Modern Wisdom - #890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Connor Beaton is a men’s life coach, founder of ManTalks and an author focusing on men’s wellness and personal growth. Emotions can be challenging. Some bring joy and comfort, while others we’d rather avoid entirely. But what if learning to embrace all emotions—even the uncomfortable ones—could lead to greater growth and understanding? Expect to learn why men have bad reputations with emotions, what emotions exactly are and why they’re important, how people can learn to start feeling their feelings, the emotions men struggle with the most and how to get more comfortable with feeling them, if there is any strength in suppressing emotions, if there is a way men can do all of the inner work by themselves or if they should seek outside help, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with any purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do men have a bad reputation with emotions, do you think? Oh, man. I mean, I think that we, I think that generally we feel emotions pretty intensely. And so when our emotions let loose, sometimes it's, it cannot be pretty. It can be loud. It can be big. It can be intense. And so I think sometimes men have a bad rap because of that. I think that there's been a

few generations of men that have been told not to feel that their best emotional tool is suppression, is repression. It's just like stuff it down, pour some whiskey over top, light some weed up, and just keep soldiering on, stiff upper lip as I think they say in your country. I think we've gone through a few generations of men who used avoidance as their main tool with emotions and because of that, cut themselves off from some pretty important data and information. And so a lot of men have just, older generations haven't been able to speak the language of emotions of what they're feeling of what they're going through. Um, but I think having worked with men for over a decade, you know, tens of thousands of men from around the world, men feel very deeply.

Yeah. I think it's not that men don't feel, I think it's that men feel very deeply. And we've in some cultures created a vacuum of being able to teach men what to do with their emotions, how to actually traverse through their emotions. So I think those are parts of it. I'm curious what your thought is on that though as well, because even you talk to a lot of people in this space.

Yeah. I think you're right. We don't exactly have fantastic emotional role models as men and. You mean Homer Simpson and, uh, Peter Griffin aren't the, like the role models of emotional acuity. Exactly. Who's that? Who's the guy that used to be like, ah, and then would hit his wife, like pretend to hit his wife on like some sitcom. Who is that American guy? I'm not from this country. I don't fuck. I don't, I think that's, I think that's before my time. I'm not sure. It may very well maybe. Yeah. You't, I think that's, I think that's before my time. I'm not sure. Very well, maybe.

Yeah. You know, it was the fifties. It was a different time. The hands were softer. Um, so yeah, I think the role model of the kind of bumbling, unfeeling, largely useless, semi useless kind of dedicated, but emotionally out of touch man, uh, I think that's got a lot to play into it. I think as well, you know, it's, it doesn't speak to many of the ways

that men like to think about being masculine. I think one of the most common, uh, contributing factors when you ask somebody what is a masculine man would be mastery over their emotions or kind of a reliable and controlled emotional state, some version of that and feeling feelings seems kind of at odds with that. So, it's not, it's not particularly well portrayed archetypally in the culture. I don't think it is a particularly proud thing, either internally or rewarded externally by society. You know, for all that the world says, we need men to open up more

and talk about their emotions. No one has any fucking idea how to deal with a man that's going through a very intense set of emotions because they're either very aggressive or even worse than that, very soppy. And you go, I have no, most of the time people have no idea how to deal with that. It's scary. And then if you try to do that and you see as you're unable to regulate somebody else disgusted at your lack of regulation, you think, okay, I'm never doing that again. So yeah, maybe some more elements there.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think a good way to put it is men are not incentivized to open up emotionally, uh, for a number of different reasons, right? I think oftentimes, I mean, I get comments on my YouTube videos all the time, stories from men who, uh, did open up to a past partner, to a girlfriend, to a wife, and were left shortly thereafter. Guys being ridiculed, whether it's in the locker room from another man or being ridiculed by a woman who then loses attraction or says that she doesn't like the way that he brought

it forward. So men just aren't generally incentivized to be emotionally expressive. Men are rewarded for being emotionally intelligent in the sense that they hold their shit together, right? That you kind of, you're able to weather through really intense emotional situations. Correct. Yeah.

really intense emotional situations. Emotional mastery. Correct. Yeah. But the, but the way that most men get there is, is maybe not the best for their mental and physical wellbeing because. Yeah, of course not. Because it's denial. It's denial because outwardly the, the, the guy that has gone and worked through all of

his shit and has completely transcended and included and integrated and alchemized all of the different things inside of him to the point where he can feel it, but not let it out until it's the right time and do it in a controlled manner and regulate and so on and so forth. And the guy that's just fucking suppressing it, like they appear as the same person. Um, I got it. I got to, uh, make a comment on what you said about, um, guys that open up to their partners. Yeah, this is a very common, it's like a trite talking point online about like, can you be vulnerable with your partner?

So on and so forth. I want to propose kind of a radical solution. Um, that I was dating a good bit last year after a breakup. And, uh, I did this a couple of times with different pathways, kind of like an emotional shit test very early on during the dating process, because what you want to see is if this person, and this is the same for women too, like, can this person handle a outside of the sort of bound of what would be typically acceptable or typically expected, perhaps not acceptable. Can they handle that?

So sending a psychology articles or something and seeing if they've got anything to say back, it's like, that's something that's important to me. And maybe you're in the early days of the flotation stage and whatever, whatever, like sending a side post article about the neurobiology of depression is like, not that copy. It's like, Hey, this is probably going to become important to me to be able to have a conversation about, because it's shit that I'm interested in. So let's see.

And the same thing, at least for me that worked really well was talking about emotions early on. Like, Hey, I'm going to open up and it doesn't need to be, you know, like your chronic athlete's foot and the trauma around that or whatever. But, um, my point being, if you're dating somebody, I think that over indexing, if you're the sort of person that really wants to do the whole like emotional openness thing, I think over indexing on that as soon as possible, once you've got past the very, very early stages just allows you to see, okay, is this person

able to like sit with this, are they able to hold the space and if they can't. Sweet. Like I've learned I'm not now three, five, 10 years down the line, opening up as all of these different videos happen. If a guy like once sheds a tear at the final scene of Interstellar or something, and the next day his wife leaves him for a fucking the dude next door, um, you kind of get this out of the way nice and early and ultimately what you're saying is like, it's the problem of your partner.

If your partner can't fucking see you talk about emotions and open up, that relationship is supposed to be the safest harbor that you're ever going to have. You should be able to deal with the darkest, most difficult things in your entire life. And for some guys, they don't, maybe don't have that much darkness, but if you're a person that does, I think that you need to try and find that out as soon as possible. Yeah. I think that summary is really good. And I'll just reaffirm something that I said, I think when we talked about attachment last time I was on, which is that, and this is my, this is my good friend, Dewey Freeman, who's been a therapist for 40 plus years, he's got a saying that

the foundation of attachment is going through a hard time and coming out the other side okay. So the foundation of relationship is being able to go through a hard time and come out the other side okay. And the truth about monogamy is that when you're in a relationship with somebody, you are inevitably going to go through some type of hardship that whether it's you individually or you as a couple that really tests who you are, who the relationship is, how your partner shows up, and how you go through that hardship, whether it's emotional or physical or whatever, is going to

determine the quality of the relationship and likely the longevity of the relationship. And I think the other thing I'll just say is people really underestimate how much they're going to change in the span of five, 10, 15 years. And one of the challenges that comes along with long-term relationships is often that people do evolve emotionally. I mean, I can't tell you how many men I've worked with whose wives are going through menopause and they're like, this is a completely different human being. I feel like I don't know this woman and she reports that too. She's like, I don't feel like I know who I am anymore. I feel like I'm a completely different person. So emotionally, her landscape is entirely changing.

And traditionally, when you look at some of the research that's out there, men generally, as they get older will soften psychologically. So they become less harsh, less aggressive, less angry, and women go in the opposite direction. Generally speaking, women become harder as they get older emotionally. And I'm not really, do you have any idea why that is?

