How To Put Yourself First Without Feeling Guilty - Nick Pollard

Nick Pollard, “The People Displeaser,” is a coach and a speaker. Why do we feel so compelled to put others ahead of ourselves? Surely at the very minimum we should be able to prioritise ourselves. Yet it's hard. So, how can you break free from people pleasing tendencies and actually start advocating for your own needs with confidence? Expect to learn why people pleasing is such a trap, how someone can distinguish between being considerate and sacrificing their own identity to please others, how to rehabilitate yourself from being a people pleaser, why it’s so hard to advocate to your own needs, how to know when you should give up on someone and much more... - 00:00 The Trap of People-Pleasing 11:24 Learning to Be Honest With Yourself 17:18 Why People-Pleasers Struggle to Find Joy 22:02 The Cost of Being a People-Pleaser 26:55 When Does Being Considerate Go Too Far? 29:34 How Men & Women People-Please 40:02 Why People Struggle to Advocate for Their Needs 55:37 First Steps to Correcting People-Pleasing 1:05:21 Biggest Misconceptions About Boundaries 1:18:14 Maintaining the Boundaries You Set 1:22:43 How Sensitive People Can Be More Assertive 1:31:09 The Guilt of Choosing Yourself Over Others 1:43:51 The Role of Triggers in People-Pleasing 1:47:35 When to Give Up on Someone 1:50:37 Highly Successful People-Pleasers 2:01:38 Impactful Books for People-Pleasers 2:05:15 Where to Find Nick - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why is people pleasing such a trap for so many of us?

• 0:06Nick Pollard?

  I, there's a long answer and a short answer. I think the, the short answer to that is that we have created an environment through social media, really, you know, predominantly that everybody's now seeking to measure up to somebody else rather than, you know, focused on this internal locus of control where you can, you can really be vibrant on your own. Um, but the way that we function now as a society is, has changed that. Um, and everybody's comparing themselves to people that, you know, are, are insurmountable. And I find myself doing this too. So, you know, I worship at the altars of, you know, Alex Hermosy and, you know, James Smith and all these guys that I see have, you know, millions of followers and make millions of dollars and they're exciting and they're fun. And I'm like, how do I get to that? Right?

• 0:51Nick Pollard?

  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, um, who said this to me that really resonated with people pleasing, which you don't have to hate where you are to wanna 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 wanna 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, that's really what the world is, you know, kind of built on these days.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Draw the line for me between that sense that we, that we measure up, but, you know, 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. What, why is that important? What, what's that got to do with it?

• 1:46Nick Pollard?

  So I think it's, um, for me, when it was, you know, when it was more of a problem, and I, I would say that I'm a recovering people pleaser. It's funny, those things, it's one of those things that I don't think ever really goes away. Um, I think you just kind of battle it. But, um, mostly it's in overwhelming sense that you're not enough.

• 2:06Nick Pollard?

  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, you know, 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 kind of the nice guy narrative,

• 2:49Nick Pollard?

  where 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 peacekeeping, you know, frame of mind. And I think that's where people get really hung up.

• 3:11Chris Williamson?

  That's the, one of the typical childhood situations that people pleasers would have?

• 3:18Nick Pollard?

  Very typical, you know, I've got, I've got one-on-one clients all over the world, kind of coming from every, every background, you know, everything from CEO down to, you know, you know, 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. So, and so what that teaches them is that, you know, to make this other person happy means they won't get abandoned. 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, 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.

• 4:03Nick Pollard?

  And now it's not serving you and nobody really knows what to do with that. So then you have to figure out like, what do I do now to make my life better?

• 4:11Chris Williamson?

  What behaviors should we look out for that suggest you might be a people pleaser? How would you get us to self diagnose?

• 4:22Nick Pollard?

  That's sounding like a real son of a bitch. Most of the time, 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 just 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, 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, 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.

• 5:07Nick Pollard?

  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 well being. And then all of the 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?

• 5:24Nick Pollard?

  If you're constantly doing that, are you low on money because other people have needs? Right? Are you prioritizing the wants and needs of other people above your own? Well, that's virtuous in many ways, right? 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, you're broke, you're alone, you feel miserable.

• 5:47Nick Pollard?

  One of the things that I used to say is that I never got invited to barbecues when I was a people pleaser.

• 5:53Nick Pollard?

  Like 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. Right? Or they'd want me to help them do something, but they, 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, it's just a masking. In, in many ways, it's similar to narcissism in that way. Is that you can't really get to know that person.

• 6:26Nick Pollard?

  Which is why, so the way I found you was you had kept identifying yourself as a people pleaser. I'm like, ah, you don't come off that way to me then.

• 6:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, interesting. You've got a fucking radar that's searching for people pleasers 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.

• 6:50Chris Williamson?

  I tend to put other people's needs before mine. And in many ways, in many ways, that can be seen as considerate, caring, altruistic, you know, looking to bring other people up. And, um, you know, this must be, I guess, e- 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 effortlessly, uh, 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 do them. It takes away a lot of the virtue and it also doesn't allow you to ever advocate for your own needs.

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 7:36Nick Pollard?

  Oh, my God, yes. Wow. I love that quote. I've never heard that.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  Joe's, Joe's a fucking, he's a beast. Um, 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.

• 8:22Chris Williamson?

  And, um, you know, I, 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 fuck ton across, you know, days and months and years. And, um, yeah, that's my, that's my self diagnosis, I suppose.

• 8:53Nick Pollard?

  Okay. So maybe I was wrong.

• 8:56Nick Pollard?

  Yeah, I mean, perhaps I was. That's that's a whole thing. So you spoke two things that are really interesting is the value of your no. I want to just touch on that. Something I've said a lot of is that it 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. So it's, it's not even the no. And one of the ways I show people how to do that is, I'll give you a little secret from one of

• 9:38Nick Pollard?

  my boundary bootcamps, but 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. 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. To you literally, you can illuminate it to everyone. Doesn't have to be a secret. And then you can change your mind after 90 seconds.

• 10:09Chris Williamson?

  Oh, but you have to sit with the discomfort of the no for a minute and a half?

• 10:12Nick Pollard?

  Well, yeah. And it also does two things. So it, 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, 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.

• 10:53Nick Pollard?

  And I can say, you know, I really don't want to go to that party. And then you don't change your mind, right? 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.

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  What was the second thing that you wanted to click on from what I said?

• 11:20Nick Pollard?

