The Masculine Dilemma: Abdication of Power in Relationships

Episode #1084

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Transcription

Doug Holt 0:00
When I think about it, I think about how many guys abdicate their power to their wives. One of the toughest things that we can do as men is reclaim that power and be able to hold it. Most men are boys pretending to be men. As men, we want to be told that we're good, and so they feel very isolated and very alone. It's almost as if I know the secrets to the universe, right? Get the answer incorrect, but be decisive rather than the other way around.

Christopher Hansen 0:24
It gives your psyche evidence that you can be trusted.

Doug Holt 0:28
But what happens when you actually try to conquer your own inner work?

Doug Holt 0:32
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of The TPM Show. I am joined once again by the great Christopher Hansen here, and today we're going to talk about the idea of giving up your power, and how many men give up their power unknowingly to somebody else and claim the victim card. Chris, thanks for being here, man.

Christopher Hansen 0:45
Hey, thanks for having me, Doug.

Doug Holt 0:47
Man, we talked a little bit about this before we hit record, but the impetus for this topic sorry, I got a little cough last night. My wife and I were like, “Just one of those nights, we’re brain dead. Give me something stupid to watch.” We were watching a documentary, and I think it was called Evil Influencer. I won’t ruin the premise of the show, but the part I wanted to talk about is well, I guess I will ruin part of the show to talk about it is there’s essentially a life coach, if you will. She’s a therapist who got her license revoked, becomes a life coach in the LDS community, and really helps, well, under the guise of helping couples. So I was like, “Oh, this sounds great, I want to see what goes on.”

And one of the things she has the men do is go away from the family, right? They’re the problem. “You go away.” And she apparently works with them or has them do stuff, but actually has them leave the house. And it got me thinking about how many men abdicate their power, right? Give their power to someone else rather than taking their own leadership.

Christopher Hansen 2:15
Sure. I think most men do. It’s their comfort zone abdicating their power to something. I think one of the toughest things that we can do as men is reclaim that power and be able to hold it.

Doug Holt 2:28
I mean, just think about how many areas. I was doing a call today an open community call. So, in our private app, in our private community, I do a call once a week if I can. Sometimes I’m just busy, but I try to do it, and it’s open for everybody. And on that call, we talk about different ways, or I talk about different ways guys can abdicate their power give it up. Some guys will give it up to a church official, right? Someone they believe is ordained from a higher spirit or God to tell them what to do.

And it’s different than giving advice, right? I mean, that’s what we do at TPM. We have a methodology that men follow. And although we get accused of being a cult, we’re not. Or we’re the worst cult, because I think cults are supposed to keep members. You’ve got to tell them what to do.

Christopher Hansen 3:13
I think there’s usually a lot more women.

Doug Holt 3:13
It’s a bad cult. We get accused of being a cult all the time by people who aren’t in the programs, right? It’s people on the outside going, “How can so many guys really rave about your programs? It must be a cult.” Like, no we don’t tell people what to do, we don’t take control, we don’t have one supreme leader or any of that stuff.

Whereas this woman who was trying to help these people or claimed to was telling them exactly what to do. And the guys were doing it under the ideology that they were helping their families. “I’ll just do whatever it takes.”

Christopher Hansen 3:54
Every guy that I’ve ever talked to within the movement, outside of the movement, whatever it is will do anything for their family. Yep. And you have to get sucked into the idea that somebody else is going to have that answer. Not even the answer, but that somebody else is going to be able to hold that power and make it okay.

Doug Holt 4:14
When I think about it, I think about how many guys abdicate their power to their wives, right? And this is what I was talking about on the call. They wait for their wife to tell them what to do and to tell them that they’re good. We had a guy join the program recently, and it was because his wife said, “You have to go. You have to go to TPM.” She met a lot of our staff, she’s met a lot of our clients at our events, and so she literally told her husband, “You need to go do this program.”

Now, I’m glad in this situation he’s coming to our program. And at the same time, there’s that abdication of power, right? That authority that comes through. Guys do it in all kinds of smaller ways.

At the same token, I mean, as an advisor, you’re the guy that gets on the phone call with men for their initial, “Hey, is TPM a good fit for me?” type conversation. And I’ve got to imagine for you, you hear a lot of guys talk who’ve abdicated their power their decision-making on whether they could join or not.

Christopher Hansen 5:20
Oh, without a doubt. It’s one of the biggest topics of conversation on those calls. A lot of the guys that I talk to we’ll go through, we’ll talk about the program, talk about them and their situation. At the end of that, they go, “This is exactly what needs to happen for me. I’ve got to go ask my wife if I can.”

Well, you know, then we talk about how to have that conversation. And I don’t know if we need to get necessarily deep into the psychology of it, but I think as men, we want to be told that we’re good. You know, and that comes from childhood. There’s a rite of passage that, in a lot of cultures, men go through, which is a reclaiming of their power. Their power is being handed over to them from their parents, and they are now responsible for their own lives.

