Ep #17: Real Life Alpha Superhero Mindset

Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast, the only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha-mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here’s your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

What’s up, my brothers. Welcome back to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud. And today, we’re going to be talking about the Model, the way we align ourselves with the universal truth, and superheroes. That’s right, we’re going to talk about superheroes.

So, really, what I’m going to do is I’m going to use superheroes as an example of how we can look at how the Model is working in their lives. Now again, this is a fictional thing, but it’s going to be fun because it’s one of those things where it’s not theoretical necessarily. We’re not just talking about theory and concepts. But at the same time, we’re not talking about real life. We’re talking about superheroes.

And today, I’m going to be comparing two superheroes, looking at how the Model is working in their lives, kind of looking at their circumstances. We really don’t know what their thoughts are, because we never are able to know what people are thinking. And we’re never really able to know what people are feeling either. We never really know what emotion is in their body.

We can sometimes guess maybe, if there’s anger or rage or if there’s sadness or joy, we could probably guess at some of these. But emotions are also unspoken. They’re observable, but not necessarily measurable. It’s difficult to tell exactly what’s being felt based on what we observe.

But actions and results are observable. We can definitely see what actions are being taken and what results come from those actions, that cause and effect relationship. And that is enough to look at some of the models that are working in these superheroes. Because, what I want you guys to get from this podcast episode is really a better understanding of the Model itself so that you can use it in your life.

I mean, I always recommend that you get coaching on the Model because it really helps you understand and apply it and see it, but if you can use these podcasts to start to understand the theory, and with the examples that I give, maybe start to see how it’s applied, the Model is applied and the universal truth is a living truth, then you can start to become more aware of your beta condition and activate and elevate your alpha state.

So, let’s get into this, guys. Let’s take a look at this. Now, I’m really going to be comparing two superheroes. One, the first one, we’re going to be looking at how he utilizes alpha state, and the other one, we’re going to look at why he is operating in beta condition.

So let’s look at the first example. And the first example I’m going to give is a little biased, I’ll admit, probably my favorite superhero, and that’s Iron Man, Tony Stark from the Marvel Universe. And when we look at the Model – you can look at the Model backwards, forwards, beginning, middle, and out, like start in the center and work your way out. You can start with the Model anywhere.

Remember, the Model itself is five components. Let’s back up and let me just give you a quick review of the Model. Now, there are previous episodes, because in previous episodes, I talked about the Model itself and then we went through each one of these components in five different episodes. So you can go back and listen to those for a longer explanation.

But essentially, what the Model is, is it’s a way to apply the universal truth by categorizing every part of life into five components. And those five components are circumstances – we always put circumstances at the top because circumstances are kind of separate. Circumstances are other people, the world, your past, sort of like that factual data. It’s neutral. Circumstances are neutral. They’re facts. They’re out of our control. They’re things that everybody would agree to. If no humans were around, circumstances would still exist.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Human beings are circumstances because how other human beings behave, what they say and do, this is a circumstance for us because we get to decide how we want to think about it. But really, circumstances are like watching the world through a video camera. The video camera has no judgment on what is happening; it’s just observing. It’s just there. And anybody that watches that video in replay would be able to see the same thing. So we would all agree to what is happening. That is a circumstance.

From there, we have the other four components. And the other four components are what we do have control over. We have thoughts, we have emotions, we have actions, and we have results. And our thoughts are what we think about our circumstance. The difference between alpha state and beta condition is here, where alpha state chooses, from a deliberate, conscious, higher brained place, how they want to think about circumstance in order to get the result they want. Whereas the beta condition is sort of influenced by their circumstance, whatever happens they’re affected by it, and the sentences in their brain just run and they don’t think that they have any control. They just kind of operate in reaction to the circumstance, whatever’s happening.

But your thoughts are under your control. Your thoughts are not a part of the circumstance. They are neither correlated nor caused by circumstance. And they are sentences in your brain. That’s what thoughts are. They’re either unconscious beta condition thoughts, or they are conscious beta condition thoughts. You can be aware of the beta condition by listening to it using your alpha state, or they are determined alpha state chosen thoughts.

