Ep #6: Why Your Thoughts Are Not Facts

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.

Guys, brothers, what’s going on? Welcome back to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I’m The Alpha Male Coach, Kevin Aillaud. And today, we are going to continue our talk on the universal truth for how life works.

Now, if you remember the universal truth for how life works – this applies to all of us at all times – is that the circumstances of our lives, the neutral events, the facts that occur in our lives will trigger a thought in our brain which will create an emotion. Our emotions are what drive our actions, and then our actions will determine our results.

This is the law of cause and effect; what we do will determine our results. Now, our results will then reinforce that original thought. So in the universal truth, we have these five components and I use what’s called the Model to align ourselves and be able to view, in a logical progression, how the universal truth plays out in our lives.

We have the circumstances that are factual, that are out of our control, that are neutral. We talked about that last week. And today, we’re going to talk about thoughts.

Now, I love talking about thoughts because it’s the thoughts, it’s our beliefs, that create our results. It is not our circumstances. And I’m going to review that. I’m going to say that again at the end of this podcast because that’s so important. I want to start with that and I want to end with that.

Last week, like I say, we talked about our circumstances. Those are the only part of the Model that we don’t control. We do not control our circumstances. Our circumstances are just out there. And our circumstances include our past, other people, their behavior, what they do, what they say, and the world as it’s happening; as it’s happening now and then rolls into the past. We cannot control that.

We can control our future, which would be our results, with our cognition, with our thinking, our emotions, and our actions. But we cannot control the world as it’s happening.

So one of the most important things I do with my students is I help them separate facts from beliefs; what actually has occurred in their past or what is occurring now in their present and the way they choose to think about it, or the way they interpret it. And this is important because, guys, the truth is most of my students, the people that I really work with are men who have had a traumatic childhood, who’ve had a childhood with abuse, with neglect, with abandonment.

And they have now these limiting beliefs, these thoughts, that are preventing them from really unlocking their personal greatness. And I focus on confidence with women, confidence in their relationships, but really, it’s these limiting beliefs about the circumstances of their past. It’s how they’ve chosen to think about what has happened to them and it’s affecting what’s happening in their lives now.

So this podcast, what you guys need to know about thoughts is a really big deal. This is a really important topic. So what is a thought? A thought is just a sentence. It’s a sentence in your brain and it’s created by a really tiny group of cells about the size of a peanut that lives in the left hemisphere, the left half of your brain.

And it runs these sentences. It just runs these words based on your conditioning from experience. Now, you are choosing what the sentences are. I’m going to tell you that. It’s not like they’re just programmed in there because they were just created there.

You created these sentences. You created these thoughts based on what you interpreted your experiences, based on what you interpreted your circumstances to be. So your circumstances are neutral. Your past is neutral. Other people’s behavior is neutral and then you will have a thought about it. You will judge it.

And when you judge it, that creates a thought. Now, if you have these thoughts over and over again, they create beliefs. So I’m going to spend a little time on beliefs before moving back into thoughts and how powerful thoughts are for us.

So guys, when someone shares their life experience, when people share their life experiences with me, they talk about their past, they usually give me a handful of facts along with a lot of thoughts and stories about the facts; the way they interpreted those facts. We all take what happens to us in our lives and then we decide what it means to us.

A lot of people look at the challenges and trials of their life and they just believe that they’re unlucky; it’s the cards they’re dealt, fate is happening to them. some people believe that they’re no good, that they’re damaged goods, because of the situations or the circumstances in which they’ve been involved and the things that have happened to them.

Now, we can choose to believe that we are our circumstances, or we can choose to believe that we’re not defined by our past. And when we choose that then we’re no longer doomed to repeat our past. That’s important. We can choose to believe that we’re meant to live big and wonderful lives in spite of anything that’s ever happened to us in the past.

You see, it’s not the events in our lives that shape us; it’s our beliefs about what those events mean. So generalizations about what we’ve learned will always guide our actions. Most of us don’t decide consciously what we’re going to believe. Often, our beliefs are based on misinterpretations of past experiences.

