LIFE UNCIVILIZED

Dating And Life Advice For Men

Archives for September 2018

How To Be Honest – The Painful Art of Stopping Your Bullshit

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how to be honest

I WAS the last of my friends to lose his virginity. For years they would talk about girls and sex and I would sit there, terrified that the conversation would get directed to me.

I thought I’d say something dumb and be exposed (‘yeah I love boobs, right guys?’), so I would always make up some quick lie (‘so, this girl last weekend…’), and move the conversation on as fast as I could.

It was a miserable way to live.

Not only was nobody fooled by this, but I was constantly in fear of my own lie being found out. Because of how much importance I put on the lie, the amount of anxiety that was born out of it compounded on itself until being exposed seemed like the worst thing in the world.

But this was just one way in which I was dishonest:

I was unhappy with my social life, but I told myself and others that I didn’t care. I was unhappy with my work life, but I told myself and others that I was fine. I was terrified of girls, but I told myself and others that I wasn’t terrified of girls and was, in fact, good at talking to them (??? – This one baffles me to this day).

I was full of shit and miserable.

But it taught me a valuable lesson.

Lying to prevent pain doesn’t actually work. All it does it cause more pain. When, instead, you’re honest about what you’re trying to hide, people’s reactions are often a lot better than you’d think.

When people found out I lost my virginity older than they did – nobody cared. When I told my best friend I was scared of socializing, he admitted (amazingly to me) that he was too, and helped me get better at it. When I admitted to myself that I was terrified of girls, I started taking steps that led me to be able to have a solid dating life.

Honesty wasn’t just a step in the process, it was the most important step in the process.

Research shows that people lie in casual everyday conversation. Often for reasons they think are compassionate. But research also shows that when people start being more honest, there is a considerate positive effect on their health that comes in tandem.

If you want to live a happier, healthier life – It turns out it’s better to cast aside the silver tongue after all.

THE BODY HAS A MIND OF IT’S OWN

The parts of you that drive you to be dishonest are always the ones that are most focused on short-term, easy gains.

But it is this focus on short-term, easy gains that prevent us from having the long-term, hard-won well being that we actually want.

The way I like to look at it is this. If you’re honest with yourself, you always seem to know what you should do. Whether you call it your conscience, your daemon, your soul, or the voice of God – something inside you always seems to be directing you towards what you ought to be doing.

But that thing is always within you, inside your head. Your body, on the other hand, has a mind all of its own.

You want to be social, but your body fills you with anxiety so you don’t. You want to be faithful, but your body fills you with lust so you don’t. You want to be hardworking, but your body is lethargic and distracted by you don’t.

The immaterial thing inside your head always wants X, but your body, equally, always wants Y.

It is within this dichotomy that the skill of honesty is acquired.

HONEST IS JUST ANOTHER SKILL

It is from this that everything percolates. The skill begins with understanding the motivations of your body and what is true, separating the two, and acting on the latter.

Whilst one might feel better in the moment, you begin to recognize that one is better. You aren’t applying universal rules or judgments to your behavior, you’re using your judgment in the moment to determine what is the honest course of action.

In other words, you tell the truth.

You’ll very quickly learn that honesty is a conscious choice. One that always seems to go in the opposite direction to which your body compels you.

In the beginning, this is going to trigger a lot of uncomfortable emotions in you. Being honest with yourself invites anxiety, shame, regret, anger – a whole swathe of difficult emotions. Being honest with others triggers them even more.

This is why it takes hard work.

But it’s in being honest with others that you learn that these emotions and your dishonesty were always misguided.

HONESTY IS AN ACTIVE PRACTICE

You don’t decide to be honest and then suddenly start walking around spouting truths and baring your soul.

That doesn’t happen. Honesty is an active practice. Because left to autopilot, you’ll just end up casually neglecting information and being dishonest.

This isn’t done maliciously, it just happens. So much so that once you start actively practicing honesty, you’ll be amazed at how much bullshit you allow to just casually stroll out your mouth.

Being honest is like meditation.

You don’t just sit there, hum a few mantas and then live in bliss all day. You have to carry that practice around with you, returning to the present moment and noticing when your mind has floated off into thinking about that hot girl on the weather forecast.

Like meditation, honesty requires an active attention to your behavior and weighing up whether that behavior is actually truthful, or if it’s just a momentarily beneficial lie.

This is both easy and hard to do. Easy because the mechanism of observation is simple, but hard because you’re actively emotionally invested in not always being honest. Sometimes for personal gain, other times for reasons as seemingly benign as compassion.

Honesty isn’t just about deceiving others. It’s first of all about deceiving yourself.

UNCOVERING THE WAYS YOU LIE TO YOURSELF

Every now and again I get emails from guys asking me to solve a problem in their life. They’ve had a breakup, they’re scared of girls, or they can’t focus enough to achieve their goals. So they send me an email like I’m some guru, sitting in the lotus position on a mountaintop, holding the answer in my navel.

how to be honest

Photo of me yesterday

But this isn’t the case. Whilst I give them an answer based on my personal experience and experience as a dating coach, I always find the concept of any kind of guru kind of laughable.

Why?

Because I suck just as much as anyone else. And everyone no matter who they are sucks on some level.

Sure, I can focus better than before, and I have a solid dating life –  but I’m also lazy, have a weird attention span that gets distracted by literally anything, I’m sometimes completely crap on dates, get rejected for reasons that are entirely my fault, and I’m often wracked by self-doubt.

It’s not something I try to hide. In fact, this is littered throughout my blog.

As I said at the start of the article, being honest about my (many) shortcomings is the only reason I’m in any position to manage them. It’s the only reason some people read this stuff and see themselves in it.

If you want to be honest with others, the first thing you have to do is unravel the ways you’re dishonest with yourself.

DISHONESTLY REMEMBERING

The first way that most of us do this is that we conveniently forget what we ought to remember. Not only is our memory unreliable – we also neglect to remember what would make our lives uncomfortable, no matter how true that memory may be.

I see this all the time in guys who are angry at women, say they don’t need anyone and are quite happy pretending to be a tough guy on their PS4. Behind all their justifications they’ve conveniently forgotten that, like anyone else, they need human connection.

That’s certainly how it was for me.

Not only do these guys end up being dishonest with themselves, but they send up dishonestly viewing, and engaging with an entire gender of people.

Likewise, whenever I hear one of my female friends talk about how they’re done with their boyfriend, one of the first things I notice is how they conveniently neglect all the positive shit about him and only focus on the negative.

They do this so much, that eventually, all they remember is the negative.

This is exactly what I’ve done when I wanted to move on from a relationship for whatever reason. I’ve chosen to ignore all the things that don’t justify that decision.

This, again, isn’t just being dishonest with ourselves, but it’s a dishonest way to interact with someone we claim to care about.

DISHONESTLY BEHAVING

Whenever we have feelings we don’t want to feel, our brains concoct ways of convincing us that we should avoid whatever it is that is triggering that feeling. Our brain deceives us into taking a course of action we don’t really want to take, and in doing so, defends us from uncomfortable feelings.

Psychiatrists call these defense mechanisms.

I’ve written about these extensively before, but the main gist is that your behavior isn’t as trustworthy as you’d think it is. And neither is your identity.

A lot of what you think is true, and a lot of what you think is you are simply complex patterns of behavior designed to protect you from uncomfortable thoughts.

Apathy, blame, repression, intellectualization, childishness – these are all ways in which we defend ourselves from what it is we’re afraid of. Perhaps an external ‘threat’ or an uncomfortable realization about ourselves.

So we get lost in our defense mechanisms, and, over time become so attached to them that they’re just part of our identity.

Which, if you haven’t guessed, is hard to unravel.

When we familiarise ourselves with the studied patterns of defense mechanisms and consider our actions, we will slowly bring awareness to the ways in which we are deceiving and misrepresenting ourselves.

Although this might not seem like it impacts others, when we stop tricking ourselves, we tend to stop trying to trick others as a result.

DISHONESTLY PERCIEVING

The way we choose to perceive ourselves and others are ways in which is train ourselves to be dishonest.

Just like a girlfriend who has chosen to only see the flaws in her partner, the way we choose to listen and see ourselves and others has a huge impact on our deceptions.

