Ep #59: Indulgent Emotions

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:09.6] 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 is your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:32.5] KA: What’s up my brothers, welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach podcast. I am your host Kevin Aillaud and welcome to the first week in December and I am having a super fun time with all of the warrior brothers in the Spartan Agoge and even in my own life because I am on board with another year of creating the impossible goal and some of the impossible goals that the warrior brothers have are truly amazing. 2020 is going to be a year of great things.

Now, this episode will conclude the emotion series and I think it’s really appropriate to talk about this episode now to kind of cap off this series with these three tier emotions and what a lot of you guys deal with and what we are going to deal with during 2020 is we focus on action towards the impossible goals.

In this episode, we’re going to talk about indulgent emotions and we’ve talked about emotions a lot in the podcast but it’s always nice to review, it’s always nice to bring it back around because even some of our most advanced students have a hard time when it comes to remembering that we often want to indulge in emotions that don’t serve us.

These are what I call tier three emotions. Now, tier one emotions are emotions we choose to have in our human experience on purpose, right? We want to balance them, we want to choose to have positive and negative emotions or comfortable and uncomfortable emotions. These are wanted emotions, tier one emotions, we create on purpose.

Tier two emotions are emotions we don’t choose to have deliberately but they come to us, they enter our body from our brain, unwanted. We want to learn how to process and allow them, instead of reacting, avoiding or resisting them. Then they are tier three emotions, the indulgent emotions which we’ll talk about today.

[0:02:26.6] KA: These indulgence emotions, they really serve us in no way. We just want to be rid of them and not allow them in our life at all because they don’t do anything for us. For those of you who don’t remember or have no idea what I’m talking about or even if this is your first podcast you’re listening to, then if that’s the case then hi, welcome, write a review.

By the way, if you haven’t written a review, hook me up, I hook you guys up all the time, right? I create this free podcast for you, this amazing content, write me a review. Anyway, let’s bring it back to the episode. Go write me a review. It will take you two seconds. I you’ve already done it, thank you very much, emotion.

Or what I will call form this point forward, the rest of this episode is an indulgent emotion is an emotion that is comfortable to you, right? It’s something that you dive into more than you would like to that doesn’t give you a result that you want. Now, if you remember the universal truth, it’s been a while since we talked about the universal truth but if you remember the universal truth and the model, then you remember that your thinking creates your emotion and that your emotion drives your action and that your action gives you a result. If you spend a lot of time indulging in emotions that don’t serve you, you’re going to have results in your life that you don’t want.

One of the emotions that I’ve been noticing that a lot of people indulge in is doubt. Especially with the impossible goal going on in the agoge. Doubt is one of those tricky little emotions that seems like it could be necessary, right? It seems like it could be useful and protective but it’s not. Doubt is one of those things, especially when you’re doubting yourself and you’re doubting your own ability.

[0:04:07.0] KA: It’s one of those things that prevents you from going into the world. Because it pretends to protect you, right? Kind of wants to keep you safe and it wants to keep you safe from another emotion, it wants to keep you safe from fear. It pretends to protect you from harm but it does just the opposite of that. What it does is it does it ahead of time so you hear me say ahead of time a lot because that’s what the beta condition does.

It puts you in a place ahead of time where you base yourself on your past and decide, before trying that you can’t because of the story that you’re telling yourself about your past. For example, people will come and say, “I don’t want to go out there and build my business because I’m afraid I might fail”, right?

They’re doubting their own ability and what they’re doing is they’re just failing ahead of time. They’re just failing before they have the chance to actually fail using the evidence that they’ve never created a business before, it’s reason to judge their potential of creating a business and deciding not to try. You know, I have clients that say, I don’t want to do that because it will be too much work.

They’re doubting their ability to be able to do the work with ease. They are putting themselves in the failure place, they’re putting themselves in the “I can’t do it” space without even giving themselves a chance. That’s doubt.

[0:05:19.7] KA: Another indulgent emotion that I’ve been seeing a lot of lately is comfort. Think about that. Comfort, it’s the kind of thing that people say is self-care and you know, being in the life coaching industry, I hear a lot about self-care and I agree with self-care. But comfort and self-care are not the same thing.