So a lot of my clients, my students – I call my clients students – a lot of my students believe that they’re damaged goods, that they’re damaged people because they were molested or because they were abused or because they were neglected or abandoned by their parents. And they live their lives filled with arguing with the past and their perpetrators.

This arguing is happening in their mind and their thoughts, and they believe that if these events hadn’t happened then they would be happy; then they would be pure, then they would be innocent. But the truth is, they are already pure and innocent and they already deserve to be happy despite what has happened to them.

Now, I teach my clients that they can decide not to believe in the shame of an event. I talked about that last week, guys. You don’t have to believe that the circumstances of your past are negative. You can choose to believe that you are amazing; that you are perfect. Not because of what did or didn’t happen to you, but because you’re a human being and because you are alive on this planet; for no other reason.

You know, I teach my students that nothing can ever take away your essence; your core humanness. A horrible experience, any experience, doesn’t have the power to change who you are at your core, never, anyone. Unless you believe it can and you live your life as though it does.

So human beings have the power to hurt us physically. They do, right; sticks and stones may break my bones, we know this. And we also know that human beings have the power to overpower us emotionally as children, because as children, we’re still developing our view of the world, our perspective of the world.

Human beings can also tell us to believe that we’re wrong or that we’re horrible or that we’re shameful or that we’re to blame for circumstances that have happened. But they cannot make us believe them. They cannot ever make us believe them.

As children, we can’t make this distinction because we’re still being taught what to believe. We’re still in that building our perspective of the world. As adults, we can choose what we will and won’t believe. No matter what anyone says or does to us, we have a sacred protected space, if you will – a space of thought, of cognition, and choice over what we believe.

No matter how big or powerful someone is, they cannot ever touch that space. That is for us. It is for us alone. It is sacred. It is given to us by our creator. It is our free will. So no matter what has ever happened to you, it doesn’t matter. No matter if you were raped, if you were molested, if you were beaten, if you were abandoned, if you were neglected, if you were cheated on, if you’ve been rejected, you have the choice to believe what you want about the event and what it means to you.

You have the choice to blame yourself and believe your perpetrator, or you can believe the truth; that your humanness, that your soul is untouched by such harm, unless you allow it to be. You can believe that no one can take your dignity, your hope, your love for yourself, or your joy without your permission.

If someone takes your physical life, even, they still cannot touch your mind. They still cannot touch your soul. So believe that you are worthy, that you are capable, that you are wonderful, that you are able, that you are powerful and strong and passionate, because you are, brother because you are the man. You are a badass.

Believe that you have the power of the universe behind you and no human being is ever a match for that. Believe that no matter what has happened to you, no matter how much pain you’ve had in your past, that you can choose to believe in yourself from this moment forward. You will never believe anyone or anything that tries to tell you that you are less than amazing again.

So these are beliefs. A belief gives us a feeling of certainty about what things mean and who we are. If you want to know what your beliefs are, all you’ve got to do is look at your life, because it is our beliefs that create our results. Your life is a manifestation of your beliefs. What we believe encompasses what we do, what we say, and how we react.

So anything you want to change in your life must be changed at the belief level if you want it to be permanent. That’s why I work at the level of cognition and emotion with my students. You can’t just treat the symptom. You can’t just treat the action. You’ve got to dig deep.

You’ve got to get into the mind and find the belief that causes you to get there in the first place. So if you believe that you’re always going to be single or strapped for money, it’s going to be very difficult to permanently be able to approach a beautiful woman or have an abundant income, because beliefs and reality tend to reflect each other.

When reality starts to contradict a belief, tension is created in our lives. And this tension makes us uncomfortable. And then we think we’re stressed. At this point, we have two choices to reduce the tension. We can change the belief system or we can change the reality. And because most of us don’t realize we have the negative belief in the first place, we have no choice but to sabotage our reality and go back to self-doubt, go back to that anxiety, that approach anxiety with women, or blow our budget out because we have to be back in line with what we believe.