A big part of it is the, is the chemical balances in your body. So as you get older, you're going to have more older emotionally and I'm not really. Do you have any idea why that is? Uh, a big part of it is the, is the chemical, um, balances in your body. So as you get older, less testosterone. And for women, it's the inverse, right? Is that from my understanding estrogen actually decreases, they have more testosterone in the body.

And so they become more, uh, more hard, I guess you could say more harsh, more aggressive, more, um, you know, some women become a little bit more angry post menopause. So, you know, we have to be able to ride the emotional waves that are naturally going to come along with everything, you know, losing a job, changing careers, having kids, uh, all of that type of stuff is going to induce different emotional states within you as an individual. And it's whether or not you and your partner have the ability to sort of weather the emotional storm together.

And you have the willingness to be transparent about what you're going through emotionally. I mean, I lost my mom last year. She passed away from cancer and she had a pretty rough battle. She was dealing with addiction up until she got diagnosed with terminal cancer and then got sober after she was diagnosed, which is a whole other conversation. But it was tough. It was really tough to watch her go through the chemo and the treatments and all of those different types of pieces.

And I think one of the things that my wife was very good at was checking in on me. How are you doing? Where are you at? And my willingness to say today sucks. And especially after she passed. I mean, the birth of my daughter happened after she passed. This was the first Christmas that, you know, since she passed. And my willingness to be transparent about this is joyful on the one hand, right? Bringing my daughter into the world and having another kid, but also be very real and transparent about there's part of this that is brutal and there's a lot of grief and there's a lot of sadness. Instead of I'm fine, I'm okay, let me just have another scotch and I'll feel better, which was like my old method. It's like don't talk about how I'm actually doing and just try and

glaze over that with some type of substance, which I think is what most of us men do. Because we feel that for better or for worse, our intrinsic value comes from our ability to perform. And so we, we over index our performance at all costs. And we oftentimes see our emotions as a hindrance to our performance. It's like, I won't be able to perform on whatever it is, right? On the trading floor, at work, in the office, and provide for my family

if I'm, you know, if I let myself be emotional. So. Yeah. Make the case for emotions for me. What use are they? Why are they important? So just like you have thoughts in your mind, those are sort of like the language of your thinking process. Your emotions are the data of the body. It's the information of your body. And so if you want any real, um, truth in your life, you need to acquire as much data as humanly possible. The way I put it to a guy that he's, he's a project manager for a big hedge

fund on wall street, and he kind of asked me the same question, like, why should I care about how I feel? You know, he's like, my wife says I should, I don't really buy it, I don't really get it. And I said, okay, imagine that you are going to buy a stock, right? You're looking at buying Tesla. This is not financial advice.

You're looking at buying Tesla. And you don't look at the company's P&L statement. Like you just don't look at their balance sheet. You just buy the stock just because you think it's a good idea. That is what going through life without emotional information and emotional data is like. If you ignore your emotions,

you're not looking at part of the balance sheet of your life. And you're trying to make decisions based purely on rationality and logic, which is already being informed by your emotions. So the case for it is fullness, fulfillment, a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. If you want to find a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life, your emotions are going to be part of the data and the information that leads you towards that. If you want to have a fulfilling relationship, your emotions are going to be part of the

data and the information that helps you choose the right partner. And sometimes we're choosing the wrong people because our emotions are all messed up and we don't know how to sift through them. We don't know how to process them. We don't know how to decipher what our emotions are saying. Or sometimes we choose really dysfunctional relationships over and over and over and over and over again because we're ignoring our emotions. So there's a number of different reasons, but I'll use a Carl Jung quote to sort of

close it off. He said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And for most of us, for all of us, our emotions are these oftentimes unconscious responses or reactions to things that are happening in our head or things that are happening outside in our world. And so until you start to become more deeply aware of and conscious to what you are experiencing emotionally, and you're able to regulate that sift through it process that you are just, you're going to be walking through life, love,

business, largely blind to a big part of the information of what brings you a deeper sense of aliveness, fulfillment, joy, the whole, the whole kit. Where should people get started with sifting through them, feeling their feelings, should we, should we sift through them before we feel them? Do we need to think about them first? Like where do we even begin on this, this journey? It's page one. I always, I always love this because the, the more that I've worked with men, the

more that I've realized that we always try and come at emotions from a rational standpoint, you know, it's like, How's it be some sort of blueprint, right? There's a, there's an optimization, there's a worksheet from Andrew Huberman. That's right. That's right. Huberman's feeling your feelings. Uh, yeah, I was, I was going to make a joke make a joke to you before we started about like how you've asked me to come

on and talk about the topic that most men least want to talk about. This is going to be a wildly unpopular episode. Yeah. Except for perhaps amongst all of the girlfriends of the women, the guys that need to hear it. This is one of those referral episodes, right? The opening is going to be like, ladies refer this to your men. Exactly. That would be a great point.

If you are a guy that's listening to this right now and you didn't put it on in the car or around the house and your girlfriends put it on surreptitiously in a desperate attempt to try and get you to fucking listen to it, please comment below, cause I want to know how many, how many of you are being slowly Psy-opped by your girlfriend into listening to this? Yeah, slowly Psy-opped or just, just directly told. Hey, listen to this. Yeah, slowly psyoped or just directly told. Correct. Hey, listen to this.

You suck. Yeah. Well, where do we begin? I think the, you know, the sort of like admitting that you have a problem is a good place to be. Actually, yeah, let's get back, go back from that one more. Let's, this is a better starting point. How do people know if they have a problem with their emotions?

Okay, good. Um, a better starting point. How do people know if they have a problem with their emotions? Okay, good. Um, a couple good indicators. Number one, you have high levels of reactivity. So reactivity is just something happens in your external environment. There's a stimulus, right? Your, your partner says something to you, your boss is something to you, et cetera. And you react, you react from defensiveness or judgment or hostility, aggressiveness. You just, you have very little tolerance.

So you have a pretty bad temper and you react from that temper quite quickly. So that's a good indicator. Another one is that you are struggling or struggle quite often to just accomplish and do the things that you know you need to do. Emotions can really become a drag on us achieving or moving forward with the things that we want to do. I think it was Jim Carrey said, depression is your body's way of saying, fuck you. That's another really good indicator that you're sort of tuned out from your emotions. You don't really know what you're feeling, but they are clawing for your attention. And how they're doing that is by preventing you from doing the things that you know you want to

be doing. So a lot of times with guys is if they're cut off from their emotions, they are cut off from their emotions, they are highly over indexed on their rational mind. And everything is through the lens of rationality and logic. And there's no sense of like, this is how I feel about this. If you ask like, well, how do you feel about your girlfriend or wife or partner? What do you think that you should get married? There's a lot of rational explanation that won't necessarily tell you at all how they feel. So there's a disconnection from, um, from oftentimes a physical sense of what's happening inside of them. So when you say, what do you think about this? And can you feel it anywhere in your body?

There's generally no sense of like, yeah, I feel anger here in my chest, or I can feel sadness in my gut, or I feel shame here. It's like a nervous system decapitation. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's a complete disconnection from the body. And another good one is what I call emotional constipation, you know, where somebody really has a hard time expressing, experiencing, or even acknowledging that they are feeling something, whether that's because there's a threat to them or they've just been conditioned not to, so emotional constipation is another really big sign

that somebody's pretty cut off from their emotions. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, it's officially 2025 and that business idea that you've been thinking about for ages is collecting dust on the shelf. It is time to do the thing. Here's the good news. Shopify makes it unbelievably simple to create your brand, open for business and actually get your first sale.

