A Man's Guide To Claiming What He Wants: The Father Pattern

There's a life you want.

The work, the money, the woman, the family. The life you've imagined a thousand times.

And some part of you is still waiting for permission to go and take it. Waiting to be ready. Waiting to be sure. Waiting to be chosen.

But if you're waiting to be chosen, you'll be waiting forever.

There's a difference between a man who is blocked and a man who is waiting. One has a problem. The other has a pattern.

The life you want doesn't get handed to you. It gets claimed.

And nobody has ever showed you how to do that.

The middle you're standing in.

Before we get into what it actually means to claim what you want, there's likely a journey you've been on that looks something like this.

You got into business or sales, and you fell into the hustle and grind of high output and long days. It generated results, until they started to slow down. And maybe you started to question if there was a better way.

Maybe then you walked the spiritual path. You went deeper into what it means to receive, or to trust. You looked at words like alignment and asked what they really mean. Things started to feel clearer.

But now you find yourself somewhere in the middle of those two.

Is it push harder, or is it trust more? Which one is it?

The mind starts to compartmentalise each one into right or wrong. This action is aligned. This one isn't.

The problem is that this is too binary to be a form of truth that's going to serve you.

And when you find yourself there, it's easy to fall deeper into the pattern where you're not truly claiming what you want.

How it shows up.

This can show up in a variety of ways. Lets look at the following examples:

• You're putting out a lot of content, but nobody really seems to be reaching out to you from it.
• You find yourself in a conversation with someone and you don't really drop the offer that you have available.
• The price for that offer is hidden away somewhere, because you never really say it out loud.
• It could be the woman you keep playing it casual with, because you're not really sure whether you want to go all in or not.
• It could be the message you drafted and then deleted.
• It could be seeing a man with everything you want and feeling some darkness come out inside of you when you experience that.

It could look like doing more, but not doing the thing that moves things forward, whether that's inner work or more action.

There's some form of avoidance there. Avoidance of the thing that's truly going to move you forward.

Waiting for someone to make it right.

I went to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and we see this play out around the beginning of the film (no spoiler).

We see it from the son of Odysseus. He's sitting in his father's home and he's frustrated. He's clearly feeling something about what's going on. The men around him are eating everything his family has to offer, and in most cases not being respectful. It's clear they're taking advantage of the hospitality, because there's nobody there to tell them otherwise. But the boy doesn't act, because he's still waiting for his father to return.

This is the pattern we're looking at. Waiting for someone to come back and make it right.

This is the most destructive version of it, because with waiting there's no end date. There's no day where this finally resolves.

You'll end up waiting forever.

One of my favourite films is The Place Beyond the Pines.

It hit me deeply, and my interpretation of it is that it's about what a boy inherits from his father, and what it really takes to break that pattern.

So the question for this journey we're about to go on is, what is the place beyond for you?

We'll come back to that.

Avoidant Structures.

The strangest part is that there's likely a deep part of you that already knows you're waiting.

So why haven't you moved?

From what I've seen in myself, and in the men I've supported, we have a tendency to build things around the patterns we're not addressing. And we become proud of it, because it feels like we built it out of our own will.

Most men think they have a strategy problem. What they've really done is build an entire structure around not making the ask, not claiming what they want, not opening a door for themselves or anyone else to walk through.

Built and designed without them even knowing. All so that nobody ever has to say no.

1) Business

This one is personal, and it's where I spotted the pattern first.

Before Modern Mastery I ran a marketing agency built entirely on cold outreach. At one point we were sending ten thousand messages a month across email and social.

When I pivoted into what I do now, I was building an attraction model. Put out content, be visible, let people come to me.

Sounds amazing.

But over time I started to notice that a part of me was subtly avoiding the ask. I was building this from a place of waiting for other people to choose me, instead of me choosing what I wanted.

The attraction model isn't the problem. It works, it's worked for me for years, and I'd encourage anyone to explore it. What matters is the reason underneath it.

Because if you're never in the sales process, nobody can ever say no.

If you zoom out and listen to what was going on in my subconscious at the time, it was something like this. I have to make everybody come to me, because then I will know I am chosen. I will know I am wanted.

This wasn't a skill problem. We'd done all of the outbound with the agency and I know what that looks like from head to toe. I could always do it. I chose not to.

What I was protecting was my own avoidant pattern of being rejected, and waiting to be chosen.

Honestly, one of the biggest breakthroughs of my life.

2) Spiritual

More courses. More journaling. More clearing. More healing. Working on yourself as a way to avoid the world, almost hoping to end up somewhere with no challenges.

