There was a Tuesday afternoon, somewhere in the last year or two, where something happened and you needed to call someone. Not your partner. Not a family member. A mate. Someone who’d known you for long enough that you wouldn’t have to explain the context. Someone you could just say the thing to.
You went through your phone. You scrolled. You stopped at three names. You looked at them for a few seconds. You closed the phone. You didn’t make the call.
It wasn’t that the three names weren’t your mates. They were. You’ve known them for years. You’d help them move house tomorrow. They’d help you. They’d have answered if you’d rung.
It was that calling and saying the thing felt, somehow, like it wasn’t the kind of thing you do. So you didn’t do it.
This article is about that moment. It’s a particular Australian male moment. There’s data about it, but the data is downstream of something specific in this country’s culture.
What the Data Says, and What It’s Pointing At
Researchers who study loneliness internationally have, for a long time now, found Australian men to be among the most isolated in the developed world. The data is real. The studies are real. The statistic gets cited often enough that anyone who follows mental health news in this country has run into it.
What the statistic doesn’t quite capture is what the loneliness actually looks like on the ground. Australian men are not, mostly, isolated in the way the word usually implies. They’re not without people. Most of them have mates. Most of them have partners. Most of them have brothers, fathers, cousins, neighbours. The numbers, if you counted social contacts, would look reasonable.
The loneliness is structural rather than numerical. The mates are there. The conversations they have aren’t the conversations that ease loneliness. The mates can’t be called on a Tuesday afternoon to say the thing. Not because they wouldn’t pick up - they would - but because the friendship’s architecture doesn’t have a place for the thing.
That’s a different kind of isolation. It’s the isolation of being well-surrounded and structurally alone at the same time.
The data is the visible expression of this. The data is downstream of a particular cultural script that has organised Australian male friendship for generations.
What Keeps the Script in Place
You’ll have considered, by now, what would happen if you actually rang. You’d play the conversation in your head. The mate would pick up. You’d ask how he is. He’d say good. You’d ask after his kids. He’d ask after yours. You’d talk about the footy, or the work, or the renovation. The conversation would not, in your head, find its way to the thing you’d been going to say.
That’s not because your mate is closed. That’s because the conversation has rails. The rails have been there since the friendship started. The rails go to places that have already been gone to. The thing isn’t on the rails.
About five per cent of what’s running in you at any given moment is conscious - the part that scrolled through the phone and considered ringing. The other ninety-five per cent is the subconscious, which knows the rails and runs them automatically.
For a lot of Australian men, that subconscious script runs something like: We don’t ring for that. We ring to organise things. We ring on birthdays. We don’t ring at random with the real version. That’s not what these friendships do.
It doesn’t run as language. It runs as the way the phone closes. The reflex to put the thing back inside. The fact that you’ve had years of friendships with men you’d describe as the closest people in your life, and you can’t quite remember any of you ringing the other to say the real version of how things were going.
The conscious-level “I should just ring” doesn’t reach the script. The script is operating at the depth where the friendship’s rails were laid.
What the Method Reaches
Inner Influencing operates at the layer the rails were laid on. Not the conversational layer where you tell yourself you’ll start a real conversation at the next catch-up. The deeper layer where the rules about what Australian male friendship is for were filed away years ago and haven’t been re-opened since.
The rules don’t change because a conscious resolution has been made. They’ve never changed by that route. They change when the layer they live on gets a different instruction, written in a form the layer can read.
That form is a specifically structured request, sent through a trigger phrase (“Purple Cow”) whose oddness is what marks it as instruction rather than as more mental chatter. The subconscious treats the phrase as a signal that what follows is to be taken as an instruction. One statement. Said once. No repetition.
Try It For Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before the next one.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the script that closes the phone before the call gets made, the rails that route the conversation away from what I actually wanted to say, and the version of me that has mates I’d never ring on a Tuesday afternoon with the real version of what’s going on, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the belief that ringing for the real version isn’t what the friendship is for, that the rails the friendship has run on for decades can’t be widened, that the mates wouldn’t know what to do with the actual call, and the conviction that being well-surrounded is the same thing as being known, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for me to ring when the moment actually calls for it, to say the thing inside the friendships I have rather than alongside them, and to know that the rails can widen and that the mates would, in fact, pick up, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Loosened
You may have felt something small. A breath that went somewhere it hadn’t been reaching. A faint sense, even small, that the phone might open differently next time. A slight loosening in the place that’s been holding the rule about what gets said and to whom. Whatever happened, the subconscious received the signal at the layer where the friendship’s architecture has been running from.
This kind of shift doesn’t arrive with drama. It tends to arrive as less of something - less of the automatic closing of the phone, a slightly more available version of what the existing friendships could carry.
What you just did is the entry-level move of Inner Influencing. There are deeper layers underneath - the original instructions about what men ring each other for, the long-running rails of the friendships you have, the inheritance of a country whose male friendship culture has produced both genuine closeness and a particular kind of structural isolation. The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into this work and explains why it reaches what other methods don’t.
A lot of Australian men have been well-surrounded and structurally alone for so long they’ve stopped expecting either could change.
Either can. The first call is the start. The script underneath the call is the rest.
The subconscious doesn’t need an argument. It needs the right signal at the right level. You’ve just sent one.