Ep #25: So What?

Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast, the only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha-mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here’s your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

What’s up, my brothers. Welcome back to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud. And today, we’re going to get into how the first piece of my methodology, or the process that I use with my clients is. And it’s a how-to.

I’ve talked about separating thoughts and circumstances before, but this is going to go a little deeper in how to really get into noticing and being aware of the difference between a thought and a circumstance, because there’s a huge illusion in our species that our thoughts are circumstances, that our thoughts are facts. So, let me give you some background knowledge.

First of all, do you remember what the definition of an alpha male is? Do you remember that way back from the earlier podcasts? It’s not what you think. It’s not what most people think, because most people, when they think alpha male, they think all of these behaviors. They think social dominance, good with women, strong body language. Sometimes they’re thinking fit body or style, like they have some idea on what style is, whatever that means.

I mean, again, these are all myths about the alpha male because they’re all very subjective. And alpha male as I define an alpha male, and a real definition, which is measurable, observable, repeatable, which is not subjective, which is objective, which can behold for you, me, and every other man out there is a man who has developed the skill set of cognitive mastery and emotional responsibility and who aligns himself with the universal truth.

Now, I could just say that he’s a man who lives in the universal truth, if I wanted to make that definition more concise. But what does that mean? What is the universal truth? You have to know what it is, not just know it intellectually, but then apply it to your life. Align yourself with it means living in it, not living outside of it, which is the beta condition, which is the illusion. To live outside of the universal truth is to live in an illusion.

And the universal truth, guys, I’m just going to repeat this very quickly because I’ve done it in the last four or five episodes – if this is your first episode listening then you should know that the universal truth is that all circumstances are neutral, everything outside of us, the world as it’s happening, the present moment, everything’s happening in a present moment in the world, the past, whatever has happened, and other people; other people’s behavior, other people’s words, just other people in general.

These are all circumstances and they’re all neutral and they’re all out of our control and they just exist. They move. They’re just there in time and space. And it is our thoughts about our circumstances, our conscious or unconscious thoughts that we choose, consciously or unconsciously. It may seem as though we don’t have a choice, but again, that’s the illusion. It’s the thoughts that create our emotions and our emotions that drive our actions and our actions that determine our results.

Now, our results will then reinforce our original thought because we use it as evidence for the way the world works. We use it as evidence that that thought is working. Now again, if our thoughts are unconscious, this is what leads to the illusion; that most human beings are not aware of their thoughts. and because they’re not aware of their thoughts, they don’t know that it is their thoughts that are creating their results.

Now, living in the universal truth, the reason why this is important, the reason why it’s an alpha male trait or a definition of the alpha male is because living in the universal truth, you make your results happen from your cognition. There are so many different manifestations of the beta male that I won’t even go into all of them now.

I’ve done several podcast episodes on them already and I’ve barely scratched the surface of how beta condition creates an illusion of how the world works. There’s so many different manifestations out there of the beta male that – I mean, I could run episodes for years and we’d barely scratch the surface. There is only one alpha male, however, and that is cognitive mastery, using your thoughts to create your results.

The reason why people get coaching is because of the results that they want. Like, you go to a nutrition coach because you want to lose weight. You go to a fitness coach because you want to gain muscle, you want to gain fitness. You got to a business coach to increase your business value. You go to a relationship coach to improve your relationships.

I am the alpha male coach. I teach you how to elevate your alpha and live as the alpha male you were meant to. It’s a subset of life coaching, brother, because I help you realize what life is. I help men improve their overall life, in health, in wealth, in relationships, in habits.

Now, I’m not talking about anything immeasurable here. I’m not talking about the law of attraction or anything spiritual, I am talking about science. I’m talking about a process that is measurable, observable, repeatable. The universal truth applies to all of us the same way gravity applies to all of us. We don’t have to know the math about gravity. We don’t have the math on gravity. We don’t have to know that it’s mass times the acceleration of the speed towards earth, right?

