Transform from Nice Guy to confident beast with my Nice Guy Recovery course
In this video, Nice Guy Recovery specialist and Confidence Coach Dan Munro gives you everything you need to know to become authentic, confident and masculine without losing your empathy and compassion. After studying Nice Guy Syndrome for more than a decade, he’s boiled it down to these top 10 areas of development:
1. Responsibility 0:14
2. Honesty 1:25
3. Confrontation 2:22
4. Bravery 3:20
5. Decisiveness 4:25
6. Leadership 5:10
7. Emotional management 6:06
8. Self Respect 7:45
9. Expressing Preferences 8:55
10. Journalling 9:45
Get in touch with Dan directly for accelerated coaching support to ensure you get past this as soon as possible and enjoy the rest of your life dan@brojo.org
Full transcript
Today I’m going to give you 10 Quick Tips with a daily practice that if you follow these for a year, you’re going to be almost fully recovered from nice guy syndrome all on your own
number one, take responsibility, not just for being a nice guy, but for your entire life. Taking responsibility is about realizing that nobody is here to save you, that if you want a good life, if you want to be a good person, that’s up to you, you’re gonna have to do that work yourself, you’re going to have to take ownership of your decision making and ownership of all the results that it’s created. Now, sure some stuff has happened to you, that’s not your fault, but it is your job to deal with it. No one is coming to rescue you. And you have to behave accordingly. A daily practice for this is to solve basically any personal problem you can, that you would usually moan about, complain about and blame somebody else for and end up not solving the problem. For example, let’s say you’re renting an apartment and there’s a stain on the bench that was left by the previous tenants. Sure they made the mess, but you’re going to clean it up because it’s your place.
Now, number two, my favorite, be more honest. Nice guy syndrome cannot survive powerful, transparent honesty. Being honest doesn’t mean just blurting out every thought and feeling that comes into your head, necessarily. But it does mean revealing the things that you usually hide in order to make people like you and in order to get approval and validation. Being more honest is about showing people who you truly are what you truly believe and what you really want, at least as much as you possibly can with your current level of bravery. Daily Practice is simply come up with one thing every day that you can reveal to someone that you’re a bit uncomfortable revealing, that you usually wouldn’t. You don’t necessarily have to go all out and say something massively controversial that will get you cancelled. You just need to say one little thing that you know, they’re probably going to react okay to, but you just don’t feel comfortable saying, for example, telling a friend that you used to have a crush on them.
Tip number three, be more confrontational. confrontation is about assertiveness, it’s about standing up for what you believe in. It’s about making it known what you would rather have happen and what crossed your boundaries and upset you or hurt you, or you believe is harmful to other people. In practice this is as simple as disagreeing on something every single day. For example, if you’re in a team meeting that you think could have been an email, just challenge the relevancy of the team meeting saying, Does this need to be a meeting? Or can we just talk about this over email.
Now part of the reason for those videos to promote my new course on Udemy Nice Guy recovery, five hours of powerful content that you can go through in your own time to go into great depth and fully recover from nice guy syndrome and become a bold, masculine confident person. see the reviews for yourself. And if you like it, buy it. And I’ll tell you what, if you get in touch with me personally dan@brojo.org I’ll send you a discount for 50% off.
Tip number four, be more brave. Bravery is about facing your fears. that old cliche of feel the fear and do it anyway. Bravery isn’t about not having fear. Not having fear isn’t bravery. It’s just not having fear. Bravery is about doing something that makes you nervous, something where you anticipate a result that you can’t handle or something that you would rather not do because it’s emotionally uncomfortable or physically difficult for you. Bravery doesn’t take much, it only has to be something you’d rather not do. Preferably something that’s good for you as well. daily practice should be pretty straightforward. Find anything that makes you uncomfortable that you’d usually avoid. Because nice guy syndrome is all about remaining emotionally stable as much as possible to all about control. Find something a little bit uncontrollable and dive into it doesn’t need to be much just needs to be something that scares you a little. For example, when you go to buy your coffee in the morning, make sustained eye contact with the barista.
Tip number five, be more decisive. Nice guys are terribly indecisive in general, because we’re afraid of upsetting people. We don’t want to do something that might cause harm to others and therefore make them not like us. So we tend to wait for a green light, we tend to wait for somebody else to make the decisions for us. And for many nice guys we have an entire life made up of decisions that somebody else made for us and are now miserable. being decisive simply means choosing for yourself without waiting for someone else to give you the go ahead, e.g. make dinner for the whole family without consulting your wife first about what you should be making.
