March 17, 2011

How to Be More Outgoing

If you’re somewhat shy or introverted, then learning how to be more outgoing is one of the smartest self-improvement steps you can make. There is no better way to solidify your social life than by comprehending how to be more outgoing and applying it

In my social confidence coaching practice, I frequently teach people how to be more outgoing and social, and I help them make real life progress in this area. I’ve realized that being social is much more a matter of attitude than aptitude, and that the attitude part needs to be handled above all.

Step 1: Outgoing = Out Going

One potentially illuminating way that I like to look at the word ‘outgoing’ is by dividing the two composing words and making it ‘out going’.

You could take that phrase literally, as in going out of the house more; because many of the individuals who aren’t very outgoing and social spend unordinary amounts of time indoors, alone, and this feeds their shyness.

However, to me it makes more sense to look at it figuratively. Thus, being ‘out going’ means putting your personality out there instead of keeping it hidden, it means expressing yourself fully.

There are multiple things you can do to achieve this. I recommended you start by watching my free presentation on Conversation Confidence. This insightful presentation will reveal to you the real key to gaining confidence and the proven formula for being more outgoing. Go here to check it out.

To assist you understand how to be more outgoing, I will list here some of the most effective ways that I know. These are ways I’ve used myself, and are recurrently used by my coaching clients.

Step 2: Break It Down and Then Put It into Practice

Do you know this joke: How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time. Well, this concept applies extremely well for becoming more outgoing and sociable.

When you get frustrated with having few fulfilling friendships, it’s temping to just try to burst out and instantly become that super-sociable person you want to be. Unfortunately, human psychology doesn’t work that way. You don’t just change completely at once.

Real, organic change in how sociable you are happens by setting gradual steps for being more outgoing, and taking these steps one by one. For example, you may start by asking more questions in group settings, and when you become comfortable with that, you continue with making more statements in group settings.

In time, step by step, you’ll eventually find yourself becoming a lean, mean, socializing machine. In learning how to be more outgoing and social, it’s crucial to understand that this gradual process is what works best and to stick to it dutifully.

Step 3: Lower The Bar

One trait most shy people have in common is that they set lofty social standards for themselves. They demand of themselves to make a great first impression, to be liked by all, and they think that if it doesn’t happen it’s a tragedy.

Even individuals with very sharp social skills can’t rise up to such idealistic standards. Shy people only torment themselves by imposing this kind of standards on themselves.

For this reason, one of the best things you can do to become more outgoing is to lower the bar. If your standard for success is to get everybody to like you, then you’re bound to be shy. But if your standard is simply to have conversations with new people, then you’re bound to be more sociable.

The vital thing you may need to realize is that you don’t have to demand that much of yourself socially. You’re only human, you will connect well with some people, you won’t connect with others at all, and that’s absolutely OK. Accept it and live your life.

Step 4: Manage Your Self-Talk

I have a (rhetorical) question for you: How does a person set the social bar high for themselves?

The answer is that they do so through their self-talk. They say to themselves in their inner dialog “I must impress this person; they must like me” and other intelligent stuff like that.

Well, people who aren’t very outgoing tend to have many other dysfunctional ways of talking to themselves than the ones that create unrealistic standards. If you analyze their inner dialog, you’ll discover that it’s full of crap.

Thus, in learning how to be more outgoing and social, a very big step is managing your self-talk. This means identifying the stupid, unrealistic or dysfunctional things that you say to yourself and willingly correcting them. I talk in more detail about this in my confidence video presentation.

As you do so in a systematic way, not only that your habitual self-talk changes, but the underlying beliefs change as well. This helps you gain confidence and interact easier with other people.

As you become more outgoing, your people skills get put into practice more and they develop as well. This makes you even more outgoing and you get a positive cycle going, which ends up visibly enriching your social life. And the best part is that in this entire journey, the sky is the limit.

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Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills, Relationships Tagged With: , , , 60 Comments
February 25, 2011

How You Fuck Yourself Emotionally

This week I’m somewhere up in the mountains, delivering a communication and public speaking training. I can see snow and skiers out the window; it’s a pretty epic scenery.

