Ep #42: Trust

[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]

[0:00:32.6] KA: What’s up my brothers, welcome back to The Alpha Male Coach podcast. I am your host Kevin Aillaud. Today, we’re going to talk about trust and there’s so much misunderstanding we have about what trust is.

In fact, we have so many understandings that when it comes to relationships in general, we have misunderstandings about love, we have misunderstandings about confidence, we have misunderstandings about what it means to accept people as they are instead of constantly trying to change them or think we know what’s best for them.

We also have this misunderstanding of trust and when it comes to trust, we typically believe that our trust in a person is dependent on their actions, right? We have this belief that someone can earn our trust and that someone can break it with their choices and behavior. Of course, this is a beta condition illusion that leads to unintentional suffering, unwanted actions and undesired results. But you guys knew that was coming, right?

Because otherwise why would I be talking about it? The definition of trust is, a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of someone or something. Now, I want you to just take a look at that. Just take a look at the definition. A firm belief.

[0:01:53.1] KA: The definition really puts the spotlight on what trust really is, doesn’t it? Trust is a thought or the thoughts we have about someone or something. When we think someone is reliable, truthful, honest, capable and strong, we trust them. Whether or not they are these things is irrelevant. We just have to believe them about a person to trust that person, according to the definition.

Now, it’s important that you understand this distinction, if you’ve listened to this podcast a lot, you may already know where I’m going. It’s important that you know that the circumstance is neutral, right? The person you choose to trust or not to trust is a neutral circumstance. They are neither reliable nor unreliable, yet, they are both reliable and unreliable.

Remember the alpha lives in a world of paradox, guys. People are neither honest nor liars but they’re both. They’re honest and they’re liars, right? Their neither capable nor incapable, they’re both, they’re neither strong nor weak, they’re both. That’s what people are.

People sometimes lie and people sometimes tell the truth. People are sometimes capable in their ability and other times they are incapable in their ability. That’s the paradox, that’s the way people are. People don’t earn our trust by being these things, you are not always reliable, you are not always capable.

[0:03:16.8] KA: This is not a state of being. People just have our trust when we believe these things about them. That is why the same person can be reliable to one person and unreliable to another. It’s not that the person is reliable or unreliable. Like I said, they are neutral. They are both and neither.

It’s that the two people have different relationships or thoughts with this person who is neutral. Why would we want to trust someone? We want to trust people so that we can feel safe with them. That’s what trust is. The point of trusting someone is so that you can have the feeling of safety when you think about them. Which is the same as saying, you want to have the feeling of safety in your relationship with them because remember, relationships are thoughts.

If we can agree on that, can we agree on that? If we can agree on that, then I know there’s a group of you, raising your hand right now. Now that this is the 42^nd episode, right? Saying, coach, if we can agree that we want to trust someone so that we can feel safe with them, then we can always trust someone no matter what they do, right?

Because that’s universal truth. My trust is based on my cognition, I would say yes, of course. The same way you can love someone no matter what they do but take a step back because doesn’t that seem irrational? Doesn’t it seem possibly erroneous even?

[0:04:35.4] KA: How can we have, which is the definition of trust, right? How can we have a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability and strength of someone if their behavior appears to us to be unreliable, untruthful, incapable or weak. Do we just change the way we define reliable?

Do we just change the way we define truth or honesty? Can we somehow convince ourselves that when someone lies to us, they’re actually being honest? No, of course, not. We do it not by changing, how we define honest so that people are still honest when they lie. Because that’s a delusion. We don’t want to convince ourselves that people are being honest when they’re deceiving.

What we do instead is we define, we change how we define trust so that people can lie and we can still trust them. Momentous sleep? Let me explain. Okay, I’m going to keep going, let me explain. Trust is a manual we have for how we want people to behave in order for us to feel safe, okay?

Now, we use trust as a manual to feel safe and when we no longer feel safe, we blame that person for violating our trust, we really think, we believe it is somehow the person, how they acted. We think that it’s what they did or what they said that violated that trust.

But the truth is, the only thing that changed is the way we think about them, we thought a certain way about them and believe they would fit into those thoughts and just created trust, right? That was our manual. They behaved in a way outside of what we thought, outside of our manual and so we changed our thoughts about them. That depletes our trust and quite frankly, that’s why it’s so hard to get trust back.

Because once you change the way you think about someone, you don’t change your thoughts back. You can always have new thoughts, you can always move forward with your thoughts but going back to old thoughts is really quite difficult, it’s almost not really. I mean, you can because thoughts are choices.

[0:06:36.7] KA: It’s more difficult to come back to old thoughts that is to create new thoughts. Let me be clear, it’s not our behavior that depletes trust. It is the way you think about their behavior, that depletes trust. Let me give you an example.

