Ep#102 The Motivational Triad

[INTRO]

[00:00:08] Announcer: Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast, the only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here’s your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

[EPISODE]

[00:00:31] KA: What’s up, my brothers? Welcome back to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud. I’m back in Arizona. I’m back out here in Arizona. I’m building on the academy land. Just in case you guys, I don’t know if I’ve really explained what’s happening out here, but I’m building a resort. It’s more of a training center for you, for you guys that want to come out and learn cognitive mastery.

What we’re doing is building a large facility with a lot of different areas to it. When we’re not using it for academy purposes, when we’re not using it to train, the project will be like a campsite, because it’s 30 minutes south of the Grand Canyon. Now the first living quarters are just about complete and I love it. It’s a 7-meter dome tent. It’s got two queen beds. It’s got a full kitchen. It’s got a bathroom with a shower and that shower’s got a steam room in it. It’s got wood-burning stove on the inside. It’s got an outdoor fire pit. It’s got a bathroom. I mean, it’s got everything, everything.

I’m building eight of these in various sizes. The next one’s going to be a 10-meter dome. Then there’s all the community buildings. I’ve got a gym going up. I’ve got a classroom. We’ve got a community area for hanging out, like watching movies, playing ping pong, shooting pool, all that, this utility area. All of this, like I say, all this is happening right now about 30 minutes south of the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It’s really fun and I’m really excited to be back out here and really putting hammers back to nails to get the project moving. I love it.

I want to continue our talk on buffering today. I want to tell you that I wouldn’t be able to operate and oversee all of these projects if I was utilizing mental energy, or physical time to avoid uncomfortable emotions. What I basically mean by that is I wouldn’t be able to do all these projects, because I was buffering. If I was buffering, if I was using my time and using my mental energy, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I have to maximize. I get to maximize each half hour block of every day to accomplish my goals, my goals of creating and contributing.

I’m feeling energized and excited about it all. I don’t feel overwhelmed. I don’t feel fatigued. I don’t feel exhausted by it and I want to share that experience. I want to share that power with you, because it’s such an incredible feeling to not be the slave to a desire that I created. We all create our own buffers. We all create our own desires. I create this over desire, this buffer that I created myself in the hopes that I could avoid something that is actually the most important thing for me to understand. That’s understanding myself and understanding my brain.

In the hopes of avoiding myself, in hopes of avoiding my brain, I went off and I created over desire with these buffers. It’s an incredible feeling not to be a slave to that. It’s so important that I want to remind you of two things that I said last week. First, I said that all my students work on buffering when they enter the academy. I want you to know, it’s like boot camp. It’s like an internship. It’s like going into any type of group and that training process for academy students is becoming aware of observing what you’re buffering with.

That is what they do in addition to their curriculum. Is it easy? No way. No way is it easy being an academy student. But being the best version of yourself, learning to grow into more of who you are isn’t an easy thing. Its virtue is in its difficulty. The value of elevating and living into your alpha, as an alpha male, is vast and beyond the scope of this podcast episode, but it all begins with removing the barrier of self-created over desire and compulsive urges.

That is actually going to lead me to the second thing I want to talk to you guys about, that I mentioned last week, which is that you don’t have to stop buffering to develop. You don’t have to stop buffering in order to improve. That is true. However, this is a big however. It’s a huge seven letters. I want to add, or amend even and say that buffering is by definition, a refusal to work on yourself in the most basic ways at the most fundamental levels. Because essentially, it’s avoiding emotion, it’s avoiding you, it’s avoiding how you feel, it’s avoiding what you’re thinking, it’s avoiding your belief systems. It’s avoiding your thought patterns.

Instead I will say it to you like this, you have the option to live your life as you want. I’ve always said that. If you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re one of my guys in the audience and you’ve listened to all these episodes, then I know you want to be the best version of yourself. If you choose to live as an alpha male from your alpha state, you must turn your attention to buffering and you’ve got to start to remove that barrier. At least, look at that and be very honest with yourself about that.