Today was speech delivery day. Each participant to the training delivered a speech and received feedback on it, from myself and from some of the other participants. It’s been another reminder for me of how our fears are self-generated and most of them are based on pure crap.

Almost every participant had a lot of anxiety before and during their speeches; the kind of anxiety you would expect somebody to have in front of an execution squad. Discussing with the participants and finding out the way they think, it wasn’t hard to figure their fear out.

Two Faulty Ways of Thinking

First of all, almost every participant was convinced that they will have a terrible speech, and they will make total fools of themselves. Despite these expectations, all speeches were actually above average and many of them were quite good. Several participants couldn’t believe this even after receiving numerous positive feedbacks.

Secondly, many of the participants had hideous interpretations of feedback on their speeches that pointed out areas to improve. Emotionally, it was like a blow to the stomach for them. One person almost started crying during the feedback process, despite the fact it emphasized a lot more strong points than weak ones.

A Million Scenarios, the Same Two Problems

These two faulty ways of thinking are only particular and slightly stronger manifestations of two broader thinking and attitude patterns. These two patterns can be found in the psychology of numerous people.

1. A negatively distorted self-image. There are tons of individuals who see themselves as less able speakers, less skilled professionals or less attractive persons than they really are. Their self-image simply doesn’t keep up with their competencies, which leads to low self esteem and low confidence.

2. Perfectionist expectations of oneself. There are also tons of individuals who believe they need to be perfect, to have no flaws, and they can’t accept themselves otherwise. Thus, any emphasis on personal flaws or discovery of personal flaws is a real drama for them.

When you ask of yourself to be perfect but you see yourself as a loser, you create a huge mental gap. Thus, you fuck yourself up emotionally. And from there, you destroy most chances you have of a prosperous and fulfilling life.

Cognitive-behavioral therapists have been saying for a few decades now that for the most part, we make ourselves feel like crap through erroneous ways of thinking. Well, my training experience this week is just another concrete demonstration of this.

The Takeaway

This is a good moment to reflect upon your self-views and self-expectations. Are they pragmatic and anchored in reality? Do they help you make progress in your personal and professional life, or do they harm your life?

If the later is closer to the truth than the former, it’s time to seriously consider changing your attitudes and your thinking. And I mean REAAAAALLY consider it.

I often say that improvements in your people skills and your attitudes are the most relevant ones you can make. The more you support your emotional life through your thinking instead of screwing it, the better you will be.

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational Tagged With: , , , , 15 Comments
February 10, 2011

Low Self Esteem

Low self esteem seems to be one of the most devastating psychological conditions alive. Millions of people struggle with low self esteem, as it sabotages their people skills, their social lives, their careers and almost every other area of their existence.

Overcoming low self esteem can be done successfully. I’m going to touch on this subject shortly, but first I want to help you get a better understanding of what self esteem is and what causes its altitude. I believe it is only armed with such knowledge that you can take effective action.

What Is Self Esteem?

Psychologists define self-esteem as a person’s overall evaluation of his or her own person and the resulting feelings towards his or her person.

Therefore, as one can deduce, low self esteem means a low evaluation of one’s own person and the associated negative feelings towards oneself.

If that doesn’t tell you much, don’t worry; it doesn’t tell anybody. The art is in the details of self esteem. One such essential detail relates to the sources and forms of self esteem.

Conditional Self Esteem

For many years, the dominating view in psychology was that as a personal evaluation, self esteem is dependent on a person’s competence, effectiveness and likeability. The subsequent consequences of this view were simple:

  • If you are a seasoned and competent professional, then you have high self esteem. If you are just a novice, then you have low self esteem.
  • If you achieve success and performance in what you do, then you have high self esteem. If you fail, then you have low self esteem.
  • If other people praise you and they like you, then you have high self esteem. If they criticize you and reject you, then you have low self esteem.

Self esteem is thus a slave to the external and internal conditions of our lives. The more we improve these conditions, the better we can see ourselves and feel about ourselves.

