Midlife Mastery Journal » male

Commit or Die

Les Brown — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 07:37:00 +0000

Last Friday, I had an unsettling experience. I've been spending the past few months scouring the web, looking for places where men leave — and find — wisdom-droppings. You know what I mean by 'wisdom-droppings' don't you? They're those little sayings or stories or insights that you read or hear and come away thinking, 'I never thought of it that way!' They're the stuff that paradigm shifts are made of. They're flashes of insight that you can take away with you, not so much like the punch-line of a joke, but as a kind of motto that you pull up from time to time to remind you of what it takes to make a good decision. What I found was that out of 323 blogs listed in Blog Catalog under the heading of 'men's issues,' only three actually addressed men's issues. Would you like to know more?

There were a fair number of blogs dedicated to male sexuality (not surprisingly). There were a number dedicated to parenthood . . . again, not surprisingly. Yet, by far the greatest number of blogs dedicated to men's issues dealt with what George Carlin called 'stuff': lotions and potions to keep up your looks, clothes to make you look young and relevant, cars and gadgets and adult toys to satisfy your every whim. At the same time, these blogs promised their readers that they'd deliver "Men News, Men Lifestyle, Men Health, Men New Technology, Men Fashion,
Men Reality, Men Relationship, Men Gadgets, Men Tips n Trick, It's All
About Men Things." And all this concerns me. Why? Because men . . . yes all men . . . are facing some pretty rough times over the next few years. And, increasingly, as they're facing their moments of truth, guys are giving up and checking out: big time.

According to statistics recently quoted by Dr. Jed Diamond, suicide claims the lives of over 800,000 people per year, worldwide. Of these, the vast majority (in ratios of anywhere from 4:1 to 10:1, depending on the location and culture) are men. Dr. Diamond writes (in The Irritable Male Syndrome), "A number of factors may account for the increased suicide rate as men age. Social isolation, divorce, and widowhood are important risk factors for men." Here's my take on the situation: guys may very well be culturally ill-equipped to deal with the crux of midlife. Popular culture paints the midlife crisis as hilarious. No doubt, even the most tragic of human drama has its comic relief. My concern focuses on the implication that men's midlife crisis is a joke or an unsightly blemish that can be neatly covered over with a gym membership, a makeover, or Superbowl tickets. In fact, it's anything but a joke. No matter who you are, the midlife transition represents your chance — perhaps even your only chance — to get it right.

What if the majority of your life was spent in acquiring the knowledge, skills, and experience necessary to meet an incredibly serious and critically important challenge. What if someone was preparing you — behind the scenes — to undertake a sacred and solemn quest that would transform your life from a meaningless, lackluster Walter Mitty existence to something that had a timeless and universal impact? What if???

What if, at some point along the gray, uneven flagstones that you shuffle over as husband, parent, provider, protector, and all those other hats that you wear from early morning until late at night without respite, you suddenly found yourself face-on with a seemingly-unbeatable foe or an insurmountable challenge? What would you do? . . . What could you do? . . . What will you do?

Neither your strenuous preparation nor your eventual confrontation with a seemingly-insurmountable challenge (or seemingly-unobtainable goal) is actually theoretical. It's as real as the breath that you breathe right now. If it hasn't already done so, it will come and you will be faced with what will literally be the decision of your life. It will be the moment where absolutely everything about you will be on the line. It'll be the moment when you have the chance to go "all-in" (or not). There will come a moment, as there must in every man's life, when none of the 'stuff' you've surrounded yourself with will make any difference. None of it will be able to shield you from the truth of the challenge you must face.

Did you ever see the musical Man of La Mancha? It's the story of Don Quixote and his quest for his ideal lady: Dulcinea. Quixote's moment comes (in the musical) when he's challenged by the Knight of the Mirrors. He cannot turn away: wherever he looks, he's forced to see himself as he really is: a silly old man with a shaving basin on his head. The dream world of chivalry that he had built so long and with such fervor shatters. He's faced with the choice of redefining his life or collapsing in utter despair. Sadly, he chooses a retreat into despair.

