Ep #24: Manuals Vs. Requests

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. Today, we’re finishing our compare and contrast. Today, we’re finishing with part four of our contrast. Today, we’re going to get into manuals versus requests. And there’s a lot of information in this one, so I’m going to get started right away by repeating the universal truth one more time.

I really can’t say it enough, but I’m going to say it again because this is how we align ourselves, how you really understand the difference between the beta condition and the alpha state. And I use those terms very specifically.

So, the universal truth is all circumstances, meaning the past, the present, other people. They are neutral, they are out of our control, and they are facts. The circumstances of our lives, this is the world, these are things that happen, that occur if we weren’t here. If human beings weren’t here, they would be happening anyway. Human beings are a part of circumstances because if you weren’t here, they would be happening anyway.

Now, what we do have control over is our thoughts, emotions, actions, and results. And these four components of the universal truth are separate from circumstances. So no matter what happens, no matter what happens in our past, no matter what happens in the world, no matter what other people do, we can control how we think about it, how we feel about it, what we do about it, and based on those three things, what we get in return for it. Our results are based on our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions.

In the past three episodes, we did some comparing and contrasting and we looked at circumstances, we looked at results, we looked at actions last week. Today, we’re going to look at emotions. We’re going to look at those feelings because that’s really what the difference between manuals and requests are.

In all of the human experience, relationships are the most misunderstood. As a life coach, really, what I work with people on is how to be in relation to other people and in the world with truth, with fact, and empowered thinking. Relationships are where the beta condition is the most hidden. It tries to really just hide.

We can be aware of our thinking when we’re alone and when we’re in meditation. We can listen to our thoughts. We can be aware of the sentences in our brain. When we are in the process of relationship, the beta condition covers itself behind the illusion of needs and fear.

And ironically, but not surprisingly, it is through the process of relationship that we find the truth and learn the most about ourselves. So this is where our manuals and our requests come in. A manual is an expectation we have on how other people should behave in order for us to feel a certain way. It’s essentially when we tie other people’s behavior to a causal relationship with how we feel.

Now, manuals can be spoken or unspoken. Just because you tell someone what your manual is for them, doesn’t mean it’s no longer a manual. That doesn’t make it a request. The defining characteristic of a manual is your emotional attachment to another person’s behavior.

A request is the action of asking something of someone. There’s no emotional attachment to whether they follow through with that request and there is no requirement for them to do so. So let’s break this down a little further. Now, I’ve already explained a manual in detail in a previous podcast episode. So, I’m not going to spend a lot of time with that. If you want to get a clear definition, go back and listen to that episode, I recommend it.

In this episode, I want to draw out the contrast between the beta condition’s use of a manual and the alpha state’s position of request. Let’s start with that all people are a circumstance. I use the word circumstance to bring awareness to what is, to fact. People are free to behave the way they want. That is a fact, brother. That is indisputable.

Anyone can do anything they want. Now, you might say people can’t murder one another or people can’t abuse children or animals. And, you know, you and I both know that isn’t true. People murder each other and abuse each other all the time, all around the world. They can.

In some cases, they’re caught and held accountable to the local laws. And much more often, they’re not. I mean, maybe in the US they are, but globally, most people get away with murder. It’s the truth.

Regardless of circumstance, regardless of consequence, people will behave this way. It’s a fact. You can’t say that people can’t do these things. If you say that they can’t, it’s a wish, it’s a dream, it’s an illusion, it’s a fallacy because people can and do. Resistance to this is a resistance to what is, resistance to the facts. And resistance to facts is what leads to emotional suffering.

Now, I’m not saying it is okay or that we should all be fine living next to murderers and child molesters. I’m not saying that at all. I am saying that when you have an idea in your mind about the way people should behave and then they don’t behave that way, it is in that contrast, it is in that rejection that the brain doesn’t understand the dichotomy. When the brain meets something it doesn’t understand, it creates fear.

This is what is. I believe it shouldn’t be this way. I don’t understand why things aren’t this way. And then fear enters the body.

Now, the problem is with the thought, this is the way people should behave, and the emotional response that occurs when people don’t behave that way. The manuals we have for the human species, in the case of don’t murder each other, don’t abuse kids, don’t abuse animals, these are very general manuals. Most of these manuals, we have all agreed upon as a society and we’ve agreed upon them as thoughts so that we can create laws.

Now, the manuals we have for our friends, our family, and our significant others are much more detailed and specific, which as a result, create higher amounts of resistance, and therefore more emotional suffering. For example, if I expect my girlfriend to text me when she wakes up in the morning and she doesn’t text me, if I have that manual for her, I might make it mean that she doesn’t love me and then the beta condition responds with the sentence in my brain, I am not lovable or she doesn’t love me.

