Ep#117: Becoming Failure-Proof

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:09] ANNOUNCER: 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.

[EPISODE]

[00:00:33] KA: What’s up, my brothers? Welcome back to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud. It is December 2020. It’s the last month of the year. I am really excited about this month, because in the academy, we start practicing and training our impossible goal for 2021. We get to look back on 2020. We get to look forward on 2021 and we start planning it out for our impossible goal, for doing the impossible. It’s an amazing time in the academy.

Today’s podcast content, today’s podcast episode is about becoming failure-proof, which is a lot of what we’re doing in this month in the academy and what we’ll do all year in 2021. Now, before I get into how to become failure-proof, I want to make a quick announcement to you guys. I told you last week that all Alpha Male courses will be available to you for the rest of the year at 50% off their regular price.

That link has been broken. There was a broken link all weekend. That link has been fixed. If you went to the alphamalecoach.com and clicked on the Alpha Male Coach courses, any one of them, whether it’s Indomitable Self-Confidence, Living Your Purpose and creating massive wealth doing it, or How to Stop Buffering, if you’re interested in any one of those courses and you went to those courses last weekend, you probably found a broken link. That link has been fixed. Those courses are available to you at over 50% off and you can choose any single one of them to enroll and to take right now and start practicing, start training your life now, so that moving into 2021, you live with indomitable self-confidence, you start living your purpose and you stop buffering.

Now, all of those courses are available to academy students who are in the tier one, or the tier two program. If you want to enroll in the academy, you’ll get access to all three of those courses as a tier one, or tier two student.

Okay. Let’s talk about becoming failure-proof. First of all, what do I mean by failure-proof? I mean, what does that even mean, coach? What are you talking about? Failure-proof. What I mean is the same as bulletproof. Think about Superman. All right, Superman, Clark Kent. You know the guy I’m talking about? The dude from Krypton, came down, bullets bounce off of him, people shoot him with all kinds of – it doesn’t matter. You could shoot him with a RPG, the thing’s going to bounce off of him, because the man is bulletproof. Bullets do not hurt him. He does not fear bullets.

When I’m talking about failure-proof, I’m talking about the same thing for you. Failure does not affect you. You do not fear failure. The more you build your failure resilience, the more you become failure-proof and you transcend the fear of failure. Now hold on. Stop right there. Is that even possible, coach? Can we transcend the fear of failure? Yes, absolutely. I’ll tell you why. Because the fear of failure is a learned fear. It’s a conditioned fear.

The fear of rejection is a little bit different. We enter into the world with this fear of rejection. It comes from our species. It’s in our DNA. We are a pack animal. We are a tribal animal. We are meant to be in groups. That’s why when we enter this world, we have an immediate desire to belong. We have an immediate desire to be in a tribe, be in a group. When we fear rejection from that group, when we think that we’re going to be rejected from that group, that’s a real visceral, a real primordial, a real deep core fear. Is it possible to get over that fear? Absolutely. In fact, it’s actually one of the last fears that you transcend moving into that momentous leap of fearless living.

The fear of failure is conditioned. It’s learned. It’s not something we’re born with. That makes it something that we can transcend and unlearn and become failure-proof. I’ll tell you what I mean. I’m going to give an example of what I mean by that. We don’t have a fear of failure when we’re little babies. Think about the little baby crawling around on the ground. The little baby crawling around on the ground isn’t afraid of failing to learn how to walk. Little baby looks up and see all the adults walk and says, “Hey, I can do that too.” You have this massive confidence, knowing that he’s never walked before, this little baby, boy or girl, has never walked before, has no idea, no idea how.

All of our brains are so stuck in the how to, but this little baby doesn’t know how. He’s never practiced, never done it before, so he crawls on over the table, reaches up, pulls himself up. He’s on these legs, like these little deer legs, going to fall and then boom, hits the ground. He fails. Does he quit? No. He does it again and again and again, until he learns how to walk. We don’t have a fear a failure of learning how to walk. We just keep trying. We keep practicing. We keep learning until we accomplish the goal.