If your wife is cheating on you and I know this is an extreme example, if your wife is cheating you, it’s not her behavior that depletes trust, right? If you know or if you don’t know what’s happening, we’ll start with the not, right? If you don’t know what’s happening, you have zero thoughts about it and it doesn’t change your relationship at all.

That doesn’t change your thinking because there’s a chance – it doesn’t change your relationship because it doesn’t change your thinking. Trust is not depleted even if she’s doing it. It’s not her actions that’s depleting trust.

Now, if you suspect it to be happening, then you’re thinking about it will deplete trust. You’re going to look for evidence to support those thoughts. Again, it’s not her cheating that’s depleting the trust, it’s your thinking about it, it’s your suspecting it and looking for the evidence.

[0:07:34.3] KA: Now, if she’s not cheating on you and you suspect that she is, then your thinking will still deplete that trust and you’re still going to look for evidence to support those thoughts. The point is that someone can lie to you and you think they’re telling you the truth and you trust them because you believe them, right?

Someone can be telling the truth and you think that they’re lying to you and you don‘t trust them. It’s never the circumstance, it’s never what someone else says or does that creates trust, it’s always your thoughts about what they say and do. It’s always your cognition.

Now, manuals are an invention of the beta condition. I have an entire podcast episode, in fact, multiple podcast episodes dedicated to manuals. I’m not going to explain them in depth here but I do want you to remember this. Manuals are rules we have for the way we want people to behave in order for us to feel a certain way.

They’re a product of the beta condition because they violate the universal truth. Manuals put the power and responsibility for how you feel into the hands of another person, which is equally impossible and disempowering, brother. I mean, manuals are – they’re erroneous. They also remove all your power. The manual for trust is in the definition of the word.

Now remember the definition is, for trust is, a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability and strength of someone or something. Our manual for trusting someone is as long as they are reliable, as long as they’re honest, as long as they’re capable, as long as they’re strong. If we think they are these things, then we trust them. We falsely believe they have earned our trust with their actions, although, it’s really just what we observe and choose to think. If we don’t think these things, then we don’t trust them.

If we think these things at one point and then they do something that violates our manual, then we don’t trust them anymore and again, we falsely believe that they violated our trust with their actions. Although, it’s really that they observe them doing something and made it mean that they’re now unreliable, dishonest and capable or weak.

[0:09:35.0] KA: I mean, the truth is, we just have more information about this person. This person could have been like this the whole time, they didn’t do anything, they didn’t change, they didn’t trick us. We just saw something that was going against our thoughts about this person, our manual for this person.

Basically, trust is saying this to another person. Be predictable, be exactly the way I think you’re going to be and as long as you do, I will feel safe with you. You can see the pure relationship between trust and love here, right guys? You can see that when we have a manual for love, it sounds like this.

Be predictable, be exactly the way I think you’re going to be as long as you do, I will love you, right? That’s our manual for love and our manual for trust is due as long as you are predictable, I’ll safe. Now, this doesn’t work and it never works and you guys know it doesn’t work and you know why it doesn’t work because just like love, it’s not about how the other person behaves that determines if you trust them.

Your trust is determined by your cognition, you are an alpha male. You are an alpha, period. Your emotions are determined by your cognition, other people don’t ever make you feel anything, it’s not their behavior that makes you love them or their behavior that makes you trust them. It’s just the rules, the manuals that you have for love and trust.

[0:11:00.2] KA: As long as they fit into those manuals, you’re going to love or trust them. Check this out, just like unconditional love, have you ever considered unconditional trust? I’ve talked about unconditional love on the podcast episodes before, unconditional love is loving someone for who they are instead of what they do.

It’s loving someone because they are a human and 100% worthy of love, there’s no reason not to love another human being. In spite of what their brain might be telling them to do sometimes despite of what their actions are.

You can love someone and still not agree with them. You can love someone and still not want to share time with them. Love is something you do for you because it feels good. Now, I want you to introduce you to the concept I call unconditional trust. It’s the same as unconditional love. Unconditional love doesn’t mean you love people for what they do, you can actually not like people for what they do.

Unconditional love means loving people for who they are. Unconditional trust means trusting people for who they are. It doesn’t mean trusting them no matter what they do and here we go with more paradoxes, right bro?

Check this out. When you trust people who they are, what you’re doing is trusting to act like humans, right? You trust them to be human. This is very different than putting idealistic manuals on people to always be reliable, honest, capable and strong. Humans are capable of anything. When you trust people to act like humans, you’re trusting them to be capable of doing anything at any time at any place.

[0:12:33.0] KA: Because, again, if you can imagine it, and it can be done then a human is going to be capable of it, it’s called unconditional trust. Trusting people to be human, trusting people to do anything that they are capable of doing because you’re really trusting that people will do, they will behave, they will act in a way that their thoughts and emotions drive them to and that is universal truth.

