A "Nice Guy" Isn't a Good Man (He's Secretly Manipulating You)
In this interview, host Josh Trent talks with body‑positivity advocate and author Kelvin Davis about the deep differences between a "nice guy" and a "good man." Davis shares personal stories of his own deception—subscribing to OnlyFans, pornography addiction, and lying to his ex‑wife—explaining how confronting those hidden vices forced him to speak the truth aloud, which gave others genuine choice and began his transformation. He connects this personal honesty to broader concepts: the physics of sexual/frustration energy, the need to redirect it constructively, and the spiritual guidance he received from God, prayer, and a reflective woman named Phoebe who challenged him to dig deeper. Davis describes how painful life events—divorce litigation, a fallout with his sister, and parenting challenges—served as mirrors teaching patience, grace, and forgiveness. The conversation weaves in the Four Agreements (especially "don't take anything personally"), the metaphor of truth as a scalpel that cuts emotional poison, and the importance of surrendering pain rather than resisting it. Finally, Davis reads a concise excerpt from his book that contrasts a nice guy’s behaviors (instant gratification, lies, seeking praise) with a good man’s (transparency, delayed gratification, moral guidance, gratitude, empathy, purposeful kindness). He urges men to clean up all aspects of their lives, admit flaws, embrace second chances, and pursue purpose over perfection, emphasizing that resistance often signals true moral work.
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A lot of nice guys are cowards.
If a man's being super nice, it's because he wants something from the woman.
Yeah.
And she can feel that on an enteric level.
Yeah. That's an act. That's a facade. When you're a nice guy, you open up this door, you'll pay for dinner, you'll say really nice compliments. You're thinking the whole time that you're gonna get some kind of sexual access.
Kelvin Davis is a body positivity advocate and author of "Be a Good Man, Not a Nice Guy." Nice guys and good men approach everything in their life differently.
Health, finances, time, money. Nice guys will find the problem, but good men find the solution. If you have a vice that you're not proud of, admit it, deal with it, and continue to strive to do better. When you're able to adapt and speak your actual truth, people can adapt to your truth and they can live inside of that honesty. And the more you let it go, the more you will get back.
How does a man meet himself in his nice guy-ness? Yeah, so that he can identity transform into a good man. So being a nice guy, oh my gosh, how I've struggled with this. And so many men have struggled with this. What is the hidden self-sabotage inside of being a nice guy?
The hidden sabotage would have to be the performative act of being nice, right? A lot of guys use it as a form of a way to portray themselves as being the best version of who they think they actually are, right? But what happens is the performative nature— when you act, you are not being your genuine self. You're not aligned with your character, your morals, your values. To give you an example, A nice guy will love to say his favorite color is blue, right? He'll be like, my favorite color is blue. My favorite color is blue. But when a hot girl comes around and her favorite color is green, he changes his color. My favorite color is green because her favorite color is green. He uses the sense of niceness to be approval seeking, to have validation, and to avoid any kind of accountability, right? So That's the hidden sabotage of it, is that internal motive of wanting to put on this act of being nice.
It seems like with nice guys, and I've dealt with this in my life, yeah, that we, if we're unconscious, then we're nice, but there's always some kind of unsaid but felt experience of an expectation that they want.
Yes.
In other words, there's like the, hey, I'm a nice guy, love me, like me, accept me, but then below that there's this covert contract that if— let's talk about male-female relationships. If a man's being super nice, it's because he wants something from the woman.
Yeah.
And she can feel that on an enteric level.
Yeah.
She can sense that.
Yeah.
How have you seen that in writing the book and in your own life play out this covert contract with being a nice guy? Yeah.
So as a former nice guy, because I used to be this guy that would use his niceness to get things that he wanted inside of life, right? So you use niceness, like you, open up this door, you'll pay for dinner, you'll say really nice compliments, and you're thinking the whole time that you're going to get some kind of sexual access. Yeah. Or you're going to get a hug, you're going to get a kiss. And when that doesn't happen, you get slowly kind of pissed as, as the nice guy, because you're like, I'm, I'm exuding all of the nice qualities that you want, but you're not giving me anything in return, right? And What I've noticed is that when good men do things just because they are good and for the purpose of it, and when you have a genuine heart and you do the kind thing, you feel less resentment towards others for not giving you the reciprocity. Right. And when you look for that validation, when you look for that sense of approval or that sense of, hey, I was nice and opened up this door, I dropped $70 on Dinner, invite me back to your place. Once you get rid of trying to perform that niceness and start tapping into the good character that you're supposed to have with your morals and your principles and your values, you no longer feel that resentment. And that helps you just as much as it helps others, because what you're starting to do is you're starting to understand, if I'm just good, If I'm just kind, just because that, that's who I am, it doesn't matter what anybody else does.
Mm-hmm.
And you're not gonna have any sort of resentment or anger or frustration because they're not meeting you halfway.
It seems like it's because most of us are raised in parental models. I know yours was different. You actually gave a great homage to your parents, which I love. Yes. We'll read that later on. You grew up in an environment that was much different. Than most people grow up. You had a very supportive, nurturing environment.
Yes.
But not everybody grows up in that. And we actually, from example, from modeling, we'll watch our dad be a nice guy or a people pleaser for sure. And we'll watch the mother inherently get more and more and more angry. So there's some kind of a rupture that deserves repair.
Oh, yeah.
But I found that, and I wonder how you feel about this, that when we are as children and adolescents and teenagers, when we watch the father kowtow and be the nice guy and hold that resentment, he's actually robbing the marriage and robbing the relationship of the authenticity that it really deserves.
For sure.
I think we learned that. I definitely learned that as a son to my father. It's not a knock on my father. He did the best he could with the level of consciousness he had. But this is something that's very prevalent. And I would say it impacts, if I had to guess, 8 out of 10 men where they see their father act in a way that's very disempowering. But the father doesn't even know that they don't know they're doing it. It's unconscious incompetence.
Of course.
Do you see this play out in your work with this book and just, you know, at large in society?
I do.
It feels like this is an epidemic of niceness.
Yeah. Yeah. What I've noticed, and I may get a lot of flak for saying this, and I'm okay with that, but a lot of the nice guys that I have encountered have been products of single-parent homes. A lot of them do not have that father or that male figure in their reachable realm. Right. And what ends up happening is that they end up adopting a way to survive. And their way to survive is to be nice. So they've dealt with maybe a mother that is dealing with some internal and external wounds from her past relationships, right?
If she's a single mom, she's dealing with something.
Exactly. So she's putting that onto the son, right? And the son has to kind of— and I've talked to a lot of guys that come from single-parent homes they felt as though when they reached a certain age, they had to be the husband that their mother never had. Mm. They had to be that person that their mother never had, or maybe the father that their mother never had, right?
Yeah.
They, and they feel a lot of sense of responsibility to try to cope with all of that. And a lot of the times when they get older and they have their own relationships or they start to date, they start to go out in that world. They start to be nice just to survive and have this survival mode of, if I'm nice and I do this, she won't be mad at me. If I'm nice and I do this, she'll, she'll like see me as her king, her knight in shining armor. Right? But what ends up happening is a lot of times when that happens, you spend so much time trying to impress, so much time trying to build this false narrative of who you are. When the mask drops and when everything stops happening, when you stop showing up the way that you were prior, because it was all an act, it was all a way for you to survive. Once you realize that you've made it to a certain point, that's when the woman or the person that you're kind of involved with starts to call you out. She starts to say, what, Well, what happened with this? Well, you used to do this, or you used to do that. And now you feel like your masculinity is being challenged. You feel as though you're not, you're not holding up to the standard of masculinity that you once presented to this woman. And you have to start understanding that the reason why this woman is acting the way that, that she's at acting, 'cause a lot of the times it comes in a negative aspect.
Mm-hmm.
You have to tap in and say, okay, did I do all this just to court her? Did I do all this just because I wanted her to look at me in this way? And once you answer those questions, and once you start being honest and transparent with who you are, you'll understand that sometimes you created the fairytale and she didn't. And that happens way, way, way more than a lot of men want to accept. And the whole thing about being a good man is accepting accountability, accepting the responsibility that— of the role that you played in your life and the roles that you play in, in other people's lives.
So once these masks come off, our arms get pretty tired. Like my biceps are burning. And it happens on both sides too. Yes, I've seen this where the woman wears the mask. And maybe the fact is, if you look at the Imago therapy, we attract the very wound that's a perfect bite for our wound.