It’s the same as we age. The older we get, we start to learn how to read. We don’t have a fear of failing learning how to read. We practice, it may be difficult, we may have struggles, we keep going, we keep learning, we keep comprehending and eventually, we get it. We learn how to read. We’re not thinking, “I’m going to fail in learning how to read, so I’m just going to quit. I’m not going to try. I’m not going to do it.”

We get older. We start to age even more and we get into riding a bike. Riding a bike, we get on this bike. Now, we may have a fear of falling. We may have that fear of failure, that fear of injury or pain, but we do it. We get on there and we do it. What happens when we fall off? We get back on. We get back on and we try again. We don’t have that fear of failure, such that we never try. We never say, “Well, I’m never going to ride a bike, because I don’t want to fail, because I don’t want to get hurt.” We just give it a try. We practice and we learn.

Somewhere along the line, usually as we get into our teenage years, we start to develop. We start to be conditioned with a fear of failure. Now this fear of failure is a trained, it’s a learned fear that comes from our parents, comes from our teachers, comes from our friends, comes from society, comes from all the things people around us. Usually, it happens around those teenage years, because we get into listening to the things that are being said, the things that are being taught to us.

Fs are bad. Think about the grading system, at least in the United States. Now for you guys that are my international students, my international audience, in the United States we have grades and they go from A to F. A, B, C, D and then we skip E for some reason. I’m not sure why. Then there’s this F. F stands for fail. We’re taught that it’s bad. Our grown-ups, our parents, our teachers say that’s bad. You get an F, that means you didn’t learn, you didn’t pay attention, there’s something wrong with you. You need to try harder. What’s going on? What’s the deal? What’s your problem? We’re taught that Fs are bad.

We’re not taught that Fs are a way to learn. That when you get an F, you just need to look in there and figure out what went wrong, where did the failure happen? It’s just this big F on your paper. Then your whole life collapses. You’re not going to get into college, you’re not going to get a good job, you’re not going to mount to anything and you might as well just drop out of school, because Fs are bad. Maybe you’ve heard somebody tell you do it right or don’t do it at all. Has a parent told you that? Has a teacher told you that? Has a coach told you that? Has a friend told you that? Do it right, or don’t do it at all.

How about this one? How about winners win and losers fail? If you fail, you’re a loser. Have you ever heard that one? Has a friend told you that? Maybe a coach. Once again, maybe it’s a athletic coach. It’s like, “We are winners. We do not fail. We do not lose.” These are trained, learned cognitions, my friend. They are not something we are born with. They’re something that we develop over time.

The problem with that is that if we never learn to fail, then we never learn to grow. We never expand our consciousness. We never expand our capacities. We never expand our capabilities and we just end up repeating over and over the things that we already know. We basically, end up crawling through life never learning how to walk.

Here’s what I want to do. I want to offer you something here to start you on your journey to becoming failure-proof. I want to go through a thought experiment with you. Before getting into the thought experiment, I want to reintroduce you to the universal truth, because a part of what I’m going to talk about in this thought experiment includes the model of alignment. Understand the universal truth, my friend, if you’ve heard this before, it bears repeating. I know you love it. I know you live it. I know you want some more of it, because it is how we align ourselves with the best version of ourselves.

It’s this; circumstances are neutral. We don’t need to control circumstances. We can’t control circumstances. Circumstances do not affect our lives. Circumstances are neutral data that in raw form, are simply acquired, simply up-took through our five senses. We see them, we hear them, we smell them, we taste them and we feel them. These circumstances, like I say are neutral, raw data. It’s our thoughts that create our feelings, drive our actions and determine our results.

Every result that is determined is simply a reinforcement for the thought, the belief that started it all. Actions and results are so similar in that the action is the demonstration of the thought, the result is the reinforcement of the thought. Essentially, the action and the result are one in the same. The action is how we show up as our cognition and the result is the evidence of that cognition. The action line of the model of alignment and the result line of the model of alignment are linked very tightly together, where we can interrupt the model of alignment at the T-line in our thoughts. We can change our thoughts. We can allow our feelings and change our feelings. We can process our feelings and change our actions.