When I was 38, my moment came to me. Ten years earlier, I remember prostrating myself on the floor in the Cathedral as prayers were sung calling on heaven and earth to support me and my fellow candidates in our ministries. Moments later, the hands of the bishop and all the priests in attendance were laid on my head. There was no question whatever in my mind how my life would unfold.

Then came that other day when I stood surrounded by men and women who were going through similar struggles to my own, and they were saying to me: "Les, what do you feel?" For the first time, the truth of what I felt broke through all the layers of 'stuff' and denial I had built up over the years. "I can't do this anymore!" I replied. "So, what are you going to do?" they asked. I looked into the abyss of commitment.

Would I fall back into the path I had paved for myself since I was nine years old? Would I deny what I had seen and felt in my heart? Or, would I step off the edge of that cliff, go 'all-in' and commit myself fully and without guarantees to my own truth? "I have no choice," I said, "I have to leave the ministry." And, for better or worse, at that moment, it was done. Was it the right decision? I don't know, even today. What I do know is that it was MY decision, fully committed with every fiber of my being to MY truth, and no one else's.

What do I mean, then, when I say "Commit or Die"? That's the midlife choice that each one of us must make, isn't it? There will come a moment when there'll be no mother, no father, no wife or husband whose words, thoughts, actions, or beliefs about us and about our lives and their directions will make any difference. There will be a moment when their voices will be silent, either because they have left us (or we have left them) or because our hearts can no longer hear them anymore. There will come that moment of decision when we have to look into the reflection in our own Knight of the Mirrors and make our choice with no one to guide us but the Spirit within and no one else to take us by the hand.

Can we choose wrongly? Yes, we can . . . but only if we choose inauthentically and betray our own heart and soul in the process. If we do, we die — whether our soul simply shrivels into a quivering mass of cowardice or whether we play "Richard Cory."

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace;
In fine we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Does it really matter whether or not the blood still pulses through our veins so long as our soul is dead?

The midlife choice awaits each of us — and in the end it is no joke — the choice that none can prepare you for, and that none can make in your stead is unique for every man, yet common to us all: commit, or die?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Men Don’t Know What They Don’t Know

Les Brown — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:00:20 +0000

In October of this year, the American Psychological Association issued a report on stress by gender. Here is some of what they said:

In June 2008, more people reported physical and emotional symptoms due to stress than they did in 2007, and nearly half (47 percent) of adults reported that their stress has increased in the past year. More people report fatigue (53 percent compared to 51 percent in 2007), feelings of irritability or anger (60 percent compared to 50 percent in 2007) and lying awake at night (52 percent compared to 48 percent in 2007) as a result of stress, in addition to other symptoms including lack of interest or motivation, feeling depressed or sad, headaches and muscular tension. Women were more likely than men to report physical symptoms of stress like fatigue (57 percent compared to 49 percent), irritability (65 percent compared to 55 percent), headaches (56 percent compared to 36 percent) and feeling depressed or sad (56 percent compared to 39 percent).

I find this information intriguing because of the words in the first line: "people reported." Of course, there's no other way that researchers can gain this sort of information except by querying their subjects, and, of course, the resulting data are necessarily subjective. That's the problem: women are far more acutely in touch with how they feel. Men face some significant cultural barriers when it comes to expressing how they feel.

The first cultural issue that men face comes from the fact that, from their youngest days, boys are taught that 'big boys don't cry.' Guys are told to 'buck up,' to 'quit whining,' to 'stop being such a wuss.' They're told that, when the going gets tough, the tough get going (and, of course, being 'tough' is equated with being manly.

In addition, our culture insists that being aware of your body and sensitive to the messages it's sending you is somehow a 'feminine' trait and, since masculinity in our culture is not a birthright but must be earned on a daily basis, being accused of 'feminine' traits is tantamount to being disgraced. What is a male without his masculinity? Our culture treats this the same as being a human without personhood: a cipher (or worse: an freak of nature or an evolutionary dead-end).