For sure.
I had Stan Tacken on the show and he was telling me about this. You know, we may have a woman who is more of an avoidant personality and we may be anxious if we're a struggling people pleaser or a nice guy that's learning how to become a good man through this conversation. Yeah, when we get to that point of, okay, my mask is off, will she still love me? And her mask comes down. There's a sacred reckoning point that occurs. It's very sacred because finally we can just be honest and real with each other. Yeah, we don't have to pretend that we're someone that we're not. How does it look for a man to actually do that? What is the emotional inventory for a man to first even recognize that he's caught in a nice guy trap? And then what does he do once he's found that out?
Yeah, I tell guys to ask yourself internally, am I doing this to be liked? Or am I doing this because it's the good thing and it's going to get me the respect that I want, right? A lot of guys do things that they— that they want people to like them. So if for me, when I started this transition from nice guy to good man, I started to ask, am I going out drinking with my cousin and my friends because I want them to like, like me? Or do I actually like drinking? And I actually don't like drinking. I actually don't, I don't find it fun.
I can go my whole life without one more drink.
Yeah. Like I don't find it fun. Right.
Yeah.
So I was like, I'm doing it because I'm in this social environment and I want these people to like me. So I want to have a drink with them so they think I'm just, just as cool as them. They like me just as much. Once I stopped drinking, I started being invited out to certain places, which I was okay with, right? Because I wanted to live in the true composition of who I was. And doing that, sometimes the trash will take out itself. And I'm not calling my cousin or anybody trash, but I'm saying that sometimes those, those things that you're so used to doing, they go away.
Yeah.
And you have to develop new habits, new hobbies, and new things. And for me, when I stopped drinking, I started to focus more on my health. And I realized, you know, when I got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2021, right? I was like, I have a choice that I have to make. I can either continue down this path of drinking, eating this fried food and not living a healthy life, which essentially was gonna lead to me dying. I mean, let's just keep it real, right?
Mm-hmm.
And I had seen so many people in my family die from complications of type 2, and I didn't wanna be a product of that. So I had to break that generational curse.
Yeah.
And when I decided to stop drinking, I realized that I was subconsciously making an effort to break a generational curse of a particular habit that may have taken the life of people prior.
Wow, that is amazing. Because I look at the Native American principle, and I don't know if you've heard of this before, it's 7 generations of healing. So when you become a cycle breaker like you described, and it could be from drinking, it could be from drugs or pornography or shopping, overworking, I don't know, these things run through generations.
Yeah, yeah.
The Native American principle is that when we heal, like, like you've chosen to do, Kelvin, 7 generations back, it gets healed and 7 generations forward. So your, your children that you have, they're watching you more than they're listening to you. I know you know this because you're a father, right?
Yeah.
Children watch what you do so much more than what you say.
Yeah.
So then at the bottom of this, whether it's drinking, whether it's drugs, it's all these things to pull us away from the truth of who we are.
Yeah.
So then really, what is the nice guy syndrome protecting? What's, what's below the nice guy syndrome? Because it's really a syndrome.
Yeah, it is.
It is a set of behaviors and patterns that are unconsciously lived out. What's the deeper truth below the nice guy syndrome? What is it really trying to protect?
You know, I'm glad you mentioned that the Native American principles was what you call the solar generation principle. So there's an old Native American tale that I write in this book about the buffalo versus the cows. Have you, have you ever heard?
No.
Okay. All right. So buffaloes and cows are very similar in their stature, right?
Yeah.
And even like, even almost down to like the cut of the meat to like the steaks and all of that. Right. But what ultimately is the difference in between them is how they react when a storm is coming. Right? So buffaloes tend to huddle up and run towards that storm. Cows tend to huddle up and run away from it. When cows huddle up and run away from a storm, they end up being exhausted. But what ends up happening is that the storm eventually catches up and they're standing there terrified of the same thing that they were running from. They're stuck in the rain, the thunder, the lightning, all of this stuff, right? Whereas the buffaloes, when they get together, they run towards it knowing that they will encounter that storm. They are going to hit the rain. They're gonna deal with the thunder and the lightning. But the opposite ends of it is that the cows are outta breath standing in the very midst of conflict that they were running from. And the buffaloes are standing in the sunshine after the storm has already passed because they've ran past it. So they're outta breath and, just the same amount, right? But they're standing on the other side in the sunshine, just enjoying all of the things that that storm taught them, right? And that's why I say in this book that I think the word cow derives from the word coward, because a lot of nice guys are cowards. They run away from that storm, which is the conflict, which is the accountability, which is a the ultimate value of responsibility. Anything that a nice guy knows that is going to challenge him and challenge him to be better, they run away from. So if you have a set of guys that hold you to a standard, right, at a gym, or let's say, for instance, you go to like some, um, some male Bible study, right? If you have a group of guys that hold you higher to a standard, a lot of nice guys tend to not want to be around those, those kind of guys.
Yes.
Because they're like, I'm really comfortable being this version of me that I don't really want to be challenged on. And I don't want to grow.
These are not the guys that go to men's groups.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have firsthand experience with that. We've run men groups here in this podcast studio.
Okay. Okay.
For like 4 years. Yeah. And then before that I did 10 years of that. I love it when my male friends who I hold in high regard call me out.
Oh, yeah.
But there's— I've trained myself to have that capacity. Yeah, I've become more antifragile as I've matured and to be able to be able to receive impact and feedback and questions.
Yeah.
Was there a point in your life where you were fragile, where you did not like feedback or you did not like criticism that was further compounding the nice guy?
Yeah.
What was that for you?
College. College, man. I was so fragile. And I would say I was fragile because, you know, when you're young, when you're in college, you're trying to figure out who you are, right?
Yeah.
You're dealing with your studies, you're dealing with friends, you're dealing with a whole bunch of different things.
Yeah.
You're dealing with trying to figure out not only who you are, but what college is going to make you be in the career-wise, right? So for me, I did not like when my professors, when I had friends, when they would tell me that I needed to do something over again. Like, I had the— okay, so I was taking this painting class, and I was, uh, I attended the University of South Carolina. I was an art education major with a minor in oil painting, right? I taught art for 7 years after this, but when I was doing this, I took an oil painting class I had never painted in oils, right? So I brought acrylic paint to the class cuz they just said painting. I was like, I can paint with acrylics. Why not? Right? I get to the class. The professor is like, what is this? I'm like, they're paints. And he's like, this is an oil painting class. Leave. I said, excuse me? I said, leave. I was like, what do you mean leave? He kicked me out of class, right? I show up the next Wednesday. With the same paints, he kicks me out again. I'm like frustrated, I'm pissed. I'm like going to my advisor. I'm like mad. I'm like, dude, he keeps kicking me out of class because I don't have oil paints, but I don't know where to get them from. Like, I just did not know. I was like, I don't think it's this big of a deal. And when I finally got these oil paints and he was teaching me how to paint with oils, he was so overly critical of everything that I did. There were numerous times I would have a composition done, right? I would go back to class and it would be blank. Like he would wipe it off. And I was like, what is this guy doing? Like, he's starting to piss me off. Like, I don't understand. Like he needs to be more communicative, right? But he was trying to teach me that I need to be ready for this class without him telling me, right? Eventually it started to click. I was like, I need to do this this way. I need to have this this way. And when I started to do what he told me to actually do and I got better at it, he invited me to Italy with him that summer to study oil painting. And he was like, you know, there's a lot of people that take this class and they're not serious about it. But I knew when you came in that not only were you going to be serious about it? But I could tell that you could take criticism. And I thought that that was weird because at that point in my life, I was very fragile. I did not like anybody telling me that it wasn't good, that this isn't great, I don't like your stuff. I didn't like any kind of criticism at all, period. So when he would do it, it would piss me off. And what it ended up teaching me is that I can take that frustration and I could use it to a positive way. Because there was a point where I was gonna drop it. I was like, I'm, I'm gonna drop this class. I was like, I know my minor is oil painting, but I might have to change it because I can't deal with this guy.
But the gift was in him being a bit hard on you.
Yes.
The best mentors, I feel like, see the greatness in a student or in a client. And they'll actually lean into them more than they would if they were to sense that a client wasn't willing to do the work.
Yes.
I know on Earth right now there's literally hundreds of millions of men that know they want to shift out of nice guy. They just don't know how to do it.
