Too Much Friction

What it means when there is too much friction in your personal or professional life, and how it can help you to reach your full potential.

In this video coaching newsletter, I discuss an email about the process of reaching your full potential and how encountering too much friction, difficulty and hardship can be used as a tool to guide you to make adjustments to your plans and strategies to make it easier and bring more harmony, ease and delight into your life.

I’m going to talk about something that comes up a lot in my phone sessions with clients. A lot of what I do is life strategy, whether it’s in your personal life, like I talk about in my first book “How To Be A 3% Man,” or aligning your life around your true calling and reaching your full potential in my second book “Mastering Yourself.”

What I’m focused on is helping people learn the mindset and the right kind of strategies to apply in their life, so they can achieve their outcomes. A lot of guys first come to seek my help trying to fix something that’s going sideways in their personal life, either somebody they’re in a relationship with or somebody they would like to be in a relationship with, that’s just not going the way they would like it to.

Success in life comes down to applying the science of high achievement fundamentals correctly, like I talk about in “Mastering Yourself,” and continually refining and optimizing your strategies and how you go about achieving those things in your life. Whether you realize it or not, we all should be trying to constantly improve and optimize our life. You’ve probably heard me say many times, the goal is to just try to get a little bit better each and every day.

I was doing a phone session with a client last week, and the guy has experienced a lot of success in his life over the last few years applying the things that I teach. And the woman that he had been dating and has been having a lot of difficulty with, basically his values weren’t really aligned with hers.

He is a very creative person, so he’s into making things. His girlfriend is very conservative, very religious, everything’s got to fit in her box the way it needs to fit, and he tends to be more liberal, more free spirited. He likes to smoke a little ganja every now and then to help him with the creative process, and even though his girlfriend would occasionally smoke, she was just not down with it.

Not only that, but in other aspects of his life and their relationship, they were constantly butting heads because their value systems are different. She wants things to be a certain way, and he’s more of a free spirit, kind of more like me, where you want to let people be who they are and obviously manage who’s in your inner circle and your life.

One of the things that I pointed out to him is that everything is going really well in his life. He’s in great shape, he’s successful and he’s successfully implementing things he wants to achieve in life so he can achieve his outcome in an effortless and easy way. But he’s getting a lot of friction in this relationship with his girlfriend.

If you’re trying to reach your full potential, one of the most important things you must have in order to get there as quickly, as efficiently and as effortlessly as possible is you’ve got to have people in your inner circle that are aligned with your vision and your goals and who have the same kind of outlook and value system that you do. Even though they have a lot in common, they’re very attracted to one another and they have a lot of fun together, their value system was constantly clashing.

Even though he really cares for this girl and is really attracted to her, over the last three or four years, it’s just constant friction. And it just boils back to the same things. There are things he really likes, that he’s into and the way he looks at the world, and there’s things that she looks at that she’s just not willing to compromise. In other words, she’s not allowing him to be who he really is, even though he’s given her the freedom to be who she is.

In order to be in a relationship with her, she wants things to be a certain way, because the family she comes from is also the same way. So even though he really loves and cares about this girl, he’s recognized now that they’re on a break that other women he’s meeting have goals and values that are aligned with his.

What I pointed out is, you’ve got two choices. You can stay with her and put up with the constant friction — because after several years of dating, she’s not going to change, and he certainly doesn’t want to change who he is or he’s not going to be happy. He would be being a pleaser to stay in the relationship with her, because she’s constantly going to be giving him grief about it. Like you’ve probably heard me say before, women are kind of like the Borg from Star Trek, where resistance is futile. Eventually. they’re going to wear you down.

So, what was happening was, he was constantly questioning himself, questioning his purpose, and questioning his mission — if he was choosing the right thing or, maybe his girlfriend was right, and maybe he should change and be more like she wanted him to be. Because at the end of the day, he doesn’t want to deal with grief from his girlfriend. And after several years, when she’s constantly giving him grief about the same things, and it always comes back to the same issue, you either accept that’s the way it’s going to be with her, if she’s not willing to compromise, or you’d be better suited to find somebody whose goals and value system is aligned with your own.

