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- [00:01]
A
Why is people pleasing such a trap for so many of us?
- [00:07]
B
There's a long answer and a short answer. I think the short answer to that is that we have created an environment through social media really predominantly that everybody's now seeking to measure up to somebody else rather than focused on this internal locus of control where you can. You can really be vibrant on your own. But the way that we function now as a society is changed that. And everybody's comparing themselves to people that are insurmountable. And I find myself doing this too. So I worship at the altars of Alex Hermosi and James Smith and all these guys that I see millions of followers and make millions of dollars, and they're exciting and they're fun, and I'm like, how do I get to that? Rather than recognizing in myself I can just be happy with where I am. It doesn't. It's. I have a really great friend who said this to me that really resonated with people pleasing, which you don't have to hate where you are to want to be better. And when I heard that, I was like, that makes so much sense. And I think we've kind of taught people that you have to, like, almost hate the way that you show up in the world in order to want to better that. And I just. And I think that causes this idea of how do I measure up and then how do I make everyone else around me happy? Because that's really what the world is kind of built on these days.
- [01:27]
A
Yeah. Draw the line for me between that sense that we measure up, but people pleasing isn't about us. It's about optic management. It's about how other people see us. It's about prioritizing their needs over ours. Why is that important? What's that got to do with it?
- [01:47]
B
So I think it's. For me, when it was, you know, when it was more of a problem, and I would say that I'm a recovering people pleaser. It's funny, those things. It's one of those things that I don't think ever really goes away. I think you just kind of battle it. But mostly it's an overwhelming sense that you're not enough. And when you're functioning from that place, there's no way you can ever really measure up. And there's ways that you can tune that to make it better. Right. So if you have something like that. So if you have that kind of inferiority complex plus a superiority complex plus, you know, impulse control is a great example. You can do great things but, but if you just have this idea that I'm not enough and that's sort of the main track in the background, then you're always trying to measure up to something that doesn't actually exist. So in, in so often this comes from, you know, it's kind of a pivot point where you have like one parent that was super involved in your life and then one parent that wasn't. Maybe they were abusive. Very similar to kind of the nice guy narrative where you, you show up trying to gain acceptance and love because the only, and the only way you know how to do that is to either not show up, like to be completely invisible or to make everyone else happy. Right. Or to keep everyone else calm or to constantly be in a peace, peacekeeping, you know, frame of mind. And I think that's where people get really hung up.
- [03:12]
A
That's the one of the typical childhood situations that people pleasers would have.
- [03:18]
B
Very typical. You know, I've got, I've got one on one clients all over the world kind of coming from every, every background, you know, everything from CEO down to, you know, you know, pick a position. But the thing that I would say is the most common is generally speaking, one parent made, it was an enmeshment issue. So one parent made that child the center of their world and then the other didn't. So, and so what that teaches them is that, you know, to make this other person happy means they won't get abandoned to. If they don't get abandoned, they'll get their needs met. And then this kind of just plays out in childhood. I forget who said it to me, but it was, they called it a transference. So it's like you developed a childhood coping strategy and you kept it all the way through your adulthood and now it's not serving you and nobody really knows what to do with that. So then you have to figure out like, what do I do now to make my life better?
- [04:12]
A
What behaviors should we look out for that suggest you might be a people pleaser? How would you get us to self diagnose.
- [04:23]
B
Without sounding like a real son of a bitch? Most of the time people pleasers are liars. And that's probably the most common denominator among all of the people I've ever worked with. Is this dishonesty in just. And how they show up in general? Right. So lying is one of the bigger things, but you have to then identify what is a lie, you know, so saying yes when you mean to say no, well, that's dishonest, right? Committing to things you don't want to go to, well, that is also dishonest. And so when I work with people and they, and they kind of realize, oh my God, I lie all the time. And it's not that you're lying to the person on purpose, it's not in this kind of malicious way. It's just you don't even recognize the damage you're doing to your own well being. And then all of the sudden you have no free time. That's one of the things that you can look for is like, are you lacking free time? Like, is your calendar always full? If you're constantly doing that, are you low on money because other people have needs? Right. Are you prioritizing the wants and needs of other people above your own? Well, that's virtuous in many ways, right? But again, it's like balance. If you constantly do that and never prioritize yourself, then what ends up happening to you is you're, you're broke, you're alone, you feel miserable. One of the things that I used to say is that I never got invited to barbecues when I was a people pleaser. Like my friends would have parties and I'd never get invited to those things. They'd want to hang out with me for lunch at the office, right. Or they'd want me to help them do something, but they, they never really engaged with me. And so I think one of the core components that I see with people is that if they're truly in that people pleasing mind frame, they have a lack of connected relationship because it's, it's just a masking. I mean, in, in many ways it's similar to narcissism in that way is that you can't really get to know that person. Which is why. So the way I found you was you had kept identifying yourself as a people pleaser and I'm like, ah, you don't come off that way to me then.
- [06:34]
A
Oh, interesting. You've got a fucking radar that's searching for people pleasers on the Internet. No, look, I mean very much self diagnosed. I'm fascinated by your work. It's been something, you know, I've spent a lot of time this year reflecting on that. I tend to put other people's needs before mine. And in many ways that can be seen as considerate, caring, altruistic, looking to bring other people up. And you know, this must be, I guess even the real gateway drug at the top of the avalanche is, well, lots of the things that you're talking about. When done by. When done consciously and effortfully, come from a place of virtue, and they're good for the world in many ways, but when you're compelled to do them, when you don't have any other choice than to do them, it takes away a lot of the virtue, and it also doesn't allow you to ever advocate for your own needs. Joe Hudson at the start of this year, and I know that you'll agree with this, he said, if I can't trust your no, I can't trust your yes. And, oh, my God, yes.
- [07:38]
B
Wow, I love that quote. I've never heard that Joe's.
- [07:41]
A
Joe's a fucking. He's a beast. But, yeah, the fact that you're not saying yes to going to the party or your friend's wedding, you simply cannot say no. And I'm not, you know, on the gradation of fucking nuclear fallout from a people pleaser. I'm nowhere near as. I'm not like, you know, the elephant's foot inside of fucking Chernobyl. But there's definitely a lot of those tendencies inside of me to put other people's needs before mine, to not advocate for my own needs, to subjugate my own discomfort in order to not make somebody else uncomfortable. This sense that if you're not okay, I'm not okay, that your emotional state is my responsibility. And, you know, I mean, this. This only came out kind of during therapy where my therapist sort of mentioned to me, you do seem to sort of put other people's needs before yours a lot. And you're kind of prepared to suffer unnecessarily, even though you could probably stop this, but the stopping it would cause a little bit of discomfort, but you're prepared to avoid a little bit of discomfort and just spread a metric ton across, you know, days and months and years. And. Yeah, that's my. That's my self diagnosis, I suppose.
- [08:53]
B
Okay, so maybe I was wrong.
- [08:57]
A
Perhaps.
- [08:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, perhaps I was. That's. That's a whole thing. So you. You spoke. Two things that are really interesting is the value of your no. I want to just touch on that. Something I've said a lot of is that it. Most people who have this kind of tendency aren't afraid to say no. They're afraid to not say yes. And so because that yes is what gives them that dopamine rush, that. That feeling of like, I did it, like, everybody loves me, everybody wants me, and then so it's that not saying yes. Like, you could. You could just say the word lima Beans. And it's going to make you feel like shit. So it's. It's not even the no. And one of the ways I show people how to do that is I'll give you a little secret from one of my boundary boot camps, but spend seven days saying no to everything. Everything. Just. Do you want to go out to lunch? No. Do you want to hang out on Saturday? No. Do you want to help me with my work project? No. Right. The answer is just no. And there's rules to the game. The rules are, you know, you have to do it for seven days. You can tell everybody you're playing to. Literally. You can illuminate it to everyone. Doesn't have to be secret. And then you can change your mind after 90 seconds.
- [10:09]
A
Oh, but you have to sit with the discomfort of the no for a minute and a half.
- [10:13]
B
Well, yeah. And it also does two things. So it, it, it changes the value system in your brain. At least it did for me, where I was like, okay, well, no doesn't really actually hurt that much. So I stopped being afraid of the word no. But it also gave me the idea that I could. Well, then I can think about what I'm trying to do. Like, do I want to actually do that? Because, you know, when you're a people pleasing kind of person. So. And I, and I do want to draw the line at some point that, you know, being agreeable and being a people pleaser, not the same. You know, I generally don't care about much stuff, so there's that. But when you start saying no, you go, okay, well, now my calendar's free and I can actually do stuff that I want to do. And I can say, you know, I really don't want to go to that party. And then you don't change your mind. Right. But you change your default answer from a yes to a no. And then that default becomes something that you can do. Which is why the fourth rule is you can only play the game for seven days. Because if I learned anything from James Clear, it's not about how long you practice something. It's the repetitions by which you do that. And you're going to repeat that action hundreds of times in a week.
- [11:17]
A
What was the second thing that you wanted to click on from what I said?
- [11:20]
B
The second. Now I've forgotten.
- [11:22]
A
That's okay. Going back. So I really wanted. I have something that's more important. Uh, the fact that people pleasers are liars, that there is a sense of inauthenticity, a malleability, a pliability that you have, which means that you're not telling the truth. And you know, it's, it's uncomfortable because again, you're saying that I should do something that upsets people more than something that's nice. It's like, well, if it's not the truth, if it's not genuinely what you believe, then which one's more virtuous? And if it's not coming from a place of genuine care and like you speaking forward, what you actually want, it is a lie. You can wrap it up however you want and say that it makes the world better and that it's coming, it's because of compassion and all the rest of it. But it's like, it's a lie, dude.
- [12:22]
B
Right, well. And so if somebody was to come to you, let's pretend you're, you're allergic to peanuts, right? And somebody says, do you want peanuts? Well, and it might hurt their feelings if you don't eat the peanuts. Are you going to eat the peanuts? Probably not, right? Because it'll kill you. But so if, if that's the case, when you think of anything that you, you dislike or genuinely don't want to do it, it's in, it's almost in the same vein because on a long enough timeline, it kills your ability to experience joy and happiness and authenticity. And then, you know, and so often I hear it like, how do I find myself? Well, so one of the core concepts, and you, you'd mentioned, you know, psychology before and I'm not a psychologist, you know, I'm just a person who's been through this and something I see in a lot of my clients is that they, they've either didn't have a ton of play in childhood or you know, so they were kind of caretakers or meeting the needs of their parents, et cetera, or they've forgotten how to play in adulthood. And because what we find is that, you know, if you don't play and you, and you don't learn, then you can't self define. If you can't self define, then you lose kind of a scope of who you are. So I actually believe know people pleasers struggle with the idea of self identity very often. And they're always asking me like, how do I find myself? And my advice is never do that. Never ever find yourself. Constantly invent the new version of you. And through self invention you find more joy. Talk to me about how to do that through play.
- [13:57]
A
Yeah, talk to me about this sort of lineage between play, self invention, self identity, how does this fit together?
- [14:04]
B
So I think I figured it out. This is a relatively new development for me. I, I have made an effort in the last 12 months to be more playful. And because I kind of lost all my whimsy. You've started a business. You know what I'm going through. I'm in year three of this thing. It's a disaster.
- [14:20]
A
Eating glass. Right.