What we know is wrong is typically much harder to resist. So we extrapolate ways of justifying it, using logic, argument, and whatever we can find in real life to act as evidence.

But rather than being an impartial detective, we actively motivated to ignore what’s contrary to what we want the evidence to suggest.

Take this example:

A guy who has neediness issues is afraid of women and thinks they believe he’s worthless. Whenever his girlfriend yells at him, rejects him for sex, or complains to him about something, he takes this as evidence that she believes he’s worthless.

As it stands, that might seem fairly irrefutable.

But what he doesn’t notice is all the times she acts contrary to this. Whenever she’s nice to him, kind to him, or attracted to him – he overlooks this in favor of all the evidence that lines up with the neediness he’s attached to.

Despite what might be true, he’s only focused on what he feels is true.

As a result, his behavior with his girlfriend is inauthentic, and his relationship falls apart.

We tend to think that seeing and listening are infallible tools, rather than something we use to perceive what we want to perceive.

Bringing awareness to what’s actually going on around us – what’s actually being said and what details are there to perceive – helps us make more honest judgments.

But more than that, it helps us provide evidence that, rather than the other person being bad news, it might just be us.

HOW TO BE HONEST

Being honest with others first requires being honest with yourself. Not only does this involve presence of mind, but it also involves digging through your identity and examining your issues. Paying attention to your perceptions and seeing if they really line up with reality.

This is an everyday practice.

The art of honesty lies in this practice, but also in the acceptance that you’re going to get it wrong.

Being honest isn’t about being truthful 100% of the time. You’re fallible after all. It’s about paying attention to where you should be being truthful but also checking to see whether what you’ve done and what you’ve said lines up with is actually true.

This doesn’t just involve presence. This involves active thinking. Questioning whether your assumptions are correct, or whether they’re just convenient.

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and SHARE it on social media.

If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics I write about and build a structured plan for applying them to your day to day life – then check out my Dating and Personal Development Coaching service for a free 15-minute consultation.

And be sure to check out my free ebooks on dating and anxiety.

If you want an easy way to stay up to date on the latest content, like me on Facebook, and you’ll always be the first to know.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

 

Photo by Callie Gibson on Unsplash

Photo by Aaron Thomas on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

How Does Sexual Arousal Work? – Stop Getting in Your Own Way

by ·

We’re usually told it takes two to tango. But in real life, human arousal doesn’t get much further than self-centered, self-sabotaging, and masturbatory.

Yeah, kind of a downer to start on, but I have a point:

We think of being aroused as a random phenomenon that happens when we see someone who’s good looking, but this idea of arousal doesn’t capture the reality. In fact, viewing arousal as something this simple confines your sexuality to blind luck.

But more importantly, it strips you of your responsibility. A responsibility to yourself, and to whoever you’re in a relationship with. Because arousal, like any experience, has huge elements that you are responsible for. 

And if you aren’t consciously making that experience better, odds are you’re unconsciously making it worse.

AROUSAL IN MEN

This will come as no surprise, but when it comes to men, arousal is pretty straightforward. Where male arousal is unique, however, is the role men play in screwing it up for themselves.

Men are almost entirely turned on visually. We see a pair of boobs or a nice ass and it’s as if we’ve been given the most compelling argument in the world that this woman is of prime importance to us. It’s like we start seeing in Predator vision and she’s the only thing that shows up.

Mac, check out this girl…

In this sense, male arousal is a very solitary experience. It’s almost entirely based on things that the man is seeing. This is extended further by the fact that men have been shown to be further turned on by women enjoying sex, especially if they’re confident it’s a result of their own prowess.

It’s a solitary, narcissistic, masturbatory experience. Which explains the popularity of pornography. Especially amateur porn, where we can all pretend it’s us behind the wheel.

Male arousal is simple but focused. It knows what it wants and knows when it’s found it. It is born out of the simple mechanism of looking. Nothing else needs to apply. So long as we can see what we want, we’re good to go.

Research shows that unlike women (as I’ll find go into later), emotion plays an almost non-existent role. As long as the visual cue is there, our arousal apparatus can make a compelling bid for control regardless of what we’re feeling.

Hence the old joke that men don’t need a reason to have sex, they just need a place.

But, whilst emotion doesn’t really play a role in our arousal, the relationship with that arousal, and our perception of ourselves certainly does.

PROBLEMS OF PERCEPTION

It’s all well and good for everyone to laugh at how straightforward male arousal is, but how do we account for all the men who have arousal problems? If it’s so simple, why is it so complicated for them?

One of the main reasons is their habits of perception.

Researchers have noted that men who have problems with their arousal usually don’t pay very good attention to how aroused they are. For whatever reason (shame, insecurity, or a generally poor connection to their feelings), they don’t really notice and tap into when they’re genuinely aroused.

The ‘I want to fuck detector’ hasn’t been properly installed.

The reverse of this is that men who are more self-aware tend to spot quite quickly when they’re aroused and turned on. They’re aware of this feeling within themselves and haven’t built, or have undone, habits of masking it behind defense mechanisms such as repression or avoidance.

Another instance of perception in action is the difference between men who do and do not have persistent arousal issues. Studies have shown that men with persistent arousal or performance issues attribute those issues to deeper problems within themselves. They’re worthless, they’re not good enough, they just can’t do what other men can do – and so on.

On the flip side, men that don’t struggle with persistent arousal or performance issues tend to attribute any instances of those said issues to benign external factors. Instead of getting hung up on being worthless, they just (rightly or wrongly) think ‘it was probably something I ate’ when they finish in a few seconds, or they think ‘I haven’t had enough sleep’ when they can’t get it up.

Where the former blames, the latter shrugs it’s shoulders and tries again.

It’s no surprise that falsely telling yourself there is something wrong with you will perpetuate arousal issues.

Arousal in men can be summed up as an act of perception. We’re aroused by what we see outside of ourselves, and our arousal can be destroyed by what we falsely see inside of ourselves.

Whilst male arousal is simple and straightforward, it’s also important to remember that it entails a healthy habit of perception that needs to be practiced.

AROUSAL IN WOMEN

Female arousal isn’t the unknowable Rubix cube popular culture would have you think it is. Instead, it’s as if someone took the simplicity of male sexuality, and just made it larger and more complex.

Emily Nagoski, in her book Come As You Are, divides female sexuality into two separate types. She calls these spontaneous sexual desire and responsive sexual desire. For ease of explanation, we’re going to rename these:

  1. She wants to have sex right now
  2. She could have sex right now but there are boxes to tick first

In the first type, something has kicked off her desire all of its own. Maybe she’s feeling sexy today. Maybe it’s hormones. Maybe you’re just incredibly good looking. Whatever it is, she wants to jump your bones and probably won’t be very subtle about it.

This type is so straightforward it needs no explanation. Take your pants off and have a good time.

In the second type, sex is like a secret level found in video games. It’s always there, can be accessed, and anyone can do it. But in order for someone to do it, they have to do specific things that are seemingly hard to do, uncover, or understand.

It is this second type -the secret level- where everyone fucks up.

Women are far more mentally aroused than physically. In their efforts to understand what the extent of this mental arousal was, researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam trawled through studies and data on the internet and came to some unsurprising, but also enlightening observations.

If you take a look at the women consume en masse, you get telling insights into their preferences of thought. Rather than being drawn to simple pornographic images, women gravitate towards romance stories. In particular, romance stories about a woman pursued by a man of status who is capable of bravery, and danger, specifically in the way he pursues her.

Anna Karenina’s Count Vronsky. Far From The Madding Crowd’s Sergeant Troy. Wuthering Height’s Heathcliff.

But that’s just the top shelf stuff. There are thousand other paperbacks littered with covers featuring bare-chested, long-haired men, clutching swooning women about the waist.

Just as guys like stories of competent men (i.e. Schwarzenegger, superheroes), women love stories of being pursued by that man.

And the reason they prefer a story, as opposed to say, something simple like porn?

The emotions.

Porn is visual. A story is emotional.

The stories that women consume leave clues as to what it is that switches their arousal on. And unfortunately, they’re two of the things men focus on (but fuck up) the most.

Status and bravery.