Now, I have an emotional response to that which could be sadness, anger, frustration, whatever, whatever that uncomfortable emotion is. I don’t expect my neighbor to text me in the morning. I don’t expect my mailman to text me in the morning. I don’t even expect my brother to text me in the morning, but my manual for my girlfriend is that if she loves me, she will text me when she wakes up in the morning. This is a manual specific to her detailed as it applies to her behavior.

Maybe I tell her I have this manual for her. Maybe I just expect that she should know to text me in the morning because that’s what good girlfriends do. Good girlfriends already know that when they wake up in the morning, they should text their boyfriend. I shouldn’t have to ask that.

Now, all over social media I see manuals that people have for each other. I see the perpetuating illusion that manuals are good things and that it’s okay to expect things of other people, and when they don’t, we can start to blame them, label them, we can start to feel bad and call them either bad people or feel bad about what they do.

People post on social media these manuals as if they’re facts, and then they wonder why they’re still single. For example, I’ve seen that there’s this belief that there’s no good men out there or that all women are damaged or that all men are toxic, or that all women are liars, cheaters, or hookers.

I see this all over social media. The fact is that people are just people. People are just acting from their emotions which come from their thinking. All of these thoughts we have about people are coming from the manuals we have for them, which are usually uncommunicated thoughts and then making their behavior mean something about them, about us, and about the world.

The beta condition is a set of ideas developed in our brain from the past. It’s a conditioning to help us understand the way the world works. The misconception that comes from the beta condition is that what we think about the world is not the way the world is.

The beta condition believes that what it thinks is facts. The truth is, we always have a choice about what we want to think about the world, the awareness of the truth comes from the alpha state, and the alpha state communicates in requests, not in manuals.

Remember, the key difference is the emotional attachment to the other person’s behavior. When I make a request of someone, it is their choice to follow through with the request or not. I do not have control over their behavior, what they choose to do. I do have control over what I make their behavior mean.

A request is asking someone to do something; a manual is asking someone to do something in order to make me think and feel a certain way. So given the example of my girlfriend texting me in the morning, if I have a manual for her and I attach my emotional response to her behavior, then she has control over how I feel based on how she decides to act that morning. If she texts me, I feel good. If she doesn’t, I feel bad. That is a manual.

Either she is a good girlfriend or a bad girlfriend. I either feel loved or I don’t feel loved. And that’s based on her. If I request that she texts me in the morning and don’t attach my emotions to behavior, then it doesn’t matter if she texts me or not, right? How I feel is not going to depend on that.

If she does text me, great, if not, so what? Do I make it mean she’s a bad girlfriend? No. Do I make it mean that she doesn’t care about me? No. Do I make it mean that I’m unlovable? No. So, what do I make it mean?

You might be asking, so what does the alpha make it mean? Well, that is the alpha state, my brother. You can make it mean anything you want. Maybe you make it mean that she was late for work or that her phone died or that she typed the message and didn’t press send. That happens. It’s happened to me.

Or maybe, I don’t think about it at all. Like, bummer, she didn’t text me, no big deal, so what? With manuals and requests, I have a few points to help you shift your mind form emotional disempowerment around manuals to emotional empowerment with requests. But first, I want to mention – I want to bring this up again.

I brought this up in a previous episode and I want to bring it up again because it bears on this episode as well. And this is the illusion that is being propagated in our species. It’s been continually taught to our educators and our educators’ educators, to both children and to adults.

And here is the lie that we are taught – I mean, that’s a strong word. This is a lie, brothers. I used the word illusion before, but this is a lie that we teach our children and each other as other adults. We teach that other people have the power to make us feel a certain way, and they don’t. They never do.

Your emotions are created from your thinking, period. Nothing anyone does or doesn’t do can make you feel a certain way. Now, I use the word emotion and I use the word feelings – remember, feelings come from emotions. Emotions are chemical responses, they are peptides, they are neurotransmitters that are released from our brain and then go into our bodies. They are measurable.

Feelings are the vibrational change, the physiological change that happens in the cell when the emotion unlocks the cell and enters the cell and creates a vibration. So we feel our emotions. And for all my brothers that are disconnected from their emotions, I assure you that you are not.

I know you feel emotions. They might not be on a huge range or in large variety or in great sensitivity even, but I know you feel things. I see it. I read it on social media. I read it in your comments. I hear it on the calls, on the coaching calls that I take.

I know that men feel, even when they say they don’t. So when you say I’m not very emotional or I don’t feel much emotion, I want you to know right away that that’s a thought, it’s not a fact. You do feel. You may just not be aware of it. You know when you’re happy or sad. You know when you’re confident or doubtful. You know when you’re angry or calm. You know when you’re frustrated or bored or confused or worried. You know this.