Whatever it is, those thoughts are going to create emotion. The emotions are molecules, chemicals that go into your body and you feel them. That’s why emotions and feelings are the same. We feel our emotions. Emotions are physiological changes at the cellular level. That’s all they are. And they create vibrations. They create changes in those cells.

Now, some of those vibrations feel good, some of those vibrations feel bad. That’s why we have positive and negative emotion. That’s why sadness feels bad and happiness feels good. We want more happiness. We want that emotion. But all that is is a change at the cellular level in our body.

Now, all of our actions are driven by emotions. The truth about the world, guys, the truth about life is that whatever you think you want is not because you want that thing, it’s because you want the way you think that thing is going to make you feel. You don’t want the sports car, you just want the way the sports car is going to make you feel. You don’t want a million dollars in your bank account, you just want the way a million dollars in your bank account is going to make you feel.

So, all of our actions are driven by emotion. They’re driven by those chemicals, by the way our body is feeling. And every action is going to have a result. There is always a cause and effect relationship in the world between action and result. These are things that manifest.

Think about actions and result as being the manifestation of thought and emotion. We have a thought, that creates an emotion, and then we put it into the world with action. And what we put into the world as action, we get back as a result. Whatever that result is, is going to supply evidence for us to reaffirm, reinforce that original thought. So really, what the Model is is that it’s a circumstance that happens and the thought, feeling, action, result cycle that happens in ourselves that we create consciously or unconsciously.

When we look at the Model, we can look at it from a place of thought, we can look at it from a place of circumstance, we can look at it from a place of action and result, which is what we’re going to do today. So, let’s take a look at these superheroes. The first one is Iron Man Tony Stark.

Now, when we look at Iron Man, we’ve got to take a specific circumstance. We have to look at a snapshot and say, in this snapshot, was this person in alpha state or in beta condition. Now, the reason why, guys, is because there’s always oscillation. There’s always flux. It’s true that the more you practice and the more you train yourself, you can be in alpha state longer. You can even live in alpha state. It’s possible. But there will be times that you flip and you go back to beta condition. There’s just times, right?

Things get stressful, things get difficult, something happens in your life, a circumstance occurs that kind of drops you out of alpha state. It’s possible, it happens, and I can address some of those later, but it’s getting off topic of this podcast, so I want to get back to explaining to you guys that when we look at actions and results, we have to take a specific circumstance, because the circumstance is what the person is thinking about to create the action and determine their result.

A specific result comes from a specific thought, and typically, those thoughts are about a circumstance. So let’s look at something in one of these movies and determine if Iron Man was operating in alpha state or beta condition.

One of my favorite scenes – and it was from the first Iron Man movie – was almost in the beginning of the movie where Tony – this is before he became Iron Man – Tony was walking out of a casino, I believe it was, and he had just won an award. And he was about to get into his car and a reporter wanted to talk to him, Christine Everhart from Vanity Fair came up to him and she wanted to chat with him.

So he says, sure, he turns around and starts talking to her. Now, this is the circumstance that I want to look at with you guys. In this circumstance – remember, circumstances are neutral, it’s just facts, there’s no subjective language. So all we would look at is what is being said, not why it’s being said or the thoughts behind what’s being said, but just what’s being said. What is she saying to him, just the words that she’s using regardless of how you think about the words she’s using.

Because I would say she was coming at him pretty hard, she was attacking him in some way. She was trying to get her story by making Tony Stark look like a war-monger, make him look like a bad guy. But the truth is, the circumstance is just what she was saying.

Now, that is his circumstance, what she’s saying to him. And what I want you guys to do is look at the way he responds. We don’t know what he’s thinking and we don’t know what he’s feeling. We don’t know what his emotions are, but look at the actions. The actions are very confident. They’re very unapologetic. He knows who he is. He’s mission driven. He’s purpose driven, goal oriented.

All of his actions are to reaffirm himself. He doesn’t apologize for what he’s done. In fact, he makes it very clear that he’s proud of who he is. He’s proud of his job and he’s proud of what he’s done in the world. He’s honest, almost to the point of being untactful. It’s almost this blunt honesty. And none of it’s complaining. He’s not giving excuses for anything.

