The Alpha, is the ideal, the elite. It’s the beginning, the first, the original. The alpha male – in the context we’ll discuss in this article – isn’t merely a social alpha, or a leader of a social group. He’s the leader of his own life in a very powerful way. He’s the leader of his friends and family, and someone who you can’t avoid respecting, even admiring, for the kind of man he is in every facet of life.
He’s a man of honor, integrity, and strength.
21 Steps You Need to Take to Become an Alpha Male
1. Be Real With Yourself.
Self awareness is a quality held by few – very few. There aren’t many who can see their deepest failures and weaknesses, and have the courage to work on them. There are even fewer that have the courage not to cover them up, or to fill the voids in their lives with quick fixes.
Quick fixes are the norm in today’s society, but they can’t exist in the life of an alpha male. He doesn’t fill his loneliness with drugs or porn. He doesn’t fill his insecurities by making fun of others and preying on the perceived weaknesses of others. He’s aware of the voids in his life, the emptiness, the longing for something greater, and he actively attempts to become a better person by making these his strengths.
Be real with yourself. What are your insecurities? Make them known. Say them out loud. That’s the first step in becoming a strong, courageous alpha male.
2. Do Your Thing.
The more I read about great leaders, and by correlation, great alpha males, I realize that they marched to the beat of their own drum. They had their own agenda in life. They had their own principles, passions, and they wouldn’t let others pull them from their mission.
This is not only a defining quality of a great leader, and a great man, but of an alpha male. A true alpha male doesn’t need a crowd to boost his ego. He’s self aware to the point that he knows his weaknesses, his misgivings, and he doesn’t need others to fill voids in his life.
Create your own path in life. Find what you’re passionate about, make sure it benefits others, and don’t let any barrier stand in your way. It’s when w have the internal strength to do our own thing, we can become a leader, and an alpha.
3. Seek to Do That Which You Fear.
I never get into arguments on Facebook, or Youtube, or the blog. To me, it’s just a waste of time. But the other day I did get in an argument with someone who scolded me for encouraging a young guy in a fight he said he had to go through with the following day.
Fact: the only way to defeat a bully is to stand strong, firm, and fight him. Avoiding him, her, it, will lead you to a life of weakness. Sometimes we have to walk into a battle knowing that we’re probably going to get our ass kicked, and take that beating like a man to earn the respect of not only our peers, but ourselves.
If my son is being bullied, I’ll tell him to stand and fight, just like my Old Man told me when I was younger. And guess what, I fought a bully once, and never had to fight anyone bullying me again.
Don’t merely do the things you’re afraid of, get in touch with your soul, and seek out that which you fear, then conquer it head on. For some, that might be fighting a bully, for others, that may mean quitting your job and starting your company. Others might have to travel.
You know what you’re afraid of. An alpha male doesn’t merely wait for an opportunity to face his fear; he understands that it’s the fight, the battle, that strengthens him, and times of calm, of peace, that weaken him.
4. Live a Life of a Warrior.
A warrior without a battle is akin to a man without a purpose; without a soul. As men, we need adventure, we need a battle, and I’m convinced that we need to look at our lives as if they’re one big war.
What are we fighting?
There’s a strong part of our hearts – the warrior in us – and a weak part: the coward. The coward wants to take the easy road, the path of least resistance. The warrior wants what our true heart and soul yearns for: action, the object of our ambition, a family, real relationships.
One is evil, one is good. The battle between the two is very real. An alpha male recognizes the battle, and he fights it every minute of every day. One of the reasons why alpha males are so few, is that the vast majority of the men in this world are cowards. They give in to the path of least resistance. They follow the crowds that lead to an empty life.
At every opportunity, live life like a warrior. This means treating life as a war, but also living a life of discipline and courage. Be the shoulder and the soldier for those who need one. Be the Alpha.
5. Have the Courage to Fail Gloriously
The average person lives in fear of failure. It’s one of the most debilitating forces on the planet. It’s what holds back potentially great men from greatness, and it’s what makes an alpha male, an alpha.
Failing at the small, inconsequential things in life is easy. It doesn’t take much courage, and it’s not even worth mentioning. It’s when you follow your heart, your ambition, and work your ass off, that the possibility of failure becomes real, engulfing, and even crushing. This is when a real man rises, fights, forges on, and fights on.
An alpha male has the courage to go against the grain, and to attempt to accomplish what has never been done. Thomas Edison was an alpha male, as was Napoleon, and Teddy Roosevelt. Each of them did more in their years than many could in 100 life times. Don’t attempt small, insignificance, attempt and fail gloriously.
6. Become Self-Reliant.
An alpha male doesn’t have to rely on others to succeed in life. He doesn’t have to rely on others to pay his bills, to make his meals, for emotional support, for strength. His strength is internal, it’s developed. You may not have that kind of strength yet, but you’ll get there, as will I.
Please come to the fundamental understanding that in life no one owes you a single thing. Everything you want in life – be they relationships, money, fame, happiness, self-worth, a place in the world where you feel that you matter – you have to create, cultivate, and forge.
