Dr. Robert Glover - Nice Guy Syndrome

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On today's episode, we are going to speak with Dr. Robert Glover, who is the author and founder of the book called no more Mr. Nice Guy. Now in no more Mr. Nice Guy, this is one of those books that for a lot of men, if they've read it, if you're one of those guys that's listening and you've read this book, you probably got 20 or 30 pages in or 40 pages in and started thinking to yourself, man, I feel like this guy is describing me to a T. For a lot of guys that have suffered from nice guy syndrome, they are often the type of guys that are dependent on external validation. So who are these nice guys? Well, nice guys are often the guys that are the friend who will do anything for anybody, but whose own life seems to often be in shambles. He's the guy who gets frustrated with his wife because he's so afraid of conflict that nothing ever gets resolved. He's the boss who tells one person what they want to hear, then reverses himself to please someone else. And he's the guy who often lets people walk all over him because he doesn't want to to rock the boat. So these guys are often the ones that are trying to seek approval from other people or trying to hide their own perceived flaws and mistakes are the ones that will cover up mistakes that they've made. Nice guys are often the ones that put other people's needs and wants before their own. And they're the ones that sacrifice their own personal power, often to play a role as the victim. So if any of these things resonate with you, listen on. Even if some of this doesn't resonate with you, Robert Glover has some incredible, incredible insight into relationships and into some of the things that prevent us from actually having the full intimacy and desire within our relationships, but also the things that are stopping us in our career. Oftentimes nice guys are stunted in their own career because they're not asking for the things that they want.

All right, Robert, I am so excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me on the Man Talks podcast.

Connor, it's good to be here with you. Thanks.

So I'm excited about this because I like most men that read your book. I read your book a few years ago, read your book and had the same thought, which was, this guy is in my head. This guy seems to know me. And just reading your book was one of those books, one of those rare and few books where it feels like the writer or the author just seems to know you. So I'm really excited to have this conversation because every single man that I've encountered that's read your book has had the same sort of sentiment. So I'm excited to pick your brain.

Yeah, I hear that a lot. Guys say, hey, you've been following me around, or I'm going to sue you for invasion of privacy. You know me too well. So I'm a recovery nice guy. So when I write about nice guys, when I talk to nice guys, it's coming from my own life. So that's why I. That's why I know nice guys.

Awesome. Awesome. So we're going to kick things off in the manner which we usually do, which is, can you tell us a story about a defining moment for you that has made you who you are today?

Well, probably one of the most significant defining moments in terms of how I am today, in terms of how I was 25 years ago, I was in my second marriage, married to a beautiful woman that I was head over heels with, who was also a little bit on the batshit crazy side and was very seductive before we got married. And then on our honeymoon, said, said to me, aren't you glad now that we're married, we don't have to pretend to like sex anymore? And I thought, huh, I wasn't pretending. And our relationship spiraled down pretty quickly in the first couple of years. I was a classic nice guy, just trying to be the good guy, trying to make her happy, trying to please her, raising her kids, trying to be different than her, tolerating a lot of things I shouldn't tolerate, no boundaries, giving to get. Trying to please her. And I just kept getting more passive aggressive and resentful. I'd have occasional victim pukes where, you know, all that stored up resentment came gushing out of me. We reached a point where she just said, I can't take this anymore. I'd rather be with an asshole, I'd rather be with a jerk. Because at least you know they're going to be a jerk, you know, with you, you're such a nice guy, but then you're not and I don't see it coming. And she said, I can't do it. You need to go get some help with this or I'm leaving you. And even though our relationship had gone downhill pretty quickly from the day we married, I didn't want to lose her. I loved her, you know, part of it was my insecurities and ego. Was my second marriage. I couldn't believe I had such a beautiful woman, but I loved her. So there's a strong enough incentive that I went and got help. I joined a 12 step group and started working on myself there, started going to see a therapist. Even with that said I was going trying to figure out why being a nice guy didn't make her appreciate me more, love me more, want to have sex with me, why she still got angry so much of the time, and why hostile and combative and sexually unavailable. So even when I started working on me, I was still trying to figure out why my way of being with her wasn't working. How can I get her to be different? And then slowly, over time, I started realizing that my way of showing up for the relationship had its own severity of dysfunction as well. I wasn't particularly honest. I had no boundaries, I wouldn't set the tone and lead. I was passive aggressive, I would have victim pukes. I had given up most of my guy friends. I didn't have a real life outside of her or raising kids. And so those were the things I went to work on in groups and in therapy. And that's what began the process of me recognizing my own nice guy stuff and the paradigms behind it and the causes for it and the fallacies of it, why it doesn't work. And around that time I started noticing a number of my clients, I'm a marriage and family therapist by training, were coming to me with their wives or girlfriends and they were saying the exact same things I was saying. I'm a nice guy is never good enough. She's angry all the time, she never wants to have sex. You know, when's it going to be my turn? And as I listened to them, I thought, these guys are just like me. They have the exact same roadmap that I do and it isn't working for them either. So I said to a Group of them. How about we start a group each every other week? We'll call it no more Mr. Nice Guy Recovery Group. And I'll just start writing some lessons. You know what I'm. What I'm discovering about me and about nice guys. From there it grew and people kept saying, you should write a book, you should go on Oprah. I ended up writing a book. I haven't ever been on Oprah. So that's a defining moment for me personally in terms of how it really changed my life. My ex wife was a big enough stick upside my head that I couldn't just keep trying to wiggle my way as a nice guy and get away with stuff. It really had to transform. I had to transform. And it's changed my life professionally that I've written a book. Most of my work is with men now. I've worked with thousands of nice guys and workshops and classes and groups and one on one. And it defines my life on many levels.

