6

DISCOMFORT

The Fourth Principle of Perseverance

IT IS NOVEMBER IN BOISE, Idaho, and I am sitting on the training table in a cold, empty YMCA gym on day two of tryout week for the NBA minor leagues, where I am competing for the lowest-paid spot on the team. I arrive half an hour before everyone else. I sit on the table and take off my shoes and my socks, which peel off the bandages on my feet. I wince in pain as the torn callouses on the balls of my feet begin to bleed. Callouses that built up resistance over years of chafing and blistering of skin, through hundreds of pairs of shoes discarded when their rubber was spent. Callouses built by evolutionary design to make sure my skin didn’t flay again. Callouses that helped me walk, run, and sprint so many miles toward my dream—now being discarded like the many shoes before, done in by my current shoes that I wore the year before in Europe. Shoes that should have been discarded a long time ago but weren’t because I couldn’t afford a new pair until yesterday after practice, when I got $30 per diem meal money and used five of those dollars to buy ramen noodles and the other twenty-five to go to a discount shoe store and buy a new pair of basketball sneakers.

The callouses were worth far more than the most expensive shoes in the world. It was a heavy cost, but I would have paid even more if that was what it took. I would have endured any amount of discomfort in pursuit of my dream.

DEFINING DISCOMFORT

Discomfort is necessary to the New Alpha male. It pushes us to the brink or even beyond, toward complete breakdowns, the kind of breakdowns that lead to breakthroughs. In those breakthroughs, we find clarity.

Comfort is the space where all your senses are relaxed. Discomfort is the act of being in and navigating spaces beyond comfort, where your senses are no longer relaxed by the physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual comfort zones. Nothing new or mind-blowing there.

What is mind-blowing is that so many people want their dreams to come true yet are unwilling to endure discomfort. Discomfort is the wager, the risk we ante up in pursuit of our dreams and goals in this life. Growth does not happen if we are not stepping outside our comfort zones, if we are not wagering a risk.

Discomfort is also the emotional and spiritual strain of learning to hold ourselves accountable for all our actions, thoughts, and stories. It is learning to move through the world with integrity, owning all aspects of ourselves as we remain the same person in every room we walk into, knowing some may not like all that we are. Discomfort is choosing to step out of our own bubble to hold compassion for others, knowing the world is not all about us. All of the Seven Principles of Perseverance require great discomfort. They force us out of our comfort zones. And the New Alpha knows that is where the magic happens.

Everyone says they want the American Dream.

But what price are they willing to pay for it?

How uncomfortable are you willing to be to get what you want out of life?

How willing are you to fail?

Everyone wants success and the American Dream, but few are willing to pay the price for it: hard work, uncertainty, risk, setbacks, disappointment, heartbreak, and many other experiences that fall under the definition of discomfort.

We see people wanting to avoid discomfort in the massive consumerism of “shortcut” books, purporting to be self-help by allowing people to think that a few quick tricks or positive thoughts will radically change their lives.

People want it easy, not just for themselves but for their children, in their effort to shield them from the necessity of discomfort and potential disappointment. Helicopter parents, in their efforts to protect their children from heartbreak, are not developing a threshold in their children for the discomfort of dealing with the real world when they come of age. They are actually doing them a disservice.

We have become not only impatient with but also intolerant of the necessity for process. I was willing to toil in the NBA minor leagues, making $1,100 a month, in debt, living off of ramen noodles, playing through great stress and discomfort to chase my dream. It wasn’t always fun. It wasn’t always pretty.

Perfection is not pretty.

We have detoured in our assumption that in order to achieve perfection we must immediately be perfect. And so most of us give up way too early on our dreams, thinking talent is more important than hard work. On the contrary, hard work is the greatest talent of all. If everyone could work hard, they would.

Where there is no struggle, discomfort, setbacks, or resistance, we cannot grow. Perfection is the daily choice of pushing yourself, awkwardly, out of your comfort zone.

Perfection is the art of aligning with discomfort.

It takes a special combination of grit and insanity or even naiveté to live in the unknown, beyond our comfort zones, in pursuit of the dreams we say we want. I admit I am fortunate in that my threshold for discomfort is high, in that early on my mother pushed me outside of my comfort zones every day by making me wear hearing aids and go to speech therapy. That daily battle gave me a high tolerance for discomfort, learning that is where magic and growth happen.

