Ep #33: Beliefs and the Alpha State

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 continue to talk about future-focused thinking. We’re going to talk about this alpha male skill set. Really, it is the way to observe and measure an alpha male because remember, the definition of alpha male, for the 21^st century, is self-mastery. It is the man who has mastered his cognition and owns his emotions.

And it’s through cognition mastery and emotional ownership that we act and we get our results. That’s the universal truth; our thoughts create our emotions, which drive our actions, and determine our results. So, when you have learned how to master your thinking and take ownership for your feeling, then you are now creating, you’re driving your actions and determining your own results.

So, future-focused thinking is having a result in the future in mind and bringing it into your reality, bringing it into your present through your thoughts and actions. Now, here’s the thing, guys; future-focused thinking requires a lot of different skills. There’s components to it. It is one skill, but it requires different components.

Last week, we talked about your wants. So I’m going to bring up the model here. And remember, the model is that five-component visual that allows us to observe the universal truth. And the universal truth, all circumstances are neutral, brother, every circumstance in your life; the past, the present, other people, what they say, what they do, all the things happening outside of your body, all the things happening in the world, these things are out of your control, they are objective, they’re neutral.

They’re facts, but they’re circumstances and they exist sort of out there independently neutral data for you to have a thought about. Once you have a thought about these neutral circumstances, then we get the ball rolling. You make it mean something to you in your mind and that creates an emotion. That emotion is like the fuel that burns in the piston because when it enters the body and it enters the cells, then it drives action.

It either causes you to be inactive through paralysis, through fear or boredom, or it drives passive action with some kind of passive emotion. Or it drives massive action with confidence, right, with love, with confidence. So once you drive this action, your actions will determine your results. Your results are what we call your life. It’s your experience. That comes back to circumstance because it includes all the things that you have in your life.

It includes the job you have, the education you have, the relationships you have, the money you have, the house, the car, everything is your result and all of those things are circumstances because all those things are neutral. It’s just how you think about those things – but how you think about your results, the things you have and want, the things you don’t have and want, the things you have and don’t want, all these things, these results will reinforce whatever the thought was that brought those things to you in the first place, and that’s past-focused thinking. That’s beta condition thinking.

Future-focused thinking, we start with what you want. We start with the result, and that’s what we talked about last week. Today, we’re going to talk about beliefs. So we’re going to take the portion of the model that’s like the C and the T, the top portion of the model. We’re going to talk about beliefs because a lot of people have an interesting belief on what a belief is.

What a belief is, is an acceptance that something is true. That’s the definition. I accept that this is true. Now, when you accept that something is true, it doesn’t make it a fact, it just makes it truth for you. It’s still a belief.  It doesn’t have to be proven and it doesn’t have to be indisputable. That’s what a fact is. Facts are indisputable. Everybody at all times would agree to the same thing, that’s a fact. We can observe gravity. We may not call it gravity, but we can all observe that everything is going to end up on the ground with no table or chairs supporting it, if you drop something, it’s going to end up on the ground. We would all agree to that at all times in all places of the world. That’s a fact.

A truth is something that you decide is true for you. It doesn’t have to be true for everyone. The universal truth is true for everyone, but there are personal truths that are just true for you. And that is a belief, brother. Now, I like to think of a belief as just a thought you think over and over and over again, because a thought that you think over and over and over again becomes a belief. It becomes a part of your identity.

A belief is a choice. It is anything you want it to be. It is a thought. And since it’s a thought, since it’s not a fact, it’s not a circumstance, you can choose if you want it to be true or not. So here’s the thing with belief – basically, I want you to understand this. And if you understand this, I mean, separating thoughts from circumstances is really 80% of the move.  It’s 80% of the skill, of that momentous leap, I like to call it, that skill set of shifting from a very dominant unsupervised beta condition to elevating your alpha and recognizing what the beta condition is creating through this repetition of past-focused thinking and allowing yourself to see the world, the alpha state will allow you to see the world in a more objective way.

So, when you do that, then you get to choose the beliefs that will get you the results you want from your future. And 80% of that is separating thoughts from circumstances. So I want you to listen to this. I want you to know this; the truth is, you are the story you tell yourself about yourself.

That’s what human beings are. We are stories. We are beliefs that we have about ourselves. Let me get real with you. You guys know I love the Matrix, right, so I’m going to introduce you to the real. The real is that we are apes, okay. We are animals. Biology, flesh and blood, we are cellular organisms. That’s what we are. We are shaved apes that live in a technologically advanced world that we created with our beliefs.