That's fantastic. And I think it's, I think it's so relatable because I'm a firm believer that a lot of our internal change and transformation can be done because of and within relationships. And I see a lot of men that avoid this oftentimes that say, oh, you know, if I want to grow, if I want to change, it can't happen in the confines of my relationship, which can be very challenging because they might be married, you know, and it's refreshing to hear you talk about this realization and that, you know, the hard stick upside the head is, as you said, that caused you to seek change and growth.

As I said, my background in training is in systems marriage and family therapy. And I'm a big believer that if we will approach our relationships consciously, they're powerful personal growth machines. They are going to bring up all of our stuff, all of our partners stuff. That stuff will all interact and get messy. And if with the right help and, and with consciousness and love and compassion, two people can really climb on the teeter totter of personal growth with each other and kind of keep catapulting each other into more and more personal growth. So I'm a big believer of it. I frequently say, you know, I've bumbled my way through every relationship I ever have. And I have. I recently married for the third time in November, an amazing woman that just makes my world beautiful. And we've had our struggles as well. But the beauty of it is we can talk about them. We get through them. We're both growing as a result of it. And like I said, it's a personal power, powerful personal growth machine. There's another alliteration.

Yeah, I like it.

And I like it because there's just, there's a refreshing sense of, you know, even though, like you're a marriage and family therapist, it's nice to hear you say there was rough patches and I haven't always had it together, you know, and I think oftentimes when people are professional at something, whether it's marketing and sales or leadership or, you know, marriages and relationships, there's often this perception and this desire to be the consistent expert. And so you can't show any of the cracks in the armor. And so it's nice to hear that some of your greatest work has actually come out of some of your greatest challenges.

Yeah, I mean, I'd love to be that professional that has everything that looks like it's working and a lot of times it does work well. But yeah, I tell people, I tell guys that, you know, like they're working with me, say, well, I'm afraid of making a mistake or I'm afraid of looking foolish. I said, wait a minute, you're talking with me because you read my book and my book is not a chronicle of my successes. It's a record of all my fuck ups. It really is. The book's autobiographical. Almost any piece of advice I give to men is because I've done it wrong, I've messed it up, and I'm like everybody else, I'm bumbling my way through life. I, you know, came from a dysfunctional family. I grew up in a fundamental Christian church. Western culture is fucked up on many levels. And, you know, we're just trying to figure it out as we go. And maybe that, maybe just the best we can hope for is that we'll learn quickly from what doesn't work and we'll go find good resources, add new and more effective tools to our toolbox, find more effective roadmaps to follow. But we're all going to bumble our way through it. And the feedback that I get most consistently from men that I work with is what they like most about me is the term they often use is authentic. I'll just tell, yeah, I fucked up in this way or I'm not good at this, or I worry about this, or, you know, I've, I've. Whatever it is, I've learned. And that's part of when I started going to that 12 step group and my now ex wife said, you got to go get help or I'm leaving you. The first thing I decided to do in that group was just start being a completely honest and transparent person. And that probably is the number one transformational piece in my life, is making a commitment to just be open, honest and transparent. What you see is what you get. And ironically, as I've lived my life more on those terms, I mean, I still make as many mistakes, but I'm just open and transparent. I don't try to hide them and pretend that they don't exist. I'm more likable. People are more attracted to me. I attract women without even trying. It's just amazing that when you're just you warts and all that people are drawn and attracted and can connect with that. And I talk about that in the book that so many nice guys are like Teflon. We want to be smooth. We want to get it all right. We don't want to rock the boat. And there's just nothing to connect with. And we think, well, people can just tell that I'm not good enough. No, that's not the problem. Problem is not that we're not good enough. We're just not letting people see who we really are. And that's what people can be attracted to.

Yeah, I think that's really powerful because I fundamentally believe that a lot of people, obviously, they connect with the good parts in us, but oftentimes, what really draws them towards us on a deeper and more intimate level is when they start to see our flaws, you know, and their internal perception of their flaws connects with how they perceive ours. And oftentimes, that's where people really align with us because they see, oh, I get you. I understand you. You're relatable to me. Not just on the shiny veneer of the identity and the mask that you've created, but behind all of that bullshit, behind that, you actually, a part of you gets me. And I feel like that's why your writing is so compelling, is because so many guys can read it and just say, oh, that's me.

Let's dive into this a little bit. Let's talk about the Nice Guy syndrome. Can you unpack just some of the characteristics of the Nice Guy syndrome before we really dive into the meat and potatoes?

Yeah, well, probably the elevator definition of a nice guy is that he's a guy that, through internalizing inaccurate beliefs about himself in childhood, has come to believe I'm not good enough. There's something wrong with me. I've got to be different for other people to like me, love me, approve of me. Want to be my. My girlfriend, whatever, and. Or I've got to hide certain things about me that might upset people or create a negative reaction. And as I said, most of us internalize these beliefs when we're at a very young age, weeks, months, years old. When we experienced things in life that all children experience in one way or another. Sense of abandonment, a sense of not being safe, being shamed in some way, being abused in some way. And children are all narcissistic by nature, and they believe they're the cause of everything that happens in their world. So we all internalize. There must be something wrong with me, that I caused these things to happen. And most children experience that at some level. And most children begin to develop some defense mechanisms to try to do two things. One, try to prevent that painful thing from happening again, and two, to try to deal with the uncomfortable emotions that are the result of that painful thing. And for probably many of the guys listening right now, that was becoming a nice guy, where we try never to upset anybody. We try to please people. We go out of their way to get that external validation and approval. We hide things about ourselves that we think might get a negative reaction. We avoid conflict. We don't want to rock the boat. We tend to repress our needs and try to meet everybody else's needs first. And so there's a fairly generalized package of behaviors that you see in a stereotypical nice guy, and not every nice guy has every one of them. Then they don't show up in necessarily every part of every nice guy's life. I've met guys that weren't nice guys at work, but were in a relationship or that were at work but were total assholes with their girlfriends or wives. So it doesn't always show up in every situation. And not every nice guy has every one of those traits. But the core piece is a conscious or unconscious belief. I'm not good enough. There's something wrong with me. We can call that toxic shame. It tends to lead to a toxic anxiety that we start trying to play it safe and keep our world as smooth and copacetic and predictable as possible.

