How To Stop Being The Nice Guy | The Ultimate Guide (2024)
This article will outline how to stop being labelled as ‘the nice guy.’ I will be examining conversational traits and body language poses you are conveying that affect your ability to build attraction with women you meet.
Covered here:
- Why we exhibit nice guy behaviours (and how they hold us back)
- What the traits and behaviours of a nice guy look like (and how to avoid them)
- Vital ways to stop being categorised as a nice guy by women (that work straightaway)
Knowing that there are simple steps you can take to stop being viewed as ‘the nice guy’ and being friend-zoned by women will give you more confidence. Moreover, you will have more impact and influence on the people you meet daily.
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The nice guy defined
As your dating coach, I’d like to discuss the concept of the “nice guy” with you. The nice guy is someone who often goes above and beyond to please others, especially women, in the hopes of gaining their affection and approval.
While being kind and considerate is commendable, the nice guy tends to put others’ needs before his own, leading to a lack of assertiveness and self-confidence. This behavior can be detrimental to your dating success, as it may cause women to perceive you as less attractive or even take advantage of your kindness.
It’s essential to strike a balance between being genuinely caring and maintaining your self-worth and boundaries. As we work together, we’ll focus on strategies to help you build confidence, assertiveness, and a strong sense of self, allowing you to create deeper connections with women while still being true to yourself.
How to stop being the nice guy?
One immediate way to stop being the nice guy is by knowing when you agree with someone in conversation without actually engaging your mind. In other words, you are acting on autopilot.
Here, it is helpful to recognise that most of us have been educated to be agreeable from a young age. In practice, this means that when someone speaks, we nod, or we may utter a murmur of assent. We are generally accomodating to what that person says in conversation.
Having a basic understanding of why we act this way will make us more conscious of being involuntarily agreeable. Significantly, it will help us put an end to this automatic behaviour.
Dominance hierarchy
If you imagine that for most of our history – and most of our societies – we have been in dominance hierarchies.
In that dominance hierarchy, if you were disagreeable with someone above you, chances are you would be forced out of the tribe. There would be severe ramifications and ultimately death because you no longer have protection from your tribe.
As a result, it is easy to see how disagreeing with anyone above you in that hierarchy would have been an emotionally difficult and daunting prospect. And comparatively, this is what we find in our dating interactions.
Passive behaviours
If we see an attractive girl, we instantly put her above us in that dominance hierarchy. However, as soon as we do that, we start exhibiting behaviours conveying we are beneath her.
These include:
- Nodding when she speaks
- Being too compliant in conversation
- Adopting submissive body language
In effect, this is harming the way that she perceives us. For this reason, we want to try and avoid acting this way in our social interactions with women.
Tired of being a nice guy?
If you are tired of being labelled as a nice guy by women, one thing that will instantly help you is to stop automatically nodding when she is speaking. When you nod your head excessively at everything a woman is saying, you convey that you are not too sure of yourself. It can also come across as subservient and submissive.
Therefore stop overly nodding your head and hold eye contact instead. Doing this will instantly improve your demeanour and prevent you from being consigned straight to the friend-zone.
Shake your head
Another way to stop being the nice guy is by actively disagreeing with your body language. On all my live training courses, we conduct exercises to make you more comfortable displaying a difference of opinion and managing conflict in an attractive way.
It simply involves having a conversation with a girl that you like. When she says something that you disagree with, you shake your head, indicating ‘no’. Your body language demonstrates that you disagree with her. You do not even have to actively say anything; simply shake your head while she is speaking.
The girl will usually recognise that you disagree and will:
- Stop speaking
- Come off autopilot
- Start asking you questions about why you disagree
Break rapport
Acting in this manner is charismatic because you are demonstrating with your body language that you are, in fact, not scared of disagreeing with her; of breaking rapport with her. It transmits that you are higher up in that dominance hierarchy. It will ultimately make you more attractive to all the women you meet.
Is being too nice a weakness?
Being too nice all of the time is a weakness and will not do you any favours with attracting women. Always being a ‘yes man’ and avoiding any conflict or difference of opinion means that you are not being honest with the girl you are speaking to or yourself.
And over the long term, it is easy to see how neglecting your own needs and overvaluing the opinions of another will also detrimentally affect your future relationships.
Moreover, there will be less respect and consideration for your opinion as what woman wants to go unchallenged all of the time?
Show disagreement
One simple but effective way to stop being the nice guy around women is to actively disagree with your spoken words.
I have a great example of this from one of my recent training courses where one of the girls working for me was discussing meditation with one of my clients who has taught meditation for the past 15 years of his life. He interrupted her and just said:
“Listen, I disagree with what you’re saying.”
It was fantastic because it was the first time in his life he had ever been disagreeable with a woman during a conversation. However, my client knew more about the subject in this context because he was a professional and got paid to teach it. He knew, categorically, that he was above her in that hierarchy. This knowledge enabled him to speak confidently from a position of authority and a position of power.
Build sexual tension
When you actively disagree with women, you create the first foundations of sexual tension. This is because of the very fact that you are not being the nice guy. You are not being overly agreeable. Instead, you are someone who has an opinion and is not afraid to share it.