- [14:22]
B
I'm constantly lighting myself on fire and then trying to put myself out with kerosene. It's really great. But so I really made a commitment to myself. I was gonna do more playful stuff. And I was watching kids in the park the other day, and I'm watching them play, and it occurred to me that they're not just playing to the adult. Like, to you and I, when we see kids play, what do we see? We see just fun. And, you know, they're on the jungle gym and they're, and they're doing the thing, whatever they happen to be doing, and they're going to get hurt and they're going to do whatever. But they're not playing. They're learning. They're discovering through play. Like, what are their boundaries? What can they physically tolerate? What do they like, what don't they like? And they do that by playing with each other. And then very often they're, they're putting on Personas of who they want to be. Right. So you, you know, one kid wants to be Iron man, one guy wants to be a fireman, one little girl wants to be a princess. Somebody else wants to be something else. Right. And, and through that idea of, like, self invention, that's how they start to form the idea of like, what is their, their definition of self? And I think adults don't play enough to continue that self invention process. So they lose contact with that core kid where they're like, okay, well, now who am I? Well, I don't know. You haven't spent any time inventing that.
- [15:42]
A
Yeah, that's very interesting. I've been thinking an awful lot recently about trying to find more fun in the things that I do and this sort of balance between joy and meaning. I kind of have it in my head that there's broadly two buckets of people. One are more hedonists and the other are David Goggins. And lots of people, lots of people that listen to this podcast will probably fall into the latter category. The people who like to take things seriously. They're earnest about their work. They apply efforts, they're rigorous, they pay attention, they're prepared to, you know, marshmallow test their way until the end of time.
- [16:20]
B
But.
- [16:20]
A
But as Bill Perkins says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. And more than that, not only do you continue to sort of manana, manana, put off all of the things that you're going to do to a time that never comes, you end up. You end up forgetting the reason that you're supposed to do these things. You're not doing hard things so you can do more hard things so you can do more hard. There has to be a point at which an inherent good comes through, which is some sense of joy and play and lightness and. And you end up being sort of very, very rigid and brittle in a very strange way. You're sort of stiff with the way that you go about things. You're not prepared to be flexible. You're not prepared to take on adventures in the same way. Even your adventures need to be fucking planned. Your holiday needs a massive itinerary and you need to make sure that you work twice as hard before you leave so you don't feel like a piece of shit when you're there. And, you know, all of this sort of comes together. So, yeah, the sense of play certainly resonates with me. Or the lack thereof. The difficulty in finding joy, I'm going to guess, typically, do you find with people pleasers, your clients, people that you've spoken to, that finding joy in life is something that they often find difficulty with?
- [17:31]
B
Tremendous difficulty. And it comes from so often anyway, I think it shows up in a ton of these guys and girls as like, giving to themselves feels inappropriate. It feels so they're kind of racked with shame in the same way that. So people pleasing very often can mirror addiction in terms of, you know, I would say it's North Star, which is shame. So when you're trying to make everyone around you happy, you're basically kind of always in this modality of trying to appease this inner voice that says, I'm not good enough, I'm not enough, which is toxic shame. It's like, I'm bad, I'm no good. Right? Rather than I did bad. You are bad. And when you're always trying to prove yourself as better, that means deep at your core, what is it? What do you believe it means? That I'm not enough. Right.
- [18:24]
A
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- [19:19]
B
Well, ask any addict why that they're, you know, nobody wakes up in the morning, goes great, I'm gonna do some heroin today. Like nobody's excited about that. Why do they do it? It's to bury this feeling of toxicity in themselves and then it just kind of spirals out of control. So when you're talking about somebody that is, that experiences almost a total inability to give to themselves before they give to everyone else. Yeah, it's really hard to find joy, you know, for me, God, I would have this story. I was in roofing sales. This is years ago and I've heard a lot of your stuff, by the way, on everybody should have a door knocking job or a club promoter job. And I fully agree with that sentiment because I'm not afraid of rejection in any way, shape or form. But that's probably a lie anyway, going back to, to the ideas, you know, here I was, I was, I had, I just gotten out of rehabilitation, you know, I'd sobered up and I'd done all the things, you know, my story is a pretty dark one. And I was standing in, in a warehouse store looking at televisions and I was crying like because I couldn't force myself to do this thing for myself. And I, and I had the money. This wasn't like something I had to go and, you know, take out a credit card for. I sitting on plenty of cash and my bills are paid and my rent was paid for the gear. And I mean I was good. And there I stood just, you know, sobbing because I couldn't make myself by myself. This present, because it didn't serve the purpose of making other people happy. And I did this for weeks. Weeks, like, weeks on end. I would just go stand there and be like, why can't I pull the trigger? And finally I went to my own therapist and he said to me, you know, you could just stop being a coward and buy the fucking tv. And I was like, okay, I go in and buy it. And I made him strap it to the car before I swiped my credit card so I couldn't turn back. And I think that was. That was really the first time I noticed it in myself, really. So this is back in 2019 when I really went, wow, I have a real challenge with experiencing joy. I have a bigger problem with experiencing celebration. I have a huge problem with asking for what I need. And then once I do that, I have a bigger problem with receiving it. So all of these components, I started to put it together. I'm like, wow, that sucks. Like, that's a really terrible way to live your life.
- [21:55]
A
Yeah. Permanently making yourself the second or third or fourth priority.
- [21:59]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [22:00]
A
After everybody else. So just dig in a little bit more to the real costs of being a people pleaser. Why is it a bad thing? What does it do to your. You mentioned well being earlier on. What does it do to the pleaser themselves?
- [22:13]
B
So it deprioritizes a lot of things. So I'd say the first is your physical well being will take a backseat to everybody else's needs. And so the first thing I started to do was get in shape. And I been listening to your show for years now, and every single person that comes on says, yeah, everything changed for me when I get shaped. So here's one more to the left. Right. I'll be the 7,000th person to say that on this show. Um, so the first thing I noticed was that I had been deprioritizing the really the core of what my body needs. So I was eating poorly because I didn't have enough time to cook for myself. I was, you know, I wasn't going to the gym. I wasn't, you know, taking yoga classes. I wasn't stretching. I wasn't meditating. I wasn't doing any of any of the cool shit I do now. So that's kind of the first thing, is that you notice that your health is suffering. So the second and probably more important is that your emotional well being takes a hit every day. Like, you always kind of feel like you're behind the eight ball in where you're going. I used to. It was really weird for me, but I never felt like I could catch up to anybody. So I think you're 35. I'm 44. Um, if I was in a room with you, I would feel like I was younger than you. And I have no idea why that was. Like, everybody was a titan to me. Everybody was better than me, and I was constantly trying to measure up. So when you think of what that does to your mental health, it just puts you in a position that you always feel like you're in the lurch and you can never be what you want to be. And then financially, it'll ruin you. You know, I would give away. I would give away money to my mom. I'd give away money to my girlfriend. I'd give away money to anybody that needed it. And I'm watching my bank account dwindle, and I'm bailing people out of jail, and I'm doing everything I can to make everybody else's life easier because I thought that's what it meant to get love. And so when you consider the implications of how over a long timeline, how it will impact you, it will literally take your life away. The average people pleaser that I work with is. Is either at or about to be burnt out at 38, like, completely burned out. And it's really kind now, very often they'll burn out and they can continue to keep going because, well, they have responsibility and they have, you know, so entrepreneurs are really great at this. We're awesome people pleasers very often because we get to a place where, like, the customer is always right and we're trying to make money in that first three years, especially where you really have to have boundaries. We really have to know what you're doing. If you aren't careful, you can go down that road really quickly. But people that have high levels of success as people pleasers generally are burnt out and they're just kind of burying it and their misery is growing and their income is rising, and they're like, why aren't I getting happy? Why aren't I getting happy? Why aren't I getting happy? Paychecks get bigger and it just keeps expanding. So it's like that foam you see, that they make. And have you ever seen this stuff, um, where they make this, like, super foam and they pour it out. Oh.
- [25:31]
A
And it goes all over. It goes all over someone.
- [25:32]
B
Room.
- [25:33]
A
Yeah. Garden. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have seen that.
- [25:35]
B
That's. That's kind of what I feel like people pleasing does is that it, it starts out as this small problem, but it becomes very explosive toward the end. And then what you see is somebody with no boundaries, no. A self image that's generally pretty flawed or wildly inaccurate. You see people that are depressed that are, you know, kind of. And they'll come to me and say, you know, I'm living in my own misery. I'm like, well, stop. Like just don't do that anymore. And you know, and they look at me like, that's possible. Yeah. You can choose to not do this. And it's. I think the biggest challenge is, is overcoming the idea too that the opposite of people pleasing isn't being an asshole. I think there's this, there's, it's this polarized thinking that, you know, you see it in American politics a lot. You see it in what? You see it in America a lot. And, you know, it's like it's either left or right, right or wrong, black or white, and it's not that, you.
- [26:39]
A
Know, so people pleasing our right, you.
- [26:42]
B
Know, why would you try and find the tipping point between two wildly toxic extremes? They're on the same through line. They both come from I'm not enough. So move up to I'm enough, and then let's see where you land.
- [26:55]
A
How can someone distinguish between being considerate and sacrificing their identity to please others?
- [27:05]
B
I knew you were going to ask me that, and I still don't know how to answer it, but I'm going to give it my best shot. Cool. I think the way that I distinguish it is by the emotion itself. So when I give to somebody from a place of, of love, and that can be anything, whether I'm buying my girlfriend flowers or whether I'm taking my kid to the park or whatever, there's a sense of peace in that. And sometimes I want to do it, sometimes I don't. But there's still. But that overwhelming sense of peace in being giving is real. And I think that's real for all people. Right. I think generosity is probably one of my. If it's not my North Star, it's probably in the top three. Right. So I think there's this beauty and generosity in being authentic about that. When I find myself in the pleasing modality, there usually is something bubbling behind it. Like most people know when they're doing something wrong. Like you can feel it. It's like the minute that resentment hits you, you need to correct course. And for me, resentment in the body just shows up like right here in my solar plexus. I'm like, motherfucker, why am I having to do this? Right? And if I start hearing that narrative mind, and I've trained my mind to hear it now, it's like, maybe I need to not, you know, do that. The other thing that I, I think you can really do to determine this is, is put space between your decision giving. So if you make a decision, like, I'm going to give, you know, 500 bucks to the waitress because that's a cool thing to do at Christmas or whatever, right? That's fine. Right. That's perfectly normal. You're never going to see a person again. They're not going to be pleased with you for eternity. But like, when you're ready to give to somebody you love, give yourself an hour, give yourself a day to ask the question, like, what am. What is the purpose of this? Am I doing this for the reasons that are genuine and generous and kind and loving? Or am I doing this because I need validation?
- [29:33]
A
Is there a difference? You mentioned it earlier on Guys and girls that you work with. Talk to me about the difference in how men and women show up with their people. Pleasing nature. Is it motivated differently? Does it present in different manners? Is the framing different in any way?
- [29:52]
B
I'd say it's similar. I don't know that it's. I don't know that there's a wild difference. It's one of those really interesting things that it's between the masculine and feminine. I don't know that. I don't know that I could pinpoint like a major difference so much as I would say there's. There's different ways of recognizing it. Women tend to be, you know, they, they're so. I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't angry. I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't a liar. And I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't aggressive or passive aggressive. Women tend to be more passive aggressive on this side. So the one thing that I can say about, you know, and I, I, weirdly, my. My practice will shift. It does this weird thing like I'll have guys and then it will stop, and then I'll have girls and then it will stop. I don't know why it does this, but it does. And right now I'm working with mostly women, but what I find mostly in women is they tend to externalize it as a problem of everyone else, where men tend to internalize it as I'm a piece of shit.
