How to Be a Dom: 16 Steps to Becoming a Dominant Man

So you want to be a Dom? True masculine Dominance is in short supply these days. This complete guide to becoming a Dominant man will lead you through 16 steps  to developing your inner and outer Dominance so that submissive women not only think you're a Dom, but can feel Dominance radiating from your core.

What is a Dom?

Generally, a Dom (or Dominant) is the person who takes on the role of authority, control, and power over the submissive. The Dominant/submissive dynamic involves consensual power exchange, where the Dominant exercises control and the submissive willingly surrenders control, all within agreed-upon boundaries and guidelines.

However, you’re about to learn that Dominance is so much more. 

Dominant vs domineering

Being Dominant means you exercise control, influence, or authority over others in service of both of you.

Domineering means you assert your will over others in an overbearing or authoritarian manner in service of only yourself. Being Dominant is NOT about aggression, manipulation or abuse.

In my experience, being a Dom is about leadership, which requires understanding the goals & desires of each person and creating a clear vision for how to achieve those goals. A Dom is in service of the dynamic: the mutual vision for the relationship.

Why be a Dom?

The obvious reason you’re thinking being a Dom would be great is because you get to have full control over another person to meet your every whim and desire, right?

To some extent, that’s partially true; however, not like you think. In fact, you won’t always get your own way. Being the Dom in the relationship often equals MORE work, because you now have to take responsibility for two people. As much as she is there to serve and attend to your needs, you must attend to hers, not taking advantage of her eagerness to please without giving her back anything in return.

So then what is the benefit?

For me, to see her sink into her sweet feminine energy and release all of her inhibitions for me is beautiful to witness. Frankly, seeing her go from composed, proper good girl to a feral, sex nympho is quite hot, too.

More than that though, when she is looking at me with those doe eyes, completely surrendered, fixated on me, I am her entire world in that moment. I find women to be one of the greatest creations of beauty, and for that moment, I get to completely own that as if I’m God, because I am. I’m the Alpha and Omega of her world. The trust, devotion, and confidence she has in me to lead her, and doing anything to serve me in her appreciation, is truly a power trip. I get to feel her admiration, respect, and ultimately her love. That feeling makes me feel like I can slay dragons. It fuels my soul so that the next day I can continue to put in more hard work towards making us both better people.

Dominance also feels authentic to me. I have a saying that how you see me show up in the scene, is how you’ll see me show up everywhere else in life. I’m not stepping into a role. I’m being more of who I am. It’s simply a part of my personality to want to have my own way, lead from the front, retain control, and do things on my terms. It feels incredibly validating to have a woman who loves to serve and please a man like that. 

But the least obvious reason is that the work required to be a Dom, makes me a better version of myself. Seeing her kneel before me is just icing on the cake.

How to be a Dom

There is an age-old debate that has probably been around since the beginning of BDSM culture which argues whether Dominance is inherent to your nature and personality or if Dominance can be learned. Really? Another nature vs nurture debate… I’m so tired of these.

Look, almost everything about being a Dom can be learned, even the pieces of inner Dominance that are going to make a submissive woman actually feel your Dominance and make her think you're a natural.

Except one piece, which is step one: taking 100% responsibility for your life. If you don’t want to take that step, I can’t help you. No one can. As far as I can tell, that’s a part of a man’s nature and some men will never take that step.

Here’s the cold hard truth: women will only submit to men they respect.

Women will only respect you if you respect yourself.

You can only respect yourself if you take responsibility for your life.

Being a Dom starts long before entering the bedroom, long before learning technical skills, and long before courting a submissive woman. You have to master yourself before you can be a master of another person.

Step 1: Take 100% responsibility for your life

If you can’t even take responsibility for your life, how will you ever take responsibility for someone submitting to you? How can you lead someone, if you can’t lead yourself?

Taking 100% responsibility for your life means, no matter the circumstances, you actively look at and address your shortcomings, positively move your life forward, and solve the problems that arise. I emphasize no matter the circumstances. 

You can’t be a victim. Being a victim means you have no power and no control, which are essential prerequisites for being a Dom. Look, I get it. All of us were dealt shitty hands in life. It’s true that some people have it harder than others. It’s true that some systems are built leaving you with a disadvantage. It’s true that life is unfair and unpredictable, that sometimes terrible, ungodly things happen to good people.

So what are you going to do about it? 

You can be a victim and continue to let your circumstances control your life or you can overcome them. That may mean your road to becoming the person you want to be is longer than others and more arduous. It doesn’t matter. You’ll still have to be the one to walk it.

When you do, you start to realize that you either directly helped to create your problems, or you were complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want. Either way, it is you. 

It’s important to address this first and foremost, because when you get in relationships, you won’t play the blame game. If something does not go the way you wanted, you’ll be humble enough to look at how you helped create the situation. Then you can work on addressing yourself because you can’t change other people. You are the only person you can change.

One of the essential behaviors of Dominance is to create order and structure for your submissive. If your life is chaotic, you won’t have built the capacity to put another person’s life in order, you’ll be a hypocrite, and your submissive is going to laugh at you rather than submit. So address any and all things wrong in your life and start putting them in order.

Step 2: Set a vision for your life

If I had to select only one behavior that is core to Dominance, it would be leadership. Leaders create visions for where they want to go and what they want to build. That vision attracts followers who share those same goals, yet were unable to reach them on their own. If you want her to follow and submit to you, then you must create a vision that is clear and compelling enough to attract her.

