Ep #44: The Perfectionist Illusion

[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]

[0:00:32.3] KA: What’s up my brothers, welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach podcast. I am your host Kevin Aillaud and I’m super excited about today’s episode and before I start getting into this, I want to tell you about the Elevated Alpha Society Facebook group. I highly recommend you join this Facebook group if you are loving these podcast because I’m a lot more interactive in that group. You can ask me questions and post comments. I do live teaching and free webinars there. There’s a ton more great stuff in the Elevated Alpha Society Facebook group. Check that out and join the team.

All right, let’s get into this episode. Because I’m really excited about this concept and its’ something that I’ve been noticing more and more in my clients and in myself. This is not a new phenomenon. I didn’t just discover this but the more I think about it and the more that I isolate it as a specific thought pattern, the more I see how it’s manifesting in so many areas of my clients’ lives.

Now, guys, I’m not psychic. The reason that it may seem that way, maybe I’m talking directly to you on this podcast or that I know what’s going on in your brain is that I pay attention to my brain. I’m always studying my own experience and my own mind and taking that work deeper, even when it’s confusing and hard and challenging and it hurts my brain.

I see that in some of my students, they want to believe that they’re different from me. They want to think that I have it all figured out and that there’s something wrong with their brain for not being able to know how to do what I teach. Sometimes I even talk to people who don’t believe what I have achieved is even possible for them, which of course is erroneous.

If I can do it, anyone can do it. I was not born like this brothers, think about it. If I was born, knowing how to manage my mind, how would I know how to do it and teach it? If I was born this way, I would just say well, I don’t know, that’s just how my brain works. The fact that I can teach it in such detail is the proof that my brain used to be like yours and still is. And that this work will change it.

[0:02:26.2] KA: The reason I understand your brain so well is that I have done all this work on myself. I never teach you something that I haven’t tested or learned or developed and refined by using it on myself first, that’s why I’m so passionate about my work and that’s why I know that it will change your life.

Someone said to me the other day during a networking event, you could sell religion to the pope and of course, I laughed, I thought this was hilarious. I’m not an actual sales-person. I really couldn’t sell anything other than my coaching, I think. I think I seem like a natural when I’m talking about coaching because I believe in it so much. It’s like this. I believe food will keep you alive. If you’re starving and you ask me what to buy to solve your problem.

I’m going to sell you really hard on the idea that food is the answer. If you say, I don’t’ know, should I eat this piece of plastic or should I try to eat some food, I’m going to reply pretty confidently, no. Not the plastic, the food. Eat the food. Buy the food bro.

Whoever you’re buying it from, just food is the answer to your problem. Whether I personally have food to sell you or not, I’m really going to be convincing you that food will solve your problem. That’s how I feel about cognitive mastery, it’s the secret to life. Whatever problem you have, I 100% believe causal coaching and development of cognitive mastery is the answer.

[0:03:39.6] KA: That is because I’ve used it on my own brain and I will keep doing that until I transcend this mortal form. The reason for this whole digression, brother, is that this episode is about perfectionism and I really want to frame it this way. Because sometimes when I talk about perfectionism. Those of you who identify with what I’m talking about start to immediately blame and berate and beat yourselves up.

You feel like you just can’t change anything that either you have to be perfect or you’re nothing, you know, this sort of binary thought pattern. I just want to remind you that everything I teach you, I know because I did that work on my brain first. The reason that I’m so 100% behind what I teach is that I know that if I can use this work to change, anyone can.

The aim is not to be perfect. I’m not perfect, neither are you. We’re never going to be and yet in this alpha paradoxical experience, everything is perfect, everything is exactly as it should be because everything is as it is. Now, I could just really end the episode right there, right? We’re all perfect to know when it’s perfect. Perfection is that everything has happened flawlessly to bring you this moment and at this moment, there’s no flaw and yet human beings are not without flaw, right?

Spend some time with that in your brain. No one’s perfect and we’re all perfect but I’m going to teach you a lot more than that on this episode, right? That’s not the end of this podcast. What is the perfectionist delusion? That’s what we’re talking about today.

