HealthyGamerGG - The TRUTH about Incels

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Today Dr. K talks about the emotional impact of dating not working, what you can do, processing these emotions, and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We'd like to think that we're rational human beings, but the truth of the matter is that the most powerful moments in our life in terms of when we learn lessons are emotional in nature. Mildly Incelish rant. I was recently told by a girl I was seeing that she wanted to be with someone she could be proud of, someone who is better than herself. Not me, according to her. First of all, ouch. Not the first time this happens. I'm not tall or muscular. I do not exude confidence. I do not behave in the most conventional. manly way. It's not who I am nor who I want to be. I've cut ties with my family years ago. I've struggled with anxiety my entire life and also depression in recent years. My support network is incredibly small and I'm having to learn alone as an adult a lot of basic stuff most kids learn from their parents, self-love, confidence relationship skills. Despite all that crap, I'm an engineer in one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I make 20 times my country's

average salary and am on my way to retire before 40. I taught myself English through games and music. I lost over 50 pounds in the last year and am now working to get a body I can be proud of. I've been working on my mental health since the beginning of the pandemic. Anxiety is no longer a struggle and despite all this rant, the world seems a lot easier to navigate nowadays, thanks to Dr. Kay into therapy. I don't have a lot of friends, but I try my best to be there for them and help them whenever they need me. They treasure me and I treasure them too. The girl I mentioned above seems to be slash have none of these things, by the way. I'm writing this because I'm truly proud of the person I am and the things I've accomplished.

However, it seems like most people don't see me like that. When it comes to people in relationships, it feels as if hard work and consistency can never beat natural selection. Nobody cares about all my progress. No amount of effort or goodwill seems to be enough. If a man is born five inches taller, the world treats him. like gold. If a man is taught self-love and confidence from loving parents, all doors seem to open for him at the slightest touch. Meanwhile, I'm invisible. I have to scream just so people know I'm here. Whenever other people are involved, everything is a lot harder. Everything I get has to be earned. I try to think

positively. All the extra hard work will make me stronger, more resilient, smarter. All the tangible, useful qualities I've been acquiring will outweigh the fact that I'm 5'8 and a bit shy. Yet, I'm still alone. Maybe I'm wrong. So I'm starting to think no amount of effort will be enough. I'm starting to think I'm doomed to run in circles. No one will ever see the awesomeness and the potential I see in myself. What's the point?

So I could use some external inputs and new perspectives on this. I'm running out of ideas, patience, and hope. By the way, this is not my usual mood. I had a bad week. Sorry if it sounds arrogant, envious, entitled Incellish, Hope it's okay to vent here. Thanks for reading. So this is a fantastic post. You know, I definitely feel for the person.

So, like, this is what's really unfortunate is everyone tells us if you want to be successful in dating. Don't focus on the person you're trying to hook up with. Focus on yourself, right? The formula for success in dating is to work on yourself. Get in shape. Like, this person lost 50 pounds. Become professionally successful. This person makes 20 times.

the national average in terms of salary and is on their way to retire by the age of 40. They've taught themselves English. They've been working on their mental health. They're doing everything right. So sometimes we get this like feedback from people that, oh, if you want to be successful in dating, do these things. And if you do these things, you will be successful. Because these are the things that you can control. There's some stuff that you can't control in life, like your height or your ethnicity,

or the parents that you're given. But what you can control is the effort that you put in, whether you exercise or not, whether you do go to therapy, whether you like, you know, watch our stuff for do coaching or whatever. And so it's like incredibly frustrating when you do everything right.

And when you do everything right, and the person you're dating says, she wants to be with someone that she can be proud of, someone who is better than herself, and that isn't you and breaks up with you, it's like, what's the point? Right? Like, you're doing everything right.