You can’t figure out where you want to go without first understanding where you’re at. Which is why you started with taking 100% responsibility for your life, including taking a cold, hard look at where you're at RIGHT NOW. Don’t berate yourself or wish things were different. It’s your reality right now. However, it doesn’t have to be. It’s time to set a positive vision for your life.

This doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, the more you try to muddy the process of coming up with a vision, the worse it will be.

What is it you want in every area of your life?

Simple to ask, hard to answer. 

It’s hard to answer because you have been:

• Oblivious to who you really are.
• Doing what others have been telling you to do.
• Afraid of actually saying what you want because the gap between where you are now and where you want to be seems insurmountable. 
• Abdicating the responsibility of doing the work necessary for what you want. 

There’s that word again, responsibility. If you’re taking responsibility for your life, that means taking responsibility for what you want and doing what is necessary to make it happen. This is important because when you and your submissive start deciding what your relationship looks like, she knows you’ll actually be a man who can make it reality. It’s also important because if you don’t have a clear vision for what you want, you’ll fall prey to the whims of others, including your submissive, and in doing so become angry, resentful, and bitter. Not a good recipe for a relationship.

Step 3: Take actions in alignment with your values

So you’ve taken responsibility for your life. You have a vision for where you want to go. How will you get there?

Any goal can be achieved with a multitude of strategies. For example, acquiring money can be done through employment, entrepreneurship, investing, stealing, extortion, selling kidneys on the black market…

Some of those resonated more with you than others did. That resonance is a hint at your values. Values are what helps you to decide what strategies you will employ to reach your vision. Your actions are downstream of your values.

What ends up happening though, especially if you don’t know your values, is you unconsciously  choose strategies that are against your values and that causes problems.

Not only must you take responsibility for what you want. You must also take responsibility for how you get it.

There are two reasons people don't understand their values. First, we don’t stop to question what they are, and so our values are shaped by pop culture, the media, and the influence of others. Second, we don’t understand that some values are more important than others. And many values are in fact not values at all, which means they get in the way of what's truly important to us.

To discover your values:

• First, use the list of values from Personal Values or any list that can be found on the internet to start brainstorming the values that are extremely important to you.
• Second, rank your values from most important to least important. This will give you a framework for making decisions when two values come in conflict.
• Finally, be clear what each value means to you.

I recommend writing your values out and letting it sit for a few days. Then return and see if they still hold true.

Once you know your vision and values, you have to take actions that are congruent with what you say you want and what you value. 

Put simply:

• Do what you want to do
• Don’t do what you don’t want to do 

This doesn’t mean being lazy and completely hedonistic because you don’t want to do the work necessary to bring what you actually want to reality.

It means that when someone, society, or life circumstances tries to make you take an action that is out of alignment with your values or takes you farther away from your vision, you don’t buckle and give in, but instead find another action that is in alignment with your values.

For example, life has tasked you with the necessity of making an income. You chose to be employed because that’s the strategy everyone chooses and is easiest, right? Yet you value freedom or autonomy. So you feel your soul decaying every day you drive to work rather than doing the hard work necessary to be an entrepreneur. 

What’s this got to do with being a Dom? 

A lot. It’s going to determine who you choose to be your submissive, how you treat her, and how you’ll lead her. It’s going to show her what's most important to you and give her an evaluation tool to see if you are actually building a life you can be proud of. 

With values, you’re a man who knows who he is, and where he will not bend. This is the kind of solidity that will help you to exude a sense of Dominance that is so much more than just a title or something you do in the bedroom. And that will give submissive women the sense of safety they need to follow your lead.

Step 4: Build your(Self) up

By now, you’ve probably realized that you are limited or fall short of being the man who can actually be a Dom, to lead, or to create the life you want. Not to worry. We all were and still are at some point in our lives. So what are we going to do? Take responsibility and build ourselves into that man.

The Self is a mental construction of how you perceive yourself in relation to the world. I like to conceptualize the Self into three components which give us a clear model for how we can improve the Self.

The three components of the Self:

• Self-image = value of identity or how you think you look
• Self-efficacy = value of doing or what you think your capable of
• Self-esteem = value of being or who you think you are

Each of these three components have work that must be done in order for you to be an effective Dom. We’re going to break these down in the order that is easiest for you to address first, starting with self-image

Building self-image

Self image is the easiest to address because the work is done largely from the outside in. It’s also beneficial to do first because creating a positive self image will serve as positive feedback loops for self-efficacy and self-esteem. Put simply, you look like a Dominant man, so you start acting like a Dominant man, so you start believing that you ARE a Dominant man. 

First, be attractive, don’t be unattractive. You can rail on about beauty standards, genetics, people being too judgemental, and so on. Reality is that people DO judge how you look and have preferences. If you want to be attractive, you will do what you can to fit those preferences, just don’t forget that you have to do so in alignment with your vision and values, otherwise you will be inauthentic and fake.