[0:04:57.6] KA: The perfectionist delusion and tomorrow thinking. These are two different terms that describe beta condition thought patterns and they kind of work together. A perfectionist illusion is an illusion about being perfect. That’s the bottom line. It can be in any area of your life. It’s believing that if you were perfect in some area, right? If you lost 20 pounds, if you never made a mistake at work, if you never yelled at your kids, if you said the right words to that woman you’re attracted to.

If you got the right job or started the right business or chose the right niche, then you could finally be proud of yourself and happy. What’s really sneaky about this is that often, you don’t think you’re being a perfectionist because your thought isn’t, I need to be perfect, right? That’s not what’s happening in your brain. What’s happening in your brain are thoughts like I just want to and should work out five times a week or good parents don’t yell at their kids or I just like my body better when I weigh less.

Or, I have to have the right job to fulfill my purpose. You just have all sorts of justification thoughts that make your perfectionist fantasies seem like reasonable goals. Yet you never achieve them and usually you don’t even try. You make elaborate plans to do them and then you never start or you start and then the minute you have a setback, you give up.

That’s because perfectionist illusions lead to what I call tomorrow thinking. Tomorrow thinking is when you create a perfectionist illusion and you tell yourself that you’ll start tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. I was hanging out with a buddy the other day and he was talking about – he was talking to me about how he wanted to find a girlfriend, basically, he’s been out of a relationship for a while and he’s been really working on creating his wealth, working his business and he settled down now, he’s gotten his business where he wants it to be and he really wants to start meeting and talking to women.

[0:06:38.9] KA: I said awesome, let’s go talk to some women. He looks at me like I’m out of my mind. He says to me what? Now? He’s like, dude, I need to go put on different clothes, I’m kind of hungry, I’d like to get some food first, I’ll tell you what, let’s go out tomorrow. That is classic tomorrow thinking.

Talking to women literally takes nothing, right? Except opening your eyes, maybe walking out into public and then opening your mouth so you can have a conversation. You can probably do it wherever you are within the next 20 minutes. It literally requires being awake and a little bit of time. But the perfectionist brains says, I’ll start fresh tomorrow so I can do it perfectly.

Tomorrow thinking is the idea that we will always start tomorrow so we can do it perfectly, whatever it is. Whether it’s a diet, creating and keeping a calendar, working out, a morning routine, conversing and meeting people. The very definition of a perfectionist delusion is that it is an illusion. It is not reality, brother.

Today is our reality, tomorrow is always a fantasy, it’s always an illusion and in your fantasy of tomorrow, you’re finally doing everything the way you should be, right? You’re finally perfect, even if you don’t use that word for it. It’s so seductive, isn’t it?

[0:07:53.9] KA: Because, when you have this unrealistic fantasy of perfection, you usually fail almost as soon as you start and you give up or, most insidiously, you never start at all. You just live your whole life using tomorrow thinking. Always thinking that tomorrow, you’re going to get around to it. Tomorrow you’re going to get started. Tomorrow you’re going to finally be perfect.

Now, this cycle can become almost addictive where you create a perfectionist delusion, indulge into moral thinking, you get a hit of dopamine, right? That’s that pleasure chemical from your brain and you get that from imagining what it will feel like to be perfect and finally feel good about yourself and ironically, of course, you create that feeling for yourself now with your brain because that tomorrow is never coming, it hasn’t come yet but imagining your future perfect self.

You allow yourself to think about feeling good about yourself and that feels good now. Now is the key word, not tomorrow. Then you start your plan, right? You go and you take action and you fail or you don’t even start your plan because you’re too scared to fail. Then you start criticizing yourself and feeling bad about yourself and then the solution your brain has is too come up with another perfectionist fantasy and get another hit of dopamine imagining how you’ll be better tomorrow.

Tomorrow thinking leads to not doing anything or trying a little, failing, giving up and then what you do to feel better is engage in more tomorrow thinking. It’s basically this form of buffering. Tomorrow thinking is a sign that you are not willing to be present with and love the reality of your today. It turns into a cycle that can last for years or even decades.