In our culture, we don’t do a great job of that of handing that power over to our children. We kind of, as men, get thrown out into the world saying, “Hey, go figure it out.” And most men don’t recover from that.

Doug Holt 6:33
They don’t. Most men are boys pretending to be men. And I mean, who defines what a man is? We can get into that debate or what have you. But I would wager to say most men listening to this know that I’m right in the sense that they just know there’s something inside of them. I always joke, you get a group of men together now, you can turn them into 14-year-old boys within a day, right? They start playing, and that’s awesome. There’s nothing demasculating about that.

What happens, though, is in my experience, men are going through something that’s not working. The mother figure the wife they’ve made their wife their mother, not their lover. You know, she starts picking up the clothes around the house. Now she’s got a big child in the house, and he wants good favor, whether he wants love, he wants intimacy, he wants sex, he wants her to think of him as a good man, a respectable man.

And during that time, he basically says, “You tell me what to do, and I’ll do it to be a good guy.” And at that point, in that moment where he’s basically consciously or unconsciously asking her, “What do I need to do to be good or be a great man for you?” he’s essentially given her the power and put so much pressure on her, he becomes another child in the house.

Christopher Hansen 7:57
Absolutely. She doesn’t want to carry that. It’s a burden, right? She’s not meant to carry the burden of his leadership. And the symptoms of that lack of intimacy, frustration. She’s got an entire world inside of her that she wants to be able to express. And that leadership burden is like a bag over that she doesn’t even feel safe to share who she is. At that point, she’s taking on that role, and it’s obviously not healthy.

Doug Holt 8:29
No, it’s not healthy at all. I was asking Aaron, my wife she did training for the guys in The Brotherhood, our one-year mastermind program that we have. It goes for a year; many guys stay in for several years. And last night, before we were watching the show, she goes, “What should I talk to the guys about?”

I go, “What are the three things your girlfriends and the women you coach complain about most about men?” And then she started rattling things off. But number two on the list was basically how men become another child in the house, right? Because they don’t make decisions, and they put all the decision-making and all the stress of it onto their partner.

What the kids do for school activities, social events all of those things fall onto her, which then she’s got to bring him along, make sure the social situation is good for him, babysit him. “Is he drinking too much? Is he not talking to people?”

You and I were at a social function and I gotta be careful what I say but at that social function, there were guys that drank too much, and their wives became responsible for managing them. Then there was a guy who was so shy and introverted that his wife had to constantly go over and take care of him. That’s not sexy.

Christopher Hansen 9:53
No, it’s not. And I think social anxiety is another symptom, for sure, of someone not being in their power. And I say this from experience. I know what it feels like to walk into a room full of other people, and I am so concerned I was, and still experience this to some degree but so concerned with what everyone else thought about me and me wanting them to think that I am good, or I am something, that I now have abdicated my power to really anyone in the room at that moment.

That creates an awful internal feeling, typically in social situations. The answer to that is, “Have cocktails,” right? “Have cocktails, and I’ll start to feel better.” The thing is, if you play that cycle out over a long period of time, eventually the cocktails aren’t going to be enough to overcome that anxiety. And then there’s a pop.

Doug Holt 10:57
And it’s really about getting to know yourself, right? I don’t want to go too far off the main topic of abdicating power, but there’s an element to it. We’re doing The Alpha Reset here next week, so this will probably come out during The Alpha Reset.

The Alpha Reset is a transformational experience that allows men to reset the Alpha inside and reclaim their power just what we’re talking about, actually. So we’ll be doing that during this time. That particular event allows those guys to strip it away and realize, “Holy cow, I’ve spent all this time worried about what my wife thinks, worried about walking into that room, trying to make everybody else like me, and making sure I don’t feel imposter syndrome.”

Everybody’s got imposter syndrome, by the way. I had a guy tell me, “Hey, I’ve got this thing called imposter syndrome,” like it was cancer. I was like, “Dude, everybody does. You’re not alone.” It’s external validation that’s what I’m getting to. That seeking of something external outside of yourself.

Christopher Hansen 12:02
And out there, you’ll run into people in the world who will happily take your power. The documentary you watched is a great example of that. Then you’ll also run into people who don’t want that power they want to genuinely connect with you.

Doug Holt 12:20
And hey guys, I just want to share something with you. I’m sure we can both agree that in order to fix something, you need to know what’s broken. And not only do you need to know what’s broken, but also have a step-by-step methodology on how you can fix it. That’s the easiest way to do it, right? Otherwise, you’re going to be toiling with things.