You know, people will say, I want to be in the space of familiarity and comfort because I don’t want to be feeling uncomfortable at all. I was just talking to someone the other day and I said, you know, I think our ability to succeed is in direct proportion to our ability to be uncomfortable which I think is a bummer but if you listen to this podcast, you know that evolving, you know, our ability to evolve and go to the next level and grow requires us to be in the uncomfortable, but really in the unfamiliar.

I want you to think about that, think about how much sense that makes? It’s almost like – it almost feels like it should be like a common sense because if you think about – if you’re going to become more of who you already are, if you’re going to change. Then, by definition, you’re going to be doing things that are unfamiliar.

For most of us, when we’re in a more unfamiliar space, we are more uncomfortable. I’ll have people try things that will make them feel very uncomfortable because of the way they’re thinking about them and so, then, they will decide that they no longer want to do that because they don’t want to be uncomfortable and I want you guys to think about that just for a minute.

[0:06:47.0] KA: Think about that, I mean, that’s what a lot of coaching is, understanding that the discomfort is not about what you’re doing, it’s about the way you’re thinking about what you’re doing, right? I want you to think about what it would be like to have the willingness to be uncomfortable.

One of the reasons why I talk about emotions is being indulgent is when it comes to life coaching, it all revolves around this idea of being related to fitness and confidence. I was a fitness coach for over a decade and I was a confidence coach before shifting into cognitive mastery which is both optimal health and indomitable self-confidence because they’re byproducts of cognitive mastery.

When we indulge in food, we indulge in eating sugar, when we know that’s not what we ultimately want to do with our lives, it’s very similar to indulging an emotion that we know isn’t going to serve us. A lot of times, we want to indulge in comfort, that emotion of comfort and one of the ways that we want to do that is by buffering, right?

It’s by over eating or over drinking or over sleeping or for some of us, it’s even overworking. We feel comfortable when we are constantly working, it’s interesting, right? Even overworking. I was just working with one of my students on this and he was really struggling with this with his goals and indulging in indecision. I’m always telling my students that they’re not allowed to tell me they don’t know.

[0:08:07.6] KA: They’re not allowed to tell me that they’re confused, right? Because one of the things I learned when I was in the Navy, we were never allowed to answer a superior’s question with “I don’t know”. You know, for superior and officer and NCO, if he ask me a question and I didn’t know the answer, I would have to respond with I’ll find out sir or chief or whatever their rank was and then I would go find out and I’ll report back.

You know, I hold my students to that same cognitive standard because whereas, I decided to go find a solution for this person asking the question, which increased both my knowledge and the knowledge of the person who wanted the information. Then when your brain is telling you I don’t know, the only problem with that is that you are the only person that knows.

The information is not outside of you, the information is in your mind, it’s in your brain. There isn’t an answer out in the universe that you have to figure out, your brain already has the answer. I hold my students to the standard all the time and they can tell me that they’re finding the answer, they can tell me that they’re seeking a solution, that they’re working on understanding something but saying I don’t know and being confused saying I’m confused.

It’s very indulgent and it’s just not allowed in the Spartans. It’s a way of not taking action. It’s a way of confusion, indulging in the emotion of confusion, it’s a tier three motion, it serves no purpose, it doesn’t help you. All it does is stall you out. You know, people and students will come to me and say, I don’t know what I want to do with my life, I don’t know what I should do with my business.

[0:09:31.6] KA: I don’t know how to approach this woman. I don’t know how to do this, whatever it is. Whatever it is they’re telling themselves they don’t know. What I’ll say to them is, you know how, right? If I ask you how to do something, you could give me the steps but you’re saying that you don’t know how for a reason. What is that reason, why are you indulging in confusion, why are you indulging in indecision?

Why are you indulging in the I don’t’ know energy because it’s not serving you? Most people are indulging in those kind of emotions because of the doubt and the feeling that they’re somehow being protected. It’s not as likely for someone to say to me, I’m afraid of doing this, I’m afraid of failing. I’m afraid of becoming more of who I am, right? I’m afraid of succeeding, I’m afraid of becoming the best version of myself. People don’t say that.