[0:09:37.7] KA: Bro, it can even become an entire way of life, you could live your whole life this way and it works like this, right? Here’s the pattern. You create the perfectionist delusion, you indulge into moral thinking, you feel good about how perfect you’ll be in the future, you do nothing in the present or you do very little in the present but it failed to achieve perfection.

You feel bad about yourself, give up, medicate with a new perfectionist delusion, indulge in more tomorrow thinking and start the cycle all over again. This cycle creates so many unfortunate consequences. First, you lose all integrity with yourself, you’re planning and goal setting becomes an exercise in illusion.

You already know when you make a plan that you probably won’t even keep it and like any drug, the high goes down over time. Eventually, you don’t even get the relief you really want because you’re already anticipating the disappointment in yourself, you’re going to feel because you already know you’re not going to do it. First you lose integrity with yourself, you’re planning for future is just a joke and you know that.

But second, you make it impossible to actually get stuff done because you refuse to create realistic plans that you can achieve. You know, people, we, as human beings are so addicted to the illusion that we are unwilling to accept the reality. We want to keep pretending that there’s some tomorrow where we’re not going to have this human experience where things are not going to be hard and challenging and then we’re going to feel perfect.

[0:11:01.8] KA: Check this out. Most people would rather plan to do 15 things that they can’t do and get a hit of dopamine the day or night before in that planning by imagining feeling okay about themselves tomorrow than they would plan to do three things that they can actually do.

We would rather imagine how amazing it’s going to feel when we’re magically the perfect image of ourselves, imagining how we will never have to feel negative emotions anymore and that we’ll always be proud of ourselves. We’d rather do that, we’d rather have this imagination while we’re buffering with Netflix, instead of taking a walk.

In fact, we’d rather imagine that we can sweep any woman off of her feet within minutes of talking to her while we’re sitting at a bar having a drink than actually walking up to a woman and having a conversation with her because we’d rather have the illusion than deal with our own reality. Here’s why, this is the truth and I want you to hear this.

The reason is because we withhold positive feedback from ourselves, unless we achieve perfection, which we never do. The brain says to you this. It says, okay, well, I’ve told myself I’m not allowed to feel good about myself until I am in that perfect tomorrow. Of course, I just have to keep dreaming about it. We keep making unrealistic plans because in imagining that plan and indulging in our tomorrow thinking.

[0:12:20.9] KA: That’s the only time we allow ourselves to have any positive emotion about ourselves. We don’t want to create realistic plans with our current reality because we tell ourselves that we’re not good enough as we are, we don’t want to be present with that person. We want the artificial high of tomorrow thinking rather than developing the ability to be proud of ourselves and take pride in our actual current reality and potential real accomplishments.

When I started coaching my students, I thought the most challenging issues that they would have would be body composition and dating, right? Romantic relationships and I was really wrong, the students who have been through my coaching programs have all been able to build massive confidence around their health and the opposite sex and women.

The most meltdowns that I’ve seen in intelligent ambitious men in developing their cognitive mastery still always came during the time I was coaching them on how to create calendars for their work and life. Most students have disappeared on me during calendar work than any other phase of causal coaching and cause of mastery development and here’s why.

Calendars are perfectionist kryptonite because they are a written record of your perfectionist illusion and your failure to live up to it over and over again. What’s ironic of course is that it’s your perfectionist illusion that is actually preventing you from achieving and building something real.

[0:13:44.4] KA: You know, you’re drugging yourself with this fantasy tomorrow thinking in a way that makes it impossible for you to appreciate what you really have and can do now. For example, if you’ve gotten yourself used to fantasizing about having a hundred-thousand-dollar business, you will then tell yourself that having a $50,000 business isn’t exciting. You’ll make all these unrealistic plans, you’ll never follow through on and now you’ve sabotaged your $50,000 business and you’re making $25,000 instead, if that.