- [31:00]
A
Yeah, that's interesting.
- [31:03]
B
So Women will say to me a lot, like, if I could only get this person to do this thing, I would be able to set boundaries. I'm like, no, maybe set boundaries. And then if they don't do the thing, let's move on from that. Whereas men are like, I'm such a piece of shit, I can never set boundaries.
- [31:19]
A
Yeah, I was thinking about this. I wonder whether there's an extra level of shame for men around being pliable. You know, you're supposed to be this sort of rigid, stoic, self sufficient pillar of the community or your relationship or your friendship or your family or whatever it might be. And that's not to say that women shouldn't have a backbone as well. Obviously they should, sure. But the level of assertiveness that we just expect dispositionally from men tends to be higher. Men on average are more disagreeable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And regardless of whether or not the actual manifestation of it is more or less acceptable, I think the story that men tell themselves around their pliability, I think that there's perhaps some additional levels of shame in that.
- [32:08]
B
I would fully agree with that. I think it shows, I think it rears its ugly head in a lot of ways. And one of, you know, potentially one of the biggest, most toxic ones is in sexuality. You know, the unfortunate news about being a man in this day and age, especially one that happens to look, talk and act like me, is that I have no voice. I, and if I do, then I'm, I'm also a piece of. But if I don't, I'm also a piece of. There's no way to win in, in this know, present environment. But I think the manosphere isn't helping by any stretch of the imagination. I think this idea of like, everybody has to be stoic and if you're not, you know, self denying yourself and if you're not, you know, again to your point of like, if I'm not deferring my gratification, then, you know, why even show up? And it's, you know, if I don't, if I don't make $300 million a year, I may as well just, you know, hang myself. And it's just, it's all of these kind of giant narrat where it's, it's the loudest, craziest people on every spectrum that get the most notoriety. And so I don't think that's helping. But I think you're, I think you're touching on something that's very interesting, is that we've redefined masculine as this toxic trait. And meanwhile, if we don't function in our masculine, we are considered toxic. So most.
- [33:50]
A
Or useless.
- [33:51]
B
Right. It's either useless or toxic. So most of my male people pleasers, you know, when I. When I look into that genre, you're going to find that Dr. Glover and I, you know, Robert Glover, function in the same realm as, you know, the male version of a people pleaser is a nice guy. And very often nice guys were raised in, you know, predominantly female environments where, you know, mom was in control, dad was generally either not around, available semicolon, however, or. Or, you know, in this sphere of abuse or some other awful thing, which is part of my story. And so I think to find those guys and tell them they're okay, like, this is okay. Like, it's just. You struck on something that's, like, deep in my heart. So I'm trying to get this to. To articulate, and it's not quite working because I spent my entire life being ashamed of who I was as a man. And then when I wasn't, I was pissed.
- [35:00]
A
Yeah.
- [35:00]
B
Like, because. Because I was. Because now wounded right now I'm like, yeah. I spent my whole life not thinking women liked me. I spent my whole life not thinking I was good enough. I spent my whole life climbing a ladder I didn't want to climb. Like, I did all this crap for everyone else, and I became a resentful, angry, drunk, addicted piece of. I didn't know what to do with it. Right. There's nobody. And you've said it before, and, you know, I've said it a million times, is that I. I truly believe that psychology, as it exists today, is not built for men. It just doesn't. I don't need you to tell me I'm okay. I don't need to cry on your shoulder. That's not what I need. For somebody to just say, hey, maybe like, let's look for some purpose, let's do something else has been so helpful. But, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question.
- [35:51]
A
This episode is brought to you by Function. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or as energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that then take that data and put it into a simple dashboard and give you insights and actionable recommendations to improve your Health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health and hormone levels to your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you would get from an annual physical. Best of all, Dr. Andrew Huben is their scientific advisor and Dr. Mark Hyman is their chief medical officer. So you can trust that the data and insights you receive are as scientifically sound as they are practical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function, it's $500 right now. You can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com modernwisdom that's functionhealth.com modernwisdom I understand this sort of threading of a needle between we want men to be strong, but we also want them to open up. Men want to be understood and they want their suffering to be recognized, but they also don't want to be pandered to or treated with kid gloves. And this is a really difficult balance to strike. It's superbly difficult balance to strike because you don't want to patronize guys because that's going to switch them off. But the line between not patronizing and ignoring is actually perilously pretty close. And then that speaks into that. That speaks into all of the fears that every guy has about, well, if I open up, I'm going to be shunned by my girlfriend or my wife or society. I'm not going to be seen as a competent man, so I'll just swallow it down. But I'm also told that if I don't do that, and I also have the sense as well that that's probably not super healthy for me from a psychological standpoint, I feel like I should be able to, you know, feel joy and feel fear and feel pain and feel scared and feel excited. And I want to embrace all of these things. But in order to do that, I need to concede the entire spectrum of human emotions. And if I do that, then I'm at the mercy of them. And being at the mercy of them doesn't have the mastery and control and conquer of your inner landscape. That is typically so it's messy. It's messy. And you know, this. It's endlessly fascinating to me to kind of try and unpack this and hopefully I know, lay out some sort of a path or, I don't know, at least like some way markers of like, here's some interesting things that guys can think about or that girls can think about for the way that they show up with the, the men that are in their lives. And yeah, that extra degree of shame around being pliable for men, I, I think is, is going to be something that they'll feel quite acutely. I think that.
- [38:37]
B
Well, here's a, here's a sound bite for you that'll probably get me canceled. Love it. Women are not equipped to handle male emotion, and men are very often not equipped to handle female emotion unless, and this is, you know, this of course, is unless you're exceptionally well trained. But I don't take my big feelings to the women in my life. So one of the things that you can look for, if you're wondering like, am I a people pleaser? Count on one hand how many guy friends you have if you're a guy and girlfriends you have if you're a girl. If that number's less than three, you've got a problem. Because people pleasers almost universally struggle to connect with the same sex.
- [39:25]
A
Why?
- [39:27]
B
Shame. Learning to open up to somebody that isn't trying to. So women tend to feel more safe with men if they're in that people pleasing mindset. Men tend to feel more safe with women if they're in that people pleasing mindset. I don't know why that is. I would love to, you know, I should probably ask Scott GALLOWAY or, or Dr. Glover why the hell that happens. But I need two men smarter than me to answer that. But the. But that's just, you know, the pattern that I see. And I haven't had a client in the last five years that was like, had a ton of meaningful guy friendships. I haven't had it the same as with women.
- [40:03]
A
I'm still struggling a little bit to understand, despite the fact of being the recipient of it, why it's so hard for certain people to advocate for their own needs. We would think from a evolutionary psychology, adaptive survival and reproduction perspective, advocating for your own needs should be the first thing that you do. Maybe up until you've got a, a partner and kids. Like, after that. Yeah, okay. Perhaps there is something that's even more important than you because that's your genetic progeny or your family going forward. I'm just trying to work out why it becomes so difficult to make our needs known and to advocate for our own desires.
- [40:50]
B
I think there's a component of rejection. So you get to a place where you've kind of advocated for everyone else long enough and you don't know how so then you, you face this idea of, you know, if I ask, will I even receive? Where I think you get as you start to heal from this, you know, profoundly challenging way to live is you stop worrying so much about that and say, okay, well, I'm going to ask for what I need and if I don't get it, I'm going to give it to myself. So there's that. But I think the advocacy, the rejection to somebody who lives like this doesn't feel like rejection. It feels like abandonment. And you're gonna have to forgive me because I hadn't said that. I don't think I realized that till you asked that question. You're good at this, Chris. And I'm a little emotional about it because the biggest fear that I see in, in that people pleasing set when I, when I talk about things like setting boundaries is everybody's going to be mad at me, everybody's going to hate me. And when I hear that, I hear my own. I hear that part of me that was a little kid that just wanted to be loved and accepted and I just wanted to make friends. And I struggled with that, you know, mightily, most of my life. So I think it's, I think the advocacy of self presents a really big challenge because it's probably the scariest thing you can do is to say, I need something. And when you're a kid and you don't get it and then you learn to ask is dangerous or could get me abandoned or to stand up for myself means the bully gets bigger, not goes away, right? I think that's where that comes from.
- [43:14]
A
Certainly the pattern of simply not being used to it, not thinking that your needs are valid, definitely thinking if you grew up in a household where it was difficult for you to communicate transparently, maybe parents didn't communicate very transparently. There was a lot of passive aggression or shadow sentences. People didn't say what they meant. They said a thing and hoped that the other person would arrive at the thing that they meant and then resent them if they didn't. At what point have you got the training for it? So, you know, for all for me to say, you know, it's a trite. Seems very strange that we wouldn't be able to advocate for ourselves with the first person. And you go, well, I guess so. But what it really shows is just how far from center your life has sort of taken you that you don't even think that advocating for your own needs is something that you should prioritize. And I imagine as well that there must come a stage or the more heavily ingrained people pleasers, they must get themselves to a situation where they've people pleased for so long that they don't actually know their own opinion or what they believe or what they want. Like, advocating for a need is tough if you've subjugated them for so long that you have no idea what they are anymore.
- [44:34]
B
Yeah, it's, it's really hard to come back from in that way, like if you do it long enough. So, and this is, it's interesting you, you come to that because we talked a little bit about, you know, what is the difference between agreeableness and people pleasing. Well, at some point you just become agreeable to everything because you, you, it's not that you don't care, it's that you don't know. Right. So if you ask me on a Tuesday, do you want to go out and get tacos or do you want to go out and get pizza? I, I'm not going to give a. Either way. Like I, I like food and both those sound great, right. So that's what agreeable means to me. It's like I'm happy to just go along, go with, flow from time to time because I don't care. Right. But when you do that because you don't like, want to be the issue of the moment and you do that long enough, you're right, you, you don't have a sense of like, what are, what do I even like pizza? When was the last time I, you know, I had an opinion on, on God forbid, Donald Trump or, or you know, Joe Biden. When was the last time I actually spoke up for myself? And this can be hugely powerfully painful at work, you know, especially if you're, if you've done the corporate environment like I have. You know, I was a corporate sales monkey for years and I would, I was always number two, never number one. That was always interesting because I didn't want to get, I wanted to be seen. I didn't want to be that scene. Right. And I never stood up for, for what was right. I never stood up for what I believed. And, and you know, the eventuality was I burned out corporate America and I'm a, I'm pretty talented guy. I just couldn't do it anymore. So, yeah, I think that, I think over, I think that line gets really blurry and that's probably one of the first things to go in terms of your self image is your ability to formulate opinion. And I mean, I can't put it on a. I couldn't, like, delineate a timeline. Like, if you started at 16, by the time you're 24, you won't have an opinion anymore. But I would say that, like, the first thing you probably start to feel is, I don't know what my interests are, and I don't know what my opinions are. And there's really only way to find that out is to, you know, do some journaling and go try some fit.