As she talks and as she delivers these words, he’s not trying to change her mind. He’s not trying to convince her of anything or manipulate her in any way. He’s simply answering her questions from his perspective where he knows what his job is and who he is in the world.

Now, what we know is the result of these actions is that he ended up taking her home that night. He ended up taking her home right away, so the result was – maybe it was the result he was looking for, I don’t know, he didn’t really know she was going to approach him, so it’s probably not the result he was looking for, but that is the result.

Now, that result comes from the actions of being unapologetic, confident, knowing who you are, being grounded, not budging. And if we wanted to, we could even kind of theorize and say, what thought is that result reinforcing? This is me, take it or leave it, I am who I am. You can judge me all you want, it’s not going to change the way I think about myself. I’m Tony Stark, this is what I do.

It could be any number of these thoughts, that result is always going to reinforce that thought. I mean, he could even be thinking, I’m awesome, you’re awesome, let’s be awesome together. And that thinking could lead to confidence where what he says to her is, look, I’m awesome, this is Tony Stark, this is what I do.

You know, there’s a couple of things that he said to her in there that you might even say that he thinks that she’s pretty awesome too. He talks about her college, he talks about education, he says he wouldn’t mind missing a few minutes of sleep with you, right. Whatever thought it is, what we’re looking at here is that the thought that you are having is going to create the emotion which is going to drive the action.

Before I move onto the next superhero, let me just ask you, do you think he was thinking anything that would create a thought of doubt, a thought of guilt, a thought of shame, a thought of I need to please this girl, I need to people-please her, I need to put her on a pedestal? Or even going to the other side where you’ve got the bad boy, was he ever putting here down or making her feel bad about who she was? Never, he was never in those beta conditions that I talked about before with women. So I can only assume that, in this circumstance, Tony Stark is operating at his alpha. He’s operating on his alpha state.

Now, let’s look at another superhero. Let’s take a look at Aquaman. And when we look at Aquaman – Aquaman is in the DC universe, a little bit different. He’s over there with Superman and Batman, but during his entire movie, he always had this action – if we look at the Model, he always had the action of blaming himself.

He was always sort of complaining and making excuses. Now, I want to give a specific circumstance, the same way I did with Iron Man, so you guys can see this. And the circumstance, or the part of the movie I’m going to use is when he was on the boat with the red-haired lady and they were talking. And it was what he was saying that was giving us some kind of clue into what he was thinking.

Now, what he was saying – and this is where I want you guys to understand that what he is saying is eventually going to lead to a result. And we’re going to get to that in a second. But what was being said was essentially the guy that they had just got done fighting was alive because he left his father to die and he could have saved his father, but if he had saved his father, maybe he wouldn’t have made an enemy and maybe this guy wouldn’t have come after him and maybe blah, blah, blah.

You have to watch the movie, but the point is that he was kind of locked in the past. He was thinking about the past and he was blaming himself for the past. And right away, guys, one of the things about the Model is that circumstance includes the past. The past is included in circumstance.

So how you think about your past is completely up to you. The past, other people, and the world, is a circumstance. You can think about these things any way you want. So the way he was talking about his past, he was taking on a lot of blame. He was saying this occurred because of this and because of this and because of this and it all happened due to this one time that I made this decision and it’s all my fault.

All my fault – that alone is a manifestation of beta condition. Now, hold on, guys, before you say, what are you saying; if we take responsibility for our past then we’re in beta condition? No, not at all. I’m saying if you take responsibility for your past, it’s very different than blaming yourself for what’s happening now because of the past.

You can take responsibility for what happened or the actions that you made at the time that you made them, with the knowledge that you had making them, saying yes I did that, I was there, this is what I did. But then, to go on and blame yourself and say all these other things that happened, this huge butterfly effect that occurred because of that one moment is now all my fault and I’m to blame for all of this, those are sentences in the brain that is very fear based.

So, in this circumstance, Aquaman appears to be in a beta condition. He appears to be in a sullen, unconfident, very doubtful of himself, doubtful of the choices that he made in the past, and operating in a beta condition, operating in a beta state. Now, the results that we see are seen throughout the movie.