Tip number six, lead and initiate. nice guys are notorious for the thing I call “Greenlight syndrome”, we wait for somebody else to tell us what to do, we’re constantly following so that we can be sure that we’re doing the right thing by other people’s standards. Leadership is a key crucial element to Nice Guy recovery, it’s very hard to be a people pleaser and a leader at the same time. In fact, by definition, those two rule each other out. In terms of a daily practice, this is about going first without an invitation. It’s about doing something that nobody asked you for and nobody gave you a green light or encouraged you to do. And you go first to set the model, to set the example so that somebody else could follow if they wanted to, you’re making it easy for someone else to do by doing it first. For example, tell someone that you’re attracted to them or just tell them how you feel about them, without waiting for them to do it first, without waiting for them to send you some sort of signal.
Tip number seven, manage rather than control your emotions. nice guy syndrome is all about emotional control, controlling our emotions, and controlling the emotions of others so that they don’t interrupt our emotions. It’s all about controlling the way we feel and keeping it in a nice smooth narrow band of bland emotion so that we never get too high or too low or too excited or too down or anything, we just don’t like emotions. Recovering from nice guy syndrome is about getting over that. you need to become an emotional human being. And that does not mean an emotional wreck, it does not mean becoming an absolute car crash of emotions, but a powerful person who allows and uses their emotions to their own benefit. In terms of a daily practice for people just getting into nice guy recovery in particular, this is about learning to just express emotions rather than hide them. Learning to speak almost like a child, to simply say this is how I feel, with no further explanation, no minimization, no justification, no explanation, there’s nothing to defend. You just have your emotion, you express it, and everyone moves on. For example, saying I’m stressed, or that upsets me, or I’m starting to get bored.
As I mentioned earlier, this whole video is a shameless promotion of my course, if you haven’t clicked on the link yet, just go check it out. If you don’t like it, just come back to this video or move on with your life. But I’m telling you, everything I know about nice guy recovery from over 20 years is in that course, if that course doesn’t do it for you nothing will.
Tip number eight. Respect yourself first. One of most uncomfortable things for a nice guy to do is to put their own needs first. And this discomfort leads them to make terrible decisions in their relationships, and the management of their own life. self respect is about taking care of your needs so that when you do help others, you’re coming from a place of strength. you never take care of other people’s needs before yours, because that does not serve either of you. in daily practice, this means identifying your critical needs for the day and ensuring that they are met before you start caretaking other people. preferably you don’t actually take care of other people at all, you just help when asked for assistance and even then you make sure it’s the best help they could get, which might not be your help. A great example of this is developing a morning routine. So you get up early and you take care of all your primary needs for the day, get yourself rolling in a good way before taking care of anyone else, even before taking care of your kids.
Tip number nine, express your preferences at all times. Your personality, who you really are, is a menu of preferences, what you’re for and against and what you like or dislike. And nice guys tend to hide this, we tend to kind of either pretend we don’t have preferences, or we manually override our preferences to suit the person we’re with or the group that we want to be a part of. If you can be honest about what you prefer in any given situation, you’re almost certainly recovering from nice guy syndrome. As a practice, this means you never sit on the fence and pretend that you don’t feel strongly one way or the other. And you never lie about what you prefer. Now it doesn’t mean you have to win every battle. You don’t always have to get what you want. You just have to make it known what you preferred. For example, letting the team at the office know that you think that the aircon is too cold, you’d rather have it warmer, and even if you get voted down and they keep it at that temperature at least you said something.
Tip number 10 My final tip journaling. every day journal just about being a nice guy. journal about nice guy syndrome. journal about your recovery. And I don’t mean sort of “Oh Dear Diary, I had a wonderful day”. I mean, today I did this behavior and this behavior and this behavior. And that was nice guy syndrome, that was authentic, that was confident, that one I’m not sure. And start to measure yourself as accurately and fairly as possible to see where you need to improve and where you have been improving. Daily Practice, we’re doing about five minutes a day or whatever minimum you’ll actually stick to. If you find it really hard to find time to journal, make it 30 seconds a day to say one lesson about nice guy recovery that you learned today. For example, you might say something like, today I let Sandy have the last piece of cake even though I wanted it, simply because she’s attractive. That was nice guy behavior. Or you might say something like, my dad was belittling me at the barbecue. And even though I wanted to stay silent, I spoke up and said something awkward that stopped him from doing it. And even though I was uncomfortable, I’m really proud that I finally asserted myself.
Keep doing the small things every day. And if you really want to smash it, you do all 10 Every day, we’re talking probably less than half an hour’s worth of conscious effort to tick off all 10. if you can’t do that, at least focus on two or three of your weaker areas. You know, when you hear this list and you think, “Oh, that one’s me, and that one’s really me”, then those are the ones you focus on correcting each day. And no exceptions, always do the journaling. You’re not going to make good progress if you don’t measure yourself accurately, and start to become self aware of what being a nice guy really is.
As I’ve already said, check out the course. And if you actually want to go deeper, and you want to turn this recovery from years into just a few months, get in touch with me for one to one coaching dan@brojo.org I will massively accelerate your recovery rate. But I’m sure you can do it on your own too.