At the most pared-down psychological level, being a man is about TWO things: Hiding emotions/being seen as 'tough' & Making money

These two primary drives are SO important that I literally want you to tattoo those two words onto your memory right now: TOUGH & MONEY

Understand these 2 basic driving facts about men, & you will ALREADY have given yourself a massive advantage over 99.8% of other women. In fact, whether your single or coupled, understanding these 2 fundamental facts will MASSIVELY increase your insight into a male mind & allow you to get the love you want, need, & DESIRE.

Right there, you've got the essence of the male psyche - & it drives literally EVERYTHING we do, from the kind of job we get, to when we want to have kids, to the type of number of women we sleep with.

Here's what it's Like to be Born a Guy

Still in Mom's tummy: your Mom gets an amniocentesis test done & it told, "it's a boy!" Your parents immediately start thinking about you differently than if you'd been a girl: Mom gets out the rollers & brushes & paints the nursery blue, & Dad breaks out the cigars & starts making plans for you to take over the family business when you grow up.

Born: Mom wraps you in one of those blue fluffy blankets & takes you home to the blue-painted nursery. Your grandparents descend on you with 'boy-baby' gifts: a camo-painted crib, a pair of tiny baby basketball boots. Dad hangs up a mobile with alpha-predator animals on it like sharks, tigers, & bears (if you were a girl, you'd get the 'pretty' animals like butterflies & hummingbirds)

On your first birthday: you get a trike colored like a racing car, pajamas printed with all kinds of trucks & a toy bear dressed like a firefighter. You have already started getting comfortable with the ideas of toughness, violence, competition, & being strong.

Kindergarten: you fall out of a tree & start crying. All of your friends gather round & laugh at you. The gym teacher hauls you aside & puts a Band-Aid (with a tough superhero on it) on your cut & quietly tells you to 'man up, son - crying's for girls.' You snort back the tears; your friends stop laughing. Holy crap, the teacher was right! Lesson learned: tears are for wimps. If you get hurt, shove it all down inside & hide it, otherwise people will LAUGH AT YOU.

Grade school: you get beaten up for the first time. You come home sniffling. Your dad takes you outside & tells you to 'quit crying & make him proud.' Then he teaches you how to fight back. Next thing you know you're in boxing class getting taught how to ram somebody's nasal bone through the back of their skull.

Middle school: you get beaten up - again. This time, though, you've learned your lesson: you 'take it like a man' without a single public tear (although in the bathroom afterwards, you do sniffle some - once you've locked yourself safely in a stall where nobody can see you.) The lesson of acting tough & never showing emotion is already beginning to harden like an evil carapace around your heart.

Age 15: you get your first job & you get your first PAYCHECK. Mom bakes you a cake & your Dad slaps you on the back & tells you that now you're the 'man of the house'. You're confused at first because you can't see how bagging groceries at Costco for eight hours a week is so great. Your friends are weirdly jealous; they still have to ask Mom for pocket-money. When you hear them complaining about it, you discover that 'winning' over other guys feels freaking amazing.

Age 16: one weekend, you use some of your hard-earned Costco money to take a girl to the movies. When you pull out a fistful of cash to pay for her popcorn & diet coke, she blushes, & smiles at you, & asks if you can get her some candy to go with the popcorn. Nervously you feel in your pockets for extra change ... & when you realize you have enough, & buy her what she wants, she kisses you on the cheek & makes a big fuss over you, & you feel warm & proud & strong & masculine ... & it's attractive. You start to figure out that it's not the JOB that's important, it's the MONEY YOU MAKE FROM IT that's the big deal here. Lesson learned: MONEY equals MANHOOD. The more money you make, the better it feels.

Senior year of high school: you try out for the football team ... & because of all the boxing lessons & backyard play-tussles with Dad, you get accepted. Before you know it, your hanging out with the cheerleaders on the weekends, & girls come & hang around after school watching you practice, Guys want to be your friend & hot girls smile at you in the corridors. You start to realize that competition & status of being 'better' & 'tougher' than other guys means guys want to be like you & girls want to be WITH you.

The details can vary a tough from guy to guy, but I guarantee you the outcome is the same.

