struggling with all these boxes. And that was usually like a nice guy, superhero moment for me like a girl a damsel in distress, right? So I’d usually fly in and be like, Oh, take the boxes. And she can pat me on the back and think I’m a good guy or whatever. But I just watched as I know, you don’t want help with the boxes, then do the boxes by yourself. And it was so fucking hard for me to do that. But what was really interesting is right at the end, when she finished with the boxes, there was this look on her face, she kind of dusted her hands like that. look on her face, and I realized fuck she’s proud of herself. That little thing of her doing the boxes is a meaningful thing for her. I could clearly see it on her face, it was just no doubt in my mind. She was glad that she did it herself. I was like fuck, the old me would have taken that away from her, would have swooped in and saved her when she didn’t even need saving, I would have deprived her of that experience. So I can go on and on about this kind of thing. But you know, respecting yourself is quite often translated as not people pleasing, or pleasing yourself first, and then pleasing others second, you know, or at least balancing a 5050. Maybe for every time you sacrifice yourself for someone else, you owe yourself a favor. You owe yourself something good. Is that balancing it out like that? Yeah, as Glenn says, Don’t cheat people are satisfaction of doing for themselves. Don’t you hate it when someone jumps in and helps you and you wanted to do it yourself? Don’t do it other people. Right? Then you hate it when someone asks you about your weekend. And you know, they don’t really care. Don’t do it to other people that you hate when someone tries to give you advice that you didn’t ask for because you know, they’re just trying to control you. Don’t do it to other people. Right? A lot of those things are you think of as nice or really just manipulative, and they’re like suffocating. And they’re actually quite the opposite of pleasing someone now the person will act pleased because they’re socially conditioned to react. But what was really happening is you’re getting your drug fixed, and they’re being suffocated by you. Nobody’s winning in that situation. You know, we like to think this is kind of reverse entitlement. We like to think as nice guys, the world would fall down without us. But the world was around long before we got here and I will be around long after we leave. We’re not as needed as we like to think we are by other people. But we really need ourselves. And that has not been you know, you’ve been neglecting that that’s part of the not good enough story. That you’ve been taking really poor care of yourself by putting everyone else first. You’d be amazed at how much putting yourself first shuts the nice guy story up and you take good care of yourself when you relax, slow down. Prioritize. Challenge yourself to be more courageous. Try to be more honest, be willing to lose people’s approval in order to be honest. You’re most They’re not good enough, stirring getting quieter and quieter. Because now you’re finally respecting yourself. I got a few things coming through here is Darren says I removed people pleasing behavior, but I lost a part of myself, since I don’t do nice things as much. And he’d start doing nice things the right way. Now, this is a great example. So like I said, it’s a 360 quite often with nice guys, when I’m working with them as they go 180. And they kind of stopped doing anything for anybody, because they have to like, reset. They have to go, why do I fucking do anything? And they have to know that before they can start doing stuff we entrust yourself to, like help people, you have to reset like, Okay, I need to know why I’m helping someone before I let myself do it. Well, once you know what your values are, and you realize you are compassionate, and you are kind and you are giving, those are really there. They were just kind of getting like, infected with other neediness, I quite often think like, nice guys are usually actually trying to genuinely give. But by the time the behavior happens, all this extra stuff has been added to it. neediness for approval, kind of like trying to be significant, trying to control things. Their original giving impulse was there, it was genuine, but just all this other shit added to it. So you can get like I said, like nice guys. 360, which is you end up being very nice again, but now it’s on your own terms, you know exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You’re not self deluding anymore. For example you give to someone but only with the permission. Like if someone wants help you say do you want help, rather than just jumping in? Because if they say no, you’d be like, fine. The most helpful thing for me to do right now is to back the fuck off that’s given, is to leave them alone. A nice guy doesn’t have that option. He’s like, I must do, I don’t care if they want it or not, I’m gonna stuff it down their throat. So they love me, you know, it’s their ability to like step back, let someone solve their own problem. Instead of giving someone advice, asking them questions that help them solve the problem themselves, and then giving them credit for doing that. Rather than fixing it for them and then asking for things, you know. So you can go back to being nice, but it’s tweaked. And as you say, dare I’m doing it for the right reasons, doing it the right way. We had a place some nice examples for giving that anonymous. Contribute and appreciate other people’s acts of kindness. What I’d say is we’ve got the brojo Facebook group for members. And it’s really like geeky you guys can share your ideas in there about what it means to be giving, you can try things and share it. You know, I tried to come up with examples all the time, one of the ones that will really help you snap out of us is giving through confrontation. So one of the few types of giving that nice guys just really struggle with because they don’t see it as giving. They think setting boundaries and telling people