Ep #66: The Alpha Mirror and Inversion Principles

[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. I’m traveling, I’m actually on the road. Now, I don’t always tell you guys when I’m traveling. Sometimes I just record from the road and you never knew that I had left but I live in southern California, I live in Irvine but I travel a lot. You guys probably know I’ve recorded podcasts from Thailand, I record podcasts from Florida, from Texas, from Oregon, from California obviously.

Now I’m recording from Arizona. I’m up in the Grand Canyon. I’m up in Arizona. I’m recording this from a very small town outside really actually close to Flagstaff. I just let you guys know that because sometimes you can tell the difference in the sound, you can tell the difference in the quality of recording. I’m letting you guys know, I am on the road. Maybe you guys want to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, maybe you don’t but I’ll start to tell you when I’m traveling more. I think you guys knew I was out in Oregon for the holidays and I was recording up there.

No matter what happens, no matter where I am guys, I will always be doing these podcasts and speaking of, I will always be putting these podcasts out. But guys, do me a favor. If you haven’t already, go to iTunes, leave me a five-star rating and review. If you have, then you’re awesome and I appreciate it. I’m happy that you’ve done that. I appreciate that. I know that the ratings have jumped up since I started asking you guys to do that.

If you have not done that, please do that. It doesn’t take you very long and I just keep doing these podcasts. I keep throwing them out as long as you keep listening to them, please give me a five-star rating and review. Now, let’s get into this, guys. Let’s get into this episode because this episode is a little more advanced.

I had a lot of fun putting this episode together and I thought it was about time to release these principles to you because in January, in the Spartan Agoge, this month, we’re working on the foundations of cognitive mastery. Even though these principles aren’t the foundations, understanding these concepts are a part of the foundation.

Practicing them, applying them, training them. That is more of an advanced level of cognitive mastery because it’s taking that to action in relationship. I want to share these principles with you and they’re going to seem like two, they’re actually two principles but they’re really just one that I teach separately, okay?

[0:03:07.2] It’s the same thing and it’s basic in the knowing of these concepts and like I said, it’s advanced in their application and their training. These principles are a part of being in relationship. Cognitive mastery has so many results as you guys know. Cognitive mastery, the results of cognitive mastery is indomitable self-confidence, future focus thinking, amazing relationships, and mastery of your behavior.

But with the amazing relationships part, these principles really apply directly to that because it’s through relationship that that beta condition, right? That limiting belief is really exposed. Well, when we train these tools.

Here we go guys, I’m going to give them to you. In the first five minutes, I’m going to give you these two principles and they’re called the alpha mirror principle and the alpha inversion principle. The alpha mirror principle is anything you think about someone else is a projection of what you think about yourself. It’s a mirror of your own belief system reflected against neutral data. The alpha inversion principle is anything anyone else ever says or does about you or to you, tells you nothing about you and everything about them, right?

You can see all those two principles are kind of the same. I separate them when I teach them and I’m going to separate them when I talk about them here in this episode. They’re also not groundbreaking principles, right guys? You guys know that I did not invent these two tools, these two concepts.

[0:04:45.2] If you haven’t ever heard of these concepts before, these principles are brand new to you and this is blowing your mind hearing this for the first time, then I’m here to offer you guys full disclosure, okay? I’m not the inventor of this stuff. Religion has been telling us this for millenniums and science is now been proving it for decades.

It’s all because it’s the universal truth. It explains the universal truth to us. Guys, I want to remind you of what that is. It’s very important that you know at least intellectually, the concept of the universal truth which is that all circumstances are neutral, okay? Everything that anybody else ever says or does because other people are circumstances. Now, we include the past and we include the present moment so the things that happen around us, you know, the weather and the traffic and all the events that occur around us, and all the events that have occurred. So everything that happened in the past. That’s all the circumstance as well.

But for these two principles, it’s important that you know that other people, their behavior, what they do, what we see them do and the words that they say, these are all circumstances. They’re all neutral.

All the circumstances in life are neutral, they’re all facts, they never have any effect over our life at all. The only thing that affects our life is our thoughts, is the way we think about our circumstances. It’s what we make other people’s behavior or words mean to us. How we take it inward and make it subjective as we reflect it against our belief system.

Once we do that, then we get an emotional response, we get an emotional experience. A lot of the illusion comes from our believing that that emotional experience comes from the circumstance or comes from the other person. But it actually comes from our cognition, it comes from our belief system.