  The second, now I've forgotten.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  That's okay. Going back, so I really wanted, I have something that's more important. The fact that people pleasers are liars, that there is a sense of inauthenticity, a malleability, a pliability that you have, which

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  means that you're not telling the truth. And, you know, 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 like you speaking forward what you actually want, it is a lie. Like, you can wrap it up however you want and say that it makes the world better and that it's coming, it's because of compassion and all the rest of it. It's like,

• 12:20Chris Williamson?

  it's a fucking lie, dude.

• 12:21Nick Pollard?

  Right. Well, and so

• 12:25Nick Pollard?

  if somebody was to come to you, let's pretend 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?

• 12:40Nick Pollard?

  Probably not, right? Because it'll kill you. But so if if that's the case, when you think of anything that you you dislike or genuinely don't want to do, it's in 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 you 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 they've either didn't have a ton of play in childhood, or, you know, so they were kind

• 13:20Nick Pollard?

  of caretakers or or meeting the needs of their parents, etc., or they've forgotten how to play in adulthood.

• 13:28Nick Pollard?

  And because what we find is that, you know, if you don't play and you 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.

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Talk to me about this sort of lineage between play, self invention, self identity. How does this fit together?

• 14:04Nick Pollard?

  So I I think I figured it out. There's a relatively new development for me. I 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.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  Eating glass.

• 14:21Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 14:48Nick Pollard?

  Whatever they happen to be doing, and they're gonna get hurt and they're gonna do whatever. But they're not playing. They're learning.

• 14:55Nick Pollard?

  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, they're putting on personas of who they want to be. Right? So you, you know, one kid wants to be Iron Man. One guy wants to be a fire. One little girl wants to be a princess. Somebody else wants to be something else. Right? And, and through that idea of like self-invention, that's how they start to form the idea of like, what is their, 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. Where they're like, okay, well, now who am I? Well, I don't know. You haven't spent any time inventing that.

• 15:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's very interesting.

• 15:45Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking an awful lot recently about trying to find more fun in the things that I do. And this sort of balance between joy and meaning, 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. The people who like to take things seriously, that earnest about their work. They apply efforts, they're rigorous, they pay attention. They're prepared to, you know, 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

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  the things that you're going to do to a time that never comes, you end up, 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 good 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, you know, all of this sort of comes together. So, uh, yeah, the, the sense of play certainly resonates with me or the, the, the lack thereof.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  The difficulty in finding joy. I'm going to guess.

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  Typically, do you find with people pleasers, your clients, people that you've spoken to, that finding joy in life is something that they often find difficulty with?

• 17:30Nick Pollard?

  Tremendous difficulty.

• 17:33Nick Pollard?

  And it comes from so often, anyway, 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. 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.

• 18:00Nick Pollard?

  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 shame. 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, right? Well, ask any addict why that they're, you know, nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, fucking great, I'm gonna 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

• 18:44Nick Pollard?

  before they give to everyone else, yeah, it's really hard to find joy. You know, for me, God, I would, I have a story. It was, I was, I was in roofing sales, this is years ago. I've heard a lot of your stuff, by the way, on everybody should have a door knocking job or a club promoter job, and I fully agree with that sentiment. Because I'm not afraid of rejection in any way, shape or form, but

• 19:09Nick Pollard?

  that's probably a lie. Anyway, going back to, to the idea, you know, here I was, I was, I had, I'd just gotten out of rehabilitation, you know, I'd sobered up and I'd done all the things. And my story is a pretty dark one. And I was standing in a warehouse store

• 19:26Nick Pollard?

  looking at televisions. And I was crying, like, because I couldn't force myself.

• 19:36Nick Pollard?

  To do this thing for myself 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 were 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 this 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, I went to my own therapist and he said to me, you know, you could just stop being a coward to buy the fucking TV. And I was like, okay, I go in and buy it.

• 20:19Nick Pollard?

  And I made him strap it to the car before I swiped my credit card. So I couldn't turn back. 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.

• 20:58Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, permanently making yourself the second or third or fourth priority.

• 21:04Nick Pollard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  After everybody else. So just dig in a little bit more to the real costs of being a people pleaser. Why, why is it a bad thing? What does it do to you? You mentioned wellbeing earlier on. What does it do to the pleaser themselves?

• 21:18Nick Pollard?

  So the, 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 got shape. So here's one more to the list. Right, I'll be the 7,000th person to say that on this show.

• 21:49Nick Pollard?

  So the first thing I noticed was that I had been deprioritizing the, 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 was, you know, I wasn't going to the gym. I wasn't, you know, 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. So that's kind of the first thing is that you notice that your health is suffering. So

• 22:17Nick Pollard?

  the second, 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.

• 22:46Nick Pollard?

  And I have no idea why that was. Like, everybody was a titan to me. Everybody was 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

• 23:30Nick Pollard?

  your life away. The average people pleaser that I work with is, is either at or about to be burnt out at 38.

• 23:40Nick Pollard?

  Like completely burned out. And it's really kind of 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?

• 24:22Nick Pollard?

  Why aren't I getting happy? Paychecks get bigger and it just keeps expanding. So it's like, 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.

• 24:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it goes all over, it goes all over someone's, yeah, garden. Yeah, yeah, I have seen that.

• 24:39Nick Pollard?

  That's, that's kind of what I feel like people pleasing does, is that it, 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, no, a self-image that's generally pretty flawed or wildly inaccurate. You see people that are depressed, that are, you know, kind of, and they'll come to me and say, you know, I'm living in my own misery. And I'm like, well, stop, like, just don't do that anymore. And, and they look at me like, that's possible. Yeah, you can choose to not do this. And it's, I think the biggest challenge is, is overcoming

• 25:22Nick Pollard?

  the idea too, that the opposite of people pleasing isn't being an asshole. I think there's this, 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. 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.

• 25:44Chris Williamson?

  People pleasing are asshole.

• 25:46Nick Pollard?

  Right. It's, 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.

• 25:59Chris Williamson?

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

• 26:10Nick Pollard?

  I knew you were gonna ask me that and I still don't know how to answer it, but I'm gonna give it, I'm gonna give it my best shot.

• 26:15Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 26:19Nick Pollard?

  I think the way that I distinguish it

• 26:24Nick Pollard?

  is by the emotion itself. So when I give to somebody

• 26:31Nick Pollard?

  from a place of, of love,

• 26:36Nick Pollard?

  and that can be anything, whether I'm buying my girlfriend flowers, or whether I'm taking my kid to the park, or whatever.

• 26:44Nick Pollard?