An even more telling cultural requirement demands that men sacrifice everything for their masculine role: that of being the protector of and provider for his family. As (self-ordained) bread-winner, 'failure is not an option.' He expects that he must sacrifice his own comfort, security, and even health to fulfill his role according to the exaggerated requirements that he's borrowed from his family, his teammates, his co-workers and popular culture. Better for him to die of exhaustion at his desk than to fail to live up to these expectations.

The final nail in the coffin of male health would have to be our cultural obsession with medication. If it hurts, drug it! This seems a bit ironic, in light of what I just wrote, but, in fact, this preoccupation with getting numb has arisen as a culturally-acceptable way for men to handle the pain (that they want to deny that they have). Somehow, if you can make the hurt go away by popping a pill or two or downing a few cocktails (or ingesting any number of other analgesic substances), then the pain must not be real and can be safely ignored. Apparently, if it can be deadened, it can't be real.

The result of the cultural evisceration of males in English-speaking North America is that many (most?) guys wouldn't recognize a stress-related symptom if it were to knock them flat on their backs. So long as they remain unaware, these men are at risk of getting sucked into the downward spiral of the midlife crisis. The physical and emotional changes that occur around andropause can be a constant reminder to men that they're not as vital or as handsome (and attractive) as they once were. Trying to meet their own high masculine standards becomes ever more difficult as time goes on. This increases the stress that they feel, just when their careers and their families are also becoming the most demanding.

Learning to listen to the feedback from their bodies may be one of the greatest challenges to men at midlife in North America. Without the ability to develop this kind of awareness, they will almost certainly find themselves at the mercy of stress-related illnesses. There's a snide old saying that taunts, "Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down." One of the skills that goes to make up true Midlife Mastery is body-awareness: the willingness to pay attention to how you feel and react to changes in your environment, noting the changes, and then doing something about it. After all, your masculine role won't do you or your family any good once you're incapacitated or dead.

In the current global economic crisis, taking care of yourself has become more difficult and more important than ever. Remember guys, what you don't know about how you feel can not only hurt you; it can kill you.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

The Masculine Mystique – Field of Lost Dreams

Les Brown — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:11:47 +0000

Each of us begins his or her life at the center of a perfect 3-pronged conspiracy. Born into an established environment, you immediately commence your cultural formation. After the initial explosion of neural and synaptic formations, for the first three years of your life, your environment plays a ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ game with your neural pathways: those that meet little external challenge tend simply to fade away, leaving those pathways most in demand to serve your life-long needs. In the game of your life, genetics determine the rules, and only the most essential players make the final cut.

The second element in the conspiracy that unwittingly determines your future was provided you by your family of origin. Only at midlife can you really appreciate how uncommon the ‘common sense’ approach that they took to raising you really had been. Every glance, every word and gesture, every fragment of information that they provided you came packaged within a set of cultural biases of which they had little or no conscious awareness. Through their eyes, you gained your own appreciation of the world into which you were born. Through their example, you learned how to interface with that world.

Finally, the last element that set your worldview in concrete arrived under the guise of your formal education. There, as you assimilated the knowledge that was made available to you, you also absorbed the presuppositions and the value systems in which this knowledge was embedded. Presented with an outlook that sold itself as ‘objective facts’, you learned to distrust your intuition, to discard socially discordant values, to accept the assumptions of the crowd over the evidence of your own perceptions and observations. You learned to replace your own hopes and dreams with more socially-acceptable goals. Together, these three influences (like the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm) taught you to bleat, “Objective good; subjective bad.”

Everybody — regardless of who you are — wends his or her way through life toward the midlife transition carrying this cultural baggage. Some of it gets dropped off during adolescence when rebellion against authority provides the cover you need to challenge social values for the first time. However, you didn’t know what you didn’t know, and, no matter how rebellious and ‘counter-culture’ you may have been then, the deeper layers of self-distrust most likely survived intact. In fact, it often happens that, during adolescence, your deeper fears about challenging social expectations become so threatening to you that you may transform them into ideologies that you’re willing even to fight and die for.