We never really know what a person is going to do or not to. When we think we know what a person will do and then they do something different, we think they lied, right? Or they tricked us. That’s not the case at all, they’re just acting from their cognition and emotion.

What does an alpha do with trust? If the only thing we can trust in other people is to act according to their thought, feelings, right? Their cogno-emotional union because we have no control over that and that we can be anything at any time.

Then, do we just toss the whole concept of trusting in the trash. Do we just say don’t trust anybody because everybody is going to let you down because people can just do anything at any time. There are two ways trust is active in the alpha state in the life of an alpha male. First, having to do with other people. As I mentioned earlier practice unconditional trust. Guys, it’s not the thought “don’t trust anyone because they are all going to let you down” that thought follows a manual, right?

I mean the only way someone can let you down is if you expect them to behave a certain way so that you are not let down, which is a manual. That is a beta condition thought. It is a victim mentality. Here is the alpha thought and I want you to consider this. The alpha thought is, I can trust people to behave according to their thoughts and feelings. That is what I can trust people to do. I can make people predictable on that accord that they’re going to behave according to their thoughts and feelings.

With this belief, with this thought a couple of things happen. First, you know that the way other people act isn’t about you. Now this is the universal truth and it allows them to behave literally any way they want without any surprise or being deemed untrustworthy. The same person can be truthful in one moment and deceitful in another and if you think that makes a person deceitful by definition, that if someone lied one time then they are a liar by definition.

Then I got something to tell you brother, everybody is a liar, right? Everybody. I don’t know a man, woman or child alive today that hasn’t been dishonest. I don’t know a man, woman or child today that hasn’t been unreliable. I don’t know a man, woman or child today that hasn’t been not at their strongest, weak at one point.

[0:15:21.0] So I will give you an example. My brother has some trust issues with my mom because of how she behaves with his daughter, her grandchild. So follow me here, this is my niece and I am going to tell this story. My niece’s name is Reagan and my brother says to my mother, “Don’t give Reagan any sugar today” and when my mom gives her granddaughter, my niece, sugar my brother makes it about him. He thinks that my mom is unreliable and untrustworthy.

He thinks she is disrespecting him because he asked her not to give her sugar and she did it anyway. He makes it about him. Now the truth is my mom gives my niece sugar based on how she was thinking and feeling in that moment. I don’t think that my mom is thinking, “I don’t respect my son so I am going to give my granddaughter sugar” that thought feels bad. I bet and I don’t know but I’d be willing to wager that she is thinking a thought that makes her feel good.

Because that is what we want, we don’t want to live in a world where we’d say, “Oh I am going to do this because I am going to get back and feel bad” no, we want to feel good. It is probably because she just wants to give her granddaughter sugar. His lack of trust in our mom isn’t because of her behavior. In fact her behavior is very predictable. I can pretty much tell you that my mom is going to give her granddaughter sugar every time.

Which is probably why there is that issue between my brother and she. His lack of trust is because he thinks she is unreliable in following his instructions and creates a feeling of being unsafe. This creates a feeling of him being unsafe because trust feels safe, remember? So it’s because he can’t control her actions that he feels like he can’t trust her, which perpetuates more lack of trust. The more he feels out of control of her, the more he feels out of control of his thoughts about her that’s the relationship.

[0:17:02.4] That is the behavior that is causing the thoughts and the emotions of anger and frustration and suspicion ensue, they perpetuate. Now we don’t have the ability that was my example, we don’t have the ability to control other people and as alpha men, we don’t want it brother. We want to focus all of our cognition in creating the life of dreams not managing the behavior of other people. With unconditional trust, we allow people to be humans.

If my brother unconditionally trusted my mom, he would trust her to be herself no matter what. He would trust her to always act from her thoughts and emotions. He would trust her to live by the universal truth because her behavior is about her cognition not his requests. The second thing the alpha thought I can trust people to live according to their thoughts and feelings does is it removes all surprise of how people behave.

The only reason we have the illusion that other people have violated our trust is that we have locked in a way of thinking about a person that makes us feel safe and then they do something outside of the thoughts we have about them. So basically they surprise our beta condition. When we have the alpha thought, when we are aware that people are capable with anything at any time, this removes surprise. This removes the surprise from the beta condition.

Like “I can’t believe you would do something like that” right? Or this just isn’t like you or even “I can’t trust you anymore.” Look, here’s the thing brother, when you say “I can’t trust you anymore” it is not because the person is violating being a human. It is not because they’re acting outside of the universal truth. What they are doing is completely neutral. What they’re doing for you is just violating your thoughts. They are just changing how you think about them.

[0:18:44.1] So it is not that you can’t trust them anymore. You just can’t trust how you think about them anymore. You can always trust people. You can always trust a person. You just want to trust them to be the one thing they will always be, which is a human bound by the universal truth and acting based on their own emotions and cognition. Based on their own thoughts and emotions. When you do that then everybody, or I should say nobody, will ever violate your trust again because that is the way humans act.