Most people don’t really look into those emotions because there’s something about those emotions that fear, that seems healable and solvable. But when you’re in confusion, it’s a more indulgent space, it’s like a lighter space instead of feeling fear.

You know when you’re indulging in emotion because there’s no traction, there’s no growth, there’s no movement. There’s also no real negativity or discomfort. It’s not like you’re feeling angry or afraid or upset about anything, you’re just moving along, right?

[0:10:49.3] KA: It’s like your indulging in food all day long. It’s not like you’re bingeing and overeating, it’s not like you’re completely overdoing it, you’re just indulging all day long, just a little bit here, just a little bit there, just a little bit here. That’s what most people do. Ironically, they do it with food and emotion. Which is actually neither surprising nor ironic now that I say that because people tend to graze when it comes to food as well.

For some people, they’ve convinced themselves that it’s actually healthy to do that. Then, they figure out two years later that they haven’t created anything that they wanted to create because they’ve been confused or they’ve been busy, right? Busy is another one, a lot of times, I’ll talk to my students and they’ll tell me that they’re just too busy to do anything.

I like to think of that as this low emotion like this low energy emotions, it’s like a little bee, people say busy bee is like this little buzz. Busy feels like a buzz to me, you just feel busy. So many people indulge in this idea that I’m busy, which is a thought, right guys? I’m busy is a thought, The circumstance which goes in the c-line, what’s a fact is you know, the things that you’re doing or the things that you – your to-do list.

But I’m busy, that’s the thought about your to do list. Then, we feel that this little buzz, it’s like well, I can’t take any risks right now, right? I can’t take any of my test right now because I’m too busy. I can’t sit down and really get any creative work done because I’m too busy, right? I’m too busy running around, I’m too busy getting things done.

[0:12:18.3] KA: I want you to know this. What does that emotion feel like to you? Busy. It’s not really uncomfortable, right? It’s just kind of like a constant movement. It’s kind of just like hangs out there, it makes you think that it’s okay. In fact, it makes you think it’s true, right? I’m just busy, it’s no big deal, you’re just busy and you feel busy and there’s not really anything except busy.

Overwhelm is like busy on steroids but overwhelm is also 100% indulgent. Another one that a lot of people like to indulge in is tired or exhausted. I think that that’s a huge wave of self-pity, which is another indulgent emotion, self-pity and that’s going around and I see people constantly referring to themselves as exhausted and tired. When I see this on Facebook all the time. People complaining about how they work a 40-hour work week and have no energy for anything else.

Most of these people have really low intense jobs. Their jobs have really low work output in terms of force times distance. I’m sorry, no. I’m not buying your story, I don’t believe that you’re tired, I don’t believe that you’re exhausted. I believe that that’s a story you’re telling yourself but it’s not a story that you’re convincing me of.

I say to my students, listen to me, you could do twice as much work as you’re doing right now. Your brain is convincing your body to be tired, not the other way around. I’m not the type of guy that’s like hey, take a rest, take a load off, sit back and relax, right?

This is not the kind of guy I am, it’s not the kind of coach I am. The kind of coach I am, I’m not the kind of coach that tries to get my student to like me, I’m the kind of coach that helps my students like themselves, right?

[0:13:55.0] KA: I’m not going to tell them to take a rest, I’m going to convince them that they can do more than what they think they’re capable of. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t some people that are overworking themselves because there definitely are. They’re out there hustling and that they’re pushing themselves too hard, definitely, for sure. But most people that I know and work with are not overworking themselves.

They are indulging in this thought that I’m so busy and I’m so exhausted and its just energy as an excuse to not show up in their lives and indulge in comfort and buffering. I really want to make it clear that I’m on to you. I’m on to you if that’s who you are. You know who you are. I know that you’re not that busy, I know you’re not that tired.

