I sat down with the hosts of KneeToKnee to talk about something I see constantly in my work with men, and it's a hard one to name because it doesn't look like a problem on the surface. The nice guy isn't the villain of the story. He's the guy who swore he'd never become his father, or never become the macho jerk who dominates a room and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process. So he goes the other direction. He becomes agreeable, attuned, easy to be around. And somewhere in that swing, he loses track of his own wants entirely.
We got into the origins of this pattern through Dr. Robert Glover's work, No More Mr. Nice Guy, and what I've come to call covert contracts, the hidden expectation that if I'm nice enough to you, you owe me something back. I never asked your consent. I just assumed the deal. That's not kindness. That's control wearing a kind face.
We also talked about what I call heart energy and ball energy, the difference between attunement and boundaries, and why so many men have one without the other. I shared a couple of stories from guys I've worked with, one who spent twenty years holding a family together with nothing left for himself, another who navigated a brutal cancer diagnosis with a group of men who actually showed up for him. Both of them found something on the other side of isolation that surprised them.
We closed on vulnerability, and why going first, before you feel ready, before it's safe, is one of the most useful things a man can practice.
Where in your life are you being nice instead of being honest? What would it cost you to ask for what you actually want instead of hoping someone notices you deserve it?
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Host (KneeToKnee): Welcome to Need a Need, a podcast for men who are ready to stop going it alone and start building the connections that actually move the needle in their health, their career, and relationships. I'm your host, Marc Merritt, and today we're sitting down with Jason Lane, a certified. I'm saying this, a certified. No more Mr. Nice Guy Coach. If you haven't heard of it, neither had I. He works with men to help them break free from the patterns that keep them stuck over giving, avoiding conflict, and building visible contracts that nobody agreed to. Jason spent years in his own work as a man before becoming the person who helps others do the same. Now, before we get into it, if this conversation hits home with you, please hit the like and subscribe buttons. New episodes drop every week, and you won't want to miss what's coming. In this conversation, we get into covert contracts. What nice Guy syndrome actually costs men in their relationships and careers, and why a man going through cancer treatment credits his men's group was getting him through it. This is the stuff men need to talk about, and often we don't. All right, let's get ready and get knee to knee with Jason. Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Knee to Knee. Very excited to have you with us. And as you all know, those of you that paid attention over the last couple years, I always say I'm very excited about our guest. And it's funny, every week, I'm pretty excited about our guest. And so today, as we mentioned earlier, we've got Jason Lange with us. Welcome, Jason. We're happy to have you here.
Jason Lange: So excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Host (KneeToKnee): Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, and we're just going to jump right in. I've got. I've got a question. I know I sent you the kind of the introduction script which we went through a couple of minutes ago, but, you know, the one that I really want to dive into, and I mentioned before we got on the call was the Certified no more Mr. Nice Guy Coach. I've never heard of that certification. Jason, tell us that. Tell us that. Evolution. You know, you were in your twenties. You were working through some struggles, and now you've got to where I. I'm really curious about the certification, about. About that process and where you ended up, where you are now.