Yeah, I think that's really great. I mean, some of the things that you touched on there really, around avoiding conflict and, you know, hiding perceived flaws is something that I've seen a lot. A lot of men do. And it creates this. It creates a surface level relationship, you know, between. Between them and either their intimate partner or them and their friends, because they're trying to hide these parts of themselves in order to be Perceived as likable or lovable or altogether in some capacity. And I like that you laid out some of the pieces around why that happens. So from your perspective in terms of the origin or the origin story, if you were. Because I love superheroes.

If you were to describe some of the origin stories, because in your book you do a good job of sharing some stories from real life men that have been through it. But from your perspective, from what you've seen, is there a general consensus of the origin stories of how a nice guy is created? You talked about childhood and some of these pieces. What are some of the core pieces that usually create a nice guy in his adult life?

Yeah, I've heard every story in the book, and every nice guy does have their own story. You can't just point to one thing and says, that's what made you a nice guy. Number one, I found that most men I work with just have a temperament that's fairly easygoing. They're not by nature aggressive, not necessarily type A, not hostile, don't like conflict. I love my mother. You know, anytime I get into a new relationship, as my mother gets to know the woman, at some point, she always tells the woman. Bobby never has liked conflict. And. And I get such a kick out of my mom, you know, And I think that's to help inform the women that if they're, you know, being kind of bitchy or angry or hostile towards me, I'm not going to do well with that. And I never have since I was a child. I think that's just part of my temperament is what I'm wired with. So I think a lot of nice guys I work with just have a fairly easy going temperament. And we kind of like to have things be calm and smooth and peaceful and life go well. Nothing wrong with that. But the most common patterns I see is typically the nice guys as children, as little boys, number one, were not well connected to their fathers. And that can be for a number of reasons. Either dad is gone, has divorced, their mother is out of the picture. Maybe he works a lot, he travels a lot, he's busy, he's tired. Maybe dad was angry or moody. That would fit more the bill of my dad. He was there and fairly involved, but just moody and angry and you never knew when he was going to go off on you. Some guys report having nice guy fathers that they could really depend on and that the dads would never protect them from their usually angry, controlling, narcissistic mothers. And so the number one thing that I see is often that Disconnect from dad. And even if dad is around, often he fails to be a role model or something that the son can connect with and feel safe with and who can initiate the son into what I call the scary, dangerous world of the adult masculine. And so what happens for a lot of guys is we get comfortable hanging out in what I call the nursery, and that the nursery is hanging out with women. And if you talk to most guys and ask them about the earliest years of their life, say from birth through junior high, the majority of their time was highly influenced by women, their mothers, preschool teachers that were women, babysitters, elementary school. I will often ask groups of guys, how many male teachers did you have from kindergarten through your first year of middle school or junior high, the average tends to play out to about one and a half. I had one, I had a fourth grade teacher who was male and I did terrible that year. It was my worst year ever in school. So what happens for a lot of boys just to graduate from third grade to fourth grade, not only do you have to master your reading, writing, arithmetic, but how to please a woman. And so for a lot of guys, we get used to pleasing women. So we hit you high, we start being interested in women. We don't want to be like the asshole jerks that we've heard our mother or other girls complain about. So we be the nice guy, we hang out and we listen to them and try to help them and try to try to make that good impression so at some point that girl will see that we're a nice guy and want to be our girlfriend. That's a whole other story. But it doesn't work. But the point is, most of us are most much more comfortable around feminine energy than we are around masculine energy. And so we're constantly seeking the approval of the feminine. Most of us have experienced that. That really can't be done. You know, you've got to find your own internal source of approval and validation. And that's a lot of the work I do with men, is how to do the things and put yourself in a situation to self validate. And then you're in a healthier position to connect with a woman. But as long as you're trying to please a woman, get her approval, make her happy, get her to like you, get her to keep liking you, get her to want to have sex with you, you're in a very precarious place that isn't going to work well for you in the big picture and won't work very well for any of the women that you happen to be with.

Yeah. It's been interesting because on this journey of understanding more about the nice guy and. And seeing it in the men that I work with or the men that are in our community, in man talks around North America, I've started to notice that every asshole was once a nice guy. And that swung the other way. It swung the other way. Right. And it's funny because a lot of the women that I talked to is like, oh, yeah, I dated this guy and blah, blah, and he turned out to be such an asshole. When we started dating, he was such a nice guy, you know? And so it's funny how the perspective can shift, shifts, and the thing that we're trying to avoid so hard ends up becoming true. Right. And what I started to notice is one of the things that you talk about in your book is manipulation and the nice guy's relationship to manipulation and passive aggressiveness and the impact that that has on the relationship that we're in because we're never really showing up. And so can you unpack a little bit around the nice guy and manipulation and how that shows, shows up and maybe the impact that it has on the relationship dynamic?