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and be like, wait, no, but like, I must be able to think my way out of this. Is that, is that some, is this a thinking problem? Well, so I'll give you Einstein for a second, then I'll answer your question directly. He said, the rational mind is a faithful servant and the intuitive mind is a sacred gift. And we've created a culture that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. And so in psychology, there's something called the rider and the elephant and the rider is your rational mind. And in the West, in our culture, we've largely over-indexed that rider who's on top of the elephant. And the elephant is your intuitive mind, it's your emotional body, it's your physical body, which has a tremendous amount of power, a tremendous amount of information. There's actually more information being sent from

your body up into your brain than from your brain down into your body, which is the work of Bessel van der Kolk from The Body Keeps the Score. And so, I think in some ways we've been conditioned to really overindex that rational mind because there's safety in it, right? There's safety in not having to really understand what's happening in our body. And for a lot of men, what they feel internally is intense, right? When a guy feels anger, it feels intense. It feels like a threat. When a guy feels anger, it feels intense. It feels like a threat. And he's been told not to be dangerous. He's been told not to be a threat. He's been told not to scare people and not to raise his voice and be a good boy and comply. And some of these things can really shut a man down from feeling his emotions, don't cry, et cetera. So it's less of a thinking problem and it's more a lack of

modeling what it looks like to feel your feelings. We've gone through generations of men where they just literally were not taught to feel their feelings or they were actively taught to suppress what they were experiencing. And I don't know if it was on your show, another show where I talked about going through World War II where all of these sayings came out of world war two, like man up, you know, was to go get into the tank, right? Suck it up. I don't know if this is a hundred percent true or not. There's like different accounts of it, but suck it up.

And then when you were in the plane and you puked into your air mask, you literally had to suck it back in and swallow it so you can continue fighting. into your air mask, you literally had to suck it back in and swallow it. So you continue fighting. And so there's all of these adages where men have been put into horrendous situations that require them for survival purposes to deploy disassociation, to literally disassociate from what they are feeling in their body. You know, if you're having to go and kill the enemy, you in some way have to disconnect from your emotional body and become hardened.

It's just a rational thing. It's like either I kill them or they kill me. And so there's many, many different examples of social conditioning, environmental conditioning, just historical pieces that have led to us as men really having to shut down our emotions. environmental conditioning, just historical pieces that have led to us as men really having to shut down our emotions. But to get more directly to it on the individual level, and maybe make this more practical for the individual, I think that for a lot of men, it feels like a threat.

It's like there's a threat to their relationship if they open up and are emotional. There's a threat to their ability to perform if they open up and are relational. And there's just a lack, again, of being taught how to feel what's happening inside of them. And when that happens, you just go into your head. You just live in your thoughts and you're constantly just in the mode of perception. Right. So the way I like to look at this is that your, your senses are how you perceive reality and your emotions are how you experience reality.

So there's your perception of your partner. There's your perception of the ice cream. There's the perception of how your burger smells. And then there's the experience, the direct experience of that relationship, that experience that you're going through at the party with your friends or eating the hamburger at the burger joint. There's the experience of that. And that's where emotions really come into play. And for a lot of men, we just sit in the seat of perception and explanation versus our direct experience because sometimes our direct experience is highly intense or it's very challenging.

It was very threatening and we've not really been taught what to do with that. Okay. Teach us what to do with that. How do people get started to feel their feelings? Okay. First place, a hundred percent is awareness. So you need to start to develop body oriented awareness. I call it your DFE, your direct felt experience.

So with every single emotion, you can think of any, every single emotion as a specific charge, like an electrical charge and every charge has a, a very specific experience, somatically or physiologically in your body. So for example, if you get angry, you might have some heat start to build up in your chest or you can feel your hands start to get a little agitated. Maybe your feet start to tap, right? Some people like bob their feet up and down. Your face might start to get flushed. Your breathing might start to get tense. But every emotional charge has a very specific somatic or physiological response, shame, grief, sadness, et cetera.

So if you're wanting to develop emotional mastery, where you need to begin is just asking yourself the question, what somatic experience or what physical experience accompanies each emotion. And as men, this might start with just having some awareness of saying, I feel angry right now, or I feel sad right now, or I feel happy right now. And just beginning to have some awareness that you are feeling what you're feeling.

Because again, depending on how nervous system de you know, uh, nervous system get decapitated. You are like that expression or how emotionally constipated you are, how backed up you are just developing that first awareness of being able to acknowledge, ah, I am feeling something is a really, really important step for the majority of men. So we need to start there. Do you want to add anything in or ask anything before we keep going? You're on a roll. Let's keep rolling. So once you've developed that awareness Do you want to add anything in or ask anything before we keep going?

You're on a roll. Let's keep rolling. So once you've developed that awareness, then you need to be able to learn what to do with each emotion and every emotion's a little bit different. I think one of the main emotions that men contend with often is anger. And for, for men, anger is usually the emotion that we deploy. It's the emotion that we reject the hardest, because maybe we've been told, don't feel that, don't experience that.

And so what you want to start to do is to use your breath because your breath is the modulation dial of your nervous system, of your autonomic nervous system specifically. And your emotions are largely being produced in your autonomic nervous system specifically. And your emotions are largely being produced in your autonomic nervous system between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. You're oscillating back and forth between those two and it's sending data and information up into the brain to your hypothalamus and amygdala. And they're determining threat response and all those types of things. But what you want to start to do is to bring awareness into your body by using the breath.

And so getting more and more attention on your inhales, on your exhales and beginning to locate where do I actually experience that emotion in the body. And being able to really detail it. So when you feel anger, what does anger feel like in your body? So for me, I kind of feel like the Ironman power core in my chest light up. And then the angrier that I get, the more it just starts to pulse out through my chest, into my arms, down into my legs. And if it reaches up into my head, then I know I'm screwed. That's when it's just like, there's definitely a cause for a pause there because your emotions can hijack your brain, right?

Your, your emotions can hijack your communication and how you're interacting. So begin to vary as much as you can with as much detail as you can, describe the physical experience of your emotions. Describe what it's like when you feel anger, describe what it's like when you feel sadness or grief or joy or frustration, whatever it is. Embarrassment. Really begin to describe what happens. Does your breath start to slow? Does it become constricted in your throat? Do you start to feel like you're closing down in your chest and you're collapsing?

Do you feel like you want to run? Like what actually accompanies that emotion? And then once you have that emotional awareness, you can move into beginning to understand if or what that emotion is trying to tell you. So every emotion again, can have some important data and information that it's trying to relay, right? Maybe a boundary has been crossed in your relationship and this is what happens all the time. So I'll give a good example that maybe is going to help guys.

Anger is necessary for setting boundaries, just as an example. So if you're disconnected from your anger and you think that your anger is a problem. Very likely you have piss poor boundaries. You get walked all over. You do not have any like real sense of no, or I'm not okay with this because your anger is an alarm system sometimes that a boundary has been crossed. So being able to identify, Oh, I feel heat in my chest. I feel heat in my face. I can feel like in my chest. I feel heat in my face.

I can feel like I'm angry. Then we can create a little bit of space from the anger. So it's not, I am angry because that's usually where we're acting and responding from that place. But we create a little bit of a pause from awareness of the emotion, the sense of the emotion, a little bit of space. And then is there something that we want to communicate or express? Not from that emotion, but maybe that something was crossed or somebody

overstepped a boundary or that you felt embarrassed about something or whatever it is that the emotion is trying to alert you to. So that's a good sort of breakdown of what you can begin to do with your emotions. There's more that we can get into for all those, but that's a kind of a good like four step, what you do. But the key to it is building awareness. And then the last step that I'll give you is to build some tolerance. So for a lot of men, there's a very low tolerance of threshold. And so grief starts to come up or sadness starts to come up and there's zero room for it. And so they shut it down immediately and anger starts to come up

and they have zero resilience to it. And so they just explode externally. And so part of what we need to do is we need to actually sit with our emotions. We actually need to sit with them in them, if you want, not wallowing in them, not feeling sorry for ourselves, but we actually need to give ourselves time to feel into what it's like in our body. Because for a lot of guys, it's like, I don't like how I'm feeling. And so I want to get away from this as quickly as humanly possible. I don't like my anger. I don't like this sadness.

I don't like this grief. I don't like this frustration. I want to shut it down as quickly, seemingly possible. Men, I'll give another example with anger, men that struggle with anger. One of the best things that they can begin to do is to sit in the anger when it arises. So I give guys that have, you're not like rage issues, but anger problems, low temper. What we'll start to do is, okay, when you feel angry and you feel that anger at like a two, because again, every emotion has a charge and then it also has an intensity.