There is however an alternative view on self-esteem emerging in psychology in the last years, a view I am in consent with as a coach with a background in psychology. According to this view, what I have described above is just one side of self esteem, meaning conditional self esteem.

But, there is also another side: the unconditional one.

Unconditional Self Esteem

This is the real crown jewel. Unconditional self esteem is not dependent upon anything. You may change, your life may change, but it is not affected by any of this.

Unconditional self esteem is not based on your achievements, your skills or how other people see you. It comes from realizing and embracing your intrinsic value as a human being.

When you comprehend that your worth stretches beyond what you do, what you own, what you are capable of, and how others see you, than you have unconditional self esteem.

I believe confidently that this is a much more powerful form of self esteem to have. It’s an inner force and drive that you can always count on, no matter the stupid things that you sometimes do as a human or that sometimes happen in your life.

It’s like your very own 500HP car that never runs out of gas.

Low Self Esteem Redefined

Now, with this new understanding, let’s look at what is low self esteem again.

Through the conditional perspective, low self esteem means an evaluation of your own overall competence, effectiveness and likeability as being poor. Here’s the key point: conditional low self esteem is not all bad.

Many people horribly underestimate themselves and thus, they end up with low self esteem that damages their lives. This is bad. However, a very good but unrealistic image of yourself is also bad practically, as it leads to poor decisions and childish choices.

In addition, there is some solid research today that points out how people with high conditional self esteem are often narcissistic and antisocial in their behavior. Not the kind of folks you want at your Christmas table.

Low unconditional self esteem on the other hand is always bad. It is a reflection of your inability to see your inner worth.

When your unconditional self esteem is high though, it means you see your inner worth with clarity. A lot of scientific research links this to more success, to better health and in combination with good people skills, to better relationships.

Overcoming Low Self Esteem

All this discussion has also been a huge overture to a few key points I want to make on overcoming low self esteem:

1. Before anything else, think carefully if your low self esteem is based on a faulty self image or not. It may be just a sign that you’re not growing or that you’re selling yourself short.

2. If you conclude that your low self esteem is indeed based on a faulty self image, then you overcome it by becoming more aware of your strengths, your successes and the people who like you (the conditional side) or your intrinsic value (the unconditional side).

3. Changing a false self-image can only be done effectively by gradually changing your automatic thinking about yourself. This is what you want to focus on. When the way you talk to yourself habitually improves, your self esteem improves with it.

In whatever ways you handle low self esteem, do not ignore the unconditional side of it. Competence and performance are all good, but they do not define you. There is a deep bright light inside of you and it shines unconditionally.

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Personal Development Tagged With: , , 5 Comments
January 21, 2011

The Bold Guide to a Fast Track Career

If patience is not one of your virtues and you have a strong desire for success, than a fast track career is for you. As a matter a fact, I barely meet anyone who doesn’t crave a fast track career, in which they can grow like a kid on steroids.

Well, a kid on steroids is not a healthy thing, but a fast track career, provided it grows organically, is. I know plenty of people who were successful managers by 25, top managers in Fortune 500 companies by 29 and flourishing entrepreneurs at 33.

It can be done and there is a recipe for it. Here are the key ingredients, from my perspective, of a fast track career.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

I find that most people start off with big career dreams, but they forget about them quickly enough. They get distracted by the comfort a safe and warm job, the free cookies and the company teambuilding programs, and career progress stops being a mental priority for them.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a coach is that once something stops being a mental priority, you pretty much stop working towards achieving it. This is the sad little story of the careers millions of people have.

If you want to have a fast track career, it’s essential to keep your eyes on the prize and never forget your goals. Enjoy the benefits a particular job, but don’t let them sidetrack you: mentally, emotionally or behaviorally.

Don’t Stay In One Place Too Long

The people who make really fast progress in their career and get to a place most only dream of, all have one key trait in common: they are predators.

They don’t let anything keep them in one place for long. When they’ve learned a job, they immediately seek advancing in the company. If they discover they can’t advance in the company, they immediately start looking for another company. They act fast, they move fast and they are ferocious about it.

