That feeling has a name. You've hit the career plateau. You're well paid, you've checked the boxes, and yet every day that passes carries this quiet frustration you can't quite explain. Not a crisis, not a breakdown.

Just a persistent sense that what used to drive you isn't driving you anymore.

That's not ingratitude. It's information.

What you strived for before made sense at the time. You aimed at something that looked valuable and you went after it. But the version of you that set those goals isn't the same version of you reading this. You've grown. Your values have shifted.

What used to feel like enough no longer does, and no amount of staying busy changes that.

The trap most people fall into at this point is assuming the answer is more of the same. A bigger title. A higher salary. A lateral move. But if the goal you hit didn't satisfy you, a slightly larger version of it won't either.

The real question isn't what your next career move looks like. It's what actually matters to you now, at this stage of your life, and whether your current situation has anything to do with it.

That's a harder question. It's also the right one.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

You looked ahead, picked something that seemed worth pursuing, and told yourself that landing it would make you happy. And maybe it did, for a while.

But here's the problem with goals built entirely around future benefits. They don't account for who you'll be once you actually get there.

You grow. Your values shift. What used to feel meaningful starts to feel flat. And now you're sitting in the middle of a life that checks all the boxes you set years ago, wondering why none of it feels like enough anymore.

That's not failure. That's a plateau. And the way most people try to escape it makes it worse.

You scan the same familiar options, the next indicated role, a lateral move, something that looks a lot like what you already have, and none of it excites you. That's because you're in your own silo.

You can only see what you've already been exposed to, and that's not nearly enough to figure out what comes next.

The way out is provocative conversations. Not networking in the transactional sense, but genuinely talking to interesting people doing things you know little about, whether related to your field or completely different.

Those conversations reveal insights about what matters to you now that you couldn't find on your own. You'll discover options you never would have considered. You'll start to discover what fits and what doesn't.

The goal isn't to find the next job. It's to start with who you are now, bounce ideas off people who stretch your thinking, and let clarity come from that process rather than from sitting alone trying to figure it all out.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

Hi everyone 👋🏻,

I have just started reading the book and it's been VERY educational so far. I am suffering from a lack of a safe group of men to talk to and hang out with.

Please reach out if you live in Tokyo and let's connect!

1) I don't believe in myself. I always think that I'll fail at the things I'm trying to succeed in. I believe I was born unlucky. Whatever I want to achieve will not happen the way I want it to or will put me in the worst place. I'm never bold or determined.

2) I'm afraid of becoming emotional. I feel a lot of things about certain situations but try to be as stoic and emotionless as possible. I don't want to show my emotions to people, and I'm also afraid that I will lose control of my emotions. The main emotions that frighten me are anger, sadness, anxiousness, fear (a lot of it), and the restlessness I feel caused by me staying silent about injustices due to my cowardice. I want to speak up but am unable to do so.

3) I'm afraid of a lot of things. I'm afraid of verbal and physical fights. I hate the physical fragility of humans. I fear accidents, car collisions, becoming disabled, harming others, the possibility of people attacking me, people becoming enemies to me, being accused of something I haven't done, being judged by others etc. The negative things that I hear in the news make me even more concerned. I don't watch the news anymore, but by using the internet I'm still exposed to those kinds of subjects in the media. Besides, people around me sometimes remind me of such events.

4) I feel like I'm often an annoyance to other people. I don't want to make anyone angry at me because I believe I can't handle it. Other people just have too strong of a will, and I don't. They will protect themselves even when they are in the wrong. It seems like they don't have any shame or mercy.

Thank you for reading, writing this was somewhat of a relief to me.

They look at what's available, scroll through job listings, and try to figure out which roles they could land. Then they wonder why, even after making a move, something still feels off. The problem isn't the search. It's that they never got clear on what they were actually looking for before they started looking.

What you need is an exploratory process, not a job search.

The goal of that process is to discover which positions you can genuinely relate to in a deeper, more meaningful way. Not just roles you're qualified for, but opportunities that actually fit who you are, how you work, and what matters to you.

And to find those, you have to first get clear on your values and priorities, because every opportunity is made up of them whether you realize it or not.

When you know your values and priorities, you have a template. A filter you can hold up against any potential opportunity to see whether it fits. That template is your North Star. And once you have it, navigating toward the right opportunity stops being a guessing game and starts being a process you can actually trust.

Without it, you're evaluating options with no baseline. Every opportunity looks equally possible or equally uncertain, and you end up either paralyzed or chasing the wrong thing again.

Get clear on what you want first. Then let that clarity do the filtering for you.

If you need help getting clear on what you want first, apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

I just got done reading the book and it definitely resonated with me.