off and giving negative feedback is somehow bad and painful. But you’ll know from your own experience getting like negative feedback, some of the sometimes it’s like helpful thing that someone can do for you. I remember when I read the book No more Mr. Nice Guy. That was a painful fucking read for me. That was I just been cut open and exposed every page. I was like, Man, this guy’s got my number. I’m so full of shit. He’s just calling me out. Like everything I thought I did for good reason. He’s showing me that I don’t. It’s undeniable. He just just it was it was so hard to read that book. I mean, I hit it on my iPad. And I’d like whatever it’s like flick one page. And then I’d have to put the book down like five minutes just to recover from the page, and then pick it up again. It was so hard. That was absolutely an act of kindness and writing that book. It felt like being kicked in the nuts, but it was much better than him saying, Hey, you’re doing well keep doing what you’re doing. That was the worst thing someone could do for me. All those people always laughed at my jokes and told me how funny I was and how Kinder was and how nice I was. They weren’t helping me. If the few people who did confront me, like the girl who told me that my self deprecating humor made me unattractive? You know, and the guy said, the reason I’m not promoting is because you don’t stand up for yourself enough. Those people helped me. So as a nice guy, one of the things you can learn is confronting people on their unhelpful behavior might be the best thing to happen to them all year. You want to really give to people take a risk, whether don’t do the safe thing where they get off things are pleasurable emotion and you’re such a good guy. But do the thing where they might actually hate you, but it’s good for them. I’ll give you a great example of this. I always remember this heuristic availability bias. I was interviewed. I was having an initial a coaching session with a girl. And she was just complaining, complaining about how hard her life was how disadvantaged she was on and on and fucking on. And I let this go for a bit. And then I just kind of said, look, I’ve got a call out what I see here, which is you really playing the victim card, you know, you kind of really selling yourself the story that you’ve been hard done by so that you don’t have to kind of do anything about it. Now, the conversation continued after that, like nothing had happened. But I got an email the next day, and she was fucking furious. Like after I said that, and she wasn’t even listening for the rest of the coaching calls. She was just fuming. Apparently, the email was like scrolling. It was like a novel of just absolute outrage. So she was very, very, very upset with me. And needless to say, she never ended up working with me long term, of course. But what was really interesting that Ryan at the end of the email, it’s kind of like postscript, she said, You are right, though. I was like, Ah, that’s good. She hates me. She’ll never speak to me again. But someone finally told her what she needed to hear. And she knew it was true. Now, maybe they had no effect on it. But I bet you it was more helpful than all the people confirming that she’s a victim, and keeping us stuck in that pointless loop that she wasn’t, you know. So what I’d suggest to you, if you’re really not sure whether you’re nice or not, you know, if you’re nice for the right reasons, is make sure that you can be confrontational. Because once you know that you can be confrontational, then you’ll be much more certain about the, the intentions behind your niceness, if you know that, when you’re being nice to someone that you can also be mean to them if you need to be. And you’ve proven that to yourself, then you can trust when you’re being nice to someone. You can trust positive feedback when you know you can give negative feedback to and this goes both ways. Like somebody will be able to trust you, if they get both from you. As you’re always like, if you’re gonna if you’ve got a partner, and say, you know, you’re, you’re so beautiful, you’re beautiful all the time. Everything you wear is beautiful, everything you do is perfect, you are a perfect person, they’re not going to believe that. But if occasionally you say man, I fucking hate it when you do that. Or you know, I don’t like it, that dress that you’re wearing, I prefer the other one. They’re much more likely to believe the other positive stuff you say, because they know that you’re capable of saying things that might upset them. So they don’t have to doubt that you’re trying to keep them happy, you know? Oh, went off on a rant and now but it’s it’s a big subject. It’s really hard for a nice guy to know why he’s being nice once this kind of nice guy syndrome is exposed to him. So make sure you can be mean not in a try to hurt people way just in a brutal honesty way. Go out there and have small confrontations tell someone you’ve got too much work. Tell someone they’re invading your space, or they’re messaging you too much or whatever. Tell someone you like them, even though they might react badly to that. Do the little things we know like I definitely didn’t do that for them. Like, I knew that was going to upset them. But it was the right thing to do. Then when you do something nice for them, you’ll be able to trust that it was for the right reasons, because you’re capable of the other thing. Darren says do you stop intrusive or negative thoughts since they can’t be trusted through mindfulness, any techniques? I do do mindfulness meditation as part of my morning routine, or I try to kind of inconsistent with it. And I do believe that contributes. Because what I’m doing essentially what that is not I’m not trying to fight against the thoughts. I’m just trying to focus on what’s real, because the thoughts aren’t, right. So mindfulness meditation is a good practice. Just constantly bring yourself back to the present moment. If you look up Sam Harris meditation, he’s got a great guided audio meditation that I use. And what I do is when