Jason Lange: Yeah. So no more Mr. Nice Guy certification has been part of my journey as a man and in men's work, both personally and now, something I support men in professionally. And what it really stems from is the author, Dr. Robert Glover, who's a friend and mentor of Mine, I'm in. I'm in a men's group with him. He wrote this book in 2001 that kind of came out of over a decade as a marriage and family counselor and therapist. And then he started working with men specifically. And essentially what it points to is one of the new archetypes a lot of men fall into. And I'm going to kind of go pop, pop out a little meta here, and then we'll, we'll dig into the specifics. And so, so many men that I work with and I think in culture at large right now, one of the primary kind of models or archetypes of manhood, masculinity that has been in our culture for probably the longest is, is a little tongue in cheek. So. But we kind of call the macho jerk, right? This is the guy who's just my way, the highway. I take what I want, I dominate, I get. I'm not particularly sensitive or in my heart. I often do have a lot of access to my power and my desire, though not necessarily super self conscious. And, you know, even now when you and I are recording this, we still have plenty of examples of the type of harm those kind of men can do in our culture to women, to children, to the environment of just, okay, I don't care about impact. I care about getting what I want. And so where the nice guy, this is kind of my argument more than Dr. Glover's, in a sense formed, is partially in response to that. A whole generations now of men either grew up directly impacted by those men, emotionally abused, physically abused, bullied, or more and more, in the last few generations, the last decade or two, were raised in a culture that was really highlighting the dangers of this, the MeToo movement. I mean, even just, you know, a couple months ago, we had the rape academy. Like, the stuff is still real and in our culture. And so there's a group of men who see that type of man and say, no, I don't want to be that. I do not want to be that guy. I want to be a safe presence. I don't want to cause harm. I don't want to objectify women. I want to be attuned, insensitive, and those. That's one of the origin stories of the nice guy, which is the guy that doesn't want to hurt anyone, right? He wants to be nice. The downside of that guy is often he can get enmeshed. He has poor boundaries, he generally puts other people's needs above his own, and he's often abandoning himself and in the family system, oftentimes where nice guys particularly start to form from an attachment point of view is anytime book just mostly focuses on men. But you know, there's a female equivalent of the good girl. We would kind of say, right, right. As I described, starts with what we call the direction of attunement.
Host (KneeToKnee): Right.
Jason Lange: When we're kids. Optimally, the direction of attunement is from caregiver to child, Meaning they are paying attention to us and attuning to our needs and feelings. Super important for us as children. For a lot of us, in different ways, shapes and forms. Some it's more extreme than others. That goes awry at a young age where in order to stay safe, I have to be attuning to my parent, to my mother or father. What is their emotional state right now and how do I have to be to keep them in a good place, Often for my own survival. But what starts to happen is we learn from a young age to abandon ourselves. Well, actually I need this. I'm feeling sad right now. But dad, he needs me to be happy right now. Because if he thinks I'm upset, he might get upset and he might actually hurt me. So I put on the face and oh daddy, it's so good to see you. I love you. And that's just one of many manifestations of that. But the challenge with that then in the way these two things conflate is we have a whole generation of men who do not know how to stay connected to their truth and desires and boundaries and are constantly abandoning themselves, avoiding conflict over giving and then becoming resentful. And most of us can think of either times in our lives when we've done this or people that we know, right? The kind of biggest platitude. Sometimes I do a lot of relationship work that this expresses itself is right is happy wife, happy life. Which basically means I just gotta make you happy. What I need doesn't matter. And there's a good version of that, obviously, but there's also a pretty deep shadow in that, which is codependency, which is unless you are feeling good and well regulated, I can't feel good and well regulated. So it leads to a Meshman. So Dr. Glover wrote this in a book back in 2001 and it's really interesting in that when he wrote it there weren't a lot of self help books for men. It was like a his. His. The initial publishers were like, that's not gonna sell. No. Like there's no market for that. And since it was released every Year, it sells more copies than the last. And for many men I work with, it's. It's kind of like their Matrix book of like, wow, I didn't even see all the ways I'm doing this. And the. The biggest bite for a lot of guys is actually how nice guy syndrome, as he calls it. This capacity, if I'm gonna be nice to you, is actually somewhat controlling behavior. I'm trying to control your behavior by being a certain way myself. And in the end, it leads to everyone being dissatisfied. So being a Certified no More Mr. Nice Guy Coach is just about how do we start to recover that process.
Host (KneeToKnee): So how do you balance that? Right, because there's the ultra masculine guy that's out there chest thumping and, you know, hair on their back. Forgive me, anybody who's got a hairy back, you know, that particular individual to the person who's so ultra nice. As you talk about that, in reality, it's almost the doormat thing where I just. Exactly. But how do you. That's two sides of the same person. It can be. So how do you regulate that in the sense. So that. That way you are still being true to your own identity, to true to being a man, a masculine man, but still be nice because you don't have to be a jerk to be nice.