A lot of it looks like progress. At some point it becomes avoidance of what's necessary to move forward.

There have been inward seasons that absolutely transformed my life. They're necessary and I still do that work. But at some point it can become avoidance, instead of being devoted to the journey of embracing the discomfort of life with an open heart.

3) Relationship

Keeping it casual to the point where she has nothing to say yes or no to.

Almost acting uninterested until she moves first. Subtly waiting to see if she's really interested in you before you ever commit or choose her.

At its core, it's waiting to be chosen again.

The house in Bali.

When you're not decisively claiming what you want, it's a disempowering place to be.

I'll never forget, I was living in Bali and going through a tough financial season.

The house wasn't what I expected, so I decided to get a refund and move somewhere else. But I didn't have the resources to just make that choice. I had to wait for the refund, and for someone on their side to sort it out in their own time.

I remember sitting there hating that I was in that position at all.

We're constantly living out circumstances created by the past version of ourselves. I could have done something in that moment to change it, but I was living inside a pattern I'd been in far longer than I knew.

The thing that made it worse was that the helplessness felt familiar.

In that moment, and in others, I was watching myself sit in a position I had watched a man in my household sit in every single day.

What it costs you.

As I dove deeper into this pattern and noticed it across different clients I'd worked with, there are a few ways this really costs you if you don't address it.

• When you can't fully choose, you can't pick a direction and stick with it long enough for it to be fruitful in your life.
• You don't open a door for someone else to walk through and say yes or no.
• It's more challenging to lead a client or a team towards that path of transformation.
• You can't own your voice when people misunderstand you, so you start to get smaller, or shrink, or work out what you should say rather than what you actually want to say.
• You can't hold a standard and invite people into it, because it's too watery when you haven't chosen it.
• In things like sales, you can't say the number out loud, own it, and stay silent.

Of course a business has many core functions, but sales is the lifeline of whether that business even exists.

You can't avoid it and call it alignment.

The father pattern.

So where did you learn it?

Because you can't build something this specific, a protection mechanism this precise, by accident.

You learned it from a man. Whether he was there and present, or whether he wasn't.

And it started before you could even speak.

If you had a man in your house who never led it, you're going to be left guessing at what leading actually looks like. The trap is that you don't even know you're not doing it.

You end up in a life you didn't fully choose. Or a woman in your life is triggering you and asking something of you that you can't quite name. Or your business is requiring something of you that you've never seen done before.

It's all connected.

The shape this takes in a household looks something like this.

• Emotional distance. Not feeling seen, heard or cared for. Never sure where you stood with him.
• He never took leadership of the home. He didn't provide fully, and your mother worked more than he did.
• He wasn't respected in the house.
• He couldn't love himself, so he couldn't fully love you either. It was never a felt experience.
• Drink, substances, or locking himself away.
• He avoided life and never came to meet it.
• Or there was no masculine presence at all, and your mother had to be both.

Witnessing those things as a boy, and especially feeling them, is a hard thing to go through.

I've been there myself. Never felt led. Didn't know where I stood with that presence in my house.

That confusion and distance creates a place that doesn't feel safe, because there's no masculine presence holding the container.

What begins to happen is that a little boy or girl feels a deep uncertainty about whether they're worthy of love.

And from what I've seen and experienced myself, this is where the origin of that waiting truly comes from.

The performer.

When a child is left uncertain about whether he is worthy of love, he doesn't stop wanting the love.

He just becomes a performer in order to get it.

He learns that his worth is something he has to bargain for, because the love that boy needed was not given unconditionally. So he becomes whoever he needs to be, and puts on whatever mask fits what was going on with the father, hoping it earns him something.

But even as the distance from him grows, that pattern doesn't go away.

It leads into not understanding what it means to truly choose yourself, because you're still waiting to be chosen by that man.

Then as he grows up, that engine built underneath the surface gets directed at everything in his life. At money. At business. At the body. And especially at women.

The question of worthiness branches into all of them. Chasing women, chasing results, chasing money, to validate something in himself. To fill the need that didn't get met in those early years.

In essence, you've been trained to be uncertain about whether you're worthy or not.

A push from behind, a pull from ahead

When I talk about a push from behind, this is what I mean. Underneath all of it is fear. Fear of not being enough, or of not having that need met.

So the boy is still a boy, but he grows into a man and goes out to chase it.

It can look like drive. It can look like real motivation. But it takes a toll, because the thing you're looking for is never going to arrive.