You may not be aware or sensitive to it, but you know it because of how you respond to it, because of how you act when you feel it. Now, the lie we tell our children is at home and at school, okay, our teachers propagate this lie, our parents, and we tell our kids.

Here’s an example; we tell our kids, what you did disappointed your mother, as a father you may have said that. Or you might have told your kid, if you don’t clean your room, you’re going to upset me. Or you might have said, you hurt your brother’s feelings, go apologize to him.

All of these sentences indirectly are teaching our kids that they have the power to make people feel a certain way, and as they become adults, they learn this lesson so well that they manipulate other people to protect their own feelings. This leads to the manual.

Remember, a manual is wanting somebody to behave a certain way so that you can feel a certain way. And if you know that your emotions are tied to other people’s behavior, then you’re going to do everything you can to manipulate other people’s behavior.

We do this as adults too. Relationship councilors will often take two adults, sit them down, sit them down in a room to discuss issues in their relationship, to express to each other what each other’s needs are, and then send them off to fulfill those needs for each other. And this is essentially equivalent to telling your partner what your manual is for them and their manual for you, then living your life to fulfill these needs for your partner.

This is not sustainable in any way. It is futile to try to make someone feel good or happy or secure because their emotions, their happiness, their goodness, their feeling of security comes from the way they think. You cannot put a thought into someone’s mind.

You can try to influence someone’s thinking, but you can’t create a thought. Even if we try to create thoughts, even if we try, we can’t do it 100% of the time. And even if we behave the way our partner wants us to, they can still be having a bad day. They can still think differently about it at the time, which will change their emotions about your behavior.

You can act the same way in two different situations and they can think about it two different ways creating two different emotions. It simply isn’t possible and it leads to emotional bondage and emotional blackmail. Instead, what we can do from our alpha state, as an alpha male, what you can do is make a request of your partner, you can make a request of other people and then give them the choice to fulfill those requests. If they do, great. If not, so what? From the alpha state, you get to choose how you want to think about it.

Alright, just like the last couple of episodes, I want to leave you with some things. Here are some things that you can do to make the shift away from having a manual for how other people behave and instead simply make requests. There’s five of them in this case. And in fact, the last one, I’m going to give you an example of a client of mine.

Here we go, number one, recognize the universal truth around the actions for other people. What is the universal truth for actions? Actions come from emotions, which come from thoughts. They do not come from circumstances. The reason other people act is because of how they feel and how they think. It literally has nothing to do with you.

To them, you are a circumstance. Their actions come from their thoughts and their emotions. It’s not you. I know, it can seem as if it’s you, but this is the illusion we’ve been taught since we were kids. The truth is there is no causal relationship between you and the actions of other people. The causal relationship come from their thinking and their emotions. Their actions come from their cognition, and usually, it’s from their beta condition, which is far removed from you.

Alpha state can have something to do with you because, in alpha state, the beta condition is quiet and we can absorb more of what the other person is actually saying and doing because we’re inquisitive and we’re looking through the sentences in our brain. We’re looking past, I should say, past the sentences in our brain, not through, as in the sentences are quiet so we’re able to oversee them, supervise them and see what is actually in front of us. But most of the time, people’s actions come from their beta condition, which has nothing to do with you.

Number two, you have no control over how other people behave. Other people do what they want to do, just like you do what you want to do. You don’t want to be controlled any more than anyone else wants to be controlled, okay. When you think you know what’s best for someone else, you don’t.

That is your conditioning, your beta condition, trying to express itself in a form of control over them. Only they know what is best for them. And sometimes, people will do things we wish they wouldn’t. It is out of our control. What is in our control is our cognition, is how we choose to think about their behavior.

Number three, we get to choose how we think about other people’s behavior, kind of a continuation of number two. This is the power you have. Don’t give up this power, brother. This is your power. Your power is over your thoughts.

The beta condition will have you believe that you don’t have control over what you think about the way other people behave. The beta condition will try to convince you that you have to think about other people a certain way. This isn’t true. For example, the beta condition will tell you that you have to think murderers are bad people. You don’t.

In fact, there are a lot of people in the world that don’t think murderers are bad people. They work in prisons. They try to rehabilitate murderers. They think that murderers come from bad pasts, bad childhoods, and they recognize that they’re suffering in their brain and they try to help them. You don’t have to think anything you don’t want to think.

You can think anything you want. The beta condition mistakes facts and thoughts. It thinks that its thoughts are facts. That is the illusion of the beta condition. You always have the power to think anything you want about the way people behave because the way people behave is a circumstance, and all circumstances are neutral until you make a choice on what you want to make it mean to you, if you want to make it mean anything to you at all.

