Male Confidence: How the "Alpha Male" Stereotype is Affecting Healthy Masculinity

You look confident from the outside. People respect you, you carry yourself well, and by most external measures you're winning. But somewhere underneath all of it there's a slow, quiet drain you can't explain to anyone around you.

That's the thing about male confidence: the version most men are performing has nothing to do with the real thing.

In Season 2, Episode 1, Dennis Procopio brings on new co-host Charles Ledbetter, a trained life coach and former Man-UP! client turned coach. They open the season by calling out something most men won't say out loud: the angry, chest-beating alpha you grew up watching is scared. And a lot of men have built their entire identity on top of it.

This episode gets into what Dennis calls the Failure Script, a six-step cycle that starts with self-judgment, moves through internalized rage and depression, and bottoms out at stagnation. Dennis and Charles walk through how that cycle works and how to flip it into the Success Script, where validation leads to motivation, motivation builds real confidence, and real confidence creates the risk-taking that actually changes your life.

They also get into why men reach for alcohol, porn, or money when what they actually need is validation, and why the quiet, stoic father nobody posts about is more authentically masculine than anything going viral right now.

TIMESTAMPS 

0:00 - Introducing Charles Ledbetter, New Co-Host 

1:33 - Male Confidence and the Winner Mentality 

4:09 - False Bravado vs. Authentic Masculine Confidence 

7:17 - The Quiet Dad Nobody Talks About 

9:29 - How to Lead in a Relationship Without Controlling It 

16:31 - Boys vs. Men: The Difference That Shows Up in Marriage 

28:17 - The Failure Script: Judgment, Depression, Low Confidence 

34:29 - Why Male Depression Is Internalized Rage 

38:03 - The Success Script: Validation, Motivation, Risk-Taking 

45:47 - Why Men Self-Medicate Instead of Self-Validate 

57:09 - Men Need Permission to Feel, and Why That's Strength

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why the alpha archetype on social media is performing confidence, not owning it
• How the Failure Script works and the six-step cycle that keeps men stuck
• Why male depression is almost always internalized rage looking for an exit
• What "because becomes can't" means and how it traps high-achieving men
• Why men reach for dopamine substitutes when what they actually need is validation
• How to lead in a relationship without control, correction, or force

THIS HITS IF YOU'RE

• Successful by every external measure but running on empty underneath it
• Performing confidence in public and not quite sure what's behind the mask
• Stuck in a cycle you can see clearly but can't seem to break on your own
• In a relationship where you're losing ground and don't fully understand why
• Starting to realize the version of strength you admired doesn't actually look like strength up close

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ABOUT THE SHOW The Bro Coach® Podcast with Dennis Procopio. Not red-pill garbage. Not therapy. Real coaching for guys who achieved success but missed the point. Dennis has 25,000+ hours working with high-earning men ($150K to $3M+) who look successful but feel stuck.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Most men want more, more clarity, more respect, more control over their lives, but few know how to get it. Welcome to the Bro Coach Podcast with Dennis Procopio, the founder of Man Up Life Coaching and the man behind thousands of transformed lives. Not red pill, not therapy, just the evolved man's blueprint for strength, presence, and purpose.

SPEAKER_05 0:23

Hello and welcome. I am Dennis Procopio. I am the BroCoach, and you are here with me on the Bro Coach Podcast. I'd like to introduce my new co host uh who is actually trained as a life coach, and he works with me in man-up life coaching. I'm here with him today, uh, Charles Ledbetter. Charles, say hello to everybody. Hey everybody, excited to be here with you guys. All right, so we are, this is season two, episode one, and Charles is gonna be uh riding along with me for the entire series. So we're a couple of guys who are gonna talk about a lot of things uh that might relate to you, all things male. Today's topic, Charles. I had the idea that I wanted to talk today about male confidence. Now that is a very, very big like whole thing that we can get into. Absolutely. Yeah. But what I have observed about coaching men is that since a lot of the guys that we work with are success-driven, their winner mentality, they want to have nice things or trade nice things for an optimal quality of life. They want to have the best woman they can, they want the best for their kids. It's a winner mentality, and I can't help but notice that there tends to be a correlation between confidence and success. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_03 2:28

I mean, belief is at the center of it all. I found that any man, I know personally in my life, I rose to the level of identity that I had. Whatever I believed about myself is how I acted accordingly and what manifested in my life. Right. So there was a time that I believed I was an absolute piece of shit. I believed that I was hopeless, right? And guess how all my behavior was? Guess what was attracted to me? People who saw similar things, right, in me. But as I started working on confidence and what I believed about myself and who I believed I really was, all of a sudden I started to attract entirely different results in my life, entirely different people. And I became an entirely different person.