The basics to address:

• Physique: Submissive women want to feel safe. They feel safer when you look like you could kill a mountain lion with your bare hands. You should aim for between 10-15% body fat and with muscular definition to the most important body parts for attractiveness  which are the neck, shoulders, arms, forearms, and traps. Don’t believe me? Ask a woman how sexy she finds forearms…
• Fashion: “It’s not cool for guys to care about their appearance and how they dress.” Bullshit. Here’s a test for you to try out. Dress how you do now and go walk the streets and see what people’s reactions are. Then wear some clean cut clothes, even just some fitted jeans and button down shirt would do, and see how many people smile, comment on your appearance, and treat you differently. Find a style that is congruent to your personality, vision, and values, and then dress as if you're the leader of people who also dress like that.
• Grooming; Hair, facial hair, skin, teeth, and so on also need to be on point. Otherwise it looks like you're dressing a homeless person in nice clothes. Taking care of these pieces shows yourself and others that you care and respect yourself enough to put time into your appearance. 

Next, level up your body language. How you stand, walk, and sit are all given weight in other people’s perception of your status. A more Dominant man will have body language that is cool, calm, and collected as opposed to nervous. Overall, you want to minimize your movements and not fidget, and make your movement slow and deliberate. When sitting, take up space and stretch yourself out. When standing, I often take the Statue of David stance, which shows you're relaxed and comfortable in yourself, not rigid, but not hunched over either. When walking, do so with a slower pace, head up, shoulders back, sway in body, and intentional direction. Finally, make eye contact and hold that eye contact easily with everyone.

Then, work on your voice. Work on deepening your voice, speaking deliberately, slowly, and directly, not being overly loud or timidly quiet, breathing in your cadence, taking long, deliberate pauses, and varying your speech/pitch/speed to bring emphasis to important parts.

I promise if you dress, walk, and talk like a different man, people will respond to you differently, and you will begin to internally believe you are that type of person.

Building self-efficacy 

Now we look like the type of person we want to become, but can we act like the type of person we want to be? Or said another way, do we have the ability to actually bring our vision to life.

When people say they want to be confident, what they often mean is they want to feel sure of themselves in being able to do something. That assurance is actually competence: the skill and ability to do something successfully. 

The way you become competent at anything is first learning the skill, then practicing that skill over and over again until you know you could execute the skill without much thought. 

So, take your vision for your life and break it down into the sets of skills you need to actually make it a reality. Then learn and practice whatever skills are necessary. This includes being a Dom. There are skills Doms have and if you want to be an effective one, you’ll need to practice those skills. We’ll cover those later.

For now, realize that if you learn the skills necessary to solve your problems and do what you want in life, you start seeing yourself as someone who can’t be fucked with. Outside circumstances don’t shake you as much, because you have enough skills to overcome whatever life throws at you. That includes whatever your woman throws at you, too. You’ll figure it out and won’t be fazed by it. Goodbye victim mentality. 

Building self-esteem

We save self-esteem for last because it’s the hardest and most internal work that must be done. You either have a low self esteem, where you place others’ value higher than your own, or you have an over inflated ego, and place your value higher than other peoples. Either way, you’re insecure and have an ineffective self perception.

What we want is to be secure, where you view yourself as worthy irrespective of others, and also view others as worthy without needing to be more than them or tear them down. 

When you’re secure, you have a positive view of yourself and don’t need reassurance from others that it’s ok to exist, to be loved, or to have your needs met. 

You also have a positive view of others. You trust others, openly express your emotions with them, ask for needs to be fulfilled, and can easily form long lasting relationships, romantically and platonically. It’s easy to love and be loved.

There is a lot you can do to make yourself more secure and I’ve written extensively about that.

However, the strongest belief that helped me become secure was the understanding that as humans we all share the same being. We might all look different or do different things, but at our core, we’re all essentially the same. We all have needs, desires, fears, emotions, and a body that can experience suffering just like everyone else. When you view yourself through this lens, you untangle your worth as a person from what you do (self-efficacy) and what you look like (self-image). You have value for just being. Just like everyone else.

That’s not to say what you do and how you look don’t matter or you shouldn’t care about them. I think we’ve already proven why that’s to the contrary. It’s to say, that who you are transcends those things. The other parts of the self are interchangeable parts, clothes taken on and off, skills learned and forgotten, yet you still remain. 

If you sit with that identification with that being long enough, you see that it’s ok. That actually, it always has been ok. That no matter what comes in the future, it will remain ok. 

That’s unshakeable. That’s a core that you can build Dominance on top of. That’s a calm that every person will feel. That’s trust, safety, and comfort a submissive can rely on.

An important note on having needs vs being needy

During the process of building yourself, you recognize that you are a limited being. That you, in fact, have needs. No one escapes that fact unless you are a god. It is perfectly normal to have needs. For most needs, you are entirely able to fulfill them yourself which is what the process of becoming secure and self-efficacious reveals to you. Some needs like the need for human connection or touch, may not be as easily fulfilled on your own. It’s perfectly normal and healthy to express those needs to others. 

There is a razor sharp line between being needy and having needs though. The difference between having needs and being needy is how those needs are expressed and what your reaction to whether or not the other person will fulfill them is. 

If you express a need and they say no, and you either find a way to cope without having that need fulfilled or identify another strategy to fulfill that need, usually starting with you fulfilling the need on your own, then you are a secure person who has needs. 

If you express a need and they say no, and then you continue to keep asking to have that need met, manipulate or force them to try to fulfill that need, create covert contracts and try to fulfill all their needs so they will fulfill yours, or just pretend you don’t have needs altogether, then you are insecure and needy.

The difference between the two boils down to expectations. Just because you express your needs, does not mean the other person is obligated to fulfill them. They are autonomous beings free to choose as they like.

You can not control other people to meet your needs and your efforts to do so are futile. “Wait a minute, isn’t control the whole point of having a submissive, that they will meet my every need when I say so?”

No. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

BDSM and Dom/sub relationships only exist on the foundation of consent. At some point, you have discussed your needs with the submissive and they have agreed or not agreed to meet them. Even in a 100% total power exchange, master/slave relationship, the slave has agreed prior to being a slave, usually in the form of an overt contract, they willingly will meet whatever need you have. They have consented and said yes beforehand.  Any form of trying to have your needs met without them saying in some form or another  “Yes, I’ll meet that need” is manipulation.

When you have a need you really only have a few options:

• Meet the need on your own
• Ask your partner for help fulfilling that need and receiving a yes
• Finding another person to fulfill that need and receiving a yes from them
• Coping with the fact that your need will not be fulfilled

When it comes to emotional needs, particularly ones where you need to feel comforted for how much struggle you go through as a man, I recommend asking another man or group of men to fulfill those for you. First, men are the only ones that understand what it's like to develop as a man and can truly empathize. Second, it's best to share what you're going through emotionally with your woman once you have an understanding of what your plan is to deal with it. Then when you share, you tell her how she could help, and will still be leading her. Additionally, you’re not asking her to comfort you or solve your problems, which pulls you out of your Dominance and her out of her submission. Again, it’s not about never having emotional needs and never sharing those with her. It’s about HOW you share them. You share them not expecting her to fix them. 

That’s your responsibility.

Step 5: Have presence and be in control of your emotions.

Too many times men think being masculine or being a Dom is about being a stone cold killer. No emotions. Rigid and never moved by anything. 

Except, that’s not actually what your woman wants. Turning off your emotions does not mean you have control of them. It makes you flatline and avoid them.

What she wants is for you to be able to feel your emotions fully and not lose your shit when you do. You’re able to let any and all emotions flow through you, be fully felt to your core, and not be triggered to grasp on to them and overreact. 

When she sees you trust yourself enough to feel your own emotions, then she will trust you and share her emotions with you to the fullest extent possible. She knows you are able to handle her deepest expressions of joy, bliss, and pleasure as much as her anger, sadness, and despair. If you want her positive emotions, you have to be able to handle the negative ones as well. You don’t get to pick and choose.

First you need to learn how to be present with your emotions, specifically the sensations it creates in your body, detached from the stories assigned to them. This requires a cultivation of awareness (what is happening) and presence (right in this very moment), repeatedly exercised over and over again. Every emotion must be felt fully, especially the ones you’d rather not feel. Meditation, somatic therapy, talk therapy, men’s groups, and many other modalities can help you practice this.

When you do this practice in combination with a strong self esteem, you see that these emotions don’t change who you are at your core. That the pain doesn’t actually destroy you. That you’re ok, even when everything in the world around you is in chaos. 

You also realize that if you are a human being with emotions, just like everyone else, then everyone else also shares these same emotions, including the painful ones. This is where empathy is born. You begin to have attunement to others states, not because you're afraid of them like an anxious person would be and not trying to upset them, but because you know and accept that it’s ok for them to feel those emotions. You don’t try to change, manage, or control their emotions. 

You become more vulnerable in the sense that you have increased your sensitivity to others emotions that would have previously triggered you, had you not done the work to control your own emotions and not be triggered by them. 

Instead, you can now approach your woman with an open heart. One that she is allowed to fully express her emotions without you trying to change, manage, or control her emotions. She knows that regardless of whether she’s happy, angry, sad, or whatever emotion is moving through her at this moment, you are not going to shut down or blow up. You’ll accept her and then still lead and take care of what needs to be done in the best interest of her. She feels seen, known, and safe, all prerequisites for her to submit and sink fully into her feminine. 

Step 6: Live with integrity

Here’s where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You say you’re taking responsibility for your life. You say these are the things you want.You say this is who you are and fully living and feeling that to your core…

Is that true?

Every time a woman “tests” you, she is actually asking this question. She’s conducting an integrity check. Because if she can not trust you, she will never feel safe, and never submit to you. It’s not that she’s trying to actively distrust you or be your adversary. It’s that she is going to put herself in an incredibly vulnerable position in trusting you and she needs reassurance that the person you say you are, that Dominant leader, is actually true. Otherwise, at best she’ll be led nowhere, and at worst she’ll be led into pain.

Your job is to live with integrity. 

Integrity is pretty simple:

• Only speak Truth
• Do what you say 
• Say what you mean
• Be who you say you are

Only speak Truth

In order for anyone to believe anything you say, you need your words and actions to be grounded in reality. The more aligned you are with reality, the more true those words and actions will be.

Part of seeing reality was done in step one when you took 100% responsibility for your life. In order to take that responsibility, you have to be really, really, honest about where you are right now. It’s ok if you have a lot of improvement to do, but you have to be honest with her about that. It’s her decision if she wants to be part of that or not.

Also, when you set a vision for yourself and state your values, you can’t lie about what it is that you truly want or value. You won’t be in alignment with the reality of your personality or your true nature.

Do what you say 

Your word is the most important tool you have between you and others. 

If you say you’re going to do something, big or small, and you actually do that thing, then others will give you more support to do future things. They see that you're a man who can turn potential futures into reality. 

If you say you’re going to do something, big or small, and you don’t actually do that thing, either by lying or negligence, people will not ally with you. You’re all talk and no show. They can’t trust a word you say.

Which man do you think a woman is going to trust the responsibility of her submission to?

There is more to this though. 