TAKING RISKS

We’ll start with the latter because it’s the simplest. Whilst yes, diving into a burning building to save a bunch of orphans would probably arouse even the most frigid woman – this isn’t the kind of bravery you need to be doing (or pretending to have done) in order to be the kind of guy who turns women on.

The kind of bravery you need is this:

You aren’t afraid of her.

In all the stories I listed above, the character pursues the woman in question aggressively, despite her feigning disinterest or her shooing him away. They aren’t creeps, but they are persistent. They’re deeply in touch with and motivated by, their desire. So they pursue her at the risk of rejection or social humiliation for themselves.

They are willing the put it on the line for her because they desire her that much.

And this turns women on.

They are aroused by being found arousing.

This is why every guy who hides his desire and treats them as a friend, ends up as exactly that.

SOMETHING ADMIRABLE

The other ubiquitous feature in all the characters is that they possess status. But not in the sense that you or society commonly think.

Any idiot will tell you that having a fast car and lots of money will get you the adoration of thousands of women. But you only need meet some of the guys with these things to realize this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

When it comes to arousal in women, status does not mean something he possesses, or even how other people view him. Status comes down to him having something within his character traits that ranks him highly, in particular, higher than her.

To illustrate, let’s take everyone’s favorite sinking ship story: Titanic.

In Titanic, rich girl Rose slowly becomes smitten with poor guy Jack, despite already being engaged to rich man Calvin.

Calvin is powerful, socially connected, traditionally handsome, ambitious, traditionally masculine, and possesses a general sense of self-mastery.

Jack, on the other hand, is poor, hangs out with the even poorer, is boyish-looking, unconcerned with success, reckless, and is completely unfamiliar with tradition.

He has nothing that Calvin or Rose don’t already possess in greater quantity. Yet despite this, Rose becomes smitten with him.

Why?

Jack, despite his flaws, is better than everyone else at being true to himself and living a good life. He outranks everyone on the boat when it comes to this.

So she, and every woman who watches the film falls in love with him. It single-handedly secured Leonardo DiCaprio’s sex life for all eternity.

Having status isn’t about superficial, obvious things. It’s about subtle nuances of character that reflect some kind of unique value that exists within you. Status is about recognizing that value within yourself and acknowledging it’s worth regardless of what anyone else thinks.

This is why these men in romance novels without any ‘status’ actually have so much. Their value is internal, that’s why they’re so unafraid to pursue her.

DANGER AND EMOTIONS

Any amount of status and bravery only works provided it makes her feel something. If they don’t spike her emotions, then she isn’t going to be aroused. Simple as that.

Interestingly, this goes further than you might think.

In primal tribes in the Philippines and Amazon, researchers have found that, during courtship, women are quite happy to put up with all kinds of violent displays -such as the presentation of severed heads- provided that the man in question has an emotional side that she can access.

This, whilst an extreme example, highlights a truth (and pitfall) of female arousal:

Women have a tendency to forgive more unsavory traits if she feels something / has an emotional connection with him.

Speak to any woman and they can provide an example of experiencing this. The cliched bad boy relationship where the passion is just too seductive to ignore his glaring faults.

But this tendency, whilst making her prone to falling for the wrong guy, also works in reverse:

It helps her avoid the really wrong guys.

Remember that joke about how men don’t need a reason to have sex they just need a place?

Well, women don’t just need a reason, they need a pretty foolproof one as they’re actively looking for reasons not to.

Where male sexuality is like a homing missile, female sexuality is like a suspicious observer, looking for clues that might suggest the guy she’s attracted to really isn’t the good guy he appears to be.

Maybe he’s using her for sex, maybe he’s a liar, maybe he’s a complete creep.

Whatever it is, women always seem to have a sense about guys they should avoid. And if that sense is triggered, then the arousal soon turns into disgust.*

SELF-CENTERED AROUSAL

As Mark Manson points out in Models, female arousal in many ways is very self-centered – Their arousal is all about them being desirable. The more power that desirableness has over a man, the more arousing he becomes. The more he has emotional sides to his personality that only she can access, the more arousing she finds him.

It’s one big narcissistic circle jerk.

And it’s the exact same thing for men.

Men are aroused as much by the tits and ass they see as they are by their own ‘incredible’ sexual prowess. Like women, male arousal has a huge element to it that’s incredibly narcissistic.

It’s not so much being aroused by someone else, but being aroused by the idea of how arousing you are.

It’s kinda embarrassing when you look at it like that.

We’re aroused by feeling special. We’re aroused by feeling better than others. We’re aroused by feeling desired. 

This, in itself, seems shallow and empty. And in many cases, it is.

But on the flip side, it also explains why genuinely liking someone from an authentic, un-needy place is so arousing for them. It tickles the narcissistic side of them that wants to be truly valued.

But it does so in a healthy way.

The idea of being aroused by the self isn’t exactly new. A similar, but different spin on it comes from the work of Carl Jung.

Jung believed that every man had a feminine element to his psyche and that every woman had a male element to hers. And it was these elements that we projected onto the opposite sex.

A projection that was dependent on the maturity of our relationship with ourselves.

If a man’s relationship with his feminine traits were unconscious, repressed, and feared, he would project that onto women. Instead of getting to know them, he would instead submit himself to his projected image of them.

His entire view of the opposite sex was wrapped up in his own emotional baggage.

Likewise, if a woman’s relationship with her masculine traits were immature, and revolved around her animalistic social and physical prowess, she would naturally project this onto men, and look for men who fit these shallow criteria.

In other words, her shallow self-knowledge would leave her chasing men with big muscles but little substance.

What happened with both sexes is that when they began to understand their opposite traits -men became more emotionally and spiritually mature, and women became more independent, creative, and spiritually mature- they would begin to view the opposite sex as individuals rather than generic projections. 

The more they worked on themselves, the more they were aroused by what’s right for them.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

This might seem like a lot of information, but arousal comes together in both sexes quite nicely. And, conveniently, it has a lot to do with self-improvement.

Before any actions are taken with anyone else, you have to sort out your relationship with yourself. If you don’t, you’ll struggle with impotence, have no idea you’re aroused, or end up chasing the wrong people, ignoring the warning signs, and constantly wondering why there’s ‘something wrong with you.’

But once you’ve cleared that up, arousal begins to interact in beneficial ways.

For guys, it comes down to action. Not only are you very easily motivated to take action, but you’re also aroused further by your own prowess at doing it. Walking towards her is like stepping your foot on the accelerator.

This is reciprocated in women by them being aroused by you taking the risk of hitting on them. Sure, they’re not going to be into you 100% of the time. Sometimes you’re not their type, sometimes they’re just not going to be in the mood. But the rule stands. The more in touch with your own arousal you are, the more likely she is to be with hers.

This is why when I speak to guys whose relationships have become sexless, I always ask them:

‘Are you still putting the moves on her? Are you still taking her out and hitting on her like when you first went out?’

9 times out of 10 they’ve stopped doing this. They’ve stopped triggering her responsive sexual desire.

And it’s no surprise that when you’re stumbling around in sweatpants, looking like the same guy she sees every day, she’s not going to get a whole lot of spontaneous sexual desire.

People are into people being into them. It’s arousing.

But as long as you’re not into yourself, you’re going to have a hard time being into others.

This means if your sex life isn’t where you want it to be, the first person you have to look at is yourself.

What is your relationship with your own arousal? Are you relying on blind luck? Ignoring it? Or are you not making it clear what your needs are?

Because human sexuality is a need. A fun one. And developing a healthy understanding of your own arousal is the fastest way to get it met.

 

 

*In plain English this means don’t fucking lie – she’s wired to sniff you out so it’s a dumb strategy, as well as gross. All you’re going to screen for are women that are ignoring their gut feeling about you because they’re too emotionally needy to be alone. They’d rather be with a creep. Is that who you really want to attract?

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and SHARE it on social media.

If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics I write about and build a structured plan for applying them to your day to day life – then check out my Dating and Personal Development Coaching service for a free 15-minute consultation.

And be sure to check out my free ebooks on dating and anxiety.