And many of the beliefs that drive us are completely illogical. Guys, they’re illusions. They’re lies even. When we become aware of the things we believe in, we might be tempted to disregard them because they seem so silly. But I’m going to tell you that this is a big mistake because many of our belief systems were formed when we were small children; when we didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand why things happened to us.

You see, as children, we tend to blame ourselves for everything because we don’t understand the complexity of other people’s lives. We might believe it’s our fault if our parents fight all the time. We might believe it’s our fault if our parents are abusive to us, like we did something wrong to deserve being abused.

And we internalize this blame for the negative circumstances because the alternative, it being completely out of our control, is unthinkable. So we then form this belief that if we were better behaved then we wouldn’t be abused; if we were better kids, we wouldn’t have gotten hit or our parents wouldn’t fight. And we’re looking for ways to fix it, like we want to fix the external.

So we search for ways to cope by trying to generalize what everything means. We take two unrelated things – completely unrelated – which would be our behavior and the abuse that was given to us, or our behavior and our parent’s marriage, and then we connect them. We make them a causal relationship, which they are not.

So later, when we grow up or our parents get divorced, we might internalize that event and believe that we weren’t good enough to keep them together. This is erroneous. This is a belief that hangs in our lives.

Now, many of us hang on to these beliefs that we develop when we are too young to know any better. And there’s no one to remind us that now we can choose to question the circumstances that have nothing to do with us. We don’t have to internalize them. It was never our fault.

We need to remind ourselves that we are good enough and that we always were. We always have been. We need to go in and pinpoint those old illogical thoughts, those old illogical beliefs, and evaluate them with new eyes as adults.

Now, the way we do this, guys, is we stay connected to ourselves and we pay attention. So when negative feelings come up and we feel them instead of avoiding them or resisting them, that is the doorway into our thoughts. That’s when we can become aware of what we’re thinking.

So if you’re feeling anxiety because you see a beautiful woman and you want to approach her but you don’t feel worthy, you feel damaged, you think there’s something wrong with you, you can evaluate what’s going on at a deeper level. You don’t know where this anxiety is coming from, you just feel it. You can think about what the real feeling is.

And it might start out as this anxiety, this feeling in your body, that makes you want to run away; makes you want to avoid this beautiful woman. But as you sit with it and you go deeper, you might see that what you’re really feeling is fear. And if you go even deeper, you might see that what you’re really afraid of is that she’s going to reject you.

And as you focus on this emotion and you start to pay attention to what you’re thinking, you might realize that you’re afraid of being rejected because you don’t believe you’re worthy of a woman’s love or a loving relationship.

And at that point, you have found the thought. You have found the belief. You’ve got that crappy belief system running in your head, running in this little peanut group of cells in your mind. It’s not true. It’s just an illusion. It’s a complete lie. But maybe you didn’t have a whole lot of love form your mom when you were growing up.

Maybe she was negligent. Maybe she had her own problems going on and she wasn’t emotionally around, she kind of emotionally abandoned you, and so you grew up believing that you weren’t worthy of a woman’s love. Now, here you are, 15, 20, 25 years later and you’re still believing that.

Now, is it logical? No. Is it true? Absolutely not. But on some level, you believe it is and it’s causing you to have anxiety around beautiful women. I want you to imagine that you didn’t have this belief. Imagine that you knew that you were worthy of deep passionate wonderful love. Imagine you were solid in knowing how amazing you are.

Now imagine coming home and having this woman there. She’s smiling at you. She’s loving on you. She’s touching you and kissing you in passionate ways. You would not jump to the conclusion that you would have been rejected because it probably would never have even occurred to you.

So if, for some reason, she did reject you, you still wouldn’t jump to some conclusion. You would just simply see that she’s not the right woman for you. You would be able to look at it from a place of security and calm because you already believe that you are worthy; that you are 100% worthy and 100% amazing.

