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Masculinity

Michael Sartain – Moving Beyond The Stereotypes

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Talking points: relationships, evolutionary psychology, culture

You know it, I know it, and Michael Sartain knows it: there are a LOT of men out there facing extreme difficulty. I wanted to pick Michael’s brain on how to help men understand why this is, but from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, and the boots-on-ground experience of a fellow coach. I appreciate Michael’s ability to follow (and focus) the data without getting lost in reactionary antics. Listen in.

(00:00:00) – How Michael works with men

(00:13:13) – What makes evolutionary psychology such a charged subject?

(00:25:40) – Why risk is important for men

(00:31:36) – Strategies to boost your risk tolerance

(00:39:02) – The difficulty of modern male relationships, and staying neutral

(00:48:42) – Does the unwillingness to take risk can impact relationships?

(00:53:23) – On status, Bonnie Blue, and what most don’t get about the “bottom third” of men

Michael Sartain’s journey from a studious kid in Dallas, TX, to a leading expert in high-status networking and masculine self-improvement is nothing short of transformative. He grew up in contrasting environments; a comfortable family life, but a high school marked by gangs and poverty. Michael found refuge in academia, eventually earning a BBA from UT-Austin while nurturing a passion for diverse subjects like physics and psychology. The events of September 11, 2001, ignited his patriotic spirit, propelling him into the US Air Force as a KC135 navigator, rising to the rank of captain. It was here he honed leadership skills and experienced the profound impact of true accountability and integrity.

In 2019, he founded Men Of Action, a coaching community that has transformed the lives of over 2,000 men. Through his podcasts and public appearances, Michael continues to inspire, emphasizing leadership, social dynamics, and personal growth.

Connect with Michael:

-Website: https://www.moamentoring.com/

-Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michaelsartain/

-YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelSartain

-Twitter: https://x.com/michaelsartain

Ryan Michler – Brotherhood, Isolation, And Rising Above The Noise

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Talking points: friendship, masculinity, culture

Ryan Michler and I have been in the men’s work biz for a long time, and we’ve seen the changes—some good, some bad—in how men are talked about and marketed to by our culture and by the wellness and therapy industries. We dig into the necessity of male friendship in the face of growing isolationism, the upcoming Men’s Forge, and a whole lot more. Listen in, team.

(00:00:00) – Intro and why does it seem like men are having a harder time maintaining relationships?

(00:12:27) – On men needing social time and where modern therapy misses the mark

(00:17:56) – How are men contributing to their own isolation and loneliness?

(00:31:44) – On the importance of some confrontation in male friendships

(00:38:32) – Why men need brotherhood as well as challenge, and what to do if you want deeper friendships with other men

Ryan Michler is a husband, father, Iraqi Combat Veteran, and the Founder of Order of Man. Ryan grew up without a permanent father figure and has seen first-hand how a lack of strong, ambitious, self-sufficient men has impacted society today. He believes many of the world’s most complicated problems could be solved if men everywhere learned how to be better husbands, fathers, businessmen, and community leaders.

It has now become his life’s mission to help men across the planet step more fully into their roles as protectors, providers, and presiders over themselves, their families, their businesses, and their communities. You can find him blogging and podcasting at Order of Man where he is working to help men become all they were meant to be.

Connect with Ryan

-Join myself, Ryan Michler, Larry Hagner, and Matt Beaudreau on a mission to improve yourself as a man, husband, business owner, and community leader at the Men’s Forge. May 1-4, St. Louis, MO: https://orderofman.clickfunnels.com/uprising-landing-page1715263442491

-Website: https://www.orderofman.com/

-Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanmichler/

-Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanmichler

-Book: The Masculinity Manifesto: https://amzn.to/3jJcmiE

-Book: Sovereignty: https://amzn.to/3G6zwqQ

Men’s Work Sessions – Four Stories, Four Strengths, Four Struggles

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Talking points: trauma, validation, mindset, relationships

Recently, I put out a call on Instagram: who wants to join me for a short, recorded Q&A. We had a TON of respondents, but I wanted to highlight four in particular that I feel are unique, but at the same time offer a window into what so many men endure.

These are everyday men from completely different walks of life, all different ages, but united in a single fact: they’re doing the work. I’m deeply grateful to each of them for agreeing to be on the show.

(00:00:00) – The story of S, six years sober, who struggles with people pleasing and feeling stuck

(00:16:04) – C’s struggle with internal validation and the relationship with his father

(00:35:15) – D’s working on feeling worthy, but his relationships have never felt safe or trustworthy

(00:56:47) – P wrestles with some of the contradictions in the self-help space and past trauma

Becoming A Man: The Story Of Perseus

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Talking points: mythology, masculinity, trauma

Myth isn’t just old story. It’s also a powerful way to frame the workings of the world, the mind, and everything in between. The story of Perseus is just one example of this, with insights on boyhood vs manhood, facing risk, and much more. Dig in.

(00:00:00) – Intro and the first lesson of the Perseus’ story

(00:06:09) – The second lesson

(00:09:36) – Lessons behind Perseus and Medusa

(00:16:09) – How the role of a mother and the initiation into manhood interact

Transcript

How do you become a man and how do you know when you’ve become one? This is one of the biggest things that I hear from men all the time. I’m 55 and I still feel like a kid, I still feel like a young man, I don’t know if I ever really crossed the threshold. Well, today we’re going to be talking about how do you actually step from boyhood into manhood and I’m not going to be giving you my personal advice or what I think you should do.

I’m actually going to be going through three lessons from the story of Perseus from one of the, I mean, I don’t know if there’s a most important character by any means necessary, but in terms of masculine development, in terms of stories that embody development from boyhood into manhood, Perseus certainly and his story and his life as a fictional character is one of the most important because there’s something unique about him, which is that he grew up without a father present in his life. And this is the case for a lot of you watching this. Now, maybe you had a father in your life.

There’s still going to be some very important lessons going to lay out in here. But the story of Perseus is certainly one that is helpful for the coming of age, the stepping into manhood for a young man or for a man who especially did not have a father in his life. So let’s just get straight into it.

Perseus’s mother was sequestered away by her father, by Perseus’s grandfather, because Perseus’s grandfather was given a kind of fortune of the future that told him that his grandson would kill him. And so he decided, the king decided that he would lock his daughter away where no man could get her. But that doesn’t mean that no god could get her.

So Zeus found her and her name is Danaeus and Zeus found her and love this idea, you know, there’s something about the sort of sequestered away virgin that shouldn’t be touched, that no man can have access to, that is sort of very appealing, especially to the gods. And so Zeus swoops down and goes to where no man can go. And he impregnates Danaeus and that creates Perseus.

And through a whole series of events, obviously, Danaeus’s father, Perseus’s grandfather, finds out that Perseus, you know, is in his mom’s belly and he schemes a way to get rid of Danaeus, to kill her essentially, to kill his own daughter, to try and sort of save his own life, which, spoiler alert, doesn’t happen through a series of events. I won’t give away what happens. But, you know, when you test fate, obviously you can’t really outsmart fate.

That’s sort of the thing, you know, that is repeated over and over again within myth. But he basically locks her in the trunk, not him personally, he gets somebody else to lock her in a trunk and basically throw her in the ocean. And anyway, she survives, Perseus is born and he is raised by a man named Dictys.

So Danaeus and Perseus, Perseus and his mother, end up sort of wandering through. There’s some gaps in the story and they come across a man named Dictys who is an older man that takes him under his ward. So first lesson here, OK, first lesson here, Perseus is born into masculine betrayal.

Perseus is born into masculine betrayal. He’s born into automatic masculine pain. His grandfather betrays him and tries to murder him.

His own real father, Zeus, doesn’t really have a part in his life. Even though his mother tells him who his father is, he obviously doesn’t believe that the god of all gods is his dad. I mean, that’s not something that most kids are going to believe.

So he’s born into a kind of masculine pain already. There’s betrayal that has happened already. And this is the case for many men.

Maybe your father was angry. Maybe he was distant. Maybe he had his own trauma and abuse from his own family system and structure that he never dealt with.

But most men are born into some type of masculine pain. And so I want you to think about what’s the masculine pain or what’s the pain generationally that is being passed down into me or that was passed down into me. There’s a great quote that I put in my book, Men’s Work, which if you haven’t grabbed a copy, you should definitely grab one.

It’s one of the most recommended books by men in the personal development space. But in the book, I put a quote from Nietzsche where he said, what is hidden in the father is revealed in the son. What is hidden in the father is revealed in the son.

There’s many different layers to that quote. And one of the layers is that the hidden pain that the father does not deal with is revealed in the son. Right.

So if your father never dealt with his own anger, very likely that that’s revealed in you. His short temper is yours to contend with. Or maybe his anger was completely hidden and he had no spine and he was sort of weak and meek.

And, you know, he let people walk all over him. Well, that will be revealed in you for you to contend with. And so the first lesson here of Perseus’ story, even before he’s born, is that he is going to have to contend with the generational pain of the men that have come before him, with the betrayal of the men that have been in his life.

And he’s going to have to choose whether he walks a similar path of betrayal, of not living with certain values, or whether he is going to take a different path of righteousness and nobility and values and honor and self-respect and, you know, familiar respect, etc. So contend with the masculine pain that you’ve been given. Contend with the pain that is in the male lineage of your life.

The next piece, and I’m going to skip around here through Perseus’ story, but the next big piece is that there is a king that is trying to court Perseus’ mother because Perseus’ mother is not with Dictys. They’re not together. Dictys is just a guy that they happen to live with.

And, you know, Dictys supports Perseus, which is very important. There’s a lesson in there that you should learn from the men who are just and good, who are good and just to you and your kin for no good reason. Right? The coaches in your life, the teachers in your life, the men in your life that are good to you and your family, you should learn valuable lessons from them.

They’re usually indirect, but do not feel the need to become them. This is very important. Perseus does not become like Dictys.

He takes some of the traits from Dictys, but he does not embody that man. And this is very common for a lot of men when their father figure is not present in their life, the father figure that is present in their life, a stepdad, a coach, etc., they glom on to that individual’s identity because of the vacancy of their own father, whether their father is just sort of absent minded. He’s not emotionally connected.

He’s not very loving. Or maybe he’s just gone altogether. He’s not present in any way, shape or form. Or their father is very violent or whatever. It’s very common for a young man who doesn’t have a proper father figure in his life to consolidate his identity too much around the man that is good to him. And that can be sort of pervasive and affect his life.

So learn from the men who are good and just to you and your kin, you and your family. But do not strive to just solely become like them. They are a part of your becoming, a part of your identity creation.

So look back at your past and kind of get a sense of who influenced me, who were men that were in my life growing up that had a positive influence on my life. Likely there is something very important that you need to have learned from them, that you need to discard from them in order to step more fully into your own sense of manhood. So there’s a king pursuing Perseus’s mother.

And this king only seems to come around when Dictys is not around. And Perseus is still a teenager. And for whatever reason, whether Perseus knows it or not, he is always interfering with this king’s ability to mack on his mom.

He’s like cock blocking the king in a big way. And so what ends up happening is that the king devises a plan to get Perseus away from his mother because Perseus loves sports and running. And, you know, he’s very athletic.

And so the king holds these games. And the intention of the game is to draw Perseus out and sort of trap him or to sort of draw him out and then go and pursue and court his mother while he’s busy. Perseus partakes in the games and after the games gets very drunk, the king gets him very, very drunk and through a series of events challenges Perseus to go and claim the head of Medusa.

