#884 - Nick Pollard - How To Stop Being Such A People Pleaser

Why is people pleasing such a trap for so many of us? There's a long answer and a short answer. I think the short answer to that is that we have created an environment through social media really predominantly that everybody's now seeking to measure up to somebody else rather than focused on this internal locus of control where you can, you can really be vibrant on your own.
But the way that we function now as a society has changed that. And everybody's comparing themselves to people that, you know, are insurmountable.
And I find myself doing this too. So, you know, I worship at the altars of, you know, Alex Hermosi and, you know, James Smith and all these guys that I see have, you know, millions of followers that make millions of dollars and they're exciting and they're fun.
And I'm like, how do I get to that? Right. Rather than recognizing in myself, like I can just be happy with where I am.
It doesn't, it's, I have a really great friend who said this to me that really resonated with people pleasing, which you don't have to hate where you are to want to be better. And when I heard that, I was like, that makes so much sense.
And I think we've kind of taught people that you have to like almost hate the way that you show up in the world in order to want to better that. And I just, and I think that causes this idea of how do I measure up? And then how do I make everyone else around me happy? Because that's, what the world is kind of built on these days.
Yeah. Draw the line for me between that sense that we measure up.
But people pleasing isn't about us. It's about optic management.
It's about how other people see us. It's about prioritizing their needs over ours.
Why is that important? What's that got to do with it? So I think it's, for me, when it was more of a problem, and I would say that I'm a recovering people pleaser. It's funny, it's one of those things that I don't think ever really goes away.
I think you just kind of battle it. But mostly it's an overwhelming sense that you're not enough.
And when you're functioning from that place, there's no way you can ever really measure up. And there's ways that you can tune that to make it better, right? So if you have something like that, so if you have that kind of inferiority complex plus a superior complex, plus impulse control is a great example, you can do great things.
But if you just have this idea that I'm not enough and that's sort of the main track in the background, then you're always trying to measure up to something that doesn't actually exist. So, and so often this comes from, you know, it's kind of a pivot point where you have like one parent that was super involved in your life and the one parent that wasn't, maybe they were abusive, very similar to the kind of the nice guy narrative where you, you show up trying to gain acceptance and love because the only, and the only way you know how to do that is to either not show up, like to be completely invisible or to make everyone else happy, right.
Or to keep everyone else calm or to constantly be in a peace peacekeeping, you know, frame of mind. And I think that's where people get really hung up.
That's the, uh, one of the typical childhood situations that people pleases would have. Very typical.
Um, you know, I've got, I've got one-on-one clients all over the world kind of coming from every,, everything from CEO down to pick a position. But the thing that I would say is the most common is generally speaking, one parent made – it was an enmeshment issue.
So one parent made that child the center of their world and then the other didn't., and so what that teaches them is that, you know, to make this other person happy means they won't get abandoned to me. If they don't get abandoned, they'll get their needs met.
And then this kind of just plays out in childhood. I forget who said it to me, but it was, um, they called it a transference.
So it's like you developed a childhood coping strategy and you kept it all the way through your adulthood and now it's not serving you, and nobody really knows what to do with that. So then you have to figure out, what do I do now to make my life better? What behaviors should we look out for that suggest you might be a people pleaser? How would you get us to self-diagnose? That's sounding like a real son of a bitch.
Most of the time, um, people pleasers are liars. And that's probably the most common denominator among all of the people I've ever worked with is this dishonesty in, um, just in, in how they show up in general.
Right. So lying is one of the bigger things, but you have to then identify what is a lie, you know? So saying yes, when you mean to say no, well, that's dishonest, right? Committing to things you don't want to go to, well, that is also dishonest.
And so when I work with people and they kind of realize, oh my God, I lie all the time. And it's not that you're lying to the person on purpose.
It's not in this kind of malicious way. It's just you don't even recognize the damage you're doing to your own wellbeing.
And then all of a sudden you have no free time. That's one of the things that you can look for is like, are you lacking free time? Like, is your calendar always full? If you're constantly doing that, are you low on money because other people have needs? Are you prioritizing the wants and needs of other people above your own? Well, that's virtuous in many ways, but again, it's like balance.
If you constantly do that and never prioritize yourself, then what ends up happening to you is you're broke, you're alone, you feel miserable. One of the things that I used to say is that I never got invited to barbecues when I was a people pleaser.
My friends would have parties and I'd never get invited to those things. They'd want to hang out with me for lunch at the office, or they'd want me to help them do something, but they never really engaged with me.
And so I think one of the core components that I see with people is that if they're truly in that people-pleasing mind frame, they have a lack of connected relationship because it's just a masking. In many ways, it's similar to narcissism in that way, is that you can't really get to know that person which is why so the way i found you is you had kept identifying yourself as a people pleaser i'm like ah you don't come off that way to me that's interesting you've got a fucking radar that's searching for people pleases on the internet no look i mean very much self-diagnosed uh i'm fascinated by your work it's been something you know i've spent a lot of time this year reflecting on that um i tend to put other people's needs before mine and in many ways in many ways that can be seen as considerate caring uh altruistic you know looking to bring other people up and um you know this must be i guess even the the real gateway drug at the top of the avalanche is well lots of the things that you're talking about when done by uh when done consciously and effortfully come from a place of virtue and they're good for the world in many ways but when you're compelled to do them when you don't have any other choice than to them, it takes away a lot of the virtue and it also doesn't allow you to ever advocate for your own needs.
Joe Hudson at the start of this year, and I know that you'll agree with this, he said, if I can't trust your no, I can't trust your yes. Oh my God, yes.
Wow. I love that quote.
I've never heard that. Joe's a fucking, he's a beast.
But yeah, the fact that you're not saying yes to going to the party or your friend's wedding you simply cannot say no and i'm not i you know on the gradation of of uh fucking nuclear fallout from a people pleaser i'm nowhere near as i'm not like uh you know the elephant's foot inside of fucking chernobyl but um it's it's there's definitely a lot of those tendencies inside of me to put other people's needs before mine to not advocate for my own needs to subjugate uh my own discomfort in order to not make somebody else uncomfortable this sense that if you're not okay i'm not okay uh that your emotional state is my responsibility and um you know i mean this this only came out kind of during therapy where my therapist sort of mentioned to me you do seem to sort of put other people's needs before yours a lot and you're kind of prepared to suffer unnecessarily uh even though you could probably stop this but the stopping it would cause a little bit of discomfort but you're prepared to avoid a little bit of discomfort and just spread a metric fuckton across, you know, days and months and years. And, um, yeah, that's my, that's my self-diagnosis, I suppose.
Okay. So maybe I was wrong.
Yeah. I mean, perhaps I was, that's, that's a whole thing.
Um, so you, you spoke two things that are really interesting is the value of your no. Uh, I want to just touch on that.

Something I've said a lot of is that most people who have this kind of tendency aren't

afraid to say no, they're afraid to not say yes.

And so because that yes is what gives them that dopamine rush, that, that feeling of

like, I did it.

Like everybody loves me.

Everybody wants me.

And then, so it's that not saying yes, like you could, you could just say the word Lima beans and it's going to make you feel like shit. Um, so it's, it's not even the no.
And one of the ways I show people how to do that is, um, we'll give you a little secret from one of my boundary bootcamps, but, um, spend seven days saying no to everything, everything. Just, do you want to go out to lunch no do you want to hang out on saturday no do you want to help me with my work project no right the answer is just no um and there's rules to the game the rules are you know you have to do it for seven days you can tell everybody you're playing so you literally you can illuminate it to everybody doesn't have to be a secret.
And then you can change your mind after 90 seconds. Oh, but you have to sit with the discomfort of the no for a minute and a half.
Well, yeah. And it also does two things.
So it changes the value system in your brain, at least it did for me, where I was like, okay, well, no doesn't really actually hurt that much. So I stopped being afraid of the word no.
But it also gave me the idea that I could, well, then I can think about what I'm trying to do. Like, do I want to actually do that? Because, you know, when you're a people pleasing kind of person, so, and I do want to draw the line at some point that, you know, being agreeable and being a people pleaser are not the same.
You know, I generally don't care about much stuff. So there's that.
But when you start saying no, you go, okay, well, now my calendar's free and I can actually do stuff that I want to do. And I can say, I really don't want to go to that party.
And then you don't change your mind. But you change your default answer from a yes to a no.
And then that default becomes something that you can do, which is why the fourth rule is you can only play the game for seven days. Because if I learned anything from James Clear, it's not about how long you practice something, it's the repetitions by which you do that, and you're going to repeat that action hundreds of times a week.
What was the second thing that you wanted to click on from what I said? The second, now I've forgotten. That's okay.
Going back, so I really wanted, i have something that's more important uh the fact that people pleases are liars um that there is a sense of inauthenticity um a malleability a pliability that you have which means that you're not telling the truth. And it's uncomfortable because, again,

you're saying that I should do something that upsets people

more than something that's nice.

It's like, well, if it's not the truth,

if it's not genuinely what you believe,

then which one's more virtuous?

And if it's not coming from a place of genuine care and you speaking forward what you actually want it is a lie like yeah you can wrap it up however you want and and say that it makes the world better and that it's coming it's because of compassion and all the rest of it's like it's a fucking lie dude right well and So if somebody was to come to you um let's pretend you're you're allergic to peanuts right and somebody says do you want peanuts well and it might hurt their feelings if you don't eat the peanuts are you going to eat the peanuts probably not right because it'll kill you but so if if that the case, when you think of anything that you dislike or genuinely don't want to do, it's almost in the same vein because on a long enough timeline, it kills your ability to experience joy and happiness and authenticity. and then you know and so often i hear it like how do i find myself, so one of the core concepts, and you'd mentioned, you know, psychology before, and I'm not a psychologist, you know, I'm just a person who's been through this.
And something I'd see in a lot of my clients is that they've either didn't have a ton of play in childhood or, you know, so they were kind of caretakers or meeting the needs of their parents, et cetera, or they've forgotten how to play in adulthood.

And because what we find is that, you know, if you don't play and you don't learn, then you can't self-define.

If you can't self-define, then you lose kind of a scope of who you are.

So I actually believe, you know, people pleasers struggle with the idea of self-identity very often.