You're trying to believe. You're trying to like really, you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. You try to think positively. All the extra work makes me stronger, more resilient, like all this kind of stuff, right? What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But when you look at the rest of the world, you see like other people just have it easier than you do. And it feels like as if hard work and consistency is never going to beat not only natural selection, but inborn advantages. you can be poor, born poor, and work your entire ass off.

Like you can work two jobs and 80 hours a week. And you'll never make as much as someone who's like, you know, air to a fortune of a billion dollars. And this is what the world looks like to us sometimes. So we're going to dive into a little bit about like how to approach this kind of situation and what you can do about it. So this is where there are a couple of different things that we're going to talk about. The first is the expectation of fixing things before the start of a relationship or like what people, actually, let me think about how to say that again. The first thing that we're going to talk about is actually emotional impact and how emotional impact affects our view of the world. Okay.

This is also going to become a little bit important when we talk about meditation later. The second thing that we're going to do is try to understand what is. the relationship between working on yourself and dating success? And those are the two things that we're going to be focused on. So the first is, our mind forms conclusions. So if we can look at this person, and I really appreciate this post for many reasons. So they're like, they've done everything right. They're like an engineer. They have a successful career. They're losing weight. They kind of don't see themselves as confident, and then they get dumped. And they even kind of acknowledge that this is not my usual mood. I had a bad week. Sorry if it sounds arrogant, envious, entitled,

Incelish, hope it's okay to vent here. It's a totally fine event here, especially in this kind of way, because this person is being a little bit reflective, right? It's not just about venting. They're sort of pointing out, like, what they've done. You can sort of see it in terms of the upvotes, right? You know, it's 93% upvote rate. So I think people are totally fine with this kind of thing. because it's not just dumer kind of mentality. It's like this person's actually making effort at understanding their beliefs and sort of saying, like, I'm doing everything right and I'm still getting screwed. So the first thing to understand is when you feel emotionally upset, what do you all think that does to the conclusions that your mind forms? Right?

Like, what does it do to them? So when we feel upset, it has a couple of interesting effects on our mind's ability to learn. So when we form a conclusion, we're essentially learning. So there's something really interesting, which is if you look at the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that learns, it's very, very tightly connected to the limbic system and especially the amygdala, which is the part of our brain that experiences emotion, especially negative emotion. So learning is very, very emotional in nature. We'd like to think that we're rational human beings and the biggest influence on our learning or actually our cerebral cortices. The cortices are like the outside of our brain, which are sort of like where a lot of our human ability to think comes from. All animals have an, actually, I don't know

about all, but mammals, certainly, all of them have amygdalas, all of them have limbic systems, and all of them have hippocampi. But the cerebral cortices is really what sets us apart. So we'd like to think that a lot of our learning comes from rational thought. But the truth of the matter is that the most powerful moments in our life in terms of when we learn lessons are emotional in nature. The challenge is that the lessons that we learn may not entirely be correct. So I want you all to think about, you know, like moments in your life where you were like swore something to yourself, like never again, right? Like, if there are moments in your life where you sort of adopted a behavior or perspective, the more powerful that perspective is, the more

emotional it is. And if you kind of think about it, like we understand this even in terms of movies, because in movies, like, people don't, you know, like, when you see someone having a transformative experience where they're like never again and they like learn and change and transform their lives, it's not an analytical experience. They're not going and sitting in a philosophy classroom and then going and Googling things and then reading Wikipedia and then sitting there and like reading books on Nietzsche. That's not where we see human transformation happen. And we sort of resonate with this as human beings because human transformation and learning things is something that's emotionally powerful. It's like this moment where someone like gets bullied and they're like left

bloody on the floors, kids like laugh and walk down. And that's that's the moment, right? That's the moment when you swore never again. And then you see the protagonists get up and they start exercising and they learn mixed martial arts and they do all this stuff and like they transform their lives and get things together and then you have your final climax and showdown. It's all emotion. Now, the challenge, so we learn easily from emotions. The challenge is that what we learn is tricky. And the more emotional we are, the lessons that we learn sink in deeper, but they're actually less correct, in a sense.

