No More Mr. Nice Guy Treatise - Part 1
How to stop idolizing the approval of others and gain self-confidence to get and do what you want
In college, I was a young Christian in a hostile world. I had left my family’s metaphysics and lack of religion behind. I attended a conventional secular liberal university. My family was neither accepting nor interested in my Christian faith, and my university believed in humanistic therapeutic deism. I was a spiritual orphan. All of my political and religious views changed overnight when I entered college and it went the opposite direction of most people my age. I didn’t have a spiritually accepting home or environment. Through grace and providence, I didn’t know I was about to start my journey to become a free and independent man. Through the hostility of my surroundings, I began to think for myself, and I got one of the most remarkable pieces of advice in my life:
You don’t have to be friends with everyone.
Due to forces outside my control, I was forced into a position to defend what I believed to the people I loved and cared for. I wasn’t in friendly territory but deep behind enemy lines. I had to find a way to survive, socialize, grow, and stand up for myself while maintaining relationships with people I differed with. I had to kill my “nice guy” to become a man of courage and principle. I had to become a good man.
Our culture and society heavily impress and teach each generation, particularly boys, to be “nice”. What was helpful to children who don’t have profound maturity or serious intelligence is now overapplied and utilized by adults, particularly men. Men in our culture today act like children and are incapable of facing the harsh reality of the world. They never transition from the playground rules of “being nice” to get what you want to the fact of humanity’s fallen and broken condition. Due to mismatched expectations and lack of agency, “nice guys” have become deeply unhappy pushovers who accomplish little to nothing. Being the social definition of “nice” robs a man of his life energy and vitality because they operate from a place of internalized fear and distorted failure. They don’t understand why they are not living the life they want based on what they have been told. This breeds exhaustion, a sense of defeat, and hopelessness that expresses itself in addictions and self-destructive pathologies like video games, pornography, and drugs. Nice guys have been given lousy tooling, advice, and deeply flawed intellectual frameworks of self-loathing, approval, passiveness, and self-effacing behavior as the means to success instead of confidence, courage, masculinity, and integrity.
I want to liberate men from the “nice guy syndrome” and have them discover who they are, be proud that they are uniquely designed and gifted, and stop the psychological damage of idolizing approval and manipulation through passivity and compliance. The tricky thing about thwarting these behaviors and embracing goodness over niceness is the brutal simplicity of the first step - stand up for yourself, have courage and be responsible. Making the decision to act is the most challenging part, but the actual outcome of the decision tends to be small. It is a significant juncture because you are deciding to no longer embrace the never-ending pathological cycle of being nice and seeking constant approval. You are finally being understood and accepted for your decisions and stopping the cycle of violence against yourself and those you love.
At the end of this series, I hope you stop being a “nice guy” or disciple others to stop being “nice guys”. Help men choose to become “good men” instead. I still do this daily for other men in life and I don’t regret it even when the seasons get hard. The outcome is so rewarding that any hardship or storm is worth the wait and pain for another brother-in-arms to become who they are meant to be.
Victims never succeed.
I will be pulling from some of my favorite resources - “No More Mr. Nice Guy”, Enneagram, Three Neurotic Solutions, Dennis Prager, and The Bible. No More Mr. Nice Guy has inspired a lot of my series. It is by far the most concise on how to kill the “nice guy” quickly and easily, but the book has moral shortcomings that I won’t address in my series. I will also be pulling from my seminary(s) training, disciplining over 100 men since I became a Christian, being discipled by wise and righteous men continuously since I was 19, helping plant two churches on opposite sides of the country, helping save countless marriages, assisting divorcees in remarrying, and reading original source work from every significant philosophical stream to impact our culture. I also read parenting books for fun despite not having kids, which is weird until you see that we are all encountering more boys than men today.
Series Outline
This will be a beast of a treatise, so I broke it up into several sections I will publish over the coming days.
Introduction and Core Ideas
What Is The “Nice Guy Syndrome”?
Approval Idolization - Desires a constant need for approval creates a self-destructive pathology
Conflict Avoidant - Idolizing the approval of others means problems are avoided and bitterly unresolved
Giving with Hidden Motives - Generosity with strings leading to constant disappointment and exhaustion
Unspoken Contracts and Rules - Not expressing what they need or want based on fear
Toxic Shame - Toxic guilt fuels the constant need for approval from others and a lack of self-respect
False Reality of Victimization - A deep desire for a world that will never be real and consequently feels like a victim when it doesn’t occur
Poverty Mindset - Doesn’t make decisions based on limitless growth and abundance but fear and approval
Hides Feelings and Faults - Ashamed of being fully known and believes he is a fraud
Fear of Failure - Failures are seen as a sign of being a fraud over learning and growing
Stubborn Destructive Relationship Cycles - Chooses a cycle of appeasement based on fear of abandonment and creates failed relationships
Unhealthy Partners - Chooses intimate relationships that are emotionally unavailable and will lead to self-destruction
Broken Boundaries - Inability to assert himself well without hurting others and fails at setting up boundaries to protect loved ones
Fails at Reconciliation - Avoids conflict from toxic shame to the point of damaging healthy relationships
Obsessed Self-Righteous Fixers - Desires unhealthy relationships that need fixing and refuses to take care of themselves
“Nice” means what? - The etymology of the word “nice”
Kindness crushes Niceness - Nice never appears in the Bible; Kindness is distinct and superior to being nice
Nice Jesus is a Weak Jesus - Nice will keep people in their sins; kindness will liberate people toward God
Be a Good Guy - Don't go overboard; love should be your guide
A New Hope - Liberate yourself and enjoy abundant life
What Is A “Nice Guy”?