Now, there’s something very important about this because, and there’s going to be two main lessons here that I’m going to close off with for this that I think are very important in terms of becoming your own man, stepping into manhood, stepping into mature masculinity and crossing the threshold between boyhood and manhood and having a more definite certainty that you have crossed into that territory. So a couple of things that are very important. Number one, the king not only tricks Perseus into claiming the head of Medusa, but Perseus doesn’t know what he’s signed up for.

He doesn’t know who or what Medusa is. He doesn’t know how dangerous that she is. He has simply heeded the call to an adventure that is incredibly risky.

And here’s the really important part. If he knew the risk, he likely wouldn’t have taken it. So this is the kind of naivete of a young man’s spirit, right? Of an adolescent masculinity.

Adolescent masculinity has a kind of bravado and boldness and naivete that they would take on something without even saying. Because in the story, Perseus is very cocky, right? He’s like, any challenge you give me, you put it before me and I’ll basically make it happen. And the king thinks about it for a moment and then obviously says, go and claim the head of Medusa.

And Perseus says, done. I have no idea what he signed up for. So here’s the first lesson, and I’m going to give you the second one, which is also very important.

The first lesson is use the trials that other men set before you as stepping stones to sharpen your own manhood and masculinity. Use the trials that other men set before you as a call to adventure, right? An initiation. And this is an initiation call, right? The very first step of any boy, any young man’s journey into adult manhood, into mature masculinity or mature manhood.

The very first step is a call to an initiation, a call to the unknown, a call into a territory and a terrain that he knows nothing about. And it’s usually terrifying and frightening. Or, you know, the young man is very sort of naive and has no idea what he’s setting himself up for.

But it’s oftentimes the trials that other men put before us. And that might be a business mentor. That might be a professor at a university.

It might even be a trial from a stepfather, you know, challenging you. I remember when I was a young man, I just graduated high school. And this is a good example of this.

I had no trajectory in life whatsoever. I had no clear path for myself whatsoever. I was completely lost. I was shit academically. I didn’t know what to do with myself. And my stepdad put a trial in front of me and basically said, you know, if you can’t find a job anywhere else, I will get you work.

With the caveat and the big asterisk, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. He said, I’ll get you a job in construction. Now, what I didn’t know was that that would take me into some of the hardest laboring jobs that I could possibly acquire.

So my very first few weeks were night shifts from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m. in central Alberta. And it was the middle of February and it was minus 45 outside. And that set me on a path of really questioning.

So here was my stepdad, obviously being supportive, but really putting a trial before me. Right. And that trial was something that was brutal and hard and made me question what I was doing with my life.

I don’t think he meant any of those things. I think he was just like, I’m going to get you a job and it’s going to be a bit of a hopefully it’s going to be a bit of a wake up call. So look at the trials that other men are putting before you.

Oftentimes there are grains of breadcrumbs. There are sort of breadcrumbs left along the way that other men are inviting you into that are meant to challenge you and push you and sharpen your edge, whether you know it or not. And so sometimes what you have to do is you have to lean in to the invitations that other men are putting before you that feel confronting and frightening.

They might even be disguised as opportunities, right? Like this challenge that the king puts before Perseus, it seems like an opportunity for him. He’s like, I’m going to prove myself. Here we go.

So there might even be an element of that, that there’s a challenge in your life right now that is meant to push you beyond the boundaries and the limits of how you see yourself as a man currently. OK, this is the last piece I’m going to give you. And then we’re to wrap up.

The last piece is that Perseus gets home to his mother and he tells his mother what has transpired. And he does it in an inadvertent way. He kind of says, you know, mom, what’s like, do you know what Medusa is? And she says, yeah, I know who Medusa is.

And he’s like, OK, well, who’s a Medusa? What’s a Medusa? And she explains what Medusa is and everything that’s involved in it and kind of lays out the challenge, right? She knows about the journey that could lie ahead, right? The danger that could lie ahead. And he says, oh, OK. And she says, why do you ask? And he says, because I’m going to go and take the head of Medusa.

And she, as any good mother would, knowing the danger and knowing that the likelihood of her son dying is astronomically high, she loses her mind. And she basically begs and pleads Perseus not to go. And she tries to convince Dictys to talk to him, to convince him not to go.

And she considers going to speak to the king, all those types of things. And Perseus stays sound and resolute in his decision to heed the call. Into this initiation journey that he’s about to embark on.

And he stays true to what he what he knows he needs to do in order to become his own man. And that is a very important part. In Iron John, Robert Bly talks about the boy stealing the key from under his mother’s pillow.

The main crux of this and the whole point of that is that in order to let out the wild man, you have to go steal the key from under your mother’s pillow. So the point here, the last and final lesson, and especially for those of you that grew up in a household with just your mom, right, doesn’t mean that she was a bad mom. She was probably exceptional.

Maybe she was great. There are lots and lots of phenomenal single mothers out there. And it’s a question of a woman cannot teach a boy how to become a man.

There are certain adventures, risks, journeys, challenges, trials that you actually need to go through on your own in order to internally understand that you’ve stepped into that place and that terrain of manhood, mature manhood and masculinity. So Perseus refuses to listen to his mom and decides that he’s going to go on his journey anyway. And in doing so, what he’s really doing is claiming his own sense of inner authority.

In doing so, he’s claiming his own sense of authority. He’s saying, my life is mine. My life is mine to decide.

My life is mine to direct. And I am going to create separation between myself and you. Now, this is very important because especially for a lot of men, they don’t create psychological separation between themselves and their mother.

Maybe that happens because their relationship is not good, which doesn’t necessarily create psychological separation. It might just be physical separation of, I’m not going to talk to you, mom. And so you might not talk to your mother.

But a lot of men don’t create psychological separation from their mother. And that psychological separation happens when you as a man make a decision to embark on something that is specifically for you to do that your mother likely disapproves of. You know, I’ve had clients that are like, you know, they’re very successful in their career, but they take up a DJing career.

Or they’re very successful in their career in real estate, but they, you know, on the side, they decide to like paint or race cars, you know, or do really dangerous rock climbing, right? Like free soloing rock climbing. And their mothers, you know, who are obviously worried for them and nurturing and always going to be that mom, protest. They protest against that.

And it’s the job of you as a son to not ignore the protest, right, to be compassionate of the protest, but to do what you know you need to do as a man regardless of the protesting. And that is a claiming of a part, taking a step more closely into or more deeply into your own manhood and your own masculine core. So leave your thoughts below.

Share your thoughts. I’d love to hear what you took away from this, how you’re going to integrate this into your own life. And what I would really encourage you to do is think about where in your life have these events taken place? And if not, what do you need to do now in order to take action on one of these events? Is there a trial being placed in front of you by a man in your life? Do you need to create psychological separation from your mother because there’s still too much closeness and enmeshment between the two of you? So start to look at which one of these are you needing to embrace and to embark on in order to take the next step in your own masculine maturity.

See you next time.

David Whyte – On Forgiveness, Fear, And Being Fully Human

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Talking points: masculinity, culture, gratitude, anger, poetry

I don’t typically get starstruck or awed in interviews, even though I’ve talked to many incredible people. But David? Well, he’s had an immense impact on my life, and so much of my work and way of thinking lives inspired by him. He joined me in Seattle and shared so much wisdom, beauty, and of course, poetry. Dig into this one.

(00:00:00) – What is the “conversational nature of reality”, why the unknown is so uncomfortable, and the fear of “descent”

(00:18:44) – How the need for control kills off meaning and purpose, and how real poetry and philosophy come from NOT knowing what to say

(00:25:53) – David reads “Blessing of the Morning Light”

(00:32:42) – How does a man start building a relationship to the unknown parts of himself, and David’s relationship with his father

(00:44:24) – The role of anger and the power of poetry

(00:56:16) – On forgiveness and male friendship

(01:31:57) – How do you properly thank someone who’s had a profound impact on you?

David Whyte is an internationally renowned poet and author, and a scintillating and moving speaker. Behind these talents lies a very physical attempt to give voice to the wellsprings of human identity, human striving and, most difficult of all, the possibilities for human happiness. He draws from hundreds of memorized poems, his own and those of other beloved poets such as Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Keats, Pablo Neruda, Fleur Adcock and the sonnets of Shakespeare. He is the author of ten books of poetry, three books of prose on the transformative nature of work; a widely-acclaimed, best-selling book of essays, and an extensive audio collection.

Connect with David

-Website: https://davidwhyte.com/

-Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidjwhyte/

-Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PoetDavidWhyte/

-YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@poetdavidwhyte

-SubStack: https://davidwhyte.substack.com/

The Impact Of Demonizing Men

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Talking points: culture, masculinity

Broad-brushing things doesn’t help us progress. Broad-brushing people is even worse. Young men are facing what feels to them a hostile landscape, and it’s causing some serious issues. Listen in.

(00:00:00) – The abusive relationship analogy

(00:05:36) – Porn DOES contribute

(00:08:16) – The new narrative

(00:11:03) – Is there a more positive vision for men and masculinity? And a message to guys who are struggling

Transcript

Why are men in such decline?

Why are so many young men checking out of work, more men living at home than ever before, you know, less young men are having sex than ever before, going to college, like less young men are going to college than ever before. Why is this happening?

I think there’s many reasons. I’ve talked about a few of them before, but the one that I don’t think has gotten enough attention is the decades-long campaign of demonizing men and speaking to men and about men as the fundamental problem with every issue in existence, basically. And I’m going to use a relationship analogy, okay?

Imagine that you’re dating somebody and that person starts to tell you that you are a problem, that you’re causing them harm, that you’re damaging them, that you’re a problem in the relationship, that any type of dysfunction that happens in the relationship is your fault, and then it gets worse, right? They start to say they don’t need you, they don’t want you, they actually would be better off without you, the world at large would be better off without you, that you’re a piece of garbage, that, you know, that so many of the issues that they face in life are because of you.

You would either move into a very defensive and attack-oriented stance and position, or you would just start to slink out of that relationship. You’d either, hopefully, you’d exit that relationship entirely, you’d be like, why the hell am I here? Or you would just, you would check out, right? You would literally just check out of that relationship and be like, why in the hell am I in this relationship with you?

But we have made it commonplace, culture, society, has let it become commonplace to make blanket statements about men as being the fundamental systemic problem with society. I mean, imagine the lack of ingenuity and intellectual honesty that you’d have to deploy in order to just blame an entire sex for all of the problems and completely remove any type of personal responsibility for your part in the equation, right? Telling men that they’re not needed, they’re not wanted, that they’re all rapists, that they’re pieces of garbage, that, you know, they’re all narcissists, that they’re all, you know, violent, that they’re all terrible, that society would be better off without you.

What we’re experiencing now in this mass checkout within our society and this massive shift, I mean, I’ve been watching post-election in America as this whole conversation around how men determined this election and how it was misogynistic and all of this sort of intellectual rigmarole that has unfolded in so many political commentators and just individuals, again, blaming men for what happened.

And I think what you’re seeing is the consequences of blaming men for absolutely everything, demonizing men for absolutely everything for decades. And when you do that, there will be consequences. Men will check out, men will start to go into decline as they have. They’ll stop showing up into college spaces because, I mean, let’s face it, I probably wouldn’t want to go to college if I was a 19-year-old kid in today’s world, especially if I was a 19-year-old conservative kid. Like, I would not want to go to a college space, you know.

And even if I was, and I mean, I was very liberal as an early, I got a music degree, you know, but if I was 19 or 20 again, and I was looking at going back to college or going to college, I mean, I’d have some real reservations about whether or not I was welcome on that college campus, whether I would be wanted in that space. And we as human beings are creatures of belonging, and we don’t generally want to go into spaces and places where we do not feel like we belong or that we have to fight for a sense of belonging. And, you know, places like college campuses have always meant to be, they’ve always been a little bit more liberal-leaning, but they’ve always meant to be a place for discourse of difference.

