Episode #1045
You can be the man everyone respects at work and still feel powerless at home. In this episode, Doug and Chris answer real questions from men who feel like they’re crushing it in business but falling apart in their marriage. If your wife shoots down your ideas, questions your decisions, or says she’s no longer attracted to you, this conversation will hit home.
They break down what’s really going on when your wife is always in her masculine, how to stop reacting when she tests you, and what it actually means to “be the lighthouse” without shutting down or checking out. You’ll also hear how attraction works emotionally for women and what to do if the spark is gone. Spoiler: you have more control over it than you think.
This isn’t about trying harder or being nicer. It’s about showing up with consistency, grounded confidence, and real leadership at home the same way you do at work. And when you do that, everything changes.
The truth is, your wife wants to feel safe with you again—but she won’t say it that way. She wants to feel your presence, your direction, your edge. If you’ve lost that connection, this episode is a reminder that you can get it back, but it starts with how you lead yourself.
If you want a simple roadmap to rebuild trust and attraction without more long talks or therapy, start with the free training at https://fixmarriage.thepowerfulman.com/scales.
Hungry for more?
Head over to our BONUS page for special access to some of the deeper tactics and techniques we’ve developed at The Powerful Man.
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Transcription
Doug Holt 0:00
His wife’s in her masculine a lot. She does not trust that you are going to make good decisions and or follow through, and she doesn’t feel safe. I’m also going to bet that she is not happy. She’s looking for safety. She’s looking for that reassurance. Whether it be socks on the floor it’s never about the socks, by the way it’s something else deeper. Attraction for a woman is an emotional thing. That’s the key. And you get to feel valuable, and you get to make yourself valuable, yep, because you deserve more than average.
Doug Holt 0:40
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the TPM Show. If you’ve been joining us for other shows, we are doing Q&As. We keep saying we’re gonna stop, but we’re both having a great time here, so we’re continuing on the trend. So Q&As we’re gonna be answering your questions. These are questions that you have submitted either to our advisory team, put into the app, or some of you have DMed them. Preferably, you give them to the app or the advisory team I get too many messages but we’re gonna do our best to answer these questions for you today. Chris, thanks again for being here, sticking around.
Christopher Hansen 1:18
Absolutely. We’ll have to do like a four-hour webinar or something at some point. Cool. So this one’s from Brian. Brian’s 45, he’s a financial advisor in Chicago. “I crush it at work. My clients respect me, my team listens to me, but at home, I feel like I have zero power. My wife questions every decision I make and shoots down my ideas. Why do I feel like the CEO in the office, but I feel like an intern in my own house?”
Doug Holt 1:49
I love that. I do love that. I want to invoke the Rage Against the Machine song, “Take the Power Back.” You know, you’ve got to take the power back. So how do you do it? That’s the key. The short answer is The Activation Method and The Alpha Reset that’s a guarantee. However, let’s see if we can help Brian out today, assuming he may or may not sign up for that program. The reason your wife questions your decisions is she does not trust you. She does not trust that you are going to make good decisions and or follow through, and she doesn’t feel safe. That’s the real reason. It’s probably not the quality of your decisions.
It’s your lack of follow-through, your indecisiveness, and your lack of leadership in the home that make her think she needs to make the decisions to be safe that she needs to take action and be in her masculine. I would bet a large sum of money that his wife’s in her masculine a lot. I’m also gonna bet that she’s not happy. I mean, anybody that’s in that kind of behavior is not a happy person. So now you have an unhappy wife who feels like her man is less than, and he comes home and she’s like, “I’ve got another kid another grown-ass kid to raise that’s not even mine.” I’m gonna guess it doesn’t say it there but I’m gonna guess he plays the nice guy role. So he bites his tongue. His wife might be rude or disrespectful that happens a lot in these types of situations. And instead of standing up for himself and saying, “Hey, you can’t talk to me that way,” or even calmer but assertive, he probably just bites his tongue or goes into DEER mode defending, excusing, explaining, and reacting.
Yep, that would be my gut. So what do you do? Well, again, short of that I mean, that’s the formula right there: The Activation Method, The Alpha Reset. Just do it. Do it now. Short of that, what he gets to start doing is respecting himself and setting boundaries. So if his wife’s talking harshly to him, he can say, “Hey, you’re not allowed to talk to me that way. I love you too much to let you treat me this way. I also love me too much and our marriage, so you can’t talk to me that way.” You get to set the boundaries. “I’d love to continue the conversation with you. You don’t have to agree with me, but you can’t talk to me that way. Talk to me with love and respect.” And if he does that, she might challenge him she might go safety test, right? Push back to see if it’s real.