You can still work on health. You can still work on creating optimal health, massive wealth and amazing relationships while you continue to buffer. However, your full alpha state to truly live as an alpha male, to live in your alpha state requires a clean mind, a complete extraction from the matrix. That is to remove your buffering.

Now last week, I taught you guys about what buffering is and some of the things you can expect when you stop buffering. The value of ending your buffering, the value of eliminating all buffering in your life. In this episode, I want to mention just one thing. Now this one thing, I could teach about four hours, because it is a foundation of the philosophy I use when I teach and I coach. It is the science of the brain. It is the function of the brain, as it relates to the brain’s connection with the body and motivation for survival. It is the program upon which the beta condition is built. It’s like the hard drive on which that software is programmed on, that beta condition software.

Without this hard drive, without this program, there would be no beta condition. Its basic function of the primal brain is primordial in origin and insidious in its existence, brother. This is the basic structure of the matrix and it’s built by humans living under the direction of the primal brain with their knowledge of technology and no knowledge of themselves. Now, if you can keep this one thing, the one thing that I’m going to teach you today, if you can keep this one thing in your mind and remember it, and train yourself from your desire to own it, then you will be in this space.

This will be a game changer. This will be a life changer. This one thing will change your life right now. This one thing is the motivational triad of the brain and how it functions to keep the body alive. What is the motivational triad? I have mentioned this before. I have talked about this before, but I’m going to talk about it now as it relates to buffering, potentially a whole another way. I want you to think about the brain as this computer that’s only mission, its only job, the software of this computer, the what’s running here is to keep the body alive, is to keep the organism alive. It’s running a survival program. Just survive. That’s the move. That’s how we do this.

Now, the members of our species that follow this program, that follow this motivational triad program, they became the humans of today. They survived and passed on those genes that continued to run this motivational triad. The humans that were running a different program from their brain, a different motivational triad, or having some different thing happening, somewhere a different motivation, they did not survive. They didn’t make it this far.

Now we have a species of human with this brain that is running this program in order to keep us alive. It’s found the best way to do that. Remember, I want you to understand, this is all pre-prefrontal cortex. This is all before the prefrontal cortex. This is happening from the beta condition.

Now what’s happening here is that the brain is sending messages to the body that says either yes, this is a great. We need this. This is important. This matters to our survival. When it does that, it sends pleasure into the body, reminding the body that hey, this is something we should do again. We should hit this up again. We should be more involved with this. It does this with food, it does this with sex, it does this with sleep, it does this with optimal temperatures of ambient environment, like comfort levels of what’s happening externally on our skin, those hot and cold temperatures. It’s happening all the time, judging the environment based on that pleasure, or on the other side of the pain.

First of all, let’s talk about that pleasure. If there’s something pleasurable happening, the brain will send a message to the body says, “Yes, do this again.” If it didn’t understand this, brother, if it didn’t do that, then we just wouldn’t have any motivation to do that activity again. We would have no motivation to go out there and have sex again, which means we would never be out there procreating, which means our species wouldn’t pass along – we wouldn’t pass along genes. Our species wouldn’t survive.

Again, the humans that didn’t have that dopamine response, that pleasure chemical response to sex, those genes didn’t pass on, because they weren’t having sex. They weren’t out there passing on their genes. It’s the same with food. When we eat food, the brain is like, “Oh, this is important. This means we’re going to survive.” It send some pleasure to the body to remind the body to do it again, to go out there and eat again. Because otherwise, we just wouldn’t. We’d be out there doing other things. We’d be out there doing whatever, in this day and age, who knows? Back then, maybe I don’t know, chasing birds around, chasing squirrels, playing with whatever, plants. I don’t know.