[0:06:42.0] It’s those emotions that drive our actions that in turn create the life that we have. Our life is a creation of our actions. Our actions are a manifestation of our cognition, that’s the universal truth. Now, again, the reason why these principles are so powerful for me and for my students is because of the application and training process.

It’s not just enough to understand these concepts because I didn’t invent these concepts. These principles have been around a very long time. But when you passively practice them and actively train them, then you develop the skills and the benefits and the results that go along with them. That’s what I do and that’s what I teach my students to do the same.

Let’s go through these one at a time, the first one is the alpha mirror principle. That one is anything you think about someone else is a projection of what you think about yourself. It’s – like I say, it’s a mirror of your own belief system, it’s reflected against that neutral data. That neutral data is either somebody else’s behavior or it’s somebody else’s words.

Behavior and words. We’re talking about motion, we’re talking about vibration of sound, we’re talking about movement of cells. It’s all just raw neutral data. The mirror principle can be broken into two separate concepts that you can train separately, that we do train and practice separately. The first one is, anything you think about someone else is a mirror of what you think about yourself.

[0:08:15.3] The second one is anything you think someone else is thinking about you is a mirror of what you think about yourself. Because there’s two separate parts, I’m going to talk about them separately. The first part is fairly straightforward, although, it’s usually incredibly elusive. Even though it’s very straight forward, it’s so elusive and it’s so easy for people, for humans to go with the illusion, right? To go with the beta condition, to go with what is not true, because it’s so elusive.

Usually when we think about someone else and the qualities of that person that we like or we don’t like, we think it’s because of that person. We think it’s because that person has these qualities. We think that this person has these qualities and because they have these qualities, that’s why we like them. Of course, that’s not the case. What the case is that this person is just exhibiting behavior and we are attributing these qualities to them from what we think about them, right?

It’s not because when they do something, that we agree with, we call them good, or that when they do something that we disagree with, we call them bad. It’s not them and it’s not their behavior that’s good or bad. It’s the mirror that we use to judge what we see or hear them do.

That’s why I call it the mirror principle. It’s almost literally – you can’t even see this person or these people if it’s more than one person. They’re not even really there. What you’re seeing is a reflection of yourself. What you’re seeing in them that you think is them is really just you based on your belief system and the subjectivity of that.

[0:09:56.7] Because we judge other people, not on what they say and not on what they do but on how we interpret their actions and their words in our mind as its weighed against our own belief system and our moral values. Because the actions of other people are neutral to us, right? It’s just raw data, we’re only thinking about other people as a reflection and I use that word a lot because we’re talking about the mirror, right? It’s a reflection of what we believe about ourselves and the world.

I have two examples. I’ve used both of these examples before so I’m going to make these examples fairly quick, because I’ve used them before. I think they’re pretty straight forward. I think you guys can understand.

The first one would be the neutral circumstance of killing another human. Now, again, we think that is not neutral, right? As soon as I say that out loud, we all have our own sort of subjectivity around that. A lot of us would jump straight to bad, right? That’s as bad thing. But I want you to understand that that is a circumstance. Killing another human, taking another life, whether it’s a human life or another mammal or even an insect, that goes in the C line guys. It goes into the neutral category. When we start having thoughts about it is when we start building up parameters around it based on again, our belief system and our moral values.

When we build up parameters around killing another human being and we call that murder, right? We say, based on these parameters, it fits into this category of cognition, this category of thought that we’re going to label as murder. Now, it’s a thought and we all have our subjectivity around that.

[0:11:37.6] We all think that murder is bad and as a community, we have created laws to protect ourselves from people who don’t think murder is bad, right? It’s still a thought, it’s still a cognition. Because I can create other parameters around the circumstance of killing a human being, where now, the thought is self-defense. Now it has a completely different set of parameters,  has a completely different set of cognition around it and from that cognition, we have different emotions around it and we have different actions from it.

I could setup other parameters around that exact same circumstance – killing other human being and given nations in uniforms and contracts and all kinds of other things, we might even say that it’s not only justified but you might actually get a medal for something like that. For that action.

Based on the parameters again, you can see that it’s not the actual circumstance that’s good, bad, right, wrong, better, worse, it’s the parameters. It’s the subjectivity that we have around it as we reflect it against our own belief systems and our own moral values. That’s the first example, right?

Now, the second example is actually a political leader, because I think that this is also very clear, especially in this day and age. A single person, one person, can have so many different people, have so many different thoughts about them and it’s really – they’re just the same person. It doesn’t matter who this person is, it could – pick your favorite political leader, it doesn’t really matter. Whoever that person is, you’re going to have hundreds of people or maybe even thousands or hundreds of thousands, millions of people who have different thoughts about them.

