“The harder life is, the more important it is for you to have the ability to manage your emotional state, the ability to decide how you’re going to experience life even in the midst of challenges.” – Hal Elrod

“Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.” – Aldous Huxley

Theory 

1. The basics

Emotional mastery is the ability to govern your emotional state. It involves actively and skilfully managing your thoughts and feelings rather than passively allowing them to manage you.

This is an attractive male quality for two reasons. Firstly, it signals a man’s capacity to endure hardship. Our ancestors had to cope with extreme swings in fortune: from feast to famine, safety to danger. The man who maintained or quickly regained his equanimity and optimism in the face of adversity was the man who could more effectively lead, problem solve, and ultimately survive.

Secondly, emotional mastery signals consistency. When emotions run high, people are easily swayed this way and that—they’re more prone to getting discouraged or distracted. If negative emotions fester for too long, they can weaken resolve and feed self-doubt. Therefore, the opposite of emotional mastery is emotional volatility, a quality that is unattractive in a man because for most of human history it was literally lethal. Women and their offspring would die if their man wasn’t emotionally stable enough to single-mindedly commit to their survival.

Emotional mastery is a strong indicator of something called “survival value”.

To fully apprehend why women desire emotional mastery in men, you simply need to call to mind how you, as a man, admire it and sometimes even require it in other men.

Imagine, for example, a sixteenth century ship captain. His goal is to safely get the ship from point A to point B through perilous seas. Frequent dips in resolve are all but guaranteed among the passengers, including the crew.

The captain himself will inevitably feel discouraged from time to time, but he, unlike the others, has a duty to keep spirits high. The ideal man for this job is emotional mastery personified. In the same way you would rely on him to be emotionally resilient if you were to board his ship, so too does a woman rely on you to be emotionally resilient if she is to stick by your side.

2. Digging deeper: Every man’s burden

Emotions are difficult work. If they weren’t, then the self-help shelf at your local book shop wouldn’t be groaning under the weight of volumes like “Master your Emotions” and “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” (as it happens, both great reads).

As a species, our emotional brain evolved first, giving primitive emotions like fear a louder voice and stronger vote than anything churned out by the more logical and ultimately more timid forebrain. If your brain were a boardroom, the majority of seats would be occupied by emotions.

Buddhists sometimes compare the emotional brain to a wild elephant—taming it requires practice and patience. Steering the elephant is a skill. Redirecting it when it goes astray takes effort. That’s another reason emotional mastery is attractive: most men don’t put in the work required to manage their emotional state. Men who do put in the work stand out from the crowd.

Women also look to a man to be her “rock”: to maintain stability when her own emotional state is in flux. Again, this has its roots in a time when women needed an emotionally stable man, as they and their offspring would be in grave danger without one. Just as a woman’s vagina is configured to need a man’s penis for insemination and reproduction, a woman’s vulnerability is configured to need a man’s strength for safety and survival.

We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that ‘tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.’

Ryan Holiday

It’s one of the myriad reasons polarity is such an effective means of attraction: nature is arranged to unite opposites. While the age of self-censorship and political correctness hates these terms, the more you “man up” and “be a man”, the more you will embody characteristics (like emotional stability) that women are hardwired to find attractive.

Now one of nature’s cruel twists is that men aren’t naturally cut out for the job. Men cry too, and I believe that despite outer appearances, men are in many respects softer internally than women. As Carl Jung wrote:

A very feminine woman has a masculine soul, and a very masculine man has a feminine soul….The more masculine [a man’s] outter attitude is, the more his feminine traits are obliterated: instead, they appear in his unconscious….Conversely, it is often just the most feminine women who, in their inner lives, display an intractability, an obstinacy, and a wilfulness that are to be found with comparable intensity only in a man’s outer attitude.

Any man who has witnessed a woman’s cruel transformation after a breakup can vouch. As Rollo Tomassi argues, “men are the romantics forced to be the realists, while women are the realists using romanticisms to affect their imperatives.”

Women and men are inherently emotional. People, regardless of gender, are emotionally vulnerable creatures. Every person on earth has to deal with fear, regret, inferiority, loneliness, guilt, frustration—the whole menu of shitty feelings.

Even so, there’s a gap between what the genders expect from each other because nature has provided them with different duties. A woman may not feel like breastfeeding her child, but it’s nonetheless her duty to do so since she has breasts. Equally, a man may not feel emotionally resilient, but it’s nonetheless his duty to act that way since he’s the protector.