If you want an easy way to stay up to date on the latest content, like me on Facebook, and you’ll always be the first to know.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

 

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

How to Be Confident in Yourself – Building a Foundation That Lasts

by ·

how to be confident guide

NOT TO GET all Biblical on you, but I need to start this article on confidence by talking about the Devil. Yeah, I know, not your typical start to a self-improvement article, but I promise, it’ll make sense in the end.

And it’ll be a shitload more useful than me telling you to ‘just believe in yourself.’

There’s a moment in John Milton’s Paradise Lost which has always stuck out to me. Satan (aka the Devil) has been thrown out of Heaven for rebelling against God.

He’s decided that rather than repent his crimes, he’s going to bust out of Hell, search through the void and find God’s new rumored creation (read: man) and corrupt them into turning their backs on the big man upstairs.

So off he goes on a grand adventure, meeting all manner of strange people on the way, and eventually finding himself on a mountain outside the Garden of Eden.

It is here that he has a momentary crisis of conscience.

Recalling his former bliss in the paradise of Heaven, he mourns his ruined life and realizes he has nobody to blame but himself.

He realizes that the real Hell is within him and it is of his own making. Instead of living in accordance with God’s will (read: selfless love) he could only love himself, and could never, despite knowing it was wrong, live a life where he had to submit himself to something greater.

His pride simply wouldn’t allow it. And now, he’s ruined his life. He knows he will never again be happy. And I mean, we shouldn’t feel sorry for him, because, y’know, he’s Satan, but it’s hard not to.

The guy’s made the ultimate fuck up.

As he sits on the mountain, it seems like redemption might almost be within his grasp. He knows where he’s gone wrong, he just has to let go of his pride and change his course.

But he can’t do it.

He tells himself that he can’t turn back and be redeemed. He says he knows his pride would eventually have him rebel, and he knows he’d always make the wrong choice.

In the midst of this woeful self-pitying, there’s a little aside that’s always stood out for me:

He says that he can never give up his war on God because all that he tempted to his way of pride and vanity (read: the other fallen angels) would see him as the fraud he knows himself to be.

And that is something he couldn’t allow. He has to be seen as better than he is.

how to be confident

Do you see where I’m going with this?

So he continues what he’s set out to do, and condemns himself to ruin for all eternity.

Not a great plan.

Rather than being a mustachioed, pitchfork-branding villain, John Milton’s Satan is a sympathetic one. He makes mistakes that any of us could make, and he painfully feels the errors of his ruined way of thinking.

Like any of us, he knows deep down that he’s led himself astray.

His vain pride is a lot like the failures I see in myself, and almost everyone else. They don’t stem from anything real, they stem from an unhealthy desire to be seen as something we’re not.

To be seen as better than we actually are.

And when it comes to confidence – that is the mistake that none of us can make.

WHAT CONFIDENCE IS NOT

Before we even address what confidence is, we have to address what it isn’t. And unless you didn’t get the allegory about Satan, it’s this:

Your vain desire to be seen as better than you are is toxic bullshit that will fuck your shit up.

I believe that’s the exact definition you’ll get on PsychologyToday.

So long as you perceive confidence as something that revolves around other peoples perception of you, specifically, your status in relation to them, then you will never be confident.

To throw some more Biblical wisdom at you (Okay, okay, just this once):

‘You cannot serve two masters.’

As long as you serve the wrong one (read: vain insecurity) you will continue to make your confidence worse. So long as you measure yourself by the opinions of others, you will only ever notice the instances where you don’t measure up.

And I assure you, that’s about as fun as it sounds.

Look, I get why people do it. Hell, I did it all the time, and like anyone, I still lapse into doing it sometimes. When you don’t feel confident, you often harbor feelings of inferiority that you desperately don’t want people to be aware of.

As a result, you try to pretend to be what you aren’t.

But as we’ll see later, this is a betrayal of your confidence on two levels.

Confidence isn’t just ‘not faking it.’ It’s also not forcing it. You can’t will yourself into a state, trick or hypnotize yourself into healing your confidence issues. At best, those are band-aid solutions. They peel off when wet.

The only way to be confident is to do the hard work and build the right foundation. That starts by cutting out the faking, the forcing, and all the bullshit. If you don’t do that none of the following will work.

Understanding what confidence IS NOT is crucial to understanding confidence itself. Because confidence, it turns out, isn’t really a thing.

WHY THE CONCEPT OF CONFIDENCE SUCKS

So confidence isn’t faking it or forcing it – you get it. But what is confidence exactly?

Well, I think there’s a simple reason why everyone gets it so wrong. And it’s in the name.

When you think about confidence it’s probably some glossy Hollywood version. Think, Tom Cruise, intense, serious look, running fast, and fighting guys.

Confidence is focused, driven, determined, strong. Right?

Or is it something else?

If you think about confidence in your day to day life, it’s often nebulous and hard to pin down. It never really feels the same way, and whenever you think you have it, it vanishes just as quickly as it showed up.

It’s never as concrete as it is in the movies. And in fact, when you think about it, it isn’t really a thing.

Confidence isn’t an emotion.

You aren’t confident because you’re possessed by some magical, all-powerful feeling. No, you’re confident because at that moment you’re more capable of handling your fear and anxiety than you usually are.

Their power over you is diminished. Rather than being something, confidence is simply the weakness in something else.

Which, when you actually look at the word itself, makes sense.

The Latin root of the word confidence is confidere which means ‘having full trust.’ Confidence is simply the ability to trust yourself in your ability to do things. This is most closely related to the idea in psychology of self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is basically your belief in your ability to achieve things. Where self-esteem is how good you feel about yourself, self-efficacy is how good you feel about your capability.

But how does this relate to confidence?

Confidence exists in the relationship between you and your fears and anxieties. The better that relationship, the more you will trust your ability to act despite your fears and anxieties. And as result, you will be far more likely to act confident.

Confidence isn’t a super-emotion that washes out all others, but rather the acceptance and experience of emotions that you don’t want to feel, and the trust in yourself to manage them and act anyway.

Confidence is feeling afraid.

WHAT CONFIDENCE IS

Someone is confident when they do something that triggers fear and anxiety. They are more confident the more they do this with ease.

Confidence is a muscle, it gets stronger and weaker the more you use it. But like any muscle, it has muscle memory so the more you’ve developed it in the past the quicker it will return if you slip-up in the present.

There are a few different ideas that relate to the building of confidence. The first is the Greek / Aristotelean view (I can’t believe that’s a word) that you build your virtues into one robust individual – the ideal man so-to-speak.

This idea has permeated Western Culture since they first put it on a scroll. Every superhero, historical theory, and impulse you have to worship politicians has its roots tied up in this.

The Aztecs had a different view. In their society, the world was seen as ‘slippery’ and that man was too inherently flawed to stay virtuous within it. In their eyes, man would always slip down. Their solution to this was to prize the community, as people would always need to rely on one another for support and guidance.

That such a human-centric philosophy came from a society that tore the beating hearts out of people baffles me.

When it comes to confidence, my experience has been that it’s somewhere in between. You have to rely on yourself to act despite the presence of fear and anxiety, sure. But this action doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

It exists in your life.

And as we’ll see, what surrounds and supports an action can often be just as important as the action itself.

HOW TO BE CONFIDENT

Okay, I’ve said that confidence is about acting despite fear and anxiety, but let me get something clear:

You cannot overcome fear and anxiety.

It’s not possible to ‘overcome’ emotions like that. You can only change your relationship with them. You will always feel as afraid as you are now, but the power that fear has over your actions will change. The way your body reacts to it will change. Instead of paralyzing you or making you run, your fear will become something more akin to a motivator.

Your confidence increasing/decreasing? That’s just your relationship to your fear changing. For the better or worse.

You build a relationship with your fears and anxieties by honestly appraising who you are and then taking uncomfortable steps to confront them. Confidence does not exist in a vacuum – the happier you are with the rest of your life the easier it will be to develop confidence in areas where it is lacking.

That said – It doesn’t cross over.

It’s easy to think that fighting someone in a boxing ring, or public speaking would help you overcome a fear like approaching girls but this isn’t the case – the confidence is built where it’s built.

What does happen however is that once you’ve built confidence in one area it’s easy to believe in your ability to build it elsewhere (self-efficacy showing up again).