- [46:51]
A
Yeah, it's a particularly. It feels like a particularly unfair curse to know that maybe you've begun to see the light. You've realized that I need to be more assertive. I need to stand up for myself. And then when you think, well, what does that. What am I standing up for? What is myself? Presumably there's some concoction of things that I want. Well, what do I want? And you don't know. And you realize that the reason you don't know is because you buried it under layers and layers and layers of appeasing others as opposed to appeasing yourself and prioritizing others as opposed to prioritizing yourself. And you think, well, I know that I kind of need to do this thing, and I don't even. I'm in a fucking dark jail cell, and I don't even know which way. Which direction the door is to get out, to begin to think about my fucking escape plan. So, yeah, I. I think about that a lot. I realized toward the end of my 20s that, you know, I'd. I'd spent a lot of time trying to do whatever I thought I needed to do in order to be able to make other people like me. So when somebody asked me a question, I wouldn't think, what do I think about this thing? I'd think, what does Nick need to hear in order for him to have the best impression of me? And the. You know, there's a million problems with that, but one of the biggest ones is that you never actually feel connected to any of your successes or any of the praise that you receive, because.
- [48:06]
B
Oh, God, that's a big one. Yeah.
- [48:08]
A
Any positive reinforcement that you get is not somebody seeing you. They're just applauding this role that you play. They're saying, hey, well done for doing the little dance that you did. That is not you. It isn't you. So I would say, you know, maybe another. At least from my past experience, one of the identifying factors is, do you feel connected to the successes that you do, or do they feel like somebody else did them sort of on Your behalf.
- [48:33]
B
That is. That is a question I'm going to steal from you. I'm taking that. So I've, I've drawn that line, but I've never asked the question that way where I can see, you know, I'm working with a really great CEO now, and he's a fascinating dude. And this something that's really interesting in that vein that I want to come back to is how, how interesting people pleasers actually are. But the. He says to me all the time, well, you know, I just got lucky, right? I just got lucky. It couldn't have been the 25 years of toil. It couldn't possibly have been that you have the mind for the work. It couldn't possibly have been that you're talented. Right? And I, I fall into that trap a lot myself still, so. And I've mentioned to you, like, this is not something that you. It's not like I say in my videos very often that I'm a recovered alcoholic. I don't know that I'll ever actually recover from this. I think this is just a thing that I do. It's like everybody has their thing that they have to deal with in life. And if you listen to, you know, whatever personal growth literature that you may tend to absorb, but you know, my very favorite one is Scott Peck. He started with the line, life is difficult, and it's. And it remains difficult until you realize it's difficult and then you don't care that it's difficult. So it's no longer difficult. So. But this is the difficulty of my life. This is the thing that I'm gonna, I'm gonna overcome for, you know, years to come. And I hope that I can teach my children to overcome.
- [50:13]
A
And all those you said, you know, you said people pleasers are interesting. And I would agree, not being fucking fellating myself here, but I think the reason is that, you know, they've got. The only way that you can be a people pleaser is if you have some sense of depth. You are a deep thinker in one form or another. You care, you know, very much about others. You have an amount of empathy. You have social sort of agility in a way that if deployed correctly, could be really, really fucking useful, really powerful. It can make the world a better place. So it doesn't surprise me that you get fascinated by these people that you get to meet. And this Thomas Sowell quote, which I can't stop thinking about even though I've known it for ages, it just, it becomes more true the longer I Think about it, which is there are no solutions, only trade offs. And you may sort of scream at the sky and shake your fist and say, if only I could have this thing without this thing. And you go, well, what if both of those things come together? What if that is kind of like a single meal as opposed to ingredients that you can make a dish from? And I get the sense that, you know, a lot of people, if they can start to transcend and include or alchemize the more pathological parts of their people pleasing nature, what they're left with is probably the things that they care most about themselves, that they love most in themselves.
- [51:40]
B
I love that you said that.
- [51:43]
A
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- [52:43]
B
It goes back to that thing we were talking about. And I've played with an idea that's also interesting that I wonder if people pleasing and narcissism aren't on the same through line. But the, the beautiful parts of you don't have to die for the toxic parts to go away. So it's like when people see, you know, they say, so I've heard you say, you know, I'm, I'm a people pleaser. I'm struggling. People pleasing, you know, like, okay, well, I don't experience you that way. Now, I've heard some of the backstory. I might have been incorrect, but the, the generosity, the kindness the, the loving way you show up, the, the joyful part of you that actually gets fulfillment and, and levels up by giving. That's awesome. Like that's beautiful. That's, that's humanity. Like that's the good. Right? But to allow the self deprecation to go away, right? To allow the self deprivation to go away, to look at yourself not as a problem, but as having a set of problems and then solving each one, you know, through a long enough timeline, you get to keep all those things you love about yourself. You don't have to turn into an asshole. You just get off that line. It's like if you're driving head on at a bus, just steer, just turn, you'll be fine. And it, I think that's Maxwell Maltz is, is probably was one of the first real books that I ever engaged. It's called Psycho Cybernetics. I don't know if you ever read that one.
- [54:31]
A
I've heard of it. I, I've never read it though.
- [54:33]
B
It, it's been a while. So, you know, this is going to be clunky and probably wrong, but his equation of humans is that we're all kind of servo mechanisms like guided missiles. And missiles don't actually. Guided missiles don't actually aim at a target. They aim away from not the target. So when you just start to realize that, okay, well I'm not on target, so just, okay, aim away from not on target. And then you're going to course correct your way to, you know, a pretty happy life, just taking good care of yourself and getting in shape and, you know, starting to eat well. It's always the first thing I work with my clients on is like, all right, let's go to the gym. Let's get some of the anger out of your body. Like pleasers are pissed historically, over, over every person. They're just mad, right, because their life hasn't gone the way they wanted it to go. Well, it's not gonna. Unless you do something about it. So get some of the anger out, get them in shape. We start to build up on this idea of like, how do I make more money? And, and you start to see life improve. Yeah, I don't know if I answered the question there. I got lost in my own brain.
- [55:36]
A
Let's, let's move down from the sort of first physical practices, stepping in on diet, presumably sleep training, blah, blah, blah. How psychologically, in terms of reframing, in terms of the sort of psychological tactics and strategies, what are the first steps that you get to take People through when it comes to their rehabilitation.
- [56:01]
B
Probably better as a, as a. As a relatively small demonstration. But if I say to you, like, if I say, chris, you're not enough, what do you feel physically when I say that to you?
- [56:14]
A
Like closing over shoulders, come forward. Okay, so you kind of feels.
- [56:20]
B
Right. So you kind of feel it in your chest. You feel it in your shoulders. Shoulders, right. The first thing you need to do is, is learn to sit with that. Learn to just sit in that feeling and ask it questions. Your emotions are not fact. They're just in there. And they come from, you know, experiences. They come from your past. And, you know, I could probably iterate a million different personal growth books on that, but once you just feel it and you'd say, okay, so now I know what that feels like, the next question is, what does it mean? What am I actually saying to myself at this moment? So if, if anybody's listening, whatever that thing is that you hear in your head, there's always a bullshit story that plays around here. Like, I'm not smart enough. I didn't get enough schooling. You know, there's a million ways you can tell yourself you're a piece of. Pick. Pick the one that's most meaningful. And then just say it to yourself in the mirror and let yourself feel it. And then wherever that shows up, just ask it. The question, what it. What are you like, are you real? Are you. Is this some. Where did you come from and get curious about these things? Like, if you get. We tend to. We tend to judge our negative emotions by calling them negative emotions. I. I don't think there's a positive or negative emotion. I can tell you for sure that I can remember the first time I ever was going to kiss a girl. I know exactly what that felt like. I also remember the first time I thought I was going to die. I remember exactly what that felt like. They're eerily similar. So, you know, kind of butterflies in the stomach. That's where I get anxiety. That's where I feel it. So now I feel that, okay, what are you? Are you excitement? Are you fear? Are you anxiety? And it'll. And generally I'll get an answer, okay, where did you come from? And it'll say, well, you know, you're going on Chris's show. It's the biggest show you've ever been on, Nick. You know, you sure this is what we're supposed to be doing yet? Like, you should have 4 million followers before you go on that damn thing. By the way, this is a real Iteration from this morning. And so as I kind of dealt with that today, that's how I take other people through it too, is just kind of learning to sit in the darkness. The other thing that I really would stress is that there has never been a people pleaser I've ever met that was created in a vacuum. So getting around other people that are kind of dealing with this is vital. It's. And it's so much more fun because I, you know, I said it earlier, people pleasers are super interesting. Like they forget that they have all these weird hobbies and they're quirky and you know, you get them laughing and talking about who they are and you find these vibrant, exciting humans that are just waiting to be unleashed. And you know, here they are in a cage that's unlocked. Just open the door and fly the away. So I think to answer your question in a long form is the first thing is learning to sit in the emotion and recognize it because it really is emotion based. It's that feeling you get when you feel like you're not enough is the thing you have to look out for and it's the thing that will sabotage you the fastest.
- [59:15]
A
Is that, is that feeling of insufficiency for you, the sort of root cause that then the people pleasing nature is born out of?
- [59:24]
B
Yes. Yeah. For me, yes. You know, for most of the people I work with, yes. Because you're trying to, you're trying to squelch that like that feeling when you felt like your shoulders were hunched forward and you kind of like I could see it on you that you were like, I don't like that. That doesn't feel good. It feels, it almost reverts you to being a child. Right. You looked as though I had scolded you and it probably felt as though I had scolded you. And what are you going to do with that feeling except for go, oh go well, fuck. How do I make that go away? Right? How do I make you like me again? Right? So when you can sit in that and get used to it and then start to get curious about when it shows up, you know, that's been the gift for me. And this is not that I cured it, it's that I'm curious about it. So it shows up and I'm like, what's that like this morning when I'm, I, I had to take a five mile walk just to get out of my head, you know, and I'm almost fanboyed when you go, oh my God, it's you. And So I take this walk, and I'm like, what am. What am I. What am I worrying about? Like, this is either going to go great or it's not. Like, there's nothing I can do. You know, I'm not a moron. I'm going to be fine. What am I really worried about? And. And here I was, you know, back in that. In that mindset, like, well, what if he doesn't like me? Well, what if it'll be what it's going to be? And it was me sitting. I was sitting on the Capitol steps at. Here in Denver. Um, on the Mile High step. There's a step right there. That's a mile high. Exactly. And I like to go sit on that when I'm kind of thinking. And it was there. I was like, okay, what am I. What am I believing about this? I'm believing if I don't show up, that I'm a piece of shit. Like, if I don't. If I don't do this right, then it's going to be the last podcast I'm ever on. And then like, okay, how am I reinforcing that belief, Nick? Well, I'm sitting here pondering this over and over and over again and ruminating in my brain like a psychopath and having conversations with myself on the street, like, the other people that are around here, and it's not looking good for me. Like, they're probably going to lock me away. And then it was like, okay, well, you know, these four questions have saved my life a million times. You know, what do I want to believe about this? Well, no matter what happens, I'll be okay. And I'm okay. Like, I'm. I don't have to be enough. I don't have to be good enough. I don't have to be bad enough. Just have to be okay. And then what do I want to do? And it was, okay, well, I really want a piece of Taffy, and I want to have a Pellegrino, and then I want to get on the show. And that's what I did. I just got myself in because my brain is going to tell me what I want. Your brain's actually really smart. You listen to it. And it was like, you know, let's have a piece of candy and relax and, you know, be a kid for 10 seconds, and let's get on the show and have some fun with Chris, and we'll see what happens. Dr. Glover was funny about this. I told him I was coming on the show, and I was afraid of it. Like, you know. And he says, what are you afraid of? I said, well, what if I screw it up? And he goes, well, you're gonna. Oh, okay, great. So now what? He goes, listen, learn to laugh, have more fun, make mistakes, and enjoy yourself. And that's what I'm doing. And I was able to do that by reaching out to, you know, my. My team, my men that I work with, and to kind of talk myself through this danger zone.