And this is the tricky thing about these kinds of emotional situations. So people have, and this person is like, it's reasonable what they're saying. They're like, I did everything right. I did my research. I dug deep. I worked hard. got my ass into therapy, got my ass to lose 50 pounds, became professionally successful, worked on myself, worked.

I wasn't taught these things like self-love. I didn't have parents who loved me. So like I'm doing all this stuff and it's friggin exhausting. And this is what happens to me. How can I not be screwed? Because I did everything that I was supposed to. And I'm still not getting what I was expecting. So then what happens as your mind comes to the conclusion, it's all about natural selection.

all about the luck of the draw. But if you think about it, what's the emotional energy behind that conclusion? It's resentment. It's dashed expectations. It's hurt. Because if your partner who you care about tells you, you know, like everything you're doing is not good enough, I need to be with someone who's better than you. Like, what does it tell you about yourself? What does it tell you about the value of all of the effort that you're putting in? It tells you that the value isn't enough. And then you learn that lesson that all this crap is a waste of time. Because if it would have worked, then I wouldn't have gotten dumped. Right? That's what that's the lesson that your mind learns. And so what do we do about this? So like if you're sitting on the outside, you can look at this and you can clearly see

that adopting your girlfriend's value system, who by the way does none of the things that you do and is not accomplished nearly as much as you have, her judgment is not actually like an accurate representation of most of life. The challenge is if you're in this person's shoes, like, that sort of doesn't matter, right? Because at the end of the day, you got dumped and it hurts. Like, so other people sort of telling you, like, bro, you're a catch.

Like, she's crazy. Like, don't worry about what she thinks. There are going to be a lot of women out there who will be very interested in, like, what you have to offer and would be very lucky to date someone who is focused on their physical health, professionally successful, and, like, goes to therapy and, like, works on themselves.

Like, that's awesome. Right? Like, that's fantastic. So people will sort of say things like there's other fish in the sea. Don't let it get to you, things like that. But I want you all to acknowledge that the conclusions that your mind comes to are going to be more exacerbated the more hurt you feel. Because in this moment, you feel like it's not doing anything. And that's sort of true because it didn't work, quote unquote, with her, right?

But there's still, like, value to what you're doing, which it's hard to believe because you feel. resentment. So what do you do in this kind of situation? The first thing that you've got to do is this person's already done, and that's why I'm really like honestly proud of this person, because they recognize that these thoughts are coming from a week where their mood has been very bad. And we've got to be really, really careful about forming permanent conclusions from temporary moods. Right? So there's a, there's a book of Russian fairy tales that I really enjoyed growing up. and I even now read them to my kids. And there's like one line in those fairy tales that I think is really interesting,

which is morning is wiser than evening. And I thought that that was like kind of interesting. I read it in the fairy tale. And I sort of noticed that that was actually true. That like when you wake up first thing in the, like the world can be falling apart the night before. But when you wake up the next day, you know, like things have a different perspective. Like your perspective will change over time, especially as you're like amygdala starts to calm down is your limbic system starts to calm down. You've got to be extra careful

if like you got broken up with and they're texting you the next day and you're thinking about it again and stuff like that. But a clear head forms the best conclusions. So if your mind is kind of messed up, just be careful about forming conclusions based on a temporary emotion. Now, what happens for a lot of people is this experience will happen again and again and again and then the emotion won't be temporary. You'll be in a relatively permanent state of doom. And then you'll be, you become a doomer or an in-cell. You reinforce this kind of emotional input through joining things like Echo Chambers, right? So you'll join some like 4chan forum or something like that or some like in-cell subreddit or whatever. And then like you'll get a lot of people who are like feeding you the same

emotion. They're feeding you their anger and their resentment. And now suddenly like you're perceiving all this stuff and you found the one corner of the internet where everyone has the same experience you do. and then since everyone is having the same experience, you start to believe it's true. As you start to believe it's true, you start to run into a lot of problems. Because now, like, you're, you sort of formed a fundamentally incorrect conclusion.

