The year was 2019 and there I was. Complaining about my job, my love life and my lack of interesting hobbies:
- My employer didn’t understand my potential and had me completing remedial tasks for a low wage in London.
- Women didn’t give me a chance even though I’m a great guy!
- My friends never wanted to do anything new. When we meet up, we just go to the same bars and have the same regurgitated conversations.
My life wasn’t living up to my own expectations. And I could list every single person who was to blame. Obviously my own name was NOT on this list. But it should have been!
My life changed when I bought Robert Glover’s No More Mr Nice Guy and realised I had the psychology of a Nice Guy. After four days of binge-reading, I finally realised my issue. I had to start taking responsibility for my life and fixing the things I didn’t like.
The Nice Guys we’re referring to act in certain ways to manipulate others and get what they want. All while holding up the badge of honour for being a “Nice Guy”. Of course this isn’t a fruitful strategy, especially not in healthy relationships.
In this post we’ll discuss the 11 steps you need to take to stop being a Nice Guy. Let’s just right in!
1. Learn to put your needs first
The first thing you need to do to recover from Nice Guy Syndrome is learn to put yourself first!
Despite how counter-intuitive it may seem, it’s healthy to have needs.
Mature people make their own needs a priority. Putting yourself first increases the likelihood of getting what you need and want in love, work and life.
When recovering Nice Guys get their own needs met, they can finally begin to give people what they really need.
The clear parallel here is oxygen masks on a plane. You should always put your mask on before trying to help others. You can’t help anyone if you haven’t gotten your own needs met first.
Five rules summarise the role of needs in everyday life.
- Having needs is part of being human.
- Mature people make satisfying their own needs a priority.
- We should always be able to ask others clearly and directly for help in meeting our needs.
- Other people want to help us meet our needs.
- The world is a place of abundance. Everyone can get their own needs met.
Once we begin to treat ourselves with the respect and approval we would otherwise crave from others, we approach life in a completely different way. We finally learn to please ourselves.
Recovering Nice Guys who put their own needs first become less needy and as a result more attractive.
2. Understand what you do for other people and why
Every recovering Nice Guy needs to take a step back and understand what they’re doing for other people – their partner, friends, family, even strangers! Now compare this effort with what you’re doing to help yourself.
Nice guys usually spend too much time helping others.
That can be a big issue for a few reasons. First of all, it’s time and energy you should spend on your personal development and satisfying your needs.
Prioritising others’ needs often also results in toxic, co-dependent relationships.
It’s important to understand that people don’t want a solution.
They’re not expecting you to solve their problems, they usually just want someone to listen. And unfortunately you can’t be fully present listening if you’re trying to solve every issue they bring up.
The moral for Nice Guys here is to spend more time understanding and satisfying our own needs and less time trying to please others.
Once we’ve learned to get our own needs met, we can start helping others in more fulfilling ways.
We’re fulfilled when we help others because we truly want to. NOT because we want something in return.
3. Learn to please yourself
When Nice Guys begin pleasing themselves, they can finally begin to experience the intimacy and connection they always craved from others.
Nice Guys can learn to please themselves in 5 ways.
- Identify all the ways you seek approval from others.
- Prioritise taking good care of yourself above all else.
- Give yourself positive affirmations (which is also a core theme in the Miracle Morning system).
- Spend extended periods of time alone to reflect on what you want without catering to anyone else.
- Reveal yourself to safe people who can help you reflect on your Nice Guy tendencies.
Whenever you feel the urge to cater to someone else’s needs, ask yourself these three questions:
- What do I want?
- What feels right to me?
- What would make me happy?
Asking ourselves these questions can help us learn to please ourselves first.
4. Take care of yourself and your development
Learning to approve of ourselves is another key goal for recovering Nice Guys.
Many Nice Guys grow up with a sense of toxic shame. Approving of ourselves comes in several forms from taking care of our health to personal development and rejuvenation.
A few ideas for learning self-approval include exercising, going for walks and fun physical activities.
It can also help to eat healthy food, get enough sleep. Also make sure you make enough time to relax, play, meet friends and goof off. These are all core activities in our post on effective rejuvenation.
A daily reflection routine or meditation practice will help you get to the root of how you try to please others and what you can do to treat yourself.
You can even get a massage or simply listen to music you love.
Make time for the activities that are good for you and you’ll notice a huge change in your mental and physical health.
When we start doing things for ourselves, our minds subconsciously tell us that we are valuable. After all, we’re putting in all this effort to take care of ourselves, so we must be worth it!
5. Reclaim your personal power
The Nice Guy Syndrome is a powerless paradigm.
Though we live in a chaotic world, Nice Guys believe life should be smooth and easy. They believe that if they do everything right, their lives will be perfect.