- [62:54]
A
What are the other two questions? You said that there was four questions that have got you through a lot of things.
- [62:58]
B
So the four questions are. So when you get that feeling where you're hunching forward, right? The first question is, what am I believing? So our beliefs drive our behavior. Our behavior creates our environments. We need to be very careful about what we're believing, especially in a moment like that, right? So the first question is, what am I believing? Very often it's come back in some iteration of I'm not enough, right? And whatever iteration that could be, you know, maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe I didn't go to Harvard. Maybe, you know, doesn't matter. It's the whole thing. It'll come back in some way or another. Core to the kind of. The really interesting thing about beliefs is that they have to be reinforced somehow. So you have, you know, an experience which is the feeling you're having, and then you have to reinforce it. So you're the only one that can reinforce it. It has to be reinforced by somebody in a position of authority. So if you're biased by yourself, then you're. You are that authority. And so you have to ask yourself the next question, question number two, which is, how am I reinforcing this belief system? Like, what am I doing or not doing that's making me feel that I am not enough? And you'll get an answer to that, right? What am I doing or not doing? Question number three is, what would I prefer to believe? Like, what would I. What is that preference? You know, rather than what should I believe? What would I prefer to believe? And in my. In my vocabulary at that point was, I would prefer to believe that I got this. Like, it's good, it's going to be fine. He's probably not going to murder me. I don't think he has a, you know, missile that will hit my house. So I think we're going to be okay. And then what do I need to do to reinforce this new idea, this new belief system? So when you go back to question number two, we ask, like, what am I doing or not doing. Very often, the answer to question number four, which is, you know, what do I need to do to reinforce this new belief system? It's usually the opposite of whatever it was in question two. So it's like I'm. I'm. I'm timid about the show. It's just to admit that I'm timid about the show. And it's a powerful exercise. I mean, I get to connect with you over it, which. And to tell you, like, this is. This has been like my. I've been excited all week and. But when you have this idea in your head that you're not enough, that excitement very quickly can turn on you into anxiety.
- [65:17]
A
Yeah, dude. So fascinating. I really appreciate that you've mentioned a couple of times already today, boundaries, setting boundaries. Um, how do you come to think about that? What is it that people are getting wrong when it comes to it? How can they be useful? What's the. What's the process? Give me the. Give me boundaries 101. The. The best and the worst.
- [65:40]
B
Okay, so the first misconception about boundaries is that they're about other people. So boundaries are about how you show up in the world. They're not. They have nothing to do with anyone else. They are delineators for what you accept and not accept. What you'll tolerate, not tolerate. And so a boundary doesn't sound like, hey, don't say that to me. It makes me mad. A boundary sounds like I have a value system that is around this. Then how you communicate that is different. So, for instance, I tend to spend my time only with people that I that value kindness. If you are an unkind person, you have no space in my life. So when someone is being unkind, I will generally say, hey, I don't appreciate the way that this is happening right now. I'm going to leave the situation. That's how you enforce a boundary. Right. So your boundaries are actually based on your value systems. That's kind of the. The most important misconceptions that, like, it's a rule book. Boundaries are not a rule book. The other one I hear a lot of is boundaries are about putting yourself first, and that's horseshit. Boundaries are about making your needs equal to everyone around you. So rather than saying, I'm putting myself first, I have to be selfish. Well, no, you don't have to do any of that. You have to define yourself in equality, which is, okay, my needs are as important as everyone else's. And then you can make decisions based on that data. Right. So if, for instance, you want to go out for tacos and somebody else wants to go out for pizza, this is not a boundary. Right. But if, you know, one of the things I see a lot with people who've gotten sober is, you know, you'll get a phone call, and it's my least favorite question of all time. Well, there's going to be drinking at the party. Is it okay if I drink? I don't. Why am I in charge of that?
- [67:36]
A
Right.
- [67:36]
B
So my boundary around this is I am not in charge of other. Of adults. Other, you know, other adults decisions. That's a boundary. Like, I am not in charge of other adults decisions. That doesn't sound like anybody's got a rule to Ben, does it? Like, it's. That's me. I am not in charge of that. So when they call me and say, is it okay if I drink? I say, I am not in charge of other adults decisions. What you choose to do, you choose to do. If what you are choosing to do makes you feel uncomfortable, I would suggest you not do that. But I'm not in charge of that decision. Right. Boundaries at work are very, very often something. You know, I get this brought up a lot. It's like, well, how do I tell my boss I'm not going to do that? Well, you just say no. And. And that's it. Like, I'm. Unfortunately, my workload is such that. And I have a boundary around personal time with my family, so I won't be able to come in this week or this weekend, whatever the. Whatever the thing is. Right. So those are the two most common misconceptions. When you start to understand that, you start to develop what it. What looks like more like a Bill of Rights than a list of boundaries.
- [68:50]
A
For the Anglosphere people. Explain what the Bill of Rights is in this context, please.
- [68:57]
B
So a Bill of rights is a list. How do I explain this? I actually do this in boundary bootcamp, which is funny because I. I explain it like shit every single time. But a Bill of Rights is a list of values and priorities that you hold yourself to. So, for instance, I'm allowed to ask for what I want is within my Bill of Rights. I'm allowed to have conversations during sex is in my Bill of Rights. I'm allowed to laugh at inappropriate jokes. I'm allowed to make inappropriate jokes. I'm allowed to have an opinion. I'm allowed to like pizza. It's a weird one, but it's in there for me because at some point in my life, I was Married to a woman who was gluten free and for some reason, or not or I was not allowed to like the things that I like. I'm allowed to. So when you think of the Bill of Rights, it's. You can also put in there things you don't have to do. I do not have to tolerate unkindness. Right. I will. I have a, I have a boundary around yelling. I don't believe that that's a proper way to communicate. So in my Bill of Rights is I do not tolerate yelling in conversation. And how does that show up if I enforce it, which is I would just simply say, hey, raising your voice with me is not an, is not an option. So we're going to take a break from this. I'll come back to it in 15 minutes when both of us have calmed down. That's it. Like, it's not like, it's just, this is what's going to happen. So that Bill of Rights really shows up. And it's, it's unfortunate because it's. It sounds a lot like affirmations. Like. And one of your, one of your, one of your good friends who is a coach to me that doesn't know he's a coach to me is Alex Hermosi. He's. The sphere of personal growth has been so awesome because I have coaches that don't know they're my coaches. And he mentioned at one point, I think it was on your show, he said confidence is not about shouting affirmations at yourself in the mirror. And so this is sort of in that vein. So it's, you know, going against one of my own, you know, heroes.
- [71:16]
A
But it feels much more operational, though. You know, most of these, these aren't things that you're saying in the whimsical hope that they're somehow going to manifest one day. They're guidelines. They're guidelines that you've put on the floor and you say, hey, if you kick one of these tripwires, then if I don't know where the tripwires are, if I don't know what they are, and if I haven't sort of made a commitment in advance, then I'm always going to negotiate with myself about whether or not that is a tripwire or not. And, you know, in the moment, trying to come up with any sort of a solution. I used to have this thing. Fuck, this is old. God, this might be 10 years old now. I used to have this, this thing about how it's basically impossible to come up with a solution when you're in the midst of the crisis and if I told you, if I told you in a week's time that I was going to push you into some quicksand, you could spend the next week on ChatGPT looking at the best strategy and what shoes you'd need to wear. And am I supposed to move? I sort of do this lateral, like, sort of shaking thing, or it's called, like, you know, the, the Hoffler movement or some shit for getting out of quicksand. But if I just push you in some quicksand and I'm like, hey, fucking try and get Chat GPT out now. It's not going to happen. You can't think laterally. And, yeah, another homozym. He says, 20 minutes of preparation adds 20 IQ points. I get the sense that with this it's a much more protracted version. You're much further out in advance. You're creating these operating principles. And yeah, maybe it is kind of lame in a way to be like, oh, my God, like, you need to write out this list of rules about how to do things. And you go, yeah, yeah, I'm in many ways phenomenal and fantastic and competent and in a ton of other ways kind of useless. And this is me compensating for my uselessness. This is a solution for me to work around that, and it helps me to mitigate the parts of me that I don't want to keep manifesting. They're these, like, if you thought about how you wanted to redirect a river, you have a river and it's moving and it's sort of carving and it's eating away at the outer edge of each turn. It's like chopping away at this thing. You're like, I need to redirect it in this way. It's going to take a fucking ton of effort when you first start and take an absolute ton of effort. But when it begins to find that thing easier than the other thing, that's when you move from System two to System one, thinking right? And that's the whole process. You start off in the deliberate and then you move into the automatic.
- [73:41]
B
So, yeah, I, I explain that really in detail to a lot of people, which is, you know, there's four levels of learning, which is you start out as unconsciously incompetent. You don't know what you don't know. You move into the conscious competence realm, where you do know now what you don't know. And at that point you have to make a choice. Do I give a shit? To learn how to do what I don't know how to do. And you then become consciously competent where you go, okay, I have to practice this until it's a thing. And at one point, you become unconsciously competent where it's. We. We call those people naturals. Like, for instance, you are a natural podcaster. I've watched your very first stuff. It was good. It's not this good. Right. If you go back to my original videos, I looked like a monkey, a football. It would like. I was terrified. I was shirtless in Panama. I thought it was going to be in men's work. The captions were all wrong. It was filmed sideways, like disaster.
- [74:36]
A
Everybody's. Everyone's got an origin story, right? I came across this quote the other day that I thought was really interesting. I wanted to bring up to you to do with boundaries says, don't try to fix people, just set boundaries. I've been kind of transfixed by that idea for quite a while. I. It is a damning indictment about how poorly most people can change. And some people can. Some people can make genuine, like, hard left turns or right turns in their life, But I think kind of meeting people where they're at and just assuming that the person that's showing up in front of you right now is the person that they are.
- [75:19]
B
Sure.
- [75:19]
A
Maybe they're drunk or whatever. Maybe this is a. They had a really, really hard day or their dog died yesterday or something like that. Okay. Like, people have over, you know, a couple of sample points. You do two, three sample points. You go, okay, I know who you are. And is it really realistic for you to expect this person who, you know, you just. You can't stop thinking about the shape of their eyes or the smell of their hair or the way that they walk or whatever it is. And you're not falling in love with that person. You're falling in love with the idea of what you could craft them into if only they were able to be sufficiently malleable. And I think don't try to fix people, just set boundaries is a really lovely redress to those of us that are maybe like, hopeful romantics in that way, or hopeless romantics. And this happens with friendships. This happens with family, too. Um, and I imagine don't try to fix people, just set boundaries probably resonates at least a bit with some of.
- [76:20]
B
The work you do, I think so. I. The other thing I tend to say is that when somebody shows you who they are, just believe them. Like, oh, that's great. It's really simple. Like, Somebody shows you who they are, believe them. It's the easiest way to, you know, we, it's the easiest way to negate narcissism. If somebody shows up and they, and you know, we talk a lot, you know, in the, in the personal growth world, or not even personal growth, but, you know, just TikTok and Instagram and in all the places that I, you know, admire myself, tend to get all the red flag commentary. Right. Well, this is a red flag and that's a red flag. I'll tell you what a real red flag is, the fact that you ignore red flags. And if you are boundaried enough, if you understand your Bill of Rights, if you understand who you are, then when somebody shows up in the world that violates that, despite how manipulative they can be, or whether they have narcissistic person personality disorder or whether, you know, they, they have sociopathy or whatever, it's. You won't tolerate it. And so. Yeah, I do agree with that statement. I agree with that a lot. I just think there's. Go ahead.