We have created stories to unify each other. We have created stories to protect each other. We’ve created stories to love each other. We’ve created stories to come together in unities and nations. The idea of a nation is a story, you feel me? Before there was the cognitive and the agricultural revolution, before these things happened, there was no government, there was no religion, there was no state. These are all thoughts, these are all stories that we’ve created to unify each other. And your life is the same.

I call myself a life coach. That’s a story I tell myself. That’s a story I tell other people. It’s not a fact. There might be people that don’t necessarily agree to that. It’s not indisputable. I have a piece of paper that says I’m a life coach, but all that means is that somebody else believed that I was a life coach also and printed me out a piece of paper because they believed it. It’s the same thing with any college degree you get. It’s a belief that you have about your education. It’s not fact. It’s a story that we tell ourselves.

And it’s a story – and any story that you tell yourself, if you start to say, well it’s because of this piece of paper that I’m able to get this type of job, and without this piece of paper I wouldn’t be able to get this type of job, or I wouldn’t be able to be successful, or I wouldn’t be able to make as much money, all of these thoughts are how you believe. They’re not facts.

Facts, again, are circumstances. And if you’re curious about that, there’s a whole podcast dedicated directly to circumstances, podcast number five. So go back and check that out. But when it comes to beliefs, most of us grow up to think limiting thoughts and create limiting beliefs because we make the world mean things to us.  You know, what we believe about the world is what holds us back from experiencing awesome things and it gets in the way of our own dreams and it gets in the way of our own desires.

A lot of times, people think beliefs require evidence, and other times, people think beliefs are just fact. They make the mistake. So there’s kind of like these two different camps of what a belief is. Some people think beliefs require evidence. Like, I don’t believe in aliens because I’ve never seen one. And when you’re in this kind of camp, it’s like, seeing is believing and you’re just facts – number one, that’s complete illusion. There are a lot of things that you believe even though there’s no proof for it. I just got done saying that.

But when you have that mindset, that I don’t believe in aliens because I’ve never seen one, this is why so many amazing guys are stuck in mediocrity, because essentially what that sentence means is that they’re looking at the model backwards, that their beta condition is telling them, I don’t believe in my thought because I’ve never had the results. So it’s like the result has to come before the thought.

They’re waiting for evidence that they’re amazing, that they’re capable before they believe they are. Now, the ironic thing is that the whole trick is to believe before and then you will become. You believe, you think, you think the thought over and over again creating the emotion, and then it becomes. It doesn’t have to become first. You don’t have to get the result first to provide evidence for the thought. But that’s kind of what that statement is; I don’t believe until I have the result.

On the flipside, you’ve got guys who mistake their beliefs for facts. And that’s a tough one because they’re kind of in that same mindset, like I believe this because it is a fact. I mean, that’s the beta condition. That is the illusion that the beta condition throws on us, but that can create a lot of suffering as well because when you start to think that your limiting beliefs are facts, that you don’t have any control over it – because again, we don’t have any control over facts.

There’s nothing I can do to change gravity. There’s nothing I can do to stop day from following night. The Earth is always going to rotate. And when I think that my beliefs are facts, I am disempowered to do anything about them. All of a sudden, these are just facts. For example, if I believe that women aren’t attracted to bald men and I’m bald, I don’t have any hair, and I think that my beliefs are facts, then what am I going to do?

All of a sudden, I have convinced myself that it is a fact, women aren’t attracted to me. The premise, women aren’t attracted to bald men, I am balled, therefore women aren’t attracted to me. If those three statements are facts, I’m screwed, right? Like, what do I do? But that’s not truth. Those are all beliefs. Those are all thoughts. The truth is there are a lot of women that are attracted to bald men. We know this.  We see it all the time.

So your belief is what’s holding you back. Your thought is what’s holding you back by thinking that it is a fact, by thinking that it is something that is just true for everyone and all people at all times. So we’ve got these two camps of beliefs, but really, what beliefs are is anything you want and everything you are because you are, your results, your life, as it is right now, is a reflection of everything that you believe.

Just look around at people’s lives and you’ll know exactly what they believe. If you get to know someone long enough, just by observing what they have and don’t have, the way they talk, you don’t have to ask them directly, what do you believe, because you can see it. Our behavior and our results, our actions and our results, are a manifestation of our thoughts, brother.