In fact, you don’t even have to believe in gravity. Gravity still affects you. The proof is in the process. If you jump off of a building, you are going to hit the ground. You don’t need to prove that mathematically. You don’t even need to believe in that; it’s going to happen every time.

The same is true with the universal truth. When you deliberately choose your thoughts, you will feel the emotion that is tied to that thought which will drive you to act and get your desired results. When you choose to think unconsciously, your emotions and actions feel out of your control. But they are still creating your results. This is the universal truth.

Now, with my clients, I use a three-part process to help them get the results they want. The first part of that process is separating thought from facts. You have to know the difference if you are going to identify which thoughts you are thinking that are creating the results in your life. If you look at all the results in your life, there is a thought that created that.

The car you drive, the job you have, the woman you’re with, the relationship you’re in, whether you’re in a relationship or not, that’s a result. If you’re not in a relationship, that’s a result. If you’re not driving a car, that’s a result. Everything in your life is a result of your thinking, and if you don’t know the difference between a thought and a fact, it is very easy to get lost in the illusion that the world is happening to you, instead of the truth, which is you are creating the world around you.

Now, I’ve discussed the difference between a thought and a fact before. Facts are circumstances, and there is an entire podcast episode dedicated to circumstances. Very briefly, circumstances are the world, present moment, the past, and other people, what other people say and do and their behavior. The reason why these are circumstances is because they are facts, they are neutral, and they are out of our control.

Now, you can think about this in two ways. First, you can think about it like a video recorder and it’s recording an event as it happens. It’s recording all the people, all the exchanges of words and actions, it’s recording all the environment as it unfolds from the present to the past, as the present becomes the past.

Now, the way the video recorder sees the recording is as facts, as circumstances. There is no thought in the video camera as it’s making the recording. It’s just recording data. It’s just in-taking data, it’s in-taking light, it’s in-taking sound, it’s in-taking movement. It records only what is.

The other way you can think about circumstances being neutral facts is to go smaller, to look closer, to see what reality really is. Reality, inorganic matter is molecular. Organic matter is cellular. Light and sound is atomic. These things appear to us to be things; it looks like a desk, it looks like a computer, it looks like a glass, it looks like water, it looks like a hat, it looks like a phone, it looks like a couch, it looks like a tree, it looks like a person, it looks like a sentence, it looks like a behavior.

The truth is, it’s just a bunch of really tiny stuff made up to look like something bigger as it’s moving through time and space. It’s all that tiny stuff is neutral. Those are facts. Those are circumstances. So then, what about thoughts?

Thoughts are what we make our circumstances mean. Our life is a life of thought, my friend. Everything we do in life is a thought. Everything we see in life, we have a thought about it. Everything we hear in life, we have a thought about it.

You might have heard this before. It’s an old Buddhist saying, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” You may or may not have heard that before, but think about that. If there’s no human beings to judge it – it’s not saying does it make a sound. I mean, of course, it’s going to hit the ground and that’s going to cause atoms to collide into each other and vibrate outward.

But if there are no eardrums, if there are no human beings for those atomic sound waves to vibrate onto, does that sound actually exist if there’s no humans to judge it, if there’s no humans to receive that data?

Now, human beings are creators through thought. This is the universal truth. We think, we feel, we act, and this is how we create. All problems are thoughts. Without thought, there is no problem. If there were no humans on this planet, there would be no problems.

And I’m not saying that humans are causing problems; I’m saying problems are all in the mind. Problems outside of our brains don’t exist at all. So that was a very long introduction for today’s teaching. That’s about a 12-minute introduction for today’s teaching.

The podcast episode today is to ask yourself, so what? So what? Why does it matter to you? When you start to learn how to separate thoughts from facts, you’re going to ask yourself this a lot. This is what my students do a lot. You’re going to ask yourself questions like, so what? What do I make this mean? Why is thinking this thought important to me? How is thinking this thought serving me? What result is this thought creating? So what? Why is this what I am choosing to think?

