You had a plan to be in a great relationship, with a fulfilling career, and maybe a family of your own. . Where are you with that plan?
Maybe your relationship is heading in the direction of previous relationships. Maybe you just don’t have one. Your work is just that – work. The plan of growing and contributing didn’t manifest.
You see others get what they want, yet, you feel stuck.
What no one told you is this: the secret to shifting these challenges is to process your emotions. Those things we were trained to avoid.
We were trained by the media, our peers, and women on how to frame our emotions as men. We know the media’s motive. Our friends may love us, but rarely do they know more than we do. And the women who do love us – from our mothers to our wives – aren’t men.
[clickToTweet tweet=”You are left with emotional shackles that feel normal. When that is all you know, and all your friends know.” quote=”You are left with emotional shackles that feel normal. When that is all you know, and all your friends know, you accept the norm as the only possible reality. Has anyone ever shown you a viable alternative?”]
There is one. It’s acquiring the emotional skills that are inherent for men. They are our Masculine Emotional Intelligence.
Why Use Your Emotions
All deep change, success, and happiness come from an emotional shift. Think about it: whenever you hit a new level in your life, there was either a breakdown, where you just surrendered, or a breakthrough where you went beyond an old limit.
The resistance you experience is your limiting emotions protecting you. Out of those emotions, you create an emotional logic—the reasons why things are the way they are. Then you start proving that you are right.
Just like the thousands of men I’ve worked with, and like myself, you will continue to cycle through your emotional patterns.
In psychology and education, pattern interrupts are what stop a reoccurring pattern. Pain can be a pattern interrupt. But as men we are tough. We power away through pain, hoping we can avoid the feared outcome.
You can do that… for a while. But eventually, repressing your emotions will start sabotaging your life. I have seen successful men ruin good marriages because they were stuck. Others begin to sabotage their success by avoiding their emotions and connections with others.
What It Will Take
Either situation will continue to wear you down, and possibly change you. Or you initiate change.
You know if you want to look and feel good, you need to eat well and exercise. Either you take care of your body, or your body will begin to fail.
The same is true for your emotional life.
To get the life YOU want, you need to build your connections to your emotional experience, others, and to your life’s purpose. Connections occur through your emotions – emotional connections come through experiencing and expressing your emotions. Don’t panic if you don’t know how to do that; you can learn. I learned. I’ve taught hundreds of men. You are no different. You can learn.
Learning is not psychotherapy. Learning is being shown new ways to connect, and receive the feedback and support you need to develop news skills quickly.
Possibly the most powerful way to develop these new skills is in a free Men’s Group. Just through working through a Men’s Group, I’ve seen men take a marriage that was poison for the soul and turn it into romance that feeds the soul. These men did it through connecting first to their emotions. From there it gets easy… and even fun!
Once you develop your Masculine Emotional Intelligence skills, the emotions you attempted to suppress, the ones who were sabotaging you, start to be your allies. They become what connects people to you.
Developing Emotional Muscle
When you want to build muscle, what do you do? You create resistance to push against.
The same is true when you want to strengthen your emotional muscles. You push up against the edges that are holding you back. You train your body-mind to become strong where it was weak. You risk, exert, and do it again.
When you feel, your body tightens—and you notice it. You accept it. Then you connect to the emotion(s) associated with your body tensing. The effort that builds your emotional muscle is not resisting your emotional experience—it’s experiencing it. If you are like the rest of, you are too strong at suppression. You need to strengthen your muscles of acceptance and expressions.
The next time you feel your shoulders tighten, feel the physical and emotional tension. Ask your body and your emotions what they want. The deeper you go into your experience, the quicker you get the shift you want.
Just like getting back to working out, it will be challenging, uncomfortable and not fun. Hang in there. Get support. It could be reading my posts and books. It might be finding or starting a free group where you give and get that masculine support. You could up level it by doing a men’s training such as our Two Day Experience or our Emotional Superman Course.
Because men are asking, I brought back our Men’s Mentoring. For many men, having a personal trainer guiding them on building their Masculine Emotional Intelligence is an investment that brings many returns. To introduce our Men’s Mentoring Program to a new set of men, I am offering a free consultation to evaluate what you need, and what might be some of your best options for getting it.
If you have any interest, to learn more or sign up for a free consult – visit this page. Note: this is limit slots for free consults and for the Men’s Mentoring Program–if you have an interest, contact me soon.