SPEAKER_05 3:17

So what I hear you saying is that your confidence was associated with belief. So if you believed that you were whatever, not worthy of having a million-dollar business, then you would argue for your limitations and they would become yours.

SPEAKER_03 3:43

Yeah. Yeah. Key word argue, right? There's this constant dialogue going on in our head, and I would constantly have this uh subconscious tape running in the back of my head according to that belief. And if I didn't, it wasn't until I started to change that dialogue that I started to be able to exude a different level of confidence that was genuine, that was not false bravado, that was not me beating my chest, but really I was just a scared little boy trying to protect myself, right? Something authentic showed up when I started to change that tape that was playing.

SPEAKER_05 4:22

See, and that's a funny thing that you said. You said scared little boy. Now, you and I both have in common, without flexing too hard. We're we're we're what the average in this in the manosphere, you and I share that we would be identified as alpha personalities. Sure. I mean, that's not a that's not a brag. We you earn that, and that's it is what it is. Um when you are that personality type, you I think as a guy, when you're on the other side of it, your idea of being sort of this alpha leader is that you're gonna be walking around, your muscles are gonna have muscles, you're gonna be walking around oiled up, you're fucking vascular, you know, in a fucking like Tarzan loincloth, going around with a babe on each arm and just kicking beta sick fuck bitches out of your way. And that's not really what it is. What happens is you're atlas and you've got the whole world on your shoulders, and you're like, man, why did I want this? This is a hard, lonely job. Sure. And anybody who thinks that you don't get scared doesn't understand what it is because you've got the world on your shoulders.

SPEAKER_03 5:46

Yeah, yeah. And that's heavy. That's heavy. Yeah, that's a hard weight to bear. Absolutely. And I believe most men, and especially if you tune into social media or anything like that, you get a bad idea of what confidence is about. You see exactly that prototype of what you just talked about all over social media, right? And it's very easy to believe, oh, that's confidence, oh, that's manliness, oh, that's masculinity. Um, and that's why I threw out the the scared little boy thing, because I I know from experience there was a time in my life that I projected what I thought confidence was about because I wanted the results, right? So if I looked angry and aggressive, I looked confident, right? And so I would wield that, right? And if I looked scary and dangerous, right, that looked confidence. Or if I was just rude, right? And I didn't care for other people's feelings, that was confidence, right? Yeah, man. And none of that shit is necessary. It's not it, but it can look just like it. And if you're uneducated, if you haven't had a man guide you on a masculine journey and haven't actually gone through a real rite of passage to know what you're really worth, it's very convincing. All that BS is very convincing, and it's just not the real, it's not the real deal.

SPEAKER_05 7:17

So I do know. Um and we can get into that, I think, over the next 20 uh episodes, we'll be talking about that sort of thing a lot. I mean, all guys have war stories, right? And I'm sure I'll share share mine at some point, and I'd love to hear yours. But if we're going to this idea that a young guy who is playing Robin to some Alpha's Batman, you know, they're they're just making a nice little nest for themselves in freaking Joe Rogan's underwear and going, I'll just snuggle up in his ball sack and and maybe some of his macho will wear off on the May. You know what I mean? I mean, because that's what you've got going on right now, is you've got these guys who were who are sucking up to what they think are alpha men without understanding how many quiet, gentle-spirited fathers that are out there taking shit from their wives and you know, and their kids are in fact the real gangsters, man.

SPEAKER_03 8:33

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. So like it looks like it's uh it looks like it's Wes Watson, you know what I mean? Like that's what they think. It's it's that guy, and and it's really not. It it's the it's the dad who has such amazing emotional regulation, right, that is going through the thick of it, man. An insane teenager who is just wearing him out. It's it's dealing with how to learn how to actually lead a wife, right? Learn how to really lead a woman and allow her to be emotional and be unmoved and stoic about it, who gets no fucking credit, who you'll never know his name, that's the guy. That's the masculinity that that is the real deal.