THE TWO TYPES OF CONFIDENCE

Confidence can be divided into two separate types: active and passive confidence.

Active confidence relates to your ability to take actions that confront fear.

Passive confidence relates to your day to day confidence in yourself.

The two are interlinked.

The more you build your active confidence, the more your passive confidence gets a boost. The more you build your passive confidence, the more your active confidence gets a boost.

Of the two, your passive confidence is the most important, but it’s important to build both, as the ‘boosts’ works equally in reverse.

A weakness in one causes a weakness in the other. I.e. Not confronting a fear of approaching will always kind of dig away your self-esteem.

The reason I divide the two is that they’re built in completely different ways. So treating confidence as ‘one thing’ is dumb and will limit your results.

ACTIVE CONFIDENCE

Active confidence is built by taking actions that confront your fear and anxiety.

There is NO OTHER WAY to do this. You can’t outsmart it. You can only confront it.

how to be confident

Unless, like me, your fear is gigantic, man-eating Sharks. Then you’re fucked.

You have to take consistent, repeatable actions that are always uncomfortable, and always move you in the direction of your anxiety and fear.

Let me repeat the most important part:

Always uncomfortable.

Building active confidence is entirely dependent on you finding the action you’re taking uncomfortable. It is required to be difficult, uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking, or frightening.

If you always avoid these feelings, then you will never develop your relationship with them, and you will never develop confidence.

The easiest way to do this is to break whatever it is you want to do into the smallest possible version of itself. As I like to call it:

Do the least-most frightening thing you can do. And do it over, and over, and over again. Then make it more frightening and more uncomfortable.

Active confidence isn’t built in big swings, it’s built by chipping away. You feel the fear and anxiety, and you act despite it, however small you can.

PASSIVE CONFIDENCE

If active confidence is acting despite fear and anxiety, then passive confidence is the quality of your relationship with yourself despite the opinions of others and the impact of the world around you.

I.e. if you fail at something you don’t feel like a loser and hate yourself.

Or if some people don’t like you, you’re okay with it and it doesn’t wound your feelings.

In other words, you achieve the fabled ability to ‘not give a fuck.’

This is where Keanu would say ‘woah.’

So how is passive confidence built?

Passive confidence is tricky. In my experience, it’s a result of a combination of factors – namely your overall happiness, your self-esteem, and your self-efficacy. And whilst I’ve only written an article on self-esteem so far (the others are fermenting as we speak), all three revolve around the same principle.

The more you develop your life so that it genuinely gets your emotional needs met, the more you will develop passive confidence.

There are a lot of theories on ‘not giving a fuck’, but in my experience, most are overcomplicated bullshit, and this is the simplest way to achieve it.

When you’re validated by your own life, you’re a lot less likely to need validation from other people. You’re a lot less likely to pursue emotional needs that are dependent on other people.

This also explains why narcissists (people who have a bottomless need for validation) can have their entire lives together yet always ‘give a fuck.’

Passive confidence stems from your own ability to take care of yourself. This is basic self-love 101. But as calling it self-love is lame as shit, we’re going with passive confidence.

THREE SHORTCUTS TO PASSIVE CONFIDENCE

There are three shortcuts I know of to help with developing passive confidence, and I use them in my own life:

1) Focus on how little you need to get your emotional needs met

You don’t need as much as you think you do to be happy. In fact, you need less than half.

Happiness is simple. It results from doing basic things well. Your life is secure, you have rewarding connections with others, you gain new experiences.

You don’t need to be a rich, famous, celebrity banging, public intellectual, world class MMA fighter. In fact, thinking you need any of that is only going to make you more miserable.

Whereas something as simple as walking in nature with a friend would have ten times the benefit.

As a culture, we do the exact opposite of this, and it ruins us. We’re always thinking we need more, when in fact, we need nothing.

The main irony here is that the more we chase, the more likely it is we end up chasing the wrong thing. This is because the things we actually need are so staggeringly obvious and simple that they don’t require any chasing.

They just require you to change your perspective and make better life choices. Ones that redirect your focus away from whatever your emotional issues are driving you towards, and more towards the happiness that’s right in front of your eyes, under your nose, and within your grasp.

2) Practice integrity

Know your values and boundaries and honor them. That means you align your life and actions with your values, and you align your behavior with your boundaries.

That is what integrity is, and it is enormous for your passive confidence (as well as your happiness, job satisfaction, sex life, and relationship success). It’s also something you can practice every single day.

If we’re honest, we all use personal development techniques and ideas in order to get something we feel we need. Women, success, whatever. But in reality, the most important techniques are the ones that don’t get us any of those.

They’re the ones that teach us to have to have a better relationship with ourselves internally. This is what living in line with your values and boundaries does. It gives you a rock through which to ground yourself.

It gives you a foundation on which to build. One that isn’t built on sand.

When instead we forget or don’t even know our own boundaries, we pursue whatever impulses or ideas enter our heads, often ones that are contradictory to what it is we actually want and need.

Not only is this an aimless way to live, it’s also a clear sign that there are things we haven’t emotionally come to terms with. It’s a sign we need to take a hard look in the mirror.

3) Pay attention to the little things

When people walk around with shitty narratives about themselves and others, it always translates into shitty behavior. Likewise, when people have confidence issues, they always encourage shitty thoughts in their own head, which lead to poor decisions… and, yeah you get the idea.

It’s like the Butterfly effect, only without the time travel.

This is an idea that’s explored to an insane level of detail by Leo Tolstoy in his books War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It’s also an idea I return to all the time.

The idea is this:

Life exists in tiny moments, and those tiny moments add up to big, important ones. Because of this, it is incredibly important you pay MORE attention to the tiny ones than the big ones.

Which is the opposite of what we always do. We get so hung up on the big stuff, that we don’t notice ourselves sewing the seeds for disaster in all the little ones.

These tiny moments in which life exists – these can be unnoticed, inconsequential thoughts, or simply small, tiny habits you repeat every day. They’ll be different for everyone. But learning to view life in this way makes a huge difference.

To slip another bit of Biblical wisdom here (alright, this time really is the last!):

You cannot harvest grapes from a thorn bush.

In plain, millennial English this means: if you carry round fucked up shit inside yourself, then all the stuff you get outside is going to be fucked up too.

Makes sense.

STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO BUILDING ROCK-SOLID CONFIDENCE

This is article is long as fuck, so to finish up here are the steps you need to to take moving forward. The simpler you keep these steps the better. The more you overcomplicate them, the harder it’ll be.

They’re listed in order. But steps 4, 5, and 6 can be done simultaneously (and should be). You could effectively name doing that as ‘living responsibly.’

Here we go:

1) Stop faking any and all behavior, stop lying and stop trying to impress people

Non-negotiable. Cut that shit out today.

2) Be brutally honest with where you’re lacking

Just as we hide our flaws from other people, we also have habits of hiding our flaws from ourselves. These are our defense mechanisms in action. But these don’t actually serve us in any useful way, they just make it harder for us to get our needs met.

Pay attention to where in life you think you’re letting your needs go poorly met, then question why this is?

3) What active steps can you take to build active confidence?

Active confidence requires you to do something. You cannot get it any other way. What uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking actions can you start taking to build it?

Remember, if they aren’t uncomfortable or don’t provoke anxiety, they don’t count.

This could be asking the cute Starbucks barista out, having a difficult talk with a loved one, or attending a new social event alone.

4) Take them

Stop thinking and just do it.

5) Assess your passive confidence

If passive confidence is having a life that you enjoy, where are you holding yourself back. What could improve?

If you do enjoy but aren’t feeling that confident about it – ask yourself just how much you really enjoy it, or whether that’s just a way of protecting you from taking the uncomfortable actions that would truly make your life better.

That goes double for you, guy who is addicted to playing video games instead of socializing. You can’t bullshit me, I was just the same as you were.

6) Address your passive confidence

Stop thinking and just do it. Start today. Because like anything related to confidence, nobody is gonna do it for you.

There’s only one person who can solve that problem for you, and he’s the exact same one you see in the mirror.

THE ONE RULE OF CONFIDENCE

At the beginning of this article, I retold John Milton’s famous story for a specific reason. Within Paradise Lost is the clearest example of what not to do, yet the example is the one we so often overlook, especially when it comes to confidence.