And they're always asking me, like, how do I find myself? My advice is never do that. Never, ever find yourself.
Constantly invent the new version of you. And through self-invention, you find more joy.
But you have to do that through play. Yeah, talk to me about this sort of lineage between play, self-invention, self-identity.
How does this fit together? So I think I figured it out. There's a relatively new development for me.
I have made an effort in the last 12 months to be more playful. And because I'd kind of lost all my whimsy, you've started a business, you know what I'm going through.
I'm in year three of this thing. It's a fucking disaster.
Eating glass. Right.
I'm constantly lighting myself on fire. And then trying to put myself out with kerosene it's really great but so i i really made a commitment to myself i was gonna do more playful stuff and i was watching kids in the park the other day and i'm watching them play and it occurred to me that they're not just playing to the adult like to you and i when we see kids play what do we see we see just fun and you know they're on the jungle gym and they're, and they're doing the thing, um, whatever they happen to be doing and they're going to get hurt and they're going to do whatever, but they're not playing.
They're learning. They're discovering through play.
Like what are their boundaries? What can they physically tolerate? What do they like? What don't they like? And they do that by playing with each other. And then very often they're putting on personas of who they want to be.
So one kid wants to be Iron Man. One guy wants to be a fireman.
One little girl wants to be a princess. Somebody else wants to be something else.
And through that idea of self-invention, that's how they start to form the idea of what is their definition of self? And I think adults don't play enough to continue that self-invention process. So they lose contact with that core kid, um, where they're like, okay, well now who am I? Well, I don't know.
You haven't spent any time inventing that. Yeah, that's very interesting.
Uh, I've been thinking an awful lot recently about trying to find more fun in the things that i do and um this sort of balance between joy and meaning uh i kind of have it in my head that there's broadly two buckets of people one are more hedonists and the other are david goggins and lots of people lots of people that listen to this podcast will probably fall into the latter category. There are people who like to take things seriously, they're earnest about their work, they apply efforts, they're rigorous, they pay attention, they're prepared to marshmallow test their way until the end of time.
But as Bill Perkins says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. And more than that, not only do you continue to sort of manana, manana, put off all of the things that you're going to do to a time that never comes, you end up forgetting the reason that you're supposed to do these things.
You're not doing hard things so you can do more hard things so you can do more hard. There has to be a point at which an inherent comes through which is some sense of joy and play and lightness and you end up being sort of very very rigid and brittle in a very strange way you're sort of stiff with the way that you go about things you're not prepared to be flexible you're not prepared to take on adventures in the same way even your adventures need to be fucking planned your holiday needs a massive itinerary and you need to make sure that you work twice as hard before you leave so you don't feel like a piece of shit when you're there.
And all of this sort of comes together. So yeah, the sense of play certainly resonates with me or the lack thereof, the difficulty in finding joy.
I'm going to guess, typically do you find with people pleases, your clients, people that you've spoken to that uh finding joy in life is something that they often difficult find difficulty with tremendous difficulty um and it comes from so often in any way i think it shows up in a ton of these guys and girls is like giving to themselves feels inappropriate it feels so they're kind of racked with shame. It's in the same way that so people pleasing very often can mirror addiction in terms of, you know, I would say it's North Star, which is shame.
So when you're trying to make everyone around you happy, you're basically kind of always in this modality of trying to appease this inner voice that says, I'm not good enough. I'm not enough, which is toxic change.
Like I'm bad. I'm no good.
Right. Rather than I did bad, you are bad.
And when you're always trying to prove yourself as better, that means deep at your core. What is it? What do you believe? It means that I'm not enough.
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Well, ask any addict why that they're, you know, nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, fucking great, I'm going to do some heroin today. Like nobody's excited about that.
Why do they do it? It's to bury this feeling of toxicity in themselves. And then it just kind of spirals out of control.
So when you're talking about somebody that is, that experiences almost a total inability to give to themselves before they give to everyone else. Yeah, it's really hard to find joy.
You me, God, I would have a story. I was in roofing sales.
This is years ago. And I've heard a lot of your stuff, by the way, on everybody should have a door knocking job or a club promoter job.
I fully agree with that sentiment because I'm not afraid of rejection in any way, shape or form. But that's probably a lie, going back to, to the ideas, you know, here I was, I was, I had, I had just gotten out of rehabilitation.
You know, I, I'd sobered up and I'd done all the things and my story is a pretty dark one. And, um, I was standing in, in a warehouse store, um, looking at televisions and I was crying like, because I couldn't force myself to do this thing for myself.
And I, and I had the money. This wasn't like something I had to go and, you know, take out a credit card for, I'm sitting on plenty of cash and my bills are paid and my rent was paid for the year.
And I mean, I was good. And there I stood just, you know, sobbing because I couldn't make myself by myself as present because it didn't serve the purpose of making other people happy.
And I did this for weeks, weeks, like weeks on end, I would just go stand there and be like, I can't pull the trigger. And finally, um, I went to my own therapist and he said to me, you know, uh, you could just stop being a coward and buy the fucking TV.
And I was like, okay, I go on and buy it. And, um, I made him strap it to the car before I swiped my credit card.
So I couldn't turn back. Um, and I think that was,

that was really the first time I noticed it in myself really.

So this is back in 2019 when I really went, wow,

I have a real challenge with experiencing joy.

I have a bigger problem with experiencing celebration.

I have a huge problem with asking for what I need.

And then once I do that,

I have a bigger problem with receiving it.

So all of these components, I started to put it together. I'm like, wow, that sucks.
Like that's a really terrible way to live your life. Yeah.
Permanently making yourself the second or third or fourth priority. Oh yeah.
After everybody else. So just dig in a little bit more to the real costs of being a people pleaser.
Why is it a bad thing? What does it do to your, you mentioned wellbeing earlier on, what does it do to the pleaser themselves? So it deprioritizes a lot of things. So I'd say the first is your physical wellbeing will take a backseat to everybody else's needs.
And so the first thing I started to do is get in shape. And I've been listening to your show for years now, and every single person that comes on says, yeah, everything changed for me when I get shape.
So here's one more to the list. Right.
I'll be the 7,000th person to say that on the show. So the first thing I noticed was that I had been deprioritizing really the core of what my body needs.
So I was eating poorly because I didn't have enough time to cook for myself. I wasn't going to the gym.
I wasn't taking yoga classes. I wasn't stretching.
I wasn't meditating. I wasn't doing any of the, any of the cool shit I do now.
Um, so that's kind of the first thing is that you notice that your health is suffering. So the second, um, and probably more important is that your emotional wellbeing takes a hit every day.
Like you always kind of feel like you're behind the eight ball in where you're going. I used to, it was really weird for me,

but I never felt like I could catch up to anybody. So I think you're 35, I'm 44.
If I was in a room with you, I would feel like I was younger than you. And I have no idea why that was like, everybody was a Titan to me.
Everybody better than me and I was constantly trying to measure up so when you think of what that does to your mental health it just puts you in a position that you always feel like you're in the lurch and you can never be what you want to be and then financially it'll ruin you you know I would give away I would give away money to my mom I'd give away money to my girlfriend I'd give away money to anybody that needed it. And I'm watching my bank account dwindle and I'm bailing people out of jail and I'm doing everything I can to make everybody else's life easier because I thought that's what it meant to get love.
And so when you consider the implications of how over a long timeline, how it will impact you, it will literally take your life away. The average people pleaser that I work with is either at or about to be burnt out at 38, like completely burned out.
Now, very often they'll burn out and they can continue to keep going because, well, they have responsibility and they have, you know, so entrepreneurs are really great at this. We're awesome people pleasers very often because we get to a place where like the customer is always right.
And we're trying to make money in that first three years, especially where you really have to have boundaries. You really have to know what you're doing.
If you aren't careful, you can go down that road really quickly. But people that have high levels of success as people pleasers generally are burnt out and they're just kind of burying it and their misery is growing and their income is rising.
And they're like, why aren't I getting happy? Why aren't I getting happy? Why aren't I getting happy? The paychecks get bigger and it just keeps expanding. So it's like that foam you see that they make.
And, you know, have you ever seen this stuff where they make this like super foam and they pour it out? Oh, and it goes all over someone's- Yeah, garden. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have seen that. That's kind of what I feel like people-pleasing does is that it starts out as this small problem, but it becomes very explosive toward the end.
And then what you see is somebody with no boundaries, a self-image that's generally pretty flawed or wildly inaccurate. You see people that are depressed, and they'll come to me and say, I'm living in my own misery.
And I'm like, well, stop. like, just don't do that anymore.
And, you know, and they look at me like that's possible. Yeah, you can choose to not do this.
Um, and it's, I think the biggest challenge is, is overcoming the idea too, that, um, the opposite of people pleasing isn't being an asshole. Um, I think there's this, there there's it's this polarized thinking that you know you see it in american politics a lot you see it in they see it in america a lot um and you know it's like it's either left or right right or wrong black or white and it's not that you know so people pleasing or asshole right you know why would you try and find the tipping point between two wildly toxic extremes?

They're on the same through line.

They both come from I'm not enough.

So move up to I'm enough and then let's see where you land.

How can someone distinguish between being considerate and sacrificing their identity to please others?

I knew you were going to ask me that and I still don't know how to answer it,

but I'm going to give it,

I'm going to give it my best shot.

Cool.

Um,

I think the way that I distinguish it

is by the emotion itself.

So when I give to somebody

from a place of,

of love,

Thank you. itself.
So when I give to somebody from a place of, of love, and that can be anything, whether I'm buying my girlfriend flowers or whether I'm taking my kid to the park or whatever, there's a sense of peace in that and

sometimes There's a sense of peace in that. And sometimes I want to do it.
Sometimes I don't, but there's still, but that overwhelming sense of peace in being, um, giving is real for, and I think that's real for all people, right? I think generosity is, is probably one of my, you know, if it's not my North star, it's probably in the, in the top three. Right.
And so I think there's this beauty in generosity and being authentic about that. When I find myself in the pleasing modality, there usually is something bubbling behind it.
Most people know when they're doing something wrong. You can feel it.
The minute that resentment hits you, you need to correct the course. For me, resentment in the body just shows up right here in my solar plexus.
I'm like, motherfucker, why am I having to do this And if I start hearing that narrative in my mind, and I've trained my mind to hear it now, it's like, maybe I need to not do that. The other thing that I think you can really do to determine this is put space between your decision to giving.
So if you make a decision like, I'm going to give 500 bucks to the waitress because that's a cool thing to do at Christmas or whatever, right? That's fine, right? That's perfectly normal. You're never going to see a person again.
They're not going to be pleased with you for eternity. But like when you're ready to give to somebody you love, give yourself an hour.
Give yourself a day to ask the question like what is the purpose of this? Am I doing this for the reasons that are genuine and generous and kind and loving, or am I doing this because I need validation? Is there a difference? You mentioned it earlier on, guys and girls that you work with. Talk to me about the difference in how men and women show up with their people-pleasing nature? Is it motivated differently?

Does it present in different manners? Is the framing different in any way? I'd say it's similar. I don't know that there's a wild difference.
It's one of those really interesting things that it's between the masculine and feminine. I don't know that I could pinpoint like a major difference so much as I would say there's different ways of recognizing it.
Women tend to be, you know, they're, so I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't angry. I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't a liar.
And I've never met a people pleaser that wasn't aggressive or passive aggressive. Women tend to more passive aggressive on this side so the one thing that i can say about you know and i'm weirdly my my practice will shift it does this weird thing like i'll have guys and then it will stop and then i'll have girls and then it will stop i don't know why it doesn't this um but it does and right now I'm working with mostly women but what i find mostly in women is they tend to externalize it as a problem of everyone else where men tend to internalize it as i'm a piece of shit yeah that's interesting um so women will say to me a lot like if i could only get this person to do this thing, I would be able to set boundaries.
I'm like, no, like maybe set boundaries. And then if they don't do the thing, let's move on from that.
Whereas men are like, I'm such a piece of shit. I can never sit.
So, yeah, I was I was thinking about this. I wonder whether there's an extra level of shame for men around being pliable you know you're supposed to be this sort of rigid stoic self-sufficient pillar of the community or your relationship or your friendship or your family or whatever it might be and um that's not to say that women shouldn't have a backbone as well obviously they should sure but the level of assertiveness that we just expect dispositionally from men tends to be higher men on average are more disagreeable etc etc etc and um regardless of whether or not the actual manifestation of it is more or less acceptable i think the story that men tell themselves around their pliability uh i think that there's perhaps some additional levels of shame in that i would fully agree with that um i think it shows i think it rears its ugly head in a lot of ways um and one of you know potentially one of the biggest most toxic ones is in sexuality um you know the unfortunate news about being a man in this day and age,

especially one that happens to look,

talk and act like me is that I have no voice.