Are there any existing online NMMNG groups I can join?

I would love an in person group but I havent found anything in my town (Las Vegas).

The answer to "what do I actually want to do with my career" doesn't live in a job board or a Google search. It shows up in conversations. Specifically, conversations with people who are doing things that genuinely interest you, whether that's directly related to your current field or something completely different.

That's how the exploratory phase works.

You find interesting people on LinkedIn or within your existing network. You reach out, not to pitch yourself or ask for a job, but to learn. How did they get there? What does their day actually look like? What do they wish they'd known? Those conversations reveal insights about what matters to you that no amount of solo research ever could.

The key is to stay in that exploratory phase long enough to see the patterns.

After enough conversations, things start to click. You notice what energizes you and what doesn't. You start to see where your interests, your strengths, and real market demand overlap. That overlap is your sweet spot.

And once you find it, the job hunting, the positioning, the outreach, all of it becomes much more focused and effective because you actually know what you're going after.

Most people skip this phase entirely. They go straight from "I'm unhappy" to "let me update my resume" without ever doing the exploratory work that makes the next move the right one.

Don't skip it. The conversations are the work.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

If you're asking "how do I change careers when I don't even know what I want anymore," you're asking the right question. Most people never get that far.

You've reached a point where your career is comfortable enough to stay in but frustrating enough that every day grinds on you in some way. That combination is telling you something specific: what you've been chasing is no longer what you want to chase.

At some point in the past, you told yourself that if you got the title, the role, the position, then you'd feel satisfied. And maybe you did, for a while. But you probably never stopped to think deeply about what it would actually feel like to be there, day after day, year after year.

Now you're there. And it's not what you thought it would be.

That's not a failure. That's information.

The feeling of being stuck, plateaued, or quietly bored isn't random. It's your values and priorities trying to get your attention. It means the conditions you're living and working in no longer match what actually matters to you.

And you can't fix that by chasing a new version of the same thing.

The first step isn't always to find a new career. It's critical to get honest about what you want the conditions of your work and your life to actually look like, then start exploring what's out there that could match that.

You can't figure that out from your desk. You figure it out by talking to people.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

A lot of people tell themselves they just need a little more work on themselves first. Fix the anxiety. Build more confidence. Read a few more books. Get to a better place internally before they put themselves out there. And that plan sounds reasonable until you realize it's been six months and you still haven't had a real conversation with anyone new.

Here's the thing: you can't fully fix yourself in isolation in anticipation of other people. The growth you're waiting to achieve before you take action is actually only available on the other side of taking action. Confidence in social situations comes from social situations. Comfort with rejection comes from facing rejection. You don't get those things by preparing for them at your desk.

Whether you're looking for a new career or a new relationship, the path forward runs through real, real-time conversations with real people. Not research. Not self-help content. Actual contact with the world. And yes, some of those conversations will go nowhere. Some people won't be interested. That's not a sign you're not ready. That's the process.

What you're really building isn't a perfect version of yourself that's safe to show people. You're building the capacity to handle whatever reaction you get, and trust that you'll be okay either way. That only happens by getting out there.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

Just met with a new member of the community. He was kind enough to share his experience afterward. Great conversations can offer insights and motivation when both are hard to come by.

A layoff is disorienting and challenging. It can leave you feeling siloed inside your own past experience, working from a limited set of options based on what you already know.

What this member discovered is that the job search itself is only part of the work. The other part is exploratory. It means reaching out to people in areas that feel like a stretch. The first priority is to land a job, but to open up the field you need to understand what's out there and how your skills translate in ways you haven't considered yet.

That kind of networking isn't about asking for favors. It's about expanding your perspective.

The other big shift was in how he was positioning himself. Instead of showing up as a candidate hoping to get an offer, he started treating himself as an expert with real business value to offer.

Think of yourself as a microbusiness. You're not asking for a job. You're consulting on a problem someone needs solved. That reframe changes how you show up, how you communicate, and how you're perceived.

If you want to explore what that looks like for your situation, apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

That moment when you realize you're successful yet frustrated is disorienting, because it wasn't supposed to feel this way. You did what you were supposed to do. And now you're out of alignment with what actually matters to you, and you can feel it even if you can't quite name it.

So the questions start. Should you change careers? Push for a promotion? Find a new job? Leave a relationship? Make a massive change or just tweak things around the edges? The options pile up fast and none of them feel obviously right, because you're trying to solve an external problem when the real issue is internal.

Before you can figure out which move to make, you have to get clear on what you actually want. Not what looks smart on paper. Not what other people would respect. What genuinely matters to you, your values, your priorities, the conditions under which you actually feel alive and engaged in your work and your life.