There are things, people acting, behaving all around the world that you have no thoughts about because they’re not a part of your life. You don’t see it, you don’t hear it. You don’t have to think about other people’s behavior at all if you don’t want to.

Number four, it is within your control to make requests of anyone, okay, not manuals. You can make requests and make it a manual if you attach emotions to it, but you can make requests of anyone. If you want the UPS man to leave a package on the porch instead of in the driveway, you can ask him.

If you want your wife to have a scotch and soda waiting for you when you get home from work, you can ask her to. If you want your girlfriend to jump out of a cake on your birthday, you can ask her to. You can ask anything you want from anyone you want, just be aware, and here’s the caveat to number four, just be aware, be alert, and be accepting of the possibility that they won’t follow through with your request and that it has nothing to do with you, it only has to do with them.

Their actions have to do with them. In fact, sometimes, they might do as you request, and other times, they might not. You know, sometimes the UPS man may leave a package on the porch, and other times, he may leave it on the driveway. It doesn’t have to do with you, maybe he’s in a hurry, maybe he doesn’t have time to walk it all the way up to your porch. He knows you want him to, but he’s living his own life, brother, he’s doing his own thing.

It’s not about you. It’s about how they think and about how they feel. It has to do with what’s going on in their mind. People aren’t living their life for you, just like you’re not living your life for other people, no matter how close they are to you, even in a marriage, a wife doesn’t – just because you put a ring on a finger, doesn’t mean that your wife is going to rewire her brain so that all of her actions are based on the wants of her husband any more than you wouldn’t rewire your brain so that every choice you make is to please your wife. It’s both erroneous and simply impossible. It just doesn’t happen. We live our lives based on our cognition, not the cognition, desires, wants of other people.

Number five, finally, and this is key, I want you to pay attention to what you want in life and manage your mind to get the results you’re looking for. Remember the model. I know it’s been a long time since we discussed the model, remember, circumstances trigger thoughts, thoughts create emotions, emotions drive actions, actions determine results.

What do you want as your result? Once you know what you want as your results, you can go backwards. What actions do I have to take, what emotions would I need to feel? What thoughts would be best for me to think to get the emotions that will drive the actions to determine the results?

You can’t force people to do what you want them to do. And in forcing people, you repel them. Nobody wants to be told what to do. However, you can influence people with love and with acceptance, and here’s the story; this is a true story.

I had one had a client who wanted his wife to be, let’s say, more exciting in the bedroom. I’m going to leave it at that. I’m not going to give you any details. Let’s just say he wanted his wife to be more exciting in the bedroom. And he told her what he wanted and she was resistant. And he made it mean that she didn’t care about him and she didn’t care about his needs and he became upset.

He thoughts, if she cared about me, she would do this for me. and since his thoughts were creating emotions and frustration and irritation and anger, and ultimately insecurity, his wife became more resistant. And eventually, their sexual life diminished even more, to the point where not only was she not adventurous, exciting the way he wanted, but they were actually having sex less often.

That’s when he came to me for coaching. And after coaching and letting him know that his results are not based on her behavior – her behavior is a circumstance, it’s neutral. His results are based on his actions, coming from his emotions and his thinking.

We, together, found thoughts that served him better, rather than thinking his wife didn’t care about him, rather than having a manual for how his wife should behave in bed, he started thinking differently. He started thinking that she was uncomfortable with being vulnerable.

His thoughts led to different emotions and ultimately different actions. And in time, can you guess what happened? Their sex life improved. They became more intimate with each other. And then one day, without him asking, she started doing the things that he had requested of her in the first place, brother. And she did it on her own because she changed her own mind about herself, about his behavior, and in the end, the results that he wanted, he got by changing the way he thought.

He had control over his cognition. He did not have control over his wife’s actions. His manual had failed. When he made a request and then wasn’t emotionally attached to it, managed his mind around it, that is when his results changed.

And I tell you this story, sparing the details of course, because the manuals and expectations we have for each other lead to conflict. They lead to suffering. And they lead to separation. When we make requests of each other and we let the other person choose to do what it is they want to do because they are adults, because they are human beings with their own minds and their own thoughts, their own actions, their own feelings, we give them the freedom to be who they are, to be genuine with us and vulnerable around us.

When we do this, then we see that other people and the world will open up to us and all barriers in life are removed. That’s what I’ve got for you today my brothers. That is the end of our four-part series on compare and contrast.

I thank you for being with me this week. I know we went a little bit long. We’re still under 30 minutes. I will see you next week, and until then, as always, elevate your alpha.

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