- [77:30]
A
No, I'm just, I'm really interested in. You have this sort of moment where you've maybe got your operating principles, your Bill of Rights. I imagine that this is a task that you should sit down, really focus on writing it out physically. What I'm interested in is the habits or routines that you recommend for maintaining those boundaries. Because it's all well and good saying it's the equivalent of the 1st of January, the day after you've written the Bill of Rights. My diet's gonna be on point. I'm gonna sleep eight hours a night and Sama Harris is waking up apps just gonna get fist fucked into oblivion. I'm gonna do of the day.
- [78:09]
B
I've got an alarm for everything.
- [78:10]
A
Yeah, exactly. Talk to me about the way that people can stay resilient in their boundary setting. The habits, the routines for maintaining that over time, for getting back to it if they feel like they've fallen off.
- [78:30]
B
So I do that in a variety of ways. I hesitate to answer it because there's so many prescriptive ways of living these days that, you know, everybody's telling me I have to be up at 4 in the morning and I've got to bathe my nuts in olive oil and then I'm going to sun my. And then I got to get into an ice bath and then after that.
- [78:50]
A
I have to sauna.
- [78:51]
B
Right. I've got to go to a sauna after this. And then, you know, once I do that, then I could start my day and. But I think put it somewhere you see it. One of the things I do with people is just say, take your top three that you want to make sure you focus on. Put them on a business card. Like, go get a blank business card, put it on that business card, hand write it, then take it and laminate it. And then you have it, right? And it's just kind of a reminder. It's in your wallet, it's in your pocket. It's about another hermosism is most people don't need to be taught, they need to be reminded. So once I've taught you, I've taught you the other way you can do this is getting involved with other people that are doing this. So, you know, my community is a great example of this. I have an incredible group of. Of humans that are all in there, and, you know, they get a text message from me like every other day, hey, stop that. Whatever you're doing that, you know, you shouldn't be doing, stop doing that or. Or do that, right? But the most important thing, I think, Chris, is just. Is just read it. You know, if you read every day or you get up and you have kind of a morning routine, it doesn't have to be, you know, you don't need to spend 25 minutes meditating on it. You don't need to, you know, have a long conversation with yourself in the mirror. You don't need to write I love you in lipstick and then a heart around your head and, you know, all that nonsense. You just read it once a day as you go. And I learned that actually one of my favorite stories about myself I'm about to. Speaking of collating myself, is I was fortunate enough to be coached one on one by Zig Ziglar at one point in my life, which, if you don't know who he is, he's. You seemingly do. He's, you know, probably the first most important sales trainer ever. And I had called him in a sales slump when I was 19 years old. My business called him on the phone and never thought I'd hear from him. But six weeks later he called me back and he sent me this little thing on his website. And it was this. It's like this long paragraph. And it was like, here's what I'm going to do today. And it wasn't like, affirming. It wasn't like, I'm good enough and I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me. It was, you know, here's how I intend to show up. And I, and he said at the bottom, never forget the quote, the eyes are the windows to the soul, so be careful what you look at. And this was the first thing I read every day for like four years. And you know, my sales kept climbing and he checked in on me about every six months. And you know, really kind, dude, I'd love to tell you that story some other time. But that's really where I figured that out, is that I just read it. I read mine every day and, and I revamp mine about every six months. So I go back and revisit it, make sure that the, you know, the things I'm working on are, are, you know, that I haven't mastered them. You know, it's, it's kind of, it's this mindfulness moment that why would I need to continue to be mindful that I've already mastered that? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So I just, I'll take things off that list. And that's another concept is that, you know, boundaries aren't static. They're evolving. Just like you, you know, who you are is, who you are is not a fixed concept. It's, it's ever evolving, it's always changing. And that means your needs will change. It means your boundaries will change. What you'll tolerate, what you're willing to tolerate will change. And, and I think if you give yourself time enough to grow into that and you can really experience a very cool life. So that's how I would say to do that in terms of, you know, tactically speaking is just read it every day.
- [82:19]
A
Once you do it.
- [82:20]
B
Read it every day.
- [82:21]
A
I've been a huge fan of post it notes over the last year. Like the most 1930s fucking technology to fix things that I need to remember just little bits, you know, I'm a big fan of mantras because I think they're sort of like the winzip, you know, file sort of compression of entire ideas and just popping things around is a really nice way to do it. So I'm all in for the laminating of the business card. Getting into the. I guess what I think we maybe haven't fully covered yet, that's probably one of the biggest sticking points is the felt sense. When you need to do a thing, when you need to say, when you need to enforce a boundary, when you need to say no, when you need to sit in that moment. It's happening, the discussion is occurring, whatever is about to go on. How can sensitive people become more assertive.
- [83:12]
B
There'S two things on that. I was actually going to bring this up way early in the call and I forgot about it. So I'm really glad you came back to this. The. The first thing is very often boundary conversations don't need to happen in the moment. There seems to be this concept that you have to immediately defend yourself. But acids and bases mix about as well as emotions and logic. So if you are in a potentially emotional situation, it's best to buy time. Now, that's not to say to be conflict avoidant, because that is kind of a core competency of the people pleasers to just avoid conflict until it goes away. But it's about conflict deferment. So. And maybe that's an hour, maybe that's a day, maybe it's after Thanksgiving dinner, you know, maybe Drunk Uncle Eddie needs to go home, like, whatever. But. So that's the first thing. It's like, if you are somebody that's highly sensitive, don't hold yourself to the standard that you're going to be, you know, Johnny on the spot with your boundaries, especially in the beginning, you have to give your time, you have to give yourself time to adjust to this new way of being. So. And the way you do that is you just say, okay, hey, I'm getting uncomfortable. I'm going to take a break for this conversation. It's a great way to do that. Or, hey, I've asked that we don't talk about that, so I'm just going to step away or whatever. You know, usually, usually, especially in family situations, it's generally around conversation. The second thing you can do is when you notice you're feeling that hunched feeling is just to breathe. So when you get that, that sense that you're being overcome, I take it. I've been a martial artist most of my life. You're probably familiar with the term kiai, which means spirit yell. I can't just scream in the middle of family dinner. But what I can do is take a very, very deep breath in and hard out. And that generally will help me reset my nervous system. So it's like in all the way and then like really hard through. So I get all that carbon out of my body and just let that out. And then that will actually cause my skin to heat up. And you can see it. I actually got flushed when I did it. So that will cause my skin to heat up, cause the emotion in my body to kind of dissipate, go other places and to balance out. And then I can say, okay, hey, that's not okay. I'm an extremely sensitive person. It may not show up that way online because, you know, I'm sort of a fire branded preacher of everything that says, you know you can do it. You just don't believe you can. And, but in, you know, genuinely speaking, I'm pretty impacted by other people or I wouldn't do this. So that's how I do it is one good solid breath that nobody even has to know I had will help me reset and I can then decide, kind of make the, the idea of, okay, do I want to even address this now? Yeah.
- [86:27]
A
What about just to add a additional layer of complexity? There's certain times where you just don't have any other choice. You need to address this situation in the moment. This isn't necessarily about a boundary. This is somebody asking you a decision. Are we going to do this or are we going to do this? And you have to have that moment of self inquiry. You need to try and tap into your desires. You need to be able to advocate for your needs. I'm gonna guess that this mindfulness gap facilitated by what's contemporarily known as the Huberman breath is a good stop. Is there any other tools for assertiveness when kind of under pressure like that?
- [87:06]
B
There are, but you know, I, I will not allow Andrew Huberman to take over the key eye.
- [87:13]
A
Okay, okay, okay.
- [87:15]
B
You can tell him I said so.
- [87:16]
A
You can take, you can take the breath name back if you give us some more tactics.
- [87:19]
B
Right? Sure. So if you're truly in a moment. So number one, speaking of another person that's a coach that doesn't know they're. My coach, Tim Ferriss says that there's no such thing as an emergency. And I fully agree with that sentiment. There is no, there's almost no reason we need a decision right now unless it's life or death. So if somebody's pushing on something and you're uncomfortable, the answer is it needs to be a default of no. Now that's really hard. So there's, there's two things that you have to remember in those moments. The first thing is no feeling is. No feeling is permanent and they're almost never fatal. So no feeling is fatal, no feeling is permanent. So if it's not fatal and it's not forever, you can get past it. This is where I was really challenged. I used to believe that I wasn't courageous, and I used to believe that I wasn't brave. And I believed those things because I was afraid those two things can't exist. Without me being afraid. That's just a Tuesday. You become courageous through action. You become brave through action. And bravery is defined as going anyway, right? So at some point, you have to realize that it's okay that you're afraid. It's okay that your, your shoulders hunch forward. It's okay that your eyes well up and you don't know what to do. It's okay that you're overwhelmed. It's okay you have butterflies in your stomach. It's okay that your jaw is clenched up and you're just. And you just want to fight. That's all. Okay? And if you can just remember that it's okay, and without it, you cannot be courageous. You can never call yourself brave. If you're not afraid, then you can immediately start to rewire the thought in your head. It's like, first, when I feel afraid, what does it mean? I'm afraid. That's all it means. It doesn't mean anything. It just means I'm afraid. Am I going to die? Probably not. The two seconds between a decision and the words make a big difference. So in the game of no that we talked about earlier. So you have 90 seconds. Give them 90 seconds. You only really need two. Really? You only need two. So if somebody is really pressuring you or somebody's really pushing on a boundary, give yourself 2 seconds, 2 seconds, 1, 2, and then speak whatever comes out. Whatever comes out. It can be anger, it can be vitriol, it can be sunshine and rainbows. It can be an I love you. It's a great way to diffuse a boundary conversation, by the way. Just I love you. Try that if you want to, if you want a good one. Just I love you just screws up the whole room, right? So that's what I would say is give yourself two seconds and then speak. Whatever comes, it comes to your mouth and it's going to be scary and you're going to feel it, right? And it. So I think what I, I heard you ask me and tell me if it's true. It's like, how do I get over the feeling? You don't. You don't. You go anyway.
- [91:10]
A
What about the guilt that people will feel when choosing themselves over others? The fact that there's this person there and I have this sense of obligation, this sort of. I'm so used to subjugating me below everybody else. I'm going to feel like I need to deal with being disliked. Maybe they're not going to like me. What if they don't like me? I, I, I'M gonna. I feel guilty. I've chosen myself over this other person.
- [91:37]
B
Sure.
- [91:37]
A
I think that's probably quite a visceral emotion that people pleasers feel.