SPEAKER_05 9:27

Yeah, bro. Yeah. And it's funny, you you know, when you say how to lead his wife, now this gets into a into a topic. This this is this is a thing right here. So when men are looking for confidence, there can be a hole in the bucket where he's just leaking confidence. If in his dynamic with his wife or girlfriend, he feels like she's kind of punking him off, you know, that he's um he imagines that, you know, he fantasizes that the alpha male who leads his wife, controls his wife, like job of the hut having Princess Leia on a leash in a bikini. And we both know it's more like you know, the sport of curling, where you kind of buff the ice ahead of the stone coming down.

SPEAKER_03 10:34

That's a great analogy. Isn't that I mean, that's really it. What do you how how so? Why how does that land for you? Well well, because it you mentioned not controlling it, but like paving the way so that it can happen, right? I call it making deposits, right? If I am sitting there and praising my wife enough, it's real easy for her to receive correction from me, right? But if the only thing I do is correct her or point out what's wrong with her behavior, well, then I'm just being kind of a controlling dickhead. I'm not I'm not filling up her cup. She doesn't feel love and appreciation from me. So everything that I say trying to correct her just sounds like a fucking threat. It sounds dangerous to her, right? She's not gonna want to hear that. But if she knows that I love her and I respect her and I cherish her and I value her and I show that not only in how I communicate, but how I support her, for instance, like we've got a baby right now. I have to take care of my wife, that way she can take care of our two-year-old, right? And the better that I sit there and care for my wife in that, the the more that she just looks at me like Superman, to where I can ask her for anything, and she's dying to do it, right? And and she'll hear anything that I have to say. And and men don't get so I don't have to control her behavior. I can speak honestly and forthcoming, and I can ask her for what I need, or I can tell her what I honestly see, and she's able to receive it because she is relaxed and her feminine. She knows that I am leading, that I care for her, that I am competent, that I'm communicative and present. And because of that, I don't get the woman that I saw today when we were walking at the park who was walking behind us. I'm walking with my wife and her friend, who is laying into her husband in a public atmosphere. I mean, she's just ripping this guy a new one. And we all kind of look at each other, and she was like, because my wife, no, my wife understands honor and respect, right? Like she she gets that as a man, that is my deepest need, right? And she just looks at me and shakes her head because she knows she would never do that to me. She knows what that does to a man, right? That's right. And and so because we have this relationship, I've got permission to lead her anytime that I need to. She trusts me. If I say, hey, no, that's not a good idea, right? Or if there is a time where I do need to say, hey, I'm pulling the authority card, let's get in the car and let's go. Or, you know, hey, this conversation's over for the moment. We can come back to it later. But it's not healthy right now. She listens. She's able to submit because she trusts me, right? And so that's the paving the way, right? And I don't have to do it in any type of controlling, bossy, rude. She is a beautiful, independent, intelligent, amazing person who I trust and I respect as a partner in my life, right? And I value her feedback now. And and we've we've cultivated this relationship over time. But if it didn't, if it came from a place of I badly needed her affirmation for me to feel okay, right, and it didn't come for a place where I was settled in myself first, right? Then we probably could have created a situation where she trust me less, and I didn't have permission to guide her. You know, I didn't have permission to help her grow, right? I didn't have, but that's not what happened. We had some very calm serious conversations from the get-go. We were like, hey, this is who we are, this is what I need, this is what I believe in, uh, this is what I'm okay with, this is what I'm not. Um, this is the direction that that, you know, and the vision that I have for our life. All that happened first, and it has made it to where the gentle guiding is the way it happens most of the time. There's just not a need for a strong hand 99% of the time.

