To some extent, we can blame evolution.

Our bodies are regulated by the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. As everyone learned in 9th grade biology, the parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for your bodily functions when you’re at rest. You don’t need will power to breath, have a beating heart, or digest food. The parasympathetic nervous system puts us into “chill” mode.

Our sympathetic are responsible for the fight-or-flight response and give us huge doses of adrenaline. If you heard a gun shot outside, your body would automatically give you a huge dose of epinephrine, norepinephrine. Your heart rate would skyrocket, your body would release glucose for fuel, and you’d be ready to move – to fight or to flee.

In other words, our bodies are evolved to help us avoid dying and to conserve energy. Our bodies are not evolved to drive us to accomplish great things.

Everyone has had to overcome some huge life crisis. We may smirk at a high school kid being emo about “having his heart broken,” but when you put yourself into the shoes of a teenager, you remember how awful all that lovey-dovey shit was.

I would laugh at a guy with approach anxiety, and that would be unfair. There was a time when fear controlled my life, too. I am unsympathetic to the plight of newbies only because I live in denial of my former, weaker, self. It is a character flaw that I am working on.

When life gets really bad, we find a way to overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable. We find a way to make things happen. Yet we make thing happen only when life forces us to.

Think about your last life crisis. You probably dealt with some huge problems. Your body became very stressed. You felt hopeless. Then somehow you were able to solve the problem. You survived.

But you didn’t rush to that crisis, did you? Instead it was thrust upon you. You didn’t have a choice. You had to either survive or die. You really didn’t have a choice.

After surviving, you probably did what everyone else does. It’s what society tells us to do. You went back to your normal life and waited for time to heal your wounds.

You did not take the resolve and fortitude you found deep within yourself and apply it to something else.

You didn’t say, “Wow. I never thought I’d be able to solve that problem. Now that life is back to normal, I am going to use those same skills to take myself from a state of mediocrity to a state of excellence.”

There are undoubtedly areas of your life that need work. You may suck at something and want to improve. Or you may be “good enough” but know you can become excellent.

If I put a gun to your head, could you accomplish your goals? Would you do something that you’ve been putting off? If I put a gun to your head, would anything stand between your current mediocre self and your excellent self?

What would happen to your life if you treated being mediocre not as something you can live with, but as a crisis that must be survived?

The post Treat Mediocrity as a Crisis appeared first on Danger & Play.

Channeling Ralph Waldo Emerson, Baldwin begins:

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.  The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.  To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.  But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.  What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.

Anyone who doubts that men are oppressed in America should read his excellent essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” and substitute “men” “for Negro.”

Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them -  I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal.  I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him.  I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it.  And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth.  I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect.

Real talk.

Read more: “A Talk to Teachers.”

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A good physique is built through progressive overload and the SAID principle. Your body will make specific adaptations to imposed demands. To make progress you must impose greater demands on your body. After several months or years (depending up your genetic pre-disposition to muscle gain and your steroid usage), you’ll have a big and fit enough body that lets people know you lift without your having to tell them all of the time.

(This is CrossFit, not Body of a Spartan)

Progress is hard. The body is lazy. Your body doesn’t want greater demands imposed upon it, as the body is designed to preserve energy rather than expend it.

Getting big and fit requires mental discipline and fortitude. Beat your log book. Add more weight (or reps, or time under tension, or set) every workout session.

Yet it’s also fundamental to strength training and bodybuilding that gains are non-linear. You may be stuck at the same bodyweight for months. Suddenly you’ll gain 8 pounds in a week. Suddenly you’re adding more weight to the bar each time you train. No one knows why you can do everything right while making zero progress and then suddenly, like magic, you break through a plateau..

Thus training programs that have a pre-defined set or rep scheme ignore real life – which can lead to injuries.

How many guys get injured doing CrossFit and Starting Strength and other training programs that have unforgiving set and rep schemes? Most, right? (Meanwhile, I haven’t been out of the gym due to an injury in over 5 years.)