Perfection is not pretty.

Are you willing to step beyond your comfort zone, not for a night but consistently, day in and day out for weeks, months, even years, not knowing where your next paycheck is going to come from? Are you willing to have people criticize and doubt you, even have some who want to see you fail?

How much discomfort are you willing to endure? How much instability are you willing to risk, to have your dreams come true?

UNDERDOGS

During the fourth quarter in a loud arena, everyone is deaf. And in the land of temporary deafness, the permanently deaf man is king.

But you have to play into the fourth quarter. Most people quit by halftime, as the discomfort is too much to bear. The underdogs who triumph, who inspire us, are the ones who are willing to do anything necessary to ascend and earn their place in history. Their desire to rise in their moment overcame the lure of staying in a comfort zone. As an underdog, if you hang around long enough, you stop being the underdog. But, you have to be willing to keep showing up. Half the battle is simply showing up, day in and day out, even if you have no idea when your moment will come.

This is what underdogs do. We stick around long enough and eventually the tables turn, at least for a moment. And then we seize the opportunity—but you have to play into the fourth quarter.

When I first got picked for the Idaho Stampede, it turned out I only made the team to be the media guy. You know, the guy who did the radio and TV interviews and also spoke to kids at schools. I was given the demeaning job, or so I thought at the time, of having to be the token guy at the end of the bench who had to go and do all of those things deemed beneath the other players.

It was a hit to my pride. I knew I could play ball and I was good at it, but my coach at the time didn’t see it the same way. There I was, sitting at the end of the bench, hungry, not playing for weeks on end, making meager pay, reading to kids at schools, saving whatever money I could to pay off medical bills from my knee surgery following my first year overseas. You can understand why I was so excited when we went on the road, because that meant $30 per diem meal money. I could have easily ended my discomfort and said, “To heck with this! I am better than this! I am going to go back to law school,” or something to that effect. Instead, I said this: “Fine, watch me. I am going to learn how to do a TV interview and radio interview. I am going to learn public speaking by talking to kids at these schools. I am going to learn these things so well that they will allow me to transition out of basketball and make more money than I ever did as a basketball player.” And I did.

If you are working a job you feel is beneath you, and you are being pigeonholed, take that opportunity as the underdog to learn everything there is to know about that job. And then everyone else’s job. When you are lurking beneath the radar, learn how to do those jobs so well that when you are promoted or start your own company, you know how to do those jobs better.

When people underestimate you, they are giving you the tactical advantage.

Later on in that Idaho Stampede season, the starting center broke his leg and the backup center got recalled to his NBA team, so by default I became the starter. In my first game as a starter on the road, I gave them thirty points and ten rebounds. I had known my opportunity would come if I stuck with it long enough, if I accepted a little discomfort. What kept me going through so much self-doubt was that I believed in the laws of physics—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And so, if I kept putting in . . . and putting in . . . the universe would return the energy and give me a shot. Maybe one shot. That was all. And so I was going to be prepared for it.

How was I able to play for forty straight minutes after riding the bench for so many weeks? I made practice time my game time. Instead of pouting during practice, I made sure I touched the line on every sprint and always got that extra stride in while running with teammates during drills. Even when my teammates were ahead of me for the fast-break layup and didn’t need my assistance to finish the play, I still ran with them, and even after they made the layup, I went one stride further and touched the baseline. Always the extra stride, so that if and when my number was called, I would be ready.

And my number was called. And I was ready.

For the rest of the season I averaged twenty-two points and thirteen rebounds a game.

To the basketball world, I came out of nowhere. Truth was, I was there the entire time; they simply chose not to see me. When they didn’t see me, I had the choice to either feel sorry for myself or use my discomfort to blindside them.

That is the thing about being an underdog—stick around long enough, the tables will turn, and you will for a moment be the one with the advantage, like me in the fourth quarter in the loud arena.

As an underdog, or someone who feels they are undervalued or underestimated, you must always be willing to think outside of the box. You must learn to be comfortable with discomfort.

You must be able to ask yourself:

How much discomfort am I willing to endure as I prepare and wait for my moment?

How willing am I to take risks?

Am I willing to step out on my own, if the moment calls for it?

