Conscious Masculinity: Be The Man You Were TRULY Meant to Be

All right. Just got some weird note saying unauthorized user. I don't know if that's me. All right. Codrosphere, June 1. This is my official start of kind of the topics that I want to cover kind of each week of the month, right. So on the first week, I'm going to talk about conscious masculinity. On the second week, I'm going to talk about conscious fatherhood. On the third week, I'm going to talk about conscious coupling, not to be confused with conscious uncoupling and then conscious living on the fourth week.

And then if there's ever a fifth week, there'll be a bonus. All right. Hey, Stephen, Christine. Hopefully this is coming through because I got some weird things saying I was unauthorized or something. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna rock and roll. Thank you for joining. You know, so this idea of conscious masculinity, be the man you truly want to be. Obviously, this is for male identified individuals. You know, gender expansive and non binary. Folks kind of have their own journey. Female identified individuals and women have their own journey.

And it's really. I mean, all of them. Right. Are ultimately about authenticity. Awesome. Thanks, Steven. Um, and so I think, you know, the. I think, like, today, what I want to talk about is a little bit about, like, my journey becoming the man I truly want to be. Am I there? No, I'm not. Like, I'm not done, and I don't really think you're ever done, and I don't want to ever be done. Right. But I'm so, so much closer to who I've ever been. Sorry about that. I've also got a really bad cold, and I just took a 15 minutes shower to get ready for this to show up, because, you know, that's part of it, right?

We show up when we say we're gonna show up. I don't think that's a man or woman thing. I think that's an integrity thing. And I think, you know, I didn't. I didn't show up. A lot of the times I'd say I wanted to do something or I was gonna do something. I have no idea how that's coming across, but I apologize. But, yeah, I caught this cold, like, two days ago, and I'm missing my daughter's volleyball tournament. It's one of the last of her season, and she's been moved up to being a starter as an outside hitter, if you follow volleyball.

But, you know, this idea of, like, well, what kind of man do you want to be, right? Like, ultimately, like, that's conscious masculinity is reflecting on a regular basis on what kind of man I want to be and then how I'm falling short of that. And there's lots of tools that I'm going to talk about that can help to, you know, support that growth. Looking. Sorry. Looking at specific things. But, like, one of the things that I learned a long time ago was this idea of integrity. How am I integrity, and how am I out of integrity?

Am I doing what I say I'm going to do? And if I'm not, how do I clean it up? And, you know, I apologize. I'm just gonna be sneezing, I think, the whole time, you know, this idea of conscious masculinity, I've just celebrated 30 years of sobriety. And, like, I can't believe that that's crazy for me to say. But that journey, right, has all been. It has enabled me to start that journey, you know, of becoming the man I truly want to be. Because I could wake up. I could start to wake up. And I think that's a big part of it.

But it's like, it's really being intentional, right? It's being very intentional about the man that I'm going to be and how I show up. So how can I do that? Well, it's called conscious masculinity, right? So it's being conscious. Well, do I even know what kind of man I want to be? Well, have I written that down? Do I have a vision of that? Well, do I know how I show up now? Or do I have a sense of the gender conditioning that drives a lot of my behavior that I'm often not aware of, right? I call it the water.

Like we're fish in the water and we're just swimming in the water. And a big, big part of the water is gender conditioning, also race and sexual orientation and other things like that. But it's like this idea of how do I show up as a man? And I think the kind of the key, right? The key for me, it's not when things are going well. It's when I'm stressed, when I'm feeling stressed, when I'm feeling really nervous or rushed or. Or even more having some kind of trauma response, I default, often unconsciously, to a way of being that even surprises me.

Like, when I see it, I'm like, what? Who is that? And I've gotten to a point where I can own it, right? The shame doesn't keep me from owning it. With my partner, with my daughter, with other people. Where I can almost just laugh at myself and like, oh, my God, did you hear that? Like, especially with my daughter, we have a wonderful rapport, and I can do that. I was like, oh, wow, that was intense. I apologize. But my point is that intensity is rooted in some of my distorted notions of masculinity.

So you have conscious masculinity? I don't talk about toxic masculinity, and I can talk more about that, but I don't. It's not that I don't believe in toxic masculinity. I believe what it should be called is the toxic culture of masculinity. And it's a much different conversation. I don't think that's semantics, but my distorted notions of masculinity that are inside of me that I. I often don't realize. And then when I get stressed, they are almost a bit of a trauma response. Like, I have a trauma response through a gendered lens.

And I go to control. I go to kind of this idea of laying down the law is what we've established it in my home. And, you know, it's not. It's certainly not conscious masculinity, but it's also not the man that I want to be. But I can give myself some grace, and my partner gives me grace, and my daughter gives me grace. And that's the key, right? Is what I say all the time. It's not about doing it perfectly. It's about doing it consciously. And that we move into that with. With a degree of humility, but also with a kind of a wide berth.

And that doesn't mean, like, letting myself off the hook for egregious behaviors. You know, if I gotta own some stuff, I gotta own some stuff. And over the years, I've really had to own some stuff. But this idea of conscious masculinity, it's making conscious. Right. The script I want to follow for being the man I want to be and being very intentional about it, writing it out, saying, this is the man that I want to be. So, as I said, I've got this. I've got this decent cold, and I'm really not feeling great.

So I'm not gonna stay on this too long. But I will say, like, I've made most of the mistakes out there by, at this point, age 51, I've. I have. Even though I've been doing this work around men and masculinity for a long time, I have fallen for. Been seduced by some of the most distorted notions of masculinity over the years. And it's challenging. Right. And it's humbling, but I have awareness of it, and that's the key. Right. The key is the awareness. Well, again, this goes back to what I talked about a couple weeks ago, awareness, acceptance, action, right?

So it starts with awareness. Then I move to acceptance, and then I take thoughtful, conscious action around what to do. So another thing that I said a while back was, was I'm a big believer that, you know, nothing changes if nothing changes, that we got to do the work. So what's the work? Well, my proposal would be for anybody watching now or later. You start by literally writing out the vision of the man you want to be. You literally write it out like, who is that man? Right? And then what you begin to do, just for one week, you notice how often you show up that way.

And when you don't, and when you don't, how are you showing up? What's the behavior? Right? Because that is probably the man you don't want to be. And then noticing, like, when's it happening? What's the situation happening around? Like, I'm going to guess the majority of the time that you're out of integrity with being the man that you want to be or the person you want to be is when you have stress, because stress sets us off, can shut down the prefrontal cortex, and if it doesn't, it can at least kind of create this reactivity, this trauma response where we go to our coping strategies that have been kind of programmed for a long, long time.

And so you may not. You in your. In your kind of conscious, in your everyday, thoughtful brain, you would be like, no, I. That's not who. That's not who I am. I don't do that stuff. And then you do, and then we just have to be honest about that, right? Because we all have our public self, and then we have our private self, we all have our external self, and we all have our internal self. And the more we pay attention to those and find some congruence with those, the more integrated we can be. So hopefully this has had some value and some interest for you.

And I wish you all a wonderful Saturday, and take care.