So we know what people believe because we can see it in their world. We see it in their behavior. We see it in their results. You want to know what you believe, look at your behavior, look at your results. You know I love confidence. I’m a confidence guy. I think confidence is an amazing emotion. It’s probably the best emotion.

Don’t get me wrong, I love love as well, I think love is great, but I love confidence because it’s a massive action emotion. It really creates your best self because, because you’re not afraid to do anything. And I love it because of how it makes your beliefs more powerful. It helps you to believe impossible things.

And I say impossible things with quotes, because things aren’t impossible, we just think they’re impossible. We just believe they are because things really aren’t impossible, when you believe they are, they become so. So, with confidence, you will believe things that other people find difficult to believe, these impossible things, and you will have more action in executing on what you believe because you have confidence in your beliefs, you have confidence in yourself and getting the results that you want.

So, check this out, who you are in your life, the story you’re living as the hero, as the writer, as the reader of your story is based 100% on who you believe you are. That is all. Now, when you’re in the beta condition, you may be unconscious of your beliefs. You know that they’re limiting because of your results, but you’re not really sure what they are and you’re just kind of going with the flow. It’s that past-focused thinking. Whatever the conditioning of your past has created in your mind for you to believe is what is being executed in your emotions and your actions determining your results, so in that past-focused beta condition.

When we take a look at the world objectively, we separate the thoughts from the facts, then we can choose the story we tell about ourselves. We can choose who we want to be. We get to believe anything because that’s the alpha state. The alpha state is your true self, is your dreams, is the life you’re meant to live.

So in many ways, these beliefs, the stories we tell ourselves are simple and we rarely think about them. They’re very unconscious. At other times they shape our identity and we hold firmly to them. Some people even die for their beliefs. In either case, they’re still beliefs. They’re still thoughts that we choose to be true for us.

So, let’s consider the three pillars of self-confidence. You guys know the three pillars of self-confidence, and I want you guys to see how they are related to belief. The first is trust in yourself. Trust in yourself is having the belief that you are the person who follows through on what you say you will. You’re the kind of person who does what he says he’s going to do. You are not the kind of person who wouldn’t keep their word. This is a belief you have about yourself.

You believe it and act this way before you accept it. When you believe that you’re the kind of guy like, I’m just the kind of person that does what I say I’m going to do, I trust myself. If I say I’m going to go to the gym after work, I go to the gym after work. If I say I’m going to pick up the kids after school, I’m going to pick up the kids after school. If I say I’m going to cook dinner for my wife, I’m going to cook dinner for my wife.

These are things I’m going to do. I don’t say one thing and then not follow through because I believe that I’m the person that does trust in myself. It’s not just what I do for other people but trusting in myself and my own capabilities and my own capacities to do what I want to do. I believe I can climb that mountain. I believe I can jump off that ledge.

Obviously there’s water down there. We’re going swimming, but I have faith in my capacities. So I believe that. So that’s number one. Number two, that emotions are just a vibration, that’s the second pillar. You believe they won’t hurt you. You believe you’re going to be okay, that they’re just a cellular change. You believe you can handle an emotion. There’s no emotion that’s so intolerable you can’t feel it and process it.

You hold that strong firm belief. There are people who believe that they just can’t handle fear, that they can’t handle anger, that they can’t handle certain emotions. Grief, for example. When a loved one dies, there are people who believe they cannot handle grief. And you know what? There are people that live with grief their entire life because they believe they’re the person that cannot handle grief and they mourn and they’re depressed all their life.

When you believe emotions are just a vibration at the cellular level, that’s what they are. That’s what a feeling is and you believe it and you know it, then you know you can handle it. You know that. It’s like scratching dead skin cells off your arm. You have an itch, you scratch it. It’s the same thing. An emotion comes into your body, causes your cells to vibrate, you process it, it’s done. You can handle that.

Believing you can handle that is how belief helps the second pillar of self-confidence. The third pillar is you just believe the awesome stuff about yourself. You believe awesome stuff that you think about yourself, you believe the awesome stuff that other people say about you, and you choose not to believe it when people say negative things about you.

When people gossip about you, when the bullies come out, right? When the bullies try to bully you and say mean things, you choose not to believe those things because those are their opinions. Those are their thoughts. So the third pillar of self-confidence is believing the good stuff and not believing the bad stuff because it’s all thought, it’s all up to you on what you choose to believe.

