Are you driven by fear?

 

We all feel fear, but rarely do we recognise how our fears drive our actions.

Most men who speak with us about coaching on our ‘Authentic Dating Success’ coaching program, seek a relationship & intimacy not because they are driven by the love of the idea of being in a relationship but because they fear being lonely and believe that being in a relationship will rid them of their loneliness and give them a sense of fulfillment.

The problem with pursuing your goals in life, being driven from fear & lack, is that you inevitably end up banging your head against a wall constantly feeling like the critical piece needed to achieve your goal, is missing from who you are as a man e.g. You believe you need more confidence/money/muscles/car before you can attract a woman.

And yet, you probably know of many men who have created relationships and lifestyles you wish to have despite being lesser men in your eyes. For example, you might think: 

“How the fuck did Mark get a girlfriend when he’s struggling with money/ looks/ muscles?? I have money/ looks/ muscles and I am still single.. it doesn’t any make sense - there must be something wrong with me”

The trick you don’t see though is that ‘Mark’ (just a name I made up for purposes of illustrating this point), is in a relationship in spite of his inherent lack of money/car/house/muscles.

Let’s take a deeper look at this - A key step in our Authentic Dating Success coaching program, is looking under the hood of a man’s outer appearance. Men who come to us struggling to create passionate relationships can often have it all: the house, business and a good physique. 

So what’s going on - why can’t they create the relationship they desire?

1.  Your ego story

When we look under the hood what we find is a man’s ‘ego story’. We all have an ego story. It’s the story of your life.

Your ego story, began when you were only a toddler around 4-5 years old. By then you have formed a specific core belief about the world based on your experiences of your parents & upbringing which define how you fit into the world and most critically how you must act in order to survive in the world.

Generic Core Belief: “I’m inherently vulnerable & exposed - therefore how do I survive this shit?”

From that 5-year-old point onwards, your life is based on an idea that if you are to get what you want - then you must first resolve the core belief of your ego story. And you begin living in unconscious anxiety, that if you don’t act in accordance with your survival instinct then you will perish. Literally!

For many men, and most likely you, your survival is connected to your performance in life. The more ‘performant’ you can be - the better you appear and the more chances of survival and sex.

And so begins the pursuit of getting ‘things’ such as money, house & muscles as prerequisites for having a relationship or feeling confident as a man.

Your ego story is narrated by a critical voice that persists in your head and stresses the importance of getting things or fixing what’s wrong with you - in order to progress in life. With most people relating to this critical voice as part of their own thoughts & personality.

I bet that voice is speaking to you right now. Perhaps disagreeing with this blog post and saying: “this blog is bullshit, I need more confidence or I’ll never get a girl because blah blah blah”

2. Naming the voice “Shook Man”

I realised that by giving the critical voice a name, the critical voice became separate from me and easier to deal with.

So I attributed a name and character to this critical voice in our heads (yes I have one too): I call him ‘Shook Man’.
Shook Man, is the critical voice of your ego. He knows all the things that you feel guilty or ashamed about and all that you wish to keep hidden from others. Shook Man, works tirelessly to ensure that you don’t ever embarrass or bring shame upon yourself.

Shook Man, always wants to keep you ‘emotionally safe’. In that regard, Shook Man is very helpful in aiding you to survive the world. Except that, in life, always being emotionally safe and avoiding any risk of shame is not the best way to live nor achieve what we truly desire.

Being emotionally safe is perhaps the best way of never making any progress ever! Avoiding, hurt, pain, shame, embarrassment and even anger, can result in you living a very pitiful existence - for, only if we accept these inevitable feelings in life - can we expose ourselves vulnerably to the tumultuous world of relationships. It’s unreasonable to expect otherwise given rejection and humiliation are a part of life and love.

Therefore, what most people do is try to appease the critical voice of Shook Man, with strategies to fix themselves in the areas that are lacking - this results in the ‘banging-your-head-against-a-wall scenario that I painted at the start of this article because you cannot fix your core story nor rid yourself of your critical Shook Man voice. (You may have already noticed this fact - Shook Man always has something to say!)

The ego story and critical voice of Shook Man are heavily ingrained in your being. It is inherently part of who you are and well-formed patterns of behaviour. It’s your default mode and gives you a sense of who you are and how to be.

3. Overcoming Shook Man

The good news is that you don’t have to rid yourself of this voice! The answer to overcoming your ego story and Shook Man is not by getting rid of him but by pacifying Shook Man by discovering and connecting to what you’d truly love to create in your life and focus your attention on that instead.

Doing this switches your focus from your fears to what you love. The core of our Authentic Dating Success coaching program is to guide men to discover what they would truly love in their life. We teach men how to uncover their ego story & suspend the fears that hold them back, and instead to connect to what they would really love in life. If that’s a relationship - then they become crystal clear that is what they’d truly love and being driven by that emotion they become inspired by the actions to take to create a relationship. 

Men stop avoiding what they fear and run towards what they love.

Most men never allow themselves to consider what they’d love in life. They’re too busy trying to fix themselves first before they allow themselves the foolish notion of having what they would love - which is a big mistake.

Every action you take in life is driven by your emotions and when you act from love - you focus on the higher emotion of love over the lower emotion of fear - and you are able to make magic happen - and create the results you want in life -  whilst already feeling whole and fulfilled - and without having to ‘have’ things or ‘fix’ yourself first.

  • To learn more about our Authentic Dating Success coaching program email us: hello@authenticdatingseries.com

 
Samantha Beneke