Nice guys appear moderately successful and well put together by cultural standards. They seem to have a perfect life, but following a self-effacing solution is the source of that perfection. Nice guys believe they will get the success, attention, and affection they desire by getting more people and more people to approve of their actions with increasing doses of self-destructive compliance and submission, ending with resentment, anger, confusion, and exhaustion. Nice guys know they are not good enough by their internalized benchmarks and standards, but they cannot healthily express their disappointment. They hide and compartmentalize their life based on fear of anger from others, rejection, and abandonment. This makes them internally frustrated, enraged, and dissatisfied with their situation. At the same time, they also feel like a victim, powerless, impotent, and hopeless. They fear standing up for themselves because their operating system is based on approval and self-flagellation. As soon as they express confidence and responsibility, they believe they will lose control of the situation and potentially be abandoned. They are terrified to speak up because they will be “found out” as some sort of “fraud”. Nice guys won’t say what they think and defend themselves due to potential criticism that makes them feel like an undeserving fraud. They are fearful of not meeting up to cultural expectations and never-ending social status objectives. They don’t take risks and bet on themselves because they fear they will muck it up when it matters most at the finish line and be known as a failure by others. Nice guys are afraid of actual success.
In their mind, the means of being an alpha male (what they want) is to be a beta male (what they are doing). They are a real-life “Free Guy” - a purposeless existence awash in bitter generosity and blind appeasement without even a distinct name.
"Moving toward people involves an attempt to accommodate them, win their affection or approval and reduce any possibility of conflict. The primary ingredient here is compliance" - Terry D. Cooper
The following are traits I have seen in nice guys. Of course, we can see ourselves in all of these traits. Our culture has pounded into everyone an idolization of niceness over goodness, honor, and duty. Not all of these traits are wrong if controlled and moderated. The problem arises when nice guys find their identity, energy, and source of meaning in these traits.
I would focus on how many traits resonate with you to tell if you are a nice guy. If you have multiple “holy crap!” moments, you probably suffer from “nice guy syndrome”. If all of these traits apply to you, don’t lose hope and don’t worry. Curing the illness is much easier than you think.
Approval Above All Else
Nice guys are fundamentally approval-seekers. Everything they do is aimed at finding approval. Approval is the gasoline in their engine and the idol of their souls. Approval from others provides meaning and purpose like a north star for their heart.
From this prototype, they gravitate toward unhealthy people who need fixing to gain more approval at a lower entry point. They hunt down problems in others’ lives to fix them, enabling consistently irresponsible and immature behavior in others. This enablement encourages a downward cycle of abuse towards nice guys as they repeatedly see themselves as deficient and inadequate to fully “fix” the problem. Abusers perpetuate the cycle as they get rewarded with more approval and compliance with each outburst from nice guys. This implosion in trust and respect creates more opportunities for nice guys to receive validation via appeasement and approval from abusers.
Nice guys tend to focus less on relationships that don’t need constant fixing and are healthy because it exposes where they find their value. They evaluate their worth based on how much approval they are getting from their performance, so healthy relationships get less care than abusive ones. Sometimes, nice guys will cause damage to healthy relationships because they don’t think they are worthy of something that doesn’t need fixing or approval. The association between performance and approval is particularly strong in marriage and towards women.
When the approval fades, nice guys get troubled and uncertain. Their world is turned upside, and they lose focus. Nice guys will keep at it until they finally break down, have no energy, and can’t give anymore. They are dazed and feel incapable of finding reconciliation and healing.
Solution
Who cares?! That’s right, you don’t even know who cares or doesn’t, so stop and see what happens. When you stop seeking approval, you will learn not many people will or do care about you anyways. You were bending over backward for people who don’t care about you but are narcissists and domineering personalities looking for easy targets. You are wasting your time and energy. Learn to care less about what others think of you.
Those who care about you will not take advantage of your approval above all else desires. Those who do care will sacrifice for you and seek your own interests and desires over their own. A hallmark of a loving, healthy relationship is asking for your preferences or being kind in their correction when you unnecessarily seek their approval.
A simple way to stop seeking the approval of others is to write down regularly what you know to be true about yourself or affirmations from trusted relationships. Put these affirmations on your phone, note cards, or personal alerts. These quotes should be direct and straightforward like “I am good and strong”, “I am valued”, “I can be myself without fear of not being accepted”, or “You are important and loved”.
“Just about everything a Nice Guy does is consciously or unconsciously calculated to gain someone’s approval or to avoid disapproval.” - Dr. Robert Glover