And we’ve lost any type of capacity to disagree without being highly disagreeable. We’ve lost any capacity to disagree with somebody and say, you know what? I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to try and annihilate you and de-person you online and get you completely canceled. But this has been the modality that we’ve taken. And so many men have been inundated with the conversation that you’re the problem, you’re contributing to the issue, society would be better off without you, or society would be better off if you just acted more like a woman. If you just showed up more like a woman, then you would be, you know, then you’d be accepted. And then men in relationships hear the same thing, right? I don’t need you, I don’t need you around, I’m better off without you, or I’m, you know, whatever it is, I’m a strong, independent woman, I don’t need you. And then that man ends up checking out of that relationship in some capacity because relationships are reciprocal, right? Relationships are meant to be a reciprocal thing. But if you show up in a relationship with somebody and they’re saying, I actually don’t need you to contribute anything to me, then the question starts to manifest of, well, then why am I in a relationship with you? Because I thought we were contributing to one another for one another’s betterment.

So, obviously, there’s many different reasons that we could give why men are struggling, right? I mean, you give men access to porn, you give young, horny men access to pornography, oftentimes way earlier than they can handle. I mean, the fact that there’s no age restrictions on pornography and any 12-year-old boy can go online and watch and see more naked women than literally any man in the span of human history pre-internet saw in his entire life is just insane. You know, that has a very damaging detrimental effect to a young man’s psyche, to a young boy’s psyche, because it skews his sense of what should be accessible. And porn is low-risk, right? Something like pornography is low-risk. There’s no real risk of rejection, but in the real world, the stakes are very, very high.

And so we’ve created conditions for young men where everything’s kind of anti-risk, right? We have helicopter parenting, we’ve got very low-risk sexual gratification acquisition, so you can just go online and watch a whole bunch of porn and get sexually gratified, but you don’t actually have to work for it at all. Whereas in the real world, you have to go and work, you have to go get rejected. There is a high level of risk to approaching a woman, talking to her and asking for her phone number. There’s a very high risk that she’s gonna say no or I’m in a relationship or some form of rejection will happen.

So when you couple telling men for a very long time, you’re the fundamental problem with pretty much everything in existence right now, and you’re not needed, and you couple that with giving them environments that are not conducive for sharpening and helping to develop certain masculine qualities, like being risk smart, being able to take risks, having the resiliency to take risks, those are, generally speaking, things that men thrive off of.

There’s a period of time in a man’s life where he will take a tremendous amount of risks, and some of them are stupid. You know, I mean, some of the risks that I took when I was a young man were absolutely, I mean, just dumb, they were just plain dumb. But those stupid risks that I took helped to inform and helped to rein in my risk-taking ability or a skill, right? Taking a risk is a skill set, and if you as a young man haven’t had the opportunity to take real risks, to develop that skill, then you’re gonna feel less capable within the world and within society.

But the main piece here that I really wanna drive home is we are creating a narrative where it’s become socially acceptable to hate on men in a way that we would never allow with women. We would never, ever allow individuals on any side of the political spectrum to just point blank say women are the fundamental problem and to spew hatred around women. I mean, misandry has become so commonplace and so socially acceptable that I literally have young men reaching out to me saying things like, I grew up in a household where my mom just hated men, and she told me how bad men were, and she told me how she hoped I never became like my father or any of the men that I was around, and so I never really had any kind of role model or idea of what type of man I should be because it just seemed like she just hated men all the time.

And so this type of blatant misandry has become so commonplace that a lot of men don’t even, it’s not even that they don’t even know how to become a good man, it’s that they don’t even want to take the risk to do that because it seems like there’s no winning, there’s no possibility that you could ever develop yourself into a man that society and culture is going to approve of.

And that’s problematic, right, that’s problematic. I mean, on the one hand with women, what we’re saying right now is you do whatever it is that you want. We’re sort of giving women, again, this sort of like blank check of go be whoever and whatever you want. We’re not gonna put any labels on it, we’re not gonna define anything. If you never want to have kids and stay single and work a job for the rest of your life and have five cats, like cool, power to you. There’s some hate around the quote unquote trad wife, right, if you want to be a traditional wife and stay at home and raise kids, there seems to be some commentary around that. But for the most part, it’s like ladies go off and do whatever you want. But for men, there is this huge movement constantly telling men, you need to do this, you need to act like this, you can’t do these things, you can’t say that things, this is misogynist. I mean, everything’s misogynistic now. To the point where if you’re a man who cares about being in shape, you’re a misogynist somehow because you want to keep your body in shape. I mean, it’s gotten to the point where it’s so ridiculous that I think the average man looks out on social media and looks out on the content and the conversation around masculinity and just kind of throws his hands up and is like, I’ll be back when y’all are done with this bullshit. Like, I’ll check back into society when you start to like end this nonsense because this is crazy.

And so I think to wrap this up, what I really want to drive home is that we need a more positive vision for men and masculinity. You know, if you’re somebody out there, if you’re a man that’s trying to work on himself or if you’re a single mom trying to raise a son, you need to have a positive vision for men and masculinity. And we need to eradicate this absolute bullshit garbage notion that we can tell men that the world is better off without them. Men already kill themselves way more than women do. And they do that in part, if you look into the data and the research, which Richard Reeves has talked about a lot, they do that in part because they feel useless, right? A man’s ability to contribute to family, to friends, to society, to culture is incredibly important to him. And when we take that away and we say, you’re not wanted, you’re not needed, I’m going to reject the opportunities for you to develop the skills to contribute, to provide, to add value for your life and the people around you, then men will fundamentally suffer.

And we see this happening. And so we need to create more positive visions, role models, opportunities for men to step into. Second, guys, if you are somebody that is struggling personally and you’ve got caught up in this rhetoric of all men bad, all men the problem, world would be better off without men, and you’re not really too sure where to start, start to pursue some type of adventure IRL, in real life. Get off of online forums. Get off of the online conversations. Pursue adventure in real life. Like go hike in the woods. Go camp. Go touch grass. Go sleep under the stars. Plan a solo trip somewhere that seems wild. Like, you know, motorcycle through Thailand. Backpack through Italy. I don’t know what it is for you. Go pursue some adventure in real life.

Maybe that just means that you go to the local bar and you talk to a woman. You know, and that’s the adventure that you pursue just to see what happens, just to see how it goes. Start to pursue some real adventure in your life so that you have some aliveness. I mean, I think I read through a lot of the comments of men that are struggling, whether they’re young or they’re old, and my gosh, does it sound bleak. You know, I think for a lot of the men that are out there, it just feels and sounds bleak. And how you combat when you feel bleak and hopeless in life is by saying yes to adventure. I mean, this is the whole point of most of what Homer wrote about in the Odyssey and the Iliad, right? It’s like we have to say yes to adventure. Otherwise, stagnation and mediocrity and a kind of bleak, mundane cover just starts to come over our psyche and our hearts and our souls. So say yes to adventure.

And then lastly, as I was talking about before, start to take risks. We need to encourage young men and men in general to take some risks, to start to fail, and to start to develop the ability to know how to take risks, to get better at saying yes, this is a smart risk that I can take. But if we don’t allow them to fail and stumble and get things wrong, if you never allow yourself as a man to develop the skill of being able to have some discernment around what a good risk is and what a terrible, shitty risk is, you will suffer as a man because there is some type of correlation, and maybe I should do another video on this, there’s some type of correlation between you having a very deep level of self-respect as a man and your ability and your competency in being able to take risks because risks take you on a very specific adventure.

So take some risks today, tomorrow, this week. Let that be your mission for a little while. And for the love of all that is holy, can we all stop feeding into this narrative that men are just point blank the problem to everything and that the world would be better off without men? The world would literally collapse in a matter of hours if men just disappeared. Everything would fall apart immediately because men are necessary and so are women.

So anyway, I’d love to hear why you think men are in decline. I’d love to hear your take and your thoughts on this conversation, specifically about the demonization of men over the last few decades. And don’t forget to man it forward. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. Until next week, Connor Beaton, signing off.

Jason Wilson – Becoming The Man The Moment Demands

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Talking points: masculinity, culture, race

It’s always a highlight of my life speaking with Jason. This man and his tireless work shaping comprehensive, authentic men is nothing short of inspiring. Deeply grateful to have sat down with him to dig into the nuances of his new book (out Jan 28!), the manosphere, Black America, and what modern men miss out on. Listen. To. This.

(00:00:00) – How Jason’s environment shaped his perception of manhood, and the challenges of hypermasculinity

(00:11:02) – Jason’s take on the idea that men need to build value because they don’t have any inherently

(00:17:40) – What do young men find appealing about the manosphere, in spite of the reactivity and misogyny?

(00:23:39) – Why men don’t share their emotions with women, and what Jason wishes more non-Black men knew about growing up in Black America

(00:35:09) – Do men need extreme hardship in order to have self-respect?

(00:42:11) – On Jason’s new book and being a Comprehensive Man

(00:50:25) – What aspect of a comprehensive man is missing the most in modern culture?

Jason Wilson is the director of the Cave of Adullam Transformational Training Academy and bestselling author of Cry Like a Man and Battle Cry. Since 2005, Jason has been mentoring boys and young men, teaching them how to rise above life’s inevitable challenges. His impactful work earned him the President’s Volunteer Service Award from President Obama, and acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne executive produced the award-winning ESPN Films documentary about Jason’s work, titled The Cave of Adullam. He is a man of the Most High, a faithful husband to Nicole, and a devoted father to Alexis and Jason II.

Connect with Jason

-Website: https://mrjasonwilson.com/

-NEW Book: The Man The Moment Demands: https://mrjasonwilson.com/the-man-the-moment-demands/

-Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrjasonowilson

-Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mrjasonowilson/

-YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MrJasonOWilson

A Man’s Guide To Inner Child Work

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Talking points: psychology

You’ve probably seen this idea floating around social media for a while, and it’s a solid framework for healing. But what does it actually mean, how does it work, and is it worthwhile if you’re a man? This week, let’s talk about what inner child work entails.

(00:00:00) – “What’s hidden in the father is revealed in the son”, and what inner child work actually means

(00:10:10) – The main benefits of this kind of work, and where to start

(00:17:35) – Two useful journaling exercises, and how to “father yourself”

(00:24:23) – Next steps

Transcript

All right, team. Welcome back to the ManTalks Show. Connor Beaton here.

And today, this is actually a video that so many of you requested because I mentioned it in a previous video about disorganized attachment. I’m going to be doing a man’s guide to inner child work. What actually is that? Now, for the purpose of today’s conversation, I’m going to be talking and referring to this as fathering yourself, fathering the boy that exists inside of you.

And there’s a great quote by Friedrich Nietzsche who said that what is hidden in the father is revealed in the son. What’s hidden in the father is revealed in the son. And that quote is going to be important for some of the stuff that we’re going to talk about later on.

But one of the things I’ll just say right here is that it’s very common that the thing or the things that your father lacked are the things that the boy in you is actually needing for you as a man to contribute and give to him. So I’m going to say that again because it might sound a little like, what? But I want you to write this down. I’m going to give you a question in a second.