Incidentally, here’s were the ‘misfits’ among us — those whose life experience and worldview contrast starkly with the cultural ‘party line’ — actually have an advantage. While most people are happily rationalizing their way into acculturation, these souls are unable to perform the ‘doublethink’ necessary to accommodate cultural requirements. Their subjective experience refuses to be extinguished by contrary acculturation. They stubbornly refuse to be mastered by a world that insists that the elephant grazing in their living room is only a stain on the carpet. For many reasons, their refusal to abandon their personal experience in favor of what they ‘ought’ to feel can be extremely challenging to cultural purists. After all, these people challenge the very values and assumptions upon which that culture is based. Psychologically unstable and unprincipled people aside, wise cultures see these individuals and minorities as spiritual visionaries; ignorant cultures only see them as ‘perverts.’

Midlife offers you the opportunity to rediscover and, once again, embrace your uniqueness. While you’ve been spending your life striving to identify yourself with your cultural and social role, midlife whispers in your ear that it may no longer be necessary. While your cultural assumptions provide a healthy and necessary framework — like a hothouse — where you can grow roots, strong branches, bloom and bear fruit, after a time, they can also constrict and strangle your progress. At some point, the stakes and wires that helped the sapling grow straight have to be pulled away before they cut into the trunk of the tree. At midlife, you’ve grown big enough and strong enough to change your mind. Neither your culture nor the ‘objective’ world owns you nor do they provide you with your destiny. As a mature person, passing through the midlife transition, you can separate yourself from your various roles (mother, father, son, daughter, provider, nurturer, protector, defender, etc.) and begin to explore the person who lies underneath all that.

For men, here’s the point where too often a stake is driven through the heart of an evolving maturity. Masculinity is more than secondary sexual characteristics. Masculinity itself is a role . . . much more than femininity is. The triple-threat that men have lived under (in most cultures) for untold ages has convinced men that to challenge the masculine role (as defined by environment, family, and society) means that you’re not a ‘real man’ and, therefore, you have no objective worth. If a man can’t challenge his most fundamental role (‘masculinity’) and redefine it in terms of his own hopes and dreams, he’ll never successfully be able to challenge any of the roles that are dependent on that one, especially the roles of protector and provider. So long as this masculine role — this masculine mystique — remains unquestioned and unchallenged, not only will the deepest longings of his heart and the primordial dreams that spring from them remain unfulfilled, ultimately, so will the pursuit of his life’s destiny.

The shame that results from a man’s challenging his understanding of masculinity (or from having it questioned by people in his social environment) tears painfully at a man’s self-image and self-respect. It can be so painful that when it becomes unrelenting it can sometimes even drive men to suicide (and men are much more successful at suicide than women are, because their weapons of choice are so much more effective). As painful as this male self-doubt directed toward the ‘masculine mystique’ may be, it remains a temporary pain that vanishes once you’re courageous enough to confront it head-on. If you manage your midlife transition well, you’ll discover that you’re not your roles, nor do your roles define you. On the contrary: those men who fail this ultimate test of manhood by retreating into a culturally-defined ‘masculinity’ find themselves living with a much more intense and protracted pain: the ultimate realization of dreams and longings unfulfilled, a unique and precious destiny denied, and a life devoid of meaning beyond its surface conformity. An unchallenged ‘masculinity’ is the potter’s field where the unfulfilled dreams of a lifetime are interred.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

What Will Your Next Career Look Like?

Les Brown — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:08:05 +0000

Thinking of retiring? If pundits are right (and it certainly looks that way from here), the concept of ‘retirement’ has been put to rest — permanently. Take a look at the recent history of employee benefits. Pensions were the first to go. They relied on a continuous growth model that has since proved to be unsustainable. They were replaced by IRA’s and 401K’s. How are yours doing these days? At the same time, employers woke up to the fact that, with mushrooming costs for medical care, insurance companies were continuing to hike the cost of corporate health insurance. To survive, even the most generous of employers had no choice but to cut benefits, increase co-pays, and reduce the percentage of insurance costs they would assume . . . very often down to 0. Many cut out corporate medical coverage entirely. Of course, there’s always Social Security and Medicare to fall back on . . . for now. And, incidentally, with what kind of life would those benefits provide you?

