I always thought being in a mature committed relationship was the greatest test of my communication skills.

Until I had a kid.

Now this is easily the greatest testing ground for my communication, my emotional and nervous system regulation.

It’s the greatest test of my shit and the work I’ve done on myself over the years. You might be the same.

If you’re a man who…

– has kids

– or wants to have kids

– or think you might end up one day having kids…

– OR values relationships with other humans…

… learning how to communicate effectively is a MUST.

Not just the words. The regulation behind them. Knowing how to hold yourself when you’re triggered, when you’re heading into defensiveness, when conflict shows up and your instinct is to either swing or shut down. That’s what your kids are watching. That’s what your partner is living with. And that’s what shapes the relationship you’ll have with both of them ten, twenty years from now.

Here’s what I see in a lot of men - and what I lived for a long time myself.

Life isn’t bad enough to do anything about. Things aren’t great but they’re manageable. The relationship has friction but it functions. The kids are fine. Work is okay.

So why fix what isn’t broken?

Because it could be so much better than this. Not marginally. Significantly. And most men don’t realise that until something breaks - the relationship, their health, their patience - and by then the cost is higher than it needed to be.

Then you end up chasing it, trying to deal with the fire at the door, is the least powerful position you can be in. Stop putting out fires when you can become fireproof.

Fear runs a lot of it, it becomes the background noise. The fear that stops a man from speaking up, from asking for what he wants, from having the conversation he’s been putting off for three weeks.

The fear that attaches a catastrophic rejection to a simple no. The one that has him rehearsing worst-case versions of conversations that haven’t happened yet, suffering the outcome before a word has been said.

We get frustrated at ourselves for snapping. For going silent when we should speak. For caving when we should hold our ground. For not being able to access the words when it matters most.

We want to feel solid in conflict. Present when we’re being spoken to. Grounded when the pressure is on. We want to know this stuff.

But wanting it doesn’t build it. Only the work does. Consistent, unglamorous, repeat-yourself-until-it-sticks work. That’s what solid looks like from the inside.

And it’s all available. All of it.

I have certain skills when it comes to communicating with Nardia - and now even more so with my daughter.

But it didn’t just happen overnight.

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I could feel the intensity of the frustration. Anger wasn’t far off.

I had three options.

1. Stuff it down and call it control.

2. Vomit it at Nardia and call it honesty.

3. Or put my man-pants on and actually deal with it.

It could only be the third.

But dealing with anger appropriately can be a challenge. I needed a plan. An outlet.

So I put my shoes on, grabbed my rugby ball, and headed for the park.

Over the next thirty minutes, I proceeded to kick the utter shit out of that ball as I ran around - literally taking my frustration out on it. I stayed present to what was going on for me. When I was exhausted, I stopped and sat.

I didn’t judge myself or blame anyone else. I reflected on what I was experiencing and let it move through me.

In other words, I had a strong physical emotion, and I chose to manage it with maturity instead of spewing it into my relationship.

After the release, I could think clearly. I could get what the emotion was telling me. That I was hurt. That I didn’t feel valued in that moment, like my needs were important.

It’s harder to get to that accuracy, isn’t it? Easier to direct it outwards.

Here are a couple of banger lines that I can’t credit but use regularly:

1. Anger is sad’s bodyguard.

2. It’s easier to say “Fuck you” than it is to say “That hurt”.

Trying to control emotions like frustration, anger, and rage - to out-think them, out-discipline them, white-knuckle your way through them - won’t work.
Yet “control your emotions” is almost part of the syllabus for boys growing up. Anchored in the psyche of so many men.

The rugby ball taught me something about my anger that I couldn’t learn by staying in the room that spurned it.

I used to stay there. Convinced that staying meant I was dealing with it. I wasn’t. I was just making sure the explosion had an audience.

The boundary most men never learn: stepping away from a conversation before it becomes damage you can’t undo.

Walking away and never coming back to it - that’s avoidance.

Staying in the room and exploding - also avoidance. We’ve just rebranded it.

Keeping the peace.
Being the bigger man.
Not sweating the small stuff.

Most men have dressed it up so long that it feels like a personality trait.

Right next to “don’t show emotion.” Different delivery, same end result.

What a headfuck that’s been for us.

It stops us from communicating effectively. Messes with our families, relationships, careers, and sex lives. And how we feel moment to moment, day to day.

Most men are walking around with decades of suppressed emotion they’ve been told is strength. It isn’t. It’s just a longer fuse on the same explosion.

So what do you do instead?

Walk away. Move it through you. Come back to the conversation when you can actually be present. That’s the difference between a man who manages himself and a man who manages everyone except himself.

The Control Trap

This points to something bigger. A pattern I see constantly in the men I work with.

Because you cannot control everything. Especially the things that are genuinely outside your reach. So by its very nature, attempting to grip all of that means you will never feel in control. There is always more you can’t grasp. So you grasp and grasp and disempower yourself with each effort.

Let go of that. Focus on what is actually within your control - and watch how different it feels.

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Most men I know are genuinely hard on themselves.

High expectations.

Clear awareness of where they’re falling short.

Often, an over-exaggeration of that.

It so easily sounds like keeping themselves honest, but really it’s making life hard as they keep setting themselves up to fail.

They lie awake running the tapes.

Mostly, what’s happening is that they just do all of it alone and they call that self-reliance.

It’s not. It’s isolation with that cozier-sounding title.

This goes for many different guys, different types, different patterns of behaviour.

Avoidants love it: Means they get to rely on themselves again. Convince themselves that’s the safe play. Exist in an echo chamber of self-criticism. A touch of self-delusion, too.

But there’s something different about it with Nice Guys.

They will isolate, not let people see how they talk to themselves.

Run the high expectation, high self-beat-up game.

While the evidence is right there that it’s not.

But they don’t just avoid being seen…

They avoid men who are capable of seeing them. Seeing through their bullshit and name what’s actually going on. Strong men.

Men capable of calling something out, inviting forward, and sitting in discomfort. Because if they can do that, then the nice guy has to face the discomfort, the fears of not being enough.

It’s not a conscious choice. It’s a protection strategy. Because if a man who actually has his shit together looks at you and sees the gap between who you are and who you’re pretending to be, that’s a different kind of exposure. Nakedness. Transparency.

So they stick to surface friendships. Blokey stuff. Banter. Which isn’t wrong - that stuff matters, it keeps you sane and connected in other ways.

But if that’s all you’ve got, you’re missing the medicine most men don’t realise they need until they finally have it.

“I’m my own worst enemy”

The thing about beating yourself up privately: It feels like holding yourself to a standard.

But it’s an unrealistic expectation, held over yourself like a blade, in a room with no witnesses. Nobody checks. Nobody challenges the version of events you tell yourself. You get to stay in your head about it without ever doing anything differently.

You set an expectation - call it a ‘standard’ - that you don’t meet, can’t meet, and then berate yourself for not doing so. You double down on that, telling yourself you should be able to meet that. You don’t. You shame yourself again. And it repeats.

Having strong, loving men around you changes that. Not by being your critics - by being your standard. A source of support, celebration, and challenge.

Mark Groves - human connection specialist and ‘Mayor of Instagram’ as our buddy Jer Goldberg calls him, someone I’ve called a friend for years - was going through a significant decision a while back.

He and his now-wife had separated. It was real, it was hard, and one day he rang me and said something like: “Mike. You’re my honest friend. Tell me honestly - am I talking bullshit? Have I made the right call?”

Not you’re honest. You’re my honest friend.

That distinction is everything. Truth delivered inside trust, with love, compassion, and integrity, is a completely different thing to truth delivered cold, blunt, and ill-considered. He wasn’t looking for agreement. He was looking for someone who’d tell him the hard thing because they actually gave a shit about him. That’s what these friendships are.

The other one cost me more to hear.

JuVan and I ran a two-day men’s event together a few years back. Months of lead-up, real pressure, a lot on the line. After the first day, late, everyone spent, the kind of hour where you’ve got nothing left - he looked at me and said: “Where were you today? These men need you present. I needed you out there. You can’t shrink on me like that.”

He was right. I’d been too up in my head about getting it right. And it showed.

The next day, I came out fully. Smashed my keynote. And when I finished, he said three words: “There you are.”

I’ve thought about those three words a hundred times since.

The men who can say ‘where were you?’ are the same men who say ‘there you are’. That’s both sides of it - seen at your worst, called forward to your best, with love and respect in both directions. Those two things are not separate, they can’t be. They come from the same place.

Strong men will call you forward not just because they want to see you win, but because they need you to, because they know that others need you to. They’ll see the bigger picture and remind you that you belong in it.

It doesn’t always look like the dramatic stuff either. In the groups I’m part of and the ones I run, it’s often smaller than that.

• Did you follow through on your training commitment?

• You were late for the call, we’re depending on you, we need you to be here on time.

• Did you do what you said you would?

• It looks like you’re carrying something, can we help you put it down?

My friend Jer has borrowed a line from an 80’s classic, the ‘Care Bear Stare.’ Where the Care Bears would point their belly symbols at something and just... beam love at it until it transformed.

Because we love you. And because we love you, we’ll hold you to the fire.

Love and standard aren’t opposites. The right men hold both at once.

The reason you don’t have this isn’t that these men are rare. They exist. The reason most men don’t have it is because men who actually see your shit and won’t look away or make you wrong for it, means you can’t hide anymore.

And hiding, for a lot of us, has been the whole strategy.

Beating yourself up in isolation is safe. Private. Convincing. You feel like you’re taking it seriously. But nothing changes because nothing real is at stake.

Men who know you are different. They’ve seen you at your best. They hold that version of you in their head when you forget it. And they won’t let you stay comfortable in a version of yourself that’s smaller than what they know is in you.

Risk of rejection is the price of admission. But the rejection most men are actually afraid of isn’t rejection by other men. It’s from having their own bullshit rejected, their own smallness called out, and their potential invited forward.

Because if I can’t fall back to my safe self where I’ve convinced myself I’m not enough, then shit, I might have to see who I really am on the other side.

It means we have to face the unknown possibility that if I change the only version of me I’ve ever known, then what if who I am on the other side isn’t enough?

And that’s the real terror. Not that you’re not enough. But that you might be. And then what’s your excuse?

Seems easier to stay small, in your head, on repeat.

The groups I run are full of men who found out the hard way that staying small wasn’t actually easier. If that’s starting to sound familiar, come and have a conversation with me.

“On the outside, life looks good. You wouldn’t notice anything is wrong. I’ve got the wife and the kid, I live in a beautiful area, I’ve got a successful business. All seems pretty peachy.

I’m good at showing the facade. On the inside, I feel like I’m on a roundabout - no matter the speed or the lane I choose, I end up back where I started.”

That’s from a client. First session. He said it like a confession.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. Didn’t need to.

He wasn’t a mess. He wasn’t failing horribly everywhere in his life.

There was no externally visible reason for him to be sitting across from me. By every measure that society uses to assess whether a man is doing okay - he was doing okay.

Better than okay, you could say.

And he was exhausted in a way he couldn’t explain to anyone without feeling ungrateful for saying it.

That’s the part that doesn’t get talked about.

There’s a specific kind of suffering that belongs to men like this. It doesn’t have a clean name. It’s not depression, not burnout, not a crisis. It’s more subtle than all of those.

Yet, it’s remarkably common. I’ve had thousands of those conversations.

It’s the gap between the life you built and the man living inside it.

You did everything right. Or close enough. You’ve worked hard. Provided. You’ve shown up.

And somewhere in the middle of all that doing, the feeling you were working toward - the sense that it would eventually feel like enough - just... didn’t come.

So you keep going. Because stopping feels worse.

Because if you stop and it still doesn’t feel right, then what?

Better to stay busy. Better to add another goal, another project, another reason to keep moving. At least while you’re moving, you don’t have to face what comes in silence.

In those moments of peace that you tell yourself you want.

The guilt makes it worse. You know how lucky you are. You’ve seen real hardship. Other people have WAY worse shit to worry about.

So you shame yourself for feeling shitty, which… makes you feel shitty.

You tell yourself to get a grip. To be grateful. To just... enjoy it.

But the feeling doesn’t care about your gratitude band-aid. It just sits there. Low hum. Background noise. A life that should feel better than this.

And at some point, without really deciding to, you stop calling it suffering. You just call it Tuesday.

I wrote a shorter version of this a few weeks back. It hit a nerve - so here's the fuller picture.

Here’s what’s actually running the roundabout

It’s not your circumstances. It’s not your job or your relationship or the fact that you haven’t had a holiday in three years.

Those are factors. Pieces of the puzzle. But they’re not it.

It’s a belief.

One you’ve probably never said out loud because it sounds too simple, or too bleak, or too much like something you’re not supposed to admit.

The belief is this: that your worth is mathematical.

Output = value.

Productivity = safety.

If I produce enough, achieve enough, provide enough - then I’ll have earned my place. Then I’ll be allowed to rest. Then it’ll feel okay.

Except the equation never balances. Because it was never designed to.

Plus, it’s carrying a secondary equation:

If I don’t stop, I don’t have to feel the things I’d rather not feel.

The subconscious doesn’t let you have more than you think you deserve.

Your actions will match your level of self-worth, of what you think you deserve.

And if somewhere underneath all the achieving, you don’t actually believe you’re worth much beyond your usefulness, that you have to achieve to feel okay or be loved - you will stay on the roundabout.

No matter how fast you go. No matter which lane you choose.

You end up back where you started.

Sucks, ay?

And the thing nobody tells you? The cost of staying on it is rarely dramatic.

It (often) doesn’t arrive as a breakdown or a diagnosis. It arrives as Tuesday. And then the Tuesday after that.

It’s the marriage that’s technically fine but nobody’s really in it.

You’re in the same house, sleeping in the same bed. You’re a good provider. But somewhere along the way, you became a stranger who contributes.