  There's a sense of peace in that.

• 26:50Nick Pollard?

  And

• 26:54Nick Pollard?

  sometimes I want to do it, sometimes I don't. But there's still, but that overwhelming sense of peace in being

• 27:06Nick Pollard?

  giving is real. And, 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. Like, most people know when they're doing something wrong.

• 27:38Nick Pollard?

  Like, you can feel it. It's like, the minute that resentment hits you, you need to correct course. And for me, resentment in the body just shows up like right here in my solar plexus. Something, motherfucker, why am I having to do this? Right? 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, you know, do that. The other thing that I, I, I think you can really do to determine this is, is put space between your decision to giving. So if you make a decision like, I'm gonna give, you know, 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, you're never gonna see that person again. They're not gonna be pleased with you for eternity. But like, when you're ready to give to somebody you love, give yourself an hour.

• 28:24Nick Pollard?

  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?

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 28:57Nick Pollard?

  I'd say it's similar. I don't know that it's, 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 don't know that I could pinpoint like a major difference. So much as I would say there's, 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 be 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.

• 29:42Nick Pollard?

  And then I'll have girls and then it will stop. I don't know why it doesn't this, 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

• 29:57Nick Pollard?

  as a problem of everyone else, where men tend to internalize it as I'm a piece of shit.

• 30:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 30:07Nick Pollard?

  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 set. So

• 30:23Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, 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 that's not to say that women shouldn't have a backbone as well. Obviously, they should.

• 30:47Nick Pollard?

  Sure.

• 30:47Chris Williamson?

  But the level of assertiveness that we just expect dispositionally from men tends to be higher. Men, on average, are more disagreeable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And 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, I think that there's perhaps some additional levels of shame in that.

• 31:13Nick Pollard?

  I would fully agree with that.

• 31:17Nick Pollard?

  I think it shows, I think it rears its ugly head in a lot of ways. And one of, you know, potentially one of the biggest, most toxic ones is in sexuality. You know,

• 31:30Nick Pollard?

  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. And if I do, then 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 this, you know, present environment.

• 31:51Nick Pollard?

  But I think the manosphere isn't helping 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 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

• 32:34Nick Pollard?

  I think you're, I think you're touching on something that's very interesting is that

• 32:40Nick Pollard?

  we've redefined masculine as this toxic trait. And

• 32:46Nick Pollard?

  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

• 32:59Nick Pollard?

  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, Robert Glover, 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, semic, or, you know, in this sphere of abuse or some other awful thing, which is part of my story. And

• 33:35Nick Pollard?

  so I think to find those guys and tell them they're okay, like this is okay. Like it's just,

• 33:45Nick Pollard?

  you struck on something that's like deep in my heart. So I'm trying 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.

• 34:04Nick Pollard?

  Yeah. 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. There's nobody, and you've said it before, and you know, I've said it a million times is that I, I truly believe that psychology as it exists today is not built for men.

• 34:39Nick Pollard?

  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. Has been so helpful, but. Yeah, I don't know if that answers your question.

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  I understand this sort of threading of a needle between

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  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 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. And then that speaks into 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.

• 35:44Chris Williamson?

  I feel like I should be able to, you know, 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, it's messy. And, um, you know, this, it's endlessly fascinating to me to kind of try and unpack this 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 men that are in their lives. And, uh, yeah, that extra degree of shame around being pliable for men,

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

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

• 36:37Nick Pollard?

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

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  Love it.

• 36:44Nick Pollard?

  Women are not equipped to handle male emotion.

• 36:49Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 37:25Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 37:27Nick Pollard?

  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 the, 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, it's the same as with women.

• 38:03Chris Williamson?

  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 in kits. 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. I'm just trying to work out why it becomes so difficult to make our needs known and to advocate for our own desires.

• 38:50Nick Pollard?

  I think there's a component of rejection.

• 38:58Nick Pollard?

  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? Where I think you get as you start to heal from this, you know, profoundly challenging way to live is 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.

• 39:38Nick Pollard?

  The rejection to somebody who lives like this doesn't feel like rejection. It feels like abandonment.

• 39:47Nick Pollard?

  And

• 39:50Nick Pollard?

  you're gonna 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. And I'm a little emotional about it.

• 40:01Nick Pollard?

  Because

• 40:05Nick Pollard?

  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. And

• 40:17Nick Pollard?

  when I hear that,

• 40:21Nick Pollard?

  I hear my own, 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 I struggled with that, you know, mightily most of my life.

• 40:36Nick Pollard?

  So I think it's

• 40:39Nick Pollard?

  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, is dangerous, or could get me abandoned, or, you know, to stand up for myself means the bully gets bigger, not goes away, right?

• 41:10Nick Pollard?

  I think that's where that comes from.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  Certainly the pattern of simply not being used to it, not thinking that your needs are valid.

• 41:24Chris Williamson?

  Definitely, you know, 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.

• 41:45Chris Williamson?

  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. We're 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.

• 42:10Chris Williamson?

  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. Like advocating for your needs is tough if you've subjugated them for so long that you have no idea what they are anymore.

• 42:34Nick Pollard?

  Yeah, it's, it's really hard to come back from in that way. Like if you do it long enough.

• 42:41Nick Pollard?

  So in this is, 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?

• 42:50Nick Pollard?

  Well, at some point you just become agreeable to everything because you, it's not that you don't care. It's that you don't know, right? So, um, 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. Like I, I like food and both those sound great, right? So that's what agreeable means to me is like, I'm happy to just go along, go with the flow from time to time because I don't care. Right? But.

• 43:16Nick Pollard?

  When you do that because you don't like want to be the issue of the moment. Um, and you do that long enough, you're right. You, you don't have a sense of like, what are, what do, 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, because I didn't want to get, I, I wanted to be seen and want to be

• 44:01Nick Pollard?

  that seen. 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 in corporate America and I'm a, I'm a pretty talented guy. Um, I just couldn't do it anymore. So, yeah, I think that, 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, 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

• 44:41Nick Pollard?

  are. And there's really only way to find that out is to, you know, do some journaling and go try some fit.

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a particularly, 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 does that, what am I standing up for? What is myself? Presumably there's some concoction of, 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 thing and I don't even, I don't, 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

• 45:32Chris Williamson?

  fucking escape plan. So, yeah, I, um, I think about that a lot. I realized toward the end of my twenties that, you know, I'd,

• 45:42Chris Williamson?

  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 the, 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. Because

• 46:06Nick Pollard?

