10 Things Men Have To STOP Doing To Be More Attractive, Confident & Self-Led

All right, guys, welcome back to the Mantalk show. Connor Beaton here. Today we're going to talk a little bit about self leadership and the 10 things that you as a man can stop doing immediately that will help you to be more attractive, more confident, and in my terms, more self led. Now I love this concept of self leadership. It's something that I've been talking about with the men that I've worked with for a decade. It's something that I've been advocating for because for me in my journey, the reason why my life went astray was because I lacked self leadership. I didn't have a good sense of internal direction. I didn't have good impulse control. I couldn't say no to myself. I didn't know when to say yes. And just in general, I lacked the skills and the tools to actually lead myself towards the things that I wanted in life. The relationships that I wanted, the type of sex that I wanted, the type of connection and closeness and business and lifestyle that I wanted. I lacked the discipline. And so these are 10 things that I had to learn personally that I have seen in so many of the men that I've worked with over the years that men have had to stop doing in order to develop more confidence, in order to become more attractive. Even if you're in a relationship with somebody, stopping these things will make you more attractive and they will also lead to you having a much deeper level of autonomy and inner authority and leadership. So let's start with the obvious, okay? Success habits are boring. They really are. I saw an interview with Jamie Dimon like a day or two ago. And Jamie Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan. Whether you like big banks or not is irrelevant. He still is an incredibly successful human being who is incredibly smart. And he talked about his morning routine of getting up at 4:30 every single morning and reading through all of this material, like going through the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and like all this kind of stuff. And it was, it was systematized. So he would wake up at 4:30 in the morning and he would have this very rigorous system and process that he would follow that allowed him to disseminate a good amount of information. And so for me, this was a reminder that there are clues to success. There are clues to you having a deeper level of self leadership. So the first thing that I think is just without question that we all need to work on is to stop making excuses for not being in good shape, for not working out regularly. You know, I remember when my Son was born. He's three now. And when he was born, I was running my company. I had just got a book deal to write my first book, which is now here. Men's Work. If you haven't grabbed a copy, drop into the caption in the comment section below and grab one. It's a phenomenal book and guys have loved it. But my son was born, I got a book deal, I'm running my company, I'm having to write my book. I took two months off from everything. I had sort of like built things up so I could take two months off to just be with him. But all of a sudden I got this book deal and I was like, oh, I have to start writing this book. I have a deadline and I'm raising a son, I'm raising a child for the first time, and that is a whole new thing. But I worked out five, six days a week. And this is during the pandemic, right? Where you couldn't go into a gym. So I bought kettlebells. Not a lot of them. I bought like four or five kettlebells. And I just worked out from home and I had an assault bike. Those were my methods of, of working out. But I had every excuse in the book not to work out. You know, like I was sleep deprived or as I said at the time, sleep depraved because I couldn't get it right because I was so exhausted. You know, I'm getting five hours of sleep interrupted every single night. I' this book, I'm making sure that my business and my company is working well. You know, I'm in the middle of a pandemic. I have every reason not to work out, but I still did it. Now does that make me special? No, I'm not special, okay? Inside of me, there's a 500 pound fat guy that just wants to sit around and play Call of Duty and smoke weed and eat potato chips and popcorn and eat shitty food and just do nothing with his life, okay? I've had to battle that version of me for a very, very long. And sometimes in my life he's won out more. But most of the time I win out. It's like a battle of attrition. But it's something that I see so many men making excuses for not being in shape, and it's not okay, right? When you start to muster up the determination and the drive to say, I am no longer going to make excuses for not working out. I'm no longer gonna make excuses not being in exceptional shape, right? I'm 40 and I am in the best shape of my life that I have