The beta male is a man lost in the illusion of the beta condition that he creates. He thinks his thoughts are facts, so he believes they are real. He believes that his thoughts about the world and other people is the way the world and other people actually are.

Now, of course, this is not true. The way the world and other people are is neutral. We know this. This is the universal truth. This is why two people can have two different thoughts about the same person, because that person is not the way we think they are.

The truth is, we are living in a neutral world and neutral people and we’re just in a constant state of judgment. When we believe our judgment is fact, we are in that illusion, we are in the beta condition. We’re in the beta condition algorithm that states a thought is caused by a fact. And often, the word because is used, which makes it even more obvious when you’re in alpha state.

When you’re in alpha state, it’s very quickly to see how that works because the alpha male uses the universal truth to be aware of his cognition. There has to be awareness. There has to be an intense alert awareness in the mind for the alpha state to elevate.

The beta condition is very tricky. It’s a trickster. To elevate the alpha state, you have to start to look at the world as a circumstance. I’m going to give you three examples, guys, and I want to see if you can pick out the illusion here. I want to see if you can find the algorithm. So, the first example is, my wife is mad at me because she said she is mad at me.

Did you get it? Did you see it? Where is the circumstance and where is the thought? The thought is, my wife is mad at me. The circumstance is, she said she is mad at me. Just because someone says something, doesn’t mean they are. You don’t have to think that way.

Just because somebody says I love you, it doesn’t mean they love you. We know that. That happens all the time. People say I love you for a number of different reasons. It’s not always because they do. People say they hate you for a number of different reasons. It’s not always because they do.

So, if your wife, if someone says they’re mad at you, they may not be mad at you. They might be mad at themselves, they might be mad at the situation, they might be mad at the circumstance. But just because she says she’s mad at you, that is the circumstance, it doesn’t mean she is; that’s the thought.

Here’s the second one. I’m not going to go into the model on this because I have some actionable steps that I want to talk to you guys at the end of this podcast, so we’re going to save the remaining time for those steps, but I can do models on this to show you, to prove that to you. The model, again, is how we align ourselves with the universal truth. It is our proof.

Here’s the second one; I can’t get a good job because I didn’t go to college. Do you see it? Where is it? Where is the circumstance? The circumstance is I didn’t go to college. The thought is I can’t get a good job. Do you see how that thought precedes the fact and they’re linked with that because? You see how that beta condition algorithm works?

Thought, because, fact – you didn’t go to college, so what? That doesn’t mean you can’t get a good job. That is your thought about not going to college. Here’s the last one; the hurricane was a tragic event because 194 people died. The truth, the fact, the circumstance is that 194 people died.

The thought is that it was a tragic event. Now, 194 people die every day all around the world and we don’t consider it to be tragic events.  But we’re having a thought about those deaths and saying that it’s a tragic thing because it happened in the hurricane. So, do you see the illusion? Do you see the thought being mistaken for a fact?

That is one of the many beta condition algorithms that are out there. And to get through those beta condition algorithms, we want to start to separate and look and see the thoughts and the facts and ask yourself some very clear and reflective questions. So, I’ve got four for you here, and number four is a little bit longer, so I’m going to get started here.

Number one, when you’re speaking – and this is for you, not for you to judge other people. So if other people use the word because, you can simply ask yourself, so what, what does that mean to you that they’re using the word because, because it doesn’t really matter. You’re not trying to point out the beta condition in other people. This is for you.

If you use the word because, stop. Stop yourself and see if you can reflect right there in that moment, see if you can catch yourself. Pay attention to what you said. And I am almost certain, my brother, that you will have preceded a fact with a thought.

Like I say, it’s one of the beta condition algorithms for illusion. That algorithm is thought because fact. I have a thought because a fact happened. And when you stop and reflect, remove the thought, isolate it, and then ask yourself, so what? Ask yourself, so what?