But sometimes life is difficult. Oftentimes, The Obstacle is the Way.
We need to learn to focus on what we can control and embrace our fate.
Personal power is a state of mind where a person is confident they can handle whatever may come. Reclaiming our personal power comes down to surrendering to reality, expressing our feelings and overcoming our fears.
Surrender to reality
The idea of surrendering to reality is letting go of what you can’t change & changing what you can.
The Stoics created the dichotomy of control framework with this exact purpose. By accepting that some things are not up to us, we have more energy to focus on the things that are up to us.
Focusing on things in our control and accepting fate helps us develop inner peace. Approach life in this way as an experiment for learning, growth & creativity.
Express your feelings
We need to express our feelings to be true to ourselves. After all, our emotions are the realest things we will ever experience.
The amount of food in our fridge or money in our bank account pales in comparison to how we feel about food and money. Or in other words the threat of starvation and poverty.
Be honest with yourself and the people around you. Express your feelings honestly to fully reclaim your personal power.
Face your fears
In addition to expressing our feelings, facing our fears helps us reclaim our personal power and live our best lives. Robert Glover says that many different things can cause suffering.
Expending energy trying to control the uncontrollable ultimately causes anxiety. There are so many things we can do in life. So why do we spend so much time worrying about things that we can’t control or will ever happen?
The Stoic To Do list is a great exercise to help us understand what we should be focusing on.
Not finishing what we start is another cause of suffering. This might seem simple on the surface, but it signals deeper feelings.
Are you the type of person who doesn’t do what they say they’ll do? Or do you have poor judgment when you start new projects?
For example, avoiding new situations and staying with what’s familiar causes suffering because it keeps people in their same patterns and routines. What we fear most is often what we need most: change.
Making bad situations worse by doing more of what hasn’t worked will not help.
7. Break your Nice Guy tendencies
Nice Guys often try to create a smooth, problem-free life for themselves in several ways:
They may value doing things “right” and always playing it safe. This helps them feel safe. They may spend their relationships anticipating and fixing problems, while never trying to “rock the boat” or become a burden to anyone else.
Nice Guys deceive themselves and other people by using covert contracts. By acting nice to someone, they might think they have earned the right to their companionship. But that’s not how relationships work.
Many Nice Guys try to control & manipulate others by care-taking and pleasing them. They can withhold information and repress feelings to make sure other people don’t have negative feelings about them.
These are all habits that recovering Nice Guys need to stop doing. Nice Guys crave other people’s approval.
A well-integrated male knows that he’ll never please everyone. All he can do is follow his own principles to live the life he wants to live.
Have Integrity & Set Boundaries
A large part of overcoming the Nice Guy syndrome comes down to respecting ourselves more and setting better boundaries.
Firstly, we have to develop integrity. We should know how much we’re worth and avoid placing ourselves beneath others. For example, Nice Guys often find themselves acting as the lightning rod in many relationships.
The Nice Guy might act indifferently and allow his partner to act abusively toward him. He might think this indifference signals that he is actually just emotionally mature and shows how nice a guy he truly is.
However this dishonest behaviour is fear-based, as Nice Guys are worried of losing the relationship. Ultimately, this indifference signals that his partner can continue acting this way toward him.
We regain our integrity by setting clear boundaries. This is a fundamental skill that involves clarifying to people what you won’t tolerate.
Nice guys often reinforce behaviours they find most intolerable.
Overcoming Nice Guy syndrome involves telling your partner how you feel and clarifying your worth. After all, you can always leave tomorrow if you’re not treated with the respect you deserve.
8. Reclaim your masculinity
Contrary to some of the prevailing sentiments of the last few decades, it is ok to be a man!
Of course, feminism has been a great movement for women’s rights. But we hardly ever talk about how the movement might negatively impact men.
From a historical perspective, two significant changes have occurred in society since the end of World War II that we need to point out.
Firstly, boys are more disconnected now from their fathers and other healthy male role models. That’s because men go to work, while boys go to school, where most of the teachers are women.
Secondly, boys have grown up seeking external validation from women. This has resulted in boys growing up with a female definition of what it means to be a man.
Nice guys tend to feel disconnected from other men. They might even feel disconnected from their own masculinity.
Masculinity is the part of a man that helps him survive — both evolutionarily and in modern society.
Positive masculine traits include:
- Persistence
- Discipline
- Integrity
- Courage
- Strength
- Passion
This definition of masculinity usually differs from Nice Guys who aim to repress their inner masculinity. They tend to associate masculinity with more negative traits like aggressiveness, destructiveness and brutality.
How to Reclaim Your Masculinity
Nice Guys can take a few steps to reclaim their masculinity.
First learn to connect with other men. It’s important to understand what masculinity means experientially.