Our feelings don’t always drive the same action when we interrupt that model, but it is going to be our results that determine that evidence for that original thought. Now when I say the model of alignment, I want you guys to understand the C-line, T-line, F-line. A-line is the action line and R-line is the result line.

Okay, let’s look at the thought experiment. Let’s say that scientists, like science, this group of scientists have gone out there and said, “We’re going to do some research on how to get an intended outcome. How do we create an expectation, a cognitive expectation and then turn it into that intended outcome? How do we go from T to R? How do we get that R-line to manifest as we want, in the way we expect it, in the way we intend it?

The scientists went out and they did a bunch of research, they did a bunch of hypothesis and analysis and they were analyzing data and everything else and what they came up with is they determined that and again, this is a thought experiment, brothers. I’m not saying I have this research. I’m not saying this research is done. This is purely a thought experiment. What they determined was that it takes 100 fails in the R-line – In other words, it takes 100 actions from the A-line to return an unintended result in the R-line, in order to reach that 101^st action in the A-line, which will create intended result, which will create the intended outcome.

In other words, for you to be successful, in order for you to make it to your goal, you have to take 101 different actions. That is the only way to get the outcome you intend. The first action you take, you’re not going to be successful. The first X you take, you’re going to fail in the R-line. Second action, you’re going to fail on the R-line. Third action, you’re going to fail on the R-line. You’re going to fail up to 100. On the 101^st, that R-line is as you intend. You get the outcome you desire.

Now, given this information, given this thought experiment, how would you look at failure? How would you start to look at failure in the R-line? Would it even be failure anymore to you? Would it just be a path? Would it just be an outcome, a known outcome, knowing that the outcome wasn’t going to be as intended, until you got to the 101st action. Would that 60^th, would that 42^nd, would that 93^rd action, or result from that action be a failure? Would you consider it a failure? Would you look at it as a failure and say, “Oh, my gosh. I failed.” Or would you simply say, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. That was my 92^nd attempt. I got nine to go.”

It’s like, “Oh, okay. Of course. Of course, I didn’t get my intended outcome, because science has proven that I’m going to need 101. This is my 92^nd.” In that way, you actually end up getting the result you expect, because you expect to fail and that’s what we’re doing in the academy this month and over 2021, but I’m not going to digress into that. I want you to know that that’s how you begin to build your failure-proof lifestyle, your failure resilience and your transcendence of the fear that accompanies the thoughts around not getting the outcome you expect, which is so strong, especially in those perfectionist mentalities.

Now given this thought experiment, knowing that this is a thought experiment, number one, that this is not real science. I’m not to give you guys any proof or data for this, but considering this thought experiment and changing that number from 100, to say 30, or 48, or 567. The number is arbitrary. What is not arbitrary, what really matters is that you are moving your cognition of failure from the R-line, from the outcome, to the A-line, to the action that you take or don’t take. This, my friend, is where you become failure-proof.

When you move, your idea, cognition of failure from the R-line to the A-line. Because the truth is you can only fail in one of two ways and both of those ways are in your action line. The first way is by not taking action. It’s simply not showing up. It could be not following through on your commitments, or buffering. It could be changing your mind, or it could be lowering your standard. It could be making excuses. The other way that you fail in your action line is when you stop taking action. This is when you give up. This is when you quit.

Now given these two ways that you can fail in the action line, how does that change the cognition? How does that change the emotion, knowing that the only two ways, stay with me brother, the only two ways that you can ever fail, the only two ways that you will feel that fear of failing is in the action line of either one, not taking action, doing nothing. Or two, giving up and saying, “I’m done. I’m through. I throw in the towel.” How does your fear of failure change?

All of a sudden, it’s like, how could you not be taking action? How could you not be running, like your hair is on fire towards this goal? Especially with this thought experiment around the scientists. It’s like, “Oh, so you’re telling me that a 101 is what I got to do? I got to take a 101 different actions? Well geez, let me write down a 101 ways, a 101 different actions I can take, so I can get to the intended result.” Then you just start taking it. You start doing it. The fear then becomes of not doing anything.