One of my clients described it like this:

“There’s no relationship. We haven’t nourished it. No care, no time, nothing meaningful.”

No affair. No blowup. Just two people who stopped tending the garden until nothing was left. And the shame that came with admitting it, “that I’ve allowed myself to get here. Like, I know better.”

It’s the kids who have a father but not quite their dad. Present in body. Somewhere else in your head.

It’s the version of yourself you keep meaning to get back to. One day. When things settle down. When the business is sorted. When the list gets smaller. When the kids are older.

I’ve worked with men in their fifties who looked back twenty years and realised they’d spent them building a cage they couldn’t name, let alone get out of.

Seeing that they were building something that never really came. Just older, more exhausted, and somehow unclear and disconnected where it matters most.

Not because they were weak or broken or faulty. But because nobody had ever told them that the roundabout was optional.

The exit’s always been there. You just kept going too fast to see it.

Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up

Getting off doesn’t require a plan. It requires one honest admission.

“I’m going in circles. And I don’t know how to stop alone.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Not a twelve-step process. Not a year of therapy before you’re ready. Not waiting until the timing is better, the business is more stable, the kids are through school.

Or the fucking to-do list is done.

There is no perfect time to face the honest reality of your situation apart from now.

You don’t even have to know what the issue is, just that there is one.

A gap. A disconnect. A pattern that feels like being caught in an eddy, just spinning in place.

Just that one admission, said out loud, to someone who can actually hear it and can help you face it and do something about it.

The men who make it to the other side are the ones who say it.

Despite how uncomfortable it feels. How uncertain the future might look with that having been acknowledged.

This is ownership. It’s the first crucial step towards true sovereignty.

To having full structural integrity.

The men who stay spinning are the ones who dress it up in logistics - money, time, readiness. Someone else’s fault.

Sure, the logistics are real. They’re also not the point.

Because when men get to the point of actually doing something about it - talking to someone, investing in real support - the objections show up fast. The money. The timing. The busyness.

None of them are the actual reason.

The actual reason is harder to say out loud. The surface version sounds like: “What if I do all this and nothing actually changes? What if I’m just built this way?”

Underneath that: what if I peel back everything I’ve built and there’s nothing worth keeping underneath? What if I do all this work and I’m still not enough?

That’s the fear. Not the cost in dollars or time.

What’s on the other side of the honesty and work?

It's quieter than that. It arrives as an ordinary Tuesday.

A client of mine had spent years running his life on fumes - always in the house, rarely in the room. One morning he took his kid for a fish before school. 45 minutes, nothing planned, just made the call and went.

His face lit up the way kids' faces do when they realise their dad actually showed up.
It might seem like nothing in isolation, but in the context, getting there, making that moment that important. That was everything.

Not wrestling with himself.
No guilt.
No phone out.
All presence. All joy. And big picture.

Just a Tuesday morning with a fishing rod. Those moments that actually count tend to look exactly like this.

That's the whole story. And if you're a dad, you know exactly how much that moment weighs.

Another man, two years into doing the stuff he'd spent most of his adult life avoiding, described his family's last holiday as "probably the most relaxed we've ever been." Casually dropped it, like it was no big deal.

Because at this stage it wasn't. Previously, it would have been unthinkable.

Two years earlier, he'd been the kind of man who'd check his phone at the dinner table and call it presence.
Duck away all holiday to check on work.

Public holiday? What’s that?

This might even be you.

The transformation doesn't arrive with fanfare. It arrives when you're actually there - not performing presence, not managing the room, not running on empty. Not run by your insecurities.

Just there. Solid. Secure. At home within yourself.

That's what's off the roundabout. The ability to stop performing altogether. Solid. Secure. No longer run by the noise in your own head. The ability to stop performing altogether.

If you read this and felt it somewhere.
That's not a coincidence.
Send me a message. That’s it. That’s the step.

Most men will read that and feel something. Very few will want to sit with what it brings up.

Its’ easier to just ignore that, sprinkle some of those cozy-sounding justifications on it - a little “yeah but my situation is different…”, “It’s just a phase…”

Sure.

There’s this thing about the words we use, they keep telling on us.

I run an exercise with my Zeus Inner Circle clients. It’s a pretty simple word association.

A word gets used. I notice the weight it carries. And so, we dive into it.

We follow where it actually goes. What comes up for them. In them, in their body, what they feel.

Last call, we started with “busy.”

I asked the group: when I say “busy,” what’s the first word that comes to mind? Then I took that word and asked again. And again. And again.

Here’s what came back.

Work. Stress. Obligation. Justification. Messy. Unavailable. Constrained. Unfocused. Detached. Hiding. Panic. Heavy. Erratic. Torn. Unfinished. Anxiety. Trembling. Sadness.

Then I read it back to them.

I ask, “How does that sound?

The room went quiet. Then, all of them: “It all sounds fucking awful.”

Yeah. It does.

That wasn’t new to their systems. It might have been new to their conscious thoughts.

“It does sound awful, so why would you keep choosing it?”

That landed.

So why do they keep choosing it?

Because busyness gives you something. That’s the piece most men miss.

It gives you a sense of importance. A socially acceptable reason not to look any deeper.

A shield with a work ethic attached - and a world full of people who’ll nod and accept it without question.

Cancel anything, miss anything, avoid anything. Just say you’ve been flat out. Everyone nods. Nobody challenges it.

It’s the most useful exit most men have ever found.

And it’s lazy.

That’s the harder truth.

Busyness is the laziest thing a man can do.

As long as you’re busy, you never have to be intentional.

You never have to ask the harder question.

You never have to be truly responsible for your choices because you didn’t really make any - you just responded to whatever came at you loudest.

Stuck in reactivity and calling it a personality.

One of these guys sat with that for a moment, then said: “Christ. I’ve been wearing it like a badge of fucking honour. What was I thinking?”

Not bragging. Realising.

Another one, quieter: “I get busy to hide.”

And when I pushed a third on what would actually be left without it - if you stop, who are you? What value do you have? - he said:

All of these realisations matter. That last one more so.

Busy is rarely a calendar problem. It’s less about time management or even productivity.

It’s an identity problem wearing a hectic schedule as a disguise.

And you can’t fix an identity problem with a better morning routine.

The men who try to solve busyness by shrinking the work bucket are still in the same mode - they’ve just applied it to a different problem. They call it “achieving better work-life balance”.

I call that a lie. Hopeless hope. An ever-moving target.

It’s still busyness. Same engine, slightly lower RPMs.

One of the men named the root of it plainly. He’d been asked why he kept choosing the overwhelm, the noise, the constant motion. His answer: “Lack of belief and self-confidence... too scary to go and achieve something that could be possible. So I just stay in the now and the old habits.”

Busyness is rarely a time management failure. It’s a deeper personal self-worth wound, with a full calendar and a crowbarred-in sense of importance as a balm.

The subconscious is ruthless about this: it will always see to it that you only ever get what you think you deserve.

If deep down a man doesn’t believe he deserves peace, joy, love for who he is, or a life that feels as good as it looks - he’ll fill every quiet moment with noise.

Not because he wants to. Because stillness forces the question he’s been avoiding:

“Who am I without the movement, the achievement, all the doing?”

By the end of the call, one of the men arrived somewhere I couldn’t have scripted.

Then he stopped himself.

“Actually - hang on. I don’t want it out of my vocabulary more than I want it out of my life.”

He got there himself. That’s the only way it sticks. That’s what this work is, that’s how it landed, how you take ownership of it.

How change actually happens - a severance from an old way of being. A realisation that you can’t go back.

This was that moment for him. I have now had the privilege of seeing the results for a few weeks of implementation. A man who almost doens’t know himself, but is willing to confront those edges where the bullshit creeps back in.

Here’s the autopsy

Three questions. Sit with them properly - not while you’re driving, not between meetings. Actually sit with them.

Read more

Man sits across from me - business solid, income healthy, family intact. Nothing technically wrong.

And yet he’s got the look of someone who’s completely beaten by it. Lost in it. Lost to it.

Just managing it. Just getting by on something he should have looked at a long time ago.

Not broken. Not dramatic. Just off.

The question we eventually get to is always some version of the same one. “Why doesn’t any of this feel the way I thought it would?”

The diagnosis he usually arrives with is wrong. He’s been told it’s a mindset problem.

Or he needs to delegate more, rest more, get clearer on his vision.

He’s read the books. Done a course or two. Still off.

The real answer is structural.

He’s built his life to a genuinely high standard - the business or career, the income, the home, the reputation - all look good enough on the outside.

The man inside that life hasn’t been built to the same standard. Those two things are now in tension, and the structure can’t hold the weight.

That’s not a personal failing. That’s what happens when men are raised to build outward things - careers, businesses, incomes, reputations - and given almost nothing when it comes to building themselves.

Not the body, although that matters too.

The internal structure of a man aligned with clarity, direction, true self-respect.

In the absence of that, he becomes a man driven by wounds, by borrowed ideas of a successful life, of approval, status, flimsy things his 18-year-old self thought were cool.

So, the outward-facing man gets all the attention. The load-bearing inner work gets none.

Structural integrity is the phrase I keep coming back to.

Not as a concept to teach - just the most accurate term for what I’m actually diagnosing when a man sits across from me.

Is he solid? Not impressive. Solid.

Does the inside match what the outside is carrying?

Most of the time, it doesn’t. And they already know it - they just haven’t had a precise enough word for it yet.

The pieces are there, they look good, maybe great even, yet, it doesn’t feel that way.

Small thing: this publication has a new name.

“Good Men with Mike Campbell” is now Structural Integrity. Same writer, same work, same men. Not a relaunch - just a more accurate phrase for what it’s always been about.

Good Men doesn’t disappear. It becomes a named series inside the publication - the fatherhood writing, the marriage pieces, the men holding down both and trying to figure out who they actually are underneath all of it. ELA, Zeus, Hunt & Gather - still the core of the work. Nothing changes there.

Just a sharper name on the door.

One other thing worth knowing: most of what lands in your inbox here is free. Fresh pieces go to paid subscribers first - then open up to everyone two weeks later. If you find the writing useful, a paid subscription is a small way to support it and get first access. No pressure either way.

“On the outside, you wouldn’t notice anything is wrong. I’ve got the wife and the kid, I live in a beautiful area, I’ve got a successful business.

All seems pretty peachy. I’m good at showing the facade. On the inside, I feel like I’m on a roundabout - no matter the speed or the lane I choose, I end up back where I started.”

He wasn’t a mess. He wasn’t failing. He was, by every visible measure, “doing well”.

And he was exhausted in a way he couldn’t explain to anyone without feeling ungrateful for saying it - shame, disappointed in himself, even.

Which makes sense, it’s hard to face a truth like that.

Easier to avoid it. To make enough noise, distraction, busyness - success even - in your life to justify not looking at it.

That’s the specific kind of suffering that doesn’t get talked about.

The man who has every reason to be fine and isn’t.

The one who knows, somewhere underneath the performance, that something is off - but can’t name it, can’t justify it, and definitely can’t say it out loud.

If that’s you, you’re not broken. You’re not ungrateful. You’re running outdated software on a body that’s telling you it’s time for a change.

Most men don’t collapse. They just slowly get used to the weight of it. The low hum.

The permanent background noise of a life that should feel better than this.

And somewhere along the way, without really deciding to, they stop calling it suffering - and start calling it Tuesday.

Over To You

Most men read something like this and think: “yeah, that’s me” - then close the tab and get back to it.

So before you do that - one question worth sitting with:

If you stripped the busyness, the title, the results, and the performance away - what would you actually find underneath?

I’ve worked with men across New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and the US for close to a decade. Builders, executives, business owners, FIFO workers, school principals. Men who look sorted from the outside and are quietly falling apart on the inside.

The roundabout isn’t a personality flaw. It isn’t ingratitude. It’s what happens when a capable man keeps reaching for more external proof of something he hasn’t found internally yet.

That’s workable. If you’re willing to look at it.

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This is a bonus fourth part - it felt necessary.

Not mythology, not archetype - just the stages, plain language, what they look like in real life, and what you can do.

I know what they look like because I’ve been through most of them myself. Not cleanly, not in order, not without getting it wrong first.

What these stages describe is an initiation.

Not a ceremony. Not a weekend retreat with face paint. The real thing - the process every culture across history built deliberately around the transition from boy to man.

A witnessed journey through challenge, loss, descent, and return.

Elders who had been through it designed the container. The community stood witness.

The boy had to go through something - genuinely through it, not around it - so the boy identity could die, and the man could emerge on the other side.

That structure is almost entirely gone from modern life.

And we did that. Not maliciously - but we dismantled the containers, lost the elders, abandoned the rites, and replaced them with nothing.

We told ourselves boys would figure it out. That growing up just... happened.

It doesn’t. It never did.

What fills the void when initiation disappears isn’t nothing. It’s something worse than nothing - it’s counterfeit initiation.

The manosphere, in its worst forms, is exactly that. It found the hunger - real, legitimate, the hunger every uninitiated man carries - and sold it the loudest, most aggressive substitute available.

Dominance. Hierarchy. Blame. A sense of brotherhood without the depth. Challenge without the descent. All competition, power, and status. No substance.

The problem isn’t Andrew Tate. He’s a symptom.

The problem is the void he walked into. A generation of boys with no elders, no rites, no container - who went looking for what they needed and found him instead.

So the question isn’t how do we stop them.

It’s: how do we rebuild what was lost? How do we create the containers, the elders, the process - so that boys meet adequate initiation instead of a monetised substitute?

And the harder question, the one most relevant to the man reading this:

What do you do now - as a grown man who never got it?

You can’t go back. You can’t redo your adolescence with better elders. But the initiation doesn’t have an age limit. It’s available to you now - through the work, through the right container, through men who know the terrain and won’t let you settle for less.

That’s what these stages below are. Not a self-help list. A map of what belated initiation actually looks like in real life.

But - and this matters - it cannot be done alone.