Yes.
So in your book that's on the screen right now, Be a Good Man, Not a Nice Guy, one of the things I love that you said is that we can actually recognize that our gestures of love bombing, as you've called it, right? When we love bomb, there's always a covert contract if we're being a nice guy, if we're unconscious.
Yes.
And so I look back at my life when I would buy my girlfriend flowers. It was because I wanted her to be like, I love you, baby.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not just the act of me buying her flowers. Yeah. And so that's why now with my wife, I buy her flowers when I really genuinely feel like buying her flowers.
Exactly.
And she can love them or not. But that was entrained upon me by me feeling the resistance and pain of me buying flowers for, for previous girlfriends and them not giving me the response that I wanted. It's again, this— I'm going to go back to this, this covert contract. Can you unpack the COVID contract in the love bombing? Yeah. And the difference between a genuine man, a good man giving without having the expectation of receiving versus a nice guy who's supplying a covert contract. Can you paint the picture of those two?
Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. So the nice guy, he will go— he will extend every resource financially, physically, emotionally. He'll tell you how beautiful you are, shower you with flowers, all this stuff, right? And if you're not smart enough as a woman, you will take it as this guy genuinely likes me, right? And you'll be like, oh, this guy likes me, especially if you're not used to a lot of male attention. And that's what a lot of nice guys tend to go after, women that don't have a lot of male attention. I don't know if people have noticed that or not, but a lot of nice guys will go for that girl that necessarily doesn't have a lot of guys going after her, right? And when they do that, it creates this sense of, okay, I am now in, in some sort of control that I can paint this narrative of how much I can show my love, right? And it's fake, right? It's very, very fake. It's very nuanced, right? And as far as the contrast of that, a good man just does it because it's the right thing, right? He knows that he doesn't have to buy a dozen roses on this first date. He can show up, pick the girl up, knock at her door, open up the door for take her to dinner. What I feel like a lot of nice guys do is they take girls to restaurants that are very expensive. They like to showboat, right? A good man can take you to, like, a little diner across the street and give you the same amount of attention and love, and you will feel as though he likes you, right? Whereas the nice guy, he feels as though he has to take you to Ruth's Chris or some kind of expensive steakhouse for you to feel that kind of love.
Yeah, the woman can feel this too.
Yes, yes, yes.
Like, I'm speaking heteronormatively. I know people relate however they relate. Gosh, I mean, it's prevalent because a woman has a very extrasensory perception that's magnified compared to us as men. Would you say that's true? Women can feel things a lot differently than men. They're just built that way. They bear children, right?
They're very intuitive.
They're very intuitive, right? So, so a woman who maybe is ignoring her intuition, she could potentially attract a nice guy.
Yes.
Seeing the potential of him being a good man. But then maybe she was never modeled from her father or her caregivers what a good man really is. So then what is it?
Yeah.
In a sentence, what is a good man?
A good man is somebody that is aligned with his morals, principles, and values, and does not jeopardize his character or his integrity under any circumstance, whether it's challenging, whether it's some type of adversity. It does not matter. He never wavers.
So then, so then this phrase, happy wife, happy life, is inherently bullshit.
It is.
Why has that been such a dogma in modern dating and marriage?
I think because a lot of people tend to think that if I can please this person that I am with, yeah, inherently that will create her to feel safe and make her feel as though she doesn't have to challenge me and there won't be any riff, right? As long as I can play it safe and I can, you know, walk underneath these rivers and bridges with my head down, I don't have to deal with the true meaning of what this means, right? So what I like to say is that nice guys and good men seem the same on the surface. It takes a lot for somebody to understand when somebody is being genuine and when they're not. And what happens is when you're in a relationship or like when you're married, because a lot of women now are divorcing their husbands and claiming nice guy syndrome. Like, I see it all everywhere— TikTok, Instagram, everywhere, right? And what they're claiming is that this guy has portrayed this version of masculinity for so long, but after they had kids, something switched. Oh, because there goes an extra layer of responsibility. It's easy to act when it's just you and her.
Exactly.
It's very easy. I can put on this act, this facade, this whole motion of what you think I need to actually be. But when we have a kid, you can't fake that anymore because you have a son, you have a daughter. You can't fake that version of who you are in being a father.
From a stress perspective, you're speaking science right now. Like if our stress is a bathtub, and we have like, you know, let's say 200 gallons can be filled. If you pour on another 10, 20 gallons, AKA I have 2 children.
Yeah.
There's no room for holding the mask up anymore.
Exactly.
You literally don't have the capacity from a scientific standpoint to be fake anymore. And so it goes back to that earlier point I was making when the masks come off and there's that real emotional inventory for the man who's a nice guy becoming a good man.
Yeah.
Is there a 1, 2, or 3 ways in which he can embody not just the values, because values, we can write them on a wall and look at them.
Exactly. Yeah.
Can he embody the virtues, the lived values in life?
Yeah.
What are some of those initial virtues that this man can put into motion as he becomes the alchemization of a good man?
Yeah. When you get exposed in that way, your brain as a man, you start to question a lot of things about who you are. I would say the main virtues about that is to looking into who you are and understanding that, okay, if I do A, I might not get B. Is that okay with you? Because it is A the right thing, or is it just something that you're doing to get B? Because if A is the right thing, you shouldn't worry about whether or not it's going to give you B.
And when you say the right thing, do you mean the most loving thing?
Yes. The most loving thing, the most kind thing, the most genuine thing, right? Setting boundaries with folks, being able to take control of your masculinity. You're able to set boundaries. You're able to say, this is what I'm willing to do. This is what I'm not willing to do. A lot of times when you're in those marital conflicts, a lot of times, I don't know if you can relate to this, but in-laws can play a huge role, right? Sure. And what happens with a lot of nice guys is that they tend to not set any boundaries. They tend to let other people dictate how things are supposed to go in their relationship. They take advice from their mother, they take advice from their father, and they tend to talk a lot about things that just their spouse and them should talk about. They tend to talk about that to other folks, right?
Yeah, this is extremely unhealthy leakage.
Yes, yes, yes. So one of those main virtues is setting boundaries, understanding who you have to set boundaries with. And it talks about this even in the Bible, right? Jesus set relational boundaries with his disciples,, right? Or was it 12?
12, 11 or 12.
Yes. Yeah. 11, 12. Don't, don't quote me, but it might have been 12. Yeah. Yeah. But he only had a strong relationship with 3 of those. Right. And the rest of them, he knew that he couldn't cry a certain way in front of them. He couldn't take them to witness him raise people from the dead. He knew he couldn't take certain disciples with him to heal the, the like sick. So it's all the way back to the biblical days where you have to choose and you have to pick your boundaries relationally, who you tell things to, who you let into your relationship, who you let into certain boundaries, especially as a father. Because once you reach a certain level, you have to understand your kids are not only listening, but they're watching too. And kids are so much easier to do what they see rather than what you tell 'em to. Right?
This is the identity trans— I love that you're speaking about this because when I became a father, Kelvin, the identity transformation was so apparent for me that I get to step into. What does it mean to be a man who lovingly holds containment of his woman in his marriage? I didn't say control. Yeah.
Yeah. Containment.
This is a big one, right? It is a big discrepancy that I love to jam with you on is the difference between control and containment.
Yes.
Teal Swan talks about this. My buddy Alex Charfen talks about this. I know you've spoken on this as well.
Yeah.
So, so containment is one aspect of becoming a man, having this maturation process where we go from being a boy.
Yeah, right.
Not having any societal or even cultural ways in which, let's be honest, a lot of the boyhood to manhood has been stripped away. A lot of those virtues and really ceremonies.
Yeah.
Have been stripped away. Of course, the rite of passage is very rare.
Yeah. Oh yeah.
For women have it when they have children, they have a beautiful rite of passage. But men, we have to seek out our rite of passage. Yes, we have to find it through mentorship or through guidance in some way. So like for the men that haven't had this rite of passage, it's going to be almost impossible for them to know the difference between control and containment. How did that get taught to you? Yeah. Where did you learn about containment? Was it from your father and watching him with your mother?