All of a sudden, your fear is completely flipped. It’s a 180 degrees different. The fear is no longer of not getting the outcome you expect, and so so you don’t do anything. The fear is of not doing anything. The fear is of not taking action. It’s like, “If I don’t take action, I fail. I have to take action. I will take action. I choose to take action. I’m going to take so much action that I’m just going to keep pushing forward.” That is how you succeed. You succeed in your A-line. You fail in your A-line. You always succeed or fail based on your actions, not on the results of your actions.

The results of your actions only reinforce the cognition. That is all. The results are the evidence that supports the belief that was driving it all. Now you can interrupt your model in several different places and that’s not where I want to go with this podcast, but what I do want you to understand my friend is that to become failure proof, the goal, the key is to be taking action.

Let me give you an example of one of the students that is in the academy. This was last year. This was 2020, and I’ve used this example in 2020, or I use this example from our academy student in 2020 for this podcast. I used it in teaching the students moving in 2021. The student said, “Hey, look. Here’s what I want to do. I want to be a big wave surfer.” Now this student had never been a surfer before. Never been in the ocean before. I don’t even know if he could swim. To be quite honest with you, I don’t know if he’d ever swam before, but he said, “I want to be a big wave surfer.” Who knows why? Didn’t matter why. I didn’t ask why. Maybe he watched Point Break one day. Maybe he watched Endless Summer, who knows? He said, “I want to be a big wave surfer.”

Maybe he just wanted to be out on the beach, be out on the ocean enjoying the sun and the surf and the beach and everything that comes with it. He said, “I want to be a big wave surfer.” What was the path to becoming the big wave surfer? Now here’s the thing, the failure ends in the A-line. The failure is only in the action line. He could have only failed in one of two ways and either not taking action, not doing anything, not making any movement towards that goal. Or two, starting and then quitting.

What were the actions? What happened here? What was the path? Well, action number one, buy a surfboard. Brother goes out, buys a surfboard. He took the action, the result was that he was not a big wave surfer. I mean, he owns a surfboard. He owns a wetsuit, but he is not a big wave surfer. What do you do? Do you quit? Is that it? Here’s the action. I bought the surfboard. I expect to be a big wave surfer, because I own the surfboard now.

Now I’m laughing and I know some of you may be laughing too, but here’s the thing; so many of us do that. So many of us open in the doors of our business and we expect to be millionaires overnight. So many of us walk up to the first girl we see and we expect her to fall in love with us and she’s going to marry us. So many of us, we go to the gym for a week and we watch our diet for a couple days, we expect to lose a 100 pounds. I mean, it’s like, we have these expectations of ourselves that are just so erroneous.

Follow me with this story, because this is the path. Our brother goes out, he buys a surfboard. He’s not a big wave surfer. He doesn’t get the outcome he expects. He’s got to take another action. Got to keep acting. Goes to the beach, sticks his surfboard in the sand and looks at all the surfers out there. Now the fear hits him. Now there’s this fear of failure. “Oh, my gosh. What if I fail? What if I don’t do it? What if I can’t make it? What if I drown out there? What if something happens? What if a shark gets me?” All the fear starts to hit.

In that fear, that’s all result. That’s all result. He decided, “I’m going to take action. I’m going to get on this board and I’m going to paddle.” He did. He got on the board and he started paddling. Now at this point, anybody watching on the beach would consider him a surfer. They don’t know if he’s a big wave surfer or not, but anybody out there watching a guy on a wetsuit paddling on a surfboard, you would think he was a surfer, right?

Now, this is a man who has never caught a wave, never stood up on his board, never even been in the ocean until that very moment, but anybody watching him would say, “That’s a surfer.” You feel me? He took another action. Now he was out there paddling, 20 minutes. Is he a big wave surfer? No. Of course not. Action, not the intended result. Did he fail? No, he didn’t fail. He’s still becoming. He’s still growing. He’s still developing. He’s still evolving.

Brothers, you can correlate this to any other situation, any other goal you have. Whether it’s wealth, health, relationships, it’s all the same. It’s not going to be the first time. It’s not going to be the first action, second action, third action, it may take a 100 actions. It may take 20 actions. It may take 300. Our brother said, “I’m going to learn how to duck-dive. I need to get on the ocean side of the waves.” He took another action. Now he knows how to duck-dive. He practiced it. He learned it. Does that make him a big wave surfer? No. He didn’t have his intended outcome yet, but he was getting there. The actions were driving him towards that goal.