Doing what you say you’re going to do requires that you do so, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. This means that you assert yourself in the face of obstacles, whether those are people or circumstances, in order to bring your vision to life. 

As you’re taking action in the world, you must do so in a way that is in accordance with your values. Otherwise, you’re out of integrity and will see your vision come to reality at all costs, including potentially the cost of her. When you're acting within your values, you're predictable and she can assess whether you're the type of man she would want to submit to and follow. When you’re not acting within your values, you're unpredictable which causes her anxiety and she can’t trust or feel safe with you.

Say what you mean

You can’t lie about your intentions, your emotional experience, or your expectations because that will only cause you both grief. You don’t get what you want because you didn’t speak up and she feels betrayed.

You also can’t edit your speech to people please others or fit their values, because oftentimes you don’t share their values and editing yourself may go directly against your values. If you don’t have the courage to say exactly what you mean in your vision and values, she can never effectively follow you and can not trust that you’ll take her where she wants to go.

Be who say your are

Being yourself is not helpful if you never completed step one because who you are without step one is a victim of circumstances. However, if you’ve been through all the steps leading to this one, especially time spent in building the Self, then being yourself is exactly what you should do. 

Being yourself means you don’t change your vision, values, self, or emotional experience to better fit your circumstances. That would be following the whims of life and everyone else. Instead you change your circumstances to better fit you. That’s leading. 

This applies to women, too. You don’t change who you are in order to win her approval. You find the woman who needs to be approved by you to fit into your life, because you’re the one leading it, right?

Step 7: Treat yourself with respect

We’ve come full circle to the truth I told you in step one: women will only submit to men they respect.

Women will only respect you if you respect yourself.

You can only respect yourself if you take responsibility for your life.

By this point, you have or are well on your way to becoming a man that you can respect. 

Let’s take stock:

• You have addressed your problems
• Created a positive vision for your life
• Defined your values to lead your actions
• You’ve built yourself up into the person who can actually achieve and be that vision
• Your not triggered by the emotions of yourself or others
• You do only that which is aligned with what you say you want

Would you respect that man? Then actually do.

How do you show others respect? It’s time to start showing those things to yourself. 

This includes:

• Honoring your time
• Enforcing your boundaries
• Taking care of yourself
• Valuing your opinions, feelings, perspectives and insights
• Giving yourself permission
• Physically taking up space
• Speaking of yourself in high regard
• Giving validation to yourself
• Treating yourself equally in regards to others
• Giving yourself the support and resources you need to succeed
• Living up to your own expectations

After all that, you will have reached a point where a submissive woman could actually respect you and give you her submission. 

Honestly, I could have written this guide without steps 1-7 and just shown you the process for you to roleplay as a Dom. That’s what most BDSM education will do. However, every woman who ever tries submitting to you in the future would feel as if something was off. It just wouldn’t feel right to her. That you were a fake Dom. She’d never be able to fully let go, to surrender, to be in full submission. Relationships would be short lived. You’d be ghosted. 

Steps 1-7 were the prerequisites to actually BE a Dom. Not to just roleplay as one. To have that strong, masculine, inner frame where Dominance comes from. One who can make her feel everything she wants to feel in full submission to you.

You're now ready to cross the threshold of inner Dominance to outer Dominance.

Step 8: Understand the psychology of submission

Whenever you want something in life, you don’t actually want the thing, but rather the feeling that thing is going to evoke in you. For example, you buy a nice watch because you think it’s going to make you feel important, respected, attractive, or loved.

Well, submissive women are the same way when they desire you to be Dominant. They don’t necessarily care about the actions you’re doing, but rather how those actions make them feel.

So what is it that a submissive woman is looking to feel?

‍She wants to feel:

• Free: She doesn’t have to worry. She doesn’t have to be on alert. She can relax and let you take care of everything. All she has to do is have fun, enjoy herself, and do as she’s told. No stress of planning, of being prepared, of worrying what will come next. She’s free from the hassles of everyday life. You will take care of it.
• Safe: She wants to know you have the capacity to be dangerous, to be a threat, but can control and deliberately exude that without actually causing her harm. She wants to know you will take care of her and keep her safe.
• Desired: Being ravished by you makes her feel wanted. To be “owned” means that someone wants you. That someone values you. That someone likes having you around.
• Important: She feels satisfaction as well, in pleasing you and accomplishing her tasks correctly and earning praise. 
• Appreciated: In a world where people are quick to criticize and judge, to see the worst in others, it can be deeply satisfying to have someone truly mean it when he says you are a good girl.
• Accepted: When she sees you pursue your desires unabashedly, she can release and pursue hers without judgment. She wants to be the sex crazed nympho for you and not be shamed for doing so.
• Loved: Someone has taken the time to learn about her, her desires, her boundaries, what brings her pleasure, and hitting all the other emotions above. All of these are going to make her feel cared for and ultimately loved.

Being submissive to someone she cares about feels completely natural. It’s her way of showing affection but also makes her happy. They are attracted to more Dominant personalities and ENJOY being told what to do. It’s RELAXING for them. 

Submission allows her to enter a state of tranquility and sink fully into the pleasure of the fantasy realm, a special bubble without stress or pressure, where you cradle her, make her long for you, and recharge her spiritual battery so she can battle through another week.

Your Dominance is a gift for her. One that she craves. 