So a good way that I like to think about this is label the charge and label the intensity. Okay. I'm feeling the charge of anger. How intense is it? It's a two. Okay. I'm feeling the charge of anger. It's a, it's an eight.

Okay. Well, if it's above a seven, it's probably cause for a pause because that means that your prefrontal cortex, your, your cognitive functions are starting to become impaired and you are likely not going to respond properly. So that would be a good cause for a pause. And then you go sit and with anger, specifically, I call it the fire meditation. You sit in that anger and you just breathe and you just notice what's happening in your body because for a lot of guys, anger hasn't really been a safe thing. Maybe you grew up around a parent who was angry and abusive or violent or hostile.

And so anger feels like a visceral threat in your body. So you have to begin to condition your body to have a higher tolerance for feeling some of these emotions. And what that will do is it will slowly over time, train your brain to know I can be angry and that can be safe or I can feel grief and that can be okay. Whatever the emotion is. So charge and intensity, and then sitting with the emotion to actually build some level of tolerance around it. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark.

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Right now you can get 10% off everything from Gymshark sitewide by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 a checkout. That's gym.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10, a checkout. Can you just take us through that process? Those four steps again. Yep. So number one, develop awareness, have some awareness around the

charge that's in your body. And that charge is just your, whatever the emotion is, right? Whatever, whether it's anger or grief or sadness, et cetera. Number two, after you have the basic awareness is label the experience of the emotion of the charge in your body. So I feel the charge of anger in my chest and label the intensity of it. So I feel the charge of anger in my chest and it's a, it's a five. Right.

And then step number three is try and describe it as much as humanly possible. Grab a journal, grab the notes app on your phone, whatever it works for you, and just try and write it out as much as humanly possible. And then number four is try and identify what the emotion is wanting to express. So a good prompt for that is, you know, if my anger had a voice, what it would say is, or if my sadness had a voice, what it would say is, and give that emotion some level of expression. That doesn't mean, just very important caveat, that you are going to launch whatever the anger says out at somebody else. It means that you're going to write that down. You're going to

reflect on it and you're going to, and this is what a lot of therapists say, process what is maybe relevant or important about what that emotion is saying. Most people just throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to emotions. It's like, well, my emotion is saying this, and so I'm either gonna vomit it all over somebody, which is not emotional intelligence, or I'm going to ignore it entirely.

That's not emotional intelligence. We wanna feel it, we wanna want to be able to identify it. We want to feel it in our body. We want to be able to sit with it. And then we want to be able to parse through if there's relevant information and data that our emotions are actually bringing up to us. Where do people get stuck the most and how do they get stuck the most during this process? the most and how do they get stuck the most during this process? So for men, where they get stuck is usually in the permission stage. It's, it's actually giving themselves permission to feel their feelings because there's a whole slew of what ifs that usually come along for, for, for them And just giving themselves permission to say,

okay, I don't know how I feel most of the time, or I am emotionally constipated, I am disconnected from my emotions. Because for a lot of guys, what they say is, yeah, well, so what? Like I don't feel my feelings, what's the big deal? It's like, well, if you don't feel your feelings, then no one else around you can feel you.

They can't interact with you relationally. They, they don't know whether you're really happy or sad. Uh, and most of the time what people get from men when they're around them is you're angry or you're just not there. So the permission stage is a big place where guys get angry. Um, the, the second stage is the tolerance stage. Um, it can be really challenging for you to build up any level of tolerance, especially because the majority of men are carrying around an intensity inside of them that is very hard

for them to manage. So some men, the intensity that they're feeling is way too much energy and that's, you know, we label that as anxiety in today's culture. So for some men, they're carrying around so much energy. And that's, you know, we label that as anxiety in today's culture. So for some men, they're carrying around so much energy in their body, whether it's because of trauma or it's because of life circumstances, or it's just their natural state, they just naturally have a tremendous amount of energy internally that they don't know how to deal with that energy for other men.

It's a lot of anger for other men, it's a lot of anger. For other men, they have a lot of grief and sadness. And when they really start to try and build tolerance around it, their natural mechanism of, I don't want to deal with this, so let me just have another drink, open up the web browser and watch porn and jerk off and get rid of this feeling is so intense. And that's what most of us have been conditioned to do. Most men have been conditioned to deal with their emotions by

jerking off and watching porn, smoking weed, drinking alcohol. All of those things are wonderful for hitting the reset button or numbing out what you're feeling. So developing tolerance is a really, really big challenge for a lot of men because when you start, you feel like you suck. There's just no, it's like, you know, it's like, I took my son skiing for the very first time

and he's never been on skis. So he, he sucks, you know? I mean, he did pretty good all things considering. He's probably about as good as me on skis, I fear. I mean, he's three and a half. So he's, he's figuring it out, but you're starting at a place of lacking competence.

And we as men hate lacking competence. We hate lacking competence. And so you have to be willing to be in a place for a little while where you are almost frustrated with the process because, you know, if you're somebody that is dealing with anger and you're angry and you keep losing your temper at your girlfriend or your wife or whatever and you're trying to develop some tolerance for it so that you have a higher

threshold of not losing your temper, it can be very frustrating at first because for a while you're going to sit with your anger and you sit down, you're angry, you set a timer for two, three, four, five minutes, just something manageable at the beginning. You're going to feel, well, probably at first you're going to curse me for giving you this exercise, which is what inevitably happens. But then you're going to feel like it's impossible because for the majority of men, that intense emotion that they're carrying around inside of them has overpowered them constantly throughout their life. Their depression, their anxiety, their anger, their rage,

their embarrassment, their shame. It's dominated them to some degree. And what you're really trying to do is sit with the enemy. For most men, their intense emotion that they're carrying, they've perceived it as the enemy. It's the thing that they do battle with, again, whether it's depression, anxiety, et cetera. And so there's this inner civil war that's constantly happening with that anxiousness that they're like, fuck you, I hate you, I don't want to feel you. Or, God, this anger is want to feel you. Or, God, this anger is ruining my fucking life. It's ruined my marriage, it ruined my career. I hate this part of me. But by sitting with it, you over time are starting to build a relationship

of acceptance, of acknowledgement, of understanding. You can even start to sit with like, well, where did this emotion, where did the intensity of this emotion come in the first place? So that inflection point of starting to try and build tolerance is really hard for a lot of men. For me, as an example, I'll just use myself, I have a tremendous amount of energy, like Energizer Bunny level energy. And so beginning this process was really hard because I had a lot of anger and I had a lot of intensity and just a, just a boatload of energy. And so sitting down with my anger when it would pop up and it would come up and it would usually show up in, you know, my intimate relationship or close

friendships, it was really hard at first because that's where my inner critic would start to spin up and I'd be shit talking myself and this is ridiculous and I want to do this. But that's really the place where you start to reconcile with this intensity that's living inside of you that's oftentimes keeping you away from the people that you love, creating distance from the goals that you want to achieve, et cetera. So those are the places where guys really get hung up. Talking about maybe the other side of the fence energetically, from an emotion standpoint, stuff like sadness, anxiety, shame, depression.

Is there a different way that guys should think about trying to feel those? Energetically, you know, things like anger and anxiety and panic and fear, they're often very externally pushing where things like grief and sadness and depression, they're very, um, it's like an anvil on the chest. Okay. So once more- Let's talk about the anvil one. Yeah.

One's more impulsive, one's more explosive. I like this quote that says that grief is praise. Grief is praise because it is the natural way that love honors what it misses. That's Martin Prechtel. I like this notion because for many of us, for many guys, and I won't speak for guys because we hate that, but for many guys, we've been taught you're weaker for grieving, you're weaker for being sad, you're weaker if you deal with depression and that compounds it, the hiding of your depression and your

grief will compound your grief and your depression for sure. It's the surest way to have more grief and more depression. So what we need to do is start to express, right? So for the explosive emotions, we need to begin to slow, we need to begin to slow our breath. We need to begin to sit with them. We need to be able to understand that we can trust ourselves when that really intense emotion starts to come up. And sometimes that means that you are labeling it, right? So I'm in with every man that I ever work with, I say, you have to determine what a cause for a pause is for you.