I,

and if I do,

then I'm,

I'm also a piece of shit, but if I don't,

I'm also a piece of shit.

There's no way to win in,

in this,

you know,

present environment.

But I think the manosphere isn't helping um by any stretch of the imagination i think this idea of like everybody has to be stoic and if you're not you know self-denying yourself and if you're not you know again to your point of like if i'm not deferring my gratification then you know why even show up and it's you know if i don't if i don't make 300 million dollars a year i may as well just you know hang myself and it's just it's all of these kind of giant narratives where it's it's the loudest craziest people on every spectrum that get the most notoriety. And so I don't think that's helping,

but I think you're i think you're touching on something that's very interesting is that we've redefined masculine as this toxic trait and meanwhile if we don't function in our masculine we are considered toxic so most of my or useless right it's either useless or toxic so most of my male people pleasers you know when i when i look into that genre you're going to find that dr glover and i you know rover, um, function in the same realm as,

you know,

the male version of a people pleaser is a nice guy.

And very often nice guys were raised in,

you know,

predominantly female environments where,

you know,

mom was in control.

Dad was generally either not around available semical and however,

or,

you know,

in this sphere of abuse or some other awful thing, which part of my story and um so i think to find those guys and tell them they're okay like this is okay like it's just you struck on something that's like deep in my heart so i'm trying to to get this to, to articulate and it's not quite working because I spent my entire life being ashamed of who I was as a man. And then when I wasn't, I was pissed.
Yeah. Like, because, because I was, because now wounded right now I'm like, I spent my whole life not thinking women liked me.
I spent my whole life not thinking I was good enough. I spent my whole life climbing a ladder I didn't want to climb.
Like I did all this crap for everyone else. And I became a resentful, angry, drunk, addicted piece of shit.
I didn't know what to do with it. Right.
There's nobody. And you've said it before, and I've said it a million times, is that I truly believe that psychology as it exists today is not built for men.
It just doesn't, I don't need you to tell me I'm okay. I don't need to cry on your shoulder.
That's not what I need. For somebody to just say, hey, maybe like let's look for some purpose.
Let's do something else. It's been so helpful, but yeah, I don't know if that answers your question.
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I understand this sort of threading of a needle between we want men to be strong, but we also want them to open up. Men want to be understood and they want their suffering to be recognized, but they also don't men to be strong but we also want them to open up men want to be understood and they want their suffering to be recognized but they also don't want to be pandered to or treated with kid gloves and this is a really difficult balance to strike it's superbly difficult balance to strike because you don't want to patronize guys because that's going to switch them off but the line between not patronizing and ignoring is actually perilously pretty close uh And then that speaks into all of the fears that every guy has about, well, if I open up, I'm going to be shunned by my girlfriend or my wife or society.
I'm not going to be seen as a competent man, so I'll just swallow it down. But I'm also told that if I don't do that, and I also have the sense as well that that's probably not super healthy for me from a psychological standpoint.
I feel like I should be able to feel joy and feel fear and feel pain and feel scared and feel excited.

I want to embrace all of these things, but in order to do that, I need to

concede the entire spectrum of human emotions. And if I do that, then I'm at the mercy of them.

And being at the mercy of them doesn't have the mastery and control and conquer of your

inner landscape that is typically... So it's messy.
messy and um you know this it's endlessly fascinating to me to kind of try and unpack this and and hopefully um i don't know lay out some sort of a path or i don't know at least like some way markers of like here's some interesting things that guys can think about or that girls can think about for the way that they show up with the the that are in their lives. And yeah, that extra degree of shame around being pliable for men,

I think is going to be something that they'll feel quite acutely. I think that...

Well, here's a soundbite for you that'll probably get me canceled.

Love it.

Women are not equipped to handle male emotion. Um, and men are very often not equipped to handle female emotion unless, and this is, you know, this of course is unless you're exceptionally well-trained, but I don't take my big feelings to the women in my life.
So one of the things that you can look for, if you're wondering like, am I a people pleaser count on one hand, how many guy friends you have, if you're a guy and girlfriends you have, if you're a girl, if that number's less than three, you've got a problem because people pleasers almost universally struggle to connect with the same sex. Why? Shame.
Learning to open up to somebody that isn't trying to. So women tend to feel more safe with men if they're in that people-pleasing mindset.
Men tend to feel more safe with women if they're in that people-pleasing mindset. I don't know why that is.
I would love to, you know, I should probably ask Scott Galloway or Dr. Glover why the hell that happens.

But I need two men smarter than me to answer that. But that's just, you know, the pattern that I see.
And I haven't had a client in the last five years that was like had a ton of meaningful guy friendships. I haven't had the same as with women.
I'm still struggling a little bit to understand, despite the fact of being the recipient of it, why it's so hard for certain people to advocate for their own needs.

We would think from a evolutionary psychology, adaptive survival and reproduction perspective,

advocating for your own needs should be the first thing that

you do maybe up until you've got a partner and kids like after that yeah okay perhaps there is

something that's even more important than you because that's your genetic progeny or your

family going forward uh i'm just trying to work out why it becomes so difficult to make our needs

known and to advocate for our own desires i think there's a component of rejection um so you get to a place where you've kind of advocated for everyone else long enough and you don't know how. So then you, you face this idea of, you know, if I ask, will I even receive? Um, where I think you get, as you start to heal from this, you know, profoundly challenging way to live is, um, you stop worrying so much about that and say, okay, well,

I'm going to ask for what I need.

And if I don't get it,

I'm going to give it to myself.

So there's,

there's that.

But I think the,

the advocacy,

the rejection to somebody who lives like this doesn't feel like rejection.

It feels like abandonment and you're gonna have to forgive me because i hadn't said that i don't think i realized that till you asked that question you're good at this chris um um and i'm a little emotional about it because the biggest fear that i see in that people pleasing set,

when I,

when I talk about things like setting boundaries is everybody's going to be mad

at me.

Everybody's going to hate me.

Um,

and when I hear that,

um,

I hear my own,

um,

I hear that part of me that was a little kid that just wanted to be loved and

accepted.

And I just wanted to make friends and,

Thank you. I hear that part of me that was a little kid that just wanted to be loved and accepted, and I just wanted to make friends.
I struggled with that mightily most of my life. so i think it's i think the advocacy of self presents a really big challenge because

it's probably the scariest thing you can do is to say i need something and when you're a kid and you don't get it and then you learn to ask um is dangerous um or could get me abandoned um or you know to stand up for myself means the bully gets bigger, not goes away, right? I think that's where that comes from. Certainly the pattern of simply not being used to it, not thinking that your needs are valid.
Definitely thinking if you grew up in a household where it was difficult for you to communicate transparently maybe parents didn't communicate very transparently there was a lot of passive aggression or shadow sentences people didn't say what they meant they said a thing and hoped that the other person would arrive at the thing that they meant and then resent them if they didn't uh at what point have you got the

training for it so you know for all for me to say you know to try it seems very strange that we

wouldn't be able to advocate for ourselves with the first person and you go well i guess so but

what it really shows is just how far from center your life has sort of taken you that you don't

even think that advocating for your own needs is something that you should prioritize and um

Thank you. life has sort of taken you that you don't even think that advocating for your own needs is something that you should prioritize and um i imagine as well that there must come a stage or the more heavily ingrained people pleasers they must get themselves to a situation where they've people pleased for so long that they don't actually know their own opinion or what they believe or what they want.
Advocating for your needs is tough if you've subjugated them for so long that you have no idea what they are anymore. Yeah, it's really hard to come back from in that way.
Like, if you do it long enough... So, and it's interesting you come to that because we talked a little bit about, you know, what is the difference between agreeableness and people pleasing? Well, at some point you just become agreeable to everything because you, you, it's not that you don't care.
It's that you don't know. Right.
So if you ask me on a Tuesday, do you want to go out and get tacos or do you want to go out and get pizza? I'm not going to give a shit either way. I like food and both those sound great.
So that's what agreeable means to me. I'm happy to just go along, go with flow from time to time because I don't care.
But when you do that because you don't want to be the issue of the moment and you do that long enough. You're right.
You, you don't have a sense of like, what are, what do I even like pizza? Um, when was the last time I, you know, I had an opinion on, on God forbid, Donald Trump or, or, you know, Joe Biden, when, when was the last time I actually spoke up for myself? Um, and this can be hugely powerfully painful at work. Um, you know, especially if you're, if you've done the corporate environment, like I have, you know, I was a corporate sales monkey for years and, um, I would, I was always number two, never number one.
That was always interesting. Um, cause I didn't want to get, I wanted to be seen and want to be that scene.
Right. Um, and I never stood up for,

for what was right.

I never stood up for what I believed. And,

and,

you know,

the eventuality was I burned out corporate America and I'm a,

I'm pretty talented guy.

Um,

I just couldn't do it anymore.

So,

yeah,

I think that,

I think over,

I think that line gets really blurry.

Um,

and that's probably one of the first things to go in terms of your self image

is your ability to formulate opinion.

Um,

and I,

I mean,

Thank you. I think that line gets really blurry.
And that's probably one of the first things to go in terms of your self-image is your ability to formulate opinion.

And I mean, I can't put it on a, I couldn't like delineate a timeline. Like if you started at 16, by the time you're 24, you won't have an opinion anymore.

But I would say that like the first thing you probably start to feel is I don't know what my interests are and I don't know what my opinions are.

And there's really only way to find that out is to, some journaling and go try some fit. Yeah, it feels like a particularly unfair curse to know that maybe you've begun to see the light, you've realized that I need to be more assertive, I need to stand up for myself.
And then when you think, well, what am i standing up for what is myself presumably there's some concoction of things that i want well what do i want and you don't know and you realize that the reason you don't know is because you buried it under layers and layers and layers of appeasing others as opposed to appeasing yourself uh and prioritizing others as opposed to prioritizing yourself and you think well i i know that i kind of need to do this do this thing and I don't even, I'm in a fucking dark jail cell and I don't even know which way, which direction the door is to get out to begin to think about my fucking escape plan. So yeah, I think about that a lot.
I realized toward the end of my twenties that I'd spent a lot of time trying to do whatever I thought I needed to do in order to be able to make other people like me. So when somebody asked me a question, I wouldn't think, what do I think about this thing? I'd think, what does Nick need to hear in order for him to have the best impression of me? And, you know, there's a million problems with that.
But one of the biggest ones is that you never actually feel connected to any of your successes or any of the praise that you receive. Oh, God, that's a big one.
Yeah. Any positive reinforcement that you get is not somebody seeing you.
They're just applauding this role that you play. They're saying, hey, well done for doing the little dance that you did that is not you.
It isn't you. So I would say maybe another, at least from my past experience, one of the identifying factors is, do you feel connected to the successes that you do?

