0:00 Introduction to Alison Armstrong

137 What does it mean to be a Man, and how does it serve the feminine?

6:35 Learning how to listen to men

10:35 Explanation of Hunting and Gathering mode as it applies to modern man

19:50 Stages of masculine development

34:02 The point of life and relationships, 5 fundamental perspectives

40:35 Building intangible kingdoms

46:22 The Queen’s Code: Helping women understand men

49:23 Uncovering the truth about men and interpreting masculinity for women

52:40 Modern relationships

1:00:13  Alison’s relationship with her father transformed

Alison Armstrong

www.understandmen.com

Book: The Queens Code

https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Code-Alison-Armstrong/dp/

Book: Keys to the Kingdom

https://www.amazon.com/Keys-Kingdom-Alison-Armstrong/dp/

Book: Making Sense of Men

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Men-Lifetime-Attention/dp/

Journey to the Center of You, Audio program

https://www.understandmen.com/products/journeytocenter.html

 (34:00)

Peter King: Welcome to the PK Experience, my name is Peter King, I'm the host of the show and
today I sit down with Alison Armstrong. Alison is a very popular author in the
relationship's niche. She has done a lot of work in better understanding men which is
really one of the reasons why I wanted to speak with her, because I find that that's a
very rare voice in today's society especially coming from a woman.
A lot of what her work is about is helping women better understand men, she's got a
program online called understandingmen.com. She's written several best selling books,
if you go on Amazon and search her name, Alison Armstrong you'll find one's that highly
recommend, The Queen's Code is one, the Keys To the Kingdom is another one, Making
Sense of Men: A Woman's Guide to a Lifetime of Love, Care, and Attention from All
Men.
She's got a lot of very wildly popular audio programs as well and you'll hear a lot of her
content in other relationship coaches and authors content themselves. So her work has
been very revolutionary in a lot of respects and has permeated again a lot of other
relationship authors in the field because of how ground breaking it's been.
So I'm excited to share this call with you, Alison is a brilliant revolutionary in this space
and please take notes and let me know if you have any questions on it, because again I
think it's a very important voice in our culture today. So, with that let's dive into the call.
Here we are, with Alison Armstrong.
Alison Armstrong thank you so much for joining us today. I am very excited to talk to
you. You are an inspiration, not just to me but to obviously many people including many
other authors and gurus. In fact, I really was introduced to you and your concepts
through Tony Robbins in an event that I went to that he gave and it was extremely
powerful and then I started to talk to other people, like, "You know that's Alison's stuff
right?" I was like, "No."
He did mention you but I didn't get all of it. But anyway you've been a source of
inspiration for many clearly in the field of relationships. So again thank you for joining
me on today's call.
Alison A.: You're welcome, I'm really excited to be here.
Peter King: Excellent. Well you don't know anything about me or my background but just to give
you the 20 second version, I grew up my father was gone a lot and he was working all
the time. Then I had a son of my own and then right at that time, my mother passed on
and my father ended up coming out of the closet telling us he was gay. It was kind of
this whole whirlwind of activity and it really got me thinking about the masculine
experience and what does it mean to be a man what does it mean to be a father.
I wanted to be very clear on all of that so I can make sure that I could give that to my
son and then also I have a daughter as well and be a man in her life. Frankly to be clear
on sort of some of the things that I didn't get from my father and then also appreciatewhat he did bring to the table. So that's really the journey that I've been on and it's led
us all the way up to this call.
Alison A.: That's great, yeah thanks for sharing that with me and I'm so glad you've taken your
journey and decided to help others with it because I think one of the biggest questions
that we're not asking enough these days is what does it mean to be a man?
Peter King: Yes.
Alison A.: Who is a man? What is a man? What are the gift of a man? What's the contribution?
Who can a man be in partnership, right? Like there's ... I mean as you know from my
work, I spend so much time convincing women to stop trying to be men. You guys do
the job very well, we don't need to take it from you. We need to understand it and
appreciate it, so thank you for what you're doing, it's awesome.
Peter King: Well I appreciate that, but yes, I have very clearly seen a shift in the dynamic of
relationships and I do agree with you that I think the biggest void is men understanding
themselves and the strength and the power that they bring to the table and then
conversely women that can appreciate that. I don't want that to come across as
sounding one sided but I do think that in its proper format, men in their strength honor
and protect and serve the feminine and serve and women.
So, I think ... Obviously one begets the other. But I do think that men better
understanding themselves is service to women and uplifts woman simultaneously. Yeah
go ahead.
Alison A.: Do we get to talk about that some more?
Peter King: I would love to talk about that some more.
Alison A.: Okay, good.
Peter King: I know.
Alison A.: Just a subject, let me at it.
Peter King: Dive in, the microphone is yours.
Alison A.: Well, I mean just that line that you said, serves the feminine, right, the masculine serves
the feminine, I think you probably know I started studying men in 1991 and at that time
I spent probably 95% of my time in what I would now refer to as hunting mode. So
which I use instead of masculine just because for many people there's so much they
have to get beyond.
Peter King: Yes, you're right.