So the first thing is, like, process your emotions. First of all, it's okay that she broke up with you. Like, this is where you've got to understand that when people break up with you, this is something that's so hard to understand. A lot of times the reason that people break up with you has nothing to do with you and has everything to do with them. And they'll even say,

the big irony here is that half the time when they say, it's not you, it's me. That's the self-aware person who actually it is you and it's not them. But the people who blame you for the breakup are often the ones at fault. They're the ones who should be saying, it's not you, it's me.

Right? Like that's the really bizarre thing. It's the less self-aware you are, the more you blame other people for your problems. And she's like, you're not good enough for me. And it's like, here you are losing 50 pounds in a year, which is amazing, by the way, working on yourself and you're not good enough for her.

That's totally fine. Let her go find someone who's good enough for her. I think it's going to be hard to find someone as good as you are. But this is where it's so tricky because what we do is internalize the judgments of the people who break up with us. We internalize the judgments of the people who reject us. but that's just their judgment coming from their flawed mind. If she's looking for someone who's like so great, like, why doesn't she get in shape?

Why doesn't she become more professionally successful? So this is what's really hard is when we feel hurt and we get this kind of feedback, we don't think about it critically, right? Because we got hurt. It didn't work, period. That's our emotional circuitry active. That's why we don't think about it critically. So here's the other thing to understand about the amygdala and the cirrhic.

cerebral cortex. When the amygdala is active, it shuts off the cerebral cortex. When the cerebral cortex is active or the frontal lobes are active, it does its best to shut down the amygdala. These things have a mutually inhibitory function. So when you get really, really emotional, your emotional mind literally shuts down your ability to like think critically. And that's evolutionary, by the way. So as it turns out, when you're in a survival situation, you don't want to be thinking critically. what you want to be doing is acting very quickly and jumping to conclusions. Because the kinds of situations that these brains evolved for were not complex internet relationships involving making 20 times your salary and losing weight and all this kind of crap. Our brain evolved for snap

decisions in emotional situations. Like I see a tiger in the jungle. Do I attack it or do I run away? Like there's no nuance. There's no like what is the tiger like is the tiger reincarnated from my dad? is the tiger hungry? Is it friendly? You know, what does it mean that there's a tiger here? Should I kill it? What is like the morality of killing a tiger? Is it okay to kill it? Is it okay to wound it? That's not how we think when we see a tiger. There's even something really interesting that we know that adrenaline does something really interesting. It takes our peripheral vision. So if you take your hands and you wiggle them out here, you can actually see that, right? Like you can see like, you can see like, our peripheral vision is actually quite wide. It's like almost 180 degrees, which is weird because we don't really think about being able to see out of the side of our head. You can do the wiggle. You'll see it.

You can even go further back and keep going further back until you don't see it. I can see it kind of like right here. Okay? The other interesting thing is that when adrenaline activates, it takes our peripheral vision and it collapses it to a 30 degree cone.

So all you can see is what's in front of you when you're emotionally activated. And it also does the same. same thing cognitively. So here's the full range of what I can consider when I'm calm. But when I become emotional, the world becomes black and white. And this is where, like, if you've ever had a political discussion with someone you disagree with, you'll understand exactly what I mean.