Or do they feel like somebody else did them sort of on your behalf?

That is a question I'm going to steal from you.

I'm taking that.

So I've drawn that line So, I've,

I've drawn that line,

but I've never asked the question that way where I can see,

you know,

I'm working with a really great CEO now and he's a fascinating dude.

And this,

something that's really interesting in that vein that I want to come back to is how,

how interesting people pleasers actually are. But, um, the, he says to me all the time, well, you know, I just got lucky.
Right. I just got lucky.
It couldn't have been the 25 years of toil. It couldn't possibly have been that you have the mind for the work.
It couldn't possibly have been that you're talented. Right.
And I, I fall into that trap a lot myself still. So, and I've mentioned to you, like, this is not something that you, it's not like I say in my videos very often that I'm a recovered alcoholic.
I don't know that I'll ever actually recover from this. I think this is just a thing that I do.
It's like, has their thing that they have to deal with in life. And if you listen to, you know, whatever personal growth literature that you may, you know, tend to absorb, but you know, my very favorite one is Scott Peck.
You know, he started with the line, life is difficult and it's, and it remains difficult until you realize it's difficult and then you don't care that it's difficult. So it's no longer difficult.
So, but this is my life this is the thing that i'm gonna i'm gonna overcome for you know years to come and i hope that i can teach my children to overcome and and although you said uh you know you said people pleases are interesting and i i would agree uh not being fucking fellating myself here but um i think the reason is that you know they've got the only way that you can be a people pleaser is if you have some sense of depth uh you you are a deep thinker in one form or another you care you know very much about others uh you have an amount of empathy um you have social sort of agility in a way that uh if deployed correctly could be really really fucking useful really powerful it can make the world a better place so it doesn't it doesn't surprise me that you know you get fascinated by these people that you get to meet and um this thomas soul quote which i can't stop thinking about even though i've known it for ages it just it becomes more true the longer i think about it which is there are no solutions only trade-offs and you may sort of scream at the sky and shake your fist and say if only i could have this thing without this thing and you go well what if both of those things come together what if that is kind of like a single meal as opposed to ingredients that you can make a dish from and uh i get the sense that you know a lot of people if they can start to transcend and include or alchemize the more pathological parts of their people-pleasing nature, what they're left with is probably the things that they care most about themselves, that they love most in themselves. I love that you said that.
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It goes back to that thing we were talking about, you know, and I've played with an idea that's also interesting that i wonder if people pleasing and narcissism aren't on the same through line but the the beautiful parts of you don't have to die for the toxic parts to go away so it's like when people see you know they say so i've heard you say, you know, I'm a people pleaser, I'm struggling people see, you know, they say, so I've heard

you say, you know, I'm, I'm a people pleaser. I'm struggling people pleasing it up.
Like, okay, well I don't experience you that way. Now I've heard some of the backstory.
I might've been incorrect, but the, the generosity, the kindness, the, the loving way you show up, the, the joyful part of you that actually gets fulfillment and, and levels up by giving. That's awesome.
Like that's beautiful. That's, that's humanity.
Like that's the good shit. Right.
But to allow the self deprecation to go away, right? To allow the self-deprivation to go away, to look at yourself not as a problem, but as having a set of problems and then solving each one, you know, through a long enough timeline, you get to keep all those things you love about yourself. You don't have to turn into an asshole.
You just get off that line. If you're driving head on at a bus, just steer.
Just turn. You'll be fine.
And I think that's... Maxwell Malt, was one of the first real books that I ever engaged in.

It's called Psycho-Cybernetics.

I don't know if you ever read that one.

I've heard of it.

I've never read it though.

It's been a while.

So, you know, this is going to be clunky and probably wrong.

But his equation of humans is that we're all kind of servo mechanisms like guided missiles.

And missiles don't actually,

guided missiles don't actually aim at a target.

They aim away from not the target.

So when you just start to realize,

okay, well, I'm not on target,

so just, okay, aim away from not on target.

And then you're going to course correct your way

to a pretty happy life,

just taking good care of yourself

and getting in shape and starting to eat well. Always the first thing I work with my clients on is like, all right, let's go to the gym.
Let's get some of the anger out of your body. Pleasiers are pissed historically over every person.
They're just mad because their life hasn't gone the way they wanted it to go. Well, it's not going to unless you do something about it.
So get some of the anger out, get them in shape. We start to build up on this idea of like, how do I make more money? And you start to see life improve.
Yeah, I don't know if I answered the question there. I got lost in my own brain.
Let's move down from the sort of first physical practices, stepping in on diet, presumably sleep, training, blah, blah, blah. How psychologically, in terms of reframing, in terms of the sort of psychological tactics and strategies, what are the first steps that you get to take people through when it comes to their rehabilitation? Probably better as a relatively small demonstration.
But if I say to you, like I say, Chris, you're not enough.

What do you feel physically when I say that to you?

Uh, like, uh, closing over shoulders, come forward.

Okay.

So you kind of feels right.

So you kind of feel it in your chest.

You feel it in your shoulders.

Right.

Well, the first thing you need to do is learn to sit with that.

Learn to just sit in that feeling and ask it questions.

Your emotions are not fact, they're just in there.

And they come from experiences, they come from your past.

And I can probably iterate a million different personal growth books on that.

But once you just feel it and you say, okay, so now I know what that feels like. The next question is, what does it mean? What am I actually saying to myself? So if anybody's listening, whatever that thing is that you hear in your head, there's always a bullshit story that plays around here.
Like, I'm not smart enough. I didn't get enough schooling.
There's a million ways you can tell yourself a piece of shit. Pick the Pick the one that's most meaningful.
And then just say it to yourself in the mirror and let yourself feel it. And then wherever that shows up, just ask it the question, what are you? Are you real? Where did you come from? And get curious about these things.
We tend to judge our negative emotions by calling them negative emotions. I don't think there's a positive or negative.
I can tell you for sure that I can remember the first time I ever was going to kiss a girl. I know exactly what that felt like.
I also remember the first time I thought I was going to die. I remember exactly what that felt like.
They're eerily similar. So, you know, kind of butterflies in the stomach.
That's where I get anxiety. That's where I feel it.
So now I feel that like, okay, what are you? Are you excitement? Are you fear? Are you anxiety? And it'll, and generally I'll get an answer and okay, where did you come from? And it'll say, well, you know, you're going on Chris's show. It's the biggest show you've ever been on Nick.
You know, sure? This isn't what we're supposed to be doing yet. Like you should have 4 million followers before you go on that damn thing.
By the way, this is a real iteration from this morning. And so as I've kind of dealt with that today, that's how I take other people through it too, is just kind of learning to sit in the darkness.
The other thing that I really would stress is that there has never been a people pleaser I've ever met that was created in a vacuum. So getting around other people that are kind of dealing with this is vital.
It's, and it's so much more fun because I, you know, I said it earlier, people pleasers are super interesting. Like they forget that they have all these weird hobbies and they're quirky and, you know, you get them laughing and talking about who they are and you find these vibrant, exciting humans that are just waiting to be unleashed.
And, you know, here they are in a cage that's unlocked, just open the door, fly the fuck away. Um, so I think to answer your question in a long form is the first thing is learning to sit in the emotion and recognize it.

Because it really is emotion-based.

It's that feeling you get when you feel like you're not enough is the thing you have to look out for.

And it's the thing that will sabotage you the fastest.

Is that feeling of insufficiency for you the sort of root cause that then the people-pleasing nature is born out of?

Yes.

Yeah. For me, yes.
You know, for most of the people Ipleasing nature is born out of? Yes. Yeah.

For me, yes.

You know, for most of the people I work with, yes.

Because you're trying to squelch that.

Like that feeling when you felt like your shoulders were hunched forward

and you kind of, like I could see it on you,

that you were like, I don't like that.

That doesn't feel good.

It almost reverts you to being a child, right?

You looked as though I had scolded you. And? You looked as though I had scolded you.

And it probably felt as though I had scolded you. And what are you going to do with that feeling except for go, oh, well, fuck, how do I make that go away? Right? How do I make you like me again? Right? So when you can sit in that and get used to it and then start to get curious about when it shows up, you know, that's been the gift for me.
And this is not that I cured it. It's that I'm curious about it.
So it shows up and I'm like, what's that? Like this morning when I'm, I had to take a five mile walk just to get out of my head. Um, you know, and I'm almost fan boyed when you got, Oh my God, it's you.
And so I take this walk and I'm like, what am, what am I, what am I worrying about? Like this is either going to go greater. It's not like, there's nothing I can do.
You know, I'm not a moron. I'm going to be fine.
Um, what am I really worried about? And, and here I was, you know, back in that, in that mindset, like, well, what if he doesn't like me? Well, what if it'll be what it's going to be? And it was me sitting, I was sitting on the Capitol steps at, at, um, here in Denver, um, on the mile high step, there's a step right there. That's a mile high.
Exactly. I like to go sit on that when I'm kind of thinking and it was there.
I was like, okay, what am I, what am I believing about this? I'm believing if I don't show up that I'm a piece of shit. Like if I don't, if I don't do this right, then it's going to be the last podcast I'm ever on.
And then like, okay, how am I reinforcing that belief, Nick? Well, I'm sitting here pondering this over and over and over again and ruminating in my brain like a psychopath and having conversations with myself on the street like the other people that are around here. And it's not looking good for me.
They're probably going to lock me away. And then it was like, okay, well, these four questions have saved my life a million times.
What do I want to believe about this? Well, no matter what happens, I'll be okay. And I'm okay.
Like, I don't have to be enough.

I don't have to be good enough.

I don't have to be bad enough.

I just have to be okay.

And then what do I want to do?

And it was, okay, well, I really want a piece of taffy,

and I want to have a Pellegrino, and then I want to get on the show.

And that's what I did.

I just got myself a bit.

Because my brain is going to tell me what I want.

Your brain's actually really smart if you listen to it.

and it was like, you know, let's have a piece of

Thank you. I just got myself a bit in because my brain is going to tell me what I want.
Your brain's actually really smart.

You listen to it.

And it was like, you know, let's have a piece of candy and relax and, you know, be a kid for 10 seconds and let's get on the show and have some fun with Chris and we'll see what happens.

Dr. Glover was funny about this.

I told him I was coming on the show and I was afraid of it.