  Oh, God, that's a big one. Yeah.

• 46:08Chris Williamson?

  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, you know, 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?

• 46:33Nick Pollard?

  That is, um, that is a question I'm going to steal from you. I'm taking that. Um, so, um,

• 46:46Nick Pollard?

  I've, I've drawn that line, but I've never asked the question that way. Where I can see, you know,

• 46:53Nick Pollard?

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

• 47:36Nick Pollard?

  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, everybody 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 the difficulty of 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 all those.

• 48:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, you said, uh, you know, you said people pleasers are interesting. And I would agree, 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 Sowell quote, which I can't stop thinking about, even though I've known it for ages, it just, it becomes more true the

• 48:58Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 49:39Nick Pollard?

  I love that you said that. Um, it goes back to that thing we were talking about, you know, and I, 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-

• 49:55Nick Pollard?

  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 pleasing, you know, like, okay, well, I don't experience you that way. Now I've heard some of the backstory, I might have been incorrect, but the

• 50:17Nick Pollard?

  the generosity, the kindness, the loving way you show up, the joyful part of you that actually gets fulfillment and and

• 50:30Nick Pollard?

  levels up by giving.

• 50:33Nick Pollard?

  That's awesome. Like, that's beautiful. That's, that's humanity. Like, that's the good shit, right?

• 50:43Nick Pollard?

  But to allow the self-deprecation to go away.

• 50:47Nick Pollard?

  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. It's like, if you're driving head on at a bus, just steer. Turn, you'll be fine.

• 51:20Nick Pollard?

  And I think that's

• 51:23Nick Pollard?

  Maxwell Maltz is probably 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.

• 51:31Chris Williamson?

  I've heard of it. I've never read it, though.

• 51:33Nick Pollard?

  It, 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.

• 51:50Nick Pollard?

  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, you know, a pretty happy life, just taking good care of yourself and getting in shape. And, um, you know, starting to eat well, it's you always the first thing I work with my clients on is like, all right, let's go to the gym. Um, let's get some of the anger out of your body like, pleasers are pissed historically over, over every person ever, they're just mad. Right. Because their life hasn't gone the way they wanted it to go. Well, it's not gonna 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 then you start to see life improve. Um, yeah, I don't, I don't know if I answered the question there. I got lost in my own brain.

• 52:35Chris Williamson?

  Let's, uh, 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, um, uh, psychological tactics and strategies, what are the first steps that you get to take people through? When it comes to their rehabilitation?

• 53:01Nick Pollard?

  Probably better as a, as a, 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?

• 53:13Chris Williamson?

  Uh, like, uh, closing over, shoulders come forward, chest sort of feels.

• 53:19Nick Pollard?

  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, is learn to sit with that. Learn to just sit in that feeling and ask it questions. Like your emotions are not fact. They're just in there. Um, and they come from, you know, experiences, they come from your past. And, you know, I can probably iterate a million different personal growth books on that, but.

• 53:43Nick Pollard?

  Once you just feel it and you'd 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, 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. A million ways you can tell yourself, you're a piece of shit. Pick, 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, what are you?

• 54:14Nick Pollard?

  Are you real? Are you, is this some, where did you come from? And get curious about these things. Like if you get, we tend to, we tend to judge our negative emotions by calling them negative emotions. I, 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 gonna kiss a girl. I know exactly what that felt like. I also remember the first time I thought I was gonna die. I remember exactly what that felt like. They're eerily similar.

• 54:45Nick Pollard?

  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, you sure this isn't what we're supposed to be doing yet? Like, you should have four million followers before you go on that damn thing. By the way, this is a reiteration from this morning. And so as I've kind of dealt with that today, that's how I, I take other people through it too, is just kind of learning to sit in the darkness.

• 55:21Nick Pollard?

  The other thing that I, 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.

• 55:59Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 56:15Chris Williamson?

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

• 56:24Nick Pollard?

  Yes. Yeah. For me, yes, you know, for most of the people I work with, yes. Because you're trying to, 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 feel, it, it almost reverts you to being a child. Right? You looked as though I had scolded you and it probably felt as though I had scolded you. And

• 56:52Nick Pollard?

  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, I had to take a five mile walk just to get out of my head.

• 57:24Nick Pollard?

  You know, and I'm almost fanboyed when you go, oh my God, that's you. And so I take this walk and I'm like, what am, what am I, what am I worrying about? Like this either gonna go greater, it's not like, there's nothing I can do. You know, I'm not a moron, I'm gonna be fine.

• 57:40Nick Pollard?

  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?

• 57:47Nick Pollard?

  Well, what if?

• 57:50Nick Pollard?

  It'll be what it's gonna be.

• 57:53Nick Pollard?

  And it was me sitting, I was sitting on the Capitol steps here in Denver. 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. 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, then I'm a piece of shit. Like if I don't, if I don't do this right, then it's gonna 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, 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. Like, they're probably gonna lock me away. And then it was like, okay, well, you know, these four questions have saved my life a million times.

• 58:37Nick Pollard?

  You know, what do I want to believe about this? Well, no matter what happens, I'll be okay.

• 58:43Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 58:59Nick Pollard?

  And that's what I did. I just got myself in, because my brain is gonna 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 go 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.

• 59:30Nick Pollard?

  I'm like, oh.

• 59:32Nick Pollard?

  Okay, great. So now what? He goes, listen, learn to laugh, have more fun, make mistakes, and enjoy yourself.

• 59:42Nick Pollard?

  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, doesn't matter. It's the whole thing. It'll come back in some way or another.

• 1:00:29Nick Pollard?

  Core to the kind of 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're, you are that authority. And 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?

• 1:01:02Nick Pollard?

  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?

• 1:01:13Nick Pollard?

  Like, what would I, what is that preference? You know, rather than what should I believe? What would I prefer to believe? And in my, in my vocabulary at that point was, I would prefer to believe that I got this. Like, it's good. It's gonna be fine. He's probably not gonna murder me. I don't think he has a, you know, missile that will hit my house. So I think we're gonna be okay. 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, which is, you know, what do I need to do to reinforce this new belief system? It's usually the opposite, or whatever it was in question two. So it's like, I'm, I'm timid about the show. It's just to admit that I'm timid about the show. And

• 1:01:59Nick Pollard?

  It's a powerful exercise. I mean, I get to connect with you over it, which 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.

• 1:02:15Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, dude. So fascinating. I really appreciate that. You've mentioned a couple of times already today, boundaries, setting boundaries.

• 1:02:27Chris Williamson?