ever been right now. And it's taken a good amount of dedication, but I can tell you that my wife loves it. I can tell you that I feel much more confident in my body and I can tell you that I feel much more autonomous. I have a deeper sense of authority within myself because that's how I start my day almost every single day, without question. It's just something that I do. So that's number one, stop making excuses for not being in good shape and for not working out. It will save your life in many, many ways. Number two is stop giving women free attention on social media. I see you guys, I get the comments, right? I created a video making a joke about dudes watching pole vaulting or women's volleyball on here and the comment section was like hilarious. I think it was on my desexualizing my brain video. And the comment section was hilarious because so many of you guys, and this isn't to like shame you, it's just to say, like, stop doing that bs, right? But so many of you guys find ways of wasting your time giving women free attention on social media through Instagram, through YouTube, through, you know, whatever it is, TikTok, Facebook, you name it, through dating apps, through Tinder. And what ends up happening is that you get caught in these thirst traps, in these low value interactions where the women that you're giving attention to, they get your desire so they actually get something from you, right? Even if you're just messaging them on Instagram or whatever, they get your desire. And for a lot of women, that's what they're wanting, right? They like being desired. I had a sex therapist on the show recently and she was talking about how for a woman, the act of being desired, actually receiving desire is the orgasm, right? So we have to keep in mind that when you're caught in, in this trap of sort of dishing out your attention non stop for free to women on social media, or even just dishing out that attention through porn and you know, through endless hours getting caught in the thirst traps on different social media platform, you are giving that desire away and you're likely not really getting anything in return, right? You're not getting attention, you're not getting connection, you're not getting relationship, you're not getting sexual interaction. And so I think this is one of those things that again, I had to work really hard because, oh, I had women that I was texting constantly and sexting with. I had women that I was Flirting with on Instagram and all of that kind of stuff. I had to really clean house. And so the one thing that I would recommend, if this is you and you're the guy that's like out there, and hours and hours and hours, every single day or every single week is spent getting caught in the thirst traps, texting women that you have no real shot with or, or interest in. But there's like some, you know, it helps you, like, pass the time when you're bored or lonely. Do the cleanse that you know you should do. Delete them off the social media platforms, tell them that you're no longer going to be messaging with them, delete their number out of your phone and actually clear out shop. Remember, just like, we store stuff in our head. Like, if you've ever tried to go to bed at night and you have like the task list stuck in your head and you can't go to sleep until you get out of bed, and you just like write down the three things that you need to remember. It's like a page, my freaking taxes. And you know, do this stupid thing, email that person tomorrow. And you can't sleep until you write those things down. That's mental clutter. Well, we now live in an age where you have digital clutter, right? And that digital clutter is, is keeping up room and energy and bandwidth in your brain. And so as you get rid of these women that you would normally be giving attention to for free on social media and through dating apps and whatnot, you are going to clear up space for likely a woman that you really want to have a connection or a relationship or a sexual exploration with, right? Or at the very least, you are clearing out energy and bandwidth that you can put towards your mission and your purpose and your orientation towards discipline, right? So it just reduces another thing that, that, honestly, for a lot of guys is the trap that. That causes feel like I'm not leading myself effectively because I'm giving away free time, free energy to all of these women or to these thirst traps that I'm not really getting anything in return from. And it makes me feel like crap. I hear that from a lot of you guys. Specifically when it comes to porn or dating apps where, you know, you're constantly chasing after women, it's not leading anywhere. So that's number two. Number three is stop comparing yourself to other men. Okay? It's a very interesting thing because I think women talk a lot about how they compare themselves to other