The boy in you, the things that your father lacked are the things that the boy in you, the younger version of you, the younger subconscious part of you is looking for from you. So as an example, if your father was a flaccid wet noodle that had zero connection to his anger, never stood up for himself, never had boundaries, the boy in you needs you to be somebody who is able to set boundaries, who’s able to say no, who’s able to develop a robust spine that can stand up for himself, that can stand up for that boy because otherwise that boy is going to feel like he has to do it all the time. So that’s just a bit of a context and container because sometimes inner child work doesn’t really land with a lot of men.

They’re like, I don’t know, but like inner child, is this really for me? So think about it as you are fathering your younger self. You’re fathering that boy inside of you. And so a great question that you can write down right now is, what was my father missing or what did I need from my father that my younger self is needing from me? What did I need from my father that my younger self was, is needing from me? And again, that can be compassion.

It can be discipline. It can be love. It can be empathy.

It can be a whole bunch of things. So what is inner child work? I’m going to go through a couple of different pieces. I’m going to talk about what inner child work is, why it’s relevant and important, and I’m going to give you some very specific exercises that you can deploy in order to begin to work on that younger self and kind of reclaim that boy, okay, and integrate him into your personality and integrate him into your psyche.

So the concept of the inner child refers to the childlike part of your subconscious mind that holds all of those emotional wounds, fears, unmet needs, the pain of neglect or abandonment or criticism that you’ve tried to either disconnect from or that you didn’t know how to deal with as a child, all right? So if you were an eight-year-old boy and your parents went through a really nasty divorce, that eight-year-old boy probably didn’t know how to deal with that. Seeing the yelling, seeing the screaming, not seeing dad or mom for sometimes weeks at a time, he didn’t really know what to do with that. And so it would have left a lot of question marks, especially if he wasn’t supported properly through that experience, and it will interrupt the way that you go through relationships as an adult.

So inner child work involves connecting to, beginning to understand, beginning to reconcile with the pain that that younger self felt. Because in all of you, there is your younger versions, right? They don’t disappear. Five-year-old you, hasn’t disappeared.

Still in there somewhere. 10-year-old you, hasn’t disappeared. Still in there somewhere, right? The angsty teenager that was listening to Metallica and punching holes in the wall, still in there, right? Still a part of you.

So part of this is about reconnecting to that much younger self and beginning to understand what did that younger version of me really need? Because for most of you, and this is why this is important, okay? This is why inner child work is important. What happens in relational conflict, right? So for example, my good friend and mentor, Dewey Freeman, has this great saying, we’re wounded in relationship, we have to heal in relationship. What that means is that in your adult relationships, the conflicts, the challenges that you go through in your marriage, in your relationship with your girlfriend or your boyfriend, those challenges are oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes those challenges are connected to a pain, an obstacle, a hurt that you felt early on in life, in one of your early attachments as a child.

Your relationship to your mom, your relationship to your dad. So another example on this front, if you keep getting into arguments with your partner and you think that they’re too harsh, they’re too critical, and then you really start to sit with it and you were a boy who was criticized a lot by his mom, you probably have a high level of sensitivity to that. And maybe as a boy, you never felt like you could stand up to her.

And so you didn’t develop the boundary and the skill to be able to stand up to your mom. And how that shows up in your adult relationships is you still don’t stand up to your partner and you develop a ton of resentment towards them. And you have a high level of sensitivity towards their disappointment, their frustrations.

If they want anything done differently, their criticisms, there’s just a high level of sensitivity to that. So being able to develop the skill of standing up to them, setting a boundary, being able to receive disappointment sometimes from your partner, which is absolutely necessary in relationships, is going to help you parent that younger self that comes online. Because a lot of the times, and this is the last thing I’ll say about this part and I’ll move into what do we actually do, a lot of the times you regress developmentally when you get into conflict with your partner.

So what do I mean by that? When you get into an argument that pokes at or hits on that pain from childhood, that feeling of abandonment, that feeling of neglect, that feeling of being hyper-criticized or never enough, when that part gets activated, right? Your partner says something that pokes at that, like, oh, I never feel like I’m enough. You regress developmentally. So you move from being that 28-year-old, 35-year-old, 55-year-old, 65-year-old man back down into that five-year-old boy, and you begin to respond from that five-year-old boy.

You become overly emotional. Maybe you start to attack their character. You start to pout and shut down, all sorts of things, right? So, but what happens is you regress developmentally.

And that’s because the pain is not from that 35-year-old self. It’s from that five-year-old version of you that needs somebody to look after him and that somebody is you. So why is it important? It’s important first and foremost for being able to heal trauma.

If you experienced trauma as a kid, right? Abuse, neglect, abandonment, all of those things can have a traumatic impact on a child. And that child, again, will live inside of you and will need a caretaker who is the adult version of you. Healing emotional wounds, being able to address some of that childhood hurt.

If you were bullied as a kid, if you had a lot of fear as a kid that wasn’t tended to, right? Let’s say you kept having like reoccurring nightmares, but your parents would like lock you in your room and no one really supported you as a kid with that fear or with the shame that you were dealing with. Inner child work can be incredibly helpful for improving your sense of self-esteem and your sense of self-worth. So a big thing that happens is when you are early on in life, this is where your sense of self-esteem is starting to develop.

Once you enter into being sort of five or six, you’re starting to develop this curiosity for how well can I do things, right? How well can I jump off of this? How well can I color? How well can I write? How well can I ride my bike? And what can happen is that in those formative years of development, your sense of self-worth can be really impacted again through criticism, through events that have happened in your environment. And that younger self will be holding on to that pain of I’m not worthy. I’m not good enough.

There’s something wrong with me. And again, it’s not the adult version of you. It’s not the 48 year old corporate executive or a construction worker that’s standing there like I’m such a piece of crap.

What’s wrong with me? It’s that younger self that had the wounding happen way back when. And so the importance of inner child work is that we work with when the wounding happened, okay? That’s really important. We work with where the wounding happened because we can talk about it conceptually as adults.

And as adults, we can intellectualize, rationalize our way around it. But when we can connect the pain of what that must’ve been like as a child who didn’t have all of these beautiful cognitive abilities to be able to rationalize like, oh, my dad said that because he was an asshole and his father beat him. Or my mom said that because she was an alcoholic and she was drunk all the time because of her trauma.

As a child, you just didn’t have that conceptually. So we need to work with where and when that hurt occurred. The next thing is that you are going to dramatically improve your relationships because when you are not responsible for the pain that your inner child is carrying, that younger version of you, it gets offloaded and outsourced onto your partner.

So very, very, very common that people who are in relationships where dysfunction is happening, what’s really going on, again, this isn’t every single time, but what happens quite a bit is that you project the hurt from that younger self onto your partner. Or you expect them to take care of it. You expect them to tend to you.

You expect them to, you know, nurture you and caretake you back into healing. So really important that as you do this inner child work, you can move more into a place of maturity. You will no longer be projecting that childlike expectation onto your partner, hoping that they’re going to save you.

They’re going to fix you. They’re going to constantly validate you and your experiences. You’ll actually have the tools and the skills to do that for yourself.

Because again, when you look at this from the frame of fathering yourself, it’s generally the pieces that you needed from your parents. So those are some of the real reasons. I mean, there’s, the other one is like, you’re going to, you’re going to be able to release some playfulness and some creativity that are often bound up in this.

Imagination is another really big one. I’ve noticed that when I work with people around doing really focused, intense inner child work, oftentimes what happens is that their imagination starts to come back online in a really beautiful way. Because usually imagination gets co-opted by the pain and the trauma that you experienced in childhood.

And what I mean by that is that when you experience a traumatic event as a kid, whether it’s a small one or a really big one, right? You’re getting bullied at school, criticized at home. You don’t feel like you fit in and belong. What that does is co-ops your imagination to look for all the ways that it might show up and happen again in your adult life.

Because trauma co-ops that energy in your imagination to try and make sure that it never happens again. And so your imagination turns into a kind of, I don’t want to say enemy, but it turns into this, this tool that is constantly imagining all of the ways that you might be hurt or betrayed again or abandoned again or abused again or neglected again. Instead of a tool for imagining positive outcomes, creative outcomes, positive possibilities, it gets co-opted for just imagining all of the crap that that might go wrong.

Okay. So now that we have what child work is, inner child work is, and why it’s so important and what can happen on the other side of that, I’m going to give you a couple different options for how you can begin to do this work. Now, some of this work, I really just strongly recommend doing with somebody that is skilled in it, right? Because there’s nothing like being led through it.

There’s some exercises that I can’t exactly give you via this video, but I’m going to give you some ideas that you can begin with. So number one is reconnecting to your inner child. Now you might, I don’t know if you can actually see this, but this is a picture that I have on my desk.

And this is a picture of me as a boy, sitting in a bucket, having a bath on the balcony after digging in the dirt endlessly. So what I want you to do is to find an ideal photo of your younger self and a photo that represents the deepest part of your younger self that you loved. 

So for me, I love this picture because I look so happy. I look free. There’s innocence there. It’s very, very playful. I’m like, sitting in a bucket. I got a bandaid on my knee. So I want you to go and find and just connect to a picture of your younger self.

So you might need to connect with your parents and get some photos and whatnot, but find a photo that really resonates with the highest version of your younger self, or that is sort of embodies the most beautiful or innocent or playful or loving or kind version of your younger self, where when you look at that picture, you’re like, oh, that kid wasn’t effed up. He wasn’t so upset. And just try and find a photo that you can connect with.

And maybe it’s not so much about that kid wasn’t effed up, but that kid was in a good space. And I really love and can connect to that child. So find a photo. And that’s step number one. 

Step number two is begin to reconnect to that younger self. So start to recall childhood memories. Reflect on some of your memories from your childhood, the good, the bad, the ugly, some of your most positive, fond memories. 

Now, for some of you that have either had trauma or just have had events where certain things unfolded that you don’t remember a lot of your childhood, this is where photos, talking to your family members, talking to your siblings, talking to your parents, talking to your aunts and uncles, those types of things are really going to help to inform and fill in. And the things that you’re really looking for are, what was I like? What was I going through? What was I questioning? What did I really enjoy doing? Who did I like being around? And if it works for you, you can close your eyes and kind of visualize it.

You can spend some time trying to just recall some of those memories from being a kid. And really just what you’re doing is building the foundation of the relationship with that younger self. Because for many of you that have never done anything like this, that younger version of you is probably going to feel so far away.

What he was like, what he did, what he enjoyed, who he liked being around, what he didn’t like, those types of things, they’re going to feel far away depending on how old you are. The next thing is that you can begin to sort of visualize that kid. And some people find it helpful to try and draw an image of them, to find a picture of them, to try and connect with family members about them.

And so just start to really get a sense of like, what was that inner child like? And then list out some of the characteristics of that kid. So what was that younger version like? Like for me, I was super playful, really high energy, kind of mischievous, didn’t mind getting into trouble, loved to be in nature. And so really try and get into outside of the memories, like what was that young boy actually like? Now, once you’ve got that foundation and you feel some type of connection with him, this is where you can start to go deeper.

So the next layer that you can start to work on is a bit of a dialogue with that younger self. And what I recommend is you can either journal, which is going to be much easier. Or if you have somebody that you can work with that does something like IFS, internal family systems, or parts work, or does like somatic processing, gestalt, attachment theory, attachment-based work, they can guide you through some inner child practices that can help you.

But this exercise is really helpful. So there’s two ways to do the journaling exercise with your inner child. Number one, I call it the pen pal. And the pen pal is that you write a full letter to that inner child. So it’s just from you as an adult. Hey, I’m 36. This is what’s going on in my life. This is how things are going. This is how things have unfolded.