Remember the ship captain from earlier: everyone on that ship, captain included, is fearful and uncertain. The captain, however, cannot succumb to those emotions or people will die. Men must take on the burden of negative emotions and learn to overcome them.

3. Levelling up: Generating positive emotions 

The culmination of emotional mastery isn’t merely to control negative emotions, it’s to generate positive emotions. In seduction, being positive is far more attractive than simply being not negative.

Take, for example, a fun frame of mind. Yes, fun—the thing that girls just wanna have. Fun is playful and light and, most importantly, sexy. Everyone wants fun. People have different agendas when they go out on the weekend, but everyone, without exception, is seeking some form of fun. They want a release from boredom, fear, frustration—all the bad stuff. And you, if you’re skillful enough, could be that release.

When you can manage emotions to the point that you have a firm grip over all the bad stuff, then, proceeding to the next level of emotional mastery, you can choose your emotional state—you can will yourself into a positive frame of mind.

For seduction purposes this obviously requires some external calibration: you want to be positive in a way that’s attractive (e.g., playful, teasing, carefree) and not unattractive (e.g., smiling too much). If done right, though, staying positive drastically improves your chances with women because it signals that you don’t take yourself too seriously and can grab life by the balls. Again, a man who is positive is much more attractive than a man who is simply not negative.

So there are two stages of emotional mastery: the first is to keep your negative emotions at bay, the next is to consciously generate positive emotions. Step one is to be her rock. Step two, her drug.

Further reading: The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel

Practice  

Since there are two stages of emotional mastery – managing negative emotions and creating positive emotions – there are also different sets of practices for each.

I: Managing negative emotions 

1. Meditation

Assuming you’re already exercising daily, mindfulness meditation is the best way to manage negative emotions.

I’ll spare you the standard pitch about how wonderful it is, how it’s backed by science, and how to do it correctly (sit upright, watch your breath, etc.)—all that information can be found elsewhere.

Instead, I’ll simply summarize some lessons I gleaned from years of daily practice:

Four takeaways from my meditation practice One good minute > 10 bad minutes Meditation needs to be a deliberate practice or else it’s just dressed up daydreaming. Without deliberate effort to observe and re-center, you won’t grow in your practice. That’s why a single deliberate minute is always better than 10 bad minutes. Don’t make it a chore Chores suck. If meditation is just another item on your to-do list alongside things like taking out the trash and buying groceries, you’ll actually add stress to your day. See it as something that replenishes your energy rather than drains it. Enjoy it You need to derive some pleasure from your practice or you won’t stick with it. For me, enjoyment comes from knowing that every second of meditation is making me a stronger man. The goal is whatever you want it to be The goal is not to achieve enlightenment or become so Zen that you lose your edge. “Do not try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist,” said the Dali Lama, “use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”

2. Solitude

Pascal said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

You get to see how needy you really are when you’re alone with no distractions, no stimulation, no text messages from family or friends or romantic partners providing you with little spurts of validation.

Excerpt from The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Cardinal Robert Sarah What men possess in themselves, they find nowhere else. Unless silence dwells in man, and unless solitude is s state in which he allows himself to be shaped, the creature is deprived of God. There is no place on earth where God is more present than in the human heart. This heart truly is God’s abode, the temple of silence.

Sitting alone in silence can be incredibly uncomfortable because you’re effectively cutting the umbilical cord and becoming as starkly naked to the world as you really are and always have been. But let me tell you this: if you can learn to love solitude, if you can derive strength from being alone, this is a superpower. It’s level 99 non-neediness.

2. Stoic practice

While every man should familiarize himself with stoicism as a philosophy, stoicism as a practice is highly underrated.

The stoics didn’t just put forward ideas and concepts, they offered actionable exercises you can use throughout your day.

**My favorite stoic practices**

Dichotomy of control This is the concept that everything that happens is either in one’s control or not. As a practice, the dichotomy of control is “to identify and separate matters” (Epictetus) into those two buckets. For example, you drive into to work and there’s traffic, so you say to yourself “I have not control over this”. You get into work and are assigned a project (no control), and while you’re unsure if unforeseen difficulties will get in the way of its completion (no control), you know that if you start on it today you’ll be in a better position to finish by next week’s deadline (control). Doing this practice over time will build a better awareness of what’s in your control so you can stop wasting energy on things that aren’t.

View from above This is the act of visualizing yourself from a zoomed out perspective. Your life is always lived in the first person, but you can remove yourself from this perspective and imagine how things would look from 10, 20, or 50,000 feet above. Visualizing yourself from a distance is a surprisingly effective way to get you out of your own head. It’s a common method in Neruo-linguistic Programming, a modern school of psychotherapy well-known for its reframing techniques.