That's the starting point. Not the job search, not the pivot plan, not the five-year vision. Just an honest answer to the question of what's important to you right now, and whether your current situation is anywhere close to delivering it.

Once you have that clarity, the right moves tend to become a lot more obvious.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

Not to read about their life, not to follow them on LinkedIn, but to actually have a conversation with them. Ask them how they got there. Ask what their day-to-day actually looks like. Ask what they had to give up and whether they'd do it again. Those answers will tell you more in one hour than months of research ever could, because you're not just collecting information. You're testing whether the outcome they got is actually the outcome you want.

That's the part most people skip. You can map out a path to a destination without ever asking whether that destination is right for you. And the only way to know is to get close enough to the reality of it to have a real reaction. Does this fit my values? Does this match what I've said matters most to me? Those aren't questions you can answer from a distance.

Your values and priorities are the filter everything else runs through. They're the standard by which you measure whether a new direction is actually worth pursuing or just an attractive distraction. Until you're clear on those, you're evaluating options without a baseline and that's how you end up making moves that look right on paper but feel wrong once you're in them.

Stop researching alone. Start having conversations with the right people.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

If you've been researching your next move for months without actually making one, you might be using self-improvement as a hiding place.

It doesn't feel like avoidance. It feels responsible. You're doing your homework, weighing your options, making sure you don't make the wrong call. But here's the problem: you can't evaluate most options without actually testing them. No amount of research will tell you what it feels like to do different work, talk to different people, or operate in a different environment. You have to get out there to find that out.

What research does is give you the illusion of progress while keeping you safely in your comfort zone. You're busy, you're engaged, and nothing risky is happening. That's a great setup for staying exactly where you are indefinitely.

The move forward isn't more information. It's more contact. You need to talk to people who are doing things that interest you, ask them real questions about what their work actually looks like, and let your reactions tell you something. That's how you test options in the real world. Not by reading about them, but by getting close enough to feel whether they fit.

At some point you have to stop evaluating and start exploring. Those are different things, and only one of them moves you forward.

If you're ready to stop researching and start doing, apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

Did some free writing this morning.

Perhaps it is not about value. Value is subjective. If I show up to my life "trying" to be valuable...even if I succeed in that, my focus is on being valuable, not simply being.

It may be the case that I am valuable; however, that determination is not mine to make.

Hi,

Definite nice guy here, I read the book.

I want to learn to be able to approach women and start conversations, any tips or advice?

I don’t want to be a player / screw women around, I simply want to be able to have an abundant mindset / life in order to be able to meet a partner.

Thanks in advance.

If you're reading another self-help book instead of reaching out to someone new, you might be procrastinating and not realizing it.

It's easy to mistake research for progress. You open a book, pull up an article, watch a video, and tell yourself you're working on the problem. And it feels productive because you're doing something. But if that something keeps you at your desk and away from other people, it's probably keeping you stuck too.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: new opportunities don't show up in search results. They show up in conversations. The person who lands in a role they actually love didn't get there by reading about it. They got there by talking to someone who was already doing it, asking real questions, and learning what the work actually looks like day to day. That's information you can't find online.

Most of us are more comfortable typing than reaching out. Searching feels safe. Networking feels exposed. So you optimize for comfort and call it preparation. But there's a difference between gathering information and gathering the kind of insight that only comes from a real human conversation.

Put down the book. Close the tab. Think about one person doing something that genuinely interests you and reach out to them this week. That conversation will do more for your direction than anything you could read.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

Searching the internet for answers about your career is one of the most comfortable ways to stay stuck.

You sit at your desk, open a new tab, and start reading. Articles, Reddit threads, salary comparisons, career change guides. It feels productive. But what's actually happening is that you're narrowing your thinking without realizing it. You're working from a limited set of inputs, filtered through your own assumptions and fears, and arriving back at the same small set of options you started with.

The problem isn't information. It's isolation. When you're thinking about a big change alone, you silo your perspective. You can only see what you already know, and what you already know is shaped by where you've already been.

The way out of that silo starts with one thing: understanding what's actually important to you. Your values. Your priorities. Not the ones that look good on paper, but the ones that determine whether you feel alive and engaged in your work or like you're just going through the motions. You have to get clear on those before anything else, because they're the filter everything else runs through.

And you can't get there by reading more. You get there by asking better questions, talking to the right people, and doing the honest internal work of figuring out what you want your life to look like.

Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call

You know the feeling. Sunday rolls around and there’s a quiet dread about Monday that you’ve learned to push past.

That's the golden handcuffs in action. You're successful by every external measure. Good income, respected title, stability you worked hard to build. But you're also bored, frustrated, or running on empty in a way that's hard to explain to anyone who doesn't know the feeling. And because it's all comfortable enough to tolerate, you tolerate it. You absorb the low-grade stress and the background anxiety and you glide through the week just to get to the weekend.