Every stage in the story involves a guide. A presence that knows what’s in you. A community that witnesses the change. Without that, most men circle the stages for years without going through them.

Here’s the manual. With some of my examples

STAGE 1 - SOMETHING IS LOCKED UP

What it looks like:

You’re functioning. On paper, life is good. But there’s a version of you that isn’t showing up - and somewhere underneath the performance, you know it.

For me it was Scotland, 24 years old, playing semi-pro rugby. Time on my hands for the first time. I became aware of how much I was in my own way.

How resistant to change I’d become without realising it. How terrified of judgment and rejection.

I’d grown up moving towns, moving schools - learned early to go inside my shell, let others go first, test the waters before committing.

Safe. Risk-averse. Good at fitting in. Not great at being fully myself.

The recognition isn’t dramatic. It’s just a quiet sense that the version showing up isn’t the whole picture.

What it asks: Stop pretending you don’t know. Name what’s been locked up - the fire, the sensitivity, the opinions you swallow, the things you want but won’t say out loud.

You don’t have to do anything with it yet. Just stop looking away.

STAGE 2 - THE GOLDEN BALL IS LOST

What it looks like:

The flatness. The performance. The 3am question - is this it? Something that used to feel alive in you has gone quiet. You’re not sure when it happened.

One man put it this way: “On the outside, you wouldn’t notice anything is wrong. I’ve got the wife, the kid, the successful business. All seems pretty peachy. On the inside, I feel like I’m on a roundabout - no matter the speed or lane I choose, I end up back where I started.”

Your life looks right. The feeling doesn’t match.

What it asks: Recognise what’s missing. Not vaguely - specifically.

What have you stopped wanting, stopped feeling, stopped reaching for? Name it.

STAGE 3 - STEALING THE KEY

What it looks like:

In the story, the key to the Wild Man’s cage sits under the mother’s pillow. The boy can’t ask for it - it won’t be given willingly. He has to steal it. Deliberately. At real cost.

For some men this is literally about the dynamic with their mother - the force that civilised them, kept them safe and small, taught them to suppress themselves to be loved.

For others it’s broader - a culture, a workplace, a relationship, an identity built to keep the peace.

Whatever taught you that the full version of you was too much.

The key is whatever gives you access to the real version of yourself. And nobody hands it to you.

You must take it. A reclamation.

Most men steal it in stages. Not one dramatic moment but a series of reaches - each one getting closer to the real thing.

For me, the first version was small and unglamorous. Scotland, 24, becoming aware of how much I was in my own way. I gave myself a mantra: “If you don’t want to do it, you have to do it.”

No fanfare. No blessing. Just a quiet decision to stop circling and step into discomfort deliberately.

The key was in my hand - partially.

The cost of not stealing it showed up later. An engagement I stayed in too long, knowing I’d say vows I didn’t fully mean in a church and god I didn’t believe in, raising kids in a faith I didn’t share. I knew it. Kept going anyway.

The key was in my hand and I still wasn’t fully using it.

The real stealing happened after. The engagement ended. The life we’d built needed untangling. My mum was sick on the other side of the world. No identity left to perform.

Stripped back to the question every man eventually has to face: who am I when there’s nothing left to hide behind?

That’s often how it goes. The key gets stolen properly in the wreckage - not in the moment of decision, but in what comes after it, when there’s no going back and no performance left to hold up.

When Iron John is finally freed he says: “You will never see your mother and father again.” Not a punishment. A truth. You cannot become this man and remain that boy.

What it asks: What part of yourself have you been handing over to keep the peace - to be acceptable, to be loved, to avoid the cost of being fully yourself?

What would it mean to take it back? Accept that something has to die for the man to live.

What is the key you need to steal?

STAGE 4 - LIFE IN THE FOREST / THE FIRST TEACHINGS

What it looks like:

You’ve made the move - said the thing, drawn the line, started the work - and the old patterns keep surfacing. You commit, you slide. You make progress, you relapse.

None of this is failure. This is the early, necessary work.

Most men think this means they’re not cut out for it. They are. They’re just in Stage 4.

What it asks: Stay in it. The discomfort IS the process. Don’t use the relapse as a reason to stop.

STAGE 5 - THE DESCENT / THE ROAD OF ASHES

What it looks like:

This is the stage most men skip. And pay for.

My mum was diagnosed with lung cancer in New Zealand while I was living on the other side of the world. The distance was its own particular kind of grief - present but not present, close but too far to be of real use.

Later, in 2010, I was in Sydney. New business. Fresh start. And my fiancée called from New Zealand to tell me she couldn’t marry me.

I asked her to meet me at Coogee Beach. We sat on the steps and talked. I don’t remember the words. I remember the feeling - completely undone.

When she left, I leaned on the railing and cried. Properly. In public. Just a wreck.

For the next six weeks, I was on autopilot.

Working all day, on the phone to the UK at night, dealing with the logistics of a shared life that needed untangling. Debt. Shared things.

My mum quietly deteriorating.

That was the ashes. Old identity gone. New one not formed yet. No performance left to hide behind.

The grief isn’t always about a loss this obvious. For most men, it’s older and quieter:

Grief for the father who was there but not really there.

For the boyhood that didn’t get witnessed.

For the years lived behind armour so familiar you forgot you were wearing it.

For the version of yourself you abandoned - slowly, incrementally - to keep everyone else comfortable.

What it asks: Descend willingly, into your depths, your pain, your insecurity.

Grieve what needs to be grieved. Don’t perform strength through this - go through it.

Find someone to do it with.

This is the stage that most needs a witness. Grief held privately doesn’t move. It needs another man who has been through his own descent to sit with you in yours - not to fix it, but to confirm it’s survivable.

STAGE 6 - THE WOUND IS THE GIFT

What it looks like:

The thing you’ve spent the most energy hiding or compensating for is pointing at something you haven’t yet accessed. Not just something to face - something to offer.

Bly’s line: wherever the wound appears in a man’s psyche, that is precisely the place for which he will give his major gift to the community.

For most of my early life I was an observer. Sitting back. Taking everything in before committing. Analysing. Working it out. Needing to be right before I spoke up. Seeking certainly. Letting others go first.

It felt like caution. What it actually was, was a wound running as a strategy - the boy who learned that watching was safer than participating, that being liked was safer than being fully himself.

Moving towns, moving schools, going inside his shell every time. Approval was the currency. Invisibility was the protection.

That wound - the deep capacity to sit still, watch, read a room before entering it - became the x-ray vision I now use every day in my work with men.

One client called it exactly that. I can see what’s happening in a man before he can name it himself.

But - and this is crucial - it only became a gift once I faced my own edges. Stepped into the discomfort I’d been circling. Severed from the old belief system. From the boy who clung to safety through approval and being liked.

The wound avoided repeats. The wound faced becomes a gift.

This is also not solo work. The wound reveals itself most fully when it’s witnessed by someone who can hold it without flinching - and reflect back what they see in it.

Yours works the same way. The sensitivity you were shamed out of. The fear you learned to armour over. The neediness you buried. The considering others first. Those aren’t flaws to be managed.

They’re doors. And on the other side of them is the man you’re capable of being - and what he has to give.

What it asks: Look at your strongest trait - the one that shows up as both your greatest strength and your biggest liability. The thing people rely on you for that also costs you something.

That’s usually where the wound is. And where the gift is waiting.

The comedian who had to make his sick mother laugh - who took on the pain of the room before he could name what pain was - didn’t choose sensitivity. It was installed by necessity. Then it became the thing that made him extraordinary.

Yours is already there. You’re already using it - probably sideways, probably at a cost.

What would it look like if you faced what’s underneath it, rather than just running the strategy?

STAGE 7 - THE GARDEN / LEARNING TO TEND SOMETHING

What it looks like:

Most men want depth. Depth of feeling. Experience. Relationships. Intimacy.

But they’ve been in output mode so long that presence feels like doing nothing. And doing nothing feels like failure.

One client’s rock bottom wasn’t dramatic. Just this: “There’s no relationship left. We haven’t nourished it. No care, no time, nothing.”

No affair. No blowup. Just two people who stopped tending the garden until nothing was left.

Real intimacy requires a man who has done the prior stages. You cannot truly be with someone else while you’re still running from yourself.

What it asks: Where have you stayed on the surface? Avoided depth?

Have one conversation this week where you leave the phone away, don’t fix anything, don’t offer a solution. Just stay with it. See them. Be seen.

STAGE 8 - THE FATHER WOUND

What it looks like:

Every man carries the imprint of his father.

Not just the memories. The pattern. The invisible blueprint for how you see yourself, how you lead, how you relate to the people closest to you.

It gets installed early. And it runs quietly in the background of almost everything.

What creates the wound isn’t only the obvious stuff - abuse, abandonment, a father who left.

More often it’s subtler than that. The father who was emotionally absent while physically present.

The one who tied love to performance.

The one who was too preoccupied, too critical, too meek to offer what a boy actually needed - structure, presence, a sense that he was seen and that he mattered.

When that need goes unmet, something happens. The boy starts looking for it elsewhere. In achievement. In approval. In the way a woman looks at him. In building a business that proves something to someone who may never know or care.

The problem is it never lands. Because what he’s actually hungry for isn’t a deal closed or a milestone hit. It’s something that needed to come from one specific man, at a specific time, that can’t be retrofitted by anything else.

And so he keeps going. Never quite enough. Never quite satisfied. Running a programme installed before he could read.

One client traced his entire work addiction back to one thing - his father’s approval. Every deal, every milestone, every late night at the desk aimed at the same target. Every restless and dissatisfied day where he didn’t get enough done.

Traced to a man who never quite said the thing his son needed to hear. To feel in his bones.

We got to the point in the work where I said it plainly: you may never get that. Your father may never say he’s proud of you.

That landed like a prime Mike Tyson right hook. Because he already knew. He’d just never let himself fully know it.

The work here isn’t about becoming your father, defeating him somehow, or forgiving him on a timeline.

It’s about becoming the man he couldn’t be. The man who carries his pain without bleeding it into the world, metabolises it instead of wounding the people closest to him.

What it asks: Name what you needed that you didn’t get from him. Not to blame him - he was running his own programme, installed by his father. But to stop outsourcing your worth to a debt that will never be repaid.

Name what you need now and what in that you can provide that for yourself. Embody the father you needed.

And then find the men who can offer what he couldn’t, what you can’t. Not heroes. Not mentors to put on pedestals. Men further down the road who will tell you the truth about what they find - and who can witness you going through what your father couldn’t hold for you.

This stage, more than most, cannot be done alone. You cannot receive from yourself what needed to come from another man. The elders the story always required - they still exist. Finding them is part of the work.

STAGE 9 - THE WARRIOR AWAKENS

What it looks like:

Some men suppress the fire entirely. Others spray it everywhere. Neither is the warrior.

The warrior is the man who knows what he’s fighting for.

For most men, the unexamined fire shows up as anger - directed at the wrong people, at the wrong moments, for the wrong reasons. Not because they’re bad men. Because the fire has nowhere legitimate to go. And it must go somewhere. Too often it goes somewhere it damages the people who need them most.

The warrior has a line. He’s willing to disappoint someone rather than betray himself. He fights for something - his marriage, his integrity, his sense of what’s right - rather than just fighting.

I once wrote a six-page letter. Said plainly what I needed, what I wasn’t willing to do anymore, what a real relationship required from both sides. Not an attack. A line, held with love.

That’s the warrior.

What it asks: The warrior stage doesn’t arrive on its own. It comes after the grief, after facing the wound, after the descent. That’s not an excuse to wait - it’s a reason to do the prior work rather than skip it and wonder why the fire keeps going sideways.

If you’re in the earlier stages - go there first. If you’ve done that work and you’re still retreating from what matters: pick one thing and take one honest step back toward it. Not a confrontation. A truth. Something you actually believe, said to someone who needs to hear it.

Find something meaningful to fight for. Something that benefits more than you.

The warrior who fights alone tends to fight the wrong things. The container - the men around you who know what you’re working toward - is what keeps the fire directed rather than destructive.

STAGE 10 - THE RETURN / IRON JOHN REVEALED AS KING

What it looks like:

Not a destination. A direction.

At the end of the story, the wild man is revealed as a king. The wildness and the wisdom were always the same man. The depth that got locked away wasn’t something to destroy - it was something to integrate.

That’s what’s waiting for you.

Not a different man. A fuller one.

The Greeks called it Zeus energy - intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, goodwill, generous leadership.

Male authority accepted for the sake of the community.

Not power over others. Power from within, in service of something beyond yourself.

The man who has been through the stages comes back to his life as that fuller version of himself. He leads from what he’s integrated, not from what he’s performing.

He doesn’t need the deal to close to feel valuable. Doesn’t need her approval to feel like he’s enough. Doesn’t need his father’s pride to finally be okay in the world.

For me: I feel at peace with myself. I don’t question my worth. I let people be disappointed and don’t conflate it with my value - they can judge me how they like. I’m solid. I have moments of doubt, for sure. But I know who I am, what I’m about, and what matters.

One of my clients arrived wanting confidence. What he found on the other side of the work was something different - and better.

A deep security in himself. A sense of actually liking who he was.

Not performance. Not arrival. Just: “I thought I wanted confidence. What I’ve found is something so much more. I feel content. I actually like myself. I feel secure in myself.”

Said casually. Almost offhand. After years of strain and noise.

That casualness is the transformation.

Do not underestimate it. That’s it.

Your wholeness is within reach. The man you’re capable of being isn’t somewhere else - he’s on the other side of the work you’ve been avoiding.

When you’re brave enough to go there.

What it asks: The Greeks called this Zeus energy. Not dominance. Not performance. Intelligence, compassionate decisiveness, generous leadership. A man whose authority comes from depth, not volume.

That energy is available to you. Not when you’ve finished the work - it emerges through it.

The question isn’t whether you’re capable of it. You are.