No strength coach will take personal responsibility for your injuries. It’s never the program’s fault that you tweaked your back and missed eight weeks in the gym. Even though the program said you had to do 5 reps that day, it was your fault for using improper form to grind out your last rep.

Sometimes you’re King Kong and sometimes your mom is sick, you have finals, you’re working long hours, your kid kept you up all night, or you’re getting divorced. Life happens.

Yes, you have to train with intensity. No, you can’t be emo and let your moods dictate your training sessions. However, stress takes a physiological toll on your body. If your life is stressed you need to get in and get out. Just show up, keep your gains, don’t get injured, and live to fight another day.

After all, a physique is built over several years. You simply cannot afford to miss weeks at at time because of injuries caused by blindly following some program. You need to lay out the road to Rome brick by brick, training session by training session.

Victor’s program is practical and realistic. He doesn’t tell you that you must do 5 sets of 5 on Monday using 85% of your squat max or anything like that.

His program is also based on basic, compound movements. At the gym I see guys who never make any progress, even though they show up regularly. They can be found doing triceps pushdowns and lat pull downs. Most guys have no business doing any isolation exercise.

As a generation, we don’t live in touch with our bodies. We live on smart phones and computers. The only mind-muscle connection we have is between our eye balls, ADHD brains, and fingers.

The muscular mind-muscle connection is built from doing dead lifts, squats, shoulder presses, and other movements that strengthen the entire structural integrity of the body. Full body movements wake up the body and get a man in touch with his true inner being.

Body of a Spartan also covers diet and cardio. He doesn’t go into great detail because unless you’re trying to get super ripped or something, diet and cardio are really easy. (If you’re trying to get below 10% body fat, you’d need a book longer than Body of a Spartan just to cover that subject.)

Obviously if you’re one of the bigger guys in the gym, Body of Spartan may not be for you, although friend who has been training for a long time said, “Even though this is stuff I already know, it has a good tone and motivates you to train harder in the gym.”

I would have been glad to have found Body of a Spartan when I first started training. It would have saved me a lot of injuries that were due by listening to some guru tell me that I should be able to add weight to the bar each training session. I missed a lot of training sessions in my 20s and those sessions are something you can never get back.

By the way, I didn’t reach out to Victor to set up an affiliate agreement or anything. I purchased a copy to review. I only recommend that you guys buy things that I’d personally shell money out for. It is possible, even in the modern world, to market while maintaining your integrity.

If you’re still a beginner or intermediate lifter, it’s an excellent choice and I highly recommend it. Outside of elite powerlifters or bodybuilders, training should be basic. Grab some weight, train with intensity, and good things will happen. Body of a Spartan is the basic solution most guys have been looking for.

Read more: Buy Body of a Spartan here.

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What went wrong? How could I be such a failure? It didn’t make much sense to me until one chance conversation changed everything.

“Line up on the right hand side, next to the wall,” the ticket guy at a local concert exclaimed. I felt the staff was being a bit oppressive and said, “Man, this reminds me of the time I was in jail!”

Two girls looked back and smiled. I had never seen a girl’s eyes light up so brightly. “Oooooh, you’ve been in jail,” the blonde one asked.

Once we got inside, I hit the two friends up. I told them that I had been in jail and they had never been so impressed. The brunette squeezed my arm, signaling to the blonde that she had chosen me.

I talked to the brunette for a while. She wasn’t some trailer trash girl who had been raped by an uncle and thus bore an attraction for bad boys. She was well-travelled, had a six-figure job, and her brother worked for a national law firm. She was, as far as chicks go, just a “regular,” “normal” and “cool” girl.

Yet the only reason we hooked up that night was because I had been to jail.

Can I talk to you about jail for a second?