Just kind of like everything that you want that younger self to know. What do you want that younger self to know? And then what do you want to know from that younger self? And then you’re going to set it aside and you’re going to leave it for however long, half a day, a day, two, three days, not too long though. Don’t like wait months.

And then you’re going to sit back down, pen and paper, and you’re going to read that letter back as if you were that younger self. And then you’re going to respond and you’re going to write a whole letter back to your adult self. And you just repeat this process as often as you want.

Usually I recommend that you do this for a month or two, and that will really give you a develop a much stronger bond with that younger version. And what you’re really exploring in this pen pal situation is what did they need? What did that younger self need? What do they need from you? What have they been disappointed in by you? What do they need you to develop more of in order for them to feel taken care of? What does that younger self want you to know about what it was like for them growing up that didn’t really ever get acknowledged by mom, by dad, by the people that they were surrounded by. And then you are trying to reinforce that child.

Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s the action I’m willing to take, acknowledging their experience, acknowledging that it was challenging for them, being able to reinforce what you’re working on as an adult to parent them and really work with them. And then the other option, if you don’t want to do pen pal, is that you just do like a straight up conversation.

So you can have a piece of paper and you ask a question and the inner child responds. And then you respond to that and you just have this back and forth dialogue. I really like the pen pal situation.

I think I’ve seen that work better than just the more dialogue oriented version. But that back and forth can also be helpful just depending on you and what works for you. So try both. Or if you feel a gut instinct towards one versus the other, then go for that. The next thing is about really reparenting. Now you’ve probably heard this word a lot.

I like to call it fathering yourself, right? Fathering yourself. That you are fathering that younger boy inside of you that needed attention, that needed validation, that needed whatever it was that you needed growing up. So fathering yourself really is about identifying what that younger version of you needed and then being able to create a system and a strategy to support that younger self.

Now some of this is going to be very clear and direct and some of it’s going to be much more vague and ambiguous. So for example, if what your younger self needed in his household was compassion, you are going to have to embark on the journey of starting to be more compassionate with yourself. That means setting boundaries with tearing a strip out of yourself whenever you get something wrong.

That means having more willingness to lean towards self-forgiveness and developing the compassion that that younger self just did not get within the household. So here’s what I want you to do. Step number one, identify and through that last exercise of the journaling, the pen pal or the dialogue, you should have a sense of what some of the things are that your younger self actually needed and is needing from you.

So step number one in the reparenting is what are the key or what are the core things that my younger self needed from my caretakers that he didn’t get? So what are those things specifically? Did he need compassion? Did he need validation? Did he need somebody to just play with him once in a while because he was freaking lonely? Like what did he actually need? Step number two is what emotional needs did he not get met? So what emotional needs? Did he not get compassion? Did he not get words of affirmation? Did he not get somebody that knew how to be firm with him and help him develop discipline? What was actually missing for him? And then step number three is beginning to deploy those behaviors and looking for opportunities in your adult relationships to build that, to develop those missing areas. So again, if your younger self needed a dad to stand up for him, where in your life are you not standing up for yourself that you can do so? Maybe you aren’t setting very good boundaries in your relationship. You just chronically say yes to everything.

You’re like this notorious people pleaser. That is a great place for you to begin to just, okay, I’m going to start saying no once a day. Just once a day I’m going to say an active no with no explanation. I’m not going to say why I’m doing this. I’m just going to say no. And so you start to parent yourself.

You start to father yourself by providing that younger version within you with the things that he needed in your life today. And that might also look like visualizing him in a conversation, right? If you’re in a relationship and there’s conflict and that younger self was terrified of conflict because conflict was loud and volatile or violent when you were growing up in your household, you can visualize when any type of conflict happens in your life, visualize taking that younger self, putting him behind the man in you. Because what can happen, again, when we go through ruptures in our adult relationships, what often happens is we regress.

We regress psychologically to that younger self and we become that boy who’s like, oh crap, I’m terrified of conflict. I don’t want to be here. I’m shutting down. Get me out of this situation. And so you can visualize having that boy standing behind you like nobody, like you’re good. I got this. I’m going to have this conversation. You don’t have to worry about it. And you start to connect to the more mature adult masculine energy within you that is protecting that younger self from the challenge and the conflict that’s unfolding in your life.

So you start to deploy the things that you know that that child needed younger in life. Lastly, well, there’s a couple more steps, but the next one is finding opportunities for playing creativity. So you can ask the question, what type of creative expression and play did my younger self need that he didn’t get? And this can be, you know, maybe you wanted to paint when you were younger.

Maybe you wanted to learn how to draw, um, sort of like realistic drawings. Maybe you wanted to learn an instrument or learn how to dance in a certain way, or I don’t know, like learn how to recite Shakespeare. I don’t know what it is for you, but connecting to that younger self and how he wanted to play and how he wanted to be creative and then beginning to give yourself time to do that.

So you might want to say, okay, younger me always wanted to learn how to play the guitar. So I’m going to buy a guitar and I’m going to schedule 30 to 30 minute blocks a week where I just start to learn the basics. And I connect with that younger self that I’m intentionally just going to play. It’s just about having fun. It’s not about becoming BB King or John Mayer. It is just about me having a little bit of joy in my life that allows me to be playful and feel youthful and feel creative.

And so you carve out specific time where you kind of just get to be that kid and you get to be a beginner at something, you know, as adults, we can get so rigid because the expectation is that when we embark on anything, we should be exceptional straight out the gates. And when you’re a kid, that’s, you know, hopefully you have the freedom to just suck at something, to just be really bad at something in the beginning. And as you take on this exercise of finding creative, playful time, you create a distraction-free, mindful space for play, which is very, very important, even as adults.

The very last piece is to really reflect as you go through this journey, try and keep a journal of how this progress is going, you know, try and see if you can listen for the voice of that younger self, that inner child that pops up sometime and is like, man, thank you so much for handling that conflict. Or that was great. Thank you for dealing with that. Or, you know, I really loved playing guitar today. That was so much fun. And just notice what that inner child is saying.

Does he need something different from you? Is he validating how you’re showing up? Does he appreciate how you’re standing up for him and for yourself? So keeping a journal as you go through this process to just refine and get a sense of, you know, how are you doing? How is that younger self responding? And then the last piece, honestly, is really about finding somebody that can help you work with this inner child, because the reality is, is that if you experienced a lot of heavy pain in your childhood, trauma, abuse, neglect, abandonment, it’s likely that as you get in touch with that younger self, you’re also going to get in touch with a lot of the really heavy emotions that that younger self had to feel, and that that younger self received, that he didn’t know how to deal with. And that can feel overwhelming for you, even as an adult, like, oh, I’m connecting with my inner child. But what I’m connecting with is this well of grief, or this really deep sense of loneliness, or a really big amount of fear in lacking trust towards relationships and other people.

And that can be challenging to deal with, to say the least. So having somebody that can guide you through certain exercises can be very, very, very helpful. Because again, and the last thing I’ll say is that the inner child work is really about acknowledging and healing that younger version of you that still exists within your emotional and psychological landscape.

And a big part of that is kind of signaling to him, to that younger version of you, that you have the capacity to be with whatever he’s experiencing—the frustration, the disappointment,  the hurt, and the pain—that you are willing to sit with him and feel those things that likely other people were not there for him with.

Anton Nootenboom – Serving Men’s Mental Health—One Step At A Time

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Talking points: masculinity, culture

Honored to have connected with the Barefoot Dutchman himself this week. In case you hadn’t heard, Anton Nootenboom recently finished walking over 3100 miles—barefoot—from LA to NYC to support men’s mental health. Yes. Barefoot. We dig into the why, the how, and Anton’s core philosophies. Listen in, team.

(00:00:00) – Intro, and what the mental and emotional strain was like

(00:15:39) – Why Anton wanted to raise awareness for men’s mental health

(00:22:04) – What are men struggling with the most these days, and what needs to change

(00:37:48) – The struggle of shifting perspectives on men’s culpability and responsibility, and what to say to younger guys

(00:44:12) – Why is it important for men to do hard things?

Anton Nootenboom is a military veteran with three tours in Afghanistan. He faced severe mental health challenges afterwards, including depression and suicidal thoughts. He found healing in barefoot walking and speaking out about his experiences. Today, his journey embodies his message: men should feel empowered to seek help and talk about mental health.

The #BraveMenTalk initiative, launched in partnership with Barebarics, emphasizes that one man dies by suicide every minute globally. Anton’s walk aimed to raise critical funds and encourage men to embrace a new type of bravery—one that fights against stigma and opens up pathways for support.

Connect with Anton:

-Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebarefoot_dutchman/

-TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@barefootdutchie

-Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anton.nootenboom.3

Best Of ManTalks 2024

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Talking points: trauma, culture, attachment, masculinity

Maybe you’re new (or new-ish) to the podcast. Maybe you’re gunning for new insights so you kick off 2025 right. Either way, we here at ManTalks have got your back. In this episode, you’ll find extended clips from 2024’s top interviews, from the veteran perspectives of Michael Meade to the attachment expertise of Sarah Baldwin. Happy New Year, team.

(00:00:00) – Peter Levine on the symptoms of trauma and using active imagination

(00:19:41) – Michael Meade on the importance of myth, and AI’s possible effects on humanity

(00:31:48) – Sarah Baldwin on anxious and avoidant attachment, and the goals for healing each

(00:47:22) – Owen Marcus on co-regulation and importance of genuine connection for men

10 Things To Stop Doing In 2025

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Talking points: mindset, new year new you

Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. So instead of adding another thing to do, be, or try to your list, why not take something away? These ten things come from my own experience as well as helping high-performing men in multiple fields. Listen in.

(00:00:00) – Stop self-deprecating, and start taking “clean accountability”

(00:04:16) – Stop blaming women for all your problems

(00:07:40) – Stop consuming mindless content. Switch it for content that supports your mission

(00:09:35) – If you are ignoring your finances, stooooop. Educate yourself

(00:13:36) – Stop outsourcing your validation, and stop overworking

(00:19:10) – Stop living without structure, and value rest

(00:24:27) – Let go of resentment, and stop rejecting support

Transcript

All right, men, welcome back to the ManTalks Show. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the 10 things that you need to stop doing in 2025. Now, this is a list of things that have dramatically changed my own life and have changed the lives of the men that I have worked with.

I’m very fortunate in the sense that the clients that I get to work with are men that run hedge funds, that are Wall Street traders, they’re some of the best in their industry, athletes, professional athletes from the NFL and NHL, rappers, musicians, heavy metal guitarists and drummers, guys that are real estate moguls and entrepreneurs in the tech world. I really get to work with some of the elite top performing men. And what I’ve noticed is that all of these men at some point have to stop doing these behaviors that are in this list.

And rather than doing some, you know, New Year’s, new you BS resolution that never works, that nobody ever follows through on, that I personally just legitimately dislike, I think it’s garbage. These are the things that you can start to call out and cut out of your life that are going to make a dramatic, dramatic difference. So number one, let’s just dive straight into it.

And if you enjoy this, please don’t forget to man it forward. Share this with somebody in your life that you know will enjoy it, goes a long way to growing the channel, but it also just goes a long way to supporting the men that are in your life. So don’t forget to man it forward, subscribe to the channel and let’s dive in.

So number one, I can’t say this any other way. Stop shitting on yourself. Stop shitting on yourself.

Stop brutally just like destroying yourself verbally in your head, punishing yourself every single time that you get something wrong, shaming yourself anytime that you don’t live up to the unrealistic expectations that you have set for yourself. Stop self-flagellating and self-punishing every single time something goes wrong. Start taking what I call clean accountability.