Once I was able to go through that with him, he was able to see the light, because he was really wrestling with it. He has a lot of chemistry with her, but at the end of the day, he walks away from his interactions questioning and doubting himself. And that’s not what you want the woman in your life to do. The right woman is going to support you, be your greatest cheerleader, egg you on and push you when you have doubts, not fill your head full of doubts and make you question your purpose, your mission and what you want to do in life.

It’s like having a team of people, and everybody’s goals and values are aligned, and you’ve got a bunch of A players on the team, but you’ve got a bunch of B and C players on the team that just aren’t pulling their weight. The longer those B an C players are allowed to be on your team, the more disruptive they’re going to become, and the more they’re going to get in the way of the team achieving it’s goals and objectives for the season.

That’s why you see a lot of free agents. You see this a lot in the NFL and the NBA. They bring in a big name free agent, and the guy just cannot put his ego aside for the good of the team. He just becomes a disruptive presence in the locker room and eventually they get released or traded away to another team, and that organization is out of a lot of money.

Oftentimes, it will hinder that team for several seasons, because it’s expensive when you lose an agent, because you’re paying for somebody that’s no longer on your team. And that prevents you from bringing in the kind of players you really need and having the capital available to pay them, because your cap is maxed out.

That’s a microcosm of what you see in a lot of different organizations and a lot of relationships. As an example, this past weekend I was in a weaponized geometry class with Kinetic Consulting — Jon Dufresne also known as Mochabear_actual on Instagram, who is a former Army Ranger — and we were working in a shoot house with what’s called UTM, which are training rounds.

They’re basically little marker rounds. Obviously, you have to wear thick clothing and face protection and cover your hands and stuff, and what you’re doing is working in a shoot house. You work the geometry, you work the angles. You go into this shoot house with the instructors behind you, watching you, and you’ve got two or three other guys in the shoot house basically waiting to ambush you, and they also have guns with training rounds in them.

The goal is to create the worst stressful environment, so it can duplicate being in a stressful gunfight. You know what it’s like when the adrenaline is pumping, you’re breathing heavily and you’re sweating, and you know if somebody sees you and you pie into a room incorrectly, they’re going to be able to put rounds on you.

The goal with the exercise is when you’re doing things right, you don’t get shot and you shoot the bad guys. If you do things wrong, you get shot and you experience pain. And as I said in the quote, pain is life’s way of saying, hey you’re doing something wrong. You need to take corrective action.

When you take a step back and you look at your life, you want to have as little friction as possible. Think about it. If things are difficult and hard and you feel like you’re beating your head against the wall, something’s not working. Instead of getting frustrated and giving up, the right way to look at that is to say, you know what, there’s something I need to optimize and do better that will get me better results and bring more ease and delight and peace and effortlessness into my life.

So, over the course of the weekend in the shoot house, that pain teaches you in essence, because you get instant feedback of what you’re doing wrong. So, if god forbid you’re ever in a real gunfight, ideally most people that you’re going to encounter, they’re not going to know what they’re doing. But the goal is to have you challenged by other people who are great shooters.

What I love about Jon is, he has two outcomes in life every day. When he gets up, he’s got two goals. He wants to have fun, first and foremost, and he wants to get better. That’s one of the things I love about being around him. He’s one of the happiest, kindest, nicest people, but one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever known. And he’s got similar goals, similar value systems, and I love hanging out with him, I love training with him. He’s a type A alpha male. His girlfriend absolutely fucking adores and worships him, and I don’t encounter that too often in the real world.

Those of you who are familiar with “How To Be A 3% Man” and what I teach, I’m sure you’ve experienced the same thing. There’s not a lot of dudes out there that get this. So when I meet a guy, and his girlfriend is just doting on him, talking about how amazing he is and how much he changed her life, that’s the kind of thing that makes me pay more attention to what she says and what he has to say. So he’s a great influence in my life, and I just love being around him and having people like that in my inner circle.