One of the things I did about five years ago was downloaded this time tracker app on to my phone and I set it up with all the different things that I was doing throughout my day to keep track of my time and wow, did I learn a lot about my behaviors. At the time, I want you to know that I was running a full time business and I was traveling throughout North and South America every weekend as a contractor and consultant.

I was doing very well, I was very accomplished and I felt very busy. I was running my own business, I was working over 40 hours a week plus gone every weekend as a contractor consulting for another company. After using this time tracker app, you know what I found out? I found out I was spending a lot of time wasting my time.

[0:15:17.8] KA: Even though I was spending time over 40 hours a week on my business and then all weekend on a plane or in a hotel or in a seminar coaching and teaching. I was wasting a lot of time, I was spending a ridiculous amount of times scrolling through Facebook and watching TV. That was my way of burning up time and then saying I’m too busy to do the stuff that really mattered to me.

I would procrastinate and I just didn’t have as many hours in the day when I’m doing that, five minutes here and 10 minutes there. Busy, that was all in my brain. That’s a way for you to see, are you indulging in that energy? When you really look at your life and you look at the amount of time you have, what are you spending it doing?

Are you spending it feeling busy or are you genuinely accomplishing a lot because there is a difference. Are you always telling yourself how busy you are? I don’t think that is a useful sentence. I don’t think that it creates a positive emotion when you say that unless you are trying to indulge in it as an excuse for not doing something else. So pay attention to what you are paying attention to brother like that is important.

Look at everything you have accomplished, look at everything that you have done, why can’t it be I have accomplished so much today instead of I was so busy today? Notice how those two sentences in your brain feel different. I have accomplished so much today instead of I was so busy today. Same with tired, “I am so tired, I am so exhausted.” So many of us need to distinguish between the tired feeling we create with our brain because of how we think about our lives.

Versus that amazing feeling of tired we have after a day of really kicking ass and I want you guys to think about that for a minute. There is the tired that you have from busying your brain and from worrying and from doubting and from creating confusion and disorganization. Then there is the tired that you feel when you’re really taking care of some business. I mean you guys know that is a very different kind of tired. It is a good tired and you don’t have to complain about it.

You love it, you’re like, “Yes, I killed it today” instead “I’m so tired that is why I didn’t get that done. I am so busy” all right? We create those excuses for ourselves. You are never going to be tired from doing the same thing every day. This is something that I learned from fitness, right? You are never going to be tired doing the same thing every day. Your body is an adaptive machine, when it gets used to a certain volume of work each day it develops efficiency for that work.

[0:17:49.3] It doesn’t matter if you sit in a cubicle all day, if you are a nurse and on your feet all day or if you are a brick layer and you are moving a ton of concrete all day, your body will adapt to your power output and become efficient at that level of volume. So you are not tired. You are never actually physically tired or exhausted unless you exceed the volume of work your body is used to creating in a certain timeframe, in this case, in a day.

And if you are doing the same thing every day and you feel tired or exhausted, it is your brain feeding that into you. It is feeding that thought into you. It is not your body telling you that you have exceeded your average volume of output. Another emotion that I think is really important for us to acknowledge is a tier three emotion is an indulgent emotion and one that is a little sneaky is this procrastination. Now, I know that some of you will say:

“Wait a second coach, procrastination isn’t an emotion. It is an action” and I want to pat on back for that because you know your model right? You understand, CTFAR and you may even heard on the previous podcast on procrastination and I usually agree with you and I’ll tell you what, I do agree with you. Procrastination is an action but I have been working with some people recently and it is a powerful word to use as an emotion because the actual emotion that drives procrastination is harder to identify.

Procrastination as an action can come from several different emotions and I want you guys to play along with me for a minute here, just follow along. If you think about how you feel, if you think about the emotion you have when you are procrastinating, how would you define it? What is it? Is it fear, is it unconsciousness? What is it? And if you can’t truly identify it, I want you to pretend with me that procrastination is an emotion.

[0:19:38.0] It is a way of feeling. It is something that we indulge in not as an emotion but as a course of action, right? So it is like an indulgent action instead of an indulgent emotion. It is like the emotion can be any tier three emotion that leads to this tier three action, procrastination. The indulgence comes from the action. It is like a form of buffering. It says, “When this happens then I will” so that creates that feeling of procrastination of delay, right?