[0:13:20.2] Now, some of these thoughts about this person may be in agreement. You know, when several people get together, sometimes they agree on their thoughts and they start to create camps or groups or communities. For the most part, everybody’s thinking something different about this person, you might agree with this camp for 90% and then 10% you might not. But the truth is, everything that we think about someone else is really just a reflection of our own belief systems.

If your belief system ranks a higher priority for the economy than it does for the environment, then you are going to have a different thought about a political leader who puts the economy above the environment. Then another person whose belief system puts the environment as a higher priority than the economy. But has nothing to do with that person. It has nothing to do with that politician.

It has to do with the reflection of that person’s actions against your belief system and moral values. That’s the mirror principle guys. That’s the first part of the mirror principles and it shows you nothing about the other person and so much about yourself.

Now, the second part of the mirror principle is exactly the same, right? It tells you nothing about other people but it tells you everything about yourself. That’s the difference between the mirror principle and the inversion principle. The inversion principle we will get to a moment. That tells you nothing about yourself but everything about someone else.

[0:14:51.3] With the second part of the alpha mirror principle, what it’s really effective for, what I really like to use it for is for helping my students help themselves eliminate social approach and performance anxiety. It’s slightly different as I mentioned in the first part but basically the same because you’re still thinking about other people, okay? You’re still projecting outward.

The difference is, with the second part is, it’s not what you think about them, it’s what you think they’re thinking about you, okay? It’s still just you thinking about you. It still has nothing to do with them and that’s why it’s still a part of the mirror principle.

It’s the second part of the mirror principle. Now, what do I mean by this? What I mean by the mirror principle is, when you’re thinking about what somebody else is thinking about you, you’re always going to be thinking about the things that you – well not always, but you’re usually going to be thinking about the things that you find in yourself that you think are a source of lowered self-worth.

A source of doubt about your own capabilities, about your own capacities. Whether it has to do with your appearance, whether it has to do with your performance, whether it has to do with your personality.

[0:16:06.8] So a lot of times this has to do with duality. So it has to do with too short, too tall, too smart or too know-it-all, too bald or too much hair and I will give you an example just from looking back where I had some social anxiety, some performance approach anxiety. You know, you never really think about other people thinking about you in a way that you think is not you, right? It is not the story you tell yourself about yourself.

So for example, the story I tell myself about myself or used to tell myself about myself was that I’m too short. I am short guy. I am a smart guy. I’m intelligent, right? I don’t have a lot of hair, I balded early. Now that has never really sort of something I was concerned about. It was more like the short thing and the smart thing and the bald thing but I want to use these three as examples for you because I never went into an approach with a stranger.

Or went into a group of people thinking that they’re going to be thinking that I was too tall, right guys? I always thought of myself as too short so I never was going to think that other people are thinking about me like, “Wow, this guy is really tall.” Now I lived in Asia for a lot of years and I was really tall but I still thought of myself as being shorter than most people even though I was taller than most people in the countries that I was living in.

Now that’s what the second mirror principle is because the second mirror principle for me was telling me, “Everybody is going to think you’re too short because you’re too short, you’re not good enough.” That was the source for me of being unworthy, being un-amazing. Like there was something wrong with me because I was too short. I also thought that I was really smart, like I have always believed in my intelligence and I always thought I was a smart guy.

[0:17:52.2] Now there is the thing about this. Being smart, I never thought that people are going to think that I was some know-it-all. There was never a cognition. There was never a thought in my brain that somebody is going to say, “Oh he is a know it all,” right? “He thinks he knows everything.” I just figure I am a smart guy. It was one of those things for me of positive self-talk. You know where being too short was the negative self-talk, being a smart person was always positive self-talk.

I never thought that somebody would call me a know it all but sure enough, there were people who thought that I was a know it all. They thought that because I was intelligent, I had an answer for most things. That I was some kind of know it all. Now again, the bald thing, the too much hair, I never thought somebody would say, “Man that guy has way too much hair” right? I always had less hair.

Now the reason why I bring up my personal stories guys is because it’s an example for you to understand that in the mirror principle, most of the time the other person isn’t even thinking these things about you, okay? What they’re thinking about has to do with them and we are going to get to that in a second but in the mirror principle, what it allows you to do is to understand that whenever you’re worried about somebody else thinking about you is only because that’s what you think about yourself and it allows you, just like the first part of the mirror principle, it allows you to go into those cognitions, those parts of the beta condition that are just not true and not serving you.