You would know that you deserve love and it will come from yourself until the right woman comes along. So first, acknowledge and feel that feeling. And second, follow where it leads. We’ve got to be aware of these emotions because that’s how we become aware of our thoughts.

When you get to the belief, when you get to the thought, pay attention, no matter how illogical it might seem to you as an adult, because you will see how it is manifesting in your life. And then you can start getting into wanting to change it.

Now, I also want to add that, as human beings, we want a contrast of thoughts. We want to have positive emotions, negative emotions, positive thoughts, negative thoughts. We want this because our brains are designed for this. All problems are a thought; all of our problems. So thoughts are always going to lead to an emotion. And when we pay attention to that emotion, we can start to unlock and move forward into our next best version of ourselves.

But we only do that when we feel discomfort. We only do that when we feel uncomfortable emotions and we move into them, when we drive through them. So all thoughts are a choice including the thoughts that create negative emotions.

I want to revisit with you guys that circumstances are neutral. And you can choose to think about circumstances any way you want. Now, we think that because we can choose our thoughts deliberately, that we just want to be happy all the time. And we try to change our circumstances, we try to change the world – we try to eliminate fighting, we try to eliminate child abuse, we try to eliminate tragedy – in order to feel better.

But the truth is, we’re choosing to feel bad about those things on purpose because it’s in our humanity to do so. We want to feel pain and we want to feel fear and sadness and grief. We want to have the thoughts that cause these emotions.

And we do that because of our values – because we know that we can’t change circumstances, we know we can’t change the world, the world is as it is. We know we can’t change the behavior of other people. We know we can’t change our past. And because we know we cannot change these things, rather than argue and wrestle with these things, we just want to feel negative emotion based on our values and who we are as human beings.

So when we look at these things and we want to feel negative emotion – we lose someone in our life or someone in our life dies – we want to feel grief. We don’t want to prevent them from dying because we can’t do that, but what we can do is deliberately choose our thoughts that will create the emotions that we want to feel.

And feeling negative emotion is important because again, it creates our humanity. It gives us that full experience of life. We just want to make sure that we’re doing this deliberately, with consciousness.

I want you guys to understand this. This is a big concept because what’s important for you to know is that, one, all thoughts are a choice. Whether you’re making that thought unconsciously or consciously, it’s still a choice – and that all problems are only ever a thought. There are no problems in the world; there are only ever problems in our minds.

Now, the measurement of a man’s character is how he deals with problems. So consider that. The measurement of a man’s character is how he deals with problems, and therefore, the measurement of a man’s character is how he manages his mind.

You see, the beta man is going to believe that the problem is coming from the circumstances. The problem is out in the world. The problem is somebody else’s behavior. The problem came from his past. The problem is happening somewhere in the world. And so he’s going to blame the problem on other people. He’s not going to take responsibility for how he is thinking and it’s always going to be somebody else’s fault.

This problem exists outside of me, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m at a loss. I can’t fix this. He’s going to go unconscious and start to, again, blame and point his finger. The alpha male knows that his problems are a manifestation of his thoughts. They are purely cognitive.

He’s going to remain conscious and choose his thoughts deliberately so that he can create the result that he wants. Whereas the beta man, he just assumes that his results come from his circumstances. There is no cognitive responsibility.

This is huge, guys, because again, your thoughts are what creates your results. I want to finish this – and this is what I mean by the alpha male. The alpha male definition is a man who is cognitively and emotionally responsible. So I want to finish this by introducing to you, very quickly, the three types of beta men that you will hear me talk about throughout this podcast. In fact, each one of these beta men is going to receive their own episode on this podcast in the future.

And I want to tell you how they think as they approach a beautiful woman so that you can see how powerful cognition is when it comes to emotion and when it comes to action and when it comes to result. So the first beta male is what we call the bad boy.

And there are many, many teachings out there that will say that the bad boy is what women are attracted to. But I’m going to tell you guys that that’s not true. Women are attracted to the alpha male. They’re attracted to genuine self-confidence.

