The nice guy syndrome is a relatively new psychological condition many modern men struggle with. First described by Dr. Robert Glover, it has soon got a worldwide recognition as a very common phenomenon of men’s psychology. In this new series of posts, I will translate a very clear and concise text about the basics of the nice guy syndrome written by Zdenek Weber, a Czech mentor, speaker, and entrepreneur, the founder of Czech Men's Circle movement. I believe that the ideas and insights contained in this text could be very helpful to many of my readers. As the text is quite long, I will break it down into a few chunks.
Part 1
Working with the nice guy syndrome is mainly about incorporating into your life self-reflection of being truthful about your needs and the needs of others. This skill requires a long-term practice.
Start with reflecting when you act on the basis of a subconsciously perceived social demand, out of a habit to be socially available, help and make others happy.
Making others happy and being at their disposal is a completely natural behavior, but if you are available at 99% and your needs are met only at 1%, then something is out of balance, and that's a nice guy’s reality.
His task is to build up his own individuality, his own ways of life and self-realization, and if nobody ever helped him and he was instead motivated to fulfill the wishes and needs of others, then he starts from zero in 30 or 45 years, and it just takes time, because his whole life is riddled with all possible strategies of getting satisfaction through being liked and praised for that the others have enough and are happy, while he does not have anything.
Archetypally it sounds like a heroic act, a lot of nice guys are great heroes, but in the end they stay abandoned, robbed, disappointed. “I sacrificed all for others, why do they behave with me like that?”
A nice guy can have many faces and it's a very individual role, but there are some similarities, or, say, an archetypal track. It's all about suppressing your needs and individuality and putting in the first place the needs and wishes of others around you.
The healthy way is to adequately evaluate your own needs and the needs coming from your surroundings, to decide what is really necessary or fair to do in a prevailing harmony with yourself, and from this position of harmony with yourself to deal fairly with your surroundings.
But a nice guy needs to train this skill, because in interacting with the others he unconsciously shows them that he will meet their needs, will help them whenever and wherever possible, thereby completely killing his own self-realization, his sovereignty that is the DNA of masculine power, and thus losing the true respect of his partner, children, neighbors, workmates.
People see him as a good person, but in reality, in their depth, they don't respect him and his needs, because he doesn’t respect his needs himself. He just wants people to love him, wants to be their favorite, and this is the source of his life paths, behavior, thinking, decision-making, priorities, relationships. A nice guy ignores his needs himself and doesn’t live in predominant harmony with his needs, because he has no natural contact with them.
To be continued.
Credits
- Original Czech text by Zdenek Weber
- Photo by Abhinay Omkar
Related
- Book: No More Mr Nice Guy by Robert Glover
- My Free Verse Poem: Manliness