They cannot see beyond 30 degrees. And neither can you. Both of you thinks you have full peripheral vision, but that's not the case. So when you're emotionally activated, all the conclusions that you're going to come to or chances are they're going to be flawed. It doesn't mean that there isn't something to be learned there from this, but chances are the takeaway may not be what you initially come up with. The takeaway may be something along the lines of like, it's okay for her to break up with you if she's looking for more than what you are. But just because she's looking for more does not mean that

you are not enough. You may not be enough for this one person, but it doesn't mean that you're not enough for a thousand other people out there. And I've talked to, worked with and been friends with over a hundred women who what they're looking for is exactly what this person is describing, which is like a man who's like somewhat emotionally available working on themselves, professionally successful, and like getting in shape. Right? Like that's what a lot of women are looking for. Which now comes to sort of like another piece that I want to talk about. Actually, so let's just pause for a second. So at the end of the day, we're told from a dating perspective that we should do particular things and then we will be successful.

And it makes sense, right? Because you can't sort of force someone else to like you. The most you can really do is work on yourself and make yourself like more attractive to like people that you want to date. So you can like become professionally successful. You can get into shape more. you can like learn how to cook and things like that. You can work on your own self-confidence, negative self-talk, like all these kinds of things. And so the thing is like doing all that crap takes a lot of energy and effort.

It's not easy to lose 50 pounds. It's not easy to make so much money that you're going to, you're on track to retire like by the age of 40. It's not easy to do that stuff. And you do that stuff and you sweat and you toil and you exert everything you've got. And then your girlfriend dumps you. and then you're like, F it. Right? Like, there's just no way to win.

Like, I was told, I was told, I was informed that if I do these things, I will find love and I will be happy. And then, like, when that doesn't happen, you feel really resentful. And when you feel resentful, you've got to be really careful about the conclusions that you form for all the above-mentioned stuff. Because our brain is forming conclusions that wants to form conclusions. That's exactly when our brain forms the most powerful conclusions is when we feel hurt and resentful. The problem is that we lose sight of things in those states. And so this is the kind of thing where, like, the most important thing is to, like, emotionally decompress. Acknowledge the resentment.

Acknowledge how bad it feels. To actually be crushing it and for it to not matter. Like, does that make sense to y'all? Like, how devastating that must be? If you're doing everything right, you're crushing it on every objective measure or on a couple of really big ones. And for you to still get dumped, makes it. feel like all of the effort that you're doing is worthless. And that's the really tricky thing because if in that moment you give up and you start letting yourself go, then you're actually

screwing yourself. Right. And so that's where like it's really, really important to first of all, like, forgive yourself. Secondly, like, deal with that resentment. Thirdly, understand that if someone breaks up with you, they may perceive that as a shortcoming from you, but like, there's all kinds of stuff going on in their mind. And you'll sort of know this. Like if you guys have had parents who have very high expectations, nothing you do is ever enough. Right?

It's like, if you get an A, they want an A plus. If you got the silver medal at the Olympics, they want a gold. And some people are looking for you to satisfy them. And no amount of effort that you put in will satisfy them. But that's where we've got to be really, really careful. because if you have those kinds of parents, that kid grows up feeling like they're not enough. But by any objective measure, they've got a 4.0 GPA and they're like an Olympic medalist. Like, what the hell?

Like, what more do you want? And so some people are not content with a particular relationship. And what they do is they'll push that onto their partner, that the reason this relationship is not working is because of you. and the less they take responsibility, the more they shove the responsibility on you, the more doomed you the relationship is, because they're not willing to accept responsibility. They're giving you the responsibility and your dumb ass is taking it. So y'all are kind of happy that way. And then when you get broken up with, you feel bad. And they're like, yeah, they just weren't good enough for me.

And even in that, there's like this like subconscious contract between like who's responsible for this relationship falling apart. And she's blaming you and you're the one who's accepting. accepting the blame, and so you're like, okay, like, then what do I do? And then you become resentful. And that's what's so challenging about these kinds of situations is when you feel hurt, when you feel like you have an insecure, when you're insecure and you get dumped by someone despite doing such a good job, your insecurity is so powerful that you never stop to consider. This person doesn't know what they want in a relationship. This relationship would have worked better if they had actually taken some responsibility. But we don't think that way when our limbic system is active, because that's