Yeah. Let me say a little bit about COVID contracts and feed that into the manipulation thing. Because, yes, nice guys are fundamentally manipulative. And that may kind of, for a lot of nice guys, say, wait a minute, you know, that's a bad word. I'm a good guy. I'm a nice guy. I'm not a controlling asshole. But our manipulation is often much more subtle than just like, physically dominating another person. So first of all, the three covert contracts of the nice guy syndrome, and I talk about these in the book. And I found, I think every nice guy has all three, probably one with more intensity than the others. But I think almost every nice guy I've worked with has had all three. Number one, covert contract. And all of them are phrased in an if then paradigm. If I'm a nice guy, then people will like me and love me, and then we can add to that, and the people I desire will desire me back. So if I'm a good guy, people will like me and love me. Number two, if I meet other people's needs without them having to ask, then they will meet my needs without me having to ask. There's a lot of manipulation in the that I'm going to do this for you, do this for you and do this for you. How come you're not doing this for me? Doing this for me. So that's manipulative in nature. Number three. Number three, covert contract. If I do everything right, then I will have a smooth, problem free world. Now, of course, we don't live in a smooth, problem free world, and we're usually the scorekeeper on have I done everything right? How come you haven't done your side? How come you're making my life miserable when you're supposed to be making it good? Because I've done everything right. So those three covert contracts is what leads to our resentment, our frustration, our passive aggressiveness, our helplessness. And it's out of that helplessness and a lack of a better life strategy that we basically have to manipulate every situation in life to try to get it to line up with what we want it to be. Where it plays out a lot is in our personal relationships. So, for example, as a nice guy, because we don't feel great about ourselves, maybe we connect with a woman who boosts our ego in some way but has some certain glaring flaws about her. But we think, well, I can fix those, I can help her, I can do this, and then she'll become this amazing person and I'll have this amazing partner. Well, anytime you're trying to change your partner, that's fundamentally unloving. It feels unloving to everybody. And I'll ask guys often I said, have you ever had a partner who wanted you to be different that tried to change you? And almost all nice guys have. And all I would ask them, did you feel loved when your partner was trying to get you to be different? No, it doesn't feel loving when your partner is trying to get you to be a different person. So as nice guys then are often manipulating their partners, either trying to get them to have more sex with them or lose weight or not flirt with every guy they meet or not spend so much time on Facebook or contribute more financially to the relationship or however they're trying get them to quit being depressed or anxious or complaining all the time. Whatever you're trying to get your partner to do, odds are if you're in a nice guy paradigm, you're going to be using manipulation, trying to get. Get her to that place using your covert contracts.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the one that really stood out for me and resonated the most, which I was notorious for. It's almost like you become a little like ninja with these covert contracts, you know? And the one that I was notorious for was the second one. I think I believe it was the second one of taking care of my partner's. Needs covertly behind the scenes and then expecting my needs to be met without communicating them and getting furious when it wasn't happening. And just like, well, you should have known that I want sex now. Or, you know, you should know that I don't want to go. Do you know that kind of stuff? And it was interesting because I remember reading through your book being like, oh, man, I can't believe how much I did that. But it was a result of me not wanting to openly speak the truth about my desires and my wants and just having this expectation that the other person should somehow know what I want because I've worked so diligently to take care of their needs behind the scenes and in front of the scenes. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about that.

Yeah, that's been my big pattern as well. And here's. This adds even more. Another layer of difficulty to the whole thing here is that in general, nice guys are not good at receiving. We're actually pretty uncomfortable with people meeting our needs. It's not unusual for nice guys to think, you know, it's wrong for us to have needs. We're bad for having needs. People are going to get angry at us if we have needs. And so not only do we kind of keep that lid on them and use our covert contracts to try to get our needs met, when people do do things for us, it makes us so uncomfortable. We either push it away or we don't let them, or we do something for them right back in return to even it out so we don't feel emotionally debted or feel like, oh, now that they're going to be mad at me because they gave. We often think people are gonna be mad at us if they give to us. And the truth is often nowhere close to that. People often get great pleasure out of giving to the people that they love. So, yeah, not only are we terrible at communicating what our needs are, we're not actually very good at letting people give to us. And if you want to add another layer of difficulty, we often get attracted to people that are really shitty at giving to other people because they're so narcissistic, depressed, or borderline that they're just constantly in their own head about stuff. You know, even if we were like, you know, roto, you know, every day, here's what I need today. Can you help me? You know, they couldn't. So, you know, we got all kinds of layers of difficulty tied into this.

Yeah, it's so, so interesting because I think, you know, in that in that paradigm of not being able to receive properly, I've seen a lot of. A lot of nice guys fall into this trap, wanting things sexually within the sexual dynamic with their partner and then not actually allowing those things to unfold. So they'll have this internal narrative of, oh, I want her to wear a lingerie, or, oh, I want her to do these certain things to me. And then when they're offered up.

They actually cut themselves off from enjoying them and cut themselves off from not only receiving them, maybe they'll go through the actions of receiving them, but not actually enjoying that space of receiving the things that they've actually been looking for.

Yeah, you're exactly right. And I watched. I've watched and still watch myself in that place. I remember especially when I was married to the woman who rarely wanted to have sex, if she did start doing something overtly sexual with me, it's like, I couldn't just enjoy it. I would immediately then flip it and start doing something for her, something to her. And. And she even expressed frustration over that. It. You know, why won't you let me do that? And it wasn't until after I got divorced and started dating and having contact with other women that I started realizing there's a lot of women out there that love sex, that love being openly sexual and giving to their man. And, you know, put it graphically, I met a lot of women who took great pride in their blow jobs. And it's kind of like, yeah, I give good head. And it hit me, who am I to rob them of their pleasure of giving a great.

And believe it or not, that took work to actually just be still, stay in my body, and let a woman pleasure me. Because everything in my head said, no, no, no, you can't do this. You have to start doing something for her to make her happy. And that, believe it or not, was a big transition that took conscious work.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's something really important to point out because, you know, there is this sort of negative connotation around receiving pleasure for not all men, but for some. For some men, there is the other side of the spectrum as well. But for a lot of men that struggle to actually receive in a sexual dynamic, and I think what you're describing, I think a lot of guys have gone through. I remember going through the exact same thing where even though I was this, like, highly sexually active man, a lot of it was just giving all the time. Like, I was just like the classic giver. And so receiving in a sexual dynamic was something That I like literally had to consciously work on, which seems so counterintuitive because that's why I was in it in the first place.

You know, it's like you wanted to feel good.

Yeah, I'm here to feel good. And yet, no, I don't want you to go down on me because like, I gotta feel like I'm in. Do you think that it's partly control? Because I found that I labeled it, I remember I'm going back to like my early 20s now, but I remember labeling it as a sense of control. Like, oh, I'm in control of this situation, I'm controlling how things are going. But it would cut me off from actually like receiving the things that I wanted to receive.