Of pause so then we tell ourselves, “We’re just going to put that on the back burner” right? And I want you guys to think about this too. When you put something on the back burner, when you don’t do it there is that immediate hit of relief that dopamine response is like, “I am not going to do that right now” and it is like your brain is relieved because you have let it off the hook of doing something that it did not want to do, something they consider unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

So it is just like that indulgence of snacking on sugars in that immediate moment it is like, “That’s yummy that is good. I am not going to do that now, I am going to put that on the back burner that gives me a moment of delay, a moment of procrastination and it feels good” and I want you guys to know this. When you are doing that, when you are feeling that and how indulgent that is there is a reason why we indulge in an emotion. There is a benefit.

That is the payoff. There is a payoff for us to indulge in not moving forward and not being uncomfortable. It is that momentary relief we get in the indulgence even though it may sound like a negative emotion, it is something that is feeling familiar to us. There is that immediate hit of pleasure that we get from it you know from eating that cookie even when we are not hungry, even when we don’t taste it. It is that immediate relief we get in the comfort and the procrastination.

[0:21:32.7] In the doubt, in the confusion. It is so much easier to be confused than it is to be afraid for people they would rather indulge in confusion than say that they are afraid than to go into that fear of knowing, it is important to recognize where you are indulging. One of the things that I want you to do that I think is a really powerful thing to do that I have most of my students do is evaluate what their top three emotions are on a daily basis. Now we did this in November.

What are the feelings that you are thinking and creating in your life all day long? How many times a day are you indulging in an emotion that doesn’t serve you? If you keep track, you know that is just throughout your day ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now? What am I feeling in this moment?” One of the feelings that I used to indulge in a lot of times was boredom. Now there is no upside to feeling bored guys, none at all.

It doesn’t create anything and I hear a lot of people say I think it is good for people to get bored. They have to learn how to deal with boredom and I do agree with that. You know we have learned to process boredom but you start feeling bored you’d be aware of it and then you take action but if you don’t take action, if they use boredom as a way to indulge in it and not create something, you can see how it is one of those emotions that it really is just indulgent, right?

Like most of us indulge in our emotions, we have a lack of responsibility to them. It is like, “Well I am not doing anything because I am confused. Well, I am not doing anything because I am bored. Well, I am not doing anything because I am procrastinating” or whatever. It just gives us a reason not to step into our true selves. Now there is one thing I want to clarify too because we’re getting to the end of the podcast here, the end of the episode.

[0:23:26.6] And I’ve been having some conversation with some friends of mine where they are saying, “I just don’t want to push. I just don’t want to hustle. I want anything that feels like it is too hard or too much work. I want everything to be easy. I want everything to be gentle.” In fact, one of my really good buddies said to me recently, I just want to grind out the rest of my life because I don’t want to grow. I don’t want to create anything new. I just want to ride it out.

And they don’t want it to have to be challenging or uncomfortable or difficult. I think that is something that you really want to consider because one of my mottos that I use in my cognitive mastery training is this practice that we can do hard things and my willingness to feel uncomfortable and my willingness to go and be in that space or hard versus easy. I think there is a misconception that that means that somehow we are going to be hurting ourselves because we are doing hard things.

And when we do hard things there is a chance of injury like when people think about lifting weights or they think about running real fast and that is so hard I could get injured and all of hat is something that makes us stronger. It makes us better if we do it in a way that it serves us and I think so many people are afraid of the backend, right? That’s not going to serve us because I am going to get hurt. I think that there is an important discussion that you need to have with yourself.

Which is what are the results I want and am I willing to create those results even if it means that it might be difficult. How do we do difficult things and how do we do hard things without harming ourselves, without hurting ourselves? How can we be uncomfortable and growing and also be caring for ourselves? How can we be our best, our most soulful connected selves and also be asking ourselves to go to the next level without that painful pushing and pushing against ourselves but also without that indulgent and comfort?