Fast trackers don’t let senseless norms keep them from moving forward. In my experience, this is in huge contrast with the behavior of the average employee, who will bitch about a job with no growth potential but will stay in it for years.

This doesn’t mean fast trackers have no ethics. If a company invests in them for two years and helps them become top professionals, smart fast trackers know to pay their dues. However, once their dues are paid, they seek the bigger better thing without delay.

Put Your Needs First

The fundamental thing that stops most people from being predators and having a fast track career is that they care too much about the needs and opinions of others and they put those first. Thus, they sacrifice their own goals to help the team, to not seem selfish and so on.

If you want to make fast career progress, it is essential to learn how to gain confidence and put your needs first, without ignoring the needs of others. This is commonly referred to as assertiveness, and it is one of the essential life and people skills to master.

Probably the most important part in becoming assertive is a mental leap: realizing that you do not exist in this world primarily to serve others, but to serve yourself and make the most out of your life.

 

This is not bad or immoral, it is the mature and healthy attitude that people with self-respect have. It is also the way to fast career progress.

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Filed Under: Attitude, Career, Success Tagged With: , , , , 6 Comments
January 10, 2011

How to Overcome Shyness

Almost fifty percent of people describe themselves as shy. If it didn’t have such dire consequences on ones life, shyness would almost be a fashionable thing. However, it does have bad effects and this is why knowing how to overcome shyness is important.

Finding the Needle in the Haystack

Do a search on the web for ‘how to overcome shyness’ and you’ll discover thousands of articles and ten times more tips on this topic. Try to put them into practice and sadly, you’ll also discover that much of the advice on how to overcome shyness is vague, impractical or just plain wrong.

Doing social confidence coaching with people with shyness, I’ve realized that there’re only a handful of ideas and techniques which provide consistent and powerful results in overcoming shyness. I want to share the most effective ones with you.

Overcoming Shyness Starts with Stretching

No, not physical stretching, but emotional. Here’s the thing: it is common for us human beings to stick to doing what is easy and comfortable for us. Thus, many shy people, because they don’t feel comfortable around other people, will tend to isolate themselves.

They will spend many hours alone, watching TV, playing computer games and secretly fantasizing about a better social life. This only works against them because it reinforces their shyness and makes the people skills they may have atrophy.

Learning how to overcome shyness starts with doing the opposite: gradually getting more out of the house, exposing yourself more to social situations and interacting more with people. Since this may feel uncomfortable at first, it’s a form of emotional stretching.

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Stretching yourself and interacting more with people works great because it gets you used to social situations and the social anxiety starts to drop. Also, your people skills steadily improve and that’s how to gain confidence.

Get Some Accurate Feedback

Working with shy people or people with an inferiority complex, I often notice that they have a hugely distorted image of themselves and how they come across to others. They usually think they are weird and that other people realize this in the very first seconds of talking with them.

If you are somewhat shy, getting some accurate feedback about your social persona from other people will be highly valuable for you in overcoming shyness. It will help you get your feet on the ground by realizing you’re an OK person.

What you basically do is ask a number of people who know you and trust about the way they see you. You can ask them a few questions about the qualities and the flaws they see in you, about the first impression you create and so on.

You can ask them all of this in a relaxed conversation, or you can request them to give you feedback using an anonymous feedback form. Feel free to test various methods.

Cut Down Mind-Reading

Mind-reading is the process of trying to figure out what a person thinks or how they feel by reading subtle cues in their behavior, words, voice tone or body language.

However, since these signals are hard to interpret accurately and shy people often exaggerate in their interpretations, this process is a lot like trying to read other peoples’ minds and it provides grossly inaccurate results.

If you want to overcome shyness, you’ve got to realize that you can’t read other peoples’ minds and that whatever interpretations you’re making of each small gesture are probably wrong. As you do so, you can move on to consciously reducing your mind-reading and thus overcoming your shyness.