- [91:41]
B
Yeah, it's. I mentioned it earlier, like, if you think of the first time you were gonna kiss your wife, you're married, right? No. You married? No. I thought you were married for some reason. If you think of the first time you're gonna kiss your. Your girlfriend or anybody, and then you think of the first time you thought you were gonna die, the feelings are identical. Right. So the question is, are you guilty or are you excited up? Are you feeling guilty because you're. You're not choosing them? Are you feeling excited because you finally chose you? So there's a. There's a big reframe there that can happen without getting into the platitudes of, like, you know, feelings and all that crap that you can say about, you know, you'll get over it. Actually know what it. Let's just do the platitudes. You're going to get over it? Yeah. You're going to feel guilty, man. It's like, you weren't good at tying your shoes in the beginning either. You know, for the first three years of your life, you. Your pants. But you're able to get over the discomfort of learning how to not your pants and how to tie your shoes. So if you can get over the discomfort of not your pants and. And learning how to tie your shoes, and there's a good fair chance you can get over the discomfort of saying no. And so it's this immersion in the idea that you are not for everyone. And. And I lived my life the opposite forever. So I think it's something I'm really passionate about, is, yeah, you're gonna feel guilty. You're gonna feel uncomfortable. Right. Is it guilt or is it just discomfort? That's the next question. It's like, are you guilty? Like, are you sitting there going, I'm really. This person's really gonna be sad. Probably not. So if they are, if you're truly believing that, are you engaged in a form of hubris? That would be. My next question is like, how important do you think your no is? And I ask people that all the time. And in exactly the same way is like, how important really. Are you really that important that if you say, no, I don't want to go to lunch with you, they're going to go outside and, you know, stick a fire hose from the tailpipe into the window? Probably not. I think they're going to be okay, they'll have a margarita by themselves. Right. And so I think there's a self importance. This is where people pleasing and narcissism tend to bump up against each other a lot. Like your no is about as meaningless as your yes because you never say no. So when you say no, nobody believes you. And when you say yes, less and less people are believing you because you're so over committed you can't show up. Oh, it's this weird, I don't know, it's this weird paradox where like when you've said yes to everything, you're no becomes meaningless and your yes becomes less than meaningless. So when you start saying no to things, you're going to be uncomfortable. Everyone else is probably just going to be surprised and let him be surprised.
- [94:43]
A
Does life get easier or harder when you stop people pleasing?
- [94:47]
B
Yes, yes. Initially it gets. And it's not, I suppose it depends on how you do it. But if you do it the way I did it, it was initially much harder because you go through people pleasing is a very lonely way to live. It's a very lonely way to live because you constantly feel like you're in a transaction with everybody around you. So. And you never really know what your value is to other people. And you start to think, okay, I really don't have any friends, so you kind of feel lonely. But then when you start to prioritize yourself as equal to other people, those people start to leave your life. And then you're like, well, now I'm so lonely. But you were lonely anyway.
- [95:42]
A
I don't even have my fake friends anymore right now.
- [95:45]
B
I don't even have the bartender that said that they liked me. Right. It's the same thing as when I, when I quit drinking, I had all these, had all these friends. But when you drank the way that I did, you start to realize that those friends were, you were just a joke. You were a paycheck and a joke. And very often the people that will exit your life when you start to do this, this work, two things will happen. Either they'll, they'll go and they'll stay gone. But more often they circle back. You know, I had a friend, we were watching football the other day and he said, I really like this version of you better. And he was the first one that ever said that to me. And I hadn't seen him in years. And it was just so, it was just a really cool moment for me where I really felt something like, he likes this version of me better. And it was when I told him, no, I don't want a shot. They don't want to do that. Like, I'm a recovered alcoholic, I can have a beer from here time to time. But like, I don't want to sit and do shots with you. That's a dangerous road for me. And I said, no, I'm good, I don't do that anymore. He goes, man, I really like this version of you better. What a cool thing. But that's been a five year timeline, right? So it's not on. It's not unlike starting a business. You go through this from the moment you change to what might consider to be the end result. You're going to experience a pretty high level of loneliness in between those two points because you're not healthy enough for the new folks. And you're, and you're way too healthy. So even having one boundary can make you too healthy for everyone around you. That profound when you're like deep in that people pleasing well is one boundary will make people start to turn on you. Like, hey, I don't want to go to your birthday party. Why? Because I don't want to. That's it. I don't want to because I value my time and I spend it with my family on Sundays. It could be any number of damn things, right? But that one boundary can really like, set this, set the tone. It's like in the fighting, in the, in the parlance of fighting, like if I jab you in the face, I've now set the tone. We know who's in control, right? And when you take control, other people aren't going to like it. So you immediately start to see people exit stage left and you're like, you're looking ahead, you don't see a lot, right? You see an empty wilderness and the, the encouragement I would give people. Some of the most beautiful, growth filled, exciting times of my life was when I was the most lonely. Because loneliness presents with it a massive amount of freedom. Like I could do what I wanted when I wanted, had to answer to nobody, had nowhere to be, no, nothing to do. Like my options were limitless. I ate when I wanted. I, when I wanted. I, I went to the, I went to movies by myself, you know, and so initially it will get worse. Worse is a weird way of saying it. I think initially it will get different and uncomfortable. But you're already uncomfortable, right? I, I get, I get a lot of people that, you know, whether it's on my channel or, or in my groups or whatever, they'll say, well, you Know, if I do this, then, you know, let's pretend you have a narcissistic person. By the way, I hate that term. I also hate the term manifestation. We can do that on another time, but let's pretend. Well, my narcissistic whatever is not going to like that. Okay, well, they're mad at you anyway, so who gives a shit? Like, if they're going to be mad whether you do or whether you don't, you may as well do. So if your life is going to suck whether you do or whether you don't, you may as well do. And if it has to be done sooner or later, it may as well be done sooner. So let's just do the thing and feel better about ourselves. And will it initially suck? Yes. Will you immediately feel better without sounding like a guarantee? Mostly yes. Because, you know, your confidence. For me, my confidence was shot. Until I started making commitments to myself and showing up for those. It didn't matter how much money I made. It didn't matter. Didn't matter who my friends were, you know, I thought it did. And it. It didn't matter what car I drove, and it didn't matter on what floor of the high rise I lived on. What mattered was the minute I started saying, I'm going to show up for me, and I would delineate exactly how I was going to do that, and then I would do it, I started to think, okay, well, maybe I'm okay. And when I start to think, okay, well, maybe if I'm okay, maybe I'm. Maybe I'm better than okay, well, maybe I am kind of smart. Maybe I'm not a fucking idiot. Maybe I can start a business. Maybe I can travel the world for two and a half years. I did that like a crazy person. And, you know, at 40, by the way, don't ever do that at 40. It's really. It's fun, but it's. I aged myself a lot. And maybe I can't ask that girl out. Maybe I can ask that guy out. Maybe I. Maybe. Maybe I can, you know, And I think that's what shows up when you. When, you know, kind of in the. In the medium term is like, maybe I can. And then so it goes from like, oh, fuck, I'm lonely, to like, maybe I can. And then it's like, oh, shit, I really can. And then your life just starts to, you know, skyrocket, and you start to feel good about yourself and you start to wonder, and then you hit a wall. And that'll happen, you know, because you'll make a new friend or you'll make a new ally and they'll turn out to be a piece of shit. That's common along this journey because you start to get a little full of yourself and then you get knocked back down a little bit. You make a course correction and then, you know, slowly but surely you start to find out that people love you for you, not because of what you do.
- [102:11]
A
Yeah. James, my business partner in Newtonic sat on a rock, took a ton of psilocybin in Australia and asked himself the question, do people love me for who I am or for what I do? And it was a, I think a difficult question for him to answer because, you know, the, the tougher question that he didn't actually get around to asking but a friend gave me was, well, does the world love me for who I am or for what I do? What about you? Do you love you for who you are or for what you do? And then you realize, yeah, you realize that you're asking the world to love you for who you are. Meanwhile, your love is contingent on how you've shown up that day. You're right. So you're asking the world to treat you in a manner that you're not even prepared to treat yourself in. You know, this is a good part of the foundation of self worth that if. Imagine that you had a friend and every time that you invited them out to lunch or to a party or something, they said that they were going to come, but they arrived an hour late or they didn't show up at all. After a while you'd stop trusting they were going to do anything. Well, you are that friend to yourself. You sort of have an intention and then your ability to deliver on that is your self trust. And if you always say that you're going to get up on time, but you hit the snooze button three times, you say that you're not going to eat the cookie or break your diet, but you continually do. You say you're going to go to the gym, you say you're not going to lie to your partner. And all of these things continue to be broken. It's like, well, where is the faith that you should be drawing from? What's the well of evidence that you should be drawing from to have any proof that you can do this? There isn't any. One of the other words that sort of we've danced around a little bit today are triggers. And sort of the role of triggers. What is that? How do they sort of factor into this.
- [104:03]
B
This will probably get me canceled. I know it's a safe space. I want to answer that. But I want to also say your business partner is also one of those coaches that doesn't know he's my coach. In fact, you can thank him. You can thank him for my sound quality today, because I went and bought this just for you.
- [104:22]
A
He's got a racist accent. Don't listen to him. Racist accent.
- [104:26]
B
So your triggers are your responsibility.
- [104:33]
A
What does that mean? What are triggers? Define them for me.
- [104:37]
B
So I struggle with this because I think I'm not. I tend to not be great in psychological terminology, and I'm gonna get on for it, but whatever. So in. In my. In my experience, I come from a lot of childhood trauma, and when I was triggered, I would have a. I would have a visceral emotional reaction within my body. It would bring me back to a state of deep fear and anxiety. That is what a post traumatic stress disorder trigger sounds like. So. And it could be auditory. It could be hallucinogenic. It can be, like. It can really be an experience where somebody will say something, you'll have a smell, you'll. You'll feel a feeling, something will occur, somebody yell at me, and it will just. And it could fire my mind off. Now, I've done a ton of work, you know, on post traumatic stress disorder within myself. I'm not an expert in the field, but I think where we've. Where we've gotten is the conflation between triggers and negative emotion. And that's what I mean by that. It's like you. Somebody who's legitimately triggered. If that's a thing for you, you need to. You need to speak to somebody in the psychological field. If you were having a visceral, like, overwhelming reaction to external stimuli, then you have a. Then that's a bigger problem that I'm prepared to address. It's the conflation between. There's two things. There's a conflation between triggers and negative emotion, and the other conflation is between trauma and adversity. When I say your triggers are your responsibility, I mean just somebody making you feel uncomfortable is not you being triggered. And if it is, that is your responsibility. Even in the sense that I was talking about with my own post traumatic stress disorder, that was still my responsibility. So dealing with that level of trigger is different. Dealing with the I'm uncomfortable trigger or, you know, I don't like it when you do that thing trigger, how do you deal with it? Is you. You grow up. Life is not required to tiptoe around you. And, and I think we've, I think we've, you know, I think we've beaten that horse to death and manifested our way into this idea of that everybody is supposed to be everything to us all the time. And it's just, it's not sustainable and it's not realistic. So I'm not sure I answered your question there so much as I gave you a soundbite that's probably going to get me punched in the face on the streets of Denver. But, you know, whatever.
- [107:38]
A
You and me both. I'm interested in the capacity to give up on people. That working out when you should actually give up. How, you know, when someone has gone too far. You know, you mentioned earlier on, when somebody shows themselves to you, believe them. I think the noble part of some people pleasing is you will maybe give somebody a chance when nobody else would. And you know, that's like very upward aiming. Every underdog movie in history has got some young street urchin that gets the coach, sees in him the fire that nobody else can and gives him a chance even though he's gonna throw it in his face a couple of times, blah, blah. But some people take it too far. So how have you come to think about this capacity to give up on people?