Memento mori “Remember death” or “remember that you will die”. Reminding yourself of your mortality is an extremely effective way to remove anxiety from your life. You and everyone you know will die and be forgotten. Famous people will be remembered for slightly longer, but given a long enough time horizon, they too will be forgotten. So what is there to lose? Reminding yourself of this basic fact of life makes other stresses and concerns seem trivial.

Negative visualization (+ gratitude) The stoics suggest that you consistently meditate on bad outcomes so that you’ll be more prepared for their occurrence. But while this practice has its place as a way to mentally prepare for emergencies, I believe it is far more effective as a way to practice gratitude. As Alex Lickerman explains in “The Undefeated Mind“, gratitude is second only to love as a positive emotion. “Few internal forces are as effective as gratitude at making our life-condition rise,” he writes. The problem, however, is that gratitude is difficult to maintain. If you keep a daily journal of things you’re grateful for, you’ll find that any positive effects this elicits fade rather quickly. This is where negative visualization comes into play: gratitude is only sustainable when you actively consider negative alternatives to the things you’re grateful for. For example, you can’t sustain gratitude for your health unless you actively imagine scenarios (a car accident, cancer diagnosis) in which your health is severely compromised. Negative visualization works on its own, but it’s much more potent when it’s combined with gratitude.

Retreat into yourself “Nowhere can one retreat into greater peace or freedom from care,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “than within one’s own soul.”   You need to carve out a space within yourself where you can retreat and relax. Recognize that any deep peace you’ve ever experienced has always come from your own mind, so that’s where you should seek it. I like to envision a place that has brought me a sense of deep stillness, such as a beautiful garden or the pew of an empty church, and then make that my inner sanctuary for difficult times. Further reading: You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being by Rupert Spira

II: Generate positive emotions

1. Create your own happiness

Here’s a powerful yet remarkably underappreciated fact of life: there is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.

While not all happiness can come about by sheer force of will, I believe people’s innate capacity to self-generate it is extremely underestimated. Over time, a person collects enough traumas and disappointments that they even forget this capacity exists. Life is then lived in a sort of listless passivity in which good moods only come and go like the weather—there’s zero agency. I say fuck that.

Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.

Benjamin Disraeli

To the best that you’re able, you should create your own happiness. Approach your mind like an artist would approach a blank canvas—it’s your reality, you determine its colors and contours. With a bit of willpower and an aesthetic appreciation for the near infinite possibilities that life presents to you, you’ll be surprised at just how much agency you have in orchestrating what goes on between your ears.

A mere taste of this autonomy is freeing, and that’s ultimately what emotional mastery is all about: freedom. Freedom from the emotions that pull you down, and freedom to choose the emotions that build you up.

So renounce the pursuit of happiness and practice creating it yourself. This isn’t magic or alchemy or Manifesting™. It’s good old fashioned self-reliance.

Further reading: As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

2. Re-frame everything 

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, framing refers to the act of giving an event a certain context. For example, a divorce can be framed as “devastating” or “liberating”—the event itself is neutral. Rejection can be framed as “failure” or “feedback”.

Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true, because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce. It’s really that simple.

Louis C.K.

Perspective is everything. Since “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”, there’s no reason at all not to see the good in everything that transpires. You should positively re-frame everything because everything is already complete, it’s all as it should be. It’s only the negative framing that causes distress.

A passage in The Will to Believe by William James captures this well. James argues that a pessimistic outlook on life actually helps to create a world worth being pessimistic about:

Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism…Every human being must sometime decide for himself whether life is worth living. Suppose that in looking at the world and seeing how full it is of misery, of old age, of wickedness and pain, and how unsafe is his own future, he yields to the pessimistic conclusion, cultivates disgust and dread, ceases striving, and finally commits suicide. He thus adds to the mass M of mundane phenomena, independent of his subjectivity, the subjective complement x, which makes of the whole an utterly black picture illumined by no gleam of good. Pessimism completed, verified by his moral reaction and the deed in which this ends, is true beyond a doubt. M + x expresses a state of things totally bad. The man’s belief supplied all that was lacking to make it so, and now that it is made so the belief was right.

In other words, if you’re pessimistic, you’re right. If you’re optimistic, you’re also right. Each frame is self-fulfilling, and, more importantly, is a choice.

So why not choose the frame that empowers you as a man and gives you energy?

Further reading: NLP: The Essential Guide to Neuro-Linguistic Programming