Learn To Let Go Of Perfectionism

The final part of the answer to the question “How to overcome shyness?” has to do with changing your self-imposed standards.

Make sure to check out my free conversation confidence guide for more details on solving this issues, as well as as how to transform into an authentic and  confident person in social settings. Get it here.

Shy people tend to be insanely perfectionist. They ask of themselves to come across as ideal and they have a low tolerance for people not liking them or not approving of them. If you want to enjoy social interactions more, abandoning such absurd standards is a must.

Now, notice that I didn’t say “let go of perfectionism”, I said “learn to let go”. This is because it’s a process. It will call for identifying your perfectionist social expectations as they manifest in your habitual thinking, then addressing them by changing your thinking in a conscious manner.

By the way, I have a free social confidence guide for you that will teach you how to do this and overcome shyness.

A Systemic Approach

Overall, overcoming shyness effectively takes not only the right pieces of advice and techniques, but also applying them in a systemic style. This implies:

  • Setting gradual personal development goals for yourself;
  • Working on them daily and rewarding yourself;
  • Persisting and getting back on track if you quit;
  • Mixing the internal cognitive change with the external behavioral change.

As you do so, you will see gradual progress and the occasional leaps forward. You will rewrite your map of the world and your social habits. As a result, you will experience more social freedom and a richer social life. That’s how to overcome shyness the successful way.

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Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills, Psychology Tagged With: , , 40 Comments
January 3, 2011

How to Gain Confidence

It’s mind blowing how many times I will coach a client and we’ll reach the conclusion that whatever they’re not getting in their life is the result of a confidence issue. When you know how to gain confidence, you can open up a lot of possibilities in your life.

On the other hand, who truly knows how to gain confidence effectively? There are hundreds of articles, books and trainings on gaining confidence, but do you see many people making substantial progress in this area?

The Deceiving World of Gaining Confidence

When it comes to the advice on how to gain confidence, I think the 80/20 rule applies very well: about 80% of the advice you’ll find out there creates 20% of the results and 20% of the advice creates 80% of the results.

To put in another way, there is a lot of self-help junk out there which does little to improve self-confidence, yet it spreads like the plague. For this reason, my aim with this article is to focus on and bring out those methods for gaining confidence that provide the best results.

These are confidence gaining methods that:

  • I’ve applied personally with consistent success;
  • I’ve seen my social confidence coaching clients apply successfully as well;
  • Are in line with what is now known in the filed of psychology about human emotions and human learning.

Developing Yourself

Your mind is always trying to gauge your level of skill in specific areas in order to generate the optimal level of self-assurance. This is why the first thing I think you want to consider in how to gain confidence is constantly developing yourself.

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If you want to be confident as a speaker, develop your speaking skills. If you want to be confident as a bowling player, develop your bowling skills. The people who invest time and energy in a systematic way in their personal development are also the people who gradually gain more confidence.

There is a catch though: even if this is the first important step, it can be insufficient. Often, our self-image doesn’t keep up with our skill level and our personality. This is why, for example, highly competent and successful people can still have an inferiority complex.

So you may find yourself needing to address your self-image issues directly. I see this phenomenon all the time with my coaching clients seeking to gain confidence and improve people skills, and it is a sign it’s time to do some belief-change work.

Test Your Beliefs

Here’s a common occurrence: let’s say you lack the self-assurance to express some of your opinions because you believe others will find them weird and they’ll judge you for them. So you keep those opinions to yourself, which only reinforces the belief that it’s bad to express them.

A lack of self-confidence often becomes self-sustaining because we never test out the beliefs which support it. If you were to give yourself a push and actually express those opinions, you may find out most people actually find them intriguing, not weird.

This is what I call testing your beliefs in reality. Just because you believe with certainty that something will happen doesn’t mean there is solid, real-life evidence that you are right. Most of us believe strongly in many silly things.

The effective way you can find out if your beliefs are grounded in reality or not is to test them out. Get out there, face your fears and you may be surprised what really happens.

If you want to overcome your limiting beliefs, you simply must watch my video presentation on conversation confidence. It will show you exactly how to crush your insecurities, using a scientifically proven method. Go here to check it out.

