I’ve coached 80+ men in 1-on-1 private coaching calls and have led hundreds of people in workshops and group coaching settings since I started this path of full-time coaching, guidance, and mentorship in the summer of 2021.
I’ve noticed a common theme in the men who come to me.
They all want better quality relationships but are quick to blame others.
Whether I am working with a start-up founder, a wealthy business owner who got to retire in their 40s, a college student, or a young adult in their 20s or 30s.
The complaint is literally copy-paste:
“Women flake a lot these days, and the dating market is trash.”
“People suck nowadays, and nobody is at my level.”
For some reason, people pick up self-improvement and read a few psychology books, and suddenly feel like they are better than most of the world.
They point outward and blame all their past “failed relationships,” but somehow miss the common denominator staring back from the mirror.
Why this blame game is wrecking you
When you decide “people are the problem,” you stop showing up, you give up effort to even give other people a chance, and start escaping into a reality that doesn’t serve you:
- Scroll loops that feed you content, confirming your cynicism because negative headlines pull up to 61 % more shares on X and Facebook.
- Algorithms will push fear and negative people into your feed, your brain drinks it up, and your default-mode network becomes your mind constantly scanning for threats in others and your environment.
- Your cortisol stays high, eye contact goes low, and genuine connection flat-lines.
Result?
You medicate with porn, pot, and alcohol, and choose nights alone in front of your TV, computer, or phone instead of choosing to be social and go out on dates.
You tighten up into the “lone wolf” identity.
You think you are avoiding a “f*cked up world out there,” but in reality, you are just making yourself angry, frustrated, and depressed.
I get it. I know this feeling very well, and I’ve worked with SO MANY men on this core issue.
This is the framework you first must understand in order to grasp a solution.
The two principles that elevate your self-respect and sense of safety in all relationships:
1️⃣ The Mirror Principle:
Every interpretation you have about someone else, their actions, and behavior is a direct mirror of your subconscious thoughts about yourself and the world around you.
Christ warned us about the plank in our own eye (Matthew 7:3).
Buddha put it simpler: “With our thoughts we make the world.”
In modern-day cognitive science, we call this confirmation bias.
Humans are prone to various cognitive biases that can affect their judgment, including:
- Confirmation Bias: The tendency to seek out and interpret information that confirms existing beliefs. This can lead individuals to focus on flaws in others while overlooking their own.
- Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to overemphasize personality-based explanations for others’ behavior while underemphasizing situational explanations. This can lead to harsh judgments of others without considering the circumstances.
- Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to attribute positive events to one’s own character while attributing negative events to external factors. This can contribute to overlooking one’s own shortcomings.
The “science” behind this spiritual teaching shows the psychological tendencies that make it difficult for individuals who struggle with relationships to see their own flaws and are quick to blame others.
I’ve seen the mirror principle play out so many times in my coaching calls.
Men complaining about women being “entitled” while they believe they are entitled to their time and attention.
Guys say they want to make friends, but nobody is “at their level of understanding,” and society sucks.
Projecting superiority over others they do not even know.
Then we look deeper together and realize it’s a defense mechanism for being afraid that other people will hurt them.
They are stuck in the past in the blame cycle rather than learning how they also contributed to the vicious cycle.
When you are able to zoom out and look at your past relationships objectively, you’ll start to notice the patterns and how every relationship is a mirror for parts of yourself you needed to learn about.
2️⃣ The Inversion Principle:
What somebody says, behaves, and acts is a direct projection of their own subconscious thought patterns. It’s their own sh*t, and not yours.
Carl Jung called this projection.
People dump disowned parts of themselves onto the world.
This principle is equally as important as the first principle because you need to identify what’s yours and what is not.
For example, if somebody calls you selfish out of nowhere and then continues to go off on you about how you may be a bad friend and a terrible person, that is their own story of you. It isn’t true.
Potentially, there could be some ways you were showing up for that friend that could “improve,” but you are obviously not a terrible person.
There is no universal fact that says “you are bad” that is objectively measurable. It is simply perspective, not fact.
Just like them, you are also a person with strengths and areas of improvement, just like the rest of the world.
When people “come at you,” you can always find peace in knowing this is a projection of their own pain.
You can understand them for what they do not realize.
Why mastering these principles upgrades everything:
- Stress chemistry drops – Heart-rate variability climbs when the brain stops treating social contact as danger. You realize your triggers are for you to raise awareness on what lessons you must learn, and you realize other people’s triggers are lessons they must learn.
- Conversations open – You listen to understand instead of constantly scanning people for flaws. People will naturally mirror that calm and openness.
- Confidence spikes – You know what’s yours to own and what’s theirs to keep; self-respect replaces second-guessing. You are not up all night questioning if you showed up the “right way” or “wrong way” in your relationships. You realize relationships and situations that arise in them are a lot more nuanced than just “right” or “wrong.”
- Growth accelerates – Each trigger becomes a data point on your work, not proof that the world sucks. You realize each trigger that rises up within you is a subconscious story you must address and rewrite so your inner world can be in alignment with what you desire from your external reality.
Much love,
Shawn “Sheshn” Heshmatpour
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