  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? What's the, what's the process? Give me the, give me boundaries 101, the, the best and the worst.

• 1:02:40Nick Pollard?

  Okay, so the first misconception about batteries.

• 1:02:44Nick Pollard?

  Is that they're about other people.

• 1:02:48Nick Pollard?

  So boundaries are about how you show up in the world. They're not, 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 I, 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, the

• 1:03:32Nick Pollard?

  most important misconceptions that like it's a rulebook. Boundaries are not a rulebook.

• 1:03:40Nick Pollard?

  The other one I hear a lot of is boundaries are about putting yourself first. And that's horseshit. Boundaries are about making your needs equal to everyone around you.

• 1:03:55Nick Pollard?

  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? But if, you know, one of the things I see a lot with people who have gotten sober is, you know, you'll get a phone call and it's my least favorite question of all time. "Well, there's gonna 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, of adults, other, you know,

• 1:04:40Nick Pollard?

  or 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 bend, does it? Like, it's, 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 gonna do that?" Well, you just say, "No," and then that's it.

• 1:05:25Nick Pollard?

  Like, I'm, unfortunately, my workload is such, 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 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 anglo sphere people, explain what a bill of rights is in this context, please. So a bill of rights is a list... How do I explain this?

• 1:06:05Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:06:18Nick Pollard?

  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 and 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.

• 1:07:02Nick Pollard?

  I do not have to tolerate unkindness, right? I will, I have a, I have a boundary around yelling. I don't believe that that's a proper way to communicate. 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, 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 gonna happen. So that Bill of Rights really shows up and it's, it's unfortunate because it's, it sounds a lot like affirmations.

• 1:07:43Nick Pollard?

  Like, and one of your, one of your, um, one of your good friends, um, who is a coach to me that doesn't know he's a coach to me is Alex Ramosi. Um, he's, the, the sphere of, of, uh, 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. And so this is sort of in that vein. So it's, you know, going against one of my own, you know, heroes, but.

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

  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. The guidelines, they're, 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, 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. I used to have this, this thing about how it's basically impossible to come up with a solution when you're in the midst of the crisis.

• 1:09:01Chris Williamson?

  And if, 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 Hoffler movement or some shit for getting out of 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 homoseism, 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.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  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. There are 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.

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  It's going to take a fucking ton of effort when you first start and 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, the whole process. You start off in the deliberate and then you move into the automatic. So, yeah, I,

• 1:10:43Nick Pollard?

  I explain that really in detail to a lot of people, which is, you know, there's 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 you go, okay, I have to practice this until it's a thing. And at one point, you become unconsciously competent, where it's, we call those people naturals. Like, for instance, you are a natural podcaster. I 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

• 1:11:23Nick Pollard?

  football. It was like, I was terrified. I was shirtless in Panama. I thought I was gonna be in men's work. The captions were all wrong. It was filmed sideways. Like disaster.

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  Everybody's, everyone's got an origin story.

• 1:11:37Nick Pollard?

  Right.

• 1:11:38Chris Williamson?

  I came across, 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. I, 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. 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

• 1:12:23Chris Williamson?

  like that. Okay. Like people have over, you know, 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?

• 1:12:39Chris Williamson?

  You know, you just, 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 like hopeful romantics in that way, or hopeless, 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.

• 1:13:20Nick Pollard?

  I think so. The other thing I tend to say is that when somebody shows you who they are, just believe them.

• 1:13:26Chris Williamson?

  Like, oh, that's great.

• 1:13:28Nick Pollard?

  It's real simple. Like, if somebody shows you who they are, believe them.

• 1:13:33Nick Pollard?

  It's the easiest way to, you know, we, it's the easiest way to negate narcissism. 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 know, just TikTok and Instagram and, and all the places that I, you know, admire 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.

• 1:14:00Nick Pollard?

  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 personality disorder, or whether, you know, they're, they have sociopathy, or whatever, it's, you won't tolerate it.

• 1:14:22Nick Pollard?

  And so, yeah, I do agree with that statement. I agree with that a lot. I just think there's, go ahead.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  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, really focus on writing it out physically. 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 the bill of rights. 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 to get fist fucked into oblivion. I'm going to do it every hour of the day. But

• 1:15:08Nick Pollard?

  I've got an alarm for everything.

• 1:15:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:15:11Nick Pollard?

  Yep.

• 1:15:12Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:15:29Nick Pollard?

  So I do that in a, in a variety of ways. I hesitate to answer it because there's so many prescriptive ways of living these days that, you know, 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, 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

• 1:16:14Nick Pollard?

  you have it. Right. And it's just kind of a reminder. It's in your wallet. It's in your pocket. Um, it's, it's about, you know, another Hermosyism 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 from 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. Um, but the most important thing, I think, Chris, is just, is just read it. You know, if you read every day, or you get up and you have kind of a morning routine,

• 1:16:57Nick Pollard?

  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 in lipstick and then a heart around your head and, you know, all that nonsense. You just read it once a day as you go. And I learned that actually. One of my favorite stories about myself, I'm about to, speaking of, um, felating 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

• 1:17:41Nick Pollard?

  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, um, it's like this long paragraph and it was like, here's what I'm going to do today. And, you know, 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, it was, you know, here's how I intend to show up. And I, and he said at the bottom, I'll 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

• 1:18:24Nick Pollard?

  where I figured that out is that I just read it. I read mine every day. And, and I revamp mine about every six months. So I go back and revisit it, make sure that the, you know, the things I'm working on are, are, you know, that I haven't mastered them, you know, it's kind of, it's this mindfulness moment that why would I need to continue doing 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,

• 1:19:07Nick Pollard?

  And I think if you give yourself time enough to grow into that and you can really experience a very cool life. So that's how I would say to do that in terms of, you know, tactically speaking is just read it every day. Once you do it, read it every day.

• 1:19:21Chris Williamson?

  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, you know, I'm a big fan of mantras because I think that's sort of like the WinZip, you know, file sort of compression of entire ideas and just popping things around is a really nice way to do it. So I'm all in for the laminating of the business card. Getting into the, 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, sit in that moment, it's happening, you can, the

• 1:20:03Chris Williamson?

  discussion is occurring, whatever is about to go on. How can sensitive people become more assertive?

• 1:20:12Nick Pollard?

  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, the first thing is,

• 1:20:27Nick Pollard?

  very often, boundary conversations don't need to happen in the moment.

• 1:20:36Nick Pollard?

  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 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,

• 1:21:20Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:21:53Nick Pollard?