Move From Irrational To Rational Thinking

These is the cherry on the cake, and the thickest layer at the same time. I’ve been noticing for some years now a huge correlation between self-confidence issues and irrational thinking. And I don’t mean negative thinking, I mean irrational thinking.

The people who struggle with confidence in some areas interpret some things or they see part of themselves in an unrealistic manner. Those who are scared shitless most of the time have such a way of dramatizing and misinterpreting things I don’t even want to talk about it.

From my perspective, a large part of the answer to the perpetual question “How to gain confidence?” is this: change the way you habitually think.

This is not one single action, it’s a gradual process: it means identifying your irrational thinking, combating it, finding and applying more realistic ways of interpreting events. You can find the guide for this in my free conversation confidence presentation.

As you do so, you’re slowly changing your cognitive schemas and you will naturally improve your confidence from that.

As a coach, I take pride in providing real results for my clients, gaining confidence included. I do so by encouraging them to aim high in their growth but be highly skeptical when choosing the methods they use. That’s how to gain confidence effectively.

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Psychology Tagged With: , , 34 Comments
December 23, 2010

How to Develop Accelerated Emotional Healing

One of my favorite comic book characters is Wolverine from X-Men. I find that accelerated healing power of his to be super-awesome.

Now in real life, unless you’re a Navy SEAL or something, you won’t have much use for accelerated physical healing. However, I find that most people find tremendous value in accelerated emotional healing.

What Is Accelerated Emotional Healing?

Quite simply, it is the ability to bounce back quickly when something bad happens: your partner breaks up with you, your boss fires you, a loved one passes away, they cancel the next season of Dr. House and so on.

Some people try to not feel any pain altogether when bad things happen, which often doesn’t work. A much better approach is to focus on bouncing back from pain quickly instead of not feeling it at all. The people who are able to do this are usually the people who are the happiest with life.

4 Steps to Accelerated Emotional Healing

In my communication coaching, I often touch on the subject of emotional healing. I believe there are four steps that work best in making it happen fast.

1. Accept Life as a Rollercoaster

Some of us get trapped in this illusion that we can somehow reach a point where our life is smooth and nothing bad happens anymore. Real life doesn’t work that way; it’s a rollercoaster with ups and down.

Accept life as a rollercoaster and keep it in mind like this. As a result, bad things won’t take you by surprise and you will find it easier to get through them and get over them. Don’t become paranoid expecting terrible things to happen everyday, but don’t delude yourself that life can ever be completely smooth either.

2. Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

Have you ever noticed this pattern unraveling? A person gets into a relationship; they’re very excited about it, they start spending more and more time with their partner and less and less time with their friends, until they eventually have no more fiends and the relationships consumes all their free time.

Then when the relationship ends (as it often does), the person has absolutely no social support system. They feel lonely, they get depressed, they take about two years to fully get over it. This is what happens when you invest all in one relationship, both in your personal and your professional life. For this reason, I encourage you to keep your people skills sharp and your social circle strong.

3. Don’t Repress the Pain

Often, people try to drown their pain using distractions. Drinking, eating, partying, having sex all can be used for this purpose. Unfortunately, as more and more psychological research now points out, distractions only make the pain submerge for a while and when it comes back, it comes back even stronger.

You don’t want to wallow in self pity, but you don’t want to repress you pain either. Pain is a natural part of the healing process. Sometimes you just need to accept it and up to a certain point, let it be.

4. Practice Realistic Thinking

If the hurt a bad event creates has a very high intensity and lasts unreasonably long, it’s frequently due to unrealistic thinking. In the heat of the moment, you start thinking to yourself that “this is intolerable” or “life will suck from now on” and so you feed the pain instead of letting it drip away.

Of course, this is nothing more than dramatizing and unrealistic thinking. If you want to heal quickly, an essential thing to do is to take conscious control of your thinking and correct it when it distorts the facts.

Accelerated emotional healing is a truly amazing super-power. When you have mastered it you can embrace life as it is, with the good and the bad, and you can always make the best of it.