Yeah, I think there's probably a number of layers to it. And most guys wouldn't say it so much, oh, I want to be in control. But really what it is is I don't want to feel out of control. Because if you think about it, if you're just kind of in the receptive place, you're being taken on an adventure, you don't have control of where it's going to go or what's going to happen or you know, what your body's going to do. And so a lot of nice guys don't like feeling out of control. And so we do a lot of things. We would never think of ourselves as controlling guys, but we avoid feeling out of control.

And I think that there's a lot of layers that of course get brought into the whole sexuality thing. And another big one is that external validation. You know, if I'm a stud in bed, if I give her multiple orgasms, if I get her screaming, oh, she's going to think I'm an amazing guy. And that's self validating. And then the corollary is, and she'll want to come back and have more sex with me.

The backfire of that is then, okay, next time she comes back for more sex, we do exactly what we did the last time because it worked so well. And then this time she doesn't come so quickly or doesn't have as many orgasms. So we keep trying harder to do those same things we did last time. And then maybe the next time she's just not in the mood and the next time she quits coming back for sex and we go, what happened? I was such a great lover. Well, we did that whatever worked last time to get her off. And that turned into boring routine sex. And most people, but especially women, do not tend to like the boring routine, let's do what worked last time kind of sex.

Yeah.

Women, for the most part, I found, are much more open to the adventure of let's just get naked and roll around together and see where this goes.

Yeah.

You know, it could get dirty, it could get nasty, could go all night. It could. May just be. We'll snuggle, you know, but let's just let it go where it goes.

Yeah, Yeah, I agree 100%. To mix it up, try in the living room, get out of there, try the living room, Try the bathroom, like just anywhere but the bedroom where you do it, you know, week on a Friday night at 11pm and be sure.

And take the woman with you into the living room as well.

So let's just kind of stay on this topic a little bit and talk about seeking approval from women, because I feel like this is a really important thing. And.

There'S kind of like the folklore of this, the iron jaundice of this, of needing to heal the relationship with our mother and sort of not like break ties, but be able to move past that. And then there's the more tangible side of it, where we are seeking approval and really seeking those relationship dynamics from women. So why does this come about and why is it so strong in the nice guy?

Well, again, I think there's probably a number of layers, and honestly, I don't know that I have them all figured out. I think one is an evolutionary wiring of men that we're wired to provide and protect. And I think it's just in our DNA. I mean, I don't know any guy unless he's a total narcissist that isn't moved by a woman's tears, that when women cry, we want to come in and fix that we're moved by them. I think that's that. I think that is the total evolutionary purpose of tears, is to create empathy in other people to come and help somebody that's in pain. And it's in us. It's wired into us. And I mean, over a period of a couple million years. And so I think part of it is, is we just want. We want to take care of women. We want to do what's right by them. And I think that that's part of the DNA that's just part of being male and part of being masculine. I think part of it goes back again to our early stages of life where we spent so much time around women. And most guys like things to be calm and smooth and predictable. That tends to be what we Strive for. And for most women, they're the weather. They're not calm and smooth. They can be up one day, down the next, or up one minute, down the next. Some women are more volatile than others. But in general, women, they're drawn to drama. I mean, in ways that guys aren't. And so while we were trying to exist in this environment, highly influenced by women, we, with all of their constant emotional flux and change, we really get caught up in this. How can I do something to make this smooth, to get life back? So we're trying to please them and fix them and get their approval. And so, again, that's just part of an early conditioning that most of us didn't have the connection with men to go out and learn how to conquer the world around us. We were trying to figure out how to keep women. Women smooth and copacetic and get their approval because we didn't have the other side. We didn't have that masculine part that knew we could go out, hang out with our buddies and penetrate the world and kill the dragons and defeat the enemy and cure cancer, you know, score the touchdown, whatever it might be. So that really made us dependent on women, and it made us dependent on reading their every mood, their every, you know, every, you know, facial expression, body language. And so most nice guys are really highly sensitive to those. Those things in women. Yeah. There may be one more piece that layers in. And I don't know if this came out of feminism in the 60s, the angry feminism of the 60s that I grew up with and was highly influenced by, but there's almost a thing, at least in Western culture. I don't know if this is true in Asian or Eastern cultures, but in Western culture, there's almost this unwritten rule. Don't piss off the woman. And this is true in the workplace. It's true in social situations, because as soon as somebody pisses off a woman, everybody's got to pay a price for it. And there's even laws in America to protect women from getting pissed off.

And I think there's that part of this. This thing that we men are walking around. Don't do anything to piss off the woman. We don't want angry women. That. That. That ruins everything. So again, it's all that, that approval seeking, trying to do it right. And I've tried my life, my whole life, trying to figure out how to do that stuff, and I've never gotten it right.

Yeah.

And hasn't kept me from trying to.

It's interesting because, like, as you were talking, I Was thinking about my early 20s, and even though I was in pursuit of a music career and a whole bunch of other things, if you were to ask me what I had spent the most time trying to master, it would have been women. They would have been relationships to women and pleasing them emotionally, sexually, intellectually, in every aspect. That was like my pursuit of mastery. And it's interesting that it hasn't been until, you know, recently, the last few years, where I shifted into a purpose in life, that my relationships with women have. Have really fallen into alignment.

It transitions them, doesn't it? Just totally. And the women are still the same, but it makes everything different.

Yeah. And so just kind of before we dive into how to combat this nice guy syndrome and some of the things to do, like making your needs a priority and reclaiming your personal power, I just wanted to touch on something that came up in your book that I think is really important, which I believe you referred to as cover up artist. Yeah, and I think this is really important because this is one of those things that. That I've seen almost as like a universal. For most. For most nice guys and even just nice guys in general, there's this like, cover up artist. So can you just unpack that a little bit and explain how it shows up in relationship dynamics with men?