Some men go the opposite way, into substances or avoidance of life entirely. It's the same thing.

What we're aiming for is a pull from ahead, rather than that push from behind.

We're not trying to get rid of the drive. We're switching the fuel source to something lighter.

When you stop running from something, you can start running towards something else.

It's always a bit of both. But the more you let go of the push, the more the pull starts to show itself.

The deeper truth here, and I say this with so much love because I've walked it myself, is that that love was never yours to earn.

From here on, this is about you choosing yourself.

The love that younger version of you was looking for has to come from you now. A felt sense of safety within your own self.

You do this by becoming the man who chooses and claims what he wants, and leads himself first.

The two surrenders.

You may be reading this and thinking, I've taken steps towards that. I've done some work around this. I've stopped forcing things.

And no matter where you're at in that journey, you may be asking, why has nothing really changed?

For me it looked a bit like this.

I had a business, I was forcing things, proving myself, and all of the energy driving me was mainly fear. I learned a lot. It's not that it was bad or wrong, it was just what I was operating from.

That led me down a path of hitting results a younger version of me would have been proud of, then feeling unfulfilled, asking deeper questions, starting the business I have today, and eventually supporting hundreds of clients across different communities.

And I was still subtly in that energy of pushing myself forward.

While everything was working on the surface, I got to a point where I had to let go of all of it. The communities. The clients.

I thought it would be a short three to four month journey. That's what I'd planned for and what I'd budgeted for.

It ended up being eighteen months, and it was incredibly transformative.

What I learned in that season was surrender. What it means to slow down, to trust my body, to not be driven by urgency and fear, to build a real sense of safety in myself.

But I started to get surrender and letting go mixed up with choosing and claiming what I wanted.

I was very much in the feminine side. Receiving, trusting, relaxing, learning to create safety in my body without doing anything.

What I didn't understand was that there's a masculine surrender too. And that this is a game of balance.

When you get onto the spiritual side of life, words like alignment and surrender and receiving can very easily become a place to hide. Like an incubator that lasts a little bit too long.

Getting good at receiving doesn't mean everything lands on your doorstep.

It's part of it. It's the feminine energy within all of us that we need in order to be fully present in what's happening, and satisfied with what we have. But going out into the world and choosing what you want is the other side.

Feminine surrender is the allowing. The letting go, the detachment from outcomes, the full presence in the moment that exists here and now.

Masculine surrender is divine will, the force of God flowing through you into action and movement. It requires courage, and the ability to hold yourself when taking risks.

It is the choosing and the claiming. It's that pull from ahead.

Both together lead to really powerful leadership, for yourself and for others.

And I sense the order matters. The choice comes first. The surrender is to the outcome.

You've claimed what you want, and completely let go of what it should look like.

I go deeper into this balance in another letter called The Energy Quadrant. You can review that letter after by right-clicking here.

Desire is not the enemy.

Before we go further into this masculine choosing, we have to get something out of the way. When you're involved in the spiritual world, things can get confusing.

You may have heard that wanting things is attachment. You may have heard that desire is the root of all suffering.

Out of the context they were said in, these turn into rules. Wanting is bad. Desire is bad.

So the trap you fall into is trying to dissolve them, which is really ignoring the seed of God within you that is trying to create through you by those very desires.

My belief is that our desires are our divine right.

We would not have them if they were not for us to move towards. That is divine will flowing through us into our solar plexus, giving us the movement of energy to go and choose.

The desire to create something. To build something. To be with an amazing partner who loves you. To love yourself. To be of service to other people.

All of these can be looked at through the lens of what is most aligned for you.

There is also a difference between pure desire and impure desire.

Purified desire moves towards love, wisdom, compassion, growth, service, creative expression, connection to the divine.

Impure desire comes from ego attachment. Greed, because of a deep sense of lack. An obsession with control or dominance, to fill a void or a feeling of powerlessness.

Knowing the difference comes down to developing your own discernment, and understanding yourself in a deeper way.

What you deeply want is how creation actually moves through you.

What I want wants me more is something I say to myself often.

When you refuse to claim that, you're not being humble. You're standing in the way of what is trying to come through you, and only you.

Desire that isn't claimed doesn't go away. It festers under the surface and becomes a heavy weight to carry.

If you've ever met someone who gave up on their dreams, or once had a beautiful vision of life that got away from them, you can feel the resentment in them.

I remember thinking in my early twenties, when I get to the point of being near death, the last thing I want is to feel that I didn't go after what I truly wanted. That I didn't claim what was here to be mine.