This means no shaming yourself. No shaming yourself when things go wrong, when you have made a messed up, when you have made a bad decision. I say this because I’ve noticed a trend in a lot of men that I’ve worked with over the last decade and in myself.

I used to beat the crap out of myself verbally in my head whenever I did anything wrong. Whenever I didn’t meet some unrealistic expectation I had set for myself, I would lace into myself. What’s wrong with you? You’re such a POS.

How could you do that? Nobody else would get this wrong. You’re so stupid. And I would just berate myself.

And in some ways, I was trying to do that to leverage shame to try and propel me forward, to get better results. Now this is a catch-22 because for some men, you might be one of the men like me where shame was crippling me. And that self-punishment, that self-deprecation was the thing standing in my way.

Now there are men who are in a very different camp where they leverage that self-deprecation. They leverage their shame. They leverage what I call dark motivation.

They punish themselves and whip themselves verbally, psychologically, and emotionally in order to try and get results. And it works for a period of time. And this is the catch.

All of the men that I have ever worked with that have used shame to motivate themselves, at some point, that mechanism of shame-based motivation will start to work against them. They’ll start to not be able to perform. They’ll get depressed.

They will just genuinely loathe and hate themselves. They’ll destroy relationships and push people away because they don’t see that they’re worthy. A whole bunch of things can happen.

So this year in 2025, start to take clean accountability. This means no shaming, no judgment of yourself. Just yeah, that was the wrong choice.

That was a bad decision. That wasn’t a smart decision for me to make in my life. And take ownership over it.

And use that as a mechanism to propel you forward. Use that clean accountability as a mechanism to help you change. Number two, stop blaming women for all of your problems.

I’ve been on YouTube not for very long. I haven’t been on YouTube for a super long time, but I’ve been working with men for over a decade. And what I’ve noticed on YouTube is that there is a very large subset of men who are convinced that every single problem in their life is the result of a woman’s.

And there’s a large subset of women who believe the same thing about men. It’s like the patriarchy is the sole problem with everything in existence today. And every issue can be traced back to men.

So I get it. I get that maybe you are a man who has been screwed over by a woman. Maybe you were betrayed.

Maybe you were cheated on. Maybe you were hurt by a woman. Maybe she divorced you and took half of everything that you earned and own.

Maybe she won’t let you access your kids. I get that there are genuinely women out there who are brutal to men. And maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of that.

That still does not warrant and justify seeing women as the enemy writ large for every single problem in your life or every single problem for men in the world. And so this is really about taking your own level of potency and power back. Because whenever we villainize the opposing sex and we say that they are responsible for all of our woes, all of our problems, we move into a victimhood position.

So you are not a victim to women. Now, you may have been victimized by women, abused by women physically, taken advantage of women by physically. I’m not negating that.

I’m sorry if that happened to you. That’s terrible. That sucks.

So I’m not saying that that’s not a real thing. And I do not ever want to downplay that that’s a very real thing that a lot of men experience. And for the most part, that’s not what a lot of men are going through.

What a lot of men are going through is they’re pissed at women. They see women as the problem. They’re angry.

They don’t think that they can get the women that they want. And so they’re projecting a tremendous amount of vitriol and resentment and hostility towards women and acting like the victim to women. I can’t get the job that I want because of women.

I can’t make enough money for women. I’ll never be able to make women happy. And women become this sort of embodiment of a man’s perfectionism, a man’s relationship with his own perfectionism, that he can never get it right with his own perfectionism because he can never meet his own expectations.

And for some men, they project that out onto women. I can never make you happy. I can never get it right with you.

You’re always going to betray me. And what it does is create not just a victim orientation within your mind and your mindset, but it allows you to stay lonely and isolated and disconnected from women because you just see them as one way. You just see women as a problem or as dysfunctional or as all entitled, and you never actually meet the woman that’s in front of you because you’re just interacting with the perception that you hold of women that’s being projected onto her.

So stop blaming women for all your problems and start to get to know the women that are actually in your life that you meet, whether it’s at the coffee shop or the gym or the grocery store or at the yoga studio, wherever it is that you go, at work. Start to genuinely get to know them and get to know that individual woman rather than projecting your animosity and vitriol towards women at large onto every single woman that you meet. Number three, stop tuning in to calorie-less content.

Stop tuning into terrible content. Stop tuning into the thirst traps. Delete your OnlyFans account if you have one.

Unfollow all the women on Instagram or TikTok that you follow that you know are just a waste of time that are just getting your attention for free, getting your follow and all your likes and all your comments and all your time and attention and your imagination is going towards them. Stop wasting your time on content that is not nourishing your mind, that’s not helping you to develop into the man, the leader, the husband, the partner, the father that you ultimately want to be. Start to consume valuable content that is designed specifically for the sole purpose of supporting you on the mission that you are on.

Whatever that mission is, maybe you want to make a million dollars next year. Maybe you just want to enter into the workforce and get a good job. Maybe you want to start a business.

Maybe you want to have an extraordinary relationship or a really great sex life or whatever it is. Maybe you want to be an extraordinary father. Start to consume the type of content that is going to help you reach your goal and attack your mission.

So really hone in on this. That might mean that you have to unfollow people. Might mean that you have to go off of social media for a while.

But really take a look at the content. Maybe you’re only listening to certain podcasts and you need to broaden your podcast listening. Maybe there’s some books that you actually need to read and not just consume content but actually dive back into some books.

So stop consuming calorie-less content and start consuming content that is going to support you in reaching your goals. Number four, stop ignoring your finances. I cannot tell you how many men I have worked with over the years who use avoidance as their main tool and tactic when it comes to their finances.

You ask them how things are going financially. How much do you have saved? Where’s your debt at? How much is your monthly burn? And they’re not able to give you any information. And I used to be like this.

I felt insecure about money. I was terribly broke. I was in debt.

I was like the ramen noodle dude. I used to make this. Oh man, I’m going to get so much flack for this if you’re watching this or listening to this.

But in university, I was so broke that I would make stir fry with lunch meat. And so because I didn’t have enough money to buy real chicken breasts or I didn’t have enough money to buy steaks and that type of meat, I would just buy turkey lunch meat. And so I would make this stir fry.

I remember dating this woman in university, and I made it for her one time. And she was like, what is this? Like, are you okay? Do you need help? Do I need to send you help? But part of that was that I was just in complete avoidance of my money situation. I did not want to look at it at all because I was broke.

I was in debt. I didn’t know how to save money. I didn’t know how to invest money.

I didn’t know what the hell an ETF fund was or a Roth IRA or a tax-free savings account. I didn’t know what any of those things were. And so it was just overwhelming.

And so I used avoidance as a tool and tactic for my finances. So start to educate yourself in 2025 about money, about how to save, how to invest, how to earn more money, maybe how to have passive income, whatever that is. Just start to level up your relationship to money so that you’re not avoiding some of the hard parts.

You should be able to get to a point where you are running your personal finances like a business, where you have a P&L statement for your personal finances on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. So you can see the breakdown of how much money is coming in, where is that money going to, how much money is being saved, where is it being invested, and how are those investments doing? That’s the basic breakdown for finances that no one taught me, that I wish someone had sat down, one of my parents. My mom was a banker.

She probably could have done that at some point. But somebody had sat me down and said, here’s how money works and operates. Here’s the basics of it.

And we’re going to help you to learn how to invest. And that just never happened. But it’s one of the things that has radically changed my life.

When I prioritized my finances, I started earning more. I started not just earning and making more, but I started to save more. I paid off my debt pretty quickly.

So I got entirely debt-free, which felt amazing, even though I made some sacrifices along the way. I remember at one point, I don’t remember, I think it was like 2014, I was going to invest, it was like $10,000 into Tesla. And I didn’t do it because at the time, I didn’t know anything about stock trading.

I thought it would be a good idea to buy Tesla stock. I think it was at like $20 at the time or something ridiculous like that, or like $42. But I had all of this credit card debt.

And I’d been carrying that credit card debt for a long time. And I just made a decision to pay down the credit card debt because I was on a mission. I had a goal, get rid of my debt.

Because it wasn’t good debt, right? It wasn’t like, I wasn’t leveraging to buy stocks and making more revenue off of the stocks than I was on the cost to borrow the money. It wasn’t good debt. It was like 20% on a credit card that had like $25,000 on it.

It was not good. So I decided to pay off all my debt. Now, in hindsight, I wish I had bought the Tesla stock, but I succeeded in my mission to pay off the debt.

And I’m really glad that I didn’t gamble because I didn’t know anything. I probably would have lost money. I would have been like the only dude that lost money on that stock.

So stop ignoring your finances. Focus on them for 2025. Number five is stop seeking validation from women, from external sources.

Now, I call this stop outsourcing validation and start insourcing validation. So what a lot of guys do, because we’re very external, is they outsource validation, outsource the reinforcement of their own self-worth. I’m not sure if I’m worthy.

I’m not sure if I’m good enough. I’m not sure if I’m smart enough. I’m not sure if I’m attractive enough.

And what they do is they try and deploy this mechanism of getting feedback from people at work, from friends, from family members, from people that they, whatever, see at the gym, from their girlfriends, from their wives, from their partners. And they try and get validation to fill up their internal lack of, I don’t feel good enough. Now, if there’s one thing that you can do, if this one really hits home with you, if there’s one thing that you can really start doing in 2025, it is to build a rigorous mechanism of self-appreciation and self-recognition.

If you can start to give yourself recognition and appreciation for the things that you are doing, that you are doing well, if you can acknowledge like, oh, I got up this morning and I executed on my morning routine and I’m like, really good job, and you can start to build the habit of reinforcing all the things that you do well and all of the parts of yourself that are valuable innately and inherently, you won’t need to externalize and outsource all of that validation. So stop outsourcing that validation and start insourcing that self-recognition and appreciation. The next piece is stop overworking, okay? This is number six.

Stop overworking. I see so many men killing themselves, really burning themselves out in order to make a living and they just really struggle to prioritize any type of time for themselves. And I think it’s challenging because hustle culture within a modern society really glorifies the pathway that leads to burnout.

Hustle culture in itself is really just a recipe for the end destination is going to be burnout. That’s really what it is. Now, there are some people who love working really hard, who love just going 1,000 miles an hour, and that’s okay.

There’s nothing wrong with that. I love working hard. I really, really do.

I love working hard. I love building my business. And I have had to learn to rest.

I’ve had to learn to pull back on the reins sometimes and not take on more than I can do naturally. And this isn’t about balance. This isn’t about work-life balance.

I think a lot of that stuff is nonsense. But this is about being able to design your life in a way that matches your priorities and your values. So if you have a value of family and friendship or community, travel and adventure, but your entire year is basically just working 80 to 90 hours a week, and you don’t travel and you don’t see friends and you don’t see family, then your life isn’t matching your priorities and your values.

It’s not matching what brings you joy, what fulfills you, and you are just pouring all of this work and effort into something that maybe you enjoy or maybe you don’t at all, but you’re missing out on living a more aligned and more congruent life. And for a lot of men, this is easy. Because for most men, it’s easier to just be doing than it is to be being.

And what do I mean by that? A lot of us men find that our worth and our value is tied or tethered to how much we can do. So we have this perception that a lot of guys have, it’s like, the more that I do, the more valuable or worthy I will be in the eyes of other people or the more valuable and worthy I will feel within myself. Now, obviously, there’s an argument to be made that if you build something in the world that that can be very rewarding and fulfilling.

It can bring you value financially. It can bring you status, can bring you a whole bunch of things. But at the end of the day, if you don’t know how to just be with yourself, if you don’t know how to just like who you are without having to cut through the task list every single day, you’re going to struggle to find any level of fulfillment.