Alison A.: If we're going to use the words masculine and feminine, right? They have so much
baggage theses days. I spent the first 20 years trying to alter how people thought of
those words and I just gave up. So you could say that I spent 95% of my time in the
masculine, or in a hunting mode or you could say committed and generating and
pursuing, pursuing, right like hot on the trail or something. It was all generated from
that that's the only way that I felt safe, right? That, that was a way to feel like I was in
charge and I was in control of my life and my future, and anything happened was
because I made it happen.
It wasn't until I started studying men, like I said in 1991, and started I just start with
learning how to listen to men, because women naturally interrupt and interrupt and
rephrase and redirect and go around the world and come back again. It's one of the
things that contributes to women thinking that their shallow, that we actually never give
you enough time space or mental or emotional space to allow men to dive as deep as
you're fully capable of doing. So I just start with learning to listen and what shocked me
the most because when I started studying men I was so normal, right? I was a
completely normal woman.
Peter King: Of course.
Alison A.: That included that I believed that men were shallow. I believed that men just wanted to
talk about sports and work. As I learned to listen to men, just what I call the imaginary
duct tape what men wanted to talk to me about was women. As they described who
women are for them, I didn't know what they were talking about. I'd never met those
people. That the men would-
Peter King: In what way?
Alison A.: Well they talked about women being magical for example. They talked about the
uniqueness of a woman;s way of thinking and the uniqueness of her power and her
influence and how much a woman believing in them meant to them, how that's what
gave them the ability to do anything. For example was it their wife believed in them and
before that, that their mother believed in them or a teacher, right or a best female
friend believed in them.
They started describing, kind of magical mystical, influential people and one man earlier
man, he even said, "Alison, women are the unicorns in the forest." That's like what?
What it led me to discover which took many years Peter was that as a man you have the
ability to create for a woman a sense of safety that allows her to be that unicorn. That
allow her to stop making stuff happen and actually just be this magical mystical
nurturing empowering, influential creature that can inspire so much.
Peter King: Yes.