  The second thing you can do is when you notice you're feeling that hunched feeling is just to

• 1:22:00Nick Pollard?

  breathe.

• 1:22:02Nick Pollard?

  So, when you get that sense that you're being overcome, I've been a martial artist most of my life. You're probably familiar with the term "ki-yai," which means "spirit yell." I can't just scream "hyah" in the middle of a 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.

• 1:22:27Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:22:39Nick Pollard?

  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, hey, that's not okay.

• 1:22:49Nick Pollard?

  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 genuinely speaking, I'm pretty impacted by other people. Or I wouldn't do this.

• 1:23:10Nick Pollard?

  So, that's how I do it. Is one good, solid breath that nobody even has to know I had, will help me reset and I can then decide, kind of make the idea of, okay, do I want to even address this now?

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what about, just to add an 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 guess that this mindfulness gap facilitated by what's contemporarily known as the Huberman breath. Is a good start. Is there any other tools for assertiveness when kind of under pressure like that?

• 1:24:06Nick Pollard?

  There are, but you know, I will not allow Andrew Huberman to take over the key eye.

• 1:24:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:24:14Nick Pollard?

  You can tell him I said so.

• 1:24:15Chris Williamson?

  You can take, you can take the breath name back if you give us some more tactics.

• 1:24:18Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:24:42Nick Pollard?

  So if somebody's pushing on something and you're uncomfortable, the answer is, it needs to be a default of no.

• 1:24:51Nick Pollard?

  Now that's really hard.

• 1:24:55Nick Pollard?

  So that there's.

• 1:24:59Nick Pollard?

  There's two things that you have to remember in those moments. The first thing is no feeling is, no feeling is permanent. And they're almost never fatal.

• 1:25:09Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:25:18Nick Pollard?

  This is where I was really challenged.

• 1:25:22Nick Pollard?

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

• 1:25:29Nick Pollard?

  And I believed those things because I was afraid.

• 1:25:33Nick Pollard?

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

• 1:25:41Nick Pollard?

  That's just a Tuesday.

• 1:25:44Nick Pollard?

  You become courageous through action. You become brave through action. And bravery is defined as going anyway. Right?

• 1:25:58Nick Pollard?

  So at some point, you have to realize that it's okay that you're afraid. It's okay that your 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.

• 1:26:33Nick Pollard?

  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 gonna die? Probably not.

• 1:26:51Nick Pollard?

  The two seconds between a decision and the words make a big difference. So in the in the game of know that we talked about earlier, I say you have 90 seconds. Like you have 90 seconds. You only really need two.

• 1:27:09Nick Pollard?

  Really, you only need two.

• 1:27:12Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:27:25Nick Pollard?

  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. It's just, I love you.

• 1:27:41Nick Pollard?

  Try that if you want to. If you want a good one, just I love you.

• 1:27:45Nick Pollard?

  Just screws up the whole room. Right?

• 1:27:51Nick Pollard?

  So that's what I would say is give yourself two seconds and then speak whatever comes it comes to your mouth. And it's gonna be scary and you're gonna feel it. Right? And so I think what I heard you ask me and tell me if it's true is like, how do I get over the feeling? You don't.

• 1:28:05Nick Pollard?

  You don't. You go anyway.

• 1:28:09Chris Williamson?

  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 feel guilty. I've chosen myself over this other person. I think that's probably quite a visceral emotion that people pleasers feel.

• 1:28:41Nick Pollard?

  Yeah, I mentioned it earlier, like if you think of the first time you were going to kiss your wife. You're married, right? You married? No, I thought you were married for some reason. If you think of the first time you're going to kiss 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 not choosing them? Are you feeling excited because you finally chose you?

• 1:29:05Nick Pollard?

  So there's a big reframe there that can happen.

• 1:29:11Nick Pollard?

  Without getting into the platitudes of like, you know, feelings and all that crap that you can say about, you know, you'll get over it.

• 1:29:24Nick Pollard?

  Actually, no, fuck it. Let's just do the platitudes. You're going to get over it.

• 1:29:29Nick Pollard?

  Yeah, you're going to feel guilty, man. It's like you weren't good at tying your shoes in the beginning either. 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 and 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.

• 1:29:58Nick Pollard?

  And I lived my life the opposite forever.

• 1:30:03Nick Pollard?

  So I think it's something I'm really passionate about is yeah, you're gonna feel guilty. You're gonna 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 gonna be sad? Probably not. So if they are, if you're truly believing that, or 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 and in exactly the same way is like, how important really are you? Are you really that important that if you say no, I don't want to go to lunch with you, they're gonna go outside and, you know, stick a fire hose from the tailpipe into the window? Probably not. I think they're gonna be okay. They'll have a margarita by themselves, right?

• 1:30:47Nick Pollard?

  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. It's like, 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 overcommitted, you can't show up. Oh, 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.

• 1:31:30Nick Pollard?

  So when you start saying no to things, you're gonna be uncomfortable. Everyone else is probably just gonna be surprised. And let them be surprised.

• 1:31:42Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:31:47Nick Pollard?

  Yes. Yes. Initially, it gets, and it's not.

• 1:31:57Nick Pollard?

  I suppose it depends on how you do it. Um, but if you do it the way I did it,

• 1:32:04Nick Pollard?

  it was initially, um, much harder because

• 1:32:10Nick Pollard?

  you go through.

• 1:32:13Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:32:22Nick Pollard?

  So, 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.

• 1:32:42Chris Williamson?

  I don't even have my fake friends anymore.

• 1:32:43Nick Pollard?

  Right. Now 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.

• 1:32:53Nick Pollard?

  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, uh, 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 and it was just so, it was just a really cool moment for me where I, 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.

• 1:33:38Nick Pollard?

  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 business. Um, you go through this. From the moment you change.

• 1:34:09Nick Pollard?

  To, you know, what 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 and you're way too healthy like. So even having one boundary can make you too healthy for everyone around you. That profound when you're like deep in that people pleasing well is, you know, one boundary will make people start to turn on you.

• 1:34:41Nick Pollard?

  Like, hey, I don't want to go to your birthday party. Why? Because I don't want to. That's it. I don't want to.

• 1:34:49Nick Pollard?

  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 the set the tone. It's like

• 1:34:59Nick Pollard?

  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

• 1:35:19Nick Pollard?

  the the encouragement I would give people.

• 1:35:24Nick Pollard?

  Some of the most beautiful,

• 1:35:29Nick Pollard?

  growth filled, exciting times of my life was when I was the most lonely.