a nuanced perspective. That comes from the courtesies. And so the most important thing in these kinds of situations is to, first of all, acknowledge that no relationship breakup is one person's fault. Like, that's just not possible, or almost not possible, I would think. Most of the time, like 95% of relationships, if a relationship falls apart, it's composed of two people, therefore two people are responsible. And the less that your partner accepts responsibility for the breakup of the relationship, the less likely they are to be correct. And you've got to be careful because if that feeds into your insecurity, because you are working on yourself so hard, because by the way, you're 50 pounds overweight or 100 pounds

overweight and you've lost 50 pounds. So boom, there's the insecurity, feeds into the whole thing, activates the amygdala and the limbic system. You blame yourself. You learn that the world is untrustworthy and there's no chance you've got. You let yourself go because it's so easy to let yourself go because it doesn't matter at the end of the day. So easy to give up.

And that's the real tragedy. It's not that you got dumped by someone who doesn't understand the value of who they're dating. The real tragedy is when they don't understand the value of what they're dating and you agree with them. When you adopt their perspective. Because it feeds right into the insecurity that already exists. So if you're working on yourself and you get dumped because someone says you're not good enough, be a little bit careful. First of all, let yourself be resentful. Acknowledge it, work through it.

But be careful about the conclusions that you form. Because at the end of the day, if you're working on yourself, that really is the best thing that you can do. And be super careful about the success of a strategy based on a sample size of one. So that's like the other, like really simple thing, right? Like, you can't base a strategy off of a sample size of one. It's like, that's just not how things work. Like that, you know. So give yourself more opportunity.

give yourself more chances, continue working on yourself, and eventually you'll run across someone who like sees the value and who you are. It's tough, though. It ain't easy. Questions. What is your opinion on you must truly love yourself before you can truly love someone else? Completely disagree. That's kind of weird.

Everyone says stuff like this, right? Because it's like a feel good thing like, oh, you must truly love yourself before you can love someone else. Bro, let me tell you what, or girl, it's so much easier to love another person. than it is to love yourself. Right? Like, let's be honest here. Right? Like, we like to think that we can't love someone.

No, but like you can absolutely love someone before you love yourself. Loving yourself is not like, it's like the end of the road, not the first thing. I mean, like, y'all tell me if I'm wrong. But like, just think about your own life for a second, right? Have you truly loved someone? and do you truly love yourself? I'd venture that there's more of you that can say, yes, I've truly loved another human being

and I've not loved myself. So much easier. Now, I think the real tricky thing is that it's really hard to love yourself if you haven't been loved by another person. So oftentimes the way, it's really unfortunate, but the way that we learn to respect ourselves is actually through the respect of others.

And we see this a lot in terms of like therapy and stuff where you go somewhere and you have low self-worth and your therapist treats you with worth. And like, that's confusing for you at the beginning. You're like, wait, what? Like, why are you treating? You're just treating me this way because you're my therapist, right? Like, you don't actually believe that. And then if you stick with it for a while, you'll start to realize, oh, no, they actually like do believe that. And then you're like, oh, maybe I am worth something.

So oftentimes it starts from someone else. This is one of the reasons in general. So when we're talking about dating and stuff, so one of the reasons I really, really like group coaching is because of this principle. So here are a couple of reasons why it's so hard to describe, but group coaching is awesome for a couple of these reasons. The first is that in general, in life,

we tend to learn from our mistakes. The challenge is that we don't learn perfectly. So what that means is that we have to like make a mistake like five, six, seven times before we learn from it, right? That's problem number one. So groups coaching fixes this because other people are making mistakes too. And we can kind of like learn from their mistakes. And you may say like, but wait, how does that work? It's because when someone authentically shares an experience of themselves and you're there like learning how to listen to them properly and like ask insightful questions when it's facilitated by a coach who sort of like