So, to really quickly go back and give you an example of this – I can’t get a good job because I didn’t go to college. So, stop. I said the word because, and I said that I want to isolate the thought, I can’t get a good job, and I’ll isolate the fact that I didn’t go to college. Now, you have these two separated. Now, I didn’t go to college, so what?

The idea here, when you’re doing your model, when you’re doing your mind management, when you’re doing your thought work – and this is actually getting into number two, we get into how this works and how to get to the deeper thought, which is you, which is always about you.

When you’re doing this, when you’re doing your mind work, you might have to ask yourself these questions three to four times. It might not always be, so what? So I’m going to go through this with you and see if you can follow this with me to see if we can get there.

I can’t get a good job because I didn’t go to college. Circumstance, I didn’t go to college. What do you make this mean? I can’t get a good job. Why? Because I didn’t go to college, and there’s the loop. You see that loop? So that is the beta condition hiding itself. That’s why this is number two.

So, number one was, be in the moment, stop, and be aware of the algorithm thought because fact. Number two is, watch the loop and see if you can get out of the loop. The beta condition wants to hide itself. The beta condition does not want you to see it. It’s going to continue to run the illusion on you. So if you are able to separate the thoughts and the facts and start asking yourself these questions, be very aware of this loop.

The circumstance, I didn’t go to college. What do I make this mean? It means I can’t get a good job. Why do I make it mean that? Because I didn’t go to college. Boom, loop. So what? We’re still at the circumstance, right, we just went through it once, now we’re back at the beginning.

You didn’t go to college, so what? Don’t say I can’t get a good job, because then you’re back in the loop. We have to be very clear. We have to be very aware and alert on this. What does it really mean to me? I didn’t go to college, so what? What does that really mean?

Well, it means I won’t be able to make more money. Okay, now you’re seeing the tie-in between getting a good job, which is also very subjective – good is subjective. What does it mean to have a good job? Does that mean a job you like, or does that mean a job that makes a lot of money? Because they’re two different things. You can like a job that pays you well, but you can also like a job that doesn’t pay you well and you can not like a job that does pay you well.

So, when you’re back in that loop and you’re really investigating your mind further, you’re not letting the beta condition run that loop on you, what does it mean that you didn’t go to college? So what? Well, it means I won’t be able to make more money. Okay, there’s a new thought, so why? What do you make that mean? I won’t be able to provide for my family. Okay, so what? What does that mean to you? What does it mean to you to not be able to provide for your family?

It means I’m not worthy, it means I’m a bad person, I’m not a good provider, so on and so forth, and you can see how you’re getting deeper and deeper into the- subconscious. You’re really exposing the beta condition. And the beta condition hates that, which is why you might feel bad saying or thinking these things, because the beta condition doesn’t like it. It doesn’t want to be exposed.

But getting in there and continuing to ask, so what, what does it mean to you, what do you make that mean about yourself – understand, these are all thoughts, brother. None of them are true. That’s the thing you’ve got to know before we go onto number three. None of these thoughts are true.

Thoughts are choices. They are not truth. The truth is fact. The truth is the universal truth, that we can choose our thoughts. But thoughts are always a choice. Now, they may feel true, and when we want them to be, they can be true. When they serve us, we can make them true with belief. But that’s when they serve us. We don’t want to make a thought that doesn’t serve us true.

Number three, another question to ask yourself is, how is this thought serving me? And I like this question. I like this one for my clients when I want to show them how this thought is creating their results, because if it’s a disempowering thought, they’re going to see how the results they have in their life is caused by their thinking; how is this thought serving me? It’s kind of like going through the model. How is this thought showing up in my life? When I think this thought, what do I feel? When I feel this way, what do I do? When I do this, what do I get in return? What are my results?