Back then, we were, okay, this is important. We need to eat again, because that’s what the brain is telling us unconsciously to survive. That’s one of the corners of the triad. That’s one of the corners of the triangle. Another corner is to avoid pain. Somewhere down the line, the brain started to pick up signals from the environment that said, this is dangerous. Startle, danger, fear. That startle, danger, fear coming from that fear from the amygdala that began to tell that, create that message from the brain going to the body saying, “This is dangerous. Avoid this. This is uncomfortable. This is fear. This is uncomfortable. We need to avoid this area.”

The message is fear. Danger, danger. We just feel uncomfortable. We’re like, “Okay. Something about this doesn’t feel right. Something about this doesn’t feel good.” We get that message from the brain and it’s just saying, okay, stay away from. That message comes from some learning that the brain has processed to say, “This is going to harm us. This is going to hurt us. This is going to kill us.” Now maybe we saw it and we saw our friends walk into a rattlesnake patch and was like, “Well, okay. We’re now learning that that is not good. Rattlesnakes are not good.”

Maybe it has something to do with something else that we’ve taught ourselves from lessons that we developed during our childhood from our beta condition. Even into our adulthood, lessons that we continue to process subconsciously. That’s what’s happening now. Understand that the reason why the brain developed this way is to avoid the situations that would cause harm, or death to the body. In order to avoid those situations, the brain would send emotional messengers of discomfort to say, “Avoid this. Stay away from this. This is harmful.”

The third point of the triangle is efficiency. What the brain wants to do is it wants to code these messages so fast that they’re unconscious, that you don’t have to consciously think about them to process them, to learn. You learn them and then they’re coded, so they happen automatically. They happen so quickly that you just feel the emotional signal, you feel the emotional feeling before you even know what you’re thinking. It happens just immediately.

Now the brain wants to do this for a couple reasons; number one, understand this all has to do with safety. This all has to do with survival. If you’re sitting there thinking about it, you might be taking too long. That might be a safety hazard. Spending time in thought, the brain doesn’t like that. No, no, no. We need to act. We need to move. We don’t need to spend time in thought. We just need to eat to feel good, or we need to have sex to feel good, or we need to rest, or we need to run, we need to fight or flight. We need to do something. It doesn’t like to sit there and think about the thought. It just wants to code it immediately, make it automatic.

The other reason the brain likes to do this is because it is a energy burning machine, brother. Let me tell you something. The brain burns so many calories. Just to be conscious of your thoughts, to be thinking about thoughts, to be learning something all the time burns a lot of fuel, burns a lot of caloric energy. You’ve really got to be eating and replenishing that fuel a lot.

Now because there wasn’t a lot of food back then, there was the hunter and gathering phase of this adaptation of this movement, human beings needed that quick wiring. They needed that efficiency, so the brain wasn’t out there burning up a lot of energy in order to send these chemical messengers, in order to send these emotions. Now that’s the motivational triad. That’s how the brain develops. That’s the brain that we all have. That’s the primordial brain that we are all born with and given as a foundation for which the beta condition is built upon. The beta condition starts to build on this motivational triad, where the brain is already out there seeking things that it deems important for survival. It’s going to code those things with pleasure, with dopamine, to remind the body, “Hey, that’s good. I like that. Let’s do that some more.”

It’s going to already be out there looking for things that says, “Hey, this is no good. We don’t like this. This is dangerous to us. It could cause us death. Let’s stay away from it at all costs.” It’s already doing that. When we look at the matrix, when we really think about circumstance, we look at everything outside of us and we know that it’s all truly neutral, we know that it’s all truly objective, I want you guys to know right off the bat, at birth, your brain is already slicing it up. Your brain is already out there looking for positives and negatives. It’s already looking for ups and downs, lefts and rights. It’s already looking for goods and bads, likes and dislikes.

It’s happening and it’s doing all this in order to feed you with that data of emotion and guide you into action. Now it would be a bummer if we didn’t have any control over that, but we do and that’s the alpha state.