If you're dealing with those explosive emotions and a cause for a pause is for you. If you're dealing with those explosive emotions and that cause for a pause might be that you have a physical response or that you say something in your relationship. And then you say, you know what, this is cause for pause. I need to pause because I'm getting so whatever you want to say, angry or dysregulated or unable to communicate with the heavier emotions. It's the inverse. Those heavier emotions almost want to cause you to be inebriated.

You know, they, they want to slow down your movement to such a degree where it feels like you can't do anything. And with grief specifically, I'm going to speak to grief first. On a point there, I think a lot of people will think when no one's died, why would I be grieving? How does grief show up in ways that we might not realize it? Yeah. Oh man.

I mean, there's so, there's so much that you can grieve. Um, I like to say that we walk through life with grief and gratitude hand in hand all the time. I mean, grief can be about, grief can be about the, the, not just the loss of a person or the death that can be a transition, you know, you might be transitioning in a career, you may have gotten a promotion and you're not working with the same people anymore

and you're grieving the loss of the team that you are working with. I mean, grief really is tied to transition. So any type of transition that you experience, there's likely going to be a grief that comes along with it. And it can even be, I mean. I'll give you an example, this might sound strange, but I reached a point in my life five, six years ago where, this is before my son was born, where I was married to this wonderful woman,

my career was going really well. And I had this very unique type of grief, which was, holy shit, I made it. Holy shit. I didn't die. I didn't kill myself. I didn't get dragged underneath the weeds of alcoholism or drug addiction or, you know, some of the heavy shit that I was dealing with. I reached escape velocity. I reached escape velocity. And there was a really unique type of, it wasn't elation. It wasn't happiness. It was a type of grief that I had been carrying in me of like, holy crap. I didn't know if I would actually reach this point.

Fascinating. And I think that people experienced that a lot. And so grief isn't just about loss. Sometimes grief is about achievement. You know, I mean, I've, I've worked with NFL athletes and NHL players and rappers, heavy metal artists, and sometimes their greatest grief comes when they win the award, when they

win the Stanley cup or the, you know, the, uh, I'm like blanking on that NFL one. Clearly I'm Canadian, right? I'm like, all hockey references. Um, but sometimes the grief comes in those moments where you achieve the thing and the, the effort that you've been carrying around and everything is, you know, comes out. So, so grief is a very specific one where it needs expression and it needs witness.

Um, there's, there's almost no way around it. I like to say that grief that's not witnessed is not processed. So if you have grief of a former relationship, a marriage that's ended, a relationship that's ended, and you will not let anybody see that grief, you cannot fully process the ending of the relationship. And this is why people stay in this space. Why can't I let them go? How come I can't move on from the relationship. And this is why people stay in this space. Why can't I let them go? How come I can't move on from the relationship? Well, you haven't actually let anybody see you grieve. And we've in our culture made it very strange to deal with grief because, I mean,

we have all these sayings now, right? It's like, oh, you know, his friend got diagnosed with cancer and he gave me the ick. You know, he was crying about his friend getting diagnosed. I saw this meme the other day. It was exactly this. Um, and, and so I think we have this, we have this social stigma around people grieving and we want it to be over quite quickly. And so usually for people, they, they hide their grief instead of express it and expose it.

And it needs that, you know, in, in this to be done. Relationally with somebody else. Yes. Yeah. Whether that's, you know, that, whether that's with that, you could do it with the therapist or a psychologist or a coach counselor, but ideally you're doing it with people who love you and who know you and who can, can witness you through that, you know, there's again, it's this notion that grief is the natural way that we honor what love misses. And that's a very important part of human nature. Oftentimes, what we end up doing is we defer grief. We try and push it down the road and it turns into a slow depression. So grief needs to be witnessed and it needs to be expressed.

You need to be able to say, I'm grieving the loss of X, Y, and Z, or I'm grieving the movement and the space in my life. I'm grieving the transition into this place. And to have somebody that can witness it and actually reflect back like, yeah, I get that. That's terrible. And so having people in our lives that can do that is important. I think with things like depression, expression is important, being witnessed is important, but there's also a kind of pressing out that's required. You actually

have to begin to move outside of the confines because depression is this thing that kind of closes in on your heart, on your mind, on your emotions, on your thinking. And it really becomes this like weighted blanket that you can't get out from underneath of. And so sometimes you need the expression of, I'm feeling this way. You need to be witnessed, but you also need people who are maybe are going to say, let me help you up. So sometimes part of depression is saying, I actually need help. I need you to help me get out of this funk because I don't know what to do. You know, it's like being caught in, um, in quicksand. It's like you, you probably need somebody to help get you out of the quicksand.

That's really what depression is emotionally. So part of depression is emotionally. So part of depression is asking for help, asking for support without falling into the trap of obfuscating the responsibility to the other person. Because oftentimes what happens with depression is this victim mindset sets in of I'm worthless, I can't do anything. I'm not able to get out of this. And then there's this, I need a savior to come and get me out of it. So we can ask for help without actually, causing somebody else to do that, to pull us out. And I think with something like depression,

there's just no way around it, working out, like go to the gym, go to the gym and work out and work out ruthlessly. At first it might feel like just getting your ass to the gym, go to the gym and work out and work out ruthlessly. You know, at first it might feel like just getting your ass to the gym once or twice a week is like everything that you can do. But with something like depression, that's really going to help you doing breath work that is very, very helpful for things like grief and depression and sadness. A lot of the times our emotions, we have all of these psychological barriers to getting into our emotions. And sometimes things like breath work and psychedelics can shut down what's called the

default mode network, which is our thinking mind. And it can access our deeper feeling body much quicker. So you can do breath work to, you know, like the intense Wim Hof or holotropic breathing, those types of breath works. If you do them long enough, can really help you to access you know, like the intense Wim Hof or holotropic breathing, those types of breath works, if you do them long enough can really help you to access a lot of that emotion and get it out. Um, with things like- So bizarre if you're, uh, sort of deep in a breath work practice like that.

And there's just this thing starts bubbling up and you're like, what the fuck are you, like, why are you, what are you doing that you're here? Like, I'm just breathing. I do this all the time. I literally have done this since I was born. And this very weird particular pattern of it has caused this reaction to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the, your body keeps the score, but I mean, that's why I say that emotions are the language of the body, right? Is that they're trying to express something. They're trying to speak something. And sometimes it's, it's from a time in your life, it's nonverbal.

You might be going through something that has no memory attached to it from when you were one or two or three, or you're expressing grief that you never dealt with or processed from a breakup, or that you never worked through properly. And you go into breath work and all of a sudden, you know, like you said, it bubbles up and, and go. So, so those are some, those are some helpful ways to, to move through things like grief, sadness, and, and depression, but we could get more granular with them, but those are some high level ways.

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I think, you know, one of the common or most likely criticisms that I'm anticipating is that men have this desire to be consistent and reliable. And there is an expectation of mastery of your emotional state among men, from other men, from your partner. Uh, how do you think about balancing that desire for mastery with a desire to not suppress emotions? You know, people don't want to feel ashamed about the things that they feel. And what you've said, there's this great story about Tiger Woods, where he had a bunch of

inefficiencies in his swing and he was good, but he was never going to be great. And one of the problems was that he had, I think it was too much movement on his backswing and he needed to, from the ground up, rebuild his entire swing. But the problem is he wasn't even starting playing golf from scratch. He had to get rid of all of the habits that he had brought in and make himself purposefully worse before he was then able to reach the next level that he was going to go to while also having all of the expectation on him and all of the comparison internally and externally of his previous

performance and oh my God, he's fallen off, he's gotten worse, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I imagine that it's a tough sell to get guys to think, okay, so you're saying that I'm going to actively make myself worse for an undetermined as yet undetermined, perhaps sort of infinite amount of time. Uh, and it's going to suck and I'm not going to be rewarded for it until who knows how far down it's like, it's like ordering an Uber and having no idea when it's going to arrive. Um, you know what I mean?