Oh yeah. How so? Yeah. So my dad, who is the prime example of what a good man is, right? He's been in law enforcement now for 40+ years. And this is a quote that he taught me, that control means that you think you're in charge. Leadership is when you contain, right? A lot of people, especially him, right? He taught me that leaders often are not in charge. There's a huge diff— difference, right? When you lead, you're leading with integrity, you're leading with love. When you're in charge, you're focused more on demanding, wanting things to go a certain way. If they don't, you're gonna be upset. Leadership is leading people and understanding that you may not get that result that you want, but you can always lead them to another direction. When you try to control, especially in life, right? When you try to control your wife or control your family, what ends up happening is that the more you push, the more they're going to pull. The more you pull, the more they're going to push. You're always going to get the opposite, right? But when you contain and show leadership, when you show kindness, when you show discipline, when you show that you're a man that can control his emotions, control who he is when a conflict happens. I like to say nice guys will find the problem, but good men find the solution. And that's just a fact. A nice guy will point out every flaw, every problem, everything, and he'll try to control it underneath some umbrella, some kind of false narrative of I'm the man. I need to be the head of this household. You need to do what I say.
Mm-hmm.
This and that. There's a difference in between that and leading, right? And I saw this firsthand with my father. There was always an open line of communication with him and my mom. But what I noticed is that my mom will always gravitate more to what my dad's, uh, choice was. And that was because she trusted him. She trusted his choice-making. She trusted his ability to guide us as kids. Right.
Because he demonstrated that through leadership instead of control.
Yes. Yes.
You said this in your book. You said, I realized in high school how fortunate I was to have you both. You were writing a letter to your parents.
Yeah.
Uh, Kelvin and Sharon Davis. You said so many of my friends' parents forced them to do things they never wanted to do. They would often berate them and make them feel unloved, useless, and like a burden. When I would share my sentiments about how amazing you were to me, my friends would often express envy and how much they wish their parents were like mine.
Yeah.
For people that didn't have parents like yours, what is the beginning process of the inventory of self to let go of the resentment towards stepping up into being a good man, to taking on responsibility?
Yeah.
And to letting go of resentment that they didn't have the parents they wanted. That's at the core of this book. That's at the core of this conversation.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's about the clearing of emotional resentment such that we can move forward in freedom and be a leader. Yeah. Yeah.
And you know, I want to expand on that because I did not know how lucky I was until I got to college when I would meet people from different walks of life that were from like different states, different backgrounds. And I would tell them, yeah, I'm going over to my parents' house. They're cooking food and my dad, you know, is doing this. And they're all like, wait, really? I'm like, yeah. I'm like, you want to come? They're like, yeah, sure. And when they would see the way we interacted, a lot of the times I would get the opposite from them. Like they would tell me, my mom would never say, say that about me. Like she would never invite me here. She would never be as loving. And this and that. And for me, I thought that the genuine standard of what my parents were, I thought that's how all parents were. I thought they were all loving. They all embraced their, their like kids. They all wanted them to do well. They all put confidence and love and kindness and told and taught them how to be the best version of who they are. But I realized in college that a lot of people did not have I have that. And I was like, damn, this is, this is really wild that this is an anomaly for a lot of folks. That my parents that are loving, that I thought were the genuine standard of how parents should be, are the anomaly of how parents shouldn't be. Because a lot of parents are not as kind and nice and all, and, and all of that. And when I would talk to some of my friends, I'd be like, you know, Have you ever tried to talk to your parents and tell them the things that they did and how it made you feel and how it affected you now that you're 19, 20 years old and you're going to graduate from college and you're going to eventually have your own family? Have you ever talked to them and told them, you know, when you told me this in the 6th grade, it made me feel this way, and this is a direct byproduct of why I do the things that I that I do now and how I feel about who I am as a man. And a lot of the times they never did. They were, they were too afraid even in their adulthood to challenge their parents.
Yeah.
And I thought that was strange. I was like, you're 23, 24 years old and you're afraid to talk to your parents about how they made you feel when you were 14.
So you just touched on something really big. This is what further fortifies the boy being stuck in the boyness.
Yeah.
And being the nice guy, never actually graduating for sure to be a good man because of fear. It's really this— it's false evidence appearing real, which I love that acronym. But this fear, it's not rational, right? It's irrational fear. Like, we don't have any way that we can actually predict the future of us being vulnerable with a parent to practice our own healing, to go into our own healing. We don't know. It might actually spark healing in them. If a young man or even a man of 30 and 40 has never had a conversation with his parents at all. I think it works like this. We use nonviolent communication. We share from the I. We don't blame our parents because they were operating from a system that was actually broken from their parents, you know, the seventh generation principle. And I would assume, I don't know, in the Black community, there is a deep amount of conditioning and wounding with the single-parent household and just the way in which the percentages are shown across America and even the world. There's a— there's this unconscious way of wounding that seems to work its way through the Black community. It's very prevalent.
For sure.
I'm sure that Black men reach out to you and say, well, it's easy for you, Kelvin. You had this situation.
Yeah.
Can you speak to those men in the Black community? And they don't have to be Black. They can be any color.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But in the Black community, I've seen this and I've witnessed this when I went to high school with, with my Black friends, that it was like this overwhelming percentage of single mother households and no spaciousness or safety for a man to be able to communicate with his parents because of their wounding.
Yeah.
Do you believe that that's something that can be unpacked through your book? And if so, how, how does a, how does a Black man even start that conversation with his parents that may not provide the safety for him to do so?
Exactly. Yeah. No, most definitely. Um, these principles and everything that I write in this book definitely can help them. And I base it back to when I was a middle school art educator for 7 years, and I taught at a predominantly Black school. I had a lot of kids who came from single-parent households, right? And I taught art after some of them had some behavior issues. When I started to look at what they were coming through, a lot of them came from single-parent households. There's no father, no brother, no other male figure. I was like thinking to myself, okay, this is a time for me to be that male figure that they need in their life. So everything that my dad taught me that I put in these books, I now can teach in this classroom. And what I would do is along with teaching art, I would teach them how to be good men. How to be gentlemen, how to be, you know, an actual productive member of this world, right? And I would tell them, and I would give them hard, hard, hard, hard truths. I would tell them, if you keep acting this way, you're gonna end up in prison. Telling them things that their father would tell them. Telling them things that their, maybe their older brother would tell them. Me having that access to them in and out of that classroom helped me build a lot of younger Black boys to be better men. I'mma toot my own horn. A lot of those kids that I taught, I can honestly say that if they did not have me as an art educator, a lot of them would be on a different path.
Yeah.
A lot of them that I coached, they ended up doing very, very well in this life. They ended up going to high school, playing more sports, graduating, going to college, going to the military. A lot of them, right? So now when I'm, I'm now 38 and when I see some of them out, I mean, they're like, some of them are in their 20s now. Like some of them have kids, right? They're fathers now. Some of them will come up to me still to this day and tell me, Mr. Davis, you changed my life so much. I'm the father because of everything that you taught me and everything that you, you know, put into— I don't wanna cry. Hold on.
Jesus Christ. Emotions are all valid.
Yeah. Hold on.
It's all good.