The perfectionist illusion may feel good in the moment, but the result of indulging in this illusion is that you lose integrity with yourself. Your planning becomes again, totally removed from reality, you feel like you let yourself down and have no follow through and you are never present with or learn how to accept your actual reality itself.

Now, having said all that, you guys know I’m a big believer in future focus thinking, okay? Future focus thinking is a very helpful thought pattern other than all those other things. I’m going to teach you how to see this. I’m going to teach you how, what the difference is between perfectionist delusion and future focus thinking and I want to address one really important distinction first.

I teach something that some of us may want to set big impossible goals, right? We want to blow our own minds with what we can do and I teach that we want to plan them out and I teach a way you want to practice living from our future self.

[0:15:13.2] KA: We want to think and learn how to think thoughts we don’t currently believe so that we can get different results and achieve different things, we want to dream big and set big goals. We have to plan what we’re going to do to get there and we have to practice believing in the person we’re becoming.

We have to practice believing that we can do things we haven’t done before and become people we haven’t become yet. Now, if you don’t understand this distinction, you might confuse that with perfectionist delusion and that happens a lot. Often when a client brings a big goal that they want to achieve. I like to check with them too see if it’s a perfectionist delusion and there’s a couple of different ways to tell the difference.

What I want to make sure you all understand because this is so important, the impossible goal is a part of the cognitive mastery course because it is fundamental concept of cognitive mastery and the alpha state. When you’re creating an impossible goal, you will feel excited and kind of nauseous and scared. You should feel excited and terrified when you are creating a perfectionist goal, when you’re in that tomorrow thinking, you will feel a different mix of emotions.

You’re going to feel good in the sense that you get relief from your negative self-talk and you get a hit of dopamine from pretending that you’ll be perfect in the future. If you’re thinking about a big goal and all you feel is good, then that’s a sign it’s a perfectionist delusion brother, right?

[0:16:33.6] KA: If it’s an impossible goal and you’re truly committed to it and believe it and you’re working on believing it and it feels terrible but you feel excited and you’re also full of doubt and fear and you’re afraid and confused and scared, that is an impossible goal, if you just feel good, it’s an illusion.

Sometimes with the perfectionist illusion, there is an undercurrent of negative emotion but it won’t be fear because fear comes from knowing you’re going to actually try and fail. When you have a perfection solution you already know that you are not really going to do it. So the undercurrent of negative emotion won’t be fear. It will be something more heavy like resignation like sadness because you already know you are not going to do it. It’s more like a disappointment. That is one distinction. Another one is if you are setting an impossible goal you may not know how to get all the way to that goal but you can see the next couple of steps.

You may not know how to make a $100,000 in your business but you do know what you could try to do to make 500 bucks. You are able to plan small chunks at a time and see them like the next three to four steps and you are ready and willing even though you probably feel scared to take them. When you are indulging in a perfectionist solution, you are much more likely to only to be thinking about being at the goal. You are thinking about the ultimate magic amount or weight or conversation.

Or perfect schedule or whatever it is, you are not looking at small concrete steps to get you there piece by piece, you just want to enjoy imagining this magical land where everything is perfect, right? I mean think about it, it’s like being at a bar and you see an attractive woman, a perfectionist fantasy has you guys married or dating or in the bedroom later on that night. The impossible goal is, I am going to stand up, success, I am going to walk towards her, success.

I am going to introduce myself and start a conversation, success. Small chunks that get you closer to your goal and you should have this feeling of, “Wow I am excited and scared” and what happens is you create this perfect looking plan right? You have this plan for 100% success. Impossible goals require belief every step of the way. You have to constantly be convincing yourself. It is super common that a client will tell me that what they think is an impossible goal.

[0:18:44.5] And if I ask, they will totally believe it’s possible right? And then if I ask if they believe the first little bit that they had to do is possible then they’ll say no, right? So going back to this 100K example, a client may say he wants to make a $100,000 in his business and then he says he believes he can. I am going to say, “Okay great, that’s amazing.” That’s awesome, then that means you have to make 800,000 this month.