• 1:35:35Nick Pollard?

  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 no one, nowhere to be, no, 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 different and uncomfortable.

• 1:36:11Nick Pollard?

  But you're already uncomfortable.

• 1:36:14Nick Pollard?

  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's pretend you 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.

• 1:36:33Nick Pollard?

  Let's pretend, well, my narcissistic whatever is not gonna like that. Okay, well, they're mad at you anyway, so who gives a shit? Like, if they're gonna be mad whether you do or whether you don't, you may as well do. So if your life is gonna 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...

• 1:37:17Nick Pollard?

  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, you know, 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 gonna show up for me", and I would delineate exactly how I was gonna do that, and then I would do it. I started to think, "Okay, well, maybe I'm okay."

• 1:37:58Nick Pollard?

  And when I start to think, "Okay, well, maybe if I'm okay, maybe I'm better than okay." "Maybe I am kinda 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, you know, at 40. By the way, don't ever do that at 40. It's really, it's fun, but it's... I aged myself a lot.

• 1:38:25Nick Pollard?

  Maybe I can't ask that girl out. Maybe I can't ask that guy out. Maybe I, maybe, maybe I can. You know, and I think that's what shows up when you, when, you know, kind of in the, in the medium term is like, maybe I can. And then, so it goes from like, oh, fuck, I'm lonely to like, maybe I can. And then it's like, oh shit, I really can. And then your life just starts to, you know, skyrocket and you start to feel good about yourself and you start to wonder and then you hit a wall. Um, and that'll happen, you know, because you'll make a new friend or you'll make a, a new ally and they'll turn out to be a piece of shit. That's a, it'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, make a course correction and then, you know, slowly but surely you start to find out that people love you for you, not because of what you do.

• 1:39:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, James, uh, my business partner, Neutonic, 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, you realize that you're asking the world to love you for who you are. Meanwhile, your love is contingent on how you've shown up that day. You're right. So you're asking the world to treat you in a manner that you're not even prepared to treat yourself in.

• 1:39:52Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, you know, this is, this is a, a good part of the foundation of self-worth. That if, imagine that you had a friend and every time that you invited them out to lunch or, or to a party or something, they said that they were going to come, but they arrived an hour late or they didn't show up at all. After a while, you'd stop trusting they were going to do anything.

• 1:40:11Nick Pollard?

  Right.

• 1:40:13Chris Williamson?

  You are that friend to yourself. You, you, 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?

• 1:40:36Chris Williamson?

  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

• 1:40:44Chris Williamson?

  proof that you can do this? That there isn't any. So one of the other words that sort of we danced around a little bit today are triggers and the role of triggers. What is that? How do they sort of factor into this?

• 1:41:03Nick Pollard?

  This will probably get me canceled.

• 1:41:07Nick Pollard?

  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. You can thank him for my sound quality today because I went and bought this just for you.

• 1:41:21Chris Williamson?

  He's got a racist accent. Don't listen to him.

• 1:41:25Chris Williamson?

  Racist accent.

• 1:41:25Nick Pollard?

  So

• 1:41:30Nick Pollard?

  your triggers are your responsibility.

• 1:41:33Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean? What are triggers? Define them for me.

• 1:41:36Nick Pollard?

  So

• 1:41:39Nick Pollard?

  I struggle with this because I think I'm not, I tend to not be great in psychological terminology.

• 1:41:49Nick Pollard?

  And I'm going to get shit on for it, but whatever. So in my, in my experience, I come from a lot of childhood trauma. And when I was triggered, I would have, I would have a visceral emotional reaction within my body.

• 1:42:05Nick Pollard?

  It would bring me back to a state of deep fear and anxiety.

• 1:42:13Nick Pollard?

  That is what a post-traumatic stress disorder trigger sounds like.

• 1:42:18Nick Pollard?

  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 could 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 that's what I mean by that. It's like you, somebody who's legitimately triggered.

• 1:42:50Nick Pollard?

  If that's a thing for you, you need to, you need to speak to somebody in the psychological field. If you were having a visceral, like overwhelming reaction to external stimuli, then you have, then that's a bigger problem than 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,

• 1:43:35Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:44:19Nick Pollard?

  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. But, you know, whatever.

• 1:44:33Chris Williamson?

  I'm interested, I'm interested, that's true, but you and me both. I'm interested in 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, when somebody shows themselves to you, believe them.

• 1:44:58Chris Williamson?

  I think the noble part of some people pleasing is you will maybe give somebody a chance when nobody else would.

• 1:45:09Nick Pollard?

  Sure.

• 1:45:09Chris Williamson?

  And that's like very upward aiming. Every underdog movie in history has got some young

• 1:45:17Nick Pollard?

  Right.

• 1:45:17Chris Williamson?

  street urchin that gets, the coach sees in him the fire that nobody else can and gives him a chance, even though 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?

• 1:45:35Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 1:45:47Nick Pollard?

  I think the no contact narrative is.

• 1:45:54Nick Pollard?

  So first, not everybody that bumps up against a boundary is a narcissist.

• 1:45:59Nick Pollard?

  Not everybody who doesn't understand this new way of you showing up is toxic.

• 1:46:04Nick Pollard?

  So I want to just start by saying that, but

• 1:46:09Nick Pollard?

  when somebody

• 1:46:14Nick Pollard?

  it's really, I mean, it's so nuanced and I hate that word too, because it's just, it's the new excuse for, you know, I don't want to hear what you have to say.

• 1:46:23Nick Pollard?

  You said it on another one of these, that nuance is the new N word.

• 1:46:28Nick Pollard?

  I almost passed out, I laughed so hard. So I was driving, I almost locked up the brakes of my car. But the

• 1:46:39Nick Pollard?

  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, 2009, I have not spoken to her and I probably will never again.

• 1:47:04Nick Pollard?

  And then one other person was an ex.

• 1:47:12Nick Pollard?

  Malevolence

• 1:47:16Nick Pollard?

  is, is unmistakable.

• 1:47:24Nick Pollard?

  And I think that's all I have to say about that. It's that malevolence is unmistakable. When you see it, run, don't walk.

• 1:47:38Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about, again, not just where people are when they're at the beginning of their journey, but as they 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.

• 1:48:19Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:48:38Nick Pollard?

  I don't know if it's more or less. I think it's... Might have been Mark Manson that said it, that, you know, 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 more at stake. And your belief system, as I mentioned this earlier, is, you know, beliefs drive behavior, behavior creates environment. But beliefs are built through reinforcement.