When we think of confidence, what we really think of is self-aggrandizing ideas like fame, charisma, success, and pride. But these ideas have nothing to do with confidence. These are just the things we think will give us confidence. We fool ourselves into believing they’re what we’re really seeking.

But as was the case with Milton’s Satan – they’re not.

In reality, confidence comes from not making the basic mistake that pursuing these things suggests you’re making:

You’re living for something outside of yourself. In particular, something that you feel you need from others.

For you, it’s not your perception of yourself that matters, it’s how other people perceive you.

That’s the mistake. You don’t realize you’re okay as you are. So you keep looking for others to tell you what you can’t tell yourself.

Real confidence comes from comfort. A comfort with yourself, your life, and a trust in your own actions. Real confidence is internal, it has nothing to do with anyone else.

And that is a comfort that is built. It begins and ends with you.

If, like Milton’s Satan, your idea of yourself is wrapped up in status, power, and the opinions of others – before you take any other step, you have to reconsider the ones you’re already taking.

Because it’s those steps that are stopping you from having what you always been seeking.

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and SHARE it on social media.

If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics I write about and build a structured plan for applying them to your day to day life – then check out my Dating and Personal Development Coaching service for a free 15-minute consultation.

And be sure to check out my free ebooks on dating and anxiety.

If you want an easy way to stay up to date on the latest content, like me on Facebook, and you’ll always be the first to know.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

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The Hidden Cost of Not Being a Failure

by ·

failure rate

IF TIGERS worked on Wall Street, they’d be kicked out the door in five minutes. Contrary to their reputation of being the deadliest cat on the planet (that honor goes to the tiny black-footed cat) it’s estimated that 95% of a Tiger’s hunts end in complete failure.

That means the odds of it successfully hunting are about 0.0526. And if you’re wondering why the hell you’re attending math class right now, let me give you some context. That’s not much better odds than the Tiger correctly guessing the ace of spades from a deck of cards.

Tigers, despite their reputation as the biggest, baddest cat on the planet, fail all the time. And considering most of their life is spent hunting, that means most of their life is spent out of breath, feeling embarrassed, and watching some shit-eating gazelle spring away.

But this isn’t just how it is for Tigers. This is how it is for all of nature.

The vast majority of animals fail all the time at exactly what they are designed to do. The tiger fails to hunt, the bear fails to scavenge, and the blue whale fails to… well, it fails to do whatever it is that blue whales do.

Failing is part of life. If we want to do what we’re best at, then we better get used to failing.

You’ve probably heard the quote ‘if you want to succeed double your failure rate.’ It crops up all the time on LinkedIn, motivational images, and youtube pep talks.

The guy who said was a man named Thomas J. Watson. Aside from putting IBM on the map, Watson was hailed as the world’s greatest salesman when he died. Despite his legacy being reduced to a quick shot of motivation, there is a deep wisdom to what he says:

Everyone wants to be so good that they never fail, but maybe the reality is that we have to fail more.

Much more.

HOW OFTEN ARE YOU FAILING?

If you were to stop and think about your goal – maybe it’s getting better at dating, starting a business, or writing a movie – how often have you allowed yourself to fail at it?

And I don’t mean failed to even start. I mean you started an attempt. You saw it through. And it ended in complete and utter failure.

You got rejected. The business went bust. The script sucked.

If you’re honest, like most of us the answer would probably be: ‘I haven’t.’

Everyone wants something, but rarely we do ever try to get it. Instead, the closest we get is trying to figure out ways to avoid failure. We engage in perfectionism, we try to learn as much as we can, or worse, we procrastinate our way out of ever trying.

So our dream… stays exactly that. A dream. Lost in our defense mechanisms.

One of the easiest ways to understand how realistic your goals are is to take a look and see how hard you’re failing. If like the Tiger, all of your attempts have ended in failure – then you’re on the right track.

Why?

Because it means you’re actually trying. It means you actually have something to learn from. And it means you’re actually in the ballpark of eventually getting lucky.

You don’t kill an antelope without chasing one in the first place.

If, however, you’ve never failed, it’s probably because you’ve never tried. And because you’ve never tried, your goals just aren’t going to happen.

You aren’t being realistic.

If you want to develop charisma, you have to slog through years of being boring. If you want to meet women who think you’re great, you have to meet dozens who think you suck. If you want to write a great book, you have to write dozens that are unreadable garbage. If you want to have a great sex life, you have to get shot down by all the people who would never fuck you. If you want to run a successful business, you have to go bankrupt and live off baked beans… Or something like that.

Failure isn’t the indicator that you’re on the right track. But it IS the indicator that you’re actually on a track in the first place. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t doing anything. You aren’t moving. You aren’t growing.

You aren’t doing shit.

YOU DON’T FAIL BECAUSE YOU DON’T CARE

Failure is like any other shitty experience. It’s part and parcel with the good ones.

No matter what goal it is you’re trying to pursue, the majority of the experience will not be that enjoyable and most of your attempts will end in failure.

This is an immutable rule of life. People make entire careers selling self-help books which say this in slightly different ways. The thing you love is the thing you spend most of your time suffering through. The thing we love is the thing we fail at.

But if everyone knows this, why do we hide from failure so much?

The truth is that you fear failure because you care only about the result of your goal, not the process of actually attempting it. This is because it isn’t really about you doing it, it’s about achieving it changing who you are.

Your goal isn’t an intrinsic expression of who you are, it’s a band-aid for your emotional issues. You don’t want to write because you have something to say – you want fame and adoration. You don’t want a great sex life because you’re in touch with your sexuality – you want emotional validation and dependency. You don’t want to succeed at business so you can add value to your own life and others – you want it so you can show everyone how much better you are than them.

Your goal isn’t so much as a goal as it is wish fulfillment for your self-esteem issues. And this is why you don’t achieve it.

Because in failing to achieve it, you reinforce the idea that you’re the opposite of what it is you wish you were. And your rock bottom self-esteem can’t handle that.

So it stops you from even trying.

THE UNSUNG BENEFIT OF EMBRACING FAILURE

There is an obvious benefit to embracing failure. You learn from the experience.

The more you fail, the more you know where you’re going wrong. And the more you know where you’re going wrong, the more likely you are to go right.

You’re also more likely to be lucky. It’s no wonder that Thomas J. Watson was considered the world’s greatest salesman. He understood the importance of luck and it’s relationship to failure.

When he said ‘double your failure rate’ one of the things he was saying is that you don’t get lucky without repeatedly being even more unlucky. So you should make a habit out of being unlucky all the time.

Rejection therapy is something which embraces this idea and makes it practical. You continually expose yourself to rejection. Some people do this for confidence, and many guys do it to get over their approach anxiety. Whatever your goal is, continually exposing yourself to rejection is the right way to go.

But the unsung benefit of embracing failure is the effect it has on your mindset. Because you’re okay if you fail, you’re not as dependent on your goal succeeding. You’re doing what you do for you, and nobody else.

This, incidentally, is what I argue is the core principle of being attractive.

In sales, this is where you develop an indifference to the whether the buyer purchases your product or not. You know it’s benefits and you know it’s value to them, but you’re okay with their decision either way. You don’t need them to buy. They can take it or leave it.

More often than not this makes them more likely to buy it.

Whereas when your entire attitude is ‘please buy my product.’ What do you think happens? It’s the exact same thing in dating. When you’re happy in your own life, having a great time as you are, your results increase.

When you embrace failure for failure’s sake, you learn to become okay with your neediness.

In other words, in failing, you learn to get out of your own way.

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and SHARE it on social media.

If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics I write about and build a structured plan for applying them to your day to day life – then check out my Dating and Personal Development Coaching service for a free 15-minute consultation.

And be sure to check out my free ebooks on dating and anxiety.

If you want an easy way to stay up to date on the latest content, like me on Facebook, and you’ll always be the first to know.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

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Defense Mechanisms – How to Stop Being a Victim of Fear

by ·

WHAT IF I told you that half of what you think is ‘you’ isn’t actually you? What if I told you that you that almost your entire idea of ‘you’ was just a series of inventive lies that have tricked you into becoming someone that you never, ever wanted to be?