Jason Lange: Exactly. This is the work for us men right now in so many ways, where there's so much pain in our culture because there's not a lot of modeling of what you're talking about here and how I would name it in a lot of ways. I mean, it's kind of funny, but we use this term so much in men's work is we have our heart energy, right? The capacity to be in our heart, to be sensitive, to be feeling, to attune to you. That's what nice guys tend to have a lot of. That's what the macho jerks, so to speak, have almost none of. But then we have what we kind of call literally our balls, our ball energy, the energy from our lower body, our gut, where boundaries are set, where we feel desire, where we can say no, where we can move towards what we want. Right? Without shame. And that's what the jerks have a lot of and that the nice guys often have very little of. So what you're speaking towards is how do we balance the two, right? How do I move from a place of being in touch with what I want and desire and have a capacity to set boundaries and say no and ask for the things I want and say no to the Things I don't while staying in relationship and being aware of impact. It's a big part of what we're kind of talking about there. So I'm allowed to feel what I want to feel and go for it, but I have to be aware of the impact on you, on my kids, on my environment. And learning to navigate those two things is really the key. And the overall frame that I sometimes use from this is it's a shift from controlling to relating. Relating and controlling are two very different energies. And the funny thing about nice guys, right, is we like to associate. We're nice, but there's some very real ways where they're not very nice because they're not honest and they're not straightforward. And Dr. Glover coined this amazing term in his book that when most men hear it, they're like, oh, my God. Yes. He calls it covert contracts. And a covert contract is when I have enrolled you in some kind of contract or agreement that I've never asked your consent for, and I have an expectation around. So the most primary version of this, you know, we see in our culture sometimes, is, oh, if I'm just nice enough to you, in this case, someone I want to date, you're going to give me sex back. Right. Like, this is an actual thing. Like, if I pay for the dates and I'm really nice and I always listen to you, the expectation is you're going to give me something back or, oh, yeah, I'm going to do these things for you.
Host (KneeToKnee): The old adage of killing with kindness.
Jason Lange: Yeah, or exactly.
Host (KneeToKnee): Just to the extreme. To the extreme, yes.
Jason Lange: Not.
Host (KneeToKnee): I mean, it's. Obviously, we need to be kind, but when it's so over the top, that. And. And if. And if we're watching and if you're aware, we all can recognize when. Oh, that guy.
Jason Lange: Yeah, totally.
Host (KneeToKnee): Right. We could. You can pick that out, definitely.
Jason Lange: But yet. So it becomes this thing, right, where what nice guys often do is they avoid being direct. So we'll start doing things for people we're in relationship with, with a hidden expectation that we're going to get something back. And when we don't get it back, we start to feel frustrated, resentful, unseen. The challenge, though, is I've never actually asked you if you're open for that deal. So it's not particularly honest, and it's also not as vulnerable. So when I say relating versus controlling, part of what we're shifting towards, it's actually being more direct about our needs and our desires. Not saying you have to do this you owe me this. It's, wow, hey, I would really like X, Y, or Z. When we're direct in that way and relating, the risk of that is, guess what? You might say, no, I have no desire to reciprocate in that way or give you that or whatever that might be. And then I have to deal with, you know, the grief of that or the anger of that or whatever that might be. But that's very different than a covert contract where I'm like, well, yeah, I'm just gonna keep doing a. You know, I'm gonna keep picking you up from the airport every time you call and ask me, buddy, because then you're going to have to show up for me in X, Y, or Z when he's like, no, I have no desire to show up for you in X, Y, or Z. If you don't want to pick me up at the airport, just be clear. Say you don't want to pick me up at the airport.
Host (KneeToKnee): Right.
Jason Lange: And so this all swirls together into a very kind of common archetype of a man right now who feels like he's giving, giving, giving in the world, often doesn't feel seen, isn't getting what he wants a lot of times in his relationships or in his career, and is often quite exhausted because he has almost no capacity to set boundaries. So, nice guy. Recovery is really about learning to bring our full selves back online and be a lot more direct and open and earnest with our requests so people can choose through consent, how to relate to us.
Host (KneeToKnee): Yeah, you're right. When you said earlier that once a guy hears the definition and explanation of the COVID contract, think how many times we. How many times I. I can't help but think, how many times have I done that? You know, whether it is. Whether it's in. Whether it's in my. In my personal life or my professional life, we all tend to. We get to that point, we're like, if I do this, then this will happen, and there's no guarantee that'll happen.