If you want my recommendation on the subject: forget about retiring. Regardless of whether you’re currently employed, facing a layoff, or already ‘semi-retired’, there’s a very high probability that there’s yet another career in your future. Do you enjoy and want to continue in the career you currently have? Again, that’s a nice thought, but chances are that’s not going to be a viable option forever. Look behind you. What do you see? There’s a hoard of younger, better-educated, more tech-savvy, cheaper applicants chasing after your job. If you’re in a highly-paid career, it’s also highly probable that the demographic of all those who are hungering to displace you from your position has changed enormously. Look carefully now! What do you see? That’s right: they’re mainly women.

Why are women starting to take over the higher-paid, more responsible careers? There are two fundamental reasons. First, 21st Century careers openings in the best areas generally require a lot of education. According to the latest information in Les Krantz’s Jobs Rated Almanac, here are the top ten jobs:

1. Web site manager
2. Actuary
3. Computer Systems Analyst
4. Software engineer
5. Mathematician
6. Computer programmer
7. Accountant
8. Industrial engineer
9. Hospital administrator
10. Web developer

Now, here are the ten worst jobs:

241. Seaman
242. Roofer
243. Taxi driver
244. Sheet metal worker
245. Dancer
246. Cowboy
247. Construction worker
248. Fisherman
249. Lumberjack
250. Roustabout/Oil field laborer

The point to notice here is that nearly all the 10 worst jobs are either exclusively male, or male-dominated. We can gather from these statistics that the best jobs (regarding environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands, security and stress) were the ones where women were either dominant or becoming so. The most desirable jobs require education and, in many cases, advanced training.Women are outpacing men in school. The Horatio Alger Association studied the most successful students and found that 63% were female, only 37% were males. Not surprisingly, in a study of disillusioned and demoralized students, nearly 70% are males. Two out of three of the people vying for your job in the future will be women.

The second factor that’s making your career more difficult for you to maintain derives from the nature of the 21st Century workplace. As Marshall Goldsmith wrote, “What got you here won’t get you there.” You may well be unsuitable for the temperament that your next step up will require. With every passing year, the aggressive, competitive ‘hunter-gatherer’ approach of the men of the last generation becomes less and less well-suited for the contemporary workplace. What’s needed are social connections and cooperation. How well are you culturally suited for engaging in these typically ‘feminine’ interactions?

You had best not wait until your next pink slip or company closing to start thinking about your future: not just your exit strategy, but also your re-entry strategy. What changes are you going to have to make to be competitive? How are you going to go about getting in touch with your deeper needs as a person so that your next career does more than just pays the bills. There’s a name for people who do meaningless work that they despise just to make money, and it’s not a complement. Especially if you’ve been in your career a long time, you have the opportunity now to reinvent yourself in a meaningful way. So, what will your next career look like?

Your Deadly Assumptions

Les Brown — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:11:11 +0000

Have you ever been traveling from one city to another, and you’re in the airport at the gate, waiting for your flight to load? You look out the wall of glass at the workers moving around on the ramp, unloading and loading baggage while the plane disgorges its complement of arriving passengers. You may have noticed one of the pilots descending the metal stairway from the jetway onto the tarmac and then taking a leisurely stroll around the body of the aircraft. It’s the flight’s first officer, and he’s doing a preflight visual inspection of the fuselage to make sure that everything is properly secured and that there’s no visible damage. It’s all part of the extensive preflight checklist that all pilots must complete before both takeoffs and landings. Those checklists are there to make sure that no one leaves anything to chance when lives and property are at stake.