Like, you know, and he says, what are you afraid of? I said, well, what if I screw it up? And he goes, well, you're gonna, I'm like, oh, okay, great. So now what? He goes, listen, learn to laugh, have more fun, make mistakes and enjoy yourself.
And that's what I'm doing. And I was able to do that by reaching out to, you know, my, my team, my men that I work with and, and to, you know, kind of talk myself through this, this danger zone.
What are the other two questions? You said that there was four questions that have got you through a lot of things. So the four questions are, so when you get that feeling where you're hunching forward, right? The first question is, what am I believing? So our beliefs drive our behavior, our behavior creates our environments.
We need to be very careful about what we're believing, especially in a moment like that, right? So the first question is, what am I believing? Very often it's come back in some iteration of I'm not enough, right? I mean, whatever iteration that could be, you know, maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe I didn't go to Harvard.
Maybe, you know, it doesn't matter. It's the whole thing.
It'll come back in some way or another. The really interesting thing about beliefs is that they have to be reinforced somehow.
So you have, you know, an experience, which is the feeling you're having, and then you have to reinforce it. So you're the only one that can reinforce it.
It has to be reinforced by somebody in a position of authority. So if you're biased by yourself, then you are that authority.
So you have to ask yourself the next question, question number two, which is how am I reinforcing this belief system? Like what am I doing or not doing that's making me feel that I am not enough? And you'll get an answer to that, right? What am I doing or not doing? Question number three is, what would I prefer to believe? What is that preference? Rather than what should I believe, what would I prefer to believe? And in my vocabulary at that point was, I would prefer to believe that I got this. It's good.
It's going to be fine. He's probably not going to murder me.
I don't think he has a, you know, missile that will hit my house. So I think we're going to be okay.
Um, and then what do I need to do to reinforce this new idea, this new belief system? So when you go back to question number two, we ask like, what am I doing or not doing? Very often the answer to question number four question number four, which is, what do I need to do to reinforce this new belief system? It's usually the opposite of whatever it was in question two. It's like, I'm timid about the show.
It's just to admit that I'm timid about the show. um and it's a powerful exercise i mean i get to connect with you over it which and to and to tell you like, this is, this has been like my, I've been excited all week.
And, but when you have this idea in your head that you're not enough, that excitement very quickly can turn on you into anxiety. Yeah, dude.
So fascinating. I really appreciate that.
Um, you've mentioned a couple of times already today, boundaries, setting boundaries. Um, how do you come to think about that? What is it that people are getting wrong when it comes to it? How can they be useful? Uh, what's the, what's the process? Give me the, give me boundaries 101, the best and the worst.
Okay. So the first misconception about boundaries, um, is that they're about other people.
So boundaries are about how you show up in the world. They have nothing to do with anyone else.
They are delineators for what you accept and not accept what you'll tolerate and not tolerate. and so a boundary doesn't sound like hey don't say that to me it makes me mad

a boundary sounds like i have a value system that is around this

then how you communicate that is different. So for instance, I tend to spend my time only with people that value kindness.
If you are an unkind person, you have no space in my life. So when someone is being unkind, I will generally say, hey, I don't appreciate the way that this is happening right now.
I'm going to leave the situation. That's how you enforce a boundary, right? So your boundaries are actually based on your value systems.
That's kind of the most important misconceptions that like it's a rule book. Boundaries are not a rule book.
The other one I hear a lot of is boundaries are about putting yourself first. and that's horseshit boundaries are about

making The other one I hear a lot of is boundaries are about putting yourself first.

And that's for shit.

Boundaries are about making your needs equal to everyone around you.

So rather than saying, I'm putting myself first, I have to be selfish.

Well, no, you don't have to do any of that.

You have to define yourself in equality, which is, okay, my needs are as important as everyone else's. And then you can make decisions based on that data.
Right? So if, for instance, you want to go out for tacos and somebody else wants to go out for pizza, this is not a boundary. right um but if you know one of the things i see a lot with people who've gotten sober is you know you'll get a phone call and it's my least favorite question of all time well there's

going to be drinking at the party. Is it okay if I drink? I don't, why am I in charge of that? So my boundary around this is I am not in charge of other adults' decisions.
That's a boundary. Like I am not in charge of other adults' decisions.
That's a boundary. Like, I am not in charge of other adults' decisions.

That doesn't sound like anybody's got a rule to Ben, does it?

Like, that's me.

I am not in charge of that.

So when they call me and say, is it okay if I drink?

I say, I am not in charge of other adults' decisions.

What you choose to do, you choose to do.

If what you are choosing to do makes you feel uncomfortable, I would suggest you not do that, but I'm not in charge of that decision. Right.
Boundaries at work are very, very often something, you know, I get this brought up a lot. It's like, well, how do I tell my boss? I'm not going to do that.
Well, you just say no. And then that's it.
Like I'm, I, unfortunately my workload is such, um, and I have a boundary around personal time with my family. So I won't be able to come in this week or this weekend, whatever the, whatever the thing is.
Right. So, um, those are the two most common misconceptions.
When you start to understand that you start to develop what it, what looks like more like a bill of rights than a list of boundaries for the uh anglosphere people explain what the bill of rights is in this context please so a bill of rights is a list how do i explain this um i actually do this in boundary bootcamp, which is funny because I explain it like shit every single time. But a bill of rights is a list of values and priorities that you hold yourself to.
So for instance, I'm allowed to ask for what I want is within my bill of rights. I'm allowed to have conversations during sex is in my bill of rights.
I'm allowed to laugh at inappropriate jokes. I'm allowed to make inappropriate jokes.
I'm allowed to have an opinion. I'm allowed to like pizza.
It's a weird one, but it's in there for me because at some point in my life, I was married to a woman who was gluten-free for some reason or not, or I was not allowed to like the things that I like. I'm allowed to, um, so when you think of the bill of rights, it's, um, you can also put in there things you don't have to do.
I do not have to tolerate unkindness, right? I will, I have a, I have a boundary around

yelling. you don't have to do.
I do not have to tolerate unkindness, right?

Um, I will, I have a, I have a boundary around yelling.

I don't believe that that's a proper way to communicate.

Um, so in my bill of rights is I do not tolerate yelling in conversation.

And how does that show up if I enforce it? Which is, I would just simply say, Hey, uh, raising your voice with me is not an, is not

an option.

So we're going to take a break from this.

I'll come back to it in 15 minutes when both of us have calmed down. And that's it.
Like, it's not, like, it's just, this is what's going to happen. So that Bill of Rights really shows up.
And it's unfortunate because it sounds a lot like affirmations, like, and one of your, one of your,

one of your good friends who is a coach to me that doesn't know he's a coach to me is Alex

Tremosey. He's the, the sphere of, of personal growth has been so awesome because I, I have

coaches that don't know they're my coaches. And he mentioned at one point, I think it was on your

show. He said, you know, confidence is not about shouting affirmations at yourself in the mirror.
Um, and so this is sort of in that vein. Um, so it's, you know, going against one of my own, uh, you know, heroes, but it feels much more operational though.
You know, most of these, these aren't things that you're saying in the whimsical hope that they're somehow going to manifest one day, they're guidelines that you've put on the floor. And you say, hey, if you kick one of these

tripwires, then if I don't know where the tripwires are, if I don't know what they are,

and if I haven't sort of made a commitment in advance, then I'm always going to negotiate

with myself about whether or not that is a tripwire or not. And in the moment, trying to

Thank you. commitment in advance then i'm always going to negotiate with myself about whether or not that is a tripwire or not and you know in the moment trying to come up with any sort of a solution i used to have this thing fuck this is old god this might be 10 years old now um i used to have this this thing about how uh it's basically impossible to come up with a solution when you're in the midst of the crisis and um if if i told you in a week's if i told you in a week's time that i was going to push you into some quicksand you could spend the next week on chat gpt looking at the best strategy and what shoes you'd need to wear and am i supposed to move i sort of do this lateral like sort of shaking thing or it's called like you know the the hofla movement or some shit for getting out of uh quicksand but if i just push you in some quicksand and i'm like hey fucking try and get chat gpt out now it's not going to happen you can't think laterally and um yeah another homoism he says 20 minutes of preparation adds 20 iq points i get the sense that with this it's a much more protracted version you're much further out in advance you're creating these operating principles and yeah maybe it is kind of lame in a way to be like, oh my God, like you need to write out this list of rules about how to do things.
And you go, yeah, yeah. I'm in many ways, phenomenal and fantastic and competent, and in a ton of other ways, kind of useless.
And this is me compensating for my uselessness. This is a solution for me to work around that.
And it helps me to mitigate the parts of me that I don't want to keep manifesting. They're these, like if you thought about how you wanted to redirect a river, you have a river and it's moving and it's sort of carving and it's eating away at the outer edge of each turn.
It's like chopping away at this thing. You know, I need to redirect it in this way.
It's going to take a fucking ton of effort when you first start you take an absolute ton of effort but when it begins to find that thing easier than the other thing that's when you move from system two to system one thinking right and that's the the whole process you start off in the deliberate and then you move into the automatic so yeah i i i explain that really in detail um to a lot of people, is you know those four levels of learning which is you start out as unconsciously incompetent you don't know what you don't know you move into the conscious competence realm where you do know now what you don't know and at that point you have to make a choice do i give a shit to learn how to do what i don't know how to do and you then become consciously competent where, okay, I have to practice this until it's a thing. And at one point you become unconsciously competent where it's, we, we call those people naturals.
Um, like for instance, you are a natural podcaster. I've watched your very first stuff.
It was good. It's not this good, right? If you go back to my original videos, I looked like a monkey fucking a football.
It was like like I was terrified. I was shirtless in Panama.
I thought it was going to be in men's work. The captions were all wrong.
It was filmed sideways. Like disaster.
Everybody's everyone's got an origin story. Right.
I came across this quote the other day that I thought was really interesting. I wanted to bring up to you to do with boundaries says don't try to fix people just set boundaries.
I've been kind of transfixed by that idea for quite a while. it is a damning indictment about how poorly most people can change

and some people can some people can make genuine like hard left turns or right turns in their life um but i think kind of meeting people where they're at and just assuming that the person that's showing up in front of you right now is the person that they are sure maybe they're drunk or whatever maybe this is a they had a really really hard day or their dog died yesterday or something like that. Okay, people have over a couple of sample points, you do two, three sample points, you go, okay, I know who you are.
And is it really realistic for you to expect this person who you can't stop thinking about the shape of their eyes or the smell of their hair or the way that they walk or whatever it is and you're not falling in love with that person you're falling in love with the idea of what you could craft them into if only they were able to be sufficiently malleable and i think don't try to fix people just set boundaries is a really lovely redress to those of us that are maybe hopeful romantics in that way, or hopeless romantics. And this happens with friendships, this happens with family too.
And I imagine don't try to fix people, just set boundaries probably resonates at least a bit with some of the work you do. I think so.
The other thing I tend to say is that when somebody shows you who they are, just believe them. Like, oh, that's great.
It's really simple. Like if somebody shows you who they are, believe them.
Um, uh, it's the easiest way to, you know, we, it's the easiest way to negate narcissism. Um, if somebody shows up and they, and, you know, we talk a lot of, you know, in the, in the personal growth world or not even personal growth, but, you, but just TikTok and Instagram and all the places that I, my or myself, tend to get all the red flag commentary, right? Well, this is a red flag and that's a red flag.
I'll tell you what a real red flag is, the fact that you ignore red flags. and if you are boundaried enough if you understand your bill of rights if you understand