Because I was on a walk. Oh, I'm, I'm going to tell this story. I was on a walk. About 2 months ago, I was walking from my apartment to a place called Five Points. It's about a 5-mile walk. And on my walk back, there was a guy that was walking next to me in a hoodie. And you know, when somebody's like walking next to you, you kind of just look, you know, just say, "Hey." I looked and we made eye contact and it was a student that I had taught when he was in the 7th grade. And he had a bag of food in his hand and he was like, "Mr. Davis?" And I took out my earphones. I was like, "Huh?" And he goes, "Mr. Davis?" I said, "Yeah." And he was like, "You don't remember me, do you?" I said, "I remember your face, but what's your name?" He told me his name. And he was like, "You know, I just started following you on Instagram." And this stuff about like being a nice guy and being a good, being a good man, you know, you used to talk about that a lot inside of the classroom. Like, you know, I don't know if you remember all of that. And he was like, yeah, I got a job now. I'm like, we're working at this restaurant. I got a wife now and I have a daughter that's on the way. And he was like, you have two daughters, right? I said, yeah. And he was like, what's some, What advice that you would give me as a dad? And I say, you know, everything I taught you when you were a student is the same thing I'm going to tell you now. And that is everything that you do, you need to do it with love. You need to do it with kindness, especially if you're having a girl. I would tell you that, you know, you have to be the prime example of what she sees in a man. And you being able to work, being able to protect, provide, and do all these things is going to show her this is what a man is supposed to do. And I was like, I don't know the situation with your now wife and all that stuff now, but you have to be able to continue to be that form of leadership for her. And we kept walking, we kept, walking and he was like, Mr. Davis, I need to ask you something. I said, yeah. He goes, do you remember when these two kids, and I talk about this in my book, there was a situation where I had two rival gang members in my class and they fought each other and I ended up getting hit in the crossfire. But one of the gang members was a good man, I will say. And the other one wasn't a very good guy, right? And what happened was that one of the other gang members was trying to protect a student with special needs that got hit with a chair. The other kid was trying to protect the other kid. They ended up fighting, right? And when this happened, I remember this kid that I was talking to was one of the kids that was in the class to witness it. And he was like, 'Why do you think that they both got the same punishment?' I said, 'You know what, I don't know.' And I still till this day don't understand that, because when you are trying to protect somebody and you end up injuring somebody or hurting somebody, I don't feel like you should get the same punishment as the person that initiated that form of physical violent contact, right? Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And when I was telling him, I was like, well, I think that for me and for you should tell you no matter what you do, life isn't fair, right? You may feel like you have to protect your family and you may hurt somebody in that case. And there may be a time where that has to happen. And you may all in all have the same legal punishment as the person that committed that other thing, right? But you have to understand that you can't let that change the way that you're supposed to initially react as a man. You're supposed to still protect your family. It doesn't matter, right? And he was like, you're right, Mr. Davis. Like, you're, you're right. And you know, we chatted up, we had a couple other personal conversations and I really told him, I said, you know, Your race, who you are, is gonna play a big role, not only in your life, but in your daughter's life. So you have to make these choices as a young Black man to hang around the right folks, to do the right thing, and, you know, to really continue down this straight and narrow path. And he was going down a straight and narrow path, and I was really, really proud of him for doing that. But a lot of the same values that I taught that one kid, live in this book. And a lot of kids that don't have that male figure, that father, that coach, that teacher, that brother, right? They can turn to these books and get the same knowledge that I would tell the same kids that I used to teach. That those, those same kids that I told to do A, B, and C is in this book. And they're, and they're doing very well. His life now.
The aspect of it's not fair, that's a really deep one. I want to go into that because for a long time in my life, and I think if most men are honest with themselves, and even for the women with us too, when you feel resentment from your man or when you feel existential angst from your man, yes, it's probably because he's still grappling with the fact that life for men specifically is not fair.
It's not.
And I remember Chris Rock was on the stage once. He was like, the only unconditional love in this world—
I say that. Yeah.
Can you finish it?
Yeah. What does he say? The only conditional thing in this world is dogs, women, and children.
And children.
It does not matter.
That's right.
If you're a man, there is no such thing as unconditional love. Your love is conditional.
Your love is based upon the condition that you provide something.
Yes.
And I love that because the red pill community takes it and runs with it.
For sure.
Women can't be trusted. A woman is only as viable to her feelings and she's only going to be as, you know, attached to you as she feels like in the moment.
Yeah.
This is the understanding from David Deida, from Gay Hendricks, from all these, from Mark Groves, from Stan Tacken. So many relational experts I've had on this podcast.
Yeah.
And when it really boils down to it, the hard truth that many men who are struggling, attempting to be a good man. They haven't grappled and grokked this yet. And it's what Chris Rock said. It's what you talk about in your book. It took me a long time to get over this, Kelvin. Yeah, I would say it's only been in the last 3 to 5 years since having children.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Children put me about-face to the magic of, oh, it's okay that I accept. Yeah. The fact that for men, life isn't fair for sure. It never will be fair.
Yeah.
Because that's the way in which our creator designed the system. That we do things differently than women. And there's a beauty to that. There's an elegance to that. But if a man doesn't have the spiritual constitution or the maturity to be able to receive that truth, it can just be attached to Andrew Tate or a lot of these guys that are sitting on microphones screaming about how terrible women are, which then further divides us. It's the opposite of what is needed in in the world right now. So, so here's the big question. If life isn't fair for men, how does a man reconcile with that unfairness?
Man, that's a good question. I will tell you, I'm right along with you, but the 3 to 5 years thing I didn't— for, for you, it was your—
for me, it was having children, right?
Yeah.
Children will make you grow up immediately.
Yeah. For me, it was the divorce of my now ex-wife. When we got separated in 2021, in the state of South Carolina, you have to be separated for like a year in order to start the divorce proceedings. So like, you have to have adamant proof that you haven't lived underneath the same household for one full calendar year. Wow. And after that, you can start the litigation, you can start the divorce proceedings, right?
Yeah.
So ours started around 2022. And that was around then when I started to understand the legal process, mother, father, my lawyer versus her lawyer. I started to peep the unfairness of what it is to be a man. And that's sad to say, but during that whole divorce litigation with the child custody, with this and that, I realized how unfair everything was. It did not matter. It does not matter how present you are as a father when you are married. It does not matter how present you are afterwards. It doesn't matter. You still get treated as though you're a deadbeat dad. And I'm telling you from experience, I fought tooth and nail just, just to simply see my kids Tuesday and Thursday. Out of the week. They wanted to give me only every other week's weekend. I'm like, they live right down the street, I can have during the week too. The judge was like, oh yeah, okay, yeah, sure, sure. But I had to fight tooth and nail. What my whole, my whole realization was, I was having a conversation with my then lawyer and he told me As much as the courts like to paint this image that father's rights are just, just as equal as mother's rights, I'm telling you as a man, and I'm telling you as a father's rights attorney, sometimes that's not that case. A lot of times we still live in this world where women deemed or seem to be more of a traditional asset to the kids rather than men. The men are supposed to work, provide, pay, help her with this, and the women are the nurturers and you're just there to pick up the rest of the slack, right? And I didn't like the way that sat with me because I can't talk for anybody else, but for me, during my time of being a father in that house, I was hands-on with everything. I would do laundry, I would cook, I would take them to soccer. I would pick them up from, from school. I would take them to school. I was there for every meeting. I was there for every dance recital. I was there for everything.
Were you doing it as a nice guy or were you doing it because it was good and right?
I was doing it because it was good and right.
So your intention was pure?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And you know, when all this stuff, it happened, I only brought it up in the setting of being inside of some court litigation when the other side would try to paint me as being a father that wasn't there. I said, no, no, no, no, I've got receipts, I've got receipts that I've been there for everything, right? So I didn't like this notion, and I still don't like this notion that fathers have to prove that they're a good father, but women are just assumed that they're a good mother. There's just no process of where a woman has to prove that she's a good mother. The father always has to prove something. Going back to Chris Rock, I remember during that standup when he was talking about his divorce litigation too, he said that he had to take pictures of his kids' bedrooms to show this judge. And he was like, I'm Chris Rock. You don't think that I have a bedroom for my own kids? Like, you think they're living in like a dungeon? Like, so he was like, so take this from me. Make sure you have every letter, every photo, everything that you ever done to your kids. Because when the stuff hits this fan, they're gonna try to be like, well, do your kids have a room? Do your kids have this? He's like, Of course my kids have a room. They get everything that they need. They just had lunch with me and Kevin Hart. They just, you know? So I thought it was funny that he painted a comedic aspect of it. And behind every comedic joke, there's truth, right?
That's why it's funny.
Yeah, and there's this truth of men always have to prove that they're a father, a good father.
This is the aspect that I'm poking on with you. I want to go back. I want to poke it again.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So let's take you out of the divorce proceedings and go into a construct of a man having to provide. It's actually a first and foremost thing, whether it's biblical or not. Yeah, I've noticed that in most relationships, maybe not all, maybe sometimes it works that the woman is the key provider. And if that works, then great.
Yeah, yeah.
I would just say, like, reductionistically across the board, when a man hasn't done the work so that he can provide, when he's not providing and there's stress around providership, it becomes this poison that he brings into a family, and everybody feels it from him, right? It's like, um, he can't give from a cup that he himself hasn't healed the hole in the bottom on yet, for sure. So there's an unconscious or a limiting belief or an emotional pattern inside of this man. It's not the fact that life is unfair, because we already have addressed that life is unfair. Oh yeah, yeah, right. And by the way, when I say that, I'm not victimizing men. You're not a victim. We're not victims as men. No, I'm just saying, if we look at 30,000 feet above our societal construct, it's inherently not fair to men. So then how do we stack the odds in our favor as men, not just in a divorce situation, but in providership, in cultivating a career, in taking care of one's self, one's health, one's mental health? That's a whole nother subject as well. Men's mental health.