Going to jail is not fucking cool at all. If you’re arrested while driving, your car will be impounded. When you get out, you’re going to have to track down your car and pay close to a grand (in cash; those impound lots don’t take checks or credit cards). I was arrested while at work. That is every bit as awkward as you’d think.

You walk into a holding cell with a bunch of filthy meth heads and scum bags. If you’re lucky, the jailers hand you a brown paper bag containing a sandwich – two slices of white bread with a piece of proceeded “meat” in between.

You’re stripped searched. You’ll bend over and spread your ass cheeks while another man looks inside to see if you’re smuggling drugs or cell phones in your anal cavity.

You’ll share a cell with another man. This means listening to him breath, snore, and take a shit in the middle of the night.

My cell mate was an obese trucker who had been arrested for (I assume) sex with a child. Fyodor Dostoevsky was right: Men have a need to confess. “I really fucked up this time,” he said as a way of opening a conversation with me. I put on my Russian serial killer face and looked right through him.

(I had requested solitary confinement, as going insane alone in “the hole” would be far preferable to listening to a child molester put “Hersey squirts” into the toilet.)

If the charges are serious, you’ll need to raise substantial cash to get bailed out. If you’re younger, this means a call to dad and mom or grandma and grandpa. You’re making collect calls to various people to get someone to get your grandparents to Western Union them cash. Now those who love you the most are sick with worry.

So, like I said, there is nothing cool about being in jail.

Yet being in jail changed my game forever.

On dates I no longer asked girls what they were interested in. I didn’t talk about my hobbies or the last book I read. I didn’t talk about my life story – which is actually pretty interesting.

On dates, I didn’t seek intimacy or try creating a connection by seeing if we had shared interests or values.

I just stayed in shaped, dressed nicely, nodded my head, smiled occasionally and talked about – nothing, stupidity, and bullshit.

Suddenly I was able to go from never seeing a girl after a date to often banging her the same night.

And that’s how I know women are crazy.

The post That’s When I Knew They Were Crazy appeared first on Danger & Play.

About 2 years ago I watched this fascinating video on nutrition and then bought the book: Minding My Mitochondria 2nd Edition: How I overcame secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) and got out of my wheelchair.

(I realize a woman is speaking in this video. Who says we are not inclusive?)

The speaker is big on beef liver and in her book she suggests we all eat it once a week.

Now the editor-in-chief of T-Mag, TC Luoma, has joined the party:

Look at this comparison between the Vitamin C content of 100 grams of apple, 100 grams of carrots, 100 grams of red meat, and 100 grams of beef liver.

The apple has 7.0 grams of Vitamin C, the carrots have 6.0 grams, the red meat has 0 grams, and the beef liver has 27.0 grams.

Let’s do the same thing with Vitamin B12.

The apple has no measurable B12 and neither do the carrots. The red meat has 1.84 mcg., but the beef liver has 111.3 mcg.

It’s no contest.

And it’s not much different when you look at other nutrients like phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc, copper, Vitamins A, D, and E, thiamin, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, folic acid, biotin, and Vitamin B6 – beef liver beats them all almost every time.

(Victor Pride at Bold & Determined is also big on beef liver. I’ll write more in my forthcoming review of his book, Body of a Spartan.)

A cow’s liver, just like your own liver, detoxifies the cow’s body. This means you want to eat the highest quality beef liver available. Ideally you’d eat grass-fed beef liver.

You can also order liver pills:

• Nature’s Life Beef Liver, Defatted & Dessicated, 1500 Mg, 100 Tablets,
• Universal Uni-Liver Tablets, 500-Count Bottles

Liver doesn’t taste nearly as bad as you’d think. Pan fry it coconut, add some some onions, and enjoy. Eat liver once a week. Or pop some liver pills.

Either way, organ meat should become part of your diet.

Read next: Juicing.

The post Should We All Be Eating Beef Liver? appeared first on Danger & Play.