women and they compare their looks and what they're wearing. To other women. And what I've noticed that with guys there is usually some type of status comparison, financial or success oriented comparison, like, oh, you know, he, I think he's making that much money or he's wearing that watch or driving that car. And like, I'm not, not even close to being there yet, or I really want to be there and I'm just not. And so there's a comparison on that front. I've also noticed that for some men, there's this interesting comparison that happens where you can compare another man's pain or trauma or challenges or obstacles to your own as a means of not having to deal with your own. This is one of the things that I've noticed, like when a guy really starts to tune into what's blocking him and why, why he's sabotaging. I've noticed that a lot of guys move into the space of like, well, it's not as bad as Frank and what happened to him when he was a kid, or it's not as bad as what he went through with his divorce. And I've noticed that for a lot of you guys, you end up negating your own pain, your own challenges, your own obstacles, your own blocks because you're comparing them to another man's and you're saying, well, it's not as bad as his. And so I just, you know, I shouldn't worry about it. But what this ends up doing is a couple things. Number one, it makes you appear on the outside, especially to a woman that you are with or dating, if she knows the challenges that you're dealing with and you're trying to offset those things or diminish them or devalue them and say, ah, they're not as bad as this other guy's. What she really hears you saying is, I don't matter as much as somebody else. And that is going to create a very weak appearance externally, especially to another guy or to a woman. And it's not what we think it is, right? Because for a lot of guys, they're like, oh, if I just diminish this and I don't deal with this, it'll bolster my sense of confidence and my sense of attractiveness. Because it'll show I can just like, I can run through any wall, I can deal with anything. But what it really does is in the long term, maybe in the short term, you'll feel a little bit better by not having to deal with what's right in front of you or by comparing yourself to another man and where he's at. Maybe it'll give you like some pseudo hit of, of shamium of shame motivation, right? Where you get to like, you know, snort that shame in and then try and drive yourself forward and beat the crap out of yourself for a couple days more and really criticize yourself and flog yourself so that you can go and take the action that you want to take. But eventually it wears off, right? Eventually it diminishes your confidence, it diminishes your level of attractiveness, it increases your insecurities and you don't feel like your ab to honestly and earnestly lead yourself through the hard parts of life. Because here's the truth about your pain and the shit that you have been avoiding in your life. A part of you is meant and can only be developed when you enter into that hurt locker that is inside of you. A part of you can only be developed. Part of your confidence, a part of your capability, a part of who you are as a mature man can only be developed when you make the decision to turn towards the pain that you've been carrying. The pain from the divorce or losing a child or losing a parent when you were like 10, or witnessing your parents divorce or experiencing abuse as a kid or whatever it is a part of you gets developed in when you go down that path. And so usually what I say to men when they come to me and they say, oh, I don't feel like I have purpose or meaning in life, life, I say, make your pain your purpose for a period of time. And in doing that, in making your pain your purpose for a period of time, what you will learn unequivocally and undeniably are some incredibly important tools and skills that you need in order to know internally that you can navigate through hardship. So it's actually a different type of resiliency. It's not the resiliency that says I can smash through any wall, regardless of what it is that shows up up without stopping. It's the type of resiliency that shows up and says I can sit with this incredibly deep pain and understand it in a way where I learn how to carry it more effectively so that it is not sabotaging my aims, my goals, my relationship. Because the truth that we all know somewhere inside of us is that the pain that you are carrying that is undealt with is the energy and the material that is sabotaging the things that you want in your life, right? The unhealed, undealt with trauma or abuse or abandonment or neglect in your childhood. That's the stuff that is getting in the way and fucking up your relationship, there's just no way around it. It is just the truth. And if you think otherwise, I'm sorry.