[0:25:26.4] And the indulgence in the things that don’t really serve us and I think that that is a really, really important question for all of you guys to be asking yourself. Every November for the last three years, me and a buddy have been doing a tradition of physical training where we do a workout every day during the month of November. Now, November is Veterans Month in the United States. We have Veterans Day on the 11^th but all throughout the months we honor our veterans.

And I was a CrossFit coach for 15 years so we do 30 hero workouts every day at random during the months of November. My buddy got this bingo hopper and bingo is b-i-n-g-o has got 75 balls in it and he made a list of 75 hero workouts and then every night, we randomly pull out a ball and whatever the number is on the ball, it would correspond to a workout and that is the workout we would do the next day and we would do this every day, 30 days in a row no rest days.

Now the reason why I bring this up is for me, knowing what I know about my capacity for work I know that this is going to be challenging. I know that this is going to be uncomfortable. It is going to be really, really uncomfortable. No rest days, these workouts are longer, they are high intensity, they are usually pretty heavy. I push myself every day to complete the workout and about halfway through the month, I am feeling the buildup of volume.

I am feeling it, I am willing to do this challenge as a tradition because I know I won’t hurt myself due to my current fitness level. I know what my capacity is, I know my capability is and I also know that it is going to be challenging. It is not going to be easy for me to do the volume of the daily workout without any rest days in the month. So not only do I know that I am pushing myself but I also know that I am keeping myself safe.

[0:27:06.9] I know that it is going to be a challenge because I don’t know what is coming up. I might have to do 300 muscle ups in four days, which actually happened one year but my point is that I know I am not going to hurt myself on purpose. I am not out there just to hurt, just to feel pain. I am doing these things that are uncomfortable in order to grow. I am aware of my why and the results of my actions and I am not putting myself at risk without cause or completely arbitrarily.

And when you go through and you look at the feelings that you are having most often in a day are those feelings going to get you the results that you want in your life. Are they going to be the ones that serve you? Look at your goals, look at your emotions, if you have indulgent emotions ask yourself why? What are you protecting yourself from? What are you hiding from? What are thoughts that are creating those indulgent emotions?

And what could you create in your mind that would produce a feeling that would ultimately give you the result that you want? At the same time, have you feeling the way you want to feel so it is the result that you get in the world in your life but you also get to feel the way you want. Are you willing to be uncomfortable enough now to get yourself the result you want and the feeling you want later? Can you find a way to make peace with it so that you can ultimately get the success and the things that you want?

Because when you think about not being able to have those things you want is that creating a whole other layer of discomfort that you ultimately want to avoid as well, right? If you are thinking about things that you want to thinking that you can’t have them, doesn’t that also create discomfort and in that discomfort isn’t there that drive to avoid as well? So that is my challenge to you, where are you indulging brother?

[0:28:57.1] What are the emotions that you are indulging in that aren’t serving you? Check it, check it throughout your day, what are the top three? When you find the one that you indulge in the most, are you willing to consider letting it go and creating another emotion that will help you get exactly where you want to go? Those are some questions for you. All right my brothers that is what I got for you today. Check yourself for indulging.

Check yourself tier three emotions. We don’t need them. It is not too late for you to join the Elevated Alpha Society Spartan Agoge program and prepare yourself this month in December for next year 2020, the year of the impossible goal. I am so excited about this program, this month and teaching and coaching my students through accomplishing their impossible goal and I want to invite you to be a part of this process to prove to yourself that you are capable of more than what you have done in your past.

More than what your brain is telling you and everything that you can imagine that is what we are doing. It is not too late to get involved. If you haven’t listened to last week’s podcast go listen to that. Listen to this one again because they’ll both help you with your impossible goal. Next week, I am going to start the results and benefits of cognitive mastery and emotional ownership series. It is really a lot of fun to reveal to yourself who you are and what you are capable of.

It is exciting and fun and inspiring and you are welcome to be a part of the process and the team. Go to thealphamalecoach.com and check out the Elevated Alpha Society Spartan Agoge program. I look forward to working with you and brother, until next week elevate your alpha.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:30:38.2] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash your Alpha: Your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset, at the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.

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