The results that we see are him sort of always in this, again, I use the word sullen, but he’s constantly blaming himself for his mother’s death. And because of that blame, he keeps himself in this perpetual state of guilt and distances himself from people. You can notice, in the beginning of the movie, he really doesn’t have any relationships with anybody. His relationship with his dad is pretty much all he’s got. He’s the only person in his life.

He doesn’t get along. He pushes people away. Somebody comes to him and says, like, hey we need you, the world needs you, he’s kind of like, forget it, it’s not for me. So his results are very, like, no, I want to stay away from people. He’s kind of hiding from the world. And that hiding is reinforcing the thought, I am the cause of my mother’s death. And there’s this guilt.

So, in both of these superheroes, we can’t judge the book by its cover. And this is one of the reasons why – I’m going to leave you guys with this thought, but one of the reasons why I brought these examples up, why I’m using superheroes, but I want you to take a look at the superheroes as they are. Like, just look at them.

If you were to see these two guys from across the street, there is this myth in the world – I want to say society – that an alpha male looks a certain way. And this is why I brought up Tony Stark and Arthur Curry, which is that when you look at the actors that portray these guys – like Robert Downey Jr. he doesn’t look like he goes to the gym. He’s a shorter guy. He’s a leaner guy, smaller guy.

He’s a tech nerd. I mean, he’s a nerd. He’s just a really smart guy with a whole lot of money that likes to build cool stuff, but he’s not your typical, like, what you would see on a billboard or in the gym. He’s just a dude. I hesitate even using the word nerd because that’s another thought, but they guy’s, you know, he’s Tony Stark, man.

You’d never see him coming. If you saw him in a room, you’d never see him coming. Whereas the Arthur Curry character, played by Jason Momoa, you know, he’s very different; long hair, got the beard, very well-muscled, tattoos. You see this guy and you’re thinking more like, he’s bigger, stronger. He’s the guy from Game of Thrones, he’s Khal Drogo, he’s huge. He’s a big, well-muscled, tattooed guy.

So, when you look at these two guys, if you didn’t take a look at their behavior at all and just saw pictures of them, just saw photos, there’s the myth in society that the alpha male looks more like Jason Momoa, it looks more like Aquaman.

I wanted to bring that up so you guys can see that visually you cannot determine alpha males. You cannot. It doesn’t work that way. The way you determine an alpha male is by cognition, is by how they use their brain. Because quite frankly, guys, if an alpha male was determined by physical appearance, then it would be a luck of genetics. It would just be a matter of genes.

It would be a matter of who your parents were, something you have no control over whatsoever, and who their parents were and so on. You know, with the small exception of plastic surgery, and of course, you can go to the gym and work on your muscles and eat healthy and all that, but most of this is going to be genetic based. And because of that, no alpha is determined by appearance.

The only thing that appearance shows us is genetics and fitness, right, some health. An alpha male is a cognitive master. That is the definition of alpha. Every single one of you is an alpha male, every single one of you, because it has nothing to do with your genetics. It has nothing to do with the way you look. It has nothing to do with how often you visit the gym. It has nothing to do with how many tattoos you have or how much hair you have, whether you have a beard or whether you have – what do you call those things that these guys have now – the little ponytails that they put up on top of their heads.

It doesn’t matter, this is just style. It has nothing to do with alpha. What has to do with being alpha and being in alpha state is only – guys, listen to me – is only the knowledge of and application of the universal truth for how life works and using the Model to align yourself with it by taking a look at your results, taking a look at your actions, by monitoring and managing your mind through cognitive mastery and emotional responsibility.

That is the definition of alpha, knowing that, separating your circumstances from your thoughts and choosing the thoughts that work to get you the results that you are deserving. That’s what I’ve got for you today, guys. Thanks for being with me.

I hope that you loved this episode. There’s some superheroes in there. Now, whether you’re a Marvel guy or a DC guy, you know, back and forth, it has nothing to do – I love DC comics too. I’m not trying to throw DC under the bus. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re a Marvel guy or a DC guy. I’m just using these two guys as an example so that you can see a little bit more about what it means to be alpha and how to go about applying the Model in your life. So, until next week, as always, elevate your alpha.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoy what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash Your Alpha – your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset – at thealphamalecoach.com/unleash.