who you are

then when somebody

shows up in the world

that violates that

despite how manipulative they can be, or whether they have narcissistic person personality disorder, or whether, you know, they're, they have sociopathy or whatever it's, you won't tolerate it. Um, and so, yeah, I do agree with that statement.
I agree with that a lot i just think there's go ahead no i'm just i'm really interested in you have this sort of moment where you've you've maybe got your operating principles your bill of rights i imagine that this is a a task that you should sit down sure really focus on writing it out physically um what i'm interested in is the habits or routines that you recommend for maintaining those boundaries because it's all well and good saying you know it's the first it's the equivalent of the first of january the day after you've written right the bill of my diet's going to be on point i'm going to sleep eight hours a night and sam harris is waking up absolutely just going just going to get fist fucked into oblivion. I'm going to do it every hour of the day.
Um, but I've got an alarm for everything. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Talk to me about the, the way that people can stay resilient in their, their boundary setting, the habits, the routines for, for sort of maintaining that over time,, for getting back to it if they feel like they've sort of fallen off? So I do that in a variety of ways.
I hesitate to answer it because there's so many prescriptive ways of living these days that everybody's telling me I have to be up at four in the morning and I've got to bathe my nuts in olive oil and then I've got to sun my asshole and then I got to get into an ice bath. And then after that, I have to get into a sauna.
Right. I've got to go to a sauna after this.
And then, you know, once I do that, then I can start my day. And, um, but I think put it somewhere you see it.
Um, one of the things I do with people is just say, take your top three that you want to make sure you focus on, put them on a business card, like go get a blank business card, put it on that business card, handwrite it, then take it and laminate it. And then you have it.
Right. And it's just kind of a reminder.
It's in your wallet. It's in your pocket.
It's about, you know, anotherie ism is, you know, most people don't need to be

taught. They need to be reminded.
Um, so once I've taught you, I've taught you. Um, the other

way you can do this is, is getting involved with other people that are doing this. Um, so, you

know, my community is a great example of this. I have an incredible group of, of humans that are

all in there and, you know, they get a text message for me like every other day. Stop that.

Whatever you're doing that, you know, you shouldn't be doing, stop doing that or do that.

But the most important thing is that we, Chris, is just read it. You know, if you read every day or you get up and you have kind of a morning routine, it doesn't have to be, you know, you don't need to spend 25 minutes meditating on it.
You don't need to, you know, have a long conversation with yourself in the mirror. You don't need to write, I love you and lipstick and then a heart around your head and, you know, all that nonsense.
You just read it once a day, um, as you go. And I learned that actually, um, one of my favorite stories about myself, I'm about to, I'm speaking of, um, collating myself is, um, I was fortunate enough to be coached one-on-one by Zig Ziglar at one point in my life, which if you don't know who he is, he's, you seemingly do.
He's, you know, probably the first most important sales trainer ever. And I had called him in a sales slump when I was 19 years old.
I just called him on the phone and never thought I'd hear from him. But six weeks later, he called me back.
And he sent me this little thing on his website. And it was this long paragraph.
And it was like, here's what I'm going to do today. And it wasn't like affirming.
It wasn't like, I'm good enough and I'm smart enough. And gosh darn it, people like me.
It was, here's how I intend to show up. And he said at the bottom, never forget the quote, the eyes are the windows to the soul.
So be careful what you look at. And this was the first thing I read every day for like four years.
Um, and you know, my sales kept climbing and he checked in on me about every six months and, you know, really kind dude. I'd love to tell you that story some other time, but, um, that's really where I figured that out is that I just read it.
I read mine every day and I revamp mine about every six months. So I go back and revisit it, make sure that the things I'm working on are that I haven't mastered them.
It's this mindfulness moment that why would I need to continue to be mindful about something that I've already mastered that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Um, so I just, I'll take things off that list.
And that's another concept is that, you know, boundaries aren't static. They're evolving just like you, you know, who you are is who you are is not a fixed concept.
It's, um, it's ever evolving. It's always changing.
And, um, that means your needs will change. It means your boundaries will change what you'll tolerate, what you're willing to tolerate will change.
And, um, and I think if you give yourself time enough to grow into that and you can really experience some very cool life. So that's how I would say to do that in terms of, you know, tapically speaking is just read it every day.
Once you do it, read it every day. I've been a huge fan of post-it notes over the last year, like the most 1930s fucking technology to fix things that I need to remember.

Just little bits bits you know i'm a fan of mantras because i think they're sort of like the wind zip you know file sort of compression of of entire ideas and just popping things around is a really nice way to do it so i'm all in for the the laminating of the business card getting into I guess, what I think we maybe haven't fully covered yet, that's probably one of the biggest sticking points is the felt sense when you need to do a thing, when you need to say, when you need to enforce a boundary, when you need to say no, when you need to sit in that moment, it's happening, the discussion is occurring, whatever is about to go on. How can sensitive people become more assertive? There's two things on that.
I was actually going to bring this up way early in the call, and I forgot about it. So I'm really glad you came back to this.
The first thing is very often boundary conversations don't need to happen in the moment. Um, there seems to be this concept that you have to immediately defend yourself, but acids and bases mix about as well as emotions and logic.
So if you are in a potentially emotional situation, it's best to buy time. Now,

that's not to say to be conflict avoidant, because that is kind of a core competency

of the people-pleasers, to just avoid conflict until it goes away. But it's about conflict

Thank you. conflict avoidant because that is kind of a core competency of the people pleasers to just avoid conflict until it goes away but it's about conflict deferment so and maybe that's an hour maybe that's a day maybe it's after thanksgiving dinner you know maybe drunk uncle eddie needs to go home like whatever but so that's the first thing it's like if you are somebody that's highly sensitive don't hold yourself to the standard that you're going to be, you know, Johnny on the spot with your boundaries, especially in the beginning.
You have to give yourself time to adjust to this new way of being. So, and the way you do that is you just say, okay, hey, I'm getting uncomfortable.

I'm going to take a break for this conversation.

It's a great way to do that.

Or, hey, I've asked that we don't talk about that.

So I'm just going to step away or whatever. You know, usually, especially in family situations, it's generally around conversation.
The second thing you can do is when you notice you're feeling that hunched feeling is just to breathe. So when you get that sense that sense that you're being overcome,

I take it, I've been a martial artist most of my life. You're probably familiar with the term

ki, which means spirit yell. I can't just scream hiya in the middle of family dinner, but what I

can do is take a very, very deep breath in and hard out. And that generally will help me reset

my nervous system. So it's like in all the way and then like really hard through.
So I get all that carbon out of my body and just let that out. And then that will actually cause my skin to heat up.
And you can see it. I actually got flushed when I did it.
So that will cause my skin to heat up, cause the emotion in my body to kind of dissipate, go other places and to balance out. And then I can say, okay, that's not okay.
I'm an extremely sensitive person. It may not show up that way online because, you know, I'm sort of a fire branded preacher of everything that says, you know, you can do it.
You just don't believe you can. And, but in, you know, genuinely speaking, I'm pretty impacted by, um, other people or I wouldn't do this.
Um, so that's how I do it is one good solid breath that nobody even has to know I had, um, will help me reset. And I can then decide, kind of make the, the idea of, okay, do I want to even address this now? Yeah.
What about just to add a additional layer of complexity, there's certain times where you just don't have any other choice. You need to address this situation in the moment.
This isn't necessarily about a boundary. This is somebody asking you a decision.
Are we going to do this or are we going to do this? And you have to have that moment of self-inquiry. You need to try and tap into your desires.
You need to be able to advocate for your needs. I'm going to do this or are we going to do this and you have to have that moment of self-inquiry you need to try and tap into your desires you need to be able to advocate for your needs uh i'm gonna guess that this mindfulness gap facilitated by uh what's contemporarily known as the huberman breath um is is is a good stop is there any other tools for uh assertiveness when kind of under pressure like that? There are, but I will not allow Andrew Huberman to take over the key eye.
Okay. Okay.
You can tell him I said so. You can take the breath name back if you give us some more tactics.
Right. Sure.
So if you're truly in a moment, so number one, speaking of another person, that's a coach that doesn't know that my coach, Tim Ferriss says that there's no such thing as an emergency.

And I fully agree with that sentiment.

There is no, there's almost no reason we need a decision right now unless it's life or death.

So if somebody's pushing on something and you're uncomfortable, the answer is it needs to be a default of no. Now that's really hard.
So there's, there's two things that you have to remember in those moments. The first thing is no feeling is permanent, and they're almost never fatal.
So no feeling is fatal, no feeling is permanent. So if it's not fatal and it's not forever, you can get past it.
This is where I was really challenged. I used to believe that I wasn't courageous, and I used to believe that I wasn't courageous.

And I used to believe that I wasn't brave.

And I believed those things because I was afraid.

Those two things can't exist without me being afraid.

That's just a Tuesday.

You become courageous through action. You become courageous through action.

You become brave through action.

And bravery is defined as going anyway.

Right?

So at some point,

you have to realize that it's okay that you're afraid.

It's okay that your shoulders hunch forward. It's okay that your eyes well up and you don't know what to do.
It's okay that you're overwhelmed. It's okay you have butterflies in your stomach.
It's okay that your jaw is clenched up and you're just, and you just want to fight. That's all okay.
And if you can just remember that it's okay and without it, you cannot be courageous. You can never call yourself brave if you're not afraid.
Then you can immediately start to rewire the thought in your head. It's like, first, when I feel afraid, what does it mean? I'm afraid.
That's all it means. It doesn't mean anything.
It just means I'm afraid. Right? Am I going to die? Probably not.
The two seconds between a decision and the words make a big difference. So in the game of no that we talked about earlier, so you have 90 seconds.
Like you have 90 seconds. You only really need two.
Really, you only need two. So if somebody is really pressuring you or somebody is really pushing on a boundary, give yourself two seconds.
Two seconds. One, two.
And then speak. Whatever comes out.
Whatever comes out. It can be anger.
It can be vitriol. It can be sunshine and rainbows.
It can be an I love you. It's a great way to diffuse a boundary conversation, by the way.
Just I love you. Try that.
If you want a good one, just just i love you just screws up the whole room right um so that's what i would say is give yourself two seconds and speak whatever comes it comes to your mouth and it's going to be scary and you're going to feel it right and so i think what i heard you ask me and tell me if it's true it's like how do I get over the feeling? You don't. You don't.
You go anyway. What about the guilt that people will feel when choosing themselves over others? The fact that there's this person there and I have this sense of obligation, this sort of, I'm so used to subjugating me below everybody else.
I'm going to feel like I need to deal with being disliked. Maybe they're not going to like me.
What if they don't like me? I, I, I'm going to, I feel guilty. I've chosen myself over this other person.
Sure. I think that's probably quite a visceral emotion that people pleases feel.
Yeah. It's, I mentioned it earlier.
Like if you think of the first time you were going to kiss your wife you're married right you're married no i thought you were married for some reason um if you think of the first time you're going to kiss your your girlfriend or anybody and then you think of the first time you thought you were going to die the feelings are identical right so the question is are you guilty are you excited are you feeling guilty because you're you're not choosing them are you feeling excited because you finally chose you so there? So there's a big reframe there that can happen. Without getting into the platitudes of like feelings and all that crap that you can say about, you know, you'll get over it.
Actually, no, fuck it. Let's just do the platitudes.'re gonna get over it like fine you're yeah you're gonna feel guilty man it's like you weren't good at tying your shoes in the beginning either you know for the first three years of your life you shit your pants but you're able to get over the discomfort of learning how to not shit your pants and how to tie your shoes so if you can get over the discomfort of not shitting your pants and learning how to tie your shoes, and there's a good to fair chance you can get over the discomfort of saying no.
And so it's this immersion in the idea that you are not for everyone. And I lived my life the opposite forever.
So I think it's something I'm really passionate about is, yeah, you're going to feel guilty. You're going to feel uncomfortable, right? Is it guilt or is it just discomfort? That's the next question.
It's like, are you guilty? Like, are you sitting there going, I'm really, this person's really going to be sad? Probably not. So if they are, if you're truly believing that, are you engaged in a form of hubris? That would be my next question is like, how important do you think your no is? And I ask people that all the time in exactly the same way.
It's like, how important really are you? Like, are you really that important that if you say no, I don't want to go to lunch with you, they're going to go outside and, you know, stick a fire hose from the tailpipe into the window? Probably not. I think they're going to be okay.
They'll have a margarita by themselves, right?