You can believe all these things ahead of time, bro. That’s the thing. That’s the future-focused thinking, and that’s the key. That’s the skill set is believing these things before you have any evidence for them. So whatever it is you want, we talked about last week with the podcast, you made a list of things you want. Start believing. Start living as if you already have them. Believe that they’re a part of your life.

If it’s amazing relationship with my girlfriend then have – believe you have an amazing relationship with your girlfriend. If it’s driving a BMW X3, then imagine – believe that you are the kind of person that would drive a BMW X3. That is future-focused thinking. That is the future of the human species is our cognitive mastery and our emotional ownership, and we develop it as a skill set so that we can create the life of our dreams, so that you can have these things.

You could have an amazing relationship, you can have a BMW wagon if you want, or whatever you want. Because elevating the alpha state to empower ourselves to be the best version of ourselves, best version of what we are and share that value with the world for each other and for future generations, you have to believe this before you have evidence for it because it’s by believing it that you create the evidence for it.

Okay my friend, so let me wrap up this podcast with some ways to identify your beliefs. Now, as I said, the big leap, the big momentous leap is separating your thoughts from your circumstances. So before we even get into future-focused thinking, I mean, I’m talking about as a coach, if you decide to work with me, which hey, go to the website, sign up for a 45-minute consultation.

We can talk about what’s going on in your life and we can look at elevating the alpha state to getting you the results you want in your life. But here’s the thing; it’s a process. We don’t just jump to this future-focused thinking. The first thing we want to do is we want to look at life objectively. We want to look at where your beta condition is.

What’s going on now? So here’s a couple ways you can do that. Number one and the fastest way to find out what your beliefs are, I’ve already mentioned this, is to look at your results. Look at your life as it is right now. Look at everything. Look at the three categories of life. Look at your relationships, look at your health, look at your wealth.

In your relationships, what do you believe? Well, how are your relationships? What’s going on? Are you single? Are you dating? Are you married? If you are in a relationship, is that relationship amazing? Is it the best relationship it can be? Is it dysfunctional? Is there a lot of frustration, anger, resentment? Is there happiness?

Are you sharing time? Are you showing up in your relationships as a people-pleaser? Are you authentic and genuine at who you are or are you trying to please the person who you’re in the relationship with? Are you living life more for them?

So what are your results? And what your results are is what you believe about relationships. Your behavior, your results are a manifestation of your beliefs. Whatever you have right now is what you believe, and it’s what you want and what you think you deserve because it’s the beta condition. It’s fear and scarcity.

Whatever you have right now, you may say well yeah, but I have this addiction. I have this – pornography. I look at pornography too much. How can you tell me, Kevin, that I want this and I think I deserve this? It’s because of what you believe. If you want something else, you would be doing something else. If you thought you deserved something else, then you would have something else.

Right now, your beta condition is telling you a story about yourself and it’s manifesting in your results. If you want something else, you have to believe something different. So to find out what your beliefs are right now, take a good deep look at your life. Look at yourself as though you’re watching yourself on a movie.

Somebody’s following you around with a video camera. What’s going on? What are the things that’s happening with you? What are the things you have and want? What are the things you have and don’t want? What are the things you don’t have and want? Look at your results. You’ll find out your belief.

Number two, do you know the difference between what you want to believe and what you think you have to believe? Again, kind of bringing this up from earlier in the podcast. If you think your beliefs are facts, then you think you have to believe them, that you don’t think you have a choice. This takes away your ability to choose and it leaves you in a tough position if these “facts” – if these beliefs that you’re mistaking for facts ever hold you back, if they’re limiting beliefs.

If you have limiting beliefs that you think are facts, then there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re holding you back and you just think that’s the way it is. That’s the way I am, that’s the way life is, that’s the way I’ve always done it, this is the way it’s always been. If you’ve ever said these things, you probably have some limiting beliefs.

If you tell yourself this is just the way I am, this is the way things have always been, this is the way I’ve always done them. That’s past-focused thinking. Those are limiting beliefs about yourself. You think that that’s just the way you are. Choosing beliefs on purpose means you are creating your life. You’re living in belief without – the choice is letting someone else create your life.

Whoever was – the person was – that originally programmed that beta condition, the beliefs you have now. Essentially, you’re living their beliefs. Elevate your alpha. Elevate your true self, choose your own path. So that’s the difference between knowing that you want to believe this or thinking that you have to believe this.

