Deep Inner Game

I’ve been watching David DeAngelo’s Deep Inner Game program with Dr Paul, and it’s really brilliant. The program is about developing the mindset that men need to be successful, particularly focused on women, dating and relationships. This mindset is often referred to as our “inner game”, and it really extends to the bigger picture of being confident and successful in life generally.

Here are some of the key things that I’ve learned:

Boundaries

Many of our problems in relating to other people are caused by having a weak psychological and emotional personal boundary, often viewed as having holes in our boundary.

Saying “No” is how we patch holes in our boundary.

Expressing preferences also helps build our boundary, and demonstrates it to other people. Women find this very attractive, even if their preferences differ from ours. If you’re very bad at expressing preferences, you may feel like you don’t have any; in which case you may need to start with arbitrary preferences. e.g. I love dogs, I hate cats.

Immature boundaries either have holes, or are thick and impermeable. Mature boundaries have doors that allow us to control what gets in and what does not.

Perfectionism is caused by a hole in our boundary, projecting our own faults and internal ideals out onto other people.

Characteristics we don’t like in other people are projections of our disowned shadow side out onto other people through holes in our boundary. The fix is to explore and accept our shadow side, while strengthening our boundary. We become better integrated and more able to accept these traits both in ourselves and other people.

Confidence

We build confidence by learning to say “No”, and to hear “No” without being upset.

Handling rejection means learning to hear a “No”. Avoiding situations that could involve rejection stops us building confidence because we don’t end up learning to hear a “No”. Lack of confidence stems from a lack of adult experience with rejection; although we often think it’s the other way around.

Nice Guys also have an excess of conscience and a lack of intuition. The cure is to examine your wounds to find the lessons they teach and develop your intuition.

Making Decisions

Making decisions builds intuition, and ultimately confidence. Avoiding decisions undermines confidence and teaches us passivity.

Constructive decisions have a win/win outcome for ourselves and other people respectively, destructive decisions are win/lose and lead to destructive behavior.

Making decisions always builds your experience and therefore helps you develop intuition. Whether a decision turns out to have been good or bad doesn’t matter so long as you can learn something from it.

Mastering decision-making leads to freedom and leadership opportunities.

Mastering our intellect leads to success.

Anxiety and Courage

The cure to anxiety is to exercise courage.

Courage is doing the right thing, regardless of how we feel.

Courage is not something we have, it’s a choice we make, available to us at any time.

Suffering

Suffering is when we burn emotional and psychological energy on things that we don’t control. Anything outside our boundary is outside our control. Attempting to control other people or situations leads to suffering.

The solution to suffering is to give up the need to control everything outside our boundary. Accept other people and situations the way they are.

At the same time, we can also learn how to influence other people to get what we want via win/win scenarios; we just need to remain detached from the outcome when we do so.

There is so much more in this program, I’ve only just scratched the surface. I highly recommend that you get this program from the Double Your Dating site.