Well, it goes back to that thing that for a lot of us nice guys is we think that if people see who we really are, there's going to be a negative response to that. And so we got to try to be good or become what we think people want us to be. And we got to hide things that we don't want to be found out about. And this could be hiding just normal, natural stuff, you know, that we want to go play, we want to goof off, we want to sleep, we want to touch our penis, we want to have sex. Those are just normal, natural things that we start hiding those things because of the messages that it's not good. And then if we make a mistake, break something, thing, fuck up, we really then do our best to, you know, keep that out of view. I think one of the. I think I wrote this in the book that for a lot of nice guys, their mantra is, if at first you don't succeed, hide the evidence. And the fear is if we. If we don't do everything exactly right, we're going to get a negative reaction. Doesn't matter if it was women or in the workplace or with our buddies. And this might be a good segue and into what you kind of already teed up about what can we start doing to become aware of and break free of the nice guy syndrome. And for me it involved, and I stress this in the book, I said don't try to do this alone. You didn't develop your nice guy syndrome in isolation. You're not going to fix it in isolation. Go get with safe people, a good friend, a minister, a coach, a therapist, a man, men's group, a 12 step group, Mankind project. Go find some safe people and start working on your stuff. And a good place to begin is to start revealing you. And that's actually what I did when, when my ex wife said, you go to therapy, you go get help. And I started going to a 12 step group and.

I realized I didn't fit into that 12 step group. But I thought this is a good place to still do some of my work. And so I made a decision to just start being open and honest about everything in my life I'd ever kept hidden, pushed down, didn't want anybody to see. And my initial experience of that was, this is amazing. I love this. I love just being able to talk about stuff that I've never shared with anybody. And I also came to realize how many secrets I had and how far from the truth a lot of the things I revealed really were. And so I started making that commitment. I made it in my marriage, I made it with my clients, my work, my life to start telling the truth and revealing the total truth. And I remember with my then wife, whenever I would notice myself rehearsing a story to give her about something like why I was late getting home from work.

Any rehearsing of stories was usually a pretty good sign that I was on the wrong track. Or when that voice in my head was saying, tell it this way or leave out this part or don't say anything. That's when I knew I had to do something different. And so what I would do is I'd go to her and I'd say, I got two things to tell you. Number one, I was going to lie to you. Here's the lie I was going to tell you. Number two, here's the truth and I tell her the truth. And amazingly for a woman, I used to tell her her middle name ought to be Overreact because that's what she always did in every situation and she rarely overreacted to that because she knew it was true. But here was a woman that overreacted almost everything except the truth. And I thought that is really profound. Especially when I told her I was going to Lie to you? Here's a lie I was going to tell you, here's the whole truth. And often it's just like, oh, okay, I don't know why you were going to lie to me. You could have just told me the truth. Because that's me. That's my screwed up thinking and paradigm. But I learned to do that in safe places. In 12 step groups, working in the therapy with therapists, working in men's groups, I practice revealing me. If I had shame about it, I had anxiety about it, I had fear about it, I put it out there. And, and the beauty of it is I never got attacked, never got shamed. Usually people just said, oh well, thanks for sharing. Or really you have shame about that. That's pretty normal. Or hey, let's just explore that, see what it means. And it was never a negative reaction. That was transformational to just start being that open and honest and transparent.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's funny that you're, you're talking about this because that's basically why we created the mastermind groups within mantalks. And a lot of the groups actually use your book within the first few months to go through that and spark the dialogue. It's incredible to see what comes out of that and the truths that come out of it. And being able to uncover some of those covert contracts that are happening in the relationship dynamics or even at work. A lot of times I find that business partners have covert contracts with one another. So, you know, getting that group is so, so, so important, especially a group of men who are going to hold you accountable to not only uncovering the truth, but then going forward and speaking the truth. Because those are, those are often two different things. What I find is that men oftentimes know the truth, but if they don't have other men calling them forward, they're not speaking the truth. And so it's something that is still avoided, it's still hidden because it's sort of been revealed, but it's just been put in the closet. So I think that's great perspective.

Yeah. And you really hit on the next thing that I stress with men and want to recover from nice guy syndrome, go get with other men, spend time with men doing guy things. And it doesn't always have to be recovery things. Go be with guys, go on a hike with guys, have a poker night, have a prayer, Bible study with guys. Go on baseball road trips with guys. Just go be with guys. Our ancestors spent the majority of their living days with men. It's Only been the last 50 years in Western culture that men have spent a fairly equal amount of time around women, whether it be in the workplace or with their wives. You go, a hundred years ago in Western culture, the men were with the men and the women with the women. And I'm not saying we got to go back in time or do it this way, but I do know that we guys are evolutionarily wired to be a part of that guy team. And whether it's just guys goofing off, having a good time as a team, or guys working together on a project or to solve a problem or hold each other accountable, got to spend time with guys. There's just no way around it. And. And I've been telling men for years that the best foundation you can build, that you can lay to build a good relationship with a woman on, is with good guy friends. Have that foundation with your guys. Don't make a woman your best buddy. That's just not going to work in the big picture.

Yeah, yeah. That's really profound, and I appreciate your insight on that. So in terms of the recovering nice guy and what men can do to start making their own needs a priority, where do they start? Because I think maybe there's a bunch of people that are listening to the podcast and like, okay, that's me. And I get a lot of this. How do I start to shift this? What are some of the tactical things that they can do in order to not only find their truth and speak their truth, but to start to make their needs a priority in their life?