1. Guys Take Steroids to Train Harder.

Geeks with 13″ arms like to shit all over the Internet that using anabolic steroids is “cheating” and “the easy way out.” The exact opposite is true.

Have you ever had a workout where all you could do is stare into outer space for a few minutes, like you were the rape victim in Guns N Roses Appetite for Destruction comic?

No, of course you wouldn’t. You’re the fucking geek I see at the gym who never makes any progress. You don’t break a sweat. You wear Vibram 5 Finger shoes and the only reason anyone knows you go to the gym is because you talk about it non-stop. People sure as hell can’t tell you train because of the space you occupy.

Anyhow, it may take several days to recover from such a workout. Most guys can’t train legs more than once every 5-7 days.

Steroids shorten recovery time. This means you can brutalize your body an extra workout or two each week. In other words, you can inflict more pain on yourself more frequently.

How is that taking the easy way out?

2. Steroids Make Your Dick Bigger.

Geeks say, “Steroids shrink your dick!” Most guys who run gear use a lot of testosterone. Testosterone is the base of a steroid cycle and some would say that without test, you’re not even on a cycle.

Remember when you hit puberty and suddenly sprang random erections in class? That’s because of – you ignorant, scientifically-illiterate fucks – testosterone.

How is adding testosterone going to lower a man’s sex drive or shrink his dick? Seriously. Think.

It is true that the testes are responsible for producing testosterone and that in the presences of exogenous testosterone, the testes stop working. In other words, the balls shrink.

So what? If you actually have quads, having huge balls hang down is a pain the ass. All it does it catch onto the exercise bike when you’re doing cardio. The ball sack is also not something women find attractive.

Smaller balls means your sack isn’t hanging down to your knees looking ugly and just being a pain in the ass.

3. Steroids Don’t Kill Anyone.

(This man survived steroids to become a movie star, make around $500 million, become governor, and he’s still alive at 65.)

Pumping Iron came out in the 1970s. None of those bodybuilders – who were all using healthy amounts of gear – died from steroid use. I even think all of the cast members are still alive. Arnold had his heart valve replaced due a genetic heart defect. I knew a guy in high school who had the same heart defect.

Lou Ferrigno can still be spotted at Gold’s in Venice.

(This man is 61 years old. What’s your excuse for being small?)

Lyle Alzado lied when he blamed his brain tumor on anabolic steroids. That claim was proven false.

There’s a list of dead pro wrestlers that circles around as evidence that steroids will kill you. Geeks say, “Pro wresters user steroids! They died! Steroids are killers!”

Do you retards know how pro wrestlers live? Do you know that they pop narcotics and pain killers like life savers? Or that wrestlers suffer hundreds of microconcussions a year?

Junior Seau and other pro footballers have begun killing themselves by putting a gun shot into their hearts. This preserves their brains.

Again, of course you don’t. You are scientifically illiterate fucks who also look like little fucking geeks that get sand tossed in their face.

4. Being Anti-Steroids Makes You a Feminist.

The media has waged a war against masculinity. All things male are evil and all things female are good. Why do you receive your information from a feminist-controlled media?

The media wants you to have less testosterone, so you will be a more docile slave. When you attack anabolic steroids, you act as a shill for feminism.

5. You’re a Scientifically Ignorant Fuck.

Anabolic steroids have been widely studied. There are hundreds if not thousands of published studies. The Internet is a large place. Sit down, shut up, and read a book or something.

(One of the best current mainstream books on anabolic steroids.)

The side effects of nearly ever anabolic steroid can be mitigated through science. If a guy doesn’t want his testes to shrink, he can run HCG. If he is losing his hair, he can mitigate that in many ways.

The most critical, scientific minds in the world can be found on steroid message boards.

Indeed, I’ve seen emails from doctors running some of the biggest clinics in the world asking “bros” for advice on how to treat patients.

6. You Don’t Have to Be a Geek.

Being a geek is a choice. It’s a choice you make every time you say stupid shit and have pathetic workouts and wear Vibram 5 Finger shoes.