Next aim to find healthy male role models. Role models can help us learn what traits we might need to work on and improve to become well-integrated males.
Ultimately it helps to reexamine your relationship with your father. Many Nice Guy tendencies start during childhood as survival mechanisms. Understanding how you relate to your father may uncover some of the reasons behind your Nice Guy behaviour.
9. Embrace the right mindset in intimate relationships
Nice Guys usually have a hard time connecting intimately with others for several reasons.
Whether it’s the inherent toxic shame or the childhood relationship dynamics they recreate in dysfunctional relationships, Nice Guys tend to perpetuate an unsatisfying cycle of habits and results.
They may simply be “bad enders” and remain in toxic relationships long after their expiration dates. In other cases Nice Guys remain subconsciously monogamous to their mothers.
Learn Intimacy
Intimacy is the result of knowing yourself, knowing another person and being known by that person. It’s vulnerable and honest. There are no walls or deception. This is true intimacy.
Nice Guys are terrified of intimacy because they’ve worked their entire lives to become what they think others want them to be. All while trying to hide their perceived flaws. Nice Guys can improve their relationships by following a few principles.
Nice Guys can start healthy relationships by approving of themselves and putting themselves first. Revealing their vulnerabilities to safe people will help them learn the skills necessary for intimacy.
Nice Guys stop victimising themselves by eliminating covert contracts, being upfront with others and taking responsibility for their own needs. Expressing their true feelings helps Nice Guys learn to develop integrity and set healthy boundaries.
Ultimately Nice Guys need to learn to embrace their masculinity.
Strategies for Happy & Healthy Relationships
Follow three simple tips to develop better love relationships.
- Focus on the relationship, not your partner. The relationship should improve the lives of everyone involved.
- Don’t reinforce undesirable behaviours. Make it known when your partner’s actions rub you the wrong way.
- If something isn’t working, try something different.
Healthy traits to look for when starting a new relationship include passion, integrity, happiness, intelligence, sexual assertiveness, financial responsibility and a commitment to personal growth.
These are all signs that your prospective partner is psychologically healthy and mature.
10. Discover passion & purpose in your life
If there were no limits on your life…
- Where would you live?
- What kind of work would you do?
- What would you be doing in your free time?
- What would your home and surroundings look like?
This is a profound point that goes far beyond relationships and masculinity. Instead, how do you want to live your life?
Nice Guys tend to underachieve in life and work because:
- They’re afraid
- They have a distorted self-image
- They’re trying to “do things right”
- They’re rying to do everything themselves
Nice Guys often don’t live up to their full potential because “trying to do it right” robs them of their creativity and productivity. Unfortunately, striving for perfection keeps Nice Guys focused on their imperfections.
Seeking external validation and approval keeps Nice Guys stuck in mediocrity, rather than following their inner purpose.
Trying to hide flaws and mistakes prevents Nice Guys from taking risks or trying something new.
Following rules makes Nice Guys rigid, cautious and fearful.
Nice Guys self-sabotage by wasting time, making excuses, not finishing projects, care-taking other people, getting caught up in chaotic relationships, procrastinating and not setting clear boundaries.
Break these patterns by first taking a moment to understand how you live your life. Are you satisfied? Or does it feel like something’s missing?
11. Have a more fulfilling life
If you’re a recovering Nice Guy, spend some time thinking about yourself.
Identify your passion and outline the steps you need to take to achieve it. Then work on it. That’s how personal development works.
Identify your fears and approach them head-on. Don’t let your fears limit your direction in life.
Chart your own path and let go of trying to “do things right”. Instead, create your own rules, follow your passion and learn to get what you truly want.
Learn to ask others for help. Respectable people won’t look down on your for not knowing something. Instead, they’ll respect you for trying to grow and improve.
At the end of the day, you need to identify any of your own behaviour that may be self-sabotaging before you can change anything. This is the moment you start taking responsibility for your own life.
Deprivation Thinking leads Nice Guys to believe there is only so much to go around. And if someone already has a lot, there is less for them. However, Abundance Thinking helps men understand that whatever one man can do, another man can do.
Take responsibility for creating the kind of life you really want, and you can finally build the life you’ve always wanted.
11 steps to stop being a Nice Guy
If you think you might be a Nice Guy and want a way out, start by identifying all the ways you try to please others. Do you go out of your way to prioritise other people’s needs over your own?
You need to learn to please and approve of yourself to achieve the life you always wanted. As a result we learn to reclaim our personal power, surrender to reality and harness our feelings and fears.
By setting clear boundaries and acting with integrity, we can finally have the love and intimacy we’ve always wanted. We can develop our own personal roadmap to have a more fulfilling life by understanding what it is we want.
Overcoming Nice Guy tendencies comes down to putting yourself first.
Learn more about Nice Guy concepts with Mind & Practice.