You believe you can make 800,000 of this or 8,000 this month and he’s like, “Uh no, absolutely not what are you crazy? Who can make $8,000 in a month?” you know he doesn’t really believe or get a client who wants to get married, right? Or have a girlfriend and I say, “Okay, do you believe you can get married and have a girlfriend?” he’s like, “Absolutely” I’m like, “That’s awesome, do you believe you can find four amazing women to go out this month who will like you?”

And he’s like, “No, no definitely not. Dating is horrible. There’s not a ton of women out here. I don’t make enough money and I live in a small town” so he doesn’t believe either, right? He is thinking about that future perfect self but is unwilling to take those small steps. When you are indulging in a perfectionist illusion, you think you believe but you don’t really believe. When you say you believe, what you mean is you intellectually agree that it’s conceivably possible for a person like you to do such a thing and that is not the same as actually believing.

This is such a subtle distinction and I am teaching this at a really high level. Look if you are new to this podcast, it is totally fine if you don’t know what I am talking right now. Listen to it 20 times if you need to or come back to it after you’ve caught up with the rest of the podcasts, that’s okay. I talk about learning to believe new things all the time. With the perfectionist illusion, it is all or nothing. You know we claim to totally believe it but we actually don’t believe it at all.

[0:20:23.0] And when you’re working with a true impossible goal that you actually are invested in, you are actively working on believing, you are grappling with your belief, which should feel hard and challenging and should hurt your brain. Your belief is like a liquid that fills a tank. You work on filling the tank to 100%. 100% belief is becoming reality. So you start at 10% belief and you work on it. It is not easy but when you get around that 60, 70, 80% marker you start to see and feel your belief.

And then you get the momentum and you get the ball rolling. Perfectionist illusions are all black and white thinking. You either don’t believe you can do it at all or you think you can totally believe it and of course you are going to be fine because what you’re really doing is making the imaginary plan that you believe that the imaginary you that doesn’t exists could do the imaginary plan. Impossible goals mean being in the real gray area of work trying to learn and believe something new.

And struggling and seeing the next couple of steps and being willing to be in that struggle. So here is another distinction, if you are creating an impossible goal, you are ready and willing to fail and you know that failure is how you will get there. You are ready to fail forward. You know and expect you’ll fail the first or second day and you are just going to get up and try again. There is no wagon to be on or off. There is no streak that you are trying to keep consistent.

You’re just going to keep trying until you get there, right? You are ready to fail. If you are indulging in perfectionist illusions, you are failing ahead of time, right? Or you are failing once or twice and giving up because your thinking is failure is a problem. You are afraid to fail. You are engaging in black and white thinking. You create a perfect plan and you are going to restart because you are afraid to fail or you start with the minute you do, you stop, you give up.

[0:22:12.2] Impossible goals are fueled and built by failure. Perfectionist illusions wilt and die and they have to be started over at the mere hint of failure. So that’s the difference. It is super important to understand and I encourage you to listen to this podcast more than once. It’s a really advanced high level teaching about this. If you think you understand it, go back and listen to it again. I had to make sure I understood it when I was preparing it.

You guys know I don’t script these. Sometimes I just outline these podcasts and then most of the time I just hit record on my computer. For this episode, I wrote a lot of information. I am all in for your impossible goals guys. That’s what Causal Coaching Cognitive Mastery is about. I am not here for your perfectionist illusions. Okay, so now how do we solve perfectionist fantasies? How do we get through this beta condition mindset?

I have just spent a little while talking about the impossible goal because it is from the alpha state and I anticipated that this would be a way your brain would want to be confused or an objection that would come up. So here’s the thing and I want you to hear me on this brother, if you’re an over indulger in perfectionist illusions, you are not ready for an impossible goal. You don’t have any integrity with yourself right now and that’s okay.

It doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You know integrity sounds moral but what it really just means is that you don’t have a reliable relationship with yourself. You can’t rely on yourself to do what you say you’re going to do and when you say you’re going to do something what it really means is that you might do it if the stars align and you’ll probably be negotiating yourself pretty quickly and it ended up not doing anyway.