Stop reading feminist-controlled media sites, start thinking for yourselves, and stop posting bullshit about steroids.

Maybe you’ll learn something that will allow you to actually look like you’ve touched a weight in your life.

Because doesn’t it get old having to tell people about your “killer workouts” because it’s not obvious from looking at you that you’ve put in any serious time or effort in the gym?

Don’t miss: The He Hormone.

The post Things Internet Geeks Don’t Know About Anabolic Steroids appeared first on Danger & Play.

We had been discussing the change in body shape of women on the West Coast. Girls aren’t necessarily fat, but you see a lot of 5s who would be 7s (and 8s when done up for the clubs) if they lost 20 or 30 pounds.

L.A. women had been praised in songs such as Bob Seger’s Hollywood Nights, David Lee Roth’s “California Girls,” and even The Doors’ “L.A. Woman.”

Los Angeles was the city of angels and when guys complained about the decline in quality of American women, I couldn’t relate. As Horace Greely said in 1865, “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

My philosophy has always been to change yourself or change your environment. I grew up in an oppressive, depressing shit hole area. I could either have become a loser and accepted my environment or I could have moved. I left and never looked back.

I only leave home when a loved one is about to die. I tell my family that I’ll put them up in a hotel and buy tickets, but I’m not coming home to visit. It’s been four years since I’ve returned to that demoralizing, depressing place.

Now we aren’t even safe in the West Coast. The same things guys in the rest of the country have complained about have come to California.

Going out isn’t even fun anymore. It’s cool to hang out with your friends, but meeting women is a rat race. Even a top-tier guy is going to have a woman give him a smug look on her face that says, “Impress me.”

Impress her…Why?

As has been taught in every economics course since the beginning of time, “Incentives matter.” What’s the incentive? American women?

• They spit on the sidewalk.
• They spend hours watching reality television.
• They are loud and behave like black women you used to only see on World Star Hip Hip.
• They eat a poor quality diet and give off an almost sick odor caused by processed foods leaving their skin pores.
• They insist that men offer “intelligent conversation,” but they don’t even read anything other than US Weekly.
• They have nannys and house keepers, as they can’t keep a home or raise a child.
• They can’t cook.
• They can’t handle their liquor. It’s impossible to just go out and have a good time with a girl, as a meltdown is going to happen. A man must count his girl’s drinks and constantly be prepared to cut her off rather than just relax and have a good time.

What the fuck is happening to the United States of America?

What is even the point of going out anymore. Cock blocking has reached epic proportions. Until you have the girl in the cab, you’re never safe.

Now feminists might claim that girlfriends are looking out for one another. They are simply trying to prevent their friends from getting taken advantage of. Does that defense of cock blocking and playing mother hen hold water?

Think about it, men. What percentage of your  friends are inveterate players who want to simply use a girl and forget about her? 5%? 10%?

Most guys want to make a connection with a girl. Most men want to meet a decent girl to spend some time with. Many men (probably most men) actually want to meet The One to settle down with.

Some recent studies have shown that modern American men are highly interested in marriage, and that on average, men want to get married more than women do.

So it doesn’t make sense for girls to cock block and mother hen to protect them from dangerous wolves?

No, the mother hens and cock blockers share one thing in common. They are not just a few pounds overweight. They are fat.

As a man, the only way to consistently get laid is to make nice with revolting women who lack the self-discipline to stop eating.

Is it worth it?

That overlong introduction leads use to Roosh’s latest book, Why Can’t I Use a Smiley Face? (available here).

The title itself is a give-a-way to the problems facing American men.

Why can’t a guy just send a fucking text message to a girl without having to play games? Why can’t he say, “Fun meeting you, let’s hang out later. ”

I use emoticons when talking to my guy friends and no one mistakes me for a softie, beta, or closeted homosexual.