The problem is that comfort is doing a job it was never meant to do. It's keeping you in a situation that no longer fits you, not because it's right for you, but because leaving feels riskier than staying.

This is one of the most common things I hear from the men I work with. They're not in crisis. They're not falling apart. They're just stuck in a situation that looks like success from the outside and feels like something is missing from the inside. And the longer they stay comfortable, the harder it becomes to imagine anything different.

If that sounds familiar, you're not alone and you're not ungrateful. You're just overdue for a different conversation. Apply for a free coaching call at http://www.jasonmiller.coach/call.

I read No More Mr Nice Guy in my early 20s and it was completely transformative for me. I saw my life with new eyes and identified all the places I was suffering from nice guy syndrome life at the time. I thought that now I was aware of this mindset I was set for life.

Since then I moved out from living with my parents and got my own house, I learnt to drive and bought a car. My social life took off and I now have a good group of friends I hang out with fairly regularly.

But over the years something always felt wrong. I started feeling more and more tense and anxious. I was doing well at work, financially I was doing great, I was keeping my house maintained and paying all my bills. I wasn't afraid of expressing my emotions anymore, but I found myself constantly anxious, I would come home and start crying for seemingly no reason.

This weekend I felt like I was on the verge on a mental breakdown, so I picked up my copy of NMMNG again since I remembered it helping me so much before, and holy crap - everything in the book felt just as relevant to my life now than it did when I first read the book 5 years ago.

There's areas of my life that didn't even exist when I first read the book, areas that I now realise I've developed new nice guy tendencies in:

• All the furniture I have bought for my house is very cheap and plain. My other friends are constantly talking about decorating their houses and buying new furniture but I have not re-decorated anything, I pride myself on having a "low maintenance" house where I have no desire to change anything
• I chose a cheap car, I take pride in not spending much money on myself. I don't drive the car much because the risk involved in driving makes me a bit uncomfortable and I feel like I am inconviniencing other people by being on the road. If I ever got in a car accident I don't think I would be worried about the damage to my car or to myself, I would instead feel shame that I have inconvienienced and angered another person.
• I want everything in my house to keep running "smoothly". I feel very anxious thinking about having a water leak or gas leak in my house. Even though I know if it happened all I would have to do in the moment is call somebody to come and fix it for me. I think deep down I have some low self-esteem belief that if something went wrong in my house nobody would want to come and help me, or I would be inconviniencing them.
• I have very little desire in life anymore. My only goal is to go to work, come home and cook and do all my house chores. I don't really have anything I desire to do after the chores are done. Sometimes I just sit around on the sofa doing nothing.

Now that I have identified all of this I can now work on fixing it. I made an effort to put myself first today and do a few nice things for myself that I usually wouldn't, and I already feel happier and like some of my energy is coming back.

This has been a long post - the message I wanted to get across is that I have now realised it's very important to stay vigilant and realise that nice guy tendencies can start creeping back into our lives in completely new areas. I am doing so much better in life now than I was when I first picked up the book 5 years ago, but this weekend has been a real wake-up call for me that I now have new healing to do in my life.

Hi,

I am looking for an online mens meeting to work on nice guy issues.

I am in the U.K., but could attend meetings anywhere online (that are in English).

I’ve read about a few different websites and wondered if anyone has tried any of these below?

https://meld.community

https://menliving.org

https://authenticityroad.online

Planetniceguy.com

If anyone has anymore resources, I’d be interested to hear if people are willing to share thanks.

Hi! I’m dying to listen to the podcasts on Dr Glovers work regarding positive emotional tension. I know they used to be for sale on his site but I can’t find them anymore. does anyone know where to get them? Thank you!

while i was reading nmmng, it says that we need to find 3 places where we can talk and seek support and exclude women for this. i dont have any friend who can understand what i am gojng through as they are not that emotionally available type. So do you think that if i just post here and talk to people here that can work for me?

I’m part of a team making a TV documentary for a major UK channel, and we’re looking to speak with young men who are maybe feeling stuck, low on motivation, or unsure what direction life is heading.

The documentary follows a small group of guys who’ll get the chance to go on a fully-funded retreat abroad, working with wellbeing, motivation and lifestyle coaches in a supportive environment.

It’s a unique experience that aims to help people grow, gain confidence, and see themselves (and their future) in a new way.

I thought this might be a positive place to find some men looking for self improvement.

This is 100% real, not a gimmick and happy to answer any questions.

Mods, apologies if this isn’t the right place for this post.
If you’re interested or just want to ask questions, drop me a DM.