the thoughts are coming up as to realize it’s like clouds in the sky, they can happen. But I’ve got shit to do. Like it’s action that matters. And so I’ve got to train myself to keep bringing back to what is the action I’m doing? What is the action I’m doing? So when the thoughts come in, just ask yourself, What am I doing right now? And keep doing that and make sure that the answer to that question is something you’re proud of. Something that you know is the right thing to do. Even right after one of those actions, just go do another one to get back from the Germany like definitely went to the gym, and your brains like year but you should have lifted more or blah blah, blah. Okay, what am I doing right now? I am resting as resting the right thing to do. Yes. Okay, I’ll continue resting Just keep checking in with your behavior. Like I said, don’t fight against the nice, the not good enough story because that just turns the volume up, you’ll know this. I do have a again, there’s a video in the brojo database on the on the effect of diffusion, which is a, I’ve got about four different color flag thought management techniques, we diffuse from your thoughts, when you see them as just thoughts, and you play little games with them to kind of prove to yourself that they’re not real, they just thought sort of thing. And so there’s some very practical things here. But honestly, I think for me, the the most powerful factor in dealing with negative thoughts is just understanding cognitive biases. And learning how to be skeptical about my thoughts, not fight against them, just question them. You know, in my thoughts is, like, let’s say, I’ve got like, no money in my bank account, my thought goes on or you’re broke, you’re gonna fucking end up homeless. I was go really? Am I homeless? You know, have I ever been homeless? Well, the answer is actually, yes, there was a period of time where I had nowhere to live, I was sleeping in a car. But I’m here now. So I survived that. So even if I am going to be homeless, I’ll probably survive it. So the evidence I just challenged him like, really isn’t that bad? Even if I do end up homeless? Is it that bad? Will I not be able to figure that situation out? based on evidence from my past? You know, it’s just this idea. I just keep challenging the truthfulness of it. It says, Oh, you didn’t get the job. It’s like, okay, I didn’t get the job. But is that really a big deal? Did I die? You know, has the world come crashing down, where my bank accounts me, I often nursing, I look up in my ceiling, I go, Well, I’ve still got a roof over my head. That’s one. And then I’ll actually walk and go and look in my fridge. It’ll be like, there’s enough food to get me through the next meal. There’s too, so I might not have money in my bank account, but I’m not at zero yet. So I don’t deny the thought, Yes, I’m broke. I just deny the like, amplification of it. So yeah, I’m broke, but I’m not dead. So let’s just chill the fuck out a bit. Yeah. You know. And But yeah, if you, if you go on the brojo, website, Darren, and type in diffusion, or just type that word into the chat here. And everyone, look up that word diffusion. I’ve got some Mind Control techniques, little practices you can make when they’re not good, my story gets a bit loud, and you just can’t fight it with action, and you’re getting a bit panicky and anxious and depressed. There’s some things you can do to just kind of bring yourself back to reality they’re there in us again, do you add more weight to ones that come back over longer periods of time, with catalysts that you may have identified? Whenever you’re saying they hold on, do you add more weight to ones that come back over longer periods of time? Can you give me an example of what you mean by that? Do you mean kind of not good enough, those that are more common and frequent? Sure, Glenn, you gotta run with thanks for being here, mate. Appreciate it. See you soon. All right. Darren, to get back to me on that. But I think we’ll start wrapping it up here. So Darren says Like if I keep questioning my physique, so look into that, definitely not to do this one of those biases. Again, we your brains giving something Wait, because it comes up a lot. But that’s actually not evidence of importance. You know, it’s not more or less important, it’s just more or less easier to remember or easier to think of. Just because it’s easy to think of doesn’t mean it’s important. And that’s the point of like one of those cognitive biases is there just because something comes up a lot and you feel really strongly about it. That’s not actually proof of anything. It just means it comes up a lot and you feel strongly about it. In the story. You’re looking at your physique and go Why am I dead yet? Do I have enough strength and mobility to do what I need to do? Does my body stop me from living by my values? Those are the way that’s how I challenge it. You know? For those of you still listening, and like I said, if you’re interested in more of these kinds of things, you can join the brojo community free for a month to check everything out. I’ll send through an email that details what comes with it. And again for the first 10 of you who get in touch Dan Arbor brojo.co.nz Id free coaching session with me on whatever subjects you want to bring up. Hopefully someone did have a nice guy recovery because that’s my favorite, but we can talk about anything. Let’s I want to thank you guys for showing up from the diehards, who stayed to the end. Really appreciate you being here. And I really hope it was valuable in some way for you. And I’m more than happy to hear your feedback, positive or negative, and facting be confrontational. If you want to practice some shit. You can send me through what you didn’t like. But if you want to validate me and pat me on the back, I won’t say no to that. I appreciate you guys being here. I really do. I love talking about this stuff. I’m happy to talk about it any time. Get in touch with me. I will see you guys all for the next one. Whenever the hell that’s going to be Cheers.