You actually have to enjoy who you are innately. And so part of this letting go of overworking, which by the way, burnout doesn’t actually allow you to be very productive. It doesn’t allow you, when you’re burnt out, you can’t perform very well.

You can’t provide for your family very well or even yourself very well. And you can’t contribute in the way that you want. And so the overworking, knowing where your limits are, it’s like, what is that? There’s a gambling ad back in Canada.

I don’t know if it’s still up, but they used to say, know your limit and play within it. And that was sort of the notion of like, know when to pull your chips off the table. And I think the same is true when it comes to working and really hustling.

Know when and know where your limits are and then play within those limits so that you don’t bet the house and come out broke on the other side, because that’s not going to be of service to you or anyone in your life. Number seven, stop living without structure. My gosh, I see so many men whose lives are, they call it free.

It’s like, I have so much freedom in my life. No, you just have no structure whatsoever. And you’re floundering around wondering why you have no direction, no path, and no purpose in your life.

We have no effing structure. If you do not have structure and order in your life, it’s going to be very, very challenging for you to feel like you have any type of direction. And I don’t care if you’re a really creative person, like I’m a fairly creative person, but structure is still one of those things that has supported my life in exponential ways.

So as an example, I organize my days to have themes. So there are certain days that I create content. There are certain days that I have business meetings.

There are certain days that I see clients, right? So like, for example, Fridays are my client days. They’re stacked with clients. That’s when I see the majority of my clients.

Wednesdays, I run groups. Tuesdays, I create content. Guess what day it is? Tuesdays, I create content and do podcast interviews, right? So start to create structure in your life.

You can organize things so that you have a bit of a routine so that your body and your mind can settle into knowing what it’s doing. And this is especially true if you are a creative, if you are a solopreneur or an entrepreneur, and you kind of wear a bunch of different hats. It’s very important to organize and structure your life in a way that is going to allow you to not have to what I call hat switch or brain switch, right? To go from a business meeting into an interview into a client meeting, that’s going to require very different parts of your brain.

And that’s going to burn you out quicker. It’s going to tax your mind and your body faster. So by developing structure in your life, and this applies to morning routines, nighttime routines, right? I have a very good morning routine.

There’s a lot of flow and flexibility in it. But there’s very specific things that happen every single day. I have a nice nighttime routine that allows me to wind down and go to bed because I have a ton of energy.

And I’m one of those guys that has a harder time falling asleep because my brain is super active. I’m thinking about my company, my business, clients, what I want to be doing. I’m thinking about my kids, my family, the task list, everything that needs to be done.

I have a hard time going to sleep. And so I have a wind down structure or routine that helps me to wind down. So start to build structure out and start simple, right? Maybe you start with a morning routine.

Maybe you start with shifting things in your workflow so that you have a little bit more structure. Maybe you bring this into your relationship and you start to build some structure within your relationship. You have a date night that you start to adhere to and you have some fun with it.

So start to build some structure. Number eight. I touched on this before, so this one will be short.

Stop disregarding rest. Stop disregarding rest. Burnout doesn’t make you more of a man.

Overworking, driving yourself into the ground doesn’t make you more of a man. If you want to be more effective, you likely need to learn how to rest. Now, you might be one of the guys that’s watching this and you’re like, actually, all I do is rest and I never get my ass off the couch.

Likely, you’re not really resting. You’re distracting. Real rest is not sitting there watching Netflix or zombie scrolling through TikTok or Instagram or whatever social media platform that you have.

Real rest is undistracted solo time. Time in solitude. That can be time in nature.

That can be meditation or breathwork or journaling. There’s a bunch of different ways to do it, but start to prioritize rest. And this can also include starting to really prioritize your sleep.

So now that I have two kids and a business that I’m running, I really hone in on making sure that I’m getting at least seven hours of sleep because otherwise I’m cranky. And sometimes that doesn’t happen just because of life, but I really try and prioritize making sure that I get a certain set amount of sleep so that I am functioning optimally for my business, for my clients, for my team members, for my kids, for my wife. Without that, if I do not prioritize rest, then I am going to bring that frustration into almost every single avenue of my life.

I’m going to make poor decisions. I’m not going to be as present with people. And what I’ve noticed for myself, and maybe this is the same for you, the less rest that I have, the more susceptible I am to those pseudo rest mechanisms, to zombie style scrolling through Instagram or whatever it is.

And so that’s usually the way that it works for most guys. So start to prioritize rest and making sure that you’re dialing in at the very least your sleep, but also prioritizing having some restful periods and learning what rest looks like. Like for me, going for a hike and going for a walk in nature by myself is incredibly rewarding and I feel very fueled after that.

So you need to find your own version of that. Number nine, two more. Number nine, stop holding on to resentment.

Cannot tell you how many men that I’ve worked with over the years whose lives are just riddled with resentment. They’re carrying around a bitterness and an anger in their hearts and their minds that is poisoning the waters of their purpose, of their intimacy, of their relationship. And it has become a kind of protection mechanism that ensures that they stay in this place of dissatisfaction.

And so often men who are more committed to the resentment that they’re carrying than the resolution of that resentment, there’s a part of them that doesn’t feel worthy and deserving of what it is that they actually want, whether it’s deep intimacy or connection or a great sex life or meaningful purpose or a good working environment or good working relationship. There’s this part of them that’s like, I’m actually not worthy of that or that’s not possible. And so I’m just going to hold on to this resentment.

But learning to forgive, learning to actually resolve the resentment is an incredibly powerful tool for you as a man. Because men have such a tendency and proclivity towards resentment, towards letting resentment build and then letting resentment become a sort of normative way of being. It just becomes this thing that they operate from, having resentment towards women at large, having resentment towards their wife or their girlfriend or their partner that they just will not let go of.

And the more that I’ve worked with men, the more that I’ve found that a lot of men just do not know how to forgive. And so they either skip straight to it and they’re like, yeah, yeah, whatever, I forgive it. It’s no big deal.

But they don’t actually let themselves feel the impact of what happened from the betrayal or whatever it was. Or they just let resentment become a huge part of their personality and their identity. And they carry it around and they allow it to pop out in these passive aggressive or aggressive ways in their relationship.

So this year, if this one really hits home with you, prioritize doing whatever you can to learn how to forgive, how to forgive yourself and how to forgive the people that have maybe betrayed you or hurt you and to forgive the people that maybe you’ve carried resentment towards. And there’s a bunch of different ways to do that. I’m happy to do a separate video on that if that would support you.

Last but not least, stop rejecting help and support. Stop rejecting help and support. I mean, listen, I run, I don’t know if you know this, but I run something called the Man Talks Alliance.

And in the alliance, there are several hundred men. And what I have seen time and time again is that whenever a man’s life is starting to go south or he’s struggling, we have this natural predisposition towards isolation. It’s not ingrained in us to reach out and call a buddy or ask a friend for help or ask a friend for support and advice.

We have this natural baked in predisposition towards trying to figure that out by ourselves or convincing ourselves that if we don’t solve it all on our own, that if we need help from other people, that there’s something even more wrong with us, that we’re fundamentally broken. And one of the things I can tell you unequivocally is that your life will be exponentially better by surrounding yourself with other men that you trust and rely on to support you and give you feedback and guidance when your life starts to fragment, fall apart, when things start to get tough, whether that’s financially or relationally. So pick up the phone.

If you do not have men in your life like this, find some. Make it your absolute mission. I can tell you that my life is what it is today because I have continued to seek out and surround other exceptional and extraordinary men that can mentor me, that can give me feedback, that are peers and equals, that I trust their opinion, I trust their perspective, I trust them to see things in a way that maybe I don’t see or I trust them to point out things in my life that I might be missing and to really hold my feet to the fire.

And this has served me in a way that I cannot even describe to you. So if you want, you can go check out Mantox.com. The Alliance is on there. Doors will be opening in January.

That is a phenomenal place to start, but there’s many programs out there like that. So if you’re looking for a good place, go find a group, go find a community. It doesn’t have to be mine or Mantox.

There are tons that are out there, but you will absolutely benefit from having men who are invested in your life, invested in your success, invested in supporting you to move through the obstacles and the challenges that you will naturally and innately face. So that’s it for today. Those are the 10 things I hope that you start to tackle in 2025.

And let me know which one you are going to be tackling or if there’s a different one that you are working on, cutting out for 2025. And as always, do not forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody in your life that you know will enjoy it or could use it.

Till next time, Connor Beaton signing off.

Dating A More Masculine Woman? Here’s What To Do

by

Talking points: relationships, masculinity, culture

This is a question I get all the time from men. They date a woman who takes on what feels like a very masculine energy, and they’re not sure how to handle that without doubling down on battles, roles, and standoffs. Here’s how to build a grounded, fulfilling, satisfying partnership instead.

(00:00:00) – Intro and the reasons women adopt traditionally masculine traits

(00:08:40) – What do you do? Number one: let go of “who’s right” battles

(00:12:12) – Stop fighting for the “masculine role” in the relationship

(00:16:54) – Evoke emotion

Transcript

All right, team, welcome back to the ManTalks Show. Connor Beaton here. And today, we’re going to be talking about the keys to dating a woman who is more in her masculine.

I get this question all the time from men, what do I do if my woman is more in her masculine or she can’t seem to switch out of that? How do I operate? It causes some tension. And no, the answer is not just bounce. I’ve seen a lot of commentary on the internet of like, oh, if a woman’s more in her masculine, then you’re beta and you’re attracting her.

Or if a woman’s more in her masculine, just bounce, don’t even bother with that. That is a life choice that you can make. But if you’re married to a woman who sometimes occupies more of a masculine energy sometimes, you seem to attract women and date women that are more in their masculine.

This isn’t about fixing her or changing her or trying to solve it. I’m just going to talk about why this happens. Why are more and more women more masculine oriented? And then secondly, what do you do? How do you build a healthy, grounded, peaceful, loving, fulfilling, satisfying relationship with a woman that maybe is more in that masculine orientation? So let’s dive in.

First, why is this happening more and more and more? I think the big thing, there’s three big things I want to lay out. The first one is that society has incentivized women to embody the masculine more and more. There has been this push for women to embody more masculine oriented gender norms or characteristics or traits, things like assertiveness, becoming a little bit more dominant and aggressive.

Those things seem to be more and more socially acceptable for women to embody, to be more direct, to have to be more ambitious. And they are less and less socially acceptable for a man to embody. We can see this in our culture, right? Feminism sort of denotes this idea that in some ways, and I’m not knocking feminism, I’m not putting it down, we’re just talking about it here.

Don’t bring the knives out. Don’t shank me. But in many ways, feminism is promoting equality through the vehicle of encouraging women to be more like men and men to be more like women.

And that’s a very basic frame, but it is a part of what a lot of feminist rhetoric and ideology promotes to women. And what ends up happening is that a lot of women end up embodying, a lot of modern women in big metropolitan areas, they end up embodying the type of man that they want to attract. So they end up becoming very much externally like the type of man that they want to attract.

They’re highly ambitious. They’re go-getters. They’re very assertive.

They’re very direct. They go after what they want, those types of pieces. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that outside of the fact that it doesn’t leave a lot of room for the man who is that way.

Because the inherent truth is that a man who is very ambitious, very direct, very assertive, he’s not necessarily looking to get into a relationship with a woman that he’s going to have to compete with, or that he’s going to have to grapple with for the masculine seat in the relationship. And what can be challenging is that for a lot of women who are very career-focused and very career-driven, which again is not an inherent problem, but what ends up happening relationally is that they can’t shift out of that. They can’t shift out of this very masculine way of being.