The question is whether you’re willing to do what it takes to stop performing it, chasing it, hoping for it, and just start living it.

THE THROUGH-LINE

You cannot shortcut any stage.

Men who skip the ashes stay naive.

Men who skip the grief stay numb.

Men who skip the warrior stay passive. Or brutal.

Men who skip the wound stay hidden - always wanting more depth, never going past the surface.

The full man has been through all of it - not perfectly, not in sequence, but all of it.

And none of it is meant to happen alone. Every stage in the story involves a guide. A presence that knows what’s in you and won’t let you settle for less.

That guide looks different for every man. For some it’s a group of men further down the road. For some it’s a container that won’t let you settle. For some it’s someone who’s been in the forest and can walk back into it with you.

If you want to know what that looks like - reply and tell me where you are. I read every one.

Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the Iron John series are on Substack - links below.

The most dangerous equation in your head…

My Output = My Worth

I know exactly what your Sunday looks like. You try to sit on the couch to watch the footy or play with the kids.

But within 10 minutes, you’re twitchy. You’re checking emails.

You’re thinking about the to-do list next week.

You’re looking for something to fix around the house.

Your head says, “I need to do something”.

You feel a physical wave of guilt just for sitting still.

A discomfort in your bones that hits you at the shittest of times.

Why?

Because you are running on Survivor Software that tells you a lie:

“If I’m not doing something, I’m not useful, I have no value.” “If I am not producing, I do not matter.” “If I am not providing, I am not safe.”

You have become a “Human Doing” instead of a “Human Being.”

This mindset will destroy your relationships.

You almost ‘clock-in’ at home, in the relationship, with the kids. Get your dad/partner duties done. Earn some love.

“Rest? What’s that? I have to earn that.”

Share

You think that as long as you provide the financial security, the house, the car, the toys, the lifestyle, you have done your job…

You want more time, more space, to enjoy the fruits of your hard work, but man, it’s tough to allow it.

So much of your identity and value has become enmeshed in your ability to provide. In what you do and how well you do it. What you can get done.

Your value is your usefulness. You have turned yourself into a high-performance ATM.

And then you wonder why you feel lonely. And numb. And unclear. And stuck.

The hard pill to swallow?

Your family doesn’t want your efficiency. They don’t want your “provision” as much as you think they do.

Yes, they need their survival needs taken care of. Space, options, freedom from financial worry. And…

They want YOU.

They want YOUR presence.

They want YOUR attention.

They want the man, not the machine who just clocks in.

But you don’t know how to give them that, because you don’t know who you are without the work.

The idea of slowing down, taking a moment to yourself, even considering a different approach gets your head running.

“I just need to get more done, then I’ll have space” - when was the last time that actually worked?

Slowing down isn’t about being lazy, losing your drive. It’s about widening your vision, sharpening your aim, so you can then speed up.

The fear that everything will crash, that the plates will fall and smash, that you can’t stop or you’ll fall further behind, that it’s lazy or ineffective to do so - that is a neon sign telling you to look deeper into the story behind that.

Because it runs your life, and left unchecked, it will ruin it.

Where the fear lives, the anxious thoughts, the insecurity
- that’s your indicator.

That anxiety/unease you feel when you stop working? That is the signal.

Dig into that. Ask yourself if you know that to be true. If there could be another way to approach this that you simply can’t see in this moment.

Challenge the idea that you have no worth if you’re not producing, providing, or getting shit done.

Look for and at the evidence in your life of nourishing yourself, of slowing down to aim and speed up. Of how much better you feel when you create the space to perform.

You need to break the equation ‘My Output = My Worth’.

You need to learn that you are worth something even when the laptop is closed and the tools are down.

If you don’t, you will grind yourself down. Into dust, trying to earn a love and belonging you already have.

Stop confusing your Net Worth with your Self Worth.

If you are ready to uninstall this software and actually learn how to switch off and approach you work and life in a way that doesn’t continually break you down and weaken you...

... tap me on the shoulder, let’s talk.

Over to You:

Do something different.

And if you haven’t tried this first simple strategy - sit down for 20 minutes and do nothing. Just BE - with your thoughts and feelings and anything that comes into that space.

No right or wrong, just be with yourself and notice what comes into the space.

Write it all down after.

Discuss this with someone who has the ability to listen, understand, and guide you.

When was the last time you let yourself simply be without earning it?

Sit down, do nothing for 20 minutes, and notice what comes up.

He can quote Jung. He references Bly. He talks about shadow, initiation, the hunger men carry that nobody names properly.

He’s articulate, perceptive, genuinely switched on about this material. When he wants to be.

He’s also, by most accounts, still doing real damage to the people closest to him. Or certainly has in the past.

That’s not only a contradiction. It’s a specific kind of denial and state of suspension.

There’s a type of man - and you’ve probably met versions of him - who has found the map, can read it fluently, quotes it brilliantly, and still won’t go into the forest.

Because going into the forest means something actually has to change. Not his vocabulary. Not his platform. Him.

He knows the therapy talk, the intellectual notes in growth and expansion. Yet he doesn’t do it.

Insight without integration isn’t wisdom.

It’s a more sophisticated cage.

Robert Bly had a name for men like this. He called them ‘ascenders’ - men who only want to go up. Toward the light, toward the spiritual, toward the next insight or the next level of understanding.

No grounding. No descent. No willingness to sit in the ashes and let something actually burn off.

The ascender knows all the right things. He just won’t do any of them.

And the tragedy isn’t that he’s a bad man (unless he uses it to be one).

It’s that he’s frozen. Suspended somewhere between the boy he was and the man he could be, performing the journey instead of taking it.

This is Part 3 of a series on Robert Bly’s Iron John - what the story actually asks of a man, and what waits on the other side of the work most men avoid. Part 1 is here and Part 2 here if you want the full map. But this stands on its own.

Because this is where it lands.

THE HOLE MOST MEN ARE CARRYING

Of everything Bly wrote, the chapter on the father wound is the one that lands hardest with the men I work with.

Not because it’s the most dramatic. Because it’s the most accurate.

I worked with a business owner - successful, driven, respected in his industry - who traced his entire work addiction back to one thing. His father’s approval.

Every deal, every milestone, every late night at the desk was aimed at the same target. A man who never quite said the thing his son needed to hear.

We got to the point in the work where I said it plainly: you may never get that. Your father may never say it.

That landed like a door closing. Because he already knew. He’d just never let himself fully know it.

That’s the father wound. Not always dramatic. Often just - a man who was there and wasn’t there. Who provided and was absent. Who did his best with what he had and still left a hole his son has been trying to fill ever since.

Most of the men I work with carry this in some form. The father who was emotionally unavailable. The father who tied love to performance. The father who was simply uninitiated himself and had nothing real to pass on - so he passed on silence, or busyness, or the message that a man’s worth lives in what he produces.

One client put it this way, looking back at his own boyhood,

“Stop dad, stop and see me. Include me. Love me!

I know he loved me, don’t get me wrong, but I also know he was always too busy for me.”

He said that as a grown man. And then told me his own son had just turned four. And that sometimes, when his son looks up at him, he sees himself at that age looking up at his father.

That’s the generational echo. That’s what’s actually at stake.

Bly is clear: you cannot wait for the father to give you what he couldn’t.

At some point the work requires grieving what wasn’t there - actually grieving it, not performing acceptance of it - and going looking for initiated men who can offer what the father didn’t.

Not heroes.

Not mentors to put on pedestals.

Men further down the road who will go into the forest with you and tell you the truth about what they find.

That’s not therapy. That’s initiation. And it’s almost entirely absent from modern men’s lives.

Your ask: Name the father wound honestly. Not to blame him - to free yourself from waiting for something he couldn’t give.

Then ask: where are the initiated men in your life? The ones who tell you the truth, hold you to something, know what’s in you? If the answer is nowhere - that’s not a small thing. That’s the missing piece. Find it.

RECLAIMING THE FIRE

Some men suppress the fire entirely. Others spray it everywhere. Neither is the warrior.

The warrior is the man who knows what he’s fighting for.

There’s a version of the capable man that shows up constantly in my work:

Competent, reliable, the one everyone calls when something needs doing.

But somewhere along the way he learned to make himself smaller. To soften the edges. To swallow what he actually thinks and say the thing that keeps the peace.

He calls it being easy to get along with. What it actually is, is a collapsed warrior.

Bly’s warrior isn’t aggression. It isn’t dominance. It has nothing to do with how loud you are, how much you can lift, or how hard you can fight.

Most men have suppressed this so completely they can’t access it when it matters. They’ve confused the absence of conflict with the presence of peace.

They’re not peaceful. They’re just quiet. There’s no fight left in them

And underneath the quiet is a man who hasn’t fought for anything in years - including himself.

The fire doesn’t go away when you suppress it. It just finds somewhere else to go. Usually somewhere worse.

For most men it shows up as anger. Directed at the wrong people, at the wrong moments, for the wrong reasons. Not because they’re bad men. Because the fire has nowhere legitimate to go.

We saw this recently at its extreme - a website, 62 million visits, thousands of videos of women being drugged and raped in their sleep. I’ve got nothing clever to say about that here.

It’s fucked.

What I know from over a decade of working with men is that in almost every man who ends up somewhere that dark, there was an earlier version of him who needed to be called out, called forward, told the truth by another man who gave a damn.

Not preached at. Just met by someone willing to say: this isn’t it. You’re capable of more than this.

The warrior, properly initiated, doesn’t direct his fire outward onto people who can’t defend themselves.

He directs it inward first - toward his own patterns, his own unexamined darkness, the places he’s never been willing to look. That’s where the real courage lives.

Your ask: What have you stopped fighting for? Your marriage. Your health. Your integrity. Your own sense of what’s right.

Pick one thing you’ve been quietly retreating from and take one step back toward it. Not a grand gesture. One honest move in the direction of what you actually believe.

Your Task: Have one conversation this week you’ve been avoiding. Not a confrontation - a truth. Something you actually think, from your heart, with your balls, said directly to someone who needs to hear it.

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“It’s easier just to go at it alone, to lone wolf it, to remain on an island”

This is a quick note to any men who feel like it’s safer and easier just to be alone, to put yourself on an island, to just shut off your feelings. Not let anyone in, keep everyone at arm’s length.

It’s a common one for NICE GUYS – as the desire to avoid rejection and being hurt runs so much of the Nice Guys life.

It might seem easier in the short term.

But the thing about an island is that it can feel safe – away from the risk of those who would harm you or try to take your freedom, perhaps.

Those who might invade the ‘safety’ of your island.

But it isolates you from the rest of the world.

And you might be thinking, “yeah, yeah, exactly; that’s safe. Duh” – but by definition this is saying:

“It’s safe purely because I can’t be hurt by others because I can’t be accessed by others”

Not only are you actually denying the largest part of you, the human, which is love, connection to and relationships with other humans, but you’re choosing to hide away from the risk of being hurt.

Risk of being hurt, risk of suffering and discomfort – these are the prices of admission for love. Shit, for being a human.

You – we all – are better than that.

And trust me, I’ve been there – in my early to mid 20’s I spent a lot of time on an island I created.

Convincing myself it was better – I could have ‘fun’ but not have to deal with what can come with deeper intimacy; hurt.

Sure, I had plenty of people around me, in my vicinity, even in close intimacy with me – but it was still a controlled arm’s length.

My heart and humanness were wrapped tightly in a box no one could get to.

And I’ve seen this many times. I recall a coaching student from the ELA program, Matt – married with teenage kids. Unsure why he was feeling the way he was; stuck, lost, disconnected from himself and others, lonely even – despite having his wife in his corner.

When he joined us he was so deeply fearful of being hurt, of being abandoned. He feared this would confirm a deeply held belief that he was not loveable, not good enough.

So, he closed off access to his heart. He kind of let them in. He loved on an island. All the while making it appear that he was on the mainland.

He thought he was safe there, away from hurt. but ultimately, he was hurting right there. On that island of his own creation.

Instead of having access to love, connection, intimacy, and joy, he had convinced himself that it was safer to be in a kind of neutral nothingness just in case he was hurt.

And we do this – missing that we are creating a low-level suffering all of our own.

There’s a quote I love from Niccolo Machiavelli that applies in many areas of life, including this one. He said:

Matt was developing the strength to suffer in isolation. A strength that doesn’t have a meaningful and rewarding payoff.

And that’s what I did for many years as a younger man. FULL of justifications.

And that’s what we must do; justify.

We have to justify where we are, our choices, and our isolation, so can make it seem like a brave thing. Convince ourselves it’s about being self-reliant and self-sufficient.

And those things can grow, sure.

But the major result is the isolation of your heart along with the self-deception that comes as we convince ourselves it’s all about ‘self-reliance and not about trying to reduce the risk of being hurt by others.

But the man who does that only serves to justify the island, making the bridge to connection (and humanness) even further away.

We must make the loneliness seem palpable.

Yet, in my experience, this way of being and justifying the island is usually accompanied by a number of numbing and distracting behaviours, all serving to amplify self-deception and avoidance.

Ranging from porn, booze, drugs – the classic whipping boys for destructive and numbing behaviours – through to work, exercise, constant achievement and busyness.

Doesn’t matter how you dress it up, if its job is to distract you from the shit you’re not facing, or an attempt to create a false sense of worth and worthiness, it ain’t serving you.

When in truth, what this creates is further disconnection from your own heart. Which is the first step to actually connecting with others. And being able to handle heartbreak.

The risk of being hurt is the price of admission for real love, connection, and intimacy – touching the very heart of our humanness.

And in case you needed to hear it – you can handle being hurt. And upset.

Sure, it might be such a bunch of dirty gym socks, but you can handle it.

And you are worthy of, deserve, and get to experience deep love connection and joy with other humans.

Even if you don’t believe that right now, isolating yourself won’t change that. It might feel like it protects you from others knowing it or proving it, but it doesn’t.