It's just an unequivocal truth that I have seen in life time and time again with tens of thousands of people that I've worked with over the years and talked to and connected to. It is the pain that they have not dealt with that is showing up and sabotaging their career, their finances, their health, their fitness, their sex life, their marriages. So it's the thing that you have to deal with. And comparing your pain, comparing your place in life to somebody else's is a means of trying to circumstance circumvent what you know you need to do and face and confront. Next is wasting time on social media, on tv, on video games, and. And actually letting go of those things for a period of time. I'm not saying forever. I'm not saying don't play video games. I'm not saying don't watch tv. There's some guys that are out there that are so rigid, that are like, you're a beta if you watch tv or, you know, you're a bitch if you play video games. It's like, no, it's okay for you to watch a TV show once in a while. It's okay for you to get enjoyment from. I mean, I love racing. I've played around with this idea of building a race simulator in my house to actually drive F1 cars or rally cars. I just love racing. And I've actually been looking for a track around where I live to go and race cars in real life. But anyway, stop wasting so much time on these things that you're not actually getting anything from. You know, go into your phone right now, look at how much time you're spending on social media, add it all up. Add up the time that you're spending on your computer, on your phone, that you're watching YouTube and you're on Reddit and you're on Instagram and. And really add it all up and look at that and say, okay, if I deleted one of these platforms, if I actually just cut back on one of these platforms, if I deleted Reddit off my phone, which is. Which honestly was one of the best things that I did because I was a Reddit guy. I loved Reddit. I loved going into the subreddits and reading through the forums and seeing what you guys were saying in there. And there's some funny comments in there, man. There's Some like really funny stuff. But if you can get off those platforms and you can have the discipline to implement some structure and some rules and some order around those things, right? Like for me, there's no social media before a certain time of day. I will not go on social media in the morning, I will not go on social media after a certain time of night unless there's like some emergency or something like that. I mean, you know, unless my team is like, hey, so there's something that you need to see. But for the most part, I have very specific rules around it. I've deleted most social media apps off my phone. There's no Facebook, there's no Reddit on my phone. I mean, not who uses Facebook that much anymore anyway, but there's no Facebook, there's no Reddit on my phone, and I got rid of those things. And then for Instagram, I basically only use it to DM with people that I want to interact with. So really start to build some rules and regulations around your social media use, your TV use and your video game use. I remember I spent an entire summer with some buddies. I called it the Summer of Diablo, where we basically sat in our house, it was three of us playing Dia. I think it was Diablo 2 or Diablo 3. And I was in my bedroom, I had this big imac and one of my buddies was out in the living room and he was on the TV and my other buddy was in his bedroom and we probably played that game for like four or five hours at least every single day. One summer when I was in university, was it fun? Absolutely. Was it a waste of time? Pretty much, right? I was never going to monetize that. I wasn't interested in that. It wasn't something that I genuinely wanted to build a scale at. It was just fun. And there's a time and place for that. But if you're really trying to build something in your life and you are trying to develop yourself into someone that you really respect, playing video games for eight hours a day, unless you are developing a career out of that and monetizing that and you're building something out of that, it's probably not the best use of your time for a certain period of your life. Next is at some point in your life, at some point in every man's life, he needs to learn to stop pursuing short term gratification and pleasure. Now this is a hard one because this is really about impulse control, right? The impulse control to text the woman, to open up the porn website, to have the drink, to Smoke the weed to whatever your thing is, right, to have the late night popcorn. So many of us, and this is something that I think, think ties into that young man syndrome. You know, every, every man goes through this phase where he's like 15, 16 years old to like, I don't know, 27, 28, where this just like wild, tenacious, no holds bar, no rules aspect of us start is like really comes out. And that part of us.

Wants short term pleasure, wants short term gratification, wants to get the intention from the woman right, right now, wants to smoke the weed right now, wants to sit around and just do whatever the hell he wants. And part of maturing and part of developing a really internal sense of control and leadership is being able to reign in those impulses when they start to rise up. So that is a big one. Next. And this is a hard one, but you need to kill your lottery mindset. I haven't heard many people talk about this, but it's something that I've noticed. I noticed it in myself when I was younger and I didn't really like, know what direction I wanted to go. I didn't have a lot going for me. But what I found was that I would put a disproportionate amount of attention and energy towards fantasizing about something, some lottery outcome, right? That like, literally sometimes I would think about like winning the lottery because I was so poor and so broke. Other times I would fantasize about like hitting it big with this business and like making all this money