And so I think there's a self-importance.

This is where people pleasing and narcissism tend to bump up against each other a lot.

Your no is about as meaningless as your yes, because you never say no.

So when you say no, nobody believes you.

And when you say yes, less and less people are believing you because you're so over committed, you can't show up. Oh, um, it's this weird, I don't know.
It's this weird paradox where like, when you've said yes to everything, your no becomes meaningless and your yes becomes less than meaningless.

So when you start saying no to things, you're going to be uncomfortable.

Everyone else is probably just going to be surprised.

And let them be surprised.

Does life get easier or harder when you stop people pleasing?

Yes.

Yes.

Initially, it gets...

And it's not...

I suppose it depends on how you do it.

But if you do it

the way I did it,

it was initially much harder because you go through... People-pleasing is a very lonely way to live.
It's a very lonely way to live because you constantly feel like you're in a transaction with everybody around you. And you never really know what your value is to other people.

And you start to think,

okay, I really don't have any friends.

So you kind of feel lonely.

But then when you start to prioritize yourself

as equal to other people,

those people start to leave your life.

And then you're like, well, now I'm so lonely.

But you were lonely anyway.

I don't even have my fake friends anymore.

Right.

No, I don't even have the bartender that said that they liked me right um it's the same thing as when i when i quit drinking i had all these i had all these friends um but when you drank the way that i did um you start to realize that those friends were you were just a joke you were a paycheck and a joke and um very often the people that will exit your life when you start to do this this work two things will happen either they'll they'll go and they'll stay gone um but more often they circle back um you know i had a friend we were watching football the other day and he said i really like this version of you better and he was the first one that ever said that to me and i hadn't seen him in years years. And it was just so, it was just a really cool moment for me where I really felt something like, he likes this version of me better.
And it was when I told him, no, I don't want a shot. They don't want to do that.
Like I'm a recovered alcoholic. I can have a beer from here, here time to time, but like, I don't want to sit and do shots with you.
That's a dangerous road for me. And I said, no, I'm good.
And I don't do that anymore. He goes, man, I really like this version of you better.
What a cool thing. But that's been a five-year timeline, right? So it's not, it's not unlike starting a business.
You go through this. From the moment you change to what one might consider to be the end result, you're going to experience a pretty high level of loneliness in between those two points.
Because you're not healthy enough for the new folks and you're way too healthy. So even having one boundary can make you too healthy for everyone around you.
It's that profound when you're deep in that people-pleasing well. One boundary will make people start to turn on you.
Like, hey, I don't want to go to your birthday party. Why? Cause I don't want to.
That's it. I don't want to, um, because I value my time and I spend it with my family on Sundays.
It could be any number of damn things. Right.
But that one boundary can really like set, set the tone. It's like in the fighting, in the, in the parlance of fighting, like if I jab you in the face, I've now set the tone.
We know who's in control, right? And when you take control, other people aren't going to like it. So you immediately start to see people exit stage left and you're like, you're looking ahead, you don't see a lot, right? You see an empty wilderness.
And the encouragement I would give people some of the most beautiful growth-filled, exciting times of my life was when I was the most lonely because loneliness presents with it a massive amount of freedom. Like I could do what I wanted when I wanted, had to answer to nobody, had nowhere to be, nothing to do.
Like my options were limitless. I ate when I wanted, I shit when I wanted, I went to the, I went to movies by myself, you know? And so initially it will get worse.
Worse is a weird way of saying it. I think initially it will get worse worse is a weird way of saying it i think initially it will get different and uncomfortable but you're already uncomfortable right i i get i get a lot of people that you know whether it's on my channel or or in my groups or whatever they'll say well you know if i do this then you know let have a narcissistic person.
By the way, I hate that term. I also hate the term manifestation.
We can do that on another time, but let's pretend, well, my narcissistic whatever is not going to like that. Okay.
Well, they're mad at you anyway. So who gives a shit? Like if they're going to be mad, whether you do or whether you don't, you may as well do.

So if your life is going to suck, whether you do or whether you don't, you may as well do. And if it has to be done sooner or later, it may as well be done sooner.
So let's just do the thing and feel better about ourselves. And will it initially suck? Yes.
Will you immediately feel better

without sounding like a guarantee? Mostly yes. Because, you know, your confidence...
For me, my confidence was shot until I started making commitments to myself and showing up for those. It didn't matter how much money I made.
It didn't matter who my friends were. I thought it did.
It didn't matter what car I drove, and it didn't matter on what floor of the high-rise I lived on. What mattered was the minute I started saying,

I'm going to show up for me and I would delineate exactly how I was going to do

that.

And then I would do it.

I started to think,

okay,

well maybe I'm okay.

And when I start to think,

okay,

well maybe if I'm okay,

maybe I'm,

maybe I'm better than okay.

Well,

maybe I am kind of smart.

Maybe I'm not a fucking idiot. You okay, maybe I'm better than okay.
Well, maybe I am kind of smart. Maybe I'm not a fucking idiot.
Maybe I can start a business. Maybe I can travel the world for two and a half years.
I did that like a crazy person at 40. By the way, don't ever do that at 40.
It's fun, but I age myself a lot. Maybe I can ask that girl out.
Maybe I can ask that guy out. Maybe I can.
I think that's what shows up in the medium term. It's like, maybe I can.
It goes from like, oh, fuck, I'm lonely to maybe I can. Then it's like, oh, shit, I really can.
then your life just starts to skyrocket and you start to feel good about yourself and you start to wonder, and then you hit a wall. And that'll happen because you'll make a new friend or you'll make a new ally and they'll turn out to be a piece of shit that's common along this journey because you start to get a little full of yourself.
And then you get knocked back down a little bit and make a course correction then you know slowly but surely you start to find out that people love you for you not because of what you do yeah james uh my business partner in newtonic sat on a rock took a ton of psilocybin in australia and asked himself the question do people love me for who i am or for what i do and uh it was a i think a difficult question for him to answer because you know the the tougher question that he didn't actually get around to asking but uh a friend gave me was well does the world love me for who i am or for what i do what about you do you love you for who you are or for what you do and then you realize yeah yeah you realize that you're asking the world to love you for who you are meanwhile your love is contingent contingent on how you've shown up that day. So you're asking the world to treat you in a manner that you're not even prepared to treat yourself in.
This is a good part of the foundation of self-worth. Imagine that you had a friend, and every time that you invited them out to lunch or to a party or something, they said that they were going to come, but they arrived an hour later.
They didn't show up at all. After a while, you'd stop trusting they were going to do anything.
Well, you are that friend to yourself. You sort of have an intention and then your ability to deliver on that is your self-trust.
And if you always say that you're going to get up on time, but you hit the snooze button three times, you say that you're not going to eat the cookie or break your diet, but you continually do. You say you're going to go to the gym.
You say you're not going to lie to your partner and all of these things continue to be broken. It's like, well, where is the faith that you should be drawing from? What's the well of evidence that you should be drawing from to have any uh proof that you can do this that there isn't any so one of the other words that sort of we've danced around a little bit today are triggers and sort of the the role of triggers what is that how do they sort of factor into this this will probably get me cancelled um I know it's a safe space I want to answer that but I want to also say your business partner is also one of those coaches that doesn't know he's my coach in fact you can thank him for my sound quality today because I went and bought this just for you he's got a racist accent don't listen to him um racist accent so um your triggers are your responsibility what does that mean what are triggers define them for me so i i struggle with this because i think i'm, I tend to not be great in psychological terminology.
Um, and I'm going to get shit on for it, but whatever. So in, in my, in my experience, I come from a lot of childhood trauma.
And when I was triggered, I would have a, I would have a visceral emotional reaction within my body. It would bring me back to a state of deep fear and anxiety.
That is what a post-traumatic stress disorder trigger sounds like. So, and it could be auditory.
It could be hallucinogenic. It can be like, it can really be an experience where somebody will say something, you'll have a smell, you'll, you'll feel a feeling, something will occur, somebody will yell at me and it will just, and it could fire my mind off.
I've done a ton of work, you know, on post-traumatic stress disorder within myself. I'm not an expert in the field, but I think where we've, where we've gotten is the conflation between triggers and negative emotion.
And's what i mean by that it's like you somebody who's legitimately triggered if that's a thing for you you need to you need to speak to somebody in the psychological field um if you were having a visceral like overwhelming reaction to external stimuli then you have then that's a bigger problem that I'm prepared to address. It's the conflation between, there's two things.
There's a conflation between triggers and negative emotion, and the other conflation is between trauma and adversity. When I say your triggers are your responsibility, I mean, just somebody making you feel uncomfortable is not you being triggered.
And if it is, that is your responsibility. Even in the sense that I was talking about with my own post-traumatic stress disorder, that was still my responsibility.
So dealing with that level of trigger is different. Dealing with the I'm uncomfortable trigger or, you know, I don't like it when you do that thing trigger.

How do you deal with it is you. You grow up.
Life is not required to tiptoe around you. and and i think we've i think we've you know i think we've beaten that horse to death and

manifested our way into this idea of um that everybody is supposed to be everything to us all the time and it's just it's not sustainable and it's not realistic so i'm not sure i answered your question there so much as I gave you a soundbite. That's probably going to get me punched in the face on the streets of Denver.
Um, but yeah, whatever. I got a big head.
I mean, it's true, but you and me both. I'm interested in, uh, the capacity to give up on people that working out when you should actually give up how you know when someone has gone too far you know you mentioned earlier on it when somebody shows themselves to you believe them uh i think the noble part of some people pleasing is you will maybe give somebody a chance when nobody else would and sure you know that that's like very upward aiming every underdog movie in history has got some young right street urchin that gets the coach sees in him the fire that nobody else can and gives him a chance even though he he's going to throw it in his face a couple of times, blah, blah.
But some people take it too far. So how have you come to think about this capacity to give up on people? Um, I think there's almost an epidemic of no contact in the world right now.
So I think giving up on people is happening a little too quickly. So I'm really glad you asked that.
Um, I think the no contact narrative is. So first, not everybody that bumps up against a boundary is a narcissist.
Um, not everybody who doesn't understand this new way of you showing up is toxic. So I want to just start by saying that.
When somebody... It's really, I mean, it's so nuanced, and I hate that word too, because it's the new excuse for, you know, I don't want to hear what you have to say.
You said it on it on another one of these nuances, the new N word. Um, I almost passed out.
I laughed so hard. So, um, I was driving, I almost locked up the brakes in my car, but the, um, I've only gone no contact or cut three people out of my life and they weren't small people.
So one of

which was my father. I talked to him once in nine years and then once on his deathbed.
That was it.