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Filed Under: Attitude, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , 14 Comments
December 18, 2010

Nice Guy Syndrome

A long time ago (or maybe not so long), it was beyond my understanding how being a nice guy can be a bad thing. I thought that the nicer you were the better results you got: in your relationships, your career and your life as a whole.

Then I learned about the nice guy syndrome and I embarked in one of the most electrifying personal development journeys in my life. If you tend to give a lot more than you get in your relationships with others, it’s a journey you may wanna consider.

What Is the Nice Guy Syndrome?

The nice guy syndrome refers to a behavioral pattern in some men of being very nice to others.

The typical nice guy puts other people’s needs first, always helps others, avoids confrontation, does chivalrous things, and is proud of it. His nice behavior is particularly obvious with women.

The nice guy syndrome has been getting increasingly more attention in the past few years in psychology, as the less than satisfying effects it creates make it start to lose its positive image.

What’s Wrong with Being a Nice Guy?

Quite a lot is wrong with being a nice guy as matter of fact. As a confidence coach, I often work with men who I soon realize have the nice guy syndrome.

As a result of this syndrome, they have mediocre careers compared with how skilled they are and how hard they work, they are in toxic relationships, or they sabotage almost every aspect of their lives. I have seen such effects so often that for me, they became highly predictable.

Nice guy behavior may look good on paper, but in reality it has a pretty ugly face. In order to grasp this, consider that the nice guy syndrome fundamentally means people pleasing behavior. As a consequence:

  • Nice guys come off as needy and insecure;
  • Nice guys are generic and predictable, so it’s hard for them to create a spark;
  • Nice guys end up ignoring their own needs and not taking care of themselves;
  • Nice guys end up not being there for the people who really matter, because they try to please everybody;
  • Nice guys are full of repressed rage and they tend to erupt at the most inappropriate times;
  • Nice guys lie, hide and they try to get what they want in indirect, manipulative ways.

From there, all hell breaks loose.

The Nice Guy Paradigm

The leading authority on this topic is Dr. Robert Glover, a therapist who specializes in working with men with the nice guy syndrome, and author of the best-selling self-help book for men No More Mr. Nice Guy.

According to Dr. Glover, all nice guys operate (consciously or not) on the same basic paradigm:

If I can hide my flaws and become what I think others want me to be then I will be loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life.

Of course, this paradigm is unrealistic and ineffective, not to mention a pile of crap.

The point is not to turn into an asshole. Being kind and polite to others has its place. However, nice guys tend to take this too far and they make being nice and getting approval the compass of their social behavior.

Having been both a nice guy and (mostly for research purposes) a jerk, I can tell you that in my experience, none of these are healthy behaviors and there is a path in-between which creates much better results.

Overcoming the Nice Guy Syndrome

As an ex-nice guy and a coach who also works with nice guys (and girls), I came to believe that there are three essential stages in overcoming the nice guy syndrome:

Step 1: Realizing and accepting the fact that being a nice guy may sound noble and some people may compliment you for it but overall, it is not a healthy or productive way of being. The concept is flawed. For many men, this step is the hardest.

Step 2: Creating a deep paradigm shift. Even after you realize being nice does not work, the nice guy paradigm will still exist in your cognitive schemas, from where it influences your automatic thinking and disempowers you. You’ll need to consciously change your thinking and weed it out of there.

Step 3: Being less nice. This step involves changing your behavior, developing key people skills and turning it into a less nice one. Specific actions may include:

  • Expressing yourself more, even when you may upset someone;
  • Asking for what you want and saying ‘no’ to others;
  • Taking more time for yourself and taking care of your own needs;
  • Ending toxic relationships which go nowhere.

The earlier you start, the faster your will enjoy the benefits of being a less nice guy. So take that nice guy smile off your face and go kick some ass!

Image courtesy of micsalac

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Relationships Tagged With: , , 45 Comments
December 8, 2010

Overcoming an Inferiority Complex

An inferiority complex is a persistent feeling of being inferior to others in some way. It is usually connected with a real or imaginary shortcoming in physical appearance, intelligence, personality, education, social status or economic status.

