Masculinity Is Two Sides of the Same Coin (And Neither One Works Alone)

Watch the full episode: Master Your Mind EP10 – Masculinity Today and My View on It All

Most of what you see online about masculinity is one of two extremes. Guy in a Lamborghini, no attachments, no weakness, get rid of anyone who doesn't fall in line. Or the opposite — quiet, agreeable, never rocking the boat, giving everyone else what they need at the cost of ever asking what he needs. Both get sold as strength. Neither one is.

The version I used to be

My old definition of masculinity was simple: unfazed. Completely detached from everything and everyone. Violent, strong-headed, quick to react. If you weren't that, I had no respect for you.

Here's the part that surprised even me looking back — I wasn't raised that way by a father figure. My father wasn't present for most of my life. I was raised by predominantly women. You'd assume that means less violence, more emotional attunement. And it did give me more emotional attunement. What it didn't do was make me less violent. It made me more prone to it — because I was feeling hurt, rejected, unimportant, and none of it was getting processed. It was just running in the background, and eventually it came out sideways.

Why most men don't talk

When I made my first ever video and talked about my own abuse as a kid, I got shredded online. Not by everyone — plenty of people opened up in return. But enough people tore it apart that it taught me exactly why men don't talk about this stuff. It's not that men don't want to. It's that most of us have never been shown how to open ourselves up, let alone handle it when someone else does. So the reaction is to attack it, shut it down, or dismiss it — and that reaction is what teaches the next guy to keep his mouth shut too.

The other failure mode

The opposite of aggression isn't health. It's passivity — and it costs you just as much, in a different currency. Not creating problems, not voicing your opinion, not rocking the boat, giving your family what you never had at the expense of yourself. That's a complete loss of identity dressed up as selflessness. You stop finding out what you're actually capable of, because you've stopped putting yourself under any voluntary pressure at all — physical, emotional, any of it. That drive, that edge, it's wiring. Deny it long enough and you lose track of who you are.

What the middle actually looks like

I'm not going to pretend I've got this fully solved. But I'm closer than I've ever been, and it looks like this: compassionate, but with boundaries. In touch with my emotions, but able to tell when it's time to feel something versus when it's time to get something done. Driven, without needing to beat the guy next to me to feel okay about myself.

My relationships taught me this the hard way. Earlier in my life I was cold — couldn't talk about anything real, couldn't give my partner the space to be vulnerable with me, too worried about my own ego to hear I might be wrong. That cost me relationships. Then I overcorrected into the other side — passive, not voicing anything that bothered me, taking a step back instead of standing up. That doesn't work either. Women don't respond to a man who's checked out any more than one who's a threat.

What's different now is I let myself be both — driven and soft, disciplined and honest about a bad day. Today's been a hard day for me, if I'm honest. I'm still here making this video anyway, because that's who I said I'd be. But I'm not pretending the hard day isn't there. I'll go walk the dog, get some sun, sit with it alone, let it out however it needs to come out. Showing emotion doesn't make you weak. Being controlled by it does.

Build the man, don't become someone else's copy

If you're working on this — and if you're reading this, you probably are — the goal was never to become another version of me. It's to find the best version of you. Ask yourself what the man you wish you'd had would actually look like. Then reverse-engineer that, and go build him.

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