Photo by Helena Lopes: https://www.pexels.com/photo/three-men-standing-while-laughing-1049317/
One of the challenges that recovering nice guys face is learning how to pay attention to and prioritize their own needs and desires. The mistake that nice guys make is that they aren’t honest with themselves or anyone else about their needs and wants. Instead they act like they are putting other people’s needs first (and often they are) but they hold onto a subconscious desire that the other people in their lives will anticipate and act on the unexpressed needs they aren’t sharing with anyone else. What the nice guy has done is formed a covert contract that no one else knows about, in the hopes that someone will somehow read their mind and fulfill their desires and needs.
This never works and is unfair to everyone involved. What it ultimately creates is a situation where the nice guy sabotages the relationships has he with other people and the relationship has with himself. The result is a man who finds himself alone, without friends or lovers.
When the nice guy doesn’t get his needs met, he acts on them, but not in a transparent and open manner. The resentment he likely feels at never having his needs met causes him to covertly go after those needs and yet ironically do it in a way where’s not even being fully honest with himself. This can only change when the nice guy learns one of the more important principles of the men’s quest:
Learn how to choose and prioritize yourself first.
Choosing and prioritizing yourself involves how to develop a healthy relationship with your desires and needs so that you can express them and act on them from a place of authenticity and integrity. When we are openly living a life of integrity, we are living a life where we are in tune with our needs and desires and able to express them so that the people in our lives have an honest chance of responding to those needs. There are 5 reasons a nice guy must learn how to choose himself and prioritize his needs and desires.
1. You learn how to validate yourself.
A nice guy engaged in covert contracts is seeking validation from other people. The problem is that no amount of validation from someone else will ever be enough. Learning how to validate yourself comes about when you start choosing yourself and choosing to honor the parts of yourself that you may have otherwise suppressed or ignored in order to fit what you thought other people wanted from you. When you validate yourself you honor the deepest parts of yourself instead of pushing them down and trying to contain them. When all of us feels heard it is much easier to show up in integrity and authenticity and that can only happen when start to choose ourselves.
2. You learn how to express your needs by being open and communicative.
A nice guy who is validating himself is also expressing himself, because he realizes he can no longer keep quiet about his wants and needs, or other things that need to be expressed.
Expressing your needs and wants to other people doesn’t come with a guaranteed yes from those people, but what it does come with is a chance to discuss the needs and wants and see what can be done to honor them. A man who expresses what he wants is a man who feels confidence in himself and his desires and can act on them in a way that is fair to all involved.
3. You discover a deeper sense of purpose and passion for life.
When you express your needs and desires you can also get in touch with a deeper sense of purpose and a passion for life that may have been previously lacking. A lot of nice guys feel trapped and lost, doing activities and jobs they don’t want to do. When a nice guy learns how to choose himself, this calls into question every choice he’s made and while this can be a bit disorienting, it can also be liberating because the nice guy is no longer constrained by a feeling of having to conform to what everyone else wants. Instead the nice guy learns how to choose himself and in the process discovers a sense of purpose that leads to a mission for his life.
We need that sense of mission and we can only find it when we start to listen to our needs and wants and identify what we have lacked and what calls for us to express our innermost truths to the world and ourselves.
4. You experience a sense of satisfaction when you act on your needs openly.
When you act on a need or desire covertly the result is often a gnawing sense of emptiness. You know you haven’t acted from a place of integrity or awareness. You’ve chosen to do something covertly and while you may get away with it, the long term result is often guilt, shame and emptiness.
When you act on your needs openly and share them with other people openly you feel a sense of satisfaction because nothing is being hidden away. You are acting from an authentic place of integrity where you can truly be present with what you’ve expressed and acted on without having to hide some part of yourself in the process.
5. You learn how to love yourself.
We aren’t taught to love ourselves, but when you choose yourself, you are also choosing to love yourself. This is one of the healthiest choices you can ever make because you are the one person you will always be with and when you learn to love yourself it shows up in all of your interactions with other people. They may not fully understand it or get it and they don’t need to. When you love yourself you are also able to love other people more freely because you are giving your love from a place of expansion instead of trying to get their love from a place of scarcity.
This actually leads us to a sixth, bonus reason for choosing yourself.
6. When you choose yourself you are able to choose other people for the right reasons.
Choosing to say yes to yourself also teaches you to say no to other people. This is powerful because if you choose to say yes to someone else, you are choosing to do it because you said yes to yourself first. When we say yes to other people and no to ourselves, we’re trying to make those people happy and sometimes we may do that, but a lot of the time we lose the respect of a person who feels like you are always trying to please them.
When you learn how to say yes to yourself, you learn better boundaries and this is so importance because those boundaries help you start saying yes to other people from the right place. We want to say yes from the right place because then we are saying yes to ourselves first and as a result acting from a place of integrity and strength instead of from a place of people pleasing and co-dependency. Saying yes to yourself means choosing yourself and therefore being able to choose others whole heartedly with the sacred masculine grounded presence you can bring to all of your interactions when you choose yourself.
If any of this lands with you and you want to learn how to choose yourself, I invite you to get a copy of my free e-book The Men’s Quest so you can start on the journey to discovering the inner strength and wisdom that is just waiting to be tapped into.