And what if I told you all of this was done in an affectionate effort to keep you safe?

You’d probably be thinking – if that’s true then just who the hell am I?

Your brain isn’t always on your side. As you attempt to do anything that provokes anxiety, your brain almost automatically comes up with patterns of thought and behavior to stop you. These patterns are so convincing that you don’t even spot them for what they are, and often, they come to form your beliefs and eventually your very identity.

Just as you can be full of shit, it turns out you can also be full of poor patterns of thought and behavior.

Psychiatrists call these patterns defense mechanisms.

I call them ‘your bullshit.’ And if there’s a magic pill in any kind of personal development it’s this: ‘learning to spot your own bullshit.’

Because it’s that exact bullshit that keeps you from growing, stifles your happiness, and turns you into a version of yourself you never actually wanted to be.

———

I first came across defense mechanisms when I was a plucky young man learning about improving my dating life. I was reading as many books and forums as I could (not advised), and trying to combine them as best as I could with some kind of grounding in psychology (also not advised).

A lot of what I came across was toxic, unnecessary, or just flat out wrong.

But in the case of defense mechanisms, it was slightly different. There was something about them that always rung true. That I saw reflected in myself, and everyone I met. And as they seemed to be directly related to anxiety, approaching, and expressing sexuality – they were simply too good for this young man to miss.

Defense mechanisms it seemed, were what stopped me and everyone else from taking the actions with women that we wanted to take.

Whenever we wanted to approach one, kiss one, or even ask one out – there they were. And in this new, fancy psychology, I figured I’d found myself a cure.

So like any good nerd, I was hooked.

A SHORT, UNNECESSARY HISTORY OF DEFENSE MECHANISMS

Even though my focus was on dating, defense mechanisms have been something that have found their way into every aspect of my life.

Whether I was trying to pluck up the courage to talk to a cute girl, or procrastinating my way through video game after video game instead of writing – defense mechanisms were always lurking behind the scenes.

Just as they will be for you.

Defense mechanisms aren’t exactly a new discovery. Whether it’s Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or John Milton’s fallen angels – observers of human behavior have long been pointing their fingers at the bizarre ways people go about avoiding uncomfortable feelings and unraveling their lives.

The idea of defense mechanisms was popularised by Anna Freud. She took what was her father’s rather doom-and-gloom view of the human psyche and created what could be called a roadmap of human self-deception. One that, through understanding it, offered a way of undoing our flaws.

To her, our defense mechanisms were the ways in which we defended our ego from harm, and in order to live properly, we had to understand and manage the ways in which we did this. In other words, these seemed to be the elephant in the psychological room.

Years later, her work was expanded upon again by Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant. And his expanded research was so on point, it paved the way for many of the psychiatric classifications we have today.

He also gave this incredibly good Tedtalk. Unique for teaching what is maybe life’s most important lesson, and is also a good substitute for Nytol.

Vaillant was the first to organize defense mechanisms into hierarchies that corresponded to what was essentially our emotional development. To him, a person’s ability to manage their defense mechanisms healthily was intrinsic to their maturity and well-being as an individual.

And he was right.

What Freud and Vaillant managed to do was lift the lid on everyone’s mind, and reveal the hedge maze of behavioral patterns underneath. Far from being unique snowflakes, we all engaged with highly similar methods of bullshitting ourselves and hiding from our emotions.

Y’know, like children.

Luckily for us, Vaillant also showed that through understanding their patterns of bullshit, people can and would change for the better.

Which is where the next part of this outrageously long article comes in.

THE MANY, MANY DEFENSES FROM ANXIETY

defence mechanisms

Despite what Darth Vader says, it is wise to lower your defenses. Defense mechanisms don’t actually protect you. They imprison you.

Now, I totally get that’s dramatic. But bear with me:

The more you give into your patterns of bullshit, the more you avoid taking actions which are going to:

  1. Actually, represent your desires.
  2. Confront anxiety and make you grow.

I think I speak for all of us when I say nobody wants to live life with the training wheels strapped on. Eventually, we’ve gotta kick those fuckers loose and start nosediving down staircases.

There are many, many ways in which you’ll try and keep your own training wheels on. My bullshit won’t always be your bullshit, but in almost everyone I’ve met, they’ve collected not one, but a cluster of defense mechanisms that hold them back.

Some are lost in denial, fantasizing, and blaming the world. Other’s are always acting out and regressing into a childlike, dependent state.

For me, I was either avoiding reality completely, intellectualizing it, overcompensating, or worst of all, forming my reactions to events in completely disingenuous ways. As you’ll see in a moment, all of these suck.

Now for the sake of brevity, I’m going to try and limit this to anxiety and dating. I do write a blog that covers that topic after all, and to be honest…

Nowhere are people’s defense mechanisms more on show than in dating.

That said, I will add some other, personal development related examples where appropriate.

These all apply whether you’re feeling anxiety, sadness, anger or any emotion you find uncomfortable. And whether you’re dating, trying to start a business, or doing public speaking – it doesn’t matter.

Within every behavior that provokes an uncomfortable emotion, there is a defense mechanism that can and will rise up to ‘protect you.’

Here are the main ways you’re doing this:

DENIAL

Reality can be scary and upsetting. So you deny the reality of situation exists, as to accept it would make you anxious or in emotional pain. This is called denial, and it’s pretty much every teenager ever.

There are thousands of ways this can crop up in your life. In dating, this is most commonly seen as:

“I don’t really want to speak to her.’ When you’re attracted to her. Or “I don’t have anxiety around women.” When you quite clearly feel anxiety around women. Or ‘I don’t care about winning.’ When in reality winning is extremely important to you.

PROJECTION

If you’re racist, sexist, or bigoted, this one almost definitely applies to you. Projection is where you start seeing in other people what you refuse to acknowledge in yourself. Whether this is a feeling you don’t want to feel or some unconscious motivation – projection is your easy way out.

Instead of dealing with it yourself, you protect it onto someone else – and you see it everywhere.

These are projections are usually persecutory in nature (i.e racist/sexist).

This is deeply tied to blame and anger, and in my experience sits at the origin of many generalizations about the opposite sex. “Women are sluts” is actually “I’m scared of women”, “All women are over-emotional” becomes “I’m emotional and just not conscious of it.”

Instead of pointing the finger at everyone else, maybe it’s a better idea to look in the mirror.

FANTASY

There isn’t a single person reading this who isn’t guilty of this. In fact, this is less a defense mechanism than just a part of being human.

The idea behind fantasy is simple: what you want provokes anxiety, so you seek out some kind of unthreatening fantasy to ‘achieve it.’

For example, this could be:

“Expressing my sexuality makes me anxious, so I’m gonna feel good about myself by fantasizing about being some sexuality confident guy all the time.”

I have a friend who does this with violent movies and he doesn’t even realize it. That’s his defense mechanism for being afraid of confrontation. I have another friend who does the same thing with video games.

What’s your method?

REGRESSION

Regression is where you adopt a childlike, dependent state in order to feel safe from whatever anxiety you re currently experiencing. This can be anything, but I always tend to notice regression in social situations.

For example, you’ve come to a party to socialize and meet new people, but doing so makes you anxious, so instead, you cling to the people you know, often following them around like a lost puppy.

Regression is a relinquishment of your own personal power. You’re saying ‘I can’t confront my anxiety, but I hope you can do it for me.’

This might seem like a downer, but almost everyone engages with this on some level. If I haven’t been on a night out in weeks, and am feeling nervous, this can be something I spot in myself.

The trick is to spot it, then break the dependency.

PASSIVE AGGRESSION

If you live in the western world, please stop and read this section. It applies to pretty much every element of your day to day life. If you’re British, read it twice.

Passive aggression is where the confrontation that comes from direct aggression makes you anxious, so you attempt to mask it or sidestep in socially acceptable, but unpleasant behavior.

An easy example of this would be someone has annoyed you, and instead of confronting that directly, you say something shitty in the guise of being socially acceptable. All because the idea of direct confrontation makes you anxious.

But in terms of dating… I find this directly relates to sexuality. For example, you’re sexually attracted to a woman and want to express that. But expressing sexuality makes you anxious. So instead you throw some bullshit lines at her, or you tease her, or you try to be her friend.