Yet using (or not using) a smiley face could completely end any chance at ever seeing a girl again. You have to be on your A-game at all times. (Again, why? See the list, above.)

Smiley Face is actually my favorite Roosh book. I’ve read it as, “Roosh grows up.” That may sound condensing at first, but it’s not. Consider his development, which is the same one many of us had. We were all once dorks. The difference is some of us go through that phase to become something better.

Like most American men, he thought that going to college, getting a degree, getting a good job, and being a solid guy was enough to meet women. If you read his own blog, you get the sense that he’s a nice guy. He would have been the kind of guy that we would have wanted our sisters to date.

Yet his vision of the world conflicted with his results. Women didn’t want to date men like him. He was outraged and angry at them.

But being angry at the world or being angry at women is sort of childish. If you’re born into the jungle, you can’t be angry at venomous snakes and rabid bats. That’s just your environment. Learn it, master yourself, and then master your environment.

If you don’t like the situation, change it or leave. None of us are going to single-handled change the U.S. Most “smart money” has an exist strategy. The U.S. is still a good place to earn some money, but it’s basically becoming a fucking dump.

(Think about this for a minute. How many of you ever heard someone say, “U.S.A.: Love it or leave it!” When you tell a mother fucker you’re about to leave, they look at little afraid. “Why not stay? You should try improving things rather than cut and run?!” Even die-hard patriots realize this place is becoming a fucking dump and the love-it-or-leave-it bravado is dying out.)

So he stopped complaining about his station in life, he found a way to earn money without having to kiss the ass of fat women in HR, and he went out into the world.

He came back for a visit and realized that the old cliche – “It’s a great place to visit but not a great place to live” – doesn’t even apply.

It will be fun to see Roosh’s later works.

You can tell from his postings on the forum and his Twitter that he’s a changed man. Some have complained that he is losing his “aw, schucks,” appeal.

He is trying to transition from everyman to overman and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Read more: Why Can’t I Use a Smiley Face?

The post Why Can’t I Use A Smiley Face? appeared first on Danger & Play.

In behavioral economics you often encounter the concept of loss aversion. For reasons probably having to deal with evolution (losing territory means losing status, which in the wild means you’re dead meat), we experience far great pain when losing something than we feel joy when gaining something.

Listen to Unleash the Power Within.

Consider that most of us have been in horrible relationships, had crappy jobs, and maybe even had a shitty self-outlook. Why not change? Changing means you’re losing something to gain something else. Logically you should want to change your pathetic self to become a more heroic self, but the fear of losing whatever little you have leads to inaction.

In order to get a person to change, it’s usually not enough to show a person what he will gain. People only generally change when they have hit rock bottom and fear losing more of their life’s savings, their friends or their sense of self.

Tony Robbins has found a way to work around the problem of loss aversion.

Not Changing Will Cost You

Although we don’t often think of it this way, our current body is borrowed from our future body. Someday the person you are today is going to get examined by the person who is 10, 20, or 30 years older. Your old man self will want to know you didn’t save for retirement, why you didn’t take care better of your knees, and why you didn’t experience more out of life when you had the energy. (Although memories are not substation for the present, one day all any of us will have are memories.)

What negative behaviors do you have today? What are those going to cost you in 5, 10, and 20 years?

Consider someone who is fat and eats a diet of processed foods. His lifestyle is going to cost him opportunities for sex. It’s going to cost him bodily decay. It’s going to make him miss out on the ability to feel good when he is older. The fat person will have missed out on so much because of his negative behaviors. Not changing is costly.

Or maybe you’re mean to your wife (or ex-wife). That’s going to cost you intimacy. It’s also going to sour any relationship you might have had with your children. Children who grow into adults don’t love a man who mentally or physically abuses their mother.