Now why is buffering such an important part of the motivational triad? The reason why is because when we get into our buffering, when we start to have that avoid pain, avoid pain, avoid pain, when we get to that point of the primordial motivational triad from the beta condition, whatever that pain is that the beta condition is – we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe is that that painful thing, and we decide to buffer, we decide to avoid that, and that buffer now becomes that pleasure. That buffer now gives us, “Whoa! Dopamine. This feels great.” The brain starts to tie that activity, that buffer, whatever it is into survival.

Now we’re getting pleasure. The first thing we want to do is avoid the negative. We avoid the negative with all the technology and innovation and invention and all the wonderful things that we get to experience in the 21^st century. I mean, we have sugar, we have movies and video games, we’ve got social media, we’ve got all kinds of stuff that is so concentrated in its source of false pleasure and source of dopamine, because it’s synthetic and it’s man-made.

When we get into it and we drop all that dopamine into our body from our brain, the first thing we’ve done is we’ve succeeded in what our brain wants to do by avoiding that uncomfortable emotion. The other thing we’ve done is we’ve given our brain all that pleasure and we’ve tied that activity into hyper survival, because of the concentration.

If we go in and we eat a strawberry in the wild, the wild strawberry, we get that sugar and our brain says, “Whoa! That’s necessary.” We need to eat. That glycogen is important for us to release insulin and store nutrients in the cells. It’s good for energy. The glycogen we burn as energy and then we oxidate it. It’s all great stuff. We need it.

The brain says, “Here’s some dopamine. Here’s the dopamine body. Remember the strawberry patch. Go and eat here some more. Eat more of these.” Now in the 21^st century when we’re eating Twinkies, so we got something with hype, or a donut, or just need a slice of bread, bro. Think about that, a slice of bread has more sugar in it than a strawberry, because it’s concentrated. You take the flour and you mill it down into its concentrated source, then you use that concentrated source to create this very, very dense carbohydrate, this very dense sugar. From that, the brain is like, “Whoa!”

If a strawberry was meant this much to our survival, if it was a five on the survival scale, then this piece of bread is a 100. Now it’s like, “Whoa! I need that.” That’s what it does. That’s what all buffering does. It doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s the social media. You get on it a little bit and all of a sudden, you’re on that phone all the time.

Guys, smartphones didn’t come out very long ago. Understand, these are 2007, I think, was the first iPhone. Understand that it’s been less than two decades. Just over one decade in fact, but now everybody’s got them and everybody’s hooked on them. We’re all looking at them, because of what it does to the amygdala, what it does to our brain, it attracts our brain. Our brain loves that. It loves the dopamine that it gets from that. Then when we put it down, then all of a sudden we’re no longer are getting that anymore. It’s such a fascinating thing.

That’s why buffering is so important. It’s not the object. It’s not the phone. It’s not the smartphone. It’s not the television. It’s not the alcohol. It’s not the sugar. What it is is it’s that brain, it’s that motivational triad of the brain linking so strongly, so strongly that concentrated pleasure and using it to secrete so much dopamine, so much importance, so much survival juice. It’s like, you now need this. This piece of bread is now the most important thing in the world, or that television, or that social media, or that pornography, or that alcohol, or that whatever it is, the video game.

You play a video game for 30 minutes, all of a sudden becomes three hours. You lose yourself in there. It’s because it’s so important. The brain just is hooked on it. It wants it. It needs it. It thinks that that is its survival.

Now as I mentioned, as I set this up ahead of time, I can talk about buffering forever. I could talk about the motivational triad for hours, for literally hours, guys, because it’s so important for you to understand. The academy is open enrollment. Enroll in the academy, get started now. We can get into it. We can really look at whatever it is you’re buffering with and help turn that around, really eliminate that immediately. You begin to see results.

That’s why I like to work with buffering with my students, because they begin to see their power almost immediately. It happens so fast. I want to finish this podcast on a understanding of how we work with that motivational triad, how we work with the brain to shift things around and really begin to rewrite not just a new program on that foundation of seek pleasure, avoid pain and work as efficient as possible.

