No More Mr. Nice Guy

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If the nice guy’s girlfriend or wife is angry at him or thinks he is a jerk, he can take comfort in knowing his buddies think he is OK. Some of Glover’s wild speculations declared as if facts suggest a sexist dark side even lurks behind his confidence; which in turn suggests maybe we shouldn’t even be reading his advice as charitably as I have been. But there is also a lot of common sense here about accepting— and realizing—the importance of genuine honesty and mutual cooperation in building effective relationships, and of becoming the sort of person you actually like. But confidence in yourself as a person is not the same thing as self-respect, and neither of those are the same thing as “body image.

I’ve covered similar subjects before in How to Do Men’s Rights Rightly and Jordan Peterson Is a Crank. Before we evaluate any purported “psychology of men,” I have to set the foundation of where I am with respect to even just psychology.Even though I am sure it is possible to break free from the Nice Guy Syndrome without the help of a group, it is the most effective tool I know for facilitating the recovery process. Though that was written by a Mormon, and drops some references to religious things (as does Glover), none of its advice requires religious belief, as there are obvious nonreligious equivalents to everything in it, e. When a recovering nice guy begins to consciously do good things for himself, these actions imply that he must be worth something. That in mind, if you think you need help with this, the books I’d recommend actually start with Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Because of this reality, Nice Guys create adult relationships that mirror the dynamics of their dysfunctional childhood relationships. Remember, no such personality type has even been shown to exist; Glover has done no science here, just some field philosophy, proposing untested hypotheses based on some personal experiences and anecdotes. Even Covey, who started with a degree in business and whose doctorate was in religious education, studied the pertinent science of education, and his dissertation was literally on self-help literature, and his resulting book remains recommended by scientists across the spectrum of the subject. Apart from the “Paradigm” he wants you to purge from your behavioral repertoire, he never explains that there actually are things that can be true about you that are bad and that you do indeed need to change (a good life is not simply about “accepting who you are as you are,” because sometimes who you are isn’t that great, and is in fact the problem); and though he warns against it, he still does not explain well the difference between genuinely changing yourself and merely pretending (“acting” a certain way as a project of “work,” rather than as a natural expression of your real self); or how to do that (his advice consists mainly of “act this way,” rather than “become this,” and he never provides or describes or even references any of the tools needed to do the latter, which is not so simple as just flipping a script—cognitive behavioral therapy is a complex and lengthy process). And that requires showing a real interest in what they have to say about all that; and listening to them; and hearing them.Only by asking himself what he believes is right, and then doing it, does he become a man of integrity.