That’s what she’s testing: “Are you really being strong?” And if he stands his ground and is strong, she most likely will back down. That has to happen if he does that consistently and believes it. So he’s in his grounded state like he probably is at work. Excuse me, that’s my alarm to go get the family. If he does it like he probably does at work, then he’s gonna be in a good place. Because it’s consistency she’s gonna feel in him. And he’s got to follow through and be decisive make decisions. So if you’re sitting on the fence of a decision right now, make it one way or the other and start getting your reps in making those decisions.
Christopher Hansen 5:21
And not necessarily worry about her shooting down his ideas. Why does she need to validate your ideas, right? She’s sensing that maybe you’re looking for that level of validation from her. Her not giving that to you is actually a gift, right, because it shows you where you need to step up in that area.
Doug Holt 5:47
It sounds like from that that she’s shooting down all of his ideas in a negative way that’s what I’m reading into it. You could be totally right. So in that situation, 100%, if he’s feeling less than because she just dismisses everything he says, that’s what I read into that. Then that’s a whole different issue. Now you have a power dynamic at play where you have somebody in an energetic state they don’t want to be in and shouldn’t have to be in and now two people, actually. So he becomes the beta, she becomes the alpha. She has to be the alpha because he’s not being the alpha, and she needs to protect herself and her family. So he gets to rise up and be the alpha not in a jerk or domineering way, but in a way that allows his wife to feel safe and surrender into her femininity and surrender into him.
Christopher Hansen 6:40
Number two, I like this one too. This is from Steve, a business coach in Arizona. He’s 41 years old. “I read about this whole ‘be the lighthouse’ thing, but honestly, I don’t get it. My wife doesn’t want some stoic, Zen monk who ignores her. She wants connection. So how does being the lighthouse actually play out when she’s screaming at me about something stupid, like socks on the floor?”
Doug Holt 7:13
So being the lighthouse that is just not reacting. We use the analogy of the lighthouse. What happens, Chris, and Steve, is when a woman is testing you or when she’s looking for safety, she’s looking for reassurance. Whether it be socks on the floor it’s never about the socks, by the way it’s something deeper. When she’s doing that and you start reacting, it’s like a lighthouse turning its light off. She’s looking for safe harbor, right? And a lighthouse that turns on and off at a whim isn’t safe, so he’s losing safety. It’s not about being a stoic monk. It’s about being grounded and masculine sitting in the eye of the storm, no matter what it is. So she’s yelling at you, and here’s the thing: if you can handle your wife yelling at you about the socks and you can turn it around, she knows you can also handle the freak in the bedroom. Yep. If you can’t handle the socks, you’re getting vanilla sex.
Christopher Hansen 8:17
For sure. When I see or hear somebody say “stoic monk” or “stoic Zen monk who ignores her,” to me, that’s detaching, disconnecting, disassociating, and avoiding. Yes, that’s not actually being present in the moment with what’s happening. Those are two very different things, and I don’t think that’s what stoicism and Zen monks do either. I think that’s what he’s implying, maybe, in that situation.
Doug Holt 8:47
I could see that. The key here is not to be stoic, right? A lighthouse can be light, fun, and funny. So when my wife comes at me, I can be very grounded, but I can joke with her and turn it into a joke. You know, I like to rhyme and sing because I’ve got young kids, so I might go, “Socks on the floor, are you going out the door?” saying things like that. And she’ll look at me because it’s dumb. She’ll grin like, “Ah, you frustrated me.” I’m like, “Get over here, babe,” and I’ll joke around with her. I’ll put the socks on, or I’ll just mess around. Does it work all the time? No. Does it work most of the time?
Yes. And it works a lot better than reacting, right? It keeps the energy light and fun. Then I can get to the real thing that’s going on. And I’m not reacting, I’m not yelling, I’m not explaining, “Well, the socks were on the floor because you look at your side of the bed, your bed’s not even made!” Now we’re in victimhood, finger-pointing, all that. I used to do that; I just didn’t know better. I would explain a lot and point out her flaws. “Well, you don’t do the dishes!” And now my wife and I were completely disconnected and further disconnected, and we became entrenched in our positions, and neither of us was going to budge an inch. Yep.
Now, you know, the “socks on the floor going out the door” I mean, I’ve never said that, but I’d say something like it. Or I’d grab her and go, “Oh, you’re so sexy when you clean,” something like that. And we’re at a stage in our marriage where I can get away with that stuff because I’ve done all the repair work we talk about in The Activation Method, and that’s where it’s so much more fun. And that’s still being a lighthouse, yep. And I think that’s what guys miss. The reason we talk more about the stoic version is because guys are so far on the other side that they need to bring in that more stoic version until they learn to be grounded.
Christopher Hansen 10:38
Yep, 100%. And there is a gap there for a lot of guys in the relationship to be able to show up that way. You said it yourself you’ve laid the groundwork for you to be able to sing a song about socks and then turn that into sex, or laughter, or whatever it may be. So there’s groundwork that gets to be laid there to sit in that space. It does require consistent work.