Alison A.: Right, so that's what was there when you said the masculine supporting the feminine,
the masculine in service to the feminine, it's even bigger than that. The feminine doesn't
get to be expressed until the masculine handles the safety thing.
Peter King: That to me is so profound that when people ... That is what I was talking about, that a
man in his fullness understands that he's creating space for, protecting space for the
feminine to really blossom and to be lit up. That when you don't have that you either
have women that completely shut down or women who build up their own defenses
and they're in that in hunting mode that you're talking about. Actually while we're on
that for a second can you explain to our listeners what you mean by hunting and then
also the other one being gathering.
Alison A.: Sure. So in all this time, I think like an engineer, so I'm always trying to take things apart
and figure out how do they work and what's the cause and effect. Could we make a
slight adjustment here to have it work better? So much of what I've created in almost 30
years are those small adjustments where if we make room for, for example a man
needing transition time, right? If you just hold a time space, right, hold a mental space,
not run over him, right? So that he can shift his focus from one thing to another you get
a completely different man.
Peter King: I just, sorry to interrupt.
Alison A.: Yeah.
Peter King: Just to be very clear to the listeners, what you're talking about in transition time often
times you'll see a man come home say from work and he's in business mode and I
literally just saw this, this morning. On Facebook there was a dialogue and they were
talking specifically about this and trying to understand it, I referenced your book by the
way.
But that transition time is when a man is in work mode and he comes home to
immediately, to a have a little bit of space to transition to turn his brain off from work
mode and then to be able to shift into home mode or whatever that may mean or wife
mode or what have you.
Alison A.: Yeah that's a really common example and one of things that's fun about this, so to
answer your question, I like to look at human beings in terms of hunting and gathering
mode because so much of our behavior is illuminated when you look at that, such an
ancient model, right? That literally our brains have ways of perceiving, absorbing and
processing information and translating into what is worth saying and not worth saying,
what's worth acting and not worth acting on.
It doesn't distinctly, depending upon if a person a man or a woman is in what I call
hunting mode which is characterized by being committed. So being any time you
commit to a specific intention, a specific result, a specific destination and that
destination could be a location, right, like get to the restaurant. Or it could be a destination like a goal or a lifestyle or a place in life, right, a position or a status if you
will.
Any time there's that kind of commitment, the brain works in a particular way where it
naturally screams out everything that is considered irrelevant to that. Women would say
you tuned me out, no, no I didn't, my brain did it for me, right? Woman as we get older
and we have less estrogen which is what creates the other kind of consciousness. We
can identity this with hunting mode more, because we do it more naturally.
But it really is it's like the volume is turned down, the colors are turned down, the
energy is turned out. Nothing jumps out at us like the things that are congruent with
what we committed to. They just don't, the women described it for me for so long is
they just don't occur as actionable. It's not that I don't notice the trash that was put in
front of the door, it's just not take out the trash time. So I'm going to move it or go
around it.
I'm not going to interrupt my process, my you know road I'm already going down with
some momentum, I'm not going to interrupt it to do that, why would I do that? That is
mystifying to many women, because gathering mode is literally the opposite. So where
hunting mode is committed, gathering mode is open to alternatives, open to options,
open to possibilities and it brings on a kind of consciousness that we call diffuse
awareness.
Which if you think about cave women walking into a meadow, if she was focused, right?
If she was hunting something, then it makes sense that it would screen out everything,
right, just zero in on that footprint for example right and follow that. But if she's there
gathering, it makes instant she's there open to all the possibilities in that meadow,
right? What could feed us, what could heal us, what could be useful and I could make
something out of it, right.
So there's this openness to the options and alternatives and possibilities that's literally
affects the perception. Men everybody, by the way spends time in hunting mode and
gathering mode, because of what estrogen does to a woman's brain, we can switch
from one mode to another, dizzyingly fast. Like what worked with a woman three
seconds ago, doesn't work now because she went from being open to committed.
Peter King: Yeah, [inaudible 00:16:41] experience that.
Alison A.: She doesn't seem like this in person and it's fair because she's now perceiving, listening,
speaking, processing and choosing what's worth acting on from a completely different
basis, than she was three seconds or three minutes or three hours before.
Peter King: Yes.
Alison A.: Yeah and so that's when we're in that gathering mode and I noticed by the way men ...
So my husband who's 68 years old his testosterone levels affect how much he's in hunting mode and gathering mode just like everyone else. But he has a much more
capacity for gathering mode than he did like in his 40s when we got married when he
was primarily in hunting mode. So the one thing I've noticed about men at every age
though is that there's this openness that you have when you're what I would call at page
if that resonates right?
So when there's nothing committed to. You're literally open to the possibilities and the
hard part Peter is that when a man is like that is when we fall in love with you. Because
there's an opportunity for connectivity for connection that doesn't happen when you're
focused, with the exception of when you're focused on me.
Peter King: Right, you can keep that up.
Alison A.: So when you're at play or focused on me all is well. When you're focused on anything
else I'm going to die because a tiger is going to come and drag me away and eat me and
you wouldn't have noticed because you will have screamed that out as irrelevant. At
least that's what I'm afraid of, as a woman, not knowing that as protectors, right,
protecting comes before provider, so the warrior comes before the hunter, that every
man has an override of that focus. It's a cry for help, right? Just help!
You guys drop everything and if you ever get to witness it, it's amazing because men
rushing towards a call for help instinctively are grabbing anything that could be used as
a weapon. It might be a pen, but anything within reach they will just grab it too to stab
to club to beat with. As they're running they just grab things and I think it's spectacular.
Peter King: Yeah, I mean you got to do what you got to do, so yeah I can relate to that. In your book
Keys to the Kingdom, it's such a, again this is something that I got at a difference
conference. But the map that you illustrate was so helpful for me in my personal
journey as a man and, so I want to go into that in a second and then I have a story to tell
you about that afterwards. But can you describe the map and the stages basically of
masculine development?
Alison A.: You want the 30 second version or?
Peter King: Let's start with the 30 second and then we'll dive in.
Alison A.: Okay. So Keys to the Kingdom proposes that there isn't just child development. That the
stages that can be observed from birth in a child continue throughout life and that in
originally we just saw it in men, but with what you might call the masculinization of
women it's occurring in women as well, I experienced it, the tunnel my gosh, how are
you going to survive that? Worst time of my life.
So we describe it as pages, knights, princes, kings and elders and that a page isn't till
puberty and a page is a knight wannabe and you can see him idolizing the teenage men
in his life, right? He wants to be like them. But it's about challenge, it's about skill development, it's about testing oneself and then knights are full on that, right?
Developing skills competing with others to see how good am I.
They basically all last at least 12 years. So a page isn't until puberty, a knight's from
puberty until often his late 20s, early 30s and then at that point in his life his need for
adventure and conquest and challenge and skill development is being eclipsed if you
will. It's like this gradual moving in front of the adventure is the growing need to build.
To build something to build somewhere that stage we call prince.
That we've paid a lot of attention to and being able to separate it into three phases of
early middle and late princes. Early princes are figuring out where they're going to be
build and that might be easy or it might take years and years. Then once they figure it
out then they're just in heavy duty, middle prince, build, build, anything that's perceived
as an opportunity. It's painful to miss it, not be ready for it, not be up for it.
A lot of conflicts happen in relationships in the middle prince stage we can come back to
if you want to. Then late prince there's a lot of points on the board, the game is being
won sufficiently, there's sort of a slowing down, looking up, what else is available in life
sense success and accomplishment. What we've seen is that last about six months
maybe a year and then slam the tunnel which a friend of mine named, he called it the
tunnel, he said, because with every step you take it gets darker.
That is really the existential journey of a man. Okay, my life is made me into this, but
now I get to choose who I am. There's a switch that happens like prince can adapt a lot
when a man;s going through the tunnel he's literally deciding, where he's going to give
no quarter, right? Like I'm adaptable here fine because I don't care, but here no,
completely rigid. As he goes through that process of questioning why he does
everything and deciding who he is, then that's when he becomes a king.
So many relationships fall apart at that point because women are not prepared to deal
with a man taking that kind of stand for himself. We've counted on that adaptability,
literally to shape you, manipulate you, maneuver you. When you stop being like that to
us, boy we go through a lot of stuff. Keys to the Kingdom as you know is written to
support both men and women. Men to understand what they're going to through and
women to understand what he's bene through what he's going through and the changes
that she needs to make or she's going to get left behind.
Peter King: Yes. So just a clarification point because I've thought this myself and I've heard other
people ask this. These are psychological stages are they not or are they actual age
stages? Can a man ... But are these just ... If a man is 60 is he a king or do they have to
go through these various psychological stages first?
Alison A.: It's definitely not age. There are biological components like the shift from a page to a
knight is triggered by puberty, because at puberty you're flooded with testosterone, and
what you might term masculine values just whoosh! So loyalty for example tremendous warrior hunter value, loyalty who's got my back, right? Who's back do I have no matter
what, that goes through the roof at puberty, it just shows up. There's nothing-
Peter King: Excuse me.
Alison A.: Bless you.
Peter King: Thank you.
Alison A.: There's just nothing more important at that point. The other seem to take a certain
amount of time. I've known men who became princes as young as 24, but they were
really serious teenagers. I know like my dad when he learned about the stages of
development he didn't become a king until his late 50s, mid to late 50s. My husband
became a king when he was 40 years old, the youngest king I've ever met was 36.
So that has to do with accomplishment. It has a lot to do with accomplishment and self
knowledge that prince king thing. I know I didn't do the 30 second version, I might not
be capable, so that's the second version.
Peter King: Fair enough.
Alison A.: I write a lot. There is the last one though that I mentioned which is an elder and not all
men become elders, I would say probably less than 15% become elders and most men
live out their lives as kings. An elder is literally a stage change, it's this profound
transformation. A man I know he calls it beyond ambition, another man I know
described to me the moment it happened to him.
One the biggest things that changes in a man when he goes from a king to an elder is
what he's willing to be accountable for has a whole lot more filtering than it did before.
Accountability is such a quality of the warrior and the hunter. You can see a masculine
quality, a natural thing for men to be accountable. Just studying, it's also fueled by
testosterone. So can exhaust women who have 15 to 30 times less testosterone than
men.
But for elders they're now filtering for is this mine to do am I the only one who can do it,
is there anyone who can do it better than me. It's only when it's left to I am exactly the
person who needs to do this, that their okay, then it's mine.
Peter King: Fascinating. Did your friend tell you what that story was where he knew that precise
moment between when he was a king and went to an elder?
Alison A.: Yeah there wasn't anything in particular that happened.
Peter King: Okay, it was just an [inaudible 00:28:58]