So yes, that, that is what I'm saying for better or for worse. That is what I'm saying. And I'm very clear when men come into work with me, because I seem to attract a lot of like finance guys that are hyper linear. They're very good at what they do. Hedge fund owners, you know, guys that are Wall Street traders. And they've lived in their brain for a very, very long time. They inevitably say, but I don't want anything to suffer. I don't want to slide back in any way,

shape or form. It's like, well, then you are going to no matter what. The consequence of not feeling your feelings is that you will inevitably sabotage in one way or another. So either you take the reins and you actively move into a position of potency by saying, I'm going to try and address this or those emotions will inevitably be a downfall for you in some way, shape or form that you just, they just can't. Not guys have a fear of the loss of power. Right.

I'm powerful. I'm competent. I'm in control and this thing stops all of those from happening. Correct. Well, you, what you mean, emotions stop you from having power? It stops you from feeling powerful, at least in the first instance, as you start to go through things. I'm aware that, you know, the gold standard is to get to the stage where you use your

emotions to inform you so that you're significantly more powerful. I mean, my reframe around this very much is a white belt at feeling feelings and, you know, like the hopeful, uh, wide eyed desire to like actually make it to somewhere appropriating the top of the mountain. Um, is the, I, I don't see denying yourself of your weaknesses to be any kind of strength, that suppression isn't strength, that denying yourself of your weaknesses to be any kind of strength. Correct. That suppression isn't strength, that denying yourself of it, of what it is that you're feeling isn't strength and that true power to me is feeling

the thing and being able to show up anyway. Uh, like that's what courage is. Um, and the goal that everybody's trying to get to is to like, you know, like fucking experience the fullness of the, the, the, the human, the human world, uh, in a landscape, uh, and not to nerf your way through this, like weird self programmed autism and a desperate attempt to, you know, like be able to fucking increase your on your profits by 20%. Yeah. Well, and who knows how you might perform,

how you might increase profits afterwards living more fully. And even, even another question on top of that, who knows if you wouldn't give a single shit about the profits given that you're now, you now have direct access to the thing that you were trying to do in any case, which is an enjoyable emotional state. Correct. Well, this is, I think what you're talking about is there is an intersection between feeling your feelings and finding a purpose. You unequivocally cannot find a deep sense of purpose. I mean, maybe not unequivocally, there are very, very, very, very, very few cases that I have ever come across of men that have found deep meaning and purpose and fulfillment in life who are shut off from their emotions.

It requires you to go through the territory of the unknown, which is your emotions. They're the things that are the battlefield that you're really, if you're honest with yourself, most men are afraid to go into. And that loss of power that you're talking about, are you familiar with Richard Rohr? He's a Franciscan, I think he's a Franciscan monk. He's quite old now, but he has this great saying where until a man experiences a journey of powerlessness, he will always abuse power. And the real essence of what initiation used to be, boys used to go through initiation processes that put them into the realm of being a man. And part of that initiation was you were powerless,

you got thrust out into some experience where you literally could not dominate it. You couldn't conquer it. You couldn't overcome it. You had to experience what it was like to move and be in relationship with something that was bigger than you that could conquer you that that you are somewhat powerless against, and that's really what I've been talking about in terms of developing you that, that you are somewhat powerless against. And that's really what I've been talking about in terms of developing that tolerance with your emotion, right? If you are a man who has this really deep darkness inside of you, that's heavy,

that, you know, feels like it's overwhelming you constantly. It's like, well, that's a type of an initiatory experience. You are up against something that you feel powerless against. Same with your anger, same with your anxiety, same with whatever it is. Right. I mean, fill in the blank with whatever emotion feels like it's too much for you to handle. And so the formula isn't to just ignore any of your emotions.

You will not find a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in that. The formula is to move into and actively choose that state of powerlessness. And for a period of time, not forever, not to wallow in it, not to be like, I'm a helpless, useless, you know, human being. But if you look at any of the great myths out there, like the Odyssey or the Iliad, they go on a journey of powerlessness. That's what it's all about. It's about you venturing out into the unknown, being put in powerless position

after powerless position and learning something extremely useful about yourself. And so as men, part of how we develop a deeper sense of maturity and mastery in life is that we begin to put ourselves in positions where we feel those feelings and those emotions inside of us that feel overwhelming, that feel like they're going to collapse our life. And I see this all the time in guys where it's just like, I've been holding this grief or this anxiety at bay for years, and I feel like it's about to blow absolutely everything up and I'm

afraid to let myself feel it. And that's the space that you have to enter into, uh, because in that is, again, it's all the data and the information. I mean, you read somebody like Marcus Aurelius, what he's really talking about is there like, he is one of the most emotionally adept writers that I've ever come across. He's just talking about his direct experience of reality, of existence, of ruling a kingdom, of going to war, of loving, of women. Like he's talking from a very emotionally experiential place, but it's, it's very

processed in a way where you can tell that there's a maturity there that he's been working on his emotions for a very, very long time. It's not that he's completely disconnected from them. It's that he's built such a deep relationship to his emotions and to his experience that he's able to articulate life in a way that draws all of us towards it. So yes, you will likely feel a loss of power. No, that's not sexy, but will likely feel a loss of power. No, that's not sexy, but you will likely learn, you will learn something about yourself that you know is missing right now. That's been my experience that the thing that you think is missing in your life,

whether it's in your marriage, your relationship, your sex life, your finances, your sense of purpose. It's in this place of going into our emotions and feeling cumbersome and like a beginner and sort of fumbling around at first for, okay, I'm going to let myself express rather than explain. Maybe we should talk about that difference, but I'm going to, I'm going to let myself feel my feelings and see what happens and be honest about what I'm experiencing. You know, Jordan Peterson says, tell the truth

and it'll take you on an adventure. Well, part of your truth is that you are feeling something and being honest about what you're feeling is brutal. Sometimes it is fucking brutal, but man, does it take you on an adventure and man can it lead you to a deep sense of purpose and meaning and love and connection in life that far surpasses anything that your rational mind can conjure up anything.

Talk to me about that explaining, expressing dichotomy. So when we live this, okay, most men, we live in, we live in explaining. This is where the term mansplaining comes from, right? We love to explain things. It's like never man's pressing. That's right. We should, there's, there's the hashtag that's going to come out of this man's pressing that's going to, we're going to popularize that.

Um, but we live in, we love to explain, we love to explain how things work. Again, it's the over indexing on the rational mind and it creates a ton of challenges in our relationship because what women are really asking for is express what you want, express what you're experiencing, express what you desire. And we try explaining it to them. And that's, it's like speaking two different languages. So to explain something is to say, this is how it works. This is why I think it's a good idea. You know, this is how it's going to unfold. It's, it's really the how it's really the, the what, what things look like, what things sound like, et cetera. It's expressing something is more about your, again, your, your DFE,

your direct felt experience. So when you went through that, when you had that conflict or that argument with your girlfriend, what expressed that? What was the feeling? What was the feeling? is more about your, again, your DFE, your direct felt experience. So when you went through that, when you had that conflict or that argument with your girlfriend, what express what you experienced? You know, were you disappointed? Did you feel frustrated with how the conversation went because you've had this conversation time and time again? Like what were you actually experiencing from your first person

subjective experience? What happened inside of you? And the more that you can express, the more that you're tuning into that other data set that is equally as important as the what and how things are going to unfold. Yeah. It's interesting. I remember you saying, uh, we never really encountered the world. All we experience are, is our own nervous system.