Note here that my client was not being judgemental – being judgemental is when you assign a judgement to something, often without reason. Instead, he had a different opinion and was confident enough to disclose it because this was a subject he knew of.
People who have informed opinions are generally confident, self-assured and they have their life in order. That is powerfully attractive to women, and they will respond to it.
Strong and prolonged eye contact is another way to create sexual tension with women.
Do nice guys finish last in relationships?
Being a nice guy all the time can mean that you, unfortunately, will often finish last in relationships. It may also mean that you struggle even to find a relationship in the first place.
One prime reason for this is that you are not being honest in your outlook. Perhaps you are even afraid to be yourself around women. Over time, any woman will pick up on this inhibition.
The only way to counter this is to deal with any insecurities and alter your body language and traits in a way that makes you come across as more confident and self-assured.
Unconfident body language
When we are around attractive women, many of us tend to put blocks up with our body language. Examples of nervous or unconfident body language include:
- Excessively touching our face
- Crossing our arms in front of us
- Turning to one side to avoid facing her head-on
However, if you are putting a physical boundary between yourself and an attractive girl, it conveys that you lack confidence and feel defensive. You are putting a protective barrier up, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Instead, you need to develop your confidence to allow yourself to be vulnerable in that situation. And the only way of doing that is to spend more time speaking to women you find attractive. Gradually your body language will become more relaxed in their presence.
Confident body language
We have role plays on our Social Attraction confidence courses that specifically aim to do just that.
We look at your body language whilst you are in dialogue with an attractive woman. Then we show you some of the signals you are unintentionally communicating that give away that you lack confidence, and we remedy this.
How to be nice without being a nice guy?
There is a balance that we want to attain with dating. We want to be nice, yet we do not want to fall into the trap of being the ‘nice guy.’ Indeed, the issue with nice guys is that they can give away subtle signs of insecurity that come across as unattractive through body language and conversation. These include seeking women’s approval, avoiding conflict, and generally being too much of a people-pleaser.
One quick way to ensure that you do not fall into nice guy territory around women is to end the interaction first and give a time constraint when you are in a conversation.
In other words, you set an appropriate boundary at the start of any conversation. For example, if you have a phone call with a girl you have met online, say at the start of the dialogue: “I only have 15 minutes.”
Set a boundary
Whenever we are talking to someone, and it is going well, often, we can hang around too long, especially if we are talking to a girl that we find attractive. We have all felt it; that significant moment where you feel the energy drop in the dialogue and the conversation tapers off awkwardly. This energy drop means that the social interaction ends on a low rather than on a high note.
Ending the exchange when it is going well stops this energy drop. Accordingly, when the conversation is flourishing, you interrupt it and make excuses to leave. Doing this allows the girl to remember you at a peak moment and with positivity.
The unspoken effect of acting this way is that you would only do this if you are a confident guy who is used to being around attractive women. Moreover, you are someone who has these peak moments all the time. It is much more appealing than acting like someone who does not often find himself in that situation and is therefore trying to hold on to the moment.
Have a time constraint
Setting a time constraint and ending the interaction first makes you more attractive to women. Additionally, it also:
- Puts less pressure on you during the interaction
- Conveys you lead a busy and attractive lifestyle
- Leaves a positive and lasting impression on her
Having this time limit also keeps you on track. It makes you aware that you only have a set period of time, so you need to make it count. This boundary enables you to put your best foot forward and make a better first impression. Likewise, it will also make the girl you are speaking to more engaged in the conversation as she will know there is a set parameter.
Another excellent little tip is if you wear a watch, then you actively glance at your watch after 10 minutes or so in face-to-face conversation. This subtle glance is a great way to deftly convey that you are in a rush and do not have much time. Again, this keeps everyone on track and ensures the conversation flows. Importantly, it also stops the exchange from ending on that low point where the girl remembers you as ‘nice’ but not in an attractive way.
In sum, ending the interaction first helps ensure that you do not come across as try-hard, too fawning or desperate.
Summary
- Recognise there is a dominance hierarchy. Excessively nodding your head in conversation communicates to the girl that she is above you in the hierarchy.
- Deliberately disagree with her by shaking your head as a way of showing – via your body language – that you disagree with what she is saying.
- Actively disagree with her in conversation. This means when she says something that you disagree with, rather than biting your tongue, you articulate your thoughts and say, “I don’t agree with that.”
- Your body language. Stop blocking; stop crossing your arms or touching your face. Instead, face her straight on and hold eye contact. Eventually, that uncomfortable feeling will diminish, and your body language will be of someone who is confident around women.
- Always end the interaction first. Give a time constraint during any conversation conveying that you have somewhere to be. It will take the pressure off and allow you to end the exchange on a high note.
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Written by Gary Gunn
Gary Gunn is a trained coach, accredited therapist and best selling author. He offers proven, evidence-based dating advice for single men.
He has hosted over 1,000 in-person dating confidence courses across the UK and Europe, as well as over 1,500 online courses.
As the head coach at Social Attraction, he leads the team and oversees the training and courses provided, helping countless men transform their dating lives.
