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Today, I am diving into part two of the barriers to belief series and unpacking confirmation bias. Before I get started on this concept, I share some of the massive changes coming to the Alpha Academy. I want to give you the chance to get in on some of the action before everything goes live. Even though things may look different, the foundation of my training is the same; to help you see the world as it is and not through the lens of conditioning.
Last week, I explored correlation and causation and the fact that we almost always confuse the two. We accept things as facts even though they are simply the stories we tell ourselves time and again. This is where confirmation bias, today’s topic, comes into play. It does not prove any truths but instead reaffirms the tales we believe are real.
Even though we know that circumstance is neutral and the data is always there, once we relate it to confirmation bias, our circumstances are no longer objective but appear as a means to support pre-existing beliefs. When these paradigms and stories prevent us from seeing the world as it is, they act as a prison.
While in many ways confirmation bias can hold us back, if we apply our elevated awareness, we can see it for what it is and move past it. We don’t have to accept stories as truth. It is possible to free yourself from the condition of the mind and the images that occur behind your eyes. Rather than having conditioning driving the vehicle that is your life, it is possible for you and the truth to take the driver’s seat once again!
Want to know more about what I do and how I can help you? Sign up for a free 45-minute session with me, and I’ll show you how this works!
What You’ll Learn From this Episode:
- Details about some of the massive changes I am making to the Alpha Academy.
- Confirmation bias is not proving any facts; it simply confirms personal biases.
- Reviewing the components of universal truth and how they relate to confirmation bias.
- All of us confuse correlation for causation and buy into a paradigm of the world.
- Revisiting the story of the farmer who believes his cows were impregnated by the moon.
- How to use confirmation bias to aid your personal growth and not hinder it.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
- Enroll for the Elevated Alpha Society Spartan Academy here.
- Sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the Alpha mindset.
[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]
[00:00:32] KA: What’s up my brothers? Welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud. Before I get into part two of the barriers to belief series, there are some big, big changes coming to the Alpha Academy, and I want to give you all the opportunity to take massive action before these changes occur.
First, the academy is moving to an application-based program. Beginning in April, if you want to enroll in the academy, you will need to apply first and go through a vetting process. Furthermore, the only option for enrolling in the Alpha Academy will be the tier one or tier two level, depending on availability of the one-on-one coaching, which applies to all tier one students.
Now, the purpose behind this change is to ensure that each student gets the maximum amount of guidance on their journey of self-discovery. Up to this point, brothers, I have allowed students to join at multiple tiers, including a workbook-only tier three. What I have found to be most effective has been the enrollment with one-on-one coaching, and the application will add for me as the guide, as the coach, the opportunity I want going into guiding students for knowing how best to work with them.
More on this in a moment as I talk about the changes in the academy. But if you want to avoid the application process, you’re going to have to enroll. You’re going to have that option up until April 1st and have to enroll before April 1st. The tier one program is nearly full, however. So if you have been considering enrolling in the Alpha Academy, I want to offer that you take that action now, rather than waiting. Because once the tier one program is full, I will enroll students into the tier two program and onto a waiting list until either a tier one student disenrolls. Completes their first year or disenrolls or I have access to more coaches of which I will draw from the coach certification course I’m releasing later this year. That’s number one.
Number two, courses. Currently, I have four courses available. They are the Alpha Relationships Course, the How to Stop Buffering Course, the How to Live Your Purpose and Create Massive Wealth Doing It course, and the best-selling Indomitable Self-Confidence Course. I am removing these courses for individual registration and purchase from the website. I will offer them again during certain times of the year, however.
Since they are all available to tier one and academy students, if you want to go through any one of these courses, you can go through all of them by enrolling in the academy. I will leave them up on the website for a couple weeks, like I say April 1st. These changes will occur April 1st, so anyone who still wants to register for any of these courses without enrolling in the academy can do that. After April 1st, they’ll all be coming down and will only be available to academy students or as special offers during certain times of the year. That’s number two.
Number three, the Alpha Academy is going through some changes in content. I am adjusting the content of the training to be in stages that drive leadership, individualism, and personal evolution. There is always, always going to be the foundation of the training, which is to see the world as it is, rather than through the lens of conditioning that you’ve received growing up and still receive through society.