Alison A.: It just shifted and he was no longer willing to be accountable for other peoples results.
So one of the things that women don't know about men is that if you ask a man for
advice like if you say what should I do. If he's willing to answer that question, if he's
willing to say you should then he's taking accountability for your outcome and he's
giving you the best he's got.
That's why it's disrespectful to not follow the advice you requested which is why one of
the things we train women in our understanding women course is if what you want is
input make sure you ask for input. I need to make a decision for myself that I'm
accountable for. If you're willing I would love your input or recommendation of things I
should consider before I make this decision. Don't offer any wedge of accountability to
him if you're not willing to do what he says.
As you know as a man there are times when you say, well I won't tell you what you
should do but you might consider, right? You're actually refusing to pick up the
accountability for that result. That's what his name is Mac, that's what Mac told me
about becoming an elder, that he stopped being willing to be accountable for other
peoples results. So instead of giving people answers or advice, he's give them questions
to think about instead. That's one of the marks of an elder they start to give questions.
Peter King: That's very interesting, I did a week long survival training out in the northern Californian
woods with a guy named Tom Brown. A lot of this training was native American inspired
and we did one day where we walked out to a big meal that they prepped and it was led
by the elders. They said that in the native american culture that the elders went first
because they were the most wise and they had the most insight.
Then it was followed by the youngest women which I thought was interesting because
they represented the next generation, the birth the fertile women were next. Then sort
of the masses were in the middle and then at the very end were the adolescent boys
because they had the stamina to wait as long and to deal with as much BS before they
got fed.
So interesting parallel there. But I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the tunnel,
this seems to be something as I've talked with other people, there's some confusion
there because you talk to some people I'm always [inaudible 00:31:50] it's always a
struggle. How do you know that you're in the tunnel?
Alison A.: Okay so the tunnel is that space between a late prince and a king. Sometimes men think
they're in the tunnel when they are between a knight and a prince because they're
confused about what to do with their life and they can't commit to anything. But you
can tell that it's at the tunnel virtually just by their age.
What I've seen and it's scary how predictable it is that it usually takes 12 years of
accomplishment as a prince building, building, failing building, frustration, building a
solid 12 years before the tunnel's going to hit you. It might hit a little bit before that if
you have an event in your life where you could call it the existing king is threatened. Like a health crisis in someone's father could cause a man to be like thrown into the tunnel
instead of just easing in, he's just thrown in, because perception is telling him the king's
going to need to be replaced you got to get busy.
All very underground and conscious kind of things. So that's what I always ask. When a
man is wondering if he's in the tunnel, I'm always wondering okay so when did you start
building, when did you figure out where you wanted to build, when did you start
building, how many years has it been. That's the first thing I ask in order to get a sense if
it's even possible. Interesting thing Peter though is that what a man is building may not
have anything to do with his career.
Peter King: Okay.
Alison A.: SO I know men who have so called careers that it's just a job and they're providing for
themselves and their family but if you talk to them with their building, is something else
entirely.
Peter King: Can you give me an example?
Alison A.: Yeah, have you ever heard our program called Journey to the Center of You?
Peter King: I have not.
Alison A.: Okay so this is something that, some work that we did many years ago because what
started showing up is conflicts in relationships because people didn't even, they weren't
even participating in the relationship for the same purpose. Like to them the point of
being in a relationship wasn't even the same. They didn't know it because they never
talked about it, because to both people it was just so obvious what the point is.
All their decisions, all their choices about spending their time, their money and their
energy were all coming from this what to them was inherent truth and they didn't even
know it and it was causing enormous conflict. So this started a study to try to figure out
how many major points of view are there about literally the point of life. What is the
point of life, which is therefore the point of relationship which is therefore the point of
this moment.
So and we found five different ones. One's that's really common we would call a builder.
So someone who's a builder it's all about the legacy of what they're leaving behind and
their accomplishments are often very visible. They get kind of overtaken by a vision of
what's possible and they can not make it real. These are often in conflict with what we
would call a knower, grower.
So a knower grower my husband is a knower grower, I'm a builder his career was never
what he was building, it was always his sense of self. It was always what he knew, what
he understood, what he can offer to other people, I call them banks and libraries. His profession as a corporate accountant was how he provided for himself and then our
family but his real work was internally what he was learning to do and to be.
His master's degree is in spiritual psychology and conscious health and healing are way
more significant to who he is than all the professional stuff. So that would be an
example. Another mode is an expressor so you might have a man who has a job but
what he's really building is his expression as some kind of artist, a musician, a writer,
does that make sense?
Peter King: It does yes, this is fascinating, continue. So that's I think that's three of the five?
Alison A.: Yeah so the fourth and we all have all of them by the way.
Peter King: Okay.
Alison A.: I knew someone who like calculated their percentage precisely. So there's builders,
knowers and growers, expressers, there's also enjoyers. So my father, my father is an
enjoyer that would be his number one. Enjoyers on the one end of the spectrum can
seem like these heated, mystic, pleasure adventure chasers. On the other end of the
spectrum it's this profoundly spiritual practice of bringing joy and finding joy in
everything in grief, in boredom, in terror, it's extraordinary. You have an enjoyer
around, life is so much richer and bigger.
So that's the fourth one and then the fifth one is what we could call a sharer. For a
sharer the point of life it isn't what you do, it isn't what you build, it isn't what you learn
or who you become, it isn't how much fun or pleasure or adventure you have, it isn't the
truth that you tell or that you reveal to the world. The expressers is always about
physicalizing the spiritual and the emotional and the mental.
To a sharer it's all about who did you live your life with? Whose life did you witness?
Who witnessed yours? There are shares that for them it's just one person, they're going
to share their life with one person. There are other shares that I call them the more the
merrier. But it's the everything is better together people and like I said everybody has all
of them, so for me as an example I am a build together with people I enjoy.
So I'm always building but I never build alone, and so I have projects things I've wanted
to do for literally decades that I don't do because the right person to do it with hasn't
shown up. I always pick people not because, I mean yes they want to do that they're
passionate about it, doing it. But it's because I enjoy doing it with them, because fun to
me is a spiritual practice, I'm going to ... Type one fun if I was, if you're a mountaineer
you know what type one fun is. I'm going to have fun at everything and I am going to
change anything and do it differently so that I have fun doing it. I don't care if it was
picking up rocks in my field which I spend too much time doing.
Peter King: I have a friend that I just met with not too long ago and we were sharing a glass of wine
and he's like he said, "If you come to my house and you don't have fun, it's your fault."