SPEAKER_05 15:09

Yeah, which you go back to, which is kind of coming back to the idea that boys becoming men who haven't earned their uh stripes, so to speak. And that that's not being disparaging. I I want every young man out there to learn from uh, you know, us veterans. I don't want to set up some sort of contentious dynamic where they're like, uh fuck those old uncles, you know, they don't know what they're talking about. I'm out here with the glock with the switch or whatever. Like it's not a it's not a it's not a competition. Um we want young men and older men who didn't get the message to reframe what confident masculine leadership looks like. So it because we're talking about relationship, and I I think it makes sense that we're talking about relationship, and of course, um confidence shows up in a lot of areas. There might be a guy who's not in a relationship and he's having challenges um engaging with his peers, you know, men and women, or or other guys, or even feeling the confidence to go outside, or the feeling the confidence to speak in public or whatever. There's so many different ways that confidence can can show up. But since we're in a segment here that focuses on relationship, I'd like to stay in that lane for a second, and then we can talk about other examples where confidence shows up for men outside of how it's defined by women. But women play such an important role in our lives. The fact we we are born out of a woman, we have a very strong relationship with our mom. We are that scared little boy, we we look at dad if he's around, um, and if he's not a dick, uh, as somebody who is an example of toughness and strength and is a little bit emotionally distant and therefore sort of a little scary. So we sort of start with mom and graduate to dad. You know. Yeah, yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and so as a guy coming into a relationship, well, you've you've graduated out of your dynamic with mom and dad. Now you're this person who's trying to adult and operate autonomously in the world, the existential crisis is real. You end up finding a woman who comes along and you kind of close the the cycle and you're back to finding that nurturing maternal um energy. So you've got this young man who's like, oh, I shave now and I fuck, so I'm a man, you know, I whatever, I I I fight, I fuck, I shave, I could be, you know, I could drink alcohol, I could be, you know, uh drafted, I got a job, I pay my own bills. You're not a you're not necessarily a man yet. You might be, but you're not necessarily a man yet. You get together with a woman, if you're a boy who gets together with a girl, then you have this sort of weird brother-sister relationship. Sure. If you're a man who gets together with a woman, um you may or may not appreciate the sort of um patriarchal model that's that's baked into saying king and queen. But and I want to be sensitive to people, like some there might be some woman listening to this right now going, I don't want my husband to correct me. We can discuss, but you're not my handler mover, you know. Um so I want to talk about how a man is confident enough to be a king for his wife, but still humble and reverent enough to respect her as a queen, and to see those not as a hierarchy, but to see those as rather than being equal because two kings are equal, two queens are equal. But being equivalent, where you complement each other and you fit. Talk to me about that dynamic.

SPEAKER_03 19:56

Ah, well, you said it. I mean, it's complementing roles, right? That we're created with this uh beautiful dynamic to we're not supposed to be exactly alike, and god forbid. And I think that most boys struggle with that, right? Is they they're trying to make a woman act like him, right? If she would just be less emotional, and if she would just talk less, and if she would just know, and it's like, well, no, I understand those are difficult things for you to figure out and navigate, but that's actually what makes her beautiful, and that when you learn about how to navigate that will unlock a whole new level in your relationship and in your manhood, period, right? So that's that's not the goal. So, you know, I I remember reading men are from Mars and women are from Venus, right? And just understanding the different communication styles is so valuable, right?

SPEAKER_05 20:57

Sure, yes, sir.

SPEAKER_03 20:59

Because I at first it was under the first thing that happened is I started to understand, like, oh, she communicates in feelings, right? And and they're often circular, right? They're often in motion, they're not a target I can pin down with logic. So when she says always or never, she doesn't mean always or never. She means this is what I'm experiencing the moment, so it feels eternal because I'm in a feeling. Feelings feel like they're you can't remember when they started and they feel like they're never gonna end, right? And so she's communicating in this wonderful, you know, that it's like a painting, right? And you're trying to get the language to identify what you're what you're experiencing with this painting. And when I learned that I could allow her to have all those feelings and communicate with what I originally saw was inaccuracies, right? When she'd say always. Or never as an immature little boy, I'd be like, oh, but that's not true. Because remember that one time I did the thing, and then you didn't fucking and then I'm interrupting her process when I was able to just sit and let all that wave of emotion crash against me and be unthreatened by it, right? Be un a threatened by the fact that it didn't follow my logical pattern and just hear what she was communicating to me. It's amazing how many times I would see her f come to a place where she solved the problem and the oceans settled. And often I didn't have to do shit. I didn't have to do anything. It was like a fucking miracle. It was like, oh, sweet. You mean I can just weather the storm and be okay, and I don't have to take any of this shit personally or get offended or get afraid by it. And she'll just be her beautiful self and go through her process the same way I would if I were communicating logically and linearly, right? The same way that I would say, well, no, but if you look at A and then we move to B and then we'll get to C and then D, I would find a place of peace and resolve, right? And knowing that I could track that linearly. That's what women do, but just in a completely different method. Like they just have a completely different nature. And thank God that they do, because all that emotional energy that they have is so creative. Like I'm watching it right now with my daughter, dude. Like and and her and my daughter. I just look and I see the the faces that my daughter's making, and I see the reaction that my wife's having. You know what I mean? It's poetry, dude. It's it brings so much beauty to my world, right? Which is not in my nature. My nature is tasks, not relationship. My nature is to hunt. It's like, no, no, no, I've got that objective, and I need to conquer that objective, and I'll get that objective done, and then we can make time for the emotion and the beautiful and the the arch, the art, and the you know what I mean? And and she brings so much brevity to my life. And and as boys, we miss that, right?