All of my closest friends, that’s the one thing they all have in common. They’re all extremely nice to me. Of all my best friends, they’ve never not been nice to me, and that’s really important, to have people like that that always look at the world in a better way. Even if you catch yourself or don’t catch yourself saying something negative about yourself, these are the kind of people that will say, “No Corey, you should look at it this way.” Or they have positive meaning behind things, and they help guide you to correct your mindset and self-correct.

That’s why it’s so critically important that the people you surround yourself with, and especially the women that you have your intimate relationships with, that they support you and they nurture you to be better. They’re not trying to tear you down and make you feel like shit, because deep down inside they feel like shit.

So, it’s really super important that you have the right people around you, and that you notice what’s causing friction in your life. I’ll give you an example. One of the things that I’m constantly working on and trying to improve are my different ad campaigns that I have, whether it’s running a Facebook ad or some of the YouTube campaigns, playing with the audiences, playing with the headlines.

For example on YouTube, one of the videos that I advertise, you can have a headline that people love and they react positively, or you can have a headline that’s maybe a little too abrasive or a little too triggering for some people. Then you get a lot of people giving the video a thumbs down vote and complaining about the video, even though most of them never even watched it. You get instant feedback.

That’s what’s great about the internet. Whatever you put out there, the crowd is going to give you instant feedback, good and bad, on what they like, what they don’t like and what you could improve. So when you’re spending money you’ve earned back out on advertising, the way you start out with your campaign is not the way it is once it’s finally optimized. And to optimize a campaign, it could take a whole month. So that whole time, you’re spending money.

You get financial pain if you’re doing things wrong. You also get negative feedback from people, so instead of being able to reach people and get them to watch your documentary, or whatever it happens to be, they’re just getting upset at a headline or a combination of words, and they just turn away without ever learning something that would have helped them. So as you continue to work through things and you finally get it optimized, especially when you’re spending time in advertising, you want to spread the peanut butter as thin as possible, so it goes as far as possible. Because at the end of the day, the system is going to take your money.

You have to notice what’s not working and come up with a new permutation. In other words, you’re trying to achieve something in life, you hit the wall, you recognize it’s not working, it’s not optimized, it’s not efficient. Then you say, what’s good about this? What can I learn from this? Just like I did in the shoot house. Every time you run through a scenario, you stop and you debrief with the the instructor, and they point out what you did right, what you did wrong and what you need to do differently, and you share it with the people that were learning as well. Everybody is there to help each other and get better. The bottom line is, at the end of the day, these are the kind of things that are going to save your life.

Just as a side note to that, one of the stats that I’ve shared is that when you look at police officers versus concealed carry permit holders, police officers are three times more likely to shoot an innocent person by accident than somebody that’s a concealed carry weapon permit holder. Now, the average citizen hears that and goes, that doesn’t make sense. The police are the ones who are supposed to be carrying the guns, and they’re supposed to be experts on that.

But here’s the reality. And this is what I get first hand from police officers that I know personally and that I train with. In the city where I live, they get four hours a year total. Everything is driven by budget in the police department, so you get four hours a year for firearms training. And most police officers, the only time they ever fire their gun is on an annual basis when they go to qualify on the range. I’ve seen their targets, and they can’t shoot for shit. That’s why you see in some of these shootings, police officers pull out their gun and they start blasting away, because they’re under stress. They don’t do force on force type of training like I was doing all weekend where you’re in a simulated gunfight.

Shooting is a perishable skill. You should be practicing two to four hours a month. So you can imagine, if you’re calling the police, hoping the police are going to show up with their guns and be able to save you, the statistical reality is the majority of those police officers that are going to show up probably haven’t even fired their gun in the last year. That’s why I’m a big advocate of self-reliance, and I talk about that extensively in my book “Mastering Yourself.”