He used a little more colorful language. But that to me is the nature of a type one fun
person. So I have a question, my father was a builder and an entrepreneur and literally
build a business and that was his kingdom. So it was very tangible, it was very linked and
associated with money. I think a lot of men have a similar thing where they, maybe not
necessarily money end or business but achievement.
So they associate kingdom with tangible achievement is that healthy? Is that the right
thing? Because a sharer you wouldn't necessarily have tangible it's not a bank account
or an expressor my have art and music that's tangible yes, but help me better
understand what a king might look like in some of those other fields?
Alison A.: Well I don't think there's any right or wrong, like you asked is that the right thing and I
have to take a step back. My journey since 1991 studying men, has left me with if I was
going to have to pick one word, it's a commitment to honoring and to understanding
and honoring ourselves and each other.
So to me builders, knowers, growers, expressers, enjoyers and shares they all have gifts,
they have beautiful amazing gifts and boy do we need each other. So a sharer for
example you sharers you're going to see in family portraits. Like you'll never find a
picture of them alone right. They're either with their wife, their family this huge family,
right and have a big grin on their face and you can tell like they own this whole space of
this family or this community or these friends.
To them they're rich, they have their own wealth. You couldn't get them to trade it for
money or a building named after them for anything because that's who they are. One of
the things I loved when we distinguished these five modes, was a man who was a
builder who had always like literally berated his son and denigrated his son because he
thought his son lived a frivolous life.
When he learned these, he started to appreciate what enjoy meant to his son. Like this
was a spiritual practice of enjoy, in joy to live in joy, that takes a lot of muscle. Most
people live in complaint. For the first time he admired his son for who his son was
becoming in his own right, in his own honoring of himself and it completely transformed
that relationship.
Peter King: Yeah, I can see that. I mean I think of a lot of people who are "successful" who have
build very big tangible things that even have a profound impact on the world and yet
they're not at peace and they're not joyful and they're not happy and what's the point
of that. It's been said that the greatest failure is success without fulfillment. So the joy,
yeah I can see how in that case someone who exudes that joy, it can be a real gift. It can
be a real inspiration for those who are builders and especially so focused on building
something that they missed the fulfillment part of life which what's the point of that?
Alison A.: Yes, so this started your question about someone being in the tunnel.
Peter King: Yes.