Again, having a support system to help with that helps because for a lot of us, we do really feel a lot of guilt and shame. And for making our needs a priority, if we're tired and want to sleep in, we feel guilty. You know, if we want to just goof off a little bit, we feel guilty. You know, if we want our partner to have sex with us, sometimes we feel guilty about that. So having a support system to support us in that is really helpful, and it really does take a very conscious practice of it. And I know again, when I was doing this work in my second marriage and working on a lot of the nice guy stuff, I very consciously started telling my wife, okay, I want to do this or I'm going to do this, or I'd like this from you. Sometimes it was needs from her, sometimes it was needs. Totally unrelated. I'm going to start going to the gym regularly. I'm going to join this racquetball league. I'm going to Start playing softball. It's just very consciously saying, I'm going to do these things for me and fill my bucket up. We were wet for. I did a year moratorium during my recovery when I was married, where I did not give anything to my wife. No surprises, no birthday cards, no gifts, no special treats, because I was so caught up in all that giving to get and not very good at meeting my needs. And she was on board with it. I mean, she didn't like my covert contracts either. So for a year, I didn't give anything to her. I just solely focused on giving to me. Now, this is, as I said, very open, very conscious, and it was liberating and helpful, and it's been powerful in changing my life. You and I were talking. I live in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico now. Been doing this for about eight years. After you're here, half the year in Seattle. I bought a house here this last summer. I live here now. But it began with just me honoring a need. I want to spend more time in Puerto Vallarta. I love it here. I love the sunshine, the people, the ocean, the food, the music. I just love it. And it was a conscious process of making my needs a priority and even changing my entire business model so that I could live here part of the year and now all the year round. So I consciously started doing stuff for me. Now, one of the assignments I often give guys in my classes, two assignments I frequently give that are very simple but very challenging. One is I tell guys, whether this is in the workplace or in relationship, three times a day. Start with one a day if you have to, but see if you can build up to three times a day. Ask somebody to do something for you that you can do yourself.

Hey, while you're up, would you bring me a cup of tea, coffee, or would you mind making these copies for me? You can get up and make the copies. You can go get your cup of coffee. But consciously ask one to three people. Start at one, build up to three. Three times a day. Ask somebody to do something for you that you can do yourself. It triggers a lot of shame, a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear. That's good. Let it come up and do it anyway. Soothe yourself. The second assignment that I'll often give, and this can be equally hard, is start at 1, but build up to 3. Say no to a legitimate request from other people. Start it once a day, consciously. Somebody asks you to do something and say, no, I can't do that. No. Don't feel like doing that. No, Not Going to do that again brings up shame, fear, anxiety, that people are going to be hostile. A lot of times they just go, okay, and then they go find someone else or go do it themselves. But we think we're doing something wrong if we tell somebody else no. So practice asking people to do things for you. Practice saying no, and practice you doing good things for you. That's where it has to begin.

Yeah. And I was just going to say on the practice saying no front, I think an important distinction is like, literally saying the words no. But also notice how, because I've done. I've done this years and years ago. Did, like, the rejection therapy and the, you know, the. No, like, rejection therapy for me was not just getting rejected, but actually also putting out rejection into the world. And one of the big components that I noticed was how often I would try and soften the. Soften the blow, you know, So I would create these. Like, it would be like, no, because X, Y and Z and I got this and that, or like, oh, I.

Would love to, but blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so there was always this, like, cushioning there. That made me feel good about saying no.

No. It made you feel less shitty about saying no is what it did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it actually softened the blow, not for the other person, but for me. And so when I really got in tune with that, it was interesting how it changed to, no, I'm not going to do that, or no, that doesn't feel aligned with me right now, or, no, I don't feel like that right now. And that fundamentally shifted things. And like you said, the other person, nothing changed for them. Nothing changed for them. It was literally just before I was softening the blow for myself. So I appreciate that insight.

Yeah. I mean, just a quick, funny example, my wife's sister was here visiting this weekend, and before she went back, she wanted to buy some Puerto Vallarta keychains to take back to Guadalajara. And my wife's Mexican, of course, her sister is, too. So we took all the kids into Starbucks in the central part of Vallarta, and they were going to go shopping for keychains. And as I was parking my wife, I said, well, there's this place back here. Maybe as we're leaving, we can just drive by there and pick some up. I said, well, or you and your sister, we're not far, could just walk back there and be in Starbucks. And she said, you don't want to go shopping with me?

We've only been married coming on seven months. And so I guess we haven't had that discussion yet. No, I don't like to go shopping with women. I learned that a long time ago. And she was so surprised. You don't want to go with us? And I said, no, I don't enjoy going shopping with women for things that women are interested in. I had some anxiety. I thought, oh, where's this going to go? And it didn't go anywhere. But, yeah, that was just saying, no, I don't want to go keychain shopping with you. And I felt a little anxiety about it.

That's good. That's a really good example. So just to shift gears.

Into some of the last sections of the book, because I think this is really important for people to hear before we wrap up, is the components around reclaiming your personal power. And you dive into some great stuff there. So I'm hoping that you can unpack. You actually talk about, if I remember correctly, overcoming the wimp factor and reclaiming your personal power, which I loved, because I think that's like, incentivizing, and it's incentive for us as the nice guys, once we identify that, to start to move through it. So can you unpack that for us?

Well, I always hate this part when somebody says, you know, the thing you wrote about on page 37, and I wrote the book 20 years ago.

I love it when people tee it up and say, when you talk about this. I don't actually remember exactly what I said about overcoming the wimp factor. But what I do know is it's two things for me are so important. We talked about making your knees a priority. We talked about spending time with men. There's something about just being with men, doing guy things that gets you in touch with your masculine. And I love that guys tease each other to show love. And a lot of nice guys are not comfortable being teased, mainly because we were maybe teased in unloving ways as children, but the way we can tease each other as guys. And I'm a big believer that we've got to be physical not just with our guy friends, but in life. Again, our ancestors were physical. They lived a very hard, challenging life. They did not sit all day. And I tell guys, as part of your great cake of a life, to really have an amazing life, you've got to sweat.