Doug Holt 11:10
It does, man. Anything worthwhile requires work. Yep, right? Working on that’s gonna be hard. Dude, I’ll tell you what being in a shitty marriage is hard.
Christopher Hansen 11:19
Choose your hard.
Doug Holt 11:20
100%. And I’ll tell you which one. I’ve been on both sides it’s kind of like being broke and then being wealthy. I’ve been on both sides of those coins, and I can tell you which one’s better, right? You still have problems in both. One person gets to have a bad day, go sit at home, and watch a movie on a 70-inch TV with his kids everyone’s safe, air-conditioned. The other guy goes home to a one-bedroom apartment with his kids, and no one’s happy. You get the idea. You get to choose your hard. One marriage sucks no intimacy, no connection, your wife’s unfulfilled, you’re unfulfilled. The other one it’s hard doing the work, but your wife’s fulfilled, you’re fulfilled, you’re connected, you’re living that dream life.
Christopher Hansen 12:09
That’s where a program like The Activation Method comes in or any program but again, I know The Activation Method. We watched a book launch recently, some marketing stuff, and one of the things that was talked about in it is that for most guys, the thing that keeps them from moving forward isn’t that they don’t want to it’s that they don’t know how.
Doug Holt 12:38
Hey guys, I just want to share something with you. I’m sure we can both agree that in order to fix something, you need to know what’s broken. And not only do you need to know what’s broken, but also a step-by-step methodology on how you can fix it. That’s the easiest way to do it, right? Otherwise, you’re going to be toiling with things. That’s why I created a free training a training that not only shows you how you got to where you are, where your relationship is missing that love, respect, admiration, and even intimacy that it used to have but also how you get it back. How do you retain that, where your wife’s looking at you the same way she used to when she said “I do”? I don’t know about you, but for me, when my wife looks at me like I’m her man, I feel like I can conquer the world and I want that for you. Simply go over to thepowerfulman.com/scales. That’s thepowerfulman.com/scales, and I have a free video training for you. You can just click play and see if it resonates for you. Now, back to the podcast.
Christopher Hansen 13:39
Right. So that’s where a program like The Activation Method comes in having the tools to actually know how to move forward and how to choose the right hard, right? Because some guys only know how to choose what they’ve chosen in the past. They don’t know that they have an option for two different hards. One of them is taking them in a direction they actually want to go. The other is just playing out old cycles and patterns. My experience has been that with the guys we bring into The Activation Method we are selective with those guys but once they have the tools, they choose to use those tools. They choose the hard path that gets them where they actually want to go. Two results.
Doug Holt 14:30
Yep, the hardest thing is for guys to get on the phone but then make a choice, right? Because most men listening to this right now are in indecisive mode, and that’s part of what’s causing problems in the marriage. If they make that decision to get on a phone call go look at testimonials, do all that stuff I encourage you guys. But get on a phone call if it makes sense to you. Give it a try. I was talking to a guy, a wealthy individual he signed up for one-on-one coaching, which was a big investment financially and time-wise. He said, “This is a drop in the bucket compared to what divorce would cost.” He’s like, “It’s worth giving it a shot, if anything and if anything, she was gonna take half of that anyway,” right? That was his reasoning. He’s a businessman he had spreadsheets. It just made logical sense. So the decision was easy. Most guys miss that they just look at the financial or time commitment, and really, those are excuses because they don’t want to make the decision.
Christopher Hansen 15:30
Yep, exactly. I love that. I love somebody that will spreadsheet out there. We’ll do one more. Okay, this is a good one. I feel like we’ve kind of touched on this, but this is good. So this is Ryan. Where’s Ryan? Ryan is from Seattle. He’s 39 years old, works in banking. “My wife says she’s not attracted to me anymore. Is attraction something you can’t control? How do you actually rebuild desire once it’s gone?” I like this because I know what that feels like. I know what it feels like to be in a relationship with my wife and go like, “Am I really attracted to this person?” Because it feels out of my control. I experienced that for several years in my relationship where I questioned, “Hey, is this somebody that I’m actually attracted to?” Because I don’t feel this naturally. So I recognize in my own experience that that’s something you do have control over, and it’s a matter of doing some work. I’m curious what your perspective is on that.
Doug Holt 16:41
I think 100% you have control over it. What do I mean by that? So I’m assuming his wife’s not attracted to him in this case but it could be the other way around. Just flip the genders; it’s similar. What he gets to do if he wants to become more attractive: one, there’s a physical component. Are you exercising, eating healthier? If you’re not, start. When I talk to women, it’s not the body the man has it’s the fact that the man is doing something that’s sexy, right? You can have fat guys that work out and are working away women find that hot. That’s where you get the dad bod. They find that sexy. The dad bod isn’t a guy that’s fat and not muscular it’s a guy that’s got muscle and a belly.