SPEAKER_05 24:26

As boys, we do, because we're socially culture, we're we're socially, and this is back to that confidence thing. This is this is that we are there is a social construct, and you're crazy if you don't notice it, it's it's it's prevalent in every society. And uh because boys are historically um biologically stronger physically, um we have different hormones, we're wired differently as a result. We as you said, the Mars Venus reference, we process differently. Um, typically, uh boys have a tendency to wear the engineer hat first, and women have a tendency to wear the empathy hat first. That doesn't mean men can't be empathetic and women can't be rational, but historically women are nurturers. You literally incubate a child for nine months, like you're you literally actually have like a beverage dispenser on your chest to nurture this thing.

SPEAKER_03 25:36

So fascinating.

SPEAKER_05 25:38

We do not have that. Um and look, I respect women so so so so hard. Like, like the female anatomy, watch, watch two women in UFC. They don't have to stop and take a five-minute break when one of them gets kicked in the balls. Like, you know, like like I, you know, I I'm not I'm not trying to set up this. I don't want the brand to sound like, you know, we're like, you know, promoting everybody needs to be a trad husband and a trad wife. I don't care what your thing is. That's between that, your your role, your dynamic is between you and you and your you and your wife, and whatever works for you works for me. I I'm very libertarian in in nature, so as long as you're not hurting yourself or others, if you're hurting yourself, I guess it's on you, but I hate to see you suffer. But if you're stupid, then whatever. Um if you're you know, uh like that's like me, I like hot sauce. She's like, all right, if you want to eat a fucking Carolina Reaper, that's on you, you know. Um but no, don't cook with it because I don't want to, I don't want to have that experience. So I believe that however you're living your life, and I coach this, um, or I should say rather, that's sort of the that's baked into our ethos is culturally, is that we're not saying, you know, the man comes home, kicks his shoes off, grabs his pipe, says what's for dinner, and the woman does all the housework. Whatever your social contract is between each other, that's for you. Um negotiating with each other is critical, and understanding that different uh perceptions come from different perspectives is important, and those perspectives are predicated by biological differences, and that's something I won't argue. I just simply will not argue it. I like I literally won't have the argument, I'll just walk away from it. Um so in the case of men being primarily engineer-minded, that does not mean that men can't be high empathy. Um, and the where confidence comes from with men, and I'm gonna run this down at the risk of making it sound like a little bit of a TED talk. So bear with me on this. Um this is some like broke 101 shit. Um I operate with the I a long time ago, I created something that I called the failure script, and I created something that I called the success script. And the failure script basically runs through a bunch of steps. It says, one, men are self-judging. We are self-judging because we hold ourselves to a standard where uh performance equals value. Performance. We are providers, protectors, and performers. So when we perform, we prove that we are good husband and father material, which is useful for the larger social construct. That's how families happen, how children are made, how we reproduce, and how billionaires get richer. Oh, please don't let me go down a rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_03 29:02

Come on, come on, bring it in, bring it in. I don't know that you can rely on me for this one. I like jokes. I think I just say go.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

Nope.

unknown 29:16

Nope.

SPEAKER_02 29:17

So I think you were looking for the frizz that was like, don't jump, and I was like, ah, fuck it. Get out of my way.

SPEAKER_05 29:28

Um but nah, but so one is that men are conditioned socially to be to be performers. Um and the result is that when we hit the home run, we feel great. When we strike out, we're we're a piece of shit. And you have, you know, it doesn't matter if you have people around saying, ah, better luck next time, buddy. We're still looking at Bro over there with sprinkles on his ice cream and all the family sitting around him running their fingers through his hair, going, Who's a good baseball player? And we're like, no, shooks, you know. And so what you do with that is that leads to step number two in my little flow chart here, which is depression. Now I'm gonna explain that. When you are judging yourself because you see that you're coming up short, what's happening is that you are um seeing yourself through a lens. And the lens that you see yourself through is the lens you see the world through. So there's a premise here um in this culture which says that if you judge yourself, you judge your brother, if you judge your brother, you judge yourself. It's the same, same. Sure. Because if you're holding your brother to a standard that you're holding yourself to, if you're mad at yourself for being fat and he's fat, now he he should lose weight too. Right. Um if he's ripped freaking eight-pack and you know, jacked and athletic and you know, Harvard, like I could just keep, you know, and getting all the girls whatever, uh 6'2, freaking whatever, you know, now all of a sudden we're measuring against him and saying I suck. So that judgment is gravely misunderstood by people to be just unfrustrated, and it's actually rage. So, and again, it's gonna be a bit of a TED talk, but bear with me. No, I'm with you. Okay, okay. So, rage, as you and I know, can go two ways.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