That’s why I created a free training a training that not only shows you how you got to where you are, where your relationship is missing that love, respect, admiration, and even intimacy that it used to have but also how to get it back. How do you retain that? How do you get back to the place where your wife’s looking at you the same way she used to when she said, “I do”?

You know, I don’t know about you, but for me, when my wife looks at me like I’m her man, I feel like I can conquer the world and I want that for you. Simply go over to https://fixmarriage.thepowerfulman.com/scales. That’s https://fixmarriage.thepowerfulman.com/scales, and I have a free video training for you. You can just click play and see if this resonates for you.

Now, back to the podcast.

Christopher Hansen 13:23
If you’re not holding your own power if you’re giving that away to someone else it’s going to keep you from having meaningful connections with people that genuinely want to connect with you on a real level, right? A true friendship, a true partnership whether it’s with your wife or a friend or whoever it really needs to be two people in their power that can truly see one another. It transcends just the relationship.

Doug Holt 13:54
And unfortunately, it’s rare. You know, they say it’s lonely at the top, and it can be. But there are a lot of people at the top. When I think of the TPM community, we have two separate wings of the community, if you will one’s business owners and one’s non-business owners.

The business owners often mention, “Wow, I can’t talk to anybody about the things I’m experiencing because they either don’t understand they clock off at five, they’re done or they have to look a certain way, right, within the community, their competitors, or even their employees and staff.”

And so they feel very isolated and very alone, and very powerless, because they feel like they have to put on a front. And one of the things they love when they come into the community is, “Oh, these are also businessmen, business leaders,” and they share some of the same trepidations and worries. They can kind of lay down their masks and their shields a little bit and just be themselves.

Christopher Hansen 14:56
Absolutely. I was just having a conversation with a guy today, and we were talking about that exact thing. He’s done business masterminds and things which are great but I was illustrating to him that it’s different when we’re really shedding all of those masks that you would typically wear in a business mastermind.

You want to look a certain way and present a certain way, but being able to step into a group of the same guys these same successful men who are out there killing it but who also know that they’re coming into this space to shed those layers and really dig deep into who they are and reclaim their power that’s different.

Doug Holt 15:39
And there’s one thing to conquer in business, right? I’m a fan of that, going for it. But what happens when you actually try to conquer your own inner work? Very few people do that work because it’s hard. It’s not easy. I’m not going to lie to anybody doing deep shadow work or work around shame or guilt those are like weights on an air balloon.

And if you can imagine yourself as a hot air balloon, the baggage that we carry around many of us don’t even know we have it. Most guys are on that hot air balloon trying to make it rise faster for their business. They’re focusing on marketing, operations, delivery, accounts receivable all of these things in the business area not realizing there are 100 bags of sand or weight around their balloon. If they could just cut those off, they’d soar much, much higher.

Christopher Hansen 16:37
I love that analogy, right? How much fuel are you pumping into that flamethrower heater in that hot air balloon? That’s a spectacular analogy. And being able to shed to take those weights off and actually let go of them that’s the real lift.

Doug Holt 16:58
Every business leader, I think, intuitively knows or at least has heard that the business can only grow to the level of the leadership. You can’t have a business supersede its leader. So, ergo, if the business leader improves, the business improves.

I’ll say most small business owners, in my experience, because guys that play at a higher level have to do a lot of inner work the stress and anxiety would just kill you if you didn’t. But most believe the work they have to do is on marketing, distribution, or sales.

In reality, in my experience, it’s mostly the inner work that moves you. You still have to have marketing, sales, distribution, legal, finance, everything else but it’s really the inner work of knowing where you’re going and knowing who you are that allows you to soar.

Christopher Hansen 17:56
And that’s going to impact every other aspect of the business, right? Doing that inner work is going to have an impact on your decision-making in marketing, in finance it’s the thing that allows you to truly lead where you’re going.

Doug Holt 18:17
When you’re grounded and you know who you are, you’re much less likely to give away or abdicate your power. It’s when we’re unsure of who we are at our core as a man that we’re more willing to outsource other people’s beliefs about us external validation, if you will.

You know, “What do you think of me, Chris? Who am I to you?” And you’re like, “Oh, this is what I think of Doug.” Then I just take that on and wear it as my identity. If I switch over here to Colton and ask him the same thing people brag about being a chameleon, “Oh, I can be like a chameleon.” That’s not necessarily a good thing. It can be adaptability is good but when you know who you are, you don’t have to be a chameleon. You can just be who you are authentically. And then you don’t have to give away your power to someone like this woman in the documentary her name was Jody, right? You can ask questions, do your own research, and not just blindly jump into something.

Christopher Hansen 19:14
For sure. Well, that’s when you become magnetic, right? When you’re showing up that way, people are drawn to you. They want to know what you know. They want to try to give you their power in a lot of ways but when you’re in your power, it feels like, to me, when I’m not abdicating that, it’s almost as if I know the secrets to the universe, right? Kind of do, because I’ve connected with myself.