It allows you that introspection to observe and to see number one, in the first part what you are thinking about other people, how you are judging other people and how those judgments on other people are really just projections of your own belief systems but in the second part also, where you fear other people thinking about you or what you think other people are thinking about you are your own demons or your own places for you to look and determine, “Are these thoughts really true?”

[0:19:46.1] Other types of duality that I have heard a lot of my students come up with is you know, the awkward versus impressive, right? When it comes to approaching anxiety, I have heard my students say, “Well if I approach her then I am worried, the fear of rejection, my fear of failure is that she is going to think I am awkward,” right? “This woman is going to think I am awkward. I will run out of things to say.”

Most of the time my students are coming to me and saying, “You know what? When I approach this girl I am so worried that she’s going to think that I am super impressive that I am just able to hold a conversation for as long as I want.” Nobody comes and says that, right? That is not creating fear. That is not creating anxiety. What is creating the anxiety is the thoughts that we are worried other people are thinking about us that we don’t like about ourselves.

So when we’re in that mirror principle, when we’re actively practicing and actively training that mirror principle, that second part of that mirror principle, we start to look at these. We start to look at what other people are going to think about us and really that is just what we are thinking about ourselves. You know, boring versus entertaining. “You know, I am worried she’s going to think I’m boring” it’s never like, “I am worried that I am going to entertain her so much she is going to be laughing all night” right? Or not enough money.

“I am worried that she’s going to think that I don’t have enough money” versus “I am worried she’s going to think I have plenty of money.” Again, it has to do with money scarcity and your views on money, not her views or not these other people’s views but it all comes down to the way you’re thinking about yourself. You don’t think you have enough money. That’s your money scarcity.

[0:21:11.3] Okay guys. Now as I said most of the time people aren’t even thinking of these things about you and the reason is because of the alpha mirror principle. They are not thinking about you for the same reason you are not thinking about them. What are they thinking about? They’re thinking about what you’re thinking about them. They’re probably out there wondering, worried that you are thinking about what their thinking about themselves that they think is a source of something that they don’t like about themselves, right? So they’re in the same mirror principle that you’re in.

So that’s why it’s so insidious and it is illusive but it is usually erroneous as well, this thinking that other people are thinking about you in the way that you are worried that they are thinking about and what this does is this eliminates. When you practice and you train this, it eliminates that social anxiety. It eliminates that approach anxiety, performance anxiety but you also stop people pleasing, right?

Because what you realize that other people aren’t really thinking about you, really what they’re doing is they’re mirroring. They are looking at your neutral raw data, your behavior is their circumstance and they are interpreting it as a reflection of their own moral values and their own belief systems and when you really know that brother, when you really understand that you are going to stop trying to manipulate. You are going to stop trying to people please.

You are going to stop trying to show up as a clown or a puppet because you know that there is nothing you can do. Absolutely nothing. Everything you do is going to be taken not by what you do or what you think you’re doing but by what they think you’re doing and the same performance that you give to 10 different people is going to be subjectively interpreted 10 different ways. So you just stop. You just stop people pleasing because it does you no good.

[0:23:01.0] Be authentic and be yourself. Now, let’s move onto the alpha inversion principle because again, I like to keep these podcasts under 30 minutes, and the alpha inversion principle is really, really powerful. It is anything anyone says or does about you or to you tells you nothing about you and everything about them, okay? Now when you look at this, it is a really big one guys and I know that you guys that are really keen when you listen to that, you’re like, “Whoa, wait a second, I think there is something about that that can be used in a devious way and a really deceptive way,” and you’re right.

Here’s the thing, I only teach you the truth, right? I only teach you these tools and this truth. What you do with the truth is completely up to you and the alpha inversion principle can be shortened. It can be easily shortened to say that anything anyone ever does or says tells you everything about them.

This is a powerful truth and I train it with my students in the former version because it has specific application to living a life closer to your potential than the later version because in the former version, it has to do with how people relate to you rather than just how they relate to themselves and their life but it is the same as the mirror principle and here’s the thing, it’s the same as the mirror principle but it is for the other person and it allows you to do two things.

Number one, it allows you not to be a victim of other people’s words and actions and number two, it allows you to move into the relationship with compassion. So very quickly, here is the universal truth. The universal truth is circumstances are neutral. You are neutral for other people. Your behavior, your words, your actions are a neutral circumstance for other people. So their thoughts are creating their emotions and driving their actions getting their results.