Really, what we’re doing is we’re creating a new foundation. That’s what I mean when I say, reprogram the brain. It’s not reprogramming the brain by saying we’re just going to think new thoughts on top of this desire for that external, on top of that desire for that pleasure and that avoiding of pain, because here’s the thing. With the prefrontal cortex, with your alpha state, there’s so much more to be had, to be understood from exercising with the brain to take you to the next level of what you already are, but are being plowed down with, or being held back with due to that foundation, due to that primordial brain.

Here’s what we do. We rewrite the brain by flipping the motivational triad. There’s that beta condition motivational triad, or that beta condition that’s written on the primordial motivational triad. Then there’s the alpha state, which helps to re-route to reprogram and write the motivational triad that will take you to the next level, which is to flip it. Here’s what we do. We take each corner and we flip it.

With the chasing pleasure, with the seeking pleasure, what we want to do is we want to make sure that we’re choosing the pleasure. We want to make sure we’re choosing well-being versus choosing the false pleasures. How we do that is we look at what is the pleasure. I’m not saying you never drink again. I’m not saying you never play video games again. I’m not saying you never watch television, or you never turn on your Netflix, Facebook or whatever. I’m not saying that. YouTube. I’m not saying any of that.

What I’m saying is that you are in control of that and you’re choosing it intentionally and you’re choosing well-being, which is that true pleasure, not the false pleasure of the hyper-dopamine, of this synthetic and saturated dopamine, but the well-being of what is natural for humans to receive pleasure, that authentic or more genuine human state of seeking pleasure, the well-being of that versus the false pleasure.

Now of course, if there is an over desire for the false pleasure, then you know that you’ve got that. Then you’re in the matrix. You know that you’ve got that and the matrix has you. We want to look at that and we want to make sure that you’re not buffering, but you are utilizing the things that you want to utilize in the world. That’s number one. We want to flip that one.

The other one is the avoidance of pain. Here’s the thing. People are like, “Okay. What are you saying? I should go seek out pain? I should seek out emotional discomfort, coach?” Yeah, yeah, a little bit. See, here’s the thing, brother. You got to understand that in order to grow, you have to feel uncomfortable. There is not growth without being preceded by discomfort. Before any growth can happen, there has to be a space, or a season of being uncomfortable.

Now you can either have that discomfort happen to you unconsciously. It’s like, okay, now life is happening to me. I’m a victim of the world and everything’s coming down on me here, so it’s happening to me and I’m uncomfortable and I’m suffering. Or you can create it for yourself. You can go out there and choose discomfort. You can make it happen for you intentionally, so that you’re growing on purpose.

Really what that means is change. The brain doesn’t like change. The brain sees change as something that is dangerous. Again, if there’s change, if there’s unknown, if there’s unfamiliarity, then there’s going to be that fear of non-survival, fear of death, fear of getting hurt. The brain doesn’t like change. Because the brain doesn’t like change, if you’re going to change, if you’re going to grow into that next version of yourself, you’re going to have to go through that discomfort that comes with change.

You seek out the discomfort. You seek out intentionally the uncomfortable emotions that really again, and this teach us at the academy that really, emotions are not uncomfortable. We just subjectify them as uncomfortable. They’re truly just vibrations in our cells. They’re chemical reactions in our cells. We subjectify that chemical reaction as uncomfortable. We don’t look at salt going into water and the chemical reaction of it diluting becoming salt water. There’s a chemical reaction up in here. We don’t say that that’s painful for the water. It’s not an uncomfortable thing, or the chemical reaction of wood being burned. There’s a chemical reaction up there, but we don’t look at the wood and say, “Oh, that would must be in so much pain.” We just see it and we observe it, because it’s neutral.

When we feel our chemical reactions, we have this very subjectivity around it, this experience. I don’t want to rob that experience from you, understand that brothers. It’s very important you understand the emotional experience is the human experience. When we subjectify it as uncomfortable, then we’re adding a level of discomfort on top of the vibration that’s already there. We make it even more uncomfortable by calling it uncomfortable.