Jason Lange: Yeah, exactly.
Host (KneeToKnee): So.
Jason Lange: And. And then we get mad at people if it doesn't start happening and they don't understand why. Right. We start to withdraw. Or we get mad because we had an expectation, but they're like, how? That's not fair because I never knew you had that expectation.
Host (KneeToKnee): Right.
Jason Lange: You never asked me to join in this contract consensually.
Host (KneeToKnee): Yeah, it's just my. You know, I say this a lot in podcast episodes. All right? My head is spinning right now because there's a new concept that's been presented, right.
Jason Lange: And you kind of go, that's a great one.
Host (KneeToKnee): Really, really interesting. Yeah, yeah. So I'm really curious as well. One of the things that I, that I was looking at is, you know, lots of men listening have built their identity around being self sufficient, not needing anyone. What do you see happening, men, especially with the men's group? You know, you're a big advocate for, for a man being a part of a men's group. So what do you see in that process to help that individual and to help them through that lone wolf to realizing that they do need those connections rather than.
Jason Lange: Yeah, it's a, it's a journey, but I think it's one of the most important journeys we can go on right now as men. Because it's not just like a, oh, wow, wouldn't that be nice kind of cool thing like this. It has actual impact and harm for us as men. Right. Suicide rates are three or three and a half to four times higher in men. Men who strongly associate with some of the traditional stoic masculine values of which no, be self sufficient. Don't let emotions get you down. Like all of that stuff, they're like, I think it's almost like twice as likely to commit suicide. The downstream effects of all that are a sense of feeling alone and isolated. Right. In 91, it was like 3% of men reported not having a close friend. By 2021, it was already up to 15%. And I'm pretty sure if they did it now with all the fallout of COVID and AI chatbots and social media, I think it would be even higher. And the, again, the harm of that is, right, there's this famous study that men in particular who report feeling lonely and isolated are much more likely to die of heart disease. It's basically as damaging as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. It has that much of a stress impact on your system. And we see it all the time. Right. There's obviously some physiological stuff there and
Host (KneeToKnee): we've reported on that. Yeah, we've talked about that in several episodes. That exact status, 15 cigarettes a day.
Jason Lange: There you go.
Host (KneeToKnee): Is the impact of extreme loneliness. And, and yeah, yeah, we've talked a lot about that in the podcast. So you know what?
Jason Lange: I.
Host (KneeToKnee): One of, one of the things our listeners love to hear is really some. A story. I want to hear a narrative of the sense of, you know, whether it's someone that you directly know that went from this, this on their own lone wolf, pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. All the way through to recognizing that, oh, my gosh, there is a strength in these connections with this brotherhood that we have their area. Can you share with us some. A specific story that you're aware of?
Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, it's one of the most common journeys. Clients of mine that I get into men's groups can report and, you know, a few. Just a few stories that come to mind. One, a client where I've worked with for about a year, you know, he came to me to do private coaching. He was really skittish about getting into community with men, partly because men had hurt him in the past. Right? So this is the double layer that sometimes happens for men's. And so he was used to literally holding the weight of the world on his shoulders solo. He was just not used to. I mean, since he was a kid, he was the stabilizing force in his family system, right? He. He, like, held it together, and we did some private work, and we went very deep. And, you know, about three quarters of the way through, I was like, you know, it was gonna be time for him to renew if he wanted to do more sessions with me. And I was honest with him. I was like, I am happy to do more sessions with you, man. And here's this other thing that I think would serve you even more deeply. And it was a men's group. I was gonna be running a men's program. And he was in the midst of an extraordinarily painful divorce at the time that he had kind of been stuck in this relationship for about 20 years. Neither of them were happy, but he had no network. He had nothing.
Host (KneeToKnee): Right.
Jason Lange: So it was this relationship, or I'm literally alone was kind of where his life was at. And thankfully, he heard the call. He trusted me. He jumped into this group, and he went very deep with this group of men, Finished the program, stayed, stayed with them. And now he is the most active participant in the group. He is exiting his relationship. He's in his own apartment. He's living a life where he feels so much happier and free. And really, the only difference in a lot of ways between then and now is he has somewhere to put his emotions.