Yeah.
And the way in which men used to meet in tribes and we don't anymore, which is why long-form podcasts are so nourishing.
Yeah.
Because it allows for this long-form discussion that people are actually searching for. So I'll push again on that. What is an inventory process for a man who desires so much in his heart to be a good man, yet he's stuck in these unconscious loops of being a nice guy? Yeah. Whether it's providership or anything else.
Yeah.
How does a man meet himself in his nice guy-ness? Yeah. So that he can identity transform into a good man.
Adaptability. You got to be able to adapt. And when you talk about being able to be a provider and being frustrated with the providership, is what you're doing to provide, is it bringing you happiness?
Yeah.
A lot of men, sometimes, oftentimes, nice guys, they feel as though their value is based off of how much money they can bring in. They'll do a job that makes them very unhappy.
But let's be honest, they might hate it. They might hate the job.
Hate it, brings their mental state all the way down.
Yeah.
This creates anxiety. This creates anger. This creates resentment. Because what you're doing is you're doing something that you do not like, that you genuinely hate, just to provide for a family that you love. So when you adapt and when you say, if you married the right person, you can say, hey, we might need to scale back on some of these things that I'm providing. Maybe you don't need that Range Rover. Maybe you don't need that big-ass house.
If you're working a job you hate and you're driving a Range Rover, you should look at your priorities.
Yeah. Yeah. So maybe it's, it's about adapting, right?
Yeah.
It's about looking at all of your cards. Right? Understanding how you got them, which ones, if you take away, could you still have that full house, right? And when you're, when you're able to adapt, and when other people are able to adapt around you, because nothing lasts forever. And when you're able to look at your spouse and say, hey, can we scale back on this? I'm thinking about changing my career to be more, you know, mentally sane and mentally happy. All in, oh, I may take less money, but I'll be more happy as a man. You will be able to adapt to a different lifestyle, but I will be able to provide more than just financial stability. I'll be able to show up more physically, emotionally, right? When a lot of times, as men, especially nice guys, they get so wrapped in, I got to work these extra hours at this job, I got to do this, I got to please this boss, I gotta please this supervisor, I gotta do this because I wanna impress this coworker, right? You're missing your daughter's dance recital because you're trying to impress a boss that doesn't love you. You're missing all these different things because you're trying to make more money or trying to prove some kind of standard of you being some workhorse to try to prove something that does not exist outside of your real realm. Your real realm is your wife and your kids, your partner and your kids, however you want to say it. That's— that is your real realm. If you die at that job, they're going to find somebody else to replace you. Don't— don't you worry about that. But your wife is going to have a hard time replacing who you were as a husband and a man, and your kids are never going to replace you as their father. So when a lot of nice guys are stuck with this aspect of like, you know, do I want to do this? Do I want to do that? Ask yourself, is it bringing you happiness? If it's not, you need to adapt. And that adapt cannot come overnight. It's gonna— it's going to take you sitting down with who you are and cognizantly making a change and verbalizing that change to your spouse. And that sometimes for nice guys is very hard. Because they want to avoid that tough conversation. They don't want to— they want to avoid that negative feedback that the spouse may or may not have. They're so unsure that they'd rather just not say anything. And that is the ultimate downfall for nice guys, is that they don't speak what their truth is. And when you're able to adapt and speak your actual truth, people can adapt to your truth and they can live inside of that honesty. But when you have this fake sense of honesty, I'm working this job, I'm working $250,000 a year doing A, B, and C. Okay, why not take that job that pays $175K or maybe $100K that brings you a lot more time, a lot more happiness, and you can adapt your lifestyle?
This is what God provides is these lessons where men fall into these traps. And the trap is lifestyle creep. Lifestyle creep is so real. I mean, I felt it myself where I'm like, hold on, we're going to have budgetary constraints here, right? Like I've put that down in my life because when I started making more money, as the podcast started to grow, I would see in ways in which a really kind of subtle self-sabotage version of Josh Trent would pop up.
Self-sabotage.
And it was this sabotaged version of Josh Trent that said, well, if I buy my wife this, or if I do this for my kids, or if I, you know, if we spend a month here, if we do all these things, then it'll make them happy. But then I was at the cost of that happiness. My emotional debt increased as their level of happiness increased. Yes. So it's this emotional debt that I think us as men are either honest about or lying about. And the lies— it's funny, we just published a podcast episode today, my buddy Tah, Tah Whitty, and he looks so healthy. And I was like, you look so healthy, man. Like, how are you so healthy? Because I don't have any lies. I don't have any lies because I can be well in a body that's not producing all these stress hormones and fear hormones and chemicals.
Yeah.
So I'll pass it back to you on this.
Yeah.
Whether a man knows exactly what he wants to do, because I believe there's seasons. Oh yeah, sometimes things just have to be paid. You may have to work a job for 6 months or 12 months that you don't love or that you hate.
Exactly.
So that you can facilitate the change that you've communicated to your wife about. But that takes courage. Really, what we're talking about here is courage.
Yeah.
How does a man develop courage? And how did you develop courage through the divorce? Yeah, to stop being nice. And to just be real.
Yeah, I did it by starting to be honest with who I was. I hid so much of who I truly was from everybody.
From your ex-wife as well?
Yeah. I mean, no one knew that. I mean, this, this is open information, but nobody knew I had all these— I was subscribing to all these OnlyFans accounts. I was watching a bunch of pornography. I was Uh, just, just, just living a very unhealthy way of life. But to everybody else, to the internet, to people that saw me outside, yeah, they would never think that. They would never see that and what I wanted them to see. Same, right?
Yeah.
So what I started to do is I started to say, if I can admit this out loud, say that truth out loud. And when my now ex-wife, when she confronts me on it, I tell the truth instead of lying. Because a lot of the times when I was married, when she would confront me about my pornography or, you know, me subscribing to these OnlyFans models, I would lie. I did. I lied. Even though the proof was there, the receipts were there. Your American Express says OnlyFans, $11.99, this, $9.99, you know? There's evidence, but I'm lying. I'm lying out loud and I'm lying to myself. And when the divorce happened, it forced me to live a truth that I wasn't comfortable with. And when I had to say that out loud and had to admit to my lawyer that, yeah, I had OnlyFans subscriptions, I was addicted to porn for a bit of time. I— yeah, I did those things. Yeah. When you have to say that and when you have to admit it in affidavit, when you have to like say these things out loud, you're like, damn, okay, that's not a good thing. That's, that's not the man I want my daughters to marry. That's not the man that I want to be. And when I started to understand that, that was when I stopped all of that stuff. Now, a lot of people, it's tough. For them. I wouldn't say I was an addict. I would say that I was definitely looking for something to fill my sexual desires because I was not performing that in my marriage, right? So I was living a separate falsehood of what I wanted sexually on, on the internet and not in my real life. So when I started to understand that and start to say that truth out loud, it's hurtful. You understand that, that truth that you're now admitting has been a lie for so many years, and that lie has impacted so many lives, including yours, and you're the reason for it. And you have to start taking accountability for that. And when you take accountability for that, that's when the process starts of I'm not going to tell any more lies about who I am, right? I'm not going to sugarcoat anything else. The next time I talk to a girl, I'm telling her the actual truth. I'm telling her this is how I feel. This is how I don't feel. This is what I believe. This is what I don't, all that. And what I started to notice is that once I did that, not only was I happier, but it creates a truth of that person now has a choice. They can decide on whether or not they want to continue with you. When you lie, you tend to avoid giving people the option.
Yeah.
And that's what I don't like. I don't like that my lies were not giving people the, that true option of, do I want them to be my friend? Do I want them to be my partner? Or do I not wanna have them in my life. When you're a nice guy, you're so afraid of being rejected and being not seen as enough and seeking that validation and approval, you will use that lie. Because you know, the more you lie, the more that they don't have that option of choosing whether or not they really want to be with you.
This is so good. But anything that we're lying about can still be felt. Yes, I love what you're bringing forth because this is an emotional intelligence conversation. But emotional intelligence, spirituality, and science are all at the table here, man. And after 800 episodes, like, we've covered some ground. So what you're describing, what I was thinking of when you were speaking, was this second law of thermodynamics that says energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transmuted. So the sexual energy, or the frustrative energy, or just the energy that we feel as men it has to be put out somewhere. There's no— you can't, you can't destroy it.