Or maybe you won’t take any business risks. People are terrified of risk. (“What if I fail,” is loss aversion causing you to doubt yourself.) Yet what’s the alternative – working for the man like a corporate slave your whole life, having to call in sick to some superior when you’re not going to be at the office, wondering if you’re breaking some HR rule, censoring yourself for fear of losing your job?

Through visualization techniques (you need to attend the seminar to experience the concepts fully), you’re forced to be confronted with everything your negative behaviors will have cost you. Since we usually don’t respond to rewards but instead seek to avoid punishment, these techniques are a breakthrough for most.

Limiting Beliefs

“A belief is something about the world that you believe to be true.” Limiting beliefs are a way to protect ourselves from taking any risk. We accept limiting beliefs in order to avoid our own weaknesses and insecurities. They allow us to pretend we are not cowards.

How many men, when receiving obvious buying signals from a woman, will say, “Oh, she’s not looking at me?” Men tell themselves that rather than take a risk of getting reject. (That’s loss aversion, yet again.)

A short man will conclude that men under 6 foot are unable to date attractive women. By accepting this belief he is freed from doing the hard work of approaching and meeting women.

Nearly all limiting beliefs take on a certain form: ”I’m not supposed to be x.” Rather than undertake the extremely hard work most of us require in order to achieve x, we use our limiting belief as a cop out. “I’m just not designed that way.” That gives us an excuse to give up, which is easy.

If men who claim they can’t be x spent as much time working through cognitive behavioral therapy work book as they do brooding over their problems, they would find x. But that’s hard as fuck. No thanks. I’m gonna sit here and feel sorry for myself!

My own personal limiting belief is that I’m just a low energy, naturally introverted guy.

After outlining your limiting beliefs, you next need to ask what those beliefs are costing you.

Since I was 14 people told me I could start a cult. I have natural charisma. I would be much richer if instead of avoiding human interaction I embraced it. My limiting belief has cost me a lot of money and opportunities.

Most of the time our limiting beliefs are false. Am I naturally low energy or just childish? A little kid says, “I don’t want to do that,” based on nothing more than his transient feeling or mood. Isn’t it pathetic and unmanly to be a petulant child who won’t do anything he doesn’t want to do? Most of the time we just reel against the unfamiliar. It’s not that we wouldn’t enjoy the experience. It’s that we’re being bratty punks who should be smacked in the mouth.

I am not “naturally” low energy. I’m just a childish whiner who gets into moods and then lets my moods control me. That is absolutely revolting and henceforth unacceptable.

Even when a limiting belief is not false, there’s no need for it to rule you. So what if guys who are taller meet more women. That doesn’t mean no attractive women will like a guy like you. You will have to work harder than others, but if you work hard enough, you will realize that your limiting belief is actually false.

Wrapping Up

Robbins is known as a “motivational speaker” and “positive thinker.” Bullshit.  He forces you to look at the negative garbage that’s deep within your unconscious. Most people lack the courage to attend a seminar and work through their issues.

He is a positive thinker in the sense that he believes all of us have far more potential than we realize. He believes if we change our behavior and destroy our limiting beliefs, it will be possible for us to achieve great things.

Is he right? I certainly think so. Long before knowing anything about Robbins, I was able to overcome some traumatic experiences by welcoming pain.

What if instead of fearing pain like a little bitch and crying about every stupid problem you have, you told yourself, “Growth requires pain.”  That is the moral of Conan the Barbarian and is the answer to the Riddle of Steel.

Your behaviors would immediately change, wouldn’t they? Instead of being a weak loser who continued repeating the same patterns of behavior that have led to the rut you’re in, you’d change your behaviors.

After changing your behaviors, you’d notice something “magical” happening. Suddenly your very mood would change.

While a lot of guys think they are “too cool” for Tony Robbins, the truth is that most guys aren’t man enough to examine the weaknesses within themselves and to take immediate and radical action to change their lives.

In America everyone wants to be a birthday boy at his very own pity party.