I've not talked to my sister since 2015 or no, I'm sorry, 20, 2009. I have not spoken to her

and I probably will never again. And then one other person was an ex.

Malevolence is,

is unmistakable.

And I think that's all I have to say about that is that malevolence is unmistakable when you see it run don't walk thinking about again not just where people are when they're at the beginning of their journey but as they sort sort of continue to go on, continuing to hold boundaries, continuing to make progress, managing that lonely chapter thing in the middle, managing the pullbacks, the price corrections that bring them back down and then put them back up. I'm interested about what happens when people are a little bit further along in life.

You mentioned, I think, the sort of avatar client that you work with is sort of like a 48 year old guy who's very successful at whatever it is that he does but has been wildly unsuccessful at ever advocating for himself what additional complications come along for somebody who's trying to do this who's trying to sort of enter into this world when they've got financial resources or when they've got some reputation or some status or some acclaim? Does that make it easier or does it make it harder? I don't know. I don't know if it's more or less.
I think it's... It might have been Mark Manson that said it, that a homeless person and Elon Musk both have money problems.
The challenges it presents when you've become a highly successful people pleaser are probably more challenging to overcome because there's, there's more at stake. Um, and your belief system, but I mentioned this earlier as you know, beliefs drive behavior, behavior creates environment.
Um, but beliefs are built through reinforcement. So you've spent 20 years reinforcing this people-pleasing as a way of living,

and you then have convinced yourself that if I don't make everyone happy,

I'm going to go broke.

Right?

If I don't, you know, and so in the highly successful people-pleasers,

that's where we start to see that burnout component is, well, fuck, I'm just an ATM machine.

And I think it's more challenging in the way that you have to literally redefine your relationship with probably the two highest value things in your life, which are your family and money. And to devalue money is probably the top priority.
And that's really hard. Um, you know, I really like money.
I like making lots of money. I like spending money.
I like going out to nice dinners. Like I'm a dude who likes stuff and I don't like stuff, but I like experiences and they're usually not cheap.
And, you know, so that's the benefit in it, of course, is that you can then prioritize things that you actually like, but your relationship with money has to change. And, um, I think it was on your show that Jordan Peterson said about getting sober that you

have to change everything.

You have to change who you hang out with.

You have to change your entire social strata.

All of it has to change.

And that's very true with the people.

Now that I think about it, it's probably more challenging.

It requires a lot more resources and a lot more time because you have a lot more invested in it.

The cool thing, though, with the highly successful variety, so my clients between 35 and 55, making a quarter million plus a year.

When the habit breaks, it usually breaks for good. And it's like a moment of clarity.
So with people that are not quite at that level, that are kind of moving up, my 28-year-olds that are doing okay, but they're not where they want to be yet. Right.
They tend to take a little longer for some reason or another, but like with a 35 to 55, you know, 65, whatever year old, when they recognize the pattern and it's like, it's always one little thing. It'll be a technique that I show them or, you know, learning how to say no.
and it's just over. And then everything changes all at once.

And it's not, and it's just over and then everything changes all at once and it's not and it's not a change that it's not like a toxic variety of it either i really thought about that chris but it's really not it's usually just okay i'm gonna do this now and everybody around him goes okay yeah that makes sense you know there's a self there's a self-assuredness uh that the prestige sort of brings along with it it's weird because i suppose people that have managed to reach some type of acclaim or renown or whatever reputation within their family within their industry whatever it is people kind of have faith that they know what they're doing. So say, hey, you managed to get us here so far.
You're the captain of the ship or the sous chef or whatever. We'll continue to follow you.
And that faith is, even if it's come from a place that's been compelled and not well-balanced and not fully integrated and not alchemized and all the rest of this stuff but it's been effective and you go well look we followed nick into battle a good bit and he sort of didn't really steer us wrong there so i i reckon we just kind of follow so you know the proof is in the pudding so to speak and if nick thinks that the new direction is to take a hard right then so be it and we We'll go and do it. So I wonder whether, yeah, there is a,

there are more ingrained habits for you to overcome

and there's maybe a little bit more to risk,

but also you've got more ballast on the ship.

Like you've got more status,

you've got more financial resources.

Yeah.

I think that's a great way of saying it,

is you got more ballast on the ship,

you know, which is a short way of saying

that you've got more support.

You know, something I would really want people to know, listening to this, people do love you. They do.
They just don't know how. and so when you change especially if you're that kind of higher status um or if i'm going to be you or james status um position um look at me i'm learning um they have more to lose than you do oh it's so i think there's a component to that of selfishness within your social strata as well.
Absolutely. People need to keep you happy.
Right. Like, you know, if you're miserable and, you know, I had a really great CEO that was in London.
We never did end up working together, but I really love him and I hope we get a chance to someday. But he has that kind of really big persona, that really big social strata.
And I don't think he knows how easy this is going to be because everybody loves him, right? And he's, you know, he's everything to everybody. Most people in your life that love you don't want you to live like this.
They really don't. They benefit from it.
You know, everybody in your life that love you don't want you to live like this they really don't they benefit from it you know everybody in your life if you're really in that

people pleaser mindset if you really do live that way everybody in your life either benefits

directly or indirectly from the behavior i promise right but

if you believe like i do that the meaning of life is love and adventure and honesty is what adventure is. If you want to, if you want to have an adventurous life, just be honest.
Then being honest with the people that you love will only make them love you more. And the reason, you know, it's like this, I heard this analogy about Velcro, that the only reason Velcro works is because it's imperfect.
And because that's what catches the Velcro.

That's what catches the loops,

is the imperfections.

And if you really want people to love you,

be you.

And watch how they change.

And be grateful for who they are.

And love them even when they're afraid of you and don't back down life is so much better than we make it it's like i have never been in a position that i am more grateful for who I am than I am now. And it's not because of status and it's not because of wealth and it's not because of any of the, you know, extrinsic motivators that people might have.
It's, I fell in love with the person I am and I just kind of let people come and go as they need to. And because I get to do that, I get to do that.
I get to have things like boundaries, but I also get to have great sex. I also get to have amazing dinners.
I also get to laugh at people like you. You know, I get to meet friends that I never thought I'd meet.
I have. So one of my coaches, his name is Stone.
I told him I'd mentioned his name on this podcast. He was 17 when I hired him to teach me how to do TikTok.
He was 32 bucks. And about a year ago, I had posted on my wall that I wanted to come on your show.
And I told all my following to tag you. And I don't know if they did or not, but I was like, I really want to go on the show.
I really want to meet this guy. And he texts me, he goes, if you get on that fucking show, I swear to God, I won't make another piece of content.
So, but why do I get to do this? It's because I show as me online i'm not a persona i'm not i'm not blowing smoke up anyone's ass i just i get out there and i do it and then i saw you say it and i said what i say it wasn't like so i didn't sit and obsess about it i was like all right i'm just gonna say this and you know he's probably never gonna see it whatever and next thing i thing I know, here I am, right? And is it harder when you're affluent? Maybe, I don't know. I don't know if it matters.
I think the journey is worth it anyway. Dude, I love it.
I love it. I really appreciate your energy.
I really appreciate the vibe. I think that it is a uh epidemic that a lot of people are dealing with and um being able to do it from a a frame that makes you feel proud to be able to sort of step up to do this uh that kind of in a very actually a very british way admits self-deprecatingly that this is a both maybe one of the most difficult challenges and like some sort of weird mortal quest and also a totally internal battle that no one's ever going to give you any glory for completing it's sort of this the most boring and magnificent thing that you're ever going to do both at the same time uh you know a champagne problem that only you are ever really going to be able to pat yourself on the back for uh even if it affects the world and the rest of the people around you i i really love it you've mentioned a couple of times i'm curious before we finish up you mentioned a few times uh different books that were really uh impactful on you scott peck was one of them um yep the road less traveled yeah if if you were to sort of think about i don't know a couple of books that you gift the most or that you've reread the most or the ones that sort of from an accessibility perspective really, really made a big impact on you, what would they be? First one is Not Nice by Aziz Gaspari.
That was really the, I think that was the first book I ever read that really addressed this kind of

people pleasing behavior,

really put,

helped me put a tag on it.

Oh,

I see that.

Right.

So that book is called not nice.

You know,

the cornerstone text,

of course,

is going to be Dr.

Robert Glover,

you know,

no more Mr.

Nice guy,

like doc,

you're the king.

You know,

you're the king.

Shut up about it.

And,

um,

um, um, I would say that probably Scott Peck is, is, I mean, it was one of the number one selling personal growth books of all time, which is the road less traveled. Um, really a direct punch in the face for making excuses.
Um, and, you know, some of the other greats, of course, Mark Manson did a marvelous job with, you know, subtle art and, um, you know, atomic habits and, you know, obviously James Clear and Tim Ferriss and all those guys, but probably those are my top threes. Not Nice by Gaspari Glover's No More Mr.
Nice Guy. And Scott Peck, I believe is no longer on the planet, but The Road Less Traveled is, and it's probably the book that will change your life the fastest.
If you really sit to and just absorb it, it'll break you. And it's, it's one of my favorites.
It's one of my favorites. I think where I learned to speak, though, if I can give you one more, my favorite fictional author is Kurt Vonnegut.
Which book? Slaughterhouse-Five is probably the one that everybody says, but Sirens of Titans is my favorite. I just love him as an author.
I've read his entire library. Whenever I'm in a mood that I don't want to read Personal Growth, which is starting to happen more and more as I write a book around this, I'm just kind of burned out on it.
I don't want to read anymore about how I have to have habits. I don't care.
I know. I'm going to think positive.
It's fine. I'm going to be fine.
Um, you know, I think I've probably absorbed 10,000 hours of the shit. So if I don't know by now, I'm not going to know.
Nick Pollard, ladies and gentlemen, Nick, I appreciate the hell out of you. Uh, I really love your energy.
I love your vibe. I love what you're talking about.
Where should people go? They want to check out courses, social media, all of that stuff. Eas easiest place to find me is the people displeaser.com um and on instagram is you know the people displeaser uh a moniker that i i love and i would hope to get rid of something nah it's good for now it's good for sure it'll take i'll take it for now but the the people displeaser.com is the easiest way to find my stuff and follow me on Instagram.

And if you really want to do me the favor, follow me on YouTube because that channel needs some love.

Same.

The people displeaser.

I love it.

I loved being here.

Thank you so much for this.

It's been a dream of mine for a couple of years now.

You made it come true.

So I appreciate you.

Well, you deserve it.

Thank you, man.

Until next time.