and you know, dating this like famous woman or something like that. And I would get caught in this fantasizing and, and, and dreaming about this sort of lottery life situation. And it would keep me from actually taking action on the things that were right in front of me. And this is something that I see with so many men who are procrastinators, who are not where they want to be in life, who aren't really too sure where they want to be in life, and don't seem to have a very deep internal sense of locus of control. It's not an internal thing. And so what, what happens for a lot of men is that some start to externalize and that they hope and they start to dream that something in their external life will shift so radically that they will be given an internal sense of peace and control and autonomy and leadership rather than developing those skills and disciplines to lead yourself right, to say no to the things, to say yes to things, the things that, you know, you need to do to go and do the hard things to send the email when you are procrastinating and don't want to, to take that kind of action. So killing off that lottery mindset and not only to mention the internal leadership piece, but like it's not attractive to women, right? Women are, and I'm going to use the D word, women are relatively disgusted by men who are stuck in this lottery mindset because it's so, so kind of childish and fantasy based. And so any mature woman who's grounded and reasonable and is looking for a man who is reliable and takes responsibility, she's going to hear him talking about all this fantasy based stuff and maybe she'll get caught into it at first because maybe you're charismatic and you're very good at painting the picture of the lottery, you know, of like, well, when my business really takes off, off and it's going to look like this or when my, you know, career reaches this point, it's going to be so, I mean, I'm going to be driving this car and build that house. I'm not saying don't have dreams, I'm not saying don't have a vision for yourself. I'm saying delineate and create the distinction between where you start to go into escapism, when you start to go into that lottery mindset, because you all have it. I almost guarantee it. I could talk to every single one of you and I bet almost every single one of you have that lottery mindset where you've created some picturesque utopian version in your mind of like when everything just checks the box and ting, ting every, everything comes up dollar signs in my life, everything will be okay. So we have to let go of that lottery mindset and move back to our vision, move back to the direction that we're heading in. And I found that one thing that really helped me was every time I caught myself in that lottery mindset, I would come back and say, what do I need to do right now? What action can I take right now? What decision can I make right now that I am clearly avoiding? And that was super helpful to ground me back in to the action that I could take in the present moment. The next thing is to stop believing that you are broken or that there is something fundamentally wrong with you. I got caught in this for a very long time. I really fundamentally believed that I was broken. And unfortunately what that did was a number of things. Number one, if you are a man who fundamentally believes that he is broken, you are going to attract a woman who either agrees with you or believes that about herself. I'm going to say that again. If you are a man who fundamentally believes that he is broken, you are going to attract a woman who either agrees with you and thinks that she can save you, or sees you as that broken version that she's always pitying you, or she believes that about herself as well. And so it's never a recipe for a great reciprocal, long term relationship as number one. But number two, there's no such thing as a broken man. There are men who have experienced things that are terrible, that are harmful, that are abusive, that are traumatic, and those things have caused some type of internal fracturing within you where there's a part of you that doesn't know how to deal with the pain or the frustration of why you keep making certain decisions and actions. It doesn't mean that you're broken. It likely means that you experience something that nobody has taught you how to deal with, with how to traverse, how to carry, how to heal, how to move through. And that is fundamentally different than being undeniably or irrevocably broken. Right? And I get it. I get, you know, if you're watching this and you're like, I feel that way and I understand what you're saying, I get being in that place because I was there for a very long time. And it wasn't until a mentor of mine came along and said, you know, sometimes we just need somebody to believe in us more than we believe in ourselves in order to start to move forward. And he was that person for me. And if I can be that person for you, then here it is. Right? Like, I believe in you and your ability to move through and face and confront the things that you are dealing with, with in your life. Even though I might not know you, and even though you might not know me, I fundamentally believe in you. Because I have worked with so many men who have shown up on my doorstep, at my men's weekends, in my men's groups, who have written me emails and, you know, DM'd me online and said, I just feel broken. Like, I just fundamentally feel broken. I don't know how to move forward. And every single time, the tragedy of those men is that it's not that they're broken, it's that they experienced something or went through something in their life that that made it feel like it broke them. And that's a tragedy because most of the time that's a sign that those men just didn't have anybody in their lives to help them learn how to traverse that pain and that heaviness. And that's why I said earlier on, sometimes you have to make your pain your purpose in life for a period of time. Because sometimes that is