Four to five times a week. You gotta have sweat rolling off your forehead on a regular basis. You've got to challenge yourself when your brain is saying, no, I don't want to do one more rep. You know, maybe you got your workout partner saying, Give me another one. You know, when your body, your brain is saying, oh, okay, you know, I can quit now. You go, no, I'm going to do five more minutes on the stair climb where you just keep challenging yourself both physically and emotional. And, you know, you don't have to read too many magazine articles or read Google News to miss the fact of how many articles stress the importance of physical exercise, for sleep, for emotional well being, for diabetes control, for, you know, erections. We were built to exercise. We're like a working breed of dog. You know, the Labradors or the German Shepherds, you know, if they're not working, if they're just sitting around the house doing nothing, they chew everything up, they shit in your slippers, you know, they're bad behaved. And we're the same way. We're built to be a working breed of animal. And so one of those ways to overcome our wind factor, like I said, spend time with men, but get to the gym or, you know, ride your mountain bike, bike or play tennis or do something that just is physically, emotionally demanding. And that gets us back, I mean, all the other health benefits, I mean, we could list 25 of them, 100 of them, but just the fact that it gets us back to our masculine source of who we are. So those are some of the things I would highly recommend to overcome that wimp factor. And, you know, since I got divorced 15 years ago and I started dating, teaching men to date, one of the most common things I've seen is guys that have traditionally are bad at dating and traditionally bad at approaching women. But they all want a 10, they all want these hot women. And so many of these guys, you know, the high point of their day is playing three hours of World of Warcraft at night or, you know, watching reruns on television or surfing the Internet till 2 in the morning. And I'm thinking, what is it that you think is going to attract a woman to you? Go get some fierceness about you, spend time with guys, get to the gym, lose your belly, take good care of yourself. And then women are just going to naturally turn heads when you walk by. You don't have to use pickup lines or routines or you can let go of the porn, Just get out there and live a life where you're actually penetrating the world, bringing your fierceness, challenging yourself, and everything gets more interesting from there.

I feel like that's just the perfect place to start to wrap things up because you're not only talking about reclaiming that personal power, but tapping into your own masculine Nature. And some of those components are absolutely essential. I think a lot of what you. You talked about there as well, is great for understanding intimacy and relationships as well. Do you feel like the more that you tune into your masculine energy and that masculine presence within you, that it deepens the intimacy within your relationship?

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, we could do a whole other series of podcasts around that, talking about masculine feminine polarity in relationship. In fact, that's a significant portion of the book I'm working on right now. For my next book, even something as simple as I said. In the last year, I bought a house, you know, got married. My wife, her two kids live here. It's just a big house down here in Puerto Vallarta. We had rooms we didn't know what to do with. And so my wife is a gym rat. She goes to class five mornings a week, but still likes to work, work out at a gym. I'm not a gym rat, but I know I need to work out, but I'd be working all day, and I'm tired, and I don't want to get in the car and drive to the gym. So we turned one of our rooms into a home gym and got a spin cycle, had our welder, build a weight rack for bench press and squats. We bought professional Olympic weights, kettlebells, benches, and I mean, it's not huge or elaborate, but you can. We can do everything we want. And it's interesting that now that the gym is in the house, I'm working out daily. I never miss. I mean, there's no excuse. And that makes my wife just the fact that I'm more disciplined in getting to the gym. She's more attracted to me because in the past, when she go, are you going to go to the gym today?

Yeah, I need to, but I got to get this done, you know, she likes it when I go get that sweat on, and she likes the discipline that it, that it shows. So having the gym in the house. And now when she walks in and I'm in my shorts with no shirt on and music's blasting and I'm sweating and I'm lifting and I'm grunting or I'm pushing out on the spin cycle, I can just see it in her eyes. She just tells me, you know, how attracted she is to me. She's always liked a lot of sex. It's like she wants even more, more now because she seen me being so physical in front of her eyes. She told me, I love listening to you when you grunt and groan. You know, so, you know, I throw a few grunts and groans in for her every now. But yeah, just it. That's just a starting place. Like I said, we could go on and on and on about the masculine, feminine polarity. And my wife has a very strong masculine side. She could kick my ass. She does my Thai. What? Muay Thai. I've seen videos of her. She's fast, she's strong. She squats the same amount of weight I do. So, you know, she's a tough cookie. She grew up 8 and 10 kids in poverty and, you know, Guadalajara, Mexico. And yeah, I don't piss her off. She could take me, but she loves it that I'm masculine. And she always says I've got big balls, but I want my man's balls to be bigger than mine. She loves, loves it that when I do anything masculine, just her getting to see me work out regularly, that alone creates this really great emotional, physical tension between us.

I love it. Well, we'll definitely have to have you back on closer to your book, next book being launched, and we'll talk about masculine and feminine polarities and those dynamics, because I think that that's something that's not only intriguing, but I think that it's so important for people to know. So we'll dive into that next time. Robert, thank you so much for being on the podcast. And if people want to get in touch with you, if they want to.

See more of your work, where can.

They go to find you?

Okay, it's simple enough. They can either go to drglover.com, which is just D R G L-O-V E R dot com, or I tell people, if you Google, either Robert Glover or Google no more Mr. Nice Guy. I used to say that if you Google no more Mr. Nice Guy, Alice Cooper and I came up number one and two. I now have 11 of the 12 spots on the same on the page. Alice Cooper comes in at 5 or 6, and, you know, bless his soul. So, yeah, they just Google no more Mr. Nice Guy. Google Robert Glover. Go to drglover.com then get information about my online classes, my podcast, my workshops and seminars, and send me an email.

And we'll connect some wonderful. Thank you very much for your time and for all the listeners out there. Don't forget to go to mantalks.com to check out our past podcasts, the blog posts that we have from men and women that write around the world for us, and check out some of our live events. We've got events going now in over a dozen cities around North America. I would love to see you out at one of them. So if you're going to go connect and touch base with me before you hit up one of our live events so that we can chat while while you're there. Until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off for the Man Talks podcast. Join us next week for another inspiring conversation with another inspiring individ.