Pilots would be crazy to fly on assumptions. There’s an old saying that says, “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” I’d like to take this occasion to remind you that you are the pilot-in-command of your own life, even when it doesn’t feel like it. You’d think that, with your own life and property at stake as you face the prospect of turbulence during your midlife ‘flight,’ you’d want to be at least as careful piloting your daily existence as the fellows who have command of that jet you’re about to take. Yet, I think that most guys take action — especially during the midlife transition — based on assumptions rather than on research, introspection, and careful deliberation. Chances are that those pilots that are prepping their plane for your trip know more about the condition of their aircraft than they do about their own lives.

One of the biggest assumptions that men cling to, and that can get them into the most trouble at midlife, is that they are what they do. It’s extremely difficult for a man to separate himself in his own mind from his career, and the more responsible, sophisticated and high-paying that career is, the more that this is true: “Jane, let me introduce you to my friend Bill. He’s a pilot.” Men realize that they are free to change careers, especially when they see prospects for advancement coming along. So long as the guy’s in the driver’s seat, ‘change’ looks like ‘challenge’ and ‘opportunity.’ These prospects get the old adrenaline pumping and they stimulate the inner hunter-gatherer instincts. Meeting challenges and conquering adversaries to provide for himself and his family bring reassurance of the quality of his masculinity. And therein lies his Achilles’ heel.

What happens when there’s an economic downturn and he’s laid off and unable to find work in his chosen field? How does he feel when, instead of surrendering his career for the sake of something better, he’s driven out of it without a viable alternative? Just because he’s no longer competitive, that doesn’t mean that the inner hunter-gatherer is no longer alive and will within. When the hunter-gatherer can no longer protect and provide for his family, what value has he left? If you live by the assumption that you are what you do, and that your value as a man and as a human being rests entirely on how successful you are in your assumed role, when that’s taken away from you, what’s left? In fact, it’s the unconscious maintenance of that false assumption that drives many men from midlife transition to midlife crisis. The way many men live their lives is less like a pilot who fails to do a walk-around because he assumes that everything is OK, and more like a pilot who takes off without fuel in his tanks because he assumes their filled.

The basic assumptions that underlie much of male attitudes and behaviors are just plain backwards. Somehow, women seem to ‘get’ this, and setbacks like layoffs and financial insecurity may upset them but they don’t destroy their self-respect the way that very often happens with men. The truth of the matter remains that what a man does gains its value from who the man is, and not the other way around. This is the 21st Century, yet, for scores of centuries men have allowed their masculinity to be defined by their roles. For the first time in human history, that’s changing. The transformation from hunter-gatherer to agrarian simply transferred the ‘protect and provide’ paradigm from one economy to another. The exact same thing happened during the industrial revolution: ‘protect and provide’ remained the male paradigm. Now, in the shift to a post-industrial global economy, the very roots of that ancient paradigm are crumbling. Clinging to an outdated ‘protect and provide’ paradigm is a sure route to eventual extinction.

What alternatives do the men of the 21st Century have? I believe that we’re experiencing not only the midlife transition of the ‘boomer generation, but also the midlife transition of humanity itself as a species. It’s overdue for men to take out the checklist and do some serious (and fearless) introspection. We need to take stock of who we are, what we are capable of, and where we want to take it. We have to make room for the nurturer beside the protector and provider. We have to stop assuming that vulnerability is a threat to our existence as men. In point of fact, like so many other minorities in our world today, we men have to step away from our own proudly-proclaimed and reinforced stereotypes.

Here’s the great irony that infuses the whole question of the redefinition of what it means to be a man: the essence of the hunter-gatherer mentality consists in a man’s proving his courage in face of adversity. That has always worked so long as the adversary was on the exterior. When we men are faced with confronting the adversary within, we most often show a remarkable cowardice. Our survival depends on harnessing our masculine courage and turning it within, transforming our inner world with the same boldness and inventiveness with which we’ve transformed the outer world. And, we’ll find, that when we properly care for ourselves, we’ll also experience the need to take better care of our world, as well. The ‘green’ man begins with attention to detail in his own soulscape.