Everyone says they want the American Dream, but few are willing to pay the heavy price of uncertainty. How willing are you to fail?

Instead of pouting, can I choose to see I have the tactical advantage when people underestimate me?

With my hearing loss and the daily discomfort of being made to wear my hearing aids, to learn to read lips and to speak, along with bullying and learning to rise through that, I developed not only a high threshold for discomfort but, more importantly, a high willingness to risk and fail. My willingness to fail and learn and get back up every time is what has set me apart from many other players. I am not afraid of failure. Failure to me means I am simply stepping out of my comfort zone.

I have failed so many times it would blow your mind. But every time I fail, I choose to get back up, one more time. Every time. It is my choice; it has always been my choice. The essence of perseverance is choice, and it is my choice to see with clarity that my worth is not attached to an outcome. It is always our choice if we are willing take full ownership of that truth and empower ourselves with the accountability of choice.

If so, then you won’t be an underdog for long.

The old, outdated alpha male believes he is entitled to success, because he is. He believes the American Dream is an automatic guarantee, and he will throw a temper tantrum and blame others—immigrants or women—if his reality doesn’t match his entitled expectations.

The New Alpha male does not believe he is entitled to anything. He understands the world owes him nothing except, again, his own self-respect. He has woken up from the old American story that one is automatically going to be successful because he is male, while understanding that the pursuit of the American Dream or any dream is possible. Furthermore, he understands that anything worth having, worth fighting for, will require discomfort.

A New Alpha male, at some point in his life, was, is, or will be an underdog.

Ask Yourself

On a scale of 1–10, how high would you rate your threshold for discomfort?

»Physical discomfort?

»Financial discomfort?

»Social discomfort?

»Lack of support from friends and family discomfort?

MANIFESTATION

Contrary to what many “shortcut” spiritual evangelists say in their selling of the “Law of Attraction,” you can’t just wish for a pony and expect a pony to magically appear. Same for a parking space. This dimension doesn’t work that way. It takes disappointment. It takes setbacks and heartbreaks. It takes discomfort in manifesting our dreams. It takes resistance to grow.

Manifestation is grit.

The Secret/Law of Attraction logic of setting intentions and never fighting or swimming upstream against resistance is flawed, if not completely devious. As a basketball player, if I had decided I wanted to have the best season of my life and didn’t do any training or conditioning to match that intention, I would have been wiped off the map. Resistance makes us stronger. There is a time and a place for “path of least resistance,” but it cannot be a mantra. Nature demands ebb and flow.

If you are in constant surrender mode, then you have not struggled, and thus you are not experiencing the true grace that comes in that alchemizing process of true surrender. Most people, especially those who “go with the flow” all the time, are usually just appropriating the word “surrender” to escape accountability, to avoid pain, heartache, and loss, which are all necessary experiences of life, as, again, a broken heart is arguably the most valuable thing in the world.

Runaway Law of Attraction propaganda keeps people stuck in the self-defeating logic of poverty shaming that positions God to be Santa Claus, blessing those who are the most spiritual. This has also enabled wealthy “influencers” to be exalted as paragons of virtue—for if they weren’t already so emotionally and intellectually brilliant, not to mention spiritual, how else could they have manifested all that abundance?

If anyone is telling you they can help you manifest your dreams/lead you to enlightenment and it will be simple so long as you follow their plan or system, run! You are talking to a charlatan who wants your money. And more likely than not, they are trying to manifest you as their first client to put into motion their delusion that they have magical manifesting powers.

Real manifestation requires grit and discomfort, not the bypassing of it.

INTIMACY

One of the most uncomfortable topics for a male to talk about, no matter how Alpha he is, is intimacy in relationships, be they professional, family, platonic, or romantic. That is because most of us don’t know what intimacy is. While we might think we do, intimacy has become misinterpreted by Hollywood and adopted by mainstream society to be nothing more than role-playing.

For many, role-playing is an unconscious expectation. Perhaps because a movie defined it when a man embarrassed himself in public to show the girl how much he loved her. Or your parents showed you that a woman is supposed to stay at home and be with the kids for a strong marriage. Many believe that as long as they play those roles, they will get the same outcome and intimacy as the movies or their parents. And in these roles, which we have been conditioned to play by our communities and culture, we have become enslaved to assumptions and unspoken contracts.