Step 9: Figure out what you want as a Dom

If you don’t understand your own desires and communicate them to your submissive, how do you think you will ever get what you want? She is going to ask you repeatedly what she can do to serve you or spit out the phrase “I want you to do whatever you want to me.” If you don’t even know what it is you want, you’re both going to have a very poor time.

First, I want you to temporarily forget everything you have learned or seen about what a Dom is supposed to be. Just because you’ve seen 50 Shades of Grey does not mean that all Doms look and act like Christian Grey. You may also think being Dominant is all about pain and being sadistic, when in fact, there are many Doms who don’t enjoy delivering pain. If you try to act like the Dom you see in some porn, it's going to be incongruent, because it will not come from a place of your true desires. She wants you to do what YOU want to do.

To discover that, I recommend doing the erotic journaling exercise from my 3 Tools to Discover Your Turn Ons. Starting with an erotic journal will be the purest expression of what turns you on without outside influence of how you should be turned on. Then I recommend that you fill out a Sex Menu in order to flesh out what certain sexual acts and kinks might look like for you.

Then you take some of the popular quizzes and see how your desires might fit within certain D/s archetypes such as Daddy Dom, Master, Rigger, Sadist, FinDom,  Pleasure Dom, or Primal Dom to name a few. These archetypes are not meant to put you into a box saying you can only do those things. Rather, it's to help you identify the submissive women who are more likely to turn you on as well as point you towards skills and education to learn if you want to engage with those types of submissive women.

Step 10: Learn the skills of being a Top

Most BDSM education starts here, which I understand why. Some acts in BDSM can be very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. D/s relationships can be abusive and manipulative if you don’t understand consent. So it’s important for you to have technical skills. However, it completely misses the mark on evoking the feelings of submission, which can only be done by BEING a Dominant. Luckily for you, we covered that above.

This is why I call these skills Top skills. A Top is someone who has the skills to perform acts on another person. A Dominant is the why, the intention, the juice, behind those acts. Of course, it’s necessary to be a good Top in addition to being a Dom if you’re going to engage in BDSM..

A good Top is someone who has a solid understanding of BDSM principles, techniques, and safety practices. They continually seek to educate themselves about different aspects of BDSM to ensure safe and enjoyable experiences for both partners.

To be a good Top, you’re going to learn:

• Philosophies on consent: Consent is the foundation of BDSM. Philosophies on consent include the popular models of consent such as safe, sane and consensual and risk-aware consensual kink. However, it’s important for you to understand and discover the nuances of consent for yourself so you know how you’d like to play. For example, I don’t like my submissives being overly intoxicated when we play because their inhibitions are far far lower and they may consent to something in that frame that they might regret later.
• Culture and lingo: It’s going to be much easier to communicate and navigate the scene if you understand what you’re talking about. Some of the easiest places to start are with the Kinktionary on FetLife and watching some of Evie Lupine’s BDSM 101 videos.
• Skills specific to your kinks: Depending on what gets your juices flowing, you’re going to have to learn how to actually do them, including safety and best practices. For skills in things like spanking, choking, and other universal or low dominance acts, I recommend Beducated. Bondage is one of the most popular kinks on both sides of the slash, so if rope is your jam I recommend attending local workshops or following online tutorials from the Duchy or Kinky Events rope bondage course. For niche Dominance acts, start with 7 Days of Domination with Lola Jean & Shayla Lange.
• Master your sexual skills: I’ve written a quick guide to becoming sexually dominant in the bedroom, so I recommend starting there. Then start taking courses and practicing your favorite sexual techniques.

Step 11: Master communication

It’s such a cliche to say that communication is the bedrock of your relationship, but it’s completely true. Communication is the only way for us to know what the other person is feeling, thinking, and believing. Communication is the only way for us to express our visions, our needs, and what we’d like others to do. To successfully lead a Dom/sub relationship, you’re going to need impeccable communication so that both your needs are met and you still remain in the Dominant frame. Here’s some tips to keep in mind.

Listen first

Let’s take this outside of the realms of relationships for a moment. If you’re leading a company or a team, don’t you want as much data as possible about a situation before you decide a course of action? 

Well in D/s relationships where you have taken the responsibility of leading, it’s beneficial to receive all the data you can from your submissive. What’s going to be frustrating to you though is her main form of communication is emotion. All she knows is that she feels a certain way, and what she believes is causing that emotion may or may not actually be the trigger. Furthermore, she may not even need you to solve any problem at all, but rather just needs to express those emotions and have a solid container to do so. You’re going to have to learn to really listen to discern what actions are necessary for you to take, if any.

First, you should be encouraging her to be emotional. If you truly want her to be feminine, then you must be able to take her full range of emotions. If she sees you can’t handle her emotions like anger, she will not show you her positive emotions either. You want her to show those emotions because they are rich feedback about how you’re leading the dynamic. So let her express whatever emotion is true for her in the moment, without trying to change it, extinguish it, or “solve” it. If you try to change her emotion, it actually puts her in control, because it shows that your emotional state is not ok unless her emotional state is ok. When in reality, you should feel ok no matter how she’s feeling. Her emotions don’t dictate your internal state.

Second, is learning to listen to her fully and facilitating the dialogue so she feels seen, heard, and known. Imago Dialogue is an excellent way to learn how you can be reacting and actively listening to what she is saying. The dialogue process is used in therapy contexts and can be quite robotic if you follow it to the letter. What’s more helpful is to learn the skills and phrases associated with mirroring, being curious, checking for accuracy in your understanding, summarizing, validating, and empathizing. This process is actually beneficial to you because it digs deeper than the surface level of her original words, giving you greater insight. What she says first is usually not the entire picture and you shouldn’t just take the words at face value.