And that’s how that thought is serving you. So, from there, we could start at the results line, we can do an intentional model, we can start at the results line and say, what do you want to get for this result? And then we can say what are the actions you have to take, what is the emotion you’re going to have to feel and what is the thought you’re going to need to think? How is this new thought going to serve you?

But that’s another topic for another day. That’s how we do future-focused thinking and intentional modeling, which I will get to, I promise, I’ve got a lot of beautiful content for all of you guys. I’m glad you guys are listening because I know this is changing lives. I get emails every day that this is changing lives. But asking yourself, how is this thought serving me, that is another powerful question, or how is this thought showing up in my life in terms of action, in terms of result, or even just why am I choosing to think this thought? Because by asking yourself that, you are taking responsibility for your cognition.

Why am I choosing to think this thought? Now, why am I thinking this thought? Why is this thought just in my head? No, no, no, it’s why am I choosing to think this thought? And once you ask yourself that and you take responsibility, you dissolve the beta condition because the alpha state now says, oh yeah this is my choice, I don’t have to think this, I can think something else.

And finally, guys, number four, when you’re at your most emotional – and I know it’s difficult when you are very emotional because you’re in that emotion – we’re going to talk about processing emotions versus reacting, avoiding, or resisting emotions later. But when you’re in an emotion, it’s hard to stop. But if you can, ask yourself – take a deep breath first of all. Realign yourself with the moment and see if you can get out of the emotion, the reaction of the emotion.

Take a deep breath and ask yourself, so what? So what? When you’re angry, when your in-laws are picking at you about your job or your hobbies, they’re visiting from out of town and they’re asking you why you do that, why you work in this, why don’t you get a better job, why don’t you make more money? Why do you spend so much time fishing? Why do you spend so much time playing video games?

And you’re angry, so what? So what if they’re saying that? Who cares? So what? What do you make it mean? Do you believe them? Do you make it mean something about you? Because remember, it’s not about you. Other people’s behavior is a circumstance. Other people’s behavior is an action they take that’s about them and their thoughts. So what if they’re saying that? What does it mean to you? How do you think about that? How do you choose to think about that? And how can you think about that in a way that serves you?

When you feel fear, when you see an attractive woman and you’re afraid she won’t give you her phone number, so what? What if she doesn’t give you her phone number, so what? What do you make it mean? What difference does it make? Why is it important to you that she does? What will it satisfy for you and, if she doesn’t, how will it change anything about you? It doesn’t. It only says something about what’s going on with her.

When you feel nervous, maybe you’re going to your wife’s work party and you don’t know anyone there, so what? You’re feeling nervous about showing up and being in a group of strangers, so what? Why? What do you make that mean? What do you make it mean to be in the presence of people you don’t know? So what?

This question is one question. How about depressed – depressed is another one. You’ve been unemployed for six months, you have no income and you’re about out of your savings, so what? What does that mean to you? What kind of thoughts are going on in your head? What are you making this circumstance mean to you? So what?

Because again, my brother, this is so key, all problems are thoughts. There is never a problem that your in-laws are talking about your job or your hobbies. It’s never a problem that this woman doesn’t want to give you her phone number. It’s never a problem that you’re going into a group of strangers. It’s never a problem that you’ve been unemployed, have no income, and are almost out of savings.

It’s only the way you think about it that makes it a problem. And I’m going to tell you right now, this is what coaching is all about; you can choose to think about these circumstances in a way that is going to get the result that you want. That’s the universal truth. When you think about them in a way that perpetuates that anger, that feat, that nervousness, that depression, you’re not going to get the results you want.

When you believe that the thoughts that you have about these circumstances are facts, then you are not going to get the results you want. When you elevate your alpha, you supervise your beta condition, you become conscious of the difference between circumstances and the way you choose to think about your circumstances. And then you make the choice on the thought you want to have to create the result you want in your life. That is when you are walking, living, as an alpha male.

And that’s what I’ve got for you today, guys. I appreciate you being with me on this week’s episode. I will see you next week. And until then, 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.