I am not removing any of the current curriculum. The Alpha Academy 101 curriculum will always be available to all students. I am however adding to the curriculum several topics around leadership, business development, relationship abundance, monetary abundance, and individualism, which means separating yourself from the pack mentality and group thinking that is the true pandemic causing suffering in the world. This new curriculum is in part the reason for the application and vetting process. The more students I guide, the more I realize that everyone is coming from their own paradigm of how they see the world, and the new curriculum is designed to meet you where you are in order to facilitate a smoother path in self-discovery and personal development. That’s number three.
Finally, this is the fourth and final announcement, I am working on and will be releasing soon a certification course that will be to train you how to coach others through the methodology that I use in guiding students on their path of self-discovery, individual growth, and personal evolution. The systems that I have created and use are a blend. They’re a blend of biology. They’re a blend of psychology. They include sociology and they include spirituality. There is nothing else and no one else using these methods in totality because I have borrowed and integrated multiple disciplines in order to create a process of systemic evolution from within the individual to emancipate the truth and relieve the burden of resistance and suffering.
If you are a teacher, coach, leader, manager, therapist, counselor or guide of any kind, if you have a calling to serve people and assist them on their journey, if you want to start a career in life coaching, or if you want to work at the Alpha Academy, if you want to work with me, then this course is for you. Now that we’re five minutes into the episode, brothers, let’s get started. That was just a very quick set of announcements for you guys moving forward because I’m really excited about everything that’s happening, and I just want to share it all with you. I try to do that in record time. I did it in under six minutes, so let’s get into the podcast.
Last week, I introduced the concept of correlation versus causation, and I mentioned briefly the psychological term confirmation bias. I want you to know right from the beginning that confirmation bias is neither evidence nor proof of anything factual. It only provides erroneous conjecture for the story you tell yourself, and this can work in your favor when you know what it is and how to use it. However, for most humans, all it does is reaffirms the stories that don’t serve them. Confirmation bias as defined by psychology is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.
I want you to understand what this means because I think the term confirmation bias can be misunderstood and is misunderstood by a lot of people. There is nothing being confirmed as a fact. There is no fact being proven. The only thing that is being confirmed is your personal bias about the way you see the world based on the stories you tell yourself about the world. The data of circumstance is always there. It’s always right in front of you in all forms, in infinite forms according to quantum theory. Everything exists in all potential states, until we observe it and it collapses into the observed state. The state of observation is a choice, not a fact. We choose the state that we believe the matter and density will be in. Then we confirm it as our bias, hence the term confirmation bias.
Now, at this point, I want to review the universal truth and the five components of the universal truth; circumstance, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. There are nuances that occur in between each of these components. However, for simplicity of teaching, these five components are necessary and sufficient. Circumstances are raw data, raw data. Everything we experience in the present is a circumstance. At the first layer of circumstance, there are things in the moment that all people would agree to. To make it really simple, circumstances have no adjectives because adjectives are describing words and subjective to the individual.
The important thing to know about circumstance as they relate to confirmation bias is that once you have determined what you believe, once you have determined your conditioning, circumstances do not appear as neutral for you. Instead they appear as evidence or support or proof for your beliefs and will trigger the unconscious thoughts that you have determined already are true about yourself and about the world. Confirmation bias is the re-affirmation of the mimetic paradigm that you’re currently living in. Once this thought is triggered, then you live through the rest of the universal truth as it applies to your personal state of doing.
This is the follow-through of the triggered thought creating the emotion that causes the vibrational feeling in your body. The feeling you experience drives the action, and the action you take determines the results of your life. These results in the future become further confirmation bias for the conscious or unconscious thought or subjectivity that you believe is true. This is the universal truth and this is how confirmation bias plays its part in the universal truth. It plays its part both in the circumstance and in the result.
Remember the farmer from last week. We’re talking about correlation versus causation, and there was the farmer who used correlation to determine that the light from the moon is what made his cows pregnant. You guys remember that? Look. If you don’t remember that, I’m not going to go through the story. You got to listen to last week’s podcast because for the sake of time, I just want to continue on with confirmation bias. I want to keep going with this analogy because this is the mimetic paradigm the farmer currently lives in.
