027 - The power of being around good men

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have many narratives that we see, hear, experience, and take on board as boys, adolescents and now as men. They range from innocent, to important, to powerful and positive, to powerful and outrageously negative.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have narratives and messages we receive about being respectful of others, about treating others how you want to be treated, about elbows on the table, about talking with your mouthful, about the importance of getting an education and getting a good-paying job, about success and what dictates it, about marriage and what makes a good one, about death and aging - just about anything in life, we receive messages and from those messages, we create narratives about them.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Those narratives become our beliefs.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our beliefs become our behaviours.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our behaviours create our life; what it looks and feels like, how we act, how we speak, and ultimately who we are.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In amongst all of this is the common narrative that includes a mixture of the following: that men need to be strong, tough, unemotional, never show weakness, be able to handle everything, and never ask for any kind of help or admit that you can’t do something or don’t know something.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Before I move on - let’s just reflect for a moment on the widely outrageous size of that as an expectation we commonly place on boys as they stare down that narrowest of narrow paths to manhood. Fuck.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the behaviours and set of outcomes that often falls in here is the common pattern of attempting to live and solve all of life’s problems on an isolated island. And friendships that stick to the surface.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A consequence of that is almost every man living this reality thinking he’