[0:24:58.3] It has nothing to do with you, they are completely subjective and personal to that person. So when people do things and say things, that’s their action. That is their A-line, right guys? And their actions come from their emotions and their emotions come from their thoughts. So it doesn’t matter what you said, it doesn’t matter what you did because that is their circumstance. Someone else might manifest different actions driven by different emotions caused by different thoughts about the same thing that you said or did.

It tells you nothing about what you said or did, right? It is nothing about you. It tells you everything about the way they think and feel about what you said or did, which is a clue to their belief systems. That’s what other people’s behavior is. Other people’s words, other people’s actions, there is always a clue to their belief systems and the reason why I use it in relationship to you is because it allows you to be compassionate with this person and it also allows you to transcend any sort of victim mentality, any sort of victim role.

So let me explain the victim first. Because you know the universal truth, because you know that whatever somebody else is saying to you or about you or doing to you or with you, whatever it has nothing to do with you. You don’t take it personally. It is just like you basically don’t believe them. Like they’ll say something – If they say something negative about you then you know that it is really not about you. It is not the truth. It is just their interpretation of you based on how they think because that is now their mirror principle.

So you can remove yourself from being their victim. You can remove yourself if you think they are being a bully right? They’re putting you down but they are not putting you down. What they are doing is they’re judging your behavior or whatever it is and they’re allowing that manifestation to come out in action, to come out in whatever words they’re saying.

[0:27:00.3] But it is not because of what you did. It is because of what they are thinking and that allows you to step into the second part, which is to move into the relationship with compassion. If you think that you are a victim, if you are in that victim mindset around what they’re doing then you think that they are attacking you and what they are doing isn’t happening to you but when you separate yourself from that and really know that everybody’s actions are the manifestation of their thoughts, not a manifestation caused by you but caused by the subjectivity of their own belief system, their own beta condition, then you step out of that victim role and into the compassion role by knowing that if somebody is acting cruelly, if they are acting in a hateful way, if they are acting in an angry way then it is because they’re feeling mean, they’re feeling anger, they’re feeling hate, they’re feeling this uncomfortable emotions that you know are not pleasant to feel.

And you know that these emotions that are unpleasant to feel are coming from thoughts that are even worse. Usually thoughts that are negative self-talk, self-deprecating, self-defeating and that allows you to be more compassionate with their actions. Their actions may seem directed to you or against you but the truth is they are not. They are directed against themselves.

When people are acting in a cruel way, it is not you that is the victim. It is themselves that is the victim and when you understand that you can be compassionate in that inversion principle, recognizing that their actions are coming from their thoughts, the same way that your actions are coming from your thoughts and that is the mirror principle. Whatever you think about someone else, whatever you say about someone else tells you nothing about them. It tells you everything about yourself.

[0:28:43.8] So with these guys, with these two principles there’s three levels. I want you to understand that. The first level is to understand the concept. The second level is to practice the concept with passive action and the third step is to train the concept with massive action. Now with the mirror principle, we can practice it by separating the circumstances from the thoughts and we can also practice it by identifying the thoughts and running models, looking at the entire CTFAR.

With the inversion principle however it’s not really practicable because it’s only able to be trained in relationship and we do train it. We train at the Spartan Agoge School for Cognitive Mastery but the first step is always awareness. It is always awareness of your own cognition through elevating your alpha state. So the inversion principle is really only practiced that relates to your own beliefs, which brings the alpha back to you and it can only be trained in relation to other people.

Obviously, you need someone else there in order to train the inversion principle because the inversion principle requires inversion of somebody else’s circumstance or requires inversion of somebody else’s behavior, which is your circumstance.

[0:29:56.6] That’s what I got for you today guys. That is a bit of an advanced level teaching. If you guys have any questions, any questions at all on this podcast episode, on the universal truth, on the model, on elevating your alpha state, go to my website, thealphamalecoach.com. Everywhere on that website, you can click a button and it will take you to the book, a free 45 minute consultation call with me. I

f you’re ready, if you’ve heard the podcast, if you believe in the results, when you’re ready to accomplish and achieve these results in your life, you can go to thealphamalecoach.com and at the very top in the menu click on “Work with Kevin.” That will take you to the Spartan Agoge School of Cognitive Mastery. You can read all about that, but again, sign up with a 45 minute consultation with me to see if the Spartan School is a good fit for you or just to ask me anything.

I will coach you on anything guys. Causal coaching is so new and so effective and so efficient and so permanent. I want you guys to understand and really have a taste for yourself. I know you guys get a lot of value out of these podcasts, being coached is taking everything to the next level. Have an amazing week my brothers and until next week, elevate your alpha.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:31:22.4] 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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