Uh huh. And, uh, yeah, this, if you're not getting to the point where you can tap into what you're feeling, you're even another step away from experiencing the world. Correct. You're, you're always in the position when you're trying to explain everything and, and you're just in your rational mind, you're one step away from the actual experience of your reality. So that means you're one step away from the experience of the love and the joy and the frustration and the anger and the whole thing. And so this is why for a lot of men, there, it's a very safe place to be.

You can operate from that place, but I think for a lot of guys, this is where the disconnect from their life comes. Right. It's like, I, I don't like my life. I feel like something's missing. I feel like some, you know, feel miserable or the, you know, there's just something not quite right. I have the passion.

I'm not fulfilled. I'm not passionate. I'm not fulfilled. I don't have those things. It's like, well, cause you're not actually letting yourself experience life because experiencing life can be challenging. You know, I, I was going to tell a story about you, but I won't do that. I was going to talk about our dinner.

Um, here I'll, I'll couch it this way. That's okay. And you can always cut this out. I remember having dinner with you at a point in time where you were in a rough state and I really appreciated how much you were grappling with this exact question. I could see you explaining what happened. I could see you explaining what was going on and why the decision, you know, was that it was, and I could, I could feel from you, I could experience from you,

the undercurrent of how hard it was for you. And that all of that, you were letting that slowly come to the surface. And when people let themselves experience and feel, we are able to connect to them more deeply. It was, I really felt much more close to you in that moment, closer than I'd ever felt to you before. Because all of you was there. It wasn't a concept.

I could actually feel like, oh, there's what Chris is experiencing about this, you know, moment in time in his life. And it really has an effect on him. this moment in time in his life. And it really has an effect on him. What are some of the ways that people can notice or protect themselves from slipping back into the cerebral world? Like if you've spent your entire life intellectualizing, reflecting your way through, you know, there's a four step human process for me to et cetera,

et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. How, how can we stop our brain coming in and sort of clamping that down or explaining it away or coming up with some nice theory about it? Yeah. So ask yourself if you're explaining or expressing, start there, start with that as number one. Am I explaining what happened or what I think is going on or am I expressing what I'm actually experiencing? Am I expressing what I'm actually feeling about the divorce, about the shit at work, about the stuff that's happening with the kids? Am I actually expressing what's going on? So just start to notice the difference because when you're explaining something, there's no emotional connection. There's almost none. There's no feeling sense

in your body. When you're expressing something, how I feel it, how most people describe it, is that you actually feel as though you are communicating with your body involved in some way, shape or form. You can actually feel your body as you're communicating. You can feel joy or a little bit of nervousness or whatever it is that you're experiencing as you're expressing. So just begin to ask yourself because what you want to do is you want to catch the pattern of falling back in to just explaining your way into oblivion. So that's number one is ask yourself, am I explaining or expressing and move towards expression?

Correct. Number two is create as much time as you can, ideally 30 to 60 minutes a day of untasked cognitive time. So this might be sorry, unstructured cognitive time. It might be stream of consciousness journaling, where you just write out whatever is happening inside of you. This is such an incredible exercise. I give it to all my clients, doesn't matter how much money they have, how successful they are. I give it to every single client or how not successful they are, et cetera.

successful they are, et cetera. You can go for a walk for 30 to 60 minutes with no music, no audio book. We clutter ourselves so heavily. Most of the men that I work with have very little unstructured cognitive time. And so at the very end of the day, they're laying in bed, scrolling through social media, trying to drown out the emotional information and data that's rising up to their mind, right? Instead of replaying that embarrassing conversation where you approach that girl and she was like,

no, I'm not gonna give you my phone number. You try and drown it out by doom scrolling through whatever your social media platform is. So have 30 to 60 minutes of unstructured cognitive time, stream of consciousness journaling, going for a walk, lay in bed for 30 to 60 minutes, give yourself an extra 30 minutes, go in bed, assume that it's going to take 30 to 60 minutes. And maybe just write down some of the things that, that you're experiencing. Uh, the last thing I would say is involve people in your life.

If you're in a relationship, one of the best ways, and even if you're not, you can get your buddies on board with this, is to have other people point out when you've moved into explaining versus expression. Now, this isn't to say that explaining isn't, I just want to put this caveat in there, doesn't mean that explaining isn't relevant or important for your life. There are some things that you absolutely need to explain at work and in board meetings. So make sure that you're not diminishing it entirely, but have other people who are going to support you. Like, you know, I asked you how you were doing today

and you started to explain to me what happened, you know, how are you actually feeling about that? So have other people that are in your corner, they're going to help you move towards that expression and communicating emotionally versus staying stuck in this rigid space. I found that to be really helpful, especially with army guys. I've worked with a lot of former Navy SEALs and military, and sometimes that accountability can be very, very helpful, especially for guys that they're trying to break a mold that they

have been conditioned to move against, right? Cause if you're in the military, you're really meant to shut off. Yeah. How much can men do all of this stuff by themselves? Some of it, you know, some of it you can do by yourself. Um, I really, uh, am a strong advocate for whether it's a men's group or a community of men that are doing some type of work like this because you can rapidly, I mean, it's like the trading bros on Reddit, right?

It's like, I don't know if you've ever been into like the trading forums on Reddit, if you've ever gone down that rabbit hole. Does Wall Street bets count? Yes, sure. Yeah. Why not? But like that's a community of men that have a mission and they can, you know, you can go sideways sometimes, but they can really support one another. And so if you find a community of guys that are supporting one another in this endeavor, it's going to help you, you know, exponentially when it comes to this,

because you're going to have other guys when it comes to this, because you're going to have other guys that are speaking this language, that are supporting you with this, that are witnessing you in the challenge and the process that you're going through. So I think for a lot of guys, they'll benefit from being in some type of community or group, because our tendency is to do it solo, right? We want to lone wolf all of this. And what I found is that most men, they try and like, I'm going to take myself away from society and away from relationship. I'm going to go work on myself. I'm going to go into monk mode for 12 months and I'm going to come back this perfect,

pristine human being. And that's not the case. You know, you need interaction with other people. And the point of doing this work oftentimes with other men is to work through some of the volatility that can come up. It's like, you're going to get into a men's group and inevitably one of the guys is going to piss you off, right? I mean, he's, he's, you're going to get frustrated.

He's like, he's talking about the same shit, you know, every single week, he's complaining about the same stuff. And the point of it is to voice and to express, I don't like this about you, right? Or to confront that part of you that would normally just keep quiet and sit back or would check out and tune out. So a big part of it is about doing that work amongst other men. I mean, you could go down the iron sharpens iron path, but it's just too cliche for me. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Sadly, I am in a couple of group chats called iron sharpens iron, which shows just how fucking basic me and the other guys that I'm with are.

No, it's beautiful. Anything else to say? Anything that we haven't included here that's mandatory listening? Anything that we haven't included here that's mandatory listening. I mean, I think there's just the, the, the statement. I almost want to say the cliche thing, which is like having emotions doesn't make you less of a man feeling. Your feelings doesn't make you less of a man being able to feel your feelings and articulate them properly actually makes you more of a man. And that's the standard now. That's the gold standard. And I would say it always has been.

If you look at the Stoics, they were just men who learned to be logical, to be hyperlogical, but to also express emotionally. Most of them were poets and playwrights and musicians, and they figured out how to express. And so if you want to find a deeper sense of purpose, I'm really trying to make a case for it because I get messages from men every day. I sent you one the other day who feel broken, who feel like they can't articulate what they're feeling, who are on the verge of

taking their own lives, who have suppressed their own emotions from the people in their life for years and are in really bad places. And my mission is to really support men like that. And you don't have to be in a bad place to start to feel your feelings. You don't have to be fucked up or broken to start feeling your feelings. You will unequivocally be better off for doing so. But man, I just wish that, yeah, I mean, I just wish that this was more normal

because I get emails and messages every day from men who have cut themselves off from their emotions and find themselves right at the brink, you know? And yeah, it's heartbreaking because I see so many men, I can't not look in men's eyes and not see their pain. And so, you know, I just wish that more men would share what's actually going on with them so they didn't feel so bloody alone in the world. Yeah, man. I mean, I know I feel like there is a corner being turned.