Now that I’ve gotten to know a lot more police officers that are in the gun community, that are avid gun enthusiasts themselves, I hear them talk about how there’s just no budget for it. So they don’t get any training and people are upset that the police are making mistakes. It’s just like Jocko Willink said, they need grappling techniques, they need better training, they need more regular training and they need de-escalation training, and they’re simply not getting it.

Yet, we keep voting for the same incompetent politicians, because 96% of all incumbents get reelected, and then nothing changes. And then the next time somebody gets killed by a bad cop, everybody flips out, riots happen, and then we all go back to our corners and we vote for the same people. Then we’re upset that nothing changes. Part of the problem is us. If we want change, we’ve got to vote for different people. We’ve got to vote the people who aren’t getting their job done out of the office.

So in other words, we collectively as a society are experiencing a lot of pain due to government incompetence. And what do we do? We keep voting for the same people that are incompetent. Then we get mad at each other and the people we keep electing, because nothing is changing. That’s just stupid.

The point being, you want to use pain to guide you. Whether it’s an ad campaign that’s not working and marketing that’s not very efficient, or you’re having friction in your relationship with your girl, or you’re going to work every day at a job where the people you work with are assholes. You can stay in that situation and complain about it and feel sorry for yourself, or you can take control of your destiny and apply the negotiation and job seeking strategies I talk about in “Mastering Yourself,” so you can get a better job lined up.

And once you get your employment letter and offer from your new company, then you can put your two weeks notice in and effortlessly and seamlessly transition to doing the same work, ideally making more money if you apply the things that are in “Mastering Yourself,” and now you get to work with people who your goals and values are aligned with.

When you do that, what happens? You’ve just improved the quality of your life. You’ve just improved your happiness and your well being. When you’re happier, you’re going to smile more, you’re going to tend to work out more, you’re going to tend to eat better, more healthy foods, you’re going to take better care of yourself, and what’s that going to do? Just like I talk about in “How To Be A 3% Man,” that’s going to make you more attractive to women.

And if women find you more attractive, or the woman who is in your life finds you more attractive, she’s going to be more feminine and more submissive and willing to support you in the way you need to be supported, instead of experiencing unnecessary friction because your personal life strategy sucks.

That’s basically what my two books boil down to, personal life strategy in “How To Be A 3% Man,” and professional life strategy in “Mastering Yourself,” and optimizing both of those so you can get up every day like I do and do whatever the hell you want to do, when you want to do it and with the kind of people that you want to do it with. You can read whichever book is most important to you, depending on what area of your life you’re trying to improve the most. In other words, wherever you’re experiencing the most friction is what book you should focus on first.

If you’re having a challenge, whether it’s in your personal life or your professional life, and you’d like to get me to help you strategize and optimize your life with you — because I’ve been applying this stuff for almost three decades now, and I’ve got an extensive background, track record and history of knowing how to properly implement the science of high achievement fundamentals so I can live my life the way I want to — and if you apply the things that are in both of my books, over time you’re going to slowly start to get the same kind of results that I write about. But you’ve got to participate in your own rescue. You’ve got to do the work that’s necessary.

“We make better decisions when we are in a peaceful and relaxed state. Reaching our full potential is a process that requires constant assessment, refinement and adjustment of our strategies and actions. Pain and too much unnecessary difficulty is life’s way of telling us that our plans, actions and strategies are inefficient, and that we need to better optimize how we are trying to reach our full potential. Being in the zone and having an effortless life of ease and delight is the result of properly optimizing, organizing and aligning our actions, thoughts and mindsets with our goals and values. Too much resistance and friction are a sign that there are better ways to execute our plans and optimize how we go about accomplishing our grandest goals and dreams. Instead of letting difficulty and resistance frustrate and demoralize us, simply use them as tools to take corrective action, so we achieve our outcomes in the shortest time and most efficient way possible. Hence the saying, work smarter, not harder.” ~ Coach Corey Wayne

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