Number three, look at your life in a more objective way. This will help you see the world as it is versus the world as you’re believing it to be. Now, this is what I do as a coach, and I help teach my students how to do this on their own.

So when you know the difference between circumstances and beliefs and start to see how your beliefs are determining your results, that’s when the skill of creating life begins to emerge and you believe into your future. That’s when the fun starts because that’s when you really get to be the co-creator of your future. You’re not just kind of going with the flow anymore. You are determining your path.

So number four, surround yourself with people who believe you. Now, this can be a difficult thing for some people, and I kind of put this in there as a bonus. It’s really just these three. The first three, but as a bonus, if you want to find out what your beliefs are, surround yourself with people who believe you.

Changing your identity sometimes means going against your own brain and it means going against everyone who knows the story you’re telling people now. When you want to tell yourself a different story, when you want to live into your future instead of living from your past, you got to tell yourself a different story about who you are. And you have to convince your brain to believe this new story because your brain thinks you’re the person from your past.

So not only do you have to convince yourself, you also have to convince everyone else who knew you yesterday. Because the people who knew you yesterday, they knew the old you. They knew your old story. So for you to have new beliefs, take new actions, have new results, for you to become the kind of person that makes 36K a year to a person who makes 100K a year, you have to tell your brain a different story. You have to tell other people a different story about who you are.

It’s the same thing. Think about it. When you go from being a single guy to being a married guy, you’re telling people a different story. All the people who used to think about you as single, they think you’re single. Now you’re telling them a different story. Now, that’s an easy thing because that’s like, yeah, I got married, here’s my wife, here’s my marriage contract. That’s a very new story to tell.

But when you make major changes, when you make these big cognitive shifts in your life where you go from being sort of doubtful, worried, insecure, to all of a sudden you get these massive leaps of confidence and purpose and you’re making huge changes in your life, it’s not just convincing your brain to believe this but everybody else on board too.

So you can do this one of two ways. You can either have the people come with you and believe you and say yes and support you, or you can just make a ton of new friends. Just find people who don’t know the old you and they only know the new you, and they’re going to know the new you and they’re going to only believe the new you and they’re going to love the new you, and that’s going to be the way it is.

Your new friends are not going to know that you were ever doubtful. Your new friends are not going to know that you ever made 36K. Your new friends aren’t going to know that you were ever single. All they’re going to know you as is as this guy. And these new people will support that belief. That new guy belief.

So I throw that in there as a little bit of a bonus, but here we go. Belief is the path to change. You have to believe. You can change and you have to believe you are the person you want to change into. Actions are movement and space. Actions are neutral. Actions are easy. The effort is in the emotion. The effort is in getting the emotion, getting the body to release the chemicals that will vibrate the cells.

Rolling on wheels is easy, but getting a car to move requires the engine to fire. So it’s the same type of thing. Movement is easy, but you got to have the emotion, and the emotion comes from the thoughts, brother. Emotion comes from beliefs. This is the universal truth.

We can see this in every circumstance when we use the model. So the story you tell yourself and other people is the person you become in the world. You get to decide who that person is. You get to choose based on what you believe, based on what you think about yourself over and over and over again until you accept it as truth.

How you act in the world and the results you receive from those actions all comes from the story, all comes from what you believe about yourself. Beta condition beliefs create unconscious or unwanted results. And if you weren’t aware of your results, believe your results aren’t  consequences of your actions or have results that you don’t want, then guess what? You’re living in the beta condition.

You’re living in the unconscious, unwanted sentences in your brain. The alpha state is the story you choose to believe. The story you choose to have conscious, determined results. You know when you have created something from your alpha state or from your beta condition. You know when you’ve created it.

You might not know how you created it, but you know when it happened, and I’m telling you right now, the how is through what you were thinking at the time. How you created it is what you believed when you were taking that action. That is the power of belief. That is the power of the alpha state and that is the tool I call future-focused thinking, my friend.

That’s what I got for you today. We are going to do more future-focused thinking next week. Until next week, as I said, go to my website. Sign up for a 45-minute free consultation session and I will take you through this future-focused thinking. It’s very simple, my friend. We look at where you are, we look at where you want to be, and we just compare the two models. That’s the coaching.

That is why this is an alpha male trait. This is how we measure and observe alpha men. So go to my website, sign up. Until next week, brother. 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.