The mimetic paradigm is mystical. It’s superstitious, perhaps sharing a paradigm with the tribes of antiquity, maybe praying to the moon god to make his cows pregnant and so on. You know that sort of mystical and superstitious old tribal mind. He develops this belief based on correlation and applies what appears to be sound logic to his beliefs. So when he wants his cows to become pregnant, what does he do? He leaves them in the pasture at night and says a prayer to the god of the moon to come and give him calves, to provide him with baby cows. He might even provide an offering to the moon god with the slaughter of a bull and a feast in honor of the god of the moon to bring him a bounty of young, healthy cows. When he doesn’t want his cows pregnant, he brings them into the barn and sheltered away from the moon light, away from the sight of the moon god.
Now, all of this is based on a correlation that draws him, the farmer, into a mimetic paradigm, which is a way of viewing the world, which is a story that he tells himself about the way the world is. A mimetic paradigm our stories we tell ourselves about the way the world is. Now, before you begin to judge the farmer, before you begin to say, “Oh, that’s silly. Moon gods and superstition and mysticism and all these things,” before we get into that, I want you to know that every human even today confuses correlation for causation and lives in a certain paradigm for how they view the world.
There are individual paradigms, there are community paradigms, and there is a global paradigm. Every single one of them, every one of these is just a story. Facts are few, my friend. Even you listening to this podcast live in a paradigm that you believe is true about the world, and you don’t know it’s just a story because you have convinced yourself it is a fact, and it is this very story that is preventing you from reaching the next level in your life. However, you can’t see it because it feels true for you. Until you can see it as a story, you will always believe it is a fact, and it will be your prison. This is one of the many purposes and values of the guidance and coaching that I offer my students, which is revealing the truth.
Let’s go back to the farmer. The farmer is out there. Remember the farmer is living in a mimetic paradigm he believes is a fact based on judgments around correlated events. The conditioning begins when confirmation bias enters the picture. Because when there has already been a great deal of confirmation bias that has led to his belief system, it wasn’t a single full moon that gave way to the belief that it was the moon light from the moon god that made his cows pregnant. Understand he had to correlate that. It took some time. He observed this correlation over and over again, providing more and more evidence, more and more confirmation bias and proof of the correlation.
The percentage of the correlation doesn’t matter, as we discussed last week. Most humans will accept a low level of correlation between two events and still believe in a causal relationship if there is enough conditioning from society. For the lone farmer, however, he needed to see the effect of pregnancy in his cows multiple times before arriving at the belief that it must be the moonlight and nothing else that is causing his cows to become pregnant.
Once he arrived at this conclusion, it was confirmation bias that took over. He took his cows that he didn’t want to be pregnant, for whatever reason he didn’t want to be pregnant. Maybe he thought they weren’t ready. They were too young or whatever. But he took his cows he didn’t want to be pregnant and he locked them in the barn overnight. He took the cows that were ready for pregnancy and he left them outside during the full moon, doing all the rituals and stuff, all the things that he knew based on his correlation that would make these cows pregnant.
When the cows that were left outside got pregnant and the cows that were put in the barn did not, he found proof for his belief. Perhaps he even knew over time being a farmer working with herds that when cows were fertile and ready to become pregnant, he had this idea of like, “Well, this cow is ready. This cow is not.” He would know when a cow was fertile and he would bring them into the barn when he didn’t want them to get pregnant. Knowing they were fertile, he brought them into the barn, and they didn’t get pregnant.
This was even more evidence for his belief. This was more confirmation bias. I mean, they were ready to have calves. He knew they were fertile. But since they were not exposed to the moonlight, they didn’t get pregnant. This is more proof for the farmer. After all, if they are fertile, why wouldn’t they get pregnant if they are in the barn? It must be the moonlight. It must be the moon god. Of course, the opposite is true. If a cow is not fertile and left in the moonlight, it doesn’t become pregnant.
Think about this. For the farmer, this doesn’t change his belief. Remember, he believes this to be true. He believes it’s the moonlight that causes pregnancy. So for him, that’s a fact. Instead of questioning this and wondering like, “Why is this fertile cow not getting pregnant in the moonlight,” instead of questioning it and investigating it, he either simply dismisses the evidence and chooses not to see it. In psychology, we call this denial. Or he considers it an anomaly that reduces the correlation. Remember correlation links two events based on a percentage, whereas causation is 100% true all the time.