My suggestion is to find people who you do feel safe around, you are supportive and loving and empathetic, and who care about you.

Find people who can and will build you up, encourage you and challenge you lovingly to step bolding into this work and more deeply into yourself.

This has singlehandedly been the most impactful thing in my life. As it was for Matt. The shift for him was IMMENSE. Letting his wife fully in, the kids, the connections that have come from that, the lightness in him, the depth, the joy – so fucking great to witness.

And that is possible for you. Single or in a relationship – the work is yours.

And you get to do that.

So, if you have ever felt curious about doing some of this work yourself, and about my work, about stepping into your depths and your potential in life and love, now is your chance.

PUTTING YOUR HAND UP IS NOT A COMMITMENT NOR OBLIGATION – it’s an opportunity to see if it can be the epic fit for you like Matt and hundreds of other men.

Bedtime. The lights off, the room quiet, that particular kind of dark where kids stump you with the things they’ve been seemingly turning over all day.

My daughter is five.

She’d been trying to work out what I do for work for a while.

Not in a worried way, just in that beautifully earnest way kids have when they’re genuinely curious about their parents’ world.

We’d had versions of the conversation before. She knew I “helped people.” She wanted to understand how. And why. ‘Why do they need help?”

So I told her. Simplified, but honest.

I gave an example that some men can get really busy, or really stressed. That they might feel upset or owrried ot grumpy in their relationship. And don’t know how to say so. That they can have a lot of worry and don’t always know what to do with it. And that I help them figure it out and feel better and be better.

She was quiet for a moment. Then:

“Dad, when someone is grumpy, they should go to their room and take alone time to calm down and then come back.”

Five years old.

I didn’t teach her that directly.

There was no lesson, no worksheet, no conversation where I sat her down and explained co-regulation or nervous system management.

She just... lives in a house where that’s what we do with hard feelings.

Where Dad names when he needs space.

Where we talk about what’s going on inside us.

Where emotions aren’t something to be ashamed of, stuffed away, or weaponised.

She absorbed it. And then she gave it back to me, solved.

That moment sits with me because of what it represents - and because of how different it could have gone.

Option three

I wasn’t always good at this.

A few years back, I wrote about a moment of real frustration - the kind that had anger right behind it, hot and close. I could feel it.

In that moment I had three options, and I knew it.

One: stuff it away. Control it. Pretend it’s not there.

Option two: let it out all over someone else - most likely my partner.

And option three: put my man-pants on and take actual ownership of it.

I put my shoes on, grabbed my rugby ball, and went to the park.

I spent thirty minutes kicking the absolute shit out of that ball while I stayed present to what was moving through me.

When I was exhausted, I stopped and sat. Didn’t judge myself. Didn’t blame anyone. Just let it move through and then reflected on what was actually going on.

That’s not a heroic story. It’s just a man choosing option three instead of the other two.

But it matters. Because my daughter was watching. Not that day necessarily - but across the accumulation of days.

Watching what Dad does with the hard stuff. What’s safe to feel in this house. What happens when things get loud inside someone.

Your kids are watching too. All of it. Every time.

The Shed Door

One of my clients said something in a session that I haven’t forgotten.

Nine months into the work, I had prompted him to go withing and speaking as his four-year-old self - addressing his own father. What came out was this:

“Stop dad, stop and see me. Include me. Love me!

I know he loved me, don’t get me wrong, but I know he was always too busy for me.”

He wasn’t angry when he said it. Just finally honest.

His dad wasn’t a bad man. He was a man who didn’t know what to do with what was going on inside him.

So he disappeared. Into his work, into the shed, into whatever gave him distance from the feelings he’d never been taught to face.

The shed door closed.

And his boy was left on the other side of it, learning that when things get hard, men go quiet and go away.

Then my client told me the kicker.

His own son had just turned four. And when that boy looked up at him - same age, same wide expectant face - he saw himself. Thirty-odd years ago. Waiting for a dad to stop.

He saw the pattern. Clearly. Probably for the first time.

And here’s what matters: his father wasn’t doing it on purpose.

He was doing what he knew. What had been done to him.

Feelings don’t just disappear when you ignore them - they get stored. Passed along.

One generation buries them and the next one inherits the burial.

Two ways it goes

That inheritance goes one of two ways.

The first is quiet.

Your kid learns to do what you do - carry it silently, stay functional, busy, ‘strong’, keep moving.

Capable on the outside, running on empty underneath.

Emotional constipation dressed up as strength.

You might recognise this if it lands close to home.

The second is louder.

Your kid swings hard the other way - all reaction, no regulation, no idea why the feelings keep exploding out sideways.

They weren’t taught the middle ground.

Nobody showed them what to do in the space between feeling something and acting on it.

So there is no space. Just the feeling and then the fallout.

Both outcomes come from the same source. A man who was never taught to be a responsible steward of his own emotional world - and so couldn’t teach his kids it either.

Nobody is to blame here. That’s the part that’s important to hold.

Your dad almost certainly drew a blank on this too.

The absent dad, the shed dad, the “just get on with it” dad - most of them weren’t withholding by choice.

Same for the volatile dad, the walking on eggshells dad.

They were all passing on what they’d been given, which was nothing.

The pattern has been quietly moving through your family for generations, causing damage no one intended.

No one wants to be a shit dad.

At some point, someone has to see it clearly enough to stop.

What it actually looks like

So what does option three actually look like as a father?

It doesn’t look like perfection. It doesn’t look like never getting frustrated, never being short, never having a moment where you weren’t who you wanted to be. That’s not regulation - that’s suppression with better PR.

For me, it looks like this…

Some days I catch it early.

I can feel the frustration building - the house gets loud, something tips it - and I’ll say to my daughter, “Dad needs a few minutes, I’m feeling frustrated. I’m going to take some space.”

And I do. I come back regulated, present, and we move on. Option three. Clean.

Other days I don’t catch it. I’m short when I didn’t want to be. Not catastrophic, but not who I want to be either. Not the dad she deserves in that moment.

And on those days, I go back.

I find her, I get on her level, and I own it.

Not a performance of ownership - actually owning it, “Dad wasn’t as kind as he would like to have been earlier, and I’m sorry. I love you. That wasn’t okay, and it wasn’t about you.”

I make sure she feels safe. I make sure she feels loved. I make sure the rupture gets repaired before it becomes the thing she carries.

That’s the work.

Not choosing or expecting myself to nail option three every time - I’m human, that’s not the deal.

The deal is being honest when I don’t, taking responsibility without making her responsible for my feelings, and closing the loop so she knows that when things go sideways between us, we come back to each other.

Most of our dads never came back.

They disappeared into the shed, moved on like it didn’t happen, or doubled down.

The silence after the storm became its own message - that this is just how it is, that feelings are dangerous, that men don’t repair, they just reset and keep going.

Stuff your shit away. Or let it fly and make it someone else’s problem.

Your kids are learning that too, if that’s what they’re seeing.

The repair is where the real teaching happens.

Any man can white-knuckle his way to option three some of the time. But going back to your kid after a shocker - clearly, warmly, without making it about you - that’s the pattern actually breaking.

That’s the thing most of their fathers never did.

And it’s something you could do tonight.

She’s five

That’s what my daughter has absorbed. Not the theory. The practice. The daily accumulation of watching her dad choose option three, imperfectly, as consistently as I can. And experiencing me apologise and repair when I fluff it.

And one night at bedtime, in the dark, she handed it back to me like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“They should go into their room, have some alone time. Calm down, and come back in.”

She’s five.

The question isn’t whether your kids are learning from you.

They are. Right now. Every day.

The question is what are they learning?

If this landed somewhere real, I work with men who are ready to stop passing the pattern on. You can find me at

Reach out today here or hit reply and we’ll talk.

“I’m just so busy, so many things going on, pulling me in different directions – I just feel so overwhelmed!”

Put your hand up if you’ve experienced this 🙋‍♂️

Put the other one up if you experience this frequently…

Overwhelm is common in Nice Guys. Usually inevitable.

The Nice Guy overcommits. He becomes overwhelmed.

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The fear of saying no and what might come from that; rejection, judgement, other people’s discomfort – is so strong, that he’d rather overload himself than say no.

Plus there is this twisted bonus the Nice Guy (thinks he) gets from saying yes despite overcommitting himself.

He short-sightedly focuses on the benefit of being seen as capable enough to do the thing he’s committing to.

Without taking into account what happens in the long run to reputation and respectability of the inevitable underdelivering.

When you OVERcommit, by definition you UNDERdeliver.

You overwhelm yourself.

The more overwhelmed you are the more underwhelming you’ll be.

Read that one again.

Overwhelming is often an indication of poor boundaries and poor capacity management around those boundaries.

Many Nice Guys say YES to more than they can handle – not even safely cover, just flat out even get near to covering at a stretch.

As a result, overwhelm becomes the friends-without-benefits for most Nice Guys.

Exceptions to this

However, overwhelm doesn’t always indicate this. It can be an indication of growth.

Of being at an edge. A place where we feel stretched because we are being stretched to a new level, new capabilities and capacities.

We’re being invited to grow into a new capability.

We’re being asked to let go of some things that are no longer for us and step up into something new. A new way of seeing things. Of doing things. A new way of being.

Enter a surprise lesson for Nice Guys; when you are overwhelmed, when you feel overcommitted, this is an indication of an edge, an invitation to growth.

You are being asked to let go of people pleasing, of the fear of saying no and being disliked or upsetting people. You are being asked to step into having self-respect, and communicating boundaries. You are being invited to shedding more of what isn’t serving you and choosing to respect your time and energy more.

You are being reminded by your entire system “Stop letting fear of what people might think about you run your life and start honouring yourself and your capacity and needs.”

If this is landing for you as it has for thousands of men I’ve spoken to and worked with over the years, then I suggest one of the major reasons you experience overwhelm is because life gets on top of you.

Or, more accurately, you let life get on top of you.

Fear wins. You chase approval and peace. You react to life instead of choosing powerfully.

Your work is to start choosing what happens in your life more, dictating your time and energy instead of reacting to life and always chasing to try and feel ok. Hoping. Waiting. Losing.

Exploring Overwhelm

I’m going to share a short scenario that I purposefully set up for my new coaching students inside the Everyday Legends Academy.

When the guys start the work in ELA or the Development Academy I mention that at some point everyone will likely feel overwhelmed.

In fact, for many guys – not everyone – before I even communicate that with them, it has already happened.

Before we properly dive into the content of the work, we have a whole week of orientation.

Orientation is what it says on the can – all the stuff they need so they can do the work.

And, purposefully, there’s a bit in there – it can be daunting.

WHY?

1. Communicate important details: we want the guys to know all the pieces that will support them in the execution of the program.

2. Facilitate some overwhelm: I want to throw a challenge at them to see how they handle it, and how they respond and show up.

How we respond to challenges speaks volumes. It holds so much information on us.

I want to see what these men and made of. I want to see where they’re at, what’s going on, and what shit comes up for them.

Do they leave it all to the end of the week? Do they find excuses? Do they ask or go silent? Do they get on top of it and plan? Do they all of a sudden feel overwhelmed and then all their stories come up and they panic?

There’s no judgment. There’s no right or wrong, but it’s all information for us to understand to better coach and support them.

This work asks you to give a shit about yourself, to prioritise yourself, to show up, to be challenged and respond to it, and to be accountable – it invites you into a growth-orientated environment of men all leaning in into the same work.

I don’t fuck around with this work or the men who choose to work with me and my team.

I want the guys to have to lean in, prioritise themselves, plan, and give a shit.

We’re sprinting. And sprinting has an intensity to it.

So, we see what they’re made of upfront, we stretch them into a little overwhelmed and step back and pay attention.

What arises shows us some areas that we get to focus on and work on.

And then, we do.

So, overwhelm is a vitally important thing to explore.

Today, my invitation is to reflect on how OVERWHELM plays a part in your life.

Where have you overcommitted?

Where have you let fear of rejection or judgment dictate your choices?

Here’s a simple exercise: pick one thing you normally say yes to (but that you really shouldn’t prioritise or don’t want to do), and say no instead. Observe how it feels. Track the reaction (from yourself and others).

Notice the space it creates.

P.S. When you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can support you:

1. Listen to a solo podcast episode with me on Handling Overwhelm

2. Level up your relationship game with the Better Partner Project

3. Explore coaching in the Everyday Legends Academy

“I help Nice Guys get their shit together and get more from life.”

This is one way I have commonly summed up what I do for a while now.

How I sum it up depends on the context, the situation, the person and the relationship. However, this theme of ‘getting your shit together’ has been in the conversation, at least.

Yes, there is more depth to it.

I have a sort of X-ray vision to spot men’s shit and the calm yet driven ability to support them in seeing it, reshaping their relationship to it, moving through it, and becoming deeply secure within themselves so they can be more purposeful, capable, and useful men.

I myself am not perfect.

Don’t claim to be. Don’t want to be.

However, I do pride myself on being a living breathing example of any message I share.

This is a standard I set for myself.

Not to ‘always have my shit together’.

Instead, it is to ‘continually be in the practise of honesty, integrity, growth, and evolving with life as it evolves’.

To me there is space, grace, intent, and invitation in there.

But it has not always been this way.

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I am not a natural…

Navigating communication in my relationship - not natural.

My ability to communicate and use effective language - not natural.

Willingness and ability to receive feedback maturely - not natural.

Living with purpose, having a grounded drive and determination to grow in alignment with my values - not natural.

Consistently being in the game of exploring my shit and gathering it together as much as any one man can at any one moment - not natural.

I used to be terrified of rejection, especially from women.

Deeply insecure about being wrong or something being wrong with me.

I used to be incredibly reserved and lacking in confidence socially.

My focus was on good times, acceptance from my peers and women, and the next dopamine hit in front of my eyes.

Sure, I was curious. Intelligent enough. Athletically gifted… but I was floating through my life.