Host (KneeToKnee): Right.
Jason Lange: It's a funny phrase, but I say it all the time. One of the reasons us men isolate is we don't know what to do with our. A, we often don't know what our feelings are because no one taught us. And B, we don't know where to put them because we're afraid that they're going to be so heavy or so Big they're going to burden the people around us. And we don't want to do that. Right. We're nice guys.
Host (KneeToKnee): Or, or there's the other aspect of that, you know, having been a, having been a wildland firefighter myself, the end. And in the first responder community, often it's not that, you know, you don't want to burden somebody else, but if I share and open up now, I am vulnerable and I'm showing weakness in a masculine, very masculine society in that aspect, in the first responder world. But that leaks over into the real world as well. So if you're in a business meeting, you're. When you're with peers, very competitive salespeople. Right. You start opening up about, well, this is where I'm struggling. Dude, you suck. Right, exactly right. And so I think there's that third aspect that you're talking about. You know, you brought up the other two, but I think there's at that one where sometimes feel vulnerable.
Jason Lange: Yeah. But point being, he had somewhere where he could feel now.
Host (KneeToKnee): Right.
Jason Lange: And what's beautiful about that is then he has a safe space with men who can hold him in that. And then he doesn't have to drag all of that emotional content with him through the rest of his life. So he literally, it sounds a little woo woo, but in the process, I've seen him, you know, his, that, that group ended six months ago and the formal part, but now he's in a men's group with these men. He has come alive like there's actual life force in his body. He's excited to be alive again, he's taking risks in the world, he feels more space in his body, he feels connected to the men around him. And that is a profound example. There's another guy I worked with who again, kind of very similar to my background, came from a more neglectful household, just learned to keep everything inside kind of more stoic, not necessarily holding up the weight of the world, but pretty isolated in his own way. And he came in, did the group after having done some work with me and within, I think about two months of the program ending and him being in this men's group, he got a very challenging cancer diagnosis and was able to navigate that entire process, which took about a year and a half, chemo, all of the things with a group of men who gave a shit about him and literally could hold him through the process. And sometimes all that meant was he was in the hospital, you know, poison being pumped through him to kill the cancer, and someone sat with him on zoom, just so he wasn't alone from his men's group.
Host (KneeToKnee): Yeah.
Jason Lange: That kind of connection allowed him to navigate something that he was like, if this had fucking happened, you know, three, four months ago when I didn't have this, it would have been a way more challenging experience. So once guys get into the safety of it, they discover it's actually the antithesis of what we often think. It doesn't make me weaker. It doesn't even, as I often argue, make us just more resilient, which means, oh, I can take the hits. This is kind of a fancy term, but being in a powerful group makes us antifragile. Whereas challenge comes in. We actually get stronger through the process. Right. We actually learn more about ourselves, get more resourced, and we leave these intense experiences able to handle even more in our life. And that is so countercultural to what we're taught as men. Particularly, you know, you and I are both here in the States, and we got this romantic myth of the Marlboro man out on the plains. The rough cowboy, doesn't eat anyone. Tough as nails, you know, just moves through the world with grit. And the honest truth that. That, you know, kind of myth, never. That romantic ideal, never really points to is those guys often die at the bottom of a bottle alone in old age.
Host (KneeToKnee): Yeah, right?
Jason Lange: Like, they don't. We don't show that part, but we
Host (KneeToKnee): show when it looks cool.
Jason Lange: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. We. We sometimes even. We always gotta show it's cool.
Host (KneeToKnee): So.
Jason Lange: Yeah, but. But it's this change to all the things most men that come to me and even myself in my journey tell ourselves we want. I want to be an effective leader. I want to have a purposeful career. I want to have a meaningful relationship. All these things we. We want, turns out we can actually get them faster when we're in a community of strong men, because it does two things.
Host (KneeToKnee): I love that. A love that.