As Mr. Balboa so elloquently stated to his son, “The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place… and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently, if you let it.” It’s only through becoming self reliant that you can ensure that you can take care of yourself and those around you.
Now, being self-reliant can take many on meanings, shapes, and forms. Emerson’s Self Reliance was one that each of us as men, need to possess. In becoming self reliant in the way that we are self reliant physically, to take care of ourselves, where we don’t need someone to build our house, hunt for our food, fix our car, write our report, we can take care of ourselves and truly forge our own path in life.
This is the way of the alpha male. If there’s an area of your life where you need assistance, learn how to assist yourself. I just travelled to Mexico for a week, and completely depended on others knowing English for my survival; never again. Being able to not only survive in a hard world, but thrive in one, is something a modern alpha male must do.
Make a list of areas in which you aren’t self reliant, and get working bit by bit.
7. Build The Body of an Alpha Male.
Growing up, Teddy Roosevelt was a weak and sickly boy, something his father would have nothing of. His dad was a strong, strapping man who took pride in his appearance, and what he could do physically. Having a son that would grow up to be a weak man was something he just wasn’t prepared to accept. So he didn’t.
At a young age Roosevelt Sr. put Teddy on a weight lifting routine to build his body, and taught him how to box. Teddy was a true alpha male, and his physical transformation – along with his embracing of the strenuous life – was a large reason for that.
How to Build the Body of an Alpha Male
8. Get in a Fist Fight.
Growing up in a Christian home, I always heard the term “turn the other cheek” in Sunday school, but when I faced my first bully, my Dad told me to stand and fight. He knew that you can’t avoid or back down from a fight unless you first posses the courage and the power to fight.
And so I fought. I beat the bully, and the bully stopped being a bully, and instead became a friend. That’s the way of the warrior. A warrior doesn’t need to fight at every opportunity, actually, he rarely does, but when the time comes where it’s a matter of honor, or of defending another, he has the power to destroy whatever enemy stands in his way.
If you let the bully win as a kid, he’ll win as a teen, and again as an adult, and that bully doesn’t get weaker, he gets more cunning, more evil, and more relentless.
Great men have known battle. They’ve fought. They’ve been beat physically, and have beaten others physically. They know that the world literally does knock you down, and it’s how many times you get back up that really matters. A real man, and an alpha male, has taken his lumps, and given many to boot.
This isn’t metaphorical: You need to get hit in the face to be an alpha male. You need to see what you’re really made of. You need to get your ass handed to you in the ring, get laid out on the football field, get blindsided on the ice. Physical violence isn’t a nice thing, but it’s a part of who we are. It has been a part of who we are for a long, long time.
Only recently have we been able to avoid confrontation and physical violence and still get through life. We find our confrontation in a false reality, and so we create false men (enter the world of video games). When physical violence and even hard tribulation and competition make an appearance in our lives, we’re ill-equipped to deal with them.
When living without honor becomes easier than living with it, we give in to the easy road because we so deathly fear violence, struggle, and competition. That’s not the way of a real man, nor is it the way of an alpha male. Join a sport, put on some gloves and get in the boxing ring, and enter the ring of life.
Too much comfort has weakened our society – it’s killed our masculinity. There is no evolution within our species without physical violence. It makes a wimp into a warrior when he stands and fights.
9. At Some Point, Stop Asking for Help
This is in line with self-reliance, but it comes from a more social and financial angle. An alpha male sometimes needs to go off on his own, to become a better leader. He needs to break free from his parents, to become a man. Human relationships are a large part of our happiness on this planet. They’re what give our lives meaning and purpose. But they can also be debilitating for our development if all we do is rely on others for support – support that can come in many forms.
One of the toughest things for me to do when I was younger, was to move out of my parents house and start a business at the same time. I’m not suggesting that everyone do this, but I am suggesting that if the time is right – even wrong – you make your life just a bit harder on yourself.
Don’t underestimate your internal strength and power.
What often holds us back from becoming real men and alpha males is the lack of faith we have in ourselves. We don’t think we have what it takes to cut it in the real world, or we’re afraid to do the work. If you’re at a point where you don’t feel that you can live without the support of your family, friends, cushy job, then break free of these things that keep you safe.
Read, and read a lot. Find strength internally, from books, and from the power you have within. It’s there. Make life harder on yourself, or you’ll never experience the power you have within.
10. Become a Voracious Reader.
An alpha male strengthens his mind as well as his body and spirit. Remember, we’re not merely talking about a social alpha, or the leader of a pack. An alpha male doesn’t have to be the biggest guy in the world. If you’ve met any bodybuilders before, you’ll know that they’re often the most insecure guys in the room.
They’re not alphas, but they’re huge. The true alpha male is the guy who’s strengthened his mind, which helps him become more self-aware, self-reliant, and confident in a quiet sense.
Try not watching any TV for a week, and instead read. Read anything by Stephen Pressfield, Robin Sharma, or Emerson. Read anything on or about Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, or Napoleon Bonaparte. If there’s one commonality between all great men in history, and all great leaders and alpha males, it’s that they had a lust for books. This is no coincidence.