What is an unspoken contract? It’s a subconscious expectation that once you establish a relationship with someone, they are supposed to play a specific role that resembles what you witnessed in your conditioning and upbringing, giving you an often false sense of control and an ability to predict the outcome. It is a societal, familial, or romantic expectation, even though there is never a spoken agreement and almost no conscious awareness at all. Unspoken contracts are often unconscious transactional exchanges that offer us belonging, which we have mistaken for intimacy.

The most popular unspoken contract is that of the soul mate, in which so many people believe and project onto someone the burden of being able to magically read their minds, and thus they shouldn’t have to effectively communicate. “If you were my soul mate, you would just get me.” Having spent sixteen years in speech therapy, the ability to communicate is one of the things I am most grateful for, and yet so many people are looking for a soul mate they don’t have to have hard conversations with. Intimacy requires the discomfort of raw vulnerability and deep communication.

The default unspoken contract I projected was that I would always be the nice guy, and if I gave my partner everything she needed, she was supposed to always be happy. This was both illogical and completely irrational. While it may be perfectly functional at the global level—if you give someone what they want, they usually will smile and say thank you—it is devoid of true depth and intimacy at the personal level. If you are expecting someone in a close intimate relationship with you to always give you the same reaction every single time, you are not asking for intimacy, but rather for an employee. A job hires and pays you to play your role.

Yet we do the same thing at home, when we aren’t being paid to play cultural roles we believe are expected of us. We don’t work at our jobs for unconditional love. We work for money—to live, to eat, to support our family, in a clear transaction of our labor in exchange for pay. Yet we bring the same pattern of role-playing into our home life, believing that said role-playing will foster intimacy. All genders are equal perpetrators of such projection of expectations and can express disappointment—or worse, are mentally or physically abusive—when their expectations are not fulfilled.

While the cliché is that men fear intimacy, what we in fact fear is role-playing. We fear being an actor in someone’s story and world of expectations—stories and expectations that society, reality television, and movies have told us is intimacy. This role-playing, which says true love has to look a certain way, is, in fact, the opposite of intimacy, and can be claustrophobic or smothering—hence the fear of powerlessness. Who wants to play a role, to be an actor all the time?

Intimacy requires the discomfort of raw vulnerability.

Communication is a path to intimacy, but talking doesn’t always equate to communicating. The body will always tell you more. People’s energy will always tell you more. Good communication is not saying out loud that you expect your partner to know you well enough by now to discern your intentions and read your mind—that’s talking and projecting.

Projections and expectations are the bricks and mortar that build walls on a foundation of unspoken agreements, separating us from true intimacy. Our subconscious believes our tacit contracts will allow us to avoid heartbreak, when they actually cause them. I have found great wisdom from relationship experts like John Gottman (author of many books including The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work) and the related research and data available from the Gottman Institute, but I believe many people have begun to overcorrect in their attempt to quantify and predict human connection and romance in hopes of avoiding heartbreak, which is often our greatest teacher.

As a society we have come to believe if we aren’t experiencing heartbreak and disappointment, we are “winning” at relationships by avoiding discomfort. It is the opposite: a broken heart means we are growing, because each broken heart tears off one more mask as it brings you closer to true intimacy with yourself. With true heartbreak comes the death of illusions of what happiness is supposed to be, and with this comes the death of expectations. We can finally get real with ourselves. And when you can finally get real with yourself, you can get real with someone else. That is intimacy.

Intimacy is seeing and sharing your cultural conditioning with another, with full transparency, understanding that if your partner disappoints you or even leaves you, it has no bearing on your worth and self-work. Intimacy requires the discomfort of checking stories and expectations you project onto others. Intimacy is discovered in respected boundaries and standards, not in the expectations and roles we have been conditioned to play.

Through all my fumbling and all my failures, and in choosing to learn from those failures, the best way I have found to attain true intimacy with a partner is to behave with full accountability for my own self. Accountability means attacking my stories and patterns, and the projections they spur, and when they reappear, gratefully acknowledging they served me for a time but no longer serve me, and I release them. Then, if appropriate, I share that work and self-realization with my partner. This is intimacy. When you own your flaws, blind spots, and projections, and expose them with full vulnerability, you can bring the most to a relationship.