Here are the lessons the average Western dude has drummed into him literally from the moment he's wrapped in his first (blue, duhh) blanket: Real men don't show emotion (unless it's anger), Displaying ANY kind of vulnerability will get you laughed at or beaten up, Winning is the most important thing, Competing with other guys to be the best is vital, Masculinity it inextricably tied to financial success, STOP CRYING. Being vulnerable & showing your feelings is for wimps, Making money to prove yourself, get status, get friends, & get WOMEN

I know it sounds sexist as hell (& it is), but it's also THE TRUTH. & fair or not (spoiler alert: it's not), this is the REALITY for the vast majority of men - whether they know it or not.

Okay, so now you know that guys have a constant drive to make money, provide for the people they care about, & WIN over other men ...

... but have you ever wondered WHY  they have that drive in the first place??

The Primal Provider Drive: Why most guys constantly feel like they're failing as men

A man & his small family crouch, hungry & cold, in a cave. The fire at the mouth of the cave flickers in the wind, sending gusts of thick black smoke back to where the three small children huddle under furs, watched over by their hollowed-eyed, rawboned mother.

The Man of the family is poised at the mouth of the cave, staring out into the night.

The knuckles of his massive hands clench white around the left of his spear. Night-time is when the big predators come out ... & every noise from the vast grassy expanse outside could spell the end of him & his small family.

His muscles are drawn tight with tension. He barely even dares to blink. He's waiting, always waiting, for the end to come ... & readying himself to fight to the death to protect what's his.

On the outside, he appears calm, motionless, ready.

But on the inside, what he's concealing is FEAR.

It never leaves him: a black, pervasive dread of what might come from the dark for him & his family.

They depend on him for their lives: for food, for protection against rival clans, for bare-knuckled, gritted-teeth combat against the hungry predators that stalk the blackness outside.

If his family is to survive, they need to BELIEVE in him. If they're to survive, he must fight the fear alone.

He knows he can never, EVER let them see how afraid he really is.

... Okay, okay, I know the whole 'caveman thing' has been done to death ... but cliche or no cliche , the thing is, it's TRUE.

Since the dawn of humankind, MEN have been the PROVIDERS & the PROTECTORS.

& even though we don't live in caves anymore - & the most of us don't have a single apex predator to fight - the INSTINCT remains hardwired into our DNA:

Men are PROVIDERS.

That means we are driven by nature & culture to compete, to succeed, to gain status, & to earn enough money to PROVIDE. & yes, we know that women are increasingly becoming primary providers as well, but that doesn't change our internal programming. It may even make things feel worse.

So here's how it works:

At the primal, cellular level, men are PROVIDERS. That is WHO WE ARE

& until we have proved that we can SUCCEED as providers - to ourselves, our friends, our peers, our colleagues, our parents, our mean older brothers, & to YOU - we will feel uncertain, anxious, empty, & ... well, kind of PATHETIC.

Even of you personally make more than enough money to pay the bills & give your family a great life, he'll feel the burden of this provider instinct anyway - it's THAT hardwired into the male psyche. I'll say it again: men are trained to believe that they are the PROVIDERS. & this has more to do with how (& when) we LOVE than most women could ever imagine.

To prove my point, I recently performed an incredible unscientific survey where I got about 20 of my male colleagues & friends together, got them all juuuust drunk enough, to be honest, & then told them to go around the room & yell out the earliest lessons they learned, as young boys, about what it means to 'be a man'.

Here are some of the responses I got: "get a good job, get a lot of women, & then your a man", "a real man does everything to the extreme", "everything in our house was centered around money. Money, money, money", "be the best, no matter what it takes", "if you've gotta take down the other guy to get what you want, then take them down", "go for the triple, not just the double", "being a man means controlling your circumstances & other people", "make money & get laid"

So...does anyone else see a PATTERN developing here?