It's so hard because the thing that you're working on is the most important thing in the world while you're working on it. Uh, so I'm seeing this everywhere. You know, I'm seeing this everywhere. You know, I'm seeing the Sebum meme reels of him talking about how he's embraced this thing and it made him a better champion and better father and a stronger man and all the rest of the stuff. And, you know, Alain de Botton is fucking following me around the

internet at the moment with all emotionally and the same with your stuff and, but I don't know. I, I don't care. I, I don't care. Frankly, I don't care. I think that it's an optimal way for a particular subset, perhaps a majority, perhaps all men, I'm not going to say that it is, but I certainly know that for somebody that has a constitution that's like mine and that I'm not that much of an outlier, there must be a, you know, non-insignificant cohort of people that

also do it, that it's better, that life's better when I'm trying to much of an outlier. There must be a, you know, non-insignificant cohort of people that also do it, that it's better, that life's better when I'm trying to do that. When I'm trying to work with emotions as opposed to against them. When I'm trying to actually feel my feelings as opposed to deny them. When I feel connected to the things that I do because there's a sense of resonance between me and it. there's a sense of resonance between me and it, when I'm not trying to explain away what's going on in life, because I can come up with some clever sequence of letters and sounds that come out of my face hole. And then you leave the conversation thinking, well, at no point in that conversation was I there. I wasn't there in that conversation. I did this really cool dance or whatever.

And everybody there was really impressed by the dance, I'm sure, but there was no part of me that actually got seen during that. And, um, yeah, the full breadth of human experience is there for us to, to go through and, uh, I'm interested in finding out what's on the other side of it. So I think that this is maybe an important redress, uh, maybe a massive fucking error and we're going to look back and realize that, uh, you know, the suppression thing was right all along, but you can't, you can't look at the state of the way that guys feel in the world and say that whatever is happening is optimal.

Like the one thing that you can't do is defend the current system. Now I'm aware that this system has an awful lot of different inputs to do with socioeconomic status and their meaning in work and what's happening to sperm counts and testosterone levels and dating and online porn and video games and social media and like, yep, yep, all of those things are in there too, but everything should be on the fucking table. Like if stuff's not going well, everything should be on the table, including the psychological and emotional landscape that these guys are inhabiting. And, um, yeah, for me, it's, uh, it's what I'm working on.

It's what I'm interested in. I think it's, I like the, I like the group that I'm a part of. I like being a part of people like yourself and like Chris who, I don't know, like fucking for the people that have got a massive problem with it, or for the people that don't think that it's sufficiently masculine, it's like pick any vector of masculinity that you want. And somebody from my friend group will beat you in it. Yeah.

So if you want to play that game, if you want to play the shallow, like my dick's bigger than your dick game, it's like, I've got a fucking army of dicks behind me and, and I've got the biggest emotional dicks on the planet. Honestly, precisely correct. Um, yeah, I, I dunno, it just seems. I've got the biggest emotional dicks on the planet. Honestly, precisely correct. And, um, yeah, I, I dunno, it just seems, it seems petty and juvenile and immature looking at kind of previous versions of what guys are supposed to be. Uh, and I understand the whole, like, I keep seeing these fucking atrocious videos

of, or, or memes or whatever of like my husband did X and I got the ick and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of the stuff. I'm like, to be honest, I feel like the more that this happens, women should be fucking ashamed for that in the same way as guys who abandoned their partner because, you know, something happens on their side, some common erode or challenge that women come up against, something like that. It's like, you suck as a fucking partner and you don't deserve to have a guy in your life and I can't wait for him to find someone that he's going to support him and I can't wait for you to be alone until you realize this.

So that's what I meant about the emotional shit test that you want to find out quite early, earlier than you think you should, whether or not this person can handle it. And if they can handle a little bit of emotionality when they don't have the buy-in, they don't have the investment, the conviction, the attachments, the dependency, that bodes really fucking well for the future. And if you, if you just see this like run for the hills thing, you think, well, great, you've been saved.

You've been saved from having to invest more time into somebody who's so emotionally immature that they can't bear to deal with a guy who feels things. Yeah. Yeah. I saw this, I saw this, I just did a commentary on it. I saw this reel of this woman is like three or four women on the podcast. And they were talking about how, uh, the one woman started off and she said, when a man treats me well, I actually feel uncomfortable and I don't like it.

And the other women all agreed with her, you know? And I was like, what a fucking wild way to say that you like dysfunctional relationships, like, why don't you just say, I like dysfunctional men and dysfunctional relays, like just say that you like dysfunctional relationships? Like, why don't you just say, I like dysfunctional men and dysfunctional relations. Like just say that. Your job as a girl is to find somebody that if that's what you want, go and find it. I mean, I think it's an insane decision, but if

that's what you want, go and find it. And as a guy, if what you want is somebody that you can grow with, that you can bear the most difficult and shameful parts of yourself and heal them together with somebody and feel like this is home and that you're the roof of the house together, that you guys are safe underneath this roof that you've built together. You need to find out if it's a chick on a podcast that wants to, you know, be mistreated for a couple of decades before she bounces off into whatever next

relationship she's going to do. Or if it's a Vienna or a Courtney, Chris's wife, who want to genuinely see their partner. And yeah, the sort of birds of a feather flock together type thing. People will get what they deserve eventually, but you want to try and find out if you're getting what you deserve nice and early. That's a good way of putting it. That's a good way of putting it, man. I mean, I think, I think the, the, the last thing

I was going to say around like dealing with emotions. I love that. I love that notion of finding out early on whether somebody's on the same page as you, uh, emotionally and having those sort of like emotional tests, you know, like, are you okay with, can we go through a hard time and come out the other side? Okay. Or, you know, do you completely fall apart or are you not interested in the same things as me? But I think for the guys that are out there and they're not

a hundred percent sure where to begin, and you just want one thing to take away from, from all this. It's just start by acknowledging what you are avoiding emotionally. Just start there. Just start by acknowledging with somebody in your life. Like I'm avoiding how angry I am. I'm avoiding how depressed I actually am. I haven't been honest about how much anxiety I actually have, or that I'm fucking scared all the time. Now, like just start with what you've been repressing.

And sometimes that can be such a powerful first step. I mean, Jung said that, um, confession is the first step of any therapeutic process and just that admission can be enough to put you on a path of expression and tuning into your emotions on a much deeper level and just practicing that, just having that become routine of like, I haven't been honest about this part of how I've been feeling. I haven't been honest about that part of how I'm feeling and just being truthful about what you've been experiencing internally with somebody that you trust, with somebody that

is on board with that, setting that up properly is important, not just dumping it on them, ad hoc and hoping that it goes well, being like that Connor guy gave me bad advice. Setting it up properly and making sure that they're on board for this process. But once you go down that path, I mean, it can lead you into developing much better friendships, much more transparent friendships like we're talking about, and a much deeper relationship where I think the greatest demand within any human being is to be fully known. I think that there's something in us that is magnetically pulling us towards being known. And to set up relationships where we can be fully known in a way that is healthy and not about attention seeking

or grandiose validation or- Or wallowing in your own misery. Wallowing in your own misery. And it's not about any of that, but it's about actually being authentically and genuinely known by somebody else who cares about you. Like what's the alternative? Like where else are you going to find that level of intimacy?

Really? You know, you can have a twin brother or sister and you're not going to be able to share quite the same things that you can in a relationship because you just don't have the same underpinning of attachment. True. In that same way. And, uh, yeah, man, you can have a safe and numb existence for the rest of time, or you can switch the color on the TV and start to actually experience things fully.

Dude, I love you to bits. I adore all of your work. You know that I do. Everyone needs to check out everything that you're doing. Why should they go? Uh, just go to man talks.com. You can check out my book there. We have a men's community.

You can check it all out there. So man talks.com or on YouTube or on Instagram. It's just man talks. Everyone needs to go and check it out until next time, dude. I can't wait. I appreciate you. Thanks buddy. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best

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