- [108:38]
B
I think there's almost an epidemic of no contact in the world right now. So I think giving up on people is happening a little too quickly. So I'm really glad you asked that. I think the no contact narrative is so first, not everybody that bumps up against a boundary is a narcissist. Not everybody who doesn't understand this new way of you showing up is toxic. So I want to just start by saying that. But when somebody, it's really, I mean, it's so nuanced. And I hate that word too because it's just, it's the new excuse for, you know, I don't want to hear what you have to say. You said it on another one of these that nuance is the new N word. I almost passed out. I laughed so hard. So I was driving, I almost locked up the brakes in my car. But the I've only gone no contact or cut three people out of my life. And they weren't small people. So one of which was my father. I talked to him once in nine years and then once on his deathbed. That was it. I've not talked to my sister since 2015. Or no, I'm sorry, 20 2009. I have not spoken to her and I probably will never Again and then one other person was an ex malevolence is, is unmistakable. And I think that's all I have to say about that. That malevolence is unmistakable. When you see it run, don't walk.
- [110:38]
A
Thinking about again, not just where people are when they're at the beginning of their journey, but as they sort of continue to go on, continuing to hold boundaries, continuing to make progress, managing that lonely chapter thing in the middle, managing the pullbacks, the price corrections that bring them back down and then put them back up. I'm interested about what happens when people are a little bit further along in life. You mentioned. I think the sort of avatar client that you work with is sort of like a 48 year old guy who's very successful at whatever it is that he does, but has been wildly unsuccessful at ever advocating for himself. What additional complications come along for somebody who's trying to do this, who's trying to sort of enter into this world when they've got financial resources or when they've got some reputation or some status or some acclaim, does that make it easier or does it make it harder?
- [111:42]
B
I don't know if it's more or less. I think it's, it might have been Mark Manson that said it, that you know, a homeless person and Elon Musk both have money problems. The challenges it presents when you've become a highly successful people pleaser are probably more challenging to overcome because there's, there's more at stake. And your belief system, but I mentioned this earlier, is, you know, beliefs drive behavior, behavior creates environment. But beliefs are built through reinforcement. So you've spent, you spent 20 years reinforcing this people pleasing as a way of living and you then have convinced yourself that if I don't make everyone happy, I'm going to go broke, right? If I don't, you know. And so in the highly successful people pleasers, that's where we start to see that burnout component is, well, fuck, you know, I'm just, I'm just an ATM machine. And I think it's, I think it's more challenging in the way that you have to literally redefine your relationship with probably the two highest value things in your life, which are your family and money. And to devalue money is probably the top priority. And that's really hard. I really like money. I like making lots of money, I like spending money, I like going out to nice dinners. I'm a dude who likes stuff and I don't like stuff. But I like experiences and they're usually not cheap. And you know, so that's the benefit in it, of course, is that you can then prioritize things that you actually like. But your relationship with money has to change. And I think it was on your show that Jordan Peterson said, you know, about getting sober, that you have to change everything. You have to change who you hang out with. You have to change, you know, your entire social strata, like all of it has to change. And that's very true with, with the people. Please. You know what? Now I think about, it's probably more challenging. It requires a lot less. It requires a lot more resources and a lot more time because you have a lot more invested in it. The cool thing though, with the highly successful variety. So my, my clients between, you know, like 35 and 55, you know, making a quarter million plus a year, when the habit breaks, it usually breaks for good. And it's, it's like a moment, it's a moment of clarity. So like with people that are not quite at that level, that are kind of moving up, you know, my 28 year olds that are doing okay, but not, they're not where they need, where they want to be yet. Right. They tend to take a little longer for some reason or another. But like with a 35 to 55, you know, 65, whatever year old, when they recognize the pattern and it's like, it's always one little thing, it'll be a technique that I show them or, you know, learning how to say no, and it's just over. And then everything changes all at once. And it's not. And it's not a change that it's not like a toxic variety of it either. I really thought about that, Chris, but it's really not. It's usually just, okay, well I'm going to do this now. And everybody around him goes, okay, yeah, that makes sense.
- [115:27]
A
Yeah. There's a self, there's a self assuredness that prestige sort of brings along with it. It's weird because I suppose people that have managed to reach some type of acclaim or renown or whatever reputation within their family, within their industry, whatever it is, people kind of have faith that they know what they're doing. So say, hey, like, you managed to get us here so far. You're the captain of the ship or the sous chef or whatever, like, let's, we will continue to follow you. And that faith is, even if it's come from a place that's been compelled and not well balanced and not fully integrated and not alchemized and all the rest of this stuff, but it's been effective. And you go, well, look, we followed Nick into battle a good bit and he sort of didn't really steer us wrong there. So I reckon we just kind of follow. So, you know, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. And if Nick thinks that the new direction is to take a hard right, then so be it and we'll go and do it. So I wonder whether. Yeah, there is a. There are more ingrained habits for you to overcome and there's maybe a little bit more to risk. But also you've got more ballast on the ship. Like, you've got more status, you've got more financial resources. Yep.
- [116:40]
B
I think that that's a great way of saying is you got more ballast on the ship, you know, which is a short way of saying that you've got more support. You know, something I would really want people to know listening to this, People do love you. They do. They just don't know how. And so when you change, especially if you're in that kind of higher status or if I'm going to be you or James status position, look at me, I'm learning they have more to lose than you do. So I think there's a component to that of selfishness within your social strata as well.
- [117:29]
A
It's like people need to. People need to keep you happy.
- [117:32]
B
Right. Like if you're miserable. And I had a really great CEO that was in London. We never did work, end up working together. But I really love him and I hope we get a chance to someday. But he has that kind of really big Persona, that really big social strata, and I don't think he knows how easy this is going to be because everybody loves him. Right. And he's everything to everybody. Most people in your life that love you don't want you to live like this. They really don't. They benefit from it. You know, everybody in your life, if you're really in that people pleaser mindset, if you really do live that way, everybody in your life either benefits directly or indirectly from the behavior, I promise. Right. But if you believe, like I do, that the meaning of life is love and adventure and honesty is what adventure is. If you want to, if you want to have an adventurous life, just be honest. Then being honest with the people that you love will only make them love you more. And the reason you know, it, it's. It's like this. I heard this analogy about Velcro that the only reason Velcro works is because it's imperfect and because that's what catches the Velcro. That's what catches the. The. The loops, is the imperfections. And if you really want people to love you, be you and. And watch how they change and be grateful for who they are and love them even when they're afraid of you and don't back down, life is so much better than we make it. It's like, I have never been in a position that I am more grateful for who I am than I am now. And it's not because of status, and it's not because of wealth, and it's not because of any of the extrinsic motivators that people might have. It's. I fell in love with the person I am, and I just kind of let people come and go as they need to. And because I get to do that. I get to do that. I get to have things like boundaries, but I also get to have great sex. I also get to have amazing dinners. I also get to laugh with people like you. You know, I get to meet friends that I never thought I'd meet. I have. So one of my coaches, his name is Stone. I told him I'd mentioned his name on this podcast. He was 17 when I hired him to teach me how to do TikTok. He was 32 bucks. And about a year ago, I had posted on my wall that I wanted to come on your show, and I told all my following to tag you. And I don't know if they did or not, but I was like, I really want to go on the show. Really want to meet this guy. And he texted me. He goes, if you get on that fucking show, I swear to God, I won't make another piece of. So. But why do I get to do this? It's because I show up as me online. I'm not a Persona. I'm not. I'm not blowing smoke up anyone's ass. I just. I get out there and I do it. And then I saw you say it, and I said, what I say. It wasn't like. So I didn't sit and obsess about it. I was like, all right, I'm just gonna say this. You know, he's probably never gonna see it, whatever. And next thing I know, here I am, right? And is it harder when you're affluent? Maybe. I don't know. I don't know if it matters. I think the journey is worth it anyway.
- [121:38]
A
Dude, I love it. I love it. I really appreciate your energy. I really appreciate the vibe. I think that it is a unseen epidemic that a lot of people are dealing with and being able to do it from a. A frame that makes you feel proud to be able to sort of step up to do this. That kind of in a very, actually a very British way admits self deprecatingly that this is both maybe one of the most difficult challenges and like some sort of weird mortal quest and also a totally internal battle that no one's ever, ever going to give you any glory for completing. It's sort of this the most boring and magnificent thing that you're ever going to do both at the same time. You know, a champagne problem that only you are ever really going to be able to pat yourself on the back for, even if it affects the world and the rest of the people around you. I really love it. You've mentioned a couple of times, I'm curious before we finish up, you mentioned a few times different books that were really impactful on you. Scott Peck was one of them. Yep.
- [122:38]
B
The Road Less Traveled. Yeah.
- [122:39]
A
If, if you were to sort of think about, I don't know, a couple of books that you gift the most or that you've reread the most are the ones that sort of from an accessibility perspective really, really made a big impact on you. What would they be?
- [122:57]
B
First one is Not Nice by Aziz Gaspari. That was really the. I think that was the first book I ever read that really addressed this kind of people pleasing behavior. Really put. Helped me put a tag on it. Oh, I see that. Right. So that book is called Not Nice. You know, the cornerstone text of course is going to be Dr. Robert Glover. You know, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Like Doc, you're the king, you know, you're the king. Shut up about it. And I would say that probably Scott Peck is, is. I mean it was one of the number one selling personal growth books of all time, which is the. The Road Less Traveled. Really a direct punch in the face for making excuses. And you know, some of the other greats, of course, Mark Manson did a marvelous job with, you know, subtle art and you know, atomic habits and you know, obviously James Clear and Tim Ferriss and all those guys. But probably those are my top threes. Not Nice by Gaspari Glover's No More Mr. Nice Guy. And Scott Peck I believe is no longer on the planet. But the Road Less Traveled is. That is probably the book that will change your life the fastest. If you really sit to and just absorb it, it'll break you. And it's one of my favorites. It's one of my favorites. I Think where I learned to speak, though, if I can give you one more. My favorite fictional author is Kurt Vonnegut.
- [124:35]
A
Which book?
- [124:37]
B
Slaughterhouse Five is probably the one that everybody says, but Sirens of Titans is my favorite. I just love. I love him as an author. I've read. I've read his entire library, like, whenever I'm in. In a mood that I don't want to read. Personal Growth, which is starting to happen more and more as I, as I write a book around this. I'm just kind of burned out on it. I don't want it. I don't want to read any more about how I have to have habits. I don't. I don't care. Like, I know I'm going to think positive. It's fine. I'm going to be fine. You know, I think I've probably absorbed 10,000 hours of this shit. So if I don't know by now, I'm not going to know.
- [125:15]
A
Nick Pollard, ladies and gentlemen. Nick, I appreciate the hell out of you. I really love your energy. I love your vibe. I love what you're talking about. Where should people go? They want to check out courses, social media, all of that stuff.
- [125:25]
B
Easiest place to find me is the people displeaser.com and on Instagram is, you know, the People Displeaser, a moniker that I love and would hope to get rid of somebody.
- [125:37]
A
It's good for now. It's good for now.
- [125:39]
B
I'll take it for now. But the peopledispleaser.com is the easiest way to find my stuff and follow me on Instagram. And if you really want to do me the favor, follow me on YouTube because that channel needs some love. That same People Displeaser.
- [125:51]
A
So, dude, I love it.
- [125:52]
B
I loved being here. Thank you so much for this. It's been a dream of mine for a couple of years now, and you made it come true. So I appreciate you.
- [125:59]
A
Well, you deserve it. Thank you, man. Until next time.