[0:23:50.6] Again, it is not because you are a bad person, bro. It is not that at all. It has nothing to do with your value. You are perfect and whole the way you are. It is actually your self-criticism that has created this mess. Constantly telling yourself negative things about yourself, criticizing yourself is what makes you want to be perfect just to get a respite, right? Just to get a break from those thoughts but the result is the same and that you aren’t able to show up for yourself.

So you really need to start small and if you’re a perfectionist fantasizer, your idea of an impossible goal is probably just another perfectionist illusion. Having a consistent minimum baseline would actually be an impossible goal for you. That is actually something that you have never done before and don’t know how to do and would really have to challenge and engage and grapple with yourself to do it. Now this podcast is already pretty long, this episode.

So I am not going to go into a deep dive solution because I have covered it before on the buffering podcast minimum baseline but very briefly, a minimum baseline is going to seem boring and pointless to the perfectionist but it’s actually the exact opposite. The minimum baseline is how you build an actual lasting habit and develop that kind of integrity with yourself. It is how you develop the kind of relationship with yourself.

Where if you’ll say you’ll do something, you know you’ll do it. You don’t get there with ambitious perfect plans. You get there little bit by little bit. Think about your relationship with someone else. Think about your relationship with a woman, right? If you’ve ever met a strange woman and she immediately declared her undying love for you, you wouldn’t trust her right? I mean that’s weird like if you met this woman and within two minutes, she’s like, “You’re the man of my dreams. I want to meet you. I want you to come meet my parents today so that we can get married tomorrow.”

[0:25:30.9] You know you’d be like, “I don’t think so” right? Instead when you meet new people, when we meet new friends or even a new romantic relationship, we build the trust in little ways. We show up for each other overtime. We make plans to meet for coffee and then we show up for a coffee, we send out a text and then we text back. Little consistent actions over time is what builds any kind of relationship, including the relationship with yourself.

So whatever area you’re working on, your minimum baseline should be the smallest commitment you can make that you know you can follow through on and when I say you know you can follow through on it, you’re going to have to manage your mind to follow through on that probably. I don’t mean that you can follow through on it without ever managing your mind but it should feel doable when you set it. You shouldn’t have the secret knowledge in your brain that you are never going to do it.

You don’t want to set something and then your brain will tell you, “Yeah right, you are not going to do that” you really need to think to yourself not like what you want to do but what you can do, what you can see yourself doing. So for example, if you’re trying to create an exercise routine, what you would like to do would be to go to the gym five days a week and spend an hour there but your minimum baseline might be to start with just walking for 20 minutes three times a week.

Or even 10 minutes three times a week. Now the perfectionist brain doesn’t like that, right? It seems boring and pointless but it’s not. If you actually go for your walk three times a week consistently, you are doing way more for your body than it does for you to make elaborate plans by gym membership, go every day for a week and then not go for four months and then start that cycle all over again. The point of the minimum baseline is not even to get results.

[0:27:10.7] So much as it is to build consistent habits and trust with yourself. You will get results overtime in whatever you are working on, whether it is writing a novel or increasing your cardiovascular fitness or talking to people, whatever, consistency will build your results but you can’t focus on the results because then your brain will say, “If we want that result let’s do this perfect aggressive plan instead” which you’ll never actually do.

So you don’t focus on the result, you focus on the relationship you’re building with yourself and focus on the idea that if you do this small actions consistently, you’ll build both the habit you want to have and the relationship with yourself. So trying it with the daily small practice. If you did five or 10 minutes of thought work every morning, you’ll whole day would be different, I promise you. I guarantee it, I see it every day with myself and my students.

You would make all kinds of different choices. You would feel differently about yourself. You would act differently. You would show up in the world differently. Your whole life would change. Now here’s what happens, six months later you’d start attributing all that progress to the actual actions you took, right? To the stuff, the things and stuff you did and you’d think, “Well now I am so much busier and I am so much more successful and I don’t have the time. I don’t need to do this mind work anymore.”