Alison A.: Right? One of the things I love about Keys to the Kingdom and then the book after that
the Queen's Code is that the chance to get to be inside of a man's head when he's in the
tunnel. How everything is being questions and what's so upsetting to him is that he
doesn't appear to be source of the questioning. Like the question of is this really
important? Does this really matter? What really matters? What have I done this for?
He's not generating those questions, he's being plagued by them.
That's the kind of torture that the tunnel can be, and especially after that
accomplishment. Whatever that accomplishment was, whether it was expressed in
tangible or intangible ways, right, what he's truly being building whether it was visible or
not to come off of that accomplishment into this tail spin is so disorienting for men.
Often like has them doubt their sanity. There are men who go into therapy at that point
because they're like what's wrong with me. A good therapist hopefully is just listening
and letting him talk it out. Because he we keep talking out you can probably talk his way
all the way through the tunnel.
I don't know if all therapists provide that, they kind of like to provide advice but advice is
the worst possible thing you could give a man in the tunnel.
Peter King: Got you. So you mentioned Queen's Code, share a little bit about what the Queen's
Code is about so that the women listeners have an idea of the reciprocal of the Keys to
the Kingdom?
Alison A.: Well it's, oh boy, how do I say this? So after studying men for a couple of years and
being a astonished by how much what I was learning from men contradicted what I had
learned about men from women, just stunned, stunned to have it so wrong. Like geez
how could we be so off base with these people. I'd also made the commitment to not
emasculate men, which this is one of the traps that happens that it's a man strength
that a woman then as the safety to get to discover the power of her unique kind of
power as a woman.
But if we emasculate you because you don't act the way we think you should which
would be like a woman then we're literally weakening you and we can tell that you're
weaker which makes us afraid and has us step up even more to be the warrior and the
protector and the provider. So it's this vicious cycle and the Queen's Code was the book
that I always, that I wanted to write starting in 1992 even and I didn't know how to write
it.
We started out workshops in 1995 so I could learn how to write a book that would
transform the way that women related to men. I didn't know it took-
Peter King: Oh did I lose you? Hello? Oh you're back. Sorry I lost you for a minute there.
Alison A.: ... 2010 to know how to write that book. Crazy amount of time to learn how to write
that book. In the meanwhile I wrote Keys to the Kingdom. So they're both books that
were written for women and for men. Both for women and for men. But the Queen's