• 1:49:23Nick Pollard?

  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 gonna go broke.

• 1:49:37Nick Pollard?

  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, you know, I'm just, I'm just an ATM machine. And I think it's, 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

• 1:50:22Nick Pollard?

  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, you know, about getting sober, that you have to change everything. You have to change who you hang out with. You have to change, you know, your entire social strata. You have like all of it has to change. And that's very true. Um, with, with the people please, you know, and now I think about it's probably more challenging. Um, it requires a lot less, it requires a

• 1:51:05Nick Pollard?

  lot more resources and a lot more time because you have a lot more invested in it. Um, the cool thing though, with the highly successful variety. So my, my clients between, you know, like 35 and 55, you know, making a quarter million plus a year.

• 1:51:25Nick Pollard?

  When the habit breaks, it usually breaks for good. And it's, it's like a moment, it's a moment of clarity. So like with people that are not quite at that level that are kind of moving up, you know, my 28 year olds that are doing okay, but not, they're not where they need, where they want to be yet. Right?

• 1:51:46Nick Pollard?

  They tend to take a little longer. For some reason or another, but like with a 35 to 55, you know, 65, whatever you're 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 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, well, I'm gonna do this now. And everybody around him goes, okay, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:52:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a self, there's a self-assuredness that, that 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, like you, you managed to get us here so far. You're the captain of the ship or the, what are the sous chef or whatever, like let's, we will 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,

• 1:53:12Chris Williamson?

  he didn't really steer us wrong there. So I, I reckon we just kind of follow, so you know, the, 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'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.

• 1:53:39Nick Pollard?

  Yep. I think that that's a great way of saying 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?

• 1:53:51Nick Pollard?

  Something I would really want people to know, listening to this, is people do love you.

• 1:53:57Nick Pollard?

  They do.

• 1:53:59Nick Pollard?

  They just don't know how. And so, when you change, especially if you're in that kind of higher status,

• 1:54:10Nick Pollard?

  or if I'm going to be your James status, position, look at me, I'm learning.

• 1:54:20Nick Pollard?

  They have more to lose than you do.

• 1:54:25Nick Pollard?

  So I think there's a component to that of selfishness within your social strata as well.

• 1:54:28Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. People need to keep you happy.

• 1:54:31Nick Pollard?

  Right, like, you know, if you're miserable, and, you know, I had a really great CEO that was in London. We never did work, 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

• 1:54:51Nick Pollard?

  I don't think he knows how easy this is gonna be.

• 1:54:55Nick Pollard?

  Because everybody loves him, right? And he's, you know, he's everything to everybody.

• 1:55:00Nick Pollard?

  Most people in your life that love you don't want you to live like this.

• 1:55:05Nick Pollard?

  They really don't. They benefit from it, you know? Everybody in your life, if you're really in that people please your mindset, if you really do live that way, everybody in your life either benefits directly or indirectly from the behavior, I promise, right? But...

• 1:55:23Nick Pollard?

  If you believe like I do, that the meaning of life is love and adventure,

• 1:55:30Nick Pollard?

  and honesty

• 1:55:33Nick Pollard?

  is what adventure is. If you want to have an adventurous life, just be honest.

• 1:55:40Nick Pollard?

  Then being honest with the people that you love will only make them love you more.

• 1:55:46Nick Pollard?

  And...

• 1:55:51Nick Pollard?

  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 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

• 1:56:39Nick Pollard?

  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 with people like you, you know? I get to meet friends that I never thought I'd meet.

• 1:57:22Nick Pollard?

  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, 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 this show. Really want to meet this guy. And he texted me, he goes, if you get on that fucking show, I swear to God, I won't make another piece of content.

• 1:58:00Nick Pollard?

  So. But why do I get to do this? It's because.

• 1:58:07Nick Pollard?

  I show up 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 know, here I am, right? And, um.

• 1:58:26Nick Pollard?

  Is it harder, um, when you're affluent? Maybe. I don't know. I don't know if it matters. I think the journey is worth it anyway.

• 1:58:38Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I love it. I love it. I really appreciate your energy. I really appreciate the vibe. I think that it is a unseen, 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.

• 1:59:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh, 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, 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 impactful on you. Scott Peck was one of them.

• 1:59:37Nick Pollard?

  Yep. The road less traveled. Yeah.

• 1:59:39Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:59:51Nick Pollard?

  Um.

• 1:59:56Nick Pollard?

  First one is Not Nice by Aziz Ghazari. That was really the, I think that was the first book I ever read that really addressed this kind of people pleasing behavior, really 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 I would say that probably Scott Peck is, I mean, it was one of the number one selling personal growth books of all time, which is The Road Less Traveled.

• 2:00:41Nick Pollard?

  Really a direct punch in the face for making excuses. And, you know, some of the other greats, of course, Mark Manson did a marvelous job with, you know, subtle art and, you know, Atomic Habits, and obviously James Clear and Tim Ferriss and all those guys. But probably those are my top threes. Not Nice by Ghazari 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 is probably the book that will change your life the fastest. If you really sit to

• 2:01:19Nick Pollard?

  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, 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, I love him as an author. I've read, I've read his entire library. Like, 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, as I write a book around this, I just kind of burned out on it. I don't want to, I don't want to read anymore about how I have to have habits. I don't, I don't care. Like, I know, I'm going to think positive.

• 2:02:04Nick Pollard?

  It's fine. I'm going to be fine. You know, I think I've probably absorbed 10,000 hours of this shit. So if I don't know by now, I'm not going to know.

• 2:02:15Chris Williamson?

  Nick Pollard, ladies and gentlemen. Nick, I appreciate the hell out of you. 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?

• 2:02:24Nick Pollard?

  Easiest place to find me is thepeopledispleaser.com. And on Instagram is, you know, thepeopledispleaser. A moniker that I love and would hope to get rid of someday.

• 2:02:36Chris Williamson?

  Nah, it's good for now. It's good for now.

• 2:02:38Nick Pollard?

  Sure. I'll take it for now. But thepeopledispleaser.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. That's saying that. The people this pleaser. So.

• 2:02:50Chris Williamson?

  Nick, I love it.

• 2:02:52Nick Pollard?

  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.

• 2:02:59Chris Williamson?

  Well, you deserve it. Thank you, man. Until next time.

• 2:03:01Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 2:03:12Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 2:03:18Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death. That's what.

• 2:03:22Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:03:26Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 2:03:27Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only appears October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.