So you stop, you will say, “I will sleep in an extra 10 minutes” and then overtime you’d stall out or actually things would start to get worse and you would be confused. So you would think, “Well I didn’t really change anything, why is this happening? Why am I suddenly getting angry or why am I suddenly procrastinating?” well there must be something wrong with me, right? I am self-sabotaging and actually what happened is you stopped taking that small daily mindset practice action that you were taking.

[0:28:51.7] That was lighting the match for all the rest of your success. You stopped lighting the kindling brother and you just started trying to light the giant logs on fire that doesn’t work. So that’s what happens. Most people who fail, who start succeeding and then plateau or fail is because they stop doing this small practices that were creating their success without ever even realizing that’s what they were doing. Now the last thing I want to say about minimum baseline is that I recommend you use it on one area of your life.

At least once. The perfectionist illusion wants to be all on the wagon or all off the wagon, right? But that’s overwhelming and that makes things way harder. So pick one thing to work on at a time, write your book, create your exercise routine, eat more vegetables, get more sleep talk to more people, whatever it is. Just pick one thing and work on that minimum baseline. You have to give yourself the chance to acclimate. Practicing the minimum baseline requires you to be present in your own life.

And to grapple with all your negative self-talk and to really do your thought work to allow for and embrace creating change with small consistent action. Make small goals and practice sticking to them. Don’t calendar your whole week unrealistically knowing you’ll be behind by Monday at noon. Calendar one hour a day and actually do that thing no matter what. You have to be prepared for your brain to tell you that it is not worth it.

That it will take too long or that you can’t get there this way, listening to that brain is how you got here. So listen to me instead, bro. Don’t listen to your brain, please for your own sakes stop making plans that you know you won’t keep. Every time you do that you are lying to yourself and the worst part is you already know that. It is an artificial high and it has a shadow side you can feel every time you do it. It is like smoking a cigarette.

[0:30:37.8] Even when you are dependent on nicotine and that nicotine feels good, the part where you’re inhaling the smoke into your lungs doesn’t feel good to you. It doesn’t feel good on your body. So stop doing it. Stop pretending. Stop lying to yourself. Be willing to experience the discomfort of being present with your actual life and actual reality. You know you are probably beating yourself up all day in your reality all the time.

Telling yourself consistently that what you are capable of doing isn’t good enough and then indulging in this fantasy that you’ll finally be good enough when you can be perfect in whatever chosen thing you are obsessing about. So this work, this practice of making small plans you can actually stick to your brain will think it’s nothing and it is really everything. It is how you learn to build reliability and integrity with yourself. It is how you learn to stay present in your real reality.

It is how you learn to deal with your negative thoughts about yourself and change them brother because if you are always escaping into perfectionist illusions, you are never going to learn how to change. You are never going to learn how to choose the thoughts that serve you. If you are married and all you do is fantasize about your secretary, then you are never going to resolve what is going on in your actual marriage and that’s what happening in the relationship with yourself.

If you are always trying to make out in your mind with your future perfect self, you are never going to learn how to love the you that actually exists, which is the only you that you actually have. The irony is that learning to do this is what is going to allow you to actually become the person you want to be but you are going to have to work for it one step at a time. Now brother, if you had any goals for yourself that you are not achieving I can almost guarantee that this is why.

[0:32:18.7] The perfectionist illusion and tomorrow thinking, and if that is the case, I want you to come join the Indomitable Self-Confidence course so that you can learn how to quit this perfectionist illusion life and give up tomorrow thinking and learn how to create the life that you want today in your real life, how to actually be here where you are and that’s the place from which you can create the change that you want.

That’s what I got for you today brothers. As always, if you would do me this favor and go to iTunes, leave me a five-star rating and review if you love this podcast. I love reading you guys’ reviews. They tell me so much about how this work is impacting and helping to change your lives. So please leave me that review, tell me about it. I love reading it and until next week, my brother, my friend, elevate your alpha.

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[0:33:18.2] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset, at the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.

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