Code was written to transform the way women relate to men and the way that they
related to themselves. That it proposes a code of honor for women that how she relates
to herself if she relates to herself as a queen respects herself as queen and is willing to
respect and honor men as her counterpart in partnership as kings or the possibilities of
kings in every man that it change everything.
Peter King: Where did your inspiration come from for all of this? What was it about your life in your
upbringing that inspired you to create all this amazing content?
Alison A.: Well I was always an activist, I think I started when I was about six years old and I was
talking to my mom about ending world hunger. I was always called to speak for those
couldn't be heard for a big part of my life that was children. Then as I started studying
men and realize that men were always trying to explain themselves to women but it was
always interpreted as a poor excuse for bad behavior.
We didn't believe it, we didn't honor it, we literally couldn't hear or see it. So I began
speaking for men, these amazing human beings that literally were being misunderstood
and misinterpreted and maligned and diminished at every turn because they were so
different and how dare you be so different than a woman who's obviously perfect.
So in between what happened was my friend who was called a frog farmer, she wanted
to know why men were great in the beginning and then changed so much. A man
explained to her that some women turn frogs into princes and she turns princes into
frogs. Yeah and my life flashed before my eyes that I actually was doing something that
brought the worst out of men and thought that that's who men really were.
Yeah so that's when I decided to study men, I thought it would take two or three
months to learn everything that was worth knowing. There's karma for you, 27 years
later I'm still amazed and fascinated by your gender. I really never committed after that
point. Like any longer I just was taken up by you could say truth, truth is my second
highest value, the absence of truth, the negation of truth, the blindness to truth. I can't
really tolerate it.
Peter King: Well I mean in our society today, I mean the culture at least in the Western world seems
very, there's a lot of people that talk about the ills of the patriarchy and there isn't at
least from my perspective there isn't that honoring of real masculinity and maybe as
part of that conversation is there hasn't been a lot of men to truly step into that space
to actually honor what men are capable of.
But I wanted to ask you how do you see today's modern relationship. Women have
come so far in the last several decades, I think especially with birth control, that's
completely changed on a such profound level how men and women relate. I think I
actually heard it from you when you were talking about how women no longer had to
choose a mate and contemplate I might be with this guy forever or get impregnated by
him and therefore have my entire life go down a different path.