the way out of this belief, of this story that you're broken. Because that's all that it is, it is a story. I remember working with a man, and I'll move on to the next one after I tell this quick story. I remember working with a man who had experienced abuse as a child and the abuse was really bad. And I'm not going to go into details about what he experienced. Experienced out of respect for him because it's just not necessary. But he had come to believe that he was fundamentally broken. And he came to believe that he was broken because he thought as a child that those things happened to him. Because there must have been something wrong with him. There must have been something wrong with him that those things happened to him. And over time he started to realize that the things that happened to him largely had not nothing to do with him, and that those were decisions that somebody else had made, an adult in his life had made, and that he was the casualty and the actual victim of somebody else's actions. And this goes back to comparing yourself to other people. Some of you have actually experienced being a victim and you're so, you're so hell bent on not admitting to being a victim in life because that's like the weakest thing a man can do. Well, sometimes the fastest way to regain your power and potency as a man is to say, yeah, I was a victim and I'm not anymore. Right? Sometimes the running away from the truth of what happened keeps you in that victim place. And so, and part of that is thinking that you're broken, right? Continuing to think, oh, I'm so effed up, I'm so broken. There's something so fundamental fundamentally wrong with me is continuing to be the victim without really owning that something happened to you that you were a victim of. Whether it was a car crash or a health incident or an abuse or a trauma or whatever it is, sometimes in life things happen to us that are so much bigger than we can carry or comprehend or understand. And we actually need support in order to, to get through those things. Which brings me to my next point, thinking that you have to do it alone. This is one thing that you as a man absolutely have to stop doing immediately. You do not have to do any of your life alone. You don't have to be successful alone. You don't have to move through your Pain alone. You don't have to go through the divorce alone or the breakup alone. You don't have to go through the loss or the death of a parent alone or the loss of a child alone. You don't have to go through any of those things alone. There are plenty of men that are out there that want to be in your corner and by your side to support you. And it is up to you to open yourself to the understanding that you will undeniably be a more attractive man. You will be a more confident man, you will be a more capable, competent man, and you will be a more autonomous man by having other men in your life who share those same values, who are holding you to the version of yourself that you are wanting to be. If you can surround yourself with men like that in your life, you will absolutely go farther, faster than you could ever have imagined. And the last piece I was going to add, I mean, I added in pretending like you're like you don't have trauma or shit to deal with in your past, that kind of went hand in hand with, with what I was talking about before. But the last piece really is thinking that peace or happiness is on the other side of some monumental achievement. And I see guys doing this all the time where they've taken their peace and their sense of happiness and they have future paced it, they have put it somewhere in the future, on the other side of making the million dollars, getting the woman, buying the car, building the house, whatever it is. And one of the skills that I reinforce that every man needs to learn is what I call pma. Pma. Present Moment Appreciation. Present Moment Appreciation. You have to practice pma. You have to practice Present Moment Appreciation every single day. You will have a healthier mindset. You will feel better about your life, people will want to be around you more. You will be happier, more in the moment, able to enjoy whatever it is that's happening and not waiting for some future perfect utopian thing to come along. And even when it does, you're not practiced in the ability to be present to the appreciation of the moment. This is the trap that so many men fall into. They take their happiness, they take their joy, they take their peace, and they put it on the other side of something in the future. That even when they attain it, because they haven't practiced and developed the skill of appreciating something in the moment in their life, all of a sudden they achieve the goal, they win the award, they get the promotion, they build the business, they hit the million dollars, they do whatever and they can't feel the joy in it and they don't feel happy or it's like it's there and gone and it's this fleeting thing. So these are 10 things I wish every man could stop doing. And, and even if you just took one of these things because I know it can be overwhelming to hear these 10 things and be like, oh my God, I have so much work to do and blah blah, blah, and all of a sudden that inner judge and critic starts to spin up. I want you to take the one thing that stood out about this that you know, if you executed on it for the next 30 days, it would like without question start to make changes and gains in your life. Even if it's just a 1% increase in happiness or groundedness or you know, a 1 1% decrease in your level of sabotage and self loathing. Take the one thing and execute on that. So if you're watching this on YouTube, so don't forget to subscribe by the way, but comment below and let me know which one really stood out to you, which one you're going to commit to. And don't forget to man it forward. Share this video with someone, somebody that you know could use it or would enjoy it. And until next week, Connor Beaton signing off. Be well.