These are all passive forms of expressing your sexual aggression, which makes you anxious. Instead of saying ‘you’re cute’ or something direct, you dodge it, smother it, and stifle it.

In any instance, whether its sexual, or just confrontation – the rule is almost always the same:

There is no good substitute for being direct.

defence mechanisms

ACTING OUT

Acting out is an action that you take almost impulsively, without awareness of the motivation that drives it.

This one is more complex, and often hard to spot. But in my own life, this came in the form of being highly impulsive with alcohol and eventually, with sex.

I had unconscious needs to avoid anxiety and to get validation, and I ended up taking those actions as ways to get those needs met. For a long time I just thought I was a big drinker and so on, but in reality, I was just acting out.

A while later, when that was less on an issue, I found myself avoiding anxiety about my future by procrastinating and impulsively watching garbage on youtube. It was the same shit, but with a new outlet.

I see this all the time in people who cheat on their partners, need excessive attention from the opposite sex, and guys who objectify their sex lives. They just don’t know what’s really motivating them, and they’re acting out on autopilot.

They have something they don’t want to feel, so the immediately start to smother it.

INTELLECTUALIZATION

A woman is more likely to acknowledge her own duality. A man is continually blinded by his intellect and does not learn through insight. ~Carl Jung

This is probably the reason you arrived at this blog. And if you’re male, almost definitely the reason for 99.9999% of your issues in personal development.

Intellectualization is where you try to learn/understand as much as you can about whatever causes your anxiety in the hopes that it will make it go away. I.e. You feel anxious about expressing sexuality, so you learn as much as you can in the hopes the fear will go away.

But here’s the thing…

This never works. It cannot work. It is impossible.

If your problem is emotional, then dealing with it is an emotional process. Thinking has nothing to do with it.

Whether your problem is anxiety in dating, fear of failure in your work life, or underlying issues with procrastination and motivation – the issue is always emotional.

Some probably think this sounds like the least masculine thing in the world to do. All I have to say to that is this:

You don’t become a well-rounded man without getting in touch with your feminine side. It’s not possible.

Moving away from the feelings is what made you end up here. Maybe instead you should start moving towards them.

COMPENSATION

Compensation is where you attempt to cover up your perceived weaknesses or anxiety by taking actions that ‘mask’ them.

This is usually where people overcompensate. You feel inferior to women and that makes you anxious, so you pretend you’re superior to them. You act cool. You act indifferent. You try to demean them by insulting them.

In reality, you’re just scared.

When it comes to dating, one of, if not the main reasons for this is feelings of inferiority. An inferiority that we desperately try to compensate for.

Alfred Adler, a psychologist back in Sigmund Freud / Carl Jung era has a quote that explains this perfectly:

‘If people feel inferior and weak in one area, they try to compensate for it somewhere else.’

In regards to dating, or even socially, what he’s saying is:

If you feel ‘less’ than other people you will act in a way to compensate for this feeling.

Nearly ALL your bullshit behavior comes from this one principle of Adler’s. All the faking, trying to impress people, and delusions of superiority – they all come from this. Jokes about the guy with the sports car who has the small dick? This too.

In my experience, compensators always know what they’re doing deep down. They’re the small kid on the playground shouting about his dad being bigger than everyone else’s.

RATIONALIZATION

Rationalization is where you use faulty logic to explain a poor behavior or feeling.

You get rejected by a woman and it makes you feel ashamed and embarrassed. Which is normal. But instead of going ‘oh well’ you go ‘she’s a fucking bitch’. In reality, she’s allowed to reject you, and it doesn’t make her anything.

You procrastinate on your work, telling yourself that you don’t need to do it yet, even though putting it off longer noticeable causes you more stress.

You cheat on your partner, telling yourself you shouldn’t tell them because it would just hurt them if they found out.

Rationalization is where you try to turn whatever is obviously an unacceptable act into an acceptable one. But you don’t do this for others. You do it for yourself. To rationalize away the feeling that comes from your shame, guilt, or anxiety.

REACTION FORMATION

Have you ever had someone you completely disliked, thought they were an asshole, but instead of making this obvious, you were in fact really nice to them?

Reaction formation is where you start acting in completely the opposite way to how you want to act due to feelings of anxiety.

I.e. In the example above, it causes you social anxiety to be upfront about your feelings with that person, so you ‘form’ a new, non-threatening reaction.

Or, you want to have sex with women, but this provokes anxiety in you, so you outwardly express zero sexuality and may even claim to not care about it all. In truth, you do, you’re just scared. (This was pretty much my entire teenage life).

DISSOCIATION

Have you ever noticed that when people are fresh out of a breakup they suddenly start hitting the gym and setting themselves wildly ambitious life goals?

This is dissociation. Drastically changing who you are to avoid emotional pain.

In the case of a breakup, you feel shame about yourself for having been part of a failed relationship, and you don’t want to keep seeing the person in the mirror. This was me 100%. In reality, I was just sad and needed to confront it and accept it.

It’s also anyone who felt like a loser back home, moves to a new country and suddenly drastically overhauls their identity. The geek at school who becomes a try-hard later in life. Pretty much any stereotypical “zero-to-hero” cliche.

But as with my own post-breakup life change – it doesn’t fix the feeling. At best it just puts down a band-aid.

Funnily enough, dissociation is also nearly always the plot of superhero origin stories. Which I think lies in their appeal.

DISPLACEMENT

Displacement is when you shift your sexual or aggressive desires to a safer, less emotionally threatening outlet.

I.e. the guy who wants to shout at his boss, but can’t so comes home and screams at his wife.

This is one of the more complex defense mechanisms, as it tends to burst out of you unaware. Something happened to you earlier that you repressed, and later it erupts out of your when it feels safe.

This can be obvious, like the example above, or it can extremely subtle. Like pornography.

You feel sexual desire, but you’re afraid of women. Approaching women and asking them out threatens your anxiety, so instead, you seek out somewhere ‘safe’ to outlet that sexual desire. In reality, all you’re doing is avoiding anxiety.

Displacement can also be seen in the micro-moments of your life, where stresses at your own failures are repressed (see below) and then you lash out at people with anger you’d actually been directing at yourself. This is something I do all the time, and have to work hard to get a handle on.

REPRESSION

What you want causes you anxiety, so you attempt to force it out of your mind and pretend it doesn’t exist.

I.e. You avoid anxiety by repressing any sexuality whatsoever.

I.e. You tell yourself you’re happy without a social life.

I.e. You say you don’t care about achieving anything.

And the sad thing is that you can do this so much that it eventually does become unconscious, and begins affecting you in subtle, almost imperceptible ways. Not only is this a bad idea, for reasons Carl Jung expresses nicely in this quote:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

But it’s also a bad idea because you’re taking who it is you really want to be and driving it deep down into the back of your mind. Which, if you’re honest, isn’t something you truly want to do.

Instead of repression, you just need to develop a better method of confronting your fear.

THE DANGER OF YOUR DEFENSES

defence mechanisms

Remember when I said that if our defense mechanisms get repeated enough they become our identity? Well if you acted in all these ways enough you’d probably end up hating and avoiding women, socially needy, addicted to pornography and shallow escapism, and at the same time decrying sex and behaving sexless.

A bizarre, living contradiction. All because of simple mental patterns.

You can probably imagine why it’s so important to bring awareness to these. If we want to direct our lives, we have to know what’s already pushing us, or in this case, protecting us.

Even though I’ve kept much of the focus of this article on dating and sexuality – defense mechanisms affect every part of our lives. Procrastination, fear of failure, and all the ways in which we avoid bringing to life the person we wish to be – these all sit hand in hand with our defense mechanisms.

When you bring these kinds of tools to the story that you tell yourself about your own life, it’ll soon become apparent that not everything you consider ‘you’ is actually you. In most cases, it’s just armor that you’ve accumulated to make yourself feel only what you want to feel.

But you can’t live life picking and choosing your feelings.

You have to feel it all. Especially anxiety. Especially the feelings which suck.

As long as you succumb to your defense mechanisms and allow them to protect you from uncomfortable feelings, you will always hinder your growth as an individual – keeping yourself immature, infantile, and incapable.

In all the ways you never had to be.

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