True intimacy is allowing the people who are destined to come into your life to shine bright, as we are all mirrors, and never shrouding them with our expectations. When you allow others to shine as their authentic selves, they will reflect not only your beauty but also the many wonderful things you still have yet to learn about yourself. Whether these lovers and friends stay or leave, you release them from your projections, allowing them the dignity to grow and shine on their path.

True intimacy is the uncomfortable act of not placing the comfort zones of your paradigm onto the other. It is in the discomfort that you find intimacy. For without your comfort zones, without your role-playing, you are truly exposed. Who are you without all the masks you have been told to wear, all the roles you have been told to play?

True intimacy is loving someone beyond the roles others have asked them to play. True intimacy is loving and accepting all aspects of you, owning your strengths and flaws with accountability as you integrate with integrity and love yourself compassionately. Step into the discomfort of being real, vulnerable, and authentic with others and yourself. This is intimacy.

It takes a brave heart to truly love oneself. When you do, you no longer project expectations on others to “complete” you. Instead, you let someone into the essence of you, unafraid of whether they reject you, for you no longer reject yourself. It takes boldness to let someone in this deep. And to love them that deep, knowing they are not yours to control. You may possess their love, but you do not possess them. And whether they stay or go does not diminish how bright your love for them in the moment truly was and still is. If you truly loved them, you love them forever.

If you loved them conditionally, depending on their behavior, you only loved the role they played, not they themselves, and thus you will simply move on to conditionally love the next role-player, feigning intimacy through stage acting. With a true unconditional love, even if they disappointed your expectations, you know that is what they were there to do: to expose those expectations and fears you were blindly holding onto, keeping you from true intimacy—from yourself and from others. And you know that despite times of discomfort, your unconditional love only makes you both shine brighter.

Put that on a stat sheet.

STANDARDS VERSUS EXPECTATIONS

The great destroyer of intimacy is expectation: “If you love me, you will do this for me.”

As we consider projections and expectations, it is important to clarify the difference between a standard and an expectation:

»Expectations are manipulative projections of perceived lack.

»Standards are nonnegotiable reflections of self-respect.

Few men have been taught the difference, because our cultures seldom make the effort to do so.

Think about this. When you ask someone, “Who is your favorite Disney princess?” you will get the usual: Ariel, Snow White, Belle, and let’s not forget the girl-power Pocahontas.

But when you ask the same person, “Who was your favorite Disney prince?”

Crickets.

“Aladdin.”

“He wasn’t a prince.”

“Oh . . . Simba?”

“A lion.”

This is because our culture portrays the fairytale prince as one-dimensional: be brave, be bold, be dashing, be on time to save the day, to provide and protect. And have lots of wealth to take someone to your castle for the happily-ever-after once you slay their dragons. No need for conversation—we can figure out your personality and feelings later, if the need should arise.

Do we think boys didn’t get the cue when they watched these culturally iconic movies, heard these stories, clearly showing the expectations for males? Be bold and courageous, protect and provide—your feelings are not even worth covering. Be there. Save the day and fix all the problems. And if you want the beautiful princess, a trophy to reward your success, you gotta be a hero, dude.

Have we ever thought about how much anxiety a boy might feel while watching these movies?

I have close female friends who have even admitted to me they were angry at their boyfriends after watching a romantic movie, because their boyfriend never did those things.

In this day of social media and the illusions of those couples that are always happy, traveling, and making photo-worthy memories, we have begun to treat “activities partner” as the most important criteria of a relationship, along with other nearly impossible expectations. Instead of focusing on finding an activities partner, seek out someone who will help you grow and learn more about yourself. Instead of looking for a partner who helps you stay inside your comfort zone, look for one who pushes you beyond the boundaries, not just physically but, more importantly, emotionally. Remember that if you are brave enough to go there, discomfort in a relationship is a positive sign. It means you are peeling off masks and setting yourself up for true intimacy. Does your partner challenge you to look within and begin to hold yourself accountable in your relationship, and not just if your couple’s selfie garnered a lot of likes?

It goes deeper than that. When you approach relationships hoping others/they will heal a wound within you, will ease your discomfort, this is a sign that you still approach relationships in a childlike way, allowing unspoken expectations to settle like landmines to sabotage relationships. An adult, an Alpha, approaches relationships knowing they alone are responsible and accountable for their own mess and development while maintaining immutable standards of respect. A standard is not controlling others with your emotions, whims, and mood swings—that is the manipulation mechanism of expectations—but rather a standard is a boundary that honors both sides of a relationship.