We want to seek those out. We want to seek those out intentionally, so that we can pass through that discomfort and we can manage that change with intention, with mindfulness. Finally guys, that last piece, that last corner of the triangle is we want to flip the efficiency. Efficiency really just means automatically, unconsciously. I want to take that and I want to explain to you that from the alpha state. What you’re doing is you are working consciously. You’re working very – I would say with effort, with conscious effort. You are using mental energy, but you’re using it very effectively. You’re using it at the right time in the right place. You’re becoming conscious.

When it comes to buffering when that time is is when the urges arise, when the urge for the buffer, when that over desire begins to flow into your body, when the brain starts to say, “I want X. I want whatever it is that that buffer is.” That over desire, that chemical of deprivation of not having that whatever that is starts to flow into your body, that’s when you want to begin to exercise that corner of the triangle, where you’re now maximizing brain capacity, brain effort in order to become aware of the emotion, aware of the desire, the over desire and the thought, and so that you can allow that urge. You can allow that desire to be there.

It’s maximizing effort at the right time. Rather than just allowing the brain to run its program, you want to start becoming aware and utilizing consciousness in the right moments. It’s effectiveness in effort. Effort and effectiveness. That’s the motivational triad that we practice in the academy from the alpha state.

When we really think about survival, what we’re really talking about was what is survival? Would you rather survive from that beta condition, from that unconscious animal space, just like all the other animals out there, bro? Just like all the other animals that are living on, I need to eat, I need to have sex, I need to sleep, I need to watch for predators, I need to be on the lookout, I need to be aware of danger and pain and death. Just like every single other animal out there in the wild, or do you want to thrive? Do you want to thrive in your humanness from your alpha state? Do you want to take that primordial and very animal motivational triad and turn it, elevate your alpha and flip that motivational triad, so now your brain serves you as a tool.

Probably the most powerful tool on the planet, and serves you to live the life that you want to live, to live into the life that you desire, that you deserve and that you can dream of. That’s the truth. That’s the move. Because when we flip that, then you chase the discomfort that’s required for change. You remove the barriers of the buffers that are creating all that over desire and false pleasure, so that you can enjoy well-being and you can enjoy the contrast of humanness and you become conscious at the right moment, so you become conscious when – you elevate that alpha, instead of just running in that efficiency, you become conscious in the moments that you are working on those changes and you are working on either removing that buffer, or creating that goal, driving towards whatever accomplishment you’re looking towards driving for.

Become conscious in the moments when you’ve planned to do something that will take you into your future self and your brain is saying, “I just don’t want to.” That is the power of flipping the motivational triad.

Now, we are going to discuss buffering next week as well, my friend, and get into how to stop buffering. I want you to know that you can enroll in the academy today and get on the fast track to quitting, quitting whatever it is you’re buffering with. Now you can cut back. You can cut back on whatever it is that you’re feeling that over desire for, because it’s not about the activity. It’s not about the action. It’s about the emotion. It’s about removing the over desire. It’s not about taking out the action.

If you’re drinking and you have this over desire for drinking, then it’s about taking out that over desire, so you could still drink when you choose to, but you won’t have this compulsive desire to act when you don’t want to. That’s the move. Quitting whatever it is you’re buffering with or cutting back, but it’ll free up your time. It’ll free up your mind and it’ll free up your drive. It’ll free up your drive to act with cutting back on and eliminating those habits that aren’t serving you anymore. It’ll also build indomitable self-confidence as a byproduct.

The academy is taking open enrollment now and you can go to thealphamailcoach.com and click on Work with Kevin at the top. It’ll give you the Spartan Academy option. Or you can just go straight to elevatedalphasociety.com/elevatedalphasociety and enroll today, so we can start working together and you can start training your brain and elevate your alpha.

[END OF EPISODE]

[00:30:01] Announcer: 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 the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.

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