No vision. No real direction or purpose.

I was too focused on feeling good and safe in the world to be brave enough to even think about what I truly wanted from my life.

I kind of cherished this, elevated it almost.

Glorifying being ‘easy-ozy’ and just present in the moment.

What I missed here was that I was too scared to commit to a big or meaningful goal because if I didn’t achieve it, well then, I couldn’t quite handle what that might mean about me.

“If I fail, shit, I’d be a failure.”

The kind of thing I’ve now seen and heard out of the mouths of thousands of men just like me.

That might be you, as well.

The result was a kind of malaise in my life.

I knew I wanted more than what I was experiencing, but I wasn’t clear on what that was.

I lacked direction. Lacked conviction in what I wanted. What was important to me.

I wasn’t clear on where I was going. I was living in the moment so much that all I had was the moment.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a great trait.

But without an eye on the future, without a north star, and without choosing my direction and path, I ended up being less in control of my life and more reactive to life.

I was like a leaf in the wind. Moved by external forces. Not my own.

The journey to clarity, to driven direction, and to living with purpose and doing purposeful work, was the most important one I have undertaken.

One I am still on.

It needed me to get clear on my values, on what matters to me, on what I wanted in life, on what I was good at and gave a shit about.

It asked me to look beyond the moment and into a future I desired.

It asked me to look at all of my shit that was in the way - and courageously work on that and continue working on it.

*I wrote about this ‘best decision’ a few months ago.

Until that point in my life, things had been pretty short-sighted.

I followed the path of the quick fix. Fun and adventure. My hormones. Especially testosterone.

Short term good times and experiences were the purpose - so my energy was directed there.

It was not bad or good; it was simply what it was.

I had a great time.

And I also had some challenging times. Undesirable consequences of a lack of foresight and longer-term vision.

This is something I had to reconcile and be at peace with.

If I didn’t do that, I’d be unhappy now. I’d pine for a different opportunity in a past that can’t come. Missing that I have an opportunity in each moment in the present.

However, I can now look at it and say, ‘It would have been nice to have some of my focus more future-oriented.’

Not all but some.

This could create regret. Or, I take it as an invitation to do something with it.

Regret is teaching me a lesson about the past and providing an opportunity in the present.

The opportunity becomes ‘What do I do now? How do I direct my life, my energy, my fucks?’

This question invites me to find things that bring me purpose and to ensure I live with purpose.

I have seen this duality absent in many guys, especially nice guys who tend to adapt to the world in order to feel safe, as opposed to showing up in the world, claiming what they want, choosing self-expression, and letting the world adapt to them.

One is reactive, safe, and lacking in intention and purpose, while the other is full of courage, intention, and purpose.

This one says “This is what is important to me so I am going to apply myself to it despite the risks, despite the fear and potential for others to think ill of me or judge me”.

How to have direction and purpose

“If I’d stayed stuck in the ‘I’m not a natural, so I can’t do it’ line, I’d have missed out on half my life.

It’s a nice idea to ‘find your purpose’, and we tend to shower people with this idea in the personal development world.

But it’s vague.

It’s reductive.

It’s so unhelpful, I think it’s counter-productive.

I have talked to and worked with countless men who have adopted this idea - a pressure, even - to ‘find their purpose’ as if it needs to be some grand thing that encapsulates every bit of meaning in their lives, every bit of financial security, and make some huge impact on the world.

Think about the ludicrously large expectations this sets in your mind.

No thanks.

Setting a direction for your life is work.

It’s about getting clear and choosing the direction you want based on what is meaningful, responsible, and aligned with your values.

‘Purpose’ isn’t so much about finding one grand purpose in your life but living with purpose in things that bring you purpose.

But find and live with it, you must.

Without purpose and direction in our lives, we flounder. We meander from moment to moment and wonder why we struggle to apply ourselves to meaningful things.

We don’t do the thing we want to do or know we need to do.

We procrastinate.

We feel stuck.

We spin in circles.

We wait. We hope some kind of magic clarity will hit us one day.

“Maybe if I just look in the right corner when the moon is at a certain angle while balancing an apple on my head, maybe then I’ll find my purpose.”

Over to You:

Identify one area where you’ve been avoiding responsibility or clarity, and take a step to own it today.

What choice can you make right now that aligns with the man you want to be?

If being hard on yourself worked…
it would have worked by now.

If you want to respect yourself, you can’t treat yourself like shit and expect to end up in a place you like.

To like yourself, start liking your choices.

I’ve spent 12 years coaching thousands of men, from husbands and fathers to business owners and leaders.

I wrote the book on becoming an Everyday Legend. I’m writing a new book on moving from chaos to command, trigger/trauma response to grounded choice.

I’ve built a proven system that takes stretched providers and chaotic business owners (Nice Guys) from stuck and frustrated to calm, respected, unapologetic, and powerful.

One of the more common traits I’ve seen playing out under the surface in so many men is a consistent pattern of being really fucking hard on themselves, convincing themselves they need to be to achieve and feel worthy of love and respect.

To feel proud of themselves, to have ease and joy in their lives, they need to beat themselves up and hold themselves to an impossible standard.

If that worked... it would have worked.

It just doesn’t.

It’s fear in a convincing dress.

So why do you do it?

Why do you keep spinning the plates even when you know they’re about to crash?

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There can be a few key reasons. Ranging from the repetitive vortex of the internal stress response, through to a dangerous equation so many men have bought into:

Your Output = Your Worth.

You believe that if you aren’t “busy,” you aren’t valuable.

If you aren’t suffering, you aren’t providing.

If you aren’t achieving and working hard, then you’re worthless, you haven’t earned love, rest, joy, or the right to feel proud of yourself.

Or whatever story and justification you have about why you have to keep your foot to the throttle.

If you sit still for ten minutes, the guilt creeps in. “I should be doing something.”

That guilt? That’s not a work ethic. That is a Trauma Response.

It’s ineffective conditioning masked as ‘work ethic’.

This isn’t to rubbish, dismiss, or diminish hard work.

Simply to show that when this is so tied to an inability to rest, slow down, enjoy life, and feel any sense of worth or value if you’re not doing something productive, you have made a rod for your back that will ensure you never allow life to have any ease.

You can become dependent on it.

You are using “busyness” as a drug to numb the fact that you don’t know who you are without the chaos. Without achievement. You’re terrified that if you stop moving, the whole thing falls apart.

Or worse, you’ll have to sit in silence with yourself and all your bullshit and demons.

Thrashing yourself with chaos or constant hard work, beating yourself up when you make a mistake or fail, is taking the punishment approach to life. It says, “To feel ok, to be enough, to earn love or joy, I need to take a hard line” - this ensures your life will never be easy.

Once ease comes, or simply relaxing on time off, you’ll make it hard for yourself, starting with your internal narrative and judgement.

Instead, we want to treat yourself with respect, make choices you respect, and set a standard for yourself that sees you thrive and be proud of yourself.

Self-respect is something you cultivate
WITH your choices and actions.

I’ve often talked about building respect for yourself by respecting your choices. If this is something that talks to you, maybe feels challenging, impossible even, it might be time to explore getting an advisor on board to help with this.

If you resonate with me and my approach to this, know this: I don’t give men a motivational pep talk. I provide them with the clarity, tools, and accountability to finally live as the man they’ve always wanted to be.

If you feel the call to have this type of training tool on your side, reply to me now and ask about our 2026 opportunities.

Over to You:

Look at how you’re treating yourself.
Are your choices earning respect or punishment?
As a role model is this really what you want to pass on to the next generation?

When was the last time you paused without guilt and actually noticed how that felt? Own it.

You don’t have control of it - it is controlling you.

It has the power when you keep it in the dark.

It keeps you disempowered.

Yet we sit there, convincing ourselves, “No, but my shame is too bad, my shame is different. I just can’t bring it to the light. The world would end, it would be too much.”

We catastrophise.

It won’t be too much. You can handle it.

However, you must be willing to face some momentary discomfort as a means to get past it.

You have to be willing to be seen - truly seen - by those who can help you carry it and put it down.

It’s that or stay under its thumb forever - exhausting yourself as you keep up the lie.

Shame is like a Vampire - it thrives in the dark. Bring it into the light and it’s fucked.

It may just burn a bit at first as you adjust to the light.

Shame be like...

You cannot avoid this part. You cannot shortcut your way through.

You can’t out-busy it.

You can’t out accomplish it.

No amount of money, status, or shiny things will mask it enough so that you feel at peace behind them.

Something external won’t address the issue.

What we hide away, we are shaming, and the longer we do it, the harder it seems to change.⁣

Francis Weller says, “What we shame we treat as worthless. And what’s worthless we avoid and leave alone.”

All you do when we stay in this mode is reject yourself in the exact way you fear others will reject you.

⁣It doesn’t have to be that hard - this mode is a prison, but you hold the key. Choose to stop.⁣

People may judge, reject, laugh at you, even.⁣

Break your heart.

You might feel like a fool, stupid, a failure.⁣

These toughen your skin.⁣ Allow your skin to be toughened.

Moving past this armour-laden life can be daunting.

But you get to be supported in it.

And I can assure you, it becomes infinitely easier when you stop trying to do it alone and bring good men around you.

If you’d like to learn more about how I do it in my business, please ask.

When we drop the burden of that armour, we feel instantly lighter.

Bringing others in doesn’t mean burdening them with your weight - but we can help you put down what weighs on you.

Don’t you want to feel lighter, bro?

When you’re not dragging around an armour and all the unprocessed shit from your past, you’re not only automatically lighter, but you have resources to put to meaningful things.

You are stronger.

You become more useful.

You can build stronger relationships, advance your career, and find greater meaning.

If you want this for yourself, then start taking steps to get there. Like this one here.

Subscribe now

Over to You

Ask yourself this:
What’s the shame you’ve been hiding in the dark? Are you still convincing yourself that if anyone saw it, your world would end?

You can keep avoiding it, burying it, distracting yourself with achievements, work, money, or busyness… but the truth is, it’s been steering your life while you pretend it’s not there.
When you stop protecting yourself from vulnerability, that’s when you actually start to grow, and trust me life gets a whole lot more.

For a deep dive into this topic, check out episode 81 of Everyday Legends:

Most men are living half a life and calling it enough.

Not because they’re lazy. Not because they don’t care. Because nobody gave them the map - and the one that exists, most men walk straight past.

It’s the most important book about men you’ve probably never read.

Robert Bly wrote it in 1990: Iron John. Spent 62 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Built around a Brothers Grimm fairy tale about what it takes for a boy to become a man.

You didn’t become a man when you turned 18. First got laid. Not at your first car or job, your wedding. Not by grinding hard enough or earning enough or achieving enough. And fatherhood is one hell of an invitation that most men still pass up. Those things made you technically an adult. That’s different.

Bly was clear on one thing above almost everything else: manhood is not automatic.

A boy needs a second birth. The first is from his mother. The second - and this is the one most modern men never get - is from men. From older, initiated men who have been through the forest and can walk back into it with you.

In traditional cultures across every continent, this wasn’t left to chance. The elders designed the container. The community stood witness. The boy had to die so the man could be born.

That structure is almost entirely gone now.

Francis Weller, who has spent decades leading men’s initiation work, put it plainly: initiation wasn’t so much for the individual. It was for the community. The man who came back through that threshold was authorised to participate in the care of the people around him. More responsibility. More accountability. More capacity to serve - to finally be of real use to the people who need him most.

That’s not a small thing. For a man who wants to matter - to his family, his work, the people in his orbit - this is the path. Achievement can still happen. The drive doesn’t go away. It just gets grounded, directed, attached to something that actually means something.

The fully developed man, returned and integrated, is the one his community actually needs.

The boy had to die so that man could be born.

Which means most men are walking around in grown bodies, still waiting for a second birth that nobody told them they needed.

This is Part 2 of a series on it. Part 1 is here if you want context. But you don’t need it. What follows stands on its own: what to do.

Here’s the map.

You already know something’s wrong

The boy in the story circles the Wild Man’s cage.

He’s been warned away. Everyone tells him to keep his distance. For a while, he listens.

But then his golden ball - his wholeness, his aliveness, the unedited version of himself - rolls into the cage. And he wants it back.

That’s how it starts for most men. Not a dramatic awakening. Not a decision. Just a quiet recognition that something is missing.

The marriage that’s gone flat.

The business that owns him.

The low-grade numbness he’s been managing with busyness, drink, porn, screens - whatever keeps the noise high enough that he doesn’t have to feel what’s underneath.

He knows something is in the cage. He’s glimpsed it. In moments of real anger, real sadness, real longing that told him something deeper is going on than he’s admitted to.

And then he circles back to ordinary life.

Because ordinary life is comfortable. Ordinary life is known. It’s full of justifiable responsibilities.

Ordinary life is also the ceiling of a confined man.

Bly noted something important here - in the original story, the boy approaches the Wild Man and runs.

Then comes back. But in real life, that gap between running and returning isn’t a day. For most men, it’s a decade. Sometimes more.

The cost of that delay is paid quietly, in the corners of his life where the people who love him can see what he can’t.

The ask: Look at where you’re circling. The marriage that’s lost its spark. The integrity gap between who you say you are and how you’re actually showing up. The commitments you keep breaking to yourself. These aren’t problems to fix - they’re symptoms, pointing at something kept locked up.

Name the symptom. Then ask what it’s pointing at.

The theft that changes everything

The key to the Wild Man’s cage is kept under the mother’s pillow.

Bly is specific about why. It’s a mother’s job to civilise the boy - to make him fit for community, capable of containing himself, respectful, kind, able to be with the world around him.

That work is real and necessary. But it’s also precisely that work - done well - that has her holding the key. She tamed what needed taming. The problem is, some of what got tamed needs to come back.

The boy can’t ask for the key. She won’t hand it over willingly - not because she’s villainous, but because her whole project has been the opposite of what he now needs.