Exactly. Yeah.
You can't mash down. You can't hold a beach ball under the pool forever. Eventually you have to let the beach ball up.
Yeah.
And these things have to come up. So from a scientific basis, it's just for me about choosing where I put that energy, whether it's sexual energy or whether it's my frustration into exercise or lifting or screaming into a pillow. There's all these tools that we've talked about on this show. When you were in the depths of your pornography addiction. And I can relate, by the way. When I first met my wife almost 7 years ago now, I was very open and honest with her about my pornography addiction. And it was super hard. But you know what it was? It was medicine for the nice guy. That nice guy swallowed that pill and he was like, ugh, like choking on it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You mean I have to tell her all the stuff I don't want to tell her? Yes, man. My higher self was talking to me. Yes, man, that's how you actually become a man.
Exactly.
Is by being honest in moments where you feel like lying.
Yes.
And that was the hardest part for me. So then when you were in the depths of it, like, let's say that the hardest part of your pornography addiction, going through the divorce, what was the narrative? Who was the mentor? What was the voice that allowed you to transcend the clutches of the depths of the pain?
God. God, man, when I started to seek that spiritual guidance from God, he would talk to me sometimes in ways I didn't want him to, sometimes in ways that felt more like wrath than it felt like grace. I am a firm believer that God only talks to you the way he knows you're going to respond and react. He knows what— he knows what to do to move you. He knows what people to bring inside of your life to help bring to shine more of a mirror.
Who did God bring into your life to shine that mirror?
I don't, I don't know if I want to say their name, but it's a girl. It's a Phoebe. It's a female that I was involved with, and she, she brought a lot of reflections towards me. She— I was not used to a woman challenging me, really asking me questions about the internal struggle of who I am. Prying, right? I was so used to people asking surface-level questions, not really prying deeper. The more she would ask, the more I would think. The more she would ask, the more I would dig deeper. And I'm like, I don't— and for me, honestly, I didn't like the way that it felt. It made me very uncomfortable.
What man does?
Yeah, I, I, I did not like it. There were times where I would get very quiet on her, very silent.
Uh-huh.
Instead of her being like, why are you so quiet? And this and that, she would know that I'm processing the information. I'm trying to process what she's asking of me or what she's telling me about who I am or asking me. And when I started to understand that God brought this person in inside of my life to show me the version of the man that I'm supposed to be, the final product. Because I mentioned to a lot of men too, being a good man isn't the destination, it's a journey. Because you're never going to— it's never going to be the end goal because you're always going to have those moments where you slip and you do more of the nice guy thing. And it's just Sometimes it just happens, right? But to be a good man, you cognitively are trying to be the best version of yourself every single day. So it's a journey and it's gonna take a long, long, long, long path. Your, your goal is to not get lost on that journey. So for me, when God would speak to, to me and he would bring me people, or he would hit me with certain things that didn't go the way I wanted them to. That was his way of teaching me patience, grace, love, kindness. Because when you pray for those things, sometimes you get the opposite. If you pray for patience, God isn't going to make you just patient. He's going to give you some very, very challenging things that's going to test your patience.
This is why I tell people, be careful about the way you pray.
Exactly.
Matthew 11:24.
Yes.
Believe when you pray that you receive it.
Oh yeah.
And you shall have it if it is in God's will.
Yes.
This is the big part. And that you can extrapolate that from the Bible and you can put it into the hermetics, you can put it into any religious system.
Yeah.
The way in which we pray gets to be a very specific way. And I'll say this for myself and for all the men and women with us. If you pray for patience, God's going to bring you situations that teach you patience, like you're being galvanized in a sword and a fire. Oh yeah. So be careful. Be cautious and be conscious about the way in which we pray.
Yeah.
That's a big one.
Yeah. And the more I prayed for patience, grace, and to have a more forgiving, less angry heart, the more challenging the divorce litigation got. Okay. The more challenging, you know, certain friendships got, the more challenging I had a, I had a spout with my sister where we didn't speak for an X amount of time because we had a huge falling out. And it felt like the world was crumbling on top of me. And the only people that I had were my mom and my dad. And that's why I speak so highly of them. And I titled that chapter forgiven, never forsaken. Because no matter what wrong I've done, and my parents know every, every wrong that I have done, they've shown me nothing but unconditional love, only the kind of love that God has shown me, right? So when everything was falling on top of me, when I was drowning financially from paying all these lawyers, from all these lawyer fees, doing this and that, my time was being taken away from my kids. I was seeing them less, like, you know, and it was just, everything just felt like it was crumbling on top of me. That's when I was able to be taught, okay, you have this situation. What is it that you're trying to learn from it? Instead of me being angry, like I used to be, be resentful, and have so much anger in my heart, I started to question myself and say, well, I can take this as a form of, I need to be more patient when it comes to this. I can be more gracious when it comes to this. Maybe I don't need to take this as personal. Maybe this is just her wanting to have some type of autonomy over this kind of thing. Maybe I don't need to— it was petty things, right? It was, Things were like that, small, small things that were in the divorce litigation things were like, it was small, tiny things that would set me off where I could just be like, that's not that big of a deal. That's not gonna change the grand scheme of your time with your daughter. That's not gonna change anything. Why are you so fixated on such of the small petty things that's causing so much anger? And the more I decided to let go of those things, the better I felt inside. And that was God teaching me patience, teaching me grace. Now, when people do me wrong or when I feel like I've been done wrong, I don't take it so personal. I don't. I take it as it's more of a mirror reflection of what that person thinks about who they are.
That's very well said.
And how they, and how they would do somebody.
Yeah. Or really a reflection of how they speak and how they behave to themselves.
Of course.
First and foremost, you're making me think of all these things as you're speaking. One of them is The Four Agreements from Don Miguel Ruiz.
Okay.
And the very first agreement, or it's one of the agreements, is don't take anything personally.
Yeah.
And I love that because in the book he talks about truth being like a scalpel. And when we have poison or anger, anger in our hearts, as you might say, we have poison, we have resentment, we have rage, we have anger, we have discontent. This is essentially— he calls it emotional poison.
Yeah.
And so when truth comes in, truth is like a scalpel and it cuts deep and lets all this poison out.
Yeah.
And it's our courageousness to be able to let the poison out and to let it go that actually determines the quality of our life.
It does.
And a lot of times in my experience and even with the students that we have in the Life Method and everything else that we're building, it's the flinch or that resistance I just had a call last week about this where somebody was saying, I'm not afraid of the thing. I'm afraid of the fear of what the thing might feel like. Mm-hmm. That we're afraid of that scalpel cutting us, the scalpel being truth. We're afraid of feeling our emotional poison.
Yeah.
And I think for us as men, and I wonder how you might extrapolate this, is to the degree that we can feel all of our emotions without judgment.
Mm-hmm.
That is the success and the quality of our life.
Yeah.
When we can actually feel what's really going on. Mm-hmm. And not bullshit ourselves or anyone around us.
Yeah.
Even when we're getting cut by the scalpel and the emotional poison is being released. Yeah. It's painful. It sucks.
It's very painful.
It requires an immense amount of maturity and courage. But I wonder, as we round out the conversation, for men that are just beginning to use the scalpel here, right? They're just beginning to go through that process.
Yeah.
Do you have any words of wisdom for men that have first identified that they're caught in the nice guy trap?
Yeah.
They now, through your book, through this podcast, and even the women that want to support their men to become great men and good men.
Yeah.
When that scalpel starts to dig and the poison starts to be released and the emotional inventory of truth is clear and present, it can't be denied. Yeah. Do you have any words of wisdom that can speak right to the heart of a man who's at that point right there?
I would tell them, let it happen. Let it ride. You gotta, you gotta let that poison loose. And I like that analogy because when, when you use a scalpel, if you were to actually do it, your, your first human instinct is to stop whatever's coming out.
Yeah.
Your, your natural reaction is to be like, I don't want this, right?
It hurts.
You have to just let it happen. And understanding that the more you let it unfold and surrender it, surrender it. Let it go. And the more you let it go, the more you will get back. The more I've surrendered myself as a man, the more I've gotten back. The more I've surrendered my life and stopped trying to be in control of every single thing, the more I've understood that things have gone the way— not necessarily the way I wanted them to in my brain, but it's always worked out in my favor.
Yeah.