Third, when you’re listening, never start to DEER (Defend, Explain, Excuse, Rationalize) with a submissive woman.

• Defend: If she is accusing you of something and it’s not true, then there is no need to defend anything. You can laugh it off. If she is accusing you of something and it is true, then getting defensive shows you’re insecure about something in your inner Dominance and you need to take responsibility for it.
• Explain: If you have to explain yourself, your vision, values, and actions were not clear. Take this as a sign that you need to be better about your communication beforehand.
• Excuse: Making excuses puts you in the victim of your circumstances frame and completely erodes your power. No one cares. Take responsibility for your life.
• Rationalize: A person rationalizes AFTER the fact. A decision or choice is made, then the rationalizing happens afterwards. Which means you were not in full control of your actions and she knows it.

Lastly, for issues that actually need solutions, discernment, and direction, create containers where she can fully express herself safely and provide you with ample feedback on your decisions. We set these times aside because there is a time and place for deep discussion and gaining feedback. During an activity or event is not the time because you should be leading with confidence. Checking in then is more often than not just seeking validation, rather than constructive criticism. Additionally, if you’re in the presence of others, it's disrespectful for either of you to be gut checking the other in front of other people. You want to present as a strong unit, uplift and encourage each other.  

I recommend having two types of containers:

• Debriefs: Anytime you take significant leadership in the relationship, have time afterwards to get feedback about how it went for her. Life naturally allows for these opportunities. After sex or a scene, get feedback during pillow talk. After taking a trip together, get feedback on the drive home. After dinner, get feedback while washing the dishes. 
• Relationship Check-ins: Usually once a week, these are opportunities to gauge the direction of your relationship and life. During these check-ins set aside the power dynamic so she is free to completely express herself. You should be gaining both emotional and logistical feedback from her, and then making logistical decisions of how to lead the relationship, and any directions for her about how the next week will go. 

Speak second

First, remember your integrity and speak honestly. After hearing her out, you decide what’s going to happen. This is where it’s going to be important that you are in control of your emotions. If you’re not, you’re going to say and do things that placate her and try to make her happy because you can’t handle the confrontation and discomfort of doing what is in alignment with your vision, values, and true desires. Don’t say something if it’s not true. Don’t do something if it's not what you want. 

Second, give direct commands. You’re not asking permission. You can ask how this decision might affect her and ways to help her through it, but you’re still making the decision. You’re taking leadership and have all the available information, right? You know what’s best. Do that and tell her what is going to happen.

Third, when you’re expressing your needs, I recommend using nonviolent communication. The benefits of doing so are:

• It separates objective observations about reality, feelings you're having about the situation, and needs going unfulfilled. 
• Keeps you from attacking and blaming her, which would put you into a victim frame, and requires you to take responsibility for your own feelings and needs.
• Allows you to speak both logically, by stating objective facts, and emotionally, by stating the feelings by themselves. You don’t conflate the two and make poor decisions or speak clearly. You also don’t disregard how the situation is making you feel.

The real power of nonviolent communication then comes in the request for your needs to be fulfilled. Remember what I said about having needs vs being needy above. When you make the request for your needs to be met, there must be no expectation of her to say yes and you must be ok no matter the outcome. Just because you are in control of her life as the Dom, does not mean you are in control of her free will. She still retains agency of whether or not she will help to meet your needs. Any form of manipulating her to try to get your needs met is insecurity and neediness. If she says no, then you take responsibility for yourself and find another way for that need to be met. 

Step 12: Embrace polarity and tension

For most of your life, you have been taught that polarization is bad and to avoid tension. It makes you uncomfortable. However, polarization and tension is what keeps relationships passionate, exciting, and full of life energy. 

If you actively depolarize a relationship, you’ll see that you two are quite comfortable with each other because you’re practically the same. You’ve made everything equal, you like pretty much all the same stuff, you do the same things, same, same, same… It’s going to be bland and feel like one of those suburban neighborhoods where every house is the exact same. Sounds pretty vanilla to me…

If you’re reading this guide, then what you want is opposite, but complementary roles. Your Dominant, she’s submissive. You’re in your masculine, she’s in her feminine.

You're leading, she’s following. 

To have that though, you must get comfortable with creating and being in tension and acting in ways that are polarizing. You exude more Dominance, you receive more submission. I’m not saying you need to purposely start arguments with her (although some people do that just for the “hot sex” afterwards). What I’m saying is don’t be afraid to tease her, disagree with her, command her, or be different from her when it’s authentic to you.

You also need to be comfortable with when she is acting more feminine and submissive. If you get upset when she can’t make a decision, or is being overly emotional, or too playful and not serious, or spending too much time on her appearance, or asking you for direction, you’re depolarizing her and punishing her for what you say you want her to be.

Having worked on your inner Dominance, you should be well equipped to do this. You can also strengthen your ability to be comfortable in tension by practicing triggering your nervous system and learning to regulate your response. 