Now, briefly consider how the alpha thought deals with infidelity because I mentioned the infidelity earlier so let us bring it back now with the alpha thought. Let’s say your wife or girlfriend has vaginal intercourse with another man. Okay, now I used that term very specifically because cheat, if I say the wife or girlfriend cheats that is too subjective, okay? Cheating is a thought. I say cheating and different people are going to have different thoughts about what that means.

But if we talk about exactly what happened and it is the circumstances, the objective fact and right away the beta condition acts up like right away just thinking about that there are all kinds of emotions like anger and range and “how could she?” and this and that but let us say that you’ve elevated your alpha and you have activated your alpha state, so now you are thinking, “I can trust people to live according to their thoughts and feelings.”

That is the trust the alpha has for other people. So first, you know it is not about you, right? She acted according to her thoughts and feelings. It is not because he, this other guy was better than you. It is not because you are a bad person or a weak man or anything else. It has nothing to do with him and it has nothing to do with you. It is all on her, her thoughts and her emotions that were driving her at that time.

[0:20:28.4] Second, you won’t be surprised. When you trust people to be able to have the capacity to do anything, you are just not surprised by it. Now that might sound horrible and I am not suggesting that you expect your wife or girlfriend to have sex with other people or another person. I am introducing to you the fact that people are capable of doing anything at any time. She is also capable of not having sex with another man ever for the rest of her life.

Don’t be surprised if that happens either, right? Humans are capable of both. They are capable of keeping it in their pants and they are capable of letting it out of their pants. It is basically the recognition that humans can and will do anything if they are thinking and feeling it. So it is no use being in shock or awe anymore if you hear that someone did something, right? People do things. I mean we see it all the time. All kinds of crazy crimes. We see on crime shows.

From your alpha state, you can unconditionally trust your wife. You know it is not about you so it doesn’t affect how you think about yourself and you are not surprised by it because your wife is human and having sex is within the capability of humans. Trust remains intact. She didn’t do anything that changed how you think about her and she didn’t do anything that changed how you think about yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to forgive her or stay with her or anything else.

Your behavior is based on your cognition, which is your choice. The other way trust is active in the life of an alpha male is having to do with yourself. You can only ever trust other people to act according to their thoughts and emotions for which you have no control. However, you can also always trust yourself to act according to your thoughts and your emotion for what you have complete control and this is where trust lives in the life of an alpha male brother.

[0:22:21.3] To build trust in someone, you can only build it in yourself. Let’s review the definition of trust one more time. Trust is a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of someone or something. By that definition alone, we can pull out four thoughts to think about ourselves. We can think that we are reliable. We can think we’re truthful. We can think we’re capable and we can think we’re strong.

Furthermore, we can build these thoughts about ourselves by thinking them over and over and acting in ways that creates results for us to reinforce those thoughts. Once those thoughts are reinforced enough to create an emotional response, which is called a belief the result is self-confidence. Emotion, why? Because one of the pillars of self-confidence is trusting in yourself and having your own back and another pillar is thinking positive thoughts about yourself.

When you believe that you can trust yourself and think great things about yourself, the resulting emotion is self-confidence. As an alpha male bro, the only person you truly need to be able to trust is yourself. You are the only one whose thoughts, feelings and actions you can control. If you take responsibility for your own emotional state, you don’t have to worry about whether you can trust other people to create the feelings you want for you or not, which is impossible.

You know that is impossible anyway, because you are creating your own feelings on purpose. If you create trust with yourself to always have your own back, to always manage your mind, you don’t have to worry so much about whether to trust other people. You can make clear decisions without being emotionally involved. Most of us spend way too much time worrying about whether we can trust other people and trying to manage them into being trustworthy.

And not nearly enough time building our trust with ourselves by learning how to manage our own mind, cognitive mastery and taking care of ourselves, emotional ownership. So shift the focus from trust in others to trust in yourself and you’ll feel safer than you ever have before. That is my alpha guarantee to you.

[0:24:39.3] Now check this out, if you want to learn how to create and use indomitable self-confidence in your life whenever you want, register for the Indomitable Self-Confidence Program. Class 002 starts in early September and all the information can be found on the website. So go to the alphamalecoach.com, check it out. It’s right under courses but it’s also in the main page, the home page. This program is an accumulation of thousands of hours of coaching hundreds of students.

It is designed to teach you the skillset of creating and using indomitable self-confidence and elevating your alpha state, you can walk in freedom as the alpha male you are. That’s what I got for you today guys, until next week, trust people to be humans and build your trust in yourself. Elevate your alpha.

[END OF DISCUSSION]

[0:25:44.4] 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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