It's like the only thing we're here to do is claim what is ours in this life.

When you're not fully claiming it, there's a real part of you that can never be at peace. Because deep down, you know you're not going after it.

The disowning of desire is where this becomes a problem.

Because deep down you want to win. You want people to see you as successful, to recognise you as someone of value, to have a life beyond the norm, to have the woman of your dreams.

And then you label it as ego, or materialism, or not spiritual.

You're disowning a deep part of yourself.

What you'll do unconsciously is keep yourself small in order to align with that, and build a deep resentment towards yourself and life in the process.

This is the disowning of what's known as the shadow.

I go deeper into The Shadow in another letter. You can review that letter after by right-clicking here.

The proof of it is in the trigger. If you see someone who has what you want, but you haven't claimed it yourself, you'll feel that heavy energy move in you. You may have something to say about them.

Really it's an invitation inwards, into what you're not claiming for yourself.

The cat.

It would be easy to look at where we've got to and think, okay, the answer is just go take action.

Go send the messages. Go make the offer. Go ask the girl out.

That's true, but not complete. There's an important piece we have to cover first.

There's a big difference between chasing and choosing. But they look the same from the outside.

I'll never forget visiting family out in the countryside, and there was a cat there.

Every day that summer, multiple times a day, it goes out. It chooses the bird or the mouse, decides, and goes after it.

If it misses, it doesn't start questioning whether it should be a cat, or whether it's worthy of being a cat. It just goes out again in five minutes, or tries again tomorrow.

When it gets it, it brings it home and drops it in front of your door. It doesn't need to perform for you or for other cats.

That's the energy we're talking about.

Chasing vs. choosing.

Two men go out and send the same message. One is choosing. The other is chasing.

From the outside the message may look identical. From the inside, they're complete opposites.

The one chasing is coming from neediness. From scarcity. He's attached to what the person says, because it says something about who he believes himself to be.

If he hasn't looked at what's going on underneath, he'll naturally get more nos because of the energy he's putting out. Even though the message may be perfect. Because every no just confirms what he already believes about himself.

When you let go of the pattern underneath, you go from chasing to choosing. You're a new person doing the same action with completely different energy.

The energy underneath the action is what matters. Not the action itself.

I believe this is why most basic strategic advice doesn't work for most people. It doesn't touch the parts underneath. It's why you can have tons of information and still be in the same place.

So let's look at what choosing actually is.

• You choose to reach out to a person.
• You choose to make them an offer.
• You choose to stay in the room with them until there is a yes or a no, so you can close the loop.
• You choose to stay solid regardless of the answer.
• You choose to do it again tomorrow.
• You choose to open doors for people to walk through.

You choose the woman. You choose the standards. You choose the boundaries. You choose your values. You choose the family.

You choose whatever you want.

Because choosing is claiming. And claiming is leading.

Staying in the room.

The key part with all of this is staying in the room.

You stay long enough for someone to say yes or no to what you've chosen, so you can either move forward with it or close the loop and go a different way.

Whether it's a potential client, a person, a partner, you put an offer in front of them.

I have chosen this. This is what I am choosing. Are you into this? Yes or no?

If they say no, you've got a clear answer, which in this case is as good as a yes.

You will never get what you want until you have chosen it and put it in front of someone for them to choose it.

The whole piece of waiting to be chosen gets solved by you choosing.

When you choose, people choose you back, because you're not waiting for it to confirm anything about who you are or what you're worth.

• You put content out, and people start reaching out.
• You're in a conversation with someone, and you make the offer.
• Someone is curious about working with you, and you say the price with certainty. You let them choose.
• The woman you've been keeping it casual with. You either choose her or you don't.
• You draft the message and you put it out there.
• You see a man with exactly what you want and you get inspired, because you've already claimed it for yourself. He's just proof it's possible.

The place beyond

We're going to land the plane here.

We spent time looking at the man who didn't choose, and how you learned it from him. There's a real part of this journey where you see it, and you feel it, and whatever that brings up for you.

But he was running his own version of this.

Nobody showed him either.

He wasn't withholding something that he had. He didn't have it to give in the first place.

And the gap that he left is the shape of the man you are now becoming.

You had to learn to choose when nobody chose you.

I see this as the curriculum of life. What we're here to change in what we lived through ourselves.

You get to be the one in your entire bloodline who chooses differently.

So, the place beyond.

It's where the pattern stops. When you stop living his life in your own way.

You get to the place beyond by choosing what he never chose.