Her job was to bring him in. His job now is to go out.

He has to steal it. No permission. No blessing. He takes it anyway - deliberately, with some courage and real cost. And when he does, Iron John says something to him that lands like a door closing.

“You will never see your mother and father again.”

Not a punishment. A truth.

You cannot become this man and remain that boy. The old identity - managed, acceptable, performance-ready, contained - doesn’t make it through.

Not hated, not burned. Just left behind. The door closes.

This is the severance that every real change requires. Whether you’re doing a full reckoning with who you are, or something that looks smaller from the outside - finally committing to your health, holding your ground in your relationship, stopping the people-pleasing that’s been bleeding you dry.

In every case, there’s a version of you that doesn’t come with you.

He doesn’t get to come with you.

Most men stall here. Not because the change is impossible. Because they haven’t decided they’re willing to pay what it costs.

Stealing the key looks different at forty than it did for the boy in the story. But the structure is the same.

It’s the man who finally stops pretending the marriage is fine and says what’s actually true - knowing it might blow everything up, doing it anyway.

It’s the man who stops shrinking in his business, stops deferring every hard call, stops making himself smaller so nobody feels threatened by him.

The moment he claims the power back in his life.

None of those are dramatic gestures. All of them cost something. All of them require leaving behind the version of him that kept the peace, kept the lid on, kept everyone comfortable at his own expense.

That version served a purpose once. He doesn’t get to come with you.

The ask: Have you stolen the key - or are you still circling, waiting for permission that’s never coming?

For some men, this is still painfully literal - stealing it looks like finally saying “I love you, and I’m not willing to participate in this dynamic anymore. You don’t speak to my partner that way. That stops now.” Simple. Terrifying. Long overdue.

If you have stolen it - what version of you are you still letting back in that needs to stay behind?

And if you haven’t - what’s the one decision you’ve been avoiding that would change everything if you made it today?

The part nobody wants

The boy steals the key. Iron John is freed. He takes the boy into the forest and puts him to work - not as a prince, but as a servant. Soon in the kitchen. Scrubbing pots. Starting from nothing.

From king’s son to cook.

This is different from circling the cage or avoiding the key.

Those are the stages before the decision. The kitchen comes after.

This is the man who has made the move - who has said the thing, drawn the line, started the work - and now finds himself in unfamiliar territory with no clear map and no guarantee it’s going to work out.

It can look like failure from the outside.

Sometimes it is literal - the collapsed business, the marriage that ended despite his best efforts, the role that dissolved when he finally stopped holding it together with his bare hands.

Sometimes it’s subtler - the quiet disorientation of a man who has stopped performing the old version of himself and doesn’t yet know who the new one is.

Bly calls this katabasis. The descent. The road of ashes and grief.

And this is the stage most men skip entirely. Or try to.

Here’s what lives inside it that men most avoid: grief. Real grief. Not the kind that comes with a funeral. The kind most men are carrying around unfelt, unnamed, and unprocessed.

Grief for the absent or unavailable father.

Grief for the boyhood that never got properly witnessed or initiated.

Grief for the years spent behind armour so familiar he forgot he was wearing it.

Grief for the version of himself he abandoned - slowly, incrementally - to keep everyone else comfortable.

Grief for the potential he’s caught glimpses of and then talked himself out of.

Grief for the marriage that became a business arrangement while he was too busy to notice.

Weller has a line that cuts through all the avoidance: “If you don’t go into the grief, you’re never coming back.”

Not a threat - an observation.

The man who keeps grief at bay spends his life frozen, a portion of his energy permanently allocated to keeping that door shut.

Which is why so many men are numb.

Functional…

Even successful…

But operating at a fraction of their depth, going through the motions of a life that looks right and feels hollow.

The ashes are what’s left when the old ways burn off. You can’t shortcut this stage.

Men who skip the grief stay numb - and wonder why nothing they achieve ever quite lands.

The ask: Where is the grief you haven’t let yourself feel? It probably isn’t about a death. It might be the father who wasn’t there - what you needed and didn’t get. It might be years of self-abandonment, the slow erosion of who you actually are under the weight of who everyone needed you to be. It might be lost time, lost potential, a relationship that died while you were looking the other way.

You don’t need to perform it. You don’t need to collapse into it. But you do need to stop outrunning it.

Francis Weller’s conversation with Anderson Cooper on the All There Is podcast is worth your time on this. A high-achieving man, decades of buried grief, finally turning toward it. - Watch Here.

And then find someone to do this with. Grief carried privately tends to stay there. It needs a witness.

The thing you’ve been hiding is the thing

The wound is where the gift lives.

Not a comfortable idea. Not meant to be.

Wherever a man has been most hurt, most shamed, most shut down - that’s precisely where his greatest depth lives. Not despite the wound. Because of it. The place he’s spent the most energy hiding or compensating for is pointing at something he hasn’t yet accessed.

I’ve said it differently for years: the gift is wrapped in your shit.

Same truth. Neither version is particularly pleasant - but both are pointing at the same door.

The man who felt shamed early and learned to make himself smaller. That shame didn’t go away. It went underground. And what’s underneath it, when he finally stops shrinking, is usually exactly the energy the people around him have been waiting for.

The man who learned he had to perform to be loved - achieve, behave, be good. That strategy has long since outlived its usefulness. Underneath it is a depth the performing version of him could never access.

The man most ashamed of his sensitivity, his fear, his neediness - those aren’t flaws. They’re doors.

Your insecurity is your indicator. Dig in there.

This doesn’t mean finding your cosmic purpose or rebuilding your life around your wound. It means stop treating the thing you’re most ashamed of as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you.

Turn toward it. Get curious about it.

What’s in there - when you stop running - tends to be exactly what the people around you actually need from you.

The ask: What’s the thing you’ve spent the most energy hiding or compensating for? Stop treating it as a flaw to be managed. Get curious about it.

Then do something with it. Write it down - one sentence: “The thing I’ve worked hardest to hide is...” Don’t edit it. Just name it.

Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding - say something true about yourself that you’d normally minimise. To your partner, a mate, a coach.

Or touch the edge of it deliberately - if it’s rejection, say the thing you’d normally stay quiet about.

If it’s ‘not being enough’, take on something you might fail at.

If it’s performing to be loved, do something for someone with zero agenda. Small. Specific. Real.

There’s more map

This is roughly the halfway point of the journey Bly lays out.

What comes next - the father wound, the warrior, the capacity for real intimacy, the return - that’s Part 3.

One question to sit with before then: which of these stages are you actually in right now - and which ones have you tried to skip?

I’m opening a thread in Chat on this.

Come tell me where you are on the map.

-Mike

If you’re a Nice Guy, you probably hold yourself to impossible standards; believing that being harder on yourself is the way to stay “good,” motivated, and worthy. But that constant internal punishment doesn’t make you stronger; it keeps you trapped.

Self-respect begins with grace.

It’s the willingness to be kind to yourself, to rest, to lower the bar just enough to actually build momentum and progress. Without grace, all you’re doing is reinforcing the same belief that you’re not enough.

If you’re a Nice Guy - there is a high chance this is you.

If you’re a reforming Nice Guy - the smart money still goes here.

⬇️ Either way keep reading to learn how to allow yourself more grace ⬇️

One of the major work-ons for Men

Sure, you have to work on letting go of the people-pleasing, the overcommitting, the conditional kindness and covert contracts. You have to work on the fear of rejection, the need to be liked, the amount of time and energy that goes into thinking about what other people are thinking about you.

There are many branches to the tree of the Nice Guy.

They all tend to stem from the roots that are a deep insecurity about being good enough, being loveable, or being liked.

Knowing that you are safe in the world is the underpinning soil that this root structure sits in.

And praise, approval, and acceptance (belonging) from others help you determine that.

The most present mental representation of that is the fear that you aren’t okay, that people won’t like you or accept you, and that you don’t belong.

Sure, there are some individual differences in the flavour of this. But that is commonly at the root.

So what’s the trunk?

The thing that tends to sit at the thick base of the tree is a pretty shitty relationship with self.

The everyday Nice Guy is incredibly hard on himself.

He sets high expectations of himself - often beyond what is realistically achievable.

In order to feel good about himself, to feel any sense of peace, pride, satisfaction, or worth, he must meet those expectations, or he is—choose your own flavour—[worthless], [useless], [a failure], [not good enough], [a POS], [not deserving of love/joy/happiness/ease].

He beats himself up for not being perfect or achieving, for doing frustrating things. Or for not doing brave things.

How you talk to yourself, view yourself, and engage with yourself and your life tells us so much. These things really give us a window into your relationship with yourself and your sense of worth.

The Nice Guy thinks that if he is outwardly nice to others he can treat himself like shit in his head, and somehow this will take him to a peaceful and rewarding place. Just so long as others don’t dislike or reject him.

All the while, rejecting himself.

All this does is reinforce the deeper belief that he’s not good enough.

He sets himself up to create evidence that appears to reinforce his belief about his worth.

It says, “In order to be happy/feel okay, you must meet these very high expectations.” And when you don’t, “See, you aren’t good enough.” And so, the cycle spins and spins.

Understand:

The thing about beliefs like this is that they sit deep in the subconscious. And that will only allow you to have what you believe you deserve.

If you have a belief that you’re not good enough then you also believe you deserve to never access that fully: enoughness, belonging, joy, ease, deep fulfilment.

Your subconscious will see to it that you never get it. It will ensure you only get what you think you deserve.

You’ll spin in fear of judgment, inadequacy, and low self-worth, waiting for the world to make you feel safe and okay.

It is a deeply passive and disempowered way of going about life.

And it sucks balls - I know, I’ve been there.

These behaviours and ways of treating yourself continue to produce results that reinforce the belief, and the belief continues to create the behaviours.

It’s the Nice Guy’s internal circle jerk.

But here’s some truth:

You can’t disrespect yourself to a place of self-respect.

You can’t hate yourself to a loving place.

The Nice Guy’s Mental Block

You might have this narrative running yourself:

You think that if you weren’t so hard on yourself, then you would fall into lethargy, ambivalence, and simply letting yourself off the hook.

Not caring. Sliding. No drive. You would appear to be worthless.

When in fact, that’s the other end of the spectrum. It’s miles away.

It’s the kind of twisted logic nice guys get caught in.

It says “If I expect little of myself then that’s proving that I have no/low worth”.

So if you keep up the super high expectations you will appear to be a man of worth. Even though it’s the cycle of disappointment and beating yourself up.

On the surface, it makes some sense—until you poke it a little, and we see that a lower standard is the path to achievement, consistency, momentum, and growth. It allows us to raise the bar as we are able to raise it.

What this is missing is THE #1 thing every Nice Guy needs to develop:

GRACE.

Join the Conversation

How do you approach grace in your own life?

Have you found ways to show yourself respect and flexibility without dropping your standards?

Leave a comment

Your story might be exactly what another man here needs to hear.

Can you let yourself off the hook, not because you’re lazy or don’t give a shit, or have low worth, but because it’s the most effective, honest, and mature thing to do?

Can you be kind to yourself?

Can you set yourself up to succeed, to progress, to build and maintain momentum?

Making it easy on yourself to perform, to thrive, to have self-respect.

Contrary to the nice guy’s initial thinking that it represents low self-worth, what it does is it allows us to raise the bar as we are able to raise it.

That is high self-worth behaviour.

It is an act of self-respect to create an environment where we can achieve, improve, grow, and progress consistently.

It is an act of self-respect to have the room and flexibility to stop, slow down, and rest if the situation calls for it… and not make an issue of it.

It is an act of self-respect to allow yourself to be human.

It’s an act of self-respect to believe you have worth and embody it through your behaviours.

This is grace.

Getting Started

I have seen every nice guy score poorly on this concept. Until we do the work.

Take the guys in my Zeus Inner Circle as examples. All of these guys self-recognise as reforming nice guys.

All acknowledged the challenge and history of being extremely hard on themselves.

And that this never worked. Not really.

All struggled to have grace.

These two things formed an accurate representation of their relationship to self.

Throughout the work we’ve been doing, they have been able to develop a reverence for themselves, a self-respect previously absent, a flexibility in their integrity that actually makes them stronger.

A belief that they are good enough - and the behaviours to match this.

This is grace.

Until you can change this internal relationship of berating, beating up, and unrealistic expectations in favour of a grounded, respect-based grace, you will continue to create frustrating and disappointing results in your life.

How to develop Grace

Work.

Do the work on yourself to understand why you do this.

Understand the roots of your tree; why you have these beliefs about yourself, why you have low self-worth, why your insecurities are there and why they run so much of your life.

Do the work to overcome this. To actually accept yourself. To move into a more peaceful relationship with yourself.

There can be a lot to it. But it needn’t be that hard.

The hard pill to swallow?
If you are stuck trying to do this alone, and the environment is everything described above: hard, harsh, unloving, disrespectful, beating yourself up, then you won’t end up in a better place.

You will need others who can see past your bullshit beliefs and into who you are capable of becoming. People who can support you in putting down those beliefs and stepping into more grace, into more self-respect.

Into believing you have worth and acting accordingly.

It’s what we do in ELA. If you are interested in this, my ideas, and my methods,
I invite you to check it out.

Or find anyone and any place that resonates with you. And do the work.

But know this - this shit won’t change itself. You change it.

It also won’t change if you remain confined to your current echo chamber beliefs and limitations. So find whatever will help you break free of them.

I believe you can do that.

Extra content for you this week:

YouTube feature video:

The Best Decision I ever made - a 25 min watch

Revisit some Coaching Corner videos:

• Nice Guy Pitfalls: The secret to keeping your word - a 7 min watch

• Why Nice Guys are actually terrified of Love - a 6 min watch

• How to commit to things better - a 9 min watch

Plus - These key podcast episodes:

• How being busy is lazy - & what to do about it

• Hidden costs of being a Nice Guy

I trust you’ll find something useful in this content.