Jason Lange: It helps us get back to center when we're knocked off course, right? When it's just, oh, my God, I had the worst week of my life. You know, my father died this year. My men held me through that, right? They were able to hold me through that process. So I was able to come back to myself at an appropriate pace. So when we're down, we get the support we need to just get resourced again. And then they also help us in the other direction of, hey, you know what a group's gonna do is they're gonna sit you down, they're gonna be like, what is it you really want. What do you really want in your life? This is the core of men's work in so many ways. What. How do you have to live your life so that when you die, you die free, without any contraction or regret? And most men, when we get really honest, we find an intuitive sense of, there's something I need to create or experience or a way I want to be. And it's so tender and it's so vulnerable. And it's not based on how big our bank account is or how hard our. How rock hard our abs are or any of that.
Host (KneeToKnee): It's.
Jason Lange: It's much deeper. Usually a good men's group is going to give you feedback and hold you accountable to staying on that course and let you know when you've started to drift. And that feedback, paradoxically what we kind of call carefrontation or challenge with love of, like, hey, you know, you said, da, da, da, da, da, and yet the last six months, you've been yada, yada, yada, like, what's going on there, though it can be confronting for us. What I've seen now over decades is that is one of the unique textures of masculine love that we're all craving. Someone who cares about us so much, they'll actually call us on our bullshit. They'll say, hey, dude, you got a big old piece of spinach in your teeth right now. You've been walking around with. And did no one tell you that? You're like, ah, no one told me that. I'm so embarrassed. But I now trust you more because you told me the thing I really needed to hear. And not to shame me, not out of competition, but because you love me and you want the best for me.
Host (KneeToKnee): Yeah. Well, Jason, thank you so much. I'm head is spinning, things are thinking, and so I appreciate you coming on with us.
Jason Lange: Happy to.
Host (KneeToKnee): Our question that everyone knows now is what is one thing that someone can do today to build deeper connections with those around them?
Jason Lange: Yeah, this is so great. And what I'm going to lead with might sound a bit like a platitude, but it's, I think, particularly for men, but this goes for anyone, really, and it's the willingness to lead with vulnerability in our culture right now, so to not wait. And what I mean by that is most people I know, particularly men, but again, women too, and anyone, and really anywhere on the gender spectrum, are dying for authenticity, like dying to have real conversations about real things. But we're all afraid. Well, I don't want to be the one that goes first and look like an idiot or get made fun of or whatever. And so one of the most powerful things we can do now is lead with vulnerability and go first. So often what I tell men is amazing. If you can find a men's group, get into a men's group, like, great. But even if you're not anywhere near that, most anyone in their lives can think of someone else they have some kind of familiarity with or relationship with that you just have a bit of an intuition. There's some connection there. I like this person. I'd like to go deeper with them. Like, I feel like I want to. I'm curious about who they are. And you just call them up on the phone and you say you want to get together for a coffee or go for a walk. I'll love to go a little deeper with you. And then when it comes to time, you go first. And all I mean by that is oftentimes two things can really deepen a conversation. And it starts with you revealing, where are you in pain? Literally, where are you in pain in your life? And what are you most yearning for? Yearning is such a great word because it's not just about like, oh, I want to get a new car. It's like, I am yearning for true love or I'm yearning to not spend time on my computer all day, every day. And you just go first, and then once you've shared, guess what? And then you reflect back and, hey, what about you? Where are you in pain? What are you yearning for? And you can drop that connection after that to an even deeper level by then starting to talk about after you've shared in that way, in real time, what does it feel like to be with each other talking about real things? This is the. What changes any relational moment is we actually start to talk about the experience of what it feels like to be with each other. So you open the door a little bit to some depth and then you talk about that. The connection rocket will often.
Host (KneeToKnee): Yeah, definitely.
Jason Lange: To outer space.
Host (KneeToKnee): Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Jason, for sharing that with us and your thoughts, everything. There we go. I just want to express appreciation for you to come on and for those of you that have tuned in to need a knee. Thank you once again for supporting us as we continue to grow the channel. I would ask that you please share, share this out. That way we can continue to grow and get the message out to as many men as possible. And so thank you very much and we will catch you all on the next go around. Thanks again.
Jason Lange: Jason awes.