Some tension practices outside of the relationship include:

• Extreme heat and cold exposure
• Difficult physical exertion, such as a difficult hike
• Putting yourself in high stakes situations
• Confronting family members
• Sitting absolutely still for extended periods
• Asserting your values in social contexts
• Completely feeling an emotion such as anger

The through line for these experiences is the physical sensations and mental blocks you will have. They have a similar, warm, antsy, tingly, slightly uncomfortable feeling that you’d rather not be feeling, but it’s not destroying your body. You’ll mentally have an aversion to it. However, if you’re able to sit with the discomfort and bring your body back to a state of calm, you’ll eventually get used to the feeling. This feeling is what underlies tension. Embrace this feeling.

Step 13: Own your power & desires 

In your journey to becoming a Dom, you’re going to go head first against societal programming about how women are to be treated and having equal power share in a relationship. If you’re anything like me, you’re going to question repeatedly if this is abuse, manipulation, and wrong. You’re going to question if the desires you have make you a bad person. 

If you truly are following this guide and are being a Dom because you want to lead her towards a vision, goals, and dynamic you both want, then you being a Dom and acting on those desires is for both of you. As a Dom, you’ve taken responsibility for her and the decisions you make are in her best interests so you both reach the goal you agreed you wanted.

The mindfuck you’ll have to walk through is you being “selfish”, is actually being selfless. She gets pleasure from being the submissive in the relationship, and therefore you are denying her pleasure if you don't let her service you.

Part of the reason consent, boundaries, limits, and safewords exist in BDSM is to keep your Dominant power in check so you don’t become a tyrant. I also urged you to seek feedback earlier in the communication section, which will help you to see when your Dominance is getting out of control and not serving either of you. Trust your submissive. She is a grown woman and more than capable of telling you if she believes you are taking advantage of her.

Picture everything that you and your submissive could possibly do together as a sandbox. When you asked your submissive what her boundaries and limitations were, you created walls for that sandbox. You are allowed to do anything you want inside the sandbox, just don’t cross the boundaries (unless she’s consented for you to do so.) 

Now that you know the boundaries, she craves for you to completely own your desires, not hold back, and not to hesitate. She wants you to take what's yours, completely. To be crass, she wants you to lose control, fuck her like an animal, destroy her, and completely fucking own her with your entire being, and the important part, be able to quickly regain composure should she call a safeword.

You will never be able to do that if you don’t internally own your desires, remove your shame, and reflect on how doing so is in service to you both. The darker the desires you can undergo this alchemy with, the more powerful you will show up in your Dominance. Not just in the bedroom, but everywhere in life.

Step 14: Help her overcome insecurity and roadblocks to owning her desires

Here’s the beautiful part about owning your own desires: she can now own hers.

The more you are able to talk about your desires, wants and needs in an open, honest, and direct manner, the more she will see that there is nothing to be ashamed of. The more you own who you are and act in accordance with that, she will see it's okay for her to do so too. If you allow yourself to be a kinky degenerate, she’s free to be the slutty nympho.

You lead by example.

Sexually, society shames her for her desires. She’s supposed to be clean and pure, never to do anything too crazy, definitely not with multiple partners, and never anything kinky…

Culturally, society makes her feel guilty for wanting to be submissive. She’s supposed to be the boss babe who doesn’t need no man, can do everything for herself, and can lead her own life…

Never shame her for sexuality or submissive qualities, for if you do, you’ll never get to see how completely unhinged she can be sexually and how fully she will submit to you.

Your job as a Dom is to build trust with her, that it’s ok for her to show you her true desires and give her permission to expose this hidden part of herself. You do this by creating a container of openness and non-judgment around her sexual nature and by encouraging and rewarding her submissive behavior. Help her become completely at ease with sex, her body, and her fantasies. Show her how much you love her being submissive for you. Remember one of the feelings that a submissive is seeking through submission - acceptance. 

Step 15: Do the essential behaviors of a good Dom

As you continue the dynamic, be diligent about practicing the essential behaviors of a good Dom. Most importantly, to always be leading. You now have responsibility for both of you. As your capacity grows, seek more opportunities to take on responsibilities because that is where the power can be found. 

Step: 16: Always be improving yourself

The interesting thing about laying these steps out in a sequence is you believe that when you reach the end of the sequence, you’re finished. You’ve thoroughly addressed each step to its fullest and will never need to revisit this process again.

That… is not how life works.

The first time you go through this process, you’re going to complete each step with a duct tape solution enough to get you to the next step. However, you didn’t fully address the depths of work that is needed to be done there. 

At some point in your life, you’ll have to take 100% responsibility for all the parts you forgot, or maybe didn’t want to look at, and begin anew. Only this time, you’ll be more skilled, wise, and better equipped. 

A book that I enjoy entitled Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, by Bruce Tift, uses the analogy of the spiral staircase where we go around and around in circles, yet we ascend to higher levels each time. We will never completely get rid of our core vulnerabilities, we will revisit the same issues over and over again, but hopefully with more skills and more insights.

You will perpetually keep running into the same problems again and again until you are able to fully solve them, internally and externally. Becoming a Dom, a master of yourself and her, requires this. So befriend the process.

Are you actually a good Dom?

Do you know one of the greatest gifts that women give you? 

Rejection.

Every time you're rejected, it’s direct feedback that you need to go back through this process somewhere.

You might want to review your history of interactions with submissive women and be brutally honest with yourself.

• Do chats on dating apps go dead as soon as you tell them you’re a Dom?
• Did they sleep with you once and never return?
• Do they often stop responding to your messages?
• Did they leave you after you reacted in some way?
• Did they not follow your lead?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you may not be a great Dominant.

That’s ok, my friend. You just need to start again at step 1: take 100% responsibility for your life.