Expectation	Standard
You will never speak to me that way.	I won’t be spoken to that way.
You should want to do those things with me.	I enjoy doing these things for myself.
I need a man/woman who will treat me right.	I will always try to meet my own needs.
You make me so happy.	I choose to be a happy person.
I will make you happy every day.	I’ll do my best to help your happiness.

A New Alpha male does not choose to be an actor on someone’s stage. He does not play into stories and the expectations that ensue. He does not engage in codependent relationships that have been disguised as true love by Hollywood. The New Alpha male knows that those movies and stories never show us what happens the day after. He is a good man, who is there to help his loved ones but does not bow to the guilt triggers that come from expectations, or the consequences of failing to meet those said expectations. He does not bend to expectations. He holds his standards through his compassionate boundaries, neither of which he apologizes for, because they are one in the same—compassionate boundaries are standards.

Remember, standards are nonnegotiable reflections of self-respect.

Expectations are manipulative projections of perceived lack.

The New Alpha male is clear in his standards and does not apologize for them, as uncomfortable as it may be, recognizing that many relationships will be outgrown as he embraces the growth that comes from such discomfort. When push comes to shove, he will always choose to be alone, free to pursue his path toward clarity, over loneliness in a relationship where he must forsake essential parts of himself to belong. If anyone tries to emotionally blackmail or manipulate him with expectations, the Alpha does not give in, even if it means the end of the relationship.

This is Alpha.

MASCULINE VERSUS FEMININE ENERGY

Ugh, the feelings—vulnerability. Most men would rather give their arm instead of talk about them. Being in touch with feelings is a place of extreme discomfort, an outgrowth of so much cultural conditioning and shaming.

With my hearing loss, I wake at the slightest vibrations. I feel very deeply, and it is overwhelming. Not just physical vibration, but others’ emotions and feelings that stir my own feelings, which were not welcomed in my ultrapatriarchal upbringing. I endured the discomfort of many bumps and bruises along the way to my eventual acceptance of feelings as a natural part of being human. In my effort to fit into the world, I began to mistake the ability to speak and hear for what made me human, when in truth, what makes us human is our ability to feel.

People remember what they feel, not what they hear.

We have glorified intellectualism in this information age, which, as I’ve said, is overheavy on logic, to the point where we assume that someone who is wealthy or financially successful must be smarter or wiser than the rest of us. Yet, the true predictor of whether someone will be successful in life, not financially, but in happiness, is a higher score on emotional intelligence tests—a higher emotional quotient, or EQ.

While my basketball IQ served me greatly and allowed me to compensate for a somewhat lower level of sheer athleticism than many of my peers had, it was my emotional intelligence and intuition that carried me further—the ability to read my teammates and my opponents through their body language, but to also instinctively know when to be more assertive (masculine) and when to be more passive (feminine). This masculinity and femininity are not exclusive to genders. Consider what masculine and feminine energy and their associated behavior looks like.

Feminine energy: empathizing, allowing/acceptance, nurturing, flexible, intuitive, passive, seductive, fluid, flow

Masculine energy: structured, logical, driven, rigid, aggressive, assertive, steady, grounding, penetrating, goal-oriented, achievement

It is a balance of both masculine and feminine that the greatest basketball players display. Masculine is knowing when to strike, when to go for the jugular. Feminine is knowing when to let the game flow and come to you.

Michael Jordan, the all-time great, displayed both masculine and feminine at crucial times on the basketball court. He used feminine energy when he passed off the ball to Steve Kerr and John Paxson for them to hit the game-winning shots for their respective NBA finals victories. It was masculine when Jordan knew to take the iconic game-winning shot in the 1998 NBA finals, the great “push-off” shot. He displayed masculine energy in clearing out his defender with force, and then shooting it with no fear.

Neither masculine nor feminine is more important than the other. Both are needed at the appropriate times. If I am in constant aggression, masculine, “pressing it,” as it is termed in the basketball world, I will find myself in trouble when I never pass the ball, and will become predictable, thus easy to guard—a liability. If I am being completely passive, feminine, afraid to take risks by always passing the ball, never shooting, I will miss opportunities—easy to guard. Living and playing in either extreme will get you benched. We must learn to balance and integrate masculine and feminine energy, be it on the basketball court, at work, or with family. And we need to do so with integrity: listening to our gut and feelings and what they are telling you—when to watch, listen, and observe and when to express your feelings and assert yourself in each room you walk into.