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SPEAKER_05 32:11

I'll be very open and say I've, you know, I was in jail for attempted murder. I I've been in Rikers Island, I've been in Orleans Parish Prison. I was not a good boy because my rage plus alcohol equaled Jekyll and Hyde syndrome, and all of the hostility that I had been bottling up, being a little scared little boy, like little accommodator, little nice guy, came out and I became venom, dude. I was a monster, yeah, and all that rage came out. So for the guys who don't either have the resources physically or intellectually or whatever to be a monster, um, you know, which again we want to reiterate is not is not a healthy thing. We are not promoting this as alpha, okay? I want to be clear. No, bad dog, don't do that. Um, but if you're somebody who has let yourself wild out and be the the the bad guy, um then you find yourself in a place like jail, or you find yourself in situations where people are telling you that is inappropriate, and now you're gonna get social punishment for that because you've you've you've you've stepped out of line. So what happens is whether you're somebody who's rehabilitated or you're somebody who just doesn't have the resources to begin with, and so you just take the the like nice guy route, you're gonna repress that hostility. And depression is internalized rage.

SPEAKER_03 33:56

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_05 33:56

You swallow the bomb and you get a groundfall. You z you start uh shorting out. So one is judgment, two is depression, where everything is harder because you're uh you have an energy leak because of this internalized rage. Okay that's gonna lead to three lowered confidence. Since everything is harder for you and you lack motivation, you lack purpose, you lack confidence, right? You're gonna go down. So step three is exactly that. You go from judgment to to to depression to low confidence. This is the this is right now the money of the of the of the podcast. Right now. This is it. You go to low confidence. Low confidence means you are now going to become risk averse. You are going to avoid conflict at all costs. And unfortunately, conflict helps us grow. So when you're avoiding conflict, you're avoiding opportunities for growth. That is where you hit step five: stagnation. You're stuck. The reason guys finally hire a coach is because they don't want to go to therapy or they've gone to therapy and it didn't work. And so they find out there's like a bro coach, and they're like, okay, maybe I can talk to this dude, he'll get it. Why I'm why I'm stuck like this, why I'm on the couch freaking doom scrolling and vaping, um, and and it and sleeping like and overeating and just fucking up. And I'm stuck, and I can't get unstuck because I'm trapped in my self-limiting beliefs, as you said, because of a little axiom that I came up with a while ago, which is that won't becomes can't.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

Right.

