Redoing the No More Mr. Nice Guy breaking free exercises

This time I plan on completing them. Yay!

It seems rational for people to try to eliminate or hide certain things about himself because he’s embarrassed or ashamed of them. He’s afraid of how it will affect others’ views of him, even if he logically thinks it’ll be fine. Also he could be afraid of hurting others if they found out.

For example, I’m living out in Hollywood, unemployed and not looking for a job. Not the most glamorous thing in the world. Tonight my mom called me and asked how my freelance work was going. I told her I wasn’t doing any, and that I wasn’t looking to do any, I’m just enjoying my life. I wasn’t very assertive, so she didn’t take me as seriously as I would have liked. However, it felt a lot better, for me, to stop lying and telling her that yes, mom, I’m looking for a job; yes, mom, I’m making money.

People try to change who they really are in order to be “better”. It’s self-improvement. If they feel that others’ views of the “perfect self” seem more correct than their own, then they try to change themselves to match the rest of the world’s view of perfection. This is done in spite of the person’s opposing feelings, because those feelings must be wrong because the rest of the world said so. The world says that guys who buy flowers are good, so I bought flowers every week for my ex. She got so many flowers she stopped putting them in vases and let them dry up on my kitchen counter. She said she like them whenever she received them, but her actions said otherwise.