And what ends up happening is that they attract more feminine, what I call feminine-forward men. So men that are generally, you know, they have more softer skills. They’re more nurturing.

They’re more caretaking. They’re less ambitious. They’re less direct.

They’re less assertive. And they have sort of these more feminine-oriented qualities or qualities that we have historically associated with feminine, with women. They seem to attract a lot more of those style of men.

And the men that they really are desiring, these sort of ambitious, driven, direct, assertive men, either get deflected away or women adopt this narrative of, I’m just too much for some men, or some men can’t handle me, or men are scared of me. And this becomes the rhetoric and the sort of way of coming to terms with the fact that they are deflecting away or turning off the type of men that they would really want. And so society has largely, a lot of society and much of feminism has told women, you should be completely independent.

You should never, quote unquote, need or have to rely on a man. And the truth about relationships is that there is reliance. There is reciprocity across the board.

And so what can happen is that a lot of women end up becoming completely autonomous and 100% independent, and there’s no room for a man in their life. Now, if that’s truly what you want and you desire, power to you. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that.

But for the women who want to be in a relationship, it can be very challenging to step out of this hyper-individualistic orientation that doesn’t actually leave room for a man to contribute into her life or give feedback or grow with her and these types of pieces. The second thing is that some women have been raised by a very dominant woman and they never really learned what it actually feels like to not be in this hyper-dominant orientation. So they don’t actually know what it feels like to be in a more feminine-oriented body, caretaking, nurturing, soft way of being.

And again, I’m not saying that those are the only qualities of a woman that are attractive or appealing to men or that in order to be a quote-unquote good woman that you have to be nurturing and caretaking. But the reality is that when you do ask men, those are things that the majority of men say that they want in a woman. They want a woman that isn’t going to make their life exponentially more complicated and drama-filled and conflict-oriented.

Men, generally speaking, desire women who are nurturing, who are caretaking to a certain degree. And it’s very interesting because the modern narrative is that men either shouldn’t want those things. It’s degrading for women to embody those characteristics, etc.

And so for some women, they’ve just never grown up around a woman who had those more feminine qualities of being able to nurture, being able to caretake, being able to care for the people around her in a way that still embodies leadership in its own orientation, still embodies strength in its own way, but they just never actually witnessed it. The last piece is that some women have been really hurt by or taken advantage of or abused by or betrayed by a man who embodied this sort of what we could call hyper-masculine orientation, right? Very dominant, very assertive, overly direct, but he wasn’t maybe honest or truthful. Maybe he took advantage of her.

Maybe he abused her. Maybe he abandoned her. Maybe he betrayed her in some capacity.

And so what happens for those women is—or maybe she just grew up around a very hyper-controlling father, a type of father that was always trying to control everything that she did, what she wore, who she talked to, gaslighting her, manipulating her. And so this very either deep mistrust of men started to come online, and so they embody those characteristics or they adopt this mentality that the only way to be safe in life is to embody those characteristics of the man who was controlling. So she becomes hyper-masculine.

You can see this in some women that maybe had these types of fathers that are very controlling, manipulative, narcissistic, coercive. A lot of these women mistrust men, and how they develop safety around men is by being in this hyper-dominant, hyper-controlling position where they’re always right, they’re controlling the outcomes, they’re dominating the conversations, they’re dominating the outcomes, and that for them is a position of safety. It’s not to excuse the behavior.

It’s just to say that that’s part of what has created it. So what do we do? Regardless of which one you found yourself in, what do you do? How do you actually develop a meaningful, deep, connected, fulfilling, and rewarding relationship with a woman who is embodying more of her masculinity? There’s a couple of things that I want to lay out for you. Number one is letting go of the who’s right battles.

This is very common in relationships where if you are a man who is remotely masculine, you’re going to get in a relationship with a woman like this, and there’s going to be a lot of battles, going to be a lot of conflict. And that conflict revolves around a kind of power struggle where she is not wanting to move out of this safe space of being in this masculine orientation, and you find yourself provoked in some way to engage in this power battle with her to try and win, to try and be right. This is the thing that you need to step out of, regardless of your relationship, stepping out of the need to win with your partner.

Because when you are in a battle with your partner and you’re trying to win, you are automatically in a position of moving out of a relational space and into an objectification space. You are moving into an adversarial form of relationships, me versus you. That is non-relational.

That is not the type of relationship. That is likely going to bring you long-term fulfillment and joy and happiness. So moving out of this power battle, beginning to identify what are the key things that you and her seem to get locked into a power battle around.

Where do you find yourself trying to prove yourself? Where do you find yourself needing to be right all the time? Where do you find yourself trying to correct her litigiously? Some guys end up going into lawyer mode, where it’s like two lawyers arguing between the man and the woman. And he’s just trying to gain some semblance of, we could call it masculinity, but he’s trying to gain some semblance of control in the relationship by being right. And so you have to start to let go of all this.

And you have to start to disengage because it’s very common that women that are very much in their masculine will use conflict inadvertently and unconsciously as a means to stay in a position of superiority and as a means of staying in a dynamic where they never have to be open, where they don’t actually have to be vulnerable, where they don’t have to share their emotions. And they can continue to perpetuate this belief or this narrative that you’re not safe or the relationship’s not safe or it’s not okay for her to open up or you never understand her or you never actually hear her or some variation of that. So when you step out of this incessant need within you to be right or to win, you stop being adversarial with her and you stop pushing her into her masculine orientation.

Because this is what a lot of guys do unintentionally. They engage in this conflict from a place of, I’m going to be right. I’m going to win this argument.

And it becomes this very adversarial thing where you push the woman that you’re with more into her masculine orientation. So step out of those power battles. The second thing is, and this is the only way I can frame it, stop fighting for the masculine seat or the masculine role in the relationship.

It’s very common that when men enter into a relationship with a woman who has a good amount of masculine characteristics or masculine energy, for some men, it ends up becoming like an intimidation thing where they feel like they need to go into this kind of battle in order to claim the masculine role or seat in the relationship. And you see this in conflict between the two of them. You see this in how the man is engaging with her.

He stops operating from a place of trying to woo her and trying to express desire for her, and he starts trying to win her. He starts trying to conquer her. And it’s a very different energy that, again, will push that woman more into battle, more into resistance, more into, I don’t trust you.

It feels like you’re trying to control me. It feels like you’re trying to manipulate me. And she will go more into this very rigid, protective orientation that, to you as a man, is going to feel more like a masculine orientation.

And it’s kind of like if you’ve ever played sports against somebody and you’re trying to win against them and you’re kind of battling for positioning of who’s the more, quote-unquote, dominant one, who’s going to win, who’s going to take the seat. That’s what ends up happening for a lot of couples where a woman is more in her masculine orientation. The man pushes her more into that by trying to battle for this position or this role of I’m going to be in this position.

Rather than battling her, stepping outside of that battle, being able to identify, here are the ways that I’m actually competing with her for the masculine role in the relationship. I see this happen all the time with guys. They’ll deploy complaints and criticisms and they’ll try and criticize their girlfriend or their wife out of this masculine energy.

They’ll try and dominate her into it. They’ll try and use avoidance. It’s like, F it, I’m just not going to deal with you at all.

And then that creates a lack of trust. So instead of battling with her for the role in the relationship, try out grounding her. The real competition, if there was one, because we all, not all, but many of us like the tactical things that we can do.

The real quote-unquote competition is can you out-ground her? Can you stay grounded? Not unfazed or emotionally shut off or completely disconnected, but can you be less reactive? Can you actually learn to breathe and ground your nervous system? Can you stay calm, cool, and collected even when she moves into the space of maybe being harsh or coming at you a little bit and having a fierce edge? I think a lot of men end up dating a woman who has a good amount of fire in her and they don’t know how to be the water that’s unfazed by the fire, that’s unburned by the fire and actually help the fire start to diminish a little bit and turn down. What they end up doing is they meet the fire with more fire and so they meet that hostility or that aggression or that assertiveness or that directness or the criticism. It causes them to be reactive and then they fight back and they try and fight fire with fire.

You’re not going to put out or reduce your woman’s fire by meeting it with more fire. So the game is to out-ground her. The game is to out-ground her.

That means using your breath, down-regulating your nervous system, having practices on a daily basis where you aren’t going to be so reactive. And the beautiful thing about this, because I can hear some of the comments being like, that’s so much work. It’s like, well, your relationship is meant to be a training ground for you to step into the highest and best version of yourself.

That’s what it is for me. Maybe for you, a relationship is there to serve as a vehicle for your ultimate level of complacency and mediocrity. I don’t know.

Maybe that is what your relationship is for. But for me, a really solid relationship is meant to support me in my journey of stepping into my highest and best self, growing myself in many, many ways. And part of that is being able to ground.

So that’s the third thing. The fourth thing, the last thing, is evoke her emotions. Women who are more in their masculine have a whole slew of unconscious tools and responses that are meant to deflect away from their emotional body.

Again, because that’s been seen as weak. They’ve been told that that’s dangerous to share with a man. They haven’t seen an example of what that looks like growing up.

They’ve done it in the past and they’ve been used or abused or betrayed because of those things. They just generally don’t trust that a man can hear or understand what they’re feeling emotionally. So your work, part of what you can do as you step out of this battle for the masculinity as a relationship, is to occupy the masculine territory of presence and the presence to evoke her emotions out.

And so what a lot of men do is they get caught in the details of what their girlfriend or wife is saying. She starts complaining about a work situation and he says, well, how do you think you should fix that? And so a lot of men continue to push their girlfriend or wife up into their head, which is where they are in their masculine versus helping them to drop down into their body. So instead of saying, what do you think you should do? Or why do you think that happened? You can ask simple questions like, what did it feel like when that happened? Or what happened inside of you when she said that? Or when your mom called you and was complaining about the same thing, how did you respond? How did you feel? And you start to redirect and hold presence for her to express herself.

Express herself, not explain herself. Explaining is a very masculine-oriented thing. And what a lot of men do is they ask their partners to explain themselves.

Explain why you felt that way. Explain why you thought that. Explain why you made that decision versus express what was happening inside of you.

And that is a natural feminine orientation. So when you start to evoke emotions and you start to encourage expression within your partner, you are supporting them in moving back into this more feminine-oriented space. And over time, this will build a deep trust between you and her.

This will build a very deep bond between the two of you. And you will naturally occupy a more masculine-oriented role of being present, being grounded, being the person that’s evoking and witnessing the emotions versus the one that is constantly being emotional. Because this is the last thing that gets caught in this relational dynamic.

A lot of men that attract more masculine women are very out of control with their own emotions and emotional expression. And they end up occupying a lot of the territory because they are the emotionally volatile one. They’re emotionally expressing themselves constantly.

They don’t have a good level. They don’t have a good relationship with their own emotions. And so they’re either completely shut off and disconnected or they are up and down and all over the place emotionally.

And for their partner, it feels like I can’t move out of this grounded state because he’s never in a solid emotional place. So part of your work, and this is where it can be a great dynamic for some men, is that you can really work on moving yourself into an emotionally stable place where you develop that type of emotional stability and robustness that is genuine and real and not a result of suppression or repressing how you feel, but actually having a good relationship with your own emotions and being able to regulate your nervous system under conflict, under duress. So don’t forget to man it forward.

Maybe share this with your partner. Talk about what you liked, disliked, what you’d like to implement and share with somebody that you know will enjoy it. Till next week, Connor Beaton signing off.

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