All these things work out for your favor if you just surrender it. The more you continue to hold on, the more you continue to try to hold that poison back, or you try to stop that leak, that leakage, the more you try to stop it, which it's eventually gonna happen. It's either gonna happen by you doing it or life is gonna force it.
It's like the cows and the, and the bison you were talking about.
Oh yeah. Yeah. It's, it's going to, happen. Your choice as a man is that you have to surrender that and you have to let that happen. And having people that let you— am I allowed to curse? Oh yeah. Go, go, go, go, go, go. That lets you sit in your shit.
Yeah.
Let you sit in it to the point where if you sit in shit too long, you'll forget what it smells like, right? And sometimes that's That's how long you gotta sit in your own shit. The things that you have done, that you have done to your life, which in hand has impacted other people's lives. You have to sit in that and understand that I did A, B, and C, and I got D, E, and F, and this is what the result of it is. And I can let this poison out, surrender it, and I can do better. The next time? Because whether people believe it or not, we always get another chance. It may look different, but you always get another chance. And it's your ability to discern on whether or not what's in front of you is you making that same choice that you made last year, because it may look completely diff— different. For, for me, Personally, when me and my sister had that disagreement, right? And we didn't talk for X amount of time. I think it was over a year, right? And it broke my heart because somebody that I talked to my whole entire life, we were now not on speaking terms for, for an entire year. So much anger, so much resentment built up in between both of us. But I let my anger get the best of me, right? And what I realized is that I need to let this go. I need to surrender it, apologize, move on. But I know I'm gonna get another chance. That other chance was my oldest daughter. My oldest daughter did something that she was not supposed to do. She's now 15. She did this when she was 14. Typical teenager stuff that we all do. But I was forced with a lot of anger inside of me. I wanted to just lash out irrationally, right? That was my second chance. That was my second chance of being like, okay, there's a moment similar to this that you've dealt with in the past. How are you gonna deal with it when it comes to your daughter? And when I was dealt with that, I said, this is my second chance. And I met her with grace, patience, and understanding. Although I was angry, I didn't yell. I didn't, you know, take it in a personal way and tell her, you know, harsh things. I talked to her as a father should. I led her with grace, love, and kindness, right? And hopefully she doesn't make that same choice ever again. Hopefully when she's— she will get a second chance. And when she's forced to make that same choice again with the same circumstance, or it may look diff— different, she will choose different as well. So it was a learning curve for both of us. It was a learning curve for her as a teenager doing something dumb, getting caught by her mom and her mom relaying the message to me. And I'm having to lay this hammer down, right? And I took that as, that was my second chance. I did not take that lightly because the way I would've reacted to that situation could've made or broken our relationship easily.
So our creator brings us these experiences to give us second, third, fourth, as many chances as we need, actually.
Until we get it right.
Until we get it right.
Until we get it right.
I have this prayer that I do a whole bunch, and I feel like you might connect with it. I sit in the sauna space and I'll close my eyes and I'll say, God, what is it that I most get to learn and how can I be most humble to learn it? And I'll say it over and over and over again. Just those two things.
Yeah.
And eventually there's some type of an answer. There's some type of powerful answer. And it might not be what I want to hear, of course, but it'll typically be something as to which you just described.
Yeah.
There'll be an event that happened that I'm still holding on to. It's still hot, cold. It's burning my hand.
Oh yeah.
And then I'll see a way that I can clean it up. And that's been the majority of the answers to those prayers has been, okay, like, go clean. It's just been like a little whisper. You ever get these whispers? Go talk to them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I'll be like, I don't want to. Go say this to her. Go clean this up.
Yeah.
And it's this constant pruning and weeding of our and weeding of our garden that I think is part of what it means to be a good man.
Yeah.
To be able to tend to our own garden such that that garden doesn't poison other gardens around us, especially for the people that we love.
Yeah.
Yeah, man. We've covered so much ground. What, what is on your heart that you want to leave people with when it comes to moving out of the nice guy trap?
Of course.
And, and being the embodiment of a good man.
I want to read an excerpt from my book because I feel like it's going to resonate with A lot of men. It's on page— I think I believe it's on page 4. Yeah, okay. All right. Let me get this close to my face so I can read this. A nice guy is honest. A good man is transparent. A nice guy wants instant gratification. A good man knows the power in delayed gratification. A nice guy finds a problem. A good man finds a solution. A nice guy is controlled by his vices, but a good man is controlled by his morals. A nice guy says thank you, but a good man shows gratitude. A nice guy tells you a beautiful lie, but a good man tells you the ugly truth. A nice guy says he cares, a good man shows empathy. A nice guy is nice for the praise, but a good man is kind with a purpose. And I want to leave that because We can use this aspect— well, people can use this aspect of nice guy versus good man, but nice guys and good men approach everything in their life differently. Everything. Health, finances, time, money, everything. They approach it completely differently. And anybody that's watching that's suffering from the nice guy syndrome, you have to clean up the other aspects of your life that you're a nice guy in. If you're a nice guy in health and money, but you're a good man and family and other parts, those other nice guy attributes are still going to come, still try to give you a way of not finding your true purpose as a man. And I say that because For me personally, I was still a nice guy in the way that I would tell the truth about my porn and the way I wanted people to perceive me. But I was a good man in other aspects. But when it came down to it, when I was forced with something, with a situation where I had to do something that was morally right or appease other people, Sometimes I gravitated more towards what appeased other people rather than doing what's morally right. And making that shift about what's morally right versus what is appeasing is very hard when you have other aspects of your life. So I tell all men that you have to clean it up in every aspect of your life. If you have a vice that you're not proud of, admit it, deal with it, and continue to strive to do better about it. It's not about being perfect. And that's what I feel like a lot of people sometimes will comment stuff and they'll be like, well, nobody's perfect. I'm like, it's not about being that. It's about living with purpose. It's not about being perfect. Because if you strive for perfection, that's the nice guy. That's, that's an act. That's a facade. You're never going to be perfect. The good man knows he's not, and he accepts that, and he lives in his flaws. His flaws is what makes him who he is, right? So when people, especially men, are on this path to becoming a good man, they have to understand that the more that you you can admit your flaws and your downfalls and learn from them, the better off you will be. The harder your journey is, the better it's going to be. If you right now are having a pretty soft journey, everything's going your way, and you know all this, you may not be doing everything right. You may not. There was a thing that one of my pastors told me And he said the devil doesn't bother the person that's doing his work. He never bothers them. He never bothers them because he's like, he's, he's doing the work that I want him to. He's carrying on the evil and the, and all the fakeness that I want him to, right? But when you're doing right and when you're living by morals, principles, and standards, right, you tend to get a little bit more of a resistance from the opposite side. When you're doing what's morally right, sometimes you're met with a side of the other end that pushes back. And that's when you know that you're doing something good. That's when you know that you're doing something right and not just doing something that's nice.
Well, I love that you said that because there's so much BS in the spiritual world of good vibes only. If it feels good, just do it. And I love that because I've never met anybody nor interviewed anyone like yourself, nor lived it in my own life where we didn't meet resistance and challenge and tons of pitfalls on the way of doing good, on the way of living our purpose. So man, I've really enjoyed you being on the show.
Thank you, Josh.
Yeah. Tell everybody where they can absorb more of you.
Yeah.
Your book is on Amazon. It's where books are sold. But what is your website?
Um, they can, they can find me on Instagram at Kelvin Davis on TikTok @notoriouslydapper and then notoriouslydapper.com and on Facebook @notoriouslydapper.
And you told me that it was a shout out to Biggie Smalls.
It is. It is. Yeah. They love it when they come in.
I used to bump that in my Ford Mustang in high school.
Oh, wow. Strong.
Y'all share this podcast with somebody who's struggling that doesn't have to struggle, that's caught in this nice guy jaw vice.
Yes.
That doesn't have to be there. And if you feel like something's worth sharing, share it. Because I can't tell you how many hundreds of times somebody has written in and said, wow, I listened to this conversation and my life has changed. My way of thinking has changed. And so if that resonates with you, share this podcast and make sure that whatever you're doing in your life, that you're doing it with authenticity, even at the price of pain and letting the scalpel cut you. There's so many gems in this podcast. I really appreciate you. Being my guest here in the studio.
Thank you, Josh Trent.
Yes, sir. Thank you for being here. And until we see you on another podcast, I'm wishing you love, wellness, but most importantly, peace and power. You cannot have true power unless it comes from peace. We'll talk with you soon.
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