But he makes reason. He rationalizes and justifies it to support his beliefs. Or he believes there’s something wrong with the cows. That the cows are deficient or that the moon god is unhappy with the cows, which means that instead of observing his belief, instead of investigating his belief, he turns his blame outward on to the external and creates conflict in the world. Do you see the power of confirmation bias? You see the power that confirmation bias has on a human being.
Confirmation bias allows humans to step into blindness, which is denial. It allows humans to step into erroneous rationalizing, making excuses for why their confirmation bias isn’t happening, isn’t true. Or it allows humans to step into external blame and judgment that creates divisiveness and separation. This is the power of unconscious confirmation bias, and it is a strong barrier to creating new beliefs. It is a strong barrier to personal growth.
That being said, confirmation bias can work with you as well. It’s not all doom and gloom, my friends. You can use confirmation bias to work for you when you are conscious and working with your alpha state. Remember, confirmation bias isn’t proof. It isn’t evidence. It isn’t fact. It is only a reaffirmation for what you already think. It doesn’t create thoughts. Confirmation bias does not create beliefs. It only makes them stronger. If you are unconscious about what you believe, confirmation bias will make your beliefs feel like facts, and they will become prisons preventing personal growth. When you open your mind and elevate your alpha, you will become conscious and aware and begin to recognize the difference between what is a thought and what is a fact. When you start to choose new thoughts, you can use confirmation bias to turn them into beliefs that feel true for you, and this will bring you into a new mimetic paradigm for life.
If you walked onto the farmer’s land and explained to him that the way a cow got pregnant didn’t have to do with the moonlight and didn’t have to do with the moon god, that it had to do with the bulls being in the pasture and having the ability to see the cows in the moonlight and making their move when the farmer was asleep, then he would probably reject the idea. Wouldn’t he? He would argue with you. He would fight with you. He would tell you you’re crazy. He would tell you that you are disrespecting the gods.
If, however, he could see his own mind, if he could see how his mind had determined what was true from a thought, then he would be ready to step into a new paradigm and begin to observe undue truth. He would put the bulls in the barn with the cows at night. When they got pregnant, he would begin to see. He would build a corral and put the bulls in the corral with the cows outside when the moon was new. There was no moonlight. When they got pregnant, he would begin to see. He would even begin to see the error of his belief when he left the cows out in the moonlight, and they did not get pregnant. Remember what he used to deny, what he used to rationalize, what he used to blame. Now, he would begin to see.
Confirmation bias will work for you when you are ready to release your current paradigm of the world and choose to look for evidence for your new paradigm of the world. Obviously, this is much more efficient and effective with guidance. This is much more effective and efficient with coaching. There is nothing, nothing in the world that is visible that is not a story. There are things that are true for all people. There are the natural laws that are governed by causation; gravity, electricity, energy, thermodynamics, cause and effect. These are all natural laws. None of these are changeable. Even if they were, my friend, changing them will not help you live the life you’re meant to live. The life you are meant to live is the life of oscillation and expansion, a life of growth and development.
Barriers to this are your old beliefs, the beliefs that we have accepted as true and used as prisons prevent evolution. Old beliefs are constructed with correlation, with confirmation bias, and with reliance on external authority. The first two we have covered in this episode and last episode, correlation and confirmation bias. I will cover external authority in an episode coming in April.
My brother, I see humans all the time acting like sheep, thinking they’re wolves, and running around like chickens. There is so much that we accept as true. So much that we accept as fact that is only a story. It’s only a belief. Our world is a story, my friend. You live in a story. You live in an idea you tell yourself. Free yourself, brother. Free yourself from the conditioning of the mind, from the images that occur behind your eyes. Your conditioning is driving the vehicle. Let go and become free. Become who you are meant to be. Let go of the doing. Let go of the questions. Let go of the doubt, worries, and fears. Put your mind in the passenger seat and let your alpha do the driving. Live the life you’re meant to live, my friend.
This is what I want for you. I want to guide you inward to the truth. The only question is how far down the rabbit hole are you prepared to go. Living is a gift. Suffering is an option. As one of my teachers said, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Emancipate the truth from within you and wake up from this dream to live the life that you dream. Elevate your alpha.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:22:11] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you have enjoyed 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.
[END]
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