I believe that an inferiority complex is one of the nastiest psychological traits you can have. Seriously, it will mess your life up in a sadistic way, as well as your social skills.

Many people struggle with a feeling of inferiority for years, even their whole lives, and this has ramifications in most aspects of their existence. As a communication coach with an attitude-based approach, I have something to say about overcoming an inferiority complex, and this article is it.

First, My Story

inferiorIn high-school, I used to have an inferiority complex because I was very thin. Yeah, I know many people have the opposite problem of being too fat. Well, I was skinny as a rail and I felt embarrassed by it.

Actually, I still am skinny as a rail, but it no longer bothers me in any way. It’s something I’ve learned not only to get over, but also to embrace wholeheartedly. Now, when I see people who have an inferiority complex, I totally understand where they’re coming from, but their state also seems silly from where I’m standing right now.

This is probably one of the reasons I find it fulfilling to do attitude and confidence coaching and help people who feel inferior to others in some way.

The Real Cause of an Inferiority Complex

There’s a big catch to overcoming an inferiority complex: you have to understand its genuine cause.

The apparent cause seem to be the fact you are inferior to others around you in a particular manner: you’re short, you’re fat, you’re bold, you’re poor, you’re less educated, you have an extra nipple etc. However, that’s not the real cause.

You see, we are all inferior to other people in some ways, and superior in others. We all have our combinations of qualities and flaws and overall we’re not that different from each other. My point is that a certain flaw is not a realistically sufficient reason to have an inferiority complex.

The real cause of an inferiority complex has little to do with reality and it has a lot to do with how we process it. In order to get an inferiority of a complex, you have to dramatize in your head the meaning of a certain flaw.

You have to tell yourself that, for example, you are so short you look like a midget, that everybody is making fun of you and that this in intolerable. Thus, you make yourself feel shitty (but the scientific phrasing is that you develop a complex of inferiority).

How to Overcome an Inferiority Complex

Since an inferiority complex is created through your thinking, it is through your thinking as well that you can overcome it.

If you want to learn how to shift from feeling inferior to being confident in interactions with other people, I encourage you to check out my instructional presentation on building social confidence. It will show you my practical formula for boosting your confidence. You can find it over here.

I have worked with clients with inferiority complexes and the way they’ve made real progress was to systemically combat their distorted thinking patterns. This is also what has worked for me.

Basically, overcoming an inferiority complex implies a set of key shifts in thinking:

  • Realizing that any flaw you have is not as bad as you think;
  • Realizing that having a certain flaw does not equal with not having any personal qualities;
  • Realizing that all people have their flaws and most people have major flaws.

And when I say ‘realizing’ all of these, I’m referring to taking them in and making them a part of your automatic, everyday thinking.

Probably the most meaningful shift in thinking is understanding that there is a huge difference between being inferior to others in some way and feeling bad about it (a.k.a. having an inferiority complex).

What Does It Take?

All the stuff you may hear about just being yourself, meditating or visualizing yourself in a better way is in my experience hyped up self-help bullshit and it will do little good in dealing with a complex of inferiority.

Overcoming an inferiority complex requires a scientific and pragmatic approach. The techniques I use in my work on attitude change are mostly from the areas of Cognitive Behavioral Coaching (CBC) and Therapy (CBT), which I encourage you to research.

CBC is not a miracle cure; it is a psychological change system which involves repetitive action, consistent practice and taking things in small steps. If you do the work, you will get the results.

I’ll teach you the most powerful CBT techniques to overcome inferiority and gain conversation confidence in this presentation. Don’t miss out on it.

Equip yourself with the right tools and a lot of perseverance, and I promise you that you’ll free yourself from an inferiority complex. Then, when you’ll look back and remember how you used to feel about certain parts of yourself, it will seem sooooo silly!

Image courtesy of Jarostaw Pocztarski

Filed Under: Attitude, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , 37 Comments