The High Status Male

Dear Mike,

Being a downtrodden LSM my whole life has adversely affected my social life, finances and even my health.  I’m 36 years old and need a complete do-over in life.  The problem is that when I get down to it I really don’t believe that I can change anything about myself.  Positive thinking isn’t going to change my underlying crummy beliefs.  I’m stuck.   Do you think this LSM stuff is genetic?   My father is a “nice guy” LSM and my mother a domineering over-protective verbal abuser.   Lucky me! What about nature vs. nurture from your point of view on this subject?   Nature already screwed me over by making me 5′5″!

My question is, how can an LSM make the transformation to HSM if you don’t BELIEVE it to be possible for you?   Can one make anything happen without belief?  Isn’t that the most important component to change?   Just knowing what to do doesn’t seem like it’s enough.

Mark

Hi Mark,

About the only aspect of being an LSM that I can imagine might be genetic is the tendency towards being introverted, as this generally ties in with shyness and tends to hold you back socially somewhat.  Your parents sound like they’ve achieved a dominance-submissive balance that both of them can live with somehow.  Your dad modeled this kind of behavior for you, and you naturally picked it up… but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.   One cannot do anything without belief as you have correctly analyzed — but it’s not your conscious mind that really needs to be doing all this believing, it’s your unconscious mind.

Your unconscious mind (UC) has a deeply imprinted image of yourself which includes an assumption of established boundaries around what it “knows” that is personally possible for you… from how much money you can make to how many women you can bed.   The only way to change this “thermostat of possibility” for yourself is by gradually exposing your UC to different REAL LIFE experiences and situations that will slowly retrain it to regard “you” in a different way.   This takes time, but (like bodybuilding) you can really make it happen for yourself if you get motivated and stick with it for awhile.   Maybe you can find a buddy to act as a wingman and you two can push each other to get motivated to go out, or whatever.   Any method that initially works to trick yourself into doing something you’ve written off as impossible can be effective.  You don’t need to create all this incredible positive belief first before attempting something — the belief will come later as your UC processes the results from reality.  It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.*

The worse place to find yourself in life is a point mentally where you feel you’ve gone as far as you can at some aspect, have hit the wall and can’t go any further.   DO NOT let yourself fall into this end-game trap, it’s all bullshit.   Your brain remains plastic enough all throughout your life to be able to change basic aspects of your nature, you just have to fight through the inertia of the old conditioning.   I like to think of these as dry-rotted neurons that need recharging.

Reality is the key — the UC learns from the reality that you present to it, not through book learning.  Use “book learning” to show your conscious mind how to create those real life situations (physical action / activity) that will eventually train your UC to have a different “opinion” of yourself.  The UC schools itself in the world of action and experience, that’s why positive thinking can only take you so far.   It’s strictly an internal process that, while useful for it’s effects on the conscious mind, doesn’t dig in deep enough into the UC to challenge and change those stubborn negative, disempowering beliefs that are currently messing you up.

So despite the fact that it “knows” everything’s all bullshit (and I used to think this way too… it might be the 5′5″ thing, otherwise known as the “little man’s disease”, use your conscious mind to place yourself into situations where reality has an opportunity to slap your unconscious mind upside it’s neurons and re-arrange it’s deep belief system and assumptions about life, love and your role in the entire scheme of things.   That’s how you make dramatic sea changes in your life.   Get busy.

* I realize that some of you guys reading this are young and maybe haven’t heard the old saw about “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”    A philosophical puzzle my dad used to like to hammer me with whenever he thought I was being too much of a smart ass know-it-all.  If you’re a believer in Creation then the answer is the chicken I suppose.  If you understand evolution however, then you know that all species of life appear gradually over enormous spans of time (which is why the process is invisible) by morphing from simpler creatures that came before them in a long, constant continuum.   Rewinding this process it takes you back to the very first animated particle of life at the dawn of Earth.   So the correct answer in this case (if you want to impress someone as a know-it-all smart ass) is “neither… what came first was an initial ‘genesis’ molecule of RNA that self-replicated a copy of itself, thus crossing the line from inanimate to animate matter”.   Now you know why I kept getting sent to my room.   But that’s okay, because that’s where this little wise guy had all his dirty magazines stashed anyway…