Now that there's birth control it frees all of that up and therefore I was just explaining
this to a friend yesterday, the standard to which you have to hold a man to in order to
sleep with him has completely changed, because now it can be more recreational and
how that changes the entire dynamic.
So with the empowerment of women over the last several decades and the change of
birth control and a myriad of other things, where do you see the modern relationship
today? What roles do you see that men and women play in a healthy fulfilling
relationship?
Alison A.: Well I was going to different answer until you said healthy fulfilling relationship.
Peter King: Well I bring that up because I do ask people. There are changes that are undeniable and
that I don't that will, unless you throw us back into pre 1950, which maybe we need to
do that, I don't know I'm asking from an open honest place. But I want to get clear on
what that looks like.
Alison A.: Okay, so if I could address the first part and then I'll propose the second part, so
between birth control and first worldness if you will where most of us don't experience
being in like the edge of starvation and the information each where now knowledge and
relationship is more important than muscle. Between at least those three things a
normal relationship between men and women right now is competition between
dueling providers and that's what I see is the biggest problem.
That instead of compliment each others strengths we're literally competing and
diminishing each other. If we have time I'd love to go back to that thing you were saying
about maybe men aren't being, I don't know that you finished your sentence.
Peter King: Worthy of honoring.
Alison A.: Yes worthy of honoring. If we have a chance to go back to that, there's a reason for that.
There's a single focus reason for that. Well I'll just go there-
Peter King: Yeah we cannot not answer it now.
Alison A.: Yeah well so if you think of a hierarchy of instincts I would assert it's pro create, then
protect then provide. In our culture we completely do not understand and do not honor
and do not accommodate the male sex drive. So we dis procreate then protect the
second in that hierarchy. Men are so much under attack that they have to be focused on
protecting themselves. So a man doesn't get to get around to protecting everybody else
when he's under attack, there's a choice and he's not even making the choice, he just
has to protect himself.
So when women stop attacking men and I found this in my own life, men instantly have
the capacity to start protecting me. Before that they were always off balance and on
guard, they couldn't protect me. So and then provide is the third, so if you're [inaudible 00:56:54] procreate which is where men's energy and life force comes from, you're
putting a man on guard so he has to protect himself instead of you, you never get the
provider. You never get the guy who's natural inclination is to make peoples lives better.
Like this is the most natural normal thing for a man to do. Anything that makes the
people he cares about their lives better, easier, happier more fulfilling, that's like what
he wakes up for. But most men never get to express that part of being a man because of
what's happening with the first two sets of instincts, does that make sense?
Peter King: 100% yeah.
Alison A.: Okay so, the good news is that because women don't need men in the way that we did
in order to survive, okay so for millennia we don't need men in order to survive which
makes us very calculating and manipulating and conniving and having sex so that I do
get pregnant so you do marry me, so you do support me for the rest of my life. Like all
that junk because we don't need that anymore we actually now have the possibility of
being partners.
The problem is though, and that would be my other word in my life partnership and
honoring, the problem is that every human instinct I've been able to identify in the last
28 years pulls in the opposite direction of partnership. Every thing that is installed in the
human body as factory installed compels us to behave the opposite of what partnership
requires.
Which makes partnership what we would call a victory of human spirit. In the brain you
would call it the prefrontal cortex executive override of the lizard impulse. That lizard
impulse is always going to be at least a split second in front of the override, always. So
literally to have the kinds of relationships which I say that it's time to transform into
partnerships which are based in accountability instead of expectation, they're based in
communication instead of assumption, we'd literally have to learn how to contain the
tension we feel in our own body and not have it rule us.
To be able to not do what the tension is telling us to do. Which for many women the
tension is what has us interrupt you.
Peter King: That's what it is.
Alison A.: Oh yeah, we are overcome by tension and ah!
Peter King: That's funny. Gosh I have a friend who constantly interrupts now that I know it I just
smile and laugh because she's just doing her thing and her feminine and I said
something that she connected to and there she goes.
Alison A.: There she goes.

Peter King: God that was funny. Well I want to be respectful of your time, I know we're right at an
hour right now. Do you still have a little more time or do you need to run?
Alison A.: I could do like two more minutes and then I actually do have to go.
Peter King: Okay. Well I only have like a thousand questions to ask you. What's-
Alison A.: Well we should do it again.
Peter King: What was your relationship like with your father?
Alison A.: Until I started studying men and before that until I started participating in
transformation when I was 19 years old, I was convinced that I had a bad dad who didn't
love me, didn't care about me, and I was never going to get to do the good stuff that my
brothers did. After I started studying men and understanding how he related to me
differently because I was a girl, which in interviewing a bunch of dads, likes what's the
difference between how they instinctively relate to the boys and the girls that what they
say is the boys is to protect and to train and hopefully have them turn out to be better
man than I am. For the girls it's to protect and to cherish.
Over time how dads protect girls has changed. Like in the beginning it was for a long
time it was find her a good husband now it's teach her how to change her own tire,
that's how dads protect girls. So recognizing the way my dad related to me, recognizing
how my dad expressed his love for me was very different than how I looked for it. We
went in a sweet spot for about 20 years and-
Peter King: That's beautiful.
Alison A.: Yeah, he just turned 80 years old, he called me yesterday, it was just the best.
Peter King: Oh that's cool.
Alison A.: Yeah.
Peter King: So sweet. Well like I said I would love to keep chatting with you, but I do want to be
respectful of your time. Thank you so much for the time today, it flew by. Where can
somebody go to learn about what you have to offer?
Alison A.: If they go to understandmen.com everything is there. Our online courses, our what men
most need from women, which is a place to start or a lot of people, as a man, men learn
a lot about it as well. All our understanding men and understanding women courses are
online there, live events with me, free stuff, everything, it's all there.
Peter King: Excellent. Understandingmen.com, Alison again, thank you so much it's been a
wonderful conversation thank you.

Alison A.: Thank you Peter, take care.
Peter King: All right, take care.