So women find that super sexy. They also find the guy with six-pack abs sexy too, but I’ve found that a lot of women that’s more of a turnoff than a turn-on. They like it, and a lot of women will look at it for a while, but that’s not what attraction is. Attraction for a woman is an emotional thing. So what do you get to do to add mystery into your relationship? Are you doing cool stuff? That’s where the guys in The Brotherhood they go on adventures together. Right now, you’ve got guys doing a trip in Sonoma coming up. They’ll be zip-lining, hot air ballooning, all kinds of events. But they’ll also be learning about leaving a legacy not just a financial legacy so they’re bettering themselves. There’s time to exercise for the guys. All of our guys do an Alpha Rise and Shine. So now this guy who’s not doing anything is suddenly like, “What, you’re going to Sonoma?” We’ve been to Morocco, Iceland, Cuba. So guys start doing cool stuff it really is what it is. Doing all kinds of activities.
We bring in speakers. Now he’s working out, that’s attractive. He’s bettering himself, adding mystery. If he starts taking her out on dates and being inquisitive about her well, guess what? Now you’re getting closer to what it was like when you first started dating. What most likely happened is they fell into routines, and those routines are boring. Thus, he’s become boring, and if you’re boring, you’re not attractive I don’t care how good-looking you are.
Christopher Hansen 19:04
When I think there’s an emotional connection that men are looking for in sex as well, yep. For me, my experience was that I wasn’t taking care of myself to the level that I should have been, so I didn’t find myself attractive, right? So, like, why would anybody else find me attractive? And that just gets projected out, right? And then sex becomes something that you look to fulfill your own self-worth in, right? At least it was for me. Once I was able to get over that hump and just start working on myself and doing things for myself and investing in myself, I found myself to be attractive, and then the connection that I was able to build in my relationship with my wife that wasn’t there before is like fire at this point. So, I mean, I do think that, hey, there are maybe people that you’re just not attracted to. I don’t know, but I would imagine that if you were attracted to your wife at one point, or vice versa, and you start to invest in who you actually are and do this work on yourself, you’re going to find that the spark and the polarity and that attraction builds back very quickly and aggressively.
Doug Holt 20:23
Very quickly and aggressive. I like that. So there’s an exercise we do at our Alpha Reset, which is our transformational in-person experience. It’s a small group, and what happens is we teach guys how to drop into their heart, which is something most men have tried to do, and unfortunately, they say the longest distance a man travels is from his head to his heart. So we teach them how to do that. Once they do, then they can actually show people love. All the guys are kind and loving guys, but until they’ve learned to love themselves and drop into their heart space, the people around them aren’t fully feeling their love, yep, right? So their wife isn’t fully feeling their love, the kids aren’t.
And so there’s something off, and these poor guys work their asses off. They’re hard workers, and they’ve been grinding it out, trying to give everybody everything, but they haven’t given it to themselves yet, so they can’t feel it. It’s the same thing you’re talking about with attraction, right? I know when I don’t feel attractive, I don’t find anybody else attractive, right? It’s just the way it is. When I’m working out consistently, when I’m feeling good about myself, doing my routines, I feel good about myself. I’m not going to be on the cover of Men’s Fitness magazine or anything, but I just feel good. Then everybody around me seems to want more of that, right? Want more of Doug in that instance, or anybody else for that matter, and that’s what makes you attractive, and it makes you magnetic, yep.
Christopher Hansen 21:57
You feel like you have something to give also that’s not draining you.
Doug Holt 21:59
You feel like you’re valuable, absolutely. That’s the key. And you get to feel valuable, and you get to make yourself valuable, yep, because you deserve more than average. That’s right. Awesome, brother. Well, thanks for doing this again, man. Thanks for sticking around. I know this has been, I think, four episodes that we keep saying we’re gonna stop, and then we keep finding cool questions to ask. I love it.
Christopher Hansen 22:24
Caffeine flowing.
Doug Holt 22:26
It doesn’t hurt. Hey, gentlemen, in the moment of insight, take massive action. As we talked about in these questions, you get to find your own value. Love yourself, treat yourself. If you’re waiting on something maybe you don’t feel like you deserve it, maybe it’s not the right time make the jump. Do it now. In the moment of insight, take massive action. If you had an insight from something that we talked about here, take massive action in the direction you want to go. It seems like God, the universe, whatever it might be, gets behind people who take action and move in the direction they want to go, but you have to take action first. That is the key 100% of the time, right? Luck favors those that are prepared, and you get to start moving forward to get yourself prepared. See you next time on The Powerful Man Show.