SPEAKER_05 36:09

Because you're afraid and you're just jammed up, you won't do the thing that all the people around you are telling you to do. Because you won't do it, you now eventually trick yourself into thinking that you can't do it. Yeah. And so once you believe that you can't do it, now you're stuck in a pretty gnarly little, yeah, you're you're you're circling the drain. You're just stuck. You're you're in this laundry cycle that's shit. And so that leads to step six, which is congratulations, you have achieved failure. You are failing. That's it. You're a failure. You followed the failure script and you got the reward. I have arrived. All right. So somebody gave you the recipe, you followed it, and you and right, and you got this nice hot shit cake out of the oven and say, This is exactly what I made. Why would I expect anything else to come out? Right. Now, I'm gonna flip that, and then after I run through the success script, I'm gonna hand the mic back to you, and I'm I'll be happy to hear your thoughts because I could feel that you're like really. Um yeah, so so what we do, you'll find something interesting. If you take the words that I just said and you flip them and you take the opposite, that is literally how when I first started this, my business, I should say, my practice in 2013 as a as a coach mentor counselor. Um I recognized the pattern of the failure script just by looking at the data that was coming in from sessions combined with my own life experience, combined with my own Dennis' personal experience, and I was like, I could codify this. This is like a thing. And then I said, Well, what if we took the opposite of each word? What would you get? And it was it was an epiphany. I'm like, well, the opposite of judgment is validation. And in this culture, I use I don't use affirmation, I use validation because it's a lot easier to understand. It's it's you either validate or you don't. Uh validation. Well, what's the opposite of lethargy and depression? Well, it's motivation. Well, what's the opposite of low confidence? It's high confidence. What's the opposite of risk aversion? It's risk seeking. What's the opposite of stagnation? It's change. Now let me take you, and so I wrote those words down as bullet points, and then I said, intuitively that feels right, but let me math that out. And it was, I was like, holy shit, I came up with something. So validation. If you've ever had a good teacher, I I taught art classes. I was a I was an art teacher for a long time. And when I found what I found out was you're never really teaching somebody how to use the materials, you're teaching them how to have the permission to be creative and express themselves. So it's good. So their confidence, their confidence required them to learn how to do the techniques. But what was going to motivate them to do the techniques to get the confidence? They thought the confidence was a prerequisite to doing the thing. What it turned out was validation. I would get a guy in my class and I'd be like, dude, you are so fucking smart. And he's sitting there with his chipped up, you know, uh his skateboard and his Lincoln Park or corn hoodie on, you know, being a total like emo little teenager back in the 90s, you know, and and going, I'm stupid. This sucks. I don't even like art. You know, art's for fags. And I'm like, well, no, art's for guys who like draw naked women, but anyway, um, but anyway, um, ask me how I don't chick a bow wow. But but sorry, another sidebar. Don't go there, don't go there, come back. Um anyway. Ew, that's so toxic and predatory. Okay, so anyway, whatever, bitch. Nah, stop, stop it, stop it. Okay, so here. So, number one is validation. We want to validate the kid. So I'd be like, dude, I've seen you skate. You're sick with it. I'm all right. Nah, dude, I just watched you land a sick trick out in the parking lot, and you've got your creative. I can see it. And you've got cool stickers all over your board, you're wearing cool graphics on your on your clothes. You express yourself as a creative. What you're lacking is technique. But you're bright, so I'm gonna show you how to do this. Dude sitting there going, uh, uh, uh you're not my real dad. Uh and um, but uh every day I just pepper this dude with validation, as you said earlier in the session or the the the podcast. Um I pepper him with validation. Hey everybody, here comes the world's best artist. Hey, don't carry the skateboard, ride it through. Come on, I want to I want to see you come through on on your carriage. King on his carriage, king creativity coming in your booth, and you see the guy like going. But if you just keep watering that dude with love, the next thing you know he's motivated. I look over, and now he's drawing somebody like cutting their wrist with a razor blade, and that's not exactly what I want to see him doing, but the razor blade's in perspective, and I'm like any shade in it. So I'm like, dude, that's joke. How'd you learn how to draw a razor blade like that? The blood looks so real. If I were gonna kill myself, I'd be totally into this picture. And a dude's like, so now next thing you know, he's getting some confidence. Next thing you know, the dude comes in and he's like, Hey, how would I paint this? Boom! Now I'm like, ah, ah, but I don't want to let on too soon. I'm like, I gotta use my dad voice and go, well, let me show you how it works. Let's get out our tool. You know, paint has properties. But I but I'm but inside I'm like, fuck yeah, man. So then that motivation is gonna lead to risk taking. One day the kid comes in and he brings in a four foot by four foot canvas, and I'm like, skateboard at home brings in a whole ass canvas. I'm like, what's this? He was like, I'm gonna do a painting, I'm gonna do a big ass painting.

SPEAKER_02 42:56

I'm like, really thrilled.

SPEAKER_05 42:59

Like, of what? I kind of want to do like a dark angel, and I'm like, let's go, dark angel. Let's fucking get it. And the next thing you know, he's taking risks. Now, risks create change. So, what's happening here now is this kid is like, maybe I want to make like a good angel and a bad angel. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. And maybe I want to have them like holding a baby, but maybe I want the baby to be like beautiful, and I'm like, okay, go on. And before you know it, I see a guy starting to embrace a different narrative. All of a sudden, the class is coming around him going, Tucker.

SPEAKER_02 43:52

Um But anyway, you know.

SPEAKER_05 44:08

That's amazing. And he's going, Show, you guys are just saying that. They're like, no, like dead ass. That's like fucking sick. Right?