He had to learn how to stand up. He’s back on the shore, popping up on his board, learning how to jump from that prone position into the standing position. Is he a big wave surfer? No. Of course, not. He’s only standing on the beach. He’s popping up on the board on the beach. He’s got to do it in the ocean. He goes back out. He takes another action. He goes back out there, learns how to pop up. He’s not catching waves. He’s just going from that prone position into the standing position.

Then he starts to paddle. He starts to try to catch a wave. Does he catch it? No. The wave is going to crash over him, but he’s taking that action. He’s learning it every time. These are actions. These are actions, these massive actions that he’s taking. Every single one of these actions is not getting him the result he wanted. Not a single one of these. Not buying the wetsuit, not buying the surfboard, not paddling around, not duck-diving, not popping up, not paddling to try to catch the wave. None of it got him the result he wanted. None of it made him a big wave surfer, but all of it was success. All of it was driving him closer and closer to his goal. All of it was evolving him in his consciousness, in his capability and in his capacity.

Eventually my friends, the good news is I’m going to make this long story very short, because it took him the year of 2020. The short of it is, yeah, he’s a big wave surfer. I’m not going to say he’s a big wave surfer, because who knows what a big wave is, but he’s out there catching waves. He’s out there doing the things. He’s out there doing the stuff. He’s out there. He’s a surfer.

Now whether it’s a 20-foot wave, or a 5-foot wave, doesn’t really matter. Look, if your goal is to make a million dollars and you make 900K, does it really matter? I mean, you could say, “Well, I didn’t reach my goal. I didn’t get to my impossible goal. The biggest wave I’ve ever caught was 15 feet. I haven’t caught a 20-foot wave.” Does that mean you failed? Does that mean that you haven’t made it? No. Of course, not. Because you are still learning, you’re becoming, you’re growing. That’s the whole point.

The whole point is not the destination. Now you’ve probably heard this thousands of times in your life and now you know why people say this. It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the journey. It’s who you become along the way. It’s all the actions you take in the aim of reaching your result, not the result itself.

I’m going to tell you this, brother, because this is true. Of all the goals, of all the results, of all the impossible goals and of everything that I’ve ever set my mind out to accomplish, by the time I accomplished them, I just didn’t care anymore. You feel me? At the time, I really wanted the result, but once I got the result, it didn’t matter, because who I had become on the way to achieving that goal was what was so important, what was so empowering, was so life-changing. All that difference in my life, that’s what was important.

By the time I reached the goal, it’s like rolling over that odometer from 999,999 into a million. Again, it’s the same. It’s like your bank account. You want to make a million dollars. You have $999,999.99 pennies, you get that extra penny. Maybe you’re walking down the street, you see it on the ground, you pick it up, all of a sudden, you’re a millionaire. So what? What difference does it make? You have an extra penny. You have an extra cent. It’s not a big deal.

The big deal is who you became on the path from where you started to where you are. That’s what matters. It’s the journey. The journey is becoming failure-proof. The journey is removing your expectation of outcome from the R-line and putting yourself into massive action in the A-line.

You can start this training. You can start this practice right now by going to the alphamalecoach.com. At the very top, you’ll see the little gold bubble that says “Spartan Academy.” Click on that bubble, it’ll take you to the webpage. You can enroll right now in the academy. It starts setting up your impossible goal for 2021, not so that you can reach your impossible goal. I want you to dedicate yourself to your impossible goal.

If you’re a student in the academy, you’ve heard this already. You’re dedicating yourself to that outcome, but you’re not married to the outcome. You are married to the actions that you will take consistently, constantly on your path in your journey to achieving that outcome. Because it’s not about the moment of achievement, it’s about all the things that came before that and that’s what I got for you today.

Until next week, my brothers. Elevate your alpha.

[END OF EPISODE]

[00:28:04] ANNOUNCER: 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.

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