Doug Holt 19:47
I think you do know the secrets to the universe when you’re there the secrets to your universe, anyway and that does make it magnetic. So let’s talk about a couple of things men can do, because we’re guys, we like practical advice. I’ll kick it off and you can jump in.

One thing you can do instead of abdicating your power is start making decisions. I think that’s a very underrated skill set be decisive. It’s okay to get it wrong and be decisive. It’s better to, especially with your wife, get the answer incorrect but be decisive than it is the other way around.

Christopher Hansen 20:23
Absolutely. I think the fear of being wrong is what holds so many men back. Yes, be decisive. Taking it back to some of the conversations I have with guys, where they say they want to go ask their wives it’s not that the program won’t work or the process won’t work going that route, but you’re now adding a layer of pressure onto her as to whether the program will work. And you’re going to have to navigate that, because she’s going to feel like she made this decision for you, and then what if it doesn’t work? Now she’s carrying that burden.

Doug Holt 21:03
And that’s what gets most guys there in the first place. Rather than, “Hey, I’m going to do this program to better our marriage and our family,” I understand telling her financially, “Look, I made an investment in myself for myself and for our family. I love you, and I’m going to make the most out of this.” That is a much better leadership style and skill.

Colton and I traveled to a house I tell this story a lot and we were talking to a guy’s wife. We went cross-country and stopped at, I think, five houses to film couples where the man’s been through our program, to see what the wife had to say about the result. You can see some of these on the website the short snippets.

And one wife told us, “He told me he’s going to do this Powerful Man thing.” She said, “I remember he was walking up the stairs, and I go, ‘No, you’re not,’” you know, just kind of being bratty. And he goes, “No, I’m doing this program,” and kept walking. And she goes, “That was the sexiest thing,” because he was in his power.

And that’s what she wants. She wants the best version of her man. He wants the best version of his woman, right? And that’s what people keep forgetting when things aren’t going well in a relationship, a power struggle starts to happen, and everybody’s grasping for straws to see who’s got the power, who’s got control. The reality is your wife wants you to be respectful, be decisive, and take control.

Christopher Hansen 22:35
It’s the sexiest thing out there.

Doug Holt 22:37
100%. Another thing guys can do is this get grounded into routines. So, The Alpha Rise and Shine. Keep consistent with that.

How does that have to do with abdicating your power? It allows you to stay grounded and rooted in who you are. Therefore, you are less reactive and less likely to seek external validation. When I’m in my power, so to speak grounded or rooted in who I am as Doug or as a man I don’t seek as much counsel. I definitely don’t care as much what other people think, because I know I’m a good human and I’m doing things with good intentions.

So, if I go out in the world and just do me, the world’s a better place. And knowing that, I don’t have to externally look for, “Is what I’m doing right?”

Christopher Hansen 23:32
Following those routines and that structure gives your psyche evidence that you can be trusted and that you can trust yourself. The Alpha Rise and Shine is a great example of that.

I got kind of off track with some of my routines over the last couple of months you know, come up with all the excuses in the world to justify that but I’ve been very intentional over the past few weeks. Even if it’s small, I’m committing to doing that every morning, even if it’s five minutes. Ideally it’s longer, but even if it’s five minutes, I will do that every morning.

And every morning that I get up and do that, I’m putting evidence into the bank account that I don’t need to abdicate my power. It reinforces that I can trust myself and that I’m going to do the things I say I’m going to do and that builds confidence and success internally.

Doug Holt 24:39
I love this, man. This documentary you said you saw you remember seeing it really got to my heart because of the kids involved, and what we do here at TPM, trying to save families, save men and their families. It just got to me. Guys listening to this, it’s on Netflix, and I think it’s worth a watch. You know, I feel bad for those other families that are out there trying to do the right thing and just got stuck with a woman who didn’t have good intentions.

Christopher Hansen 25:12
For sure, and was feeding off of that power. Some guys show up and say, “Okay, I’ll hand my power over to you.” It was a hard watch.

Doug Holt 25:24
It was. It absolutely was. My wife had to walk away a number of times going through theirs.

Gentlemen, as I always say, in the moment of insight, take massive action. What I’d love for you guys to do if you have access to the TPM private community is open up your app and go be ballsy here, boys. Go into the general channel and let us know: where have you been abdicating your power? Where have you been leaking your power or letting other people make decisions for you?

And what is it costing you? And what are you going to do differently?

If you’re not in the private community, then just write that down on a piece of paper so you have some optics for yourself. But for you guys that are in the community there’s over 2,000 of you in there I want to see some posts. I want to see you guys commenting and letting us know.

At least let me know that you understand it and that you know where those areas are, and that way we can work together to get them fixed.

See you next time on The TPM Show.