SPEAKER_03 44:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 44:16

So so in that environment, what you heard, I told it fun, but what you heard, what you heard was validation leads to motivation. Motivation leads to higher confidence. Confidence leads to risk, not only taking, but seeking. Like me, when I take my Jeep out to somewhere I know I don't belong by myself. You know, and I'm fucking the dude free soloing, Alex Honnell free soloing Taipei 101. Like risk seeking, and risk seeking leads to change. And Charles, here's the money chat. Change creates success. I want to be really careful with the language. Change creates creates success. So if you're afraid of your creative side, you're afraid of your feminine side. Because all throughout history, the muse is always female. Always. Absolutely. Now, boom, TED Talk. What do you got?

unknown 45:21

What do you got?

SPEAKER_03 45:23

That was so good. No, I absolutely love how you carved that path out because I do. I'm so familiar with the the downward fall to failure, and it makes perfect sense of the the upward dig to you know the climb to success. Like I've got real experience with both. I'll tell you, I and I'm gonna tell you just about how big a dork I am. So I was playing uh Call of Duty the other night, right? So I like I and my wife plays with me, which is the coolest fucking thing ever, right? The fact that I married a woman who will play Call of Duty with me is the coolest freaking thing in the world. I mean, absolutely, like yeah, yeah. Uh we're we're done now. Y'all, everybody can just call me the one, right? Like it was so she's not playing with me at this point. Yeah, yeah. I'm playing, right? And I've I'm in a lobby with uh three other we're playing Warzone, which is like you're on a team of four. And I get in there, and it's these three other young guys. One's in high school, two are just barely in college, right? And they're all friends. They're joking around and they're talking, and you can tell one's a little high, and you know, one's talking about his bottle and you know, these things. And so I'm laughing and I'm joking, and I'm not judging, right? So just step number one, I'm just validating these guys, right?

SPEAKER_04 46:49

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 46:50

Just connecting with them and building them up as we're playing this game, right? And and through that, all of a sudden they kind of heard a little bit about what I do, and and and they were like, Man, you could be a freaking coach. This is awesome, Charles. I was like, Well, actually, yeah, but funny that right, and so I tell them, right? Well, and the next thing they start going, really? And here comes the motivation. They start asking me questions. They're like, Well, hey, dude, I'm kind of I'm kind of dealing with this. Like, what do you think about right? And you know, what's what do I need? I'm single, like, what should I be doing right now? Right, and they start asking me these questions, and so I start being able to kind of pour into them a little bit, and then from there, the next thing that happens is they start wanting to take a risk, right? And they're like, hey, I got an idea, all right? We'll bet on the game, right? If we lose, you guys got to start 90 days of personal development. You gotta work out every single day, and you've got to read out of a book that's good for you every single day.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

They're like, fucking bet, let's go, boy. All of a sudden they got some confidence, right? They're like, Oh, it's sweet, hell yeah, like one's drunk, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_03 48:08

They're like, Yeah, hell yeah, dude, let's do this, man. And so sure enough, we lose that game. I'm not gonna say I tanked it, but you know, whatever. So we lose the game, and they're like, okay, bet, dude, I'm gonna do it, man. And sure enough, these guys have they've gotten my Instagram. I've been following them, keeping up with them, man. And they have been doing this 90 days of pouring into themselves and investing in themselves, dude, consistently, right? And it's starting to be a change. One of them's like, hey, dude, I haven't, I just I figured I'm working out and I'm reading anyway, so I just stopped drinking as well. You know what I mean? And it's like it's the coolest thing. Men need so little, and if you just give them some validation and some permission to be okay and be who they are, you can start this rise up this ladder, man. Like I was thinking about as you were talking about the failure side of this and how real it was with my story, because that's exactly what happened, right? I started and broke promises to myself, right? And then found myself in a place where I showed so little self-control, right? Because the rage turned inwards, busted out into drugs and violence, and I made a fucking mess of it. So I could no longer trust myself, and I just turned the rage inwards. Yep. And then I got fucking, I went the other direction. I went super depressed, locked myself indoors, right? And then before I knew it, I was scared to make a decision about anything because I didn't trust me because I broke every fucking promise I ever made to myself. I wasn't gonna raise my voice again at her. I wasn't gonna fucking go get high again, right? I wasn't gonna fucking fight this guy. Like it was, and I just I got to a point where I had no confidence that I had the ability to stick to anything that I wanted to do.

SPEAKER_02 50:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:13

Right?

SPEAKER_02 50:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:15

And then so from there, what did I do? I I basically just resolved to like, okay, this is I