Over to You

Ask yourself:
Where am I still trying to earn my worth through perfection or punishment?

And what would it look like to show myself a little grace instead (not as an excuse, but as strength)?

Drop your reflection in the comments. Let’s talk about what real self-respect looks like when no one’s watching.

Leave a comment

And when we keep playing and living life on the surface, we have a surface-level life.

Yet, all of these men want lives of depth.

I suspect that’s why you’re here - maybe not a direct thought, but in some significant way - you want to experience more depth in your life.

Depth in yourself, in your experiences, in your relationships. Connection. Love. Adventure. Purpose. Fulfilment. Direction. Clarity.

If you want depth, you must visit your depths.

And so, in ELA, that’s what we do.

We support and guide men in going to and understanding their depths so they can move past what has them stuck in their past beliefs and patterns, and step into what’s possible for their present and future.

Often despite their current limited view of themselves of what’s possible for them.

Spending time there can seem daunting before you do it.

Exploring the stuff we keep tucked away in a dark closet can feel terrifying. Uneasy.

Rather not, thanks.

But what we keep in the dark will run our lives from those shadows.

And we’ll continue to feign ignorance.

Like we don’t know where the light switch is.

It holds all the power in the dark.

But when we shine a light on it, when we can see it, the power it holds dissipates. Things come into focus. We start to realise that it’s not as big and scary as we might have made it out to be. We see that we can handle this.

Sure, maybe not alone. But it shows us the way. It points us to where we need to work.

And we can get to work.

And get to work we must if we are to take control of our lives and our worthiness story and step into what’s available to us.

Doing The Work

On a group coaching call recently, one of the guys dropped a real doozy of a question on this exact topic:

“For the longest time I didn’t believe I was good enough, I didn’t believe I was worthy of love and belonging. It was the soundtrack to so much of my life.

Now, through the work we’ve been doing, I get it intellectually. I am good enough. I deserve and am worthy of love. Yet, I don’t seem to believe it yet.

How do I take it from an intellectual understanding to truly believing it?”

First of all, let’s acknowledge the immense progress indicated in even asking this question.

Also a note: for brevity, we are skipping through how he got to the point of being able to understand it intellectually. That is via the type of teaching and coaching we do.

Suffice it to say, we get the guys there - that’s step one.

Step two is wrapped up in his question.

This is a common piece - I can see that this thing here makes sense but I struggle to believe it or embody the actions relevant to it.

What you must first understand, Mike, is that a foundational belief system in the realm of “I don’t believe I am worthy of love and belonging” will not only infiltrate everything in your life, but the longer it goes on (like, decades) the longer it takes to turn it around.

Think of one of those giant supertankers and ships supertankers - there is a lot of momentum when one of those things is at speed. To turn it around 180° can’t be done in an instant.

Even if you see “Oh shit, I get it intellectually that we need to be going in the other direction. This direction is taking me towards an iceberg. But it’s taking time and energy to stop the momentum of this thing.”

It will.

Big beliefs about yourself that have decades of repetition and engrained behaviours will take time to turn around.

Be patient.

And be persistent.

Keep your eyes on the prize (whatever that is for you). For example, believing deep in your bones that you are worthy of love, belonging, joy, and a dope life.

And being the embodiment of that.

This was lesson, and analogy, number one for the guys on the call with me.

Then What?

This is the tricky part.

What often happens at this point is that we want to rid ourselves of that belief, of that part of ourselves.

This can’t happen. Not really.

The thing with growth, with healing (if you want to call it that), is that we often engage in it to become better, in rejection of the part of ourselves we don’t like. That is self-rejection.

Self-rejection won’t take you to a place of self-respect and self-worth.

Real growth, real evolution, starts with accepting the parts of yourself that you have found hard to love and loving the aspects of yourself that you have found hard to love.

Enter lesson, and analogy, number two.

Where I took this with the guys was the below.

For the longest time this belief system, this way of seeing yourself and moving through life has bene driving the bus.

The bus that is your life.

The aim is not to kick him off the bus. That would be entirely counter-productive to feeling like you belong, that you are loved.

Instead, the aim is to reassure that part of yourself that he doesn’t need to drive the bus.

Your task and goal is to take the wheel.

As a sovereign adult, it is your job to drive the bus.

But if there’s an insecure kid on the bus who really just needs to be loved - despite how shit their behaviours might be on occasion - a mature, responsible steward doesn’t kick that kid off the bus.

And they certainly don’t let them drive.

You give them a comfy seat at the back. You tell them “I’ve got this now - you needn’t white knuckle the steering wheel. I’m here now and I can steer the bus”.

Let that part of you feel loved and welcome. Let him have a seat on the bus, relax, be a kid, play, listen to some music. The driving is over. But you get to be here. You are welcome here.

But from now on, I drive the bus.

In this analogy, ‘taking the wheel and driving the bus’ means taking actions in your life that take you where you want to go. Embodying the actions of a man who believes he is worthy of love and belonging.

Even if you still can’t see the whole route. Even if you can’t entirely believe that this route will get you there.

To ‘drive the bus’ is to action high self-worth behaviours because they are the road upon which you get to the destination.

As you drive the bus more you become more competent at driving the bus.

You build evidence that the action of driving moves you forward. In doing so, you start to believe in the actions and journey as a whole.

The more you do this, the more you assure the little boy now sitting in the back, who believed otherwise, that you have got this shit.

He can trust.

He needn’t try and control things by taking the steering wheel and driving you off a fucking cliff.

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More specifically, you can trust yourself.

Trust that you are enough, that you are worthy of love and belonging.

So, don’t try and throw that part of you off the bus. Remind him that he is welcome, just not to drive anymore.

Take the wheel. Take the actions of a bus driver - act as if you do believe you have worth.

Trust in the journey. Be patient and persistent.

Watch what happens over time.

There’s certainly more to it. There will always be specifics for an individual.

But my intention here with these analogies is to lay out and make sense of the path needed if the specifics are going to work.

Over to You

Ask yourself: Who’s been driving your bus?

Who’s been holding the steering wheel when you should have?

A little task for you this week: notice one area of your life where you’ve been letting old insecurities or limiting beliefs take the wheel. Make a conscious choice to step in and drive it yourself. Not perfectly, not flawlessly but intentionally, consistently, with self-respect and patience.

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Podcasts. Reels. Guys with their shirts off telling you the world is against you, women are the enemy, and the answer is to get jacked, make money, and give zero fucks.

Some of it gets a few things right.

Most of it is a dumpster fire of insecurity and wounding dressed up as wisdom by uninitiated men for insecure and uninitiated men.

The real-world consequences are bad enough. What frustrates me almost as much: none of it is new.

A poet named Robert Bly saw all of this coming. In 1990. He wrote a book about it - Iron John - that gave us the map, the story, and the antidote.

Not enough people read it. Fewer listened.

And here we are.

Why does this matter to you?

You might be reading this thinking: I’m not out here watching Andrew Tate videos. I’m just trying to get through the week.

But what I’m writing about isn’t those guys. It’s what’s underneath all of it. For them. And very possibly for you.

The loud, performative, brittle masculinity you see online doesn’t come from strength. It comes from emptiness and a deep internal powerlessness.

From men who were never shown what it actually means to be a grounded, mature, initiated man.

So they grabbed the loudest, most aggressive version they could find and called it identity.

Then marketed it.

Bly would not be surprised.

Who was Robert Bly & why should you give a shit?

Bly was a poet, a deep thinker, an unusual bloke. He spent years studying mythology, fairytales, and what happens to men when they don’t get properly initiated into manhood.

Iron John is built around an old Grimm Brothers fairy tale - a wild man found chained at the bottom of a lake, who becomes the unlikely guide for a boy on his way to becoming a man.

Not a self-help book. Not a men’s rights manifesto.

A map.

Written in the language of story, because that’s the language men have always understood.

His central concern: what happens to men when the path to mature masculinity gets cut off?

When fathers are absent - emotionally if not physically? When boys aren’t initiated, aren’t challenged, aren’t taught how to sit with difficulty? When they don’t learn the true meaning of their power - of what power is?

You get stunted men. Boys in grown bodies.

Bly had a line about the men of the 1950s.

He said they:

Rough. But fair.

Those men were shaped by war, by Depression-era survival instincts, by a culture that said feelings are weakness and work is identity. Decent men by the standards of their time. But emotionally absent. Cut off from their own depth.

Their sons grew up with full bellies and empty fathers. A father-shaped hole in their soul.

Then came the cultural whiplash. Men were told - rightly - to soften some, open up, get in touch with their feelings. Correct direction. But you can’t just dismantle the old masculine without building something real in its place.

So you got two camps.

Men who overcorrected - who lost their spine and their sense of themselves in trying to be what the world wanted. Nice Guys who abandoned themselves so thoroughly that everyone around them eventually stopped respecting them. Including themselves.

And men who rejected the whole thing and swung hard back to dominance and aggression and called it strength and power .The manosphere, in its worst forms, is that second camp with a smartphone and a Patreon.

Both are the same wound wearing different clothes. Both are men who never did the real

work and likely never had it shown to them.

So what is the real work?

Bly talked about the ‘Wild Man’. Which, on the surface, is easily misunderstood and resisted.

The Wild Man is not the violent savage. He’s not the guy breaking others and calling it strength.

Before any of that, there’s a golden ball.

Bly uses it to represent everything you were before life started editing you -

You lose it young. Most men do. And the Wild Man - the part of you that got locked away - is where it ends up.

The part that knows what you actually want, not what you were told to want. The part with edges, opinions, fire, depth. The part your parents, your school, your culture decided was too much, too risky - the part you learnt to put away in order to be a good, acceptable boy.

So you locked him up in your psyche.

‘Put him at the bottom of a lake’.

And you became manageable. Palatable. Safe.

Flat.

Now - maybe that’s not you.

Maybe you weren’t the manageable one. Maybe you were the kid who pushed every boundary, got kicked out of class, couldn’t sit still, drove everyone mad with it.

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Same story.

Different chapter.

Bly would say your golden ball got branded as the problem. So you ran with it sideways. The fire was always there; it just never got properly directed. You didn’t go flat. You went loud.

And loud has its own kind of emptiness when there’s nothing underneath it holding it up.

The work is the same. What got locked away is the same.

You’re just coming at the cage from a different angle.

And here’s the thing about a cage. It doesn’t just confine the Wild Man.It confines you. Everything you’re capable of - the depth, the range, the full version of who

you are - is operating from inside it. What you’re living right now is the ceiling of a confined man.

The story has a detail worth sitting with: the key to the Wild Man’s cage is kept under the mother’s pillow.

He’s not blaming mothers. He’s pointing at something real - the key to your own depth sits

with whatever force in your life taught you to suppress yourself to feel loved. For most men,

that conditioning started young. Very young.

To get the key, the boy in the story has to steal it.

Not violently. Not resentfully. Deliberately. Consciously. With some courage.

That’s the work.

“Isn’t the answer to all this just... don’t be a dickhead?”

Kind of. But not quite.

Because it doesn’t answer the more important question: why are so many men drawn to that

BS ‘Manosphere’ stuff in the first place?

Bly would say,

“Because they’re starving.”

Starving for initiation.

For challenge.

For someone to look them in the eye and say,

‘I believe you’re capable of more than this’.

For a sense of direction and purpose that isn’t just tied to their output or their bank balance.

The manosphere - at its least toxic - offers some of that. Tells men: you matter, your struggles are real, stop being a pushover.

Not wrong.

The problem is what gets wrapped around it. Contempt for and power over women. Victimhood. Monetised rage that profits from keeping men stuck.

That’s can’t be initiation, only exploitation.

And for the record - needing power over women to feel powerful is weakness. That’s the irony those men can’t see. The louder the dominance, the emptier the man behind it.

Real strength - the kind Bly was pointing at - isn’t loud. It doesn’t need an audience. It’s built in the quiet, uncomfortable, often humbling process of a man actually meeting himself.

His fears. His patterns. His unlived life.That’s where the depth is. That’s where the actual man shows up - when he finds his internal power.

Why does this apply to you?

You don’t have to be watching ‘Alpha Bro’ content to be living a version of this.

You’re holding it all together on the outside - the business, the family, the mortgage, the reputation - while something inside is going quietly missing. Performing a version of yourself that everyone else seems satisfied with. You know it isn’t the whole picture.

Or you’ve never quite let yourself want something deeply, commit to something fully, or say what you actually think - because somewhere along the way you learned it wasn’t safe to.

Here’s what Bly would say about that - and what I’d say: you’re probably more unfinished than you realise. Not broken. Not failing. Just unfinished. And nobody told you that’s what was happening, because the world around you was too busy measuring your output to notice.

That’s what initiation is, at its core. Not a ceremony. Not a weekend ritual. It’s the process of a man deliberately going into the parts of himself he’s been avoiding - the fear, the unprocessed shit, the places he’s never let himself look. The forest, in Bly’s language.

Most men never go there. They stand at the edge their whole lives and call it enough. Then wonder why they never feel it.

When a man does go there - properly, not performatively - everything downstream gets better. His relationship. His kids. How he leads. How he rests.

That’s not a sales pitch, just what happens when a man stops living at half capacity.

Bly wrote Iron John because he believed men were capable of far more than the confined version most of them were living. Not performance. Not dominance. Depth.

Thirty-five years later, I’m still watching men discover he was right.

The manosphere knows men are starving. That part they’ve got right.

What they’re selling just keeps them hungry.

Francis Weller put it plainly:

A man in a cage who’s decorated the bars and called it a throne. The harm he causes is

real. But it comes from emptiness, not strength.

The key is accessible. The cage door opens.

Most men are living at half capacity and calling it life.

What’s still in the cage?

Next issue - what the story actually asks of you. The practical stuff.

Where most men stop short, and what it looks like to not.

If this is your kind of thing, I’d be glad to have you in.
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