My view has always been different. You are the lowest life form of a man if you live in a condition worthy of pity.. Dogs left by their owners in animal shelters are pitiable. Children who are abused are pitiable. They lack the ability to change their environments and my heart truly feels for them.

Are you a stray dog who is at the shelter after your owner’s house was foreclosed? Do you feel anxious and abandoned while you sleep on a stone concrete floor rather than on a comfortable dog bed or in a bed with your owner? Are you nothing more than a child who hides after his alcoholic father has had too much to drink? Is that really who you are?

How can you look yourself in the mirror as a man when others have pity for you? How can you actively seek out pity and then call yourself a man?

Robbins offers many useful strategies and in the future I likely won’t allow anyone to complain about anything unless they’ve gone to one of his seminars.

The irony is that most men think they are “too fucking cool” to attend a Tony Robbins seminar. Yet moping around the house is cool? Crying and screaming and having childish outbursts about stupid shit is cool?

Maybe my definition of cool differs from some, but I fail to see how wallowing in self-misery is somehow more cool than taking action to change your life.

Call me uncool if you like, but I’m a believer. Unleash the Power Within was my first Tony Robbins seminar and it won’t be my last. I was able to begin understanding how negative behavior patterns have cost me success and pleasures.

The work has just begun. I welcome the new challenge.

Whether you decide to continue feeling sorry for yourself or changing your life is, of course, up to you.

Read more: Unleash the Power Within.

The post Unleash the Power Within Seminar Review: Day 3 appeared first on Danger & Play.

The fire walk wasn’t a fear I needed to overcome. It’s basically impossible to get burned during the fire walk unless you make a mistake. You know what’s terrifying? 20 Rep Squats – because you know that’s going to hurt, badly, and that you might pass out, might puke, and that your legs will be sore for days afterward. I stayed for the walk because it was part of the experience.

I’m a believer in, “Trust the process.” If you’re going to a seminar, trust the process. If you don’t like it later, no big deal. You don’t have to leave with the process. But listen to what you are told and do what you are told for a few hours or days.

The walk was meh for me, but people were super excited.

Day 2 began with the day’s speaker, a Tony Robbins’ protégé, opening with, “Good morning fire walkers!” The crowd erupted with cheers. People were feeling it. Good for them.

Since Robbins can’t talk for 4 days straight, he has a stand-in. During Day 2, his long-time associate leads the group through the exercises in the workbooks. Tony Robbins also appears via a pre-recorded lecture.

The Day 2 material was more practical. Day 1 was about discovering your fears, conquering your fears, and changing your state. Day 2 was about connecting with others.

During Day 2 we performed numerous mirroring exercises and learned about rapport. This stuff was very basic to me. However, the exercises were a powerful reminder of this: If you go into an interaction with the mindset (or state, see Day 1′s write-up) that you will connect with this person, your entire demeanor changes. Your tone of voice is stronger. Your words are more pronounced. Your body language is stronger and your moves are more confident.

Rapport skills are like any other skill. If you don’t use them, you will lose them. Most guys in the game spend a lot of time trying to show disinterest to women. This can unfortunately harm a guy’s professional life since he takes that state into his office. What works for the game on American women is different from what works in the office – where eagerness is often rewarded.

Be mindful of those states. If you’re in a bad state, change it.

Day 2′s materials also included coverage of business development skills. The lectures were extremely useful. There was a blueprint for people building a business to follow that included a lot of things I had forgotten or overlooked.

During the business skills session, they also had us stop to think, “What is your x-factor?” That is, what makes you different from every other doctor, lawyer, accountant, insurance salesman, personal trainer, or investment banker?

Tony Robbins remains bearish on the overall economy and believes that only the exceptional will achieve good results. To become exceptional, you must discover your x-factor.

Day 2 was cool, although Day 3 was my favorite.  I’ll cover Day 3 within the next few days.

Read more: Unleash the Power Within Seminar Review: Day 1.

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