Yup. Men are PROVIDERS

That is the way we are wired

& that means we equate MONEY ("providing") with MASCULINITY ("being a man")

& that has HUGE ramifications for YOU

Every single guy (in Western culture) is raised to believe & embody the fact that if you can't provide a roof over your head, food on the table, gas in the car & shoes for the kids, then you're no man at all

Translation: if a guy hasn't attained some measure of financial success in his life then he will feel like only half a man

& when he feels like only half a man, he can't give you ALL of his HEART

In plain English: until he's fulfilled his Primal Provider Drive & achieved financial independence, he won't be ABLE to love himself... which means he can't love YOU, either

IMPORTANT NOTE: financial success does NOT mean 'getting super rich'

it's actually much simpler than that (whew): in a masculinity sense, 'financial success' simply means that he is SOLVENT - he can pay his way, he can put a roof over his own head, & he's bringing in enough cash to put food on the table, gas in the car, & take YOU out for nice meals & the odd vacation

This stuff runs a LOT deeper than you probably think it does

A lot of women have had a hard time understanding how potent this primal driving force is to a man. & look, I totally get that - I mean, we've all HEARD that 'men are providers'

But what most women struggle to comprehend is that this stuff isn't just a mild preference for guys

It's a burdensome DRIVE that MUST be fulfilled - like hunger, thirst, or the need to sleep - & that same drive won't let us rest until we fulfill it completely

Oh, & in case you were wondering...whatever amount you earn (or don't earn) is irrelevant & besides the point to most men. Even if you personally earn a million bucks a year plus stocks, he still feels that providing is his RESPONSIBILITY & his DUTY

The plain ugly truth is that we need to make money (be able to 'provide') in order to feel like we're succeeding as men

& if we don't 'feel like a man', then EVERYTHING ELSE (including love) becomes IRRELEVANT to us

This might sound startlingly shallow, but it really is the way guys feel

Remember, we care about WINNING, COMPETITION, & STATUS - which is why 'measuring up' to the expectations of our parents, our friends, our colleagues, * our SELVES is the number-one yardstick we use to decide whether we're 'men' or not

& guess what?

If we don't FEEL like we're measuring up as men, well, that's when we get into all sorts of nasty stuff like...drinking too much, abusing recreational drugs, spending way too much time on Xbox, smoking pot & eating pizza, sleeping with a butt-ton of random women, lying to our girlfriends, buying stuff we can't afford, gambling next month's paycheck, getting into dumb fights

Remember we are PROVIDERS

This is who we are

The burden of providing is a HEAVY one to a guy

After more than a decade of coaching, calling, emailing, & meeting with tens of thousands of men & women, I still struggle to make it clear to my female clients just how deep this primal provider drive goes in the masculine mind

Over dinner last night, I decided to ask my amazing wife about the 'female equivalent' of the male obsession with earning & providing; & she told me the closest 'female equivalent' is probably (as she puts it) 'the relentless anxiety most women feel about their bodies'

"it doesn't matter how old we are, how young we are, how pretty we might've felt yesterday, or even what our friends & parents say to reassure us" she said. "to every single woman I know, we don't just 'want' to look good & have a hot body; we feel like we NEED to"

For the record, my wife is a tall, athletic ex-model 35 years old who constantly gets attention from random people on the street to tell her how pretty she is (yesterday afternoon, for example, she took the dog out for a walk in sloppy shorts, no make-up, & her gross old baggy dog-walking T-shirt, & the garbage man leans out of his truck & asked her for a date. So, when I say she gets a lot of attention, I mean she gets a LOT of attention)

But, when I asked her if SHE feels insecure & worried about HER looks, she literally laughed in my face & said "have you ever been listening to me? Of COURSE I freak out about my body. Even if I feel like I'm in shape & pretty happy with how I look right now, that little voice in my head is worrying about tomorrow, & next year, & what about TEN years from now...it's a constant battle. & every woman I know feels the same way"

The moral of the story? For most men, the Primal Drive to provide isn't just a desire, it's a DUTY. & it runs so deep that almost NOTHING can take that burden away from a guy, even for a single second

KEY POINTS: Things to Remember So Far: our culture puts a huge amount of pressure on men to be TOUGH, to WIN, to COMPETE, & to PROVIDE, we are primed to seek PRESTIGE (mostly from other guys), winning, competing, & earning money (ding ding ding!) are the KEY status symbols that men seek out in order to fulfill our primal provider drive, we don't need to get 'rich', but it is way easier for us to think about love when our finances ate stable, if we don't get enough 'wins' &/or don't feel like we can provide properly, we feel like FAILURES & shut down emotionally, men who have NOT fulfilled their Primal Provider Drive typically make terrible boyfriends/husbands because we're too ashamed of ourselves to love you right

Keep reading to find out why men would rather crawl over broken glass than talk about all this masculine shame & pain for you...& how to use the "Master Male Emotion" to get him to finally open up!