Here is an example of how a healthy Alpha male can express his feelings: “I feel frustrated because I feel emasculated every time you want to tell me about your feelings; it seems you are listing all the things I am doing incorrectly. I don’t feel your feelings, but rather your judgment.”

There is a fine line between expressing how you feel and dumping on someone your projections and judgments for failing to meet your expectations. The New Alpha male, in expressing his emotions, does not blame or dump his emotions on others, nor does he tear others down or emotionally abuse them.

Authentic vulnerability is empowered ownership of your feelings and clear communication of the masculine and feminine energy balanced in your heart space. All genders struggle with this. Just because women may stereotypically be better at expressing their emotions does not mean they have the monopoly on communication; for men, it takes great work through the serious discomfort of the fear of shaming to get to this space of balanced and centered heart-space communication.

While the New Alpha male is comfortable in his balance of feminine energy with his masculine, he still wants to feel and be treated like a man. This might mean he loves to provide, to protect, to climb and build and create and achieve. He may love to hold a woman in his arms, to allow her to cry on his chest, feeling that he can protect her—not necessarily save her, but be there for her. Men, it is okay to tell your significant other that you would like this, that you need to feel this.

Men evolved into the creatures we are. We are bodies that feel what our evolutionary coding has produced. And when men are not allowed to feel that intimacy, they will act out, mistaking power for the intimacy they are craving. This does not mean I condone men behaving badly—men who are only chasing power to fill the void of intimacy that is killing them from within. It is, however, me emphasizing that it takes all genders to heal all genders and rise into a new level of consciousness, walking the path of the heart where the New Alpha freely and courageously loves unconditionally, without strings attached, and allows others to love him unconditionally—even if that love is so great and blinding that it burns.

That is discomfort: the overwhelming feeling in your heart of love and gratitude for all that is—so much so that it hurts.

This is Alpha.

Do the Work

Try to find one small thing to put yourself out of your comfort zone on a daily basis. It can be physical exertion and training, or inward reflection and writing in a journal. If you’re an introvert, do something social that connects you with people; if you’re an extrovert, sit silently in reflection for an hour. Maybe it means holding your tongue during the dinner conversation and not letting everyone know just how smart you are or how in the know you are when they talk about the latest social media app, even though it may feel like death by a thousand cuts.

Make this a habit. Write down one thing that you notice about yourself that if you had to do it would feel so awkward it would nearly constitute torture. And as you make note of that, find an opportunity to meet and outgrow it. Do this each day, and as you do, notice how the anxiety lessens and how your confidence grows.

The ability to be uncomfortable is a skill. Learn to step beyond your comfort, and you will see the growth and reward on the other side from a place of acceptance.

In the Zone

»After you have completed your round of heart drumming, lay face down on the floor with a towel as your mat.

»Stretch your arms and legs to four corners.

»With the first minute of breathing, focus on pressing your forehead into the towel.

»During the second minute, notice the pressure on your nose and neck.

»In the third minute, notice the pressure on your chest as your ribs work to expand.

»Notice the pressure on your pelvic bone as well as your knees in the fourth minute.

»By now your body should be uncomfortable. With each thought that comes into your head about how you want to switch over, instead say, “Thank you for letting me grow comfortable with discomfort.”

»In another minute, you will finally roll over onto your back, keeping your eyes closed, noticing the sensation of your body moving the blood around. In that moment of clean circulation, hold the intention in your mind of how you will do something today that will make you slightly uncomfortable socially.

»Notice how it doesn’t seem as scary as it normally would have, for you are developing the threshold of discomfort. It is a habit that turns into skill.

RECAP

Discomfort is essential in our growth and self-development. Without it, and without the sacred detours of life, our perspective will only be tunnel vision. Discomfort gives us the ability to have true compassion and thus intimacy with others as it leads us not only to greater heights and experiences but also to deeper places of loss and heartbreak, which set us up for the powerful skills of acceptance and surrender, which in turn leads to transformation.