moves the conversation in the right way, you actually learn from them. And so even if you watch our streams or our YouTube content and you feel personally attacked or you're learning a lesson from what we talk about, that has nothing to do with you. You can actually learn lessons from other people. That's the whole basis upon which AOE healing is built. It's that you don't have to screw up eight times to learn eight lessons. The other big irony is, as we've already discussed, when you actually make a mistake, you're so caught up in it. So anyone who this dating post that we just looked at, this person gets dumped by his girlfriend after he loses 50 pounds,

and he's on track to retire at the age of 40. And she says he's not good enough. When you're in that space, it's hard to see how that's crazy and how you're actually doing a fantastic job. This is actually on her. The cool thing is that when you learn from other people's mistakes, you actually see it more clearly.

And then what happens is you say, oh, crap, I do the same thing. It's actually easier in a weird way to learn from someone else's mistakes because you are objective about it and they are subjective about it. When you're emotionally all messed up, you don't actually like learn, right? Because like the whole point of this post that we just saw is when you get dumped after doing everything right, you actually come to the erroneous conclusion that it doesn't matter. because your mind is all screwed up. So the cool thing about group coaching is when one person makes a mistake, everyone learns from it.

And hopefully those people will share their perspectives and bring that person back into alignment. And then it's the next person's turn to make a mistake. And essentially what happens is you've got eight people, let's say hypothetically, all get dumped over the course of six months. And now you've learned how to handle eight breakups. because you see how each and every person handles the breakup. You help them get through it. And when you help them get through it, you learn a different way of talking to yourself.

How do you learn different self-dialogue? You learn it by dialoguing with other people. And then when you get dumped and they treat you with value and worth, and remember, they're not your therapist, right? So the other group members, this is the other key thing. The other group members are paying to be there. You're not paying them to be there. And so getting the respect and worth, when someone else tells you, hey, I think you're worth it and I think someone would be lucky to date you, here are the reasons that I think you're a valuable human being.

Here are all the ways that you have helped me over the last three months. When you hear that from one of your peers, that's something that's incredibly powerful. And personal coaching is great. Don't get me wrong. But like there's this aspect of like peer support and the respect of your peer support. and the respect of your peers, that is actually really, really important. People have done studies on software developers. And what they discovered is the most important thing for a software developer

is actually not the respect of your bosses. It's the respect of your peers. So peer support can have awesome impacts on self-worth. So what we tend to see is that group coaching works really well for people who are like students and people who are trying to navigate like common issues. So that's where like it really thrives because everyone's struggling to date. Right?

Like everyone's like trying to figure out this online dating business. And we'll go into that in a little bit more detail. But the whole point is that like when you go through it and your mind is all messed up and people help you work through it, when they're helping you, that's when they themselves learn. Does that make sense? Like this is huge. And Irvin Yollum did a bunch of research on this.

And what he kind of discovered was really important. that helping someone else through a problem equips you to deal with it. Because you've walked them through the things that you say, right? Like you give them the dialogue. And then some part of your brain knows what to say. Some part of your brain knows how to see value despite the person beating themselves up. And then when it happens in your own mind, you have some of that experience. And so like this is why group coaching, I think is really powerful.

From an outcome perspective, what we see is, you know, just for the the sake of completeness, we tend to see like standard metrics improve faster in personal coaching. The thing is, I think a lot of the stuff that improves in group coaching, we actually don't have good metrics for. So you'll get there sort of like in terms of reductions in depression, anxiety, life purpose, all that kind of stuff. But I think there's some of these other factors which we just don't have good instruments for. That's the real value.

And that's why it's also confusing for people because they're like, why should I, you know, like about talking about my problems or something I do with an individual. And that can be useful too. Don't get me wrong. But it's like really for shared problems. So if you suffer from something that someone else or like that's a common problem, then like group is better because group will like help you help other people through it. And when you help other people through it, you yourself are going to internalize it.

And there's a lot of value to being able to be objective and learning from a problem as opposed to being subjective.