The bad boy is coming from an emotion of arrogance. And the thoughts that create arrogance are, I’m better than her, I’m going to make her feel bad about herself, I’m going to put her down and brag about who I am. I’m going to ignore her and remain distant and play games with her. I’m going to give backhanded compliments and I’m going to treat her like she’s not worthy of me.

And you can see all the comparing that’s happening in there. The bad boy is thinking about her and he’s comparing her to him in such a way where he is going to bring her down. But the thought is still about her, and that is creating an arrogant emotion where the action is then driven by arrogance. Arrogance is a form of insecurity, which we’ll talk about later.

The other type of beta man is mister nice guy. Mister nice guy is coming from an emotion of insecurity as well, but you can see the insecurity. You can hear it with the thoughts I’m about to tell you where he’s thinking, as he approaches her, she’s so amazing. She’s way too good for me. I just want to make her happy all the time. Happy wife, happy life. If I don’t say nice things and do nice things, she’s going to reject me. I need to treat her like a queen and put her on a pedestal. I need to be the person she wants me to be and I always want to please her. I always have to say yes to her and do what she wants me to do.

Again, he’s comparing himself to her and he is thinking about her, always trying to control. You can see both the bad boy and mister nice guy are always trying to control the woman. It’s all a manipulative thought, just in a different way where the bad boy is going to manipulate her down to make her feel bad. The mister nice guy is saying, I’m going to manipulate her up to make her feel better than me.

Now, don’t get me wrong, guys, woman love kindness. Women do appreciate a kind man. But never mistake kindness for weakness. They do not appreciate weakness. And mister nice guy is always approaching with an emotion of insecurity and with weak actions.

The third beta man is the perfectionist, and you’re going to notice right away that there is a common theme here. When he approaches a woman, he’s thinking, I have to say the right thing or she’ll reject me. I have to approach her in the right way. I have to wear the right clothes. I have to ask the right questions. I have to be the right person. I have to be the person she wants me to be. I have to do all the right stuff.

He’s still thinking about her and he believes, because he’s the perfectionist, that there is a right and a wrong way of doing things. He’s always looking for that right move, that right answer, that right thing. you know, he’s looking for the A-plus.

All three of these guys have put the person, the woman, as the focal point of their thinking. And what do we know? What do you guys know from last episode? You cannot control other people. Other people are circumstances.

If you are trying to control other people, you are a liar. You are manipulating. And that’s why the beta males of different character traits are all approaching from a lack of cognitive and emotional responsibility.

Now, the alpha man who has genuine emotional confidence has very different thoughts. His thoughts are, this is who I am. I’m myself. I’m amazing. I’m charming. I’m perfect. I’m a 10. I’m fun. I’m exciting. I’m wonderful. I’m intelligent. I’m trustworthy. I’m capable. I can handle any situation. Anything anybody else says or does is only about them. I’m lovable. I’m a badass. I’m the man.

Never once is the alpha male thinking about the other person, because he knows he can’t control the other person. The other person is a circumstance. So having that cognitive mastery, managing your mind around the circumstance – in this case, the approach of a beautiful woman – is really the only thing that separates the alpha male from the beta males.

Now again, I’m just going to cycle back and say this is true about your past as well, guys. So if you’re dealing with trauma from your past, what you need to know is that it is only how you think about your past that is going to determine your emotions and is going to determine your actions. Your thoughts are always new.

They are always in the present moment. So cognitive mastery means deliberately choosing what you want to think so that you can create your emotions, drive your actions, and create the results you want in your life.

That’s what I’ve got for you today, guys. I appreciate you hanging out with me on The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. As always, I want to leave this podcast with much love. You guys are badasses. You guys are all alpha males; born to be. The only thing preventing you from unleashing your alpha, the only thing that’s keeping your value form being thrust upon the world is your mind. It’s how you think, brother.

So you are an alpha. You need to let that out. Unleash your alpha.

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